"Durations" A Book Talk with Ted Pearson

Join Professor Fred Moten in conversation with Ted Pearson and Lyn Hejinian about Ted's new book of poems, Durations, published by Selva Oscura Books.

Purchase the book here! Use the discount code: TED2022 for 20% off your purchase! 

More about the book:

Ted Pearson's new volume of poems, DURATIONS, is paralyzingly simple only until Pearson springs upon the reader what the poems are about, and what they are about doing. The poems seem to be about writing poetry, but really, they are about the fever, the fervor that breaks the paralysis, the seizure, the complacent holing up that has stricken these times of pandemic, political catastrophe, and racial reckoning. These poems, in their reclaiming bewilderedness, possibly start the new conscience on a path from paralyzed stasis toward healing. —Ed Roberson

BIOS:

Ted Pearson was born and raised in Palo Alto, California. He began writing poetry in 1964 and subsequently attended Vandercook College of Music, Foothill College, and San Francisco State University (BA, English, 1971). His first book, The Grit, appeared in 1976, when he began his long association with the San Francisco Language Poets. He has since published twenty-six books of poetry, including Extant Glyphs 1964-1980 (2014), An Intermittent Music 1975-2010 (2016). His most recent books are Set Pieces (2021) and Durations (2022). He also co-authored The Grand Piano (2006-2010), a ten-volume experiment in collective autobiography. He currently lives in Houston, Texas, with his wife Sheila Lloyd and their dog, Kofi.

Lyn Hejinian is a poet, translator, and scholar whose literary career has been long associated with Language writing. She is the author of over twenty-five volumes of poetry and critical prose, the most recent of which are Tribunal (Omnidawn Books, 2019) and Positions of the Sun (Belladonna, 2019). A volume of essays, titled Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday, will be published next year by Wesleyan University Press, and The Proposition, a critical edition of her early (1963-1983), previously uncollected work will be published in fall 2022 in the University of Edinburgh Press’s “Foundations of Avant-Garde Writing” series. She lives in Berkeley with her husband, the musician Larry Ochs.