October November 1999 December

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

All events take place at the Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, Philadelphia (U of P).

---

Monday, 11/1

• 5:15 PM in Room 202: Penn and Pencil Club: a creative writing workshop for Penn and Health Systems staff
• 6:30 PM: Reading by Noah de Lissovoy and Mytili Jagannathan. RSVP to wh@writing.upenn.edu for dinner to follow. Noah de Lissovoy's two most recent chapbooks are Spark, from Jensen/ Daniels and Notes for the Imagination from Margin to Margin.

---

Tuesday, 11/2

• 6:00 PM: "Forbidden Storytelling," a talk and reading by Joyce Maynard, co-sponsored by the English Department, Women's Studies, and the Kelly Writers House This event was recorded and is available in RealAudio format here.
  Joyce Maynard's many books include To Die For, Where Love Goes, Domestic Affairs, Baby Love, and Looking Back. She has written for many national publications and is a frequent contributor to National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." She lives in California with her three children.

---

Wednesday, 11/3

• 4:30 PM: 20th Century Reading Group in Room 202
• 8:00 PM: Speakeasy: Poetry, Prose and Anything Goes, an open mic performance night
• 9:30 PM in Room 202: Sangria: The Artists' Group

---

Thursday, 11/4

• 7:00 PM: Theorizing in Particular presents Charlie Sheperdson, "The Atrocity of Desire: Lacan's Antigone." Hosted by Comparative Literature, Classics, and the Philadelphia Lacanian Group.
  Charles Shepherdson is a Member in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He has published widely in literary theory, continental philosophy, and psychoanalysis. He is the author of Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis, and The Epoch of the Body. He is currently working on two books: The Atrocity of Desire: Tragedy, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis, which focuses on Sophocles's Antigone and theories of tragedy, and Insinuations, which will address Lacan's relation to Aristotle, Kant, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.

---

Friday, 11/5

---

Saturday, 11/6

• Saturday Reading Cooperative
• Homecoming Weekend
• 9:00-11:00 PM: Alumni Perform Their Own Writings
  Not quite a "poetry slam," not quite a nightclub improv, not quite a coffee house, not quite a variety show, this informal evening program will feature a great range of talented alumni writers and spoken-word performers. Refreshments served from the famed Writers House kitchen. Hosted by Class of 1942 Professor of English and Kelly Writers House Faculty Director Al Filreis. (If you want to be in the program, contact Prof. Filreis at afilreis@english.upenn.edu.)
  
  The eminent Philadelphia writer, Dan Rottenberg, is the author of seven books, among them Finding Our Fathers, A Guide to Tracing Jewish Ancestors (1977), Main Line Wasp, The Memoirs of Philadelphia Civic Leader W. Thacher Longstreth (1990), and Revolution on Wall Street (1993).
  Ellen Umansky's short stories, essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Playboy, The Forward, Salon, and elsewhere. This month's issue of Jane Magazine carries one of Ellen's new short stories. Ellen will be co-leading one of the new Kelly Writers House Alumni Virtual Book Groups in spring 2000.
  Russel Like is well known for his widely read and favorably reviewed book After the Blue. The Daily Pennsylvanian commentary on the book can be seen here: http://hometown.aol.com/Farnstarfl. At Penn Russel earned a CAS degree in natural science and his Wharton degree in economics and management.
  Joe Williams studies poetry with Stephen Dunn, is earning a degree in literature at Rutgers, having already taken degrees in several other disciplines, including a masters in clinical psychology. He does not categorize his writing conventionally, and may offer us a sampling from among his "JonBenet sonnets" or from poems that won him a prestigious prize last spring - writings on the Heaven's Gate cult and on Jacques Derrida. "My poems are obsessed with the dramas of guilt and sorrow in which we are actors and locate our humanity," writes Joe. "They are marked by sensations of isolation, designation, resignation, and desolation. I seek the ink in blood, and the blood in ink." Joe has been an alumnus affiliate of the Writers House since its founding in 1995-96.
  Nate Chinen is already well known for his stylishly precise jazz reviews, which appear in Philadelphia's City Paper and Billboard Online. He was a co-founder of the VIRGIN HOUSE BAND which for several years has played regularly at the Kelly Writers House. His poem "movement, acceleration" appeared in Xconnect (volume 3, issue 3), and he has read his poems widely around Philadelphia. He has resided in New York for the past year, where he is currently co-writing the autobiography of jazz impresario George Wein.
  

---

Sunday, 11/7

• 6:00 PM: Manuck! Manuck! a fiction writing group, in Room 202

---

Monday, 11/8

• 5:00 PM in Room 202: "The Idea of the Experimental College," featuring Robert Streeter, former Dean of the College of the University of Chicago, with responses from Rick Beeman, Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at Penn, Bob Lucid, emeritus Professor of English, one of the architects of the idea of the residential college at Penn, and Susan Albertine, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies at Temple University.
  Listen to an audio recording of this event.
  Robert Streeter, emeritus Professor of English of the University of Chicago, was a key part of the famous curricular reforms undertaken at the University of Chicago in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. He was there when Chicago made the big move toward a unified "undergraduate college" with a single common curriculum--a big change led by U of C's daringly innovative president, Robert Maynard Hutchins. As faculty leader and university administrator he was charged with implementing many of Hutchins' and others' new ideas. Professor Streeter was for many years the Dean of the College at Chicago. At the same time he became an eminent scholar and teacher of American literature, publishing on topics ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Edward Everett to the North American Review to relations between psychology and literary nationalism in the U.S. He published in American Literature in 1944 and in Critical Inquiry in 1977. In 1991 he wrote a comprehensive history of the University of Chicago called One in Spirit, to help commemorate the university's centennial. Robert Streeter was born in Williamsport, PA, in 1916. His memories of attending minor league baseball at still extant Bowman Field in Williamsport date back to the early 1920s. He attended college at Bucknell University, and soon became a journalist, first covering sports. From the moment of his unlikely arrival at the University of Chicago, colleagues and students knew he would become what he did become: a legendary teacher, a generous and tireless mentor, a reasonable advocate for major curricular change, a devoted student of the very idea of the university.

• 10:00 PM: Live at the Writers House, a one-hour spoken word and music radio show. This month's show features poets Frank Sherlock, Daniel Nester, Abigail Susik, Don Silver, Tonya Hegamin, Deborah Richards and Ross Gay.

---

Tuesday, 11/9

• 6:00 PM: The Hollywood Club meets in Room 202
• 7:00 PM: Reading by Robert Stepto, author of Blue as a Lake: A Personal Geography.

---

Wednesday, 11/10

• 7:00 PM: The Play's the Thing
• 9:30 PM in Room 202: Sangria: The Artists' Group

---

Thursday, 11/11

• 6:00 PM: Reading by poet Kit Robinson. Hosted by the Creative Writing Department. RSVP to wh@writing.upenn.edu for dinner to follow.
  Kit Robinson is the author of more than ten books, including Democracy Boulevard (1998), Balance Sheet (1993); The Champagne of Concrete (1990); and Ice Cubes (1987). Robinson's poetry is one of the quickest, wryest enterprises now going. As literary labels arrange things, he is a Language writer (his poem, "In the American Tree" provided the title for the first anthology of Language writing). He is also a master practitioner of the wit of the New York School; and a successful notator and translator of the working world in poetry.
  
  This program was recorded and is available through PENNsound.

---

Friday, 11/12

---

Saturday, 11/13

• Saturday Reading Cooperative
• 9:00am-5:00 PM: The 5th Annual Writers' Conference at Penn will be held on Saturday, November 13. Published authors will lead workshops. Co-sponsored by the College of General Studies, Kelly Writers House, and the Penn Humanities Forum. For a detailed brochure, please call 215-898-6479.
• 9:00-11:00PM: Perspectives in Humanities hosts a "Bad Poetry Reading"

---

Sunday, 11/14

• 11:00 PM: Live at the Writers House airs on 88.5 XPN

---

Monday, 11/15

• 6:00 PM: PhillyTalks: a reading and dialogue between poets Barrett Watten and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, with dinner to follow. RSVP for dinner to wh@writing.upenn.edu. For more about this event, look here. For a recording of the webcast of this event, click here.
  Barrett Watten is the author of Bad History (1998), Progress (1985), Under Erasure (1991), and Frame (1971-1990), a collection of eight previous works. He is also co-author of Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (1991); former editor of This and publisher of This Press; co-editor of Poetics Journal; and author of Total Syntax (1984), essays on modern and contemporary poetics. He teaches modernism and cultural studies at Wayne State University, Detroit.
  Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Professor of English at Temple University, is a poet, essayist, feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modern and contemporary poetry. DuPlessis is the author of Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1986), H.D.: The Career of that Struggle, both from Indiana University Press, and The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (Routledge, 1990.) The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetry, co-edited with Peter Quarterman, is forthcoming from The University of Alabama Press in 1999. Her poetry is collected in Draft X: Letters (Singing Horse Press, 1991), Drafts 3-14 (Poses & Poets, 1991), and Drafts 15-XXX, The Fold (Poses & Poets, 1997). Some of this work has been translated into French as Essais: Quatre Poemes (Un Bureau Sur L'Atlantique, 1996). Her recent poetry has appeared in Grand Street, West Coast Line, Conjunctions, Common Knowledge, Chelsea, Parataxis, The Iowa Review, Action Poétique and Hambone. In 1990, she held a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant for poetry, and in 1993, she received an award from the Fund for Poetry.

---

Tuesday, 11/16

• 6:00 PM: Talking Film and the Alumni Writers Series present Alec Sokolow
  Sokolow is a Penn alumnus, and he has written the scripts for Toy Story, which received an Academy Award Nomination for Best Original Screenplay, and the film Goodbye Lover which was screened at the Cannes Film Festival and released last year. He has written or co-written about twenty feature length screenplays, including an adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats and a sequel to The Mask.

---

Wednesday, 11/17

• 4:30 PM: 20th Century Reading Group in Room 202
• 8:00 PM: Speakeasy: Poetry, Prose and Anything Goes, an open mic performance night
• 9:30 PM in Room 202: Sangria: The Artists' Group

---

Thursday, 11/18

• 7:30-9:30 PM: Poets and Composers: Listening to Each Other
  The first of two gatherings (the second will be at St. Mark's Church on 11/21), these evenings will bring together poets and composers to share and discuss their work before and with an audience. Organized in collaboration with the Philadelphia Chapter of the American Composers Forum.

---

Friday, 11/19

---

Saturday, 11/20

• Saturday Reading Cooperative
• 2:00-3:00 PM: Laughing Hermit Reading Series presents Jan Heller Levi and Gary Short
  Jan Heller Levi is the author of Once I Gazed at You in Wonder, which won the 1998 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Gary Short is the author of two books of poems, Theory of Twilight and Flying Over Sonny Liston.
  
• 5:00 PM: The Korean Student Association presents a reading by poet Ko Un
  Ko Un was born in Kunsan, Korea, 1933. He made his formal debut into the literary world in 1958 with his short poem, translated into English, "tuberculosis." Earlier in his life, he was a part of the Bhuddist clergy, earning renown among Buddhist circles. He has been head priest of Chondung Temple, then education director and acting head of Haein Temple, and finally a member of the Central Committee of the National Monks' Association. In 1957, he, along with another monk, founded the Buddhist Newspaper. As its editor-in-chief, he began to publish essays and poems. In 1973 he became a militant nationalist poet, actively involving himself in contemporary social and political events. He is a key figure in the Korean democracy movement. He is involved with the struggle for human rights in Korea and was the first secreatary general for the Association of Artists for Practical Freedom. In May 1983 he married and a year later a daughter was born to him. Ko Un has written the most amount of literature by any Korean poet to date. His works are very diverse, covering many topics and subject areas. For his keen sensitivity, outstanding powers of intuition, the breadth and depth of his imagination and his skillful use of language, as well as the maturity of this understanding of human life, Ko Un is widely acknowledged to be Korea's foremost contemporary poet. He has resolved to represent in poems every person he has ever encountered since he was born, resulting in the creation of his work, Ten Thousand Lives. A short list of his works (not comprehensive): Other World Sensitivity (1960), On the Way to Muui Village (1974), Going into Mountain Seclusion (1977), Early Morning Road (1978), Ko Un's Collected Poems (1983), Homeland Stars (1984), Pastoral Poems (1986), Fly High, Poem! (1986), Your Eyes (1988), Morning Dew (1990), For Tears (1991), Sea Diamond Mountain (1991), the nine volumes of Ten Thousand Lives, and the four volumes containing the first two books of the epic Paektu Mountain.

---

Sunday, 11/21

• 2:00-4:30 PM: Second Poets and Composers: Listening to Each Other at St. Mark's Church, 21st and Pine. Organized in collaboration with the Philadelphia Chapter of the American Composers Forum.

---

Monday, 11/22

• 8 PM, live webcast discussion, led by Al Filreis, on John Ashbery and the emergence of postmodern poetry, for English 88v--from the Arts Cafe
• 8:00 PM: "Mix It Up," a first meeting and discussion, in the dining room
• 8:00 PM: The Hollywood Club meets in Room 202

---

Tuesday, 11/23

• 5:00 PM: Planning Committee Meeting and Gathering

---

Wednesday, 11/24

• Thanksgiving Break

---

Thursday, 11/25

• Thanksgiving

---

Friday, 11/26

• Thanksgiving Weekend

---

Saturday, 11/27

• Thanksgiving Weekend

---

Sunday, 11/28

• Thanksgiving Weekend

---

Monday, 11/29

• 6:00 PM: PhillyTalks: a reading and dialogue between poets Dan Farrell and P. Inman, with dinner to follow. RSVP for dinner to wh@writing.upenn.edu.
  Dan Farrell is the author of Last Instance (Krupskaya, 1999),(Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization by R. Buckminster Fuller, pp. 1-50) Grid (Meow Press, 1999), ape and Thimking of You, both from Tsunami Editions. Forthcoming from Coach House Press is The Inkblot Record. Dan is a recent resident alien of Brooklyn NY, and works as a financial proofreader.
  P. Inman was born in 1947 & raised on Long Island. He graduated from Georgetown University a year after Bill Clinton. Since 1980 he has worked at the Library of Congress, where he has been active as a union rep & negotiator for Local 2910 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. His most recent books are: at. least (krupskaya), vel (o books) & criss cross (roof). He's appeared in anthologies in three different languages.

---

Tuesday, 11/30

• 7:30 PM: Talking Film presents a screening of senior Jordan Rockwell's new film, September Song!

---