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