Here’s that set list we promised for Joanne Kyger’s reading in the NWS on 27 September 2007. The event report is here. The set list was patiently prepared by Katie Lattari (thanks, Katie!). Some titles approximate. Time values correlate to DVD duplicate.
Month: October 2007
Next up – David Matlin
The New Writing Series welcomes David Matlin, novelist and poet, who has written extensively on war and imprisonment. The reading will take place at 4:30pm on Thursday, 18 October, in 100 Neville Hall.
David Matlin, Associate Professor of English at San Diego State University since 1997, uses a variety of writing forms—blistering poetry, meticulously researched essays, and a novel that has been described “an hallucinatory mix of dreams, myths, folktales and exacting factual realism”—to explore and expose “the infamy and lies of the new capitalist war-state.”
Matlin wrote his Ph.D. on William Blake at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and has studied with such diverse talents as Robert Creeley, John Clarke, and Diane Christian. His primary interests lie in the Black Mountain poets (the experimental writers in 1950s North Carolina, whose ranks included Creeley and Charles Olson), the San Francisco Renaissance (the Beat era of the mid-1950s, epitomized by poet Allen Ginsberg), and in the visual arts.
After teaching for ten years in the Prison Education Programs in New York, Matlin became an advocate for prison transformation. He points out that American prison system is the most populous in the world “because no other nation has been able to nor wanted to reinvent its peculiar forms of racism as we have, and to transform that reinvention into a massive growth industry, a massive kidnapping and transformation of these persons into a new mineral and treasure. In the process we have become extremely skilled in the practices of brutality and savagery and how to hide these skills from ourselves.”
Matlin can be heard twice on the University of Maine campus on October 18, from 12:30 to 1:45 in the Bangor Room of the Memorial Union (as part of the Marxist-Socialist lecture series), and in 100 Neville Hall at 4:30 pm as a featured reader in the New Writing Series.
To read excerpts from Matlin’s work please visit here or here. Learn more about Matlin in the “Author Spotlight” found here (scroll down).
release prepared by Hansie Grignon
UMaine New Writing Series 