Dale Smith

Thursday, February 8, 2018, 7:00 pm
Photo of Dale Smith in a cafe and photo of Dale Smith's books
Toronto-based poet-scholar Dale Smith discusses and reads work by Robert Duncan and Charles Olson. Smith's discussion will include correspondence between Duncan and Olson, "one of the foundational literary exchanges of 20th-century American poetry. The 130 letters collected in this volume begin in 1947 just after the two poets first meet in Berkeley, California, and continue to Olson’s death in January 1970. Both men initiated a novel stance toward poetry, and they matched each other with huge accomplishments, an enquiring, declarative intelligence, wide-ranging interests in history and occult literature, and the urgent demand to be a poet." Smith will also read from his own recent poetry. Free.
Location: 
Humanities Building, The Poetry Center (Room 512)
Directions: 
View Directions on Google Maps
Sponsor: 
The Poetry Center
Contact: 
The Poetry Center
E-mail: 
poetry@sfsu.edu
Phone: 
415-338-2227
Event extras: 

Smith is a poet, critic and scholar of poetry and poetics on the English faculty at Ryerson University, Toronto. He is the editor, with Robert J. Bertholf, of An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson and Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan's Lectures on Charles Olson (both University of New Mexico Press). A critical study of poetry and public culture, Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship and Dissent After 1960 (University of Alabama Press), was published in 2012.

Smith’s writing has appeared in The Baffler, Best American Poetry 2002, Colorado Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, The Walrus and elsewhere. His recent book of poetry, Sons, was published by Knife/Fork/Book, and Slow Poetry in America was released by Cuneiform in 2014. Other poetry includes American Rambler (2000), The Flood and the Garden (2002), Black Stone (2007) and Susquehanna (2008). Recent reviews, essays and other writing can be found in the Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brick and Poetry.

In the 1990s, Smith attended the New College of California in San Francisco, where he met Joanne Kyger, Philip Whalen, Bill Berkson, David Meltzer and other West Coast writers.

Links

Photo by Jeff Kirby