Poetry off the Shelf: Renee Gladman, Eileen Myles & Simone White

In Renee Gladman’s Plans for Sentences, Eileen Myles’s a “Working Life,” and Simone White’s or, on being the other woman, longings and plans laid bare accumulate in staccato bursts of life, almost self-generatively. Hovering between genres, these three new books vibrate with willful misdirection, fierce unknowing, and flummoxed dualities. How can the work of writing set life in motion?

This is a hybrid event, which will be offered in-person and via livestream.

Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of poetry, prose, drawing, and architecture. Gladman is the author of 14 published works, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, as well as three collections of drawings: One Long Black Sentence, a series of white-ink drawings on black paper, indexed by Fred Moten; Plans for Sentences, an image/text-based meditation on Black futurity and other choreographies of gathering; and Prose Architectures. She makes her home in New England.

Eileen Myles is a poet, novelist, and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has become a touchstone for the identity-fluid internet age. Pathetic Literature, which they edited, came out in Fall of 2022. Myles’s newest collection of poems, a “Working Life”, is out in April. Their fiction includes Chelsea Girls, which just won France’s Inrockuptibles Prize for best foreign novel, Cool for YouInferno (a poet’s novel), and Afterglow. Their writing on art was gathered in the volume The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art. They live in New York and Marfa, Texas.

Simone White is the author of the collections or, on being the other womanDear Angel of DeathOf Being Dispersed, and House Envy of All the World. White teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

In-Person Attendance

All guests over the age of two must wear a mask inside the Poetry Foundation building. If you will not comply with this requirement, you will not be granted entry to the event. Please note that some performers may choose to perform without a mask. Guests are encouraged to register in advance.

Livestream Attendance

The livestream link will be shared with registered guests on the day of the event. In order to receive the livestream details, please register in advance here.

Poetry Foundation’s events are completely free of charge and open to the public. This event will include CART captioning and ASL interpretation. For more information about accessibility at the Poetry Foundation, please visit our Accessibility Guide.