Conversation about poetry

Episode 13 – Kythe Heller

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Kythe Heller is a poet, essayist, performer, filmmaker, and scholar.In mixed-genre poems, essays, and pieces for collaborative and solo performance, Heller experiments with a grounding of poetics in textual, spatial and performative practices that re-orient art-making as a practice of consciousness: In what ways can our writings become sites of resistance, sites of evolution, parts of an array of realizing new social and ecological relationships by considering how to use language to radically change one’s way of being in the world? She is the author of the poetry collection Firebird (Arrowsmith, 2020), and two chapbooks, Immolation (Monk Honey) and Thunder (WICK: Harvard Divinity School). Her recent poetry and essays have been published or are forthcoming in Tricycle, The American Poetry Review, POOL, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, and other journals. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from Harvard University, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, The Mellon Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and the Laurels Foundation. Her recent film, performance and multimedia work has been staged at the Harvard Film Studies Center, SEEDS Festival, Sonoma State University, WAXworks (NYC), BAX (NYC), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and in various collaborations and street performances in NYC and elsewhere. Her performance work is often collaborative and uses a combination of media (text, music, performance, and video). She has received degrees from Reed College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Harvard Divinity School and has taught literature, religion, media, and art at Coachman Family Homeless Shelter, Harvard University, Bayview Correctional Facility, Bard College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Hofstra University. Currently she is a poet on the faculty of the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College while also pursuing a doctoral degree in Comparative Religion at Harvard University.

Episode 12 – Sam Cha

Sam Cha was born in Korea. He earned an MFA from UMass Boston. A winner of two Academy of American Poets prizes and a St. Botolph’s Club Emerging Artists Grant, his work has appeared in apt, Anderbo, Better, Best New Poets, Boston Review, decomP, DIAGRAM, Memorious, Missouri Review, Rattle, RHINO, and Toad. He’s a poetry editor at Radius. He is the author of a chapbook, American Carnage, that was published by Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs in 2018, and of The Yellow Book, a full-length collection of cross-genre writing, forthcoming from [PANK] Books in 2020.

Episode 11 – Ruth Lepson

Ruth Lepson is poet-in-residence at the New England Conservatory and has often collaborated with musicians. Her most recent book, Ask Anyone (Pressed Wafer), is accompanied by musical settings—see her website, ruthlepson.com, and received the Phillip Whalen Award from Chax Press. Her other books of poetry are Dreaming in Color (Alice James Books), Morphology (blazeVOX), and I Went Looking for You (BlazeVOX). She edited Poetry from Sojourner: Feminist Anthology (Illinois). She has just put together a book of her new & selected poems. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including spoKe, Ping Pong, Let the Bucket Down, Agni, Ploughshares, and The Women’s Review of Books, and she has given many readings, including in St. Petersburg, Russia, and in Barcelona, as well as on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” She grew up in the D.C. area and lives in Cambridge.

Episode 10 – Oliver Strand

Oliver Strand is a visiting lecturer in Studio Foundation at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and Wood Shop Coordinator at Harvard University’s Dept. of Art, Film, and Visual Studies. He received an MFA from Brown University, where he received the Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop Prize for Innovative Writing. His poetry has appeared in Entropy, The Fanzine, Poor Claudia, Burning House Press, and the Spoon River Poetry Review.

Episode 7 – Donald Wellman

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.

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