"Emerging and veteran pioneers of the avant-garde consider the challenges and responsibilities of their role as editorial gatekeepers of the new. With Lee Ann Brown, Rachel Levitsky, Ravi Shankar and Geoffrey Young. Moderated by Jeffrey Lependorf

Editors from a range of political and aesthetic perspectives discuss how they coexist in the contemporary poetry community, and what is at stake in their choices as editors and publishers. With Ram Devineni, Alice Quinn, Martha Rhodes, and Juliana Spahr. Moderated by Rebecca Wolff

A Kashmiri-American, Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001) was a gifted poet, an inspired translator and scholar, and a generous, ebullient spirit in the world of contemporary American poetry. Among his poetry collections are A Nostalgist's Map of America, The Country Without a Post Office and, just published this year, Rooms Are Never Finished.

Robert Bly is one of our country's most beloved poets. Over the span of his career as a writer, critic and translator, he has introduced a wide range of international poetries and practices to American poetics. His newest poetry books are Eating the Honey of Words: New & Selected Poems and The Night Abraham Called to the Stars. He recently launched a literary magazine, The Thousands.

The genius of Henry Darger—a reclusive Chicago janitor now recognized as one of the most important outsider artists of the 20^th Century—is visited through the poetry of John Ashbery and critical work of novelist A.M. Homes. Readings from Darger’s epic, In the Realms of the Unreal, and an introduction by poet and art critic David Shapiro, make this event an essential companion to the museum’s comprehensive exhibition of Darger’s work.

Saturday, March 16, 10:00am–4:00pm
Sunday, March 17, 9:30am–12:00noon

This class is for advanced writers of poetry.

Inspired by the feminist and civil rights movements, many 20^th century women poets adopted an “I”-empowered poetics that intertwined personal and public worlds. By the end of the millennium, fragmentation and polyphony appeared in poetry as a response to the notion of “I”-dentity as constructed by class, religion, race and sexual preference. Is the exploration of a woman’s everyday “personal experience” in poetry still a political act? What are the challenges of writing a poetry that destabilizes gender and diffuses the self?

This workshop is for new writers of poetry.

Poet Lorine Niedecker (1903–1970) lived most of her life on Blackhawk Island in rural Wisconsin. However, she was not isolated from the avant-garde poetry practices of her time. A life-long correspondent of Louis Zukofsky’s, Niedecker established her own “condensory” of poetic language.