Ted Rees, who recently relocated from Northern California back to his hometown of Philadelphia, and Ariel Resnikoff, who recently relocated from Philadelphia back to his previous home in Northern California, met up at the Wexler Studio at the Kelly Writers House in October to read from and talk about Ted’s new book, In Brazen Fontanelle Aflame.
On March 26, 2003, before an audience gathered for an event sponsored by the SUNY Buffalo Poetics Program, David Antin performed a fifty-minute talk-poem called “War.” It seems to have been a tense gathering. The second US incursion into Iraq had begun six days earlier, led by George W. Bush, who features prominently in Antin’s talk that evening. After delivering “War” this once, Antin apparently never transcribed it — nor apparently then, in his usual mode, lineated this talk-poem. Did he not sufficiently value it, then or later? Is it perhaps too unlike his usual talking performance? Perhaps it too directly referred to the political problem of the moment in relation to the poet’s work?
Al Filreis was joined by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Ariel Resnikoff, and Stephen Ross to talk about five sections — or pages or passages — from a book called Uxudo by Anne Tardos. Only one of the five has a title (the first of our selections, called “She Put It Mildly”). Those who have access to the Tuumba Press/O Books edition of the book can follow along: our five sections, in the order in which we hear Tardos perform them, can be found on pages 55, 19, 31, 43, and 53. On PennSound’s Anne Tardos author page, one can find all five of these sections, and others, in the recording made of her performance at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, in 1999, at an event sponsored by “After-Englishes.”
Harold Schimmel reading his poetry in Hebrew and English (27:05): MP3; Schimmel in conversation with Charles Bernstein (46:15): MP3.
Harold Schimmel was born in 1935 in Bayonne, New Jersey, and attended Cornell University before immigrating to Israel in 1962, where he started to write in his adopted language, Hebrew. He lives in Jerusalem. Schimmel has translated Hebrew poets Uri Zvi Greenberg, Avot Yeshurun, and Yehuda Amichai. His first book, First Poems, came out in 1962 in English. He has many books in Hebrew and two in English translation: From Island to Island (Selected Poems) and Qasida (essay).
Harold Schimmel reading his poetry in Hebrew and English (27:05): MP3 Harold Schimmel in conversation with Charles Bernstein (46:15): MP3
Harold Schimmel was born in 1935 in Bayonne, New Jersey, and attended Cornell University before immigrating to Israel in 1962, where he started to write in his adopted language, Hebrew. He lives in Jerusalem. Schimmel has translated Hebrew poets Uri Zvi Greenberg, Avot Yeshurun, and Yehuda Amichai. His first book, First Poems, came out in 1962 in English. He has many books in Hebrew and two in English translation: From Island to Island (Selected Poems) and Qasida (essay), both from Ibis in 1997 and both translated by Peter Cole.
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.
Pierre Joris, Anna Strong, and Ariel Resnikoff joined Al Filreis to talk about Paul Celan’s poem “Corona.” Celan had chosen to continue writing in German after the elimination of Jews from his town and the murder of his parents by the Nazis and their fascist allies — and maintained, to the say the very least, a complex relationship to the mother tongue he kept using with increasingly inventive disfiguration. There was knowledge of the original difficult German in our Wexler Studio, although as PoemTalk is an English-language podcast series we focused on the challenges of the English translation. Our translation was Jerome Rothenberg’s, from his groundbreaking anthology New Young German Poets (1959, City Lights).
Kathryn Hellerstein, Peter Cole, and Ariel Resnikoff joined Al Filreis to talk about Allen Grossman’s poem “My Radiant Eye.” It’s a late poem written in a late style. It appears in Grossman’s last book, Descartes’ Loneliness. The performance of the poem, recorded by Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, gives us a voice that has “vatic sweep and boost,” as Peter puts it, but also “fragility.” Kathryn, who knew Grossman as her teacher of Humanities 1 at Brandeis decades earlier, will “never forget th[e] voice” of those long-ago lectures.
On September 10, 2015, Jerome Rothenberg re-visited the Kelly Writers House to give an evening reading. A few hours earlier, Ariel Resnikoff and Al Filreis met Rothenberg in the Wexler Studio for an extended interview/conversation that ranged across many epochs, poetic modes, and topics.
The poet and translator Yosuke Tanaka visited Philadelphia and the Kelly Writers House in late 2014. The purpose of his visit was threefold: to join a scientific conference on cell biology; to see the Writers House in person after spending much time there virtually as a participant in the open online course called “ModPo”; and to sit down in the Wexler Studio with Ariel Resnikoff to talk about contemporary Japanese poetry.
Harold Schimmel on Close Listening
Harold Schimmel reading his poetry in Hebrew and English (27:05): MP3; Schimmel in conversation with Charles Bernstein (46:15): MP3.
Harold Schimmel was born in 1935 in Bayonne, New Jersey, and attended Cornell University before immigrating to Israel in 1962, where he started to write in his adopted language, Hebrew. He lives in Jerusalem. Schimmel has translated Hebrew poets Uri Zvi Greenberg, Avot Yeshurun, and Yehuda Amichai. His first book, First Poems, came out in 1962 in English. He has many books in Hebrew and two in English translation: From Island to Island (Selected Poems) and Qasida (essay).
Harold Schimmel reading his poetry in Hebrew and English (27:05): MP3
Harold Schimmel in conversation with Charles Bernstein (46:15): MP3
Harold Schimmel was born in 1935 in Bayonne, New Jersey, and attended Cornell University before immigrating to Israel in 1962, where he started to write in his adopted language, Hebrew. He lives in Jerusalem. Schimmel has translated Hebrew poets Uri Zvi Greenberg, Avot Yeshurun, and Yehuda Amichai. His first book, First Poems, came out in 1962 in English. He has many books in Hebrew and two in English translation: From Island to Island (Selected Poems) and Qasida (essay), both from Ibis in 1997 and both translated by Peter Cole.