Poetry Reading - James Cohan Gallery

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
What fortitude the
Soul contains
(Dickinson)
2015
Oil on canvas
18 x 18 in.
45.7 x 45.7 cm
FEB 25 - APR 3, 2016 | 291 GRAND ST NYC
Philip Hanson
It is too difficult a Grace
POETRY READING: THURSDAY, MARCH 10 | 6:30 PM
Coinciding with the exhibition Philip Hanson: It is too difficult a Grace, James Cohan
is pleased to be hosting an evening of poetry with Anselm Berrigan and John Yau on
Thursday, March 10 at 6:30PM at our Lower East Side gallery.
533 West 26 St
New York NY 10001
291 Grand St
New York NY 10002
+1 212 714 9500
info @ jamescohan.com
jamescohan.com
It is too difficult a Grace presents a selection of new and recent paintings that exemplify
Hanson’s intersection of text and image, and his complex layering of dense, richly
colored patterns with excerpts from Romantic era poets. Originally associated with
the Chicago Imagists, Hanson’s approach to painting possesses the Imagists’ desire to
capture the visceral and emotional aspects of what it means to be human, yet through
the earnestness and sincerity that lives within the words of Emily Dickinson, William
Blake, and William Shakespeare.
Berrigan’s poetry makes associative leaps of personal and political observation. In a
review for his collection Free Cell, critic Keith Taylor noted that Berrigan “comes back
to the basic elements of American speech and the direct representation of emotion, an
attitude he seems to trust even as he forces us to challenge the prejudices of our own
experience with language.” IIn his poems, Yau frequently utilizes pun, trope, and play
with the English language and offers complicated, sometimes competing versions of the
legacy of his multivalent identities as Chinese, American, poet, and artist. Berrigan and
Yau will be sharing both older and more recent work, with Berrigan reading from his
upcoming collection, Come in Alone, due to be released in April.
Anselm Berrigan earned a BA from SUNY Buffalo and an MFA from Brooklyn College.
His collections of poetry include Come In Alone, available this April from Wave, and
Primitive State a book-length poem from Edge Books (2015). He is the Poetry Editor for
The Brooklyn Rail, former Artistic Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church,
and co-editor of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, with Alice Notley and Edmund
Berrigan. Other recent works include Pregrets, a booklet from Vagabond Press (2014),
and Loading, a collaborative book with painter Jonathan Allen (Brooklyn Arts Press,
2013).
A poet, art critic, and curator, John Yau was born in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1950. Yau
attended Bard College and earned an MFA from Brooklyn College in 1978. His first
book of poetry, Crossing Canal Street, was published in 1976. Since then, he has won
acclaim for his poetry’s attentiveness to visual culture and linguistic surface. Yau has
since published numerous collections of poetry include Corpse and Mirror (1983), selected
by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series. Yau has also published many works of
art criticism and artists’ books. In 1999, Yau started Black Square Editions, a small press
devoted to poetry, fiction, translation, and criticism. Yau was the arts editor of The
Brooklyn Rail from 2006-2011. He currently teaches art criticism at Mason Gross School
of the Arts and Rutgers University. He resides in New York City.