Off to Providence, Off to Buffalo

I'm excited about travelling this week to two northeastern cities. I'll be reading poems with Jen Hofer at Ada Books in Providence, @6:00 Saturday. I've only been to Providence once before, when my family was driving around looking at colleges for my sister, and that visit lasted for no more than four or five hours. Also, when I lived in Hollywood I sometimes hung out with the singer of a metal band from Providence. He cleaned houses for a living and was very working-class conscious (and drank with a determined working-class seriousness). And had a shaved head, which made him look like Michael Stipe. I've always imagined Providence as being full of guys like him, and I expect a lot of bald, drunken, self-consciously working class heavy metal intellectuals who are proud of their house-cleaning skills to be milling around in the airport when I arrive.

Next Thursday at 8:30 am I'll be reading about Hannah Weiner and Juliana Spahr at the &Now Conference in Buffalo. Here's the panel info:

Jim Kurt, “The Procedural Form: Breaking the Categorization of Constraint and Chance”
Stan Apps, “New Representations of the Global in US Poetry”
Ellie Porbohloul, “Another Birth: Rethinking Social Political Engagement in
Forough Farrokhazad’s Late Poetry”

My paper focuses on the use of strategies of analogy to articulate the relationships between distant people who have not met each other.

Here are a couple teasers:

Much of the specific activity and living that governs and determines the situation of most individuals is not only geographically, but also psychically distant from them. The local environment is typically flooded with objects, machines, and produce from far away, so that to understand local conditions in the U.S. today, a quick trip to China would seem to be an essential first step. Without making such a trip, the local environment is in many ways opaque and incomprehensible. The keys to comprehending specific, local environments are scattered all over the Earth, in the distant places from which these specificities are sourced. These keys are in the hands, the work, the identities of distant people whom we may never meet. These people hold the keys to what our lives mean as we negotiate an increasingly opaque local landscape.

&

Hannah Weiner’s poem “Radcliffe and Guatemalan Women” uses analogy powerfully to study the real, nonfictional relationships between distant persons. These are not personal relationships; they exist without the persons involved having met and without creating any fiction that they have met. Nonetheless, the relations are intimate and of predominant importance. They are analogical relations, and the pressing question of the poem is whether such relations can be a basis for solidarity.