On Stacy Szymaszek’s Famous Hermits by Courtney Bush in Annulet

Midway along the journey of her life, a poet and beloved director of the Poetry Project leaves New York City. Though the poems in her new book Famous Hermits (Archway Editions, 2022) are not explicitly in Szymaszek’s signature annual journal form, they do not abandon her field of mastery: the diaristic recording of everydayness as a field for insight, revelation, and moments of pure beauty (or what beauty looks like to me), like the “elder woman” who appears in “Stop Making Peace” to sell her handmade soap, her voice suddenly lineated and descending the page:

                    

                        mine has more

                                                            pine tar

                                    in it

                                                            because frankly

                                    I am

                                                            a master

                                                                                    of my trade (41)

Read the whole review here.

On Famous Hermits - Review of Famous Hermits by Will Fesperman in Social Text

“In the fall of 2023, it is a bit late to be reviewing Stacy Szymaszek’s Famous Hermits, which came out months ago. But that does not matter so much. In fact, there are parts of Famous Hermits that seem already posthumous. I wouldn’t write that in a review (for fear of sounding morbid), except that Szymaszek said it themselves, in an interview with Sallie Fullerton. To write posthumously means to write for a wider audience than your peers: dead, alive, and future people. That means you have to cast off the provincialism of some US poets, who are so fixated on their US lineages that they forget about the rest of the world.”

Read the whole review here.

Stacy Szymaszek on the Liberatory possibilities of outsider poetry

Read the conversation between me and Sallie Fullerton here.

“The titular poem in Stacy Szymaszek’s new collection Famous Hermits begins with a quote by Agnes Martin, delivered at a Poetry Project talk in 1980. “I know that you’ve been conditioned to…become famous, and make your mark, and all that kind of thing, but you won’t go very far…” Though it appears halfway through the book, the statement settles over the poems like a portentous cloud. A moment of shared recognition and complicity. The poet, however, seems to have already given this idea quite a bit of thought.”

Three Novenas published by auric press

Visit auric’s site to order.

2022
hand-bound softcover, 6.5 x 4.75 in
58 pages, edition of 200
$13

special edition of 26 chapbooks, signed and lettered
with purple covers and a 9 x 5 in broadside 
letterpressed by Wry Press - $40

The Privilege of Thinking published in the New York Times Magazine

“Stacy Szymaszek’s “The Privilege of Thinking” borrows its title from the poem of the same name by the filmmaker and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini. In both poems, the terrain of thought is the shared space of this world, its landscapes and social conditions. Illumination is no one-way street. Thinking doesn’t radiate solely from the depths of the individual mind, but as Pasolini writes, “there’s light/in the world all around.” In Szymaszek’s poem, thinking in the city — eked out in scraps of survival-inflected time — reflects the city’s qualities: those of motion and vigilance, even a kind of gentle arrogance. But the city is a past-tense place. The present of the poet is in the desert, where a newfound stillness issues its own stark reply.” Selected by Anne Boyer

Read the poem here.

Illustration by R. O. Blechman

Illustration by R. O. Blechman

Famous Hermits Playlist

Largehearted Boy invited me to share a playlist of music that influenced the writing of Famous Hermits. I found it a cool approach to memoir.

TWO REVIEWS OF THE PASOLINI BOOK

Review of THE PASOLINI BOOK in The Poetry Project Newsletter by Becca Teich

“Amidst the upsurge in use of terms such as “babyqueer” or “tenderqueer” which one could say infantilize adults and lower expectations for mature behavior due to a sort of social infancy, Szymaszek inverts the paradigm of the childish adult to reveal the unique nonconformity of the adult-like child. The nonlinear interplay between childhood, gender nonconformity, and queerness reveals this cruel world in which such children are viewed as “both a threat and in need of protection” while simultaneously obscuring and denying children’s autonomy—an all too relevant insight in the midst of the current fascistic onslaught against trans children.” from “On The Pasolini Book by Stacy Szymaszek”

Review of THE PASOLINI BOOK by Giulia Crispiani on NERO.

“In The Pasolini Book, Rome and reality are indeed suspended in Stacy’s memory of it—a non-phenomenological experience driven by the desire to remember everything of a life that is made of two, that is lived by two bodies in two different fragments of a linear vector of time. When he dies, she doesn’t know—only later will she value the relevance of that specific event, she’ll come back to mourn and celebrate that life, she’ll borrow his moves and return to those places to become that man. This is what writing can do—because writing doesn’t fear time.” from “STACY AFTER PIER PAOLO On Stacy Szymaszek’s The Pasolini Book”

The Pasolini Book - official pub-date april 15

order your copies now directly from Golias Books!

“This is a strong and sure book of poetry. Like a city, it is deeply inviting and expansive at every corner. Yet it also provides a solace I didn’t know I needed: as a series of moments and movements toward a queer genealogy. For it is a problem for us, people of the body, that everything disappears, including our ancestors. How can we connect to our blistering and lost history, or speak fully of the curled shame and its sex? The Pasolini Book is a complex sensate record of the poem as location through which life, especially queer life, surges and withdraws. Enter this book as if you are together walking with Szymaszek and Pasolini: enter the smooth stream of the body across time. These poems are not frames for the lost but sites for their reoccurrences; the past hasn’t disappeared – it has become the present.”
— Camille Roy

Video from Majolica Poetry Reading

November 15, 2021 | Wayne Koestenbaum, Sally Wen Mao, S*an D. Henry Smith, Stacy Szymaszek.

We were all commissioned to write a poem in response to the exhibit of Majolica at the Bard Graduate Center. The poem I write is called The Serpent. I read it at about 11:45 on the video.

92Y workshop

Advanced Poetry with Stacy Szymaszek

Mon, Mar 28, 2022 - Mon, Apr 18, 2022
6:30 pm - 9 pm ET

One of my favorite ways to think about poetry is “an art of sounds moving in time,” to quote Karl Shapiro.

In this workshop, we’ll read and write poems with an eye toward the ear. How can we expand sonic presence in our poems to register another layer of meaning in sound’s own right? We’ll read poems aloud and listen to recordings of poets reading. The atmosphere will be supportive of discussion, and experimentation in your own sense of prosody.

Students are chosen by Stacy Szymaszek on the basis of a manuscript submission. Applications must be received by Monday, February 28, at 5 pm. View the submission guidelines. Scholarship assistance is available. Applications must be returned to Scholarship Services at least two weeks before the first session.

The Pasolini Book

Golias Books is pleased to announce

New Releases for 2022

We are very happy to announce two new publications for 2022: Matt Longabucco's Heroic Dose and Stacy Szymaszek's The Pasolini Book. We received our largest and strongest pool of submissions ever this summer, and we've spent the last several months reading, rereading, and discussing quite a number of excellent projects; thank you so much to everyone who shared their work. In the end, we were thrilled to find in Stacy's and Matt's manuscripts not only a good fit for Golias but the kind of sustained attention, strong conceptual and genealogical architecture, and care for the felicity of individual words that any press would be lucky to publish.

Longabucco's Heroic Dose collects longer poems and serial works into an extended journey in which lyric and critical reflections collocate a range of social geographies and milieus, narrative temporalities and mythic histories, into a richly guided passage through our ongoing contemporary underworld. Szymaszek's The Pasolini Book documents a nearly two-decade engagement with the "civic poetry" of Pier Paolo Pasolini and a two-fold cultivation of identity and vocation through the daily work of language and the re-visionary creation of one's own intellectual and political precursors. Suffice it to say that we were deeply impressed by both projects' combination of intellectual rigor and commitment with a clear and contagious enjoyment of words, thoughts, and images that make each line a springboard for one's own inquiry.

We offer our warmest thanks and congratulations to Stacy and Matt, and we look forward to making these books available next year.

Please stay tuned for more information on release dates and readings, and as always, thank you all for your support of the press. Feel free to take a look at our books here, and consider ordering one or more of the excellent titles from our back catalogue that you may have missed or that might make a good gift in the upcoming months. 
 

Stacy Szymaszek is the author of the full-length books Emptied of All Ships (2005), Hyperglossia (2009), hart island (2015), Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals (2016), which won the Ottoline xPrize from Fence Books and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in 2017, A Year From Today (2018) and Famous Hermits (forthcoming). Once the director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church (2007–18), Szymaszek is now a nonprofit arts consultant and teacher, living in the Hudson Valley region of New York. Szymaszek's work was recognized with a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant in Poetry. She serves on the boards of Wendy's Subway and The Committee on Poetry.

Matt Longabucco is the author of M/W: An essay on Jean Eustache’s La maman et la putain (Ugly Duckling Presse 2021). His chapbooks include Athens Notebook and The Sober Day. Poems and essays have appeared recently in Mirage, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing, innovative pedagogy, and critical theory at New York University and at Bard College’s Institute for Writing & Thinking.

photo by Venn Daniel

Richard Avedon | Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1966

Some Recent Publications

Read a new interlocution entitled “Babies with Fire Eyes Forever” between me and poet/translator Carlos Lara in Nomaterialism. Issues aren’t archived so I’ll upload a PDF here. But it’s a great issue so read it while you can.

Read an old interlocution entitled “Time Bandits” between me and Brenda Coultas over at The Poetry Project. Thank you to the team there.

Poems in The Tiny. Thank you to editors Gina Myers and Emma Brown Sanders.

Poems in Prolit. Thank you to editor Patrick Blagrave.

Not to neglect the print journals:

Poems in The Canary issue 7. Thank you to Joshua Edwards, Lynn Xu, Nick Twemlow, and Robyn Schiff.

A poem in Castle Grayskull but I can’t tell you where to find it.

Video from Segue Readings Series

Segue Reading Series: Charles Theonia & Stacy Szymaszek. October 16, 2021, Artists Space. Curated and hosted by Lonely Christopher and Venn Daniel. With thanks to James Sherry.

Video is here. I read a new poem entitled “Three Novenas.” My segment starts at about 57:26.

Video from Fahrenheit 451 House reading

Reading with Brenda Coultas and Martina Salisbury on June 12, 2021 for “Unwalled,” an exhibition of works by photographer Corinne May Botz, poet Brenda Coultas and installation artist Elana Herzog. Video set to start with Brenda introducing me. I read two poems from The Pasolini Book.

GAM as an Experiment in Gift Exchange

Nearly 14 years ago to the day I talked to students at SUNY Buffalo about my poetry mag GAM. I expanded those ideas in an essay for publication in the first issue of Wild Orchids (Melville issue), edited by Robert Dewhurst and Sean Reynolds - check out WO here. Still as true more true ever true: “but the crew of the Pequod doesn’t actually have a proper gam. Ahab’s obsession limits the exchange of information to “Have ye seen the white whale?” #anticapitalism #mutualaid

GAM AS AN EXPERIMENT IN GIFT EXCHANGE (The following talk was given to a small group of students at Buffalo State in 2007.) "GAM. Noun-A social meeting of two (or more) Whale-ships, generally on a cruising-ground; when, after exchanging hails, they exchange visits by boats' crews: the two captains remaining for a time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other."

GAM_szymaszek.jpg

Famous Hermits

Famous Hermits, my sixth full length collection, will be published by Archway Editions in June 2021. It features cover art by KB Jones, a piece I knew was the perfect image for FM at first sight. It’s a watercolor entitled “Women in Surrealism.” Check out her work! I’m really excited to be working with this new press and be part of the catalog they are building.

Cover: KB Jones

Cover: KB Jones

Also, Lucy Ives, Fred Moten, and Edwin Torres have given it their kind words of endorsement. The book will be distributed by Simon & Schuster. It has a page here.

The latest work from poet STACY SZYMASZEK, author of A YEAR FROM TODAY.

In Famous Hermits, her sixth full-length poetry collection, Stacy Szymaszek departs from the annual journal form of her past three books yet still adheres to the belief that the potential for revelatory and revolutionary transformation exists in the power we have, when we claim autonomy, to organize the fabric of our day to day lives. Her New York City is present as a memory that interjects its expectations onto new Western and Southwestern landscapes that don't recognize its logic. The concept of the famous hermit is born out of a desire to experience integrity, to not go forgotten, yet with a fierce need to separate from liberal ideas of what poetry should publicly perform. She invokes other kindred artists such as Dante, Bob Kaufman, Tina Modotti, and Jean Seberg as guides as she writes her own statements of renunciation and ultimately of middle-aged self-love.

“Sometimes all it takes is becoming a hermit. Continuing her exploration of the poem-as-diary with this new ecstatic collection, Stacy Szymaszek proves herself a glorious master of the aphorism, the bon mot, and the scintillating image. Somewhere between memory and shouting for joy are these lines. ”
— Lucy Ives
“We have no choice but to love our lyricism hungry, insistent and outgoing in withdrawal. It has to sound like something as it rounds the corner, down the steps and through the park into a broken city left behind for chaparral. Famous Hermits is a book about how we share necessity through sequestration, moving for love, if we can. Made by a poet who loves poetry, it makes a beautiful argument for poetry. Szymaszekal music won’t stop midstride, midlife, midline, and we have to love that. ”
— Fred Moten
“The poems in Famous Hermits take surface narrative and give it deep glide, that deeper dive that happens when you approach the world as your confidante. Within a few lines, Stacy Szymaszek interlaces eons worth of intricate history to galvanize a poet’s hangout — “I writhe / I am a human I think.” There is tenderness in the assimilation of being human, to write the savage heart with a poet’s restraint. In these pages, Basho meets the collective aporia — “my body takes me on a ride / I effloresce” — to enter a synesthetic space, where each allegory is its own parsed quench. Szymaszek shows her mastery of line and form by encapsulating cinematic propulsions that glint, in a flash, to then come back to our daily dialogue. Infiltrating cohesion with density, and a razor sharp wit, the poet’s “elite city” appears as a temporal embrace in the heat of a desert, an emodiment of our migratory needs. What do we hold back, that may emote us, to enter, with simultaneity, our understanding of each other—of people, of poem—where all entrances are lived, all recollected stanzas othered? This richly focused collection explores our diurnal awakenings as cognitive planes, where each grouping of text is a radial entity, a hermetic investigation of a poet’s walk.”
— Edwin Torres
KB Jones, Women in Surrealism

KB Jones, Women in Surrealism

47th Annual Poetry Project New Year's Day Marathon Reading

I was hibernating so I didn’t post before this event, but I read in it (first time as a “civilian”). It was really wonderful to be able to participate virtually in this organizational triumph - great to hear friends perform and so many new-to-me people, which is part of the spirit of the ritual. The Project is posting some of the videos with permission on their Youtube channel so eventually maybe my crappy phone recording of my short poem will be there. It’s called “I WORK ALL DAY” and it’s after a poem by Pier Paolo Pasolini.


I WORK ALL DAY

 

I work all day like a cool priest

and at night I wander the house on the slats

that don’t creak reading the tea leaves

at the back of my skull  

frequency of rose bouquets

hung stalk-first to dry 

mark every sill as if to say

someone with a heart still lives here

 

the sound of street racing mobs come down on my calm courage

they want us to be like scientists this the rational

outcome of their experiment but I when I watch myself

with camera-eye

being massacred

my ancestral blood flies

 a flock of crows upon the etched faces

 of the treacherous


it is not my job to study their political violence

of which we are always before

but to write all day

with painstaking attention to each line

and how I love

the people I love

and how I hate

the revving newborn fascist

how I celebrate by releasing unforgiving word bundles

that rise into the civic sky

 

Photo by Ted Roeder, The Poetry Project’s New Year’s Day Marathon, 2015 (I think).

Photo by Ted Roeder, The Poetry Project’s New Year’s Day Marathon, 2015 (I think).