Noted Poets Maclow And Ignatow to Be Among UB's Special Literary Guests This Fall

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- "Wednesdays at 4 Plus," the bi-annual literary series sponsored by the Poetics Program in the University at Buffalo Department of English, this fall will celebrate the 75th birthday of Jackson MacLow, one of America's most renowned and innovative poets, with special readings by or in honor of MacLow on Sept. 24, Oct. 8 and Nov. 19.

David Ignatow (Ig-NAH-tov), one of the nation's most distinguished poets, a superb writer considered the poetic heir of Whitman and William Carlos Williams, will present the Oscar Silverman Memorial Reading on Nov. 14.

In the 1950s, MacLow was associated with both the second generation of Black Mountain poets like Robert Creeley, and with the Fluxus movement comprised of such artists as John Cage, George Brecht, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Al Hanson, Allen Kaprow and LaMonte Young. From this convergence of the minimalist forms developed by both groups emerged sound poetry and language poetry, of which MacLow is a critically recognized master. He has been cited as an important influence by several major postmodernist writers, and his work, "Words and Ends from Ez," is an important re-reading of seminal America poet Ezra Pound.

Ignatow, a first-rate poet, is a true and honest writer recognized for the wondrous subtlety of his art and characteristic concern with human mortality and alienation in the world as it is "defined by suffering and despair, redeemed at crucial times by cosmic vision and shared lives."

Of Ignatow, writer Gerald Stern has said, "...what I have always liked most about his poems, the wisdom, and the humility. They are truly there. We are in the presence of an overwhelmingly important voice. It is eternity speaking."

In addition to MacLow and Ignatow, writers who will read or lecture in the fall series are poets Kevin Killian (Sept. 17) and Michael Basinski (Sept. 24); novelist Marta Werner (Sept. 30); author and poet David Bromige (Oct. 20); virtuosi poet Laura Moriarty (Oct. 29), and poets Steve McCaffery (Nov. 5) and Randall McLeod (Nov. 13).

Bilingual poet and performance artist Janine Pommy Vega will be the guest author at a reading and book signing on Oct. 1 at Talking Leaves Books honoring the publication of her new travel book, "Tracking The Serpent: Journeys to Four Continents." Usually included in lists of the best American beat writers, Vega's work can be found in a compilation by Brenda Knight titled "The Writers, Artists, And Muses At The Heart Of A Revolution."

On Nov. 19, UB will host a performance by F'loom (formerly known as Murmer), an engaging and unusual all-male vocal trio whose members draw their material freely from literature, music, comedy and social commentary and are rapidly developing a national reputation as performance artists. This performance will honor Jackson MacLow's birthday.

On Dec. 4, Joan Jonas, a renowned performer, stage director and video artist from New York City, will present a lecture titled "Video as a Medium." Among her early and well-known works is "Double Lunar Dogs" (1984), which originated as a performance and was later recorded on both videotape and film. The recorded material has been transformed in the editing process, notably through the use of video effects. The performers include Jonas, Spalding Gray, Jill Kroesen and David Warrilow.

There also will be a lecture on Oct. 14 by poet Alan Halsey and a poetry reading on Oct. 15 featuring Halsey and Geraldine Monk. Author of "Five Years Out" and "Perspectives on the Reach," Halsey is known for his fierce, quiet poetic voice, both determined and without illusion. Monk is the author of "The Sway of Precious Demons: Selected Poems" and the novel "Interregnum." The latter work explores current and historical abuse and misuse of language for the purpose of limiting the freedom of certain individuals and groups, in this case, a group of East Lancarshire "witches," hanged in 1612, who had fallen victim to what Monk calls a "patriarchal language-magic far more potent than their own."

€ Wednesday, Sept. 17 € 4 p.m. € Center For The Arts Screening Room

Writer and poet Dodie Bellamy is the author of several books and serves as the director of the Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center. She is working on a multi-dimensional romance, "The Fourth Form." Her last book, "Real: The Letters of Mina Harper and Sam D'Allesandro," is a collaborative spin-off on Bellamy's earlier works.

Kevin Killian, poet, novelist and playwright, has written several books and is a leading figure of the so-called "New Narrative" movement, a loosely organized group of writers working to infuse prose fiction with the theoretical insights common to the experimental poetry of our time. He is collaborating with Lew Ellingham in the production of a biography featuring American (and frequent Wednesdays At 4 Plus guest) poet Jack Spicer, to be published in 1998.

Bellamy and Killian have co-edited more than 70 issues of the San Francisco-based writing/art zine Mirage #4/Period[ical].

€ Thursday, Sept. 18 € 4 p.m. € 438 Clemens Hall

€ Wednesday, Sept. 24 € 4 p.m. € Center For The Arts Screening Room

A poet from Lancaster, Michael Basinski is assistant curator of the Poetry/Rare Books Collection at UB. His work has appeared in more than 100 magazines and he is the author of 14 books of poetry, including "Idyll" and "Heebee-jeebies." Basinski will perform with the East Buffalo Media Associates, a prominent fixture of the Buffalo poetry scene for more than a decade. This performance honors Jackson MacLow's birthday.

€ Tuesday, Sept. 30 € 3:30 p.m. € 420 Capen Hall

Werner is the author of "Emily Dickinson's Open Folios," an extremely important reference book for Dickinson scholars that presents an authentic explanation of late drafts and fragments previously known as the "Lord Letters."

€ Wednesday, Oct. 1 € 7 p.m. € Talking Leaves Books, 3158 Main St., Buffalo

Author Janine Pommy Vega has written 12 books of poetry and essays since 1968. Her most recent work, "Tracking The Serpent: Journeys to Four Continents," is a collection of essays on travel in the Amazon, the Andes and the Himalayas.

Her work with bilingual students around New York State uses the poetry of Latin American writers as a springboard to students' own work, and as a source of pride in their common heritage. She divides her time between Woodstock and New York City, teaching both in upstate schools and the New York City school system. Vega has performed extensively with her band, Tiamalu, in both English and Spanish. She also is director of Incisions/Arts, a coalition of writers who go into prisons and juvenile facilities to conduct writing workshops and help inmates produce their own anthologies.

€ Wednesday, Oct. 8 € 4 p.m. € Center for the Arts Screening Room

Jackson MacLow, one of the great American poets of the 20th century, will celebrate his 75th birthday with a short stay at UB, during which he will lecture and read from his work.

MacLow has been writing and composing music since 1937 and is widely associated with the second-generation Black Mountain poets like Robert Creeley; with the international Fluxus movement, which influenced many art forms in the 1950s and Œ60s, and with postmodern literary forms, especially language poetry. He began his career using what he now describes as "quasi-intentional" methods involving subliminal choices among word choices arising in both the outer and inner environments, later moving into "reading through," techniques. MacLow has traveled extensively with his wife, Anne Tardos, performing repeatedly at many international venues.

He has been awarded fellowships by New York State's Creative Arts Public Service Program for multimedia art and poetry. In 1986, he received a Fulbright travel grant to New Zealand, where he was the keynote speaker at the Australia and New Zealand American Studies Association conference at the University of Auckland.

€ Tuesday, Oct. 14 € 3:30 p.m. € 436 Clemens Hall

British poet Alan Halsey is the author of several books and directs The Poetry Book shop in Hay-on-Wye, England. He has read at numerous forums in the U.K., including the Cambridge Poetry Festival and at Kings College in London. Halsey is the author of "The Text of Shelley's Death."

€ Wednesday, Oct. 15 € 4 p.m. € Center for the Arts Screening Room

Geraldine Monk works with what she terms "language-magic" to craft works in an arresting style all her own. She is the author of "Interregnum" and has contributed to numerous anthologies. She and Halsey will present a poetry reading following the lecture. Monk is known for the intensity of her performances, so this reading promises to be a unique experience.

Alan Halsey: see above.

€ Sunday, Oct. 19 € 2 p.m. € Penney Burchfield Arts Center, Buffalo State College

Poet and UB English Professor Emeritus Mac S. Hammond, who died on July 9 at the age of 71, will be remembered by Buffalo's literary community at a memorial service.

Hammond began his career at UB in 1963 and became a full professor in 1969. During his tenure, he served as master of Cassirer College, one of UB's experimental colleges of the 1960s that offered an alternative to the traditional educational experience. He also directed UB's graduate program in creative writing. The author of four volumes of poetry, he is described by his colleague, poet Carl Dennis, as "a mixture of romantic hoping and very down-to-earth concreteness. He was very much his own man."

€ Monday, Oct. 20 € 7 p.m. € Talking Leaves Books, 3158 Main St., Buffalo

Bromige is one of the most important poets to emerge from the projectivist tradition of Robert Duncan. He has been called a "vervy, impatient, embracing and ironically amused" writer and often incorporates social commentary into his verse. He has written 23 books of poetry (including "Threads" and "My Poetry"), most published by Black Sparrow Press, and is noted as well for his short stories and prose poems for which he has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Canada Council. His book of selected poems, "Desire," won the Western States Arts Federation Award in 1988, the most important literary prize west of the Rockies. A native of England, Bromige emigrated to Canada in 1953 and to the U.S. in 1962. He has taught at Sonoma State University in California since 1970.

€ Thursday, Oct. 23 € 12:30 p.m. € 438 Clemens Hall

Poet and lecturer Steve McCaffery will present a lecture titled "Text, Lay-out and Memory." McCaffery who holds the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetics residency at UB, has an international reputation as a poet and essayist, as well as in performance and video art, two media in which he has worked extensively. He is a founding member of the Toronto Research Group and has issued a number of audio cassettes and records that feature him in solo performance and with the sound poetry group, The Four Horsemen. He lives in Toronto.

€ Wednesday, Oct. 29 € 4 p.m. € Center for the Arts Screening Room

Poet Laura Moriarty, whose recent books include "Like Roads," "Rondeaux" and "L'Archiviste," will present a reading from her work. She won a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award in Poetry in 1992 and has served as director of the American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University since 1986.

€ Wednesday, Nov. 5 € 12:30 p.m. € Center For The Arts Screening Room

See above for McCaffery biography.

€ Thursday, Nov. 13 € 12:30 p.m. € 438 Clemens Hall

McLeod, who is among the most innovative textual editors extant, serves as editor of "Crisis in Editing: Texts of the English Renaissance." He teaches at the University of Toronto and his book of essays, on the material of Shakespeare, are forthcoming from Cambridge.

€ Friday, Nov. 14 € 8 p.m. € 250 Baird Hall

Poet David Ignatow is a prolific writer whose work has been celebrated for many decades. As early as 1964, he was feted by the National Institute and American Academy of Arts and Letters "for a lifetime of creative effort" and went on to win such professional kudos as Guggenheim Memorial fellowships in 1965 and 1973, and the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America in 1966. He also has received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bollingen Prize and a Wallace Stevens Fellowship from Yale University, among others.

Widely published and anthologized, Ignatow is considered an autobiographical writer influenced by William Carlos Williams, Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Rimbaud and the Bible.

His early work renounced social problems like urban crime, social dissolution, war and economic collapse. In subsequent books, Ignatow's focus on his social environment broadens to include his relationship with nature. More philosophical and imaginative than his earlier work, later poetry, such as the poems in "Facing the Tree: New Poems" and "Whisper to the Earth," meditates on plants, stones, water and weather, and asks of nature the same questions the author raises elsewhere.

Ignatow is a professor emeritus at the City University of New York.

€ Wednesday, Nov. 19 € 4 p.m. € Center For The Arts Screening Room

F'loom is an all-male vocal trio that uses aspects of music, literature and comedy to produce what has been described as "an unforgettable auditory and visual experience." Critics describe the group's use of "wit, humor and mind-stretching verbal pyrotechnics" to create a type of "language-music" composed of "poetry, diatribe, tongue clicks, whirs, breaths and ululations." Michael Ives is a jazz musician and student of classical literature. Robert Kulik is a jazz guitarist and avid amateur Sanskrit scholar. Rick Scott got his start at a German music conservatory and describes himself as "a neopagan herbalist with a vast fondness for the absurd."

€ Wednesday, Dec. 3 € 4 p.m. € Center for the Arts Screening Room

Joan Jonas is recognized as being among America's premier video, visual and performance artists. In the early Œ70s, she was one of the first to discover the medium's potential as a mirror that allowed performances to be easily disseminated and exhibited without the artist's physical presence. Jonas represented the United States in the 1995 Biennale D'art Contemporaine de Lyon and has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the CAT Fund. A recipient of the 1989 Maya Daren Award, her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Cleveland Center of Contemporary Art, among many other venues.

€ Thursday, Dec. 4 € 12:30 p.m. € 438 Clemens Hall

See above for Jonas biography