One Makes Many: A Conference of Poetic Interactions

Mark your calenders. The Duke/UNC Contemporary Poetry Working Group is excited to announce

ONE MAKES MANY: A CONFERENCE OF POETIC INTERACTIONS

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 11 (DUKE) & SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12 (UNC)

"One Makes Many: A Conference of Poetic Interactions" brings together local, national, and international scholars and poets to participate in panels, readings, exhibitions, and events. Each of our panels orients itself along one or more disciplinary boundaries and aims to interrogate poetry’s relation to visual art, technology, history, folk tradition, religion—to name just a few. We are enthusiastic about the multidisciplinary nature of the conference, which draws interest and participation from multiple departments across both campuses.

http://onemakesmany.siteslab.org

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

Friday, November 11

Location: Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke U., Smith Warehouse, Bay 4, Floor 1, C105

10:30-12:00 Sacred Poetry: Carl Ernst, Paul Losensky, Murat Nemet-Nejat, and David Need

12:00-1:00 Lunch

1:00-2:30 Latin America (in Translation): Steve Dolph, Carlos Soto-Román, and Guillermo Parra

2:45-4:15 The Digital Muse: Steve Roggenbuck, Dan Anderson, and Bill Seaman (Moderator: Patrick Herron)

Gather at concurrent digital/new media poetry exhibition

Break for dinner

8:00 Reading by Nathaniel Tarn

Saturday, November 12

Location: YMCA, UNC, 180A East Cameron Ave., Chapel Hill

10:30-12:00 Black Mountain Aesthetics: Tyrone Williams, Kimberly Lamm, and Julie Thompson

12:00-1:00 Lunch

1:00-2:30 Afrosonics: Andrew Rippeon, Shirlette Ammons, and Harmony Holiday

2:45-4:15 Folk Poetics and Oral History: Christopher Green, Frank Sherlock, and Ali Neff

Break for dinner

8:00 Musical performance by Lightnin' Wells (Durham, TBA)

For more information, http://onemakesmany.siteslab.org

We would like to thank our major sponsors:

The Kenan-Biddle Partnership and the Duke English Department,

our Duke co-sponsors: the Program in Literature, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Romance Studies, and the Franklin Humanities Institute,

and our UNC co-sponsors: The Department of English and Comparative Literature, the Graduate School, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and the Center for the Study of the American South.

Sigo & Taylor Read POEMS!

SECOND MINOR AMERICAN READING OF THE SCHOOL YEAR!

Cedar Sigo
&
Ken Taylor

Wednesday, October 19, 2011, 8pm
PLACE: Women's Studies Lounge, 1st Fl., East Duke Bldg, East Campus, Duke University

Map is Here.
BYOB, FREE, & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!

[This Event is sponsored by Duke English Department's

Faculty/Graduate Student Reading Group in Contemporary Poetry]

Cedar Sigo is a poet and sometime teacher, active in the art and literary worlds since 1999. He studied writing and poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the author of seven books and pamphlets of poetry, including two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse , 2003 and 2005) Expensive Magic (House Press, 2008) and most recently, Stranger In Town (City Lights, 2010) His poems have been included in many magazines and anthologies, and he has published poetry books and magazines under the Old Gold imprint. He participated in “Coordinates: Indigenous Writing Now,” a conference at California College of the Arts. He has given readings and performances at the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church, Bowery Poetry Club, PS1 Museum of Contemporary Art, Beyond Baroque, San Francisco Poetry Center, The San Francisco LGBT Center, Intersection for the Arts, and Small Press Traffic, among others. He has collaborated with visual artists including Cecilia Dougherty, Frank Haines, Will Yackulic and Colter Jacobsen. He lives in San Francisco.

Ken Taylor's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Chattahoochee Review, The Stony Thursday Book, elimae, MiPOesias, The New Guard, Whale Sound, Eclectica Magazine, OCHO, Poets & Artists, HAM Literature and Gigantic Sequins. His manuscript "dog with elizabethan collar" is a finalist for this year's National Poetry Series. He is the 2011 winner of the Fish Publishing Poetry Prize.

Minor American Reading, September 2011

FIRST MINOR AMERICAN READING OF THE SCHOOL YEAR

RYAN ECKES
&
ALLISON CURSEEN

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2011, 8pm
PLACE: Women's Studies Lounge, 1st Fl., East Duke Bldg, East Campus, Duke University

Map is Here.
BYOB, FREE, & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!

[This Event is sponsored by Duke English Department's 

Faculty/Graduate Student Reading Group in Contemporary Poetry]

Ryan Eckes was born in 1979 in Philadelphia. He's the author of Old News (Furniture Press 2011) and when i come here (Plan B Press 2007). More of his poetry can be found on his blog, which is also called Old News, and in various magazines. Along with Stan Mir, he organizes the Chapter & Verse Reading Series in Philly. He works as an adjunct English professor at Temple University and other places, and he spends a lot of time hanging out with poets.

Allison Curseen is an English PhD candidate at Duke. She earned her MFA in creative writing at American University in DC but still loves her undergraduate, Oberlin College, best.  She thinks of herself primarily as a fiction writer but has been for the last year, at least, working mostly on poetry.  Allison also enjoys facilitating creative writing in different settings from universities and middle schools to churches and prison.

My Intro For Eileen Myles

This was written with the help of several posters on FB, who gave me some concrete reasons as to why they love Eileen Myles. Of course, the intro is filled with my own reasons. But the writing process was, for a few hours, a collective one. The introduction was for a reading Eileen gave on February 8, 2011 at Duke University. Thanks to all of you who sent "love" in for Eileen:

This week on Valentine’s Day the online magazine “The Awl” published an article by Eileen Myles called “Being Female.” In the article Eileen discusses the recent Vida pie charts that showed how low the numbers of female writers getting reviewed in the mainstream press are, a sad and discouraging fact for all vaginally equipped scribes. Eileen’s article opens with a description of one of her own personal rituals to overcome the self-doubt that is a natural part of being a female writer in this world. She writes, “When I think about being female I think about being loved. What I mean by that: I have a little exercise I do when I present my work or speak publicly or even write…In order to build up my courage I try to imagine myself deeply loved.” She goes on to say that when she finds herself wondering how certain men she admires are able to live so boldly (she uses the life of Passolini as an example) she sees it as a result of such love. She writes, “A mother loves her son. And so does a country. And that is much to count on. So I try to conjure that for myself particularly when I’m writing or saying something that seems both vulnerable and important so I don’t have to be defending myself so hard. I try and act like its mine. The culture. That I’m its beloved son.”

So I thought that since Eileen is a beloved guest in our house tonight, that I would do the job for her. That I would now speak in the name and words of many of our nation’s poets, all of our nation’s Polish mothers and in the name of the American nation itself to let Eileen know just how and why she is our beloved son and our beloved uncle. Eileen, We, the poets of America, the Polish Mothers of America and the United States of America love you! We love you for your honesty and your courage, your ability, despite “the blues and the greys and the feelings of lostness” “to be inexcusably addicted to light” in your work and in your life. We love you because your like poetry's very own Kennedy, only unafraid of eros. we love to hear her say the words "dark red hair. We love you because you wear cool boots, because you wear your charisma and poetic authority lightly and with good humor. We love you because you’re part of this NY downtown art and poetry scene that is still so alive and real and searching and open. We love you for the surprise in the line: "But he always needed to go out and stay out for long stretches and freely kill other creatures." We love your Rhythm: the living scansion of thought and line in a performative drive. We love you for taking everything that's brilliant, edgy and humane in the New York School, throwing out the dross, adding the special kinds of aliveness, that are only yours to add, we love you for making quite a lot of sense in sound, for telling the right people to fuck off, and telling so many girls, girlish boys, and boyish girls they were “right on” when the rest of the world was telling them they were all wrong, we love you for having enough guts to open up the kitchen cabinets and let in negative capability, we love you for not believing that poets are contaminated by writing novels. We love you for being pretty much totally hot. We try not to drool when standing close to you. We think it’s awesome when you order clams during job interviews. We love you for running for President, but are glad that you didn’t win because we’re pretty sure the bankers would have had you shot and no one really needs to be that much like a Kennedy anyhow, and besides I think you look more like Warren Beatty. Eileen, we are so cool for you, we can hardly stand it. We might have to make a 51^st state just to hold our love for you, We love you in all your freedoms, short lines, long paragraphs, Eileen, our own dear queer defender of American forms, how could we have imagined ourselves without you?