October 12, 2007

Revisioning Authors presents Ron Silliman and Tracie Morris

“Silliman\'s Argus-eyed daily also includes whatever dance, music, and films the editor is attending to, and his daily bulletins and commentaries remind me more of an arts newspaper than a journal. . . . His blog is the best vehicle we have at this point for news on what is new.”
–Clayton Eshleman, editor, Sulfur

“It would be impossible to overestimate the importance of Ron Silliman’s Age of Huts; it was ground-breaking when it first began to appear, piecemeal, a quarter of a century ago, and it remains a revolutionary work today. With its proliferative architecture, its encyclopedic arc, and its endlessly inventive methodology, The Age of Huts, with every sentence, renews its engagement with the world.”
—Lyn Hejinian, University of California, Berkeley

“Morris made her mark on the then-burgeoning Hip-Hop influenced New York poetry scene a decade ago when she won both the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam championship and the National Haiku Slam Championship. Soon thereafter, she began to add more experimental sounds to her work, including free jazz and African and Indian classical music. In her performance poetry, she creates soundscapes that blend rock, jazz, hip-hop and funk with experimental digital loops, samples and special effects.
—Tracie Morris web site

Friday, October 26, 2007, 3-5 PM
Welcome Center Auditorium, Warren and Woodward Avenues, Wayne State University,
Detroit. Free and open to the public

Preceded by an informal talk
by Ron Silliman on the poetics of blogging and the editing of his renowned site Silliman’s Blog (http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com)
Friday, October 26, 1-2:30 PM
English Department Conference Room, 10304 5057 Woodward Avenue

Ron Silliman has written and edited 26 books to date. One of the founding members of the West Coast Language school of poets, Silliman is known for his use of the “New Sentence” in constructing his capacious, open-ended prose poems. Between 1979 & 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, entitled The Alphabet. Silliman sees his poetry as being part of a single poem or lifework, and has begun writing a new poem entitled Universe, the first section of which will be called Revelator. Silliman\'s fame has grown considerably since 2002, due to his popular and controversial weblog, Silliman\'s Blog. Debuting on August 29, 2002, it is now (arguably) the most influential English-language blog on the web devoted to contemporary poetry and poetics. In early February 2007, Silliman\'s Blog surpassed 1,000,000 hits. He is also currently collaborating with nine other West Coast poets on The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, 1975–80.

Tracie Morris, originally from Brooklyn, New York, emerged as a writer from the Lower East Side poetry scene in the early 1990s, where she became known as a premier performer in the "slam" scene located in the Nuyorican Poets\' Cafe. She has toured nationally with other "slam poets," including Maggie Estep, Dael Orlandersmith, Mike Tyler, and Paul Beatty.

She has also collaborated with musicians she met through the Black Rock Coalition, an organization that she was affiliated with from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. Morris is known as a sound artist/sound poet and theatrical performer; her works are available at PennSound (http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Morris.html).

She is the author of Intermission (Soft Skull Press, 1998), and teaches creative writing at Eastern Michigan University. (More information on Silliman and Morris can be found on Wikipedia, and other sites.)

Sponsored by: Revisioning Authors, a Working of the Humanities Center