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A central duality appears in the work of Henri Cole: the revelation of emotional truths in concert with a “symphony of language” — often accompanied by arresting similes. We are excited to offer this conversation between Pádraig and Henri, recorded during the 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, New Jersey. Together, they discuss the role of animals in Henri's work, the pleasure of aesthetics in poetry, and writing as a form of revenge against forgetting.Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan and raised in Virginia. He has published many collections of poetry and received numerous awards for his work, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent books are a memoir, Orphic Paris (New York Review Books, 2018), Blizzard (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), and Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023). From 2010 to 2014, he was poetry editor of The New Republic. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College and lives in Boston.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.
Acclaimed poet and Pulitzer Prize finalist Elizabeth Alexander, who composed and delivered the 2009 inauguration poem for President Obama, offers a deeply felt meditation on the blessings of family, art and community following the death of her husband in her memoir, The Light of the World. Poet Kevin Young, author of ten books of poetry, winner of the Lenore Marshall Award and a finalist for the National Book Award, gathers twenty years of highlights from his extraordinary career in his new compilation Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015. Longtime friends Alexander and Young share the stage for poetry, companionship, and to discuss their newest works: lyrical forays into life’s passages through grief and joy.**Click here for photos and video from the event.
Drawing on two decades worth of award-winning poetry, Marilyn Hacker’s generous selections in A Stranger’s Mirror include work from four previous volumes along with twenty-five new poems, ranging in locale from a solitary bedroom to a refugee camp. In a multiplicity of voices, Hacker engages with translations of French and Francophone poets. Her poems belong to an urban world of cafés, bookshops, bridges, traffic, demonstrations, conversations, and solitudes. From there, Hacker reaches out to other sites and personas: a refugee camp on the Turkish/Syrian border; contrapuntal monologues of a Palestinian and an Israeli poet; intimate and international exchanges abbreviated on Skype—perhaps with gunfire in the background. A Stranger’s Mirror is not meant only for poets. These poems belong to anyone who has sought in language an expression and extension of his or her engagement with the world—far off or up close as the morning’s first cup of tea. Marilyn Hacker is the recipient of the National Book Award, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, the Robert Fagles Translation Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. Her collection Winter Numbers received a Lambda Literary Award and the Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Paris, France. A Stranger’s Mirror was longlisted for the National Book Award. Poet and dance producer/curator, Karthika Naïr was born in Kerala and lives in Paris. Naïr is the author of Bearings (HarperCollins India, 2009), a poetry collection and The Honey Hunter/Le Tigre de Miel (Young Zubaan, India/Editions Hélium, France, 2013), a children’s book illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet. She was also the principal scriptwriter of DESH, choreographer Akram Khan’s award-winning dance production. In Karthika Naïr’s résumé as an enabler, one finds mention of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Damien Jalet, Käfig/Mourad Merzouki, two Olivier awards, Auditorium Musica per Roma, the Louvre, the Shaolin Temple, misadventures with ninja swords and pachyderms, among others, many of which make their way willy-nilly into her poetry (though, hopefully, not into this retelling of the Mahabharata)."
Wednesday Reading Series Benjamin Hollander was born in Haifa, Israel and as a boy immigrated to New York City. He presently lives on the west coast of North America. His books include: In the House Un-American (Clockroot Books/Interlink Publishing, Spring 2013); Memoir American (Punctum Books, Spring 2013); Vigilance (Beyond Baroque Books, 2005); Rituals of Truce and the Other Israeli (Parrhesia Press, 2004); The Book of Who Are Was (Sun & Moon Press, 1997); How to Read, Too (Leech Books, 1992); and, as editor, Translating Tradition: Paul Celan in France (ACTS, 1988). Of his newest book, In The House Un-American, the poet David Shapiro says: “It is difficult to speak of Benjamin Hollander's masterpiece, so America, so like an inner emigration, as if we had all changed names….A book of this order comes very rarely to our consciousness; we are so censorious of new genres….[T]his book exists as music barely heard in the air becomes music of our ground, grain.” Fanny Howe has written numerous books of fiction, essays and poetry and has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lenore Marshall Award and the Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement Award, among others. Her most recent collection of poetry Second Childhood was published by Graywolf Press. She is currently a Visiting Writer at Brown University.
In this podcast our Programme Manager, Jennifer Williams, talks to Robert Wrigley about his new collection and first book to be published in the UK, The Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2013). They also touch on narrative in poetry, the infinite capacity of poetry to talk about love and wild horses on the southern plains of Idaho. Robert was at the SPL in November 2013 for a reading with John Burnside. From Bloodaxe (http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/personpage.asp?author=Robert+Wrigley) - His first book to be published in the UK, The Church of Omnivorous Light: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2013), draws on several collections published in the US, including Beautiful Country (2010);Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (2006); Lives of the Animals (2003), winner of the Poets Prize; Reign of Snakes (1999), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award; and In the Bank of Beautiful Sins(1995), winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy of American Poets. Wrigley has also won the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize, Poetry magazine’s Frederick Bock Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Celia B. Wagner Award, Poetry Northwest’s Theodore Roethke Award, and six Pushcart Prizes. Read more about Robert: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-wrigley Music by James Iremonger: www.jamesiremonger.co.uk
Please join Melissa Studdard and Tiferet Journal on 9/4/13, from 7-7:30 PM EST, 6-6:30 PM CST, for a conversation with fabulous poet, acclaimed literary critic, professor, editor, best-selling translator, and former United States Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky. Studdard and Pinsky will discuss Pinsky’s newly released anthology, Singing School, a joyous collection that “proposes that attention to great poetry is the best path to fresher, more pleasurable writing and reading.” According to scholar and poet Alicia Ostriker, “Singing School is nothing like the usual anthology of safe and sane selections. Instead, it is a gathering of poetry designed to stimulate the young and startle the old practitioner, with a surprise around every corner. Where else might you find Sterling Brown's 'Harlem Happiness' next to Queen Elizabeth I's 'When I Was Fair and Young,' and two poems away from Plath's 'Nick and the Candlestick'? . . . A book that will instruct and charm every reader." Pinsky has received numerous awards for his poetry and translations, including the Lenore Marshall Award, the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, and the Theodore M. Roethke Memorial Poetry Award. He currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University and serves as the poetry editor for Slate. Tiferet Journal recently published a compilation of twelve of our best transcribed interviews. To purchase The Tiferet Talk Interviews book, please click here.
Please join us as Melissa Studdard talks with Robert Pinsky about poetry, translation, editing, and more. Pinsky, who served three terms as United States Poet Laureate, is also an acclaimed literary critic and the best-selling translator of The Inferno of Dante. He has received numerous awards for his poetry and translations, including the Lenore Marshall Award, the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, and the Theodore M. Roethke Memorial Poetry Award. He currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University and serves as the poetry editor for Slate. His most recent collection of poetry, Selected Poems, was released just this April. Lloyd Schwarz, of The Boston Phoenix, has said of Pinsky, “In his poems Pinsky talks, with democratic warmth and intimacy, to the common things of this world. His extraordinary poems remind us that he has always embodied the very ideal he proposes for what a poet can do.” Tiferet Journal has recently published a compilation of twelve of our best transcribed interviews. To purchase The Tiferet Talk Interviews book, please click here.
Robert Pinsky was the twelfth poet in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series and read in 2010. Former Poet Laureate of the United States, Robert Pinsky is the author of seven volumes of poetry, including Gulf Music (2007) and The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996, which received the Lenore Marshall Award and the Ambassador Book Award of the English Speaking Union. Pinsky's most recent book is Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud (2009). Pinsky's best-selling translation of The Inferno of Dante received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for translation. Pinsky is one of the few members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters to have appeared on television's The Simpsons.
Eamon Grennan was the thirteenth poet in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series and read in 2010. Grennan's books include Matter of Fact (2008); The Quick of It (2005); Still Life with Waterfall (2001), the recipient of the Lenore Marshall Award for Poetry from the American Academy of Poets; and Relations: New and Selected Poems (1998). His Out of Sight: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming later this year. Grennan's Leopardi: Selected Poems (1997) earned the 1997 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He as also the author of a collection of essays entitled Facing the Music: Irish Poetry in the 20th Century(1999). Grennan is a native of Dublin and divides his time between the U.S. and the west of Ireland.
If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Donald Revell is the author of ten collections of poetry, most recently of A Thief of Strings (2007) and Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems (2005), both from Alice James Books. Winner of the 2004 Lenore Marshall Award and two-time winner of the PEN Center USA Award in poetry, Revell has also received the Gertrude Stein Award, two Shestack Prizes, two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the NEA as well as from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. He is also the author of three volumes of translation: Rimbaud's A Season in Hell (Omnidawn, 2007), Apollinaire's Alcools (Wesleyan, 1995) and The Self-Dismembered Man: Selected Later Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire (Wesleyan, 2004). Revell's critical writings include Invisible Green: Selected Prose (Omnidawn, 2005) and The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye (Graywolf, 2007). He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at UNLV.
If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Donald Revell is the author of ten collections of poetry, most recently of A Thief of Strings (2007) and Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems (2005), both from Alice James Books. Winner of the 2004 Lenore Marshall Award and two-time winner of the PEN Center USA Award in poetry, Revell has also received the Gertrude Stein Award, two Shestack Prizes, two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the NEA as well as from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. He is also the author of three volumes of translation: Rimbaud's A Season in Hell (Omnidawn, 2007), Apollinaire's Alcools (Wesleyan, 1995) and The Self-Dismembered Man: Selected Later Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire (Wesleyan, 2004). Revell's critical writings include Invisible Green: Selected Prose (Omnidawn, 2005) and The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye (Graywolf, 2007). He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at UNLV.
If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Donald Revell is the author of ten collections of poetry, most recently of A Thief of Strings (2007) and Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems (2005), both from Alice James Books. Winner of the 2004 Lenore Marshall Award and two-time winner of the PEN Center USA Award in poetry, Revell has also received the Gertrude Stein Award, two Shestack Prizes, two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the NEA as well as from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. He is also the author of three volumes of translation: Rimbaud's A Season in Hell (Omnidawn, 2007), Apollinaire's Alcools (Wesleyan, 1995) and The Self-Dismembered Man: Selected Later Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire (Wesleyan, 2004). Revell's critical writings include Invisible Green: Selected Prose (Omnidawn, 2005) and The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye (Graywolf, 2007). He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at UNLV.
If you experience any technical difficulties with this video or would like to make an accessibility-related request, please send a message to digicomm@uchicago.edu. Donald Revell is the author of ten collections of poetry, most recently of A Thief of Strings (2007) and Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems (2005), both from Alice James Books. Winner of the 2004 Lenore Marshall Award and two-time winner of the PEN Center USA Award in poetry, Revell has also received the Gertrude Stein Award, two Shestack Prizes, two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the NEA as well as from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. He is also the author of three volumes of translation: Rimbaud's A Season in Hell (Omnidawn, 2007), Apollinaire's Alcools (Wesleyan, 1995) and The Self-Dismembered Man: Selected Later Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire (Wesleyan, 2004). Revell's critical writings include Invisible Green: Selected Prose (Omnidawn, 2005) and The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye (Graywolf, 2007). He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at UNLV.