Vincent Katz

Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, and teacher. He is the author of eleven books of poetry and two books of translation, and his criticism has been published in numerous books, catalogues, and journals. He curated an exhibition on Black Mountain College for the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and is the editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, published by MIT Press in 2002, with a second printing scheduled for spring 2013. He is the translator of The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (Princeton, 2004) and the author of Alcuni Telefonini, a book of poems in collaboration with painter Francesco Clemente, published by Granary Books in 2008. Katz is the publisher of the poetry and arts journal VANITAS and of Libellum books. He teaches in the MFA program in art criticism and writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he recently taught a course entitled Investigating Interdisciplinarity.

Vincent Katz, Vienna, 2010, photo by Vivien Bittencourt.

By this author

The Dogs of São Paulo

Edwin Sitting

Back From the Dead

The lyrical personal of Joe Ceravolo

Poems from '6x6' vis-a-vis a poem by Joe Ceravolo

Poetry as music

Endless

A conversation with the materials

To speak out of difference

Three poems

Recently in Jacket2

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

Anna de Noailles, translated by Chris Mustazza

Charles Bernstein

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