In his roles as a curator and primarily as an artist, Michael Morris has been a key figure of the west coast art scene since the 1960s and his contribution to the development of Vancouver as a contemporary art city has been immense. Morris was engaged with Concrete Poetry in the 1960s. The Concrete Poetry movement was perhaps the first global art movement, springing up in South and North America, Japan and Europe in the mid to late 1950s.

In conjunction with Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry All are welcome. Admission is free. General seating. SCHEDULE 1:00 pm Introductions Shelly Rosenblum, Curator of Academic Programs, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery Michael Turner, Author and Curator Vancouver 1:30 pm Stephen Scobie, Poet and Scholar Victoria, BC “Summer Elephants: Ian Hamilton Finlay and Concrete Poetry” 2:30 pm Lori Emerson, Department of English University of Colorado, Boulder “A Typewriter is a Poem. A Poem is Not a Typewriter” 3:30 pm Coffee break 4:00 pm Liz Kotz Department of the History of Art University of California, Riverside “the kind of grid a typewriter produces in a very machine-like way” 5:00 pm Postscript Donato Mancini, Department of English, UBC