BPC Readings Tomorrow + New New Directions Anthologies

Readings tomorrow at Bowery Poetry Club
There are some great readings tomorrow at the Bowery Poetry Club. At 2 pm, my very good friend Reggie Harris, author of Ten Tongues (and whose blog Noctuary is now on the roll at right) will be reading with two other poets from Baltimore, Barbara DeCesare and Chris Toll. From 4-6 pm, Eliot Weinberger (see below) and Susan Howe (one of my favorite poets!) will be reading their work. From 6-7, poet Leonard Gontarek will be signing copies of his book, Deja Vu Diner, and my NYU contemporary Daniel Nester, author of God Save the Queen, will be signing his book History of My World Tonight. At 10 pm, the BPC is hosting a Hip Hop Commedia.

From their calendar:
The Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery, New York, NY 10012
212.614.0505
***
2:00pm
Baltimore Poets $6
4:00pm - 6:00pm
Segue Reading Series: Eliot Weinberger and Susan Howe $6
6:00pm - 7:00pm
Leonard Gontarek Reading & Signing Deja Vu Diner, Autumn House Press, 2006.
Daniel Nester Reading & Signing History Of My World Tonight, BlazeVOX, 2006.
7:00pm - 7:45pm
Crystal Bacon, Brandel France de Bravo, Jennifer Martelli, and Barbara O'Dair $6
8:00pm - 9:30pm
Greetings Zine
10:00pm - 11:30pm
Hip Hop Commedia $10/5

New anthologies from New Directions
Eliot Weinberger, who'll be reading tomorrow, is the editor of a hot new anthology, World Beat: International Poetry Now from New Directions (2006), that features the work of over 20 internationally renowned poets who've been published by New Directions Publishing Corporation over the last 25 years. Most of the poets in the volume have made their name in part through formal experimentation and political progressiveness, and they include the late Nobel Laureate Mexican Octavio Paz, Bajan wordsmith and scholar (and my former prof) Kamau Brathwaite, Chinese poets Gu Cheng and exile Bei Dao, Japan's Kazuko Shiraishi, Israeli Aharon Shabtai, the young Albanian writer Luljeta Lleshanaku, Denmark's Inger Christensen. There are a handful of outstanding American poets, including the late Robert Creeley, Anne Carson, Nathaniel Mackey, Michael Palmer, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Susan Howe. Also in the volume is Iraqi exile and US resident Dunya Mikhail, who with Palmer is a finalist for Canada's 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize.

New Directions has published a companion fiction volume, Terrestrial Intelligence: International Fiction Now from New Directions (2006), edited by ND's Editor in Chief Barbara Epler. Like the poetry volume, this one features selections from novels and books of short stories the press has published over the last 25 years, and includes authors such as the deceased and periodically sublime German-British author W. G. Sebald; Russia's comic "enfant terrible" Victor Pelevin; Germans Uwe Timm and noted filmmaker and theorist Alexander Kluge; Scot Dame Muriel Spark, the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and other suberbly styled novels, who passed away just a few weeks ago in Italy; Swiss ironist Fleur Jaeggy; Guatemalan Rodrigo Rey Rosa, who was translated by famed Beat Era expatriate Paul Bowles; Haiti's René Philoctète; Spanish maximalist Javier Marías, a likely candidate for the Nobel in a few years; Israeli experimentalist Yoel Hoffman; and Chilean native Roberto Bolaño, whose remarkable last novel 2066 will appear later this year. In this volume, there's only one American writer, whom I can say I know very, very well: John Keene.

Both collections would be perfect for general enjoyment and classroom use, so consider purchasing them if you're so inclined.

Random photo

66th St. Station, Lincoln Center, on a Saturday afternoon