Language/Beats
Book event & discussion
Barrett Watten: Zone:
correlations (Chax Press)
Erik Mortenson: Allen Ginsberg
in Context (Cambridge UP)
Third Mind Books
118 E. Washington, Ann Arbor
June 11, 2026, 7:00 P.M.
On this day, Erik Mortenson and I took the stage to present and reflect on recent work, literary history, and our work together, which stretches back two decades since Erik was my first Ph.D. advisee at Wayne State University. His project was exemplary, on its own merits and in terms of what I wanted to direct: a comprehensive, revisionist, culturally reflexive account of the Beat movement. What resulted was his first book, Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of the Present. I cannot stop recommending this book: it is “cultural poetics” as it should be: a synthesis of historical and contextual readings, revisionist expansion of the canon, and focused attention to form and media—with strong readings of key figures in a larger field of authors, history, genre, and meaning. Not only should his work be better known; it should be taught and emulated. And there is strong evidence that the range of poetics it takes part in continues, not least with Erik’s current edited volume, Allen Ginsberg in Context. It was the occasion of his publication and my own Zone that brought us to this “moment” of continuation. … More
