Random Photos

A bouncer throwing a very drunk maninto the street on 3rd Avenue(I'd never seen this happen in real life until this night - several people nearby had already called the police before I could. The extremely drunk man, covered in snow and filthy water, nevertheless kept dragging himself along the sidewalk because he couldn't stand. Finally the cops, followed by an ambulance, showed up.)Young fashion student, examining her portfolio at a West Village...

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Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize Launch + Clifton Gachagua Wins Sillerman First Book Prize

For those in Chicago, a wonderful event I've been involved with that you don't want to miss:The Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize Launch is this Thursday, January 31st at 7:00 p.m.. We will host an evening of poetry, song, and dance at The Poetry Foundation's auditorium (61 W. Superior St., Chicago) to celebrate our first annual Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize for emerging poets of color. Kristiana Rae Colón (our prizewinner) and renowned...

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"Lunch Hour NYC" Exhibit @ NYPL

Depression era sign, Lunch Hour NYC (NYPL.org)I spend at least one or two days of almost every week at the New York Public Library's Research Branch (the Schwarzman Building, soon to undergo a monstrous transformation), but so narrow and routine are my tracks there that it took a post on Jeremiah's Vanishing New York to draw me to the "Lunch Hour NYC" exhibit on the library's first floor. It is a delight, and if you're in Manhattan and anywhere...

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Spring Semester Classes Begin

This post is of zero interest to anyone beyond my students and me, I know, but Spring 2013 semester classes began today, first thing this morning to be exact, and I'm excited about both of them, but especially about my undergraduate literature class, which incorporates some material I've taught before but many new texts as well. That class is officially an English and African American Studies class on The Black Arts Movement, satisfying two distinct...

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Happy MLK Jr. Day & Inauguration Day + Inaugural Speech & Poem

What an auspicious day, in an auspicious year! Today, as we honor the great Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose vision and courage and sacrifice and martyrdom, alongside so many others whose names we know and do not know, made possible the freedoms we enjoy today, Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., will be publicly sworn in, for the fourth time, and reinaugurated as the 44th President of the United States of America.President Obama, being sworn...

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Poetry Makes Something Happen + Poem: Marianne Moore

"Poetry makes nothing happen," or so writes W. H. Auden in his famous elegy, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," though he went on to qualify this oft-quoted fragment with a much cannier and profounder understanding of poetry, noting that it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth.That is to say, by its very existence...

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Three From Kluge & Richter in NYRB

Alexander Kluge, Germany's living avatar of analytical fiction (and a cinematic pioneer in the l950s and 1960s), and Gerhard Richter, one of its most important living visual artists, have collaborated on a book entitled December, which Seagull Books, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, published early last year in English translation. (Seagull posted an pre-publication interview with Kluge  in December 2011.)There are few fiction...

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Poem/Translation: Xavier Villaurrutia

For a long time I've loved the poetry of Xavier Villaurrutia (1903-1950), one of the greatest poets in Mexican and Latin American literature, and I've read translations of his work that I liked, but I've only tinkered with translating one or two poems of his, publishing none of them on here. Back in September 2005, however, I did publish one of Rachel Benson's translations, of his poem "Love Is an Anguish, A Question," and also posted my...

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"The Black Female Body in Art" Panel at the Brooklyn Museum

"How has the black female body been idealized and misread in visual culture?" And: "How might these tendencies affect black women today?"Tisa Bryant, Isolde Brielmeier, Deborah Willis, Carla WilliamsThese were just two of the many provocative questions posed yesterday at a Brooklyn Museum of Art panel discussion entitled "The Black Female Body in Art," which took place in conjunction with the museum's superb current exhibit, Mickalene...

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Chris Stackhouse's Book Launch @ This Red Door

Plural, artist, critic and poet Chris Stackhouse's first collection of poetry, is now out from Counterpath (November 2012), and tonight he launched the book at This Red Door, the experimental arts collaborative, now running for a rich and exciting month at Kunsthalle Galapagos, in DUMBO, Brooklyn.Chris's book encompasses his interests in visual art and theory, engaging with the likes of John Cage, Alain Badiou, Barnett Newman, Beauford Delaney, and...

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