The Graduate Center, CUNY

Dana Ward is the author of This Can’t Be Life (Edge Books), Typing ‘Wild Speech’ (Summer BF Press), The Drought (Open 24hrs), &, with the artist Paul Coors, I Want This Forever (Perfect Lovers Press). He lives in Cincinnati, edits Cy Press, & works as an advocate for adult literacy at the Over-The-Rhine Learning Center.

John Coletti is the author of Physical Kind (Yo-Yo-Labs, 2005), Same Enemy Rainbow (fewer & further, 2008), and Mum Halo (Rust Buckle Books, 2010). He recently finished serving as editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter.

The Graduate Center, CUNY, Rm 5409

Poet, essayist, and drawing poem text artist Robert Grenier, a leading figure in the Language Writing movement, attended Harvard College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught literature and creative writing at U.C. Berkeley, Tufts, Franconia College, New College of California, and Mills College. He has held an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship and two NEA Fellowships in Creative Writing.  He recently co-edited The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner, Volumes 1-4, for publication by Stanford University Press. An archive of Grenier’s work over the years, the Robert Grenier Papers, is housed in Stanford University’s Green Library.  Many of Grenier’s more recent creative works originate in personal notebooks, where he uses colored ink pens to make word/text-based drawings wherein “letters in some words have been left out or elided with others or take on resemblance to other letters or to natural forms or to personal gestalts.” (Karl Young, publisher, Light & Dust Books)

Ramsey Scott’s essays, poems, and fiction have appeared in various journals, including the Southwest Review, the Seneca Review, The Massachusetts Review, Shampoo, Tarpaulin Sky, Confrontation, Mirage #4/Period(ical), House Organ, and the Review of Contemporary Fiction.  He teaches at Brooklyn College, CUNY.

CUNY Graduate Center, Rm 5414

Anne Waldman was born in Millville, New Jersey, in 1945. Recently deemed a “counter-cultural giant” by Publisher’s Weekly, Waldman is a poet, performer, professor, editor, and cultural activist. From 1966 until 1978, Waldman ran the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in New York, and in 1974, together with Allen Ginsberg, co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. She is the author of more than 40 books and has concentrated on the long poem as a cultural intervention with such projects as Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of The World Compared to a Bubble, Manatee/Humanity (all published by Penguin Poets) and the anti-war feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press, 2011). Her numerous anthologies include Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan, and the co-edited collections Civil Disobediences, The Angel Hair Anthology, and Beats at Naropa. She has recently collaborated with artist Pat Steir on CRY STALL GAZE, which will be published by Brodsky Center, Rutgers University in 2012. Her CD The Milk of Universal Kindness, with music by Ambrose Bye, was released in 2011. Waldman is a recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, and has recently been appointed a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Waldman is the Artistic Director of the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University, the first Buddhist inspired university on the North American continent, and divides her time between Boulder and New York City.

Jeffrey Yang is the author of the poetry books An Aquarium (winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Prize) and the Vanishing-Line. He is the translator of Su Shi’s East Slope and a collection of classical Chinese poems called Rhythm 226. Yang is also the co-editor (with Natasha Wimmer) of Two Lines: Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, and the editor of Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems from New Directions. He is currently working on a translation of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies.

7:30PM

in The Skylight Lounge @ The CUNY Graduate Center (5th Avenue, b/w 34th & 35th)

This event will feature a talk by the poet, novelist, and National Book Award finalist, Ben Lerner, concerning his recent novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press, 2011), followed by a short conversation, moderated by Kyle Waugh.

Thu Sep 29, 2011, 4:00pm | Martin E. Segal Theatre

Meena Alexander, Kimiko Hahn, Nicole Cooley, Lee Ann Brown, Tina Chang, Marcella Durand, Betsy Fagin, Idra Novey, Tracy K. Smith, Leah Souffrant, Karen Weiser, Rachel Zucker, Cate Marvin, Erica Hunt

How do we theorize a poetics of motherhood?  Attentive to divergent experiences of motherhood and using the maternal as a field that hovers outside neat categorization, this symposium will investigate the poetics of the maternal self and body through the experiences of women of color, adoptive mothers and single mothers.
Panel discussion with poets Meena Alexander, English, Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY; Kimiko Hahn, Creative Writing and Translation, Queens College; Erica Hunt, independent scholar. Moderators: Nicole Cooley, Creative Writing and Translation, Queens College; Leah Souffrant, English, The Graduate Center, CUNY. Followed by a poetry reading with Meena Alexander, Lee Ann Brown,Tina Chang, Nicole Cooley, Marcella Durand, Betsy Fagin, Kimiko Hahn, Erica Hunt, Cate Marvin, Idra Novey,Tracy K. Smith, Leah Souffrant, Karen Weiser, and Rachel Zucker.

4:00: Panel Discussion
5:30: Reception
6:00: Poetry Reading

co-sponsored by the Poetics Group. Image (c) Jennifer Wroblewski.

http://centerforthehumanities.org/events/tangled-spaces-poets-writing-motherhood

Grad Center writers share their work Friday from 5:00-6:00 pm in Room
4409 of the Graduate Center.

This round’s line-up featured fiction, poetry, hybrids, translations, and more.

****STARRING****
Kyle Waugh
Andrew Statum
Sara Jane Stoner
Leah Souffrant
Rainer J. Hanshe
Louis Bury
faculty member Ammiel Alcalay
And hosted by Margaret Carson

Ana Božičević

Tonya Foster

Tim Peterson

Jason Schneiderman

moderated  by Leah Souffrant

Join us on Tuesday, May 3 at 6:00 pm in room 5414 of the Graduate Center for the upcoming Showcase Showdown.  This event features a panel discussion, interrogation, reading, recitation, celebration of GC student writing, featuring GC writers.

***The Poetics Group asks four Grad Center students with new books to get together, read each other’s work, and talk about it on stage. You get to hear some of the exciting new poetry and prose coming out of our community, and you get to hear it discussed by its authors. We call it the Showcase Showdown. The authors interview each other on stage about selected poems from their new books, and the conversation is interspersed with readings and followed by questions and discussion. The public is welcome.***

This event is sponsored by the GC Poetics group, made possible by support from the DSC.

Joan Retallack & Joan Richardson in Conversation

Friday, April 29, 4PM
@The CUNY Graduate Center, Room 4406 (34th Street @ 5th Avenue)
co-sponsored by the English Department and The GC Poetics Group
Free & Open to the Public

Joan Retallack is the author of eight books of poetry, including Memnoir, How To Do Things With Words, Afterrimages, and most recently PROCEDURAL ELEGIES/WESTERN CIV CONT’D/. She is also the author of MUSICAGE, a volume of conversations she had with John Cage over a three-year period. Her most recent critical works are The Poethical Wager and Gertrude Stein: Selections for which she wrote an extensive introductory essay. Retallack is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College.

Joan Richardson is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and American Studies at CUNY’s Graduate Center. She is the author of a two-volume biography of the poet Wallace Stevens, and she co-edited, with Frank Kermode, Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Richardson’s study, A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007 and has been nominated for the 2011 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. She is currently at work on another volume, Pragmatism and American Culture, as well as a book-length study, The Return of the Repressed: Stanley Cavell and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

@ CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue (@ 34th Street)
free! open to the public!

BARGE - the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics – has organized several (de)tours, actions, and installations in and around the San Francisco Bay Area, investigating regional sites and spaces that are underrepresented and overlooked in more conventional touristic, commercial, & socio-political notions of place and publicspace. BARGE’s various projects draw from artistic domains such as performance art, experimental poetry, site-specific art, and psychogeography, in order to investigate the pressing political issues of environmentalism, surveillance, gentrification, and ongoing struggles over public space. Using photographs, performance documentations, writing, and performance, Buuck’s talk will guide usthrough a wide range of artistic tactics for writers, artists, and activists to think critically about the politics of contemporary space and writing.

Workshop: For the workshop, Buuck will lead an intensive seminar of collaborative writing, using a wide range of methods to help participants critically and creatively engage the urban environments we live in. Working with techniques drawn form the fields of documentary poetics, geography, conceptual and site-specific art, and
others, participants will work together to move from creating a set of inquiries to the investigative modes of research and writing that might help extend their work off the page and out of the classroom, into more direct encounters with urban histories, politics, and the experience of everyday life.

David Buuck is a writer and artist who lives in Oakland, CA. He isthe founder of BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics, the author of The Shunt (Palm Press 2009), and the editor of Tripwire, a journal of poetics. From 2003-2009 he was contributing editor at Artweek, and since 2007 has been board president of Small Press Traffic, a literary arts nonprofit based in San Francisco. He teaches writing at Mills College and Bard College, and works as a freelance editor and critic.