Mark Doty meets Anne Waldman at the Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, between Houston and Bleecker, F train to Second Ave, or 6 train to Bleecker) at 8:00 pm. Admission is $12.
Mark Doty’s Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. His eight books of poems include School of the Arts, Source, and My Alexandria. He has also published four volumes of nonfiction prose: Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Heaven’s Coast, Firebird and Dog Years, which was a New York Times bestseller in 2007. Doty’s poems have appeared in many magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, The London Review of Books, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The New Yorker. Widely anthologized, his poems appear in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and many other collections.
Doty’s work has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. He is the only American poet to have received the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K., and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill and Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community for over 40 years as writer, sprechstimme performer, professor, editor, magpie scholar, infra-structure and cultural/political activist. Her published work is prodigious and she has concentrated on the long poem as a cultural intervention with such projects as Marriage :A Sentence, Structure of The World Compared to a Bubble, the recent Manatee/Humanity (Penguin Poets 2009) which is a book-length rhizomic meditation on evolution and endangered species, and the 900 page Iovis Trilogy :“Colors In The Mechanism of Concealment” which will be published by Coffee House press in 2011. “Waldman’s work is the antithesis of stasis…She is a flame. ” as one reviewer has noted. She has also collaborated extensively with a number of artists, musicians, and dancers, most recently artists Pat Steir and Kiki Smith and the theatre director Judith Malina. Publishers Weekly recently referred to Waldman as “A counter-cultural giant.”
