Kristin Dykstra

Photograph by Anna Deeny, 2015.

Kristin Dykstra’s translations of poetry collections by Reina María Rodríguez, Juan Carlos Flores, Angel Escobar, and Marcelo Morales were published by the University of Alabama Press in 2014 and 2016. She previously translated other books from Cuba, including works by Rodríguez and Omar Pérez, which are available in bilingual editions from Factory School, Green Integer, and Shearsman Books. Dykstra is currently cotranslating and editing Maqroll’s Prayer and Other Poems, a collection by Álvaro Mutis for New York Review Books. With Kent Johnson, she is coeditor of Materia Prima, an anthology dedicated to Amanda Berenguer forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse. Dykstra coedited Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas / Nueva escritura de las Américas from 2004–2014 with Gabriel Bernal Granados and Roberto Tejada. She lives in Hinesburg, Vermont.

Kristin Dykstra's commentary series, 'Intermedium'

By this author

The sea doesn't have to be a wall

Germanía / Germaniadified (detranslations)

Selections from "Heard about the fighting cat?" (Poems 1994–1998)

Eight poems from the manuscript "Lingua Franca"

Gossiping Cuba

"Coño acere, todo se vuelve agua!"

Dispatch from Havana: Ricardo Alberto Perez

On equal footing

Three poems

The great leap outward

Isla / Island

Recently in Jacket2

Raw from the bellicose tumble (PoemTalk #203)

Callie Gardner, "Culture Warrior"

PoemTalk

From left: Laynie Browne, Julia Bloch, Iain Morrison

Julia Bloch, Laynie Browne, and Iain Morrison joined Al Filreis in KWH’s Wexler Studio to talk about a poem — or rather two versions of a poem — by the late Callie Gardner. One version, titled “when will my love return from the culture war?,” is 6-quatrains long. A second, for which we have a recorded performance, is four quatrains; there’s a variation on the second that seems to invite us to call it a sonnet. Callie added a version — organized in the quatrains — to their blog on May 1, 2020. On November 19, 2020, Callie read the shorter version of the poem as part of a live-streamed reading given by eight poets. Callie was the fifth to read. We link the YouTube recording HERE, and PoemTalk listeners are invited to watch and listen to our poem at 53 minutes into the group reading.

December 24, 2024

Launch for The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies

with Tracie Morris, Christian Bök, Tan Lin, Felix Bernstein, & Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein

at Giorno Poetry Systems in New York, Dec. 5, 2024

My thanks to Alan Thomas and Randy Petelos at the University of Chicago Press. This is my tenth book with Chicago, going back 25 years. Thanks also to Anthony Huberman and Eli Coplan (sound engineer) of GPS for hosting this event.

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 García 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