Delany And Mcclure to Appear In UB Literary Series

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 spring will include a number of renowned authors, poets and playwrights from around the world.

Major events will include a British Poetry Festival featuring poet and painter Allen Fisher, a Canadian Poetry Festival with performances by today's most innovative Canadian poets and a Black Ice Festival of "avant-pop" and postmodern fiction.

The series also will feature visits from internationally renowned American authors Samuel Delany and Michael McClure.

"Wednesdays at 4 Plus" also is sponsored by the James H. McNulty Chair (Dennis Tedlock), the Samuel P. Capen Chair of Poetry and the Humanities (Robert Creeley) and the David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters (Charles Bernstein), all in the UB Department of English; the Rare Books Collection curator (Robert Bertholf), and the Melodia E. Jones Chair in French (Raymond Federman) in the UB Department of Modern Languages and Literatures.

The series is produced with the cooperation of the UB Center for the Arts, the Department of Media Study and Talking Leaves bookstore. Call (716) 645-3810 for more information.

All venues are on the UB North (Amherst) Campus, unless otherwise indicated.

• Wednesday, Feb. 4, 4 p.m., Center for the Arts Screening Room

• Thursday, Feb. 5, 12:30 p.m., 438 Clemens Hall

Author and curator, Yau has published more than 20 books of poetry, criticism and fiction. Recent books include "Forbidden Entries" (Black Sparrow Press, 1996) and "The United States of Jasper Johns" (Zoland Books, 1997). A book of short stories by Yau, entitled "My Symptoms," is awaiting publication.

He has contributed essays to magazines such as Artforum, Art in America, Interview, Vogue and New Art Examiner , and has published many monographs and catalogs.

Yau was an Ahmanson Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1993 and 1996, during which he organized the exhibition, "Ed Moses: A Retrospective of the Paintings and Drawings, 1951-1996."

He has taught at Brown University and the University of California at Berkeley, and is currently writer-in-residence at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

• Saturday, Feb. 7, 1:30 p.m. and 8 p.m., Cornershop Gallery, 82 Lafayette Ave., Buffalo

This special one-day event will include readings and performances, accompanied by visuals, of innovative Canadian poets Christian Bok, Lise Sowne, Beth Learn, Dan Farrell, Peter Jaeger and Darren Wershler-Henry.

• Wednesday, Feb. 18, 4 p.m., Center for the Arts Screening Room

• Thursday, Feb. 19, 12:30 p.m., 438 Clemens Hall

Lecture by Allen Fisher: "Recurrence and the Grand Theme in the Art of R.B. Kitaj"

Fisher is a poet, painter, publisher, editor and art historian who has been enormously influential on the younger generation of UK poets.

Listed in the major British anthologies, Fisher is the author of 114 chapbooks and books. His most recent chapbook is "Pulling Up Quasi Queen" (Spanner 1996). Other works include the books "Civic Crime" (Lowestoft, 1995) and "Dispossession and Cure" (Reality Street, 1994).

He also exhibits paintings in many shows and examples of his work are in the Tate Gallery collection in London and in the Living Museum in Iceland.

The current editor of Spanner, he lives in Hereford, England, and is the head of academic affairs at the Herefordshire College of Art and Design.

• Wednesday, Feb. 25, 4 p.m., Center for the Arts Screening Room

Rod Smith is the author of "In Memory of My Theories," "The Boy Poems" and "Protective Immediacy." He is associated with poetics of indeterminacy, which suggests that his work does not lend itself to facile categorization or reduction, but is much more open to the notion of conceptual poetry. Smith's vision is of whimsy, irony and responsibility, which manifests itself in the attitude that each reader is responsible for his or her own take on the poem and the world.

He edits Ariel, a journal of contemporary poetry and poetics; publishes Edge Books and manages Bridge Street Books in Washington, D.C.

Heather Fuller is the author of "Perhaps This Is A Rescue Fantasy," (Edge, 1997) and is the literary editor of the Washington Review. She works at the National Law Center in Washington.

• Thursday, Feb. 26, 12:30 p.m., 438 Clemens Hall

Poet Glazier, a Tejano native, is the director and founder of the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC) at UB and webmaster of the University Libraries. His books include "Leaving Loss Glazier" (Paisan Press), "The Parts" (Meow Press, 1995) and "Small Press: An Annotated Guide" (Greenwood Publishing, 1992).

As director of the EPC, he has worked to make substantial poetry resources available on-line and to engage the emerging multimedia environment of the Internet.

• Friday, Feb. 27, 3 p.m., UB Center for the Arts, and 7-9 p.m., Talking Leaves bookstore

• Saturday, Feb. 28, 8 p.m., Hallwalls, 2495 Main St., Buffalo

• Mark Amerika, a hypertext guru, is author of the novels "The Kafka Chronicles" and "Sexual Blood," both published by FC2/Black Ice. He is the founder and publisher of Alt-X, (http://altx.com/) one of the first on-line publishing sites that has been called the "literary publishing model of the future" by Publishers Weekly. Since 1995, he has been a creative writing fellow and lecturer on net publishing and hypertext at Brown University, where he developed the GRAMMATRON project, a multi-media Internet narrative that is being electronically circulated worldwide. Exhibitions of GRAMMATRON have taken place at Ars Electronica, the MIT Media Lab and the International Biennial of Film and Architecture in Graz.

• Jeffrey Deshell, experimental fiction writer, holds a doctorate in English from UB and teaches at Allegheny College. He wrote the controversial novel, "S & M" (FC2/Black Ice, 1997), and his fiction has appeared in Nobodaddies, The Iowa Review, Black Mountain II Review, Blatant Artifice and several Internet magazines.

• Elisabeth Sheffield also received her doctorate in English from UB and teaches at Allegheny College. She is an established avant-garde short-story writer and critic. Her stories have appeared in 13th moon, Nobodaddies, Asylum Arts Annual, Gulf Coast, Southern Plain Review, and Kiosk. She co-edited the "FC2/Black Ice Controversial Anthology of Young Women Writers Chick-Lit II."

• Edmund Cardoni, a doctoral candidate at UB, is the director of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center and the editor of Blatant Artifice. His work has appeared in a number of magazines.

• Alan Bigelow, UB professor of English for the past 12 years, is completing a novel. He has given many public readings and served as both a creative writing fellow for Erie County and as a grant recipient for the writer's-in-education program through Just Buffalo Literary Center.

Also starring in the festival are aspiring novelists, Ted Pelton and Nicolette DeCsipkay, both alumni of the UB English department and the University of Colorado at Boulder Creative Writing Program. The event, hosted by Raymond Federman, is being co-sponsored by Hallwalls, the UB Department of English, the UB Poetics Program, the UB Gray Chair of Poetry and Talking Leaves bookstore.

• Wednesday, March 18, 4 p.m., Center for the Arts Screening Room

• Thursday, March 19, 12:30 p.m., 438 Clemens Hall

An award-winning poet and playwright, McClure is noted for the popularity of his dynamic poetry readings. At the age 23, he gave his first reading at the legendary Six Gallery event in San Francisco, where Allen Ginsberg first read "Howl."

For the past nine years, he has been reciting poetry with piano accompaniment by Ray Manzarek, former Doors' keyboardist. They were featured with saxophonist David Sanborn on NBC-TV and performed a jazz rendition of McClure's "Love Lion Blues."

McClure, who was drawn into the Beat vortex of the San Francisco poetry renaissance, writes poetry infused with the awareness of nature and is especially interested in the animal consciousness that he says too often lies dormant in mankind.

McClure reads with an actor's command and sense of timing, bringing an impact to transport the audience to a very different and intriguing place.

He has received a Guggenheim award, an National Endowment for the Arts grant, the Alfred Jarry Award and a Rockefeller grant for playwriting.

McClure has made two television documentaries and published 19 books of poetry, two novels, three collections of poetry and eight books of plays, including Obie winners, "The Beard" (Oyez, 1965) and "Josephine: The Mouse Singer" (New Directions, 1980). One of his more recent books, "Simple Eyes" (New Directions), received the Josephine Miles Award from the National Poetry Association for "Lifetime Achievement in Poetry."

He is a professor at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.

• Wednesday, April 1, 4 p.m., Center for the Arts Screening Room

Prose reading by Samuel R. Delany

• Thursday, April 2, 12:30 p.m., 438 Clemens Hall

Talk by Samuel R. Delany: "Longer Views"

Author of more than 30 novels and story collections, including mainstream science-fiction, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, intellectual critical theory and pornography, Delany published his first novel when he was 20. His work has been designated "a major achievement in American literature" by literary theorist Fredric Jameson of Duke University.

Delany is credited with the invention of a new style that exceeds the conventions of science fiction. He is the recipient of the Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime's contribution to gay and lesbian literature, as well as two Hugo awards and four Nebulas, science fiction's highest honors.

In 1997, Wesleyan/University Press of New England published new trade paperback editions of two Delany classics: "Trouble on Triton" and his best-selling masterpiece, "Dhalgren."

Delany resides in New York City and commutes to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst three times a week to teach comparative literature, science fiction and short-story writing.

His visit is being co-sponsored by the UB Department of Comparative Literature, the Buffalo Theory Group and the Eugenio Donatio Chair.

• Wednesday, April 8, 4 p.m., Center for the Arts Screening Room

• Thursday, April 9, 12:30 p.m., 438 Clemens Hall

Mullen's three recent books, "Muse and Drudge" "SPeRM**KT" and "Trimmings," have established her as one of the most innovative voices in contemporary poetry. She is associated with both the language school and a broader tradition of performance poetry.

Her work also has been published in The Village Voice Literary Supplement, Callaloo, and "Best American Poetry 1994."

She is particularly interested in the mnemonic power of rhyme and rhythm, advertising jingles, song lyrics, poet recitation, children's chants and nursery rhymes. Her work enacts the dissonance of sound and language, provoking investigation into poetic conventions of coherence and cultural constructions of identity.

Mullen teaches creative writing at the University of California at Los Angeles.

• Thursday, April 23, 12:30 p.m., 438 Clemens Hall

Burke is an art writer, essayist and translator of French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. Her most recent book, "Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (University of California Press, 1997), traces the many voyages of the late poet and pioneer of experimental filmmaking. She is working on a biography of the American photographer Lee Miller.

Burke's visit is being co-sponsored by the Poetry Society of America.

• Friday, April 24, and Saturday, April 25, 8 p.m., Katharine Cornell Theatre, Ellicott Complex, North Campus

This play concerns events that took place in an ancient Mayan kingdom in Guatemala. In form and mood, its closest kinship is with Japanese noh drama. It is being translated and produced by Dennis Tedlock and directed by UB Cuban artist-in-residence Leandro Soto.

It is being co-sponsored by a grant from Conversations in the Disciplines and the UB faculties of Arts and Letters and Social Sciences.