Poetry and Revolution at Birbeck

Birkbeck Poster
Friday 25 May 2012 - Sunday 27 May 2012

full schedule now on-line

The current crisis makes it possible to think what couldn’t be thought before, which has always been the task of poetry.
With its echoes of previous crises of modern society, it places on the agenda a reappraisal of revolutionary art from the point of view of the necessities of the present.


Keynote Speakers

Joan Retallack
, poet, essayist, activist, John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College, New York.
Jack Hirschman
, poet, translator, essayist, activist, Poet Laureate of S. Francisco 2006, member of the Revolutionary Poets Brigade.
Mark Nowak
, poet, activist, Director of Graduate Writing Programme at Manhattanville College, NY.

Poetry Readings

Friday Night (25 May 2012), 7.30pm
Tom Leonard, Jack Hirschman, Ziba Karbassi, Marianne Morris, Sean Bonney, Harry Gilonis.
At X-ing the Line, The Apple Tree, 45 Mount pleasant WC1
This reading is sponsored by Birkbeck College Contemporary Poetics Research Centre in association with the XING the Line reading series, as part of the Poetry and Revolution International Conference
Door charge: £5 waged and £3 unwaged. All proceeds to the poets. 
Numbers are limited: first come first served.

Saturday Night (26 May 2012), 7:00-10:30pm
7:00-8:00pm: VLAK: Launch of Special Issue of VLAK on Occupations
8:00-10:30pm: Joan Retallack, Maggie O’Sullivan, Abdullah al-Udhari, Keston Sutherland, Ulli Freer, Mark Nowak.
At The Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London WC1X 9NG
This reading is sponsored by Birkbeck College Contemporary Poetics Research Centre in association with Royal Holloway Poetics Research Centre, as part of the Poetry and Revolution International Conference
Door charge: £6 waged and £4 unwaged. All proceeds to the poets.Numbers are limited: first come first served.


Papers:
 Approximately 45 papers on a wide range of issues over the Saturday and Sunday. Speakers from Portugal, Greece, the USA, Ireland, & the UKLiaisons and co-operation with Occupied and Free Spaces
Venue:
 Birkbeck Main Building, Torrington Sq., WC1.
Registration:
No registration required. All welcome.

Contact: Stephen Mooney, estaphin@gmail.com

Supported by the Birkbeck Institute of the Humanities, and co-sponsored by the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Writing, University of Southampton

See http://www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc/events/Poetry_and_Revolution for further updates

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Full Conference Schedule below:

Poetry and RevolutionConference Schedule

Friday 25 May 2012


19.30-23:00 Conference Reading
Tom Leonard, Jack Hirschman, Ziba Karbassi, Marianne Morris, Sean Bonney, Harry Gilonis
At Xing the Line, The Apple Tree, 45 Mount Pleasant WC1

This reading is sponsored by Birkbeck College Contemporary Poetics Research Centre in association with the XING the Line reading series, as part of the Poetry and Revolution International Conference.
Door charge: £5 waged and £3 unwaged. All proceeds to the poets. 
Numbers are limited: first come first served.


Saturday 26 May 2012


10.00-11.30   9 papers in 3 parallel sessions
11.30-12.00   Coffee break
12.00-13.00   Jack Hirschman Keynote talk 
13.00-14.00   Lunch break
14.00-15:30   9 papers in 3 parallel sessions
15:30-16.00   Tea break
16.00-17.00   Joan Retallack keynote talk
17:00-17:30   General discussion

19:00-22:30 Conference Reading

(19:00-20:00)   VLAK: Launch of Special Issue of VLAK on Occupations

(20:00-22:30)   Joan Retallack, Maggie O’Sullivan, Abdullah al-Udhari, Keston Sutherland, Ulli Freer, Mark Nowak 
At The Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London WC1X 9NG
  
This reading is sponsored by Birkbeck College Contemporary Poetics Research Centre in association with Royal Holloway Poetics Research Centre, as part of the Poetry and Revolution International Conference
  
Door charge: £6 waged and £4 unwaged. All proceeds to the poets.  
Numbers are limited: first come first served.

 

Sunday 27 May 2012


10.00-11.30   8 papers in 3 parallel sessions
11.30-12.00   Coffee break
12:00-13:30   9 papers in 3 parallel sessions
13.30-14.30   Lunch break
14:30-16.00   11 papers in 4 parallel sessions
16:00-16.30   Tea break 
16:30-17:30   Mark Nowak keynote with immigrant workers from UNITE
17:30-18:00   General discussion
18:00-19:00   Wine & chat

All conference rooms are in the Malet Street main building, Birkbeck College, University of London, Bloomsbury
, London WC1E 7HX (entrance on Torrington Sqr)

 

Saturday 26 May 2012 - Papers

10:00-11:30 


Panel A   (Room 353)    
Chair: Alex Latter

Peter Jaeger 
John Cage, Anarchy, and Anarchy

Abigail De Kosnik 
“We are the 99 Percent” and “GS [Goldman Sachs] Elevator Gossip”: Tumblr and Twitter as Archives of Testimonial Poetry

Fabian Macpherson
William Morris’s Chants for Socialists and the Problem of Utopia


Panel B   (Room 354)
    Chair: Steve Willey

John Mateer 
The Poem “Invictus” and the Negotiated Revolution

Mandy Bloomfield 
Revolution in spatial poetics

George Paizis
‘Marcel Martinet  is the Poet of the Revolution’


Panel C   (Room 355) 
   Chair: Robert Hampson

Mary Coghill
Russian Formalism and Revolution: Elena Guro (1877-1913) Russian Formalist writer and contemporary of Roman Jakobson (pseudonym: Aljagrov)

William Allegrezza
Charles Bernstein’s Disruptive Praxis

Sean Bonney 
The Magic Words Are . . . . . Riot as Prosody


14:00- 15:30

Panel A   (Room 355)    Chair: Harry Gilonis

Amy De’Ath 
‘Not not this. What, this then?’ : Kevin Davies and the Merely Interesting

Michael Zand
Reclaiming the House of Leo. Lion as a poetic response to the impact of the Islamic Revolution on the treatment of the Iranian “lion and sun” motif.

Becky Cremin
to initiate a poetics of occupation. occupy as poetics : poetics as occupy


Panel B   (Room 354)  
  Chair: Aodan McCardle

Demosthenes Agrafiotis
Cries, crises. Greek Passions

Piotr Gwiazda
Ether: Conformity and Resistance in Contemporary US Poetry

Allen Fisher
Fascism and the State


Panel C   (Room 353)   
Chair: Sean Bonney

Danny Hayward
Revolutionary Poetry and Reactionary Thinking

Karen Veitch
“A means o’ world locomotion”: Hugh MacDiarmid and the Poetics of Revolution

Amy Evans
“Revolution or Death”: Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan and the problem of the English gentlewoman as revolutionary

 

Sunday 27 May 2012 - Papers


10:00-11:30

Panel A   (Room 353)     Chair: Peter Jaeger

Julie Carr
The Eros of Utopia: William Morris, Lisa Robertson

cris cheek
murmuration of poeisis : praxis between control and emergence

Harry Gilonis 
Ch'iu Chin (1875-1907) and Chinese, revolutionary, poetics


Panel B   (Room 354)    Chair: Steve Willey

Jeffrey C. Robinson
A Radical Romantic Poetry: Poems for the Millennium, Three

Jennifer Cooke
“Public Disorder” and Poetry, 2010-2011


Panel C   (Room 355)    Chair: Sean Bonney

Sophie Robinson
‘the grave of love’: queer desire and anti-sociality in the poetry of Frank O’Hara

Richenda Power
Post-'68 Poetry and Self: voices from a commune

David Vichnar 
TRANSITION IN LANGUAGE: FROM TRANSITION TO L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E


12:00-13:30

Panel A   (Room 353)    Chair: Will Montgomery

David Buuck 
WE ARE ALL SOUND: POETICS & PUBLIC SPACE IN THE OCCUPY OAKLAND MOVEMENT

Stephen Mooney
Insuperable Underlanguage: Epochal Change and Will Rowe’s Nation

Rachel Galvin
“Incantation and Recantation in the English and French Revolutionary Ode”


Panel B   (Room 354)    Chair: Luis Trindade

Richard Owens
SHATTERED SPACE AND LYRIC PRACTICE

Steven Fowler 
Dada: the ethical exception.

David Kessel


Panel C   (Room 355)   Chair: Jeff Hilson

Keston Sutherland 
Revolution and Really Being Alive

Jacob Edmond
Revolution’s Echo: Poetry after 1989

Josh Robinson
Adorno, Lyric, and the Poetics of the Wrong State of Things


2:30-4:00

Panel A   (Room 353)    Chair: Harry Gilonis

Paul Sutton
Poetry and Revolution

Wayne Clements
The return of what has been forgotten
Ian Hamilton Finlay: Revolution and Poetry (a reply to Drew Milne)


Panel B   (Room 354)  
  Chair: Luis Trindade

Maria Damon
Micropoetries as Po(e)tential Kindling for Greater Revolution

Robin Purves 
Deconstruction Fucked My Beatrice

Albert Pellicer on Cecilia Vicuna 
SABORAMI by Cecilia Vicuña, then & now


Panel C   (Room 355)    Chair: Aodan McCardle

Kaia Sand 
Landscapes of Dissent: seven notes on the Occupy Movements.

William Rowe
Bill Griffiths: the Negative and the Multiple

Zoë Skoulding
Translation and irruptive citizenship in the poetry of Erín Moure


Panel D   (Room G15)

Andy Croft (Smokestack Books)
Je suis tous les autres : common music and radical poetry

Association of Musical Marxists
“Why Destroy”

orignally posted CFP and poster 2012-03-19; this updated replaces that post.