[Wgcp-whc] New Semester--First session on 9/14

[Richard Deming]

Dear Comrades,


A new academic year is about to begin and The Beinecke Library/Whitney Humanities Center Seminar for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (WGCP for short) is rumbling back to life after last spring's brief hiatus whilst two of our coordinators were abroad.  Jean-Jacques Poucel, one of our founding coordinators is staying abroad--beginning this spring he will be landing at the University of Calgary with his wife Marita and their new baby boy, Jules.  A loud round of congratulations to them all, though this means that Jean-Jacques will become a "member at large."

Here in New Haven, we will continue on and we have a very international year ahead in terms of our visitors.  Forthcoming guests for this year include: Jan Wagner (Germany), Michel Delville (Belgium), John Koethe (USA), Alice Notley (USA/France), and Lisa Robertson (Canada/France).

Our first guest is Michel Delville, one of the world's foremost scholars (and practitioners) of the prose poem (below I will post his official bio). Delville will be joining us for the first session of the semester on Friday September 14, from 3-5 PM in room 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.   Delville will lead a discussion on the prose poem, talking to the WGCP about his research in this particular poetic form with such a fraught and even somewhat controversial history.  Attached, you will find some of Delville's essays about the prose poem, including the introduction to his groundbreaking study, The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre (U of Florida Press, 1998). These will serve as the basis for our discussion on 9/14. We will also look at his new collection of his own prose poems, Third Body. We have bought copies of this book and will distribute them to those who are interested.  We only ask that you take a copy only if you are reasonably sure you will come to the actual session.  We still need to determine where we will leave copies of this book for distribution.  When I know that, I will email again. 

Here is a link to a very useful review by Marjorie Perloff of Delville's The American Prose Poem: http://marjorieperloff.com/reviews/delville-prose/

Here is Delville's bio: Michel Delville is a writer and musician born in Liège, Belgium. He is the author of The American Prose Poem; J.G. Ballard;Hamlet & Co (with Pierre Michel); Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism (with Andrew Norris); Food, Poetry, and the Art of Consumption: Eating the Avant-Garde, and many other essays pertaining to comparative poetics and interdisciplinary studies. He teaches literature at the University of Liège, where he directs the Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Poetics. His awards as a writer and essayist include the SAMLA Book Award, the Choice Outstanding Book Award, the Léon Guérin Prize and the 2001 Alumni Award of theBelgianAmerican Educational Foundation. As a musician, he has recorded and toured extensively with various bands such asThe Wrong Object and Alex Maguire Sextet, as well as high-profile jazz and rock musicians including Elton Dean, Harry Beckett, Annie Whitehead and Ed Mann. He was recently signed to the New York-based label Moonjune Records.



We are very fortune to have this thoughtful and influential poet/scholar joining us from Belgium.  It should prove to be a generative and compelling first session of the new year.   
 
As a reminder, the WGCP is open to all, so please feel free to spread the word of our activities to anyone who might be interested. In a subsequent email, I will announce the specific dates of our sessions this semester. 


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.

Onward
Richard Deming, Group Coordinator





-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20120820/5ca79562/attachment-0004.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: DelvilleAnthology--Final.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 775103 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20120820/5ca79562/attachment-0002.pdf 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20120820/5ca79562/attachment-0005.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Delvilleintroduction toamericanprosepoem.doc
Type: application/msword
Size: 76800 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20120820/5ca79562/attachment-0001.doc 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20120820/5ca79562/attachment-0006.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: DelvilleMarginalArts--Final.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 1696582 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20120820/5ca79562/attachment-0003.pdf 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/wgcp-whc/attachments/20120820/5ca79562/attachment-0007.html