The Institute for New Feeling, November 4, 2016, with readings by Daniel Owen and Tony Iantosca
On Friday, November 4, 2016, at 7 p.m., join us for a presentation by The Institute for New Feeling of a video installation of their wellness product line. Scott Andrew, Agnes Bolt & Nina Sarnelle will present in person a looping series of video advertisements from their line of speculative sculptural products. The Institute for New Feeling is an artist collective committed to the development of new ways of feeling, and ways of feeling new. Their work includes treatments, therapies, retreats, research studies, products and a multi-faceted marketing campaign. For more information visit newfeeling.institute.
Reading at the event will be Daniel Owen, author of Toot Sweet, and Tony Iantosca, author of Shut Up, Leaves.
Daniel Owen is a writer who lives in Brooklyn and makes books and other things with Ugly Duckling Presse. Toot Sweet (United Artists Books, 2015) is his first book of poems.
Pay what you can ($5 suggested donation)
“Like its punning title, Dan Owen’s agile first collection is playful but with a subtext of urgency. “We ask for nothing less than new / means of new streets,” he writes, but the request goes unanswered – which is what happens when poems end but whatever prompted them persists. Here, the prompts range from the cannibalism of cockroaches to the terrifying specter of ‘the Capital skull,’ from an image of ’40 active war heads” to an intuition of existing in “a prison of safety.’ The cumulative effect is one of a quiet, persistent claim to some kind of agency against the odds. Even the puns and wordplay in Toot Sweet make for small acts of resistance, not in lieu of but in line with action in the world (‘things happen so we / take to the bridge’) – for puns also have the power to divert traffic from its prescribed course. Owen has developed a disabused but undeterred lyric mode, fit to metabolize ‘futurity’s bitty / beads of fat.'” Anna Moskovakis
“Tony Iantosca’s sentences sharpen all the senses at once; the heard world is as present as the seen and touched. “I’m tapping my foot to nothing much,” but actually, it’s the profound rhythm of elegy disguised as mundane, everyday life: street, couch, phone, heart. Something or someone is missing, it could be a dog, it could be the poet. There are rumors of Ted Greenwald and Joseph Ceravolo in these poems, amidst their self-deprecating vernacular, calling to mind William Carlos Williams when Spring and All was green. ‘Once poetry / was important I guess or at least / peripherally relevant to something / everyone else was doing.’ This is unfashionable and excellent poetry. Consider reading it to a lover so as to elicit a reciprocal feeling, ‘or whatever.’ It will work.” Matvei Yankelevich