I Remember 1963—1973 (after Joe Brainard)

I remember red roses next to Mildred’s backyard and front porch.
The smell of bleach inside of school halls.
white socks meant you were queer. Read More >

A Short Essay on Protest

In fourth grade, I refused to go to school until the principal met with me about the teacher who I said was cruel. In his office, Dr. Swan agreed, the teacher was a bully but also old. I should take pity on her outdated ways. As he handed me a mint lollipop, I watched his turtles circling each other in the terrarium. Read More >

In May of 2014 I participated in Aller Retour Paris:  a week of art, poetry, film, and music in the heart of Paris, celebrating the city’s role in shaping Henry Miller as a writer and raconteur. Ping-Pong literary journal hosted the opening night party at Shakespeare and Company. Reading poetry while looking at Notre Dame Cathedral is kind of wondrous. I hope I never get to that place where I think that isn’t the coolest thing on earth, cuz it kinda is. I figured since I was in Paris I’d see about interviewing one of my favorite poets, Alice Notley, who kindly agreed. J. Hope Stein, my friend and newest poetry editor at Ping-Pong also came along, and together we had tea and conversation with a woman who makes life itself an art, like Henry says is the trick of the whole thing. What follows is a shortened version (you have to buy the print copy of Ping-Pong to read it in its entirety).

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
the (partial) interview with Alice Notley

by: Maria Garcia Teutsch and J. Hope Stein
May 2014 at a café in Paris, France

MGT

I find a playfulness with language and punctuation in your writing with the things that bind our language and in some ways release them. And I’m wondering if in English you find there are more boundaries on the language than you do in the French?

Alice

No (laughs). No, because English is my first language and for me it has no boundaries. But I don’t think one has more or fewer boundaries than the other.

MGT

In French everything is gender, and I know in German everything is gendered.

Alice

In English a lot is gender and nobody notices it.   And if you speak a language you don’t notice it. I don’t notice it so much in French. Mostly I strive to master it so I can speak the language. The words you expect to be feminine are never feminine.   It never works the way it’s supposed to. It all comes from Latin. I took Latin in high school and I know that gender is always unexpected. (Laughs) Read More >

“Henry at Henry” by Maria Garcia Teutsch

Henry Rollins has rocked my world for as long as I can remember. When I first heard him sing with Black Flag my body hummed for hours afterwards. Read More >

Ping-Pong Free Press’ 4th Annual Speech is Not Free gathering: Writers Against Fascism and for Freedom of the Press. Ping-Pong Free Press  and Poet Republik Ltd. gathered at the Howl! Happening Gallery in the Bowery to feature readings by writers who oppose fascism and dictatorships, and who are for freedom of the press and against totalitarian notions of state-sponsored propaganda. Read More >

When Word Came of My Mother’s Death Read More >

We are happy to announce Jameson O’Hara Laurens as the winner of the Ping-Pong Free Press Poetry Prize 2016: Judge, Melissa Broder. Her collection MEDÆUM was published Fall of 2016, here is a poem from this outstanding collection. Congratulations Jameson! Read More >

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of five books poetry, most recently The Year of Yellow Butterflies (Hanging Loose Press 2015) and Pageant (Alice James Books 2009). She served as poetry editor for Ping-Pong Journal of Art and Literature.

I Have a Secret Crush on Everyone in the World

When I say I have a secret crush on everyone
in the world, I mean the earth is a fur-covered
fireball, speeding into the expanding spaces
between paragliding atoms. It means I have
a crush on the way your dangling earlobes
say one thing and your elephant, anxious
hips say another– the way you dial the same
number six times before you build up the nerve
to finish. And yes, it means I am seriously
crushing on your chipped gold nail polish,
the way it signifies a desire to make the world
more beautiful, but also the way it displays
a fuck-you approach to beauty. I was going
to email to say I have a crush on your pre-
apocalyptic recipe poems, but it’s 2016
and according to twitter only old folks
use email. Is there anything more crush-
worthy than a manifesto spelled out in
lightly frosted snickerdoodles, or an essay
floating in a lagoon-shaped swimming pool?
I have a public crush on the number 8 bus,
alfresco Thai brunches and dirty Brooklyn
swans. I love all errors and eras equally.
I have a repressed crush on New Jersey
pollution, the way its oil refineries remind
me I have a nose. To have a crush is to crush
out doubt so thoroughly its green, leathery
skin becomes your own, to taste another’s
DNA so purely Januaries dissolve into vats
of frothy vanilla egg creams, spilling into
the cracks of your spine and your loose brain
jelly, into old feet and the cold twitch of your
jaw. To crush is to slide into the neural network
where our wires are made of bird songs
and magenta-colored loss, is to feel the floor
open and the reverberating metallic shivers after.

This poem first appeared in Apogee Magazine

Featuring Anne Waldman and Ambrose Bye in performance

pc: Jaroslav Kratochvil

Group Reading of Howl, screening of the Telling Pictures film, Howl.

Poetry Reading of The Revolution Will Have its Sky, Maria Garcia Teutsch

For Immediate Release:

Contact: Mike Scutari 667-2764

Speech is Not Free

Howl 60^th Anniversary, choral reading and Film; music by Anne Waldman and Ambrose Bye; a benefit for Ping-Pong Free Press/release party for the 2015 journal.

On Friday October 16 the Henry Miller Memorial Library will present their second annual Speech is Not Free Event with apoetry reading from the Library’s literary journal Ping-Pong; a group reading of Howl; a performance featuring Anne Waldman and Ambrose Bye followed by a showing of the Telling Pictures film, Howl.

On Saturday the Library will host performance and poetry workshops: 10-11:45, Riot Writing: poems to start a revolution generative workshop with Ping-Pong EIC, Maria Garcia Teutsch; 12-12:30 brown bag lunch. 12:30-2:30-Performance and Poetry workshop with Anne Waldman and Ambrose Bye; 2:30-4: Free Speech Presentation and exhibit: informal chat with library executive director Magnus Torén.

On Saturday Evening there will be performances by Grammy award winning artist Ian Brennan, and Bob Forrest of Thelonius Monster.

Allen Ginsberg typing Howl

Saturday 10/17/15 Workshops:

10:00-11:45 am: Riot Writing—Poems to start a Revolution: Poetry of Protest is Poetry of Witness generative workshop with Maria Garcia Teutsch

Poetry is written for any number of reasons, most often having to do with witnessing: the poet sees something so beautiful they want share it with the world, or perhaps the poet sees an injustice they want to give voice to—poetry of social consciousness. Working primarily with poetry of the latter ilk, we will examine Chicano/a poetry, Feminist poetry, Palestinian Poetry, Jewish poetry, Russian poetry, Syrian poetry etc… and then generate and share our own poems of protest.

12:30-2:30:The Poem-in-Performance: A Workshop with Anne Waldman & Ambrose Bye

Working with our melopoeia, — the innate music of our writing — we will let our poetry guide us into various performance strategies and modes of composition. We will be working with our voice, our timing, possible instrumentation, collaboration and the like. We will consider methods of sprechstimme (speak-singing), monologue, vocal duets, curses, spells, lullabies, blues, poem-as-libretto, and also consider how to shape the work on the page with its orality in mind. We will begin with some “experiments of attention” and work toward individual pieces we will then record on a CD. Participants may also bring a piece of their choice to class to work on, as well as instruments they can play. Musicianship is welcome! Discussion will include some performance theory.

Sign up for Workshops here: Workshop signup (space is limited)

7:00PM–Saturday evening performances by Grammy Award winning artist Ian Brennan and Bob Forrest (Thelonius Monster).

About the artists:

Anne Waldman The author of more than 40 collections of poetry and poetics, Anne Waldman is an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry movement, and has been connected to the Beat movement and the second generation of the New York School. Her publications include Fast Speaking Woman (1975), Marriage: A Sentence (2000), and the multi-volume Iovis project (1992, 1993, 1997).
Her work as a cultural activist and her practice of Tibetan Buddhism are deeply connected to her poetry. Waldman is, in her words, “drawn to the magical efficacies of language as a political act.” Her commitment to poetry extends beyond her own work to her support of alternative poetry communities. Waldman has collaborated extensively with visual artists, musicians, and dancers, and she regularly performs internationally. Her performance of her work is engaging and physical, often including chant or song, and has been widely recorded on film and video. www.annewaldman.org

Ambrose Bye, musician/producer grew up in the environment of The Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University, graduated from The University of California, Santa Cruz and was trained as an audio engineer at the music/production program at Pyramind in San Francisco. Working primarily with poets, he has produced four albums with Anne Waldman, “In the Room of Never Grieve”, “The Eye of the Falcon”, “Matching Half”, and “The Milk of Universal Kindness”. He also produced “Comes Through in the Call Hold” featuring Waldman, Thurston Moore, and Clark Coolidge. Recently he produced, “Harry’s House” a compilation from recordings done at Naropa University and is working on Volume Two. www.fastspeakingmusic.bandcamp.com

Maria Garcia Teutsch is an award-winning poet, editor and educator. Her most recent collection, The Revolution Will Have its Sky, received the Minerva Rising Chapbook award, Judge: Heather McHugh. She serves as editor-in-chief of The Homestead Review, Ping-Pong Magazine and Ping-Pong Free Press. She has been teaching poetry and creative writing classes at Hartnell College for the past 16 years where she received the Gleason Award for teaching excellence. Ilya Kaminsky says of Maria’s poetics: “The voices in her poems are direct and yet there is a certain mystery to this directness, this clarity of address. Clarity, the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish taught us, is the first mystery. She understands this too. Her poems can be devotional, or political or sexy, but there is always this sense of direct address, of clarity that isn’t all that simple, that contains a kind of tenderness, a kind of playfulness that is clear and mysterious at the same time.” www.marialoveswords.com

Begins with a sunset on the Pont Marie next to our pied-à-terre in the Île Saint-Louis, one of two natural islands in Paris.

The next evening we invited some folks over for a small fête to kick of the week of events planned for the Henry Miller Memorial Library’s Aller Retour Paris literary festival. Naturally this involved much wine, bread and cheese. The calm before the storm:

Pont Marie Gang at Sunset (not featured, our photographer and pal: Debi Lorenc)

I wanted to only eat bread, cheese and butter the whole time in Paris, but after two days, I had to add some roughage. That’s all I’m saying. I made everyone go out to the bridge at sunset where we drank German sekt (sorry France) and ate petite madeleine from Combray and talked about Proust, yes, I am serious. Reading the new translation of Swann’s Way right now. Read More >