Poet (and original GPS board member) Anne Waldman presents The Genius of Others, a two-day series celebrating the relaunch of Giorno Poetry Systems at 222 Bowery.
Saturday, October 28, 7-10pm
7pm: Films by Ed Bowes on Akilah Oliver, by Natalia Gaia on Tongo Eisen Martin, and by No Land on Mary Norbert Korte
8pm: A talk by Sarah Riggs on Etel Adnan
9pm: A reading by Yasmine Seale, Sarah Riggs and Anne Waldman of translated works by Safaa Fathy, Souad Labbize, Soukaina Habiballah, and Etel Adnan
Throughout: Musical interludes by Miriam Elhajli
PURCHASE TICKETS HERE ($10)
Sunday, October 29, 4-7pm
4pm: A lecture by Vincent Katz on Edwin Denby, Rudy Burckhardt, and Yvonne Jacquette
5pm: A conversation between Cisco Bradley and William Parker on Charles Gayle
6pm: A musical performance by William Parker and Rob Brown
PURCHASE TICKETS HERE ($10)
Organized with the assistance of Zoe Brezsny.
Bios:
Poet, founder, professor, performer, librettist and cultural activist Anne Waldman is the author of over 60 volumes of poetry and anthologies, and co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics program at Naropa University which will be celebrating its 50th anniversary 2024. Waldman was awarded the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for Lifetime Achievement in 2015. Her most recent books include para ser estrella a medianoche (Arrebato Libros, 2021), Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House Press, 2023) and New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (Nightboat, 2022), co-edited with Emma Gomis. Waldman wrote the libretto for the critically acclaimed opera/movie “Black Lodge” with music by composer David T. Little that premiered at Opera Philadelphia in October of 2022. She has been called “one of the most important and irreducible living American poets.” Waldman has been intimately involved with Giorno Poetry Systems for decades, where she has served as a board member and has been featured on four editions of Dial-A-Poem and many GPS record anthologies.
Ed Bowes is a filmmaker, writer, and director who pioneered the use of video as cinema. After making the first-ever feature-length films using video, Romance (1975) and Better, Stronger (1978–79), Bowes began a long career as a cinematographer for filmmakers and video artists including Kathryn Bigelow, Lizzie Borden, Vito Acconci, and Robert Longo, among others.
Natalia Gaia is a freelance photographer and independent filmmaker living in Mexico City. Her first documentary, Poesía en la niebla (2019), follows a group of artists visiting a music school for teenagers in the mountains of Oaxaca. Other films include Stepping Back (2020) and Archive Litany (2021). Skid Bid (2021) is a short film she made from a recording session with San Francisco poet laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin.
No Land is an artist, poet, filmmaker, and photographer who is guided by spirit encounters with downtown artists, poets, elders and activists. Books include Authentic Artifice (Newest York, 2018), a book of poetry and photographs, the forthcoming The Velvet Wire with Anne Waldman (Granary Books). She has performed previously at 222 Bowery, as well as at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Fotografiska Museum and has curated performances and gatherings of her artist peers in New York since 2009.
Sarah Riggs is a poet, artist and filmmaker. She is the author of seven poetry books, including Eavesdrop (Chax, 2020) and The Nerve Epistle (Roof, 2021). She is the director of Six Lives (2013) and the producer of Outrider, a forthcoming film on and with Anne Waldman. With Omar Berrada, she co-edited Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets in Translation (Litmus Press, 2023) and co-founded the intercultural arts organization Tamaas in Brooklyn, Paris, and Marrakesh. Riggs had a long-standing relationship with the late Lebanese-American poet and painter Etel Adnan and translated her book Time.
Yasmine Seale’s work includes poetry, translation, criticism, and visual art. She is the author, with Robin Moger, of Agitated Air: Poems after Ibn Arabi (Tenement Press, 2022). Her translations from Arabic include The Annotated Arabian Nights (W. W. Norton, 2021) and Something Evergreen Called Life, a collection of poems by Rania Mamoun (Action Books, 2023). She is a 2023-24 Fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Miriam Elhajli is a folk singer, composer-improviser, and musicologist whose work is influenced by the rich musical traditions of her Venezuelan, Moroccan and North American heritage. Elhajli has performed alongside such artists as Bread & Puppet, Mali Obomsawin, Jen Shyu, Lau Noah, and Adam O'Farrill, and works as a researcher at The Association for Cultural Equity founded by Alan Lomax. Elhajli's LPs include Observations and The Uncertainty of Signs, which was released 2/22/22 on Numina Records, a label she founded to aid in the documentation of traditional women’s music in the Maghreb and beyond.
Vincent Katz often writes poems on the streets and avenues of Manhattan. He is the author of the poetry collections Broadway for Paul (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020), Southness (Lunar Chandelier Press, 2016), and Swimming Home (Nightboat Books, 2015), among others. He and Anne Waldman collaborated on Fantastic Caryatids (BlazeVOX, 2016), a book-length poem and conversation. He curated an exhibition on Black Mountain College for the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and edited Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, published by MIT Press. Katz curated the Readings in Contemporary Poetry series at the Dia Art Foundation from 2010 to 2021.
Cisco Bradley is a scholar of social, cultural, and intellectual history set in diasporan contexts, as well as a cultural theorist, ethnomusicologist, and ethnographer. His current research focuses on the Great Migration and the emergence of Black Creative Music across the United States. His most recent book, The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront (Duke University Press, 2023), examines the rise and fall of the Williamsburg underground music scene from the late 1980s to the early 2010s, and Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker (Duke University Press, 2021) is a critical biography of the free jazz bassist. Bradley also runs the Free Jazz Oral History Project, which has produced nearly 500 interviews with musicians since 2016. He is also the editor of JazzRightNow.com and has produced many concerts in New York over the past decade.
William Parker is a bassist, improviser, composer, writer, and educator. He has recorded over 150 albums, published six books, and taught and mentored hundreds of young musicians and artists. Parker’s current active bands include the large-band Little Huey Creative Orchestra, the Raining on the Moon Sextet, the In Order to Survive Quartet, Stan’s Hat Flapping in the Wind, the Cosmic Mountain Quintet with Hamid Drake, Kidd Jordan, and Cooper-Moore, as well as a deep and ongoing solo bass study. He has been a key figure in the New York and European creative music scenes since the 1970s and has performed with Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Peter Brotzmann, Milford Graves, Peter Kowald, and David S. Ware, among many others. He has been called “one of the most inventive bassists/leaders since [Charles] Mingus.” Parker has lived in New York’s Lower East Side since 1975.
Rob Brown is an alto sax musician who has been working with William Parker’s many ensembles for almost 30 years, recording at least 18 albums together. He and drummer Whit Dickey started playing together in the late eighties, which led to a trio with guitarist Joe Morris. More recently, Brown has worked with cellist Daniel Levin, percussionist Satoshi Takeshi, visual artist Jo Wood-Brown, and dancer/choreographer Miriam Parker.