200! This is the 200th monthly episode of PoemTalk. To mark the occasion, we celebrated Evie Shockley with a day of events and recordings and conversation and it was all informally dubbed “Evie Day.” Before a live audience in the Arts Café of KWH we talk about two of Evie’s poems: “My last modernist poem, #4 (or, re-re-birth of a nation)” from The New Black; and “studies in antebellum literature (or, topsy-turvy)” from Semi-automatic. Evie’s expansive PennSound page happens to include recordings of her performing both of these poems, but since we were feeling the honor of having Evie there with us in person, we asked her if she wouldn’t mind reading these poems. She did, and you'll be hearing them as part of the PoemTalk discussion after the introductions. It was the annual gathering of a group that had been meeting for some years: Aldon Nielsen, William J. Harris, and the late and much-missed Tyrone Williams.
October 11, 2024
Transposing 85
In speaking on some aspects of translation, Roman Jakobson wrote that “poetry by definition is untranslatable. Only creative transposition is possible: either intralingual transposition—from one poetic shape into another, or interlingual transposition—from one language into another, or finally intersemiotic transposition—from one system of signs into another.” The 85 project, by Claire Huot and Robert Majzels, engages in all three kinds of transposition (a placing across) as it investigates the reception of the Chinese language and culture into English through various poetic and multi-media platforms. The 85 project involves many layers of transference and is in constant movement: from Chinese texts to literal character-for-word translation; from these translations into 85 English letters and visual poems; from the visual poems to the reading of those poems by others or to multi-media enactments, to a website and even to furniture.