Wednesday

William Corbett is a poet living in Boston’s South End. He teaches writing at MIT, directs the small press Pressed Wafer and is on the advisory board of Manhattan’s CUE Art Foundation. He edited James Schuyler’s letters and his book on Philip Guston’s late work remains in print. His recent books of poetry are Poems On Occasion (Pressed Wafer) and Opening Day (Hanging Loose Press.)

Filmmaker and poet Jonas Mekas was born in 1922 in Semeniskiai, Lithuania. He has been one of the leading figures of American avant-garde filmmaking or the “New American Cinema,” as he dubbed it in the late ’50s, playing various roles: in 1954, he became editor and chief of Film Culture; in 1958 he began writing his “Movie Journal” column for the Village Voice; in 1962 he co-founded the Film- Makers’ Cooperative (FMC) and the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque in 1964, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avant-garde films. His own output ranging from narrative films (Guns of the Trees, 1961) to documentaries (the Brig, 1963) and to “diaries” such as Walden (1969) and As I was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2001) have been screened extensively at festivals and museums around the world. His latest book To Petrarca is published by Dis Voir. A one man show of his mixed media works will open later this spring at Serpentine Gallery, London. Visit his website for more!