IN WHICH WILL BE FOUND WHAT IS SET FORTH THEREIN

Thursday, October 25, 2012

MODERNISM STUDIES - LAS VEGAS

"Listen to the birds sing."  We gathered under the sign of Bugsy Siegel to talk about spectacle, though the final key note speaker informed us with assurance that the age of spectacle had been replaced by the performance image.  Guess the stilt-walking women were a sort of confirmation of that.  I did in fact see a wedding performed by an Elvis Impersonator.

Not enough poetry this year, at least when compared to last year's conference in Buffalo.  Still, a fine set of sessions, including the discussions of Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp and Gil Scott-Heron I got to participate in, thanks to Michael Coyle. 



























Saturday, October 13, 2012

RON SILLIMAN AT PENN STATE

This week Ron Silliman made a return visit to Penn State.  He had last been there in Spring of 2002, when he visited the first graduate seminar I taught at PSU, a course in contemporary poetry and poetics.  On that occasion, Ron read from his notebook what was to be the final sentence of The Alphabet.  This time Silliman was visiting to give a public reading, the recording of which will appear on Penn Sound in the near future.




Thursday, October 11, 2012

CONVERGENCE ON POETICS IV

Saturday night after dinner at the Alehouse and quite a bit of time being lost in Bothell, it was back to the event center for the second night of poetry readings. 














Sunday morning I was moderator for a panel titled Poetics, Affirmation, and Dissensus, with Amaranth Borsuk (a new faculty member at our host institution), Elizabeth Frost and Cynthia Hogue.  Second panel of the morning brought us Jeanne Heuving, who organized the conference, Peter O'Leary and Lissa Wolsak on Poetics and the Medium of Language. Noontime began the second series of short postings, during which my grad school prof David McAleavey, with a title out of Lenin, talked about What to Do -- at the close of which he did it -- 
















This is Larry Sammons.  He wasn't at the conference. Larry's the director of exhibits and facilities at the zoo in Seattle, and knows a few things about media poetics. I've known him since I was twelve years old, and we spent a few hours after the conference doing what we did back then, with better instruments these days, before I had to head out to the airport.