Quips & Cranks

Discussion #3 in our series is:
Documentary Poetics

poet Jena Osman
poet Kristin Prevallet
painter Zachary Wollard

on Thursday, April 28 at 7 PM
at The School of Visual Arts
136 West 21st Street, room 220 (on the second floor)
NYC

Admission: Free and open to the public.

Presented by the MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department at SVA

Documentary Poetics: How do different arts understand and practice documentary poetics, and what can they learn from one another? Although the “documentary” mode entails a certain amount of artifice when it translates reality into art, documentary draws its authority from a claim to be nonfiction or to be recording external reality, often by playing on the emotions of viewers. What draws artists and poets to this claim associated with the documentary mode, and how does it relate to their process of making art? What if we think of documentary as encompassing artwork that, rather than trying to move the viewer, presents dangerous information? One example that comes to mind is Hans Haacke’s “Real Time Social System,” the listing of real estate holdings in Manhattan which was declared “not art” by the Guggenheim Museum. What if we throw in Olson’s investigative poetics–the idea of immersing oneself in one aspect of reality-or the documentary poetics of Kristen Prevallet and Jena Osman, who use social facticity and procedural methods to achieve dramatic political and aesthetic effects? What do we say about Zachary Wollard’s psychedelic and visionary translations of reality into memorable and sometimes disturbing images? Clearly “information” is not a neutral category, especially when we are dealing with problematic or difficult information. If we honor the (at times dubious) claims of documentary as a genre, is it possible for us to “lie with statistics” in an ethical way? Moderated by poets Vincent Katz and Tim Peterson.

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Jena Osman‘s latest book is The Network (Fence Books, selected for 2009 National Poetry Series). Other books include The Character and An Essay in Asterisks. She teaches in the graduate Creative Writing Program at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Kristin Prevallet is a poet, essayist and performer who is the author of four books including I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time and Scratch Sides: Poetry, Documentation, and Image-text Projects. Recent documents have appeared in VLAK: Poetics and the Arts, VIZ Inter-Arts, and the forthcoming anthology I’ll Drown My Book. She works as a hypnotherapist (trancepoetics.com) and lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Zachary Wollard grew up in Kansas City and went on to study English Literature at Columbia University. He began working as a painter after graduation. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and sculpture and had his first solo show in 2004 at Massimo Audiello gallery, New York. Since then he has shown his work in many venues in the United States, and in Europe. Recent shows include “Psychedelic and Visionary Art since the 1960′s” at the San Antonio Museum of Art and “Empty Collisions” at Larissa Goldston Gallery, New York. His work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, NY.

Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, and publisher. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including Alcuni Telefonini, a collaboration with painter Francesco Clemente (Granary Books). He is the publisher and editor of the poetry and arts journal VANITAS and of Libellum books. He co-curates the Readings in Contemporary Poetry series at Dia Chelsea.

Tim Peterson (Trace) is a poet and critic, author of the book Since I Moved In (Chax Press, 2007) and the recent chapbook Violet Speech (2nd Avenue Poetry, 2011). Peterson edits EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts and curates events throughout NYC.

Discussion #2 in our series is
Poetry as Music: A Different Way of Thinking

painter and publisher Phong Bui
poet Kimberly Lyons
poet Anselm Berrigan

on Thursday, March 17, at 7 PM
at the School of Visual Arts
136 West 21st St, room 220 (on the second floor)
NYC

Admission: Free and open to the public

Presented by the MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department at SVA

Poetry as Music: poets Anselm Berrigan and Kimberly Lyons join painter and publisher Phong Bui to discuss ways in which musical forms can be seen as fruitful terms for a poetics of difficult or willfully obscure art, art that does not yield easily to analysis. A particular focus for this topic will be the poetry of Barbara Guest and Joe Ceravolo. We see in them, and in some poets working today, an interest in musicality that dominates the nature and composition of the work. Rather than texts generated from a pre-determined taxonomy, platform, or political position, the poetry of Guest and Ceravolo is most usefully thought of as something for which we do not yet have language. It is most evocatively approached using an emergent vocabulary of analogies, like those from music: sounds, phrases, introductions, interludes, endings, codas, etc. Painting–abstract painting springs to mind, but the same can apply to paintings with images–are also an endeavor whose expression can be analyzed in terms of music. We wish to trace some of these commonalities across different art forms. Moderated by poets Vincent Katz and Tim Peterson.

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Phong Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator (P.S.1 curatorial advisor 2007-2010) and Co-Founder, Editor/Publisher of the monthly journal The Brooklyn Rail, publishing press The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions, and Host/Producer of “Off The Rail” on Art International Radio. He is currently teaching at University of Pennsylvania MFA Program and School of Visual Arts Graduate Program in Art Criticism & Writing as a Senior Critic. His installation work has received the Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Eric Isenburger Annual Prize for Installation from the National Academy Museum (2003).

Kimberly Lyons is the author of the books of poems Phototherapique (Katalanche Press/Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2008), Saline (Instance Press, 2005), Abracadabra, and Mettle, a collaboration with artist Ed Epping (the last two from Granary Books) and has had poems published in the journals Aufgabe, EOAGH, New American Writing, Peaches and Bats, and Talisman. She is the publisher of a new imprint, Lunar Chandelier, which has three books of poetry forthcoming: Homework by Joe Elliot; petals, emblems by Lynn Behrendt; and Deliberate Proof by Vyt Bakaitis.

Anselm Berrigan‘s most recent book of poems is Free Cell (City Lights, 2009). Other books include Some Notes on My Programming (Edge, 2006), Zero Star Hotel (Edge, 2002), and Notes From Irrelevance (forthcoming 2011, Wave Books). He is the poetry editor of The Brooklyn Rail and co-editor of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan and the forthcoming Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan, both published by University of California Press. From 2003-2007 he was Artistic Director of the Poetry Project at St Mark’s Church. He currently teaches writing at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn College, and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts.

Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, and publisher. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including Alcuni Telefonini, a collaboration with painter Francesco Clemente (Granary Books). He is the publisher and editor of the poetry and arts journal VANITAS and of Libellum books. He co-curates the Readings in Contemporary Poetry series at Dia Chelsea.

Tim Peterson (Trace) is author of the book Since I Moved In (Chax Press, 2007) and of the recent chapbook Violet Speech (2nd Avenue Poetry, 2011). Peterson edits EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts and curates readings and events throughout NYC including the TENDENCIES: Poetics and Practice talks series at CUNY Graduate Center.

QUIPS & CRANKS:
A Series of Panel Discussions on Poetics in the Arts
curated by Vincent Katz & Tim Peterson

Discussion #1
Not Nature Poems: Current Trends in Ecopoetics

Our first discussion this season features:

painter Rackstraw Downes
poet Brenda Iijima
critic/scholar Joan Richardson
poet Jonathan Skinner

on Thursday, September 16
at 6:30 PM
at The School of Visual Arts
133/141 West 21 Street, room 101C
NYC

Admission: Free and open to the public.

Ecopoetics : how are artists reconceiving their work in respect to nature?  Poets Brenda Ijima and Jonathan Skinner join painter Rackstraw Downes and critic/scholar Joan Richardson to discuss recent developments in their work regarding how to make art in relation to devastating human-engendered changes in the natural environment. As more artists respond to the condition of climate change, ecopoetics asks how we can begin to have a new understanding of our volatile world.  How can and should we reimagine the way we conceive our relationship to nature?  Is language “just talk” in the face of the current environmental crisis?  Have our traditional ways of articulating ecological awareness – through either elegy or Chicken Little pronouncements that the sky is falling – become outdated ideas that rely upon problematic assumptions?   What can our active roles be, given the increasingly volatile natural world in which we live and participate?

Two of the jumping-off points for our discussion will be recent publications by panel participants, including Jonathan Skinner’s ongoing journal, titled ecopoetics and Brenda Iijima’s eco language reader, published by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs in collaboration with Nightboat Books.

Presented by the MFA Art Criticism and Writing Department at SVA.

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Painter Rackstraw Downes was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2009.  His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, and the Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, among others.  Downes has published two books of his own writings: In Relation to the Whole: Three Essays from Three Decades, 1973, 1981, and l996. (New York: Edgewise Press, 2000) and Under the Gowanus and Razor-Wire Journal: The Making of Two Paintings, 5.9.99 – 11.15.99, (New York: Turning the Head Press, 2000).  In 2005, a monograph on Rackstraw Downes was published by Princeton University Press with essays by Robert Storr, Sanford Schwartz and Downes.  Downes is also the editor of Art In Its Own Terms, the collected writings of painter and critic Fairfield Porter.  His MacArthur citation reads in part, “Rackstraw Downes is a painter whose minutely detailed, oil-on-canvas landscapes invite viewers to reconsider the intersection between the natural world and man-made objects. Rejecting picturesque views…his landscapes depict scenes generally overlooked or dismissed for lack of a traditional aesthetic appeal.  His subjects range from the roadways, urban detritus, and industrial backyards of the East Coast to the oil fields and vast, empty terrain of Texas. In painting the American landscape as it is, not as it has been idealized, Downes imbues seemingly ordinary subjects with extraordinary power.”

Brenda Iijima was born in the hilly town of North Adams, Massachusetts. She is the author of Around Sea(O Books), Animate, Inanimate Aims (Litmus Press), revv.you’ll-ution (Displaced Press) and If Not Metamorphic (Ahsahta Press) as well as numerous chapbooks and artist’s books. She is also the editor of the eco language reader (Nightboat Books and PP@YYL).  Currently she is working on a body of work titled Some Simple Things Said by and About Humans- a chronicle of how humans have used animals as surrogates.  She is also choreographing site-specific dances surrounding issues of environmental toxicity and human engagement in her hometown together with videographer Tammy Fortin.  She is the editor of Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs (http://yoyolabs.com/).

Joan Richardson is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and American Studies at The Graduate Center.  Author of a two-volume biography of the poet Wallace Stevens, she coedited, with Frank Kermode, Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America, 1997).  Her essays on Stevens, on Ralph Waldo Emerson, on Jonathan Edwards have been published in the Wallace Stevens Journal, in Raritan, and elsewhere, and essays on Alfred North Whitehead, William James, and pragmatism have appeared in the journals Configurations and The Hopkins Review.  Review essays have appeared in Bookforum and other journals.  Her study A Natural History of Pragmatism: The Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007, and has been nominated for the 2011 Grawemeyer Award in Religion.  She is currently at work on another volume for Cambridge, Pragmatism and American Culture as well as a book-length study, The Return of the Repressed: Stanley Cavell and Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Joan Richardson has been the recipient of several awards and fellowships including a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Her work reflects an abiding interest in the way that philosophy, natural history, and science intersect with literature.

Jonathan Skinner‘s poetry collections include With Naked Foot (Little Scratch Pad, 2008) and Political Cactus Poems (Palm Press, 2005). Skinner founded and edits the journal ecopoetics<http://www.ecopoetics.org>, which features creative-critical intersections between writing and ecology.  His most recent essay, “Thoughts on Things: Poetics of the Third Landscape,” appears in the eco language reader (Portable Press at Yo-yo Labs and Nightboat Books, 2010). Skinner teaches in the Environmental Studies Program at Bates College in Central Maine, where he makes his home.

Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, and publisher.  He is the author of ten books of poetry, including Alcuni Telefonini, a collaboration with painter Francesco Clemente published by Granary Books.  He is the publisher and editor of the poetry and arts journal VANITAS and of Libellum books.

Tim Peterson <Trace> is a poet, critic, and editor.  The author of Since I Moved In (Chax Press), Peterson currently edits EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts and curates readings and events throughout NYC including the TENDENCIES: Poetics and Practice series at CUNY Graduate Center.

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