<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> Dear Friends,</o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">I wanted to send a reminder that the next session of the
Contemporary Poetics Group will be on March 26.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>We will be discussing the work of Lyn Hejinian, a poet whose
work we have looked at on two different occasions in the past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </span>Specifically her most recent book
Saga/Circus (there are three copies left at our mailbox of the Whitney
Humanities Center—get them while they last!). Professor Hejinian will be
reading at the Beicke Library on April 13 at 4 PM.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>The next day (April 14) she will meet with us for a special
session of the WGCP to her discuss her work.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span>The time and place of that discussion will be determined
soon, so stay tuned.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">A useful review of Saga/Circus by the poet Joyelle McSweeney
is available here:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://bostonreview.net/BR34.2/mcsweeney.php">http://bostonreview.net/BR34.2/mcsweeney.php</a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">McSweeney writes:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">In Lyn Hejinian’s latest book, two long poems (but they
hardly feel long) make short work of narrative and dismantle genre with an
alert and damaging wit. First comes “Circus” or “Lola.” This prose piece, with
its attention to rings, battles, payers and players, moves characters through a
tightening, finally dismaying cycle of events. Next comes “Saga,” also titled
“The Distance,” which applies pressure to two figures of continuity: the
first–person speaker and the sea voyage. Together, these texts form a contrast
of cyclicality and stasis and test the limits of writing as vehicle and vessel
of both violence and knowledge.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Here is the official bio:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, and translator; she was
born in the San Francisco Bay Area and lives in Berkeley. Published collections
of her writing include <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Writing is An Aid
to Memory, My Life, Oxota: A Short Russian Novel, Leningrad</i> (written in
collaboration with Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The Cell,</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">The Cold of Poetry</i>, and<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"> A
Border Comedy;</i> the University of California Press published a collection of
her essays entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The Language of
Inquiry</i>. Translations of her work have been published in France, Spain,
Japan, Italy, Russia, Sweden, and Finland. She is the recipient of a Writing
Fellowship from the California Arts Council, a grant from the Poetry Fund, and
a Translation Fellowship (for her Russian translations) from the National
Endowment for the Arts; she was awarded an Award for Independent Literature by
the Soviet literary organization “Poetics Function” in Leningrad in 1989. She
has travelled and lectured extensively in Russia as well as Europe, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Description</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">Xenia,</i> two volumes of her translations from the work of the
contemporary Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, have been published by Sun
and Moon Press. From 1976 - 1984, Hejinian was the editor of Tuumba Press and
from 1981 to 1999 she was the co-editor (with Barrett Watten) of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Poetics Journal</i>. She is also the
co-director (with Travis Ortiz) of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and
publishing cross-genre work by poets; Atelos was nominated as one of the best
independent literary presses by the Firecracker Awards in 2001. Other
collaborative projects include a work entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">The Eye of Enduring</i> undertaken with the painter Diane Andrews Hall
and exhibited in 1996, a composition entitled Qúę Trân with music by John Zorn
and text by Hejinian, a mixed media book entitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">The Traveler and the Hill and the Hill</i> created with the painter
Emilie Clark (Granary Press, 1998), and the experimental film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Letters Not About Love,</i> directed by
Jacki Ochs, for which Hejinian and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko wrote the script. In
the fall of 2000, she was elected the sixty-sixth Fellow of the Academy of
American Poets. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">And here is a link to the recordings of Hejinian archived by
pennsound:</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Hejinian.php">http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Hejinian.php</a></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">And finally here offers a short essay by Hejinian on closure: <a href="http://www.jacketmagazine.com/14/hejinian.html">http://www.jacketmagazine.com/14/hejinian.html</a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">In a few days I will circulate the minutes for our recent intense
discussion of Charles Reznikoff’s testimony.<span style="mso-spacerun:
yes"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">More, soon—</p><p class="MsoNormal">Richard Deming, Co-coordinator</p>
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