Last Monday, May 11, I got to KGB early because Stephen Paul Miller, Mary Jo Bang, and Ron Silliman were reading and I knew it was going to be packed. I wanted to get a table with a good seat so I could record, and I did. You will find the fruits of my wonderful labor in the Vimeo below. Enjoy.

 

KGB: Miller, Bang & Silliman

This is “KGB: Miller, Bang & Silliman” by Don Yorty on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

 

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Stephen Paul Miller

Miller’s recent Beautiful Snacks is published by Marsh Hawk Press. You can check him out here:

Stephen Paul Miller: “The Poetry Mailing List: Poetry Beyond Borders”

for Felix D’Arienzo and Gerri Czachowski “1976” After his reading I asked Peter Schjeldahl for a poem for our one-page magazine folded in an envelope. “I haven’t written a poem in two years. You don’t know?” Later that night Peter found himself talking to “Verse” as if thinking over my plan to bypass everything but poetry through new Xerox technology.

 

 

Mary Jo Bang

Bang’s most recent book, A Film in Which I Play Everyone, is published by GrayWolf Press: You can check it out here:

https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/film-which-i-play-everyone

 

HAIL MARY

As in Hello, which is as good as any beginning.
A pouty look, a flirty look, how should
one look? To be the queen of anything isn’t
easy. What is easy? “You have got this”
is frequently said. Frequently recently. To be
favored, to have grace bestowed upon,
when everyone in the Book of Hours is busy
contorting themselves to make sense
of what it feels like to be in the light. You are
right, we’re moving from sea to shining sea
across the stolen broken land, stricken with
a grief that knows no bounds and yet singing
and saying, “Let’s wake one more day in order
to confirm that there was a moment yesterday
when we were one.” That’s right, all these
theatrics—for which one pays with their body.

“Hail Mary,” by Mary Jo Bang was first published in The New Yorker on May 6, 2024

 

Wikipedia:

Mary Jo Bang – Wikipedia

Bang grew up in Ferguson, Missouri. She graduated from Northwestern University with a Bachelor’s and Master’s in sociology, from the Polytechnic of Central London with a Bachelor’s in Photography, and from Columbia University, with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry).

 

Ron Silliman

Silliman’s The Alphabet is published by the University of Alabama Press. You can check it out here:

The Alphabet

A remarkable and notorious literary achievementThe Alphabet-decades in the making, continually debated, discussed, and imitated since fragments first appea…

 

Ron Silliman – Wikipedia

Ron Silliman (born August 5, 1946) is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet.