Leslie Scalapino Lecture in Innovative Poetics at Naropa University

The Leslie Scalapino Lecture in Innovative Poetics is an annual lecture series hosted by Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with a focus on critical analysis of innovative poetry, essays, plays and cross-genre work primarily by women poets. The series invites contemporary writers to present their work in the spirit exemplified by Scalapino’s own critical writing and editorial vision as publisher of O Books.

Monday, March 14, 2016; 7:30 PM

Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics presents the 2016 Leslie Scalapino Lecture in Innovative Poetics:

Dawn Lundy Martin
On Discomfort and Creativity 

Location: Naropa University Performing Arts Center: 2130 Arapahoe Avenue, Boulder, CO
Free and open to all

Join us for a lecture with Dawn Lundy Martin as part of the How to Grieve and Dream At The Same Time: Discuss spring symposium.

Poet, essayist and multimedia artist Dawn Lundy Martin is the author of three books of poetry, and three chapbooks. Of her latest collection, Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books 2015), Fred Moten says, “Imagine Holiday singing a Blind alley, or Brooks pricing hardpack dandelion, and then we’re seized and thrown into the festival of detonation we hope we’ve been waiting for.” Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh, Martin is a member of the three-person performance group, The Black Took Collective. She is also a member of the global artist collective, HOWDOYOUSAYYAMINAFRICAN?, the group that withdrew its work from the 2014 Whitney Biennial to protest the museum’s biased curatorial practices. Martin is currently working on a hybrid memoir, some of which appears as the essay, “The Long Road to Angela Davis’s Library,” published in the December 2014 New Yorker magazine.  Martin was also, most recently, the editor of “On Race and Innovation,” a dossier featured in boundary2: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF LITERATURE AND CULTURE.

Many thanks to Something on Paper for publishing Dawn Lundy Martin’s lecture, On Discomfort and Creativity, in JKS’ online poetics journal.


Monday, March 30, 2015; 7:00 PM

Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics presents the 2015 Leslie Scalapino Lecture in Innovative Poetics:

“Forms of Poetic Difficulty” with Dorothy Wang

Location: Naropa University Performing Arts Center: 2130 Arapahoe Avenue, Boulder, CO
Free and open to all

Join us for a lecture with Dorothy Wang as part of the I / Not I Symposium On Identity Politics with Kazim Ali, Ana Merino, and Ronaldo Wilson.

Dorothy Wang is an Associate Professor in American Studies and a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of English at Williams College. Her book Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2014) received Honorable Mention in the Poetry Foundation’s first Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. She previously taught in the English departments at Northwestern University and Wesleyan University. Wang holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.A. from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Many thanks to Something on Paper for publishing Dorothy Wang’s lecture, Forms of Poetic Difficulty, in JKS’ online poetics journal.


2014-Scalapino-PosterTuesday, April 22, 2014; 7:00 pm

Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics presents the 2014 Leslie Scalapino Lecture in Innovative Poetics:

“Driven to Abstraction? Listening for ‘Late Style’ in Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry”
with Steve Evans

Location: Naropa University Performing Arts Center: 2130 Arapahoe Avenue, Boulder, CO
Free and open to all

Join us for a lecture with Steve Evans, who will test the concept of “late style” against the recent work of poets roughly of Leslie Scalapino’s generation, all of whom have enjoyed unbroken (and interconnected) arcs of artistic activity since the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their extraordinary achievements, considered individually and collectively, create a context for a radical revision of the idea of “late” or “mature” style. Examples will be drawn from the phonotextual, as well as the textual, archive, and the talk will be followed by a curated set of clips by the poets discussed.

Steve Evans, educated at UC San Diego (BA) and Brown (PhD), has served on the Poetry and Poetics faculty at the University of Maine, where he also co-directs the National Poetry Foundation, coordinates the New Writing Series, and tends the website thirdfactory.net. His criticism has appeared in numerous publications, and in 2001 he edited After Patriarchal Poetry: Feminism and the Contemporary Avant-Garde. He is presently working on a project tentatively titled “The Poetics of Phonotextuality: Timbre, Text, and Technology in Recorded Poetry.”


CANCELED: October 2013
The Leslie Scalapino Lecture in Innovative Poetics: Petah Coyne
Naropa University
Performing Arts Center, Arapahoe Campus, 2130 Arapahoe Ave., Boulder, CO 80302
Free


Thursday, June 14, 2012; 1 pm 
The Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture in Innovative Poetics: Jalal Toufic
“I Have Something to Say (Silence-over) and I Am Saying It (Thanks to Music-over) and that Is Poetry”
Naropa University
Performing Arts Center, Arapahoe Campus, 2130 Arapahoe Ave., Boulder, CO 80302
Free


Thursday, April 5, 2012, 8:15 p.m.
The Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture in Innovative Poetics: Joan Retallack
Naropa University
Shambhala Hall, Arapahoe Campus, 2130 Arapahoe Ave., Boulder, CO 80302
Free

Joan Retallack Reading for The Leslie Scalapino Lecture in 21st Century Poetics
Presented by Small Press Traffic, San Francisco, May 27, 2011