The eagerly awaited Yusef Komunyakaa – Tomas Doncker Band collaboration Big Apple Blues will be released on Tuesday, and the afternoon gig at NJPAC on Friday is the one to keep your eye on for sure. But Komunyakaa has any number of other performances coming up and so before we move on to the other shows this week, here is his press release:
Yusef Komunyakaa was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, the son of a carpenter and a mother who bought a set of encyclopedias for her children. When he was sixteen, he discovered James Baldwin’s essays and decided to become a writer. From 1965 to 1968, Komunyakaa served a tour of duty in Vietnam as an information specialist, editing a military newspaper called the Southern Cross. Nearly twenty years after his Vietnam experiences, Komunyakaa wrote his war poems, published in 1988 as Dien Cai Dau. By 1994, when these poems were included in Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, 1977-1989, Komunyakaa had won two Creative Writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the San Francisco Poetry Center Award, and he had held the Lilly Professorship of Poetry at Indiana University. Neon Vernacular received the Pulitizer Prize for Poetry, as well as the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award from the Claremont Graduate School, and as a result his earlier eight collections of work have been re-evaluated. In 1998 his poetry collection Thieves of Paradise was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award, and that same year saw the publication of his recording, Love Notes from the Madhouse. In 2000, Radicloni Clytus edited a book of Komunyakaa’s prose, Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries, for the University of Michigan Press series.
Schedule
THURSDAY
11:15 am-12:30 pm
Conversation: The Voice that is Great Within Us
(with Alice Oswald and Gary Snyder)
Location: Victoria
3:45-5:00 pm
Poets for Teachers
Location: Victoria
7:00-10:10 pm
Poetry Sampler
Location: Prudential
FRIDAY
12:10-1:10 pm
Poetry and Conversation: Readings and Q & A
(with Billy Collins and Rita Dove)
Location: Prudential
2:50-3:50 pm
Poetry and Music
(with the Tomás Doncker Band and M.C. David Daniel)
Location: Prudential
SATURDAY
10:30-11:40 am
Conversation: Masks and Masculinity: Poetry and the Rituals of Men
(with Stephen Kuusisto, Patrick Rosal, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, and Brian Turner)
Location: Peddie Baptist
6:30-8:00 pm
Main Stage Reading
(with Brian Turner and Marilyn Nelson)
Location: Prudential
8:15-9:45 pm
Another Kind of Courage
(with Jehanne Dubrow, Elyse Fenton, Charles H. Johnson, Gardner McFall, Marilyn Nelson, Brian Turner and poets from the Warrior Writers and Combat Paper workshops)
Location: Prudential
SUNDAY
9:00-10:10 am
Conversation: Mirror, Blossom, Urn, Collage
(with Cathy Park Hong, Patrick Rosal, and Brenda Shaughnessy)
Location: North Star Auditorium
12:00-1:10 pm
Tribute to Amiri Baraka
(with Billy Collins, Natalie Diaz, Rita Dove, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Marilyn Nelson, and other Festival Poets and guests)
Location: Prudential
Monday – American Express Presents – MHOW – Bleachers, Betty Who, Rixton, Mary Lambert come together to help out a credit card.
Monday – Gerard Way – Irving Plaza – “Action Cat” is a great song, the rest of the album not so much. Still, people like Gerard.
Monday – Marsha Ambrosius – Her new album is a disappointment but the soul singer is a lively intense figure on stage
Tuesday – Saturday – CMJ Music Marathon 2014 – NYU and Various Venues Throughout NYC – I can’t even imagine the logistics of putting together this Marathon, a thousand bands everywhere you turn around.
Tuesday – Sunday – The Allman Brothers Band – Beacon Theatre – The beginning of the end
Tuesday – James – Webster Hall – The new album is OK, and they will play “Laid”
Tuesday – – Buster Poindexter – Cafe Carlyle – Should be hot hot hot
Thursday – Little Kids Rock Benefit Honoring Joan Jett – Hammerstein Ballroom – Cheapest ticket is $250 -it is a benefit of course.
Friday – Jerry Lee Lewis – BB Kings – I can’t bring myself to watching the lion in winter, when I saw him in 2010 he was already tired.
