ZONE READINGS: Barrett Watten, Marjorie Welish, Steve Benson
About this Event
We begin with zone as a spatial concept through which the question of boundary and form is undecided and fluid. Activating the concept in poetry, performance, and a poet-artist’s reflection on the concept and experience of zone:
Barrett Watten will conduct a dérive across the territory of Zone, sampling its twelve regions on the border between Chance and Form.
As present absence, Steve Benson saunters across mutually unintelligible patches of implacable culture.
Thanks to an initiative in cultural exchange, Marjorie Welish remembers an experience during her art residency in Łódź, Poland.
Guillame Apollinaire, Emily Dickinson, and hosts Lee Ann Brown and Carla Harryman will contribute poetry, song, and recitation.
About the featured readers:
Steve Benson participated with 10 other veterans of the late 1970s San Francisco language movement in writing ten essays for The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography (This). Recently he has published a CD-and-book called It's a Stool Pigeon Universe (Rastacan Records), in collaboration with the Splatter Trio, as well as a book of 3 long poems called AS IT HAPPENS (Lulu), and a book of four improvisational poetry performance transcripts, as poems, in Four Eyes (City Point Press). He has lived in Downeast Maine since 1996.
Barrett Watten: in addition to Chax Press’s publication of Zone: correlations, a bilingual selectedwritings recently appeared in Moscow, though currently held behind borders (Not This: Selected Writings/Не то: Избранные тексты; Polyphem, 2024); a Russian translation of the co-authored Leningrad-89: American Poets in an Defamiliarized Land (Ленинград-89: Американские поэты в остраненной стране) is forthcoming from Nosorog. This summer he worked on essays on Alexander Kluge and the “global anti-Bildungsroman;” a critique of the surrealist/Language word/image; and an essay on Russian poets in emigration; while correlating his 1980 poem "Non-Events" with present catastrophes.
Marjorie Welish is the author of several books of poetry, limited-edition constructed artists' books, and a book of art criticism. Her most recent book of poetry is A Complex Sentence (2020). Concerning her wider arts practice, she received her first solo show thanks to Laurie Anderson, then curator of the Whitney Museum Art Resources Center; support for her art includes the Trust for Mutual Understanding (funding an exchange between the International Studio Program, New York and the Artists’ Museum, Łódź, Poland). Her current art has traveled to Bonn, Amsterdam, Cambridge, and now, this September, is on view at Emanuel von Baeyer, London, which represents her art.
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