December 4: Olivier Brossard on Keith Waldrop

The WGCP will meet this Friday, December 4, from 3-5 in room 116 in the Whitney Humanities Center; the focus of our discussion will be Transcendental Studies by Keith Waldrop, recent winner of the National Book Award.

Our discussion will be guided by Olivier Brossard, associate professor at the University of Paris Est (Marne-La-Vallée). Professor Brossard is an esteemed scholar of the New York School of Poetry, and a talented and accomplished translator of American poetry into French. He will provide a strong context for reading Waldrop’s work and will offer insights that he’s gained from being so deeply invested in Waldrop’s work as a translator and scholar.

For links and related resources related, visit: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/2009-November/000233.html ; for a sample of Waldrop reading from his work, visit: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2009/11/weekly-poems-keith-waldrop-2009-national-book-award-winner.html

This session will be our last of the semester, but when we resume again at the end of January our first session of the new semester will feature a visit from Waldrop himself.

Keith Waldrop Wins NBA

Keith Waldrop’s Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy has been awarded the National Book Award for Poetry.

Of Waldrop’s work, the judges write “If transcendental immanence were possible, it would be because Keith Waldrop had invented it; he’s the only one who could—and in Transcendental Studies he has. These three linked series achieve a fusion arcing from the Romantic to the Postmodern that demonstrates language’s capacity to go to extremes—and to haul daily lived experience right along with it: life imitates language, and when language becomes these poems, life itself gets more various, more volatile, more vital.”

The WGCP will discuss Transcendental Studies with visiting scholar Olivier Brossard on December 4th at 3pm in room 116 at WHC. Keith Waldrop will join the WGCP for a discussion of his work in January.

Meeting Minutes: Peter Gizzi

The Working Group in Contemporary Poetics met on Friday November 6 to discuss the poetry of Peter Gizzi, who was able to join our conversation that day. The Meeting Minutes have been posted tot he WGCP Minutes Archive: WGCP Minutes–Gizzi Visit, 11-6-09

In response to the opening question about what is “Americanness” in terms of his interest in an American vernacular and poetric tradition, Gizzi described that the American landscape and the nation’s rhetoric or forms of address and speech patterns are tied together. Part of this, he explained, comes from his understanding of his parent’s and grandparent’s immigrant and working class background. Thus, the question of place and identity are not settled questions. His work, and the work he is drawn to investigate, aesthetic values which are braided with moral and political values.  In terms of rhetoric, language is largely performative and therefore brings certain conditions into being.  Poetic language is not strictly fictional, nor is it reportage. It composes, presents, and represents the world as he encounters it. The poetic text in a sense ratifies this encounter and fashions it into a communicable reality that readers can then take part in. Read the Meeting Minutes in full here: WGCP Minutes–Gizzi Visit, 11-6-09

Image: The Watts Towers, featured on the cover of The Outernationale by Peter Gizzi

Futurismo/Futurizm

Futurismo/Futurizm:
The Futurist Avant-Garde in Italy and Russia
Friday and Saturday, November 13 and 14, 2009

featuring WGCP contributors Marjorie Perloff & Paolo Valesio

Conference website: Futurismo/Futurizm

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Filippo Marinetti’s founding manifesto of Italian Futurism. The manifesto’s publication sparked intense interest across Europe and Eurasia, from France to Italy and Russia, and is widely considered the inaugural text of the 20th-century literary avant-garde. Marinetti’s subsequent visit to Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1914 allowed the Russian avant-garde to differentiate itself from rival European currents, raising important questions about the competitive diffusion of aesthetic modernism and cultural modernity within and beyond Europe. Taking advantage of Yale University’s unique resources for the study of the Italian and Russian avant-garde, our conference will add its comparative and transnational perspective to the many celebrations of Futurism’s 100th anniversary currently being held in the United States and abroad.

This conference has been made possible by the generous contributions of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Departments of Italian, Slavics and Film Studies, the European Studies Council and the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund. We would also like to acknowledge the public endorsement by the Triennale di Milano.

Events are free and open to the public, however registration is required. For more information call (203) 432-0595.

The Department of Italian at Columbia University in the City of New York is pleased to announce Beyond Futurism: F.T. Marinetti, Writer, a two-day international symposium. The sister conference will take place on November 12-13, 2009. For more information please visit the conference website.

Image: Parole in Liberta, F.T. Marinetti, 1932

Peter Gizzi at Yale

Poet Peter Gizzi will visit Yale University on November 5th and 6th. On the evening of Thursday, the 5th, Gizzi will read in the Graduate Poets Reading Series; on the afternoon of Friday, November  6th, he will meet with the Working Group in Contemporary Poetry. Details of both event follow. Peter Gizzi is one of the most talented experimental lyric poets of his generation.  His books include The Outernationale, Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Artificial Heart, and Periplum and other poems 1987-92.  His many honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets and a Guggenheim Fellowship.   He is also the editor of The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer and, with Kevin Killian, of My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer.  Currently he teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Gizzi’s Reading: Grad Poets Reading Series, 7:00 pm, Thursday, November 5th, Linsly-Chittenden Rm. 317. Books will be available to purchase, courtesy of the Yale University Bookstore. This event has been generously sponsored by the Yale Graduate and Professional Student Senate, the Dean’s Fund and the Yale Review.

WGCP Meeting with Peter Gizzi:   3 pm, Friday, November 6th, Whitney Humanities Center Rm 116. The group will discuss The Outernational and additional readings (http://wgcp.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/gizzi-outernational), focusing on the questions outlined here: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/2009-October/000229.html.

Meeting Time Change

Please note, the WGCP will meet to discuss Peter Gizzi’s The Outernational at 3:30pm Friday, October 23 in room 116 at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University, 55 Wall Street (the corner of Church and Wall). Suggested additional readings include the following: http://wgcp.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/gizzi-outernational/. Future meetings and readings can be found here: http://wgcp.wordpress.com/meetings-readings/.

Next Meeting: Peter Gizzi’s The Outernational

The WGCP will meet next Friday, Oct 23, from 3-5pm, to discuss the work of Peter Gizzi; his book The Outernationale will be the focus of our discussion. Gizzi is one of the most significant lyric poets of his generation.  His work blends together a fierce interest in what might be conceived as an American trajectory of poetry and poetics that is infused with a Continental (particularly French) inflection. Peter Gizzi will be reading Thursday, Nov 5, here on campus and joining the WGCP to discuss his work on Friday, Nov. 6 from 3-5.

Peter Gizzi was born in 1959 and grew up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He holds degrees from New York University, Brown University, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. His books include The Outernationale (Wesleyan, 2007), Some Values of Landscape and Weather (2003), Artificial Heart (1998), and Periplum (1992). He has also published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. His work has been widely anthologized and translated into numerous languages.

About his collection Artificial Heart, the critic Marjorie Perloff has said: “In his visionary quest, his raw emotion, and his New York school spontaneity, Gizzi performs a clinamen that relates him to O’Hara, Ashbery, and, beyond these poets, to Rimbaud and Hart Crane…. a master of the mot juste and of sound structure. Most of the book’s poems… are as memorable as they are moving and spare.”

Gizzi has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, The Foundation of French Literature at Royaumont, Un Bureau Sur L’Atlantique, and the Centre International de Poesie Marseille. His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets and fellowships from the Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

His work as an editor includes o•blék: a journal of language arts, The Exact Change Yearbook, and The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. He has taught at Brown University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Poetry editor for The Nation, he is currently on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

More about Peter Gizzi and his work:

–Radio interview with Charles Bernstein: http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/groups/XCP/XCP_148_Gizzi_10-14-07.mp3

–Review of Outernationale: http://bostonreview.net/BR32.3/palattella.php

–Interviews with Gizzi: http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_gizzi.php

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/gizzi/gizzi_kunin_interview.html

–An essay by Gizzi on poetry, avant-garde film, and “the art of assemblage”: http://www.sienese-shredder.com/3/peter_gizzi-jack_spicer_bruce_conner_and_the_art_of_the_assemblage.html

Marjorie Welish: Additional Readings

 

The following additional readings for Marjorie Welish’s upcoming visit have been posted online here: Welish Readings. Requests for permission to reprint should be made to author and editors.

Marjorie Welish, “A Test of: Spacing,” in Denver Quarterly, 42:1, 2008

Marjorie Welish, “Isle of the Signatories” and “In Situ,” in War and Peace #4: Vision and Text, Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino, Eds. (O Books, 2009)

Marjorie Welish and Judieth Goldman, Interview in War and Peace #4: Vision and Text, Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino, Eds. (O Books, 2009)

Marjorie Welish Readings

This fall’s first two sessions are dedicated to the work of poet, artist, and critic Marjorie Welish. A discussion of her recent book Isle of the Signatories (2008), as well as several essays (to be announced) will take place on Friday, September 18, 3 p.m. at WHC; Welish will join the WGCP for a conversation about her work on Friday, October 9, 3 p.m. at WHC.

Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish (Slought, 2003) consists of papers given at a conference on her writing and art at the University of Pennsylvania. A Fulbright Senior Specialist Fellow in 2007, she taught seminars in art criticism at the University of Frankfurt, where she also worked to complete Oaths? Questions?, done in collaboration with James Siena. Other art grants and fellowships awarded her: Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Fifth Floor Foundation, International Studio Program, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and Trust for Mutual Understanding. Marjorie Welish lives in New York City where she regularly teaches at Columbia University and Pratt Institute. Her paintings are represented by Bjorn Ressle Fine Art in New York and are in the following public collections: Collection Werner Kramarsky, New York; Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson; New York Public Library, New York; Rutgers (University) Archive for Printmaking Studios, New Brunswick, NJ; Smith College, Northampton, MA. Her book of art criticism is Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960 (Cambridge
University Press, 1999).

Isle of the Signatories (2008) is her most recent book of poems; others are Word Group (2004), and The Annotated ‘Here’ and Selected Poems (2000), this last a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. All are published by Coffee House Press. Welish has received poetry grants and fellowships from the Djerassi Foundation, the Howard Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and New York Foundation for the Arts. She was the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University in 2005.

Sound files of Welish reading at UPenn and elsewhere:

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/linking-page/Welish.html

Recent art criticism by Welish:

http://www.observer.com/2009/style/whatsits-and-thingamabobs

Images of some of Welish’s paintings:

http://slought.org/images/2002.Welish/

Photo: Marjorie Welish reading in the Belladonna Series; photo by Erica Kaufman.

Fall 2009 Schedule

The Yale Working Group in Contemporary Poetry is pleased to announce its tentative meeting schedule and proposed readings for fall 2009. Please check back often for updates and changes or subscribe to the WGCP mailing list to received updates directly.

Tentative WGCP Schedule, Fall 2009 — Subject to Change

WGCP Meeting
Friday, September 18, 3 p.m.
Readings: Marjorie Welish — Isle of the Signatories, Essays (TBA)

WGCP Meeting: Marjorie Welish Visit
Friday, October 9, 3 p.m.
Readings: Marjorie Welish — Isle of the Signatories, Essays (TBA)

WGCP Meeting
Friday, October 23, 3 p.m.
Readings: Peter Gizzi — TBA

WGCP Meeting: Peter Gizzi Visit
Friday, November 6, 3 p.m.
Readings: Peter Gizzi — TBA

WGCP Meeting
Friday, December 11, 3 p.m.
Readings: TBA

The Beinecke Library / Whitney Humanities Center Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics meets Fridays at 3:00pm in room 116 at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University, 55 Wall Street (the corner of Church and Wall); schedule changes and special group meeting times and locations will be announced on this site.