George Oppen: A Centenary Conversation
Event Poster
Wednesday, April 23rd, Thursday, April 24th and Friday, April 25th
Celebrating the life and work of George Oppen on the occasion of his 100th birthday, the Poetics Program will be hosting a three-day event involving panel presentations, roundtable discussion, keynote addresses from invited guests, and celebratory readings both of Oppen’s work and work inspired by his life and practice.
Keynote addresses and poetry readings by Stephen Cope, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Susan Thackrey, and John Wilkinson. Roundtable conversation among SUNY Buffalo faculty members Joseph Conte, Myung Mi Kim, Steve McCaffery, and Krzysztof Ziarek
This event is sponsored by the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo (David Gray Chair Steve McCaffery), the English Department, the Humanities Institute, the Graduate Student Association Scholarly Symposia Fund, the College of Arts & Sciences Fund for Conferences and Lectures, the History of Ideas, the Graduate Poetics Group, the Comparative Literature Graduate Student Association, and the English Graduate Student Association. Special thanks to the Poetry Collection at SUNY Buffalo, the Karpeles Manuscript Museum, and Rust Belt Books.
Schedule of Events
Wednesday, April 23
Rust Belt Books (202 Allen St)
7:00PM:
"Presencing the (New) Disaster: Recent Poetics of Consequence after George Oppen," Thom Donovan
Readings by Thom Donovan Rob Halpern
8:00PM:
Conference participants will be reading from Oppen’s work and/or their own.
Thursday, April 24
Poetry/Rare Books Room (420 Capen Hall, SUNY Buffalo North Campus)
9:30-10:00AM
Coffee
10:00-11:00AM
Keynote: Stephen Cope (Ohio University) "This With Which We No Longer Share the Century: Some Futures for Oppen Scholarship"
11:15 -12:30PM
Panel I: Disaster / Catastrophe / Accident
"How Do You Spell Modernity?: Oppen and Adorno on Poetry and Disenchantment," David Collins (SUNY Buffalo)
"What Whitman Leaves to Oppen," Zack Finch (SUNY Buffalo)
"George Oppen's Aesthetics of Accident: 'The wheels of the overturned wreck / Still spinning – ,'" Aaron Lehman (University of Rochester)
"Oppen and the Body Snatchers," Jill Richards (UC Berkeley)
12:30-2:00PM
Lunch
2:15-3:300PM
Panel II: Dwelling, Domesticity, and the Urban
"'Not Some Manly Toughness': Oppen's Domesticity," Rob Halpern (Independent Writer)
"George Oppen's Urbanizing Pastoral," Todd Thorpe (University of Notre Dame)
"'The Shipwreck of the Singular': George Oppen and the American Experience of Dwelling," David Miller (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
Thursday Evening Events in Downtown Buffalo Karpeles Manuscript Museum (453 Porter Ave)
7:00PM
Opening Reception
8:00PM
Keynote: Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Temple University) "Oppen from Seventy-Five to a Hundred, 1983-2008"
Readings by John Wilkinson and Susan Thackrey
Friday, April 25
Poetry/Rare Books Room (420 Capen Hall, SUNY Buffalo North Campus)
9:30-10:00AM
Coffee
10:00-11:00AM
Keynote: John Wilkinson (University of Notre Dame) "The Glass Enclosure: Transparency and Glitter in the Poetry of George Oppen"
11:15-12:30PM
Panel III: Translations and Re-Visions
"To Memory: Oppen, Buddhadeva Bose and Translation,"Pat Clifford (Independent Scholar)
"'The little hole in the eye:' George Oppen's Critique of Vision," Grant Jenkins (University of Tulsa)
"‘It seems necessarily true that I did not read those sentences’: Oppen's 'Route' and a Practice of the Actual," Andrew Rippeon (SUNY Buffalo)
"Oppen's 'We' and the Poetics of the First Person Plural," Siobhán Scarry (SUNY Buffalo)
12:30-2:00PM
Lunch
2:15-3:30PM
Roundtable: SUNY Buffalo Faculty
Joseph Conte, Myung Mi Kim, Steve McCaffery, Krzysztof Ziarek
3:45-4:30PM
Keynote: Susan Thackrey
Evening Events in Downtown Buffalo
Karpeles Manuscript Museum (453 Porter Ave)
7:30PM
Reception
8PM
Readings by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Stephen Cope
Biographical Notes
Stephen Cope’s poems, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics, Mirage#4: Period(ical), Denver Quarterly, Shark, Sagetrieb, The Germ, Jacket, and elsewhere. In Spring 2001, he served as guest editor of The Review of Contemporary Fiction's special issue on the work of David Antin. Cope received his PhD in 2005 from the University of California, San Diego, where he was a research fellow at the Archive for New Poetry. He has taught at universities in California, Iowa, and Ohio, and is currently a lecturer in the English Department at Ohio University in Athens as well as a faculty member in Bard College's Language and Thinking program. His edition of George Oppen's Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers has just appeared from the University of California Press.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is a poet, feminist literary critic, and editor of Oppen’s Selected Letters (Duke, 1990) and, with Peter Quartermain, The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (Alabama, 1999). Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work, a book of essays, was published by the University of Alabama Press in 2006; in the same year, Alabama reprinted DuPlessis’s now classic The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. Other recent critical work includes Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908-1934 (Cambridge, 2001). Her most recent collection of poetry is Torques: Drafts 58-76, which continues her long poem Drafts. Other volumes of this project include Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan, 2001) and Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft, Unnumbered: Précis (Salt, 2004). In 1999, DuPlessis received Temple University’s Creative Achievement Award, and in 2001-2002 a Pew Fellowship for Artists. Also in 2002, she was awarded the third Roy Harvey Pearce / Archive for New Poetry Prize, given biennially to an American poet/scholar who has made a significant lifetime contribution to American poetry and literary scholarship. Recently, she has been awarded a National Humanities Center Fellowship for 2008-2009. Currently, DuPlessis teaches at Temple University.
Susan Thackrey’s poems have been widely published. She is the author of a book of poems, Empty Gate (Beyond Baroque, 1999), and George Oppen: A Radical Practice (O Books, 2001). She is an analyst member and on the teaching faculty of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, and she has a private practice in San Francisco.
John Wilkinson is a poet and professor at Notre Dame University, and he also has a professional and academic background in mental health. Wilkinson has been Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard University and Fulbright Distinguished Scholar at the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research. Recent books of poetry include Effigies Against the Light (2001), Contrivances (2003), Lake Shore Drive (2006) and Proud Flesh (2005), all from Salt, and his poetry is also represented in the Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2001). His critical writing has appeared in Cambridge Quarterly, Critical Quarterly, and Chicago Review, and The Lyric Touch: Essays on the Poetry of Excess collects his critical essays on British and American poets.
