PROGRAM OF EVENTS

Thursday October 12. 8pm. Trinity Church 371 Delaware Ave.
Readings by Rosmarie Waldrop and Robin Blaser.

Friday October 13. 10am. Poetry Collection 420 Capen Hall
10am. Benjamin Friedlander: "What is Experience?"
11am. Alan Golding: "Seriality in Creeley's Poetry"

Lunch

1.30pm. Michael Gizzi: "Robert Creeley: Music on Words."
2.30pm. Peter Middleton: "Creeley Teaching"
3.30pm. Rachel Blau du Plessis: "Death and Sexual Difference in later Creeley."

8pm. Trinity Church, 371 Delaware Ave.
Readings by Susan Howe and John Ashbery

Saturday October 14. 10am Trinity Church Chapel, 371 Delaware Ave.
10am. Stephen Fredman: "Talk as Action: Robert Creeley, Bob Dylan and the Art of the Interview."
11am. Michael Davidson: "'the repeated / insistence': Creeley's Rage"

Lunch

1.30pm. Charles Altieri: "Why does Echoes Echo?"
2.30pm. Peter Quartermain: "Momently"
3.30pm. Marjorie Perloff: "Creeley as Radical Poet."

8pm. Trinity Church, 371 Delaware Ave.
Readings by Charles Bernstein and Ann Lauterbach

Born in Rochester, New York in 1927, distinguished poet, essayist and critic John Ashbery is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including, Chinese Whispers; Your Name Here; Can you Hear Bird; Hotel Lauréamont; Flow Chart, and Where Shall I Wander. His volume Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. Some Trees was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. His essays and critical writings are gathered in Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987; Other Traditions (the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures), and Selected Prose. He has also published Three Plays, and co-authored with James Schuyler A Nest of Ninnies (fiction). Harold Bloom calls Ashbery "America's greatest living poet and the New York Times Book Review referred to him as "a National treasure." He is currently Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.

Born in 1925, poet. scholar and teacher, Robin Blaser was a founding member of the San Francisco Renaissance. He moved to Vancouver in 1966, becoming a Canadian citizen in 1972 and in 2005 was invested into the Order of Canada. Among his many volumes of poetry are The Park (1960); The Faerie Queen (1961); Image Nations 1-4 (1962-64); Image Nations 5-14 (1967-74) and Pell Mell (1981-88). His lifelong a serial poem The Holy Forest (which collects many of these separate publications) appeared in 1993. In addition Blaser has published numerous essays including "The Fire" (that appeared in The Poetics of the New American Poetry (1974), and "The Practice of the Outside" which is included in his edition of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (1980). Robert Creeley said of Robin Blaser that he "has become a touchstone for all his company, a bond in mind and heart."

Susan Howe is the author of many books of poems and two volumes of criticism, including The Midnight (2003), Kidnapped (2002), The Europe of Trusts (2002) and My Emily Dickinson (1985). Her book of criticism The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993), was named an "International Book of the Year" by the Times Literary Supplement. She has received two American Book Awards from the Before Columbus Foundation and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. She was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000. Since 1989 she has been a professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and is currently the Samuel P. Capen Chair Distinguished Professor of Poetry and the Humanities.

Poet, translator and publisher Rosmarie Waldrop is the author of more than three dozen volumes of fiction, criticism, and poetry including Reluctant Gravities (1999), A Key to the Language of America (1994), and The Reproduction of Profiles (1987). She is also the prize-winning translator of the work of Edmond Jabès and Friederike Mayröcker. With her husband Waldrop, she is the publisher of Burning Deck Press and lives in Providence, Rhode Island. The Village Voice writes "This influential avant-garde doyenne … handily manages the paradox of the lucid enigma. … She maintains a distinctively American voice-quick-witted, conversational, and visually concrete … a poetry that pleases no less than it puzzles."

Why does Echoes Echo?

Charles Altieri is the author of numerous distinguished books including Act & Quality. A Theory of Literary Meaning and Humanistic Understanding (University of Massachusetts Press, 1981); Canons and Consequences. Reflections on the Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals (Northwestern University Press, 1990) and Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1980). He is Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley and has written on Robert Creeley on several occasions. There are sections on the poet in Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry during the 1960s (Bucknell University Press, 1979) and in his two latest books The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects, and The Art of Modernist American Poetry.

Death and Sexual Difference in Later Creeley

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Professor at Temple University, is known as a feminist
critic and scholar with a special interest in modern and contemporary poetry;
she is also a well-known poet and essayist. Her newest critical books are Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work (University of Alabama Press, 2006), and Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (Cambridge University Press, 2001). Alabama also recently reprinted her classic work The Pink Guitar. She is the editor of The Selected Letters of George Oppen and other work on the Objectivists. Her recent books of poetry are Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan University Press, 2001) and Drafts 39-57, Pledge with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis (Salt Publishing, 2004). Torques, Drafts 56-78 is forthcoming from Salt Publishing in 2007. DuPlessis was the recipient of a 2002 Pew Fellowship for Artists and a grant for residency at Bellagio in 2007. In 2002, she was also awarded the third Roy Harvey Pearce / Archive for New Poetry Prize, given biennially to an American poet/scholar who has made a significant lifetime contribution to American poetry and literary scholarship.

'the repeated / insistence': Creeley's Rage

Michael Davidson is professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (Cambridge U Press, 1989), Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetery and the Material Word (U of California Press, 1997), and Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (U of Chicago, 2003). He is the editor of The New Collected Poems of George Oppen (New Directions, 2002) and author of eight books of poetry, the most recent of which is The Arcades (O Books, 1998). With Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, and Ron Silliman, he is the co-author of Leningrad (Mercury House Press, 1991). He has written extensively on disability issues, most recently "Hearing Things: The Scandal of Speech in Deaf Performance," in Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, Ed. Sharon Snyder, et al (Modern Language Association, 2002), and "Phantom Limbs: Film Noir and the Disabled Body," GLQ 9:1-2 (2003).

Talk as Action:
Robert Creeley, Bob Dylan, and the Art of the Interview

Stephen Fredman is Professor of English, University of Notre Dame. His first book, Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983; 2nd ed. 1990), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His second study, The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), examines the tradition of avant-garde writers in America. His third book, A Menorah for Athena: Charles Reznikoff and the Jewish Dilemmas of Objectivist Poetry (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001), looks at Objectivist poetry in relation to modern Jewish identity. He has edited A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Blackwell, 2005) and is at work on a new study, "Grand Collage: Robert Duncan and California Culture." He has also published a book of poetry and translated works by Fernando Alegría, Vicente Huidobro, Lope de Vega, and Federico García Lorca.

What is Experience?

Benjamin Friedlander is Assistant Professor in the English Department, University of Maine. He is the author of Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism (University of Alabama Press, 2004) and coeditor of Charles Olson's Collected Prose (University of California Press, 1997). His edition of The Selected Poem of Robert Creeley is due to be published by California in Spring 2007. In addition to his scholarly endeavors, he writes poetry. His most recent collection is A Knot is Not a Tangle. He is currently completing a book on Emily Dickinson and the Civil War, and co-editing with Alan Gilbert a new edition of Creeley's Collected Essays.

Robert Creeley: Music on Words

Michael Gizzi is the author of several volumes of poetry most recently My Terza Rima, The Figures (2001), Cured in the Going Bebop, Paradigm Press (1999) and Too Much Johnson, The Figures (1999). Throughout the 1990s he edited Hard Press and the magazine lingo. Gizzi has continued in this publishing vein with Qua Press, which he co-edits with poet Craig Watson. Since the early 1980s he has coordinated many poetry readings most notably at Simon's Rock of Bard College and at Arrowhead, the former home of Herman Melville. He is presently a visiting lecturer at Brown University, where he coordinates the Downcity Poetry Series.

Seriality in Creeley's Poetry

Alan Golding is Professor of English at the University of Louisville, where he teaches American literature and twentieth-century poetry and poetics. He is the author of From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), which won a CHOICE Best Academic Book Award, and of numerous essays on modernist and contemporary poetry. His current projects include Writing the New Into History, which combines essays on the history and reception of American avant-garde poetics with readings of individual writers, and "Isn't the Avant-Garde Always Pedagogical," a book on experimental poetics and pedagogy. He also co-edits the Iowa Series on Contemporary North American Poetry with Lynn Keller and Dee Morris.

Creeley Teaching

Peter Middleton is professor of English at the University of Southampton in England. He is the author of The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 1992); Literatures of Memory: History, Time and Space in Postwar Writing. [with Tim Woods] (Manchester University Press, 2000), and Distant Reading: Performance, Readership and Consumption (University of Alabama Press, 2005). He writes poetry and fiction, and published a retrospective collection of poems, Aftermath, with Salt in 2003. He is currently completing a book on American Science and Poetry in the Cold War and a study of British avant-garde poetics. He continues to publish widely on modern and contemporary poetry, and also to write on literary theory and modern fiction.

Creeley as Radical Poet

Marjorie Perloff is the author of many critical books on Modern and Postmodern poetry and poetics, including The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media, Wittgenstein's Ladder (which has a chapter on Creeley), and, most recently, Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy. She is Sadie D. Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities at Stanford University and currently Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Southern California.

Momently

Peter Quartermain taught contemporary poetry and poetics at the University of British
Columbia for over thirty years; was Mountjoy Fellow, University of Durham (1990); was Resident Fellow, Bellagio Conference Centre, Italy (1997); received a Killam Research Prize at the University of British Columbia (1997); and has conducted workshops and lectured in the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University (2002 and 2006). Author of many articles in modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, he has written or edited several books, including Basil Bunting: Poet of the North (1990) and Disjunctive Poetics (1992); with the English poet Richard Caddel he edited Other: British and Irish Poetry Since 1970 (1999), and, with Rachel Blau DuPlessis, The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (1999). He is currently writing his autobigraphy Where I Lived and What I Learned There: Part I: Growing Dumb.