Event: Clive Bush and Allen Fisher, 19 February

We are excited to announce that Clive Bush and Allen Fisher will join us at the Literature and Visual Cultures Research Seminar to discuss their collaborative works and explore the process behind their creations.

Thursday 19th Feb, 6-8pm, Senate House, London, room 261

For more information, please our website: https://literatureandvisualcultures.wordpress.com

We look forward to seeing you there.

Sarah Chadfield and Sophie Oliver, Royal Holloway, University of London

ABSTRACTS

Clive Bush‘s talk will mainly concentrate on Pictures after Poussin, and deal with some or all of the following points:

1) The circumstances which prompted the book.

2) The question of ekphrasis and the history of the relation between poetry and painting.

3) Why the issue of ekphrasis is only sometimes relevant to Pictures After Poussin.

4) Some of the poetic influences which assist the formal aspects of the book, in European and American modernism, including William Carlos Williams and Pictures from Brueghel.

5) A short reading from a poem, together with a brief comment on the three books in which Allen Fisher and Clive Bush have presented their work together, including Lingerings of the Large Day (Five Seasons, 2014).

Allen Fisher’s talk is mainly a review of three approaches to responding and providing pictures for three books of poetry by Clive Bush. The illustrated talk endeavours to unpick the different ways in which decisions about how to facture each sequence of works takes place and then how choices are arrived at in each book considered. The seminar will conclude with brief attention to an image and a text factured by Allen Fisher as part of a single artefact.

BIOS 

 Clive Bush is Emeritus Professor of American Literature at King’s College London and the author of some ten books, including four monographs on American literature and culture. The latest, The Century’s Midnight: dissenting European and American Intellectuals in the Era of the Second World War, was published in 2010. He has also written a book on contemporary English poets: Out of Dissent: five contemporary English poets, covering the work of Thomas A. Clark, Allen Fisher, Bill Griffiths, Barry MacSweeney and Eric Mottram, together with an edited anthology of their work. He has five books of poetry, the latest of which, Lingerings of the Large Day, came out less than two months ago with Five Seasons Press. He has been associated with the British Poetry Revival since the late 1960s. At the University of Warwick he helped organize the first Arts Festival of Contemporary Art, which included Basil Bunting, Roy Fisher, Tom Philips, and Carolee Schneeman’s experimentalist feminist movies. From the Sixties to the Eighties he organised a weekly series of poetry readings with Paul Merchant that included not only the then young poets of the British Poetry revival, and Basil Bunting, but also American poets including Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Creeley, Jerome Rothenberg, Jonathan Williams, and Allen Ginsberg.

He pioneered American and Film Studies at the University of Warwick, where he taught for twenty-four years, and was Chair of the English Department at King’s College. He has done most of his scholarly work at Yale University, where he has been in receipt of a number of American Council of Learned Society and Beinecke Rare Book Library fellowships.

Allen Fisher, is a poet, painter and art historian. His website is: www.allenfisher.co.uk. He is the author of 150 publications of poetry, graphic work and commentary; his Fluxus performance and conceptual work of the 1970s developed into new visual work, now in many international collections including the Tate. He is publisher of SPANNER and co-publisher of Aloes Books. He is Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Art at Manchester Metropolitan University. Most recent books: SPUTTOR, Veer Books 2014, Proposals, Spanner Editions 2012 and LEANS, Salt Publications 2007. Forthcoming books for 2015 include a collection of essays on aesthetics from the University of Alabama Press; the Allen Fisher Reader edited by Drew Milne and Redell Olsen from Shearsman Publishing; a Companion to the work of Allen Fisher, edited by Robert Hampson, also from Shearsman.