NEW YEAR

 HAPPY SAMHAIN

(pronounced SOW-IN)

AKA CELTIC NEW YEAR

AKA IRISH NEW YEAR

LOVE, JOE

[I'll only be there on video, and my reading includes graphic sex  so be forewarned] 

Love, Joe – an evening celebrating the publication of Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard Wednesday | 10/30 | 7:30pm reception, 8pm event | The Parish Hall @ St Mark's Church

Please join us for an evening celebrating the publication of Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard, edited by Daniel Kane. Joe Brainard was one of the most distinctive figures on New York City’s vibrant cultural scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Widely known for his influential experimental memoir, I Remember, Brainard worked in a variety of forms, from New-York-School-aligned poetry to Pop-Art-adjacent artworks, including wild riffs on the comic strip character Nancy. Love, Joe presents a selection of Brainard’s letters that stretch from 1959 to 1993 addressed to artists and friends such as John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Fairfield Porter, Bernadette Mayer, James Schuyler, Alex Katz, and Andy Warhol. The letters, edited and annotated by Daniel Kane, allow readers to witness an extraordinarily fertile moment in New York’s history, when literary and visual arts intersected with happenings, proto-punk and psychedelic rock concerts, and experimental music and dance performances. The evening will include readings by Tyhe Cooper, Kyle Dacuyan, Heather Denton, Mike Funk, Brad Gooch, Vincent Katz, Michael Lally, Ann Lauterbach, Keith McDermott, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, and Nicole Wallace. We hope you can join us at 7:30pm for a reception before the event. This event will also be livestreamed for free on The Poetry Project's YouTube channel.

TICKETS

Daniel Kane's publications include All Poets Welcome: the Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (2003), We Saw the Light: Conversations between the New American Cinema and Poetry (2009), and Do You Have a Band? Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City (2017). He lives in Copenhagen and teaches American literature at Uppsala University in Sweden.

FYI 2

 click here 

FYI THIS SATURDAY

 

Can't get this announcement to scale correctly but if you hit on the LINK part this Saturday the 26th at 5pm eastern, it should connect you to a poetry reading I'll be doing via zoom with 3 other poets, could be interesting.   LiVE MAG! & Lit Balm Present     EYES LEFT      A Needed Dose of Hip   Michael Lally    Brendan Lorber    Elinor Nauen    Larry Sawyer

Please join us for a recital of legends.     Saturday, October 26       5pm EST set.EST     Link to join Zoom    https://us04web.zoom.us/j/461603228   This invitation brought to you by Live Mag!   SUBSCRIBE!   https://store.livemag.org/

MARSHALL NORSTEIN R.I.P.

When I moved back to Jersey from LA in 1999, I lived with my wife and our toddler in a two-family house in a row of two-family houses whose backyards backed into a branch of the Rahway River. Most of our neighbors had children too, who used the connected backyards like their own private playground which it was. One of our neighbors, Marshall, was the acknowledged overseer of the place.

His day job entailed carrying tons of equipment on the train to Manhattan where he photographed precious artifacts for the catalogues of the big auction houses. But his real vocation was creating new ways for making folks happy. He made a great swing on a giant tree by tying a rope to an arrow and shooting it over the strongest limb then detaching the arrow and attaching a seat he made. He put up a zip line for kids and adults to ride on. He built a smoker for ribs and other meats which we partook of during warm weather when we all sat around his picnic tables and contributed our own dishes to the dinners we shared.

He was always ready to help whoever needed some handy work done. When we threw a surprise birthday party for him we called to say we had a plumbing problem and he came right over with his toolbox and was genuinely moved and surprised. As real estate prices rose and so did our rents, we all dispersed to other neighborhoods, but continued to get together for holidays and hang outs. And Marshall continued altering things for the better, like an old junked Mercedes he fixed to run on cooking oil.

Digital cameras ended his day job, but he got a new one as maintenance man for the local Ethical Culture Center that also supplied a top floor for his family to reside. Last Sunday morning bringing home a bag of bagels for his family, he collapsed and died in the entryway to the building, quick but unexpected, and way too soon.

My heart goes out to his wife, journalist and novelist Elaine Durbach, and son Gabe, and all his family and friends. He will be sorely missed.   

 

'COMING OUT'

 
I just learned that it was recently Coming Out day (who designates these days and months dedicated to categories of humans?) ao belatedly here's a cover photo of me at 29 in DC in early 1972 when I 'came out' as gay because calling myself bi-sexual would have spared me a lot of the oppression suffered by gay men in The Gay Liberation Front I became active in at the time, when homosexuality was still considered a mental illness and a crime for which you could be locked up, let alone fired, ostracized, belittled, and attacked.

Plus I felt the term bi-sexual implies there's only two kinds of sexual activity and identity when my experience is that every sexually intimate connection is unique, so the possibilities are incalculable. Later on I used the term 'pansexual' and eventually let all labels go (though I love the term 'fluid' for what I feel). I'm grateful I had the chance to be a part of a movement that made much progress as a result of our activism, though tere's still so much to be done. [SAY IT AGAIN tells the story of how I got to that 'coming out' day] 

MY YOUNGEST

Two favorite photos of my youngest child, Flynn, and me goofing when he was around 5 and 23. He just turned 27 and every day makes me grateful and proud.