Author of Parades and Babette, her latest book is Hyperphantasia. Her work is of a radical imagination. The reader who enters the space of her poems faces at first a slight sense of disorientation. The way one feels in a building of unfamiliar layout. Because our usual expectations are not immediately met, the reader begins to feel both anxiety and wonder. Sara Denis Akant is able to bring about conflicting emotions and ideas and hold them there in unresolved tension. Like a slow panning shot that seems to take too long until we stop anticipating the next action and we start paying attention to the details of the image, her poems are an invitation.
In this episode I had the opportunity to speak with Kristen Case. She is the author of two books of poems “Little Arias” and “Principles of Economics” and has a new manuscript “Daphne” looking for a home. An editor and a professor of English at the university of Maine, she wrote a fascinating book on the connections between philosophy and poetry called “American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice”.
In this second conversation with Michael Franco we explore the notions of delight and generosity in poetry. Without the constraints of a 27 minute live broadcast, we were able to dive into the deep waters of sound and meaning, community and experience, and much more.
Cheryl Clark Vermeulen received an M. F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop after a decade of experience in organizations focused on social change. Author of chapbooks This Paper Lantern and Dead-Eye Spring, she has published poems and translations in the journals The Bombay Gin, Transom, Small Po[r]tions, Drunken Boat, Caketrain, Jubilat, Sixth Finch, Third Coast, Solstice Literary Magazine, TWO LINES Online, DIAGRAM, EOAGH, Split Rock Review, among others, as well as the anthology Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico. She is an Assistant Professor in Liberal Arts at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she initiated a Creative Writing Minor. She is also the Poetry Editor for the literary magazine Pangyrus. She was a finalist recipient for a Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Artist Fellowship. Originally from Illinois, she has lived in Jamaica Plain for twenty years, now with her husband, twin sons, and several pets. She loves, more than anything, to laugh.
Donald Wellman has
nine books of English-language poetry to his credit. He translates from several
languages, German and French as well as Spanish. He is the English language
translator of Antonio Gamoneda, Emilio Prados, and Roberto Echavarren. From
German he has translated Yvan Goll’s Neila’s Evening Song: Last Poems
of Yvan Goll; from French, Blaise
Cendrars, The Prose of the
Transsiberian and Little Joan of France. His academic
expertise is in modern and contemporary poetry and poetics. His research and
scholarship has concentrated on the works of Ezra Pound, William Carlos
Williams, Charles Olson and on figures associated with Black Mountain College
and with emerging avant-gardes (conceptual poetry and language-centered
poetry). Additionally, he has written on transnational literature, including
the literature and culture of the Caribbean. A study of translation practice, Albiach / Celan / Reading Across Languages
is available from Annex, 2017. His Expressivity in Modern Poetry is newly
released from Fairleigh Dickinson UP, March 2019. Editing O.ARS,
1981-1993. Among
the Neighbors, The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at
Buffalo is forthcoming.
His book of poetry include Fields (1995),a selection of twenty years previous work. In addition to a range
of lyrics, Fields addresses themes
related to childhood and youth in New Hampshire and Maine. It includes a
“libretto” dedicated to labor history during the period of industrialization
and establishment of the mills. An ethnographic bent characterizes much of his
work, Baroque Threads and Prolog Pages were shaped from materials
in the notebooks that were kept while living in Costa Rica, Mexico, and Spain. A North Atlantic Wall is drawn from pilgrimage
experiences in Spain and Morocco, where he pursued portions of the Camino de
Santiago and then continued to follow trails used by Albigensian refugees
fleeing through the Pyrenees, at the conclusion of a 20-year crusade initiated
by Pope Innocent III to eliminate Catharism. This soul journey concludes on the
peaks of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. Working with a close ethnographic
focus on the rural poor, Cranberry Island
Series is a collection addressing life in the Gulf of Maine. Essays are interleaved
with a sampling of poetry dating from as early as the mid1970s, including poems of mourning for
lost companions. Roman Exercises and Essay Poems were released in the last three
years. These works are long serial poems, mixing prose and verse composition.
Wellman was born in Nashua, NH. He also identifies with
Cranberry Island, Maine, his mother’s home. He graduated from Stuttgart
American High School in Germany and the University of New Hampshire. After
military service in Germany, he earned a Doctor of Arts from the University of
Oregon. He now lives in Weare New Hampshire. He has two loving and precocious
children, each an accomplished scholar and creative talent. He has just
returned from residence in Madrid and visits to Istanbul and Morocco. The
profile would seem to be that of a
wanderer, but he identifies deeply with each of the places that have shaped his
life.
antonioochoa.org 