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Dear friends and colleagues, I will be reading at the Poetry Project on Wednesday, March 28^th at 8 PM from /This Constellation Is A Name: Collected Poems 1965-2010/ just published by Nightboat Books. Some advance notice on /This Constellation Is A Name/: "Full-throated praise for this remarkable accomplishment, a generous tome of over a half century's life and astute consciousness in poetry. Michael Heller is one of our best poets and thinkers who has carried Oppen's dictum that poetry embodies "precise information on existence" forward. His erudition and scope astound: Jewish mysticism finds company with Baudelaire and TibetHis modes are various and true, and constellate fully realized an experimental/ philosophical/profound Lyric. ---Anne Waldman To conceive otherwise," says Michael Heller, is the poet's essential task, to which he has apprenticed himself for nearly fifty years. No matter if the poem is brief or extended, the line long or short, the setting Manhattan or the Colorado Rockies, a lost Bialystok or an imagined Tibet---what arises from the page is an action of mind, an asking, questing trajectory, tracked with uncanny surety by movement of the poetic line. This is no language-locked adventure, but an impassioned, ethical /listening/ to the mind---and the world---at work in words. ---Susan Tichy Reading with me will be Kristin Prevallet the author of /I, Afterlife:An Essay/ and other volumes. The Poetry Project is located in St. Mark's Church at the corner of 2^nd Avenue and East Tenth Street in Manhattan (call 212-674-0910 for more information). -- Home page: michaelhellerpoetry.com Recent books: Beckmann Variations& Other Poems (Shearsman, 2010); Eschaton (Talisman, 2009); Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the work of George Oppen (Salt, 2008); Uncertain Poetries: Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics (Salt, 2005); Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems (Salt, 2003). Available at bookstores, SPD and at Amazon.com Collaborations with the composer Ellen Fishman Johnson: This Art Burning and other poetry, Benjamin (a music-theater work based on the life of Walter Benjamin), go to: http://www.efjcomposer.com/efjcomposer/Welcome.html and for excerpts visit Ellen's Youtube videos at: http://www.youtube.com/user/efjcomposer Michael Heller PennSound page: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Heller.php