Spring Quarter 2019 Poetics Events
Poetic Form in Political and Spiritual Crisis: A Workshop in Revealed Knowledges with Ariana Reines and Rebecca Wolff
Thursday, April 4, 3:30 pm
Logan Center, Room 801
What kinds of political and spiritual worlds can poetry reveal and create? What kinds of knowledges and actions does poetic form distinctly make possible? And how can we develop those knowledges and actions in our reading, writing, and editorial practices? To address these questions, poet and astrologer Ariana Reines and poet and editor of Fence Books Rebecca Wolff will lead a workshop on questions of reading experimental poetic form alongside issues of displacement, diversity, and inclusion--with special attention to the power of political and spiritual crisis. How are the "revealed knowledges" of poetry distinctly able to address the hidden and not-so-hidden crises that suffuse our social lifeworlds? How can form be used or thought through in ways that move beneath (or, like a spirit, above) the radar of familiar frameworks of sense-making, and how can this be connected to social and political remaking, individually and collectively?
This workshop is sponsored by History and Forms of the Lyric; the Joseph Regenstein Library; the Working Group on Contemporary Migrations; the Diversity and Inclusion Initiative; and the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor Program.
"Poetry is Translation:" History & Forms of Lyric Lecture with Adriana Jacobs
Wednesday, April 10, 5:00 pm
Logan Center, Room 801
Adriana X. Jacobs is Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature at the University of Oxford and Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. She has published widely on contemporary Hebrew and Israeli poetry and translation, including articles in Shofar, PMLA, Studies in American Jewish Literature, and Prooftexts. Her translations of Hebrew poetry have appeared in Gulf Coast, Anomaly, World Literature Today, North American Review, The Ilanot Review, among others, as well as in the collection Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant (Wayne State UP, 2016). Her book Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry came out last year with University of Michigan Press, and she is currently working on a new project on contemporary poetry and crisis. She is a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant recipient for her translation of Vaan Nguyen’s The Truffle Eye (Zephyr Press, forthcoming in 2020).
Presented by the Program in Poetry and Poetics, The History and Forms of Lyric Series, and The Joyce Z. and Jacob Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies
‘The Sound Came from Everywhere and Nowhere’: African-American Songmaking, The Collectors, and the Fantasy of Origins in Twentieth-Century Lyric
History and Forms of Lyric Lecture with Andrea Brady
Wednesday, April 24, 5:00 pm
Logan Center, Room 801
This lecture investigates early ethnographic collections of African-American songmaking, focusing on the late 19th and early 20th century. By examining how these songs were framed and gathered within abolitionist and early folklore contexts, this talk sets out some enduring (and problematic) ideas about lyric as the expressive song of the individual which both shaped those collections, and the discipline of English criticism. In particular it shows how the racist ideology of the Southern Agrarians pursued an idea of lyric that was the opposite of what the collectors documented, and how this opposition fed into New Criticism.
Andrea Brady's books of poetry include The Strong Room (Crater, 2016), Dompteuse (Book Thug, 2014), Cut from the Rushes (Reality Street, 2013), Mutability: Scripts for Infancy (Seagull, 2012), and Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination (Krupskaya, 2010). She is Professor of Poetry at Queen Mary University of London, where she runs the Centre for Poetry and the Archive of the Now. She is also co-publisher of Barque Press. In 2018-19 she is a fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, where she is finishing a book on Poetry and Bondage.
Poem Present Reading by Brandon Shimoda
Wednesday, May 8, 6:00 pm
Logan Center, Room 801
Brandon Shimoda's recent books include The Desert (The Song Cave, 2018) and Evening Oracle (Letter Machine Editions, 2015), which received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His first book of nonfiction, The Grave on the Wall, is forthcoming from City Lights this summer. He lives in the desert.
Poem Present Lecture by Brandon Shimoda
Thursday, May 9, 12:00 pm
Logan Center, Room 801
Brandon Shimoda's recent books include The Desert (The Song Cave, 2018) and Evening Oracle (Letter Machine Editions, 2015), which received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His first book of nonfiction, The Grave on the Wall, is forthcoming from City Lights this summer. He lives in the desert.