[Cwgrad-announcements] In the Vernacular: Poetry and Experimental Film (Tonight and Tomorrow!)

[Gabriela Jauregui]

For those of you who plan on being in LA tonight or tomorrow night,
there's a great event happening tonight and tomorrow at USC (some
amazing filmmakers and poets will be reading/screeining their work!)

In the Vernacular
Poetry and Experimental Film
Visions and Voices: The USC Arts & Humanities Initiative

Friday, October 26, 2007; Saturday, October 27, 2007

University Park Campus
Multiple Locations
Lucas 108 and Doheny Memorial Library

Free


Overlapping and interconnected readings, film screenings and panel
discussions probe the intersections between verse and cinema.

This two-day symposium takes as its point-of-departure a historic
meeting held in New York City on October 28, 1963. On that day,
filmmaker Maya Deren, poet and film critic Parker Tyler and poet Dylan
Thomas gathered to publicly formulate, in an American context,
correspondences between the most advanced practices in the two mediums
– creating an interdisciplinary model that would inform the cultural
renaissance of the '60s.

Forty-four years later, "In the Vernacular" brings together poets,
filmmakers, critics and historians to re-think these issues. The
symposium poses such questions as:

• How does cinema provide inspiration and materials for contemporary
American poetry?

• What roles do vernacular materials such as slang, jargon and dialect
play in the composition of experimental poems and films?

• How does poetry provide a model for filmmakers who aspire to make
work that is more intensely sensual, imaginatively rich, metaphoric
and self-conscious of the medium than the "prosaic" narrative film?

It's particularly exciting to explore these questions in Los Angeles,
with its long history of experimental filmmaking and rich tapestry of
poetries; and at USC, home to celebrated writers and a world-renowned
film school.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26
George Lucas Instructional Building, Room 108

5:30 pm: Dinner Reception
Lucas Building Courtyard

7-10 pm: Screenings and Poetry Readings.
Screenings: Lost Motion (Janie Geiser, 1999); Covert Action (Abigail
Child, 1984); 17 Reasons Why (Nathaniel Dorsky, 1985-1987). Readings
by Lee Ann Brown, Joshua Clover, Craig Dworkin, Peter Gizzi and Tan
Lin

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 27
Doheny Memorial Library
Intellectual Commons, Room 233

10 am: Reception

10:30 am-12:15 pm: Poetry and Experimental Film: Four Scholars/Critics
Panelists: Melinda Barlow, Craig Dworkin, Tyrus Miller and Lydia Liu;
moderated by David James.


1:30-2:45 pm: Elision and Voices in Experimental Film Practice
Keynote address by Abigail Child. A prolific artist, Child has made
than 30 films and published four books of poetry. Her forthcoming
projects include Cake and Steak, an experimental sound film on
suburbia, gender and assimilation; and a new book, This Is Called
Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film, published by the University of
Alabama Press in its Modern and Contemporary Poetics series.

3-4:45 pm: Poetry and Experimental Film: Four Poets
Panelists: Lee Ann Brown, Joshua Clover, Peter Gizzi and Tan Lin;
moderated by Andrew Maxwell.

About the Panelists

A professor in the film studies program at the University of Colorado
at Boulder, Melinda Barlow has published widely on avant-garde films
and is the editor of Mary Lucier: Art and Performance. She is the
author of the forthcoming Lost Objects of Desire: Video Installation,
Mary Lucier and the Romance of History.

Joshua Clover teaches English literature, film studies and critical
theory at UC Davis. Recent published work includes The Totality for
Kids: Poems and The Matrix. He writes the column "Marx & Coca-Cola"
for Film Quarterly. His favorite movies are Band of Outsiders and
Caddyshack.

Craig Dworkin is the author of Reading the Illegible and the co-editor
of a collection of early writings by Vito Acconci. He curates the
digital archive Eclipse.

Peter Gizzi is the author of four books of poetry, including Some
Values of Landscape and Weather, and the editor of The House That Jack
Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. His honors include the
Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets and a
fellowship in poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Tan Lin is the author of two books of poetry, Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe
and BlipSoak01. Lin is the recipient of a Getty Distinguished Scholar
Grant for 2004-2005 and a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts
Writers' Grant. His video and LCD work have been shown at the Marianne
Boesky Gallery, the Yale Art Museum, the Sophienholm Museum in
Copenhagen and the Whitney Museum of American Art's Sound Check
Series. He has taught at the University of Virginia, CalArts and
Centre College. He currently teaches creative writing at New Jersey
City University.

Lydia H. Liu is the W.T. Tam professor in the humanities at Columbia
University, where she teaches in the Department of East Asian
Languages and Cultures and at the Institute for Comparative Literature
and Society. Her work focuses on literary modernity in translation;
the movement of words, ideas and artifacts across cultures; and the
evolution of writing, textuality and technology. She has published
numerous books and articles in English and Chinese, including
Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated
Modernity; The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern
World Making; Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global
Circulations; and Writing and Materiality in China.

Tyrus Miller is an associate professor of literature at UC Santa Cruz.
He is the author of Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Arts
Between the World Wars and a recent study of postwar avant-garde
aesthetics and politics.

Organized by Daniel Tiffany (English) and David E. James (Cinematic Arts)