Tag: Williams Center for the Arts

Wednesday, June 3, 2015, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com

Paul Muldoon is the author of twelve major collections of poetry, including One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015), Maggot (2010), Horse Latitudes (2006), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Hay (1998), The Annals of Chile (1994), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), Meeting the British (1987), Quoof (1983), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Mules (1977) and New Weather (1973). Muldoon served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University from 1999 to 2004. He has taught at Princeton University since 1987 and currently occupies the Howard G.B. Clark ’21 chair in the Humanities. He has been poetry editor of The New Yorker since 2007. Paul Muldoon is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, he has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature, the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2005 Aspen Prize for Poetry, and the 2006 European Prize for Poetry. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War.”

Your giving poverty a try
has hit another snag
since you stopped off in Shanghai
and bought three Kelly bags
and now you claim a Birkin’s
prohibitively dear
I hear you baby
I hear you loud and clear

Wednesday, April 1, 2015, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

MATTHEW ROHRER is the author of several books of poems, most recently DESTROYER AND PRESERVER, published by Wave Books, and SURROUNDED BY FRIENDS, forthcoming in April 2015. His poems have been widely published and anthologized, and he is the recipient of the Hopwood Award, and a Puschcart Prize, among others. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at NYU.

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com

The model farm is therapeutic.
The 4-horned sheep
has all manner of things
clinging to his wool.
The cow is not angry.
None of the goats are daunted.
My daughter steps into the gravel
near a puddle and leaves a hole
that quickly fills
with water and sees this
and does it again.
On the way out
of one of the buildings
art students have posted
their pencil drawings
of the animals and they
are so accurate
we stop walking.
—
Is this—Sir—what you asked me to tell you?
Emily Dickinson

Wednesday, March 4, 2015, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Judith A. Christian is an editor and poet. She is formerly President of South Mountain Poets, workshop leader, and editor of the anthologies Gathered on the Mountain, The Final Lilt of Songs, and Off Line (South Mountain-Watchung Poets, 2006, 2008, 2010). Her poems appear there and in The Stillwater Review and Voices From Here (Paulinskill Poetry Project, 2009). Her haiku “rising from your bed” is the subject of an essay in The Haiku Aesthetic by Jean LeBlanc (Cyberwit, 2013). She is a long-time student of Buddhist philosophy and continues to receive teachings from exiled Tibetan monks and the scholarly descendants of the first Lama to bring Tibetan Buddhism to the United States. After leaving a career in technical publishing two decades ago, she has worked a series of part-time jobs, most recently, in a grocery store.

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com

Who puts purple with green
is no one, yet it is done again on the ivy
in a mottled array maybe more maroon
than purple. Who shot the deer
for the ivy to return is no one.

In a dream I am telling you this
no one sitting beside a tangle
of stems of Russian sage
as white as the coming and going
of everything as light.

Wednesday, February 4, 2015, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Valery Oisteanu is a writer and artist with international flavor. Born in USSR (1943) and educated in Romania, he adopted Dada and Surrealism as a philosophy of art and life. He has been writing in English for the past 42 years. He is the author of 11 books of poetry, a book of short fiction and a book of essays: The Avant-Gods. A new collection of poetry with collage illustrations, titled Perks in Purgatory, was published by Fly by Night Press, New York, in 2010. For the past 10 years, he wrote art critic essays for Brooklyn Rail (New York). Oisteanu is also a contributing writer for French, Spanish & Romanian art and literary magazines. He exhibits collages and assemblages on a regular basis at the galleries in New York and also creates collages as covers and illustrations for books and magazines. Oisteanu also performs theater plays and musical collaborations with jazz musicians from all over the world, in sessions known as Jazzoetry. Valery Oisteanu is the receiver of Acker Award NYC 2013 for contribution to the avant-garde in Poetry Performance.

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com

Spill green beer onto the ground
From a glass with a clover on it
Talking to Astrid about your Irish mother
Happy St Patrick’s Day Barney!
I cannot believe you are gone
Gone but not forgotten
The phosphorescence of your voice
On the corner of Grove Street
The shadows of Miller and Becket
They come to me in a dream
Barney in his couch, in his chair at Veselka
Lost in the maze of books at the Strand
Books that created resistance in Bucharest
Ionesco in the Evergreen review, devoured by the underground
Translating Gregory Corso into Romanian
I cannot believe Barney is gone

Lisa Marie Basile

Wednesday, January 7, 2015, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Lisa Marie Basile is the editor of Luna Luna Magazine and the small press Patasola Press. Her poetry and essays can be seen in Best American Poetry, Coldfront, Tin House, PEN American Center, Poets & Artists Magazine, PANK, The Nervous Breakdown, Huffington Post, Thrush Poetry Journal, Poetry Crush, and Prick of the Spindle, among others. She is the author of the chapbooks Andalucia (The Poetry Society of New York) and Triste (Dancing Girl Press) and of the full-length collection Apocryphal (Noctuary Press, 2014). Lisa Marie has edited for Sundress Publications and Weave Magazine. Her work has been nominated for the Best Small Fiction 2015 and the Best American Experimental Writing 2015 anthologies. She was the February 2014 feature poet for Poets & Artists Magazine, and has been named a top contemporary NYC poet to watch in features by The New York Daily News & Relapse Magazine. She is a graduate of The New School’s Masters in Fine Arts program for creative writing.

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com

today my father came to pray
black denim & brown suede
a little tattoo of something holy
only he isn’t holy
he was raised at church & in fields of flora
in the back seat of the family Ambassador sedan
his eyes the color of that caballero tan
pinching his sister those pretty curls
setting fire to stacks of Playboy magazines.

Robert P. Langdon

Wednesday, December 3, 2014, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Robert P. Langdon is a poet living in Northern NJ. He has worn many hats over the years, including Director of Sales and Marketing at a publishing house, Director and Curator at an art gallery, professional photographer and teacher. Robert lived in San Francisco for 13 years which helped raise his political and social consciousness and a strong appreciation for diversity and community in all it’s forms. These themes show up often in his writing.

Robert has been writing poetry and the occasional short fiction since the late 1980s. He began writing after being exposed to the poetry of Anne Sexton and discovering, through her writing, that poetry can be exciting and accessible. He is drawn to strong imagery and is influenced by confessional poetry and the works of Sexton, Sharon Olds, Diane Ackerman, Robert Lowell, Ai, and Gregory Orr among others. Robert’s own writing tends to focus on issues of identity and he uses poetry as a way to work through personal issues and reflect on meaningful events in his life. He recently released his first collection, The Candied Road Ahead: Poems & Stories available through Amazon.com in print and Kindle formats.

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com

Malled

The Disney dream is a lie. Bambi has been rewritten.
No longer is it the danger of flames and firearms. It’s crossing
a four lane highway and being trapped against a median.
A warm blood Flower streaked by the wipers of a Humvee.

J. Scott Brownlee

Wednesday, November 5, 2014, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Originally from Llano, Texas, J. Scott Brownlee is a founding member of the Localists, a literary collective that emphasizes place-based writing of personal witness, cultural memory, and the aesthetically marginalized working class. His poems appear in The Kenyon Review, Narrative, Beloit Poetry Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, Drunken Boat, RATTLE, The Greensboro Review, [PANK], BOXCAR Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of two chapbooks: Highway or Belief, which won the 2013 Button Poetry Prize, and Ascension, which won the 2014 Texas Review Press Robert Phillips Poetry Prize, and is a former Writers in the Public Schools Fellow at NYU. He currently lives in Brooklyn and is the Assistant Director of the University Learning Center for the College of Arts & Science at NYU.

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com

Llano River, Sunrise

This morning dark, the light is turning
into morning. Slowly, clouds sift
sand and yellow perch. You walk beside
the river, falling in. Fish swim.
Fish swim the river. Falling in,
you walk beside the sand and yellow perch.
Clouds sift slowly into mourning:
this morning light. The dark turns
into mourning. Slowly, clouds sift
sand and yellow perch. You walk beside
the river, falling in. Fish swim
this morning dark. The light is
turning.