May 15: Yusef Komunyakaa & Laura Yes Yes – Final Pairing of the Season!

YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, where he was raised during the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. He is the author of many poetry collections, including: Dedications & Other Darkhorses (1977); Lost in the Bonewheel Factory (1979); Copacetic (1984); I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Award; Dien Cai Dau (1988), winner of The Dark Room Poetry Prize; Magic City (1992); Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989 (1994), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Thieves of Paradise (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000);  Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999 (2001); Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part 1; Warhorses (2008); and The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). Komunyakaa is the recipient of the 2011 Wallace Stevens Award. His other honors include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the William Faulkner Prize from the Université de Rennes, the Thomas Forcade Award, the Hanes Poetry Prize, fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Louisiana Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at University of New Orleans, Indiana University, as a professor in the Council of Humanities and Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. He lives in New York City where he is currently Distinguished Senior Poet in New York University’s graduate creative writing program.

LAURA YES YES is a Callaloo and Cave Canem fellow, and associate editor of Muzzle magazine. She has competed with her poetry on a national level many times, notably as a finalist in 2010′s Women of the World Poetry Slam. Laura performs and leads workshops at venues all over the world. Her poems have appeared in deComP, The Legendary, and kill author. Write Bloody Publishing recently released her first collection of poems, How to Seduce a White Boy in Ten Easy Steps, which was nominated for a National Book Award. She is currently an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College.

(Photo by Emily Rose)

This is the final pairing of the 2012-2013 Season of Page Meets Stage. Our 2013-2014 will begin the third Wednesday of September with Taylor Mali and Faith Shearin!

Page Meets Stage is a monthly poetry series that pairs more page-oriented, academic poets with poets who come from a more spoken-word or performative background. Both poets are on stage at the same time and read back and forth, poem for poem, sometimes answering each other and other times taking the conversation in a different direction.Pairings take place on the third Wednesday of every (non-summer) month. Admission is $12/$6 students. The series is currently hosted by The DL Lounge at Delancey & Ludlow on New York City’s Lower East Side. (95 Delancey Street).

April Pairing Post Mortem

Moreso than any pairing recently, the two poets at the April pairing made an effort to find the common thread that lead them to choose each poem they read, even though sometimes it was a comical thread. Jamaal May read three of his “phobia” poems throughout the night, which he said was more than he usually does. He started the evening off off with “Athazagoaphobia: Fear of Being Ignored.” Marilyn Nelson started with a poem called “14-year-old American Negro Girl.” Many of her poems were persona pieces, especially ones about Seneca Village, an area of Manhattan that was razed to make room for Central Park in the 1800s. Her poem “The Lotus Eaters” reimagined the famous story of Odysseus’s crew but from a new angle: imagine if eating the lotus really made you see life clearly and beautifully? Imagine if you realized what was truly important then? The persona is furious at Odysseus for dragging him back to the “sweat and spray of minute life.” All in all, a great night.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, into a military family, Marilyn Nelson is a three-time finalist for the National Book Award and an accomplished poet, children’s verse author, and translator. She has won two Pushcart Prizes, two Yaddo residencies, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and the 2012 Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. Nelson is a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut at Storrs and was Connecticut’s poet laureate from 2001 to 2006. In 2013, she was elected as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Her publications include The Homeplace (1990), The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems (1997), and Carver: A Life in Poems (2001). She is also the recipient of the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award, and received designations as both a Newbery Honor Book and a Coretta Scott King Honor Book. In 2004 Nelson established Soul Mountain Retreat, a writer’s colony that aims to “encourage and support emerging and established poets—especially those belonging to traditionally underrepresented racial or cultural groups.”

Detroiter Jamaal May is the author of Hum (Alice James Books, Nov 2013), winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award, as well as two poetry chapbooks (The God Engine, 2009 and The Whetting of Teeth, 2012). His poems have been published widely with his most recent work appearing or forthcoming in Poetry, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Blackbird, Michigan Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, The Believer and New England Review. Honors include scholarships and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Cave Canem, and Callaloo, as well as an International Publication Prize from Atlanta Review and several nominations to both the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets anthologies. Jamaal is a graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA program for writers and recipient of the 2011-2013 Stadler Fellowship from Bucknell University. In addition to being a finalist at several national and international poetry slams, he is a three-time Rustbelt Regional Slam champion and has been a member of six national poetry slam teams, including five from Detroit and the 2012 semi-finalist NYC LouderARTS team. Jamaal has served as Associate Editor of West Branch and is currently the series editor, graphic designer and web-manager for the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Series.

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Page Meets Stage is a monthly poetry series that pairs more page-oriented, academic poets with poets who come from a more spoken-word or performative background. Both poets are on stage at the same time and read back and forth, poem for poem, sometimes answering each other and other times taking the conversation in a different direction.Pairings take place on the third Wednesday of every (non-summer) month. Admission is $12/$6 students. The series is currently hosted by The DL Lounge at Delancey & Ludlow on New York City’s Lower East Side. (95 Delancey Street).

March Pairing Post Mortem

Taylor Mali, Joanna Hoffman, and Ravi Shankar

Last week, Ravi Shankar (page) met Joanna Hoffman (stage) in one of the most bizarrely conjoined pairings we’ve ever had in the 8 year history of Page Meets Stage! They were both very good about saying why they were choosing to read certain poems and how they related to the “narrative thread” that seemed to be developing before our eyes. Sometimes the connection was humorously tenuous (“That last poem mentioned vegetables, so here’s a poem about how much I hate bananas!” Ravi said at one point), but other times the connection was surreal. For example, midway through the first half, Joanna read a poem about William Moulton Marston, the inventor of both the lie-detector and the superhero Wonder Woman. After the poem, Ravi walked to the stage somewhat incredulously and said, “You’re not going to believe this, but I was planning on doing a poem about the same guy!” Later, because Ravi had rapped a poem called “MC Walt & the Body Electric,” Joanna was convinced by her fans to pull out her “Passover Rap,” which ends with the line, “I’ve got my mind on my Torah, and my Torah on my mind.” This was definitely an “Apples & Oranges” pairing, and the audience was well fed!

FEBRUARY 2013 PAIRING POST MORTEM

by Taylor Mali

C. K. WILLIAMS met ANGEL NAFIS on 2/20/2013

I’d been looking forward to this pairing for a long time, especially since C. K. Williams had twice before been scheduled to appear at Page Meets Stage back when it was at the Bowery Poetry Club; once he was kept away by snow and another time he had to cancel (with plenty of warning) because his pairing happened to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton, and he kinda HAD to be there for that. However, pairing him with Angel Nafis, a young (maybe 25 tops?) New York City poetry slam dynamo just worked perfectly!

A word about the art of pairing poets. Early on in the series, I was often guilty of pairing wildly disparate voices just for the sake of the contrast. If you ever saw an episode of the reality TV series called “The Surreal Life,” in which iconic (but sometimes past-their-prime) celebrities share a house with others who don’t even “live in the same universe,” it was kind of like that. Corey Feldman and MC Hammer starred in the first season together; subsequent episodes corralled a tattooed snake handler, a gospel singer, and the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. I was sort of like a producer for that show. “What about putting HIM with HER?” I would muse to Marie-Elizabeth Mali or Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, two other curators who helped out with Page Meets Stage in the early days. Often they talked sense into me, but sometimes they gave in to the fascination, knowing that there are wondrously fortuitous accidents that occur when two poets are brought together, and sometimes you just need to go ahead with it to see what happens. By and large, these disparate marriage of “opposites” have been successful, some wildly so. Fans of one of the poets, who had never even heard of the other, show up and discover a new poet to love, and everyone leaves, richer for the experience.

Once and only once, I was convinced to alter a pairing after the cards had been printed. Upon seeing one particular pairing—and I won’t say which—my friend Jeffrey McDaniel (twice a veteran of Page Meets Stage himself) took time out from his busy teaching schedule to call me with a warning of the train wreck I had planned. “It’ll be a disaster,” he said. “He will hate her! And she will find him offensive. And then she’ll talk about what a horrible time she had. Him too.” Some changes were made. Everyone was charmed by the result.

So it’s important for the two poets to have enough in common—in background, experience, craft, or simply sensibility—that they can have a conversation with each other. Consequently, some pairings could be called “mentor pairings.” Martín Espada and Rich Villar, the pairing they called “Six Hundred Pounds of Latino Thunder,” was a mentor pairing. Thomas Lux and Marty McConnell was another. Heck, the very first pairing of the series, me and Billy Collins, was definitely a mentor pairing! The danger here, of course, is that the pairings appear segregated, too match-matchy. It’s a dance.

But back to last Wednesday! C. K. didn’t read any of his poems about race, but he sure read a lot of sex poems! At one point, when it was Angel’s turn to read, she said, “The way you mentioned the word ‘balls’ so many times in that last poem somehow made me think of my father.” She then read a great poem about all the times her father has been “married.” C. K. read a beautiful poem about prayer and his three grandsons. Angel read a found poem (called “Chocolate”?) about being harassed on the street by men all the time. It’s funny; I need to keep better notes during the reading because I’ve noticed that when I’m wearing my “organizer’s hat,” I cannot listen too (or remember) many of the poems. I can tell you how many people were there (51) and whether the bartender was happy (he was), but no one really cares about that except me.

Jan 16 Sneak Peek! Victoria Lynne McCoy reads Dana Gioia

Join us next Wednesday, January 16th, for the next installment of Page Meets Stage: Dana Gioia Meets Victoria Lynne McCoy.

8pm @ The DL Lounge, 95 Delancey at Ludlow
$12 / $6 for students

Wednesday, January 16, 2013 – 8pm at the DL!

 

DANA GIOIA is the author of four full-length collections of poetry, most recently Pity the Beautiful (Graywolf Press, 2012), as well as eight chapbooks. His poetry collection, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia’s volume Can Poetry Matter? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award. He received a B.A. and a M.B.A. from Stanford University and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. A former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia is currently the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California.

VICTORIA LYNNE MCCOY received an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA from the University of Redlands’ Johnston Center for Integrative Studies. She was selected by Matthew Dickman for Best New Poets 2012. Her work has also appeared in Boxcar Poetry Review, Used Furniture Review, PANK, and Union Station Magazine, among others. She is a member of the louderARTS Project and was the 2011 and 2012 Work Fellow for the Frost Place Conference on Poetry. Victoria lives in Brooklyn and is an assistant editor and publicist for Four Way Books.

Wed. December 19th, 2012, 8 pm

 

Jennifer L. Knox’s latest book of poems, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, is available from Bloof Books. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and four times in The Best American Poetry series.

 

Ian Khadan is one of the curators of the Urbana Poetry Slam, the only three-time National Poetry Slam Championship venue in New York City. Born in Georgetown, Guyana, he writes and performs his finely-crafted poems about race, whiskey, and urban living with equal parts eloquence and passion.