Ben Lyle Bedard is interested in Modern and Postmodern Poetry. The focus of his dissertation is the Material Context of Modern Poetry and the Anthology. Work can be found in BlazeVox, fhole, Jacket (forthcoming), Ninth Letter, P-Queue, Damn the Caesars, Verterbra, ArtVoice, Yellow Edenwald Field.

Victoria Brockmeier is primarily interested in modernism. Ongoing projects include tracing out the relationship between poetry and the language of psychosis, or perhaps more properly that of “unreason”; Frankfurt school aesthetics; masculinity, history-making, inheritance & education in Joyce; the possibilities for formal innovation in criticism; and, the eventual topic of my dissertation, 20th-century mythopoesis.
Focus of project: For millennia, devotional and divinely-inspired poetry was the norm; suddenly, early in the 20th century mystic experience and poetry become unloosed from each other, or at least their workings together become obscured. I’m curious to formulate an explanation of why, and of how mythic poetry does go on, in various ways. There’s a direct throughline of interest from Pound through HD, Robert Duncan and Nate Mackey; I’m also interested in Yeats, Eliot, Hart Crane, Jack Spicer, Anne Carson, and others. Poetry has appeared in New Letters, LIT, Chelsea, Inkwell, Natural Bridge, and other magazines and is forthcoming in Pleiades: a journal of new writing. In 2006 I started a reading series and an associated small press project called dove|tail which has so far featured Laura Mullen, Matthew Cooperman, and Tim Donnelly. “I bake a phenomenal cheesecake, love NFL football, and enjoy knitting complicated cable and lace patterns.”

Matt Chambers is a Buffalo native, who keeps returning to the city. He received his BA from SUNY Buffalo, while working with Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, and Charles Bernstein (who got him into this mess). He received his MA in Creative Writing Poetry at Temple University. He his now in his 3rd year in the PhD Program. He has edited several magazines: most recently he has launched the 2nd issue of "Pilot" magazine, which features the work of 16 poets currently practicing in the UK. His areas of focus include post-war British poetry - specifically, the poets of the British Poetry Revival - as well as the poetry and miscellaneous critical prose of Basil Bunting.

Jon Cotner focuses on the practice of dialogue in poetry, philosophy, anthropology, and oral history. His recent publications include Denver Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, and Paper Monument. He co-edited an issue of Interval(le)s, the poetics journal based at University of Liège in Belgium. The issue’s theme is “Interdisciplinary Transcriptions.”

Michael Cross is interested in 20th and 21st Century Poetry, Continental Aesthetics, Poetics, Objectivists, San Francisco and Berkeley Renaissance, Black Mountain, Language, Frankfurt School. Focus of project: Equilibrium / Thermodynamics / Grace / Zukofsky / Scalapino / Oppen / Olson. Publications: in felt treeling (Chax 2008), throne (Dos Press 2007), cede (Vigilance Society 2007), Involuntary Vision (Avenue B, 2003). Editor: Atticus/Finch Chapbooks. Website: http://www.atticusfinch.org/books.htm

Zack Finch is interested in Poetry & Poetics, Philosophy, Music, Art. Poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Poetry, Radical Society, Forklift, Ohio, Tin House,, 88, Gulf Coast, Shankpainter, Green Mtns Review… Book Reviews in Boston Review. Essays in P-Queue and I Have Imagined a Center (essays on Susan Howe)

Jordan Green works on romantic poetry; aesthetics of violence and catastrophe

Margaret Konkol is interested in transatlantic print culture, theories of the archive, Victorian, Modernist and Contemporary Poetry. The focus of her dissertation is on Inscription & cultural memory. Margaret curates the Mildred Lockwood Lacey Small Press in the Archive Lecture Series. Her article "Creeley in Age: Negative Poetics in Robert Creeley's Late Work" appears in _Jacket_ 31 and a critical Introduction to a manuscript of Alice B. Toklas appears in _Meridian_ (Fall 2005).

Warren Lloyd came to UB with an MFA in ‘New Forms’ which is a multi-media approach to fine art, taking shape, primarily, in the form of installations, performances, video and textual explorations. His work has focused on the way language and images work together to create meaning. Within the last two years the focus of his work has been involved with engaging assumptions about fine-art, while taking issue with surveillance culture, the medical gaze, and identity (production). Focus of project: I’m interested in the social and historical potentialities of language based writing, its possible engagement with the body, trauma studies, working-class narratives and early modernism. Creating forms of creative scholarship and fusing poetics with historical and contemporary criticism are among my central projects. I’m also working on a project called Moving, which deals with how the moving of household furniture relates to writing and naming. The project focuses on parallels between the two, which intersect at areas of possession, private property, objects (furniture), labor, and homes. Work has appeared in Homonumos Magazine ( Beijing), There Journal, Vibrant gray, and a review of Maria Damon and mIEKAL aND’s book: pleasure TEXT possession is forthcoming at Moria Poetry.

Brian Mornar is interested in Mid-20th Century Poetics: History, Knowledge, & Textuality. Focus of Project: I am reading the work of American poets Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Olson, George Oppen, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and Michael Palmer, to demonstrate how certain American poetries interrogate notions of national identity and space. It is well known among Black Mountain School-ites that Charles Olson was the first to use the term “postmodernism.” I would like to examine this “post” (as in the hitching-place), as in the non-geographical place around which these poets sought and seek to redefine and reaffirm the space as wor(l)d-as-text, as the practice which dances around the (limp) development of theory (whatever universal color with which it may be striped). This project is the unabashed celebration of praxis—the accumulating trainwreck that it may be (cf. Benjamin)—and its limitations. Documental history and the voices heard in the margins are the agents of praxis here and we follow along closely, listening. Recent (EuroAmericanoContinental) practitioner/theorists such as Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy will referee. In the end, if I get there, I would like to loop around to the entirely problematic spaces of the transatlantic (and transpacific) D.H. Lawrence, the perhaps keenest reader of American space and the literary beginning of my project. Work has appeared in Poetry Salzburg, P-Queue. Chapbook published on Punch Press: Repatterning. Collaborative chapbook forthcoming from Dos Press.

Richard Owens is interested in 20th and 21st Century Anglophone poetry, Marxist and post Marxist theory. Focus of project: The thrust of my project, although not yet clearly defined, involves an investigation of the (re)mapping of space and those strategically constructed oppositional identities which emerge in the longer autobiographical poems of Basil Bunting, Hugh MacDiarmid, David Jones, Lynette Roberts, Mina Loy and others.
Publications: Editor. Damn the Caesars is a journal of contemporary poetry and poetics committed to fostering a transnational, transoceanic dialogue among poets, artists, and critics. The journal has enjoyed generous support from the David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters (Steve McCaffery), the James H. McNulty Chair (Dennis Tedlock), and the Samuel P. Capen Chair of Poetry and the Humanities (Susan Howe). Editor/ Publisher: Punch Press is a small press imprint which has brought out letterpress chapbooks and broadsides. Recent titles include Brian Mornar’s Repatterning and Dale Smith’s Susquehanna. My writing has appeared in the following journals: Jacket, Skanky Possum, Rain Taxi, Aufgabe, Big Bridge, Cipher Journal, BlazeVOX, O Poss, Kadar Koli, Origin (6th Series in memory of Cid Corman), House Organ, and Maximum Rock-n-Roll.
Website: http://damnthecaesars.org

Justin Parks is interested in Modernist poetry, Black Mountain poets, post-structuralist theory. Focus of project: I am currently thinking about the idea of the local in poetry, and particularly in the work of Charles Olson and Edward Dorn.

Courtney Pfahl is interested in 20th century experimental poetry – especially visual poetry, visual arts, theory, and film. My project – both creative and scholarly – is to challenge the artificially constructed distinction between poetry and art.

Alessandro Porco is interested in Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Poetic Theory, and Sports Literature. His dissertation focus is on Radical Hip-Hop Poetics in Contemporary American Poetry. Books of poetry include: Augustine in Carthage (Toronto: ECW Press, 2008) and The Jill Kelly Poems (Toronto: ECW Press, 2005). For a listing of his essays and reviews, visit www.buffalo.edu/~asporco or www.ecwpress.com.

Andrew Rippeon is interested in Twentieth-century American poetry, studying in particular ways of knowing and being made possible through, or opened to inquiry by, the poem; i.e. constructions of individual, collective, national, and/or historical subjectivities. The American serial poem, mid-century and after, is of particular interest, especially in how it tells, through and as itself, about the function of the human and the possibilities of human relatedness. Andrew is currently editor of P-Queue (www.p-queue.org), a journal of poetry, poetics, and innovative prose.

Siobhán Scarry is interested in 20th century poetry and poetics, 20th century fiction, intersections of poetry and philosophy, the American prose poem Poetry has appeared in Five Fingers Review, jubilat, Mid-American Review, P-Queue, and Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics. Fiction has appeared in Phoebe and Greensboro Review.
Books: Instructor's Resource Manual to Accompany The Writer's Workplace, 8th edition and The Writer's Workplace with Readings, 6th edition, Thomson/Wadsworth (August, 2007) Instructor's Resource Manual to Accompany The Writer's Workplace, 7th edition and The Writer's Workplace with Readings, 5th edition, Thomson/Wadsworth (August, 2004)

Andrea Strudensky is interested in 20th Century poetry and poetics. Andrea is currently editor of Broke; a lit mag that publishes poetry and fiction. Her dissertation is on the “apostrophe” in 20th Century poetry.

Divya Victor has lived and learned in Seattle, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Singapore and India . Her work has appeared in ambit: journal of poetry and poetics, generator, Xconnect, in/vision: forge, dusie and is forthcoming in ixnay reader 3 . She is currently suturing up her previous manuscript exuviae and dissecting material for her next poetic project. She reads poetics and post-colonial/transnational literatures as a PhD candidate at SUNY Buffalo.

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