POG presents

"War in/of Words: Searching for Poethical Models":

a talk and roundtable discussion with poet Jena Osman

Saturday, February 19, 3pm,

Dinnerware Contemporary Art Gallery,
210 N. Fourth Ave., Tucson
Admission: $5; Students $3

 

poetry reading:

Jena Osman, Tiffany MacFerrin, Dawn Pendergast
Saturday, February 19, 7pm,

ORTSPACE,
121 E. 7th Street, Tucson (entry on east side of building, at alley door)
Admission: $5; Students $3

Jena Osman teaches in the graduate writing program at Temple University. She has published six books of poetry: Jury (Meow Press, 1996), Amblyopia (Avenue B, 1993), The Lab-Book (Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo, 1992), Balance (Leave Books, 1992), Underwater Dive: Version One (Paradigm Press, 1990) and Twelve Parts of Her (Burning Deck Press, 1989). Her poetry has also been anthologized in The Art of Practice: Forty-Five Contemporary Poets, as well as Subliminal Time and Writing From the New Coast: Presentation. She is the co-editor (with Juliana Spahr) of Chain, a journal that investigates language in its various presentational frames. Also see her online works:

Tiffany MacFerrin is an original Tucson specimen, guilty of subjecting cohorts to spontaneous singing on the streets after a few beats of the wind in her hair.  She is too often having work to fun hard on her poetry, but come hear, if you dare, what stars might explode in midair!

Dawn Pendergast is a second-year MFA student at University of Arizona. She received her MA in Performance Studies at NYU and a BS in Science, Technology, and Culture at Georgia Institute of Technology. Recent collaborative projects include

She currently teaches creative writing and works for the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

Abstract for the Roundtable Discussion

with Jena Osman:

Poet-critic Joan Retallack has described the poethical art form as "a form of life in which we would, in our most enlightened moments, want to live — [that] which makes the intricate complexity of the intersecting intentional and accidental that is our world known to us through the sensory and imaginative enactment of complex forms" ("Accident ...Aeroplane ...Artichoke"). I've been thinking about this concept in relation to a comment Anne Waldman made a year or so ago at the Kelley Writers House in Philadelphia about how now is a time of "outrageous metaphor and terrible misnomers," what she called a kind of "interior terrorism." She said that the best thing we can do right now as writers is study euphemism. Poet-critic Barrett Watten said in a talk called "War=Language" that "We need to take the mechanized hardware of the language of war apart — by locating alternate evidence in multiple media, by questioning the pseudo-objectivity of its delusional conclusions, by unpacking its embedded metaphors and narrative frames, by thinking otherwise." There seemed to be a necessary hope that as writers, pointing to language itself is a first step toward action. But in what ways is that pointing poethical? Are there ways to critique the topical world, the world of events, while at the same time providing alternative "poethical" forms? In other words, in what ways can words in poems make war, and in what ways can they make peace?
 

POG events are sponsored in part by grants from the Tucson/Pima Arts Council, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. POG also benefits from the continuing support of The University of Arizona Poetry Center, the Arizona Quarterly, Chax Press, and The University of Arizona Department of English. 

thanks to our growing list of 2004-2005 Patrons and Sponsors:

We're also grateful to hosts and programming partners