Commentaries - March 2017

Human Language: The Poetry of Michael Steven

Catherine Dale

Michael Steven. Photo credit: Greta Anderson.
Michael Steven. Photo credit: Greta Anderson.

Unlike many New Zealand poets of his generation, Michael Steven is not part of the literary establishment. Steven has been writing and performing poetry in New Zealand “in fits and starts”[i] for more than twenty-five years, but has not pursued an MA in creative writing or yet published a monograph with a university press.

Renee Gladman's 'Event Factory'

Renee Gladman's 'Event Factory'

If epic is a story of the community for the community, then Event Factory asks the contemporary reader to consider: How does one tell the tale of the community now? In the place of a sure narrative about a place and its people, Renee Gladman’s text presents ambiguities — palpable, permeating, and resonant — that refuse to resolve or settle.

Murat Nemet-Nejat: From 'Animals of Dawn,' with an essay on 'Hamlet & Its Hidden Texts: Poems As Commentary'

            Bait & Switch    

                        “Polonius: What do you read, my lord?”

 

the sculpture                                                    

of the night —

 

dream —                                                           

                  

erodes                                

in the morning

 

words words   words left                                 

 

over the melting                                               

 

dew (the pickpocket).           

Alan Bernheimer's multilingual poetics

Q&A on January 17, 2017

Alan Bernheimer (left) with Ariel Resnikoff — photo by Kelly Writers House staff posted to KWH Flickr site

This is a fifteen-minute excerpt from a fifty-four-minute event featuring Alan Bernheimer on multilingual poetics — on January 17, 2017, at the Kelly Writers House, in a series curated by Ariel Resnikoff. The excerpt features the session’s Q&A.

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Alan Bernheimer responds to questions about his translation of Philippe Soupault’s, Lost Profiles: A Memoir of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, which was published in November by City Lights. The book is a retrospective of a crucial period in modernism, written by a co-founder of the Surrealist movement. The video below is a fifteen-minute excerpt from a fifty-four-minute-long program held at the Kelly Writers House on January 17, 2017.

Langston Hughes and Studs Terkel in 1960

Note: the audio linked below is temporarily unavailable.

Thanks to George Drury and Lois Baum, PennSound has recently added a stunningly good cache of audio recordings from the “Word of Mouth” series, originally aired on WFMT at Loyola University, Chicago. Among these recordings is a conversation among Langston Hughes, John Sellers, James Cotton, and Otis Spann, moderated by Studs Terkel, at Roosevelt University, aired on WFMT on July 15, 1960. Here is your link to the forty-seven-minute audio: MP3. (We are in the process of segmenting this recording by topic. Stay tuned, as it were.)