Basinski Named Curator of UB's Poetry Collection

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Michael Basinski, Ph.D., has been named curator of the Poetry Collection in the University at Buffalo Libraries.

Basinski, who received his doctorate in English from UB, is an acknowledged expert on modern poetry and has worked in several capacities for the libraries. He previously was associate curator of the Poetry Collection, appointed in 1993, and is the Poetry Area chair for the national conference of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association.

His scholarly work has focused on small-press poetry. He is a working artist and visual, concrete and performance poet whose work is published regularly in literary magazines. He currently is working on a critical study of underground writer Charles Bukowski and a book of critical essays on poet Gerald Locklin. He regularly contributes articles on these poets and others to journals, encyclopedias and reference books.

Basinski has written dozens of small books of various forms of poetry, some of which is available at Small Press Distribution (http://www.spdbooks.org/). His visual poetry was exhibited in 2004 at Harvard University, the University of Maine at Orono, the Burchfield-Penney Gallery in Buffalo and the Oculus Gallery in Tokyo. His performance group, BuffFluxus, comprised of UB graduate and undergraduate poets and performance artists, performs nova- and retro-Fluxus works on a regular basis.

For more than 20 years, he performed his choral voice collages and sound texts with the intermedia performance ensemble, The Emba, which has released two albums, "SEA" and Enjambment." For additional information and sound files, go to RadioRadio at http://www.ubu.com (Search using "Basinski" or "BuffFluxus") or http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/lakeaffect/audio.html.

Basinski is a resident of Lancaster.