All Announcements

Kamau Brathwaite honored by PEN Foundation, Gina Ulysse long-listed

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Kamau Brathwaite was honored with the 2018 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry

Awarded “to a poet whose distinguished and growing body of work represents a notable and accomplished presence in American literature.”
Ed Roberson, Natalie Scenters-Zapico, and Ocean Vuong acted as judges for the award, noting Brathwaite’s large body of work, including Elegguas, Born to Slow Horses, and Ancestors.

Brathwaite’s newest collection is Lazarus Poems (2017, Wesleyan)

Gina Athena Ulysse’s first poetry collection, Because When God is Too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD, was long-listed for the PEN Open Book Award. Ulysse was recently in Barbados, presenting the annual honorary Kamau Brathwaite Lecture at the University of the West Indies. She will be reading for the Bryant Park Winter Reading Room Series on March 20, 6pm, located at the Kinokuniya Bookstore, 1073 Avenue of the Americas. Reading with Shane McCrae, Kerri Webster, Sarah Blake, and Miranda Field.

Rage – Thinking of School Shootings, thoughts noted by Michael Eigen

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Michael Eigen’s post to the APA/Psychoanalysis listserv

Shared here is Michael Eigen’s recent post to the American Psychological Association’s Psychoanalysis listserv

The need to redress injury, get even.

The young man experienced severe humiliation in his life and compensated with a show of gun strength.

About eighteen years ago I noted this subcurrent of mood and what seemed like increasing violent outbursts in pockets of the country near and far and internationally. A kind of semi-contained but explosive violent rage epidemic linked with feeling humiliated, dis-respected or otherwise unjustly treated. I wrote about this impinging current in a book Rage, which was already going to press when 9/11 happened. I managed to put a few lines in about 9/11 in the proofs. The synchronicity of writing on rage and this local explosion was chilling. One of the themes in Rage was the amount of harm a sense of being “right” has claimed in human history.

Rage was part of a Wesleyan trilogy in which I traced destructive and creative currents in Ecstasy and Lust as well. The trilogy was personal, free-associative, and true to life curents in my (and many others) experience. One of the side benefits of Rage was its use by ragers to help take the edge off inner pressures, opening a wider network of experience.

Pockets of violent rage continue, often allied with planning and calculation, and sometimes momentary outbursts.

So much more to learn and share about our destructive tendencies—although portions of humanity have been working with it for millennia. A “control” psychology can be useful but not enough. Networks of psychical possibility create more generative contexts.

Michael Eigen is a psychologist and psychoanalyst. He is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology in the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at New York University, and a Senior Member of the Nationals Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. He is the author of a number of books, including Rage (Wesleyan, 2002), Ecstasy (2001), Lust (2006), The Sensitive Self (2004), and Emotional Storm (2005).

Alvin Lucier at the ISSUE Project Room

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A celebration of the life and work of experimental American music composer, Alvin Lucier, the ISSUE Project Room is partnering with Zürcher Hochschule der Kunste(ZHDK), November 8-9, 2017 to recreate ZHDK’s October 2016 three-day festival of music composition, theory, musicology, sound studies, aesthetics, critical theory, and art history. Although compressed to two days instead of the original three, ISSUE’s New York staging of the festival is the first of its kind, bridging Germany’s experimental music culture and American musicology. Some of the invited musical guests include Joan LaBarbara, Charles Curtis, Stephane O’Malley, Oren Ambarchi, Gary Schmalzl, and the Ever Present Orchestra. The series also will include the publication of an exclusive German-curated box set of documents from the original October 2016 festival, including four LPs, a CD, essays, interviews, scientific articles, archival photos, and music compositions. Lucier is to host a signing of the box set after the concert each night.

Alvin Lucier is an American composer of experimental music. Internationally known for his experimentation in electronic music and sound aesthetic, Lucier was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in 2006 and has been invited to numerous festivals and residencies in Germany, Czech Republic, Spain, United Kingdom, and the United States. His most recent book, Eight Lectures on Experimental Music, is an influential collection of lectures, featuring influential composers, Maryanne Amacher, Robert Ashley, Philip Glass, and more, to tell the story of twentieth-century American experimental music. Lucier is also the author of Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music and co-author, with Douglas Simon, of Chambers: Scores and Interviews.

Information for buying tickets to the ISSUE Project Room series can be found here and here, featuring a schedule of performances for each night.

Gearing up for Halloween: Ishiro Honda Tribute Nights at the Egyptian Theatre

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As Halloween lurks on the horizon, people are looking to sate their appetites for the spooky, supernatural, and fantastic. For the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, California, embracing the uncanny means “The Soul of Godzilla: An Ishiro Honda Tribute”: a two-day celebration of the sci-fi creations of director Ishiro Honda. Over the course of this sci-fi celebration, the theater will show four of Honda’s most famous and action-packed films. Honda’s biographers, Steven Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski, will also be in attendance, signing copies of their book Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film from Godzilla to Kurosawa.

Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film from Godzilla to Kurosawa is an exploration of the accomplishments of the Japanese director who is considered to be the most internationally successful Japanese director of his generation. Famous for bringing creatures like Godzilla and Mothra to the silver screen, Honda played with the idea of the kaiju (“strange creatures”) that are still a staple in sci-fi productions.

This weekend, the Egyptian Theatre will be reintroducing these strange creatures to the public through the screenings of Mothra (1961), Battle in Outer Space (1959), Godzilla: The Japanese Original (1954), and The H-Man (1958). The Egyptian Theatre, built in 1922, has been a cultural landmark in Hollywood for generations. The theater first was a venue where early Hollywood blockbusters premiered, like The Ten Commandments, BEN-HUR, and My Fair Lady, but since the 1990s, it has been owned and operated by the American Cinematheque. Today, the Egyptian Theatre celebrates cinematic history and public program.

This Friday, the Egyptian Theatre will start of the sci-fi bash with Mothra and Battle in Outer Space, and on Saturday, the celebration continues with Godzilla: The Japanese Original and The H-Man will be shown. A discussion between each film will be led by Steven Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski.

“semiautomatic” by Evie Shockley – Available Now!

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Evie Shockley’s new book semiautomatic is now available!
Poetry that acts as a fierce and loving resistance to violence.

“Evie Shockley’s semiautomatic goes beyond mere weaponry. This book is revelatory. A tool in the chest of cultural workers, a vocabulary that resists decoration; this is self-portraiture and truth-telling at its best. From her epic ‘the topsy suite’ to her one-acts (a new form), through her fearless lens and appropriation of authorities, there’s no level of denial or proof-vest that will protect you from Shockley’s poetry. You can run, Reader, but you will not be able to look the other way.”  –Willie Perdomo

“Evie Shockley suggests that poetry is necessary to seeing, surviving with equilibrium and wholeness in this period’s vital and precarious junctures. The poems in semiautomatic are on fire. This will make an excellent source book of poetic form and historically grounded black aesthetics for the classroom.” –Erica Hunt

“There is no keener mind in American poetry than Shockley’s, with her quick turns and inflections, slipping between subjectivity and documentary, between verse and refrain. Her poems engage—politically, formally, historically, profoundly—with the redistribution of power through language. Read this book and get shook.” –D.A. Powell

Evie Shockley’s semiautomatic insists that art can feed the spirit and reawaken the imagination. Responding to the inescapable evidence of the discriminatory terms placed on black life, her poems connect the violence facing people across the racial, ethnic, gender, class, sexual, national, and linguistic boundaries that both encompass and divide. The poems of semiautomatic vary from fragment to narrative and from sequence to song. Shockley observe past and present; meditating on what wisdom we might glean from memory to guide us to a better future.

Shockley’s previous works include the new black (Wesleyan, 2011), winner of the Black Caucus of ALA’s Literary Award for Poetry, and a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), in addition to two chapbooks. She also has a book of criticism, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa, 2011). Her prose writing has appeared in Callaloo, African American Review, and Indiana Review. Her poetry has appeared in MELUS, Harvard Review, Columbia Poetry Review, and in the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, among other publications. Shockley received her BA in English from Northwestern University, followed by a J.D. from University of Michigan Law School, before earning her MA and PhD from Duke University. She is assistant professor in the English department at Rutgers University.

Watch Evie Shockley read from new work, including work from semiautomatic

poem from the book:
weather or not

time was on its side, its upside down. it was a new error. generation why-not had voted its con-science and a climate of indifference was generating maelstromy weather. we acted as if the planet was a stone-cold player, but turns out the earth had a heart and it was melting, pacific islanders first into the hotter water. just a coincidence—the polar bears are white and their real estate was being liquidated too. meanwhile, in the temper-temper zone, the birds were back and i hadn’t slept—had it been a night or a season? the birdsong sounded cheap, my thoughts cheaper, penny, inky, dark. language struck me as wooden, battered. the words became weeds, meaning i couldn’t see any use for them. i had signed my name repeatedly without any sign of change. i was still bleeding from yesterday’s sound bites, and the coming elections were breeding candid hates by the hand-over-fistful. there’d been an arab spring, but it was winter all summer in america.

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Richard Wilbur 1921–2017

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Richard Wilbur (March 1, 1921–October 14, 2017), eminent poet and former professor of English, passed away on Saturday, October 14, at the age of 96. Wilbur was a member of Wesleyan University’s faculty from 1957–1977. During his two decades at Wesleyan, he received the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for Things of This World (1956), was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and instrumental in the founding of the renowned Wesleyan University Press poetry series.

In 1958, Wilbur proposed the idea of a poetry list to then director Willard Lockwood. He noted that while some fifty university presses were turning out poetry criticism, there seemed to be little opportunity for poets to publish original work. In 1959, four auspicious volumes—by James Wright, Barbara Howe, Hyam Plutzik, and Louis Simpson—marked a new direction in American poetry. The next decade saw work of such poets as John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Marge Piercy, Donald Justice, Philip Levine, Charles Wright, James Tate, and Ellen Bryan Voigt on the Wesleyan list. The original guidelines for our poetry program stated, “There re no restrictions on form or style. The single criterion of acceptance is excellence.”

Over his long and distinguished career as a poet and translator, he was appointed as national poet laureate, received two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Medal of the Arts, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the T.S. Eliot Award, and the Frost Medal, among others. His work as a poet and teacher has touched many.

Read obituaries for Wilbur at New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and NPR.

Read his poem, “For the Student Strikers,” here.
This poem was written by Wilbur in 1970, for publication in Wesleyan’s school newspaper.

 

Congratulations to NBA Finalist, Shane McCrae!

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Wesleyan University Press’s In the Language of My Captor, by Shane McCrae, shortlisted for the National Book Award.

Judges for the 2017 National Book Award in the category of Poetry have selected Wesleyan University Press title In the Language of My Captor as one of five finalists. The judges are esteemed poets Nick Flynn, Jane Mead, Gregory Pardlo, Richard Siken, and Monica Youn.

Acclaimed poet Shane McCrae’s latest collection is a book about freedom told through stories of captivity. Historical persona poems and a prose memoir at the center of the book address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. In the book’s three sequences, McCrae explores the role mass entertainment plays in oppression, he confronts the myth that freedom can be based upon the power to dominate others, and, in poems about the mixed-race child adopted by Jefferson Davis in the last year of the Civil War, he interrogates the infrequently examined connections between racism and love.

Critic Valerie Duff-Strautmann described In the Language of My Captor as reminiscent of the great Romanian poet, Paul Celan. And a review in Publisher’s Weekly noted that McCrae’s “raw honesty…refuses to shy away from the effects of oppression and faces up to those not willing to acknowledge their part in a history many want to forget.”

Past Wesleyan titles honored with the National Book Award for Poetry

Jean Valentine’s Door in the Mountain, 2004
Charles Wright’s Country Music: Selected Early Poems, 1983.
James Dickey’s Buckdancer’s Choice: Poems, 1966

In 2016, Peter Gizzi’s Archeophonics was a finalist for the Poetry award. Rae Armantrout’s Versed, which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critic’s Circle Award, was a finalist in 2009. And in 1973, The Glorious Revolution in America, by David S. Lovejoy, was a finalist in the History category. ­­­

Announcing “The Lazarus Poems” from Kamau Brathwaite

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The Lazarus Poems, by renowned Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, is characteristically sui generis, vatic, and strange. The book is a mystical masterwork that exhibits a well-earned ornery bravura. Tonally and typographically frenetic in the “sycorax video style” he’s been employing for decades, the work examines a major theme appropriate to a great poet in the late stages of his career: the afterlife. Brathwaite achieves a kind of spiritual/aesthetic GPS in a series of poems outlining experiences of “Cultural Lynching.” These poems speak of appropriation, theft, isolation, and exploitation, all within a context of an American hegemony that intensifies racial politics and agism. Brathwaite’s expression of pain and outrage are almost overwhelming. Filled with longing, rage, nostalgia, impotence, wisdom, and love, this book is moving in every sense of the word.

 

brathwaitelazarus

KAMAU BRATHWAITE is an internationally celebrated poet, performer, and cultural theorist. He has won numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Griffin Poetry Prize, for Born to Slow Horses. A retired professor of comparative literature at New York University, Brathwaite now lives in CowPastor, Barbados.

“No one writes like Kamau Brathwaite. He is a poet of global importance. The book is an intimate, mystical lens to gaze across time periods and literary modes and frames. The overall effect is mesmerizing, even transcendent, from his lush, mystical descriptions of island nature to his totally unexpected arresting invitation to a beheading. This is a liberatory, heartbreaking book.”
—Joyelle McSweeney, author of Dead Youth, or, The Leaks

“This book is Kamau Brathwaite’s grand, retrospective understanding of his entire poetics—which has extended and developed and ramified across well over half a century of enormous human change. It is also a culmination of his insistent, original vision. Lazarus, recalled from the dead, is reprised in the history of the collective mind of a once enslaved and now resurrected people—a mind embodied in the individual mind of this magnificent poet and called back to life by his absolute freedom to speak.”
—Vijay Seshadri, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet

 

“Public Figures” and the State

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The topic of monuments and memorialization of historical events has become a point of contention, leading to violence in Charlottesville, VA. During the “statue debate,” the fact that many Civil War-related statues were erected long after the war, in the early 20th century, was brought up in several articles. This fact might leave one to ponder, what was the intention of honoring Confederate military leaders in the early 20th century?

In Jena Osman’s book, Public Figures, she examines the monuments and statues of Philadelphia, exploring each statue’s literal “view” on the city as well as the embedded history within their creation and placement. As the book progresses, including photographs of various figures, the common theme remains (unsurprisingly) of militarism and pride in the state. Regardless of the historical context of a statue, whether it be a Civil War soldier or a replica of a classical Greek statue, weaponry including guns, swords, spears, and grenades are attached to the hands and arms of these iron men. Many are dressed in military uniform, differentiating them from the civilian life of the passersby.

Is the bellicose nature of these statues misplaced in common areas, such as the market, the park, post office, or public library? Osman ponders what we do and do not notice as we move about our lives. Does our oblivious walk past such statues parallel our nation’s ability to ignore the deadly work of our military and indicate an implicit acceptance of our country’s violent history?

The violent response to the proposed removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville left many wondering what such statues mean, what is their value? Some in Charlottesville have described the Robert E. Lee statue as overlooking the city, placed at one of its highest points. One might wonder: What message is being sent to the African American community of Charlottesville? Why is this community expected to accept a Confederate general looming over their daily lives?

When you next find yourself in a public space, take a look around at the monuments and art placed there. Ponder what the intended message is. Are their different messages for different communities? Could the work be intimidating to some?

To learn more about Public Figures, check out our Reader’s Companion. Teachers might find these classroom exercises useful.

Kit Reed (1932–2017)

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Kit Reed (1932–2017)

Author of 39 books of fiction, Kit Reed moved to Middletown, Connecticut, in 1960 when her husband, Joe, took a position with Wesleyan’s English Department. Kit became a Visiting Professor of English in 1974, an Adjunct Professor of English in 1987, and Resident Writer in 2008. She has more than a hundred short stories published in periodicals including Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Village Voice Literary Supplement, and Yale Review. Her short story “Winter” (1969) was included in the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction (1987). Her short story collection, The Story Until Now, was published by Wesleyan in 2013. Her previous books with Wesleyan are Weird Women, Wired Women and Seven for the Apocalypse.

A Guggenheim fellow, and the first American recipient of a five–year literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation, Reed also received the New England Newspaperwoman of the Year award in both 1958 and 1959. Reed is an ALA Alex Award Winner who was nominated for the Nebula, Tiptree, and World Fantasy Awards.

Reed received her BA from the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, in Baltimore, and worked as a reporter at the St. Petersburg Times and New Haven Register before joining the English faculty at Wesleyan. She died September 24, 2017, from a brain tumor.

Kit and Joe were Wesleyan fixtures. They were often seen walking their Scottish terriers around campus. In 2009, a labyrinth was built on campus, in their honor, from funds gathered by their beloved students.

Kit said she did not want a memorial service. As her son Mack said, “Raise a glass in her absence —or a chocolate bonbon—next time you’re out with friends. And keep plugging for the day when Kit just knew you would do something extraordinary. Because, just maybe, you will.”

You can read more about Kit and her writings here, at Locus Online.

Kit is survived by Joe, her children, Kate, Mack, and John, and their families.

In lieu of gifts, the family requests you consider using Kit’s donations page for the Alzheimer’s Walk of Greater Los Angeles (https://m-alzgla.akaraisin.com/14103/participant/3643677).