3 Upcoming Events: Halpern's Oppen Memorial Lecture, Belladonna, Scalapino Memorial

From XPoetics, so head over there for full info, dates, times, writeup etc.

It's killing me to be here when hearing news like this. Three of the events I am most stoked about (wow, that's an old school term; and to be stoked means to KNOW of it, of course) are upon us. Rob Halpern's been chosen to present for the George Oppen Memorial Lecture; the Hejinian and Harryman Belladonna book release party is happening (The Wide Road, an experimental parallel world, politically-inflected re-narration of Thelma and Louise...!); and the bay area Leslie Scalapino memorial, an evening of reading etc is too coming up. All within the next month or so. Up next, Rob on Sat:

Saturday, December 11th
2010 7:30 pm @ the Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin (at Geary), San Francisco, $10

Rob Halpern will be presenting the Poetry Center's George Oppen Memorial Lecture : "Becoming a Patient of History: George Oppen's Domesticity and the Relocation of Politics."

Just want to say that since Rob told me he was giving the Oppen Memorial Lecture, and with regard to "patiency" (see Rob's use of the term over at Nonsite Collective), I've been chomping at the bit to ask any of you out there near the Poetry Center to go and hear it, then report back to me--please? The term "becoming" in the talk's title adds a thickness that I love, as juxtaposed to (or otherwise tied up in) "history." Though he hasn't (yet) published as much as some whose names are synonymous with scholarship on Things Objectivism, it's widely known among Oppen scholars that Halpern's studies, poetically (Disaster Suites, Music for Porn) and critically, are deeply important to the quote end quote field (for lack of a better term). I remember Stephen Cope, Oppen scholar and editor of the Daybooks, saying to me that Rob's talk (not yet published) for the big Oppen conference a few years ago, made quite a splash--and the implications have rippled out since. A few weeks later various parts of it were being cited in some of the weekend's proceedings appearing after in various venues. So, dabbler that I am, I've been waiting for Rob to publish or otherwise make public some of his essays on Oppen and agency/patiency, Oppen on the middle-later WW, etc., essays that have changed the way we read Oppen's and WW's works, from the civil war poems to the civil war poems to OBN. Well: Go--record, bootleg! No, don't do that. But take notes, lots of notes, and let us know what we missed. What I missed while teaching large parts of OBN this semester at Evergreen. Would be helpful, you know?

Anyhow, I want to thank Robin Tremblay-McGaw, intrepid editor of XPoetics, for the triad of announcements. All three arrived in one package as email from the journal/blog, and all events three I wish I could attend.