Poetics of Healing: Cultural historian/critic Morris Berman with poet Eleni Stecopoulos @ The Poetry Center and Moe's Books

The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University presents:

cultural historian and social critic MORRIS BERMAN

with poet ELENI STECOPOULOS


Wednesday November 18, 7:30 pm @ the Unitarian Center, SF
"A Question of Values"
- a talk by Morris Berman, addressing the poetics of healing
Unitarian Center
1187 Franklin (at Geary)
San Francisco
$5

Thursday November 19, 3:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, San Francisco State University
a public conversation with Morris Berman, Eleni Stecopoulos, and you the audience
HUM 512, SFSU
free

ALSO NOTE:
Monday November 16, 7:30 pm @ Moe's Books
a poetry reading by Morris Berman and Eleni Stecopoulos

2476 Telegraph (Berkeley)

free

"It is the truth itself that is healing, not New Age dreams or populist fantasies. And the truth is that real change is historical..."
- Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture

This week-long residency with celebrated cultural historian and critic Morris Berman, together with poet Eleni Stecopoulos, extends the Poetry Center's ongoing program series "The Poetics of Healing," begun during Spring 2009 and continuing into Spring 2010. The Poetics of Healing began with an inquiry into relations between language, healing, and the efficacy of art. Through the diversity of its participants, who include poets, physicians, ethnographers, therapists, diviners, disability activists, and performance artists, it has evolved into a series that asks questions about healing on multiple levels, from the individual body to the body politic.

Morris Berman's expertise spans the history of science, heretical movements, spiritual and somatic practices, philosophy and esoteric literature, political economy and globalization, American "exceptionalism"and beyond. His work bears witness to the twinned legacies of bodily repression and capitalism in the West, the “ideologies [that] arise when people feel they have no real somatic anchoring” (Coming to Our Senses), the symbiosis of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Berman’s books stand as uniquely holistic critiques of the institutions and mentalities that took over long ago, and his recent work focuses on the decline of American empire.

Want to think and talk together about our contemporary pathologies and what “healing” might mean at this moment? (including whether talk of healing is misplaced, and why we use organic metaphors to talk about culture)? Want to talk about where heterodox energy locates today and what we can do in “dark ages America?”

Come listen to Morris Berman and take part in the dialogue.

MORRIS BERMAN is well known as an innovative cultural historian and social critic. He has taught at a number of universities in Europe and North America, and has held visiting endowed chairs at Incarnate Word College (San Antonio), the University of New Mexico, and Weber State University. Between 1982 and 1988 he was the Lansdowne Professor in the History of Science at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. In 2000 The Twilight of American Culture was named a "Notable Book" by the New York Times Book Review. His other work includes Dark Ages America (2006) and his noted trilogy on the evolution of human consciousness: The Reenchantment of the World (1981), Coming to Our Senses (1989), and Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality (2000). Berman won the Governor's Writers Award for Washington State in 1990, and was the first recipient of the annual Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies in 1992. During 2003-06 he was Visiting Professor in Sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and Visiting Professor in Humanities at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico City, during 2008-9. His volume of poetry, Counting Blessings, will be released in 2010.

ELENI STECOPOULOS's first collection of poetry, Armies of Compassion, is being published this year by Palm Press. In 2008, she received a Creative Work Fund grant to curate an interdisciplinary program series for the Poetry Center (The Poetics of Healing: Creative Investigations in Art, Medicine, and Somatic Practice) and to write a creative-critical book, now in progress and forthcoming from Factory School in 2010. Eleni Stecopoulos is on the faculty of the Language and Thinking program at Bard College. She lives in Berkeley.


supported by the CREATIVE WORK FUND

http://www.sfsu.edu/~poetry/eventCalendar.html