Poets Ron Silliman and Steven Farmer, Wednesday, March 30th

Ron Silliman has written and edited over 30 books, and had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. Silliman was the 2006 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere, a 2003 Literary Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and was a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council as well as a Pew Fellow in the Arts in 1998. He received the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation in 2010. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry on Addison Street, although he now lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania. The University of Windsor will have a symposium on his poem The Alphabet March 25 & 26, and his sculpture "Poetry" will be unveiled at the Text Festival in Bury, Lancashire at the end of April, where it will be part of the festival's museum exhibit over the summer before being permanently installed at the city center in the fall. A graduate of Albany High School, he first began to publish poetry while hanging out with the street people of Telegraph Avenue.

Of Steven Farmer's Glowball (theenk Books, NY, 2010), Sianne Ngai says: "Is the word 'glow' now permanently ominous? What is the future of aesthetic enchantment in the society of the spectacle? In a book where poems become exploding dandelion heads of the spreadsheet and situation room, Steve Farmer radically estranges us from our present as if it were the future's past. Glowball est a praeclarus quod perago libri! ". Recent correspondence featuring work based on constrictive methods can be found online at Others Letters/Wild Horses of Fire. See also the Oakland Poetic Labor Project, where he and other artists spoke on the subject of labor and its impacts on the practice of writing.

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