Having a Party for Planisphere:
John Ashbery’s Reading Thursday Night, 12/3/2009

Eugene and I were at the NYU Law School, but not in the Tishman Auditorium, this ridiculously balmy early December night. Anxious ushers were separating poets from lawyers, sending us into a ballroom off to the right. There were expensive suits and dresses in the formal auditorium, but this was the Greenberg Lounge. We were one hour early, sitting on folding chairs that set rumps at a forward tilt after thirty minutes. Portraits of lawyers, mantelpieces, big old oriental carpets, plaster cartoucheries, and a gilt jug of poinsettias beside the lectern. Two blue bottles of Saratoga water. Before long, it looked like SRO. The bookstore rep set up his table: Planisphere is beautiful, exquisitely designed, cartoon blocks and art nouveau arabesques, and its two-page-spread title page mixes fonts: “JOHN” is like subway graffiti, “ASHBERY” a steampunk goth. Jeff Clark at Quemadura did the book design (read all about him:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6525583.html).

John was off in a room somewhere signing copies. The back cover’s a really nice photo of him in front of his leaded-glass double front doors in Hudson, his hands on the back of a Chippendale: Jennifer May took the picture. Poems inside are alphabetical by title.

I love being one of the yentas by now, running around before the reading, kissing old friends as if I were at a bar mitzvah. Hi, Star, Marcella, Maggie! Piotr, Olivier—in town! David Shapiro and David Lehman said happy birthday, which they knew about because of FaceBook. Then Deborah Landau introduced, her students attentive in row two left, in reserved chairs. The director of NYU’s Creative Writing Program, Deborah thanked Lillian Vernon, Fred Hochberg, and the poet Tom Healy for their help, and mentioned the program of conversations with John, running through the spring term. She had recently visited John’s Hudson house, and remarked how it reflected his poetry’s juxtapositions of high culture beside low.

John began (“I was just thinking of how old I am”) by recalling that he’d been new in New York before the NYU Law School building had gone up; a friend had taken a picture of him that winter, in front of the site where they’d demolished old Washington Square brownstones prior to construction. “A very poetic photo, no doubt, in the snow, but I don’t know where it is now.” His voice is still clear, its upstate accent lending angles to the ironies of the poems, read with animation and with humor. As always, he sounded bemused, entertained, surprised, and engaged with the words on the page, as were his listeners. We were a big crowd, but the reading was a glass of champagne in hand for each of us: sparkly, intimate, nicely complex.

He started with poems from A Worldly Country, his last volume from 2007: “The Black Prince,” “Thrill of a Romance,” “Objection Sustained,” “So Long, Santa.” Then he read from Planisphere: “Circa,” “Decembrists” (the “no-see-ums” / “no-goodniks” lines are always fun), “Default Mode” (“They were living in America . . .”), “Episode,” “Floating Away,” “He Who Loves Runs Away” (its title from an operetta by Rudolf Friml, a composer celebrated by Ogden Nash—“I trust your conclusion and mine are similar: ’Twould be a happier world if it were Frimler”), “Idea of Steve,” and “Leave the Hand In.”

He told us that “Pernilla” was published in the New Yorker, but the fact-checkers there kept asking about the title. “It’s a woman’s name,” John would repeat, and they’d say, “Yes, but which woman?” A planisphere is a two-dimensional representation of a round surface, explained the poet; he’d thought he’d found the word for the title of the title poem in a love lyric by John Donne, but it turned out to be from Andrew Marvell’s “The Definition of Love” (http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/The_Definition_Of_Love_by_Andrew_Marvell_analysis.php). “Sons of the Desert” takes its title from a Laurel and Hardy short, some of its lines from Antiques Roadshow. “They Knew What They Wanted” is a sure crowd-pleaser, its lines adopted and adapted from one of Leonard Maltin’s film guides. Another movie-title poem title was “They Made Me a Fugitive,” which, he told us, was a great British film, directed by Alberto Calvacanti, but retitled I Became a Criminal when it was released in the United States (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039895/). He finished with “The Tower of London,” a comedy; and “The Winemakers,” a longer piece: “We were in a state / called New York, where only bees made sense.”

I think of John’s readings as continuations of the party that started with Kenneth, Frank, and John, with Jane and Jimmy, Larry and Willem, Alfred Leslie and Rudy Burckhart, at Harvard, the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, the Cedar Bar, or back in the apartment by the El, in Southampton, Chelsea, Paris, Hudson. There are martinis and movies and typewriters, art on the walls, and talk. It’s like the party at the end of William S. Wilson’s novel Birthplace:Moving into Nearness, a party described in a letter from a grandfather to his granddaughter:

I have been writing, and I am happy to be able to write, to tell you, Octavia, the words I hear in my head as I write, that we are having a party, and have been for some time now, and we want, with words I am trying to deliver alive from my heart, to invite you. You are welcome to join us in our consonance, at any time, to come as you are, to take potluck with us. Feel free to bring a friend, or partner. Don’t wait until you are ready.

The Art of Ruth Stone: Poetry, Editing, and Collaborating with a Major American Woman Writer

The Art of Ruth Stone:

Poetry, Editing, and Collaborating with a Major American Woman Writer

Society for the Study of American Women Writers

Philadelphia, October 2009

Kandace Brill Lombart chaired this panel, a roundtable discussion on “The Art of Ruth Stone,” last weekend. Undertaking the tremendous task of compiling a bibliography of Ruth’s archives, from publications through manuscripts, photographs, videos, publicity materials, and more, Kandace must be the strongest channel working now—outside of the Stone family circle—for the understanding and preservation of the legacy of this legendary poet. Her description of her project was enlightening, amazing, and deeply moving, as we learned how long Ruth’s poetry has been in the public eye, how much she struggled, how widely she traveled, how far her influences have reached. I was, just today, surprised to find in an old manila folder with notes on Ruth from 1989—the year before I had a son, got a job, and moved to a new city—the urgently penned words: “Find Leslie Fiedler’s student who asked Ruth, ‘Who is the widow’s muse?’!” Twenty years later, there she was: it was Kandace who asked that question, and so started Ruth writing the poem cycle with that title, a work unlike any other in the American canon, one of a very few in the world to meditate on such experience, whose traumatic shock still inexorably moves so many women living out their lives.

As Martha Nell Smith finished her presentation, drawing from her years of research on Ruth, Emily Dickinson, and women’s poetic traditions, she read a few lines from a lullaby that all of us remember: “I Have Three Daughters.” It was the song I’d decided to start my talk by singing, since I knew it from a film called “The Excuse,” made by S. Wolinsky in 1973. Once you hear Ruth sing, you don’t forget it, and Martha and I sang it together then and there, as best we could.

The following is a edited transcription of my talk, which started out as ten minutes of hastily-written memoir from the night before the panel.

I studied with Ruth thirty-five years ago and visited often afterwards. Although I lost touch while in grad school from 1977-86, I asked her to write an introduction for Apple Perfume, the chapbook of my poems published for the Intuflo Series in 1989, and it’s become much easier to stay in touch, since many of the girls, grandkids, even great-grandbabies, are on Facebook. Nora's there, Walter's there; Bianca is running The Ladder Reading Series in New York City; Hillery's teaching at NYU; photos of Phoebe's studio are posted, and a profile picture of Abigail with Chloe.

A book here called Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections, edited by Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker, came out from Iowa last year; obviously referencing Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, there’s no mention of Ruth and her students. But then, Ruth has a volume of her own—the 1990 The House is Made of Poetry, in which articles like Martha Nell Smith’s, Sharon Olds’s, and Jan Freeman’s offer much the same kind of tribute. I finally wrote up a memoir-homage, too, for her eightieth birthday, which appeared in time for her ninetieth, in the American Poetry Review, in 2006. And it’s nice how she’s gone a bit viral on the internet lately, with the lecture by Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat, Pray, Love) for TED.com (Technology, Entertainment, Design). Gilbert met Ruth a few years ago, and recalls how Ruth described her muse as a kind of locomotive: when she was a child, out working in the fields, she would feel and hear a poem “coming at her from over the landscape, like a thunderous train of air.” “She’d have to run like hell to the house” to write it down, but didn’t always catch it. Sometimes it would almost escape her, then she’d reach out and “catch the poem by the tail,” “perfect and intact, but backwards, from the last word to the first”

(<http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html>; <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zbbOINF-08>).

Some of what Ruth taught me about teaching is pretty standard: “Don’t bring your own work to the seminar; it’s not about you.” But the real work wasn’t in the classroom, anyway, and it was about her in the way in which we were all so in need of mirrors: how many magic mirrors are there, that will speak back something life-changing and memorable forever? As I wrote in that APR article, “Ruth Stone: A Gift from the Universe,”

Stone has always been a stunningly empathetic teacher for poetry seminars, funny and dead serious at once, masterful at the excruciating dance of giving immediate responses to first drafts of student work. This lifelong care for her students shows in "Entering the Student's Poem," from In the Next Galaxy, published when she was eighty-seven. To maintain a focus on her students, she strictly refrained from showing her own poems to classes, but there were plenty of readings both informal and organized, so we all came to know each other's themes and voices. And who else could have given us "Some Things You'll Need to Know Before You Join the Union," a hilarious look at "the poetry factory" in second-Hand Coat? I couldn't get away with my lonesome self-pity around her, because she permitted self-pity: she pitied me even more than I pitied myself, and pitied herself, too; pitied the dogs, the cats, the ants-it was all such a pity!-and then she would laugh out loud. myself, and pitied herself, too; pitied the dogs, the cats, the ants-it was all such a pity!-and then she would laugh out loud.

(<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3692/is_200605/ai_n17172669/pg_2/?tag=content;col1>)

Does anyone know of an earlier source for the wonderful put-down “po-biz,” or did Ruth originate it? I heard it first from her in 1973.

Ruth’s kids were good at this kind of deflationary technique, too: I recall Abigail at age twenty—we called her Blue Jay then—mocking her momma’s poems. “In an Iridescent Time” begins, “My mother when young scrubbed laundry in a tub.” Abigail muttered, with a lilt in her voice, as she passed the potatoes, “My mother, when young, was laundry in a tub.” This gave me, a very staid bourgeouis suburban daughter, a considerable thrill: imagine not only being raised in a house so full of poetry, but even being able to make fun of it! Parody was really paradise. My head’s gotten full of her lines, now, too, but especially the lines making fun of herself and the human condition: growing those weird chin whiskers; the old body hiding in the kitchen and eavesdropping on the teenagers; the salt complaining about how degrading it is, the way they pinch her.

Ruth took a similar line with me, who needed a good shaking out, all Bouvard et Pecuchet as I was. When I first came to visit, in 1974, at her mountain cabin home in Goshen Four Corners, she asked me how I like her house: I, who’d never before seen mouse droppings, and when I answered, naiive and secure, ‘It’s kind of a mess, isn’t it?”—then, as her brow darkened, “. . . but, I mean, a creative mess”—she delivered a quick corrective talk to me, about a woman’s life in the art: hard work, danger, loss, being lost, cold comfort, and your children making fun of you at dinner. At ninety-four, she’s mellowed, though—I think. She’d appreciate the bioneurologist’s insight, that dopamine, accessed by a shock, makes neurons write to disk: if it hurts, you’ll remember it better.

It’s not enough to have talent, or time, or connections, or luck, or even five hundred a year and a room: you have to be able to hear that train a-comin’. Not everyone does, or can. It’s a spirit power.

Miriam Haskell

Miriam Haskell (1899-1981) designed jewelry and created a company that still bears her name. Born in a small Indiana town on the banks of the Ohio River, not far across from Louisville, where she is buried, she came to New York City in the early twenties, with $500 borrowed from her father. Her small shop became a sensation, carrying affordable costume pieces created from glass and gold-plate brass, with designs of a richness and complexity never before imagined.

Haskell's life story, triumphant and heartbreaking, is the center of a new, not-yet-published book of poems by Rosanne Wasserman. Below is the first poem of the book:


Bijoux de l’Heure

. . . and the world was not young any more, but only some of the women wore jewels. All of them were ladies now, and wanted decorations, things to sparkle on their hands and collarbones and ears. They had their own property, and they wanted more. They saw other beautiful ladies, goddesses, sparkling in Paris and Hollywood. They kept a sharp eye on the avenue, knowing that that’s where their dreams would appear.

Miriam lived by the river, then she left and traveled north. She carried a forest, a garden, a love of gold, and her own two hands. She was going to teach the children, but she could not learn the steps, so chose a new path. She went to the city instead, where her childhood ruffled the dreams of others.

Miriam gave them the forest first, oak leaves and snail shells. Gold encased spider and cobweb, tortoises and dragonflies. Colored wooden flowers hung from chains. It was American, but it was not Grant Wood. It was Midwestern meadow and Jewish art. Her hands were Byzantine; they knew midoriental fashions. She rented an avenue storefront near the McAlpin Hotel; she wrote her name by hand on a window card. Her shop was a fractal of the old McAlpin’s Marine Grill, a terra cotta cavern at Herald Square. Chanel had just opened a grand canal of beauty and desire, true lies of poured glass gems in settings stolen from the past; but by the thirties, she worked for De Beers. What was a typist to do, walking home from work down Thirty-fourth Street, set on spending any slack in a distasteful paycheck? What rhythmic swinging counterweights could she hang on her earlobes, what sling around her neck to hide necessity’s steel collar, what loop on her wrists to charm unhappy eyes while her fingers flew? What home-bound mom could exit Macy’s without stopping by the small boutique?

Everything flashed in the spotlights, and nothing was real. It was paste and plating, brass and foil, faceted glass. Four small hands reached from the walls, their white white fingers hung with white enameled chains, faux pearls, and strings of gilt-brass beads. The women stopped in front, then walked inside, and word got round: chic, unique, and beautiful for sale. Gorgeousness and craftsmanship and glitter at a price they could afford. Something to talk about.


For more info, see The Best American Poetry Blog: http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2009/10/miriam-haskell-and-me-by-rosanne-wasserman.html
and please contact @ zannie@aol.com.

GERRIT HENRY, The Time of the Night Forthcoming from the Groundwater Press

A long-awaited project is at last once more underway: we will soon publish Gerrit Henry's posthumous selected poems, edited and introduced by Marc Cohen, his literary executor. The Time of the Night: Selected Poems by Gerrit Henry will also offer the introductions written for Gerrit's earlier books by John Ashbery and David Lehman. The cover will feature a portrait of Gerrit from Alex Katz's 1977 painting "Place," now at the Whitney Museum. Look for a new book announcement by 2010!

Rosanne's Publications and Poetry Work

ROSANNE WASSERMAN

zanwasserman@gmail.com

67 Edgewood Road, Port Washington, NY 11050

PUBLICATIONS

POETRY

Poetry Books

Miriam Haskell (forthcoming).

The Shoemaker’s Children (forthcoming).

Learning to Swim in the Ocean (forthcoming).

Psyche and Amor, collaboration with Eugene Richie (Amherst: Factory Hollow Pres, 2009).

Place du Carousel, collaboration with Eugene Richie (Vilna: Zilvinas & Daiva, 2000).

Other Selves (New York: Painted Leaf, 1999).

No Archive on Earth (New York: Gnosis Press, 1995).

The Lacemakers (New York: Gnosis Press, 1992).

Apple Perfume, Intuflo Editions (New York: Groundwater Press, 1989); introduction by Ruth Stone.

Willing Suspensions (Bloomington, IN, 1975).

Pomes (Louisville, KY: Innominate Press, 1971).

Poems in Journals and Magazines

“For Dara.” Thumbnail 1 (April 2010). Print.
“Limits” and “Steak & Eggs.” Video recordings for THEthe Poetry (December 2010).

“Limits.” THEthe Poetry (November 2010).

“Stringing the Crinoids.” notnostrums 4 (2010).

“Missed Call” in Pirene’s Fountain (October 2009).

“Qui Vive, Qui Vire,” Pirene’s Fountain (May 2009).

Six Choices from “Sonnets from the Brazilian,” Specs Journal 2.

“Our Lady of Quelques Choses,” “Local Soul,” and “Learning to Swim in the Ocean,” Cimarron Review 158 (2007).

“Grove,” “Joy,” and “ Forgetfulness,” Electronic Poetry Journal 7 (2004).

“Spirit” in GoodFoot Magazine 5 (20030.

“Why Poetry?” in Hear This (2002).

“Listening to Reason,” “Afikomen,” “Visionary Menus,” “Already in the Fire,” and “Stay Home,” Slope 17 (2002).

“Montage Sequencing” in Can We Have Our Ball Back? 13, canwehaveourballback.com.

“Laps” and “Finish” in Shampoo 15 (2002), .

“Sparkly Moon” and “The Last of January on the Hudson” in GoodFoot Magazine 2 (2001).

“Here Are Your Options,” Bad Henry Review, 1998.

“Crepes Dentelles,” “The Combs” (with John Ash), “Eurydice in Love,” “Sappho’s Hymn to

Aphrodite,” and “Journal Entry (May 10, 1994),” Online edition of Poetry New York (1998).

“Cut to the Chase,” Caprice, 1997.

“Journal Entry,” Poetry New York, 1997.

“Swansneck Valentine” and “A Perfect Sleeping Night,” Private, 1996.

“Inuit and Seal,” “A Fine Romance,” and “Sunset with Venetian Blinds,” Gnosis (Moscow), 1995.

“Caffeine,” Caprice, 1995. (Also featured in cover photograph in this issue.)

“The Hawthorne Circle,” Caprice, 1995.

“Fire-Ender,” “Wings Will Fly You,” “At Diamond Park,” collaborations with Eugene Richie,

Private, 1995.

“Ship’s Medicine,” Lingo, 1994.

“A Personal Friend,” Caprice, 1993.

“Putting in a Word,” Boulevard, 1993.

“Shanghai Lil,” Private, 1992.

“The City of Beautiful Circles,” American Letters and Commentary, 1991.

“Thank You for the Present, Those Two Books”; and “Departure for Cythera,” a collaboration with John Ash, Joe Soap’s Canoe, 1990.

“Crepes Dentelles,” Poetry New York, 1989.

“Pillow Dreams of a Woman She Loves,” Caliban, 1989.

“View from Jane’s Window,” Mudfish, 1988.

“Sappho’s Phainetai Moi” and “A Reading of Agathias,” Mudfish, 1987.

“The Greek Revival Columns Long for Rose Street” and “Journal Entry,” Numbers, 1987.

“Buskins and Robins,” “Dark Furniture,” “Interview with Elpenor,” and “Inuit and Seal,” Sulfur, 1987.

“Eurydice in Love” and “The Combs,” collaborations with John Ash, Poetry New York, 1987.

“Valkyrie/Amor” and “What is Love?,” Bad Henry Review, 1987.

“Bread Made of Pearls,” Bookstore Review, 1987.

“A Provinical Synagogue,” Gambit, 1987.

“Women Reading Flesh,” Talus, 1987.

“Hymn to Aphrodite,” Poetry New York, 1985.

“Scotch Jazz,” collaboration with Eugene Richie, City, 1980.

“Thin Air” and “The Order in the Wooden House,” Gnosis, 1979.

“Eight O’Clock in Goshen” and “Laundromat,” City, 1977.

“Early March, Driving to Louisville,” Euterpe, 1977.

“Steak & Eggs” and “A Man in Love with the Color Red,” City, 1976.

Poems in Anthologies

From “Boustrophedon,” Disco Prairie Social Aid and Pleasure Club. Amherst: Factory Hollow Press, 2010.
“Holes in the Plot,” Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard, ed. Scott Gibson (New York: Painted Leaf, 1999).

“The Hero Herself,” “A Provincial Synagogue,” and “His Craft,” Hardboot: An Anthology of Kentucky Voices, ed. Virginia Shipley, Negative Capability Press.

“Moon-Milk Sestina,” The Breast: An Anthology, ed. Marin Gazzinga (New York: Global City Press,

1995).

“Putting in a Word,” The Best American Poetry of 1994, ed. A. R. Ammons (New York: Macmillan, 1994).

“Spring at Aughwick Creek,” Broadway 2: A Poets and Painters Anthology, ed. James Schuyler and Charles North (New York: Hanging Loose Press, 1989).

“Inuit and Seal,” The Best American Poetry of 1988, ed. John Ashbery (New York: Macmillan, 1988).

Sappho’s “Phainetai Moi” and “Hymn to Aphrodite,” translations, in Humanities I Sourcebook, ed. Joe

Salemi (New York: New York University Press, 1987).

“Three Marches to Miss the Victory,” Epiphanies: The Prose Poem Now, ed. George Myers, Jr.

(Westerville, OH: Cumberland, 1987).

“Ritual,” “Blueberries,” and “Sandwich Glass,” Gnosis Anthology of Contemporary American and Russian Literature and Art (New York: Gnosis, 1982).

LITERARY CRITICISM

WORK IN PROGRESS

Selected Translations, by John Ashbery. Researching, collecting, editing, and introducing a volume of Ashbery’s translations of six decades from French prose and poetry. The collection is complete but awaits my editorial choices; I will also write an intro and biographies of each French author; the book will be sent to Harvard University Press and Carcanet Press (Manchester, England) in 2007-08.

Letters by John Ashbery. Researching, collecting, editing, and introducing a volume of Ashbery’s letters of five decades to his friends, including James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, Jane Freilicher, and Harry Mathews.

PUBLICATIONS

“Eugene Richie,” “Elaine Equi,” “Ange Mlinko,” “Marcella Durand,” “Star Black,” “Eilene Myles,” “The Groundwater Press,” “Tom Weatherly,” Encyclopedia of the New York School Poets. Ed. Terrence Diggory. New York: Facts on File Reference Series, 2009.

“Hudson 1993: A Tour of John Ashberys Home.” Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2008. .

Selected Poems by Pierre Martory. Translated by John Ashbery. Co-edited with Eugene Richie. New York: Sheep Meadow Press; Manchester, England: Carcanet Press, 2007. Researching, collecting, and editing this volume was my responsibility.

Oh Lake, poems by Pierre Martory. Translated by John Ashbery. Co-edited with Eugene Richie. London: Artery Editions, forthcoming. Researching, collecting, and editing this volume was my responsibility.

“Ruth Stone: Gift from the Universe,” American Poetry Review, 2006.

“John Wheelwright,” “John Ash,” “Peter Gizzi,” “Michael Gizzi,” “Sandra Gilbert,” The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry. 7 vols. Eds. Jeffrey H. Gray, James McCorkle, and Mary Balkun. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006.

Other Traditions by John Ashbery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Researching and editing this volume was my responsibility.

“Sea Literature: Stories from Kings Point,” U. S. Military Academy, West Point, 1996.

“H. D.’s Helen in Egypt: Comment on the Lyric,” Sage¬treib.

“An Interview with Pierre Martory,” American Poetry Review, 1993.

“Falstaff and Father Silen,” Hellas, 1993.

“James Schuyler: Selected Poems,” American Poetry Review, 1989.

“Condemned to Memory” (Harry Mathews’ Cigarettes), Cover: Arts New York, 1988.

“Marianne Moore’s ‘Marriage’: A Study in Lexis,” New Interpretations of American Literature, ed. Richard Fleming and Michael Payne (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1988).

“’A Tutelary Muse’: Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop,” Marianne Moore: Woman and Poet

(Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1988).

“Marianne Moore and the New York School: Ashbery, O’Hara, Koch,” Sage¬treib, 1988.

“Helen of Troy: Her Myth in Modern Poetry,” Diss. 1986, Graduate School and University Center,

CUNY.

“Poetry Demonstrates Richness of Lyric” (Ruth Whitman’s Permanent Address), Jewish Week, 1982.

CONFERENCES

2010 John Ashbery, International Conference, Paris, France

2009 Special Session on Ruth Stone, Society for the Study of American Women Writers, Philadelphia

2006 “Ashbery’s Prose and Translations: Influences on Independent Publishing,” Editors’ Roundtable, Sixth Annual Juniper Literary Festival, University of Massachusetts Amherst, April

2006 “New Resources in Ashbery Studies,” International Ashbery Festival, New School for

Social Research, April

2000 “Sea Lit: Stories from Kings Point,” American Popular Culture Conference, New Orleans, LA

1999 Attended Poetry and Pedagogy Conference, Bard College Writing and Thinking Program,

Annandale-on-Hudson, June

“Sea Lit: Stories from Kings Point,” in SEA at CEA, College English Association Conference,

Philadelphia, April

1996 "A House Tour: John Ashbery's Paintings," and "Ruth Stone: Shaming the Ghost,"

National Poetry Foundation "American Poetry in the 1950s" Conference, Orono, ME.

"Introducing Cross-Curriculum Material into Writing Courses," Teaching Conference, West Point, NY.

1993 "Laura Riding: A Few Sources," NPF "American Poetry in the 1930s" Conference.

Panelist, "Poets and Publishers," Women's Book Association, New York.

1992 West Side YMCA Writer's Voice Seminar with the poet John Yau.

1989 "New York School Poetry," Faculty Round Table, USMMA.

1988 "Marianne Moore and the New York School," Northeast Modern Languages Association (NEMLA).

1987 "A Tutelary Muse: Moore's Influence on Elizabeth Bishop," NPF Conference and NEMLA. Vitae

1986 Chair, Marianne Moore Section, NEMLA.

1985 "Helen in Modern Poetry," NEMLA.

1984 "Marianne Moore's 'Marriage,'" NEMLA.

1983 "H.D.'s Helen in Egypt," NEMLA.

POETRY READINGS

2001 Time & Space Limited, with John Ashbery, Ann Lauterbach, Eugene Richie, and others, Hudson, NY

2000 William Corbett’s Series, with John Yau, Boston

Canio’s Books, with Susan Baran, Sag Harbor, NY

National Arts Club, with Jaime Manrique, New York

1999 Pace University Honors, with Charles Norton, New York

Hudson Opera House, with John Ashbery and others

1998 KGB, with David Lehman

Hudson Opera House, with John Ashbery

1997 MIT, with Tomoyuki Iino

USMMA Round Table Reading and Discussion

1996 Biblios Bookstore, New York, with Star Black. Reading at USMMA Library.

1995 USMMA Library.

1994 With Mary du Passage at the New School for Social Research, NY.

1993 Bard College, series directed by John Ashbery, Annandale-on-Hudson.

Gnosis Press, New School, NY. The Writer's Voice, West Side YMCA.

1992 Intuflo with Susan Wheeler, Phoenix Gallery, Soho.

Paris-American Academy with Eugene Richie and Pierre Martory, Paris.

Gnosis Press with Victoria Andreyeva, New School, New York.

1991 Intuflo with Ruth Stone, Phoenix Gallery, Soho. M.I.T. with Pierre Martory and John Ashbery, Boston.

1989 Intuflo with Christopher Hewitt, Susan Schreiber Gallery, Soho.

1988 Intuflo with Tom Weatherly, Schreiber-Cutler Gallery, Soho.

Gnosis Press with Victoria Andreyeva, New School, New York.

Guest poet, Shelley Society of New York, CUNY Grad Center.

1987 Intuflo with Robert Thompson, Intuflo Hardware Store, 68 Columbus Avenue.

Gnosis Press group reading, Bowery Gallery, Soho.

1986 "New Voices, New York," group reading, Graduate Center, CUNY.

Solidaridad Humana, Spanish-English reading.

Department of Cultural Affairs, translations of Victoria Andreyeva.

1981 Gnosis Magazine Poets, group reading, Manhattan Cable broadcast.

Poetry New York group reading, CUNY Graduate Center.