Two Canadian poets who often find themselves in various controversies in their native country will flee to the United States Thursday, October 26, for the second fall installment of Just Buffalo’s Small Press Poetry Series at Rust Belt Books. Both Gustave Morin and Daniel f Bradley are best known as concrete poets (poets who draw attention to the physicality of language, bordering on the graphic) who have their most recent works released by BookThug (Morin’s The ETC BBQ and Bradley’s A Boy’s First Book of Chlamydia: Poems 1996-2002). They talked with Artvoice in preparation for their reading here.

On Friday, October 27, the Humanities Institute at the University of Buffalo will kick off a two-day conference celebrating the start of its second year of existence. Titled “How We Became Human: Genealogies of the Humanities,” the conference brings together 14 scholars from seven different disciplines and 10 universities to address how the humanities has emerged as a discipline, as well as what its role has been in the tangled relations of the West to its global neighbors. Central to the conference is an examination of how humanistic ideas have been used both to privilege Western culture and to critique it.