Carla Harryman is a poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright. She has published thirteen single-authored works, including Adorno's Noise (Essay Press, 2008), Open Box (Belladonna, 2007), Baby (2005), and Gardener of Stars (2001) and has received numerous grants and awards including from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, Opera America, the American Embassy in Romania, and the Fund for Poetry. A frequent collaborator, she is co-contributor to the multi-authored experiment in autobiography The Grand Piano, a project that focuses on the emergence of Language Writing, art, politics, and culture of the San Francisco Bay Area between 1975-1980. The Wide Road, a multi-genre collaboration with poet Lyn Hejinian was released in 2011 from Belladonna Press. Her poets’ theater and interdisciplinary performance works have been performed nationally and internationally, while her writing has been translated into a number of European languages. Her work is widely anthologized including in The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater, Great American Prose Poems, The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry, Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative and in international collections such as La Lengua Radical, Action Poétique: Etats-Unis Nouveaux Poètique, and Out of Everywhere: linguistically innovative poetry by women in North America and the UK. 

Her critical writing focuses on contemporary innovative writing by women and the politics and poetics of Poets Theater and performance writing. She is co-editor of Lust for Life (2006), a volume of essays on the novelist Kathy Acker and special issue editor of Non/Narrative (2011) for the Journal of Narrative Theory.

• Carla Harryman
• PennSound page

 
Barrett Watten is a language-centered poet, critic, editor, and publisher. His collected early poems, Frame: 1971–1990, appeared from Sun & Moon in 1997; Bad History, a nonnarrative prose poem “including history,” from Atelos in 1998; and Progress/Under Erasure, in a combined edition, from Green Integer in 2004. He edited This, one of the central publications of the Language school of poetry (1971-82), and co-edited Poetics Journal with Lyn Hejinian, featuring writing on poetics by poets and academics. He collaborated on two multi-authored projects: Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (1991); and The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography (2006–10). With Carrie Noland, he coedited Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (Palgrave, 2009); Wesleyan University Press is in the process of publishing a combined print/digital Guide to Poetics Journal and Poetics Journal Digital Archive in 2013-14. His critical writing includes Total Syntax (Southern Illinois University Press, 1984); The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2003), winner of the René Wellek Prize in 2004; and, forthcoming, Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Material Practice, which will reach an academic publisher in 2014. He is a Professor of English at Wayne State University, Detroit.

• Barrett Watten
• PennSound page

We are delighted to extend the tradition of visits to the University of Auckland by distinguished Australian and North American poets. Over the years the University has hosted Charles Bernstein and Jackson MacLow (1987), Lyn Hejinian(1995) and Robert Creeley (1995), John Tranter (2002, 2013), Pam Brown (2005, 2013), Sawako Nakayasu (2011) and Rachel Blau DuPlessis (2012). Carla and Barrett’s visit also strengthens our ties with Australian colleagues in Sydney and Melbourne, who have generously included time for the New Zealand visit in planning their own events with the poets. The NZ Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc) has hosted trans-Tasman symposiums in 2010, 2012 and 2013, and Auckland colleagues have attended reciprocal symposiums in Sydney (2010) and Melbourne (2011). Most of these visits and symposiums have been audio and/or video recorded and the files made available on nzepc, ensuring public access to comprehensive documentation of our visitors and their impact on the local scene. Carla Harryman and Barrett Watten’s visit will be similarly documented, and the interaction with Otago will mark a new stage in our collegial and poetic relations

The visit likewise builds on the University of Otago’s hosting in recent years of poets and scholars of contemporary poetry such as chris cheek and Brian Reed (both in 2012) and on collaboration with Auckland, which, for example, enabled Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s visit to Otago, also in 2012.