"To Open Eyes": Black Mountain College Into the 21st Century

Friday 3rd - Saturday 4th June, 2011

Founded in 1933 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, Black Mountain College was not your garden variety college compared to other institutions of higher learning in the United States at the time. Indeed, Black Mountain was as much a vortex of avant-garde art performances, experimental lifestyles, political radicalism, macho theatrics, utopian architectural dreaming, and collective manual labor as it was a college of liberal arts. Black Mountain College was where people gathered “to open eyes” as Josef Albers, teacher at BMC, put it.

Following up the 75th anniversary of the founding of BMC, we seek to gather a small group of scholars, artists, philosophers, musicians, architects and others interested in Black Mountain College to explore the ways the legacy of Black Mountain College continues to resonate across contemporary postmodern culture. Papers are to cover a wide range of subjects, including Black Mountain's relationship to:

• The Bauhaus (Josef and Anni Albers)
• Painting (Dan Rice, Robert Motherwell, Elaine and Willem de Kooning)
• Music (John Cage)
• Dance (Merce Cunningham)
• Architecture (Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius)
• Poetry (Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov)
• Visiting Speakers (Albert Einstein, Thornton Wilder, Norbert Wiener)
• Publishing (*Black Mountain Review*)
• Pedagogy (John Andrew Rice, John Dewey, Theodor Dreier)

Abstracts of no more than 500 words should be submitted to Daniel Kane and Paul Betts, by Friday 15th April.

Notification will be made by Tuesday 3rd May.

3rd June - University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9RH (keynote)

4th June - Landsdowne Hotel, Lansdowne Place, Brighton BN3 1HQ

via Keston Sutherland

Conference: Contemporary Poetry and the University

Saturday 7th May 2011

Proposals from practitioners of poetry, academics, and post-graduate students are invited for the symposium ‘Contemporary Poetry and the University’, at Girton College, Cambridge. The conveners hope that potential contributors will interpret this theme as broadly as possible, and would welcome proposals on any relevant subject.

Possible areas to consider might include:

• University teaching of contemporary poetry
• Constructive relationships between poets and university-based research/teaching initiatives
• Universities and poetic traditions
• The institutionalization of creative writing
• The current reforms of higher-education funding and their impact on the teaching and production of poetry within the university
• 'Impact' and creative writing
• The relationship between academic journals and contemporary poetry
• Archiving contemporary poetry
• Contemporary poetry and the essay

Proposals (300 words) for twenty-minute papers should be submitted to Dr. Adam Crothers by Thursday 17th March 2011.

This symposium will coincide with the awarding of the first Girton College Jane Martin Prize for Poetry.

via Sam Ladkin

Tripwire

Tripwire, a journal of poetics, was founded in 1998 by Yedda Morrison and David Buuck. Six issues were published between 1998-2002, with a special supplement published in September, 2004 for the RNC protests in New York. In 2011, Tripwire is being re-launched, with several new issues to be announced soon. See the submissions page for more information.

Website

Submissions page

Making and Unmaking Text

27th - 29th January 2011

Making and unmaking text across performance practices and theories is a three day participatory event which looks to expand the notion of the academic conference, by asking participants to present and respond. We hope this direct and primary response-led work will open up discussion and offer productive cross-discipline exchange. We will be providing a performative academic forum: to explore the place of text in practice; the making and unmaking of the text; and the questioning of academic protocols by this destabilising of the text. We hope participants and will see how text functions in different practice-based disciplines and how to contextualise different notions of textuality.

This event aims to bring together practice based postgraduate students from institutions across the uk. We invite 30 participants to engage in a series of performances, responses, workshops and conversations over the course of three days. Each participant will be asked to contribute by performing, discussing or presenting their work. This event will provide opportunities for practice-based researchers from different academic disciplines to engage in dialogue and knowledge transfer with their peers, and to open up possibilities for future collaborative and multi-disciplined events to take place.

Funded by Beyond Text, an AHRC programme, in association with Royal Holloway, University of London

Details of a call for work posted on the Making and Unmaking Text website.

RunAmok

RunAmok is a new publisher of innovative/experimental poetics based in Cork City, Ireland. Our aim is to publish new poetry that excites us and not get bogged down in one particular style or school. We want to publish young emerging writers alongside much more established ones. We hope that the chapbooks we publish, our two part magazine 'Fontanelles' and 'Foma', along with this blog will help foster a community and open up conversation between old and new friends.

RunAmok is run by James Cummins, Sarah Hayden, Niamh O'Mahony and Rachel Warriner.

Please email no more than 6 poems or no more than 5000 words of criticism or reviews of various length to RunAmok.

Submission guidelines

GOBSMACKED – Call for Postgraduate Students Researching Performance

Saturday 20th November, 10am - 8pm

GOBSMACKED is a one-day conference that will take place on 20th November, 2010 at Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL). Part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council's (AHRC) Beyond Text programme, it is organised by QMUL PhD candidates Johanna Linsley and Helena Walsh.

Writing in 1962 Susan Sontag stated: “To describe a Happening for those who have not seen one means dwelling on what Happenings are not.” Set within this context of a critical loss for words, GOBSMACKED focuses on the ways in which experimental performance practices that fall within the brackets of ‘live art’, ‘performance art’ and ‘body art’ may elicit a failure of language. In titling our conference GOBSMACKED we purposefully draw on the reputation of these performance categories for that which is shocking, explicit or provocative. However, we wish to consider the many other ways in which experimental performance practice can effect a failure of speech amongst those who experience it.

During the conference, academic panels will alternate with artists presenting on relevant aspects of their practices. These include: Aine Phillips, Silke Mansholt, Chris Goode, Mat Fraser, Lena Simic, Helena Hunter, Brian Lobel, UnionDocs.

We are seeking 15-minute papers or presentations from postgraduate students researching Live Art. We encourage innovative forms and approaches.

Deadline 5pm, Friday 22nd October gobsmacked.conference@gmail.com.

Successful applicants will be informed by Friday 29th October.

Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS

Update on Wednesday 17 November, 2010 by Openned

Please note the start time is 9am, not 10am as originally stated.

halfcircle poetry journal

halfcircle poetry is a new, free, monthly poetry magazine based in Oxford, UK.

The first issue of halfcircle poetry will be available from the 5th October in Oxford and Cambridge. We are now taking submissions for our first few editions. All interesting contemporary original poetry welcome. Submissions to tom.oliver.graham@gmail.com, arabella.currie@balliol.ox.ac.uk

Website

10th Muse

Andrew Jordan is looking for submissions to the next issue of 10th Muse, a magazine for quite good poetry. Please get in touch using the form on this page in the first instance. If you know anyone else who writes quite good poetry please poke them with a stick and tell them to get in touch too. Deadline 1st October.

SoundEye & Greenwich Contributions

If anyone would like to contribute a record of their thoughts about SoundEye and/or the Greenwich festival for the next Openned Zine, please send it to us by Saturday 21st August. It can be a paragraph, a page, a photo, a diagram - whatever you want.

blart

Stephen Emmerson is looking for submissions to the first issue of blart, a new magazine for innovative poetry. Send your submissions to brokenbonebooks@yahoo.com. Deadline for first edition is 1st September.