KlezCalendar

WordSpoke Festival at the Sixth Street Synagogue presents
Radical Poetics with Charles Bernstein, Hank Lazer, and Erica Kaufman

Sunday, May 6 at 07:00 PM
The Sixth Street Community Synagogue
325 E. Sixth Street
New York, NY 10003
Tel: 212.473.3665

Milestone publication of the "Radical Poetics & Secular Jewish Culture"—a collection of poetry & criticism—opened a great deal of dialogues, readings, and possibilities for contemporary exploration of Jewish identity. Publication's contributors Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer (on a rare visit from Tuscaloosa, Ala.!) will be joined by Erica Kaufman for a poetry reading and conversation.

Charles Bernstein is an American poet, theorist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein holds the Donald T. Regan Chair in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the Language poets (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets). In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2005, Bernstein was awarded the Dean's Award for Innovation in Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. Educated at Harvard College, he has been visiting Professor of Poetry, Poetics, and Creative Writing at Columbia University, Brown University, and Princeton University. A volume of Bernstein's selected poetry from the past thirty years, "All the Whiskey in Heaven," was published in 2010 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Bernstein's continued commitment to small presses remains strong—In the same year that FSG released his major collection, Chax Press released "Umbra," a collection of Berstein's latest translations of poems from multiple languages. The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein is forthcoming from Salt Publishing. Bernstein will serve as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Poetry, Poetics, and Theory at Princeton University in the Fall Term of 2011. In May of the same year, The University of Chicago Press will release Bernstein's new collection of essays, "Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions."

Hank Lazer has published seventeen books of poetry, including Portions (Lavender Ink, 2009), The New Spirit (Singing Horse, 2005), Elegies and Vacations (Salt, 2004), and Days (Lavender Ink, 2002). He is Associate Provost for Academic Affairs and Professor of English at University of Alabama, where he edits the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series for the University of Alabama Press.

Erica Kaufman is the author of censory impulse (Factory School 2009). Excerpts from her newest project, INSTANT CLASSIC are available in chapbook form from Least Weasel and Belladonna*, and online in Little Red Leaves and Elective Affinities. kaufman lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Baruch College and is a faculty associate of Bard College’s Institute for Writing & Thinking and Institute for Language & Thinking.

Curated by Jake Marmer

Cover: $5

More info: sixthstreetsynagogue.org/special-events