Parasol Unit: poetry reading series
Monday 16 April, 2007 The Parasol Unit poetry series is pleased to announce that a third reader has been added to our previously announced reading on Tuesday, 5 June, at 6:30 PM. In addition to the English poet Michael Glover and the Mexican poet Ernesto Priego, this reading will also feature the distinguished American poet Bill Berkson. Bill Berkson, poet, critic, and teacher, was born in New York City in 1939. A longtime resident of California, he has for many years taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. He is the author of sixteen books and pamplets of poetry, most recently Our Friends Will Pass Silently Among You (The Owl Press, 2007) and Gloria (Arion Press, 2005, with etchings by Alex Katz). Other recent books include Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981-2006 (Cuneiform Press, 2007), What’s Your Idea of a Good Time: Letters & Interviews 1977-1985 with Bernadette Mayer (Tuumba Press, 2006), and The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writings (Qua Books, 2004). As Ron Padgett says: "Bill Berkson's writing is witty, musical, daily, and deep, underpinned by a bracing integrity and shot through with gorgeous abstraction and other brilliant hookups between eye, ear, mind, and heart." Michael Glover has written art criticism for The Times, The Economist, The Independent, and The Financial Times, among others. He is the author of several books and chapbooks of poetry, including Amidst All This Debris (2001) and The Bead-Eyed Man (2000), both from Dagger Press, and Impossible Horizons (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995). Of his new book, For the Sheer Hell of Living, to be published this year by San Marco Press, John Ashbery writes, "Michael Glover’s lines unspool gravely and efficiently with few commas like waves that know they are on the way to someplace but without making much fuss about it. They can be piercingly sad and hilariously wry, sometimes at the same time, as: ‘Someone loses the midge swat./ Many glasses are raised.’—this from a poem called ‘Few things happen.’ Few things happen here, true, but those that do are tremendously important even when tiny." Ernesto Priego is a Mexican poet, essayist, and translator presently living in London. He is the author of Not Even Dogs (Meritage Press, 2006) as well as the blogs "Never Neutral" (http://neverneutral.wordpress.com/) and "The Jainakú Project" (http://thejainakuproject.blogspot.com/). A recent interview with him can be found on Tom Beckett’s blog "e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e -s" (willtoexchange.blogspot.com). The readings at Parasol Unit are organized and introduced by Barry Schwabsky. Previous readers have been Tim Atkins, Guy Bennett, Peter Cole, Kelvin Corcoran, Linh Dinh, Carrie Etter, Allen Fisher, Mark Ford, Lee Harwood, Lyn Hejinian, Sue Hubbard, Vincent Katz, Tony Lopez, Drew Milne, Redell Olsen, Anthony Rudolf, Leslie Scalapino, Barry Schwabsky, John Seed, Simon Smith, Carol Szymanski, Catherine Wagner, and Barrett Watten. Readings begin at 6:30 PM and are free to the public. Parasol Unit is located at 14 Wharf Road, London N1, near the Old Street and Angel tube stations.
As far as I can remember Mike Wallace-Hadrill did not turn up for this reading However he did read at a night sometime in 2008.