Poetry and the Trace: Some Readings
14 July 2008
A series of readings from the Poetry and the Trace conference at the State Library in Melbourne. The speakers are:
Lionel Fogarty
A deeply political poet, Lionel Fogarty is a leading spokesman for indigenous rights in Australia. Fogarty writes an innovative, passionate poetry, transforming the language and forms of Europe to resist its colonising force and, in the process, generates new connections between the Australian land, its people, and modern life. His books include Dha’gun Jabree Djan Mitti: The More Complete Works of Lionel Fogarty (Salt Publishing, 2008), New and Selected Poems: Munaldjali, Mutuerjaraera (Hyland House, 1995), Booyooburra: A Story of the Wakka Murri (Hyland House, 1993), Ngutji (Cheryl Buchanan, 1984), Yoogum Yoogum (Penguin, 1982), and Kargun (Cheryl Buchanan, 1980)
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a Professor of English at Temple University and author of Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work and the now reprinted landmark collection, The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (both by U of Alabama P, 2006). DuPlessis is also the author of Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1985), H.D.: The Career of that Struggle (1986), both from Indiana University Press, and The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (Routledge, 1990). She is the editor of The Selected Letters of George Oppen (Duke University Press, 1990), and the co-editor with Peter Quartermain of The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (University of Alabama Press, 1999). The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation, co-edited with Ann Snitow, was published by Three Rivers/Crown in 1998; it will be reprinted by Rutgers University Press in 2007. She is also the co-editor with Susan Stanford Friedman, of Signets: Reading H.D. (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). Her recent books of poetry are Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan University Press, 2001) and DRAFTS. Drafts 39-57, Pledge with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis (Salt Publishing, 2004). Torques: Drafts 58-76 is forthcoming. An interview of DuPlessis conducted by Jeanne Heuving appears in Contemporary Literature (2004).
Wystan Curnow
Wystan Curnow’s latest book of poetry is Modern Colours (Auckland, Jackbooks, 2005). His poetry has appeared recently in Jacket, Landfall, London Review of Books, Green Integer Review, and Critiphoria. He co-edits Reading Room, A Journal of Art and Culture, and co-directs Jar, a project art space in Kingsland, Auckland. Dr Curnow is a Professor of English at the University of Auckland, where he teaches modern and contemporary poetry and creative writing. He has published on the work of poets such as Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian and Charles Bernstein and artists who work with language. Curnow has authored, or co-authored, monographs on a number of artists including Imants Tillers, Stephen Bambury, and Max Gimblett ,and has curated survey exhibitions of work by Colin McCahon and Billy Apple.
Susan Stewart
Susan Stewart is the author of five books of poems, including The Forest, Columbarium, which won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the forthcoming Red Rover. Her many prose works include Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, which won both the Christian Gauss and Truman Capote prizes for literary criticism, and The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics, a collection of her work on visual art. Recently she co-edited TriQuarterly 127: Contemporary Italian Poetry and her translation of the selected poems of Alda Merini will appear in 2008. The Annan Professor of English at Princeton University, she is a former MacArthur fellow, a current Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.