[Wgcp-whc] Notley books available, next session, events

Mon Mar 18 11:11:16 EDT 2013

Dear All,

we have come through the Ides of March and St Patrick's Day and the official start of spring is just a few days away. Now is a time to think of the next two WGCP sessions.  This email will give information about that and then also includes announcements for some upcoming events of interest (I'll paste those at the end).

We will next meet on on Friday April 5 from 3-5PM in room B04 of the Whitney Humanities Center.  The focus of our discussion will be the work of Alice Notley.  Specifically we will concentrate on one of her most recent books of poems: Culture of One.  Copies of this book are now available on the bookshelf in room 116 of the Whitney Humanities Center.  These are free to any regular members.  We just ask that you only take a copy of you're reasonably sure you will make it to at least one of the two meetings devoted to this work. 

Here is a bio for Notley:

Alice Notley, who was active in the New York poetry scene of the 1970s, is often identified with the so-called second generation New York School poets, though her work also shows the influence of Modernist writers like William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein. Taking on themes ranging from cultural politics to gender, Notley's later style has evolved into a formally ambitious attempt to transcribe thought itself. According to Joel Brouwer in the New York Times, the "radical freshness" of Notley's poems "stems not from what they talk about, but how they talk, in a stream-of-consciousness style that both describes and dramatizes the movement of the poet's restless mind, leaping associatively from one idea or sound to the next without any irritable reaching after reason or plot."

Notley has published over 25 books of poetry. In addition to the Marshall and Griffin prizes, Notley has received the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She currently lives in Paris.

Here is the Poets and Writers Magazine note on Culture of One (written by our own Ravi Shankar):
Victor Shklovsky in 1916 posited that one crucial function of art is estrangement, defamiliarization or making the commonplace strange again and that's just what Alice Notley has accomplished in Culture of One (Penguin Books, 2011) by inventing the compelling voice of Marie who lives in a dump in the desert and has to construct her life with the materials found there, the detritus and ephemera becoming her book of wisdom. These disposable texts, which swamp our collective imaginations, are very much a part of our shared culture of disregard, and Notley, as she has for decades, reorients our attention to the ‘robotic jewels [that] can be stroked or focused’ and the essential cri de coeur that just wants ‘to SEE, without brambles like you in front of me, / stressing me out.’ Blending a fragmentary narrative from the internal cognitive landscape of a wounded but perspicuous heroine who walks inside a lucent force and projects it too, Notley is an underrated treasure, an American living in Paris as the genuine inheritor of the Left Bank expatriate genius of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Gertrude Stein, and Chester Himes, and this latest book finds her at the top of her game.”

—Ravi Shankar from New Haven, Connecticut

Here is a discussion between Notley and Kenyon Review Editor, David Baker: http://www.kenyonreview.org/conversation/alice-notley/

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And here are 3 reviews of the book from online journals:

http://www.smartishpace.com/reviews/alice_notley_culture_of_one/

http://www.bookslut.com/poetry/2011_09_018193.php

http://coldfrontmag.com/reviews/alice-notley-culture-of-one

 Notley will be reading at the Beinecke at 4 PM on Thursday April 18th.  She will then join the WGCP the next day to discuss her work with us.

 As ever, we are open to newcomers and visitors, so please do pass word of these events to anyone who might be interested. In the meantime, those events I mentioned are described below. Have a great second half of spring break.

 Richard Deming. Coordinator, WGCP

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Katie Yates presents a reading by Nate Klug and Mark Lamoureux at the Infinite Well (123 Court Street, New Haven)  tomorrow, March 19th, beginning at 7.30. See attached flyer for the deets.

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"Footprints. Art Exhibit + Reading: Thursday, March 28th, 2013

@ Fellowship Place

441 Elm Street

New Haven, CT 06511

203-401-4227

1-3pm, Art-room. Ask to sign in as a guest at the front gate with

Denise, the receptionist.

Feat. the paintings of Maxwell Clark (possibly one other artist)

Readings by Desiree Branch and Maxwell Clark, fellows and poets.

Refreshments will be served.

contact: maxclark84 at gmail.com"

http://06515.blogspot.com/2013/03/footprints-art-exhibit-reading-32813.html

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Beyond the Text: Literary Archives in the 21st Century

April 26–27, 2013 

REGISTRATION REQUIRED

Register here: http://beinekebeyondtext-eorg.eventbrite.com
Details: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/programs-events/events/beyond-text

The two-day symposium will bring together literary and information science scholars, historians, curators, archivists, writers, and publishers. Panelists will explore the collaborations between library professionals and scholars around use of manuscript material in teaching and research, the intersections between archival and literary theory, and the impact of the changing shape of archives on institutional stewardship and scholarship.

SPONSORED BY
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University

LOCATION
Whitney Humanities Center at Yale, 53 Wall Street, New Haven, CT

PANELS
Born Digital • Sound Archives • Publishers’ Archives • Intersections of Archival and Literary Theory • Romance of the Archive • Teaching with Literary Archives • Mining the Archive 

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