The Flow of the Poem's Display of Itself Reading & Discussion

The Flow Chart Foundation in collaboration with Roof Books is proud to present a reading and panel discussion of Carrie Hunter’s The Flow of the Poem’s Display of Itself. Hunter’s book channels John Ashbery’s seminal long poem Flow Chart revealing an extended reflection on influence, community, and what it means to spend one’s life reading and writing poetry. Hunter’s reading from her book at the historic Flow Chart Space will be followed by a panel discussion on Flow Chart and poetry communities in the NY School and the Bay Area by Hunter, Marcella Durand, and Ann Lauterbach with an introduction by Roof publisher James Sherry.

About The Flow of the Poems Display of Itself

Carrie Hunter’s The Flow of the Poem’s Display of Itself began as a formal experiment with a canonical text of the avant-garde, John Ashbery’s legendary long poem Flow Chart. It grew into an extended reflection on influence, community, and what it means to spend one’s life reading and writing poetry.

Hunter's experiment with Flow Chart continually returns to Ashbery as a portal to the particulars of Hunter’s own writing life. But the work expands to include ecological connections and collapse, her friend and publisher Marthe Reed, and Bay Area writing communities.

It would be easy to read this work as either an homage to or takedown of Ashbery, but Hunter’s experiment yields something ultimately more interesting, a poem that happens in the context of the community in which it was written and read. This was surely the case for Ashbery and the New York School as it is for The Flow of the Poem’s Display of Itself, a tribute to the work of her friends.

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Praise for The Flow of the Poem’s Display of Itself

Carrie Hunterʼs writing takes the most exciting innovations of Language Poetry and cleverly folds them into a voice that is playful, anxious, wise, and funny. In The Flow of the Poemʼs Display of Itself, she uses the unexpected collision of Marthe Reed and John Ashbery to produce a well of language from which she draws ingeniously to illustrate how hilariously inadequate poetry is as a political tool in our fraught and failing moment at the same time that it may be the only way to speak truthfully to this era. As Hunter puts it: “Songs never end, they just vibrate off each other, / resounding back and forth forever. / Half full/half empty, but about the shore.” – Misha Crafts

In The Flow of the Poemʼs Display of Itself, Carrie Hunter drops us into a deep, associative state where thought and its output, language (her own and others), become animate, sentient, brilliant under her gaze. Get your necessary neuro-plasticity here! Pathways burn bright as Hunter runs new routes via filmic cuts and splices. Hunter’s poetics also clearly act out an ethics and a politics around collectively-generated, collectively-augmented reality. There’s so much joy in watching her work. – Lindsey Boldt

[Left to Right Carrie Hunter, Marcella Durand, Ann Lauterbach, and James Sherry]

Carrie Hunter received her MFA/MA in the Poetics program at New College of California, was in the Black Radish Books publishing collective, and edited the chapbook press, ypolita press. She is the author of four full-length collections of poems, The Flow of the Poem's Display of Itself (Roof Books, 2025) Vibratory Milieu (Nightboat Books, 2021), and two from Black Radish Books, Orphan Machines and The Incompossible. She lives in San Francisco and teaches ESL.

Marcella Durand is the author of several books of poetry, including A Winter Triangle, forthcoming from Fordham University Press in Fall 2025 and the recipient of the 2024 Poetic Justice Institute Prize. Other books include To husband is to tender (Black Square Editions, 2022), The Prospect (Delete Press, 2020), The Garden of M./Le Jardin de M., translated by Olivier Brossard and published in a bilingual edition by joca seria, 2016, and a book-length translation of Michele Metail’s constraint-based work, Earth’s Horizons/Les Horizons du sol, (Black Square Editions, 2020). She is the co-editor with Jennifer Firestone of Other Influences: The Untold History of Avant-Garde Feminist Poetry, published by MIT Press in Fall 2024, and the 2021 recipient of the C.D. Wright Award in Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art. She lives and works in the Lower East Side, where she also engages in local ecology advocacy and monitoring urban wildlife.

Ann Lauterbach’s eleventh poetry collection Door (Penguin 2023) was short-listed for the 2024 Griffin International Poetry Prize. She received a 2025 NYSCA grant for her forthcoming work“The Meanwhile”. Recent writings include Untitled (Event)in Felix Gonzalez-Torres Photostats(Siglio 2020); Art of the Unbeautiful True, in Mina Loy Strangeness is Inevitable (Princeton University Press 2023), Topos Non Topos : Notes on David Novros (Paula Cooper Gallery 2023).Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship, she teaches at Bard College.

James Sherry is the author of 15 books of poetry and prose. His selected works, Comin’ ‘Round, is just out (Chax Press, 2025).Selfie: Poetry, Social Change & Ecological Connection was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2022. His most recent poetry book, Entangled Bank, was published by Chax Press in 2016. Since 1976, he has edited Roof Books and Roof Magazine, publishing nearly 200 titles of seminal works of language writing, flarf, conceptual poetry, new narrative, and environmental poetry. He started The Segue Foundation, Inc. in 1977, producing over 5,000 events of poetry and other arts in NYC. For more, see jamessherry.net.