The Poetry Project invites you to join us in celebrating the poet, photographer, filmmaker, and downtown icon Gerard Malanga on the occasion of his 80th birthday! The evening will feature a slideshow of Malanga’s photographs, a screening of Film Notebooks (2005), a reading by Malanga of his recent work, and a conversation and Q&A with Malanga moderated by Vincent Katz.
We hope you can join us at 7:00PM for a reception before the event. The program will begin at 8:00PM. During the reception, while enjoying drinks and conversation, masks will be optional. However, you will be required to wear your mask once the event begins.
Gerard Malanga was born in The Bronx in 1943. His poetry came to prominence in the early 1960s with a growing international following. In 2014 he was named the Official Poet of the annual Glasgow Arts International.
He is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry spanning a nearly 50-year period, including No Respect: New & Selected Poems 1964-2000 (Black Sparrow Press), Cool & Other Poems (Bottle of Smoke Press, 2019), and The New Mélancholia & Other Poems (Bottle of Smoke Press, 2021), and the editor of The Angus MacLise Checklist.
Malanga has also had four photography monographs published; two Spoken Word CD compilations; and co authored with Victor Bockris the internationally acclaimed Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story.
In 2003, he produced the double CD of Angus MacLise's selected tapes called The Cloud Doctrine. He is also the author of the 4-volume set, AM: Archives Malanga (2012), consisting of essays, sketches, photography and poetry.
His work has appeared in Poetry, Raritan, Yale Review, Harvard Review, Southwest Review, Paris Review, Partisan Review, and The New Yorker.
Malanga recently completed his memoirs, In Remembrance of Things Past. He lives with his cat Odie in upstate New York. His website gerardmalangaofficial.com
Vincent Katz is a poet and translator. He is the author of the poetry collections Broadway for Paul (Knopf, 2020), Southness (Lunar Chandelier Press, 2016) and Swimming Home (Nightboat Books, 2015), as well as The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (Princeton University Press, 2004), which received a National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. He is the editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (MIT Press, 2002; reprinted 2013), and his writing on contemporary art and poetry has appeared in publications such as 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 from 2010 to 2021, Katz edited the anthology Readings in Contemporary Poetry (Dia Art Foundation, 2017). In 2021, he collaborated with Sarah Sarhandi on the opera While There's Light, based on his translations of Propertius. Katz lives in New York City.
Masks are required at all Poetry Project events unless otherwise specifically noted. If you forget to bring your mask, we are happy to provide you with one. We also encourage all event attendees to take a rapid test the day of the event before heading to the church.
This in-person event will also be livestreamed via The Poetry Project's YouTube. Livestream captions will be available via a StreamText link or the CC button on YouTube's player.
Open CART captioning is scheduled for most in-person events.