Linda Mence

Photo by Uģis Olte.

Linda Mence (b. 1992) is a Latvian poet, visual artist, and one of the editors of Punctum literary magazine. She earned an MA in Printmaking from the Art Academy of Latvia, graduating with a series of drawings of the 16 virtues from Ordo Virtutum by Hildegard of Bingen. Her first poetry collection Apļi (“Circles”; Neputns, 2023) received the Ojārs Vācietis Literary Prize in Poetry and the Annual Latvian Literary Award for the best debut. Linda also writes poetry for children, her book Kosmoss ir virs bēniņiem (“Above the Attic is Space”) was published by Liels un mazs in 2024. She has translated the poetry of Edgar Lee Masters, H.D., Christina Rossetti, and others. Mence has a particular interest in early modernist poetry, eerie children's literature, and the history of medicine.

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Richard Foreman (1937-2024)

Charles Bernstein

Richard Foreman
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Foreman at EPC/PennSound/Ontological
(PennSound page has many videos of Foreman's theater)

His memory, and the memory of his work, is a blessing for all who had the pleasure to experience it.

Raw from the bellicose tumble (PoemTalk #203)

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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

Linda Mence’s Personification Allegories

Linda Mence, translated by Kevin M. F. Platt and Sintija Ozoliņa

Poetic Languages of Latvia

Linda Mence, “Obedience,” illustration for Hildegard of Bingen’s “Ordo Virtutum”

Mence’s poems are ambiguously allegorical in the schematism and suggestiveness of their settings and situations: a house under attack by unclear or mystical forces; a garden falling into decay; a train ride that both connects people and separates them.

For her final project in the MFA program at the Art Academy of Latvia, the poet and visual artist Linda Mence created illustrations of the seventeen virtues who figure in the twelfth-century morality play Ordo Virtutum, by the Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen. While working on this project, Mence realized that she found the human figure “uninteresting,” as she recently remarked in a casual conversation, and turned instead to abstract geometric patterns in order to represent the virtues.