#undiscipliningthefields

The Poetry Center welcomes Divya Victor, for a special day-long pair of programs in downtown Berkeley at the East Bay Media Center. At 2:00 pm Victor will be reading from her poetry, then joining in conversation with Tonya M. Foster for this the third gathering under the rubric Undisciplining the Fields: Study, Performance, and (Re:)Creation, organized in collaboration between The Poetry Center and the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry.

Undisiciplining the Fields is a new conversation, reading (and sometimes performance) series that will invite writers, artists, filmmakers, and scholars from a range of fields to discuss and share their cross-disciplinary practices and thinking. Initiated by Tonya M. Foster, in collaboration with The Poetry Center, the series is envisioned as an unruly exploration of the ways that practice expertise is developed and encouraged through interest, study, and accident; and of the ways that creativity motivates / instigates investigations of the possible. 

NOTE: At 4:00 pm we'll take an early dinner/late lunch break, then reconvene at 6:00 pm, when Divya Victor delivers the 39th annual George Oppen Memorial Lecture. 

This event is free and open to the public.

VIDEO for this program will be posted after editing at Poetry Center Digital Archive.

Divya Victor is the author of CURB (Nightboat Books, winner of PEN America Open Book Award and the Kinglsey Tufts Poetry Award); KITH (Fence Books/ Book*hug); Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays  (Merve Verlag); NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH (Les Figues). Her work has been collected in numerous venues, including BOMB, the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, POETRY, and boundary2.

Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Czech, and performed and installed at Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Los Angeles, The National Gallery of Singapore, the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition (L.A.C.E.) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). She has been an editor at Jacket2 (United States), Ethos Books (Singapore), Invisible Publishing (Canada) and Book*hug Press (Canada). She is currently an Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University. Photo by John Gresham. More at divyavictor.com

Tonya M. Foster, the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University, is the author of the poetry collection A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna*, 2015) and the bilingual poetry chapbook La grammaire des os (joca seria, 2016). She is coeditor of the essay collection Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2002). Forthcoming are a poetry chapbook, A History of the Bitch (AHOTB) (Sputnik & Fizzle), and the full-length collection Thingification (Ugly Duckling Presse). With the support of a Creative Capital Award, Foster is also developing a multimedia, multi-genre project titled Monkey Talk, that studies issues of race, paranoia, surveillance, and aesthetics.

Related event

Divya Victor, The George Oppen Memorial Lecture

Video

erica lewis and Divya Victor: March 10, 2022

• Mask requested for in-person attendance
• Join us in person or via Zoom webinar
• Tune in to the video livestream

Join us for one in a number of programs taking place at SF State during February and March 2023 under the heading WOMAN. LIFE. FREEDOM., presented in solidarity with the Iranian Freedom Movement.

This event is free and open to the public.

Undisciplining the Fields: Study, Performance, and (Re:)Creation

co-presented by The Poetry Center and the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry

Undisiciplining the Fields is a new conversation, reading (and sometimes performance) series that will invite writers, artists, filmmakers, and scholars from a range of fields to discuss and share their cross-disciplinary practices and thinking. Initiated by George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry Tonya M. Foster, in collaboration with The Poetry Center, the series is envisioned as an unruly exploration of the ways that practice expertise is developed and encouraged through interest, study, and accident; and of the ways that creativity motivates / instigates investigations of the possible. Foster's guest for this second program in the series will be anthropologist, filmmaker, poet, and educator Abou Farman, visiting the Bay Area from his home in New York City. 

• ...what kind of new formations, logics and subjectivities, new allegiances and metaphysical quests are emerging in the secular interplay of religion, spirituality, science, and technology, especially as put into play by transhumanism—that is, more broadly speaking, as put into play in the post-human space in which technology, power, and ideology together are changing the way we can be humans and the meaning of being human in relation to the cosmos, that is to our own account of the universe and our place in it. —Abou Farman, “Mind Out of Place: Transhuman Spirituality”

An anthropologist, writer and artist, Abou Farman is author of On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience and Clerks of the Passage. As part of the artist duo caraballo-farman, he has exhibited internationally and received several grants and awards, including NYFA and Guggenheim Fellowships. He is producer and writer on several feature films including Icaros: A Vision, Vegas: Based on a True Story, and Uyra: The Rising Forest. He has published widely in academic and literary publications, with essays nominated for a National Magazine Award in Canada, selected for the Best Canadian Essays and twice awarded the Arc Poetry Magazine Critics Desk Award. He teaches at The New School and is founder of Art Space Sanctuary as well as the Shipibo Conibo Center of NY, working alongside indigenous autonomy movements.  

Tonya M. Foster, the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University, is the author of the poetry collection A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna*, 2015) and the bilingual poetry chapbook La grammaire des os (joca seria, 2016). She is coeditor of the essay collection Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2002). Forthcoming are a poetry chapbook, A History of the Bitch (AHOTB) (Sputnik & Fizzle), and the full-length collection Thingification (Ugly Duckling Presse). With the support of a Creative Capital Award, Foster is also developing a multimedia, multi-genre project titled Monkey Talk, that studies issues of race, paranoia, surveillance, and aesthetics.

Image from portrait by Sophia Garcia.

Related events: 

International Womens Day: Marjan Vahdat and Tonya M. Foster, in performance

To the People of Iran — Music for a New Year’s Liberation

• NOTE: WEBINAR BROADCAST ABANDONED, USE LIVESTREAM LINK BELOW
• Program also available via live-stream and at the same link after the event.
• Masks are requested for those attending in person

Undisciplining the Fields: Study, Performance, and (Re:)Creation

Undisiciplining the Fields is a new conversation, reading (and sometimes performance) series that will invite writers, artists, filmmakers, and scholars from a range of fields to discuss and share their cross-disciplinary practices and thinking. Initiated by George and Judy Marcus Chair in Poetry Tonya M. Foster, in collaboration with The Poetry Center, the series is envisioned as an unruly exploration of the ways that practice expertise is developed and encouraged through interest, study, and accident; and of the ways that creativity motivates / instigates investigations of the possible. Foster's guest for this premier iteration of Undisciplining the Fields is Ronaldo V. Wilson, whose body of work in writing and drawing, movement and performance, will serve as the starting point for these two Black artists' improvised and intensified, focusing and generative colloquy. Please join us.

Ronaldo V. Wilson, PhD, is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh, 2008), winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Prize., Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry in 2010.  His latest books are Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other (Counterpath Press, 2015), finalist for a Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and Lucy 72 (1913 Press, 2018). Co-founder, with poets Dawn Lundy Martin and Duriel E. Harris, of the Black Took Collective, Wilson is also a mixed media artist, dancer and performer. Wilson is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at U.C. Santa Cruz, serving on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program, and co-directing the Creative Writing Program.

• In her review of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, Claudia Rankine writes, “Ronaldo V. Wilson’s prose poems are alternately tough and tender probes into the underbelly of their psyches. With audacity and wit reminiscent of the work of Hilton Als, bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, and James Baldwin, Wilson decodes sociopolitical narratives around race, sexuality, and class. Identity, Wilson seems to say, is only a collection of stories—the ones told about us in battle with the ones we tell ourselves. What we have here is palpable consciousness: a stunning achievement.”

Tonya M. Foster, the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University, is the author of the poetry collection A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna*, 2015) and the bilingual poetry chapbook La grammaire des os (joca seria, 2016). She is coeditor of the essay collection Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2002). Forthcoming are a poetry chapbook, A History of the Bitch (AHOTB) (Sputnik & Fizzle), and the full-length collection Thingification (Ugly Duckling Presse). With the support of a Creative Capital Award, Foster is also developing a multimedia, multi-genre project titled Monkey Talk, that studies issues of race, paranoia, surveillance, and aesthetics.

Video:

Ronaldo V. Wilson in conversation and reading with Angel Dominguez for The Poetry Center, October 16, 2021

Tonya M. Foster’s Harvard Ratcliffe Institute 2021 Fellow presentation, “AHOTB”