Karen Finley. Professor.
A Different Kind of Intimacy will bring together for the first time a collection of performance artist Karen Finley's texts, performances, short stories, essays, op-eds, art and photographs, creating a unique memoir of a woman whose life and career have embodied the urgent cultural conflicts of our time. The writings include text from the infamous performances that brought her to the Supreme Court in Finley vs. NEA, a battle that became a mainstay of the culture wars and which has made Finley an icon in the struggle for freedom of speech. Included in this volume will be the never before published, Obie Award-winning The American Chestnut for which she received a Guggenheim; such works as We Keep Our Victims Ready, A Certain Level of Denial, The Return of the Chocolate Smeared Woman, and an excerpt from her forthcoming film Shut Up and Love Me. Also appearing will be previously unpublished short stories, photos, artwork, and an essay on censorship. In 1998 Finley was named Woman of the Year by MS. magazine; she posed for Playboy the following year. She has appeared in numerous films including Philadelphia, and will soon be directing her own first feature film, Shut Up and Love Me, produced by Forensic Films. She has recorded albums including a collaboration with Sinead O'Connor. Finley is a regular on Politically Incorrect and can be seen giving her opinions on Exhale, a new show hosted by Candace Bergen on Oxygen. She will be hosting The Naked Players, a "nude Candid Camera" as well as Shock Video, both on HBO. Finley has written four books: Shock Treatment, Enough Is Enough, Living It Up, and Pooh Unplugged. "We need Finley: she doesn't duck the bullets, she keeps her eyes peeled on the artillery aimed at women, and she continues to push against her own boundaries as an artist" -- MS. Magazine
Publishers Weekly
In 1978, Karen Finley was arrested while portraying "a mix of red-light-district prostitute and locked-up psychopath" in the window of a defunct JC Penney. This was, as she puts it, "the beginning of my career causing psychic disturbances." In a retrospective that should appeal to fans and scholars of performance art, Finley, well-known as one of the NEA 4, presents the full scope of her socially conscious art, from performance texts and elaborate installations to segments of her already-published parodies of the self-help movement and Winnie-the-Pooh. Her direct imagery has forced her audience to look at the hopelessness of the disenfranchised, the cruelty of misogyny and the heartbreaking self-betrayal in a victim's own sense of shame. In short, muddled transitional essays, Finley describes her growth as an artist in the pressure cooker created by an eight-year First Amendment battle, the AIDS crisis and her father's suicide. Numerous photographs, drawings and reproduced documents, including a copy of her father's suicide note, deliver the visual context for her writings. Often distressing and downright ugly, this collection expresses the enormous personal and creative costs Finley absorbed while fighting in the culture wars, but, better yet, it presents the "organic explosion" at the heart of her confrontational art.
David Henderson. Professor.
Bob Holman. Professor and director.
Anne Waldman. Visiting writer and director.
Anne
Waldman is an internationally known poet, performer,
professor, editor, with strong personal links to
the New York School, the Beat Literary Movement,
and the experimental strands of the New American
Poetry. She has also extended performance to new
dimensions with her "modal structures" as
in the celebrated "Pieces of An Hour" (for
John Cage). She is a Distinguished Professor of Poetics
at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
at the Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, a
program she co-founded with poet Allen Ginsberg in
1974. She is the author of over 30 books including,
most recently, Vow To Poetry: Essays, Interviews & Manifestos,
(Coffee House Press, 2001) Marriage: A Sentence (Penguin
Poets, 2000) the 20th anniversary edition of Fast
Speaking Woman (City Lights Books), Iovis: All Is
Full of Jove: Books I & II (Coffee House Press),
Kill or Cure (Penguin Poets). She is also the editor
of The Beat Book (Shambhala Publications), and co-editor
of Disembodied Poetics: Annals of The Jack Kerouac
School (University of New Mexico Press). She was
an Assistant Director (1966-1968) and the Director
of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project (1968-1978)
and edited The World Anthology, Another World and
Out of This World, compendiums of writing from The
Poetry Project which included writings by three generations
of cutting edge, and culturally active poets and
writers. She has also been on the guest faculty of
the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe,
and advisor to the Prazska Skola Projekt in Prague.
She was the director of curriculum for the Schule
fur Dichtung in Vienna in Fall of 1999 (a decade-old
program she helped develop) and has taught classes
and workshops in literature, creative writing and
performance for a number of other projects, universities,
schools in the US and abroad. She has been a guest
at recent festivals in London, Italy, Prague, Venezuela,
Colombia, and Mexico. She has had books published
in Italian and German and work translated into French,
Turkish, and Czech. She is featured on the video, "Battle
of The Bards" (Lannan Foundation) and "Eye
In All Heads" (Phoebus Productions/Boulder).
She is the recipient of grants from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation and
is a winner of The Shelley Memorial Award for poetry.
She has recently released a CD of her poetry and
songs co-produced with Steven Taylor entitled "Alchemical
Elegy: Selected Songs & Writings" and co-edited
with Lewis Warsh The Angel Hair Anthology (Granary
Books, 2001), an anthology of work from Angel Hair
Magazine and Books, an alternative press of the 60s
and 70s. Also, she has collaborated and performed
with jazz musician Steve Lacy, collaborated with
composer and musician Steven Taylor, musician Mark
Miller, dancers Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, Lisa
Kraut, and has worked collaboratively with artists
Joe Brainard, George Schneeman, Red Grooms, Susan
Rothenberg, Richard Tuttle and Elizabeth Murray,
among others. She has been the Director of the Naropa
Abroad Program to Bali, Indonesia and makes regular
visits to that part of the world. She is a two-time
winner of the International Poetry Championship Bout
in Taos, New Mexico. She traveled with Bob Dylan’s
Rolling Thunder revue in the 1970s, and recently
performed at Town Hall in New York City in a Tribute
for Bob Dylan’s 60th birthday. She is a 2002
recipient of a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary
Performance Arts.
Steve Cannon. Visiting writer
Celena Glenn. Visiting writer.
Celena
Glenn is a ballet-toed bulldozer shoveling blankets
off the ice-covered lakes of our heart’s
malfunctions. She is former host of the Nuyorican
Poets’ Café, two-time National Poetry
Slam Champion, and currently ranked second in the
World Individual Poetry Slam. Celena is featured
in Spoken Word Revolution, a new anthology narrated
by the creator of the poetry slam Marc Smith, and
Urban Scribe, a documentary about the lives of contemporary
poets. Glenn urges every ghetto, every suburb, every
mansion recognize the relativity of circumstance
and allow those elements that discriminate, to unify
the world as a one humanity of oppressed souls needing
release.
“If you are looking for the new poetry, listen
to Celena Glenn. The new poetry is digital producer,
fashionista, poetry party par-layer, writer with
shape, sound, bullets, rhyme. Hearts tremble, walls
tumble, worlds collide. What's going on is Celena
Glenn on stage, and neither poetry nor its audience
will ever be the same.”
– Bob Holman
“Pure lyricist, lovely” – Saul Williams
Poetry Slam
Two-time National Poetry Slam Champion
Four-time member
and two-time Grand Slam Champion of Urbana NYC
Individual
Slam Champion of Bowery Poetry Club.
Host of the Nuyorican
Poet’s Café.
Host, feature, and panelist
of Brave New Voices National Youth Poetry Slam.
Features:
National Public Radio
PBS
Link TV
Vagina Monologues Worcester
Nuyorican Poets Cafe
NYC
Paramount Seattle
Orpheum Minneapolis
Bottom Line NYC
Poetry Project at St. Marks Church
NYC
Bowery Poetry Club NYC
Green Mill Chicago, among
others.
Universities:
Brown
Princeton
Sarah Lawrence
Barnard
NYU
Wesleyan
University of Rhode Island
New School
Long Island University
Universities of California
Davis and Riverside
Teaching and Workshops:
Urban Word
After-school Workshop Mentor
Program Coordinator,
and Facilitator for collaborations with the NYC Knicks
The
Studio Museum of Harlem
The Whitney Museum, and Free
Arts for Abused Kids.
As well as Community Shelter and Public High School
outreach.
Def Poetry
Hettie Jones. Visiting writer.
All things come to she who waits. She who writes
in earnest, secreting away her poems in the drawer
until the day arrives when she is ready to share
them--and an audience is willing to listen.
In 1998, Hettie Jones published Drive, winning the Norma Farber Award for a first book of poetry, a vindication of sorts for a woman who had been writing for more than thirty years. Hettie Jones, born Cohen, was part of the cultural whirlwind of the late fifties and sixties that encompassed not only the heyday of the Beat generation but also the birth of the Black Arts Movement. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Laurelton, New York, she attended Mary Washington College in Virginia and then headed back to New York where she met LeRoi Jones, a young African-American fresh out of Howard College. Both shared an interest in music and Kafka, and both soon found themselves at the forefront of the civil rights movement. Their interracial marriage broke tabooed ground, and their Village flat became not only a place where racial boundaries seemed to diminish in importance but also where hip young poets, painters, and musicians came to hang out and create a new American literary scene.
Hettie and Roi had two children during this time. They also established Totem Press and Yugen, a literary journal that provided a forum for many of poets of the Beat and New York schools, including Jack Kerouac and Frank O'Hara. Hettie Jones's role in Yugen was central--without her patience and perseverance, without her talents as typist, typesetter, editor and designer, the little journal would never have made it into print.
It was also during this time that Hettie Jones met Joyce Johnson. The two became fast friends, bolstering each other through pregnancies, divorces, and deaths--and celebrating the sheer exhilaration of being part of a world on the brink of radical change. It is this world that she writes about in her memoir, How I Became Hettie Jones (E.P. Dutton, 1990), a poignant account of her courage to combat racial prejudice (her own family disowned her after she married Jones), to cope with the fact that LeRoi Jones divorced her because she was white, and to raise on her own their two daughters, Lisa and Kelly. It is also the story of a woman who willingly worked as an editor and secretary to support her husband's art, and of a woman who developed her poetic talents--as did many of the women associated with the Beat movement--in virtual isolation, writing late at night after the children had been put to bed.
Jones's emergence as a writer in her own right has taken place over several decades. Besides her work with The Partisan Review, for which she served as managing editor from 1957 to 1961, she has authored many short stories and poems as well as several books for adolescents, including The Trees Stand Shining: Poetry of the North American Indians (Dial Press, 1971, reissue 1993); Big Star Fallin' Mama: Five Women in Black Music (Viking Press, 1974); and I Hate to Talk About Your Mother (Delacorte Press, 1979).
She has taught poetry, non-fiction writing, memoir and juvenile fiction at colleges and universities in New York as well as at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Her passion for teaching has also taken her into the prisons; she has conducted writing workshops at the New York Correctional Facility and at Sing Sing. In 1997, she edited Aliens At the Border (Segue Books), a collection of poetry written by female prisoners at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. In 1984, she was elected to PEN.
She lives in New York City, where she teaches writing at New School University and the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center.
Tuli Kupferber. Visiting writer.
Well,
I was the world's greatest poet before I became the
world's oldest rock n'roll star. I wasn't with the
Fugs until I was 42 but before that my life was trivial.
I went to graduate school for sociology in Brooklyn.
I dropped out and became a bohemian, living in Greenwich
Village. The rest is mystery and history. It's all
one blur now.
I was a free-formist. I never took to the traditional forms. I never bothered to learn them. It's OK to learn the old forms though and study what you've inherited in any art. I valued spontaneity a lot and being young, you're always afraid that you're going to be overwhelmed by the masters so you try to avoid it.
Ed Sanders.
Visiting writer.
Ed Sanders was born
August 17, 1939 in Kansas City, Missouri.
In the extra chapter "A Book of Verse",
appended to the 1990 re-issue of Sanders' satiric
memoir 'Tales
of Beatnik Glory',
Sanders recounts the experience of discovering Allen
Ginsberg's "Howl
and Other Poems" as a teenage boy in 1957. Refering
to himself in the third person, he says of the days
following: "When he returned to school the next
day he was a changed person. 'Holy holy holy holy
holy holy', he must have chanted that word, in long
continuous singsong sentences, at least four or five
thousand times a day. He felt great. Every care assumed
before evaporated. He read the poem to anybody who
would listen and got into trouble almost immediately." School
officials' admonitions to stay away from such "despicable
ravings of a homo" were ignored, and before
the year was up he'd be suspended for refusing to
stop bringing "filth" onto school property.
Ginsberg's work, then, had a profound impact on
the young seventeen year-old, showing him that
he had more options than those carefully laid before
him by his family: go to law school like his uncle
Milton, or work in his father's dry goods store.
After graduating from high school, he and a friend "got
really loaded and then said goodbye. 'I'm going
to New York to become a poet.' "
Sanders founded the Fugs in 1964 with Tuli Kupferberg.
Their music was a literate-tone folk/rock: they "chanted
poetry, wrote songs and did a lot of partying" (the
name came from the "fornicatory euphemism
Norman Mailer had utilized in his novel, "The
Naked and the Dead"). They created the Fugs
because it was "better than working or graduate
school, and it gave us a modest hope of earning
our livelihood from art."
Among his other ventures in the 60's were the Peace
Eye Bookstore on East 10th Street in Manhattan,
and a journal called "Fuck You: A Magazine
of the Arts." Other books include 'The Family'
about the Manson family and 'Hymn
to the Rebel Cafe'.
In the late 90's he presented his "Amazing
Grace" project at St. Mark's Church in the
East Village; this involved many poets, singers
and other creative people contributing verses to
the old gospel song. He lives in Woodstock, New
York, where he publishes The Woodstock Journal,
a community newspaper with poetry and art.
Alan Gilbert. Faculty advisor.
Kristin Prevallet. Lab poet-in-residence.