Poet, critic, and editor Dale Martin Smith presents a talk on small press poetry publication in the 1990s, with emphasis on communities that formed in San Francisco around the New College of California’s Poetics Program. Smith contextualizes small press publishing in the period while exploring the creative relationships and structures of feeling associated with the magazine and book imprint he published with Hoa Nguyen from 1998-2006. How does a small publisher enter larger national conversations? How do commitments to poetry and politics manifest new forms of art or new possibilities of living? In what ways do past models of writing and community formation continue in new social and creative settings? Smith addresses these questions with an eye to the circulation of poetry in the present.
Dale Martin Smith writes on poetry for literary journals like the Boston Review, Chicago Review, Lambda Literary, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry. A monograph, Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 (Alabama 2012) looks at poetry as a public art while recent edited works—An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson and Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson (both New Mexico 2017)—consider the formation of close personal bonds in literary production. Smith is the author of five books of poetry, including Slow Poetry in America (Cuneiform 2014) and Sons (Knife/Fork/Book 2017). A new publication, July Oration, will be published by Talonbooks in 2021. Other poetry has appeared in The Baffler, Best American Poetry 2002, Brooklyn Rail, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Hambone, and The Walrus.
Lecture in Guilford Parlor, 3:15 to 4:15 p.m.