Commentaries - March 2015

A short interview with Stephen Brockwell

Stephen Brockwell in the Washington Airport : photo credit: rob mclennan
Stephen Brockwell in the Washington Airport : photo credit: rob mclennan

Stephen Brockwell is an Ottawa poet who runs a small IT company from a tiny office in the Chateau Laurier. His collection Fruitfly Geographic won the Archibald Lampman Award in 2004.

Mountains to Sea 2015

Some notes from the festival

Last weekend was the seventh annual Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival, in Dun Laoghaire, which is on the coast a short distance southeast of Dublin. The five-day festival, directed by Alice Lyons, had an extraordinary line-up, including readings by Paul Durcan, Maureen McLane, Tom Pickard, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Peter Sirr, Kei Miller, Peter Fallon, and David Ferry (among many others).

Kelly Writers House 'Open Learning Teaching Fellowship'

The Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania invites applications to the ModPo Open Learning Teaching Fellowship, which will be offered for the first time in Fall 2015 and is designed to support teaching resources within the Modern and Contemporary American Poetry free open online non-credit 10-week course taught by Al Filreis and others. This Fellowship is sponsored by the Teacher Resource Center, an intrasite within ModPo.

Bright arrogance #2

The Traduttoreador Tradition

Traduttore, traditore”: a cliché perhaps not worth repeating (like most bon-mots about translation, including that singularly awful quote from Yevtushenko). Except that, pari passu and funiculi, funicula, it doesn’t get repeated enough. That is, in its original it’s a near sonic repetition, with only one changed vowel—it is a repetition, then, that is subject to disavowal when you say “translator, traitor” in English.

David Matlin: Excerpt from a novel-in-progress

[“The following excerpt is from the final novel of a trilogy which includes the previously published How the Night Is Divided and  A HalfMan DreamingIt is part of an on-going experiment in the Southern California rural dialect I grew up with among not only Jewish ranchers and farmers but a larger community of diverse backgrounds.  Much of the narrative includes multiple portraits of land, water, and a world, for the mo