>> Events <<

December 28, 2015

Document 39: Transvaluations II

Barrett Watten, “The Poet/Critic:
Transvaluations of Value after Modernism”
MSA, 20 November 2015

I continue my discussion of the poetics of value in modernism (Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams) in taking up political economy and poetics as twin forms of historically specific making, twin discourses of the determination of value. For poetics as value making, let me advance that the thirty-six individual essays in our recent Guide to Poetics Journal, along with the editorial and publication work involved in soliciting, editing, rethinking, and repurposing their content, counts as such. Each essay in our Guide—for example, Ron Silliman on “the parsimony principle,” George Lakoff on avant-garde framing, Susan Howe on Emily Dickinson, Lyn Hejinian on “the rejection of closure,” in the volume’s first section—demonstrates how poetry is a value-making activity, in giving value to it. … More

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Event 55: Transvaluations I

Transvaluations of Value: Poetics and Political Economy
Session P28, 8:30–10:00 A.M., Friday, 20 November 2015
Modernist Studies Association

Herman Rapaport, “Transvaluations of Value: Fredric Jameson, Jackson Mac Low”
Barrett Watten, “The Poet/Critic: Transvaluations of Value After Modernism”
Tyrone Williams, “‘The Changing Same’: Value in Marx and Amiri Baraka”

This panel takes up debates between poetics and political economy after the recent turn to Marxist political economy as a materialist interpretive strategy for poetry and poetics. In a contrary move, a return to the aesthetic as a construction of value, sited in a more classical reading of modernist form by Charles Altieri, appropriates the concept of “value” for self-reflexive poetic forms. The three presenters will develop approaches to the concept of value that are irreducible either to economism, especially the commodity form, or to the aesthetic, e.g. modernism, and will seek to articulate more inclusive accounts of value that extend political economy to other value-producing registers in the horizons of art, history, ethics, and politics. [See next post.]

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Event 54: I Met (MSA)

Modernist Studies Association
Boston, Massachusetts
19–22 November 2015
(after On Kawara)

Herman Rapaport
Tyrone Williams
Carla Billiterri
Ben Friedlander
Alisa Allkins
Alan Golding
Aaron Nyerges
Sarah Posman
Dorothy Wang
Rachel Galvin
Kaplan Harris
… More

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

December 24, 2015

Document 38: Occupy Poetics

Barrett Watten, “Occupy Poetics:
A Work in Progress”
ASAP, 28 September 2015

This paper follows on a contribution to the EAM meeting in Helsinki that tracked two opposing accounts of language-centered writing’s influence on experimental poets engaged in Occupy movements, specifically Oakland. Moving from a materialist account of utopian possibility realized in poetic form to a combinatorial freedom associated with chance-generated strategies, the essay sought a convergence between contingent decision, radical freedom, and experimental practices among Occupy poets, focusing on poets David Lau and Brian Ang. In extending my argument, I survey a greater range of poets in the movement, beginning with Sara Larsen and Jasper Bernes, to develop a set of terms that interpret Occupy itself as informed by poetic principles. I return to the proliferation of poetics in the various Occupy sites, both to confirm the importance of a poetics of “combinatorial materialism,” and to extend the analysis of my first two examples by alternative concerns more prominent or visible in other poets. … More

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Event 53: I Met (ASAP)

Association for the Study
of the Arts of the Present
Greenville, South Carolina
24–27 September 2015
(after On Kawara)

Jonathan Eburne
Nico Israel
Lytle Shaw
Sarah Brouillette
Mark Goble
Gloria Fisk
Brian McHale
Esther Gottlieb
Jennifer Ashton
Walter Benn Michaels
… More

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

September 22, 2015

Document 37: Poetry Chronology, 2010–2015

The following is a collectively authored and lightly edited chronology of significant events and publications in poetry and poetics from 2010 to 2015. Submit 3–5 entries, including year and month, to barrett.watten@gmail.com for inclusion. The project is intended to sample an expansive account of poetic activity during this period, as an aid to memory, reflection, and action.

 2010

April   Alice Notley, Reason and Other Women (Chax Press)
Rae Armantrout wins the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

June   Rethinking Poetics conference, Columbia University; organized by Bob Perelman and Michael Golsten

July   95 Cent Skool: Summer Seminar in Social Poetics, Oakland; organized by Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr

October   Final volume of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography (Mode A/This Press)
Gail Scott, The Obituary (Nightboat); a novel close to poetry and the impact of First Nations genocide on urban psycho-geography

November   Ed Roberson, To See the Earth Before the End of the World (Wesleyan UP)

December   Kit Robinson, Determination (Cuneiform Press)

2011

August   Durruti Free Skool, sequel to the 95 Cent Skool, Berkeley
ARMED CELL 1, ed. Brian Ang, distributed at Durruti Free Skool

September   Start of Occupy movement, which would include significant participation and related publishing by poets

November   Performances of The Grand Piano at University of California Berkeley and California College of Arts, San Francisco (dates t/k)

2012

 

 

January   Death of Stacy Doris (January 31)

February   Franziska Ruprecht’s Dichtwerkvariété events combine performed writing with American variety show style in Munich, Germany

April   Lyn Hejinian, The Book of a Thousand Eyes (Omnidawn)

May   Death of Leslie Scalapino (May 28)

September   Death of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (September 12)

November   Amiri Baraka at the African-American Museum, Detroit (November 16)

2013

May   East Bay Poetry Summit

September   Carla Harryman, W/M (Split Level)

November   Ronald Johnson, Ark (Flood Editions)

2014

January   Death of Amiri Baraka (January 19)

March    Nathaniel Mackey, Outer Pradesh (Anomalous Press)

May   The Water Street Journal; an act of sublime and politically radical piracy published on May Day without a barcode and distributed free in Ypsilanti, MI

December   10th anniversary of Dos Madres Press, Heterotopia Book Store, Cincinnati (date t/k)

2015

January   Franziska Ruprecht, Meer-Maid (Wolfbach Verlag)

February   Tony Sanders (d. February 11) wins the Bernard F. Conners Prize

March   Kenneth Goldsmith performs Michael Brown’s autopsy report at Brown University (date t/k)

June   Cancellation of Berkeley Poetry Conference after complaints over inclusion of Vanessa Place; the conference is restructured and renamed Crosstalk, Color, Composition: A Berkeley Poetry Conference

August   Death of Stephen Rodefer (August 22)
Hungarian PEN awards Charles Bernstein the Janus Pannonius Grand Prize for Poetry

September   A poetry reading with three black men and one working-class man of unspecified ethnicity in an Ypsilanti house to celebrate one among them who has suffered from police harassment (September 11)

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

May 29, 2015

Event 52: I Met (BAA 2015)

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Bavarian-American Academy
Amerikahaus, Munich
University of Regensburg
10–23 May 2015
(after On Kawara)

Heike Paul
Volker Depkat
Marga Schweiger-Wilhelm
Markus Heide
Silvia Spitta
Florian Tatschner
John Landreville
Mary Catherine Lawler
Jessi Lee Jackson
Barry Shank
… More

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

April 4, 2015

Event 51: I Met (ACLA)

American Comparative Literature Association
Seattle, 26–29 March 2015
(after On Kawara)

renee hoogland
Anjuli Raza Kolb
Marjorie Levinson
Jonathan Stalling
Nick Admussen
Jinyi Chu
Jacob Edmond
Paul Manfredi
Florian Wagner
Yang Zi
… More

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

March 17, 2015

Event 50: Chinese Avant-Gardes

Tracking the Chinese Avant-Gardes: Literary and Visual
Organizers: Barrett Watten, Wayne State University
Jonathan Stalling, University of Oklahoma
Jacob Edmond, University of Otago

American Comparative Literature Association
Seattle, 26–29 March 2015; stream B (10:30–12:10)
Dashpoint, Seattle Sheraton

The past thirty-five years has witnessed the phenomenal growth of numerous avant-garde art and poetry movements in China, from the 1979 Stars exhibition and Misty School of poetry to the present. This seminar will survey the formal innovations, historical development, and cultural logics of the Chinese avant-gardes, working across genres and disciplines in doing so. It will present examples of formally innovative and culturally provocative art, from its period of emergence after the Cultural Revolution in the 80s to the traumatic break that occurred with the events of the June 4/Tiananmen Square movement to periods of growth and dispersion in the 90s and global recognition in the 00s. How have Chinese avant-gardes developed, dispersed, changed, been absorbed—what are their influences, accomplishments, contradictions, historical mission? How are the Chinese avant-gardes global; how do they respond to or resist globalization; how do they reflect, affirm, or critique China’s role in the global order? How are the Chinese avant-gardes a moment of cultural translation or hybridity between Chinese and Western/avant-garde aesthetics, philosophy, and/or politics (including gender)? How were emergent forms of transnational art, such as Conceptual Art or Concrete Poetry, interpreted in China? How do the Chinese avant-gardes negotiate the visual/verbal interface between pinyin and roman characters as a part of its task? And finally, what does the emergence of the Chinese avant-gardes, in their specific historical and cultural conditions, mean for the theory of the avant-garde, given its Eurocentric historical basis?

… More

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

January 9, 2015

Event 49: Tomb of Fourier

Maquette of destroyed statue of Charles Fourier

Modern Language Association
Vancouver, Canada
8–11 January 2015

371. The Surrealist Enlightenment
Presiding: Jonathan P. Eburne, Penn State University, University Park

1. “Material Wonder as Catalyst for the Surrealist Collection,” Katherine Conley, Coll. of William and Mary
2. “Thanks for the Memories: The Repetitions of De Chirico’s The Disquieting Muses,” Joanna Fiduccia, Univ. of California, Los Angeles
3. “Sapere imaginare: Surrealism and Quantum Physics,” Nathalie Fouyer, Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York
4. “Light of the Image @ Four Corners: Breton’s Ode to Charles Fourier,” Barrett Watten, Wayne State Univ. [Presented in absentia]

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »