Wendesday, May 18, 2011 - 19.30 - Wayne State Junior Year, Richard-Wagner-Str. 27, Munich

Carla Harryman is the author of fourteen books of poetry, prose, plays, and essays. Harryman is widely acknowledged as an innovator in poetry, prose, and inter-disciplinary performance. She is a frequent collaborator and is a participant in the multi-authored experiment in autobiography The Grand Piano that focuses on the emergence of language writing, art, politics, and culture of the San Francisco Bay area between 1975 and 1980. She is co-editor of Lust for Life, a volume of essays on the novelist Kathy Acker and has published articles on women's innovative writing by and on poets’ theater and performance. Her literary and theatrical works have been presented nationally and internationally. She lives in the Detroit Area and serves the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University.

Donna Stonecipher has published three books since 2002, each exploring how the mind attempts to slip undetected through its own security screening and arrives at meaningful destinations. As tour directors of signification and its frustrations, her poems are both enactments and examples. Her main metaphor is travel – with all the displacement, amazement, certitude, and confusion that the metaphor is capable of eliciting in an expert’s hands. The émigré, the visitor, in transit or extending his/her stay, arrives with expectations and pre-wired notions of the “new” and the “different”. Stonecipher attempts to project that moment when multiplicity (in the world and the psyche) gives way to a selective but tentative exactitude, only to collapse under the weight of its own effort at establishing meaning.

Free Admission, Public Program of the BAA Summer Academy 2011

Carla Harryman teaches in the Department of English at Eastern Michigan University and is on the faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts Graduate Program at Bard College, New York. She lives with her husband, Barrett Watten, in Detroit, MI.

Harryman’s awards include an Opera America Next Stage Grant (1995-2000), with composer Erling Wold, for the staging of a chamber opera based on a Max Ernst collage novel, A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil. She also has been awarded a number of performance and writing grants, including the award in poetry from The Foundation of Contemporary Art (2004).

In her first book of poems, The Reservoir, Donna Stonecipher records her own displacement as the survivor of a world that exists only in reflection. It is a world Stonecipher is “anxious to tell” her “version of,” but “must be careful how many times” she asks “to be rescued” from it. Fear of dissolution—the kind that presages self-disclosure—often results in the revelation that “you can talk for hours before you realize you won’t say it.” Drawing upon the image of the reservoir as a vessel of containment, Stonecipher attempts to record the seepage and evaporation of her world, as well as the function of memory to act as a catch basin for such loss. It is a trope that manages to both regulate the flow of memory and preserve the supply of images and impressions caught within its torrent.