[ROB HALPERN] MATERIALS READING SERIES
Saturday 9th May 2015
Venue: Newnham College
Category: Gigs & Live Music
One Liner: RH's 1st Cam reading
Price Info: Free
Time Info: 7.00-10.00
This is the thirteenth reading in the Materials Reading Series. It will take place on Saturday 9th May at the *Lucia Windsor Room*, Newnham College, Cambridge, 7 for 7.30pm.
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Rob Halpern is a poet, critic and translator, whose work arguably constitutes one of the most important projects in the recent, politically-committed materials that have emerged from Anglophone poetry communities. His books Snow Sensitive Skin (co-authored with Taylor Brady), Music for Porn and Disaster Suites constitute a sustained, rigorous and troubling examination of contemporary politics and its complex enmeshment with desire: deeply informed by Marxism and queer theory, they refuse easy answers, rejecting the notion that poetry could be a refuge against the encroachment of the world of finance, war, disaster and trauma.
He is involved in the Nonsite Collective and has published widely in little magazines and journals. As a critic, he has written on Baudelaire, kari edwards, Conceptual poetry, and an important essay on Bob Perelman’s poem ‘China’, which carefully situates the poem in its original context of publication in order to question the widely-circulated interpretation of that poem put forward by Frederic Jameson in Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. (http://jacketmagazine.com/39/perelman-halpern.shtml) He has also made extensive translations of the work of Georges Perec, and is currently in the process of editing an anthology of the work of Bruce Boone. His work emerges from the New Narrative context of San Francisco – writers such as Boone, Kevin Killian and Bob Gluck – but aims at a more viscerally politicized engagement with American geopolitics. Recent work centres on the figure of the dead and wounded American soldier and on autopsy reports from Guantanamo Bay, both of which are which are subject to sexual fantasy and meditations on sexuality, death, appropriation, politics and desire. [————] (or Placeholder), a selected poems, has recently been published by Enitharmon, and Common Place is due from Ugly Duckling Presse this year. His work has been the focus of a feature in the journal Damn the Caesars, edited by Richard Owens (http://damnthecaesars.org/), and a long essay by Sam Ladkin, published at World Picture Journal. (http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_8/Ladkin.html)
This reading will focus on work from Common Place.
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There will be a book-table with books and pamphlets from Cambridge small presses. BYOB. Email dmg37@cam.ac.uk and ljj28@cam.ac.uk for any further details.
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