The Opening of the Field: A Conference on North American Poetry in the 1960s

Program

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 28

Opening Reception and Outdoor Barbecue

Greetings from President Peter Hoff, Dean Rebecca Eilers, and Vice Provost Douglas Gelinas

Plenary Session #1

Chair: Burton Hatlen

Marjorie Perloff, “Watchman and Spy: O’Hara, Johns, and Cage in the ‘Cool’ Sixties”

Michael Davidson, “Missing Larry”

Poetry Reading #1: Amiri Baraka

Chair: Aldon Nielsen

Poets of the 1960s General Reading #1

Chair: Don Wellman

Amiri Baraka, Lorenzo Thomas, Gene Frumkin

Open Reading #1

Chair: Mark Rutter

K. Silem Mohammad, Mark McMorris, Jim Dunn, John Landry, and others

 

THURSDAY, JUNE 29

Panel Session #1

Panel 1A: Echoes of the 1930s

Chair: Richard Brucher

Thomas Lisk, “Ramon Guthrie as a Modernist Renegade”

Elizabeth Losh, “Epigrams from Another Front: Carl Rakosi’s Americana Poems”

John Lowney, “‘A Metamorphic Palimpsest’: the Underground Memory of Thomas McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend”

Panel 1B: In and Around New York

Chair: Steven Evans

Lytle Shaw, “Airing Pound’s Cubicle: Audience from Citizen to Person”

Christopher Volpe, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being Avant Garde: Pop Art, the New York School, and Contemporary ‘Language’ Poetry”

Panel 1C: A Sense of Place

Chair: Laura Cowan

Jonathan Minton, “‘A Living Current’: Charles Tomlin­son and the Embodiment of Place”

George Hart, “Larry Eigner, Landscape, Place, and Space”

Burton Hatlen, “A Poetic Geography, a Geo­graphic Poetics: Theodore Enslin and the Maine Poetry Scene in the 1960s”

Panel 1D. John Ashbery

Chair: Marjorie Perloff

Matthew Richardson, “Ashbery’s Writings of the 60s: Surrealism and Citation”

Jacques Debrot, “Exact Fantasy: John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath”

Mark Silverberg, “Shades of Ella Wheeler Wilcox: Camp, Cliché, and John Ashbery’s Good Bad Verse”

Panel 1E. Baraka and Others I

Chair: Aldon Nielsen

Richard Quinn, “Pursuing Blackness: Amiri Baraka, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane”

Chris Funkhouser, “LeRoi Jones, Larry Neal, The Cricket and JIHAD: Jazz and Poets’ Black Fire”

Aldon Nielsen, “Crow Jane Approxi­mately: Bob Dylan, LeRoi Jones and Big Joe Williams”

Poetry Reading #2: Theodore Enslin

Chair: Mark Nowak

Poetry Reading #3: Nathaniel Tarn and Toby Olson

Chair: Mark Nowak

Panel Session #2

Panel 2A. Louis Zukofsky I

Chair: Kenneth Sherwood

Jonathan Ivry, “Articulating Self-Identity in the Translations of Louis Zukofsky”

Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas, “Turning Verses: Zukofsky and Duncan Translating”

Mark McMorris, “Postcolonial ‘A’”

Panel 2B. Dickey, Eckman, Snyder

Chair: Paul Bauschatz

Daniel Turner, “The Savage(d) Ideal: Southern Poetic Primitivism in James Dickey’s ‘May Day Sermon’”

David Adams, “Coming Home: Pivotal Changes in Frederick Eckman’s Poetry”

Luke C. Schlueter, “The Founding of the Domestic in Gary Snyder’s Regarding Wave”

Panel 2C. From Modern to Postmodern: Brooks, Rukeyser, Rexroth

Chair: Shyamal Bagchee

Jenny Goodman, “Gwendolyn Brooks and Muriel Rukeyser in the 1960s: From Modernism to Post­modernism in the Long Poem”

Sophia Tekmitchov, “No More Masks! No More Mythologies!: Muriel Rukeyser as Innovator and Influence”

Samuel Garren, “The Influence of Kenneth Rexroth’s Bird in the Bush and Assays on North American Poetry in the 1960s”

Panel 2D. The Politics of Publication

Chair: Dodie Bellamy

Matthew T. Pifer, “The Underground Press and the Poetry of Resistance in 1960s Detroit”

Nicholas Lawrence, “Mimeo Fever: Sixties Small Press within a Global Context”

Linda Russo, “On Seeing Poetic Production: The Case of Hettie Jones”

Panel 2E. Baraka and Others II

Chair: Aldon Nielsen

Andrew Epstein, “‘Against the Speech of Friends’: Amiri Baraka, Individualism, and the Avant-Garde”

Alicia R. Thompson, “Amiri Baraka’s ‘Am-Tram, Ka ’Ba’”

Jonathan Gill, “History and Habit: Allen Ginsberg and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka in the 1960s”

Panel 2F. The New York School

Chair: Kevin Killian

Marjorie Welish, “The New York School and Metapoetic Lyric”

K. Silem Mohammad, “‘Unrelentingly? Huh’: New York School Poetics and the Romance of the Inarticulate”

Tony Lopez, “‘Powder on a Little Table’: Berrigan’s Sonnets and 60s Poems”

Panel Session #3

Panel 3A. Johnson, Samperi, Bronk

Chair: Peter O’Leary

Patrick Pritchett, “The Prairie Home Companion, or Location Location Locution: Ronald Johnson and the Liturgy of (Queer) Poetics”

Peter O’Leary, “‘The new man is always the spiritual man’: Frank Samperi’s Poetry of Paradise”

Gary Roberts, “Bronk’s Chaste Collectivity”

Panel 3B. Identities

Chair: Shyamal Bagchee

George Hartley, “Yo Soy Joaquin: Chicano Poetry and Retroactive Identity, 1967”

Donna Hollenberg, “‘Black one, incubus’: Sisterhood and Identity Politics in Levertov’s The Sorrow Dance”

Panel 3C. Allen Ginsberg

Chair: John Landry

Sean McDonnell, “‘The Key is in the Sunlight’: Bodily Distortion and Visionary Madness in Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish”

Joshua Clover, “Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan”

Panel 3D. Roethke, Ammons, Jarrell

Chair: Karen Alkalay-Gut

Karen Mills-Courts, “The Gift of Emptiness: Ammons’ Tape for the Turn of the Year and the Diary Genre of the 1960s”

Von Underwood,  “In a Far Field, In a Dark Time: Theodore Roethke’s Uncanny Timeliness in the Mid-1960s”

David Adams, “Lost & Found: Thirty-five Years with Randall Jarrell’s The Lost World”

Panel 3E. Poetry and the Visual Arts

Chair: Kevin Killian

Catherine E. Paul, “Rituals of Citizenship: Poetic Critique of Museums in the 1960s”

L. A. Phillips, “Modern Visual Art and Some Poems by Frank O’Hara”

Alicia Cohen, “Visual Art and the Art of Poetic Vision: The Visible in the Work of Robert Duncan”

Panel 3F. The East Coast Scene

Chair: Laura Cowan

Anthony Libby, “Diane di Prima, ‘Nothing is Lost; It Shines in Our Eyes’”

Peter Puchek, “Desire and Ideology: Anne Waldman’s Early Poetry”

Kevin McGuirk, “Poetry and ‘Stupidity’: Beats to Language”

Poetry Reading #4: Keith Waldrop

Chair: Steve Evans

Plenary Session #2

Chair: Marjorie Perloff

Frank Davey, “Regressive Poetics of the Sixties”

Barrett Watten, “The Turn to Language after the 1960s”

Poets of the 1960s Generation Reading #2: David Bromige and Frank Davey

Chair: George Bowering

Open Reading #2

Chair: Sylvester Pollet

Keith Tuma, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Tony Lopez, Linda Russo, Arielle Greenberg, Tom Lavazzi, Patrick Pritchett, and others