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“Discrepant Analogy:
Immanent Transpositions of Surrealism”

CALL FOR PAPERS/SESSION PROPOSAL
SUBMIT BY MARCH 15, 12:00 P.M. CET

“Surréalismes Paris 2024
6th Conference of the International Society
for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS)
October 28–30, 2024 / pdf here
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“Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour:
Destruction, Displacement, Emergence”

CALL FOR PAPERS/MULTI-SESSION PROPOSAL
SUBMIT BY MARCH 15, 12:00 P.M. CET

“Avant-Garde and War”
9th Conference of the European Network for
Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM)
Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
September 17–19, 2024 / pdf here
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A Poetics of Encounter:
Dialectic of Outside with the Beats

Read at “Can We Teach the Beat Generation?”
Discussion organized by Erik Mortenson and Tony Triglio
Session 228, 5 January 2024, 10:15–11:30 AM, Loews 3rd Fl.
Modern Language Association, Philadelphia 

“The transmission of poetry is a passion unlike any other.”
“I too have started a riot in the academy.”

In this note, I want to call up certain moments of encounter that were, as with the visual image of a “diamond thunderbolt” or dorje, immediate, double-faced, and bivalent: outward in the transmission of poetry, from the Beats or New Americans and others; and inward, toward self-formation and a long process of professionalizing within the Academy. In charting such a poetics of encounter, I draw from my presentations at the “decades” poetry conferences at University of Maine, Orono, in the 90s and 00s that I, in the company of a shifting assemblage of poet/critics, took part in. I connect these moments to Steven Belletto’s genealogy of three early moments of encounter between Beats and the Academy: Jack Kerouac’s intervention at a symposium sponsored by Brandeis University in New York, 1958; Diana Trill­ing’s reaction to Allen Ginsberg’s being given an “unofficial” reading at Columbia, that same year; and Gregory Corso’s rebuttal to a symposium on the Beats in Wagner Literary Review, 1959. These are part of series of breakthrough moments: the Gallery 6 reading, San Francisco, 1955; Ginsberg’s appearance in Time magazine, 1959; the Vancouver Poetry Conference, 1963; the Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965. What makes the first three definitively “Beat” aligns with two concepts from my essay on Michael McClure: antagonism and holism. In challenging the Academy’s scholastic pedagogy—I often thought of the English Department in the 60s or 70s as a kind of monastery, corridors filled with the brethren nodding to each other under hooded robes—the Beats took a position Outside that was, at the same time, subject to everything—“Is there a world?,” Kerouac asked; “Man does not exist,” opined Corso. The nature of this encounter between an unregulated Outside and a self-regulating Inside points to a dialectic of the Academy whose stakes are not only literary, pointing toward our volume’s significance not only for Literary but University Studies. … More

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MATERIAL TRANSMISSIONS:
DEMOTIC SURREALISM/HIERATIC LANGUAGE,
SAN FRANCISCO, 1975–1980

Plunged each day into the fog of received ideas, man is led to conceive
of all things and to conceive of himself through a dizzy series of quickly
hidden stumblings, of false steps rectified as best as possible.

—André Breton, “The Automatic Message” (1933)

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SESSION PROPOSAL WITHDRAWN

Poetry, Translation, and Crisis:
From the Post-Soviet Moment
to War and Emigration

American Comparative Literature Association
Montréal, 14–17 March 2024

Due to the difficult circumstances of the global present,
the organizers have canceled this session proposal.
Stay tuned for plans for a virtual colloquy in 2024.  

In 1989 and 1990, eight American avant-garde poets traveled to then-Leningrad to meet with Soviet counterparts, experimental poets working under quasi-nonofficial conditions during late Perestroika. These meetings followed extensive travel and translation activities in the 1980s. Among then-Soviets, the poetic schools of “metarealism” and “conceptualism” were well represented—by poets such as Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Alexei Parshchikov, Nadezhda Kondakova, Ivan Zhdanov, Ilya Kutik, Nina Iskrenko, Dmitrii Prigov, and Lev Rubinshtein. These events and developing contacts led to the publication of the collectively authored Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union and a flurry of translations. Three decades later, the dialogue between American poets and poets of the former Soviet territory, including both Russia and Ukraine, has continued. A comprehensive anthology of American experimental poetry, Ot “Chiornoi gori” do “Yazikovo picmo” (From Black Mountain to Language Writing), appeared from NLO in late 2022, with a publication event in Moscow and subsequent online reading. Other translations are imminent or postponed under the present circumstances, while interest in and translation of two generations of poets, now disrupted by war and emigration, continues. This session solicits contributions on past and on-going translinguistic, transcultural projects from both periods: the post-Soviet moment and now. What “cultural work” is being undertaken and advanced in these works of translation and affiliation, crossing over global spaces of conflict and establishing global poetic networks? The session language will be mainly in English, but contributions in Slavic languages are encouraged, and hopefully English translations can be arranged.

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The Inaugural Academy of Scholars Lecture in the Arts
and Humanities, in Honor of Guy Stern

Prof. Claudia Koonz, History, Duke University
author of The Nazi Conscience (Harvard UP):

“Harnessing Virtue in the Service of Cruelty:
Belief, Delusion, and Race in Nazi Germany”

Friday, April 7, 3:00–4:30 / hybrid format
Shaver Music Recital Hall, Old Main, WSU
480 West Hancock, Detroit (enter West Hancock)

Open to WSU faculty, students, and general public

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Diasporic Avant-Gardes Noir: Blackness, Innovation, Futurity
American Comparative Literature Association
Sheraton Hotel, Chicago, 17–19 March 2023
Register for Zoom link: http://bit.ly/3YW8A4w

Session 1 Friday, March 17, 8:30–10:15 AM, Executive Suite 7

Lauri Scheyer, “Jitterbugging the World: Calvin C. Hernton’s Diasporic
Avant-Garde and Anti-Movement Communitarianism”
Matthew Johnston, “N.H. Pritchard’s Avant-Pastoral”
Tyrone Williams, “Autobiography of a Middle Name”
Christopher Winks, “Downward Path, Inward Path: The Hermetic Poetics
of Magloire-Saint-Aude”

Session 2 Saturday, March 18, 8:30–10:15 AM, Executive Suite 7

Andrew Haas, “Black Power’s Free Improvisation and Its Afterimage
in Tongo Eisen-Martin”
Barrett Watten, “Horizons of Complexity: The Ends of Form in Anthony
Braxton and Language Writing”
Bryant Brown, Jr., “Architectural Non Sequiturs: Renee Gladman’s
Plans for Sentences”
Joseph Shafer, “Stanley Whitney: Opposition, Dramatic Struggle &
Literary Rhythm”

Session 3 Sunday, March 19, 8:30–10:15 AM, Executive Suite 7

Noah Hansen, “The Poetics of Garveyism: Situating Garveyite Poetry
in Space and Time”
Anthony Joseph, “Performance: Sonnets for Albert and the Frequency
of Magic”
Duriel E. Harris, “Re/Sounding Serious Play: Notes on Black Listening
with/through avery r young’s ‘groun(d)’”
avery young, “rock | paper | skittles: groun(d) as soun(d) monument
fo(r) trayvon martin”
Tracie Morris, “Black Hypertonality and the Performative Utterance”

C0-Organizers

Lauri Scheyer, British and American Poetry Research Center,
Hunan Normal University
Duriel E. Harris, English, Illinois State University
Tracie Morris, Writers Workshop, University of Iowa
Barrett Watten, English, Wayne State University

Notes

Image: AACM circa 1968: group photo in Wadsworth Jarrell’s back yard, Chicago. [Musicians t/k[ From George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: U Chicago P, 2008).

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CALL FOR PAPERS

Diasporic Avant-Gardes Noir:
Blackness, Innovation, Futurity

American Comparative Literature Association
Chicago, 16–19 March 2023

To submit a proposal, click here
(deadline: October 31)

“Diasporic Avant-Gardes,” held at UC Irvine in 2004, brought together poets and critics of the African diaspora and Euro-American avant-gardes, published in 2009 as Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (ed. Barrett Watten and Carrie Noland). Nathaniel Mackey, Fred Moten, Tracie Morris, Brent Hayes Edwards, Mark McMorris, and Kamau Brathwaite presented creative work; critical work included writing on Aimé Césaire, Brathwaite, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Franco Luambo Makiadi, and Harryette Mullen, and other avant-garde formations. Eighteen years since has seen an explosive emergence of innovative African American/Black diasporic avant-garde writing: Will Alexander, Tisa Bryant, Renee Gladman, giovanni singleton, Duriel E. Harris, Harmony Holiday, Douglas Kearney, John Keene, McMorris, Jonah Mixon-Webster, Julie Ezelle Patton, Tyrone Williams, and others in the 2015 anthology What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America (ed. Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey), building on the 2006 Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans (ed. Nielsen and Ramey). The same period witnessed the emergence of avant-garde studies, in a global, transnational, and diasporic turn that radically expands the Euro-American avant-garde. In his important essay “Otherness: From Noun to Verb,” Nathaniel Mackey theorized Black improvisational or “free” musical forms in relation to “outness,” writing/imagining/playing “outside the box” that comprehends social outsiderness. Fred Moten has described Black creative practice as “in the break” of normative narrative or poetic forms, preserving rupture and discontinuity. More recently Duriel E. Harris calls for poets and performers to explore Black aesthetic practices that at-tend to active aural witnessing across concepts of time, environment, space, ability, embodiment, genre, and historical markers. How do these conceptions of African American/Black diasporic aesthetics chart new paths for avant-garde studies, in its present global moment? This seminar seeks papers at the intersection of radically innovative work by African American/diasporic Black writers, visual artists, or musicians, of multiple global regions or historical periods, that reference, critique, qualify, modify, add to, and/or contest the Euro-American history and theory of the avant-garde. Topics may include individual authors, artists (Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Hammons, Kara Walker), musicians (Albert Ayler, Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor), present or past; literary or artistic movements or groupings (Negritude, Black Arts, or Umbra but later AACM or Black Took); new modes of oral and musical performance and written and visual forms; and historical or theoretical connections between African American/Black diasporic artists and “what it means to be avant-garde.”

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“Modernist Poetics: New Genealogies
of ‘Making the Work’ in Modernity”

Seminar for “Making Modernism”
Modernist Studies Association
Portland, Ore., 27–30 October 2022

NOTE EXTENDED DATE FOR SEMINAR REGISTRATION
AUGUST 31: REGISTRATION HERE

Seminar led by Barrett Watten, Wayne State University
and Herman Rapaport, Wake Forest University
with invited guest Lyn Hejinian, UC Berkeley

Seminar prospectus (to enroll see below)

This seminar takes up the conference rubric, Making Modernism, as a question of “poetics”—a discourse of “making the work.” Poetics may either immanent to a modernist work of art or a supplement to it; it is an aesthetic or theoretical reflection that offers a blueprint for how the “work” is made and how to read it. Poetics may take the form of a separate instance of writing, a preface or explanatory essay external to the work of art, or it may be described or enacted in the work itself, as a set of instructions to the reader on how work may be read. In this seminar, we will seek new ways of understanding modernist poetics, at or beyond the epochal date of 1922, as a response to the crisis of modernity. Modernist poetics is often characterized as “formalist,” after avant-garde manifestos, the New Critics, or the Russian Formalists. For this inquiry, Eliot’s “Notes” to The Waste Land and his editorship of The Criterion would be as important for modernist poetics as the poem itself. Extending this principle, Joyce’s turn to writing “Work in Progress” and its serial publication in transition from 1927 on would depart from the modernist masterpiece into another kind of writing; Stein’s “Composition as Explanation” (1926) would supplement the publication of Geography and Plays (1922); and McKay’s development of vernacular prose romances from Home to Harlem (1928) to Banana Bottom (1933) would augment the formal poetics of Harlem Shadows. After 1922, a reflection on the “making of the work” emerges in numerous works of poetics that address the modern present and its “condition of possibility.” Such a deliberate inquiry into the making of the modernist work motivates the prose/poetry dialectic of William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All (1923); it is found in the self-reflexive explorations of women authors such as Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Laura Riding, and Djuna Barnes; it extends to the social discourses on poetics in the Harlem Renaissance and the Popular Front; it is everywhere in the manifestos of the avant-garde, especially surrealism; it appears in the turn to fascism in Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis; it is central to key works of Critical Theory such as Walter Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer” and Theodor Adorno’s many writings on modernism. This seminar invites literary, historical, cultural, and theoretical inquiry into works broadly seen as “poetics” in modernism. What will count as a key work in modernist/modern poetics is the task of participants to determine; our aim is to establish a broad and productive series of works that represent the aesthetic, cultural, political, and critical “making of the work” under conditions of modernity. In so doing, it seeks a broad discussion on modernist poetics in line with our earlier work on contemporary examples in A Guide to Poetics Journal and Poetics Journal Digital Archive (Wesleyan UP).

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Diasporic Avant-Gardes:
East Asian Transitions in Form and Genre

ACLA Virtual Conference, 15–18 June 2022
GUESTS WELCOME WITH REGISTRATION/SEE BELOW
NOTE REVISED SEMINAR SCHEDULE

Organized by Barrett Watten, Wayne State University
and Lauri Scheyer, Hunan Normal University 

Seminar program

Session 1: Diasporic Regions
Thursday June 16, 8:30–10:15 AM PDT/11:30 AM–1:15 PM EDT

Introduction: Diasporic Avant-Gardes

Barrett Watten, WSU: “East Asian/Asian American: Displacement and Innovation in Hung Liu’s Collective Portraits and Tao Lin’s Autofictions”

David Perry, NYU Shanghai: “Internal Migrations, Deep-Time Retreats, and Solastalgia: Anthropocenic Arrivals, Departures, and Exile in 21st Century Avant-Garde Mainland Chinese Poetry”

A.J. Carruthers, Nanjing U: “Avant-Garde Austalgia”

Session 2: Transition/hybridity
Friday June 17, 8:30–10:15 AM PDT/11:30 AM–1:15 PM EDT

Lauri Scheyer, Hunan Normal U: “Asian American/East Asian Identifications with African American Poetry”

Katie Bradshaw, U Tennessee: “The ‘Dragging Foot’ of José Garcia Villa’s Performative ‘Comma Poems’”

Carla Harryman, Eastern Michigan U: “Reciprocal Echoes of Citation and Photographic Document in Mary Kim Arnold’s Essay ‘Litany for the Long Moment’”

Edwin Torres, Poet New York: “The Inter-Lingo of Language-Seeing: between what is heard and what is held onto”

Session 3: Translational Avant-Gardes
Saturday June 18 / 8:30–10:15 AM PDT/11:30 AM–1:15 PM EDT

Lucas Klein, Arizona SU: “‘Rivers of When, Why, and What’: Translational Sinophone Poetry”

Spencer Lee-Lenfield, Yale U: “Diasporic Translation and Historical Emplacement: Emigrant Translators between Korean and English”

Katharine Streip, Concordia U: “J’écoutais les cygnes: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Alchemical Dictation”

Hyunjung Kim, Texas A&M U: “Don Mee Choi’s Salivary Poetics: (Non)silent Translation of Kim Hyesoon’s Poetry”

… More

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