In Constant Creation

by Doug Manson

The UB graduate poetics community functions both in the classroom and out of it. Some people already have a magazine going when they come, and they continue to actively work on it. Other people start up magazines after arriving. You can look at four-year intervals of the program, and you notice a turnover in publications that get made here.

I know a number of different students involved in publication. Patrick Durgin makes Kenning, and Kyle Schlesinger is getting his Cuneiform books running at UB using a press up there. There's Verdure, Linda Russo and Chris Alexander's poetics journal. Kristen Gallagher makes single authors' books, three a year. They're beautiful.

Some projects are collaborative, like Mike Kelleher's "Elevator" series. Mike comes up with collaborative poetry-sculpture-graphic arts projects. They have involved artists working with groups of poets. I guess he considers "Elevator" to be a publication, but they make an event go off too, a "happening."

There are also occasional things that come out. The twelve graduate students who went to Cuba in 2001 collaborated on a text, put together by Jonathan Skinner.

Talks have been going on at least since the late '60s. Jonathan does Steel Bar, a series in his wife's art studio at the Tri-Main Building. Last year we had a brunch discussion series. Mike Kelleher and I came up with a series of questions. Loosely, the first question was: what is it to write poetry? The second one was: what are you writing? The third one was: what is to be done? There were a lot of arguments. That's the beauty of the thing.

Each discussion was amazing. Robert Kocik came to the second one, with a kind of generosity, to discuss creation. He's a polymath. He's a sculptor and a very interesting poet; he more or less designs buildings; he heads up "The Bureau of Material Behaviors." He is in constant creation. That's the only way I could describe him. He already knew the questions that hadn't been asked. I got yelled out of that one.

Now there are Rust Talks, held at a used book store. Poets put together texts to present and have a dialogue, and the audience participates in talking about the poetry.