Schoen Books Blog

W E R: CHRISTIAN HAWKEY, PIOTR SOMMER, MATVEI YANKELEVICH

Когда: S a t u r d a y 21 N o v e m b e r 8pm

GDZIE: The Old Firehouse (Schoen Books)

NEARING TWO YEARS OF CELAN SALON

MATVEI YANKELEVICH played Daniil Kharms in the most popular Celan Salon to date. Now he’s back so we can celebrate his Boris by the Sea, the newest book from Octopus Books (home of our own Heather Christle. In the interim, his long poem, The Present Work, is still available from Palm Press and his Kharms translation, Today I Wrote Nothing, is in paperback, joining Oberiu: An Anthology of Russian of Absurdism.

His translation of Mayakovsky’s “A Cloud in Pants” is included in Night Wraps the Sky: Writing By and About Mayakovsky (FSG, 2008). Octopus Magazine hosts his Field Notes on Russian-American poets, and he edited Aufgabe 8, on Russian poetry and poetics, just out from Litmus Press.

A founding editor of Ugly Duckling Presse, where he designs books, co-edits 6×6 and edits the Eastern European Poets Series, he teaches at Hunter College and Columbia University School of the Arts. Let Celan Salon suggest sampling recent poems at, por ejemplo, Action Yes and in, par excellence, Damn the Caesars, selah.

PIOTR SOMMER is “the great poet of ‘everyday loneliness, contrary to yourself perhaps.’ Like Frank O’Hara, whom he has translated into Polish, he is on the lookout for what he calls ‘improper names’—the very ones that allow us to construe the unkempt and taciturn world that surrounds us.” So John Ashbery. When Sommer’s O’Hara appeared in 1987, “it led to a small poetical war between the young experimental group of poets influenced by O’Hara, known as “The Barbarians”, and their opponents “The Neo-Classicists”, who defended more traditional Polish poetry.”

Tomaz Salamun, another poet Sommer has translated–and Ashbery, Berryman, Cage, Koch, and Reznikoff are still others–sums in up: “It might come as a shock to you, but the real father of Polish poetry written in the last 20 years is Piotr Sommer. Look at his clarity, his gentle light as immediately after rain, his landscapes and touches, his fascinating human scale—and find out why.”

Sommer, who lives outside Warsaw, where he edits the seminal literary journal, Literatura na Swiecie, is a Franke Fellow at Yale for Fall 2009. In addition to ten volumes of poetry in Polish, there are two in English, with translations by Ashbery and Michael Kasper among others. The latest, Continued (Wesleyan, 2005), will be available at the reading.

CHRISTIAN HAWKEY, star of When You Think Of It, is the author of three books of poetry: The Book of Funnels (Verse Press, 2004), Citizen Of (Wave Books, 2007) and Ventrakl (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010).

Information leading to the capture of Hawkey’s chapbook, Hour, Hour (Delirium Press, 2006), or collection, Reisen in Ziegengeschwindigkeit (kookbooks, 2008), will be rewarded with a copy of the first Minutes of the Robert Walser Society of Western Massachusetts, the second Sienese Shredder, or the third Agriculture Reader, where excerpts from “Ulf” and “Sonnets in the Mouth of an Elizabethan Wolf” will and have appeared, retro-respectively.

The most recent Chicago Review features a portfolio of contemporary poets from Berlin, edited by Hawkey, who has translated Daniel Falb, Sabine Scho, Steffen Popp, and Uljana Wolf, with whom he has also translated the greatest living writer writer-in-German.

The Waldrops are coming! On Wednesday, September 2 at 8 p.m. Schoen Books will host a special evening with Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop, poets (with some two score books between them), publishers and printers (at Providence’s legendary Press, Burning Deck), translators extraordinaire (Baudelaire, Celan, Jabes, etc.), Chevalier(s) des Arts et des Lettres, novelists (Rosmarie), collagists (Keith), essayists, gentle godparents of the American avante garde. For more, see below.

But first, Sunday, August 23 at 8 p.m. Ben Estes and Emily Toder will each read poems, to celebrate the post- and pre- release of their respective chapbooks: Lamp like l’map (Factory Hollow Press, Spring 2009) and Brushes With (Tarpaulin Sky, Fall 2009). Whereas Mark Leidner will stand up and tell jokes, Lewis Freedman will sit down and tell magic. *UPDATE* Carson Cistulli (sojourning from Portland) will select from these aphorisms and Ari Feld (departing for Barcelona) will read poems like this one in the new NOÖ. Also on hand, printed by Nor By Press: special invitations to the below and a new broadside, Jono Tosch’s My Own Chair.

There will be seltzer and snacks before, during and after. Arrive early to browse and graze.

What can Wikipedia tell us about the Waldrops? Well, Keith Waldrop, born Emporia, Kansas, 1932, his father Arthur Waldrop, worker for the Santa Fe railroad, his mother Opal née Mohler, in later life piano teacher and practical nurse. After grade school and junior high in Kansas, went to high school at a fundamentalist (holiness) school in South Carolina. Pre-med program at Kansas State Teachers College interrupted by draft in 1953. Sent as army engineer (in water purification) to Germany. {Meanwhile} Rosemarie Sebald was born in Kitzingen am Main on August 24, 1935. Towards the end of the Second World War, she joined a travelling theatre, but returned to school after in early 1946. At school, she studied piano and flute and played in a youth orchestra.

At Christmas 1954, the orchestra gave a concert for American soldiers stationed at Kitzingen. Afterwards, one of the audience, Keith Waldrop invited members of the orchestra to listen to his records. He and Rosmarie became friendly and worked together over the next few months, translating German poetry into English. That same year, she entered the University of Würzburg, where she studied literature, art history and musicology. In 1955, she transferred to the University of Freiburg, where she discovered the writings of Robert Musil and participated in a protest against a lecture given by Heidegger. She then moved to the University of Aix-Marseille, where Keith spent 1956-7 on his GI Bill. At the end of the year, he returned to the University of Michigan. In 1958, he won a Major Hopwood Prize. He sent most of the money to Rosmarie to pay for her passage to the United States.

The couple married, and…in 1961, the Waldrops bought a secondhand printing press and started Burning Deck Magazine. This was the beginning of Burning Deck, which was to become one of the most influential small press publishers of innovative poetry in the United States.

But what wouldn’t the Waldrops tell us about the Waldrops? Well, the Waldrops have won too many prizes to recount, most recently Rosmarie’s 2008 Pen Poetry Prize for Translation for Ulf Stolterfoht’s Lingos I-IX (Burning Deck). In 2006, New Directions compiled three prize-winning books of poetry, including her own gravities (The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle, and Reluctant Gravities) as Curves to the Apple, which along with Keith’s recently gathered Transcendental Poems (University of California Press) is surely one of the great poetic trilogies of any age. 2009 also saw Keith’s first book of collages (with poems), Several Gravities (Siglio) and a second translation of Baudelaire, Paris Spleen (Wesleyan University Press, which also recently issued 2006’s acclaimed Flowers of Evil in paperback.)

*A wide range of past and future Waldropiana will be for sale / on display and commemorative ephemera from Nor By Press may be present. Arrive early to browse and reserve a seat.*