The Conference on Cinema & Poetry at the University of Maryland will bring together scholars of cinema and media studies who are examining the ways that poetry has refracted and generally asserted influence on cinema. Or vice versa: how has cinema affected thinking about poetry—and, indeed, its very production? The conference will explore the seemingly boundless possibilities of “poetic cinema,” both in the Soviet and post-Soviet context, and, in broader terms, within world cinema.

This conference aims for an in-depth engagement across regions, languages, media, and disciplinary approaches.

The Maya Brin Resident of this year, Aleksandr Skidan, will be a guest speaker at the conference.

Aleksandr Skidan (b. 1965). Poet, critic, essayist, translator. Skidan attended Leningrad Free University (1989–1992), while working as a stoker in a boiler house (1985–2002). His poetry collections include Delirium (1993), In the Re-Reading (1998), Red Shifting (2005), Dissolution (2010), Membra disjecta (2015) and most recently Contamination (2020). He is also the author of five books of essays, Critical Mass (1995), The Resistance to/of Poetry (2001), Sum of Poetics (2013), Theses Toward Politicization of Art and Other Texts (2014) and Damp Words Chalk: About Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (2019). He has translated American contemporary poetry and fiction into Russian (Paul Bowles, Charles Olson, Susan Howe, Rosmarie Waldrop, Michael Palmer) as well as theoretical works by Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Jean-Luc Nancy, Paolo Virno, Gerald Raunig. He has been awarded the Andrey Bely Prize in poetry (2006), and was a Joseph Brodsky Fellowship Fund fellow (2018). His poetry has been translated into many languages and published in different anthologies. In 2008 his book Red Shifting was published in the US by Ugly Duckling Presse. Member of Chto Delat’? working group. Co-editor of the New Literary Observer magazine where he has been curating the New Poetry (Novaya poezia) book series since 2009. He lives in Saint-Petersburg.

College Park Marriott Hotel & Conference Center  
3501 University Blvd E, Hyattsville, MD 20783
Time 9 am-5 pm

Schedule

Thursday 21 April

breakfast: 8:30-9:30
9:15: Welcome 9:30-12:00: Poetic Cinema

•  Elizabeth Papazian, U of Maryland: Geometry, Texture & Temporality in Soviet Poetic Cinema
•  Silvia Carlorosi, Bronx Community College: The Aesthetic Resistance of Matteo Garrone’s Poetic Camera
• Viktoria Paranyuk, Pace University: Thinking in Verse in Marlen Khutsiev’s I Am Twenty

12:00-1:00: lunch

please RSVP here

1:00-2:30: POETRY ROUNDTABLE with Aleksandr Skidan

•  Aleksander Skidan, poet, essayist, translator, Maya Brin Resident
• Thomas Epstein, Boston College
• Matvei Yankelevich, poet, translator, editor

2:30: coffee break

3:00-5:00: Dead Poet in the Desert

• Karla Oeler, Stanford University: Pasolini, Poetry, and the Desert
• Roberto Dainotto, Duke University: Don’t Kill the Poet: Vittorio Cottafavi’s Television of Poetry
• Cesare Casarino, University of Minnesota, respondent

Friday 22 April

breakfast: 8:30-9:30

9:30-12:30: Poetry & Intermediality

•  Nariman Skakov, Harvard University: Ornament as National Form in Eisenstein’s Kazakh Drawings
• Lilya Kaganovsky, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: Dysphonia as an Art Practice: Muratova, Tarkovsky, Gogoberidze
• Luka Arsenjuk, University of Maryland, respondent

12:00-1:00: lunch

please rsvp here

1:00-3:30: Poetry & form

• Vitaly Chernetsky, University of Kansas: Iryna Tsilyk’s The Earth Is Blue as an Orange: War Documentary as Surrealist Poetry
• Raisa Sidenova, Newcastle University, UK: Poetry and Folklore in Soviet Poetic Documentary
• Eric Zakim, University of Maryland: From Russia with Formalism? Maya Deren and the Poetics of American Experimental Cinema

3:30: coffee & Poetry reading by Aleksandr Skidan