May 19: Poetry Reading with Vincent Katz and Charles North
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Vincent Katz and Charles North will read from their new collections of poems: Broadway for Paul: Poems (Knopf, 2020) and Everything and Other Poems (The Song Cave, 2020) at 6pm ET on Tuesday, May 19.
The live event will stream directly on this page on Tuesday, May 19 at 6pm ET. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards. During the broadcast, please email your questions to evan@192books.com.
Broadway for Paul: Poems by Vincent Katz (Published by Knopf)
Broadway, the famous artery, both off the grid and definitive of Manhattan as it cuts its way downtown, is a metaphor for Katz's path through these poems: from Lincoln Plaza on the Upper West Side to the African Burial Ground and the courthouses downtown, Katz mines his native city for the deep humanity that undergirds its streets. His title, Broadway for Paul, with its implication that one could give something as large and undefinable as Broadway to a single person, courts an impossibility that generates the possibility of friendship, as well as the largesse Katz wants to find in our civic discourse. In poems such as "Ivanka Skirting" and "This Beautiful Bubble" we encounter his reckoning with a divisive culture that can, he suggests, be healed through our daily acts--through a kind of alert graciousness that also defines his poetry. In this moving collection, we enter Katz's world, both public and private, and experience poetry as a way of seeing that can change hearts and minds.
Everything and Other Poems by Charles North (Published by The Song Cave)
Charles North is the quintessential poet's poet. James Schuyler confidently named him "the most stimulating poet of his generation," while Harry Mathews possibly took it one step further to claim that Charles "belongs on the summit of our American Parnassus." To say that Charles North is a cornerstone in the home of contemporary American poetry would not be an exaggeration. In Everything and Other Poems, his twelfth collection, the trademarks of North's poetry shine with an earnestness, ambition, intellect, and his modest sense of humor, capturing the many-faceted lives we lead. Prose poems, long-form poems, studies for poems, lists, plus a game of cat and mouse with some French Symbolists, North is at the top of his game in this collection. If anything, with a career spanning over 40 years, this book proves North to be the poet of, well, everything.
Vincent Katz is a poet and translator. He is the author of Swimming Home and Southness and The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius, which received the National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. Editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, Katz has written for Apollo, Art in America, ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. As curator of the “Readings in Contemporary Poetry” series at Dia:Chelsea, Katz edited the anthology Readings in Contemporary Poetry.
Charles North has published twelve books of poems including What It Is Like (2011), which headed NPR’s Best Poetry Books of the Year, as well as books of critical prose and collaborations with artists and other poets. He has received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, four Fund for Poetry Awards, and a Poets Foundation Award, and is Poet-in-Residence at Pace University in NYC