Anna Moschovakis & Matvei Yankelevich kick off the NWS Thursday at 4:30pm in the Soderberg Center Auditorium. Here are some of the posts we’ve run in advance of their visit:
MY On Contemporary Russian American Poetry.
AM On Ugly Duckling Presse and independent publishing.
MY, AM Some online poems.
MY Announcing The Present Work.
AM Poem in Shearsman magazine.
AM & MY Podcast from Los Angeles in Spring ’06.
AM Excerpt from The Blue Book.
We’ve been lucky to have the talented artist MaJo Keleshian design posters for all fifteen seasons of the NWS. Here’s her latest effort on our behalf, just arrived from the printer this morning:
Here’s a detail that accentuates the “make it smudged” quality we were shooting for:
And here are a few of the posters from past seasons, set off by the charming institutional wall behind them:
Thomas St. Pierre has contributed a brief story previewing the fall 2006 NWS for the Maine Campus. The site is free but requires you to register before reading.
Here’s a shot of poet David Perry reading in the Soderberg Auditorium (aka The Cube) on 17 November 2005. Not long after reading in Orono with Peter Culley, Perry headed off for China. His blog Sound Friend documents, in pictures and words, some of his adventures while there.
Nancy Kuhl, Associate Curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, has announced the acquisition of the papers of poet and visual artist Marjorie Welish (NWS F’04). “The papers include correspondence with Barbara Guest and Ann Lauterbach, whose papers are also at the Beinecke Library, as well as Michael Palmer, Carla Harriman, John Taggert, Maxine Chernoff, Rosmarie Waldrop, Barrett Watten, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Tony Lopez, Gustaf Sobin, Charles Altieri, Marjorie Perloff, Robert Kelly, Trevor Winkfield, Norma Cole, Emmanuel Hocquard, Dominique Fourcade, Forrest Gander, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, among many other writers and artists, curators, editors, art critics, and artists.”
Jacket magazine has published a long essay by poet and scholar Rachel Blau DuPlessis (NWS F’01) on “Manhood and Its Poetic Projects: The Construction of Masculinity in the Counter-Cultural Poetry of the US 1950s.” Derived from a keynote address at the National Poetry Foundation’s conference on the poetry of the 1950s (held in Orono in 1996), the essay investigates the styles and stakes of masculinity in the work of Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and others. It’s been a productive fall for DuPlessis: the University of Alabama recently published Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work and reprinted her classic work of scholarship The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. And in October, she will speak on the topic of “Death and Sexual Difference in Later Creeley” at the Buffalo conference On Words.
In addition to giving readings, most NWS writers give talks and visit classes while on the Orono campus. Here you see poet, anthologist, and translator Pierre Joris (NWS S’06) discussing his work with members of Professor Laura Cowan‘s section of English 222: Reading Poems.
And here poet, publisher, and translator Lyn Hejinian is shown talking to members of Professor Carla Billitteri‘s graduate seminar in the spring of 2005.
Most New Writing Series events take place on Thursday afternoons in the Soderberg Auditorium, the photogenic cube shown here in winter garb (just a little to the right of center, peeking from behind the tree). It’s a great space for listening, with comfortable seats (that swivel!) and few distractions. 
Read an excerpt from The Blue Book, the limited edition chapbook by Anna Moschovakis published by Phylum Press in 2005, here.
In April of 2006, Matvei Yankelevich and Anna Moschovakis were interviewed as part of the LA Lit series recorded at the artspace/nightclub Betalevel. You can connect to the podcast here. The writers discuss their activities with Ugly Duckling Presse in the “part a.” In “part b” they read from their own work. (Sound quality on Moschovakis reading is not great.)
UMaine New Writing Series 