Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

Last updated

Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is an American lyric poet, writer and publisher. [1] Wright graduated from West Virginia University before coming to New York. Beginning in 1976, Wright studied with Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. He also studied with Allen Ginsberg at Brooklyn College and received an MFA in poetry from there.

Contents

Biography

Poetry and performance

In the late 1970s Wright performed at PS122's avant-garde-arama. He read often at St. Mark's Poetry Project between 1979 and 1990 and served a three-year term on the Project Board of Directors. In 1996, Wright performed in two Museum of Modern Art's poetry series events curated by the late philanthropist and poetry activist Lita Hornick. In the millennial years, he hosted poetry events at the Bowery Poetry Club, La MaMa E.T.C., KGB and other East Village venues. In 2013, Wright wrote the poetry-play Clubhouse on East 13th Street, which was performed at La MaMa E.T.C. and elsewhere. In 2014 he and Lili White completed a 40-minute video about a community garden issue that documented his eponymous performance The Key Ceremony. As a poet in residence at Howl! Happening, Wright produced The Fun Doctrine tv series Howl Happening.

Wright is the author of 18 books of poetry. His poems also appear in twelve anthologies including Best American Poetry 2023 from Scribner https://www.bestamericanpoetry.com/, Out of This World from Crown Press and Thus Spake the Corpse from Black Sparrow Press. He is well known as an impresario, organizing artistic parties and events at La Mama, Howl! Happening. He is also a long-time member of Brevitas, a community of invited poets who email short poems to each other and publish a periodic selection. Wright designed a cover for one their 15th anthology . The Brooklyn Rail published a suite of his poems in 2011.

Publishing

In 1978 Wright started Hard Press , where he published 80 postcards by different artists and poets. A selection of the postcards were included in the book A Secret Location on the Lower East Side , and were displayed at New York Public Library. Hard Press also published five books.

From 1986 until 2001 Wright published 80 issues of Cover Magazine, The Underground National , with the help of estimable artist and writer contributors including Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Steve Mumford, Sue Scott, Judd Tully, and John Yau. The magazine covered a broad range of arts and culture, profiling many important artists in advance of their heyday. Among others, Wright and Cover editors covered Steve Buscemi, Penny Arcade, Chakaia Booker, Andrea Zittel, Dawoud Bey, Sarah McLachlan, The Cranberries, and artists such as Andres Serrano, Vik Muniz and Doug and Mike Starn. The magazine's interviews with Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, and Rufino Tamayo are among their last. Cover is archived at Fales Library at New York University.

Wright started Live Mag! Live Mag in 2007 in response to an invitation from Bob Holman to create an event at the Bowery Poetry Club. Wright's idea was to unite poetry publication in multiple forms: performance, electronic, and print. The magazine is a curation of current poetry and visual art and hosts events regularly.

Criticism

Wright's art criticism has appeared in ARTnews , Art and Antiques , ArtNexus and The Brooklyn Rail . In 2008 the monthly Rail instituted his column of poetry reviews called "Rapid Transit". [2] Cover and Wright's Live Mag! host arts reviews by Wright and other contributors. Literary criticism also appears in Rain Taxi and the American Book Review. '

Collage

After 2007, Wright exhibited collages in group shows at Tribes Gallery, 532 Gallery (Thomas Jaeckel, Director) Turtle Point Press, and others. He has a collage in The Unbearables Big Book of Sex (Autonomedia, 2011) and has contributed poems and collages to online venues, including Bicycle Review , Beet, Reading Dance , and Tool: A magazine . In 2010, his visual and performance work was the subject of the solo, participatory exhibit The Good Outlaw at AC Institute.[ permanent dead link ] In an A-List preview of the show, The Villager described Wright as a "master collagist." [3] A brief video documentary of the opening event encapsulates the performative and visual experience. Wright showed collages in "Paper View," a two-person exhibit with sculptor Ga Hae Park at Tribes Gallery in 2011. [4] Capital One Bank extended the run by hanging Wright's work in its East 3rd Street branch during the Occupy Wall Street protests. Wright co-curated "Occupy the Walls" at AC Institute in Chelsea, NYC. Savitra D., Bob Holman, and others participated in readings and events associated with the December two-week show of protest posters. [5] Steve Dalichinsky published Wright's collage in his 2013 curated online exhibit "Visual Poetry".

Critical response

In 1980, a Village Voice article labeled Wright's poetry "street smart." [6] His performance carried crowds and the words had sticking power with which he won a following. Wright has performed at Bob Holman's Bowery Poetry Club. Holman has stated that "Jeff did not just read poems, he lived them.". [7] Joe Maynard devoted a page in Beet to Wright, including a collage, several poems, and a mini review, claiming that "Wright is a terrific poet." Steve Dalachinsky in reviewing the volume in the Brooklyn Rail writes "Jeff Wright’s book of sonnets, Triple Crown (Spuyten Duyvil), replete with Wright’s collages, offers us a panoramic peek into the sometimes-hyper brain of a mad poet." [8] And among the accolades for Triple Crown, [9] in Rain Taxi, "While most contemporary New York School poetry seems aimed at like-minded, coterie hipsters, Wright’s poems ostensibly are directed (as were Shakespeare’s sonnets) to a single ear." [10] According to Sparrow, Wright "invented New Romanticism" in the early 1990s. A poetic movement that was "joyful, communal, erotic, and spontaneous." [11]

Awards

Wright received a Kathy Acker Award for writing and publishing in 2016. In 2023, he won the James Tate Poetry Prize.

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Allen Ginsberg</span> American poet and writer (1926–1997)

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Howl (poem)</span> 1955 poem by Allen Ginsberg, part of the Beat Generation movement

"Howl", also known as "Howl for Carl Solomon", is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1954–1955 and published in his 1956 collection Howl and Other Poems. The poem is dedicated to Carl Solomon.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne Waldman</span> American poet (born 1945)

Anne Waldman is an American poet. Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outriders Poetry Project experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. She has also been connected to the Beat Generation poets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bob Holman</span> American poet and poetry activist

Bob Holman is an American poet and poetry activist, most closely identified with the oral tradition, the spoken word, and poetry slam. As a promoter of poetry in many media, Holman has spent the last four decades working variously as an author, editor, publisher, performer, emcee of live events, director of theatrical productions, producer of films and television programs, record label executive, university professor, and archivist. He was described by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The New Yorker as "the postmodern promoter who has done more to bring poetry to cafes and bars than anyone since Ferlinghetti."

Michael Andre is a Canadian, disc jockey, poet, critic and editor living in New York City.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bowery Poetry Club</span> New York City performance space

The Bowery Poetry Club is a New York City poetry performance space founded by Bob Holman in 2002. Located at 308 Bowery, between Bleecker and Houston Streets in Manhattan's East Village, the BPC is a popular meeting place for poets and aspiring artists.

<i>The Brooklyn Rail</i> Journal of arts, culture and politics

The Brooklyn Rail is a publication and platform for the arts, culture, humanities, and politics. The Rail is based in Brooklyn, New York. It features in-depth critical essays, fiction, poetry, as well as interviews with artists, critics, and curators, and reviews of art, music, dance, film, books, and theater.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kristin Prevallet</span> American poet, essayist, and teacher

Kristin Prevallet is an American poet, essayist, and teacher. Her poetic work incorporates conceptual writing and trance, and her performances are rooted in feminist performance art and spoken word. Everywhere Here and in Brooklyn, I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time, and Trance Poetics are among her poetic books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Taylor Mali</span> American poet

Taylor McDowell Mali is an American slam poet, humorist, teacher, and voiceover artist.

Lewis Warsh was an American poet, visual artist, professor, prose writer, editor, and publisher. He was a principal member of the second generation of the New York School poets,; however, he has said that “no two people write alike, even if they’re associated with a so-called ‘school’ .” Professor of English at Long Island University and founding director (2007–2013) of their MFA program in creative writing, Warsh lived in Manhattan with his wife, playwright-teacher Katt Lissard, whom he married in 2001.

Valery Oisteanu is a Soviet-born Romanian and American poet, art critic, essayist, photographer and performance artist, whose style reflects the influence of Dada and Surrealism. Oisteanu is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, a book of short fiction, and a book of essays. He is the brother of Romanian historian of religion, cultural anthropologist and writer Andrei Oișteanu.

Brenda Coultas is an American poet.

Sharon Mesmer is a Polish-American poet, fiction writer, essayist and professor of creative writing. Her poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch, The Virgin Formica, Vertigo Seeks Affinities, Half Angel, Half Lunch and Crossing Second Avenue. Her fiction collections are Ma Vie à Yonago, In Ordinary Time and The Empty Quarter. She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of New York University and The New School. She has lived in Brooklyn, New York since 1988 and is a distant relative of Franz Anton Mesmer, proponent of animal magnetism and Otto Messmer, the American animator best known for creating Felix the Cat.

<i>Howl</i> (2010 film) 2010 American film by Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein

Howl is a 2010 American film which explores both the 1955 Six Gallery debut and the 1957 obscenity trial of 20th-century American poet Allen Ginsberg's noted poem "Howl". The film is written and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and stars James Franco as Ginsberg.

Star Black is a poet, photographer, and artist. She has authored seven collections of poetry and taught in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton and at The New School.

Terese Coe is an American writer, translator, and dramatist. Her work has been published in over 100 journals in the United States, England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and India. She is the author of three collections of poetry, four published prose stories, and many translations from the French, German, and Spanish.

Larissa Shmailo is an American poet, translator, novelist, editor, and critic. She is known for her literary translations from Russian to English, particularly her translation of Victory over the Sun and the anthology Twenty-First Century Russian Poetry.

Dick Gallup was an American poet associated with the New York School.

Diane Marie Burns was an Anishinaabe and Chemehuevi artist, known for her poetry and performance art highlighting Native American experience. After moving to New York City, she become involved with the Lower East Side poetry community, including the Nuyorican Poets Café.

References

  1. ↑ "Jeffrey Cyphers Wright". Listing of Writers. Poets & Writers Magazine. June 9, 2008. Retrieved 21 July 2010.
  2. ↑ Contributor page, Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved 5/1/14.
  3. ↑ The Villager, Vol. 79, No. 50, May 19–25, 2010.
  4. ↑ Rammos, Sarah, "A Day in the East Village", Time Out New York, September 2011.
  5. ↑ Crawford, Holly "Occupy The Walls" AC Institute show announcement http://artcurrents.org/occupythewalls.html Archived 2011-12-03 at the Wayback Machine His book "Party Everywhere" also contains graphic work done in collaboration with Barbara Rosenthal, publisher of Xanadu Press. https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/57692/
  6. ↑ Village Voice, July 16, 1985.
  7. ↑ The Key Ceremony, director Jeffrey C. Wright, Community Gardens Brand, 2014. Video.
  8. ↑ "Outtakes". www.brooklynrail.org. 2013-09-04. Retrieved 2016-04-11.
  9. ↑ "Triple Crown". www.spuytenduyvil.net. Retrieved 2016-04-11.
  10. ↑ Feast, Jim, Rain Taxi, Vol. 18, No. 2, Summer 2013.
  11. ↑ Sparrow (2018). "Slaying Dragons with Love". American Book Review. 39 (6): 26–27. doi:10.1353/abr.2018.0109. S2CID   149837813 . Retrieved 14 August 2022.
  12. ↑ 2 Poems at Amazon.
  13. ↑ Morgan, Bill (1995-01-01). The Works of Allen Ginsberg, 1941–1994: A Descriptive Bibliography. ABC-CLIO. ISBN   9780313293894.
  14. ↑ "All in All (Signed) by Jeff Wright: Gull Books 9780940584075 Paperback, Signed by Author(s) - 246 Books". www.abebooks.com. Retrieved 2016-04-11.
  15. ↑ Drowning Light. Soncino. 1992-01-01.
  16. ↑ Flourish: Sonnets. Soncino Books. 2004-01-01.
  17. ↑ Wright, Jeffrey Cyphers (2009-01-01). October Centerfold: A Collaborative Escapade. [Place of publication not identified]: Dummy Books. OCLC   779987939.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.