POETICS list

Last updated

The University of Buffalo POETICS listserv (informally and variously known as UBPOETICS or the POETICS list) was one of the oldest and most widely known mailing lists devoted to the discussion of contemporary North American poetry and poetics. It began on 8 December 1993, [1] although the most easily accessible archive only contains messages from after the middle of 1994. A number of influential poets and critics associated with various movements in contemporary poetry, including Marjorie Perloff and Charles Bernstein, were list subscribers. Estimates of list membership numbers vary, but were around 1800 readers.[ citation needed ] The list was discontinued in 2014. [2]

It was run on servers owned by University at Buffalo, and was associated with the school's graduate program in poetics. It was a closed list with submitted postings selected by the administrator and editor Amy King.[ citation needed ] The list had undergone numerous controversies over the years. In 1999, Bernstein briefly shut down the list allegedly in response to a large number of postings by one subscriber, Henry Gould, [3] who denied his postings as the cause. The list later reopened. The list provided for a mild amount of moderation by the list owners, with most messages "pre-approved"; the new list rules also state that:

"We generally do not accept postings of creative work not directed toward a discussion of poetics issues on the list. The Poetics List is not a venue for the posting of free-standing, personal poems or journal entries. However, the Poetics List editor may occasionally solicit or approve poems for posting on the list."[ citation needed ]

In the early days of the list, membership, list discussions and even the existence of the list itself were kept private, and members were required not to discuss the contents of list postings or the list itself with "outsiders." People who wished to join the list were asked to provide a short "personal statement" before being approved. "Real names" were also required. These requirements were relaxed in later years. [4]

In 2001 the list served as the main forum for a protest against the appointment of Billy Collins as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Members of the list participated in the election of an anti-laureate run by Robert Archambeau. Anselm Hollo was elected to this honorary position [5] [6]

Related Research Articles

Robert Creeley American poet

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.

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.

Charles Bernstein (poet) American writer

Charles Bernstein is an American poet, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein is the Donald T. Regan Professor, Emeritus, Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E or Language poets. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. and in 2019 he was awarded the Bollingen Prize from Yale University, the premiere American prize for lifetime achievement, given on the occasion of the publication of Near/Miss. Bernstein was David Gray Professor of Poetry and Poetics at SUNY-Buffalo from 1990 to 2003, where he co-founded the Poetics Program. A volume of Bernstein's selected poetry from the past thirty years, All the Whiskey in Heaven, was published in 2010 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein was published in 2012 by Salt Publishing.

Susan Howe American poet

Susan Howe is an American poet, scholar, essayist and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among other poetry movements. Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre. Many of Howe's books are layered with historical, mythical, and other references, often presented in an unorthodox format. Her work contains lyrical echoes of sound, and yet is not pinned down by a consistent metrical pattern or a conventional poetic rhyme scheme.

American poetry Poetry from the United States of America

American poetry refers to the poetry of the United States. It arose first as efforts by American colonists to add their voices to English poetry in the 17th century, well before the constitutional unification of the Thirteen Colonies. Unsurprisingly, most of the early colonists' work relied on contemporary English models of poetic form, diction, and theme. However, in the 19th century, a distinctive American idiom began to emerge. By the later part of that century, when Walt Whitman was winning an enthusiastic audience abroad, poets from the United States had begun to take their place at the forefront of the English-language avant-garde.

Carolyn D. Wright American poet

Carolyn D. Wright was an American poet. She was a MacArthur Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island.

Anselm Hollo Finnish poet and translator

Anselm Paul Alexis Hollo was a Finnish poet and translator. He lived in the United States from 1967 until his death in January 2013.

Ron Silliman

Ron Silliman is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, The Alphabet. He has now begun writing a new poem, Universe, the first section of which appears to be called Revelator.

Léonie Adams American poet

Léonie Fuller Adams was an American poet. She was appointed the seventh Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1948.

Spam poetry, sometimes called spoetry, is poetic verse composed primarily from the subject lines or content of spam e-mail messages.

Kenneth Goldsmith American poet and critic (born 1961)

Kenneth Goldsmith is an American poet and critic. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb and since 2020 is the ongoing artist-in-residence at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches. He is also a senior editor of PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania. He hosted a weekly radio show at WFMU from 1995 until June 2010. He has published ten books of poetry, notably Fidget (2000), Soliloquy (2001), Day (2003) and his American trilogy, The Weather (2005), Traffic (2007), and Sports (2008). He is the author of three books of essays, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011), Wasting Time on The Internet (2016), and Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb (2020). In 2013, he was appointed the Museum of Modern Art's first poet laureate.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

Mark Pawlak is a Polish-American poet and educator.

o•blék: a journal of language arts was a small literary magazine founded by Peter Gizzi who co-edited it with Connell McGrath. The magazine published a number of poems often not in the mainstream but recognized for their excellence. The magazine ran from 1987 to 1993.

Cole Swensen American poet

Cole Swensen is an American poet, translator, editor, copywriter, and professor. Swensen was awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and is the author of more than ten poetry collections and as many translations of works from the French. She received her B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and served as the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Denver. She taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa until 2012 when she joined the faculty of Brown University's Literary Arts Program.

Frank X Walker African-American poet from Kentucky, born 1961.

Frank X Walker is an African-American poet from Danville, Kentucky. Walker coined the word "Affrilachia", signifying the importance of the African-American presence in Appalachia: the "new word ... spoke to the union of Appalachian identity and the region's African-American culture and history". He is a Professor in the English department at the University of Kentucky and was the Poet Laureate of Kentucky from 2013-2015.

Peter Seaton was an American poet associated with the first wave of Language poetry in the 1970s. During the opening and middle years of Language poetry many of his long prose poems were published, widely read and influential. Seaton was also a frequent contributor to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, one of the influential magazines and theoretical venues for Language poetry, co-edited by Charles Bernstein. In 1978, Bernstein published Seaton's first book of poetry, Agreement, the same year that L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine made its first appearance. Some of Seaton's work from this time has been reprinted in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (1984).

Kelly Cherry American writer and poet laureate of Virginia

Kelly Cherry is a novelist, poet, essayist, and a former Poet Laureate of Virginia (2010–2012). A resident of Halifax, Virginia, she was named the state's Poet Laureate by Governor Bob McDonnell in July 2010. She succeeded Claudia Emerson in this post.

Amy King is an American poet, essayist, and activist.

Jonathan Stalling American poet, scholar, editor, translator, professor, and inventor

Jonathan Stalling is an American poet, scholar, editor, translator, professor, and inventor who works at the intersection of English and Chinese. He is the Harold J & Ruth Newman Chair for US-China Issues and Co-Director of the Institute for US-China Issues, and is Professor of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma. He is also the affiliate English professor at the University of Oklahoma where he serves as the founding curator of the Chinese Literature Translation Archive (CLTA), and as a founding editor of Chinese Literature Today (CLT) journal and as the editor of the CLT book series published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

References

  1. ↑ "Poetics Archive". Buffalo edu. Retrieved February 22, 2010.
  2. ↑ Staff, Harriet (27 January 2014). "Farewell to All That: SUNY Buffalo's Poetics List Rides Into the Sunset". Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 5 November 2021.
  3. ↑ "Buffalo 99, Kent Johnson". flashpointmag.com. Retrieved February 22, 2010.
  4. ↑ "The Poetics List". epc.buffalo.edu. Retrieved February 22, 2010.
  5. ↑ "Poetics Archives". listserve.acusedu. Retrieved February 22, 2010.
  6. ↑ "Broken news, issue 10". Exquisite corpse. Archived from the original on December 30, 2003. Retrieved February 22, 2010.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.