What's the use of poetry in the midst of the anxiety and promise of our times? This symposium will pose some unusual conceptual and poetic answers to this question. We invite you to join two poets and a critic as they attend to experiments with language and form--the "radical artifice" of contemporary poetries--in search of what it means to live in the complexity of today's world.

Symposium Schedule

1-2pm • Lecture by Marjorie Perloff: Unoriginal Genius: A Genealogy: With Reflection on the Poetics of Lyn Hejinian and Joan Retallack

2:15-2:50pm • Poetry Reading by Joan Retallack

2:55-3:30pm • Poetry Reading by Lyn Hejinian

3:45- 4:30pm • Panel Discussion: Marjorie Perloff, Joan Retallack, Lyn Hejinian

4:30-5:00pm • Reception and Book Signing

Speakers

Marjorie Perloff

Marjorie Perloff is Sadie D. Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities at Stanford University and currently Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Southern California. She teaches courses and writes on twentieth—and now twenty-first—century poetry and poetics, both Anglo-American and from a Comparatist perspective, as well as on intermedia and the visual arts. Her first three books dealt with individual poets—Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O’Hara; she then published The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), a book that has gone through a number of editions, and led to her extensive exploration of avant-garde art movements in The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986, new edition, 1994), and subsequent books (13 in all), the most recent of which is Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (2005). Wittgenstein’s Ladder brought philosophy into the mix and Perloff has recently published her cultural memoir The Vienna Paradox (2004), which has been widely discussed. She has been a frequent reviewer for periodicals from TLS and The Washington Post to all the major scholarly journals, and she has lectured at most major universities in the U.S. and at European, Asian, and Latin American universities and festivals. Perloff has held Guggenheim, NEH, and Huntington fellowships, served on the Advisory Board of the Stanford Humanities Center, and has just completed her year as President of the Modern Language Association. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recently was named Honorary Foreign Professor at the Beijing Modern Languages University.

Lyn Hejinan

Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her most recent books include A Border Comedy (Granary Books, 2001), Slowly and The Beginner (both published by Tuumba Press, 2002), and The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003). The University of California Press published a collection of her essays entitled The Language of Inquiry in 2000. Since 1976 Hejinian has been the editor of Tuumba Press and from 1981 to 1999 she was the co-editor (with Barrett Watten) of Poetics Journal. She is currently the co-director (with Travis Ortiz) of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets. Other collaborative projects include a composition titled Qúê Trân with music by John Zorn and text by Hejinian; two mixed media books (The Traveler and the Hill and the Hill and The Lake) created with the painter Emilie Clark; the award-winning experimental documentary film Letters Not About Love, directed by Jacki Ochs; and The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography,, co-written with nine other poets. In the spring of 2007, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

Joan Retallack

Joan Retallack is the author of seven volumes of poetry including Memnoir, Mongrelisme, How To Do Things With Words, Afterrimages, and Errata 5uite which won the Columbia Book Award chosen by Robert Creeley. Currently at work on a collection of her procedural poetry and an ongoing, multi-genre project (“The Reinvention of Truth”) Retallack is the author of Musicage: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack, Wesleyan University Press, recipient of the America Award in Belles-Lettres. Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary (Palgrave MacMillan, co-edited with Juliana Spahr) came out last year. The Poethical Wager, a book of interrelated essays, was published in 2004 by the University of California Press which is bringing out her Gertrude Stein: Selections this Spring. Retallack has received a Lannan Literary Grant for Poetry and has been visiting artist at many institutions, including Brown University, Fondation Royaumont (France), Dartington College of Art (U.K.), and the American Academy in Rome. She is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College.