2024 Events & Programs
THIS LAND: An American Song Recital
Saturday, December 7th, 2024 Flow Chart Space
America’s relationship to land is complex and provides a rich topic for poets and composers to investigate. Historically, humanity explores, connects with, and exploits land. Property ownership is a sensitive and controversial topic as land has been stolen and lost, yet loved by so many. What is our responsibility to the land we call home and how can we care for the land that has always cared for us?
With music that examines both the destructive and loving relationships Americans have to land, four Bard Conservatory vocalists—Joseph Breslau, Nisha Caiozzi, Megan Maloney, and Sam Warshauer, together with pianist Gabrielė Žemaitytė—delved deep into the context of each piece, poet, and composer, aiming to paint a picture of the past so we can find a better way forward. The program featured art songs by quintessential American composers, such as Aaron Copland and Charles Ives, contemporary composers such as Jerod Tate and Lori Laitman, and musicians from the American folk music revival, such as Joni Mitchell and Pete Seeger.
Jeffrey Lependorf, Flow Chart's Executive Director, introduced the program. Special guest Rachel Hoppins from the Columbia Land Conservancy spoke as part of the program as well.
Sonic Meditations, featuring Ghost Ensemble
Friday, November 22nd, 2024 Flow Chart Space
On Friday, November 23rd, 2024, The Flow Chart Foundation presented members of Ghost Ensemble—Margaret Lancaster (flute), Ben Richter (accordion), Chris Nappi (percussion), and James Ilgenfritz (contrabass)—along with special guests Jeffrey Lependorf (shakuhachi) and David Rothenberg (birbynė & bass clarinet) in a music program rooted in the Deep Listening practice of Pauline Oliveros.
The program included:
Three Paths to Animal Music — David Rothenberg
Laramidia — Ben Richter
Outline — Pauline Oliveros
Hudson Air (Arctic Air) — Pauline Oliveros
Note that the final work was only partially recorded.
Ghost Ensemble fosters groundbreaking music that blurs borders of genre, style, and scene, expanding perceptual horizons through shared immersive experience. Collaboration with living composers is its primary focus. Since its 2012 inception, the ensemble has performed over 100 works and commissioned dozens of new compositions by a diverse range of highly original composers who share a belief in music’s potential for individual and community transformation. Rethinking the norms of composer/performer collaboration, Ghost Ensemble conducts innovative workshops to nurture adventurous new music over the course of multiple seasons. The resulting work often draws from contemporary classical, experimental chamber music, avant-garde jazz, environmental sound art, and territories in between. Ghost Ensemble has also maintained close engagement with the work of ensemble mentor Pauline Oliveros and her Deep Listening practice, collaborating on events including the release concert for her Anthology of Text Scores at Eyebeam (2013) and releasing premiere recordings of Angels and Demons (2018) and Mountain Air (2021). Critics have praised Ghost Ensemble performances as “prodigious … a thrilling listen” (Christian Carey, Sequenza21), “wonderful work … both exhilarating and a bit scary” (Peter Margasak, Bandcamp Daily), “beautifully performed and recorded … a body-felt sound mass … a multifaceted texture that evokes the primeval” (Meg Wilhoite, Sound Meets Sound), and “cloudy, mysterious, and dark … Beckettian in its slow spread … certainly a group to keep an eye on” (Brian Olewnick, Just Outside). The group's newest album, ensemble director Ben Richter's Rewild, was released October 2024 on New World Records.
IF I GATHER HERE AND SHOUT: Funto Omojola & Samiya Bashir
Saturday, November 16th, 2024 Flow Chart Space
On Saturday, November 16th, 2024 at 5pm in The Flow Chart Foundation's Flow Chart Space, we celebrated the publication of IF I GATHER HERE AND SHOUT (Nightboat Books) by Funto Omojola with readings and a discussion by Funto and Samiya Bashir.
Samiya Bashir is a multi-media poet, writer, librettist, and artist whose solo and collaborative work has been widely published, performed, installed, printed, exhibited, screened, experienced, and Oxford comma’d from Berlin to Düsseldorf, Amsterdam to Accra, Florence to Rome, and across the United States. Bashir is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Field Theories, winner of the Oregon Book Award. Her fourth collection, I Hope This Helps, is forthcoming in Spring 2025. Bashir lives in Harlem, NYC.
Funto Omojola is a Nigerian-American poet and artist based in New York State. They’ve received fellowships from MacDowell, the Cave Canem Foundation, Millay Arts, and the Poetry Project, among others and their work has appeared in the Boston Review, Pigeon Pages, Ghost Proposal, and elsewhere. If I Gather Here and Shout is their first book.
CONTEXT COLLAPSE: with Ryan Ruby & Bianca Stone
Saturday, November 13th, 2024 Flow Chart Space
On Saturday, November 13th, 2024 at 6:30pm in The Flow Chart Foundation's Flow Chart Space, we celebrated the publication of CONTEXT COLLAPSE (Seven Stories Press) by Ryan Ruby with a reading a discussion by Ruby and Bianca Stone on poetry, history, and legacy.
Ryan Ruby is a writer and translator from Los Angeles, California. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Bookforum, the New Left Review and elsewhere. His debut novel The Zero and the One (Twelve Books 2017) subsequently appeared in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and France. He is the author of a book-length poem, Context Collapse (Seven Stories 2024), a Finalist for the 2020 National Poetry Series and a Semi-Finalist for the 2020 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. He is currently at work on a nonfiction narrative book about Berlin called Ringbahn for Farrar Straus, and Giroux. He is the recipient of the 2023 Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation and the 2019 Einstein Fellowship from the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. He has translated Roger Caillois and Grégoire Bouillier from the French for Readux Books. A graduate of Columbia University and the University of Chicago, he lives in Berlin, where he is on the faculty of the Berlin Writers' Workshop and has been an Affiliate Fellow of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry.
Bianca Stone is the author of the poetry collections What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022) which won the 2023 Vermont Book Award in Poetry; The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018), Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Octopus Books and Tin House, 2014) and collaborated with Anne Carson on the illuminated version of Antigonick (New Directions, 2012). Her work has appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Nation. She teaches classes on poetry and poetic study at the Ruth Stone House, where she is editor-at-large for ITERANT magazine and host of Ode & Psyche Podcast.
COWBOY NOCTURNE: a concert on the Ashbery piano
Saturday, September 21, 2024 Flow Chart Space
On Saturday, September 21, 2024 at 7pm in Flow Chart Space, we presented an evening of music by Robert Savage & Robert Schumann—including works composed on John Ashbery’s piano—performed by Daniel Baer, with a talk and poetry reading by Dylan Zavagno.
Note, this video does not include the Schumann performance, but a complete audio recording can be heard here
The New York Times has hailed Daniel Baer as a pianist who plays with “fluidity, warmth, and sparkle” who “achieved the often elusive…goal of putting virtuosity at the service of bigger ideas.” Daniel Baer is an active music educator and performing artist throughout the United States. He was the artist-pianist for the 2020-2021 LYNX Project, premiering new compositions for voice and piano and recording songs for an anthology celebrating four years of its autism advocacy series. He has also served as the Music Director for Queer Poem-a-Day, a poetry podcast for pride month hosted by the Deerfield Public Library. Daniel earned his Masters of Music from the Juilliard School and his Doctorate from the Eastman School of Music. He is currently the on faculty at Illinois State University and the Music Institute of Chicago where also he directs the Chamber Music Program.
Dylan Zavagno is a writer and humanities educator and he works at the Deerfield Public Library as the Adult Services Coordinator. Dylan hosts award-winning conversations with authors, artists, and academics on the Deerfield Public Library Podcast and is the co-founder, in 2021, of Queer Poem-a-Day, a daily poetry podcast and program series that runs each June. In 2019, he led the program series The Fight to Integrate Deerfield: 60 Year Reflection, which won the prestigious John Cotton Dana Library Public Relations Award from the American Library Association. Dylan lives in Chicago with his husband, pianist Daniel Baer.
Flow Chart Cabaret Cinema: A Night of Neo-Benshi 2024
Friday, September 30th, 2024 Hudson Hall
We again joined forces with Hudson Hall in Hudson, NY on Friday, August 29th, 2024 for our annual "Flow Chart Cabaret Cinema: A Night of Neo-Benshi."
This year, Charles Bernstein, Samantha Hunt, Paolo Javier, Dorothea Lasky, Kamikaze Jones, Jeffrey Lependorf, and Dawn Lundy Martin offered newfangled poets theatre re-imaginings of clips from films.
The Lineup (in alpha order):
Charles Bernstein—It Happened One Night
Samantha Hunt—Eyes Without a Face
Paolo Javier—Monty & Turtle (Be Kind Rewind)
Dorothea Lasky—The Shining
Jeffrey Lependorf—Edward Scissorhands
Kamikaze Jones—Can’t Stop the Music
Dawn Lundy Martin—Get Christie Love
INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE LOVERS: Dawn Lundy Martin & Ariana Reines
Saturday, July 13th, 2024 Flow Chart Space
On the occasion of INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE LOVERS being published by Nightboat Books, poets Dawn Lundy Martin and Ariana Reines presented a discussion and poetry reading in The Flow Chart Foundation’s Flow Chart Space in Hudson, NY on Saturday, July 13th, 2024.
Dawn Lundy Martin is a poet, essayist, and memoirist. The author of five books of poems—Good Stock Strange Blood (2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry); Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry); DISCIPLINE; A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering; and Instructions for The Lovers—her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Chicago Review, and Best American Essays 2019 and 2021. Martin was a 2022 USArtist Fellow, inaugural Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh, and founding Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Currently, she is Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.
Ariana Reines is the author of A Sand Book, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Prize in 2020, Mercury, Coeur de Lion, and The Cow, which won the Alberta Prize in 2006. Her Obie-winning play "Telephone" was produced by the Foundry Theatre in 2009 and has been translated into Norwegian, Turkish, and French. Reines translated TIQQUN's Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl and Jean-Luc Hennig's Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal, both for Semiotext(e), and wrote extensively for Artforum in its earlier incarnation. She has taught poetry and art as Mary Routt Chair in Creative Writing at Scripps College, Holloway Lecturer at UC Berkeley, as a visiting critic at Yale, and in community workshops at The Poetry Project and Poets House. In 2020, while she was a Divinity student at Harvard, Reines founded Invisible College, a lab for the study of poetry and the sacred. Wave of Blood, an auto-epistolary essay in poetry and talks, is forthcoming from Divided Publishing this fall, and The Rose, a new book of poems, will be out from Graywolf in April 2025.
THE INTIMACY: a first person plural performance by Kate Kremer
Saturday, June 29th, 2024 Flow Chart Space
On Saturday, June 29th, 2024, Kate Kremer performed THE INTIMACY, a “first person plural performance” at the Flow Chart Space in Hudson, NY.
Kate Kremer is an interdisciplinary artist, playwright, and publisher whose work is characterized by a commitment to strategies of autobiography, collaboration, and bricolage. Frequently using archives as sites for addressing the ways that our ethics, feelings, and intimacies are conditioned by the systems that we live and love within, her work has been described by Mac Wellman as “way ahead of the curve.” Kate’s plays have been produced at JACK in Brooklyn, the Public Theater, Dixon Place, SFX Fest, the Motor Company, the Wild Project, Brooklyn College, and Stagefemmes. Charlatans was selected for the Bushwick Starr Reading Series and was a finalist for the Princess Grace Award. She has been a finalist for the Dennis and Victoria Ross Foundation Award, shortlisted for the Tom LaFarge Award and the Leslie Scalapino Award, and received an honorable mention for the Leah Ryan Fund for Emerging Women Writers. Her performance installation uncollected trash collection premiered at the Figge Art Museum in Iowa and was published in 2022 by 53rd State Press. She received her MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College, where she studied with Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney. She is the editor of the experimental play publishing organization 53rd State Press and currently teaches playwriting at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise.
Anne Waldman + Gerard Malanga—conversation and poetry
Saturday, May 5th, 2024 Second Ward Foundation
On May 4th, 2024, The Flow Chart Foundation, in collaboration with Second Ward Foundation, presented poets Anne Waldman and Gerard Malanga in conversation and reading their work.
Internationally recognized and acclaimed poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community, a culture she has helped create and nurture for over four decades as writer, editor, teacher, performer, magpie scholar, infra-structure curator, and cultural/political activist. Her poetry is recognized in the lineages of the Beat, New York School, and Black Mountain trajectories of the New American Poetry. But has raised the bar as a feminist, activist and powerful performer. She has read in the streets as well as numerous larger venues such as the Dodge Literary Festival in the USA and the Jaipur Literature Festival in India, the T.S. Eliot Memorial Foundation at Harvard University, and continues to teach poetics all over the world. She remains a highly original “open field investigator” of consciousness, committed to the possibilities of radical shifts of language and states of mind to create new modal structures and montages of attention. Her work is prophetic, multidisciplinary, energetic, passionate, panoramic, fierce at times.
She was one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Marks, working there for twelve years. She also co-founded with—Allen Ginsberg and Diane di Prima—the celebrated Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first Buddhist inspired University in the western hemisphere. She is the author of more than 60 books, including the mini-classic Fast Speaking Woman, published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books in San Francisco; a new collection of essays, interviews, letters, and poems entitled Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House Press, 2023); as well as her classic, Vow to Poetry. Penguin has published her books over many years, including Manatee/Humanity, Marriage: A Sentence, and Trickster Feminism.
Recent publications include Rues du Monde, English and French (Apic Press, Algeria 2024), Para Ser Estrella a Medianoche, English and Spanish, (Arrebato Libros, Madrid 2021), New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive, co-edited with Emma Gomis (Nightboat, 2022), and The Velvet Wire with No Land (Granary Books, Forthcoming 2024).For more info: annewaldman.org / naropa.edu
Gerard Malanga is an American poet, photographer, filmmaker, and archivist. He worked closely with Andy Warhol from 1963-70, helping Warhol create his most important paintings, publications, and films. In 1969 they co-founded Interview magazine, and it was during this time that Malanga again started taking pictures. The New York Times called him “Andy Warhol’s most important associate.”
Malanga appeared as a “superstar” in dozens of Warhol classics including Vinyl, Bitch!, and Camp, which coincided with his own movies like Andy Warhol, Portraits of the Artist as a Young Man (1964–65) In Search of the Miraculous (1967), and Preraphaelite Dream (1968). His photographs have appeared in countless books and magazines, including the New York Review of Books, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, Lid, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, among others.
Two full-length books of Malanga’s photography have been published: Resistance to Memory (Arena Editions, 1998) with a preface by Ben Maddow, and Screen Tests Portraits Nudes 1964-1996 (Steidl, 2003). He also compiled the first photographic study of voyeurism, Scopophilia: The Love of Looking (Alfred Van Der Marck Editions, 1985).
Malanga’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Raritan, Yale Review, Harvard Review, Southwest Review, Partisan Review, and The New Yorker. He is the author of 14 books of poetry spanning a 50-year period, including Cool & Other Poems (2019) and The New Mélancholia & Other Poems (2021). A new collection, Odie Is Being Called Back & Other Poems is forthcoming from Bottle of Smoke Press in 2024.
Gerard Malanga’s Secret Cinema, a monograph documenting his movies and notes on film, is forthcoming from the Waverly Press in 2024. Malanga recently completed his memoirs, In Remembrance of Things Past.
In 2023, the Republic of France by an Order of Decree through the Ministry of Culture awarded Malanga the Chevalier of Arts and Letters, in recognition of his lifelong contributions to poetry and photography. For more info: gerardmalangaofficial.com
Jill Magi and Stephen Motika—“if recopying is to author” Exhibition Launch
Saturday, March 2nd, 2024 Flow Chart Space
On Saturday, March 2nd, 2024 Jill Magi and legendary poet/publisher of Nightboat Books, Stephen Motika, had a conversation the occasion of “if recopying is to author” New Paintings, Fabric Works, and Books by Jill Magi at the Flow Chart Space.
Jill Magi is a poet and artist based in southern Vermont after eleven years living in and learning from Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. She has had solo exhibitions at Abu Dhabi’s 421 gallery (formerly known as Warehouse421), Grey Noise gallery in Dubai, Tashkeel in Dubai, the Southern Vermont Arts Center, and the New York University Project Space in Abu Dhabi. She is the author of six full-length books of poetry, and her handmade books are collected by the University at Buffalo Poetry Collection. Jill has held residencies with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Brooklyn Textile Arts Center, and her visual work is in the permanent collection of Art Jameel and in private collections in Boston, New York, Kentucky, and elsewhere. For ten years she ran Sona Books, a community-based chapbook press, and she is a co-founder of JARA Collective, an Emirates-based publishing project. For her work in publishing, she was named as among the most inspiring authors in the world by Poets & Writers magazine. A dedicated educator, Jill has taught writing, art, cultural studies, and theory for over twenty-five years at public and private universities, small liberal arts colleges, and art schools. She is currently at work on a dissertation at the European Graduate School: a poetics that reframes “literature” and “experimental poetry” via textile practices, specifically, and via textility, more broadly.
Stephen Motika is the author of the book of poems, Western Practice, and the chapbooks Arrival and at Mono, In the Madrones, and Private Archive. He is the editor of Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman and coeditor of Dear Kathleen: On the Occasion of Kathleen Fraser’s 80th Birthday. His articles and poems have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, At Length, BOMB, the Brooklyn Review, the Constant Critic, Eleven Eleven, Maggy, the Poetry Project Newsletter, Poets & Writers, Poets.org, and Vanitas, among other publications. He has held residencies at the Lannan Foundation, Marfa, TX; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace; Millay Colony for the Arts; and ZK/U in Berlin, and taught at the Indiana University Writers Conference, Lehman College of the City University of New York, Naropa University, and the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. He is the director and publisher of Nightboat Books.
January at the U.S. Capitol: Mark Nowak & Stacy Szymaszek
Friday, January 12th, 2024 Flow Chart Space
This event featured Stacy Szymaszek presenting a talk on birds of prey—along with images of her drawings—as a prelude to Mark Nowak reading from “Winter,” an abcedarian poem confronting the January 6th insurrection, which features a great number of birds of prey throughout the text. The reading was following by a conversation between Mark and Stacy.
Mark Nowak’s books include Shut Up Shut Down, Coal Mountain Elementary, Social Poetics, and …AGAIN (forthcoming), all from Coffee House Press. He recently edited Coronavirus Haiku (Kenning Editions, 2021), guest-edited the “Why We Write” issue of Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 2021), and wrote an introduction to Celes Tisdale’s When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal (Duke University Press, 2022). A native of Buffalo, Nowak is founding director of the Worker Writers School (https://www.instagram.com/workerwritersschool/).
Stacy Szymaszek is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently The Pasolini Book (2022), and Famous Hermits (2023). Her most recent chapbook, Three Novenas, was published by auric books in 2022. She is the recipient of a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant in poetry. From 2007-2018 she was the Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in NYC. She currently lives and works in the Hudson Valley.
Mark Nowak’s books include Shut Up Shut Down, Coal Mountain Elementary, Social Poetics, and …AGAIN (forthcoming), all from Coffee House Press. He recently edited Coronavirus Haiku (Kenning Editions, 2021), guest-edited the “Why We Write” issue of Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 2021), and wrote an introduction to Celes Tisdale’s When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal (Duke University Press, 2022). A native of Buffalo, Nowak is founding director of the Worker Writers School (https://www.instagram.com/workerwritersschool/).
Stacy Szymaszek is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently The Pasolini Book (2022), and Famous Hermits (2023). Her most recent chapbook, Three Novenas, was published by auric books in 2022. She is the recipient of a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant in poetry. From 2007-2018 she was the Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in NYC. She currently lives and works in the Hudson Valley.