Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Remaking It New: Contemporary Poetry and Tradition


Remaking It New: Contemporary Poetry and Tradition

Friday, April 29th
602 Hamilton Hall, Columbia University, New York

What are contemporary poetry's formal and conceptual engagements with the poetry of the past? We’ve invited four poets--Kimberly Johnson, Maureen McLane, K. Silem Mohammad, and Eleanor Johnson--each of whose work reconfigures, re-imagines, or reinvents poetic forms from periods prior to the twentieth century. They will be joined by four scholars--Jeff Dolven (Princeton), Erik Gray (Columbia), Heather Dubrow (Fordham), and Michael Matto (Adelphi)--in a day of readings, responses, and roundtable discussions.

We are planning four sessions, two in the morning and two in the afternoon, lasting an hour and a quarter apiece. Each session will feature one poet, who will begin with a short reading, to be followed by a brief response from a scholar. The session will then finish with a roundtable discussion between the scholar and all four poets.

Organized by Michael Golston and Molly Murray

Program

Session 1: 10:00-11:15
Maureen McLane and Erik Gray

11:15-11:30 Break

Session 2: 11:30-12:45
K. Silem Mohammad and Heather Dubrow

12:45-2:00 Lunch

Session 3:
2:00-3:15: Kimberly Johnson and Jeff Dolven

3:15-3:30 Break

Session 4 3:30-4:45
Eleanor Johnson and Michael Matto

5:00—6:00 Reception

Thursday, April 07, 2011

Michael Nicoloff & Alli Warren, Eunoia


Together again for the first time since Bruised Dick: Michael Nicoloff and Alli Warren bring the hot poetry action with Eunoia, new from Abraham Lincoln Press!

Using only the twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet (and a few Arabic numerals and assorted punctuation marks), Warren and Nicoloff have created in Eunoia sixteen poems of a certain number of letters each that when read by English-speaking readers can be experienced as a series of intelligible or semi-intelligible words, phrases, lines, and sentences referring or seeming to refer to various things.

22 pp.
$5 + $1.50 s&h

I Have to Itch His Subaru

for Erika Staiti

I've got this ukulele
in a plastic bag
I'm saving it for the clungheads
and spoadies and I hope
this brave decision will be followed
by others Now yell at the sandwich
with the consistent narrative voice
your mama gave you
Sandwich, how'd you get in them jeans?
by failing to signal while holding
hands in the time of the Perseids
with the weird dude who owns
those cabins the dude who invented
coinage What a clown!
clogging the sidewalks of the republic
I remember when this bar was a horsehair
love mat or another man's noodles
what did you do to it
I harumphed
repeatedly
I missiled I'm sorry
I was high
and I totally bricked it