presents

distinguished scholar/critics

Marjorie Perloff

Robert von Hallberg

“Poetry Now”

a conversation with and between

Marjorie Perloff & Robert von Hallberg

Saturday, April 1, 5pm,

Tucson Museum of Art Education Auditorium

(TMA is located at 140 N Main Avenue)

free & open to the public (donations accepted)

Distinguished scholar Marjorie Perloff is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential critics writing on innovative contemporary poetry.  Among her many celebrated books are The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, 21^st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics, and the recent memoir The Vienna Paradox.  Professor Perloff is current President of the Modern Languages Association and Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities, Emerita, at Stanford University.

Distinguished scholar Robert von Hallberg is Helen A. Regenstein Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago.  Among his germinal studies of avant-garde poetry and the issue of poetic evaluation are Charles Olson: The Scholar’s Art, American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980, and Poetry, Politics, and Intellectuals: A History of American Poetry, 1945-1995.

This will be a free-wheeling discussion and debate with and between Professors Perloff and von Hallberg, who enjoy disagreeing with one another when it comes to what poets and what sorts of poetry matter most.

Marjorie Perloff and Robert von Hallberg are also presenting papers at the Arizona Quarterly Annual Symposium.  Held at the UA Alumni Building, the Symposium is free and open to the public.  There is free parking (and refreshments).   Professor Perloff will talk 10 a.m. Friday on "The Pleasures of Deja Dit: Citation, Intertext & Ekphrasis in Recent Experimental Poetry.”  Professor von Hallberg will speak at 10 a.m. on Saturday on "The Authority of Lyric.”  For a complete schedule of Symposium events go to http://www.u.arizona.edu/~azq/symp00.html.

READING, PERFORMANCE, TALK: 3 Poets 3 Nights
 
March 14-16 POG & Chax Press present a poets’ residency featuring:
DAVID ABEL
ANNIE GUTHRIE
SIMON PETTET
 
Three nights of programming. Admission to all events is FREE, but we hope you will consider a $5 contribution to Chax Press (as you are able) if you attend one event, and a $10 or greater contribution if you attend two or more events.


Tuesday, March 14, 7pm
A poetry reading (held as part of the Cushing Street Poetry Series) by
        Simon Pettet (New York)
        Annie Guthrie (Tucson)
        David Abel (Portland)
At Cushing Street Bar & Restaurant
198 W. Cushing Street, Tucson
just south of Tucson Convention Center, 1 block east of Main Street
 
Wednesday, March 15, 7pm
An evening of lexical performance work by
        David Abel (Portland)
        A group of Tucson poets performing works created by Jackson Mac Low
At Dinnerware Contemporary Arts
101 W. Sixth Street, Tucson
SW corner of 6th St. & 9th Ave. Entrance is on the 9th Ave. side of the building
 
Thursday, March 16, 7pm
A conversation titled:
        More Winnowed Fragments: The Ethics and Poetics of the Short Lyric Poem
        featuring Simon Pettet & David Abel & Annie Guthrie
At Casa Libre en la Solana
228 N. Fourth Avenue, Tucson
All three of these poets share an affinity for the short lyric poem, a poem at once spontaneous and perfectly poised as art. They also are questioners in their poems rather than answerers; the poems embody an investigation that wants to know but that keeps open the possibility of both knowing & un-knowing. An ethic of being personal without exhibiting dominant personae or personal insistence allows entry into the poetry for all readers, even allows the creation of poetic space that, while intimate, blurs the distinction between private and public. A conversation will begin around issues of the process of creating these poems, and the stance or ethic of the poet within the poem, within the relationship to language and reader. This conversation will travel wherever poets and audience take it, and we hope the audience shares its questions and comments.
 
Please call 620-1626 for information about all of these events.
 
 
David Abel is a poet, performer, editor, and bookseller. He moved to Portland, Oregon in 1997, after tenures in New York City (where he had the Bridge Bookshop in the late 1980s) and Albuquerque (Passages Bookshop & Gallery, in the mid 1990s). His publications include the chapbooks Black Valentine (Chax Press) and Cut (Situations), and the artist's books and text objects Threnos (Katherine Kuehn, 2001), Rose (Salient Seedling, 1997), and Selected Durations (Salient Seedling, 1994). Recent performances and installations include Signs in Situ (Land and Language exhibition, The Land/an art site, Mountainair, NM, 2005; with Paul Maurer); Excerpts from the Actual Teaching Practice of Agility (Richard Foreman festival, Performance Works NW, Portland, 2005; with John Berendzen); Closet Drama (Second Annual Sound Poetry Festival, Portland, 2004); and Frozen Sea (Collaborative Poetics festival, Portland, 2003; with Karl Lind). A founder of the Spare Room reading series in Portland, he recently played Mephisto in the defunkt theatre production of Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights.
 
 
Annie Guthrie is a writer and artist who returned to Tucson this year after spending two and a half years in Tuscany where she studied Italian and taught jewelry fabrication at Fuji Studios, an international arts school of design.
Guthrie received her MFA at Warren Wilson and has received grants from the Tucson Pima Arts Council and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. She serves on the Poetry Center Advisory Board and last read for the University of Arizona in August. She has published poems in Harness and canwehaveourballback and is currently working on her second manuscript of poems, "J'arc, Loss Translations," which sifts through the language of mystics/martyrs for the untranslatable speech of the "divine."
 
 
Simon Pettet is the author of Selected Poems and, most recently, More Winnowed Fragments (both from Talisman). English-born, he is a long-time resident of Manhattan. Aside from his work with James Schuyler, he published two important books with the photographer, film-maker, Rudy Burckhardt (Talking Pictures and Conversations About Everything). A selection of poems and essays on his work and an interview appear in Jacket 25. He is a Scorpio (like James Schuyler) and happy to be one!
 
I wish I were in my own garden now, naked or not, reading Simon Pettet. He has been such a bright and consistent light amidst the usual gathering glooms. He lives as though life were its own pleasure, which it is and must obviously be. He sounds those same simplicities of profound music Blake also knew. He moves with a deft and practiced quiet. ‘It is as though he were telling us/ that this small space/ contains the pattern for/ all eternity.’ He speaks the truth.
­     Robert Creeley
 
 
(from Black Valentine, by David Abel)
 
Sunset makes the windows
music lights the sequence
so there is a code
 
and a precipice ­
the basin is inviting
as on a holiday
 
history seems poetic:
grave
but sustaining ­
 
a soapy taste on the tongue
independent of the music
or the prospect
 

 
Climb into
the coldest day’s
 
the most replete
emptied sky’s
 
vibrant
maddening ass
 
at a distance
love-filled face
 
collapsing
in the view
 
 
 
(Untitled, by Annie Guthrie)
 
As an American I wasn’t happy
not making progress.
 
One time though, in the vineyards    |the moon|
an escape hatch, etc.   A man’s body. 
 
A moment drop skipped itself.
Whimper/seam.
 
Attempted equivalence
a sputtering engine.  Moon on the lean.
 
Concealed chutes & pulleys            
their illegible tracks
now unzipped revealing a sheen:
 
Guilt
kept as a standard
 
by which the self to measure
Up.
 
In the morning I flew into town
a shade of green gone yellow
 
Children had grown into hysterical builders
and the sky had a highness
 
no one could put down.
 
 

(Two Poems by Simon Pettet)

‘Sleep fitful wake grumpy...’

Sleep fitful wake grumpy go down stairs in dark still morning fill kettle tin can
cold water
make tea light fire kindling examine
the early morning light, put on the radio (it is quarter to seven
you are listening to the farming report)

blessed sleep I know not what you wear or who you are
I imagine you in something extraordinary

slept last night again a baby what do I know?
(what is my plot?) all curled up like that
(on a blanket)


The Sentence

It is as though he were telling us
that this small space
contains the pattern for
all eternity


Chax Press & POG events are sponsored in part by grants from the Tucson/Pima Arts Council, the Arizona Commission on the Arts (with funds from the State of Arizona and from the National Endowment for the Arts).

 

POG events are sponsored in part by grants from the Tucson/Pima Arts Council, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. POG also benefits from the continuing support of The University of Arizona Poetry Center, the Arizona Quarterly, Chax Press, and The University of Arizona Department of English. 

thanks to our growing list of 2004-2005 Patrons and Sponsors:

We're also grateful to hosts and programming partners