Nathaniel Tarn

Nathaniel Tarn is a poet, translator, critic, anthropologist (Highland Maya; Sociology of Buddhist Institutions, etc.), and “distinguished” professor with over thirty-five books to his credit and translations in over a dozen languages. He was among the founders of ethnopoetics. Between academic posts he was founding editor of Cape Editions and of Cape Goliard Press. He has lectured and read around the world. His latest publications are Selected Poems: 1950–2000 (Wesleyan, 2002), Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers (New Directions, 2008), The Embattled Lyric: Essays and Conversations in Poetics and Anthropology (Stanford, 2008), and Sur les fleuves de la foret (Paris: Vif, 2012). New Directions is reprinting The Beautiful Contradictions (1969) shortly. He lives, works, writes, gardens, and birdwatches north of Santa Fe, New Mexico

By this author

Ancestors

Regarding the Issue of 'New Forms'

'Scandals in the House of Birds' excerpt

Fragment of a Talk on Octavio Paz, Anthropology, and the Future of Poetry

Nathaniel Tarn reviews 'Selected Nonfictions' by Jorge Luis Borges

Two pieces from 'Architextures'

A Poet at (and of) the Movies

Gnostic contagion

From 'Dying Trees'

Partly a monologue, partly also a dialogue with Stephen Watson about his 'The Other City: Selected Poems 1977–1999'

Nathaniel Tarn reviews 'Selections' by María Sabina

'Library Dust'

For Mister Irby, 'Merican Master

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