What’s Up in American Poetry? UB to Host “Majors” This Fall

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Wearing the patina burnished by repeated major national recognition, the "Wednesdays at 4 PLUS" series presented by the Poetics Program in the University at Buffalo Department of English will, with its typical panache, present a star-studded program of readings and literary performances this fall.

The series' glitterati will include genre-twisting novelists David Foster Wallace and Samuel Delany, as well as several current and former chancellors of the Academy of American Poets -- Adrienne Rich, Jorie Graham and Carolyn Kizer. Kizer will present the annual Oscar Silverman Memorial Reading on Nov. 10.

A series of bilingual readings in Spanish/English and French/English, and presentations by visiting guests like poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and poet Alice Notley, whose feminist epic "The Descent of Alette" has earned much critical attention, will be featured, along with performances by visual artists, UB poetics students and distinguished UB English faculty. The complete program is attached.

A few of the highlights:

• Adrienne Rich (Oct. 18) has been an inspirational force in American poetry for more than 40 years. "I intend to go on trying to be part of what I think of as an underground stream -- of voices resisting the voices that tell us we are nothing," she wrote in one of her often-quoted epigrammatic statements.

A cultural icon and well-known, longtime political activist, Rich is the author of 20 books of poetry, many of which reflect political and feminist themes and stylistic experimentation. She is also the author of noted essays on poetry, feminism, motherhood and lesbianism, including the popular collection "Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution." Her work includes "An Atlas of the Difficult World" (1991) and "Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995" (1995).

In 1999, Rich received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Lannan Foundation. Her previous awards include the American Academy of Poets Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the National Book Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 1997, she was awarded the academy's Tanning Prize for outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry, and in 1999 she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy.

• Dynamic and intellectually dazzling, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham (Sept. 6) "shuns the fashionable literary postures of irony and frivolous despair to speak without embarrassment of poetry as a moral and spiritual undertaking, an instrument of discovery and awakening," wrote one critic.

The author of seven books of poetry, Graham received the Pulitzer in 1996 for "The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994." She edited the influential anthologies "The Best American Poetry 1990" and "Earth Took from Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language," and is a popular speaker and teacher.

Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University, Graham also directs the poetry program in the University of Iowa's famed Writers' Workshop, one of 35 authors associated with the university to win the Pulitzer. In 1997, she was elected chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, a distinction she shares with Robert Creeley, Samuel Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at UB, and UB English Professor Susan Howe.

Graham's many honors include the Morton Zaubel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Lavan Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Whiting Foundation Award and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ingram-Merrill Foundation.

• The Oscar Silverman Memorial Reading will be presented this year by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carolyn Kizer (Nov. 10) the author of seven books of poetry, including "Yin" -- for which she won the Pulitzer in 1984 -- several books of essays and the anthologies "100 Great Poems by Women" (1995) and "The Essential Clare" (1992). She is the founder and former editor of the journal Poetry Northwest and served as the first director of the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Program. A former chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, Kizer has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Frost Medal, the John Masefield Memorial Award and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award. Copper Canyon Press will publish her collected poems this year.

• Popular memoirist and science-fiction novelist Samuel "Chip" Delany (Oct. 11), a member of the UB Poetics Program faculty, is an influential author of science-fiction, which is surprising given his outsider status as a gay man and an African American. In the past few years, he has garnered much critical acclaim as a memoirist as well, and it is in that genre that his current interest lies.

Delany's first novel was "The Jewels of Aptor." By age 26, he had won four Nebula Awards before briefly bowing out in the late '60s to explore a musical career. He returned to write an intellectually challenging series of books that included one of his most famous and critically applauded novels, "Dahlgren," an apocalyptic tale whose bisexual theme reflected the concerns of the author's private life. The gender-bending "Triton: An Ambiguous Hertopia" (1976) followed and is considered a masterpiece by some and unreadable by others. Themes in his "Neveryon" series reflect the AIDs crisis.

In his 1988 memoir, "The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965," Delany described the subterranean sexual life of New York City, as well as his own forays into that realm. This was followed by several more novels, many works of short fiction and scores of articles and critical essays. "Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany," a book of essays edited by James Sallis, was published in 1996.

• The "velvet and off-the-hook genius," novelist David Foster Wallace (Sept. 15) has a large popular and cult following. The 34 year-old savant, who has received mostly positive but sometimes frosty criticism, frequently is compared to literary superstars Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis.

He is perhaps best-known for his idiosyncratic and darkly brilliant 1996 grunge novel, "Infinite Jest," 1,000-plus pages of what Newsweek critic David Gates called "epic preposterousness…(full of) salted clues and interlinked motifs with white-knuckle suspense and gross-out violence right out of Stephen King."

Wallace also is the author of "Conversations with Hideous Men," "Girl With Curious Hair" and other books, plus dozens of articles in major journals, magazines and newspapers.

"Wednesdays at 4 PLUS" is a Poetics-Program production sponsored, in part, by the James H. McNulty Chair, Department of English (Dennis Tedlock); the Samuel P. Capen Chair of Poetry and the Humanities (Robert Creeley); the Melodia E. Jones Chair in French, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures (Gerard Bucher); the David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters, Department of English (Charles Bernstein); the Just Buffalo Literary Center and Professor Susan Howe, Department of English.

Poets and Writers, Inc., also funded the series through grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Abbott Fund, with the cooperation of the Center for the Arts, the Department of Media Study and The Poetry and Rare Books Collection, all at UB, and Talking Leaves Books.

For further program information, call (716) 645-3810.