After a night of post-election demonstrations in the city of angels, the sun was up and we gathered at Cal State L.A.'s downtown campus, site of last February's grand What I Say group reading.
After greetings from our conference organizers, Lianggong Luo and Laurie Ramey, the sessions began with Marjorie Perloff's discussion of Charles Bernstein's "Lives of the Toll Takers," from Charles's 1994 collection Dark City. The first plenary panel, which I moderated, began with Charles reading that poem, followed by a partly autobiographical paper by Yunte Huang and a study of Australian works by Brian Reed.
Among the concurrent sessions, I chose the ones on Sound, Visual and Performance and the panel Dorothy Wang organized on "Colonialism & Modernism: American Poetry and the Circulation and Branding of 'China.'"
Following the evening banquet, we convened in the lobby area for a performance of Stephen Dembski's settings of poems by Zhang Er and Martine Bellen. The performers were Zachary Deak and Susan Mohini Kane.
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