Poetry Working Group
The English Department Poetry Working Group will meet on three evenings to discuss various and exciting poetry/poetics/critical readings. In addition, the working group will continue last year's Reading Series with a new line up of guests throughout the semester. (Scroll down for the Minor American Reading Series schedule.)
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Fall Working Group Meetings
Wed. 9/30 5:30
Our purpose is to read and discuss strange and exciting documents from the last 100 years of poetic practice. This semester, we'll be looking at questions of translation. The first reading will be pretty fascinating. We'll look at excerpts from two texts: Jack Spicer's After Lorca (1957) and Araki Yasusada's Doubled Flowering (1997). The Spicer book opens with a preface written, from the grave, by Frederico Garcia Lorca, and unfolds as a series of translations and variations on Lorcan themes, and hybrids of these two tendencies (each poem's status or source is not identified within the book). The Yasusada book is the product of what's believed to be an elaborate quote-unquote hoax, consisting of poems and various ephemera supposedly written by a Japanese survivor of the Hiroshima bombings who also happened to be a connoisseur of experimental American poets (such as Spicer). Perhaps the most controversial poetry project of the last few decades, the Yasusada project was called "a criminal act" by at least one prominent poetry editor.
Readings: Spicer and Yasusada
Additional readings: Dictation and 'A Textbook of Poetry,'" from The House that Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer
Tues. Oct. 27th 5:30 at the home of Priscilla Wald & Joseph Donahue.
Please RSVP if you plan on attending.
Pete Moore has selected a few really terrific texts for our discussion. His description of those texts is below:
"The death of Aimé Césaire in April of last year marked the passing of one of literature’s most significant postcolonial practitioners. The self-penned poem that now serves as epitaph on his headstone in Martinique reads, “the atmospheric or rather historic pressure/even if it makes certain words of mine sumptuous/immeasurably increases my plight.” Taking up these issues of historicity, descent and subjectivity, the next meeting of the poetry work group will focus on Clayton Eshleman’s English translation of Césaire’s final book of poems, moi laminaire (1990). Although the book received little fanfare or critical attention, it evidenced a shift from Césaire's surrealist associative metaphor aesthetic toward a more accessible poetics that A. James Arnold counts among Cesaire’s “most moving and mature poetry.” Alongside Eshleman’s Césaire, we will consider a selection of Eshleman’s translations of César Vallejo, the Peruvian modernist accredited with “inventing ‘surrealism’ before Surrealism.” The pairing of these texts intends to provide insight into Eshleman's unique antiphonal approach to translation, as well as perhaps initiating a contemplation of the cross-cultural exchange as visionary event."
Food and drinks shall be provided.
Please RSVP if you plan to attend, so we don't under or over shoot on the food. Folks from all fields and disciplines are welcome.
RSVP to: tonytost@yahoo.com
The last meeting this semester will most likely be geared towards preparing us for the planned visit and reading by the superb poet-translator-editor-publisher team of Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop. For next semester, our plan is to explore the possible intersections, seductions and corruptions that recur b/w the realms of poetry and music.
Minor American Reading Series
For directions , contact minor.american@gmail.com
Location: "The Space:" 715 Washington St., Durham NC (unless otherwise noted)
Time: 8 pm
Free!
September 19th: Vanessa Place, Aimee Argote, & Ted Pope
Vanessa Place is a writer, a lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is author of Dies: A Sentence (Les Figues Press, 2006), La Medusa (Fiction Collective 2, 2008), and Notes on Conceptualisms, co-authored with Robert Fitterman (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009); her nonfiction book, The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law is forthcoming from Other Press. Place is co-founder of Les Figues Press, described by critic Terry Castle as “an elegant vessel for experimental American writing of an extraordinarily assured and ingenious sort.”
Ted Pope: “I am the warm and fuzzy wall between the Church and The State. Trapped out here in the orbit-of-Mars like a Hound-Dog or an Owl. the little inner buddha is building a wondrous canoe that will travel from my heart... to you.”
Des Ark is the secret soundtrack of midnight Carolina. It’s the hard and sweet noise of everything that keeps you up at night, a bulldozer come to break its heart with you. Alone, you hear Des Ark through the broken window of the used bookstore. Inside, everyone is there and everything is real.
October 24th: Robert Glück & Gail Scott
Robert Glück is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction, including two novels, Margery Kempe and Jack the Modernist and a book of stories, Denny Smith. Gluck edited, along with Camille Roy, Mary Berger and Gail Scott, the anthology Biting The Error: Writers on Narrative. Glück was Co-Director of Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center, Director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State, and Associate Editor at Lapis Press. His poetry and fiction have been published in the New Directions Anthology, City Lights Anthologies, Best New Gay Fiction1988 and 1996, The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Best American Erotica 1996 and 2005, and The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction. His critical articles appeared in artforum international, Aperture, Poetics Journal, and Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors, and he prefaced Between Life and Death, a book on the paintings of Frank Moore. Last year he and artist Dean Smith completed the film Aliengnosis. Gluck teaches at San Francisco State University.
Gail Scott has completed a new novel, The Obituary. She has written 7 other books, including the anthology Biting The Error edited with Bob Gluck, Camille Roy, and Mary Berger, Coach House, 2004 [shortlisted for a Lambda award]; the novel, My Paris, about a sad diarist in conversation with Gertrude Stein and Walter Benjamin in contemporary Paris, Dalkey Archive [Normal, Ill] September, 2003; the story collection Spare Parts Plus Two [Coach House, 2002]; the novels Main Brides and Heroine, and the essay collections Spaces Like Stairs and la théorie, un dimanche [with Nicole Brossard et al]. Her translation of Michael Delisle’s Le Déasarroi du matelot was shortlisted for the Governor General’s award in translation [2001]. She was named one of the 10 best Canadian novelists of the year 1999 by the trade magazine Quill + Quire. She is co-founder of the critical journal Spirale (Montréal) and Tessera (new writing by women). She teaches Creative Writing at Université de Montréal.
(This reading is co-sponsored by Duke's Center for Canadian Studies.)
Nov. 14th: Lucy Corin &Guillermo Parra
Lucy Corin is the author of the short story collection The Entire Predicament (Tin House Books, 2007) and the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls (FC2, 2004). She teaches at the University of California, Davis, where many professors are currently working to keep the university from being privatized. You can find her microfictional apocalypses in The Massachusetts Review, Gulf Coast, West Branch, Pen/America, and Diagram.
Guillermo Parra lives in Durham, NC and writes the blog Venepoetics. He has published Caracas Notebook (Cy Gist Press, 2006) and Phantasmal Repeats (Petrichord Books, 2009). He is currently translating the work of Venezuelan poet Juan Sánchez Peláez.
December 3rd (Thursday!): Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop
NB: This reading will be held in the East Duke Parlors
Keith Waldrop's 2009 books are: Transcendental Studies (poetry, Univ. of California Press); Several Gravities (collages, Siglio Press); and a translation of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen: little poems in prose (Wesleyan Univ. Press). He has also translated Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil as well as books by contemporary French poets Anne-Marie Albiach, Claude Royet-Journoud, Paol Keineg, Dominique Fourcade, Pascal Quignard, and Jean Grosjean. Other books of poems include The Real Subject (Omnidawn) and the trilogy: The Locality Principle, The Silhouette of the Bridge (America Award, 1997) and Semiramis, If I Remember (Avec Books).
He was born in Emporia, Kansas in 1932 and teaches at Brown University in Providence, RI.
Rosmarie Waldrop’s recent poetry books are Curves to the Apple, Blindsight (both New Directions), and Love, Like Pronouns (Omnidawn). Her collected essays, Dissonance (if you are interested) are out from University of Alabama Press; her memoir, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, from Wesleyan UP. She has translated, from the German, books of poetry by Friederike Mayröcker, Elke Erb, Oskar Pastior, Gerhard Rühm, Ulf Stolterfoht and, from the French, Edmond Jabès, Emmanuel Hocquard and Jacques Roubaud.
Together, Keith and Rosmarie have published Well Well Reality (collected collaborations, Post-Apollo Press), Ceci n’est pas Keith Ceci n’est pas Rosmarie (autobiographies, Burning Deck), and translated Jacques Roubaud’s poems on the streets of Paris: The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Human Heart (Dalkey Archive). They co-edit the small press, Burning Deck Press.
January 30th: Brian Evenson & Brian Howe
February 27th: Stacy Szymaszek & Stephanie Bolster
March 20th: Therese Bachand & Magus Magnus