French-American Poetry Week
: A Celebration of Contemporary Poetry across the Atlantic (25-30 April
2005)
The Cultural Services of the French Embassy in Chicago are joining
several Midwestern institutions (University of Chicago, Northwestern
University, Guild Complex, University of Wisconsin-Madison,
International Writing Program of the University of Iowa) to present a
week of encounters, cross-cultural readings, lectures and translation
seminars dedicated to contemporary poetry.
The relationship between French and American poetry dates back to the
19th century, when Baudelaire then Mallarmé translated the work
of Edgar Allan Poe. It has enjoyed a vital dialogue ever since, from
the modernism of the 1920’s to John Ashberry or Yves Bonnefoy, by way
of Wallace Stevens and the French surrealists. This continuous ebb and
flow of reciprocal translations, mutual influences and counterpoints,
is still in effect today, and it seemed important to us to enhance this
existing synergy by showcasing new voices from both countries.
Thus we set out to bring together eight poets, four from each country,
to form four different pairs of first-time partners. The objective was
simple yet difficult: to ask poets of different generations and styles
who did not know each other previously to translate each other’s work,
which is to say to intimately experience the language of the other,
before even meeting to read together, deepening the profound connection
that comes from the act of translation, which is a reversible knowledge
in the sense that we experience our own language as well.
We chose to wander off the beaten path and to invite poets who, for the
most part, have never been translated, in order to make their work
directly available in a poetic version. We hope this effort will help
attract a few more readers from both sides of the Atlantic, to their
poetry, in both languages — as it is said, poetry begets poetry.
ITINERARY
(different poets featured at each event)
CHICAGO PROGRAM – April 25-27th,
2005
April 25, 2005 : 1-5 PM
Poetry Readings & Round Table
University of Chicago
Classics 10
1010 East 59th Street, Chicago
Tel : 773-834-8524
April 26, 2005 : 7.30-9.30 PM
Poetry Readings
Co-hosted by
Guild Complex and Bridge Magazine
Flatfile
Galleries
217 N.
Carpenter St
Tel:
312-491-1190
April 27, 2005 : 4-6 PM
Poetry Readings & Translation Discussion
Northwestern University
Harris 108
1881 Sheridan Road, Evasnton, IL
Tel : 847-491-5966
RECEPTION TO FOLLOW EACH EVENT
MADISON PROGRAM - April 27th,
2005
April 28, 2005 : 1-5 PM
Poetry Readings
University of Wisconsin
La Maison Française
633 North Frances Street,
Madison
Tel : 608.256.1113
7.30-9 PM Poetry
Readings
Pyle Center
University of Wisconsin
702 Langdon Street
Madison
Tel: 608.262.3941
IOWA CITY PROGRAM - April
29-30th, 2005
April 29, 2005 : 4-5.30 PM
Poetry Readings
Poets : David St. John, Jean-Patrice Courtois, Christina Pugh and
Esther Tellerman
April 30th, 2005 7.30-9 PM
Poetry Readings
Poets : Cole Swensen, Nicolas Pesquès, Robyn Shciff and Emmanuel
Laugier
5.30-6.30 PM Translation Panel
Poets : Cole
Swensen, Nicolas Pesquès, David St. John, Jean-Patrice Courtois
University of
Iowa
Shambaugh House
430 N Clinton
Street,Iowa City
Tel :
319.335.0128
8 PM
Andramelch’s Monologue by Valère Novarina
Performed by
Hilario Saavedra
Theatre B
The University
of Iowa,
100 Theatre
Building, Iowa City
Tel :
319.335.0128
THE POETS
Cole Sweensen (American)
Cole Swensen received her B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State
University and a Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from the University
of California, Santa Cruz. Her books include Goest (Alice James Books,
2004); Such Rich Hour (2001); Oh (2000); Try (1999), which won the Iowa
Poetry Prize; Noon (1997), which won the New American Poetry Series
Award; Numen (1995); Park (1991); New Math (1988), which won the
National Poetry Series competition; and It's Alive, She Says. Her
translations of contemporary French poetry include Art Poetic (1999, by
Olivier Cadiot), Natural Gaits (1995, by Pierre Alferi), Past Travels
(1994, by Olivier Cadiot), and Interrmittances II (1994, by Jean
Tortel). Her work as a poet and a translator has appeared in many
journals and anthologies. She is a Contributing Editor for American
Letters and Commentary and for Shiny, and is the translation editor for
How2. Cole Swensen currently teaches at the University of Iowa.
Nicolas Pesquès (French)
Nicolas PESQUÈS, born on July 2, 1946 in Paris, made his
début as a writer in May of 1971. In 1980, facing a hill, he
embarked upon an adventure in writing which includes today four
published volumes: La face nord de Juliau un, deux, trois, and quatre
(The North Slope of Juliau, One, Two, Three, and Four, André
Dimanche Editeur 1988, 1997, 2000). Neither finished nor possible to
conclude, this poem leads and displaces his pursuit; it questions its
own progress as its object. La face nord de Juliau, cinq is on the
editor’s desk. The author is working on its continuation. Other poems,
offshoots of this central work, also appeared: among them, Trois
poèmes (Three poems, Édition du Limon, 1995). Nicolas
Pesquès is equally the author of essays and texts on painting
and artists, in particular on Gilles Aillaud, Anne Deguelle, Jan Voss,
and Aurélie Nemours, as well as of a study on the poetry of
Jacques Dupin.
David St. John (American)
David St. John was born in Fresno, California, in 1949, and
educated at California State University, Fresno, where he received his
B.A. In 1974, he received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. He is
the author of nine books of poetry, including Face : Anovella in verse
(Arctos Press, 2004), Study for the World's Body: New and Selected
Poems (1994), No Heaven (1985), and Hush (1976). His awards include the
Discover/The Nation prize, the James D. Phelan Prize, and the prix de
Rome fellowship in literature. He has also received several National
Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. St.
John currently teaches in the English Department at University of
Southern California, Los Angeles.
Jean Patrice Courtois (French)
Jean-Patrice COURTOIS was born in 1954 in Viroflay, near Paris.
He is a professor of literature at Université de Paris 7, Denis
Diderot, where he teaches Enlightenment philosophy and literature,
aesthetics, theater, and poetry. He has published numerous books
of poetry, including Vie inverse (Inverse Life, Deyrolle, 1992), Hors
de l’heure (Outside the Hour, Deyrolle, 1992), Complication du sommeil
(Complication of Sleep, Circé, 2001), and D’arbre et d’oeil (Of
tree and eye, Prétexte, 2002) and in collaboration with
painters, several limited edition books.He has written numerous
articles on poets, among others on André du Bouchet, Jacques
Dupin, Valère Novarina, Jean-Luc Parant, Rilke, and Reverdy. He
is also an active translator, and has recently contributed eleven poems
by Robert Walser to the revue L’Animal (No. 17, 2004), and is preparing
an integral translation of a book Robert Walser published in 1909. He
conducts research on the 18th century, in particular on Montesquieu and
Rousseau, and has published an essay entitled Inflexions de la
rationalité dans l’Esprit des lois – Écriture et
pensée chez Montesquieu (Inflections of Reason in the Spirit of
Laws: Montesquieu’s Writing and Thought, PUF, 1999).
Robyn Schiff (American)
Robyn SCHIFF’s first collection of poems Worth, which was
recognized with an award from the Greenwall Fund by the Academy of
American Poets, was published in 2002 by the University of Iowa Press,
Kuhl House Poets Series. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming,
in Fence, Verse, Volt, Columbia Poetry Review, and other journals.
Robyn is a contributing editor of the literary journal The Canary, and
she holds an M.A. in Medieval Studies from the University of Bristol,
in England, and an M.F.A. from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a
Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University.
Esther Tellermann (French)
Esther TELLERMANN was born in 1947 in Paris. A former student at the
École Normale Supérieure, she received her diploma in
literature. She is interested in psychoanalysis, and is a member of the
editorial board of La Célibataire. Her contributions appeared in
numerous literary journals, such as Action Poétique, Banana
Split, Po&sie, Ralentir Travaux, Scherzo, Nioques, Le Nouveau
Recueil, L’Étrangère, Moriturus. Her work was included in
a number of anthologies, including the Anthologie de la poésie
française du XVIIIème auXXème siècle
(Anthology of French Poetry from the 18th to the 20th Century)
published in the Pléiade editions by Gallimard. From
Première apparition avec épaisseur (First Appearance with
Thickness, 1986) to Encre Plus Rouge (Ink Redder, 2003) and including
Pangéia (1996) and Guerre extrême (Extreme War, 1999),
Esther Tellermann has continued, for over twenty years, the composition
of her poetic oeuvre published by Flammarion,. Her latest book is a
prose récit entitled Une odeur humaine (A Human Odor, Farrago
Léo Scheer, 2004).
Christina Pugh (American)
Christina Pugh is the author of Rotary (Word Press, 2004), a
book of poems which received the Word Press First Book Prize in 2003.
She has also published Gardening at Dusk, a chapbook of poems (Wells
College Press, 2002). She has received Poetry magazine's Ruth Lilly
Poetry Fellowship, the Grolier Poetry Prize, the Associated Writing
Programs' INTRO Award in Poetry, a Whiting Fellowship for the
Humanities, a William Meredith Scholarship from the Wesleyan Writers
Conference, and three nominations for a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have
recently appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Harvard
Review, Provincetown Arts, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art,
the website Poetry Daily, and in the anthology Poetry 180: A Turning
Back to Poetry, edited by former United States poet laureate Billy
Collins (Random House, 2003). Her criticism has appeared in Poetry,
Verse, Harvard Review, Boston Review, Jacket, and Herspace: Women,
Writing, Solitude (Haworth Press, 2003), and is forthcoming in
Interrogating Images (Continuum Books). She has taught literature and
creative writing at Harvard University, Emerson College, and CUNY,
College of Staten Island, and teaches poetry, fiction, and postcolonial
literature at Northwestern University.
Emmanuel Laugier (French)
Emmanuel LAUGIER was born in 1969 in Meknès, Marocco. He
has published several books of poetry, including L’oeil bande (Tighten
up eye, Deyrolle, 1997), Et je suis dehors déjà je suis
dans l’air (And I Am Outside Already In the Air, Unes, 2000), Son
/ corps / flottant (His / Body / Floating, Didier Devillez, 2000),
Vertébral (Vertebral, Didier Devillez, 2002), and most recently
Portrait de Têtes (Portrait with Heads, prétexte, 2002),
Tout notre aer se noircit (All Our Aer Grows Black, Éditions 1
:1), and Suivantes (The Following, Didier Devillez, 2004). Member of
the L’Animal Review editorial committee, he also co-edited, with Lionel
Destremeau, a number of critical volumes and anthologies of
contemporary poetry published by Éditions Prétexte
(Singularities of the subject; Pluralities of the poem; Fourteen poets;
Critical and Poetical Anthology; Poetry: Variations, forthcoming in May
2005). He conceived the Cahier Jaques Dupin Strates (Farrago, 2000),
wrote an afterword to the second edition of De nul lieu et du Japon (Of
Nowhere and of Japan, Farrago 2001) by the same author, as well as to
publications devoted to the work of Dominique Fourcade, and of
Jean-Patrice Courtois. Two of his essays frame special issues of the
L’Animal: one devoted to Jean-Christophe Bailly (No. 17, 2004) and the
other, co-written with Philippe Choulet, devoted to Jean-Luc Nancy
For more information about the exchange, contact:
Yannick.MERCOYROL@diplomatie.gouv.fr