JOHN ASHBERY POETRY SERIES AT BARD PRESENTS FREE READINGS IN MARCH, APRIL, AND MAY

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—The John Ashbery Poetry Series at Bard College presents readings by internationally acclaimed poets on Thursday, March 16; and Mondays, April 10, April 24, and May 1, at 6:30 p.m. All readings take place in the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard. Tom Raworth will read from his recent work on Thursday, March 16, in the Weis Cinema. Raworth was born and grew up in London. During the 1970s he traveled and worked in the United States and Mexico, returning to England in 1977 to be resident poet at King’s College, Cambridge. Since 1966 he has published more than 40 books and pamphlets of poetry, prose, and translations. His graphic work has been shown in France, Italy, and the United States, and he has collaborated and performed with musicians, painters, and other poets. In 1991 he was invited to teach at the University of Cape Town, where he was the first European writer to visit in 30 years. Raworth is the recipient of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize and the Cholmondeley Award. Among his recent books are Tottering State, Landscaping the Future, Meadow, Etruscan Reader V, and Clean and Well Lit: Selected Poems, 1987–1995. On Monday, April 10, in the multipurpose room, three poets—Redell Olsen, Drew Milne, and Juliana Spahr—will read from their recent work. Redell Olsen’s publications include Book of The Fur and the collaboratively edited Here Are My Instructions. She is interested in the intersections between poetics and the visual arts, and her practice spans a range of media, including poetry, installation, and performance. Olsen lives and works in London, where she teaches poetic practice at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the managing editor of the internet journal How(2): www.how2journal.com. The poet and critic Allen Fisher recently described Olsen’s practice as moving “on roller-blades into chromium façades and rural deserts, holding on inside the consumer bubble wrap, cordoned-off streets and anxiety of contemporary international capitalism.” Drew Milne’s books of poetry include Sheet Mettle, Bench Marks, The Damage: New and Selected Poems, Mars Disarmed, and Go Figure. He edits the occasional journal Parataxis: Modernism and Modern Writing and the poetry imprint Parataxis Editions. Milne coedited Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader with Terry Eagleton, and has recently edited the anthology Modern Critical Thought. Sections from a novel in progress titled The Prada Meinhof Gang have appeared in a number of journals, including Edinburgh Review. In 1995 he was writer in residence at the Tate Gallery, London. He is currently the Judith E. Wilson Lecturer in Drama and Poetry at the University of Cambridge. The poet Marjorie Welish recently described Go Figure as “radical-informed iconoclastic arrays that are not so bitter as they are bittersweet.” Juliana Spahr (Bard ’88), a leading poet-critic of her generation, is the author of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs; Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity; Fuck You–Aloha–I Love You; and Response. The W. M. Keck Professor of Creative Writing and associate professor of English at Mills College, Spahr is founding coeditor (with Jena Osman) of Chain and is the recipient of a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to study “The Crisis of Language in 20th-Century Literature.” She frequently self-publishes her work, archived at http://people.mills.edu/jspahr. The series presents Bard alumni Drew Gardner and Stuart Krimko on Monday, April 24, at 6:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema. Drew Gardner (Bard ’91) is the author of Petroleum Hat and Sugar Pill. He lives in New York City, where he edits Snare magazine and teaches workshops at St. Mark’s Poetry Project. Gardner conducts the Poetics Orchestra, an ensemble featuring poetry and structured improvisation. His began his weblog, Overlap, in 2003. Stuart Krimko (Bard ’00) has published two books of poems, Can’t exist I can’t resist and Not That Light and has translated the work of Argentinian poet Hector Viel Temperley. Quasi-random, his collaboration with Slovenian artist Tobias Putrih, was shown at Max Protetch Gallery, New York, in 2005. In 2006 he was the recipient of a grant from the Fund for Poetry. The series concludes on, Monday, May 1, at 6:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema with a reading by Ron Silliman, who has written and edited 26 books to date, most recently Under Albany. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, titled The Alphabet. In addition to Woundwood, a part of VOG, volumes published thus far from that project have included ABC, Demo to Ink, Jones, Lit, Manifest, N/O, Paradise, (R), Toner, What, and Xing. He has now begun writing a new poem titled Universe. Silliman was a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council, as well as a Pew Fellow in the Arts in 1998. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two sons, and works as a market analyst in the computer industry. Since 1995, the John Ashbery Poetry Series has brought leading contemporary poets to Bard for readings and discussion in an intimate setting. For further information about the series, call The Bard Center at 845-758-7425. # # # (3/3/06)

This event was last updated on 05-02-2006

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