Faculty
The Poetics Program, in the Department of English at SUNY-Buffalo, was founded in 1991 by Charles
Bernstein, Robert Bertholf, the late Robert Creeley, Raymond Federman, Susan
Howe, and Dennis Tedlock. The core faculty for 2005-2006
consists of Myung Mi Kim, Steve McCaffery (David Gray
Chair of Poetry and Letters and Director of the Program), and Dennis Tedlock (James H. McNulty Chair of English). Each fall
semester they are joined by Susan Howe (Samuel P. Capen
Chair of Poetry and the Humanities). Dr. Bertholf is now Charles Abbott Scholar in Residence at the
University Library’s Rare Books and Poetry Collection.
The Poetics Program is one of several
special programs and centers sponsored by the Graduate Program in English at
UB. There are no individual degree requirements for these programs, which are
open to all enrolled students. The existence of the Poetics Program is a
testament to the active involvement of practicing literary artists in the
teaching of poetics and critical theory in the Graduate Program. Our approach
to “poetics” resonates with the orientation of many of our colleagues in
literary and cultural studies at UB. The Program is dependent on the active
participation, (by way of seminars, co-sponsorship of visiting scholars and
writers, as well as through orals and dissertation committees), of a
significant number of critics and scholars in the English Department and
Comparative Literature Program, as well as in the faculty of related fields. Besides the “core” faculty a large pool of
Associate Faculty are available to students in the Program, including Michael
Basinski, Curator of the Poetry/Rare Books Collection; Joseph Conte, Tim Dean,
Stacy Hubbard, Ming-Qian Ma, Christina Milletti, Neil
Schmitz, Jim Swan and Scott Stevens (all in
English); Henry Sussman and Krzysztof Ziarek (Comparative Literature); Justin Read (Romance
Languages); Gerard Bucher and Jorge Guitart (Modern Languages and Literature); Tony
Conrad (Media Studies); Loss Pequeño Glazier (Media
Studies and Director of the Electronic Poetry Center); Jeff Stadelman
(Music); and Barbara Tedlock (Anthropology).
Program
The Poetics Program offers an
interdisciplinary approach to literary, cultural, and textual studies. Our
programs and resources include:
1.
Graduate Seminars. The
essence of the Poetics Program is the series of interrelated graduate seminars
offered by the faculty in such areas as ethnopoetics, cross-cultural poetics, and the indigenous
writing systems and oral traditions of the Americas; the European tradition from Mallarmé to
the present; twentieth-century English-language poetry and poetics, with
emphasis on the radical modernist approaches; interdisciplinary poetics
including the relation of poetry to the other arts; the American traditions of
the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; twentieth-century
innovative prose, fiction, and speculative fiction; philosophy, ideology, and
literature; poststructuralist and other philosophical approaches to poetry and
poetic issues, philosophy, linguistics, and ethics; poetics and/as cultural
studies; language and performance (including visual and concrete poetries,
sound and performance poetries); the poetics of prose; and a history of poetics
from the pre-Socratics to the present (including the philosophy of language and
related work in linguistics).
2.
Visiting Writer/ Scholar
Residencies.
3.
Conferences and Festivals. The
Poetics Program sponsors and supports both student-and faculty-initiated
conferences, festivals, and stage productions.
Such events have included “Writing from the New Coast,” a milestone
gathering of newly-publishing poets from across North America; “The New
Gothic,” readings and discussion with Kathy Acker, Peter Straub, Bradford
Morrow, Paul West, and others; the “Samuel Beckett Conference”; “The
Convergence of Science and the Humanities” on the new electronic writing; the
“Festival of French Poetry”; “E-Poetry 2001,” the first international digital
poetry festival; and critical symposia on the work of poets Robert Duncan,
Charles Sanders Peirce Conference, and Louis Zukofsky. In addition there has been a costumed reading
of Robert Duncan’s Adam’s Way, and a full stage production (in
cooperation with the Department of Theatre and Dance) of the play Rabinal Achi: The Mayan Dance of the Trumpets of Sacrifice, translated
by Dennis Tedlock and directed by Leandro Soto.
Commencing in 2007 there will be an annual Robert Creeley
Memorial Conference devoted to innovative poetry and poetics.
4.
Publications. The
Poetics Program, in conjunction with other funding sources, supports a large
number of imprints and presses, which
are independently edited by Program participants. Their productions include poetry magazines, chapbook
series, critical anthologies, broadsides, critical journals, and newsletters.
5.
Teaching.
Through its various offerings, the Poetics Program emphasizes teaching of the
arts at the college level, with special emphasis on how to teach innovative
works of literary arts in their cultural and historical contexts to
undergraduates.
6.
Individual Consultation.
Faculty members are available for individual consultation on course selection,
oral examinations, dissertation topics, and all aspects of writing and poetics.
7.
Poetry/Rare Books Collection. The
Collection houses one of
8.
Electronic
9.
11.
Undergraduate Program. UB
undergraduates actively participate in the Poetics Program through seminars in
both contemporary and historical poetics, related courses offered by the
associate pool, and attend open talks, lectures and readings. A lively group of
undergraduates organizes readings and discussion groups and edit their own
independently produced literary magazine. Additionally, in cooperation with
Poetry/Rare Books, undergraduates have access to one of the most significant
archives of twentieth
and twenty-first century
manuscripts, first editions, and literary magazines.
Philosophies
The Program is committed to historical,
contemporary, interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches to poetics. It takes poetics in its broadest sense as the
theoretical discourses that define, modify and inform the term poiesis as
construction and making. It recognizes the foundational relation of poetry to
both the materiality of the text and the physiology of its human enactment.
Hence, attention is paid to the relation of the human body and the organic
revolution to language in speech and perception.
Poetry and poetics never happen in vacuo but within the contingencies of history and along incommensurate vectors of potential. Hence, while preeminently focusing on the
cutting edge poetics and poetic practice of today, the Program understands the
chiasmic omnipresence of a past that is new, a past to be discovered anew, a
past that can be contemporized as much as the present can be historicized. (There are intimations, for example, of
digital poetics in the Bi-literal cipher of Sir Francis Bacon.) It is mindful too of the
potential of the organic revolution in science and the emergent domains of ecopoetics
to open up new ways of situating language and poetry in the life world.
Too often History is understood
as “Western” history to the exclusion of a multiplicity of constructed and
marked heterologies.
Ethnopoetics reaches outside the Western tradition and relocates the West within a
field of multiple cultures, languages, and poetic practices that have histories
of their own. Inhabiting this field are languages that challenge standard
Indo-European translation methods, oral performances that expand the range of
the human voice, and writing systems that suggest new ways of overcoming the
limitations of the alphabet. We consider
both poetic practices that have already been documented and the imaginary practices of a potential present.
Core
Funding
Funding for the Poetics Program comes
from the Samuel P. Capen Chair of Poetry and the
Humanities (Susan Howe); the David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters, Department
of English (Steve McCaffery); the Melodia E. Jones
Chair in French, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures (Gerard
Bucher); and the James H. McNulty Chair of English, Department of English
(Dennis Tedlock), as well as from the Department of
English and the College of Arts and Sciences.
Admission
Any graduate student in Arts and Sciences
at UB can participate in Poetics seminars and special programs. Applicants
applying for admission to the Ph.D. or M.A. program in English should contact
the Director of Graduate Admissions, Department of English, 306 Clemens Hall,
SUNY, Buffalo, NY 14260.
For more information on the Poetics Program,
go to http://epc.buffalo.edu/poetics.