To be *out of* something is both to be beyond the confines of that thing and to have emerged from it. The way poetry might be said to run parallel to the rest of life and also to spring from it. To be *out of place*: not just to not belong, but to no longer be somewhere out of which you have come.
A place is a project: an ongoing attempt to designate the boundaries and purpose of a given (or taken) space. A tradition is like a place: it includes, it excludes. One can run out of space. One can get run out of space. And “place,” of course, is not a neutral term, its boundaries negotiated and enforced by power.
We are interested in outsider traditions, poetic legacies, the history of the East Village/The Poetry Project, gentrification, colonialism, belonging and place. We welcome poets to interpret the concept of *out of place* however they see fit.
With Ken Chen, Julie Ezelle Patton, Anne Waldman, and Rachel Zucker. Moderated by Erica Hunt.
Ken Chen is the Executive Director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. He is the recipient of the Yale Younger Poets Award, the oldest annual literary award in America, for his book Juvenilia, which was selected by the poet Louise Glück. An NEA, NYFA and Bread Loaf fellow, Chen co-founded the cultural website Arts & Letters Daily and CultureStrike, a national arts organization dedicated to migrant justice. A graduate of Yale Law School, he successfully defended the asylum application of an undocumented Muslim high school student from Guinea detained by Homeland Security.
Erica Hunt is a poet, essayist, and author of Local History and Arcade, Piece Logic, Time Flies Right Before the Eyes and A Day and Its Approximates. Her poems and non-fiction have appeared in BOMB, Boundary 2, Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetics Journal, Tripwire, Recluse, In the American Tree and Conjunctions. Essays on poetics, feminism, and politics have been collected in Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women and The Politics of Poetic Form, The World, and other anthologies. With poet and scholar Dawn Lundy Martin, Hunt is co-editor of an anthology of new writing by Black women, Letters to the Future, forthcoming in June 2018 from Kore Press.
Julie Ezelle Patton was born and braised in Ohideyhideho, north coast facing the republic of Ontario. Her work has primarily appeared in live spoken-sung performance art pieces in honor of the sound presence of all earthlinks. She has performed throughout the Americas, Europe, and the Milky Way.
Patton’s most recent bound-ink-to-paper production is Notes for Some (Nominally) Awake. Her work has appeared in ((eco (lang)(uage(reader)), I’ll Drown My Book, What I Say and other publications. Julie is a selfproclaimed “phonemenologist” whose book length serial poem B (Tender Buttons Press) and Writing with Crooked Ink (Belladonna) are forthcoming. In 2015, Julie was honored with a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award and an Atlantic Center for the Arts Master Artist Residency. She used to teach creative writing through Teachers & Writers Collaborative, museums, universities, and other crack joints (until she bought her freedom).
Anne Waldman is a poet, performer, professor, editor, literary arts curator, and cultural activist. She is the author numerous collections of poetry, including the 1000 page feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House 2011) which was the winner of the 2012 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. Other recent books include Extinction Aria (Pied Oxen 2017), Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born (Coffee House Press 2016), Jaguar Harmonics (Post-Apollo Press 2014), Gossamurmur, (Penguin Poets 2013). She co-edited Cross Worlds: Transcultural Poetics (Coffee House 2014), an anthology of lectures from The Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University. Waldman is the recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. She received a long-life achievement award by the Before Columbus Foundation in 2015. She has collaborated with numerous visual artists, including painter Pat Steir. Waldman has also worked on a collaboration with Meredith Monk performing at Danspace and ICA in Boston, which will also be presented Brown University in the spring of 2018. She founded Fast Speaking Music with musicians Ambrose Bye and Devin Brahja Waldman, with whom she also collaborates. Publishers Weekly has deemed Waldman “a counter cultural giant”. She co-founded the Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics celebrated Summer Writing Program with Allen Ginsberg, a program she continues to curate in the summers. She has performed in recent years at festivals in Mexico City, Paris, Brussels, Calcutta, Jaipur, Marrakesh and Tangier. Trickster Feminism was released from Penguin in 2018. Website: annewaldman.org
Rachel Zucker is the author of nine books, most recently, The Pedestrians and MOTHERs. She was honored to write the foreword to Wait Till I’m Dead, Uncollected Poems by Allen Ginsberg. Zucker is the host of the podcast Commonplace: Conversations with Poets (and Other People).
