The Poetry of the 1970s

A scan of the cover for the conference The Poetry of the 1970s

In memoriam

Sylvester Pollet

June 28, 1939-December 20, 2007

Associate Editor of the National Poetry Foundation

Burton Hatlen

April 9, 1936-January 21, 2008

Director of the National Poetry Foundation

Program

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 11

Reception and Art Opening at Lord Hall Gallery

Art exhibition curated by Laurie Hicks

Partial digital reconstruction of Bernadette Mayer’s 1972 “Memory” installation

Archival materials courtesy of Bernadette Mayer Papers, Archive for New Poetry, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego

Plenary Poetry Reading: Fred Wah

Chair: Jennifer Moxley

Group Reading by Queering the 70s Panelists

Chair: Jennifer Moxley

Featuring Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, and Eileen Myles

Open Poetry Readings

Chair: Bill Howe

THURSDAY, JUNE 12

Panels

01A: Disturbing Language

Marie Buck, “‘BIG APPLE PIE is beginning to appear over words that are negative’: Hannah Weiner’s Use of Symptom to Critique the Abstraction of Materiality”

Brad Flis, “Overflow Crowd to Out(side): Neoliberal City-Subjects and the Modular Piece of Ted Greenwald”

Aaron Winslow, “Writing the Object In/Reading the Subject Out: Representing Labor(ers) in Hejinian’s Writing is an Aid to Memory”

Steven Zultanski, “The Failure of the Domestic: Bernadette Mayer in the Late ’70s”

01B: John Ashbery

Gregory Hazleton, “Ashbery’s Heterogeneous Thinking about Poetry: Environments of Writing in Three Poems and The Vermont Notebooks”

Ross Leckie, “John Ashbery”

Mark Mendoza, “Deprivation and Difficulty: Reading the Ethical Moment in John Ashbery’s Poetry”

01C: John Wieners and Bob Kaufman

Stephen Ellis, “Linkages of Part to Whole: John Wieners and the Capacity to Love”

Thomas Fisher, “Bob Kaufman: The ‘Possible’ of Poetry”

01D: UK Poetries: Peter Redgrove, Barry MacSweeney, Seamus Heaney

James Byrne, “The Poet-Shaman: Peter Redgrove’s ‘Dr Faust’s Sea-Spiral Spirit’”

Jeremy Green, “Barry MacSweeney in the Seventies: Poetics and Aversion”

James Langer, “Seamus Heaney’s Archeological Cosmopolitanism”

Plenary Panel: Black Arts

Chair: James Smethurst

Fahamisha Brown, “A New Black Poetics: Lucille Clifton, Black Arts, and Black Feminism”

Grant Matthew Jenkins, “re: Source: African Contexts of Nathaniel Mackey’s Ethics”

Lytle Shaw, “Performing the Black Arts: Baraka’s Newark”

James Smethurst, “‘Return to English Turn’: Tom Dent, the Nkombo Poets, and Black Nationalism in the 1970s”

Jayne Cortez, Respondent

Plenary Panel: No More Masks!

Chair: Ellen Smith

Annie Finch, “Anthology of Seeds: No More Masks! and the Reflective Power of Editing”

Judith Johnson, “Where Was Our Avant-Garde: No More Masks! and Experimental Traditions”

Ellen Smith, “‘In jail / underground / at war’: No More Masks!, Praxis, and Postmodernism”

Florence Howe, Respondent

Panels

04A: Feminisms: Alice Notley and Joanne Kyger

Chair: Carla Billitteri

Kimberly Lamm, “‘Incidentals in the Day World’: Alice Notley and 1970s Feminism”

Linda Russo, “1970 Summer Bolinas: Buddhism-as-covert-feminism in Joanne Kyger’s Joanne”

04B: Who Can Lift It: Re-Thinking the Long Poem after the Modernist Movement

Justin Parks, “The (cognitive) ‘map of locations’: Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger and the Postmodern Epistemology of Place”

Andrew Rippeon, “‘Somehow not to be accidental’: On Niedecker, on Creeley, and Forms of Tangential Connection”

Richard Owens, “Glasgow Beast: Ian Hamilton Finlay and The Poetics of Aggressive Gardening”

04C: Ronald Johnson

Joel Bettridge, “Ronald Johnson’s Poetic Destiny”

Ross Hair, “A ‘Mosaic of Cosmos’: ARK’s Bricolage Poetics”

Peter O’Leary, “Talking Cosmos: Influencing Ronald Johnson, Deriving Robert Duncan”

04D: Globalism & Empire: Ammons, Pinsky, and Spahr

Piotr Gwiazda, “Culture Poets: Robert Pinsky, Juliana Spahr”

Susannah Hollister, “A.R. Ammons and the Poetics of the Planet”

Panels

05A: Unfamiliarity & Comfort

Stan Apps, “Hypnotist-Collectors: The ‘New Sentence’ in Cage and Silliman”

Michael Clune, “Whatever Charms is Alien: John Ashbery’s Everything”

Aaron Kunin, “Barbara Guest’s Revolutions”

05B: Little Magazines of the 1970s

Barry Alpert: “On Vort”

Lisa Howe, “Anti-poetic Poetry and Women’s DIY Zines: The Case of Lisa Baumgardner’s Bikini Girl”

Brooks Lampe, “‘Please take the lid off my galaxy’: American Surrealism in the Age of Kayak”

05C: Susan Howe

Alicia Cohen, “The End of Art: Susan Howe in the 1970s”

Elisabeth Joyce, “Force Fields: Susan Howe’s ‘Cabbage Gardens’ as Third Space”

05D: Ted Berrigan & Anne Waldman

Peter Puchek, “Beat Out of New York: Anne Waldman and the ‘Centerless Sprawl’”

Rebecca Weaver, “A Poem of Community: Anne Waldman’s ‘Billy Work Peyote’ and the Early Years of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Voices”

05E: Erotics, Embodiment, Negation

Chair: Carla Billitteri

Dawn Michelle Baude, “Not Just Randy Animism: The Erotics of ‘Being’ in the Early Work of Gustaf Sobin”

Malgorzata Myk, “Toward a Poetics of the Embodied Outside: Nomadism and Corporeality in Nicole Brossard’s Mecanique Jongleuse”

Sandra Simonds, “Laura Jensen’s Poetics of Negation: Bad Boats as a Response to Robert Bly’s Deep Image”

Plenary Poetry Reading: Bruce Andrews

Chair: Benjamin Friedlander

Plenary Poetry Reading: Jayne Cortez

Chair: Aldon Nielsen

Special Group Reading: Grand Piano Contributors

Featuring Steve Benson, Kit Robinson, and Barrett Watten

Chair: Lytle Shaw

Open Readings

Chair: Bill Howe