Lev Rubinstein

It was a delight to hear Moscow poet Lev Rubinstein read last night at Hunter College, with translations from the UDP collection, Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties, which includes the complete set of his works composed (in sequence) on small library catalog cards. Matvei Yankelevich read the translations.

Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva's 'The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry' +: new Lev Rubinstein volume from UDP

Charles Bernstein

The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry: Reference, Trauma, and History (Bloomsbury, 2014) is divided in half. The first part looks at 1970s/1980s Russian (Moscow) conceptual poetry and poetics, focussing on Dmitry Prigov and Lev Rubinstein (Rubinshtein) but also on the "meta-realists" Elena Schvarts and Alexi Parschikov (Arkadii Dragomoschenko is a key poet for this context, though not a main subject here). Artists Grisha Bruskin and Ilya Kabakov are also main subjects. The second part of the book makes an between both Moscow conceptualism and St. Petersburg metarealist poetry and the 1970s/1980s poetry/poetics associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Lutzkanova-Vassileva offers detailed readings of Bob Perelman, Bruce Andrews Steve McCaffery, David Melnick, Ron Silliman, as well as my work. Lutzkanova-Vassileva also traces the connection to the Russian futurists (Shklovsky, Khelbinikov, Kruchenykh).

Rubinstein in Serial Motion

video portrait of Lev Rubinstein, 11/18/07

Charles Bernstein

Matvei Yankelevitch asked me to join Lev Rubinstein in a memorial tribute to Dmitri Prigov at the Bowery Poetry Club. Rubinstein's is a poetry of changing parts that ensnares the evanescent uncanniness of the everyday (in ways that bring to mind the seriality of both Reznikoff and Grenier). By means of rhythmically foregrounding a central device — the basic unit of the work is the index card — Rubinstein continuously re-makes actual for us a flickering now time that is both intimate and strange.

Recently in Jacket2

Cry me a makar

On translating Lorca into Shaetlan

Christie Williamson

“Only if you want to, and it might not work, but do you think you could translate some of the poems into Shetlandic?” I’d been writing poems fairly consistently in Shaetlan for two or three years by this point, but my primary creative outlet remained theatre. Still, it was too good an idea not to pursue. I knew Shaetlan and knew how to write a decent poem in it. The Garcia Lorca poems whose English translations we’d been giving voice to were extraordinary so, why not? What could possibly go wrong?

“I’ve got a suggestion for you. Can I buy you a glass of wine?” The answer to that question is always yes. We were in rehearsal for Lorca’s Shadow, a devised theatre piece by Moving Parts Theatre Company, and this suggestion from Corinne Harris, the play’s director, was to change the course of my life.

December 5, 2024

Every flower a reminder (PoemTalk #202)

Harryette Mullen, "Chasing Dirt"

PoemTalk

From left: Laynie Browne, Harryette Mullen, Simone White

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Simone White, Harryette Mullen, and Laynie Browne joined Al Filreis to talk a six-page section of Harryette’s new book Open Leaves. The book, subtitled “poems from earth,” was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press of London in 2023. The section discussed by the group is titled “Chasing Dirt” and consists of two epigraphs, a prose-poem paragraph, a mixed media artwork titled Silent Talks by Tiffanie Delune, and a sequence of three-line poems across four pages of four poems each. Since PennSound’s Harryette Mullen author page did not yet include a recording of Harryette performing poems from Open Leaves, we asked her to read “Chasing Dirt” at the start of the recorded session. The pages from Open Leaves are available HERE.

November 20, 2024

The &vs. (andverse) of the Gurlesque

Becca Klaver

Electric Gurlesque, like the first edition of the anthology, is centered on an idea of the Gurlesque as a feminist aesthetic that emerges most prominently in American women’s poetry at the turn of the 21st century. The braided strands of the Gurlesque — which the subtitle of the first edition identified as “grrly,” “grotesque,” and “burlesque”— come together to form one complex aesthetic strategy, and also suggest the diverse avenues of inquiry pursued by the essayists in this section.

The following is the Preface to the Essays from the new anthology Electric Gurlesque published by Saturnalia Books in 2024. The complete anthology can be found here.

November 19, 2024