Livestream

Poetics in the burning question

Hudson Valley Squares — Edwin, Laura, Sparrow, Anne, Michael, Brenda, Sam, Chris, and Amy at the Green Kill event.

In an attempt to locate by other means (than commentary posts) the pith of each member of our Hudson Valley group’s take on the relationship between poetry and the 2020 elections, we invited them to participate in a livestream gathering on the evening of October 4th, a month before the vote, at Green Kill, a peer-to-peer arts space in Kingston, NY. Here the poets who chose to respond (above) read from their poetry, selecting pieces that seemed to them to touch a political, electoral verve, or not (it was open). Afterward we responded to the “burning question”:

To enhance the visual field, behind them as they spoke appeared scrolling upward the text of William Blake’s America a Prophecy; the rationale for its addition is discussed in part in the introduction to the event.

Here is a record of what happened:

October 15, 2020

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Michael Ruby, Sam Truitt, and fellow poets in New York's Hudson Valley survey the intersection of poetry and electoral politics — especially with regard to the November vote — and try to tell it like it is.

Michael Ruby is a poet who has worked for more than thirty years as an editor of articles about US politics at The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of The Star-Spangled Banner (Station Hill, 2020), The Mouth of the Bay (BlazeVOX, 2019), American Songbook (Ugly Duckling, 2013) and Compulsive Words (BlazeVOX, 2010), among other poetry books, and a trilogy in prose and poetry Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (Station Hill, 2012). He is also coeditor of Bernadette Mayer’s collected early books, Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words (Station Hill, 2015). Recordings of many of his books, including his new book, are available on PennSound. He is currently living in the Hudson Valley in Gallatin, N.Y.

Sam Truitt was born in Washington, DC, and raised there and in Tokyo, Japan. He is the author of Tokyoatoto (Station Hill, 2020 [October release]), Heresway (MadHat, 2018), Dick: A Vertical Elegy (Lunar Chandelier, 2014), Vertical Elegies 6: Street Mete (Station Hill, 2011), Vertical Elegies: Three Works (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008), and Vertical Elegies 5: The Section (Georgia, 2003), among others. He is the coeditor of In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley; and Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer. Robert Creeley likened Truitt to “a contemporary Everyman,” and he is the recipient, among other recognitions, of numerous Fund for Poetry awards, a Contemporary Poetry Award from the University of Georgia, and a Howard Fellowship. The producer and a cohost of the podcast Baffling Combustions and Director of Station Hill Press, he lives in Woodstock, NY. For more, visit: samtruitt.org

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