Poetry Center Feb 17 & 19 Events

The Poetry Center
presents


• Thursday FEB 17, 2011
Gloria Gervitz (Mexico City)
3:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free

• Saturday FEB 19
Gloria Gervitz (Mexico City) and Esther Tellermann * (Paris)
with François Luong, Stacy Doris, and Susan Gevirtz
7:30 pm @ Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin (at Geary), $10

* NOTE: Esther Tellermann has had to cancel her travel plans. We are arranging for a virtual presence, together with her work in translation to be read by poet-translators François Luong and Stacy Doris.

French poet Esther Tellermann is best known in the US for her work Mental Ground (Burning Deck), translated by National Book Award-winning poet Keith Waldrop. Born in 1947, she is an agrégé of letters and teaches in Paris, where she’s on the editorial board of the psychoanalytical review La Célibataire. Flammarion has published her seven books of poetry, beginning in 1986 with Première apparition avec épaisseur; Trois plans inhumains (1989), Distance de fuite (1993), Pangéia (1996), Guerre extrême (1999), Encre plus rouge (2003), and Terre exacte (2007). Regarding Keith Waldrop's translation Mental Ground (2002, from Guerre extrême):

“I read, on page 49, ‘Nothing will be disclosed/ but stone to dissolve/ at the border. . . .’ And it was then that I had to return to poem one and begin reading again to be within the poetry . . . and with my next breath moist on the window, I was released again, as I am by great poetry to travel within my life. . . . Poems like these allow people like me, and you, access, free and open, to other real realms.” —Michael Basinksi


Gloria Gervitz was born in 1943 in Mexico City, where she still lives. Her work as a poet for almost thirty years was one multi-book poem, Migraciones. The first volume, Shajarit, was published in 1979, and the last two volumes, Treno and Septiembre, each appeared in 2003, completing the work. Published, in Mark Shafer’s translation, in the UK by Shearsman and in the US by Junction Press, Migrations has been called “one of the more important poetic texts to emerge from Mexico, or just about anywhere, in recent decades.” (Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno)

“To say that is this is a book of the immigrant experience — which in some sense it is — is to underrate the range of form and feeling that Gervitz brings to it, creating thereby an epic of the migratory self. Like Pound’s Cantos or Zukofsky’s “A”, hers is the work of a lifetime. . . . Migrations takes its place with theirs as a long and difficult poem which is the achievement of a great poetic talent: a complex tribute to the complex world from which it comes.” —Jerome Rothenberg

Gloria Gervitz has pubished studies of the work of Clarice Lispector, and Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, and translated poetry by, among others, Anna Akhmatova, Samuel Beckett, Kenneth Rexroth, Susan Howe, and Lorine Niedecker. Her own work has also been translated into French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Swedish, and her name appeared on the list of recent nominees for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
For Esther Tellermann’s reading, her voice will be accompanied by poems read in translation by poet-translators François Luong and Stacy Doris.

François Luong, originally from Strasbourg, France, lives in San Francisco. He is the author of a chapbook, The Symmetries (Ink, France, forthcoming) and the French translator of Angela Rawlings’ Wide slumber for lepidopterists (Le clou dans le fer, France, forthcoming). His poems and translations can be found or are forthcoming in Telephone, Open Letter, Absent, Bombay Gin, Mantis, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. He works in the video game industry.

Stacy Doris, who teaches at SFSU, is a prolific translator, primarily from the French. Esther Tellerman’s poetry was the first work by a French poet she translated, for the anthology of contemporary French poetry that she co-edited, titled Violence of the White Page (Tuoyonyi, 1991). Her recent books include Knot (University of Georgia) and Cheerleader’s Guide to the World: Council Book (Roof Books).

Gloria Gervitz will read her own work en Español, with translations read by Susan Gevirtz, author most recently of Thrall (Post-Apollo), Broadcast (Traffiker), and Aerodrome Orion and Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street). Cofounder with Greek poet Siarita Kouka of the Paros Symposium for Translation and Conversation, she teaches at California College of Arts and at Mills College.


Gloria Gervitz's Poetry Center appearances are in conjunction with the exhibition México Política y Poética, and are co-sponsored by the Fine Arts Gallery, San Francisco State University.

Exhibition: OPENING Feb. 17, 4:30–7:30pm; runs thru March 24; Wed–Sat, 11am–4pm

Photos: (top) Esther Tellermann; (above) Gloria Gervitz by Graciela Iturbide; (below) The Trench by Máximo Gonzalez. Watercolor on out-of-circulation currency. 6.5 cm x 15.5 cm. 2003. Private collection, Mexico City.


COMING UP:

Most events are free for SFSU students and Poetry Center members; reduced low-income admission; no one turned away for lack of funds.
• Thursday FEB 17
Gloria Gervitz (Mexico City)
3:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free

• Saturday FEB 19
Esther Tellermann (Paris) and Gloria Gervitz (Mexico City)
with François Luong, Stacy Doris and Susan Gevirtz
7:30 pm @ Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin (at Geary), $10

• Thursday FEB 24
Steve Katz (Denver) and Barbara Henning (New York City)
3:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free

• Thursday MAR 03
Tisa Bryant (Los Angeles) and Ronald Palmer (San Francisco)
3:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free

• Sunday MAR 06
The New Talkies, with Tisa Bryant, Jen Hofer, Jennifer Nellis, Ronald Palmer,
Konrad Steiner, and special guests Erin Morrill and C.S. Giscombe
co-sponsored with ATA and Small Press Traffic
curated by Konrad Steiner and Jen Hofer
7:30 pm @ Artists Television Access, 992 Valencia Street (at 21st), $10

• Thursday MAR 10
Fred Moten (Durham, NC) and Steve Dickison (San Francisco)
7:30 pm @ Meridian Gallery, 535 Powell Street (above Sutter), $10

• Thursday MAR 24
Jennifer Martenson (Providence, RI) and Claire Becker (San Francisco)
3:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free
7:30 pm @ the Green Arcade, 1680 Market (at Gough), free

• Thursday APR 07
Reginald Dwayne Betts (Maryland)
3:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free

• Thursday APR 14
Camille Roy (San Francisco) and Robert Glück (San Francisco)
7:30 pm @ Meridian Gallery, 535 Powell Street (above Sutter), $10

• Saturday APR 16
Philippe Beck (Paris) and Guy Bennett (Los Angeles)
7:30 pm @ Meridian Gallery, 535 Powell Street (above Sutter), $10

• Thursday MAY 05
Poetry Center Book Award reading
Joseph Stroud (Santa Cruz) and Peter Weltner (San Francisco)
3:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free

• Saturday MAY 14
Susan Thackrey (San Francisco) on Robert Duncan’s THE H.D. BOOK
7:30 pm @ Unitarian Center, 1187 Franklin (at Geary), $10

Most events are free for SFSU students and Poetry Center members; reduced low-income admission; no one turned away for lack of funds.