Barbara Henning

I am starting a new website and blog. It is presently under construction. This website is only here for historical posts.

Go to barbarahenning.com

As many of you know, I teach several ten-week on-line classes for Writers.com. Many of these courses I also teach in MFA Programs. The cost to enroll is minimal compared with the universities..

My upcoming schedule is:

"Poetic Prose: The Prose Poem" begins on 9/17/12. This course is a combination of a workshop course and a reading sequence about various experimental writing movements. I teach the identical course (except shorter here) for the MFA Program at Naropa and at Long Island University, as well as the Poetry Center in Tucson and The Poets House in NYC.

"Borderline Writing: A Writing/Lit Class" begins on 10/1/12. In this course we read several works that bridge the novel and poetry. Journal Writing and Fiction/Poetry workshop. I have taught this course for the Poetry Center in Tucson and also the MFA Program at Long Island University.

"Flash Fiction: Writing the Short-Short Story" begins on 12/3/12. In this course we experiment with writing tiny fictions using many poetic forms and constraints to generate narrative. We read other examples and some theory. I teach the identical course (except shorter here) for the MFA Program at Naropa and at Long Island University, as well as the Poetry Center in Tucson and The Poets House in NYC.


Full Descriptions of the Courses are here

My Classes at Writers.com

In Aporia: The Annual Akilah Oliver Memorial Reading

September 19, 2012 at 7pm

Lang Café, Eugene Lang College
65 W 11th street


The annual Akilah Oliver Memorial Reading at The New School honors the memory of Akilah Oliver, a radical poet, professor, feminist, and activist. The second of this annual reading series, this event will feature the work of Nick Von Kleist, Krystal Languell, Wendy S. Walters, and Eileen Myles.

Nick Von Kleist is a current senior at Eugene Lang College of the New School, where he studies Literature, Chinese and Fine Arts. Nick has been published on the online zine ShortfastandDeadly in London, where he also did many readings at the Woodburner. In New York, Nick has read at Bowwow at the Bowery Poetry Center.

Krystal Languell is a graduate of the MFA program at New Mexico State University, where she won the Mercedes Jacobs Thesis Award. Her first book, Call the Catastrophists, was published by BlazeVox in 2011. Her poems have appeared in Barn Owl Review, DIAGRAM, esque and elsewhere, and her reviews and interviews have been published online at NewPages and Coldfront. Founder of the feminist literary journal Bone Bouquet, she is part of the Belladonna Collaborative in Brooklyn and teaches writing at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and Pratt Institute.

Wendy S. Walters is the author of Troy, Michigan (forthcoming from Futurepoem Books in 2013), Longer I Wait, More You Love Me (2009) and a chapbook, Birds of Los Angeles (2005), both published by Palm Press (Long Beach, CA). She is a 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Poetry. Walters’ poetry has been recognized with residency fellowships from Bread Loaf, MacDowell, Cave Canem and Yaddo, and her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Los Angeles Review, Callaloo, HOW2, Natural Bridge, Seneca Review and the Yalobusha Review, among several others. She has been a nominee for the Essay Prize and her prose has been published or is forthcoming in Bookforum, The Iowa Review, Coldfront, Seneca Review, Seattle Review, and Harper’s Magazine. She is also a co-founder of the First Person Plural Reading Series in Harlem with Amy Benson and Stacy Parker Le Melle.

Eileen Myles is from Boston and moved to New York in 1974 to be a poet. Eileen has published 18 collections of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction most recently Snowflake/different streets (poetry), and Inferno (a poet’s novel). Also The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009) for which she received a Warhol/Creative Capital art writers grant. She is a 2012 Guggenheim fellow. She lives in New York.

A year ago or so, I interviewed Harry Mathews about Oulipo and women and about politics of the members and such. This interview will be published by Critiphoria/Eoagh in their next issue. Because the interview started in response to a correction to the preface of LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN, it is now posted on Belladonna. It is a very interesting interview. Please check it out

Here's the website --

www.belladonnaseries.org/images/reviews/harry_mathews_interview.pdf//

Labels: Barbara Henning, Belladonna, Harry Mathews, Harryette Mullen, oulipo

Georgia Marsh is a dear friend and collaborator. I absolutely love her paintings, watercolors, whatever she does--the transformation of line and color, the delicacy, and celebration and transformation of material, sense, intellect, emotion, etc. We met in the early nineties at an art colony in the Catskills. We wandered through the forests, spending our days with Georgia drawing and me writing. Anyhow, I want to share her website with you, all of you.

Here's the website --

https://www.georgiamarsh.net//

Labels: Georgia Marsh, Painter

Labels: Auction, Belladonna, Conceptual Poetry

What I noticed when I left New York City was that when I wasn't here, I wasn't here, even though I had been here for a very long time. We New Yorkers are always moving so fast and the clock on Union Square keeps flashing new numbers and new poets arrive all the time from here and there and old ones stay or migrate elsewhere. I arrived in New York in 1983, a few months before Ted Berrigan died, and it was like the end of an era that I had missed. But Harris Schiff was there and in his new book, One More Beat (Accent Editions), he writes a phenomenal introduction, talking about how he became a poet and who was there and where and how the East Village poetry scene fit into the greater political world of the USA back then and today.

Following Harris's introduction is an introduction Ted Berrigan gave when Harris read at the Poetry Project on May 18, 1977. And then interspersed between Harris's poems is a set of photos by Monica Claire Antonie of Harris, Ted, Susan Cataldo, Lewis Warsh, Burroughs, Bernadette Mayer, Rudy Burckhardt, John Godfrey and many others. Reading the introduction, Ted's introduction, the photographs, and then the poems is like quickly living through those years with Harris. There is a wonderful collaboration between Harris and Ted, "Love Song." This book is a must read for anyone who wants to know what was going on in the 70's and early 80's with poetry in the East Village. I was sitting in Quantum Leap reading the poems, and when I finished, I felt like weeping. Sometimes when life is good, you suffer a lot afterwards.

Go to this website for more information: https://www.accenteditions.com/

Here are a couple of Harris's poems:

Under Halley's Sky

The world's a dangerous place
you take your chances every time you do anything
& even when you don't

you are fragile
as your life

driving is scary
& taking the train

& living next to a nuclear power plant
& having gasoline trucks go through your neighborhood
& working in districts subject to terrorism
or sabotage (depending how you look at it)

walking downstairs
stepping off a curb

strange sex

ordinary sex

eating in a restaurant

eating out of cans

jogging

being a zen buddhist

sleeping in earthquake zone

living under nuclear umbrella

being on planet which may be hit by asteroid

being in suspicious universe which
may collapse at any time or burst

these activities could all be hazardous to your
health & the surgeon general has recommended against
engaging in any of them

unless you smoke substantial numbers of cigarettes
barf regularly
clean up your act
straighten up
run it up the flag pole
& see how it blows

the wind cries any number of names
on a mild
autumn night

trees
riffled
by breeze

leaves
gilded
with light

[below this poem, the sweetest photo of Susan Cataldo.]

Abstract Depressionism

among aristocrats
the large banking houses
perfected the concept
of the oblique hit-man

they called it
noblesse disoblige

it's one of the few lessons
we can learn today from
the spurious collection of data
we call so blithely
History

History also teaches us that
language changes constantly
women remain gracefully
beautiful
men
continue to be
brutal
it does not explain when that started
or why

[Beside this is a beautiful photograph of young Anne Waldman]

Labels: "One More Beat", Accent Editions, Barbara Henning, Harris Schiff, Poetry, St. Marks Poetry Project, Ted Berrigan, The East Village