Kaufman’s Hill opens with a prosaic neighborhood scene: The author and some other young boys are playing by the creek, one of their usual stomping grounds. But it soon becomes clear that much more is going on; the boy-narrator is struggling to find his way in a middle-class Catholic neighborhood dominated by a family of bullies, the Creelys, who often terrify him. It’s the Pittsburgh of the early and mid-1960s, a threshold time just before the counter-culture arrives, and a time when suburban society begins to encroach on Kaufman’s Hill, the boy’s sanctuary and the setting of many of his adventures. As the hill and the 1950s vanish into the twilight, so does the world of the narrator’s boyhood. Kaufman’s Hill is lyrical and profound. It captures the dynamics of the lost world of boyhood in a way no one has before. The late, great historian Howard Zinn called it “the best book written on American boyhood in decades.” Novelist Tim O’Brien claims that “Kaufman’s Hill is among the most touching, sensitive, and spellbinding memoirs I’ve encountered in many years. Beautifully and exactly written, this book will surely reach into the hearts of its readers. I was deeply moved.”

Prof. John C. Hampsey teaches Romantic and Classical Literature at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, where he won the University Distinguished Teaching Award. Previously, he taught at Boston University and MIT. He received his BA from Holy Cross College and his PhD from Boston College. Hampsey’s book Paranoia and Contentment: A Personal Essay on Western Thought was the first book to view paranoia in a positive light; and won enthusiastic endorsements from fellow writers Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Tim O’Brien. More than thirty of Hampsey’s stories and essays have appeared in such places as The Gettysburg Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Antioch Review, The Alaska Quarterly, The Boston Globe, Arizona Quarterly, and the European Romantic Review

Renowned poet
DAVID ANTIN
 will read from and discuss his new book
  HOW LONG IS THE PRESENT:
SELECTED TALK POEMS  OF DAVID ANTIN
Edited by Stephen Fredman
Saturday, Februrary 21, 7pm

Poet, performance artist, and critic David Antin invented the “talk poem.” He insists that his poems be oral and created in front of a live audience, in a specific time and place, with the transcription of the performance adjusted for print by presenting it not in prose but in clumps of words without justified margins or punctuation, peppered with white spaces that indicate pauses. In this book, editor Stephen Fredman provides a critical introduction to a selection of talk poems from three out-of-print collections, accompanied by a new interview with the author. As Fredman points out, Antin’s work is a form of conceptual writing that has influenced generations of experimental poets and prose writers.

David Antin is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. A poet, critic, and performance artist, he is the author of over a dozen books of poetry, including Talking, Talking at the Boundaries, Tuning, What It Means to Be Avant-Garde, i never knew what time it was, and John Cage Uncaged Is Still Cagey, and Radical Coherency. He received the PEN Los Angeles Award for Poetry in 1984 and has received fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.  For the past forty years, whether spoken under the guise of performance artist or poet, cultural explorer or literary critic, Antin’s innovative observations have helped us to better understand everything from Pop to Postmodernism. Antin’s first serious assessment of Andy Warhol published in a major art journal, his provocative take on Clement Greenberg’s theory of Modernism, as well as frontline interventions in present debates on poetics and fugitive pieces from the ’60s and ’70s,  represent a gold mine for art and literary historians of the period. From John Cage to Allan Kaprow, Mark Rothko to Ludwig Wittgenstein, consummate trailblazer David Antin takes the reader on an idiosyncratic, personal journey through twentieth-century culture with his trademark antiformalist panache.

Stephen Fredman is a professor of English literature and American studies at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is Contextual Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art.

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Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet
RAE ARMANTROUT
reads from her new book
 ITSELF
 Saturday, 28 February, 7PM

What do “self” and “it” have in common? In Rae Armantrout’s new poems, there is no inert substance. Self and it (word and particle) are ritual and rigmarole, song-and-dance and long distance call into whatever dark matter might exist. How could a self not be selfish? Armantrout accesses the strangeness of everyday occurrence with wit, sensuality, and an eye alert to underlying trauma, as in the poem "Price Points" where a man conducts an imaginary orchestra but "gets no points for originality." In their investigations of the cosmically mundane, Armantrout’s poems use an extraordinary microscopic lens—even when she’s glancing backwards from the outer reaches of space. 

Rae Armantrout, 2008 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry, is a native Californian whose poems are masterful contradictions; according to Robert Creeley, her poems have "a quiet and enabling signature." He adds, "I don’t think there’s another poet writing who is so consummate in authority and yet so generous to her readers and company alike." Her poems are telegenically "regional," filled with bungalows, newscasters and swimming pools, yet they ring with an immaterial clarity that quietly subsumes her readers and listeners in a radical and eerily funny vision. Armantrout studied with Denise Levertov, and was at the center of the first generation of Language Poets, the group in the US most often credited with introducing poetry to postmodernity. Since then she has forged a growing international reputation and whose works include Versed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2010; Next Life; Up to Speed; and Veil: New and Selected Poems; as well as countless poems anthologized in Best American Poetry 2002, 2005, 2007, and 2009;  American Hybrid; Poems of the Women's Movement; The Oxford Book of American Poetry; and Postmodern American Poetry.  She directed the New Writing Series at UCSD for nearly two decades, and co-organized the Page Mother’s Conference in 1999.