Reporter Volume 25, No.14 January 14, 1994

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Bureau Staff
The university's Spring 1994 "Wednesdays at 4 Plus" literary series,
to be held from Feb. 1-April 27, will present more than 20 events on
the North Campus and at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center and the
Central Park Grill.
All associated events are free of charge and open to the public.
The series, sponsored by several entities in the UB Department of
English and the Faculty of Arts and Letters, has since 1990 given
public hearings to hundreds of experimental poets, fiction writers and
critics from the U.S. and nations around the world.
The invited writers are those whose work alters our notion of what a
poem or a work of fiction is. Their styles are varied, evolving, for
instance, from the notion of language as a kind of free agent
operating at will all around and within us, or from the sense of
language as an expression and enforcer of cultural hegemonies.
Recent past presenters have offered exhilarating alternatives to
standard forms of literary expression, including physical garden
"poems" built of signs and symbols, hypertext fiction,
demonic/hieratic verse and poetic metaphors for painterly "drip
dynamics."
 Featured events this spring will include a talk and reading by poet
and critic Ron Silliman, author of "The New Sentence," one of the most
significant works of poetics of the post-Vietnam era. Silliman has
written more than 20 books of poetry and criticism, and edited the
groundbreaking anthology, "In the American Tree."
One of the most important of the so-called "language poets," Silliman
has carried the most sustained analysis of the linguistic interplay
between realism and reificationQthe making of the abstract into a
concrete or material thing. His poetic theory and practice explore the
likelihood that capitalism has "a specific reality" that is passed
through the language and thereby imposed on its speakers.
Ann Lauterbach, a 1993 MacArthur fellow, will be a guest speaker and
reader in April. Her book of poetry, "Clamor," published to
considerable acclaim, is said to illustrate her method of poetic play
in which "language is kind of a free agent operating at will all
around and within us." Influenced by John Ashbery, her work is
strongly metaphorical and gives free play to language, letting "it"
set the rules to produce what one critic called an "intense but very
balanced repose."
A special reading and discussion on March 16 and 17 will highlight the
work of two guest writers from South America: Chilean poet Raul Zurita
and Jorge Santiago Perednik, an Argentine poet, critic and translator.
Zurita, who now lives in Rome, was an important figure in the cultural
resistance during Chile's most recent military dictatorship and has
gone on to become one of the most influential poets of his generation.
Perednik is the co-founder of XUL, a magazine of poetics and poetry
dedicated to new and innovative writing. He is director of the poetics
program at the University of Buenos Aires and author of a number of
works, including the controversial anthology, "New Argentine Poetry
(1976-1983)."
"Wednesdays at 4 Plus," which has frequently wedded readings to
innovative performances and symposiums, will present "New Fiction
Festival" on April 15 and 16, a series of readings and discussions by
seven of the most dynamic new voices in contemporary fiction.
In addition to those noted above, the series' guest writers will
include 1994 UB Poetics Fellow Dubrvka Djuric, a Yugoslavian poet,
critic and translator; Misko Suvakovic, one of Yugoslavia's leading
theorists of postmodernism; Beijing-born language poet Mei-Mei
Berssenbrugge; poet Agha Shadid Ali, a native of Kashmir; Cecilia
Vicuna, a Chilean poet, filmmaker, performance artist and sculptor,
and Native-American poet Ray A. Young Bear.
Poet and critic Joan Retallack, visiting Butler Chair professor of
English at UB, will lecture on the work of composer John Cage on March
8; poet Ron Padgett will present a reading on March 16, and poets P.
Inman and Tina Darragh will read from their work on Feb. 16.
Poets Aaron Shurin of San Francisco State University and David Levi
Straus, former editor of Acts (San Francisco), will present a joint
reading at Hallwalls on April 26. On April 27, there will be a poetry
reading from the 1993-94 issue of Atmosphere, UB's Literary Society
magazine.
Poet and critic A.L. Nielson, author of the boldly revisionist
"Reading Race: White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the
Twentieth Century," will lecture and read from his work on Feb. 24 and
26. Barbara Tedlock, UB professor of anthropology, and Dennis Tedlock,
UB McNulty Professor of English ,will present a joint reading on Feb.
23. And on March 2 and 3, poet Erica Hunt will read and present a talk
titled "The City in the 21st Century."
Wednesdays at 4 Plus is sponsored by three of the principal endowed
chairs in the UB Department of English: the Samuel P. Capen Chair of
Poetry and the Humanities (Robert Creeley), the David Gray Chair of
Poetry and Letters (Charles Bernstein) and the James H. McNulty Chair
(Dennis Tedlock), and by the UB Poetry/Rare Books Collection curated
by Robert Bertholf. 
It is presented in cooperation with Susan Howe and Raymond Federman,
UB professors of English.
Poetics Program Fellowships are co-sponsored by the UB dean of Arts
and Letters and by the Office of the Provost. 
The series is made possible in part by Poets & Writers, Inc., through
a major grant from the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund; a grant from
the Literature Program of the New York State Council on the Arts, and
by the Poetry Society of America.