"Pre-Logical Poetry Hijinx!": A Reading by poets Steve McCaffery and Edwin Torres October 4, 2007

Two cutting-edge performance poets one from the Canadian multi-arts 1970s, one from the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe share their perspectives on poetry, process and community, and perform their work. Born in the Bronx and raised in Puerto Rico and New York City, Edwin Torres started creating text and performance work in 1988 under the banner "I.E. Interactive Eclecticism," an invented "movement" whose purposefully broad term gave his one-man variety shows a forum. In 1990, he discovered poetry at The Nuyorican Poets' Cafe and The St. Marks Poetry Project. The recipient of multiple poetry fellowships and author of six books of poetry, Torres has collaborated with a wide range of artists, creating performances that mingle poetry with vocal/physical improvisation, visual theater, music and sound. Originally from the UK, Steve McCaffery moved to Toronto in the late 1960s, where his concrete poetry work focused on refiguring what counts as poetry. In Toronto he met poets bp Nichol, Paul Dutton, and Rafael Barreto-Rivera, with whom he formed a sound-poetry group: the Four Horsemen. Nichol and McCaffery also founded the Toronto Research Group and published two-author works. McCaffery's multimedia writing explores the materiality, intermediality, and intersubjectivity of poetry - its visual, signifying, and sonic dimensions, its relations with other arts and media, with theory, thought, and politics, and especially its potential for multi-authorial practices. He now holds the David Gray Chair at SUNY Buffalo. Sponsored by the Poetix Collaborative, which is dedicated to the cross-cultural study of poetics and poetry and to performing poetic works for campus and non-campus communities alike, and the Institute for Advanced Study.

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu