The Waldrops are my Heroes.

Thanks to everyone who came out last night to hear the Waldrops read. And special thanks to Joe Donahue and Tony Tost for their wonderful introductions.

I was glad to have the chance to thank the Waldrops for their role as teachers in my life and in the life of many other writers and poets. Here's what I said in a very husky and cold-ridden voice:

Tonight Poet Tony Tost will introduce Rosmarie Waldrop and Poet Joe Donahue will introduce Keith. But before Tony comes up here to start things off, I wanted to say a few words about the Waldrops. From the readings tonight you will learn what wonderful poets Keith and Rosmarie are. But you might not know about their work as mentors and teachers. I would venture to say that there are a few hundred poets who would claim them as mentors. I was going to run a poll on Facebook so that I could offer you an exact number, but I unfortunately came down with this terrible cold and never got around to it.

But I can tell you from personal experience what wonderful teachers they are. When I was 18, I met Keith and Rosmarie for the first time. It was my first year of college and though they were both teaching that semester, I was in class with neither of them. They quickly befriended me, however, because I was taking a poetry workshop led by one of their students. She must have slipped them the news that I too might be one of those unfortunate people who would like to cut words out of old books in the middle of the night or translate sonnets from languages that I didn’t understand, rather than going to law school or doing something else that would let me eat well. In any case, before I even knew there was a poetry community in Providence, they welcomed me into it. They looked at my fledgling work seriously, offering both criticism and praise. But the most significant thing they did for me happened at their house that same year. The Waldrops were hosting a party for a Scandinavian poet. They were not only kind enough to invite me to it, but when they introduced me to the visiting poet they said, “This is Maggie Zurawski. She is a poet.” This may not seem like a significant gesture to everyone, but I am sure that many of you in the room tonight know what it’s like to be 18 or 19, thinking that you want to be a poet. It takes a lot of courage to accept yourself in those terms. Aside from feeling that the proposition of being a poet is an absurd one given the world we live in today, one also feels that perhaps to make such a claim one must first produce a masterpiece, or at least a fair number of works. But when the Waldrops introduced me as a poet that night, I knew that they took me and the little work I had written seriously and that it was also time for me to do the same. They didn’t doubt me, so I stopped doubting myself, at least often enough to never stop writing. Over the years, they have kept up with me, finding me no matter where I seemed to land, always making sure I would get the latest books they’ve published. I made sure, too, that they were the last people to read my book manuscript before it went off to the publisher. I needed to know what Rosmarie and Keith thought should be cut before I would listen to any editor. In short, they’ve taught me what it means to be part of a poetry community. That if we care about poetry, we need to care about one another, too. What they’ve done for me, they’ve done for many others. I’m not special, just lucky enough to have received their care. I only hope that when I become a teacher, I am able to treat my students with as much kindness and generosity as they treated us. So tonight Rosmarie and Keith, I want to thank you for all your kindness and encouragement over the years. I know I am not the best at remembering to send thank you notes when I get Burning Deck books in the mail, so tonight I wanted to make sure you knew how grateful I am for all those books that have come like clockwork over the years, thank you for your poems, for your translations, for all your encouragement, for your loyalty and enthusiasm, in short for everything you’ve done for us and for poetry. Thank you.

You can listen to last night's reading by the Waldrops here.

(Please Forward Far and Wide!)

Minor American Presents:

Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Talk on Translation: 4pm
Duke University, English Department Lounge (West Campus), Allen Building, 3rd Floor, Chapel Drive.

Poetry Reading: 8pm
Duke University, East Duke Parlors (East Campus), 1st Floor - Pink Parlor

(For Campus Map and Directions go to: http://map.duke.edu/)

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC!

(Co-ponsored by the English Department's Graduate Reading Group in Contemporary Poetry, the Department of Romance Studies, the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature, and the Franklin Humanities Institute)

Keith Waldrop's 2009 books are: Transcendental Studies (poetry, Univ of California), which won the 2009 National Book Award for Poetry; Several Gravities (collages & poetry, Siglio Press); and Paris Spleen, the prose poems of Baudelaire (Wesleyan). He has also translated Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil as well as books of poetry by Anne-Marie Albiach, Claude Royet-Journoud, Paol Keineg, Dominique Fourcade, Pascal Quignard, and Jean Grosjean. Other books of poems include The Real Subject (Omnidawn) and the trilogy: The Locality Principle, The Silhouette of the Bridge (America Award, 1997) and Semiramis, If I Remember (Avec Books). He teaches at Brown University in Providence.

Rosmarie Waldrop’s recent poetry books are Curves to the Apple, Blindsight (both New Directions), and Love, Like Pronouns (Omnidawn). University of Alabama Press published her collected essays, Dissonance (if you are interested). She has translated, from the German, books by Friederike Mayröcker, Elke Erb, Oskar Pastior, Gerhard Rühm, Ulf Stolterfoht and, from the French, Edmond Jabès, Emmanuel Hocquard and Jacques Roubaud. Together, Keith and Rosmarie have published Well Well Reality (collected collaborations, Post-Apollo Press), Ceci n’est pas Keith Ceci n’est pas Rosmarie (autobiographies, Burning Deck), and translated Jacques Roubaud’s poems on the streets of Paris: The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, Than the Human Heart (Dalkey Archive). They co-edit Burning Deck Press in Providence.

Please Forward This Announcement:

MINOR AMERICAN READING
Lucy Corin & Guillermo Parra
Saturday, November 14, 8pm
at THE SPACE
715 Washington Street
Durham, NC
FREE, OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, BYOB

This event is sponsored by
The Duke University Department of English Poetry Working Group

Lucy Corin is the author of the short story collection The Entire Predicament (Tin House Books, 2007) and the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls (FC2, 2004). She teaches at the University of California, Davis, where many professors are currently working to keep the university from being privatized. You can find her microfictional apocalypses in The Massachusetts Review, Gulf Coast, West Branch, Pen/America, and Diagram.

Guillermo Parra lives in Durham, NC and writes the blog Venepoetics. He has published Caracas Notebook (Cy Gist Press, 2006) and Phantasmal Repeats (Petrichord Books, 2009). He is currently translating the work of Venezuelan poet Juan Sánchez Peláez.

Question

Is the face a person made presentable?

Production is overrated, or perhaps, at this point, simply overdone. Anything we might need is nothing that can be made. This is the best argument for poetry.

MINOR AMERICAN READING
Gail Scott & Robert Glück
-musical performance by y2kbunker-
Saturday, October 24th, 8pm
at THE SPACE
715 Washington Street
Durham, NC
FREE, OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, BYOB

This event is co-sponsored by
The Duke University Department of English Poetry Working Group
&
The Center for Canadian Studies at Duke

Gail Scott has completed a new novel, The Obituary. She has written 7 other books, including the anthology Biting The Error edited with Bob Gluck, Camille Roy, and Mary Berger, Coach House, 2004 [shortlisted for a Lambda award]; the novel, My Paris, about a sad diarist in conversation with Gertrude Stein and Walter Benjamin in contemporary Paris, Dalkey Archive [Normal, Ill] September, 2003; the story collection Spare Parts Plus Two [Coach House, 2002]. The novels Main Brides and Heroine, and the essay collections Spaces Like Stairs and la théorie, un dimanche [with Nicole Brossard et al]. Her translation of Michael Delisle’s Le Déasarroi du matelot was shortlisted for the Governor General’s award in translation [2001]. She was named one of the 10 best Canadian novelists of the year 1999 by the trade magazine Quill + Quire. She is co-founder of the critical journal Spirale (Montréal) and Tessera (new writing by women). She teaches Creative Writing at Université de Montréal.

Robert Glück is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction, including two novels, Margery Kempe and Jack the Modernist and a book of stories, Denny Smith. Glück edited, along with Camille Roy, Mary Berger and Gail Scott, the anthology Biting The Error: Writers on Narrative. Glück was Co-Director of Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center, Director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State, and Associate Editor at Lapis Press. His poetry and fiction have been published in the New Directions Anthology, City Lights Anthologies, Best New Gay Fiction 1988 and 1996,The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Best American Erotica 1996 and 2005, and The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction. His critical articles appeared in artforum international, Aperture, Poetics Journal, and Nest: A Quarterly of Interiors, and he prefaced Between Life and Death, a book on the paintings of Frank Moore. Last year he and artist Dean Smith completed the film Aliengnosis. Glück teaches at San Francisco State University.

y2kbunker is either a noise collective or a doomsday cult/commune. Instrumentation ranges from the standard (violin, trombone, guitar) tothe profane (electric drill, fireworks, riding crop). http://www.myspace.com/y2kbunker