We are delighted to host the renowned US poet and publisher Devin Johnston (Flood Editions) in a day devoted to the discussion and reading of poetry at the UWS Bankstown campus. There will be two sessions: a morning seminar on rhyme in poetry and an afternoon poetry reading. You are welcome to attend both events.

10.30am: coffee, welcome
11am - 12.30pm: Devin Johnston on 'Recursions of Rhyme' followed by discussion
12.30pm - 1.30pm: lunch
1.30pm - 3.00pm: Devin Johnston poetry reading with Q&A

Building 23.G.41, Bankstown campus, Bullecourt Ave, Milperra
via the Henry Lawson Drive exit of the M5

RSVP for catering by Friday 22 July to Suzanne Gapps, writing@uws.edu.au

'Recursions of Rhyme'
This seminar will address the return to rhyme in far-flung corners of American poetry over the last few decades. This recurrence of rhyme offers a challenge to progressive views of poetry, drawing on pre-modernist formal possibilities. Among child psychologists, rhyme is associated with archaic 'magical thinking' and such associations linger in our culture. In this sense, rhyme takes the measure of a poem's proximity to childhood, sending us back. In terms of the mechanics and physiology of reading, rhyme entails a recursivetendency, not so much a closure but an oscillation, a little circuit or subroutine. As Giorgio Agamben observes, these sonorous circuits never fully correspond with the semantic development of a poem. In other words, the poem sustains itself in an ongoing tension between sound and sense. We will discuss these issues through a close look at the varieties of rhyme in some modern and contemporary instances, including poetry by Lorine Niedecker, Robert Creeley, Lisa Jarnot, Frederick Seidel, Paul Muldoon, Basil Bunting and WB Yeats.

Devin Johnston's collections of poetry include Sources (2008), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Aversions (2004) and Telepathy (2001). His prose writing includes the critical study Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice (2002) and Creaturely and Other Essays (2009). A former poetry editor for the Chicago Review, he co-founded and co-edits Flood Editions with Michael O'Leary. He lives in St. Louis and teaches at St Louis University.