Wednesday, Mar 31, 2021 10:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Globus Books is excited to present a bilingual reading by Ivan Sokolov & US poets: “Off with the Top of Their Head!”

Part One: Ivan Sokolov reads his poem “AND NIGHT TOOK NIGHT AND ILLUMINED THE NIGHT” in Russian, his English translation of it recited by Lissa Tyler Renaud.

Part Two: Ivan presents his recent translations from contemporary American lyric accompanied by the authors themselves. Charles Bernstein, Norma Cole, Evan Kennedy, Nathaniel Mackey, Michael Palmer, Julien Poirier, Ariel Resnikoff, Aaron Shurin and Matvei Yankelevich will read their originals.

The event will be held in Russian and English. A selection of the translated poems under the same title (referring to Dickinson) is about to come out in Vozdukh Magazine.

Poster art: Norma Cole.

This conversation will be held on Zoom, at 10.00 am PDT, 1.00 pm EDT and will be streaming on the Globus Books YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/GlobusBooksSF/videos.
To register for the Zoom conference, please send a private message to Globus Books Facebook page. Free, but with a limited number of seats.

Charles Bernstein is the author or editor of near 100 books, ranging from full-length collections of poetry and essays to pamphlets, libretti, collaborations and translations of his work. His most recent books are Topsy-Turvy (April 2021), Near/Miss (2018), Pitch of Poetry (2016), Recalculating (2013) and Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions (2011), all from the University of Chicago Press and All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (2010) from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Press, 2011). Bernstein is the recipient of the 2019 Bollingen Prize for American Literature, the premier American poetry prize, for lifetime achievement and for Near/Miss. In 2006, Bernstein was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is the co-founder and co-editor, with Al Filreis, of PennSound; and editor, and co-founder, with Loss Pequenño Glazier, of The Electronic Poetry Center. With Bruce Andrews, he edited L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which was anthologized as The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Southern Illinois University Press, 1984).
Norma Cole is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Fate News (Omnidawn, 2018), Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988–2008 (City Lights, 2009), Spinoza in Her Youth (Omnidawn, 2002), and Metamorphopsia (Potes & Poets Press, 1988). She is also the author of TO BE AT MUSIC: Essays & Talks (Omnidawn, 2010), and her translations from the French include Jean Daive’s White Decimal (Omnidawn, 2016). In 2006 she was the lead artist for Collective Memory, a project commissioned by the California Historical Society. Cole has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, among others. She has taught at San Francisco State University, the University of San Francisco, and Otis College. Cole lives in San Francisco, California.

Evan Kennedy is a poet and bicyclist residing in San Francisco, California. He is the author of several books, including Jerusalem Notebook, THE SISSIES, TERRA FIRMAMENT, and I am, am I, to trust the joy that joy is no more or less there now than before.

Nathaniel Mackey was born in Miami, Florida, in 1947. He is the author of several books of poetry, his most well-known collection, Splay Anthem, won the 2006 National Book Award, and his work has been recognized with other prestigious awards, including the Bollingen Prize and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Mackey has published two books of criticism, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (1993) and Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (2005), and five other books of prose, the most recent being the epistolary novel Late Arcade (2017). Mackey taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for several decades and is now the Reynolds Price Distinguished Professor at Duke University.

Ariel Resnikoff is a poet, scholar, translator, editor and educator. His most recent works include the chapbooks 'Ten-Four: Poems, Translations, Variations' (The Operating System, 2015), with Jerome Rothenberg, and 'Between Shades' (Materialist Press, 2014). His writing has been translated into Russian, French, Spanish and German, and has appeared or is forthcoming in Jacket2, Golden Handcuffs Review, Full Stop Quarterly, Tinge Magazine, The Wolf Magazine for Poetry and Schreibheft, Zeitschrift für Literatur. With Stephen Ross, he is at work on the first critical bilingual edition of Mikhl Likht’s modernist Yiddish long poem, 'Processions,' and with Lilach Lachman and Gabriel Levin, he is translating into English the collected writings of the translingual-Hebrew poet, Avot Yeshurun. Ariel is a reviews editor at Jacket2 and a founding editor of the journal and print-archive Supplement, co-published by the Materialist Press, Kelly Writers House and the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught courses on multilingual diasporic literatures at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (UPenn) and at BINA: The Jewish Movement for Social Change. In 2019, he completed his PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation entitled 'Home Tongue Earthquake: The Radical Afterlives of Yiddishland, and he is currently a Posen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Secular Jewish Poetics and Pedagogy. Ariel lives on Alameda Island in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, the artist and landscape architect, Rivka Weinstock. 'Unnatural Bird Migrator,' (The Operating System, 2020) which the poet Jake Marmer has described as “deep Ashkenazi Voodoo” is his first full-length poetry collection.

Michael Palmer was born in New York City in 1943 and is long resident in San Francisco. He is the author of At Passages (1995); The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972–1995 (1998); The Promises of Glass (2000); Codes Appearing: Poems 1979–1988 (2001); Company of Moths (2005), Thread (2011) and others. He is the translator of works by Emmanuel Hocquard, Vicente Huidobro, and Alexei Parshchikov, among others, and the editor of Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics. For over thirty years he has collaborated with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company.

Julien Poirier is the author of several poetry collections, including El Golpe Chileño (Ugly Duckling, 2010), Stained Glass Windows of California (Ugly Duckling, 2012), Way Too West (Bootstrap, 2015) and Out of Print (City Lights, 2016). In 2005, he published an experimental newspaper novel, Living! Go and Dream (Ugly Duckling). With Garrett Caples, he is the co-editor of Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems by Frank Lima. He is also the editor of an anthology of writing by Jack Micheline, One of a Kind (Ugly Duckling, 2008), and a book of travel journals by Bill Berkson, Invisible Oligarchs (Ugly Duckling, 2016). A founding member of Ugly Duckling Presse Collective, Poirier edited the newspaper New York Nights from 2001 to 2006. He has taught poetry in New York City public schools and at San Quentin State Prison. He lives in Berkeley with his wife and two daughters.

Lissa Tyler Renaud (MFA Directing; PhD Theatre History/Criticism, UC Berkeley 1987). Lifelong actress. Since 1985, founder-director of the Actors' Training Project studio based in Oakland, for training inspired by Kandinsky's work. Since 2004, as visiting professor, master teacher, invited speaker, actor-scholar and recitalist, she has taught, lectured and published widely on theatre training, dramatic theory and the early European avant-garde: at major theatre institutions of Asia, around the U.S, in England, Mexico, Russia and Sweden. Founding editor, English-French Critical Stages; board member. Co-editor, The Politics of American Actor Training (Routledge); invited chapter, Routledge Companion to Stanislavsky. Editor, Wuzhen Theatre Festival, China; Editor, Stan Lai: Twelve Plays (U. Michigan Press, pending). Senior Writer, Scene4; founder-editor, “Kandinsky Anew” series.

Aaron Shurin is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, most recently Flowers & Sky: Two Talks (Entre Rios Books, 2017), The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks (University of Michigan Press, 2015), and two books from City Lights: Citizen (poems, 2012) and King of Shadows (essays, 2008). His work has appeared in over forty national and international anthologies, from The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry to Italy’s Nuova Poesia Americana: San Francisco, and has been supported by grants from The National Endowment for the Arts, The California Arts Council, The San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Gerbode Foundation. A pioneer in both LGBTQ studies and innovative verse, Shurin was a member of the original Good Gay Poets collective in Boston, and later the first graduate of the storied Poetics Program at New College of California. He has written numerous critical essays about poetic theory and compositional practice, as well as personal narratives on sexual identity, gender fluidity, and the AIDS epidemic. A longtime educator, he’s the former director and currently Professor Emeritus for the MFA Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.

Ivan Sokolov is a poet, translator, scholar and critic from St Petersburg, now based in Berkeley. Author of four books of poetry. Poems and translations in russophone magazines Vozdukh, [Translit], Mitin zhurnal, Zerkalo, Nosorog, as well as online: GRIOZA, Queer-Culture in Russia, etc. Critical writing and reviews in Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, on Colta.ru and syg.ma. Russian translations of selections from G. M. Hopkins’s Journal, of Frank O’Hara’s Oranges (short-listed for the Nora Gal’ Award), poems by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers, Clayton Eshleman, Barbara Guest, Norma Cole; currently at work on translating Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath. Contributing editor for an upcoming Russian anthology of Language writing. English translations of the poetry of Nataliia Azarova (Trafika Europe, 2018). Author of essays on the music of Leonid Desiatnikov and on the religious in contemporary art. His poetry has been translated into English, German, Greek, Spanish, Italian and other languages. Finalist of the Arkadii Dragomoshchenko Award for Poetry (2016) and other prizes. Resident at Villa Sarkia (Finland, 2015) and the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators (Sweden, 2019). Participant of the Russo-German poetry project VERSschmuggel (2015), of PEN AMERICA’s Writers in Dialog translation seminar (2020) and of a few music and dance collaborations. Co-editor at MRP Press, member of the editorial board at GRIOZA, where he curated an international festschrift for the centenary of Paul Celan.

Matvei Yankelevich is the author of Some Worlds for Dr. Vogt, Alpha Donut, Boris by the Sea, and several chapbooks, including: Writing in the Margin, The Present Work, The Nature Poetry of Matvei Yankelevich, and Bending at the Elbow. His translations of the eccentric early 20th century writer Daniil Kharms appeared in Harpers, The New Yorker, and Open City, among others, and were collected in Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms. He teaches translation and book arts at Columbia University, and has taught at the Russian Department of Hunter College and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. He is a founding member of the Ugly Duckling Presse editorial collective where he curates the Eastern European Poets Series.

This program is produced and hosted by Zarina Zabrisky, the author of three short story collections and a novel "We, Monsters" (2014). Zabrisky's work appeared in nine countries in over fifty literary magazines and anthologies, including The Nervous Breakdown, A Capella Zoo, Eleven Eleven, The Rumpus, Guernica, and received nominations and awards. Zabrisky runs literary and cultural programs at Globus Books.