SUNY Geneseo
English major alum Evan Goldstein (’17) and Assistant Professor of English Lytton Smith are both included in a new issue of the online journal BathHouse focused on ideas of collaboration. The nine poems were written as part of a back-and-forth poem exchange between Goldstein and Smith.
The issue also features photographs taken by Goldstein as part of his CIDD Ambassadorship at SUNY Geneseo in the Summer of 2016.
Assistant Professor of English Dr. Lytton Smith has just published a collaboratively-authored essay, written with Dr. Katherine Baxter, on the poetry of Chamoru poet Craig Santos Perez and Maori poet Robert Sullivan.
“Writing in Translation: Robert Sullivan’s Star Waka and Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory” is the first comparative study of these poets’ works, and it makes an argument for translation as a “kinetic space” defined not by a movement from “source” to “target” language but as a means for allowing “multiple idioms and registers to co-exist, displaying a range of power structures and social hierarchies simultaneously.”
The article appears in Vol 2.2 of Literary Geographies, an interdisciplinary open-access e-journal that provides a forum for new research and collaboration in the field of literary/geographical studies.
“Dear World Service,” a new sound poem by Assistant Professor of English Lytton Smith, is included in the second issue of ythm, an audio journal of contemporary poetry. Written in response to Robyn Schiff’s “Death of a Salesman,” Smith’s poem is one of five audio-only poems in the issue. A podcast can be found via Soundcloud. The issue also features work by Katie Peterson, Michael Joseph Walsh, and Sheila McMullin.
Taking its name from Nathanial Mackey’s gloss of “ythm” as “anagrammatic myth” in his 1993 poetry collection School of Udhra, ythm is an argument that “the spoken voice is central to both the praxis and appreciation of contemporary poetry,” and central, in particular, to the American tradition.
ythm editor Sean Pears found Smith through the blog that Smith maintains for Geneseo students in Literature and Creative Writing, The Contemporary Poem. Responding in a comment to student Nicole Pero’s post about “breaking from sound” via Benjamin Franklin, which neatly synthesized themes from Geneseo’s Western Humanities courses and the Advanced Poetry Workshop, Smith suggested “isn’t sound a form itself?,” offering Karen Volkman’s sonnets from Nomina, published by Rochester-based BOA Editions, as an example.
Smith credits the English department’s transition to four-credit courses with creating the space in his classes to incorporate student blogging.
Geneseo English Department alumnus Nick Friedman has been awarded the highly prestigious Jones Lectureship at Stanford University. In March 2014, Nick was appointed a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. As a Jones Lecturer, Nick will teach courses in creative writing while also working to complete his first book of poetry. Previous Jones lecturers include Tobias Wolff, ZZ Packer, Nan Cohen, Ehud Havazelet, and Skip Horack. Two years ago this week, we reported on Nick’s selection for the Stegner Fellowship and reminded readers of his appearances in the New York Times’ T Magazine and on NPR’s Weekend Edition.
Poet, editor, and musician John Gallaher will read from his work on Monday, September 21 at 8 p.m. in Welles 111, the Harding Room, on the SUNY Geneseo campus.
According to Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips (Yes! Gallaher gets praise from rock stars!) “Gallaher is not a writer or a poet, he is a psychic using words to trick us.” He’s written collaborative books and produced film poems.
A previous winner of the prestigious Boston Review Poetry Contest (judged by Rae Armantrout) and the author of five books of poetry, Gallaher is a writer no less a person than John Ashbery has called “[a] poet I once influenced who ha[s] moved beyond me.” Gallaher builds on Ashbery’s chatty multidirectionality and associative logic by adding his own philosophical edge, a pondering that’s at once homespun and existential.
Afro-Canadian poet, writer, and activist M. NourbeSe Philip will perform from her recent book, Zong!, a radical collection of poetry that tries to come to terms with the 1781 tragedy of the slave-ship Zong, from which ship over 150 African men, women, and children were thrown overboard as part of an insurance claim. 
No one was ever tried for their murder, and all that survives recording the incident is a two-page legal decision, Gregson v. Gilbert, named for and concerned with the ship’s owners and insurers, not the Africans onboard. It has been described by Juliana Spahr as “exceptional and uniquely moving.”
Philip’s performance will be accompanied by an original musical composition by SUNY Geneseo’s Glenn McClure.
The event, which will be held at Doty Hall on the SUNY Geneseo campus, is free and open to the public; books will be available for purchase.
M. NourbeSe Philip is the acclaimed author of four books of poetry, two collections of essays, a play, a novel, several short stories, and other writings; her work features in the Norton Anthology of English Literature. The recipient of many illustrious international awards, including the Casa de las Americas prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a McDowell Fellowship, a Chalmers Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation residency, Philip has read and performed her work internationally, including as writer-in-residence at the University of the West Indies and as part of The Scream Literary Festival. She lives and writes in Toronto, where she has previously been the writer-in-residence at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore.
The latest issue of international digital poetry magazine Rattapallax contains a feature on British poetry by new assistant professor of English Lytton Smith.
Introducing five emerging British poets, Prof. Smith argues that “The dynamism and excitement of British poetry emerges from its internationalism, its reckoning with a world beyond (and, strikingly, inside) its shores.”
Rattapallax #22 is available as a download from the iTunes store. You can read Prof. Smith’s introduction to the feature here.
Three poems by rising senior English major Amy Bishop (Creative Writing) will appear in the upcoming issue of the Susquehanna Review, an annual international undergraduate journal run by students at Susquehanna University that features work in fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and visual art.
The three poems are “Envisaging Hot Springs During the Winter Solstice”; “[Winter punctures my sore spots]”; and “Inheriting Grandmother’s Wedding Plates.”
The current issue of the review contains a poem by SUNY Geneseo creative writing track alum Dan O’Brien.
Come celebrate National Poetry Month with a book launch for Visiting Assistant Professor of English Cori A. Winrock’s new poetry collection, This Coalition of Bones, just out from Kore Press.
When: Saturday, April 19th
Where: The Yards (50-52 Public Market, Rochester, NY)
Doors Open: 6:30 pm
Festivities begin: 7:00 pm
Admission is free! Donations are always welcome!
This will be a special event featuring readings by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon and Geneseo alum Daniel T. O’Brien.
Bring a friend! Bring three! It’s a mentor/poem-maker party! There will broadsides by the lovely Anne Royston, poem-lined tote bags, string lights and general merriment! Throw some confetti and ring in the book year!
From the website of Kore Press:
In This Coalition of Bones, the mortal lessons of the body, the unreliability of the mind, the hyperbole of suburbia, and strange intersections of reality are embroidered into a cerebral, yet evocative landscape. Cori A. Winrock’s poems move through an unforgiving, terminal world infused with science, sleight of hand, and the shock of the gross clinic. It is an unsentimental world defined by a playful, eccentric storehouse of created verbs—a place where a glowworm slinkies, girls tween, punks are bonering, people relationship their way into the car, hive their way home.
Prof. Winrock’s work has appeared in Best New Poets 2013, Anti-, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, From the Fishouse, The Journal, and elsewhere. Winrock won the 2012 SLS St. Petersburg Review Award, was chosen as Editor’s Choice for Mid-American Review’s James Wright Poetry Award, and is the recipient of a Barbara Deming Individual Artist Grant.
Poet Adrian Matejka reads in the MacVittie College Union Ballroom April 2 at 2:30 p.m. Matejka is the author of three collections of poetry. His second book, Mixology, was selected by Kevin Young as the winner of the National Poetry Series. Big Smoke, his most recent collection, was long-listed for the 2013 National Book Award in Poetry.