OEI poetry area: extension # 20 Lytle Shaw on fieldworks and moiré effects

New York based poet, writer, essayist, critic and art historian Lytle Shaw will discuss and read from his two most recent books Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics (University of Alabama Press, 2013) and The Moiré Effect (Cabinet books and Bookhorse, 2012).

“In Fieldworks Lytle Shaw makes a brilliant case for a site-specific approach to poetry by foregrounding cultural history, community, installation, anthologizing, process, presentation, and context. In his series of detailed studies, Shaw uses the vocabulary and framing of contemporary visual art criticism to illuminate the dynamic role of place in postwar American poetry.”—Charles Bernstein

Lytle Shaw is an associate professor of English at New York University. He is the author of Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics; The Moiré Effect; The Chadwick Family Papers; Cable Factory 20; The Lobe, and Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie among other books.

“My work centers on twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry and art. I’m interested in how texts and art objects mediate, transform, and disrupt (rather than simply ‘reflect’) the cultural and social possibilities of their moments. Recently my teaching and writing have explored how concepts of place and site involve similar rhetorics of immanence (and consequent possibilities as “devices”). Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics (out in April, 2013) traces a history of postwar poets and artists as on-location ethnographers and historians. Recent graduate courses have included ‘Theorizing the Archive,’ ‘New York Poetry and the New Left,’ and ‘Site-Specific Poetry and Historiography.’ In general my teaching and writing will continue to focus on how recent poetry and art might not just relate to but in a sense become experimental versions of historicism, ethnography, documentary and landscape aesthetics.”

Lytle Shaw is also contributing editor of Cabinet; founder/co-editor of Shark; founder/curator of “Line Reading Series” at The Drawing Center.

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