LANGUAGE TO COVER A WALL:
VISUAL POETRY THROUGH ITS CHANGING MEDIA

Nov 17, 2011 – Feb 18, 2012
UB Art Gallery, Center for the Arts, North Campus
For more information, click here.

Opening reception Thur Nov 17, 5 pm to 7 pm:
5:45 pm Opening address by Marvin Sackner
6:15 pm Sound poetry performance featuring internationally acclaimed Canadian sound poets Paul Dutton, Nobuo Kubota, and W. Mark Sutherland

This exhibition of international scope will be one of the largest single gatherings of its kind, drawing upon language-art material from as early as a Pueblo Indian petroglyph (Galisteo Basin, New Mexico, ca. 1350-1680) up to the twenty-first century that contributes to an alternative tradition to standard linear poetry. Included are examples of seventeenth-century pattern poems, contemporary concrete, poesia visiva, eye poems, typestracts, poem-objects, and digital poems. Works by George Herbert, Lewis Carroll, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Barbara Kruger, Henri Chopin, Robert Lax, Dick Higgins, Daniel Spoerri, Alison Knowles, d. a. levy, Bob Cobbing, Siebren Versteeg, bpNichol, Bill Bissett, and Guy de Cointet are among a multiplicity on view.

Funding for the exhibition is gratefully acknowledged: UB Art Galleries, David Gray Chair of Poetry & Letters (UB), The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, Canadian-American Studies Committee (UB), and the Government of Canada.

Generous support has also been provided by the Canadian Consulate, Buffalo, NY; Electronic Poetry Center (UB); Department of Media Study (UB); James H. McNulty Chair of English (UB); and Gaylord Bros.

For exhibition poster, click Language to cover a wall.

The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, is currently hosting two exhibitions for the fall 2011 semester:

James Joyce & His Literary Circles: Paris, Personalities, Presses
An exhibition of Paris literary culture of the 1920s featuring Poetry Collection items relating to James Joyce, Sylvia Beach and Shakespeare and Company, The Little Review, William Bird and Three Mountains Press, Gertrude Stein, Nancy Cunard and the Hours Press, and Harry and Caresse Crosby and the Black Sun Press.

May I Trespass on Your Valuable Space
An exhibition of broadsides by Norah Maki. Completed primarily during the artist’s scholarship at the James Joyce Foundation in Zurich, Switzerland, each of the images corresponds to one chapter of Joyce’s novel Ulysses.

Monday – Friday, 9am-5pm
The Poetry Collection
University Libraries, University at Buffalo
420 Capen Hall (North Campus)
Buffalo, NY 14260-1674

http://library.buffalo.edu/pl

716.645.2917

Last fall, the Poetry Collection experienced what may well be a first in its nearly 75-year history when it received a generous donation from the undergraduate students in Professor Steve McCaffery’s English 361 class.

Impressed and inspired by their class visit to the Poetry Collection, during which Curator Michael Basinski gave a history of the collection and presented a number of significant, rare, and otherwise noteworthy poetry items, the students in Professor McCaffery’s Modern and Contemporary Poetry course decided among themselves to make a class donation. More specifically, they wanted to raise funds to repair the binding of the Poetry Collection’s first edition of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (Claire Marie, 1914), an important volume of linguistic innovation and a favorite of the English 361 students.

A strong advocate for the Poetry Collection, Professor McCaffery, David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters, introduces his students to the primary materials of the collection each semester. Commenting on the respect these particular students developed for the materiality of the collection’s holdings, McCaffery states, “In my entire history of teaching, this spontaneous collective gift was unprecedented. To me it indicates the value placed on rare and fragile items. It was a rare gesture, and in our current predominantly digital world, an almost revolutionary gesture.”

This gift will ensure that the Poetry Collection’s first edition of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons receives the physical conservation it requires, and will be available for the benefit of students and scholars for decades to come. Once the repair work is complete, Professor McCaffery’s students will be honored with an acknowledgment slip placed inside the book.

Such a donation underscores the Poetry Collection’s need for ongoing maintenance of its renowned collection of modern and contemporary poetry publications, some of which have become endangered over time. It also demonstrates how preservation funding can come from diverse sources. Historically, the collection has received conservation awards from individuals and private foundations, but never—until last fall—from a group of students. “By this act of simple philanthropy,” notes Curator Basinski, “our young scholars and poets have become curators in the realm of the poem.”

This is not the first time that Professor McCaffery has directly supported the University Libraries’ Poetry and Rare Books collections. Last year he sponsored the rebinding of a 1482 edition of The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius as part of the Gray Chair’s commitment to an annual restoration, a generosity that is most appreciated for its long-term care of the rare and special items in both collections.

For more information about other conservation projects in need of funding, please contact the curators at (716) 645-2917 or lpo-poetry@buffalo.edu. Gifts to the Poetry Collection can be made online by visiting library.buffalo.edu/giving.

Dear patrons of the Poetry Collection:

There will be construction in our research room in Capen 420 beginning May 19. We will remain open for research during our regularly scheduled hours, but patrons should be prepared for elevated noise levels and other disruptions in the research room.

We appreciate your patience and understanding.

Sincerely,
The staff of the Poetry Collection

April 14, 2011

Dear patrons of the Poetry Collection:

Due to the installation of new shelving in our closed stacks, some materials may not be immediately accessible. Should you be requesting any of these, please understand that there may be a short delay of a few days until they can be ready for you.

Thank you for your patience as we upgrade our facility.

Sincerely,
The staff of the Poetry Collection

The Poetry Collection invites you to a reception for the exhibition

Poems & Pictures: A Renaissance in the Art of the Book (1946 – 1981)

Date: Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Time: 7 p.m. – 10 p.m.
7 p.m. to 8 p.m. : wine, cheese, and conversation with the Poetry Collection’s Michael Basinski and James Maynard. 8:20 p.m. to 10 p.m. : reading by members of the UB undergraduate poetry group The Pronouns
Location: Western New York Book Arts Center (WNYBAC), 468 Washington at Mohawk, Buffalo, NY 14203

Organized by the Center for Book Arts in New York and curated by Kyle Schlesinger, Poems & Pictures examines the relationship between visual and language art. The exhibition features over 60 books produced between 1946 and 1981, as well as paintings, collages, periodicals, and ephemera. Poets, artists, and collaborators include Wallace Berman, Joe Brainard, Robert Creeley, Jim Dine, Johanna Drucker, Philip Guston, Joanne Kyger, Buffalo’s own Steve McCaffery, Emily McVarish, Karen Randall, Larry Rivers, George Schneeman, and many more. The bulk of this exhibit is on loan from the Poetry Collection. WNYBAC is the final stop (on display between February 25 and April 2, 2011) of a 3-city exhibition tour.

Charles Olson, 1964

Olson in/and Buffalo

The UB Poetry Collection hosts an exhibition of archival materials to celebrate the poet’s centennial

For many American poets living at mid-century and after, Charles Olson (1910 – 1970) was a defining poet of the era, and Robert Duncan, for one, often referred to the 1950s and 1960s as “the Age of Olson.” Within the wider circle of innovative poetries, Olson is most closely identified with a group of writers known as the Black Mountain poets, known for their shared appearance in the pages of The Black Mountain Review, a literary magazine published by the experimental liberal arts college of the same name.

Olson’s 1950 essay “Projective Verse” is most often recognized as a central statement of the group’s poetics, and he both taught at Black Mountain College and served as its rector leading up to its closing in the fall of 1956. Seven years later, Olson joined the UB English Department where he taught such courses as modern poetry and myth and literature. Although he left the department in the fall of 1965 to return to Gloucester, Massachusetts, Olson made a lasting mark on the history of poetry in Buffalo. His students edited magazines such as Niagara Frontier Review and The Magazine of Further Studies before having their own careers as poets and teachers. To this day, Olson still exists as a tutelary spirit for UB’s Poetics Program. In addition to “Projective Verse,” Olson is best known for Call Me Ishmael (1947), a study of Melville, and especially The Maximus Poems (1953-1968), a wide-ranging long poem that investigates the history and geography of Gloucester.

On Friday, October 15, 2010, as part of Olson at the Century: A Symposium, a celebration of Olson’s centennial, the UB Poetry Collection hosted a day of panels and presentations organized by Professor Steve McCaffery, David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters, and the UB Poetics Program. In conjunction with the event, the Collection is presenting Olson in/and Buffalo, an exhibition of first editions, little magazine appearances, broadsides, manuscripts, correspondence and ephemera that showcases the history of Olson’s publications as well as the archival traces of his presence across the Poetry Collection’s various manuscript collections.

Curated by Alice Bailey, Michael Basinski, Jeannie Hoag, Simon Horning, Mary E. Kohler, James Maynard and Susan A. Sturm, the exhibition is on display from October 15, 2010, through January 31, 2011 in the Poetry Collection, University Libraries, 420 Capen Hall, UB North Campus.

Earth’s Daughters presents

Gray Hair Series: Season 5
Helen Conkling & Bernhard Frank
Wed, Oct. 13 at 7:30 pm
Hallwalls
341 Delaware Ave
$5

More information about both writers can be found here.

THE DAVID GRAY LIBRARY FELLOW TALK by ERIC KEENAGHAN

“Poetic Lock-picking: Robert Duncan’s Anarchism or How the Poet
Must Sublimate Politics to Unlock Human Meaning”

Thursday October 7, the Poetry Collection
420 Capen Hall 2.30pm

Eric Keenaghan is Associate Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is the author of Queering Cold War Poetry: Ethics of Vulnerability in Cuba and the United States (Ohio State, 2009), and is a contributing author to several edited critical volumes, including Queer Exoticism: Examining the Queer Exotic Within (Cambridge Scholars, 2010), Ronald Johnson: Life and Works (National Poetry Foundation, 2008), as well as the forthcoming volumes (Re:)Working the Ground: Essays on the Late Writings of Robert Duncan (Palgrave Macmillan) and The Other Emerson: New Approaches, Divergent Paths (Minnesota). His essays on modernist poetry, Duncan, and other queer writers (Jack Spicer, Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén, Luis Cernuda), have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Translation Studies, The Translator, modernism/modernity, The Journal of Modern Literature, Contemporary Literature, and Wallace Stevens Journal.

UB Anderson Gallery
Thursday, August 19, 2010
7 pm – 9 pm
Free and open to the public

UB Anderson Gallery is pleased to present a poetry reading and talk by Sherry Robbins, from or, The Whale, published by BlazeVOX [books]. In anticipation of UB Art Gallery’s exhibition Artpark: 1974-1984, opening on September 25th, the poet will present a talk about her involvement with Artpark’s vibrant poetry and art scene during the 1970s and 1980s. Poet and BlazeVOX [books] publisher Geoffrey Gatza will open the event, reading from his new book, Secrets of My Prison House.

For more information, call Ginny O’Brien Lohr at 716-829-3754, or visit ubartgalleries.org. This event is funded in part by the Mildred Lockwood Lacy Fund for Poetry and the Poetry Collection, UB Libraries.

UB Anderson Gallery is on Martha Jackson Place, located off Englewood Avenue one block south of Kenmore Avenue in Buffalo. Gallery Hours: Wed-Sat 11am-5pm and Sunday 1-5pm.