Next Monday, December 6, at 6:00 PM, the Writers House celebrates what happened in poetry a half century ago with a symposium entitled POETRY IN 1960. Symposium host and Writers House faculty director AL FILREIS brings together eleven poets each to discuss a seminal work from that pivotal year -- work by Frank O’Hara, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Cage, Barbara Guest, Larry Eigner, and Jackson Mac Low. A Q&A and reception will follow. We hope you will join us for this exciting confabulation!If you can't make it to Philly, watch this live as a video stream. Just go here at 6 PM eastern time next Monday and watch!
The recordings will later be made available in PennSound and the symposium will be published in Jacket2.
- - -
The Kelly Writers House presents
POETRY IN 1960
a symposium
featuring
BOB PERELMAN
RON SILLIMAN
RACHEL BLAU DuPLESSIS
CHRIS FUNKHOUSER
ERICA KAUFMAN
JUDITH GOLDMAN
KRISTEN GALLAGHER
DANNY SNELSON
MICHAEL S. HENNESSEY
CHARLES BERNSTEIN
MEL NICHOLS
hosted by AL FILREIS
Monday, December 6, at 6:00 PM in the Arts Café
Kelly Writers House | 3805 Locust Walk
No registration required - this event is free & open to the public
- - -
KWH Faculty Director AL FILREIS curates a remarkable gathering of poets to present brief commentaries of books of poetry published in 1960 – to help mark the 50th anniversary of each. Each poet will read his or her 500- to 750-word critical commentary or retrospective review, after which there will be a Q&A session and a celebratory reception. The poet's commentaries will later be published as a special feature on the poetry & poetics of 1960 in Jacket2.
BOB PERELMAN on The New American Poetry edited by Donald Allen
RON SILLIMAN on The Opening of the Field by Robert Duncan
RACHEL BLAU DuPLESSIS on Second Avenue by Frank O'Hara
CHRIS FUNKHOUSER on Stanzas for Iris Leza by Jackson Mac Low
ERICA KAUFMAN on The Location of Things by Barbara Guest
JUDITH GOLDMAN on The Bean Eaters by Gwendolyn Brooks
KRISTEN GALLAGHER on Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note by LeRoi Jones
DANNY SNELSON on Cartridge Music by John Cage
MICHAEL S. HENNESSEY on A New Folder edited by Daisy Aldan
CHARLES BERNSTEIN on On My Eyes by Larry Eigner
MEL NICHOLS on Hymns of St. Bridget by Bill Berkson & Frank O'Hara
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
