Poetry & Seminar Series
Archive: 2000-2001

Harryette Mullen and John Taggart
Social Lyric, Acoustic Forms
Tuesday, September 19, 2000
Working with African-American vernacular traditions and post-modern formal innovation, Harryette Mullen defies easy classification. Her work has been anthologized in Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African-American Poetry and The Jazz Poetry Anthology, and her collections include Tree Tall Woman, Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse and Drudge. Mullen has received grants from the Texas Institute of Letters and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, as well as a Rockefeller Fellowship. She teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles.

John Taggart toils in the lyric gardens of re-iteration and acoustic mesmerism. He is the author of 11 books of poetry, including Loop, Standing Wave, and When the Saints. He has published a volume of essays, Songs of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary Poetry & Poetics, and a book of art criticism, Remaining in Light: Art Meditations on a Painting by Edward Hopper. His poetry appears in Poems for the Millennium and From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990, and he has received of fellowships from the NEA and the Ford Foundation.

Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop
Poetic Collaborations
Tuesday, October 10, 2000
Keith Waldrop teaches at Brown University and co-edits the venerable small press Burning Deck with Rosmarie Waldrop. Waldrop's Silhouette of the Bridge received the America Award for Poetry in 1997. He is the translator of numerous contemporary French poets, as well as the author of such collections as The Locality Principle, Analogies of Escape, and with Rosmarie Waldrop, Well Well Reality. Co-founder of the Waste Paper Theater in Providence, he has also written the fictional memoir, Light While There Is Light. Waldrop was inducted as Chevalier of Arts and Letters for his service to literature by the French Government in 2000.

Rosmarie Waldrop acted with a traveling theater in her native Germany as a child, but soon settled into the quieter pleasures of reading and writing, which she has pursued in and out of universities, in several countries, all her life. Co-editor of Burning Deck Press, Waldrop is a translator of contemporary French and German poetry, notably the work of Edmond Jabès, as well as the author of two novels and numerous volumes of poetry, including Another Language: Selected Poems and Reluctant Gravities. In 2000, she was inducted as Chevalier of Arts and Letters for her service to literature by the French Government.

Robert Creeley
Talking Shop with Creeley
Tuesday, November 14, 2000
Robert Creeley taught at Black Mountain College in the 1950s and also edited the Black Mountain Review, a journal he calls "a crucial gathering place for alternative senses of writing at the time." Decades later, Creeley sustains this sense of alternatives in his poetry, fiction, and literary criticism. He has collaborated with musicians and visual artists, and his published correspondence with Charles Olson provides a window into shared creative process. His most recent collection of new work is Life and Death. In 1990, he co-founded the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo, where he continues to teach. Winner of the Bollingen Prize and the Robert Frost Medal, Creeley was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1987.

Susan Howe
Manuscripts and Books: What's Lost in Transcription
Thursday, February 15, 2001
Susan Howe is a New Englander by birth and disposition, and that region¹s literature and history trouble her poetry into beauty. Volumes of her "lyric histories" include The Nonconformist's Memorial and The Europe of Trusts. Kirkus Reviews calls her 1999 collection, Pierce-Arrow, "reminiscent of Borges at his sharpest." My Emily Dickinson, a landmark critical work, won the 1985 Before Columbus Foundation Book Award, and The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History received the Roy Harvey Pearce Award for Work by a Poet and Critic. Howe co-founded the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo. She was a Distinguished Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.


Merle Collins and Mervyn Morris
Caribbean Writing and the Voice
Tuesday, March 13, 2001
The rhythms of Caribbean community permeate Merle Collins's work as a writer and performer. She is the author of four collections of poetry, including the 1999 volume Lady in a Boat. She has also written two novels, notably, Angel and a book of short stories. In her criticism, Collins investigates the relationship between the spoken word and writing, in particular the diverse oral traditions that inform much of contemporary Caribbean poetry. She has lived in Grenada, Britain, and the United States, and she is currently professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland.

Jamaican poet Mervyn Morris has re-directed critical attention to the work of writer-performers of the Caribbean region through his work as an editor and essayist. He is the author of 'Is English We Speaking' and Other Essays, the editor of The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories, and co-editor of Voiceprint, an anthology of oral and related poetry from the Caribbean. His volumes of poetry include The Pond, On Holy Week, Examination Centre, and Shadow Boxing. Morris teaches at the University of the West Indies, where he is Professor of Creative Writing and West Indian Literature.


Bernadette Mayer and Lorenzo Thomas
Experiments
Tuesday, April 24, 2001
Say poetry on the Lower East Side, think Bernadette Mayer. Allegedly a card-carrying member of the New York School, her work extends from experiments in her own writing (such as Midwinter Day, a long poem written during the course of a single day) to translations of Catullus and Horace. Her latest volumes are A Bernadette Mayer Reader, Two Haloed Mourners, and Another Smashed Pinecone. She has been co-editor of the experimental magazine 0 to 9, an editor at United Artists Press, and a teacher of note at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York City's East Village. Mayer lives in upstate New York.

Born in Panama, Lorenzo Thomas's writing was shaped, in his words, by "the social and artistic forces" circulating in Harlem, Greenwich Village, and the Lower East Side in the late 50s and early 60s. He is the author of Es Gibt Zeugen / There Are Witnesses and Chances Are Few, among others poetry collections, as well as the critical work Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Thomas is also the editor of the essay collection, Sing the Sun Up: Creative Writing Ideas from African-American Literature. He teaches at the University of Houston-Downtown.