"Burnt Norton" Group Reading: Invitation to Participate

Burnt Norton, Group Reading: Invitation to Participate

In this season of Norton remixing (see Dodie Bellamy’s awesome and just-published  “cunt-up” of the 1975 Norton Anthology of Poetry, Cunt Norton), the Poetic Research Bureau joins in the scrum with a community celebration of the decanonized, the deauthorized and the deprecated.

One week from tonight, Saturday, September 28th, from 8pm to 10pm, the PRB invites you to come by and read a couple poems from one of the 47 poets deleted from the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry.

Between its first edition published in 1994, and its second edition published in spring of this year, 59 new “postmodern” “American” “poets” were added to the Norton Postmodern, while 47 were removed. Blame the atavistic medium of the print anthology, with its peculiar physical constraints, or blame editorial whimsy and the mercurial projects of “movement poetries”, but 47 poets once thought burning bright and of the moment had their wicks snuffed and got shot out of the canon, as it were.

So let’s light ‘em up. There’s nothing duller than canon politics or carping about anthologies, but reading good poets aloud is pretty terrific, and this sounds like as good a reason as any. Come out and read from the work of one of the following poets for five minutes next Saturday night. If you aren’t in the Los Angeles area, take some video of yourself reading and upload it to Youtube, and share the link with us at directors@poeticresearch.com . We’ll post it to our blog and FB page, and will project it on the PRB wall next Saturday.

The 47 poets decanonized between the first and second editions of the Norton PAP are:

James Laughlin, Hilda Morley, Charles Bukowski, Hannah Weiner, Harry Mathews, Jerome Rothenberg, David Antin, Anselm Hollo, Joseph Ceravolo, John Wieners, Robert Kelly, Russell Edson, John Giorno, Jayne Cortez, Clarence Major, Diane Wakoski, Tony Towle, Ed Sanders, Stephen Rodefer, Robert Grenier, Miguel Algarin, Tom Clark, Charles North, William Corbett, Tom Mandel, Ray DiPalma, Maureen Owen, Paul Violi, Michael Davidson, Lorenzo Thomas, John Godfrey, Andrei Codrescu, Paul Hoover, David Shapiro, Barrett Watten, David Lehman, George Evans, August Kleinzahler, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Jessica Hagedorn, Jim Carroll, Art Lange, Jimmy Santiago Baca, David Trinidad, Dennis Cooper, Amy Gerstler, Diane Ward

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“Burnt Norton” Group Reading

Saturday, Sept 28, 8pm-10pm

Poetic Research Bureau

@ 951 Chung King Rd

Chinatown, Los Angeles