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.
Poems from About the House at Baest
Thank you to editor Noah Ross for publishing poems from a new manuscript. Read them here.
Three Poems from The Pasolini Book Translated into Italian
The wonderful poet, scholar, and translator has translated three of my Pasolini poems into Italian at Argo. Thank you to editor Fabio Orecchini for giving Allison and me the opportunity to work together.
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.”
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
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.
