Conversation & Reading

Lost & Found Series VIII Launch

Fri, Nov 22, 2019

6:30 PM–8:00 PM

The Skylight Room (9100)

Watch the recording of this event now:

Join us for the launch of Lost & Found Series VIII archival publications, as CUNY graduate student and faculty editors will share their experiences in the archive researching Diane di Prima, Pedro Pietri, Muriel Rukeyser, Mary Norbert Korte, and Julio Cortázar. We will also be launching the first two Lost & Found Now and Then publications dedicated to Cecil Taylor.

LIVESTREAM: This event will be livestreamed; click hereto watch the livestream starting at 6:30 PM.

Grounded in an exploration of relationships between writers and their guides past or present, as well as particular times and places, Lost & Found Series VIII unfolds an astounding array of unknown materials that reconfigure our present cultural and social map. From Argentinian exile Julio Cortázar’s erudite and intimate companionship with John Keats, as portrayed in never before translated excerpts from his little known first book, to Diane di Prima’s methodical thinking through the ritual of a poetics based on Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound—in the form of her raw notes to a series of lectures—we glimpse the depth and stakes of transmission across time. In Mary Norbert Korte’s 1967 Response to Michael McClure’s Ghost Tantras, we see the human gesture of one poet reaching out to another at a time of radical political and personal transition, as Korte is considering leaving the Dominican Sisterhood she had been a member of in order to lead a different life. The discovery of Muriel Rukeyser’s student translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, undertaken in the early 1930s while Rukeyser was active over the Scottsboro Trial, amply displays the roots of her poetics and the basis of her lifelong commitment to translation. Not tied to an individual relationship but to a whole community, selections from Pedro Pietri’s poetry and activist art during the AIDS crisis, Condom Poems 4 Sale One Size Fits All—with an envelope of reproduced visual artifacts—demonstrates Pietri’s commitment to working outside mainstream forms to incite the people’s imagination. Finally, we introduce our Lost & Found Now & Then Series, with two projects commemorating the extraordinary life and work of pianist, composer, and poet Cecil Taylor.

This event is free and open to the public, but please click here to RSVP.

This series includes the following publications: