Poetics at Buffalo
Faculty
The Poetics Program, Department of English, SUNY-Buffalo was founded in 1991
by five literary artists affiliated with the English Department. Core faculty
for 2004-2005 consists of Steve McCaffery,
Dennis Tedlock, Susan
Howe, Myung Mi Kim (from the Department
of English), and Loss Pequeño Glazier
(Department of Media Study, Director of the Electronic Poetry Center). Ming-Qian
Ma is Associate Director of the Poetics Program. Associated faculty include
Robert Bertholf, Curator of the Poetry/Rare Books Collection; Joseph Conte,
Neil Schmitz, and Scott Stevens of the Department of English; Henry Sussman
of the Department of Comparative Literature; Gerard Bucher and Jorge
Guitart of the Department of Modern Languages and Literature; Tony Conrad
of the Department of Media Studies;
and Barbara Tedlock of the Department of Anthropology. Founding Directors:
Robert Creeley (now at Brown University)
and Charles Bernstein (now at the University
of Pennsylvania).
Program
The Poetics Program has an interdisciplinary approach to literary, cultural,
and textual studies. Our programs include:
Visiting Writer Residencies. Readings
by and seminar visits with both American and foreign poets, fiction writers,
critics, theorists, and philosophers, featured as part of our ongoing "Wednesdays
at 4 Plus" series. Visitors have included Samuel R. Delany, Lyn Hejinian, Susan
Stewart, Barbara Guest, Tom Raworth, Clark Coolidge, Rosmarie Waldrop,David
Antin, Lorenzo Thomas, Nicole Brossard, Harreyette Mullen, Michael Palmer, Robin
Blaser, Jerome McGann, Rachel DuPlessis, Steve McCaffery, Leslie Scalapino,
Ron Silliman, Ann Lauterbach, Cecelia Vicuña, David Antin, Marjorie Perloff,
Ulla Dydo, Richard Foreman, David Bromige, Maureen Owen, Ray Young Bear, Norma
Cole, Erica Hunt, Joan Jonas, Bruce Andrews, Tan Lin, Charles Altieri, Adrienne
Rich, Dominique Fourcade, Arakawa & Madeline Gins, Bob Perelman, James Logenbach,
Joanna Scott, Joanne Kyger, Al Cook, Edward Dorn, Kathleen Fraser, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge,
Ron Sukenick, Eric Mottram, Stanley Cavell, Fred D'Aguir, Arkadii Dragomoschenko,
Jackson Mac Low, Jorie Graham, Simon Ortiz, Michael Joyce, Cary Nelson, Kathy
Acker, Joan Retallack, John Taggart, Michael Davidson, Douglas Messerli, Rae
Armantrout, Michael McClure, Regis Bonvicino, Abigail Child, Henry Hills, J.
M Coetzee, Keith Waldrop, John Yau, Fanny Howe, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Paul
Auster, Barrett Watten, Michael Ondaatje, Fiona Templeton, Adrienne Rich, Carla
Harryman, Christian Prigent, Emmanuel Hocquard, Claude Royet-Journoud, and Michel
Deguy.
Poetry/Rare Books Collection. The Poetry/Rare
Books Collection has one of North America's most extensive holdings of twentieth-century
poetry books and manuscripts and continues to acquire archives from innovative
contemporary poets. Each year, a few graduate students have the opportunity
to work in the Collection, placements that are integral to the goals of the
Poetics Program.
Graduate Seminars. The essence of the Poetics Program
is the series of interrelated graduate seminars offered by the faculty
in such areas as ethnopoetics and Native American verbal arts; the European
tradition from Mallarmé to present; twentieth-century English-language
poetry and poetics, with emphasis on the radical modernist approaches and the
relation of poetry to the other arts; the American traditions of the seventeenth,
eighteenth and nineteenth century; twentieth-century innovative prose, fiction,
and speculative fiction; philosophy, ideology, and literature; poststructuralist
approaches to poetry, philosophy, linguistics, and ethics; poetics and/as cultural
studies; language and performance (including visual and concrete poetries, as
well as sound and performance poetries); the poetics of prose; and "core poetics"
-- a history of poetics from the pre-Socratics to the present (including the
philosophy of language and related work in linguistics).
Publications. The Poetics Program, in conjunction
with other funding sources, supports a large number of magazines and presses,
which are independently edited by Program participants. These publications include
poetry magazines, chapbook series, critical anthologies, broadsides, and newsletters.
The Art of Nonfiction Writing. Through a series of
prose writing workshops and individual consultations, the Poetics Program provides
support for investigating and developing new approaches to critical writing.
By emphasizing the importance of the mode and style of all types of writing,
the program encourages -- and supports -- students in writing essays and dissertations
in creative, exploratory, dialogic, and self-constructed forms.
The Poetics of Translation. Many of the Poetics courses
and events emphasize an experience of the verbal arts of languages other than
English, both in terms of the sound and music of other languages as well as
considering a variety of approaches to translating from these languages in,
to, and around English: translation as a poetic process.
The Art of Teaching. Through its various offerings,
the Poetics Program emphasizes teaching of the arts at the college level, with
special emphasis on how to teach innovative works of literary arts to undergraduates.
Individual Consultation. Faculty members are available
for individual consultation on course selection, oral examinations, dissertation
topics, and all aspects of writing and poetics.
Electronic Poetry Center. The Poetics Program has
a strong presence on the Internet through the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC):
http://writing.upenn.edu/epc, directed by Loss Pequeño
Glazier. The EPC is the most extensive collection of digital resources in innovative
poetry and new media literature available on the Web. Graduate seminars focusing
on digital media and computer media poetics, student-initiated web-based research,
arts, and publication projects are supported technically and materially by the
Program.
Conferences and Festivals. The Poetics Program sponsors
both student-and faculty-initiated conferences and festivals. Such events have
included "Writing from the New Coast," a milestone gathering of newly publishing
poets from across North America; "The New Gothic," readings and discussion with
Kathy Acker, Peter Straub, Bradford Morrow, Paul West, and others; the "Samuel
Beckett Conference"; "The Convergence of Science and the Humanities" on the
new electronic writing; the "Festival of French Poetry"; "E-Poetry 2001," the
first international digital poetry fesitival; and critical symposia on the work
of poets Robert Duncan and Louis Zukofsky.
Undergraduate Program. UB undergraduates actively
participate in the Poetics Program through "reading workshops" featuring numerous
class visits and readings by visiting poets and writers and interactive and
creative responses to assigned readings in modern and contemporary poetry and
fiction. A lively group of undergraduates organizes readings and discussion
groups and edits such independently produced literary magazines as name.
In addition, in cooperation with the Poetry/Rare Books room, undergraduates
have access to the one of the most significant archives of twentieth century
manuscripts, first editions, and literary magazines.
Philosophies
While poetics suggests a long history of laws of composition, the Poetics Program
stresses poiesis -- the actual making or doing: poetry as process. Every doing
carries the potential of something new, emergent, something not already predicated
by poetics. Practice overtakes theory, practice changes theory. And not just
writing practice, but performance practice, the practice of sound.
To write is to produce meaning and not reproduce a pre-existing meaning. To
write is to progress and not remain subjected (by habits or reflexes) to the
meaning that supposedly precedes language. To write is always first to rewrite,
and to rewrite does not mean to revert to a previous form of writing, no more
than an anteriority of speech, or of presence, or of meaning. The book creates
meaning, and meaning creates life (and not vice versa). Fiction or poetry is
never about something, it is something. Writing is not the living repetition
of life. The author is that which gives the disquieting language of fiction
or poetry its unities and disunities, its knot of coherence and chaos, its insertion
into the real. All reading is done haphazardly. Now some people might say the
situation (of poetry and fiction) is not very encouraging but one must reply
that it is not meant to encourage those who say that!
Poetics is "an unruly, multisubjective activity"; the reading of poetry, just
as the writing of poetry, is beyond the control of any authority. Poetics opens
the space of a page to interplay and contradiction, to many voices, a complexity
of words. A poet brushes scraps of themes against the continuum of history.
Language surrounds chaos. Poetry brings similitude and representation to configurations
waiting from forever to be spoken. A poet is writing from inside the opening
where the writing subject disappeared without writing. The search for traces
is a polyphony of stories.
Ethnopoetics is not simply the poetics of exotic others but calls attention
to the ethnicity -- the particularity and nongeneralizability -- of all poetic
practices. Oral poetry is best thought of as something not older than or prior
to or simpler than the written, but as something that goes on coexisting with,
and interacting with, the written. We consider both alphabetic and nonalphabetic
writing codes of the historical past and imaginary codes of a potential present.
Poetics stays grounded in the fact of making, the complex of that which has
so made such "it," inside and out, the intimately present (oneself, like they
say), else the vastness of all possible dimension. "To measure is all we know..."
Such reference proposes world in all its times and places, in determined labors
of common body, constructs of passage and echo. "Only the imagination is real..."
(As in New England -- to work ...)
Participating Faculty
The Poetics Program is one of several special programs and centers sponsored
by the Graduate Program in English at UB. There are no individual degree requirements
for these programs, which are open to all enrolled students. The existence of
the Poetics Program is a testament to the active involvement of practicing literary
artists in the teaching of poetics and critical theory in the Graduate Program.
Our approach to 'poetics' resonates with the orientation of many of our colleagues
in literary and cultural studies at UB. The Poetics Program is dependent on
the active participation, through seminars, co-sponsorship of visiting writers,
as well as through orals and dissertation committees, of a significant number
of critics and scholars in the English Department and Comparative Literature
Program, as well as in the faculty of related fields such as Modern Languages
and Literatures, Art History, American Studies, Philosophy, Classics, and Media
Studies.
Core Funding
Core funding for the Poetics Program comes from the Samuel P. Capen Chair of
Poetry and the Humanities (Robert Creeley); the Melodia E. Jones Chair in French,
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures (Gerard Bucher); the David Gray
Chair of Poetry and Letters, Department of English (Charles Bernstein); and
the James H. McNulty Chair, Department of English (Dennis Tedlock), as well
as from the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences.
Admission
The Poetics Program is an integral part of the Graduate Program in English at
the University at Buffalo, with special affiliation with the Program in Comparative
Literature and the Poetry Collection.
Any graduate student in Arts and Sciences at UB can participate in Poetics seminars
and special programs. Applicants applying for admission to the Ph.D. or M.A.
program in English should contact the Director of Graduate Admissions, Department
of English, 306 Clemens Hall, SUNY, Buffalo, NY 14260. You can contact the Poetics
Program directly by writing to us at that same address or emailing us at mdunlap@acsu.buffalo.edu.
For more information on the English Department, including application information,
go to: http://writing.upenn.edu/cas/english/graduates.html
For more information on the Poetics Program, go to http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/poetics.
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