robert duncan
Showing 49 items.
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The Poetry Center presents Allen Ginsberg, reading his poetry and talking on contemporary politics and poetics with Neal Cassady and in response to filmmaker/poet Richard O. Moore. Ginsberg reads "Kraj Majales" (King of May) and an anti-war poem written on a protest sign. The footage was filmed July 18, 1965, just prior to the Berkeley Poetry Conference at UC Berkeley, in the basement at City Lights Books in North Beach, San Francisco. Among others in the audience, John Wieners, Robert Creeley, and Bobbie Louise Hawkins appear briefly on camera.
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The Poetry Center presents Annie Finch in a solo reading from her books Eve (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010) and Spells: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2013), and from works in manuscript, followed by her responding to questions from the audience.
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The Poetry Center presents Benjamin Hollander reading his poem "Levinas and the Police," later to be published in his book Vigilance (Beyond Baroque Books, 2005). The close of the poem incorporates a recording of William Alwyn's soundtrack music for Carol Reed's 1947 film noir, Odd Man Out. Sarah Menefee also read her work on the same program.
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The Poetry Center presents Carolyn Kizer reading other poets' works as well as her own poems and Classical Chinese translations.
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The Poetry Center presents Charles Alexander and Susan Thackrey reading and in conversation. Alexander reads from Pushing Water (Cuneiform Press, 2011) and unpublished work. Thackrey reads from Andalusia (Chax Press, 2015). The readings are followed by a conversation in response to questions from the audience.
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The Poetry Center presents Dale M. Smith speaking on Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, reading briefly from his own poetry, and in conversation. Smith presents two pieces drawing on his research into the relationship between poets Duncan and Olson, as involved in his work on two books: An Open Map: The Correspondence Between Robert Duncan and Charles Olson and Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan's Lectures on Charles Olson, both volumes co-edited by Smith and the late Robert J. Bertholf (University of Mexico Press, 2017). Smith also reads briefly from his recent book Sons (Knife Fork Book, 2017). The reading is followed by a conversation with the audience.
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The Poetry Center and City Lights Books co-present a memorial tribute to David Meltzer, at San Francisco State University. Steve Dickison opens, with Garrett Caples as emcee, introducing Lawrence Ferlinghetti (via recording), Julie Rogers, George Herms, Jack Hirschman, Jerome Rothenberg, Marina Lazzara, Sunnylyn Thibodeaux, Michael McClure, and Clark Coolidge, all of whom come together to pay tribute, read from their own work, and from Meltzer's books of poetry, including David's Copy: The Selected Poems of David Meltzer (Penguin, 2005), Luna (Black Sparrow, 1970), Beat Thing (La Alameda Press, 2004), and a poem written by Meltzer for the 2011 Theo Saunders Sextet album Intergeneration. The event also features several recordings of David Meltzer reading his work at City Lights Bookstore. Photo, left-right: Sheppard Powell, Jack Hirschman, George Herms, and Clark Coolidge, courtesy Richard Friedman. Note: audio recording only, with apologies for distortion and irregular audio levels.
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The Poetry Center presents Denise Levertov, speaking of the nature of her work and reading from her poems, with her husband Mitchell Goodman commenting, and son Nickolai and a family friend, Robert Goldman, also present. Richard O. Moore engages Levertov and the others with questions and comments throughout. The footage was filmed March 20, 1966, at Levertov's apartment in New York City.
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The Poetry Center presents Divya Victor, delivering the annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture. Victor's talk, " 'Whether It Could Be Lake Or Fog': Reading Oppen in a Time of Rupture," was presented at the East Bay Media Center in downtown Berkeley, during the evening following her public conversation that afternoon at the same site with Tonya M. Foster, as part of Foster's "Undisciplining the Fields" series.
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The Poetry Center presents Duncan McNaughton, reading from Tiny Windows (Auguste Press, 2014), among other work, and Bill Berkson, reading from earlier poems and then from Expect Delays (Coffee House Press, 2014), followed by the two poets conversing and responding to questions from the audience.
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The Poetry Center presents Robin Blaser and Ebbe Borregaard, reading their work at the San Francisco State University Student Center, in the erstwhile Barbary Coast Room. Blaser, on a rare visit from Vancouver, BC, returns to what he regards as his home, San Francisco, to read from his poetry, with a declaration that he's leaving that mode of writing poetry behind him. Borregaard, saying he had intended to present only songs, opens by reading his poems, then, returning to the microphone after Blaser's reading and a break, he reads from a prose piece he calls "Notes of Arrogance and Possibility" — punctuated then overtaken by Blaser's extended interventions. Lewis MacAdams as Poetry Center director provides the introductions, dedicating the program to the goddess Isis.
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The Poetry Center presents Ed Sanders, reading from his poetry — excerpts from Poem from Jail (City Lights Books, 1963) and "Elm Fuck Poem" — on site at his Peace Eye Bookstore on New York City's Lower East Side; visiting with the editors at the offices of counterculture newspaper The East Village Other; speaking with filmmaker Richard O. Moore on protest, poetry, obscenity and censorship; and rehearsing with his band The Fugs.
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The Poetry Center presents Frances Richard delivering the 32nd annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture, entitled "The Mind's own Place and Feminine Technologies: George Oppen and Possibilities of the Political." The Oppen Memorial Lecture series benefits from the support of the Dorothy A. Fowler Trust.
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The Poetry Center presents Geoffrey Young, Stephen Rodefer, and Larry Goodell, in that sequence, reading and, in Goodell's instance, performing their poetry at San Francisco State University. Young reads from In XX Arrondisements (The Figures, 1975). Rodefer reads from One or Two Love Poems from the White World (Duende, 1976) and other work. Goodell reads from The Staff of Ometeotl and the Bowl of Ometeotl (Truck Press, 1975), A Garden of Ourselves, The Face of Velma, and Dried Apricots (all from his own Duende Press). Kathleen Fraser makes the introductions for this early video-documented event by these three poet friends, visiting as she notes from New Mexico, in an augmented classroom (décor by Goodell) at SF State.
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The Poetry Center presents George Stanley, visiting from Vancouver. Born and raised in San Francisco, where he lived most the first 30 years of his life, he is an alum of San Francisco State. Stanley presents an "open workshop," reading at large from his poetry and talking about his life and work, responding to questions from his audience (which includes Joanne Kyger, Donald Guravich, Tinker Greene, Ed Mycue, Lew Ellingham, among others). He reads poems from After Desire (2013), Vancouver: A Poem (2008), At Andy's (2000), and Gentle Northern Summer (1995, all from New Star Books, Vancouver). This is the first of two October 2013 programs featuring Stanley; two nights later he read with Ellingham at the Meridian Gallery in San Francisco.
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The Poetry Center presents Jack Gilbert reading from Views of Jeopardy among other poems.
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The Poetry Center presents James Broughton and Helen Adam, presenting their poetry at a special reading held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with their friend and peer Robert Duncan on hand to introduce each of them. Broughton reads an extended set of poems, drawing on Erogeny: A Geographical Expedition (1976) and Odes for Odd Occasions (1977), both from Manroot Press, along with selections from Seeing the Light (City Lights Books, 1977), and from The Androgyne Journal. Adam, visiting from New York City, where she moved after leaving San Francisco (the move in part was in order to work on a New York production of her ballad opera San Francisco's Burning), reads and sings for a vigorous program of her postmodern ballads and songs, from Turn Again to Me and Other Poems (Kulchur Foundation, 1977) and earlier works.
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The Poetry Center presents Jared Stanley and Steven Seidenberg, reading and in conversation. Jared Stanley reads unpublished poems, "Civilian" (previously published by the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, 2017, and forthcoming in Harvard Review), and work from Ears (Nightboat Books, 2017). Steven Seidenberg reads an extended excerpt from Situ (Black Sun Lit, 2018). The reading is followed by a conversation with the audience.
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The Poetry Center presents Jerome Rothenberg, reading and in conversation. Rothenberg reads works from several of his books, including Flower World Variations (revised, expanded edition, The Operating System, 2017), Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader (Black Widow Press, 2013), China Notes & the Treasures of Dunhuang (Ahadada Books, 2006), and A Field on Mars: Divagations & Autovariations, Poems 2000-2015 (PURH, 2015), plus a new poem and a poem previously published in the online magazine Jacket2. The reading is followed by a conversation with the audience.
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The Poetry Center presents Joanne Kyger and Australian poet Robert Adamson, reading primarily from new works: Kyger's On Time (City Lights Books, 2015) and Adamson's Net Needle (Flood Editions, 2015.)
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The Poetry Center presents John Wieners, reading his poems from Ace of Pentacles (James F. Carr and Robert A. Wilson, 1964) and The Hotel Wentley Poems (The Auerhahn Press, 1958), and engaging in conversation with Robert Duncan. The poets appear in front of the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park, then in the fire-scarred room of the former Hotel Wentley, on Polk Street, in which Wieners eight years before had written in one week his series of poems bearing the hotel's name. Wieners was in San Francisco to attend the Berkeley Poetry Conference at UC Berkeley this same month, and the film marks his first return to San Francisco after leaving for New York, then Boston, shortly after composing the poems of that first brief book.
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The Poetry Center presents Joseph Donahue, delivering the 28th annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture. Donahue's title and theme is "Oppen at the Apocalypse," drawing on Oppen's later poems, his correspondence with Robert Duncan, and the presence in his late work of William Blake. The event takes place at the erstwhile Meridian Gallery, on Powell Street near Union Square in San Francisco.
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The Poetry Center presents Andrew Joron and Julie Carr, reading and in conversation. Joron reads from Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems (City Lights Books, Spotlight Series, 2010) and The Sound Mirror (Flood Editions, 2008), as well as some unpublished poems. Carr reads from her then forthcoming book Think Thank (Solid Objects, 2015), Rag (Omnidawn, 2014), and new poems. Their readings are followed by a conversation with the audience, in which bodies, dancing, indexing and found-text poems, among other things, are discussed.
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The Poetry Center presents a reading and conversation with Julien Poirier and Matvei Yankelevich. Poirier and Yankelovich are both founding members of Ugly Duckling Presse, as well as prolific poets, with Poirier having published numerous pamphlets and books, such as El Golpe Chileño (Ugly Duckling, 2010), from which he reads here, and Yankelovich numerous books of poetry, including Alpha Donut (United Artists, 2012) and Some Worlds for Doctor Vogt (Black Square Editions, 2015), and many translations from 20th century and more contemporary Russian poets and prose writers.
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The Poetry Center presents Louis Zukofsky, March 16, 1966, speaking of his work and its background, of literary precedents and some contemporaries, his long poem "A" and his transliteration (made with his wife Celia) of Catullus's Latin poetry, in response to questions posed by Richard O. Moore, and reading from "A"-9 (his canzone after Guido Cavalcanti's) and from an essay. Zukofsky appears in his New York City apartment (with Celia Zukofsky making a cameo appearance) and with audio of him reading accompanying the TV footage of the poet walking on the streets of his Brooklyn neighborhood.
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The Poetry Center present Madeline Gleason, Rosalie Moore, and Maxine Kumin, reading their poetry. The reading takes place at the First Unitarian Universalist Church in San Francisco, and due to a power outtage the poets read by candlelight. A volume of Gleason's Selected Poems (Dragon's Teeth Press, 1973) had appeared the prior year, with Here Comes Everybody: New & Selected Poems (Panjandrum Press, 1975) soon to follow. Moore reads a span of her poems, including selections from Year of the Children (later published by Woolmer Brothers, 1977), poems on the Children's Crusade of 1212 A.D. Kumin reads work reaching back to her first book, Halfway (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), to her recent Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Up Country (Harper & Row, 1972), and poems soon to be published in House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate (Viking/Penguin, 1975). Kathleen Fraser, director of The Poetry Center, provides the introductions for this multi-generational reading by women poets.
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The Poetry Center presents Maria Damon, delivering what was the 29th annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture. Damon takes up the consideration of the making of works other than poems, by persons other than poets, as pursuing a poetics that gets denied serious study. Taking potter and writer M. C. Richards' statement "Poets are not the only poets" (Centering: in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person, Wesleyan University Press, 1964) as title of her talk, Damon moves from her being drawn to both "micropoetries" and "macropoetries" in her study and writings into a reading of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" as an instance of confounding of human and animal voices, with the poem's reiterated "who... who... who..." as sounding that borders on that of the beast.
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The Poetry Center, in collaboration with The Wattis Institute, presents Norma Cole and Adrian Lürssen, reading their own poetry and work written in collaboration. Diego Villalobos welcomes the audience and speaks to the exhibition within the gallery space: Ana Jotta: Never the Less (the Portuguese artist's first public exhibition in the United States was curated by Anthony Huberman and Miguel Wandschneider, and organized by Villalobos). Steve Dickison of The Poetry Center introduces the poets, and alludes to events unfolding in Israel/Palestine. The poets' selection they present from their work is, in part, in response to these circumstances, as well as to their reading in the context of The Wattis among Jotta's visual works.
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The Poetry Center and Small Press Traffic co-present an evening devoted to the life and work of David Melnick, to help mark the publication of Nice: Collected Poems of David Melnick (Nightboat Books, 2023), edited by Alison Fraser, Benjamin Friedlander, Jeffrey Jullich, and Ron Silliman. Noah Ross, of Small Press Traffic, provides the introductions for presentations by three guests: Benjamin Friedlander, Jo Aurelio Giardini, and J. Gordon Faylor. The program takes place at Et al., bookstore and gallery on Mission Street in San Francisco.
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The Poetry Center presents Orlando White, recipient of the Poetry Center Book Award for LETTERRS (Nightboat Books, 2015). White reads with award judge Patrick James Dunagan, who reads from Drops of Rain / Drops of Wine (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016) and Book of Kings (Bird & Beckett Books, 2015). The poets' readings are followed by an extensive conversation with the audience focused on questions of poetics.
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This panel was convened by SFSU faculty in response to two events that took place in San Francisco in 1966: a police action that closed down the initial production of Michael McClure's play The Beard, and the police seizure of Lenore Kandel's The Love Book from City Lights Bookstore. The intent of the event, as stated by SFSU professor Leonard Wolf, was to provoke the police into arresting professors for reading censored works in defiance of the City's police censorship squad. About 300 people were in attendance.
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The Poetry Center presents an historic re-creation of the "Festival of Modern Poetry," originally organized by Madeline Gleason's San Francisco Poetry Guild in 1947. This 1974 reading features nine of the original participants of the 1947 festival, a partial representation of poets then active in the San Francisco Bay Area who helped establish San Francisco as a center for poetry, before the Beat movement and San Francisco Renaissance defined other new directions in the 1950s. The nine poets read largely from works written during the 1940s. Robert Duncan serves as emcee and reads briefly at the opening.
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The Poetry Center presents an historic re-creation of the "Festival of Modern Poetry," originally organized by Madeline Gleason's San Francisco Poetry Guild in 1947. This 1974 reading features nine of the original participants of the 1947 festival, a partial representation of poets then active in the San Francisco Bay Area who helped establish San Francisco as a center for poetry, before the Beat movement and San Francisco Renaissance defined other new directions in the 1950s. The nine poets read largely from works written during the 1940s. Robert Duncan serves as emcee and reads briefly at the start of the second half of the evening.
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The Poetry Center presents Robert Adamson reading from The Goldfinches of Baghdad (Flood Editions, 2006) and Net Needle (Flood Editions, 2015). Adamson responds to questions from the audience and talks extensively about his adolescent incarceration and discovery of poetry while in prison.
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The Poetry Center presents Robert Creeley reading from his poetry.
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The Poetry Center presents Robert Creeley reading poems from his book Words, as well as a long prose piece titled The Lovers.
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The Poetry Center presents Robert Creeley, reading from his poems and commenting on his poetry and poetics, in response to questions from filmmaker/poet Richard O. Moore. Creeley is accompanied by Bobbie Louise Hawkins (at the time, Bobbie Creeley), and speaks extensively of his poetics and his contemporaries and the sense of a common and complementary undertaking between them.
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The Poetry Center presents poet-scholars Robert Dewhurst and Michael Seth Stewart reading from and discussing the works of poet John Wieners (1934–2002). The program includes a screening of the outtakes from Richard O. Moore's 1965 "USA: Poetry" public television documentary featuring John Wieners in San Francisco along with Robert Duncan.
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The Poetry Center presents Robert Duncan and George Oppen, reading from their poetry, in the very first video recording (following near-20 years of audio recordings) made for the Center's then newly established American Poetry Archives. The poets appear before a large audience at the San Francisco Museum of Art, its Van Ness Avenue, Civic Center location, for the first of a number of events billed as "Evenings at the San Francisco Art Museum," noted in the event program as "re-establishing our historical & cultural ties" between the museum and The Poetry Center. Following the poets' readings was a screening of the outtake footage from two of the USA:Poetry film series, on Charles Olson and on Frank O'Hara, as made available by Richard O. Moore, General Manager for San Francisco public television station KQED.
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The Poetry Center presents Robert Duncan reading his poetry from and discussing his book The Opening of the Field (1960).
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The Poetry Center presents Robert Duncan reading from his poetry and a play.
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The Poetry Center presents Robert Duncan, writing and working with recent poems, from his "Passages" series, and discussing his poetics in response to questions by filmmaker and poet Richard O. Moore. The footage was filmed on November 2, 1965, in the home of Duncan and his partner, artist Jess (Collins), on 20th Street in San Francisco's Mission District.
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The Poetry Center presents Stefan Hyner in a reading and talk entitled "This Other World Not Civilized." Hyner reads in reverse-chronology from his own poetry dated 2003–2015, all in manuscript. He also reads his translations from Classical Chinese poets Lao Tzu, T'ao Yuan-Ming and Li T'ai Po, and responds to questions and remarks from the audience.
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After an introduction by their friend and comrade Manolo Callahan, of the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten deliver the second of four linked Bay Area lectures, under the collective title "Felicity Street." The present lecture is titled "Involvement and Betrayal" (On Andaiye, Martin Carter, Guyana and what Michelle Cliff calls "the centerless, outward edgelessness of the Caribbean"). Throughout their talk, Harney and Moten respond to questions and comments from the audience. The program was co-presented by The Poetry Center and The Green Arcade, with thanks to our host, the McRoskey Mattress Company, and to the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry, for their initiation and support of this series of lectures.
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The Poetry Center presents a memorial tribute to Stephen Rodefer (1940–2015), with reminiscences and poems, mostly by Rodefer, read by twenty Bay Area poets and friends. The event incorporates a portion from a Poetry Center video of Stephen Rodefer reading, May 8, 1975, at San Francisco State University.
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The Poetry Center presents a reading and conversation with Ted Rees and Alana Siegel. Rees reads from what he says are older poems and newer poems. Siegel reads from ARCHIPELAGO (Station Hill Books, 2013), just released at the time of this event, after opening with an excerpt from Robert Duncan's The Opening of the Field. The poets' readings are followed by a conversation between the two of them and with their audience.
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The Poetry Center presents Thom Gunn, Joanne Kyger, and Nathaniel Tarn, each presenting substantial readings of what was at the time of their readings primarily new work. Gunn reads several poems from manuscript, closing with his longer poem "Jack Straw's Castle," title poem to his subsequently published Jack Straw's Castle (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1976; UK edition, Faber & Faber, 1976). Kyger reads her newly published chapbook Trip Out and Fall Back (from Wesley Tanner's Berkeley-based Arif Press, 1974, featuring intricate ink drawings by artist Gordon Baldwin, who appears in the poem and is present at the reading), after opening with a birthday poem written for her the day before by Tom Clark. She follows with a story by Theodora Kroeber, a citation from Jaime de Angulo, and new poems. Tarn reads from manuscript new work subsequently published in The House of Leaves (Black Sparrow Press, 1976), and closes with one poem, in manuscript, from Lyrics for the Bride of God (New Directions, 1975).
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The Poetry Center presents Tomas Tranströmer, reading his poetry in translations by May Swenson, Robert Bly, and Samuel Charters, and in the original Swedish. Nearly four decades before he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the celebrated Swedish poet reads and introduces a range of his poetry that was becoming available from American presses. He follows his reading with an extended conversation on translation, on his background and influences as a poet, on the relative cultural place of poetry in Sweden and other countries, and closes by reading briefly, again, from Swedish and in translation. Tranströmer is introduced by Kathleen Fraser, Poetry Center director, and his interlocutors from the audience include Michael Palmer, Robert Duncan (both briefly on-screen), with George Oppen also noted as present. The reading, as Fraser remarks, happened on an impromptu basis, and she's gathered an audience on short notice.
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The Poetry Center presents Jane Gregory and Vincent Katz reading and in conversation. Gregory reads new poems from an unpublished manuscript titled Profices. Katz reads works from Swimming Home (Nightboat Books, 2015), The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (Princeton University Press, 2004), and his forthcoming book, Southness. Their readings are followed by a conversation with the audience.