Charles Bernstein

EPC@20 : Twentieth Anniversary Celebration in Buffalo Sept. 11 and 12

Thursday & Friday, Sept. 11-12, 2014
UB Media Study (afternoons) + Burchfield Penney Art Center (evenings)

Featuring: Charles Bernstein, cris cheek, Tony Conrad, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Steve McCaffery, Myung Mi Kim, Tammy McGovern, Joan Retallack, Laura Shackelford, Danny Snelson, Dennis Tedlock, Cecilia Vicuña, Elizabeth Willis, & Wooden Cities with Ethan Hayden.

Fifty years of Buffalo poetics readings on PennSound

We've been working on this page for a decade, but now near complete -- 150 readings and events at Buffalo, from 1963 to 2003. 

Most of the readings here are connected to two series: "Walking the Dog" programs coordinated and recorded by Robert Creeley until 1990; "Wednesdays@4 Plus" programs (1990-2003) coordinated and recorded by Charles Bernstein (working with Susan Howe, Raymond Federman, Dennis Tedlock, Robert Bertholf, and Creeley). While the Poetics Program as such didn't begin unitl Fall 1991, we include on this page readings beginning 50 years ago in Buffalo, associated with the State University of New York's English Department.

Ian Probstein: Three translations of Osip Mandelstam's 'Stalin's Epigram'

Komer & Melamid, Stalin in Front of Mirror (Tempera and oil on canvas, 72”X48”, 1982-83)

It is said that a translator is like a spy: if everything is fine, the author of the original is praised and the translator is barely noticed; if not, the translator is blamed. Having that in mind, I am going to discuss several translations of Osip Mandelstam’s “Stalin’s Epigram”, which cost him two exiles and eventually, life.

Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) led an unsettled life full of tribulations, wandering and exile. After his Stalin’s epigram of 1933, for which the dictator, who used to say that “vengeance is best when served cold,” never forgave the poet.

Jennifer Bartlett in conversation with Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

Jennifer Bartlett, photo by Emma Bee Bernstein

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa:  Jennifer, I’d like to start by discussing the anthology you co-edited, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability.  In the preface you explain that a purpose of the anthology was to present non-mainstream views of disability while offering a considerable range of stylistic diversity in poetry by disabled poets, mostly poets with a visible disability.  Since the anthology was a collaboration I wanted to ask you what you learned through the process — what benefits did you receive and what hurtles did you need to overcome?  What did you learn both from the process of collaboration and from the project as a whole?  Also, how would you evaluate the result — do you feel you achieved your aims?  What reactions have you received from readers who identify as disabled and from others who don’t?  (This is a bunch of questions that we could discuss either separately or all together, depending on how you wish to answer them!)