Dennis Cooley Discussion - Language of Contemporary Poetry Series

• Tue, 03/20/2012 - 5:30pm - 7:00pm

Boardroom, 2nd Floor

Regionalism & Vernacular Poetics

English graduate students coordinate a public discussion with visiting Winnipeg poet Dennis Cooley. Cooley’s essay, “The Vernacular Muse in Prairie Poetry,” actively attends to the dialogic and carnivalesque in vernacular speech, which he enlists in a class-based critique of standard Canadian English.

Dennis Cooley

The many books by Dennis Cooley (Winnipeg, MB) include Sunfall: New and Selected Poems, 1980-1996 and The Vernacular Muse: The Eye and Ear in Contemporary Literature (1987).

Cooley is founding editor of Turnstone Press, and editor of Inscriptions: A Prairie Poetry Anthology (1992).

Dennis Cooley graduated from the University of Rochester, writing the first doctoral dissertation on poet Robert Duncan.

Language of Contemporary Poetry /  Discussion Series

"Regionalism & Vernacular Poetics" is the fourth of four discussions in the winter 2012 series Language of Contemporary Poetry.

The series is coordinated by graduate students in Louis Cabri's course "Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously": Poetry & Linguistics and is generously supported by the Humanities Research Group and the Deparment of English.