Michael Hulse and Quinn Latimer, reading in Basel, Monday, November 21, 2011

ESP (English Seminar Poetry) presents:

Michael Hulse and Quinn Latimer will read from their poetry on Monday, November 21 2011, in the Grosser Hörsaal of the English Seminar of the University of Basel, at Nadelberg 6 in downtown Basel.

For more information, click on the image of the flyer below.

Rob A. Mackenzie and Katy Evans-Bush, reading in Basel, Thursday, October 20, 2011

ESP (English Seminar Poetry) presents:

Salt poets Rob A. Mackenzie and Katy Evans-Bush will read from their poetry on Thursday, October 20, 2011, in Room 11 of the English Seminar of the University of Basel, at Nadelberg 6 in downtown Basel.

For more information, click on the image of the flyer below.

The next ESP reading will feature Michael Hulse and Quinn Latimer on November 21, 2011.

At Weep

Reginald Shepherd's poems seem to resonate with other things for me, as in my post on "Even This." The poem "At Weep" (on-line here with several other RS poems) reminded me of one of my favorite books, W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants. Here's Shepherd:

Song litters upstate New York maps
with classical towns, Attica, Utica, Syracuse,
Troy, lining the throughways with Latin

and Greek: Ithaca and the other islands
fingering slim lakes.

Here's Sebald (as translated by Michael Hulse):

Monroe, Monticello, Middletown, Wurtsboro, Wawarsing, Colchester and Cadosia, Deposit, Delhi, Neversink and Nineveh—I felt as if I and the car I sat in were being guided by remote control through an outsize toyland where the place names had been picked at random by some invisible giant child, from the ruins of another world long since abandoned.

I remember driving through the south and passing not only Athens but also Philadelphia and perhaps even a Cleveland! This from someone who spent six years living in a Toledo that is not in Spain. :-)

Joachim Sartorius, "Ice Memory"

The latest book to which I have contributed translations is Ice Memory, by Joachim Sartorius, which has just been published by Carcanet in the United Kingdom. The book features translations by many renowned translators, including Michael Hamburger, Michael Hulse, and Christopher Middleton. (What an honor to have my translations included in this book!)

A poem is for nobody.
I send it to my friends,
the freedom to understand it
or not to understand.
— Joachim Sartorius, "Poetics," tr. Andrew Shields