About GU Lannan

• LANNAN LITERARY PROGRAMS
• WRITER BIOGRAPHIES
• THE LANNAN FOUNDATION
• DC POETRY
• LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
• FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY

The GU Lannan Literary Programs, an enterprise in the Department of English, stages readings, seminars, talks, and symposia from the world of contemporary writing. Generous support for the Programs is provided by the Lannan Foundation of Santa Fe, NM.

Organized in concert with the Folger Shakespeare Library in downtown Washington, DC, literary events take place throughout the year as part of the GU POETRY & SEMINAR SERIES. The series is the oldest part of the Lannan Programs, dating back to 1989. Georgetown undergraduates apply to enroll in the LANNAN FELLOWS PROGRAM, through which they are able to attend the events on campus and at the Folger, and to meet with writers at small informal seminars and suppers. The Lannan Fellows intensify their encounter with contemporary poetry by enrolling in a spring semester course, where they complete an independent creative or critical project based upon the work of the year’s visitors. As part of an OUTREACH effort, Lannan Fellows have also served as tutors in the After School Kids Program at the Center for Social Justice.

The WRITERS-IN-RESIDENCE program brings visitors to Georgetown for shorter or longer-term stays. These periods range from a week—Derek Walcott (2005); to a month—the British Council (USA) writers Bernadine Evaristo (2005), Diran Adebayo (2006), and Courttia Newland (2007) and the Caine Prize Award winner Monica Arac de Nyeko (2007); to a semester—Donna Hemans (2004, 2005) and Dinaw Mengestu (2007). Residencies have been co-sponsored by, or organized in collaboration with, the Program in African American Studies, the Humanities and Human Rights Initiative, the British Council (USA), and the Caine Prize Award in African Writing.

The LANNAN VISITING CHAIR IN POETICS is held by a distinguished writer for one to three years at a time. Ammiel Alcalay is the inaugural holder of the Chair for 2007-2008.

The annual LITERARY SYMPOSIUM AND FESTIVAL is devoted to exploring “art’s social presence” in various national and international contexts. These events have included:

“‘Let Freedom Ring’: Art and Democracy in the King Years, 1954 – 1968 (2008);

“‘Befitting Emblems of Adversity’: Lyric and Crisis in Northern Irish Poetry 1966 - 2006” (2007);

“The World Republic of Literature” (2006);

“Black Archipelago: Writing and Performance from the African Diaspora” (2005);

“Native Lands: Contemporary American Indian Story and Performance” (2004);

“Societies of American Poetry: Dissenting Practices” (2003).

With continuing support from the Lannan Foundation, the GU Programs will be reformatted and expanded into the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, to be inaugurated in the 2008 -2009 academic year.

TRANSITION 2008 – 2009
THE LANNAN CENTER FOR POETICS AND SOCIAL PRACTICE

I. Concept and Purpose
The Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University is a literary, critical, and pedagogical undertaking devoted to the situation of poetry and poetics in the contemporary world. Based in the Department of English, the Center brings attention to a traditional domain of academic research, but sees poetry as a current practice rather than as a field of historical research. The Center recognizes that “art’s social presence,” in the phrase of Adrienne Rich, is vital to contemporary culture; that poetry, or writing more generally, traverses the fields of aesthetic, social, political, and religious thought: it reconfigures these fields according to the designs of imagination. In the broadest of terms, the Center is concerned with the plural forms of culture and the advance of cultural freedom in the world today. It is guided by the idea that writers--poets, novelists, film-makers, playwrights, and critics--offer more than what is sometimes called a valuable perspective onto culture. In a crucial respect, writers disclose the hiddneness of culture, its human complexity and irreducible difference, and its filiations. As the Czech linguist Roman Jakobson wrote, “the relationship between art and the social order is in constant dialectical flux.” Poetry as social practice--as a mode of social life--bears the turbulent imprint of that flux.

The Lannan Center pays special attention to what is emergent, or uncapitalized, in the cultural field. The withdrawal of the old European empires, the rise of American hegemony, the circulation of transnational capital, the movement of the world’s peoples, and the global articulation of culture have in recent decades altered the horizons of literary study in the academy. The racial and linguistic homogeneity of the Western nation-state has been revised. Writers, and writing, are seen as part of a world system. Yet, at the same time, local concerns continue to circumscribe social life and to inform its re-materialization as poetry and other forms of art. Writing is a practice and an engagement through language with members of linguistic communities; it fashions and records social relations that are found to be near at hand. Thinking about such incongruent kinds of influence--the local and global, the social and aesthetic--is what the Lannan Center proposes to further. While it may be said that the arts do not progress, it is possible to imagine--or desire--an active role for them in a progressive and more just social order. How such a role might be described, and what forms it might take in actuality and at any given moment--these questions are as pressing as ever, and provide the Center’s conceptual orientation.

Building alliances with faculty and programs at the university is an important part of the Lannan Center’s collaborative and inter-disciplinary posture. There is an evident sympathy among the arts that the Center recognizes and works to engage: not only between the liberal arts and “creative” forms, but also between the verbal and visual arts, writing and performance, literature in traditional media and symbolic practices arising from new formats such as digital environments. Culturally self-aware, the Center can help to stimulate, expand, diversify, and sustain this inter-related chorus of art forms across the university. From this perspective, the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice is only one of many centers of intellectual life on campus devoted to the openness and freedom of the arts.

II. Programs
There are five programs: Events, Residencies, Learning, Outreach, and Knowledge.

1. Events. Organizing readings, seminars, presentations, and performances, the Lannan Center endeavors to make writing as practice available in various forums to audiences from the Georgetown and Washington, DC communities. Events sponsored by the Center range from small experimental poetics laboratories and translation colloquia to an annual symposium on some topic of social and cultural moment at the present time.

2. Residencies. The Center offers a platform not only for staging events, but for carrying out writing, research, and translation projects. It sponsors residencies and visiting positions for writers who stay for a time at Georgetown to pursue their work, hold seminars & readings, teach classes, and otherwise interact with local communities. (See also III. The Lannan Foundation Chair in Poetics, below.)

3. Learning. Through course offerings and related fellowships, the Center fosters critical inquiry among students and faculty into the aesthetic, social, political, and cultural implications of the language arts. It gives pedagogical emphasis to innovative learning and writing, and embraces connections between poetry and other art forms.

4. Outreach. As an endeavor based in Washington, DC, the Center cultivates relationships between the university and the wider domains of the city, seeking partnerships with community youth organizations on joint projects in arts education and programming.

5. Knowledge. This program is an effort to document the Center’s work--readings, seminars, colloquia, lectures--and assemble an archive to which the public can have free access. Materials from the archive are made available through the website and on DVD and, as far as possible, through print publication.

III. The Lannan Foundation Chair in Poetics
This is a visiting position at Georgetown, with a tenure of one to three years, to be held by a distinguished writer and public intellectual from the United States or overseas. Providing intellectual steerage during his or her tenure, the Chair in Poetics lends visibility, focusing energy, and imaginative scope to the programs on offer. In any given year, the holder convenes significant public events in accord with his or her interests; and teaches in the undergraduate or graduate curriculum. The Chair in Poetics is unique among residencies at the Lannan Center in that it is designed to allow the holder to exercise leadership in the Center’s programs, through consultation with other faculty members.