THIS SATURDAY 3PM

KFB POETRY LAB PRESENTS

“Arranged in five chronological sections, theirs was an often recondite correspondence, by turns cryptic or dramatic, essentially small essays on poetics and exchanges of latest works or comments on their reading. The letters are also full of affectionate greetings (‘my dear Dunk’) and humor.”—The Times Literary Supplement

“In these two companion volumes [An Open Map and Imagining Persons] . . . the letters are complete, the lectures are beveled, and a nimble apparatus of introductions, notes, glossaries, bibliographies, and indices nearly half as long as the texts themselves collapses the distance between these documents’ moment and our own.”—Jacket2

“An essential correspondence between two [of] the most innovative and visionary poets in American literature. In these letters is contained the generative energies of some of the best poetry written in the twentieth century.”—Peter O’Leary, author of Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan and the Poetry of Illness

DALE MARTIN SMITH

ON DUNCAN + OLSON

SATURDAY MARCH 7TH 3PM

k | f | b MEZZANINE

To celebrate the paperback launch of Smith/Bertholf’s two-volume set of correspondences, affections, and lectures, between Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, an informal talk on these 20th century giants.

DALE SMITH is a poet, critic, and scholar of poetry and rhetorical theory on the faculty of English at Ryerson University, Toronto. He is the editor with Robert J. Bertholf of An Open Map: The Robert Duncan / Charles Olson Correspondence and Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson. A critical study of poetry and public culture, Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960, was published in 2012. His writing has appeared in The Baffler, Best American Poetry 2002, Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, The Walrus, and elsewhere. A recent book of poetry, Slow Poetry in America, was published by Cuneiform in 2014; other poetry includes American Rambler (2000); The Flood & the Garden (2002); Black Stone (2007); Susquehanna (2008); Sons (knife | fork | book, 2017). Smith’s new collection, Shreve, will be published by Talonbooks, Fall 2021.  His reviews and essays have appeared in the Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Brick. Born in Dallas, Texas, Smith has resided in Ontario since 2011 with the poet Hoa Nguyen and their children, Keaton and Waylon.