photo courtesy of Dino Ignani

Poets House, New York City
April 25, 2013 – 7:00PM
Kray Hall
$10, $7 for students and seniors, free to Poets House Members

Poet, translator and scholar Jennifer Scappettone discusses the work of the Italian poet and musicologist Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996) — whose first book was introduced by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1964 — and will read from her award-winning translation. Rosselli’s extraordinary upbringing as a self-defined “child of the Second World War” led her to compose among three languages and synthesize a hybrid literary heritage stretching from Dante and the troubadours through Ezra Pound and John Berryman, recasting both the tradition and the future of Italian poetry.

The term ecopoetics has become increasingly important to scholars and poets alike. It is certainly a critical moment for the field and practice. Please join us in February for a three-day conference that will focus specifically on exploring ecopoetics, taking up such questions as: What is ecopoetics? What representational strategies and sociopolitical commitments might characterize this practice? How might we periodize ecopoetics and situate its modes of cultural production? It is our hope that the conference will bring scholars, poets, and creative artists into sustained dialogue on the historical and contemporary practices of ecopoetics.

Forrest Gander
Robert Hass
Brenda Hillman
Lynn Keller
Jonathan Skinner
Michael Ziser

Conference Organizers
Angela Hume
Gillian Osborne
Margaret Ronda

Friday, Feb. 22

2-4 p.m.
Conference Advisory Board Roundtable on Ecopoetics
Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Forrest Gander, Lynn Keller, Jonathan Skinner, Michael Ziser

4:30-6:30 p.m.
Editing the Book of Nature: New Anthologies of Ecopoetics
Joshua Corey, Camille Dungy, Laura-Gray Street, Ann Fisher-Wirth

Precarity, Neoliberalism, Late Capitalism
Rachel Greenwald Smith, Matthew O’Malley, Andrea Actis, Nicky Tiso, Miriam Nichols, Marthine Satris

The Troping of Ecopoetic Form
Lauren Brozovich, Matthew Cooperman, George Hart, Joshua Schuster, Heidi Lynn Staples, Clara Van Zanten

“We have left our broken house in ecstasy”: Ecopoetics Through Travel
Charles Alexander, Diana Arterian, Jenny Browne, Todd Fredson, Andy Meyer, Laura Moriarty, Sarah Vap

Saturday, Feb. 23

8-10 a.m.
The Book, Ecopoetic Instrument
Richard Greenfield, Brenda Iijima, Jared Stanley, Tyrone Williams

Embodied Ecopoetics
Sean Dempsey, Scott Knickerbocker, Katherine R. Lynes, Richard Cole, Matthias Regan

Geopoetics: Thinking Landscapes/Landscaping Thought in German Literature
Jason Groves, Tove Holmes, Bernhard Malkmus

Groundworks: A Collaborative Lab
Jolie Kaytes, Laura Mullen, Linda Russo, Hazel White

(Im)Permeable Matter: Rocks, Stones, Minerals
Tim Cresswell, Rob Halpern, Jasmine Kitses, CJ Martin

10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Emergency, Ethics, Ecopoetics: 21st Century Ecopoetry’s Efficacies
Brenda Hillman, Angela Hume, Lynn Keller, Myung Mi Kim

Field Laboratory for Esoteric Ecologies
Kathleen Brown, Adam Dickinson, a.rawlings, Erin Robinsong, Jonathan Skinner

Historical Ecopoetics
Mark Cladis, Carolyn Dekker, Rachel Feder, James Finley, Rebecca Porte

New World Ecopoetics
Anny Dominique Curtius, George Handley, Juliana Leslie, Jorge Marcone, Fenn Elan Stewart, Mac J. Wilson

2-4 p.m.
Chinese Ecoaesthetics
Ronald Egan, Chris Tong, Yiman Wang, Winnie Yee

Ecopoetics of the City
Lara Durback, Pablo Guardiola, Evan Kennedy, Lauren Levin, Michael Nicoloff, Nico Peck, Kathryn Pringle, Yosefa Raz, Barbara Jane Reyes, Wendy Trevino, Stephen Vincent, Alli Warren

Ecopoetics and/as Coexistence
Gwenola Caradec, David Gilcrest, Grant Jenkins, John Shoptaw, John Sitter, Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor

Environmental Dreamscapes and the Heedless Sublime
Nathan Brown, Jed Rasula, Evelyn Reilly, Brian Teare

Poetic Labor
Anne-Lise Francois, Gillian Osborne, Joanna Picciotto, Samia Rahimtoola

4:30-6:30 p.m.
The Ecopoetics of Film
Peter Burghardt, Forrest Gander, Rusty Morrison, Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Illness, Landscape, Healing
Margit Galanter, Hillary Gravendyk, Petra Kuppers, Juliette Lee, Neil Marcus, Eleni Stecopoulos

Molecules, Microbes, Parasites
Tania Aguila-Way, Karen Andrade, Bo Earle, Megan Fernandes, Charlie Legere

Pacific Ecopoetics
Elizabeth Deloughrey, Dina El Desouky, kuʻualoha hoʻomanawanui, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Brandy McDougall, Craig Santos Perez

The Thingness of Things: Connecting with the Culture’s Material Trace
Allison Cobb, Alicia Cohen, Jennifer Coleman, CA Conrad, Jen Hofer, Kaia Sand

Sunday, Feb. 24

8-10 a.m.
(De)composition
Stephen Collis, Stephen Cope, Kevin McGuirk, Camilla Nelson, Jordan Scott, Michael Ziser

Garden, Farm, Poetic Form
Arielle Greenberg, Sonnet L’Abbe, Louis Kirk McAuley, Stephen Motika, Michelle Niemann

Queering Ecopoetics: Hybridity, Ferality, Eroticism
Seminar moderated by Anne-Lise Francois
Brook Barman, Michelle Detorie, Julia Drescher, Abby Hagler, Sarah de Leeuw, Dana Maya, Art Middleton, Alyce Miller, Sarah Nolan, Eric Sneathen

Ground Scores: Unburying Ecologies through Embodied Practice
David Buuck, Seung-Jae Lee, Rachel Levitsky, Ira Livingston, Jennifer Scappettone, Kathy Westwater

10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
The Ghost in the (Drum) Machine: Tracking Remix, Reuse, and Return in Contemporary Ecopoetics
Joshua Bennett, Lisa Brown, Katy Didden, Ross Gay, Judith Goldman, Patrick Rosal

Ecopoetics and Affect
Seminar moderated by Charles Altieri
Caleb Beckwith, Dianne Chisholm, Sarah Dimick, Damon Franke, Anna Hiller, Cate Lycurgus, Laurel Peacock, Lisa Sewell, Mande Zecca

Ecopoetics, Object Relations, and Object-Oriented Ontology
Seminar moderated by Nathan Brown
Anthony Camara, Duskin Drum, Julia Fiedorczuk, Devin King, Sarah Lewison, Robert Mitthenthal, Eileen Myles, Tze-Yin Teo

Elegy, Mourning, Melancholia
John Beer, Catherine Owen, Margaret Ronda, Russell Stone

Mobility and Rootedness in Literature Symposium

will be discussing their work-in-progress,

“Testimonium”

in the Logan Arts Center, room 801

Tuesday, February 5, from 4:20-5:50 pm

as special guests of Jennifer Scappettone’s Documentary Across the Genres course, through the support of the UChicago Arts Council

(Please note the unusual time; it will not be possible to enter after 4:20 pm)

Testimonium, previously titled Testimony 2.2, presents recitation, movement, and music, composed in response to Testimony: The United States 1885 – 1915, the unfinished masterwork by the American Objectivist poet Charles Reznikoff. Bryan Saner recites a reimagined text, unfolding the original with biographical and philosophical material. Stephen Fiehn performs a series of near-silent movement sequences, activating objects on the installation-like stage. Joan of Arc (Tim Kinsella, Bobby Burg, and Theo Katsaounis) perform live an original 6-song cycle. Three alternating modes of performance form a complex weave at three radically different volume levels.

Biographies of the Artists:
Matthew Goulish co-founded Goat Island Performance Collective in 1987, and Every house has a door in 2008. His 39 Microlectures – in proximity of performance was published by Routledge in 2000, and Small Acts of Repair – Performance, Ecology, and Goat Island, which he co-edited with Stephen Bottoms, in 2007. He was awarded a Lannan Foundation Writers Residency in 2004, and in 2007 he received an honorary Ph.D. from Dartington College of Arts, University of Plymouth. Goulish is Provocations editor for The Drama Review, and he teaches in the MFA and BFA Writing Programs of the The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Lin Hixson co-founded Goat Island in 1987, and Every house has a door in 2008. She is full Professor of Performance at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and received an honorary doctorate from Dartington College in 2007. Goat Island created nine performance works and toured extensively in the US, England, Scotland, Wales, Belgium, Switzerland, Croatia, Germany, and Canada. Her writing on directing and performance has been published in the journals P-Form, TDR, Frakcija, Performance Research, Women and Performance, and Whitewalls; and included in the anthologies Small Acts of Repair – Performance, Ecology, and Goat Island, Live Art and Performance, Theatre in Crisis?, and the textbook Place and Placelessness in Performance. Hixson has directed two films, Daynightly They re-school you The Bears-Polka and It’s Aching Like Birds, in collaboration with the artist Lucy Cash and Goat Island.

Photo credit: John Sisson

This is one of a score of books recently issued by Nathanaël, who writes between genres: that word genre referring to both genre and gender, in the French sense—in what is much more than a pun transgressing tongues, but instead a primary aperture onto the unflaggingly, unapologetically seismic, fracturing and yet twinning, hermaphroditic terrain of this author’s mind. I was asked to open the space to a voicing of this latest text, which is in conversation with all of the prior, and whose very body models the reconception of the self as, to cite Nathanaël, “in seism.”

I’ll transcribe here my opening remarks as moderator about the text as counterboulevard:

The work is clearly related to Nathanaël’s earlier texts in being composed as from within a thicket of discussants, both living and on paper, and including herself. However, formally speaking, Sisyphus, Outdone pulls itself apart to a greater extent. It is as though the threads in what Judith Goldman justly calls Nathanaël’s “tissue of citations” had been yanked convulsively to make the threshold/voids between voices more palpable—as in translation. The frontispiece in fact features the formula for the “equation of dynamic crack growth,” courtesy of Michael O’Leary.

I think of course of Benjamin’s Arcades Project, since Benjamin was the one who said of translation that “if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade”: literalness being a structure of innumerable, unapologetic thresholds.

In the open thresholds signaled by white space on the page we are subjected to the difficulty, and silent undertaking, of advancing from one voice or citation to the next in “disappointed bridges” (cited from Joyce on page 53), “Bawling by architecture’s apertures” (68).

And in fact, the status of the “advance” is thrown into question by this work, which is constantly doubling doors, seeing the threshold of text and abode as both exit and entryway, a text that can reverse, repeat, revise, the “instant cast backwards.” And this itself has to do with the “repetition at the heart of catastrophe” that Cathy Caruth theorizes and Nathanaël reperforms.

http://storify.com/ncecire/the-poet-scholar/

http://thirdfactory.wordpress.com/2012/11/23/attention-span-2012-jennifer-scappettone/

and the directory of the whole:

http://thirdfactory.wordpress.com/attention-span-2012-directory/

Bachelor Reading Room, Bachelor Hall, Miami University of Ohio
Tricolore: Symposium on Poetry in Translation

Jennifer Scappettone, poet & translator of Amelia Rosselli
Matvei Yankelevich, poet & translator of Daniil Kharms
Peter Manson, poet & translator of Stéphane Mallarmé

4:00pm: presentation of translations (reading and projection) followed by panel discussion
5:30pm: reception

(Join us also for a reading by all three poets, 7:30pm Tuesday, October 8, 40 Irvin)

In the wake of a successful pair of French translation events in the spring, the lecture series 21st Century Poetic Praxis will bring together, on October 8 & 9 in fall of 2012, three poets, each an extraordinary poet and a celebrated translator.

Participating poet/translators:
Peter Manson is an eminent Scottish poet whose Poésies of Stéphane Mallarmé was published by Miami University Press in March this year. A recent review in the Guardian newspaper (London) called Manson’s Mallarmé “one of the most exciting translations of recent years”; a Financial Times review called it “a marvel of luminous precision.” Manson’s books include Between Cup and Lip (also from Miami University Press), For the Good of Liars and Adjunct: an Undigest (both from Barque Press). Another book, Poems of Frank Rupture, is due in 2012. He lives in Glasgow, Scotland.

Matvei Yankelevich’s translations of Russian conceptualist poet Daniil Kharms were collected in Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Ardis/Overlook) and received praise from the TLS, the Guardian, the New York Times, and elsewhere (the New York Times review was by the great contemporary American short-story writer George Saunders). He edited a portfolio of Contemporary Russian Poetry and Poetics for the magazine Aufgabe (No. 8, Fall 2009) and has written essays on Russian-American poetry for Octopus magazine online. His translations from Russian appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, Calque, Circumference, New American Writing, Poetry, and Harpers, and in anthologies including OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern) and Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky (FSG). He teaches at Hunter College, Columbia University School of the Arts (Writing Division), and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. He lives in Brooklyn.

Jennifer Scappettone is a scholar, translator and poet. She won the 2012 Raiziss/de Palchi Book Prize from the Academy of American Poets for Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli (University of Chicago Press, 2012), which she edited and translated. As the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Modern Italian Studies for 2010-11, she spent the year at the American Academy in Rome. She was guest editor of an issue of Aufgabe featuring work by 13 contemporary Italian poets and several critical pieces (2008). Her poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Washington Square, GAMMM, Zoland Annual, The Brooklyn Rail, Circumference, Bombay Gin, Mid-American Review and American Poetry Review, among other journals. She lives in Chicago, where she is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago.

Antonio Adams’ first solo exhibition since 2009, Unrealized and Unforeseen, will be in its last few days of viewing at Thunder-Sky, so if you haven’t yet seen the show, take advantage of the opportunity before it comes down.

8 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 7.  Thunder-Sky, Inc., 4573 Hamilton Ave., Northside, Cincinnati, OH.