Anna de Noailles (1876-1933) was one of the most famous French poets of her day. While her work has mostly fallen out of fashion, I’ve opted to translate this poem because it was one of (if not the) first poems ever recorded to sound by a female poet. Her recording at the Sorbonne, made in the early 1920s, causes this ars poetica to realign itself with the performance of the poem rather than the written text. It speaks to pertinent questions of posthumous reception and the archive, through a light, playful, sexual mode: the nachlass as seduction. --Chris Mustazza
Tim Barry: Susan, I am very familiar with your work, as I showed you and your great friends, the wonderful artists Mimi Gross and Mira Schor, at my bookshop in Provincetown in 2016 in the show: “Three Friends.” So, congratulations on your first museum retrospective! The editor at Artsfuse, Bill Marx, recently saw the exhibition and noted that his initial take on your show was that it uses folk art and outsider art imperatives “to explore issues of feminism, among others.” Is this accurate?
Bandyopadhyay and Bernstein in Mumbai, 2024, for launch of Pataquerical Ballad
Runa Bandyopadhyay recently published an extended review of Pitch of Poetry in Chhapakhanar Goli, 21st year issue, April 2024 (W. Bengal). For this page, she adapted and extended that review to create a new essay in English, published here for the first time. I am publishing it as part of my ongoing, transformative, collaboration with Runa, outlined in the links at the end.
Keith Waldrop discovered John Barton Wolgamot’s 1944 poem, IN SARA, MENCKEN, CHRIST AND BEETHOVEN THERE WERE MEN AND WOMEN while browsing in a bookshop, as he recounts here. The poem was to remain a touchstone for him both its poetic power but also as a icon of how quixotic our poetic achievement are.
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