Night Wraps the Sky: A Reading Dedicated to Vladimir Mayakovsky
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
6:30 p.m.
Reading at the MoMA in Tribute to a Russian Futurist Romantic Poet hosted by the filmmaker Michael Almereyda — who edited Night Wraps the Sky — and featuring readings by and about Mayakovsky, read by Ethan Hawke and others, as well as a screening of a short silent film directed by the poet.
Says L Mag contributor David Varno in his review of the new anthology Night Wraps the Sky: Writings By and About Mayakovsky:
In a decade when few prominent artists or writers are truly engaged in politics, particularly in this country, it is difficult to imagine a poet so much at the center of things as Vladimir Mayakovsky was during the Russian Revolution. It was a time of intense literary and artistic production, and as leader of the second wave of Futurism, Mayakovsky worked to change the way people created, understood and participated in art. But he was an ever-contradictory figure, one who would embrace Pushkin while also calling to destroy the static art of the past, and his poems’ lyricism and unapologetic internationalism — with nods to Whitman and Rimbaud — set him well beyond the polemical.
link to L Magazine Blog post
