FAIRHOPE, Ala. — Next weekend in Mobile, three major figures in the world of poetry and literary criticism will read from their works and talk about poetry and writing as the kick-off event of the new Stokes Center for Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama.

“As a poet, I have long admired the work of Charles Bernstein,” said Sue Walker, the Stokes Distinguished Professor at USA, director of the English department’s creative writing program and Poet Laureate of Alabama. “As a scholar, I am captivated by Marjorie Perloff’s critical work. Last year when Hank Lazer read and spoke at USA, we talked about getting this event together. It is wonderful that this can be the first Stokes Center for Creative Writing event.”

Walker said the Stokes Center will promote creative writing in the area and bring noted authors to campus to teach courses, conduct workshops and share their work.

“The Friday, Sept. 19, 2 p.m. session at the USA Library will focus on a discussion of the media and how it conveys our thinking in and through language, with a question and answer period after the discussion,” Walker said. “(On) Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Laidlaw Performing Arts Center, (the event) will bring the three authors together so that the audience can hear each of them read from their work. Perloff will read from her memoir, and Bernstein and Lazer will read from their works of poetry.”

Bernstein is on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, Perloff from Stanford University and Lazer is vice provost and an English professor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

“In 1984, Hank Lazer organized the Eleventh Alabama Symposium on the topic ‘What is a Poet?” at UA in Tuscaloosa,” Perloff said Thursday. “As it turned out, this was one of the most stimulating, exciting, groundbreaking, and also maddening conferences I’ve ever attended. Hank … invited a very varied group of poets and critics, ranging from Louis Simpson, who was on the attack the whole time, to the late Kenneth Burke, one of the grand old men of American letters, to Helen Vendler and myself.   The most memorable aspect of the conference was that it marked the debut of the young Charles Bernstein.”

Perloff said Bernstein was invited partly because John Ashbery, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his groundbreaking poetry collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, couldn’t come and Lazer wanted someone “experimental.”  Perloff said Bernstein was attacked by several of the poets in an animated discussion, which was published in What is a Poet in 1987, and makes, she said, for fascinating reading about the currents in poetry and literary criticism at the time.

“Since then Burke, (Denise) Levertov, and (David) Ignatow have died, and the poetry landscape has been transformed,” Perloff said. “Charles Bernstein has become a star although the poets who disliked him in 1984, like (Gerald) Stern and Simpson, no doubt continue to mistrust his poetics. What I want to do at this symposium, held 24 years after that memorable one, is to see to what extent the basic aesthetic assumptions and axioms of 1984 have changed.”

Walker encourages people to attend the upcoming event.

“They don’t realize how in the aftermath of hurricanes like Katrina, words allowed those involved in disaster to come together and express fear, sorrow, relief, and other emotions that connect with (how) we live on a daily basis,” Walker said. “Recent national television documentaries have dealt with how important language is when confronting illness.”