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
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
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. ”
“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. ”
“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.”
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).
Radical Poetry Reading with Edwin Torres and friends: New Social Environment #166
Let Edwin Torres, Cecilia Vicuña, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Urayoán Noel, Stacy Szymaszek, and Xandria Phillips ground you in radical poetics: imagining possible futures and articulating their forms with words.
11 Poems from Divine Mimesis :: Pasolini Poems
Blazing Stadium has published a very limited edition pamphlet!
11 Poems from Divine Mimesis :: Pasolini Poems, by Stacy Szymaszek.
5x7.5
24 pages, staple bound
$11.00 including shipping within continental U.S.
Also in the series: The Saint-Nazaire Notebook, by Garrett Caples; Real Signs, by Kirsten Ihns; Torching the Pier, by Kevin Opstedal; and Detonated Mirror, by Sara Larsen.
Purchase of these VERY LIMITED EDITION pamphlets will make it possible for them to print others.
For ordering info please visit the Blazing Stadium website.
Poems in A Perfect Vacuum
I haven’t published much of the title poem from my forthcoming book, FAMOUS HERMITS, so am happy to have this excerpt published in A Perfect Vacuum. Thanks to the editor, and my friend, Judah Rubin. Also, I’m in good company with work by: Julia Wong Kcomt, María Paz Guerrero, Cesareo Martínez, and Mariela Dreyfus.
A Perfect Vacuum, October 2020 - “Always against the fascist creep.”
Recording of a short reading I did for CCA Santa Fe
Thank you to Daisy Atterbury and CCA Santa Fe/Living Room Series for hosting me yesterday. The reading was over IGTV and now a recording lives on their Instagram page . Here is a photo KA took of me while reading from Famous Hermits. First time I’ve read from it! And it felt like the first time I’ve managed to feel warmth and connection using this technology. Thx to the friends who made it so.
Photographs in 2 ZINES
I’ve had photographs appear in two zines recently and you can download them.
Marble Hill Camera Club (Thanks to Patrice Helmar).
Tucson Walks (Thanks to Amanda Meeks).
Drawings and Poems in The Poetry Project's HOUSE PARTY #15
I started drawing portraits (using pastels) of animals in May. I’m really gravitating toward birds these days. My main mode of sharing the drawings has been to send them to friends through the USPS. I’ve made a pleasing ritual of it. I was very happy when The Poetry Project asked if I’d send them some drawings and poems for one of their online projects, HOUSE PARTY. Here is the trio of birds of prey I sent them. And click the HOUSE PARTY link to read two new poems from a new series of Pasolini Poems I’m working on.
Prompts Against Anxiety 17 — TALK TO THE POETS for Woodland Pattern Book Center
It always makes me happy to support Woodland Pattern and be included in their programming and projects. Check out their Prompts Against Anxiety series here. You can sign up to receive the prompts in your inbox and also submit writing if you use any of the prompts. Pretty cool.
Poems with BLAZING STADIUM
Editors Whit Griffin and Tamas Panitz have published two poems from my forthcoming book, FAMOUS HERMITS in their new journal Blazing Stadium. Check it out here.
“Issues begin and end in conjunction with the New Moon. Continuously updated”
Elderly Magazine's End Capitalism Now
I have a poem in this thick collection of anti-capitalism poetry edited by poets Jamie Townsend & Nicholas DeBoer. It’s available as a PDF on their site. I’m looking forward to reading through it and broadening my thinking on how to work in an unjust system as it exists while subverting it in order to survive while dreaming to tear it down with experimental discernment.
Review of Rachel Levitsky’s NEIGHBOR in The Poetry Project Newsletter #261
Thank you to The Poetry Project for publishing my review of Rachel Levitsky’s NEIGHBOR (Ugly Duckling Presse) in a great issue that also has reviews of recent books by Ted Rees and Fred Moten, and an interview with Jasmine Gibson.
New: Six Ponderosas published by G L O S S
I’m very happy to be part of G L O S S, a new publishing project started by Morgan Vo that gifts poetry to people in exchange for donations to a mutual aid fund or social justice organization of the poets choice. “Our distribution pattern is meant to encourage social support.” Even though I wrote these poems in 2018, I love how a PDF press can get new work, work written in response to current events, to people in a timely fashion.
This small group of journal poems didn’t fit into my forthcoming book FAMOUS HERMITS so I’ve been looking for the right opportunity to share them. They are the last journal poems I wrote. Feels like the end of that era and area of exploration for me.
The organization I chose is Protect Native Elders because they are a volunteer run group responding to the COVID crisis that is disproportionally effecting tribes across the US. Their goal is to raise $500,000. The Navajo and Zuni here the Southwest have been very hard hit. Give them some cash if you can.
how to order
If you would like a * .pdf * of Six Ponderosas, please make a donation of $3 or more to Protect Native Elders, and send a screenshot of the receipt to: frogs.of.gloss@gmail.com
If you are unable to make a financial donation, no worries! You can email us your order, and we'll pass you the book.
From Protect Native Elders: “Operating in consultation with tribal command centers, our rapid response model enables us to deliver directly to facilities and first responders in emerging COVID-19 hotspots. In the two months since our grassroots beginning, we’ve delivered over $300,000 worth of PPE and other critical supplies to over 60 sites. We work with suppliers, manufacturers, and DIY maker collaboratives to ship masks, face-shields, hand sanitizer, food, water and other essential elements directly to our distribution hubs throughout Indian Country.”
about six ponderosas
We’re counting the days ’til we leave Missoula, we’re counting the does on the walk to and from campus, we’re counting the last cigarette. Not a catalogue, but a transmutation: the grace of numerology, the register of pain on a scale from one to ten. Szymaszek prepares us for potential encounters with wild cats, for the invasive friendliness of the local cashier, for the formative process of detailing that turns the merely adequate into something astonishing. We’re after a knowledge that can’t be known before knowing. We’re strength training in a new state.
FEATURED SHELVES at Wendy's Subway for our workshop - Poets on Jobs, Money, and Capitalism
The great people at Wendy’s have featured all the books we’re using in our workshop on their “featured shelves.” Read along!
Writing prompts for those who resist instruction
[Wendy’s Subway invited me to participate in their Writing Night series in April.]
1. Communicate (vibe) with your house plants, or if you don’t have plants, the nearest tree (can you walk to it or is the communication through a window?)—then record that communication.
2. Mysterious neighbor noises. Write about what you hear when you are home—what sound patterns emerge?
3. Write a one-word poem.
4. Write a poem called “don’t tell me what to do.”
From the Archive
I generally haven’t liked watching video or hearing audio of myself, but I can see that is shifting as I get older. Relatedly, I am less inlined to take self-portraits these days, but I still do. This all seems to be related to the ongoing project of self acceptance.
I really love this interview that took place after I read at SPT in San Fransisco on March 13, 2009. I had spent some hours before the reading steaming and soaking at a Japanese spa. I always remember that when I watch this video because I seem genuinely relaxed, maybe even care free.
If you love a salad buffet as much as I do and are curious about what usually ends up on my plate, this video if for you.
Workshop - But Could I Make a Living From It?: Poets on Jobs, Money, and Capitalism (FULL)
This workshop is sponsored by Wendy’s Subway in Brooklyn, NY, and will take place online.
In 2011, Time Magazine asked John Ashbery if he made a living from his poetry, to which he said, “Heavens no. Gosh no. Shucks no. No, not at all.” The poet is in a bizarre situation of always having to do something else to meet our material needs—maybe poetry-adjacent, maybe not. Many of the poets we will be reading in this workshop bridge the difference between making a living and making art by writing about work, registering varying manners of capitalist critique and antiauthoritarian/antibureaucratic spirit, using the tension that can arise when they have to participate, to some degree, in what they critique. The uniting factor of the readings is that all the poets (who are primarily US-based) bring an amazing vitality to the page by creating their own multidimensional, capacious, and just systems. Their lingual energy is whipped into an antidote against the despair we are meant to feel, by capitalist design, about the ordinary day, on an ongoing basis. Pandemic days are not ordinary days—the cruelty of the design has been made ever-more transparent. Poets are the artists, the inventors, we can go to for a new, un-nostalgic normal.
Some preliminary questions to answer in conversation and in writing throughout the workshop: how often, and why, is the poet asked to justify their existence by explaining the use/value/role of poetry? If you put your weekly pay, or deficit, in a poem what happens to that number? Why is the US dollar bill so creepy? We’ll discuss the reading and share our own writing inspired by the readings during class.
Some of the poets whose work we’ll read are: Krystal Languell, Ryan Eckes, Wanda Coleman, Antler, Jill Magi, Sean Bonney, Bernadette Mayer, Stephanie Young, Jeff Derksen, Maged Zahar, Lorenzo Thomas, Hattie Gossett, Mónica de la Torre, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Simone White, the Worker Writers COVID haiku project, and poems from the anthology Ritual and Capital. Participants will be able to add to a growing bibliography on the subject.
Manuscript Consultations for Poets
Just a reminder that I do MS consultations as part of my fledgling freelance practice. Sliding scale rates always but especially during the pandemic/quarantine. See more information and testimonials on this page