SING IN ME, O MUSE! GREEK-AMERICAN POETRY IN ASTORIA

SING IN ME, O MUSE!
New York’s Greek Community Honors Its Poetic Heritage with a special visit by the POEMobile!!!!

On July 15^th, a special visit by the POEMobile, projections of poems on the side of the Hell Gate Bridge,and performances of poetry and music will mark the hundredth anniversary year of the birth of Greece’s Nobel Laureate Odysseas Elytis. New York’s Greek-American poetry community will honor its cultural heritage with SING IN ME, O MUSE! a performance of poetry, music, and dance at the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York on July 15, 2011 at 8pm, sponsored by Bowery Arts + Science, City Lore, and the Federation.

Dean Kostos, editor of Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek-American Poetry, Nicholas Samaras, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award, Penelope Karageorge, and Sylvia Mouzourou will read their poems on the subjects of love, longing, homeland, and exile accompanied by building-sized projections of text from their poems. The poems will be projected from the roof of the POEMobile, a hand-painted truck and travelling cinema of words, onto the exterior of the Federation’s headquarters in Astoria and the Hell Gate Bridge. Additional projections will include the poems of Elytis himself as well as Sappho, Aeschylus, Ritsos, and Cavafy and be accompanied by traditional music by the Greek Folk Ensemble. The Greek-American Folklore Society will perform two sets of dances: one from the mainland and one from the islands. Poetry will be in Classical and Modern Greek, with the projections morphing into English translations.

This performance is one in a series of poetry events composing A White Wing Brushing the Building, a Bowery Arts + Science and City Lore project highlighting the poetry of New York City’s ethnic communities and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Cultural Innovation Grant. The project will focus on the poetry of 8 cultural communities in New York in 2011 and 8 in 2012, with the majority of the events happening during the summer. The titular “white wing” is taken from a poem by Martín Espada and refers to the projections of the poems that are integral part of the project as well as the live poetry readings which will happen in each of the communities. To date, White Wing has hosted projections and poetry performances in the languages of the Lower East Side (Yiddish, Ukrainian, Spanish, and Cantonese) at the New Museum’s Festival of New Ideas and new work by Native American poets at the American Indian Community House. Additional 2011 collaborating communities include Haitian, Mexican, Garifuna, and Nuyorican. The events will be stand alone programs but unified by the common elements of the poetry projections, which will reach the city’s neighborhoods—its storefronts, its basketball courts, its warehouse walls—from the POEMobile.

SING IN ME, O MUSE! GREEK-AMERICAN POETRY IN ASTORIA

July 15, 2011, 8pm
The Federation of Hellenic SocietiesStathakion Center
22-51 29th Street
Astoria, NY 11105

www.citylore.org www.hellenicsocieties.org

212-529-1955 x 308

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