The New Talkies

SATURDAY, JUNE 11th
8:30pm / doors lock 9pm
**please note change from usual time**

Featuring:
John Beer
Daniel Borzutzky
Krista Franklin
Judith Goldman
Carla Harryman
Konrad Steiner

Neo-benshi guest curated by Konrad Steiner
co-presented with Red Rover Series
and funded in part by Poets & Writers

at Outer Space Studio
1474 N. Milwaukee Ave
suggested donation $4

logistics –
near CTA Damen blue line
third floor walk up
not wheelchair accessible

JOHN BEER is the author of The Waste Land and Other Poems (Canarium, 2010), which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. He lives in Chicago, where he writes about theater for Time Out.

DANIEL BORZUTZKY is the author of The Book of Interfering Bodies (Nightboat, 2011); The Ecstasy of Capitulation (BlazeVox, 2007) and Arbitrary Tales (Triple Press, 2005).  He is the translator of Raúl Zurita’s Song for his Disappeared Love (Action Books, 2010) and Jaime Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl (Action Books, 2010).  His work has been anthologized in, among others, A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years (Fence Books); Seriously Funny (University of Georgia Press, 2010); and Malditos Latinos Malditos Sudacas:  Poesia Iberoamericana Made in USA (El billar de Lucrecia, 2010).  Journal publications include Fence, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions, Chicago Review, TriQuarterly, and many others. Chapbooks include Failure in the Imagination (Bronze Skull, 2007) and One Size Fits All (Scantily Class Press, 2009).  He is a contributing editor to Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas.  He lives in Chicago.

KRISTA FRANKLIN is a poet and visual artist from Dayton, OH who lives and works in Chicago. Her poetry and mixed medium collages have been published in lifestyle and literary journals such as Coon Bidness, Copper Nickel, RATTLE, Indiana Review, Ecotone, Clam and Callaloo, and in the anthologies Encyclopedia Vol. II, F-K and Gathering Ground. Her visual art has been featured on the covers of award-winning books, and exhibited nationally in solo and group exhibitions. Franklin is a Cave Canem Fellow, and a co-founder of 2nd Sun Salon, a community meeting space for writers, visual and performance artists, musicians and scholars.

JUDITH GOLDMAN is the author of Vocoder (Roof 2001), DeathStar/rico-chet (O Books 2006), “the dispossessions” (atticus/finch 2009), and l.b.; or, catenaries (Krupskaya 2011).  She co-edited the annual journal War and Peace with Leslie Scalapino from 2005-2009 and currently edits a feature on contemporary innovative poetry for the e-journal Postmodern Culture.  She is a Harper Schmidt Fellow and collegiate assistant professor at the University of Chicago, teaching in the arts humanities core and in creative writing.  In fall 2011, she will be the Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at University of California, Berkeley.

CARLA HARRYMAN is the author of fifteen books of poetry, plays, and prose. Her most recent works include a collection of conceptual and experimental essays Adorno’s Noise (Essay Press, 2008), the book length poem Open Box (Belladonna 2007), and a sequence of essays in The Grand Piano, a multi-authored serial work that locates its project in the San Francisco Bay Area writing scene between 1975-1980. The Wide Road, a novella in poetry and prose co-authored with Lyn Hejinian was just released from Belladonna Press.

Recent performance works have emphasized polyvocal text, bilingualism, choral speaking voices, and music improvisation. She is co-editor of Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (Verso, 2006) and she is the special issue editor of “Non/Narrative” for the Journal of Narrative Theory (forthcoming, 2011).  She serves on the creative writing faculty of the Department of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University and the MFA faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts.

KONRAD STEINER, filmmaker and independent curator, studied film at SAIC and Linguistics at Stanford University. Since 2003 he has produced events of live cinema collaborating with musicians and writers, as well as making single channel video and film.

Roy Fisher Symposium

***REGISTRATION REQUIRED*** If you plan to attend the symposium, please send an e-mail with you first and last names to john.tipton64@gmail.com. You need to be on the access list to enter the building on Saturday.

April 15 at 7 p.m. (New) Corpse Space, 1511 N. Milwaukee Ave. (2nd floor), Chicago, IL 60622- Readings by August Kleinzahler, Maureen McLane, and Tom Pickard
April 16 at 1.30 p.m. Morningstar Auditorium, 22 W. Washington, 7th Floor – Short talks on the work of Roy Fisher by August Kleinzahler, Maureen McLane, and Tom Pickard plus a screening of Pickard’s film on Fisher, “Birmingham is What I Think With.”

Two Chances to see Minimalist Concrete Poet Márton Koppány

Wednesday, April 6 at 5:30 p.m. – Márton Koppány will give a presentation/reading of his minimalist visual poetry.  Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 5th floor, 37 S. Wabash, Chicago, IL 60603.

Saturday, April 9 at 1 p.m. – Márton Koppány will lead a small workshop on visual poetry. Please contact the Chicago Poetry Project if you are interested in attending.  (New) Corpse Space, 1511 N. Milwaukee Ave. (2nd floor), Chicago, IL 60622

About himself, Koppány writes: “Born in 1953, I’m a writer and editor living in Budapest, Hungary. I started writing something that turned out to be ‘visual poetry’ thirty years ago because by the late seventies I’d understood that if I didn’t want to give up the faint hope of communicating, I should ‘get rid’ of my mother tongue. So the main source of my way is a deficiency, which makes things simple in some sense. 

Artist Statement:
My inclinations have always directed me towards the (actual, ever-changing) limits of verbal communication. But I don’t distrust/need/enjoy words more or less than the empty spaces between them, the sheet of paper they are written on, the rhythm of the turning of the pages, unknown and forgotten symbols, fragments, natural formations like clouds—each of them and any combination of them may be an invitation. When I feels easy and ready to make something, I experiences their complete equivalence.”

Nearly sixty years ago, Charles Olson warned, “The poet cannot afford to traffick in any other sign than his ‘one’,” preparing the way whether he knew it or not for Márton Koppány to take leave of his native Hungarian and to move into English, where for more than two decades he has been creating traffic signs with the gleeful abandon of a deranged city planner with an advanced degree in Dada. Language is our great connecting principle and Koppány’s language artfully breaks, reduces, and repairs poetry with a metaphysician’s discomfort and a with a physician’s healing touch.

Rabbit Light Films at The Corpse Space, and Other New Events

New CPP events for 2011 have been updated to the “Upcoming Events” Tab!  Find this, and later goings-on here (details TBA).

March 1, 2011 Rabbit Light Films at The (New) Corpse Space

Rabbit Light Movies event, co-sponsored by Green Lantern Press, including supershort live readings by Kristy Odelius, Hideaki Noguchi, Josh Corey, John Tipton, Carrie Olivia Adams, William Fuller, Michael O’Leary, Mary Nash, Lisa Janssen, Melissa Severin, Michael Anichini, Simone Muench, and Quraysh Ali Lansana. 7pm Tuesday March 1st, The (New) Corpse Space, 1511 N. Milwaukee.

Brenda Cardenas for “Poets Talking” Series

CHICAGO POETRY PROJECT: POETS TALKING

Since 2001, the Chicago Poetry Project has brought locally and nationally significant poets to Chicago audiences. This year, the Project initiates a new series of poet’s talks. In the tradition of Bob Perelman’s Folsom Street talk series, but without the book & DVD package, or the lectures of Prof. Irwin Corey, but without the academicism, the series aims to generate discussion of issues in poetics among writers and readers outside the university umbra. This inaugural year will take up the issue of education: how does a poet get educated? and how might he or she work as an educator, in and outside of writing?

Talks take place at the Green Lantern Gallery, 1511 N. Milwaukee Ave. The final talk of our first season will feature Brenda Cárdenas on Tuesday, June 15, at 7:30pm.

Brenda Cárdenas’ collection of poetry Boomerang was published by Bilingual Review Press in 2009, and her chapbook From the Tongues of Brick and Stone by Momotombo Press (Institute for Latino/a Studies) in 2005. She also co-edited Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest (MARCH/Abrazo Press, 2001). Cardenas’ work has appeared in a range of publications, including Achiote Seeds, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, The Wind Shifts: The New Latino Poetry, RATTLE, and the Poetry Daily web site, among others. Her poem “Song” was recently made into an animated film in the Poetry Everywhere series sponsored by the Poetry Foundation. Cardenas is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is the 2010-2012 Milwaukee Poet Laureate.

Jenny Boully at the Green Lantern “Poets Talking” series

CHICAGO POETRY PROJECT: POETS TALKING

Since 2001, the Chicago Poetry Project has brought locally and
nationally significant poets to Chicago audiences. This year, the
Project initiates a new series of poet’s talks. In the tradition of
Bob Perelman’s Folsom Street talk series, but without the book & DVD
package, or the lectures of Prof. Irwin Corey, but without the
academicism, the series aims to generate discussion of issues in
poetics among writers and readers outside the university umbra. This
inaugural year will take up the issue of education: how does a poet
get educated? and how might he or she work as an educator, in and
outside of writing?

Talks will take place at the Green Lantern Gallery, 1511 N. Milwaukee Ave.

This month's talk will feature Jenny Boully
on Tuesday, May 18, at 7:30pm.



Jenny Boully is the author of the forthcoming not merely because of
the unknown that was stalking towards them (Tarpaulin Sky Press), The
Book of Beginnings and Endings (Sarabande), [one love affair]*
(Tarpaulin Sky Books), and The Body: An Essay (Essay Press).  Her work
has been anthologized in The Next American Essay, The Best American
Poetry, Language for a New Century, and Great American Prose Poems.
Her work has been published in Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Fourth
Genre, Columbia, Verse, Seneca Review, Conduit, and other places.  She
is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York and holds previous graduate degrees in creative
writing from the University of Notre Dame and Hollins University.  She
teaches in the Nonfiction and Poetry programs at Columbia College
Chicago.

Upcoming:

6/15 Brenda Cardenas

Robert Duncan Symposium

Chicago Poetry Project presents
with the Writing Program of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
and the Poetry Center of Chicago

The Truth and Life of Myth
A Robert Duncan Symposium

April 22-24, 2010
Chicago

“The surety of the myth for the poet has such force that it operates as a primary reality in itself, having volition. The mythic content comes to us, commanding the design of the poem; it calls the poet into action, and with whatever lore and craft he has prepared himself for that call, he must answer to give body in the poem to the formative will.”
Robert Duncan, “The Truth and Life of Myth”

Keynote speakers

Michael Palmer
“Robert Duncan and the Invention of Childhood”
Nathaniel Mackey
in conversation with Joseph Donahue and Peter O’Leary

Presenters:
Faith Barrett        Stephen Collis        Joseph Donahue    Amy Evans
Norman Finkelstein    Stephen Fredman    Karl Gartung        Siobhan Scarry
Margaret Sloan    Brian Teare

Events include: talks and readings by the keynote speakers; a dramatic reading of Duncan’s play “Medea in Kolchis”; poetry readings by presenters; and talks, presentations, and conversation about Robert Duncan’s poetry.

Events will take place at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

in the Columbus Auditorium
280 S. Columbus Drive
Chicago, IL 60603

and

the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection
5th floor, 37 S. Wabash Ave.
Chicago, IL 60603

Finalized Schedule for Duncan Symposium

the truth and life of myth
a robert duncan symposium

chicago poetry project

co-sponsors:
writing program, school of the art institute of chicago
poetry center of chicago

april 22-24, 2010
chicago

participants

Keynote speakers
Nathaniel Mackey
Michael Palmer

Presenters
Faith Barrett Stephen Collis Joseph Donahue Amy Evans
Norman Finkelstein Stephen Fredman Karl Gartung Siobhán Scarry
Margaret Sloan Brian Teare

schedule

Thursday, April 22

Evening performance
Duncan play. Medea at Kolchis.
Directed by John Beer.
RSVP for Location
Players to be determined.

Friday, April 23
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

10:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Morning panel.
Columbus Auditorium
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
280 S. Columbus Drive

Presenters: Stephen Collis; Stephen Fredman; Siobhán Scarry.

Lunch 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.

1:30 – 3:00 p.m.
Afternoon panel.
Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection
5th Floor, 37 S. Wabash Ave.

Presenters: Joseph Donahue; Amy Evans; Norman Finkelstein

5:30 – 7:30 p.m.
Columbus Auditorium
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
280 S. Columbus Drive

Nathaniel Mackey, reading.
Michael Palmer, Keynote Address:
“Robert Duncan and the Invention of Childhood.”

8:00 p.m.
Group poetry reading w/food.
Green Lantern Gallery
1511 N. Milwaukee Ave., 2nd floor.
{Green Lantern is above the Singer Sewing Machine shop; the doorbell doesn’t work but
the door will be open.}

Stephen Collis
Joseph Donahue
Siobhán Scarry
Brian Teare

Saturday, April 23
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

All events at the Columbus Auditorium
280 S. Columbus Drive

12:00 – 1:30 p.m.
Afternoon panel.
Presenters: Margaret Sloan; Brian Teare; Faith Barrett & Karl Gartung.

2:30 – 4:30
Michael Palmer, reading.
Nathaniel Mackey,
in conversation with Joseph Donahue and Peter O’Leary

Talks for Duncan Symposium THIS WEEKEND!

The Truth and Life of Myth: A Robert Duncan Symposium

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Michael Palmer
“Robert Duncan and the Invention of Childhood.”

Nathaniel Mackey
in conversation with Joseph Donahue and Peter O’Leary

PRESENTERS

Faith Barrett & Karl Gartung
“In Words War: Writing through the Duncan-Levertov Correspondence”

In words
w a r
is not

contained

Inwards
war is

)not
contained(

Three or so years ago, we (Faith Barrett & Karl Gartung) thought to write a play from the Duncan/Levertov correspondence. When that failed we, nevertheless, continued in this collaboration. A correspondence is a kind of collaboration, and to that extent, we wished to correspond, to co-respond. In a conversation, a dialogue, what is said is not really said by the one or the other, but what is between them. “Let’s keep it between us,” the song says. Keep love and language and passion and disagreement. The hope always is to lessen the “small distances” which divide us, which divided them. In the case of Duncan and Levertov, what divided them was not so much, really.

It is amazing, really, to see her first criticism of his political stance in “Earth’s Winter Song” (Letter 363) mirrored in his withering attack on her war poetry in the late stages of their debate over response(s) to the Vietnam War. The difference seems to come down to her public participation and endorsement of the antiwar political movement versus his adherence to individual anarchist and aesthetic principles. But even here the differences did not really hold. He also took part in antiwar readings, etc. In this we do not look to agree or to disagree. That we do or not seems beside the point. We, of course, were drawn, considering the present state of war, to their controversy, that tragedy.

Watching, as if from a corner, or under a table, as parents fight, crockery is broken.

Those we love, those we do necessarily love.

Collaborating, it’s not an argument we’re making but an argument that is made.

Stephen Collis
“Duncan Etude – Truth and Life of a Potential Poetry”

Starting with the first line of Duncan’s essay – “Myth is the story told of what cannot be told” – I argue that Duncan’s discussion of “myth” is really a discussion of the potential state of poetry (which, following Agamben, is simultaneously a state of “impotentiality”). I draw this out towards a reading of Duncan’s poetics (and politics) of incompletion in the PASSAGES poems, and intersect this discussion with reflections upon my own efforts to write a poetry of (im)potentiality in “The Barricades Project.”

Joseph Donahue
“Like Capricorn: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of the Vertical”

That concern would be what I’m thinking of as a post-Duncan ascensional poetics, looking at the whole realm of the vertical, of flight, of out of the body travel, of all that is associated with that most ancient and most discredited area of poetry, rising upward.

Amy Evans
“The Adoption of Influence: Robert Duncan, Derivation and the Writing Woman”

My presentation grows out of the importance of many women poets, artists and thinkers in Robert Duncan’s poetry. Within a landscape of Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin, Helen Adams, Jane Harrison, Denise Levertov and others, I will focus on H.D. as both a poetic influence and a complex dramatic figure in Duncan’s work. First, I explore how Duncan’s H.D. provides the groundwork for a pervasive, mythic female in his poetry. Secondly, I consider matters of gender and sexuality with regard to H.D.’s significance, reading Duncan’s poetry alongside our expectations of both the New American and ‘queer’ post-war poetry. Linking the two parts, I will suggest that Duncan’s writing of the female poet is unique, and still highly political for the twenty-first century: I ask if it presents fresh approaches to academics’ and readers’ existing notions (as well as personal experiences) of the canon, the tradition and the muse.

As part of this presentation, I will introduce the correspondence between Duncan and the leading figure of the British Poetry Revival, Eric Mottram, during the 1970s, relating it to my work on Duncan and writing women.

Norman Finkelstein
“Robert Duncan’s Oracular Contradictions”

According to Robert Duncan in his essay “Changing Perspectives on Reading Whitman,” “The oracular mode enters poetry and history where profound contradictions come into play.”  Duncan is writing about both Whitman’s poetry and his own. Deeply influenced by Whitman (“in the course of writing The Opening of the Field…Leaves of Grass was kept as a bedside book”), Duncan is acutely sensitive to the contradictions in his precursor’s stance, especially in regard to the issue of American democracy.  This sensitivity is due in part to a fundamental contradiction in Duncan’s own discursive practice at a crucial point in his career.  Although he wishes to assume to the mantle of an American bard, he is also steeped in a much older tradition of hermetic utterance, in which, as he notes in “The Truth and Life of Myth,” “the truth of things was esoteric (locked inside) or occult (masked by the apparent).”  Paying particular attention to Duncan’s essays on and addresses to Whitman, this talk will consider the ways in which Duncan negotiates these contradictions to achieve his own oracular mode.

Stephen Fredman
“In Robert Duncan’s ‘Anima Rebellion,’ Denise Levertov Meets the Goddess Kali.”

Siobhán Scarry,
“Cruising the Archive with Duncan’s ‘Night Scenes.’”

In 1959, Duncan writes: “I would leave, as I do, a vast nervous contradictory record of the worldly life I have come to celebrate, almost to worship. Not to seek a synthesis; but a melee.” Duncan’s serial poem “Night Scenes” from his 1964 collection Roots and Branches provides us one of these vast records, a single poem that becomes, through Duncan’s poetics, an act of criticism, translation, citation, letter writing, and friendship as much as it is also a single poem. My talk will trace the poem’s genetic history and share a number of constellatory materials from the archive – among them, a previously unpublished poem and translation of Duncan’s, and a number of unpublished letters – in order to open a reading of the poem that may expand the critical conversation about both the textual practices and political import of derivation in Duncan’s poetics.

Margaret Sloan
On Duncan’s Voice

Brian Teare
Robert Duncan’s Tribunals: Techne, Poiesis & the Fate of the Book.”

Keynote Speakers for Duncan Symposium

In addition to the presenters speaking at the Robert Duncan Symposium on April 22-24, CPP is proud to announce our very exciting (and very famous!) keynote speakers, Nathaniel Mackey and Michael Palmer.  Please find their bios below.

Michael Palmer is invoked by name in Robert Duncan’s “In Wonder [Passages],” from Ground Work II: In the Dark. (“FOR MICHAEL PALMER     who also   may    work     alone.” His association with Duncan was longstanding, stretching back to the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, continuing through shared time on the faculty at San Francisco’s New College. Palmer has been a steward of Duncan’s work in the years since his death, most recently providing an introduction to the single volume publication of Ground Work by New Directions in 2006.

Palmer is the author of many books of poetry, including Company of Moths (2005); Codes Appearing: Poems 1979-1988 (2001); The Promises of Glass (2000); The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995 (1998); and At Passages (1996), all published by New Directions; Sun (1988); First Figure (1984); Notes for Echo Lake (1981); Without Music (1977); The Circular Gates (1974); and Blake’s Newton (1972). In 2008, New Directions published Active Boundaries: Selected Essays and Talks.

He lives in San Francisco.

Nathaniel Mackey’s involvement with Robert Duncan’s poetry began with the dissertation he wrote at Stanford University on Duncan’s Open Field poetics. His essays on Duncan’s poetry, especially its serial component, are groundbreaking; his monograph “Gassire’s Lute: Robert Duncan’s Viet Nam War Poems” is one of the best sustained readings of Duncan’s poetry we have. In his own poetry, Mackey has expanded the open field of Duncan’s poetry but has also struck out for new territory, discovering places uniquely his own in an ever-expanding body of work.

Mackey’s books of poetry include Splay Anthem (New Directions, 2006), which won the 2006 National Book Award in Poetry; Whatsaid Serif (1998); School of Udhra (1993); and Eroding Witness (1985). From a Broken Bottle, Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, his series of epistolary novels, has four parts so far: Bedouin Hornbook (1986), Djbot Baghostus’s Run (1993), Atet A.D. (2001), and Bass Cathedral (2008). His essays have been collected in Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (1993) and Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (2005).

He lives in Santa Cruz and teaches at the University of California.