Bunk Bed Conversation /
“The Poetics of Sleep,” with Jeff Dolven & Wayne Koestenbaum

Date: Thursday, 25 March 2010, 7–9 pm
Location: Cabinet, 300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn (map and directions here)
FREE. No RSVP necessary

From the top and bottom bunks, respectively, Jeff Dolven and Wayne Koestenbaum will consider the ancient friendship between sleep and poetry, touching on such topics as embowerment, somnambulism, styles of sleeping, crepuscular consciousness, no-doz, and drowsy syrups.

The first in a series of bunk bed conversations at Cabinet, exploring the public potential of this most private, archaic, and companionable of American scenes. For a long time, we used to go to bed early. On March 25, won’t you stay up and talk with us?

For a list of all the bunk bed conversations, as well as audio and images from the other installments, see here.

About the Participants
Jeff Dolven teaches English at Princeton University, and his poems have appeared in the Yale Review, the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. His learned monograph Das Etagenbett durch die Jahrhunderte is forthcoming, though he himself is reticent.

Wayne Koestenbaum has published five books of poetry: Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Model Homes, The Milk of Inquiry, Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender, and Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems. He has also published a novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, and five books of nonfiction: Andy Warhol, Cleavage, Jackie Under My Skin, The Queen’s Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist), and Double Talk. His newest book, Hotel Theory, is a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, and a Visiting Professor in the painting department of the Yale School of Art.