Past Events

Archive 2001-2002

September 25

Ammiel Alcalay & Jerome Rothenberg
The Political Character of Translation

A crucial figure in providing access to voices under duress, Ammiel Alcalay has edited and translated work from Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, and Serbo-Croatian and is responsible for the collection of Middle Eastern Jewish writing, Keys to the Garden. His own books include After Jews and Arabs, Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays, 1982-1999, and Cairo Notebooks.Jerome Rothenberg describes his work as an “ongoing attempt to reinterpret the poetic past from the point of view of the present.” He has published some 50 books of poetry and numerous translations from the Spanish, German, Czech, Navajo, Seneca, and Aztec. Celebrated for his work in the field of ethnopoetics, Rothenberg edited the anthologies Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, & Oceania and Poems for the Millennium (with Pierre Joris).

October 16

Steve McCaffery & Julie Patton
Poetry/Society/Body

Somewhere to the North of Intention (the title of his 1986 volume of essays), Steve McCaffery conducts his researches into poetic form and sound. Sound poetry, he says, transmits language that has been “sonorized, pulverized, deracinated, plasticized, lacerated,” and his sound poetry group Four Horsemen is famous for their contributions to his vocal practice. McCaffery’s most recent book is Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics.

Julie Patton is a one-woman center for the verbal, visual, and performing arts. Working on the page and on stage, her media may encompass body, text, graphic image, and voice, singly or in collaboration. Widely published, her lectures and performances have taken her across the United States to South America and Europe.

November 15

Kamau Brathwaite
Conversations with Kamau Brathwaite

Punning, prophetic, scathing, with wide erudition, Kamau Brathwaite sounds out the cultural sources that cross and collide in the Caribbean; his riddims enact a conversation between the New World of the Americas and the Old Worlds of Africa and Europe. Born in Barbados, Brathwaite has lived in Ghana, Jamaica, England, and the United States. Fittingly, his poems have an international readership, and his critical work is central to the field of post-colonial studies. Brathwaite was awarded the Neustadt Prize and the Casa de las Americas Prize for Literature.

February 12

Anne Waldman & Lisa Jarnot
Community & Cultural Interventions: Beat Legacies

Festival attendees worldwide can attest to Anne Waldman’s energizing stage performances and to the power of her “shamanistic” poetry. She has collaborated with jazz musicians, dancers, and visual artists, and her most recent books include Jovis and Vow to Poetry: Essays, Interviews, and Manifestos. Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute with Allen Ginsberg in 1974.

A younger light of the New York arts world, Lisa Jarnot takes her readers on Some Other Kind of Mission, through a Ring of Fire, and between the waves of her Sea Lyrics. One may catch sight of visual poetry or hear echoes of the Beat Generation in her insistent arrangements. Her biography of Robert Duncan is scheduled to appear in 2002.

March 26

Lyn Hejinian & Tom Raworth
Poetry and Barbarism

Lyn Hejinian’s collection of essays The Language of Inquiry “brilliantly demonstrates the myriad, paradoxical ways in which philosophy and poetry are indivisible and distinct,” says one of her admirers. Her autobiographical My Life is already a classic of the “new sentence” method of composition announced in the 1980s. Hejinian was elected to the Academy of American Poets in 2000.

Tom Raworth has read and performed his work in the UK, USA, Western Europe, South Africa, USSR, Macedonia, and Yugoslavia, and he has collaborated with poets, painters, and musicians in many countries. Tottering State, a reprint of his selected poems, appeared in the U.S. in 2000, and Collected Poems: 1962-2002 is due out next spring. A great friend of American poetry, Raworth lives in Cambridge, England.

April 16

Peter Gizzi & Elizabeth Willis
Generations of the Lyric: Who’s Speaking?

Peter Gizzi’s Artificial Heart has been called “one of the events of the decade” (Stand, U.K.). A poet, editor, and teacher, Gizzi traces his lineage as lyric singer back to the Troubadour poets of Provence. He co-edited The House that Jack Built: The Collected Lecture of Jack Spicer. Gizzi is author of Periplum and Hours of the Book.

With roots in the American Mid-West and a sensibility shaped by the Pre-Raphaelites and Objectivists, Elizabeth Willis’s poems seem to leave out more than they put in. As one critic says, her poems “wield a hammer of quietness against the house of words.” Her collection The Human Abstract is a winner of the National Poetry Series.