[Wgcp-whc] WG/CP-- Polis Is This & meeting on April 20th

richard.deming at yale.edu richard.deming at yale.edu
Fri Apr 13 11:35:54 EDT 2007


April 13, 2007

Dear All,

Last Friday (April 6, 2007), the Working Group in Contemporary Poetics along
with Yale Collection of American Literature hosted a screening of Henry
Ferrini?s documentary on the poet Charles Olson, ?Polis Is This: Charles
Olson and the Persistence of Place.?  The film featured archival footage of
Olson reading and being interviewed as well as photographs of the poet taken
throughout his life.  The actor John Malkovich is featured in the film giving
intense recitations of Olson?s poetry.  As one would imagine in a documentary
such as this, there were a number of other poets (Amiri Baraka, Anne Waldman,
Robert Creeley, Robin Blaser, and Jonathan Williams, to name but a few) as well
as scholars in order to contextual Olson?s life and work.  Ferrini aims his
documentary at a audience less familiar with the poet?s work but the archival
material makes the film of general interest even to those who do know the work
well.  Interestingly (though surprisingly given that is where the poet and the
filmmaker call home), Ferrini builds the documentary around Olson?s life in
Gloucester, MA.  Not only then does he include a sense of the town?s history
and milieu but he also includes interviews and testimonials by citizens of the
town who speak of the cultural value of Olson to their community.  That
broadens the film?s scope and makes it less parochially academic than many
documentaries about writers can be.  This was the first showing of the film in
its finished version.  A website for the film is here
http://www.ferriniproductions.com/polis_is_this/index.html


Our attentions turn now from Olson to contemporary poetry of China.  We will
next meet on April 20th at 3 PM and we will discuss the work of 8 contemporary
Chinese poets.  A reading packet is now available in our mailbox in the Whitney
Humanities Center (in the main office).  A bilingual reading of a number of
Chinese poets is occurring on campus on the 18th  (see below for more
information) and one of the featured readers is Xi Chuan, who is in the packet
we?ll be reading.  Moreover Xi Chuan will be joining the WGCP for a
discussion of his work as well as his perspective on trends and issues in
contemporary Chinese writing. This is of course a remarkable opportunity to be
exposed to China?s poetry by one of its leading figures and is not to be
missed.  Our meeting on April 20 will prepare us for Xi Chuan?s visit 2 weeks
later.

Here is a bio of the poet: Liu Jun (Xi Chuan) is a poet, essayist and
translator, and has been recognized as one of the most dynamic poets living in
China today. He was born in 1963 in Jiangsu province, and graduated from the
English Department of Peking University in 1985. After his graduation he became
an editor of the Globe magazine, compiled by the Xinhua News Agency, and
presently he is teaching Classical and Modern Chinese Literature at the Central
Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Xi Chuan has published four collections of
poems including A Fictitious Family Tree (1997) and Roughly Speaking (1997),
two books of essays and one book of critique, in addition to a play and
numerous translations, including works of Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges and
Czeslaw Milosz. His own poetry and essays have been widely anthologized and
translated. He is the winner of prizes, honors and fellowships like the Modern
Chinese Poetry Prize (1994), UNESCO-ASCHBERG bursaries of artists (1997),
national Luxun Prize for Literature (2001), Freeman fellowship at the
International Writing Program of the University of Iowa, USA (2002), and the
Zhuang Zhongwen Prize for Literature (2003). He was awarded one of the top ten
winners of the Weimar International Essay Prize Contest (Germany, 1999).

A brief article about the poet is here:
http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/crevel.html



And as ever: The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics meets every
other Friday at 3.00 PM in room 116 at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale
University to discuss problems and issues of contemporary poetry within
international
alternative and /or avant-garde traditions of lyric poetry. All are welcome to
attend.


Richard Deming, Co-coordinator and Group Secretary




Contemporary Chinese Poets at Yale:

Poetry Reading in Chinese & English

Historic Gathering Featuring
Seven Established & Emerging
Poets from Mainland China

Xi Chuan ??
Zhai Yongming ???
Tang Xiaodu ???
Zhou Zan ??
Zhao Ye ??
Chen Chao ??
Luo Ying ??



Wednesday, April 18, 2007, 4:30 pm
Room 211, Linsley-Chittenden Hall, 63 High Street, New Haven, CT



Poets' bios appear below:

Xi Chuan ??
Xi Chuan, penname of Liu Jun, is a poet, essayist, and translator, and has been
recognized as one of the most dynamic poets living in China today.  He was born
in 1963 in Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, and graduated from the English Department
of Beijing University in 1985.  He was a frequent contributor to unofficial
poetry journals in Beijing, Shanghai, and Sichuan during the 1980s and 1990s. 
Xi Chuan has published four collections of poems including A Fictitious Family
Tree (1997) and Roughly Speaking (1997), two books of essays and one book of
critique, in addition to a play and numerous translations, including works of
Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges and Czeslaw Milosz. His own poetry and essays
have been widely anthologized and translated into many languages. He was
awarded the October Prize for literature by October Bimonthly in 1988, the
Prize of Shanghai Literature Monthly in 1992, the Prize of the People's
Literature Monthly in 1994, the Modern Chinese Poetry Prize in 1994, the Anne
Kao Prize for Poetry in 1995, and the Aiwen Prize for Literature in 1999.   He
is now an associate professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing,
currently serving as Freeman Visiting Professor at New York University.


Zhai Yongming ???
Zhai Yongming was born in 1955 in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. A graduate of the
Chengdu Institute for Electronic Science and Technology, she formerly worked in
a research institute of physics. She published her first book of poetry, Woman,
in 1986. Her other poetry collections include Above All Else the Roses (1989),
Collected Poems of Zhai Yongming (1994), Plain Songs in the Dark Night (1996),
Call It Everything (1997), and I Am Eventually Made Unworkable (2000). She is
also the author of three books of essays: Buildings on Paper (1997), Tenacious
Broken Flowers (1999), New York, to the West of New York (2003), and a book of
criticism, Just as What You?ve Seen (2005). Her poems have been translated
into English, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, German and other languages. In
2004, translated collections of her poems were published in German under the
title Café Song and in French under the title Consciousness of the Dark Night.
She has been invited to international conferences and poetry festivals in
England (1992), the Netherlands (1992), France (1997), and other countries. She
was awarded the USA-Italian Civitella Ranieri fellowship in 2005.


Tang Xiaodu ???
Born in 1954 in Yizheng, Jiangsu Province, Tang Xiaodu is a prolific poetry
critic and poet.  After graduating from Nanjing University in 1981, the
following year he became an editor at Poetry Monthly in Beijing. He is now a
senior editor at The Writers Publishing House and is a member of the Chinese
Writers? Association, a council member of the Chinese New Poetry Institute, a
research fellow at the New Poetry Research Center at Beijing University, and a
professor at Hainan University.  For over 20 years, Tang has devoted himself to
researching, criticizing, and compiling materials on Chinese contemporary
poetry, especially works of the avant-garde. He has published four collections
of critical essays including Starting Points Anew Constantly (1989),
Self-Selected Anthology of Tang Xiaodu?s Poetic Criticism (1993), Close
Readings of Masterpieces of Worldwide Modern Poetry (1998), and An Anthology of
Tang Xiaodu?s Essays on Poetics (2001). He has also translated the works of
many poets into Chinese, including Sylvia Plath, Vaclaw Havel, Czeslaw Milosz,
Zbigniew Herbert, and Miroslav Holub.  He has edited numerous poetry
anthologies, and his own work is much anthologized at home and abroad. He was
the recipient of the first Literature and Art?s Zhengming (contending) Award
and the first Shanhua (countryside flowers) Award for excellence in literary
theory in 1995. He was awarded the Modern Writers Review Prize for excellence
in literary criticism in 2004 and 2005.  Tang has been a frequent guest at
poetry conferences and festivals in the West since the mid- 1990s and has also
been a visiting scholar at many universities abroad.


Zhou Zan ??
Zhou Zan was born in 1968 in Jiangsu Province.  She is a poet, scholar,
translator, and editor-in-chief of Wings, a literary journal for Chinese
women?s poetry.  She holds a PhD from the Chinese department of Beijing
University, where she completed a dissertation on the avant-garde in
contemporary Chinese poetry.  Her poetry collection, Loosen: Selected Poems
1997-2005, was published in 2007, and her other works include volumes of
critical essays entitled Through the Periscope of Poetic Writing (2007) and
Studies on Chinese Contemporary Literature (2001). Her translation of Margaret
Atwood?s Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965-1995 is forthcoming from The
Writers Press in 2007. She currently lives in New York as a visiting scholar at
Columbia University.


Zhao Ye ??
Zhao Ye was born in Sichuan Province in 1964 and graduated from the Foreign
Languages Department of Sichuan University. In 1982, he initiated the poetic
movement of ?The Third Generation,? and in 1983 he organized the Poetry
League of University Students in Chengdu, where he compiled The Third
Generation, the first unofficial poetic journal in China. In 1985 he joined the
Young Poets? Association of Sichuan Province and jointly compiled The
Collection of Modern Poetry for Internal Exchange. In 1989 he helped initiate
the unofficial poetry journal Xiang Wang. In 2000 he was awarded a poetry prize
by The Writer, one of the most influential literary magazines in China. In 2003,
his poetry collection Time Passes Like Flowing Water was published by the
Writers? Press. In 2005 he attended the Asia and Circum-Pacific Region Poetry
Conference in Tokyo.


Chen Chao ??
Chen Chao was born in 1958 in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province.  He is a professor in
the Literature Department of Hebei Normal University, as well as a research
fellow of the Chinese New Poetry Research Institute affiliated with Beijing
University, an editorial member of the literary journal New Poetry Review, and
the vice-chairperson of the Hebei Writers? Association. His main works
include: ?A Discussion of Poetry of the School of Life,? ?Opening the
Drifting Bottle of Poetry?Modern Poetry Research Papers,?  ?An
Appreciation of Inquiries on Twentieth-Century Chinese Poetry,? ?A Guide to
Reading Outstanding Works of Contemporary Foreign Poetry,? and a collection of
original poems entitled Passion, Yes.  In total, he has published more than two
hundred academic articles and more than three hundred poems.  In 1993 he was
awarded the Sixth Zhuang Zhongwen Literary Prize by the Chinese Writers?
Association, in 2000 he received the annual poetry prize from the literary
journal The Writer, and in 2005 he took third place in the ?Lu Xun Literary
Prize? awarded by the Chinese Writers? Association.  Additionally, he has
won many other literary prizes.


Luo Ying ??
Luo Ying is the penname of Huang Nubo. Born in Lanzhou, Gansu Province, he grew
up in Yinchuan, Ningxia Province. He graduated from the Chinese Language and
Literature Department of Beijing University in 1981 and obtained an EMBA from
the Chinese-European International Industry and Commerce Institute in 1998. He
began writing poetry in 1976, and, in 1992, he published his first poetry
collection, Don?t Love Me Anymore. His other poetry collections include
Melancholy Declined (1995), Fallen Blossoms (2003), and Wandering in Cities
(2005). While acknowledging that there are many ?I?s? in his poems, he
believes that even if one adds his real persona to all of these, it is still
impossible to make up an integral self. He believes himself to be a world
abundant in possibilities and transformations.








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