Kristin Prevallet (b. 1966) is an American poet, essayist, and teacher. Her poetic work incorporates conceptual writing and trance, and her performances are rooted in feminist performance art and spoken word. Everywhere Here and in Brooklyn, I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time, and Trance Poetics are among her poetic books. [1]
Prevallet grew up in Denver, Colorado. Her parents were both public school teachers. Before dying of cancer at the age of 46, her mother fulfilled her vows to become a Sister of Loretto. Prevallet studied poetics with Robert Creeley and media studies with Tony Conrad at the University at Buffalo.
Since the early 1990s, she has been teaching writing and literature courses for a variety of universities and art institutions including Bard College's Writing and Thinking Workshop, Pratt Institute, Naropa University, Poet's House, and The Poetry Project. From 2003 to 2006, she worked with Anne Waldman and Bob Holman to start a school for poets at the Bowery Poetry Club, the venue which defined the New York downtown poetry scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
At the University of Buffalo, Prevallet catalogued the archive of Helen Adam and her scholarly archive is a part of The Poetry Collection. She edited the definitive volume of Helen Adam’s work (A Helen Adam Reader, published by the National Poetry Foundation), which contextualizes Helen Adam within Robert Duncan's circle in The San Francisco Renaissance, as well as Adam's influence on Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation.
Prevallet's poem "Lyric Infiltration" from her second book Scratch Sides: Poetry, Documentation and Image-Text Projects is analyzed by Redell Olson in “Reading and Writing Through Found Materials: From Modernism to Contemporary Practice.” [2] Olson writes, "The use of the term ‘cut-up’ places Prevallet’s procedural work in relation to the strategies of previous writers such as Tristan Tzara, Brion Gysin, and the Oulipo founder Raymond Queneau, and can also be related to the chance-based operational writing of John Cage and Jackson Mac Low. The work of Prevallet is unusual in that it does not dispense with either the term ‘lyric’ or the process of lyric writing but uses it as a basis for her procedural work." [2]
Elizabeth Jane Burnett describes her 2004 performance of "Cruelty and Conquest" at Naropa University as "playing with audience response as a feminist poetry that explores the ways in which the body is transacted." [3]
Her work has been published in numerous anthologies including The Body in Language (CounterPath Press, edited by Edwin Torres), I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing By Women (University of Iowa Press), Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts & Affections (Edited by Arielle Greenburg and Rachel Zucker, University of Iowa Press), and Telling it Slant: Avant-garde Poetics of the 1990s (edited by Mark Wallace, University of Alabama Press).
Jacket No. 16 (March 2002)
Riding the Meridian v2 n2
Jacket No. 12 (July 2000)
Jacket No. 7 (April 1999)
Robert White Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1991, he joined colleagues Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, Robert Bertholf, and Dennis Tedlock in founding the Poetics Program at Buffalo. Creeley lived in Waldoboro, Buffalo, and Providence, where he taught at Brown University. He was a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.
Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was the primary instigator and theorist of the so-called "Objectivist" poets, a short lived collective of poets who after several decades of obscurity would reemerge around 1960 and become a significant influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.
The Language poets are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapino, Stephen Rodefer, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Alan Davies, Carla Harryman, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, James Sherry, and Tina Darragh.
Anne Waldman is an American poet. Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. She has also been connected to the Beat poets.
Rae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with the Language poets. She has published more than two dozen books, including poetry and prose.
Robert Edward Duncan was an American poet and a devotee of Hilda "H.D." Doolittle and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black Mountain College. Duncan saw his work as emerging especially from the tradition of Pound, Williams and Lawrence. Duncan was a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance.
Michael Palmer is an American poet and translator. He attended Harvard University, where he earned a BA in French and an MA in Comparative Literature. He has worked extensively with Contemporary dance for over thirty years and has collaborated with many composers and visual artists. Palmer has lived in San Francisco since 1969.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is an American poet and essayist, known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modernist and contemporary poetry. Her work has been widely anthologized.
Juliana Spahr is an American poet, critic, and editor. She is the recipient of the 2009 Hardison Poetry Prize awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library to honor a U.S. poet whose art and teaching demonstrate great imagination and daring.
Peter Gizzi is an American poet, essayist, editor and teacher. He attended New York University, Brown University and the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Helen Adam was a Scottish poet, collagist and photographer who was part of a literary movement contemporaneous to the Beat Generation that occurred in San Francisco during the 1950s and 1960s. Though often associated with the Beat poets, she would more accurately be considered one of the predecessors of the Beat Generation.
Skanky Possum was a twice-a-year poetry journal and small book-publishing imprint begun in Austin, Texas and associated with a long-running, home-based poetry reading series. It existed between 1998 and 2012.
Gloria Frym is an American poet, fiction writer, and essayist.
Redell Olsen FEA is a British poet, performance artist, film-maker and academic. Her work incorporates traditional books alongside images, texts for performance, films, and site specific work. Olsen describes her work as involving avant-garde modernist and contemporary poetics, feminist theory and writing practice, Language Writing, ecology and environmental literatures, and performance.
Andrew Schelling, is an American poet and translator.
Jena Osman is an American poet and editor, who graduated from Brown University, and the State University of New York at Buffalo, with a Ph.D. She teaches at Temple University.
Elizabeth Robinson is an American poet and professor, author of twelve collections of poetry, most recently Counterpart, "Three Novels" "Also Known A,", and The Orphan and Its Relations. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, the Denver Quarterly, Poetry Salzburg Review, and New American Writing. Her poems have been anthologized in "American Hybrid", "The Best of Fence", and Postmodern American Poetry With Avery Burns, Joseph Noble, Rusty Morrison, and Brian Strang, she co-edited 26 magazine. Starting in 2012, Robinson began editing a new literary periodical, Pallaksch. Pallaksch, with Steven Seidenberg. For 12 years, Robinson co-edited, with Colleen Lookingbill, the EtherDome Chapbook series which published chapbooks by emerging women poets. She co-edits Instance Press with Beth Anderson and Laura Sims. She graduated from Bard College, Brown University, and Pacific School of Religion. She moved from the Bay Area to Boulder, Colorado where she taught at the University of Colorado and at Naropa University. She has also taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has twice served as the Hugo Fellow at the University of Montana.
Eleni Sikelianos is an American experimental poet with a particular interest in scientific idiom. She is Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.
Bobbie Louise Hawkins was a short story writer, monologist, and poet.
Fast Speaking Music is a label founded by poet Anne Waldman and Ambrose Bye, in New York City. Releases by Fast Speaking Music have prominently featured jazz, the literary, and performance art. Its recordings have been made featuring poets, musicians, and interdisciplinary artists such as Anne Waldman, Amiri Baraka, Clark Coolidge, Meredith Monk, Akilah Oliver, Thurston Moore, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and many others. Variously associated with contemporary poetry, Conceptual Poetics and Conceptual Art, the Beat Generation, New York School, Black Arts Movement, New American Poetry, Nuyorican Poetry, Abstraction, Dematerialized Art, rock & roll, jazz, and experimental music and cinema, artists in the Fast Speaking Music catalog have roots that stretch across a broad spectrum of disciplines and art practices ranging from letters to music, dance, film and visual arts. Musicians featured on the label include Daniel Carter, Ha-Yang Kim, Devin Brahja Waldman, Max Davies, and Thurston Moore.