[photo credit: Mandana Chaffa]

2022 July 31 at the Flow Chart Space

THIRTEEN MILLION PILLARS OF GRASS: A GATHERING

OF POETS, WRITERS, SCHOLARS, ARTISTS, PERFORMERS, AND READERS

THE TENNIS COURT OATH AT 60 & JOHN ASHBERY AT 95

Sunday, July 31st from 9am–7:30pm

PROGRAM

NB: Proof of vaccination required for admittance. The wearing of COVID-safe masks is encouraged.

Please post on social media throughout the day using #FCFgathering22

The event was LIVE-STREAMED through our radio partner, WGXC Radio for Open Ears, and archived there as well for later playback.

Start of Day

9:00am — Coffee & Bagels

9:50am — Welcome from Jeffrey Lependorf

Presentations, Poetry, Performances, and Provocative Conversation 

PART I — On The Tennis Court Oath at 60

Presentations (10:00 – 10:50):

Vincent Katz—A Recitation of “The Tennis Court Oath"

A recitation—from memory—of “The Tennis Court Oath,” with a few words of introduction about the significance of the poem to Katz, the importance of memorization in general, and the role the poem played and continues to play for him vis-a-vis sound and vocalization in poetry.

Antonio Sergio Bessa—Looking Through History

Ezra Pound famously said that an epic is a “poem including history.” This presentation will consider aspects of Ashbery’s Tennis Court Oath in regards to Pound’s concept of the epic. 

Lee Ann Brown—Color Play, or Soft Hornet as a New Kind of Green

A new poets play in homage to the use of color in the poetry and collages of John Ashbery, written by Lee Ann Brown, performed by Lee Ann and Tony Torn

Chiara Shea—Public Poetics and Private Poetry

An examination of  private vs. public poetics, considering The Tennis Court Oath as an expression of what Ashbery termed a form of “poetry [which] is actually more public than private,” specifically exploring the collection’s “enigmatic and fragmented poetry” in connection to “Litany.” from As We Know, which (in his 1980 interview with The Bennington Review), Ashbery described as a deliberate “re-examination of the experiments in The Tennis Court Oath.” Both works, this presentation argues, are concerned with themes of private vs. public poetics and with finding a way to approach poetry as something “different than what we commonly take it to be.”

Charles North—A Recitation of “Idaho” 

…from The Tennis Court Oath, with commentary.

Discussion (10:50 – 11:05) – moderated by Eugene Richie

Break (11:05 – 11:20)

PART II — On The Tennis Court Oath at 60

Presentations (11:20 - 12:20)

Sparrow—On the Subject of Oaths

What is an oath? Is Ashbery suggesting, with the title "The Tennis Court Oath," that a poet takes an oath? And if so, what is that oath? And what was the oath Ashbery himself took?

Eléna Rivera—A Poem

A poem after John Ashbery's "The Tennis Court Oath." 

Brandon Downing—The Oath of the Tennis Court

Finding the recursive roots of John Ashbery's late style in The Tennis Court Oath, by a close exegesis and careful reading of a key poem from it—"The Last World"—juxtaposed against details from Jacques Louis David's 1793 sketch for his painting "The Oath of the Tennis Court." 

Charles Kell—A Poem

“The Idiot,” poem Kell has written-—equally stark and playful—that engages with themes threaded through The Tennis Court Oath.

 Rebecca Wolff—The Hudson Tennis Court Oath

In all sincerity, in all insincerity, as a tennis ball so bright and green bounces side to side out of bounds and back to front across the net, so does the drive of the artist to change the world with their art or to be in the world with their helplessness bounce back and forth over the net of the Hudson Indoor Tennis Court. Too big to fall, too big to contain a durational performance museum, too big to evade synchronous momentousness, the Ashberian oath is sworn to obliquity; the Tennis Court Oath of 1789, at the start of the French Revolution, sworn to solidarity by a representative government body.

 Emily Setina and Susannah Hollister—“Gish! Wow! Help!” and “No Hyphen”: Kenneth and Janice Koch on The Tennis Court Oath

Drawing on their research for a biography-in-progress of Kenneth Koch, this talk locates Ashbery’s 1962 collection in the lives of Koch and his wife Janice through letters that depict Kenneth’s repeated rereading of “Europe” in their Greenwich Village home, theorize the book’s effect on his own writing, describe its immediate prominence in his courses at The New School and Columbia, and share Janice’s input on the title, casting it for the present as a physical experience of constant and connecting change. 

Discussion (12:20 – 12:35) – moderated by Mandana Chaffa

Lunch (only full-day registration includes a vegan boxed lunch)—12:35

Presentations, Poetry, Performances, and Provocative Conversation

NB: Due to a camera malfunction, we cannot share complete videos of the remainder of the Gathering; however, complete audio can be streamed HERE.

PART III — On The Tennis Court Oath at 60

Presentations (2:00 – 2:50)

Adriana Tampasis —"When you read it was sincere..."

A musical response to reading John Ashbery's "The Tennis Court Oath" composed as a trio, performed by Justin Geyer on piano, Meghan Mercier on cello, and Tampasis on alto flute, the piece is inspired by Ashbery's ability to reinvent words and how they play with one another. This composition utilizes improvisation and composition to "read" Ashbery's work. 

Elisabeth Joyce—Ashbery’s “Europe” as Readymade

David LeHardy Sweet describes John Ashbery’s poem “Europe” as an example of what he calls “junk” collage like Robert Rauschenberg’s combines as the “disorienting quality … of combining disparate, junk elements and … [creating a] ‘random order.’” Sweet takes this stance because the main collage source of this poem is a children’s book about wartime escapades, a little cheap and silly and even quite cringeworthy at moments, but notions of camp and nostalgia undermine the junkiness of the poem. 

Melissa Ginsburg and Ravi Shankar—A Poem

A collaboratively written poem in conversation with The Tennis Court Oath, responding in particular to Ashbery's syntactical mode and his startling juxtapositions, relying on the structural integrity of the sentence and the line while making room for invention, the absurd, and shifting tones and contexts. The process of composition for this collaborative poem relied on what Fredric Jameson has called Ashbery's Mallarmean mode and the operations of pure syntactical operation. 

Todd Colby—A Recitation of “Night” 

Colby always read "Night" as a glitchy dramatic monologue that dissolves into a melancholic reverie. In his reading, he hopes to capture and convey the voice he hears with its jump cuts and ellipses, punctuated by colloquialisms that arrive like curveballs.

Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers—Moving Through The Tennis Court Oath

Bruce Andrews will move through his essay/collage on The Tennis Court Oath originally appearing in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E while, along with each phrase, Sally Silvers will move.

Discussion (2:50 – 3:05) – moderated by Emily Skillings

Break (3:05 – 3:15)

PART IV — On Ashbery at 95

Presentations (3:25 – 4:35)

Marcella Durand—Artists and Poets Still Hang Out

The strong connection of poet to painter continues onward and expands—vibrant inclusive provocative connections that for many has become even more essential through the pandemic, climate change and war. "I talk art with all of my poet-friends and even with poets who are not my friends. It is a regular ongoing conversation ... Artists and poets still hang out." Durand will name names and name recent pieces and poems that inspire and inspired each other. 

Charles Bernstein—The Influence of Kinship Patterns upon Perception of an Ambiguous Stimulus

A poem on Ashbery's influence, from Dark City (1994).

Andrew Epstein—"The Mostly Limited Steps That Can Be Taken Against Danger": Reading "The One Thing That Can Save America" in an Age of Crisis

In this presentation, Epstein will read this moving, central Ashbery poem that asks the perhaps unanswerable question "Is anything central?" and will briefly discuss its ongoing relevance to our own troubled times.

Lesle Lewis and Stephen Cohen—“Clarity”: a Word-by-Word Reading 

The presentation will be a reading in two voices.  Cohen  will read "Clarity in Velocity" from Parallel Movement of the Hands, pausing to give time for Lewis to respond to each word.

Madhur Anand—Slow Dance: a poem inspired by "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror"

Anand will read and comment on her long poem "Slow Dance," published this year, which was inspired by her reading of Ashbery's famous poem more than 25 years ago.

Robert Polito—Veiled as in a Dream: JA and Four Crime Films

A look at a moment in “The Kane Richmond Project,” one of the “five unfinished longer works” in Parallel Movement of the Hands (edited by Emily Skillings). 

Ann Lauterbach—On “Soonest Mended”

Some recent thoughts on revisiting a favorite poem and how Ashbery’s work has influenced Lauterbach’s poetic thinking. 

Discussion (4:35 – 4:50) – moderated by Dara Barroir/Dixon

Break (4:50 – 5:00)

PART V — On Ashbery at 95

Presentations (5:00 – 6:00) 

Rachel Blau DuPlessis—Collage-Homage

In this visual essay. Blau DuPlessis glosses, in her own way, the perspectives and findings of some modern/contemporary collagists.

Edwin Torres—Cult of the Wordnew: the Inside Shorthand of Interlocking Narratives

As the poem looks to eradicate time, memory finds dystopia between the blanks. "Why not talk to myself and see what I get out of it," Ashberry's response to creating work that no one would ever hear. This essay will explore — the interlocking juxtaposition as a temporal object, the collaged thoughtphrase as a new kind of wordnew, the removal of location from location to arrive at inspiration — the non-spatial as social construct in guise of language.

Evelyn Reilly—John Ashbery Live

"A planisphere is your astronomy friend," says the website earthsky.org, a line which could easily have found a home in an Ashbery poem and brings back a "report" written following a 2009 appearance by the poet, who read from Planisphere and A Worldly Country. Reilly will revisit that attempted phenomenology of an Ashbery reading and explore the kind of listening that was required—a floating, yielding, "going with the flow" that demanded relinquishing any literary "will" one might have brought along that evening. What did it mean to be thus disarmed, then tossed into a language universe toggling constantly between cosmos and chaos?

Patricia Spears Jones—Overboard, Another Way to Talk April Galleons

A look at Ashbery’s poetry titles and how they do or don’t relate to the poems that follow.

George Quasha—The Implicit Music of a Singular Voice

Listening through Ashbery’s poems, early and late, as written and spoken, for the ways leading into the total music of his poiesis, one gets a feel for the overall livingness—the life music—of his singular poietic being. Not foregrounding interpretation but the nuanced openness and variability of singular sounding lets its actual dimensionality come through.   

Joan Retallack—28 Facts about John Ashbery as Disclosed by John Ashbery in 2006

A recitation of facts about John Ashbery.

Discussion (6:00 – 6:15) – moderated by Tracie Morris

RECEPTION — 6:15

FIN — 7:30

BIOS

Madhur Anand is the author of the experimental memoir This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart and the poetry collections A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes and Parasitic Oscillations. She received the Governor General’s Literary Award in 2021. She is a professor of ecology and sustainability at the University of Guelph.

Bruce Andrews, one of the key figures of the Language Poets, edited the influential journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (1978–1981) together with Charles Bernstein, anthologized as The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Andrews’s first book of poems, Edge, was published in 1973, and he has since gone on to publish over forty other books of poems, including Swoon Noir, Tizzy Boost, Executive Summary, and Film Noir.

Dara Barrois/Dixon’s thirteen books include the In the Still of the Night, You Good Thing, and Reverse Rapture. Her most recent book is Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina. She was awarded The Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives Book Award in 2006, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Lannan Foundation. Her poems are included in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. 

Charles Bernstein is the author of Topsy-Turvy (Chicago, April 2021) and Pitch of Poetry (Chicago, 2016).

Antonio Sergio Bessa is the chief curator emeritus at The Bronx Museum of the Arts

Lee Ann Brown is a poet who uses collage and song forms in her multiplicitous works, which recently include Other Archer (published in French as Autre Auchere with translations by Stéphane Bouquet). She edits Tender Buttons Press and curates poetry happenings at Torn Page in Chelsea, NYC and other venues.

Mandana Chaffa is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Nowruz Journal, a periodical of Persian arts and letters, which was a finalist for CLMP’s Best Magazine: Debut; and an Editor-at-Large at Chicago Review of Books, Mandana Chaffa’s writing has appeared in a variety of publications and anthologies. She serves on the boards of the National Book Critics Circle and The Flow Chart Foundation. Born in Tehran, Iran, she lives in New York.

Stephen Cohen is a practicing lawyer and author of four mystery novels. He is also the brother of Lesle Lewis. He lives in Rhinebeck with his journal and yoga mat.

Todd Colby is an artist and poet. He was born the same year as The Tennis Court Oath. His writing and art have recently appeared in The Believer, Bomb Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, Dizzy Magazine, Hyperallergic, Iterant Magazine, and Poetry. He is the author of six books of poetry, his most recent book, Splash State, was published by The Song Cave.

Brandon Downing’s collections of poetry include The Shirt Weapon (2002), Dark Brandon (2005), AT ME (2010) and Mellow Actions (2013). In 2007 he released a feature-length collection of short digital films, Dark Brandon: Eternal Classics, while a monograph of his literary collages from 1996 to 2008, Lake Antiquity, was published by Fence Books in 2010. He's recently completed an inaccurate, sixteen-book translation of Euripides' The Bacchae.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis has work forthcoming in 2022 and 2023 including Selected Poems 1980-2020 from CHAX Publishing, Life in Handkerchiefs, a book of collage poems, from Materialist Press, A Long Essay on the Long Poem, from University of Alabama Press, and Eurydics, loosely based on Sonnets to Orpheus, from Shearsman.

Marcella Durand is the 2021 recipient of the C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art; recent books include To husband is to tender, Black Square Editions, 2021; The Prospect, Delete Press, 2020; and a translation of Michèle Métail's book-length poem, Earth's Horizons/Les Horizons du sol, Black Square Editions, 2020.

Andrew Epstein is a professor of English at Florida State University. He is the author of Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture, and the forthcoming Cambridge Introduction to American Poetry Since 1945, and he blogs about the New York School of poetry at Locus Solus.

Justin Geyer is a pianist, keyboardist, composer and educator active in the jazz and experimental scenes as well as working with various rock groups.  An aspiring music therapist, Justin is passionate about sharing music in ways that are healing and uplifting. He believes that music can be a catalyst for growth and change as well as a powerful vehicle for bringing people together. 

Melissa Ginsburg is the author of the poetry collections Doll Apollo and Dear Weather Ghost, the novels The House Uptown and Sunset City, and three poetry chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, West Branch, Guernica, and other magazines. She is associate professor of creative writing at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, and serves as editor of Tupelo Quarterly.

Susannah Hollister is a writer based in central New Jersey who works on poetry, pedagogy, and memoir. With Emily Setina, she co-edited Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation (Yale 2012), and together Hollister and Setina are now writing a biography of Kenneth Koch—a project awarded an NEH Long-Term Fellowship at the NYPL for 2022-23.

Elisabeth Joyce is a professor at Edinboro University. In addition to her recent book on Ashbery's poetry and phenomenology, she has written on Marianne Moore's poetry and the visual arts and Susan Howe's poetry and questions of space.

Vincent Katz is the author of the poetry collections Broadway for Paul (2020), Southness (2016), Swimming Home (2015), and the book of translations, The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (2004). His writing on contemporary art and poetry has appeared in Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. As curator of the Readings in Contemporary Poetry series at Dia:Chelsea from 2010-2021, Katz edited the Dia anthology Readings in Contemporary Poetry. 

Charles Kell is the author of Cage of Lit Glass, chosen by Kimiko Hahn for the 2018 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. Ishmael Mask, his second full-length collection, is forthcoming from Autumn House Press in 2023. He is an assistant professor at the Community College of Rhode Island and editor of the Ocean State Review.

Ann Lauterbach is a poet and essayist. Her eleventh collection of poetry, Door, will be published in spring 2023. A recipient of numerous awards, her work has been supported by grants from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. She is Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.

Jeffrey Lependorf is Executive Director of The Flow Chart Foundation.

Lesle Lewis is author of five books: Small Boat, Landscapes I & II, lie down too, A Boot's a Boot, and Rainy Days on the Farm. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, dog, and books.

Meghan Mercier is a born-and-raised Hudson Valley composer and cellist. A recent graduate of Bard College, where she studied composition with Joan Tower and Matt Sargent, Meghan was the co-recipient of the Bard Class of 2020 Jacob Druckman Memorial Prize. She has collaborated in recording the improvised score for the NYSIFF and MONIFF selected short film “Five Elizabeths” and collaborates with various rising singer/songwriters.

Tracie Morris is a poet working in multiple genres including live performance, sound art, music, visual art, film, creative non-fiction and cultural studies, and is the author/editor of 10 books. She holds an MFA from Hunter College and a PhD from NYU. A Guggenheim Poetry Fellow, Tracie is a Professor of Poetry at Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Charles North has published 12 poetry collections including Everything and Other Poems (2020), a New York Times New Noteworthy Book, and What It is Like (2011), which headed NPR's Best Poetry Books of the year; three books of essays; collaborations with artists; and the poet/painter anthologies Broadway 1 & 2, co-edited with James Schuyler. Among his awards: two NEA Fellowships and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant.

Robert Polito is a poet, biographer, essayist, and teacher. In collaboration with Adam Fitzgerald, Tom Healy, and Irwin Chen, he founded ASHLAB, a digital mapping of John Ashbery’s Hudson house, initially at the New School, then later at the Poetry Foundation.

George Quasha is a poet and artist with twenty+ books published, including in the invented genre “preverbs,” Not Even Rabbits Go Down This Hole (preverbs) (2021) and Waking from Myself (preverbs) (2022). In poetics and art: Poetry in Principle (2019), Axial Stones: An Art of Precarious Balance (2006), and An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works & Writings (2009). A Guggenheim Fellow, an NEA Fellow, as well as this year’s recipient of the T-Space Annual Poetry Award.

Anna Rabinowitz is a poet, librettist and author of five collections of poetry, most recently including Words on the Street, also performed as a multi-media experimental opera at Baruch Performing Center, NYC. Previous volumes include At the Site of Inside Out, Darkling, The Wanton Sublime, and Present Tense (a Huffington Post selection as one of the 10 best poetry books of 2010). Her awards include include the Juniper Prize and an NEA Fellowship.

Evelyn Reilly is a New York-based poet, scholar, and environmentalist. Her books include Styrofoam, Apocalypso and Echolocation, all of which are published by Roof Books. Her poetry has appeared in many anthologies and is included in The Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene, a multimedia compendium of work by scientists, thinkers, poets and artists. Recent essays have been published in Jacket2, The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times, and Fractured Ecologies.

Joan Retallack is a poet, essayist and sometime dramaturg with an irrepressible background in philosophy and visual arts. Her most recent poetry volume is BOSCH'D: Fables, Moral Tales & Other Awkward Constructions (Litmus Press, 2020).

Eugene Richie is Director of Creative Writing in the Pace University English Department in New York. He has published five collections of poems and three books of translations, as well as many articles and reviews. He has edited Ashbery’s Selected Prose (University of Michigan Press/Carcanet) and, with Rosanne Wasserman and Olivier Brossard, three bilingual collections of Pierre Martory’s poems translated by Ashbery. With Wasserman, he also edited Ashbery’s Collected French Translations. 

Eléna Rivera’s new book of poems, Epic Series, is just out from Shearsman Books. Her third full-length collection of poetry, Scaffolding (2017), was published by Princeton University Press in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Translation and was a recent recipient of fellowships from MacDowell (2020), Trelex Paris Poetry Residency (2019), and the SHOEN Foundation (2016).

Emily Setina is associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and author of The Writer in the Darkroom: Photography and Biography in Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore (Oxford, forthcoming). With Susannah Hollister, she co-edited Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation (Yale 2012). Setina and Hollister are now collaborating on a biography of Kenneth Koch.

Chiara Shae is an early career researcher and academic specializing in the fields of modern American poetics and spatial theory. She recently received her PhD from King’s College London, exploring the representation of space, place and the built environment in the work of Ashbery. Her academic interests are interdisciplinary in nature, combining aspects of spatial philosophy, architectural history, and literary criticism.

Ravi Shankar, a Pushcart prize-winning poet and translator, has published 15 books, including Norton's Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond and the memoir Correctional. Founder of the journal Drunken Boat and Chairman of Asia Pacific Writers & Translators, he received his PhD from the University of Sydney. He has appeared in The New York Times, NPR, BBC and PBS Newshour. He teaches at Tufts University.

Sally Silvers, a Guggenheim Foundation and “Bessie” award-winning choreographer, has been making work since the 1980’s. As the Artistic Director of Sally Silvers & Dancers she has toured nationally and internationally in USA, Mexico, Europe, and the far East. Called the “downtown queen of intelligent quirk” (The New Yorker), she has choreographed three musicals for the Sundance Theater Festival and co-directed two award-winning dance films: “Little Lieutenant” and “Mechanics of the Brain.”

Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.” She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Skillings received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017. She teaches creative writing at Yale and Columbia and lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

Sparrow has published 10 books, and numerous pamphlets, booklets, flyers (he hates the word “chapbook”). His recent books include Small Happiness and Other Epiphanies (Monkfish) and The Princeton Diary (Vinal). Sparrow is the premier avant-garde art critic of the Hudson Valley.(he writes for Chronogram). He is a member of the local band “Wait! What?”

Patricia Spears Jones, a poet, playwright, anthologist, educator, and cultural activist, won the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. She is author of A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems. The Beloved Community is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2023. She has taught at Hollins University, Adelphi University, CUNY, and Barnard College. She organizes the American Poets Congress and is a Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Black Earth Institute.

Adriana Tampasis is a Hudson Valley-based composer, performer, and poet. Her work is inspired by the fusion of free jazz and chamber ensemble music, employing both improvisation and through-composition. She is the flute player in jazz fusion group “Pocket Merchant” and experimental chamber ensemble “Microfauna.”

Tony Torn is an actor, director and writer whose many works include the devised theater mash-up UBU SINGS UBU and a recent role in DOM JUAN at Bard College’s Fischer Center. He has worked with many luminary troupes including Reza Abdoh’s Dar a Luz and was in many plays by Richard Foreman.

Edwin Torres is a poet, performer, artist with thirteen books of poetry published, most recently, Quanundrum: i will be your many angled thing, The Animal's Perception of Earth, and Xoeteox: the infinite word object. His work has been widely anthologized, and he has received fellowships from NYFA, Foundation for Contemporary Arts and DIA Foundation. He is editor of the inter-genre anthology, The Body In Language: An Anthology.

John Emil Vincent is a poet living in Montreal. He’s written criticism including John Ashbery and You: His Later Books, as well as poetry, most recently, Bitter in the Belly.

Bernard Welt was, like many, the grateful beneficiary of Ashbery’s kind encouragement. “I stopped writing poetry . . .”, in The Best American Poetry 2001, was selected by the students in Ashberyland as a poem “having the most to say to today’s generation of high school students.” He wrote a thesis on Ashbery in 1976, which he knew better than to ask John to read.

Rebecca Wolff is the author of five books of poems and one novel, and founding editor of Fence. She lives in Hudson, NY. Slight Return is out this fall from Wave Books.