FLOW CHART @ KITTY’S GARDEN⁠ ⁠ Friday, July 7, 5:30–7pm FREE⁠ POETRY & MUSIC ⁠ Paolo Javier & Wayne Koestenbaum & Adriana Tampasis Trio ft. Meghan Mercier & Justin Geyer

CAT’S MEOW: FLOW CHART @ KITTY’S GARDEN⁠ ⁠

Friday, July 7, 5:30–7pm

FREE⁠ POETRY & MUSIC ⁠

Paolo Javier & Wayne Koestenbaum & Adriana Tampasis Trio ft. Meghan Mercier & Justin Geyer

Kitty’s Garden ⁠- 60 South Front Street, Hudson, NY⁠ ⁠

The Flow Chart Foundation has partnered with Kitty’s (60 South Front Street, Hudson, NY) to offer a series of free and fabulous poetry (and some music, too) events—curated by the incomparable Brandon Downing—in Kitty’s Garden. ⁠ ⁠

Have a glass and tickle your ears.

The former Queens Borough Poet Laureate (2010-2014), Paolo Javier has produced three albums of sound poetry with Listening Center (David Mason), including the limited edition pamphlet+cassette Ur’lyeh/ Aklopolis (Texte Und Tone) and the booklet+cassette Maybe the Sweet Honey Pours (Nion Editions/Temporary Tapes), currently streaming on Bandcamp, Spotify, and iTunes. The recipient of grants from the Rauschenberg Foundation, NYFA, Queens Council on the Arts, and New York State Council on the Arts, Javier was a featured artist in Greater New York 2015, and in Queens International 2018: Volumes. The author of O.B.B. (Nightboat Books, 2021) and a recent book of paraliterary and hybrid poems, True Account of Talking to the 7 in Sunnyside (Roof Books, 2022), he lives with his family in Jackson Heights, Queens.

Wayne Koestenbaum—poet, critic, novelist, artist, performer—has published nineteen books, including Camp Marmalade, Notes on Glaze, The Pink Trance Notebooks, My 1980s & Other Essays, Hotel Theory, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Andy Warhol, Humiliation, and Jackie Under My Skin. The Queen’s Throat, praised by Susan Sontag as “a brilliant book,” was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and appeared this year in French translation. His novel, Circus, was reissued in July 2019 with an introduction by Rachel Kushner. His essays and poems have been widely published in periodicals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, The Best American Essays, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, London Review of Books, The Believer, The Iowa Review, Cabinet, and Artforum. Koestenbaum has exhibited his own paintings in solo shows. His first piano/vocal record, Lounge Act, was released by Ugly Duckling Presse Records in 2017, and he has given musical performances of his improvisatory Sprechstimme soliloquies at The Kitchen, REDCAT, Centre Pompidou, Walker Art Center, The Artist’s Institute, and the Renaissance Society. He won a Whiting Writers Award, and was a co-winner of the Discovery/The Nation Poetry Prize. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

Justin Geyer is a pianist, keyboardist, composer and educator active in the jazz and experimental scenes as well as working with various rock groups.  An aspiring music therapist, Justin is passionate about sharing music in ways that are healing and uplifting. He believes that music can be a catalyst for growth and change as well as a powerful vehicle for bringing people together.

Currently residing in Chatham, NY, Meghan Mercier is a born-and-raised Hudson Valley composer and cellist. She is a graduate of Bard College, where she studied composition with Joan Tower and Matt Sargent, Meghan was the co-recipient of the Bard Class of 2020 Jacob Druckman Memorial Prize. In her compositions and her performance, Meghan is interested in collaboratively creating affective sonic environments through improvisation.

Adriana Tampasis is a Hudson Valley-based composer, performer, and poet. She has composed for solo, chamber, and large ensemble groups, integrating traditional and nontraditional notations including narrative and graphic scores into her compositions. Her work is inspired by the fusion of jazz, chamber, and literary arts, employing both improvisation and through-composition. She has held a recent residency at Westben as a Performer-Composer and is currently recording an album with her jazz-fusion quartet, Pocket Merchant.