Just printing out some flyers for the Stanford Workshop on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, which I'm helping to coordinate this year. It's a great gig--we get money from the Stanford Humanities Center and use it to sponsor a series of talks, readings, and workshop presentations, about evenly divided between faculty presentations, graduate student presentations, and readings and talks by visiting poets.

Back in the fall we had a visits from Joy Harjo and Myung Mi Kim, and in the winter we had Harryette Mullen. We usually have an evening reading followed by a discussion the next morning, usually an intimate affair with about eight people or so. We were lucky in all cases to have poets who are very self-aware and self-conscious writers and quite articulate about their own aims in writing; Kim even prepared a few remarks to start off discussion.

This quarter we have presentations on Lorine Niedecker, Mina Loy, and Ian Hamilton Finlay. The highlight is a symposium on Buddhism and poetry, which--through much heroics of persuasion and finance on the part of my fellow coordinator--features Norman Fischer, Michael McClure, and Leslie Scalapino.