Monday, September 22, 2014

Ann Lauterbach Symposium at Université Paris Est Marne-La-Vallée, Monday 15 December & Tuesday 16 December


On Monday 15 December and Tuesday 16 December, we will be hosting a 2 day symposium on Ann Lauterbach’s work at Université Paris Est Marne-La-Vallée, bâtiment Copernic, 2nd floor, room 2B055-057 (Monday) and room 2B047-049 (Tuesday). 

How to get there? See here.

So far, we’ve tried to focus on the writer’s own (creative and critical) work on the first day of the P&C symposia and on broader issues of poetics and practice-based criticism with the writer on the second day. But there’s no specific preconceived program for the 2 days of the symposium: as the previous sessions of the program have shown, it seems important to let the conversation take its own course.


Bio, bibliography & links from National Poetry Foundation website : 


We will be meeting in the morning of December 15th at 10 am to prepare our sessions with Ann Lauterbach. Ann Lauterbach will be joining us at 2 pm on the 15th. She will also be with us all day on the 16th.

On Monday 15 December at 8pm, Ann Lauterbach will give a poetry reading in Paris.

Poems and essays available from the following websites:
- The Poetry Foundation
- Poets.orghttp://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poems/46011
Excerpts from books are also linked to on this website. 



Lauterbach was born in New York City, the daughter of a war correspondent or Life and Time magazines in Moscow who was also the head of the Moscow Bureau of Time during World War II. Lauterbach’s father died in 1950, when Ann was still a child; this absence and his absences while traveling would later feature in her poetry. As a child, Lauterbach studied painting and became especially interested in abstract expressionism. After receiving a BA in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1964, she attended Columbia University for one year on a Woodrow Wilson graduate fellowship. At the completion of her studies, Lauterbach moved to London, England, where she edited books and taught literature. In 1974 she returned to the United States and immersed herself in the art world, working as an art consultant and an assistant director to various art galleries.




Poet Ann Lauterbach's work has been compared to the poetry of John Ashbery and Barbara Guest. She has published several volumes of poetry, including Many Times, but Then (1979), Before Recollection (1987),Clamor (1991), And for Example (1994), On a Stair(1997), If in Time (2001),Hum (2005) and Or to Begin Again (2009), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. If in Time, a volume of her selected poetry, demonstrates the transformation of her style over three decades, an evolution described by Thomas Fink in the Boston Review: “Lauterbach has found new forms for expressing the continuousness of change: its ways of summoning and disrupting intimacy, of evoking and subverting the position of perceptions and the framing and decentering play of language itself.” 



Lauterbach's linguistically complex, senstive work has been compared to the poetry of John Ashbery and Barbara Guest.“Suffice it to say that she evidently wants us to experience her work form-first, to sense its shapes before shaping a sense,” noted critic Andrew Osborn of the poems in On a Stair. Lauterbach seems to concur with this assessment. In a Rain Taxi interview, she declared, “I’m much more interested in a more difficult kind of sense-making, and I mean difficult in the sense of complexity, and obscurity, but not willful obscurity, just the fact that there are certain things we cannot penetrate and do not know, we can’t know, we may never know.” In an essay for the Poetry Society of America, she further discussed the disjunctions in her work: “I began to give up the use of classical syntax, the logic of cause and effect, of an assumed relation between subject and object, after my sister died. The narrative as story had been ruptured once and for all; I wanted the gaps to show.” In Or to Begin Again Lauterbach continues to investigate the potential of narrative and rupture, as well as the differences between spoken and written language; taking its title from a sixteen-poem elegy, the book also contains the long poem “Alice in the Wasteland,” which uses the work of both Lewis Carroll and T.S. Eliot to explore language, reading, and consciousness.
In addition to poetry, Lauterbach has published a book of essays, The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience (2005). She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. For over 15 years, she has taught at Bard College and co-directed the Writing Division of the MFA program. She has also taught at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Columbia University, Princeton University, and the University of Iowa.



BIBLIOGRAPHY 



POETRY
o    Vertical, Horizontal, Seafront Press (Dublin, Ireland), 1971.
o    Book One, Spring Street Press (New York, NY), 1975.
o    Many Times, but Then, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), 1979.
o    Later That Evening, Jordan Davies (Brooklyn, NY), 1981.
o    Closing Hours, Red Ozier Press (Madison, WI), 1983.
o    Sacred Weather, with a drawing by Louisa Chase, Grenfell Press (New York, NY), 1984.
o    (With Bruce Boice) Greeks, photographs by Jan Groover, Hollow Press (Baltimore, MD), 1985.
o    Before Recollection, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1987.
o    How Things Bear Their Telling, with drawings by Lucio Pozzi, Collectif Generation (Colombes, France), 1990.
o    Clamor, Viking (New York, NY), 1991.
o    And for Example, Viking (New York, NY), 1994.
o    A Clown, Some Colors, a Doll, Her Stories,a Song, a Moonlit Cove, with photogravures by Ellen Phelan, Whitney Museum (New York, NY), 1996.
o    On a Stair, Penguin Poets (New York, NY), 1997.
o    If in Time: Selected Poems 1975-2000, Penguin Poets, 2001.
o    Hum, Penguin Poets, 2005.
o    Or to Begin Again, Penguin Poets, 2009.

ESSAYS
o    The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience, Viking, 2005.


BOOKS
o    Contemporary Women Poets, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1998.
o    Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 193: American Poets since World War II, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.
o    The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry, University of Alabama Press (Tuscaloosa, AL), 1995.

PERIODICALS
o    American Poetry Review, January-February 1988; May-June 1992.
o    Booklist, November 15, 1994, Elizabteh Gunderson, review of And for Example, p. 574.
o    Choice, March, 1980, review of Many Times, but Then, p. 74; December, 1987, M. Gillian, review of Before Recollection, p. 622.
o    Cream City Review, summer, 1988.
o    Denver Quarterly, spring, 1995.
o    Diacritics, fall-winter, 1996.
o    Hudson Review, spring, 1992, Andrew Hudgins, review of Clamor, p. 162; summer, 1995, Thomas M. Disch, review of And for Example, p. 345.
o    Ohio Review, no. 48, 1990.
o    Parnassus, spring-summer, 1981, Bonnie Costello, "Four Ways to Break the Silence," pp. 111-124.
o    Partisan Review, spring 1994.
o    o    Publishers Weekly, October 31, 1994, review of And for Example, p. 54.
o    Queen's Quarterly, spring, 1989, Myra Junyk, review of Before Recollection, pp. 159-162.
o    Talisman, fall, 1994; winter, 1995.
o    Times Literary Supplement, January 18, 1980, John Fuller, "The Americans," p. 65.
o    Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 1991; winter, 1998, p. 28.
o    Wallace Stevens Review, fall, 1995.
o    Washington Post Book World, February 16, 1992, Harriet Zinnes, "Sound and Sense," p. 11.







Sunday, September 21, 2014

Ann Lauterbach Interview by Brainard Carey from Yale radio WYBC

(c) Steve Evans


Listen to Ann Lauterbach interview by Brainard Carey from Yale Radio WYBC at http://museumofnonvisibleart.com/interviews/ann-lauterbach/ or by pressing play below:





source: Yale Radio WYBC

Ann Lauterbach's Essay "The Given and the Chosen"

 Ann Lauterbach wrote "The Given and the Chosen" at the invitation of David Levi Strauss, Chair of Art Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where Ann Lauterbach gave her talk as part of D. L. Straus's lecture series on the 11th of February 2010.

Ann Lauterbach subsequently published her essay with Omnidawn (2011; click on image for more information) and gave her lecture in the Sherry Poet-In-Residence Series of the University of Chicago (full length video below).


Ann Lauterbach's Under the Sign

Click on book cover for excerpts from the book.

Ann Lauterbach's Hum

Click on book cover for excerpts from the book.


Ann Lauterbach's On a Stair

Click on book cover for excerpts from the book.








Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Anne Waldman Symposium at Université Paris Est Créteil, May 12-13

(c) Greg Fuchs for Coffee House Press

On Monday 12 and Tuesday 13 May, we will be hosting a 2 day symposium on Anne Waldman’s work at Université Paris Est Créteil, salle 117, Maison des Langues. How to get there? See here.

We will be meeting in the morning of May 12 at 10 am to prepare our sessions with Anne Waldman. Anne Waldman will be joining us at 2 pm on the 12th. She will also be with us all day on the 13th.

So far, we’ve tried to focus on the writer’s own (creative and critical) work on the first day of the P&C symposia and on broader issues of poetics and practice-based criticism with the writer on the second day. But there’s no specific preconceived program for the 2 days of the symposium: as the previous sessions of the program have shown, it seems important to let the conversation take its own course. 

We will work primarily on Anne's last books: Gossamurmur and Manatee/HumanityAnd will also concentrate on some of her essays contained in Vow to Poetry

We will of course discuss a broad range of topics from criticism, pedagogy, poetic institutions such as Naropa, which Anne founded with Allen Ginsberg and others. And of course, matters of poeticity as well as literary history (her crucial position in the poetic field) will be central. 

On the occasion of the publication of her book Archives, pour un monde menacé, translated by Vincent Broqua (collection américaine, joca seria, May 2014), Anne Waldman will give a reading at the Maison de la Poésie de Paris on May 12 at 8pm, with Patrick Beurard-Valdoye

Anne Waldman's bio, from her website: 



Internationally recognized and acclaimed poet Anne Waldman has been an active member of the “Outrider” experimental poetry community, a culture she has helped create and nurture for over four decades as writer, editor, teacher, performer, magpie scholar, infra-structure curator, and cultural/political activist. Her poetry is recognized in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg, and in the Beat, New York School, and Black Mountain trajectories of the New American Poetry. Yet she remains a highly original “open field investigator” of consciousness, committed to the possibilities of radical shifts of language and states of mind to create new modal structures and montages of attention. Her work is energetic, passionate, panoramic, fierce at times. She is the author of more than 40 books, including the mini-classic Fast Speaking Woman, a collection of essays entitled Vow to Poetry and several selected poems editions including Helping the Dreamer, Kill or Cure and In the Room of Never Grieve. She has concentrated on the long poem as a cultural intervention with such projects as Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of The World Compared to a Bubble, and Manatee/Humanity, which is a book-length rhizomic meditation on evolution and endangered species, and the monumental anti-war feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, a 25 year project.

She was one of the founders and directors of The Poetry Project at St. Marks’s Church In-the-Bowery, working there for twelve years. She also co-founded with Allen Ginsberg the celebrated Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, the first Buddhist inspired University in the western hemisphere, in 1974. Ginsberg has called Waldman his “spiritual wife.” She is a Distinguished Professor of Poetics at Naropa and continues to work to preserve the school’s substantial literary/oral archive. She has edited and co-edited many collections based on the holdings of the Kerouac School including Civil Disobediences andBeats at Naropa. She is also the editor of Nice to See You, an homage to poet Ted Berrigan, The Beat Book, and co-editor of The Angel Hair Anthology.
She has been a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, a fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, and has held the Emily Harvey residency in Venice. She has worked at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and at the Women’s Christian College in Tokyo, She has presented her work at conferences and festivals around the world, most recently in Wuhan, Beijing, Berlin, Nicaragua, Prague, Kerala, Mumbai, Calcutta, Marrakech, and Madrid. Her work has been translated into numerous languages.
Waldman works with the anti-nuclear Guardianship Project in Boulder and was arrested in the 1970s with Allen Ginsberg and activist Daniel Ellsberg at Rocky Flats, which led to a commitment to the accountability for nuclear waste to future generations, a vow that according to Waldman is “a nearly quarter of a million year project.”
“Waldman’s work is the antithesis of stasis. . . . She is a flame,” as one reviewer has noted.
She has also collaborated extensively with a number of artists, musicians, and dancers, including George Schneeman, Elizabeth Murray, Richard Tuttle, Donna Dennis, and Pat Steir, and the theatre director Judith Malina. Her play “Red Noir” was produced by the Living Theatre and ran for nearly three months in New York City in 2010. She has also been working most recently with other media including audio, film and video, with her husband, writer and video/film director Ed Bowes, and with her son, musician and composer Ambrose Bye. Publishers Weekly recently referred to Waldman as “a counter-cultural giant.”
“Cyborg on the Zattere,” with music by composer Steven Taylor and 12 performers, including cellist Ha-Yang Kim and reed instrumentalist Marty Erlich and a Renaissance trio, premiered at the Douglas Dunn Salon in Spring of 2011. This “Poundatorio” takes on the “knot” of Ezra Pound, his poetics and politics. It includes settings for parts of the Pisan Cantos.
She was active in Occupy Art, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street in NYC, and has recently been involved in projects around the theme of Symbiosis, which studies the interaction between two or more different biological species. “The living together of unlike organisms,” a challenge for our times. How to include the cyborg? How to insure / take better care of the “human” in relation. Fight the pipelines and induced hydraulic fracturing. More arts in education!
Waldman is a recipient of 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, and has recently been appointed a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. TheHuffington Post named her one of the top advocates for American poetry.
Waldman divides her time between New York City and Boulder, Colorado.  

Anne Waldman's first full length book in France: *Archives, pour un monde menacé* edited and translated by Vincent Broqua, collection américaine, joca seria


textes rassemblés et traduits par Vincent Broqua
couverture Kiki Smith
Collection américaine des éditions joca seria
160 pages
mai 2014
Archives, pour un monde menacé est le premier livre de la grande poète, écrivain et artiste Anne Waldman publié en France. Venant compléter les quelques titres édités par le collectif Maelstrom en Belgique, le livre, préparé et traduit par Vincent Broqua, traducteur et spécialiste de poésie américaine, est un choix de textes couvrant les treize dernières années de l’œuvre d’Anne Waldman. Archives, pour un monde menacé donne donc à lire l’évolution d’une pensée et d’une pratique poétique, mais aussi philosophique et politique, au début du 21ème siècle. Ce choix éditorial de textes récents est d’autant plus significatif qu’il s’appuie aussi sur les leçons tirées du passé, qu’il tienne de la mémoire collective ou bien, plus précisément, de la mémoire littéraire. En effet, ces cinquante dernières années, Anne Waldman, en fréquentant et rassemblant un très grand nombre d’écrivains autour de divers projets, comme The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics qu’elle a fondée avec Allen Ginsberg ou plusieurs aventures éditoriales, est devenue l’infatigable animatrice de la poésie américaine, une mémoire à elle seule de la seconde moitié du 20ème siècle américain en art et littérature. Archives, pour un monde menacé, apporte un double démenti à la critique parfois adressée à l’encontre de l’école de New York  : que ce groupe d’écrivains était apolitique et que les femmes y étaient absentes. La voix puissante, féminine et féministe d’Anne Waldman donne vie à ces Archives. C’est une voix «  pour  », une voix affirmative qui, au lieu de renoncer, propose.

«  L’écriture d’Anne Waldman est singulière dans la poésie américaine contemporaine. Elle effectue en effet un lien entre la poésie la plus expérimentale, celle qui prend le langage comme lieu d’expérience formelle, et la poésie post-romantique des Beat Poets, où la voix lyrique a une part importante. En effet, parce qu’elle écrit pour la performance en reprenant ou en créant des formes multiples (épopée, élégie, collage, poème-partition, document poétique…), son travail et sa voix ont, comme chez les Beat Poets, un poids politique évident, qui, comme chez les L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, n’est pas dénué d’un humour poétique parfois volontiers loufoque. Ainsi, dans Tullamurmur, elle se dédouble et crée deux «  Anne  », dont l’une est un miroir déformé de l’autre, les deux «  Anne  » se pillant l’une l’autre. 

Archives, pour un monde menacé, dont le titre a été donné en accord avec Anne Waldman, est une lecture de ses quatre derniers livres publiés dans la collection Penguin Poets. En effet, Marriage  : A Sentence (2000), puis Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble (2004), puis Manatee/Humanity (2009), et enfin Gossamurmur (2013) constituent un ensemble poétique, politique et éthique. 



Possédant tous une forme différente, issue directement du sujet qu’ils traitent, ils plongent le lecteur dans un questionnement voire un acte méditatif qui est une expérimentation langagière de la relation entre les mots et le monde. Marriage  : a Sentence joue sur le double, la répétition, la paire, pour donner à entendre les formes et les contradictions du mariage et de la place des femmes au sein de pratiques rituelles contestées. Chaque page est double  : l’une, en prose, archive et met en crise des rituels et des formes de cérémonies ou des équivoques (comme avec la reprise deFigaro), l’autre partie en vers opère un contrepoint, souvent sous la forme de la liste. Dans Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, le texte d’introduction présente la série de poèmes du livre comme un ensemble qui vise d’une part à mettre en texte la conservation d’un lieu qui était menacé (l’immense Stupa de Borobudur), en lien aux pratiques du bouddhisme, telles que la Mudra, traduite dans ce volume. Il faut y voir une manière de répertorier, cartographier, des gestes (images du Bouddha), des architectures (images de Borobudur), des pratiques de méditation. Enfin, les deux livres les plus récents, qui ouvrent et ferment le volume que nous publions, s’interrogent sur le rapport entre animalité et humanité, comme l’indique très clairement le titre de Manatee/Humanity (Lamantin/L’humanité). 
Dans ces quatre livres, l’archive devient donc une forme poétique (utilisation de documents poétiques, utilisation d’images, collage au fil du texte de citations de poètes ayant lu à Naropa dans Gossamurmur) pour donner à lire la fragilité du langage et la fragilité de la lettre dans un monde en déséquilibre, qui, avec Gossamurmur, prend la forme d’une fable où le capitalisme menace la poésie même. D’où aussi les efforts faits à Naropa depuis des décennies pour créer un lieu entièrement dévolu à la poésie et aux différentes formes de poésies. 

Ainsi, sans jamais tomber dans un formalisme apolitique ou dans un engagement sans forme, ou encore dans une poésie New Age, qu’elle moque de temps à autre, Anne Waldman met en œuvre une éthique poétique, une poéthique de l’archive, dont nous souhaitions donner à lire des moments singuliers à travers ces larges extraits.  » 



Vincent Broqua

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

AW on Anne Waldman's Vow to Poetry

Anne Waldman, Vow to Poetry, Minneapolis, Coffee House Press, 2001.

Anne Waldman interviewed on the book HERE.

Thursday, January 2, 2014

"Formes Critiques Contemporaines," co-edited by Vincent Broqua and Jean-Jacques Poucel available online

"Formes Critiques Contemporaines," co-edited by Vincent Broqua (UPEC) and Jean-Jacques Poucel (U. Calgary) is now available online (click on the image below for full access to the issue).