NEXT PAIRING: Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010!

Tony Hoagland’s poems have been described as moving unerringly with wit and irony, like an arrow through its target—we, the readers—with exhilarating results. His poems sprint across the page and unexpectedly blow apart a single moment, exposing its contradictory nature—and often our folly. Hoagland explores the spiritual bereftness of American satisfaction, creating poetry that is scathing, funny, rich, and refreshingly intelligent. Steven Cramer writes of Hoagland’s poems, “[They] grapple with selfhood and manhood, but they also consider the mysteries of the national identity—how the social and the personal mutually impinge.” Hoagland currently teaches in the poetry program at the University of Houston.

Pushcart Prize Nominee Anis Mojgani is a two time National Poetry Slam Champion, winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam, and a former resident of the Oregon Literary Arts Writer’s-In-The-Schools program. Anis has performed at numerous universities, festivals, and venues around the globe, while his work has appeared on HBO, NPR, and in the pages of Rattle magazine. Originally form New Orleans, Anis currently lives in a white pointy house in Portland OR, where’s he’s working on the followup to his book Over the Anvil We Stretch.

Page Meets Stage was born in 2005 when Billy Collins and Taylor Mali read together on the same stage in an event called “Page vs. Stage: The Final Smackdown!” Now it is a monthly series curated by Taylor which brings together two poets—one ostensibly repping the “page,” the other ostensibly repping a more performative style—read/perform back and forth, poem for poem, continuing the conversation of where poetry exists. Some of the most prominent poets in the United States both in the “academy” and in spoken word circles (Gerald Stern, Mark Doty, Carol Muske-Dukes, Valzhyna Mort, Paul Muldoon, Thomas Lux, Roger Bonair-Agard, Patricia Smith, Rives, Lynne Procope, to name just a few) have been involved.

All Page Meets Stage events are benefit readings for Bowery Arts & Sciences, the educational wing of the Bowery Poetry Club). Check out YouTube to see some of the more memorable moments in the series (search for “Page Meets Stage”), or go to www.PageMeetsStage.com for the complete schedule. Tickets are always $12 and will be available at the door.
Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, between Houston & Bleecker, F train to Second Ave, or 6 train to Bleecker).

May 2010: Dorianne Laux & Shira Erlichman

A legendary pairing of two incredibly talented women who have never met!

A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, DORIANNE LAUX’s fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon (W.W. Norton), is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award, chosen by Ai. It was also short-listed for the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the most outstanding book of poems published in the United States and chosen by the Kansas City Star as a noteworthy book of 2005. Laux is also author of three collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Awake (1990) introduced by Philip Levine, recently reprinted by Eastern Washington University Press, What We Carry (1994) and Smoke (2000). Superman: The Chapbook was released by Red Dragonfly Press in January, 2008. Co-author of The Poet’s Companion, she’s the recipient of two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Best American Erotic Poems Prize, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has appeared in the Best of the American Poetry Review, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Best of the Net, and she’s a frequent contributor to magazines as various as the New York Quarterly, Orion, Ms. Magazine and on-line journals. Laux has waited tables and written poems in San Diego, Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Petaluma, California, and as far north as Juneau, Alaska. For the last 13 years she has taught at the University of Oregon in Eugene and since 2004, as core faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program. Her summers are spent teaching poetry workshops at Esalen in Big Sur, Spoleto, Italy and Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. In fall of 2008 she and her husband, poet Joseph Millar, will move to Raleigh where she will join the faculty at North Carolina State University as a Poet-in-Residence.

April 2010: Martín Espada & Rich Villar

Special THURSDAY show. Page Meets Stage presents:
Rich Villar and Martin Espada

Called “the Latino poet of his generation” and “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors,” Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published seventeen books in all as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. Two more books are forthcoming: The Trouble Ball (Norton, 2011), a collection of poems, and The Lover of a Subversive is Also a Subversive (Michigan, 2010), a collection of essays. The Republic of Poetry, a collection of poems published by Norton in 2006, received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Another collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton, 1996), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other books of poetry include Crucifixion in the Plaza de Armas (Smokestack, 2008), Alabanza: New and Selected Poems (Norton, 2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (Norton, 2000), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (Norton, 1993), and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Curbstone, 1990). He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Robert Creeley Award, the Charity Randall Citation, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, the Premio Fronterizo, two NEA Fellowships, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. His poems have appeared in the The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Nation and The Best American Poetry. He has also published a collection of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (South End, 1998); edited two anthologies, Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination from Curbstone Press (Curbstone, 1994) and El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (University of Massachusetts, 1997); and released an audiobook of poetry called Now the Dead will Dance the Mambo (Leapfrog, 2004). His work has been translated into ten languages; collections of poems have recently been published in Spain, Puerto Rico and Chile. A former tenant lawyer, Espada is now a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches creative writing and the work of Pablo Neruda.

Rich Villar’s poetry and prose have appeared in the journals
MiPoesias: The American Cuban Issue, OCHO 15, Rattapallax, and the first edition of the chapbook series Achiote Seeds (Achiote Press,
Spring 2007). He is a co-founder and director of the Acentos
Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the development and publication of Latino/a poetry. He lives and writes en la madre tierra de New Jersey.
Watch Live on the Web!

http://www.bowerypoetrylive.com/

March 2010: Susan Somers-Willett & Regie Gibson

March 24th, 2010, 8 pm

Page Meets Stage: Susan B.A. Somers-Willett meets Regie Gibson

Susan Somers-Willett Susan is the author of two critically acclaimed books of poetry: Quiver (VQR Series, U of Georgia Press, 2009) and Roam (Crab Orchard Award Series, SIU Press, 2006). A former slam poet, she is also the author of a book of scholarly criticism, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America (U of Michigan Press, 2009).

Both a writer and a scholar of verse, Susan currently teaches college courses in creative writing, contemporary poetry and poetics, African American literature and culture, and gender and performance studies. Her articles and essays about poetry, poetics, and performance have appeared in a number of peer-reviewed journals including theJournal of the Midwest Modern Language Association; Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies; The American Voice; Teachers College Record;and Text, Practice, Performance Journal of Cultural Studies.

Regie Gibson is author of Storms Beneath the Skin, is the 1998 National Poetry Slam Champion and co-writer of the autobiographical film by New Line Cinema Love Jones. Regarded as one of the best performance poets in the world, Gibson has performed at The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Symphony Orchestra Hall, the Steppenwolf Theater, Harvard Universities Longfellow Hall, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in seven countries, most recently Havana, Cuba.

February 2010: Yusef Komunyakaa & Tyehimba Jess

This will be a legendary pairing! Be sure to arrive early (say, 7:30) to the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, between Houston & Bleecker, F train to Second Ave, or 6 train to Bleecker).

A video of Yusef Komunyakaa:

A video of Tyehimba Jess:

Alexandra Oliver & Chad Anderson (27 January 2010)

The January pairing of Page Meets Stage will feature Alexandra Oliver and Chad Anderson. They are both formalists who tend to rhyme a lot so this should be interesting. Check them out below:

Terrance Hayes & DJ Renegade (9 December 9 2009)

Sharon Dolin & Elana Bell (18 November 2009)

Sharon Dolin & Elana Bell continue the conversation.

Kurt Brown & Jai Chakrabarti (14 October 2009)

Major Jackson & Tara Betts (23 Sept. 2009)