>> Lectures <<
March 25, 2023
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
March 14, 2023
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”
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
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).
February 20, 2023
Questions of Value: Rethinking the Discourse
of Valuation in Literature and Art
The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture
Saturday 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM Room: Humanities 109
Chair: Barrett Watten, Wayne State University
Barrett Watten, Wayne State University
“Questions of Value: Poetics as Living Labor
and the Specter of Past Work”
David Kellogg, Coastal Carolina University
“Literary Values after the End of Curation:
Broadening the Scope, Limiting the Claims”
Tyrone Williams, University at Buffalo
“’Bessie, Bop or Bach’: Iconoclasm, Coterie, and/or
Communalism in Montage of a Dream Deferred”
Adeena Karasick, Pratt Institute
“In the Value of the Shadow of. . . : Questions of
Value in 21st Century Art and Literature” … More
October 22, 2022
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.”
October 16, 2022
Carla Harryman & Jon Raskin
Cloud Cantata and “Scales for the Living”
Text-based and multi-instrumental performance
Gray Loft Gallery
Saturday, October 22, 7:30 PM
2889 Ford Street, 3rd Floor, Oakland
RSVP grayloftgallery@gmail.com
Poet Carla Harryman poet and musician Jon Raskin musician render Harryman’s Cloud Cantata and in-progress “Scales for the Living” in variations of speaking, singing, and musical interpretations. These dialogue poems respond to domestic companionship and televised bubble, dreamscapes and slant trouble, war, immigration catastrophe (de) realization, dangerous waters, historical circumspection, and whatever occurs in the liminal mind or neighborhood of pandemic time.
August 29, 2022
“Transpositions: Global Poetics @ EAM 2022”
Readings by Kazim Ali, Carla Harryman, Abigail Lang, Barrett Watten
Saturday, September 3, 17:00
Bar Barraca-Cinearte, Lisbon, Portugal
July 23, 2022
Monday, June 21
Delta DTW > LHR [canceled]
Carla Harryman
What does it mean to travel? And what are the risks? You could hit an iceberg, for example. In this age of global devolution due to war, pandemic, climate change, and supply chain disruption, the risks are increasing. The magic “reward miles” that purchased at least one ticket were offset by ambiguous reentry requirements and increased insurance costs. Our awareness of global supply chain disruptions came with the brutal cancellation of our fully boarded flight. The air conditioning had heated up, needing to be replaced; the parts were in Atlanta, but no means to get them to Detroit; by the time they would arrive, crews had to rotate; no additional crews were available. By the time this was decided we had wandered the Detroit airport for some hours, only then to be automatically rebooked. The gap in expectations was predictive: this would be no easy trip, but still worth the attempt, we believed.
Tuesday, June 22
Delta DTW > IAD
Virgin IAD > LHR
Refreshed by an extra night of sleep before departure, we renewed the attempt. Now we are less concerned with global supply chains, as the aviation network is algorithmically rebooted to our advantage. Now it is a question of mask behavior and the algorithms of disease transmission. Universally, or in the metropole, the “unfulfilled democratic demands” for global travel had become a surge of pent-up consumerism; with the release from austerity, as a form of repression, off came the masks. They were no longer required to board a flight, nor were negative test results required for readmission, at least for passport holders. The politics of the New Normal are us. Willingly confined to our cubic meter of seating, we endured the deprivation of freedom as a contract with global mobility. One flight took us to the sterile, remodeled Dulles Airport, with many murals of JFK, and then onward to Heathrow, on an airline named for the “Virgin Queen” during the heydey of Thatcherism.
Wednesday, June 22
189 King’s Cross Road, London
“Surrealism Beyond Borders”
@ Tate Modern
Our trip was structured around several agendas: for me, catching up with global exhibitions, literary friends, and Berlin; for Carla additionally, a launch of Cloud Cantatas, published by Pamenar Press and delivered that very day in London. After presenting at last November’s virtual conference on surrealism, I had wanted to get to the New York version of the show before it closed in January at the Met, but omicron put an end to that. The Tate Modern was the next venue, the monumental showcase for New British Art responding to the global, decolonial imperative. To what extent this exhibition truly understood or could identify the theoretical horizons of the global dispersion of surrealism was, however, in doubt. Static art-historical orders of style and periodization remained in place, tending toward inadequately framed concepts of history and space. There were groups of painters in Mexico City or Cairo, for example, who carried on the tradition of group activity in surrealism. But what could be seen of the decolonial moment, precisely the moment of surrealism’s global dispersion through emigration and emulation after 1945? There was not nearly enough education on postcolonial liberation, not enough hard connection between the “inner” liberation of surrealism and the politics of liberation as a post-modernity. That said, there were many revisionist moments to be explored: the rise of an African-American “demotic” surrealism with Ted Joans, Amiri Baraka, and Bob Kaufman, for example; or the anti-Eurocentric contributions of second-wave women surrealists, from Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo to Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, and Ithell Colquhoun, not to mention Lee Miller and Dorothea Tanning. But this was still surrealism as art history, alas. The lesson for global exhibitions is to radically contextualize the exemplary work in an unfolding horizon of global negativity—a globality that is not one thing.
July 7, 2022
“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
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).
June 6, 2022
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
Session 1: Diasporic Regions
Thursday June 16, 8:30–10:15 AM PDT/11:30 AM–1:15 PM EDTIntroduction: 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 EDTLauri 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 EDTLucas 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”
May 27, 2022
Sunday, May 15
> Buffalo
Kaplan Harris
Sarah Buckley
Getting on the road, I wrote on Facebook: “Turns out I am driving to Buffalo this very day. What sadness, so terrible. I am sure it is affecting everyone there.” After entering via the Peace Bridge, the first thing I saw was a block party in a Black neighborhood, conveying a somber tone of survival despite everything. Kaplan Harris and his partner Sarah greeted me with exceptional food and conversation, ranging from archives to prison abolition. Later, walking out in the Elmwood District, I wondered how it had been going in Buffalo since when. Everywhere is war, I hear the echoes of Bob Marley in my head as I walk by some loud partying. I exited next day through the fated neighborhood itself.
Monday, May 16
> Germantown/Brooklyn
Ann Lauterbach
Terrific storms accompanied my power drive through upstate New York, blasts of rain pelting in sheets creating maelstroms with each passing truck. Somewhere in the middle of the state, I stopped for gas to find an electrical glitch would not open the gas tank flap. There is no manual override. This event, dramatic perhaps only to myself, needed about an hour of phone calls to a long-distance service expert, after which I was able to re-set the circuit. Coming down the Hudson and into Germantown, the rain accelerated to the point of zero visibility, in buckets of slushy hail. In from the storm, Ann Lauterbach greeted me from the porch of her restored schoolhouse down the road. Our elegant meeting, with an Italian white and hors d’oeuvre something like a mozzarelline fritte, but with a thicker, seasoned crust (help me out on this one, Ann), led to serious discussion of the crisis of the academy, seen from the perspectives of a liberal arts college and a working-class university. Of the many fine editions on display, I admired chapbooks of Eliot’s Little Gidding and Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle (or was it Work in Progress—same thing). There was an altar to Ann’s friendship with Joe Brainard and portrait of her by Alex Katz. Back on the road, briefly clearing up, I had forgotten my umbrella. The Taconic Parkway beckoned to New York and the overpriced hotel, set between a dialysis center and U-Haul truck return, I had booked in Lower Park Slope.
