XXVIII AISNA Biennial Conference

“Facing West: Thinking, Living, Outliving the American West”

(Bergamo, Italy, 11-13 September 2025) Deadline: February 28 2025

Panel 5

Coordinators: Tadeusz Pióro (University of Warsaw), t.t.pioro@uw.edu.pl Daniela Daniele (University of Udine), daniela.daniele@uniud.it

Avant-garde Poets of the San Francisco Bay Area. Their Lives, Works, and Film Portraits

The poets of the San Francisco Bay Area who became known as ‘’the language poets” – Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, Carla Harryman, and about ten others – began to publish startling, original work in the 1970’s. They acknowledged as key influences the writings of Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky and Robert Creeley, but were much more politically engaged than those great figures and highly cognizant of the ideological assumptions and consequences of their own writing. Our panel aims to present several aspects of these poets’ work and to place them within the specific, cultural and political context of Northern California in the period between approximately 1970 and 2000. To this end, we will speak about their collective autobiography, titled The Grand Piano, after the name of the San Francisco club where they used to have their readings. We also mean to discuss the film portraits of the previous generation of experimental poets made by Richard O. Moore, and their specific poems, this last topic meant to show their approach to the lyric tradition and their attempts to revise it, perhaps beyond recognition, which hopefully will be a topic for heated discussion after our presentations.