Poems from Conference of the Birds by Stephen Cope




Stephen Cope

 

From Conference of the Birds by Stephen Cope

Note: Given the score-like nature of Stephen's work in these pieces and my desire to preserve their formatting, I've experimented with posting on Scribd as a way to achieve that. We'll see how this works. Thanks Stephen for your fine work!

Stephen Cope was born in Houston, Texas, and grew up in Ohio and California. From 1986-1996, he played guitar and other instruments in numerous bands and performance ensembles, including thelemonade, a roving poetry/ music ensemble that he co-founded with Christopher Funkhouser in 1989. He received his PhD from University of California, San Diego in 2005, after having hosted numerous readings and performances in the San Diego area and receiving numerous research fellowships from the Archive for New Poetry, where he archived the papers of Bernadette Mayer, Lyn Hejinian, John Taggart, and others.His poems, reviews, and articles have been published in XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics, Denver Quarterly, We Magazine, Becoming Poetics, Review of Contemporary Fiction, The Germ, and elsewhere. His edition of George Oppen's "Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers" was > published by the University of California Press in 2007, and his poem "Bellerophonic Sonnet" was chosen for PIP- Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry in 2005. He currently lives in Ithaca, NY, and hosts "Conference of the Birds," a weekly podcast of post-colonial, cross-cultural, and poetic musics from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Americas, the Middle-East and places between and beyond. Cope has recently taught literature, poetry, poetics, and related subjects at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), Ohio University, Bard College, Ithaca College, and (via Bard's Prison Initiatvie) at the Elmira Maximum Security Correctional Facility.

Stephen's current writing in poetry -- a ongoing serial project entitled "Conference of the Birds" is provoked by encounters with (and produced in part as responses to) the cross-cultural materials featured on his podcast.