November | 2009 | TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice

The second event features talks by:

Amy King, Wayne Koestenbaum, & R. Erica Doyle

…followed by a discussion/Q&A session.

on Tuesday, November 17
at 6:30 PM
FREE

at CUNY Graduate Center
(in the Skylight Room)
365 Fifth Avenue, NYC

Amy King is the author of I’m the Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi, and forthcoming, Slaves to Do These Things (Blazevox) and I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press). She teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. For information on the reading series Amy co-curates in Brooklyn, NY, please visit The Stain of Poetry: A Reading Series (http://stainofpoetry.com) and http://amyking.org for more.

Wayne Koestenbaum has published twelve books, which include five works of nonfiction prose (Andy Warhol, Cleavage, Jackie Under My Skin, The Queen’s Throat, Double Talk), five collections of poetry (Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Model Homes, The Milk of Inquiry, Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender, Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems), one novel (Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes), and one deliberate hybrid of fiction and nonfiction (Hotel Theory). The Queen’s Throat was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He wrote the libretto for the opera Jackie O (music by Michael Daughterty). Koestenbaum is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, as well as a Visiting Professor in the Yale School of Art’s painting department.

R. Erica Doyle was born in Brooklyn to Trinidadian immigrant parents, and has lived in Washington, DC, Farmington, Connecticut and La Marsa, Tunisia. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, Callaloo, and many other places. She has received grants and awards from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, and was a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow. She is also a fellow of Cave Canem and her manuscript, proxy, was a finalist for the 2007 Cave Cavem Poetry Prize. Erica teaches in the NYC public schools and is the facilitator of Tongues Afire: A Creative Writing Workshop for queer women and trans and gender non-conforming people of color.

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TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice is curated by Tim Peterson (Trace).

All events are co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, CLAGS (the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies), The Graduate Center PhD Program in English, and the GC Poetics Group.

upcoming TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice events:

Dodie Bellamy, Eileen Myles, and Kevin Killian

on April 9 at 6:30 PM

in the Martin Segal Theater at CUNY Graduate Center

A Brief Note About the Series

This new talks series on queer poetics is poised, like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work itself, to potentially suspend various foreclosures of meaning that usually happen when we talk about contemporary poetics. Just a few of these obstacles include reification of concepts already prevalent in today’s MFA programs, predictable uses of the hermeneutics of suspicion, and a lingering blockage around the form of the poetics manifesto. With Frank O’Hara’s “Personism” held prominently in mind as a more generative example, I want to try and create a space in which what Sedgwick called the reparative impulse can be just as important as these other types of reasoning, a space in which we can pause to attend to the idiosyncrasies and capaciousness of the individual writer, in this case the individual queer writer, and who knows what larger implications will occur as a result. In the Introduction to her book Tendencies (from Duke University Press), Sedgwick writes “I know Tendencies sounds like a title for Walter Benjamin essays—really it’s channeled from Dame Edna Everage.” And so it might be with this series, inspired by Eve who was a great friend to and fan of poets, and a poet herself.

But really, queer poetics will be any damn thing it wants to be; violet speech cannot be legislated. In her book Manifesto: A Century of Isms, Mary Ann Caws smartly and critically defines the medium of the manifesto, the usual means by which poetics is transmitted, with a certain amount of appreciative ambivalence: “It can start out as a credo, but then it wants to make a persuasive move from the ‘I believe’ of the speaker toward the ‘you’ of the listener or reader, who should be sufficiently convinced to join in.” I imagine the ground for TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice stretched between that description and Sedgwick’s own comment that “’I’ is a heuristic; maybe a powerful one.” In the capacious spirit of Eve, I want to hear names for things we almost know but don’t have language to describe yet, the way a sentence in Proust unfolds, nudges, hints, and predicts. As curator, I want to learn from this series something about poetry and poetics that I don’t know yet.

TENDENCIES: Poetics & Practice

a series of manifestos and talks on contemporary writing practice and queer poetics

Monthly Archives: November 2009

11/17: King, Koestenbaum, & Doyle

A Brief Note About the Series

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