Nguyễn Tiến Văn

Nguyễn Tiến Văn was born in Hà Nội 1939. He lived in South Vietnam as a translator, editor, and publisher in 1954–1975. After 1975, he worked as a bookseller in the open market before becoming a refugee in the UNHCR camp of Pulau Bidong, Malaysia (1985–1987), and then moved to Toronto, Canada (1987–2005). In 2005, he returned to Vietnam, and he is currently living in Saigon as a translator and an editor. He has translated several Vietnamese poets such as Inrasara, Cát Du, and Trang Thế Hy into English.

By this author

Sampler: Open Mouth poetry — Lý Đợi

Recently in Jacket2

Digital Poetics 2

Not Your Father’s Confessionalism

William Lessard

A blank text field. Oblong. With rounded corners. It is our refuge where we are free to say almost anything. Some treat it as a mail slot to dispatch their most personal thoughts. Others leap across it as a stage where they become a different person. Or a heaving jumble of Pessoa-like heteronyms, or what most people call trolls. Most of us troll without noticing, or we perform for clicks with a keen understanding that what we type (however non-factual) conjures data about what we are. An armchair existentialist might say the space mirrors the void inside us.

Jerome Rothenberg: December 11, 1931 – April 21, 2024

A reflection from Amish Trivedi

Jerome Rothenberg

Well, we’ve come to our end here. Somehow, in the hundreds of hours of phone calls and emails and late nights and breakfasts after, Jerry and I had never once discussed what might happen to this space once he passed away. We have even published a number of obituaries for friends of Jerry’s over the years. I’m not entirely convinced, sitting here writing at 3 a.m., that Jerry thought I’d be left with this task — and not the other way around.

Also I don't suffer (PoemTalk #195)

Ron Padgett, "Joe Brainard's Painting Bingo" & "The Austrian Maiden"

PoemTalk

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Al Filreis brought together James Berger and Richard Deming (who traveled together from Yale) and Sophia DuRose to talk about two poems by Ron Padgett. The poems are “The Austrian Maiden” and “Joe Brainard’s Painting Bingo.” Our recording of “The Austrian Maiden” comes from a February 26, 2003, reading Padgett gave at the Kelly Writers House; the poem had just recently been published in Padgett’s book You Never Know (2002). The recording of “Joe Brainard’s Painting Bingo” — a poem published in Great Balls of Fire (1969) — was performed at a November 20, 1979, reading given at a location that is now (sadly) unknown. That reading in its entirety is available at Padgett’s PennSound page; the recording comes to us courtesy of the Maureen Owen Collection of Greenwich Village Poetry, now housed at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

April 17, 2024