2022 Events & Programs
FLOW CHART FÊTE: A holiday open house
On December 11, 2022 at 2PM, The Flow Chart Foundation hosted a holiday party featuring treats, cheer, the Ashbery Christmas Tree, and a special music + poetry performance by Volker Goetze, Lokí, and Zach Layton. The performances were live-streamed on on WGXC: Radio for Open Ears.
Artist, composer and trumpeter Volker Goetze’s contributions to the art world are multifaceted: he recently produced New York City's first Sound Sculpture Walk (Sonic Gates), toured the globe for over 12 years with his transcultural African-Harp and trumpet duo with griot and kora virtuoso Ablaye Cissoko, released multiple jazz albums including large ensembles and orchestral while also creating feature documentaries - uplifting and inspiring communities and fans.
Lokí is a local Artist, Performer and MC, and has been hosting a very successful all-inclusive open mic event every week at the historic Lightforms Art Center, 743 Columbia St Hudson. Loki also hosts a monthly karaoke event at the Main St Pub in Philmont NY. Over the years, he has hosted charity events and parties for the community.
Zach Layton is a composer, curator, improviser, multi-instrumentalist, and educator based in upstate New York. His work explores vibration, resonance, and sound localization. He has performed at the Guggenheim Museum, PS1, ISSUE Project Room, Roulette, the Kitchen, and many other venues in NYC and around the world. He has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Jerome Foundation, and has participated in residencies at Signal Culture, Experimental Television Center and Art OMI. He is assistant professor of music production at Ramapo College of New Jersey.
A NIGHT OF NEO-BENSHI: Flow Chart Cabaret Cinema
still from it’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world
On July 30, 2022 at 7PM, The Flow Chart Foundation returned to Hudson Hall with a new evening of one-of-a-kind neo-benshi fun. Taking inspiration from early Japanese film interpreters, neo-benshi artists choose scenes from popular films and replace the dialogue with their own unique re-inventions, performed live in front of the screen. From re-imagined classics to new takes on blockbuster movies, it was a singular evening of performance, poetry, and dance, ranging rom the sublime to the ridiculousness.
Featuring Madhur Anand, Bruce Andrews, Dara Barrois/Dixon (formerly Dara Wier), Jeffrey Lependorf, Sheila Maldonado, Tracie Morris, Sally Silvers, and Wayne Koestenbaum. Watch excerpts of A Night of Neo-Benshi below (note; films/performances by Tracie Morris and Jeffrey Lependorf have not been included).
CLEAN SLATE POETRY SLAM
On November 7th, 2022 in collaboration with Hudson Catskill Housing Coalition, we presented an evening of poetry performance in the Flow Chart Space by formerly incarcerated individuals and family members to help raise awareness of the housing challenges faced by formerly incarcerated people who have fully served their time.
DESCRIPTION OF A MASQUE at WATERFRONT WEDNESDAYS
On July 13, 2022 at 7PM, John Ashbery’s zany modern fairy tale of life came to life in a mash-up of classical mythology and nursery rhyme characters with a touch of noir film banter thrown in: a masque where anything might happen, just like in life itself. Performed by Shanekia McIntosh, Craig Reardon, and Zoe Tuck (“radio play” arrangement of text by Jeffrey Lependorf).
The performance was preceded by an exhilarating drum circle led by Kuumba Dance & Drum / Operation Unite.
Shanekia McIntosh is a poet and performer. Her interdisciplinary work, inspired by the black diaspora, aims to disrupt and confront historical colonial erasure. Utilizing the thematic palettes of dislocation, trauma, migration, climate crisis and afro-futurism. Her work has been featured in the New Museum, Second Ward Foundation, Charim Galerie, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s TBA Festival, Hudson Hall, NY Live Arts, ICA at VCU, Basilica Hudson and more, with recent work published in Chronogram, Apogee Journal and The TENTH Magazine. More at ShanekiaMcIntosh.com.
Craig Reardon is a poet and the Librarian & Archivist for The Flow Chart Foundation. He received his MLIS from the State University of New York at Albany, where he is also completing an MA in English Literature with a concentration on modernist poetry. A phi beta kappa scholar, he has presented public poetry lectures and presentations. He also tutors in Latin and Ancient Greek, and leads poetry reading groups.
Zoe Tuck was born in Texas, became a person in California, and now lives in Massachusetts, where she teaches through the Threshold Academy and hosts “The But Also Reading Series with Britt Billmeyer-Finn. She co-curates Belladonna* Collaborative's Close Distances Reading Series and co-edits Hot Pink Magazine. Zoe is the author of Soft Investigations (Daisy Mayhem Books 2019) and Terror Matrix (Timeless, Infinite Light 2014). An excerpt of her epic poem, The Book of Bella, is forthcoming in 2022 from DoubleCross Press. Find out more at zoetuck.com.
This project is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature and administered in Columbia County by the Greene County Council on the Art (dba CREATE Council for the Arts)
COLLECTIVE ASHBERY:
A Group Reading-Through / Thinking-Through of THREE POEMS
From December 1 through December 13, The Flow Chart Foundation welcomed scholar Daniel Kane to lead us in a group reading-through, thinking-through of John Ashbery’s book-length metaphysical masterpiece THREE POEMS via Twitter and Instagram. On Friday, December 16th at 1pm EST, we hosted a live, concluding celebration discussion, led by Daniel Kane.
Daniel Kane is professor of American literature at Uppsala University in Sweden. His publications include the monographs All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (2003), We Saw the Light: Conversations Between the New American Cinema and Poetry (2009) and Do You Have a Band?: Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City (2017). He is currently at work editing Love, Joe: The Selected Letters of Joe Brainard.
COLLECTIVE ASHBERY:
A Group Reading-Through / Thinking-Through of FLOW CHART
Full details about how to take part, as well as a detailed reading schedule and links to each day’s recordings can be found HERE.
From January 3 to February 10, The Flow Chart Foundation organized a group reading-through, thinking-through of John Ashbery’s book-length poem “Flow Chart.” Emily Skillings, a former assistant of Ashbery and the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, will lead our online discussion, taking place over Twitter. We will read all of Flow Chart as a group over 38 days, from January 4th through February 10th. Each days reading is accompanied by a recording read by a cavalcade of literati, so you can listen along as you read!
Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.” She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Skillings received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017. She teaches creative writing at Yale and Columbia and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
On February 15, 2022, 7-8PM via Zoom, The Flow Chart Foundation hosted a concluding celebration of our 38-day Twitter "slow reading" of John Ashbery's book-length poem Flow Chart. Twitter-read leader, poet and editor Emily Skillings, poet and translator Marcella Durand, and scholar Andrew Epstein shared impressions, questions, revelations, and conundrums, with input from participants. Moderated by Flow Chart's Executive Director, Jeffrey Lependorf.
Full details about the #CollectiveAshbery Twitter reading can be found HERE.
Marcella Durand is the author of To husband is to tender, Black Square Editions, 2021; The Prospect, Delete Press, 2020; Area, Belladonna* Books, 2008; and Traffic & Weather, Futurepoem, 2008. She is the 2021 recipient of the C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art. Earth's Horizons, her translation of Michèle Métail's book-length poem, Les Horizons du sol, was published by Black Square Editions in 2020.
Andrew Epstein is a Professor of English at Florida State University. He is the author of Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture, and the Cambridge Introduction to American Poetry Since 1945 (forthcoming). His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Contemporary Literature, American Literary History, Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other publications, and he blogs about the New York School of poets at Locus Solus.
Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (The Song Cave, 2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.” Her poems can be found in Poetry, Harper’s, Boston Review, Granta, Hyperallergic, jubilat, and the Brooklyn Rail. Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery, which was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2021. She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. She currently teaches creative writing at Yale, NYU, and Columbia and lives in Brooklyn.