Anne Lesley Selcer and Dawn Lundy Martin: October 16, 2014

The Poetry Center presents Anne Lesley Selcer and Dawn Lundy Martin, in the first of two programs they share on the same date. Here they each read their work and engage in conversation with one another and the audience at The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University. Martin selected Selcer's From A Book of Poems on Beauty for the 2014 Gazing Grain Chapbook Award, which opened the occasion for their invitation to appear together. Selcer reads from that chapbook, and Martin reads for the first time in public from her soon-to-be-published book, Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life (Nightboat Books, 2015), followed by a generous set of responses to questions from their audience. That same evening, the poets appeared again together, reading their work at The Green Arcade in downtown San Francisco.

Publisher
American Poetry Archives
Location
The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University
Date
2014-10-16
Event Run Time
01:21:27
Contributors
Steve Dickison
Rights

©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu.

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Anne Lesley Selcer (00:16:20)

Anne Lesley Selcer thanks Dawn Lundy Martin and credits Abbas Akhavan for her chapbook's cover art, then reads a number of selections out of From A Book of Poems on Beauty.

Dawn Lundy Martin (00:20:23)

Dawn Lundy Martin introduces then reads from the opening and from the last section of her soon-to-be-published book, Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life. Martin explains the later section was part of an opera libretto for a collective work intended for, then withdrawn from, the Whitney Biennial. 

Conversation (00:37:45)

Following their readings, Dawn Lundy Martin and Anne Lesley Selcer respond to questions from the audience regarding their poetry, and converse extensively on what each of their writings make present. Among other things, they speak of writing to register and counter authoritative language uses, ways of knowing that can emerge from poetry as different from critical or cultural theory, aspects involved in doing artistic work collectively (in groups such as the Black Took Collective, and Non-Site Collective), the presence of silence and particular kinds of rhythm and receptivity in their writing (Selcer), and working in forms outside writing per se, e.g., making video in order "to trick yourself into ideas" (Martin). 

They close by coming up with an assignment for the students in the room, to write from what is presently "on your desktop," materially or on the computer screen.

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