please do circulate this pdf and or the text version in the body of this message, to you classes. Many thanks.

There will be a reception for Rob Halpern chez moi, 111 Spring Drive . Oxford . Ohio 45056, for all graduate students and faculty plus .  from 9.30pm onwards.

cris


______________________________


Rob Halpern 

reading and in discussion.

Wednesday August 29th 2012. 7.30pm

Bachelor Reading Room, 338.

ALL WELCOME.



  


Rob Halpern is the author of three books of poems, Rumored Place (Krupskaya 2004), which was nominated for a California Book Award, and Disaster Suites (Palm Press 2009), as well as several chapbooks, including Weak Link (Slack Buddha 2009) and Imaginary Politics (TapRoot Editions 2008). His most recent project, Music for Porn, is a new publication from Nightboat Books, 2012. With Taylor Brady, he also co-authored the book length poem Snow Sensitive Skin (Atticus/Finch 2007), soon to be reissued by Displaced Press in an expanded edition.

In his poetry, Halpern's writing activates a lyric voice shot through with linguistic debris and media fallout. In the confusion of our current geo-political conflicts, his poems make the fatal abstractions of crisis—finance, militarization, war—audible, by implicating the lyric voice in the materialization of those abstractions. The short lyric poems that comprise Disaster Suites, for example, formally register the rhythms and affects of everyday life—longing and rage, lust and disgust—as they collide with the representations of many devastating events, from Hurricane Katrina to the war in Iraq. 

In addition to writing poetry, Halpern is an essayist and a translator, as well as a scholar of modern culture and contemporary writing. His essay on Baudelaire's prose poems recently appeared in Modernist Cultures. A new essay entitled “Realism and Utopia: Writing, Sex, and Politics in New Narrative” appeared in a 2011 issue of the Journal of Narrative Theory. Recently, he’s been co-editing the poems of the late Frances Jaffer, together with Kathleen Fraser, and translating the early essays of Georges Perec, the second of which, “Commitment or the Crisis of Language,” can be found in the Review of Contemporary Fiction with an essay of his own on Perec. 

His poetry and narratives also appear in a range of reviews, anthologies, zines, and journals. Most recently these include: The Poetic Front, The Swan’s Rag, Chicago Review, Bay Poetics, James White Review, Galatea Resurrects, Abraham Lincoln, P-Queue, Gam, Submodern Fiction, EOAGH, War and Peace, Switchback, Crayon, /nor, Vanitas, Little Red Leaves, West Wind Review, Aufgabe, Wheelhouse, Try!, and New American Writing. His essays can be found in Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House Books), No Gender: The Work of kari edwards(Belladonna / Litmus Press, 2009), ON: Contemporary Practice, andJacket Magazine. Audio files of Halpern’s readings and talks are archived at PennSound.

Halpern received his Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz (2006), where he wrote a dissertation on the prehistory of literary modernism in nineteenth-century France. He’s held faculty positions at Bard College, San Francisco Art Institute, and San Francisco University. He's also an active participant in the Nonsite Collective, whose commitment to self-organized pedagogy and collaboration across disciplines models some of the outreach and community work we seek to initiate in our program. He is an Assistant Professor at Eastern Michigan University.


This event is sponsored by the English Department and Creative Writing.