Thursday, March 24, 2011
5:00PM to 8:30PM
Room 5417

@ 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.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010
5:00PM to 7:30PM
Room 5414
Free!
open to the public

Join the GC Poetics Group for a [creative] writing workshop!
No advance reading or preparation required.

“In this frantic, routine-driven world we need freedom from regimented (poetry) writing, and a healthy dose of walking the space between Soma (spirit) and Somatic (body). Using gemstones, trees, and the city itself, we will create deliberate, sustained physical manipulations to generate language to write.”

This workshop will begin with a short talk by CAConrad on the process of (Soma)tic writing, followed by a reading of some of his (soma)tic works. Conrad will then lead us through our own (soma)tic exercise, and by the end of the session, all participants will have a new draft of a piece of writing to work with, and time to consult with Conrad and participate in a collective rendering of the afternoon’s work.

CAConrad is the recipient of The Gil Ott Book Award for The Book of Frank (Chax Press, 2009). He is also the author of Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), (Soma)tic Midge (Faux Press, 2008), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled The City Real & Imagined (Factory School, 2010). Conrad has taught (Soma)tic Writing Workshops at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, Small Press Traffic in San Francisco, CA, and locally in and around the Philadelphia area.

Join poet and editor Annie Finch, along with contributors to the anthology Multiformalisms: Postmodern Poetics of Form, for a lively discussion of how contemporary poets use and understand forms. The conversation, like the book, will juxtapose traditional formalism and Flarf, the American long poem and native Hawaiian poetry, rhyme in Paul Muldoon and textual variability in New Media poetry, Susan Howe and Lucinda Roy, jazz and Asian American poetics, and much more. Featuring Marilyn Hacker, Patricia Smith, Tyler Hoffman, and Stefania deKenessey. Presented by the Center for the Humanities and the GC Poetics Group. Moderated by Corey Frost.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010. 6:30 pm. At the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue New York, Rm. 9206.
Multiformalisms : Postmodern Poetics of Form. (Essays. Edited by Annie Finch and Susan M. Schultz. Textos Books.)

The Postcolonial Studies Group invites you to a special event to celebrate and discuss two new books: Lopamudra Basu (University of Wisconsin, Stout) and Cynthia Leenerts (East Stroudsburg University) will discuss their anthology Passage to Manhattan: Critical Essays on Meena Alexander, and Meena Alexander (Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY) will be present to discus her own Poetics of Dislocation.

March 26, 4-6pm

CUNY Graduate Center 4th floor English Lounge (4406),  365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016

Some very exciting work has been going on around here, a large-scale archeological dig of sorts, and December 8th is your chance to discover what has been unearthed: come to the launch of the inaugural chapbook series of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Documents Initiative. This is a ground-breaking project, and we’re all excited to see it happen. More info here.