St Mark's Talks (1985)

Erica Hunt, Bruce Boone, Peter Inman, Jackson Mac Low, David Antin, Barbara Guest, Lorenzo Thomas, Steve McCaffery, Kathleen Fraser, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Nathaniel Mackey, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Anne Waldman, Nick Piombino

In 1985, Eileen Myles was the new director of the St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York. She asked me to curate a lecture series, the first such program at the church. I modelled the series at the Poetry Project on my earlier series New York Talk, giving it the amusing title, given the sometimes seeming resistance to poetics at the St. Marks at the time, St. Marks Talks. And talk it did.

I made these recordings myself and we are missing some of the talks, and in some case parts of the talk, in this new PennSound archive of the events. Here is what we got:

October 25, 1984
"Politics and Language"

November 11, 1984
"line music counterpoint disjunction and the measure of mind"

  • David Antin
    part 1, includes introduction by Bernstein (45:44) MP3
  • part 2 (22:45) MP3
  • discussion (46:16) MP3

January 10, 1985
"Writing as General Economy"

poster for this event


poster for the next four talks

April 24, 1985
"Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol"

May 2, 1985
"What Takes?"

June 6, 1985
"The Tradition of Marginality"

October 4, 1985
"Condition, Information, and the Paranoia of the New"

October 25, 1985
"Writing from a House of Women"

  • Judy Grahn (1:25:46): MP3
  • discussion (42:39): MP3

November 11, 1985
"Subject Matter"

the talks by Robert Glück and Lydia Davis were not recorded
Nick Piombino
(27:21): MP3
discussion (1:20:30): MP3

January 26, 1986
on the Black Arts movement, projective verse, and cinema

March 23, 1986
"Mysteriously Speaking of the Mysterious Byzantine Proposals of the Poem"

April 13, 1986
"Postmodernism: Sign for a Struggle, the Struggle for the Sign" (draft)

  • introduction (3:43): MP3
  • Ron Silliman (1:34:33): MP3
  • discussion (40:39): MP3
  • Silliman pubished the final version of this talk in Poetics Journal, No. 7, September, 1987, pp. 18–39. Reprinted in Contemporary American Poet-Critics, translated into Serbian by Dubravka Djuric and published in Gradina, Vol. 26, No. 2–3, 1991, Nis, Yugoslavia, pp. 162–179

May 25, 1986
 "Celine, Pound, and Fascism": 

the first half of the talk was not recorded