5:30-7pm CAW Centre Boardroom, 2nd Floor

Language of Contemporary Poetry

discussion series

7 February
2012

Farr Wah Silliman Cooley

Dennis Ron Fred

Roger

From Gabriola Island, BC, Roger Farr is author of the poetry books Surplus, Means, and IKMQ. He writes on social movements, media, childhood, and the avant-garde. Farrs essay Gangland and Linguistics is forthcoming from Autonomedia where it serves as the introduction to the English translation of former Situationist International member Alice Becker-Hos The Essence of Jargon.

SLANG, JARGON, ANTILANGUAGE

6 March
2012

Poet Laureate of Canada Fred Wah, from Vancouver, BC, has authored over twenty poetry books, including, most recently, is a door, Sentenced to Light, and The False Laws of Narrative (selected poems with commentary). Faking It: Poetics & Hybridity collects Wahs essays on poetry and identity politics.Wah was an editor of the influential newsletter begun in the 1960s, Tish, and holds an MA in linguistics from SUNY-Buffalo, where he studied with Henry Lee Smith, Jr.

TISH POETS & THE UTTERANCE

13 March
2012

2006 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere, Ron Silliman (Philadelphia, PA) has published over thirty books of poetry and criticism, including the long poem, the Alphabet, and the collection of books, The Age of Huts (compleat). Silliman engages poetrys relationship to the social dimensions of language and to linguistic theories (including Noam Chomsky`s). His editing includes the important collections The Dwelling Place: Nine Poets for Alcheringa: A Journal of Ethnopoetics (1975), Poetry and the Politics of the Subject for Socialist Review (1988) and In the American Tree: Language, Realism, Poetry for the National Poetry Foundation (1986).

LANGUAGE-CENTRED POETRY & GRAMMAR

20 March
2012

The many books by Dennis Cooley (Winnipeg, MB) include Sunfall: New and Selected Poems, 19801996 and The Vernacular Muse: The Eye and Ear in Contemporary Literature (1987). He is founding editor of Turnstone Press, and editor of Inscriptions: A Prairie Poetry Anthology (1992). Cooleys essay, The Vernacular Muse in Prairie Poetry, actively attends to the dialogic and carnivalesque in vernacular speech, which he enlists in a class-based critique of standard English. He graduated from the University of Rochester, having written the first doctoral dissertation on poet Robert Duncan.

REGIONALISM & A VERNACULAR POETICS

This Discussion Series is coordinated by Ashley Girty, Paige Hanson, Greg Paziuk, Greg Raymond, Kevin Shaw, Courtney Steel, Jordan Turner, and Craig Visser, all students in a graduate course led by Louis Cabri: Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously: Poetry & Linguistics. Produced with the generous support of the Humanities Research Group and the Department of English Language, Literature, and Creative Writing. For further information, please contact lcabri@uwindsor.ca or visit uwindsor.ca/english.

Department of English