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September 1, 2023

Event 103: Poetry, Translation, Crisis

SESSION PROPOSAL WITHDRAWN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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April 21, 2023

Event 102: Can We Still Teach the Beats?

 

Can We Still Teach the Beats?:
Holism, Antagonism, Poetics,
and Pedagogy

A talk by Barrett Watten

Wednesday, April 26
WSU Humanities Center
12:30–1:30 PM, 2339 F/AB
In person/Zoom (here)

This talk will be drawn from a theoretical and historical reading of Beat poets Michael McClure (famous for transgressing species barriers and writing in “beast” language; now seen as a pioneer ecopoet as well as a poet writing at the intersection of language and the body) and Lenore Kandel (famous for her 1960s sex-positive collection The Love Book and other erotically charged writing; she is now seen a proto-feminist representative of the 60s sexual revolution). Both poets were subject to censorship in the 60s—McClure for his play The Beard, featuring a dialogue between Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow; and Kandel for The Love Book; both would be vindicated in the long run. Encompassing this moment are the poetics of “open form” promulgated by Charles Olson and others, as the pedagogical framework for Black Mountain College through the 1950s, and at later experimental programs. In adapting my research to the present talk, the question on the table is how to teach the work of the Beat poets today, with their expressive/embodied excesses and absolute refusal to comply to with normative decorum. This is not a hypothetical question. The recent decision at Cornell University not to require trigger warnings for difficult material was a significant pushback against content restrictions in the classroom, and supported the discretion of faculty to present course material. But this issue is not simply a matter of Right or legal guidelines; how does one present and interpret the transgressive work of an earlier period, both as a research topic and a teaching occasion? How did the Beats themselves imagine their work as “teaching, and being taught,” as we see in the publicity photo of Allen Ginsberg from 1965? How do we contextualize their historical present from the perspective of ours? The stakes for our pedagogy in the increasingly corporatized university are high. … More

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March 25, 2023

Event 101: Academy of Scholars Lecture

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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March 14, 2023

Event 100: Black Avant-Gardes @ ACLA

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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February 20, 2023

Event 99: Questions of Value @ Louisville

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

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October 22, 2022

Document 100: Diasporic Avant-Gardes Noir

 

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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October 16, 2022

Event 98: Carla Harryman/Jon Raskin

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.

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August 29, 2022

Event 97: Transpositions @ EAM

“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

Rethinking Histories on a Planetary Scale”
Friday, September 2, 9:30–11:00 and 11:30–13:00
Barrett Watten, Aleksandr Boškovic, Claudia Franken
Lauri Scheyer, Kazim Ali, Abigail Lang

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July 23, 2022

Event 96: Travels in Reparative Space

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.

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July 7, 2022

Document 99: Making Modernism

“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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