JOHN ASHBERY POETRY SERIES FEATURES READINGS BY LESLIE SCALAPINO AND JOAN RETALLACK ON FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 16

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY—On Friday, February, 16, at 3:30 p.m., The John Ashbery Poetry Series will feature readings by Leslie Scalapino and Joan Retallack. This program, presented by The Bard Center, will be held in Room 102 of the F. W. Olin Humanities Building at Bard College. A new feature this year is the pairing of visiting poets with poets who teach at Bard. Additional readings in the series this spring will include poets Nicole Brossard and John Ashbery, Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard; and Claudia Keelon, and Ann Lauterbach, Ruth and David E Schwab II Professor in Languages and Literature at Bard; times and dates to be announced.

Library Journal calls Scalapino \". . . one of the most unique and powerful writers at the forefront of American literature.\" Scalapino, who grew up in Berkeley, California, and now lives in Oakland, is the author of eighteen books of poetry, prose, essays, and plays. Her most recent publications include inter-genre works The Public World/Syntactically Impermanence and R-hu. Her most recent book of poetry is New Time; Zither/& Autobiography is scheduled for publication in 2002, both by Wesleyan University Press. A volume of her photos and text is due out this fall from Granary Press. Other works of poetry include way (1988), which received the Before Columbus American Book Award, the Poetry Center Award from San Francisco State University, and the Lawrence Lipton Prize. Scalapino\'s works of fiction include Defoe (1995) and The Front Matter, Dead Souls (1996). She teaches in the M.F.A. Program of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and has also taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, Mills College in Oakland, and elsewhere.

Joan Retallack is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College. She is the author of six books of poetry, including the first in a three-part series, MONGRELISME: A Difficult Manual for Desperate Times, How To Do Things With Words, and AFTERRIMAGES. She received a Lannan Foundation Literary Grant for Poetry in1998-99. Her edition of artists\' books WESTORN CIV CONT\'D, AN OPEN BOOK, was produced with partial funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Retallack received the America Award in Belles-Lettres for M U S I C A G E, her book on and with composer John Cage. A book of interrelated essays, The Poethetical Wager, and a book on Gertrude Stein are forthcoming from the University of California Press, Berkeley. Retallack is also codirector of the Workshop in Language and Thinking at Bard College.

For further information about the reading, call The Bard Center at 845-758-7425.

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This event was last updated on 03-02-2001

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