If you’re in New York, this is a can’t miss!

The breakdown for this year’s festival is:

WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 9, 7:00 P.M.
Sidewalk Café (94 Ave. A, at E. 6th St.)
Boog City Classic Albums Live will kick off the festival with local musical acts performing, for its 10th anniversary, The Magnetic Fields’ classic 69 Love Songs. Among those partaking:

Ben Krieger
Dream Bitches
Gracefully
The Trouble Dolls
Andrew Philip Tipton
Genan Zilkha

and more

THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 10, 6:00 P.M.
ACA Galleries (529 W. 20th St., 5th Flr., bet. 10th/11th aves.)
This is the first date of season seven of our d.a. levy lives: celebrating the renegade press series, where each month we have a different non-NYC small press host its authors and a musical act.

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 11, 7:00 P.M.
Sidewalk Café (94 Ave. A, at E.6th St.)
We’ll have poets, smaller musical acts, full bands, and theater performances.

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 12, 12:00 P.M.
Unnameable Books (600 Vanderbilt Ave., bet. Prospect Pl./St. Marks Ave., Brooklyn)
Poets and musical acts performing nonstop during our 6th annual small, small press fair, which will also have readings from poets representing the exhibiting presses. The day will also feature two poets in conversation with each other.

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 13, 12:00 P.M.
Unnameable Books (600 Vanderbilt Ave., bet. Prospect Pl./St. Marks Ave., Brooklyn)
We’ll close the festival with more poets and musical acts performing, sandwiched around a discussion.

The poets who will give readings on Fri., Sat., or Sun. include:

Ammiel Alcalay
Sandra Beasley
Mike County
Jim Dunn
Eric Gelsinger
Hailey Higdon
Paolo Javier
Paul Foster Johnson
Basil King
Martha King
Brendan Lorber
Dan Machlin
Justin Marks
Tracey McTague
Ryan Murphy
Elinor Nauen
Jean-Paul Pecqueur
Nick Piombino
Joanna Sondheim
Ryan Walker
Dana Ward
Lewis Warsh
Karen Weiser
Dan Wilcox
Angela Veronica Wong

and more

On Saturday, Anselm Berrigan and Buck Downs will be reading and in conversation with one another.

On Sunday there will be a discussion on politics, poetics, and community curated and moderated by longtime Boog contributor Greg Fuchs

The musical acts who will perform solo sets on Fri., Sat., or Sun. include:

Dorit
Gracefully
Serena Jost
Phoebe Kreutz
Alan Semerdjian
The Lo and the Lonesome

and more

Please email editor@boogcity.com for additional information.

1. Douglas Rothschild’s Theogeny.  Douglas’s poetic family tree comes from second- and third-wave Language poets and fourth- and fifth-wave New York School.  That’s his poetic DNA. The result, however, is a kind of poem that is straightforward, found, outsider, schooled, subversive, arch, and tender, often all at the same time. In person, even Douglas would admit he’s a complete eccentric (just look at the above photo, taken from his book launch, all zoot suited and making rolls out of quarters for one of his jobs, running a couple of laundromats); he is also a died-in-wool poet.  I’m hard-pressed to think of a post-Language, post-NY Schooler who can write a poem feeling and human/e presence.

2. Sage Cohen’s Writing the Life Poetic. Imagine a cross of Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, Lewis Turco’s The Book of Forms, and Jeffrey Yamaguchi’s 52 Projects, and you have Writing the Life Poetic. If you are teaching poetry to high school or undergraduate students, I suggest you consider adopting this puppy. Check out the book’s website here.

I used to think it was cheesy to call writing a “practice”: it seemed so yoga, so crunchy granola.  Then I did yoga, and then I started to eat and enjoy crunchy granola.  Oh, and then I also started teaching, and using terms such as “practice” and “deep listening” made more sense, made connections to students, moreso at first than, say, “objective correlative” and “negative capability.”  I save those cans of critical whoop-ass for later.

Anyway, there’s an idea that to teach poetry, at least to the beginning writer, means you have to in some sense “trick” the student into thinking they are not writing poetry, that they are really practicing, doing drills, running laps, all for the show, that never quite happens or arrives. And, whammo: those same people have written poems. They didn’t see it coming.

And that’s perhaps the common ground among these two quite different projects: in one, we have poems transcribed in part from voice mails, scrawlings on note books from the subway; and in another, we have a writer-teacher outlining just what it might take to enter that mindspace in which voice mails and writing in notebooks might lead to the life poetic.  Both present poetry as a lifestyle choice. I suggest you get both and enjoy.