However, there are a few exceptions, and here's one that I'm tremendously excited about. Joan Retallack will give the inaugural talk in The Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture in Innovative Poetics here in San Francisco on Friday night May 27th at 7:30 pm in Timkin Hall at CCA, 1111 8th Street. Admission is $8-15 (Members Free). You simply can't miss this one!
The Leslie Scalapino Memorial Lecture in Innovative Poetics is an annual lecture series with a focus on critical analysis of innovative poetry, essays, plays and cross-genre work primarily by women poets. The series invites contemporary writers to present their work in the spirit exemplified by Scalapino’s own critical writing and editorial vision as publisher of O Books.
Joan Retallack’s most recent publication Procedural Elegies / Western Civ Cont’d / (Roof Books) was named by Artforum as a best book of 2010. Other poetry includes Memnoir (Post-Apollo, 2004), How To Do Things With Words (Sun & Moon Classics, 1998), Afterrimages (Wesleyan, 1995), and Errata 5uite (Edge Books, 1993), chosen by Robert Creeley for the Columbia Book Award. Her critical books include Gertrude Stein: Selections (2008) and The Poethical Wager (2004)—both from University of California Press. Poetry & Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary (Palgrave MacMillan, 2006) was co-edited with Juliana Spahr; MUSICAGE: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack (Wesleyan University Press, 1996) won the America Award for Belles-Lettres. She is a recipient of a Lannan Poetry Award, two Gertrude Stein awards, and National Endowment for the Arts funding for an artist’s book project—Westorn Civ Cont’d, An Open Book. Retallack lives in the Hudson Valley where she is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College.