Anne Lesley Selcer and Suzanne Stein: February 27, 2020

Stein and Selcer read a brief selection from Dialogues, a collection of performances which took place during Stein's residency at Right Window Gallery in San Francisco, March 2019.

Anne Lesley Selcer reads from Sun Cycle and comments on her preoccupation with sound, form, and formlessness; her use of the manifesto form; and the philosophy of aesthetics.

Suzanne Stein talks about her time in the MFA program at SFSU and references poet, translator, and professor Norma Cole, and poet and playwright Kevin Killian. She introduces her long poem New Sutras and describes the procedure that went into its creation, and then reads from the book.

Asked to describe their relationship to writing, Selcer and Stein talk about productive tension, working in multiple artistic mediums, and the notion of a work of art as a conceptual object. For Selcer, political engagement in the world is bound up in choices about aesthetics and form. Laura Moriarty, poet and novelist, asks about the difficulty of being a poet in the midst of distress and difficulty, in response to which they discuss the economic constraints that have shaped their writing, and reflect on the material conditions that define the lives of writers in the United States. Stein talks about her use of color in New Sutras, and then she and Selcer discuss the ways in which their work and experiences of precariousness have informed their writing and their thinking. Lastly, Stein explores the significance of her book’s use of language, its experimental and chance-driven qualities, and the way that it demonstrates modern modes of processing spiritual values through personal experience; and Selcer explains the rhetorical nature of her work as involving a conscious process of appropriating philosophy and literary theory for the sake of commenting on issues like race, class, gender, colonialism, and power.