Women Poets at Barnard Presents a Multimedia Reading by Stephanie Strickland and by Language Arts Poet Joan Retallack, Nov. 7

Contact: Petra Tuomi, Office of Public Affairs, 212-854-7907
James Griffith, Office of Public Affairs, 212-854-1139

New York, NY, October 22, 2002—Stephanie Strickland, a poet and hypertext pioneer, and Joan Retallack, a poet who uses grammatical symbols and typographical errors in her work, will give the final reading for the fall in this year’s Women Poets at Barnard series on Thursday, November 7, at 7 p.m. in the Julius S. Held Lecture Hall of Barnard Hall (117th Street and Broadway).

Strickland is a leader in exploring the poetic possibilities of hypertext. In 1998, she published a hypertext version of her poem, True North, which won a Salt Hill Hypertext Prize. In 1999, her Web poem, Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot, won first prize in the Boston Review Poetry Contest. Her hypertext work can be found at stephaniestrickland.com.

Strickland will read from her latest work, published this year, titled V. It is the first work of poetry to be published simultaneously in print and on the Internet as one piece. Two parts of the poem, V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L’una, were published in print as an invertible volume with two beginnings. The third section, V: Vniverse, exists in cyberspace at vniverse.com.

Strickland received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and an M.S. from Pratt Institute. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities and from the New York State Creative Artists Public Service, and Yaddo and MacDowell Colony Fellowships. Her poetry has been printed in The Paris Review, Grand Street, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares and Boston Review, to name a few.

Retallack will read from a new work, Memnoir. As a leader in postmodern poetry, she rarely allows her poetry to follow traditional rules of form, content or grammar. "At the point where most poets stop, she takes off – into shifts of imagination," wrote poet and member of the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, Rosmarie Waldrop, on Retallack’s Errata 5uite, which brings together the errata slip with the five line of a musical staff to explore language as the place of all human experience.

Her ongoing serial poem, WESTERN CIV, continues to appear in various formats and her WESTORN CIV CONT’D, AN OPEN BOOK, consists of cardboard, grommets, movable images, handmade paper, collage and text. In 1994, Retallack published Icarus FFFFFalling, a collaboration with Ovid’s Metamorphoses and her students at Bard College who were assigned to photograph Icarus falling.

In How To Do Things with Words, she tries to answer poetically the questions on the relationship between saying and doing that J.L. Austin asked in his philosophical book of the same title. The opening lines of the poem The Woman in the Chinese Room, from Retallack’s How demonstrate her style:

Intersperse entries & numerals from notebooks
(back to Chicago (Chinese story in tact (quotes
from assordid pm sages
= Manual text ?

She is captive in China
" " " " a moment in history
" " " to a sense of history

Retallack is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities and co-director of the Workshop in Language and Thinking at Bard College. In addition to her books of poetry, criticism and art, she has written essays for Poetics Journal, Parnassus and The Washington Review of the Arts. Her poetry has been anthologized in ONWARD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, The Art of Practice, International Anthology of Visual and Language Poetics and The Best American Poetry, 1990. She has also been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Foundation Grant for poetry, an American Award in Belles-Lettres, a Columbia Book Award and a Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative North American Poetry.

For more information about the Women Poets at Barnard Series, please contact Saskia Hamilton at 212-854-2721.