<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">Dear Friends,</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">I would like to report on the recent Working Group discussions with the Canadian poet Christian B�k. Before doing so allow me to remind active participants that our next meeting is scheduled for November 30th, 3-5pm. On that occasion we will be meeting at the Beinecke Library to discuss the work of Marianne Moore with Patricia Willis, Curator of American Literature. Please stay posted for additional information about the proposed readings.</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">Also, Thursday November 15th, this coming week, poets Graham Foust and Elizabeth Robinson will give a joint reading at the Beinecke Library. The reading begins at 4pm, it is open to the public, and it will be followed by a reception. You are hereby invited to attend.</FONT><SPAN><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">� </FONT></SPAN><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">(Further details about the work of these two poets may be found at the end of these minutes).</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">Now to my report, where I�ll refer to recent Working Group activities with a perforated sense for ordering the way things happened�a self interrupting memory at work will allow for such extravagance. </FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">On October 26<FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="2" style="font-size: 14px; ">th</FONT>, members from the working group met to discuss <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">Eunoia</SPAN>, the Griffin Poetry Prize winning univocal lipogramatic poem-novel that Christian B�k published in 2001. The fruit of �seven years of perseverance,� this book attempts to use 98% of the single-vowel lexicons B�k culled from the<SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;"> </SPAN><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">Webster�s 3</SPAN><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="2" style="font-size: 14px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">rd</SPAN></FONT><I><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> Ed. Unabridged Dictionary</SPAN></SPAN> </I></FONT></SPAN><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">(which he chose over the <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">OED</SPAN></FONT></SPAN><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond"> because it contains more scientific terminology), stitching them into five semi-narrative chapters, one for each vowel (A, E, I, O, U). </FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">Initial reactions from group members could not have been more divided; some loved the book, others hated it. Insofar as readers remained stuck on constraint, there was a tendency to reduce the work itself to gimmickry, a flamboyant flourish of lettered virtuosity deprived of a genuinely compelling reflection on (personal) experience. Insofar as readers embraced the texture of each page for its sound above all, the experience of reading was given to all sorts of ancillary reflections, including posing problems of genre, voice, and emergent/descriptive metaphors.</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">While considering the initial critique, we reveled at the way the work foresees and in fact already triumphs this very line of rejection. This anticipation of the critical eye is quite prominent in the opening passages of Chapter I : �Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I sing nihilistic witticism, disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks�impish hijinks which highlight stick sigils. [�] I dismiss nitpicking criticism which flirts with philistinism. I bitch; I kibitz�[�] dismissing simplistic thinking in which philippic wit is still illicit� (50). Gestures of self-deprecation seems to take on the character of a manifesto in the book�s dedication ��<I>to the new / ennui in you� </I></FONT></SPAN><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">(7)� and in the deviant slogan attributed to Derren Wershler-Henry before the book�s afterword: �The tedium is the message� (103); that is, what provokes rejection is precisely the fact that the constraint remains opaque, a constant (and superficial) obstacle to more engrossing content�the book�s paratext constructs that stiff-arm distance as one of its most committed rhetorical moves.</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">As we considered elements that delighted us in the work�s attention to sound (often pausing to read aloud), we enjoyed discovering how diverse the music of each vowel, and we paid homage to the scriptor�s skill in tying together so rich a context (both in terms of the intertextual references that were made apparent, and in terms of the thematic constraints that recur in each chapter: e.g. maritime travel, gastronomy, sexual endeavor, etc.). Group members confessed to having favored one chapter over others while reading. Praise was emitted over the use of so many rare and beautiful words. The existence of additional, number-based constraints were guessed at. And thus, the conversation recursively wended back to the central fact of labor, the thoroughgoing toil that must have entered the building of this book letter by letter, an element that is detailed in all of its late-night, post-graduate-student-angst-enriched glory, in the afterword, as if part of an increasingly explicit personal mythopoesis. </FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">While as a group we enjoyed thinking about the manner in which the vowel in each lexicon would conspire to tell its own story in the process of composition�a revelation B�k describes in his recent <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">Postmodern Culture</SPAN></FONT></SPAN><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;"> </SPAN>interview�, a couple of detailed points taken from our reading of the book in conjunction with the interview complicated what might otherwise have been felicitously read as an attempt to �yield the initiative to words� themselves, to let the personality of each lexicon (of language itself) dictate the direction and tone of each chapter. </FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">The first objection is that the value of poetic process (writing and reading), as it is represented by B�k, risks being reduced to nothing more than a game of one-upmanship, a dynamic that is already deeply inflected within constraint based writing generally, where inspiration is �programmable� (according to B�k�s <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">�Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science</SPAN><I>)</I></FONT></SPAN><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">, as well as elsewhere in the extended poetic tradition (contests are part of poetic life from the medieval age to the contemporary). When asked about his favorite contemporary poets, B�k cites Kenneth Godsmith as �the man to beat.� If the selected opponent is appropriately formidable, what struck some group members as particularly regrettable is in the turn of phrase: that the agonistic character of poetry should bear such importance, that competition would be defined and confined to increasingly explicit formal and thematic elements of the text, without taking into account how those sophistications actually motivated the meaning of that work, or what contribution they make to the greater field of experimental (and normative) poetics and their place in the world. </FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">We linked this discussion to the opening passage of Chapter E, a passage that may be read as much as a metapoetic commentary as a mythopoetic program: �We see the revered exegete reject metered verse [�] He rebels. He sets new precedents. He lets cleverness exceed decent levels. He eschews the esteemed genres, the expected themes. [�] He engenders perfect newness wherever we need fresh terms� (31). <I>En effet</I></FONT></SPAN><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">, within the confines of very self-conscious constraint based writing, there is indeed a kind of arms race (e.g.- who will be the one to write the longest (and most elegant) palindrome?) and it is almost natural (predictable) to (re)knit that competitive spirit to the nihilism associated with the brightest avatar�s of the avant-garde, Beckett�s advice in <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">Westward Ho</SPAN><I> </I></FONT></SPAN><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">to �Fail again. Fail better.� In other words, even if there are considerable limitations imposed by the constraint here, B�k manages to put what�s there to use in the service an explicitly motivated and manifesting negative poetics. Adopting a starkly anti-lyrical voice, �he eschews expected themes,� or says he will; all the while he retells tales of Helen from the Trojan wars, and composes paragraphs rife with delicious syllables and pit pleasing smut�this paradox complicates the way �the rebel peddles these theses,� it adds a kind of vulnerability under the hardened ironic voice that plays at portraying its own process as �depthless pretense� (32).</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">The second point emerged from considering how working under constraint affects notions of inspiration. We suggested that it was crutch, a kind of mask, a safety net in its own right, one that places some limited faith in the execution of a proof, however arbitrary the question might be (whatever else it will be, the text will have demonstrated a solution to a problem). We also underlined that since it is the generative process of the writing that we could not lose sight of, what is glorified in the writer here is first and foremost his skill as craftsman, his handiwork. We wondered how B�k would react to our comparing this work to the craft of needlepoint (which is often used to decorate and protect the soft underbelly of a pillow, for example), a hand-made tale stitched for show among a super select coterie of like-minded craft artists (after all, the French word <I>ouvroir</I></FONT></SPAN><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">, so prominent in Oulipo (<I>ouvroir de literature potentielle</I></FONT></SPAN><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">), denotes first and foremost a sewing workshop). This metaphor is all the more enjoyable to imagine considering <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">Eunoia</SPAN> has sold over 20,000 copies; the dream come true/deepest fear of any cottage industry. Again, what�s beguiling about B�k�s book is that while it may take as its direct addressees (and claim its heritage among) some of the more extreme conceptual artists known, its currency among the general public runs more rapidly that Warhol�s Campbell soup sreenprints. </FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">While the better part of that initial discussion was devoted to <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">Eunoia</SPAN>, we did begin discussing Christian�s current project, based on <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">Xenotext</SPAN>, the file he sent along for our consideration. Elaborating on William S. Burrough�s declaration that �the word is now a virus,� this work-in-progress consists of genetically engineering a poem-text into the DNA of a radiation resistant organism (the bacteria </FONT><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">Deinococcus radiodurans</FONT></SPAN><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">) in such a fashion that the RNA produced using the encrypted DNA sequence will constitute an equally �heart breaking� poem. In other words, B�k aspires to make a living organism into a machine for making poetry. When Christian talked about this project during his November 2<FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="2" style="font-size: 14px; ">nd</FONT> visit to the Working Group, he revealed one of the arguments he uses to secure funding for the project�it is a collaborative endeavor embarked upon with MacArthur Fellow and biochemist, Stuart A. Kaufman�, namely that once they are completed and encoded into the targeted organism, these poems may very well exist and continue reproducing themselves long after the disappearance of the human race. Immortality through art?</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">On the occasion of our first discussion (10/26), we recognized, not without some admiration, that this conceptual poetics engages with (and pushes the limits of) even highly experimental notions of literature and, more broadly, art itself.</FONT><SPAN><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">� </FONT></SPAN><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">Deep concerns, however, were expressed about the consequence of what was described as a slippery slope of epistemological translations, transpositions, and displacements: if code (or encrypted DNA), which remains unreadable to the naked eye, is taken as poetry, then much�if not all�of the dialogic character of literature will have been abandoned. This seeming disregard for the character of human understanding problematizes for several group members the ethical commitment subtending this ambitious incursion into the poetics of biochemistry. </FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">The first question a group member posed in response to B�k�s live description of his <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">Xenotext</SPAN> (11/02): �If no one is around to hear it, does a falling tree make a sound?�</FONT><SPAN><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">� </FONT></SPAN><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">This seemed to be a non-problem problem for B�k who brazenly admitted to liking above all music made by machines for machines. Intent on outdoing what has been achieved in <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">Eunoia</SPAN>, B�k claims to worry very little about a modern day readership for the poem itself (in some sense its final addressees are not in fact contemporary humans, but post apocalyptic intelligent life (alien or not)); perhaps having already had more readers than most contemporary poets would know what to do with has had some liberating effects. Still, he described pursuing his Xenotext experiment in a variety of practical and pragmatic ways, including : 1. The process of designing a computer program that is helping him select the most propitious DNA lexicon (and propitious will have been defined as the cipher that allows for the most �moving� translation into the RNA (or protein) sequence); 2. planning a final publication that will include a description of the compositional procedures, a copy of both poems, some analysis of the cipher selected (those eschewed), and, as part of the book, a microscope ready slide containing the germ itself, a primer for the scientific inspection of the bacterial-lyric by the general public. </FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">Discussion of this project underlined the extent to which B�k fashions himself as a conceptual provocateur. While occasionally pretending to bracket humanist values, his often polemical remarks incisively clamor for a repositioning of poetry against, within, and before the leading contemporary epistemologies, most prominently scientific discourse. For the record, I will list some of those claims here. B�k dismisses slam poetry events as a poor excuse for authors who lack the talent (or grit) to go toe-to-toe with the masters of (pseudo)socially conscious rhyming, today�s top hip-hop artists. He challenges poets to redeem the relevance of their art by breaking into and incursively appropriating discourses where truth, its relation to the human, are not only in question, but under rapid development world-wide. He decries that fact poets remain confined to the category of the quaint, the <I>d�pass�</I></FONT></SPAN><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond"> realm of contemporary culture; and, in the same breath, he laments the fact that no one has yet written the beautiful epic poems occasioned by our journey to moon. He praises the work of Kenneth Goldsmith�whose writing, despite being reduced to two �constraints� (1. never writing a single original word (i.e. working entirely from citation, pastiche, collage) and 2. selecting only the flattest, most boring passages), remains paradoxically original and interesting, as well as the writings of Greg Betts (<SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">If Language</SPAN>), Jordan Scott (<SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">Blert</SPAN>) and his close friend Darren Wershler-Henry (<SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">Apostrohe</SPAN> (with Bill Kennedy)). He passionately evoked R. Murray Schafer�s experimental opera <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">The Princess of the Stars</SPAN>, and the gothic atmosphere that surrounded its third ever staging in August of 2007, a performance in which B�k played the Three-Horned Enemy. And, along the way, he generously drew relationships between modern Canadian letters and American literature writ large. </FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">Reflecting on how we might understands B�k�s revival of the ephemeral sound poems of Kurt Schwitters and Hugo Ball (two elements of the reading he gave at the Beinecke (soon to be streaming@ </FONT><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond"><A href="http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com">http://beineckepoetry.wordpress.com</A>/</FONT></SPAN><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond"> ), we considered how<SPAN style="">�avant-garde experimentation appeals to</SPAN> transnational audiences more easily than works more steadily inscribed in a national, modernist aesthetics. In response to how he viewed his (dis)connection to the Oulipo (the contemporary French experimental group known for its exploitation of formal constraints), B�k doubted he could be a part of a group in which he did not have a founding stake. And, in addition to citing temperamental differences, B�k explained some frustration with that group�s conservative poetics. Decrying the apolitical character of the group, B�k regretted that with so much talent and potential that group of writers and mathematicians would preoccupy themselves tweaking normative poetic forms such as the sonnet or the sestina, instead making bold attempts at creating new forms detached from what remnant nostalgia tradition instills. </FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">Th</FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">ough our conversation remained entirely improvised, group member were impressed by how pat the emission of B�k�s responses. If little seemed to surprise him�clearly a consummate professional whose mastery of his voice and persona astounds�some of us were left with an eerie feeling that perhaps parts of Christian had already become robotic, monstrously mechanical in the wicked quick deduction and analyses of multiple consubstantial possible solutions to each real or imagined query. </FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">Looking forward to seeing many of you at the reading this Thursday at the Beinecke.</FONT></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">Cordially,</FONT></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�Jean-Jacques Poucel, Occasional scrivner</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond"><B>Graham Foust</B></FONT></SPAN><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond"> is the author of three books of poetry, <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">Necessary Stranger</SPAN>, <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">Leave the Room to Itself</SPAN>, and <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">As in Every Deafness</SPAN> and numerous poetry chapbooks. He was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He is currently the Director of the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing at St. Mary�s College of California.</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond"><B>Elizabeth Robinson</B></FONT></SPAN><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond"> is the author of numerous books of poetry, including <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">Pure Descent,</SPAN> winner of the National Poetry Series, <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">Apprehend</SPAN>, winner of the Fence Modern Poets Series, <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">Under that Silky Roof</SPAN>, House Made of Silver, and <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">Bed of Lists</SPAN>. She has been awarded the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry and a grant from the Fund for Poetry. She is co-editor of 26, a magazine of poetry and poetics, EtherDome, a press dedicated to publishing the work of emerging women poets, and Instance Press.</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">For more information about and examples of Graham Foust�s and Elizabeth Robinson�s work visit:</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond"><B>Graham Foust</B></FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond"><A href="http://lit.konundrum.com/poetry/foustg_poems1.htm">http://lit.konundrum.com/poetry/foustg_poems1.htm</A></FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond"><A href="http://www.typomag.com/issue02/000026.html">http://www.typomag.com/issue02/000026.html</A></FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond"><A href="http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/2004/12/graham-foust-wrote-two-books-of-poems.html">http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/2004/12/graham-foust-wrote-two-books-of-poems.html</A></FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond"><B>Elizabeth Robinson</B></FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond"><A href="http://www.woodlandpattern.org/poems/elizabeth_robinson02.shtml">http://www.woodlandpattern.org/poems/elizabeth_robinson02.shtml</A></FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond"><A href="http://brooklynrail.org/2007/9/poetry/three-poems-by-elizabeth-robinson">http://brooklynrail.org/2007/9/poetry/three-poems-by-elizabeth-robinson</A></FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond"><A href="http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/2005/04/elizabeth-robinson-is-author-of-6.html">http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com/2005/04/elizabeth-robinson-is-author-of-6.html</A></FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV><DIV class="MsoNormal" style="font-size: 16px; "><SPAN style=""><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Garamond">�</FONT><O:P></O:P></SPAN></DIV></BODY></HTML>