#bagleywrightlectureseries

• NOTE: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED, TO BE RE-SCHEDULED

Poet and scholar Julian Talamantez Brolaski returns to the Bay Area. Join us in person at East Bay Media Center in downtown Berkeley, for this program co-presented by The Poetry Center and Small Press Traffic, with support from the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry. 

This event is free and open to the public. 

Livestream video via our co-host, Small Press Traffic.

The End of the Line: Rhyme and the Poetics of Authority
This talk explores the role end rhyme has to play in the construction of poetic authority.  Rhyme sets up an epistemological paradox: forms and meanings seem to correlate, and thus to be true and trustworthy, but there are reasons to distrust what the poet says at line’s end.  Rhyme is a potent locus in which the problem of believability is foregrounded.  It also foregrounds, through its reliance on artifice, the presence of an author or authors.  I’m interested in the relationship of these properties to rhyme position, which I discuss as a place where formal constraint can result in the display or concealment of poetic skill.

Julian Talamantez Brolaski (it / its / itself) is poet and country singer, the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights 2012), and gowanus atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011). With Juan & the Pines, Julian released an EP, Glittering Forest, in 2019; its first full-length solo album is coming out this fall. Julian is the recipient of the 2020 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Cy Twombly Award for Poetry and a 2021 Pew Foundation Fellowship. Its poetry was recently included in When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020) and We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical
Trans Poetics (Nightboat 2020).

Photo by Ryan Collerd.

Video: 

Julian Talamantez Brolaski and Garrett Caples at The Poetry Center: February 15, 2018

Audio: 

Juan & the Pines, Glittering Forest EP at Bandcamp

• This program also available via live-stream and at the same link after the event.

Supported by the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry
With introductions to our featured speakers by Manolo Callahan

Co-presented by The Poetry Center and The Green Arcade, with kind thanks to our host, the McRoskey Mattress Company

Door opens 6:30 pm for 7:00 pm Pacific start time. RSVP TO ATTEND IN PERSON

Join us at McRoskey Mattress Co., where Market, Gough, Valencia, and Haight all intersect in San Francisco (or tune in via live-stream) for this in-person talk, one of four linked lectures at four Bay Area venues by friends and writers Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. This program is co-presented by The Poetry Center and The Green Arcade, and is supported by the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry. Harney and Moten will kindly be introduced by their friend and comrade, Manolo Callahan.

• Please note: proof of vaccination and mask are required in order to attend in person.

"Involvement and Betrayal" (On Andaiye, Martin Carter, Guyana and what Michelle Cliff calls the centerless, outward edgelessness of the Caribbean) is the title for this evening's talk, the second of four by Harney and Moten focusing on hemispheric black social poetics. For details on the other three Bay Area lectures in the series check here.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten are students of the black radical tradition. Together, they are authors of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) and All Incomplete (2020) both from Minor Compositions/Autonomedia. Stefano is Professor of Transversal Aesthetics at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Fred teaches in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University. They have been friends and writing partners for almost forty years.

Manolo Callahan is an insurgent learner and convivial researcher with the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy (CCRA). Callahan’s work explores three interwoven areas: the US/Mexico border and borderlands historically and in the present; Indigenous struggles across the Americas including Zapatista struggles in Chiapas; and convivial research, a community-based research approach that engages the intersections between Zapatismo, conviviality, and autonomous struggles throughout Greater Mexico. He also participates in the Universidad de la Tierra Califas, an autonomous learning space networked across the San Francisco Bay Area and connected to other autonomous campuses across Mexico and beyond.

The Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry supports contemporary poets as they explore in-depth their own thinking on poetry and poetics and give a series of lectures resulting from these investigations. Lectures are delivered publicly in partnership with institutions and organizations nationwide. More here.

Poetry Center Digital Archive recordings

Manolo Callahan, Stefano Harney, and Tonika Sealy Thompson: December 4, 2016 at the Howard Zinn Book Fair

Fred Moten and Nathaniel Mackey with Hafez Modirzadeh: March 5, 2016 at McRoskey Mattress Co.

Insubordinate Conviviality in the COVID-19 Conjuncture, by Manolo Callahan, at Resilience, May 6, 2020