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Ways of Reading: Bernadette Mayer and the New York School

Rosa Campbell and Rebecca Kosick

Ways of Reading: Bernadette Mayer and the New York School

Rosa Campbell and Rebecca Kosick

Dr Rebecca Kosick and Dr Rosa Campbell

Information

Information

Join us for a conversation and a collaborative writing session dedicated to the New York School poets and the works of Bernadette Mayer.

Bernadette Mayer is an influential avant-garde writer associated with the New York School poets of the mid-20th century. Like her artist sister Rosemary Mayer, she garnered visibility during the second-wave feminist movement in the US. Mayer is known for her experimental poetic forms and narrative structures akin to streams of consciousness, which examine the complexities of gender and sexuality within the intimate interactions and attachments of family life.

A conversation between Dr Rebecca Kosick, Co-Director of the Bristol Poetry Institute, and Dr Rosa Campbell, Associate Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of St Andrews, is followed by the collective reading of selected texts by Bernadette Mayer.

Ways of Reading is organised in collaboration with the Bristol Poetry Institute and hosted on the occasion of Rosemary Mayer’s solo exhibition Ways of Attaching.

DR ROSA CAMPBELL

Dr Rosa Campbell is Associate Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of St Andrews. She is a poetry scholar specialising in the work of twentieth and twenty-first century American women and queer writers. Her primary research and teaching interests include ideas of marginalisation and the “canon,” the relationship between poetry and visual art, and feminist/queer theory. Alongside her monograph-in-progress on a feminist revision to the New York School, her current research focus is the American poet and playwright V.R. “Bunny” Lang. She is also a poet, and the author of Pothos (2021), a book-length lyric essay on grief and houseplants. She tweets as @rosaetc.

 

DR REBECCA KOSICK

Dr Rebecca Kosick is a poet, translator, and scholar who works in a variety of traditional and experimental text-based formats. She is the author of Material Poetics in Hemispheric America and the poetry collection Labor Day and is translator/editor of the forthcoming Hélio Oiticica: Secret Poetics. Kosick is a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Poetry and Poetics at the University of Bristol where she also co-directs the Bristol Poetry Institute.

 

BRISTOL POETRY INSTITUTE

The Bristol Poetry Institute exists for the advancement of poetry. The Institute works as a poetry hub and a focal point for poetry within the University and the City of Bristol. They actively encourage collaboration and engagement between University departments, local schools, the public, community partners and local organisations.