Maureen Owen and Susie Timmons are two very crucial reasons why we have a Poetry Project at all. These are two poets who recognize the fundamentally collaborative, social, and care-based heart of poetry, and it’s from this heart that they write their poems. Featuring a guest introduction by Patricia Spears Jones.
This event is presented in partnership with The Poetry Coalition's spring 2023 program, “and so much lost you’d think / beauty had left a lesson: Poetry & Grief” a coalitional program effort supported by a major grant to The Academy of American Poets from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
We hope you can join us at 7:00PM for a reception before the event. The reading will begin at 8:00PM. Masks will be optional while enjoying drinks and company during the reception but will be required once the reading begins.
Maureen Owen’s title, let the heart hold down the breakage Or the caregiver’s log, is just out from Hanging Loose Press. Other recent books include Edges of Water from Chax Press and Erosion’s Pull, a Coffee House Press title that was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize. Her work AE (Amelia Earhart) was a recipient of the prestigious Before Columbus American Book Award. She can be found reading her work on the PennSound website.
Susie Timmons was born in Chicago, grew up in Skokie, IL, barely survived adolescence in a creepy NJ suburb and fled to NYC in 1975, at age 19. She lived elsewhere for awhile but New York is really her home. Immediately upon her arrival, (then) editor of the Poetry Project Newsletter Billy Mackay introduced her to the incredible universe of the Poetry Project where she had the great fortune to take workshops with Alice Notley, Bill Zavatsky, Jim Brodey, and Ted Berrigan. She co-founded the NYC Poetry Calendar with Bob Holman and Sara Miles, operated a brief reading series at Sobosseks, edited an ephemeral 2 issue poetry newspaper called Bingo. She was active in downtown music and poetry scenes through the 1980s. She appeared in Henry Hills’ motion picture Money, was in Christian Marclay’s opera Dead Stories w/ Shelley Hirsch, David Moss, Arto Lindsay, David Garland and others, played variously in the 1980s with Charles K. Noyes, Mark Miller, Carol Parkinson, Judy Dunaway, David Linton, John Zorn and other others. Her lyrics appear on The Unlistenable Years by The Toy Killers, the compilation LPs Speed Trials and Peripheral Vision and on the recently reissued album Spill by the band, No Safety. As bands go, she was a founding member of The Scene is Now. She was in The Sunset Chorus w/ Ikue Mori & Cinnie Cole, The G-Spots with Joel Chassler and Barbara Barg, and The Busters with Ann Rupel, Heather Drake, AC Chubb and Barb. She played opposite Johnny Stanton and Simon Pettet in Alice Notley’s play Australia and portrayed a suicidal poet replete with oven hat in Eileen Myles’s Patriarchy, a play. She wrote declamations for Corey Tippin and Delia Doherty’s Tabula Spectacula, a gorgeous costume extravaganza celebrating the elements, performed al fresco in the NYC parks. She performed in an immense iteration of Sally Silvers’ Bark as a sort of debutante in pedal pushers tip-toeing diagonally across the space. She collaborated briefly with artist Rebecca Howland. In 1986-87, she taught a couple of workshops at the Poetry Project, and did so again in 2009. She was awarded the inaugural Ted Berrigan Award, and Joel Lewis got the other one. Her books include Hog Wild from Bob Rosenthal and Rochelle Kraut’s Frontward Books, Locked From the Outside from Yellow Press, The New Old Paint, Faux Press. These three were bundled together in Superior Packets, Wave Books 2015. Her work appears in Pathetic Literature ed. Eileen Myles, Grove Press 2022.
Masks are required at all Poetry Project events unless otherwise specifically noted. While we will have masks available we encourage you to come with a mask for the reading. 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.