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E V E N T S
Upcoming Reading Giuseppe Leporace and I would like to invite you to the Seattle book launch of our translation from the Italian of Amelia Rosselli: The Dragonfly: Selected Poems, 1953-1981 (Chelsea Editions 2009). It will be held at the UW Bookstore, University Branch, at 7 p.m. on March 3rd. We have been working on this book, in one form or another, since 1995, and it would be our great pleasure if you could come to share this occasion with us. This will be a bilingual reading, so you will get the full flavor. Scroll down for the UW Bookstore announcement from their Events Calendar, a sample poem, and some responses to Amelia Rosselli and our translation. Cheers, Deborah and Giuseppe Wednesday March 3 at 7pm Giuseppe Leporace & Deborah Woodard, translators The Dragonfly - A Selection of Poems: 1953-1981 by Amelia Rosselli (CHELSEA EDITIONS) Reading & Book Signing University Book Store 4326 University Way NE, Seattle Jewish, anti-fascist, experimental, Rosselli explores the intersection of the traumatized self with the psyche of the post WWII generation. BAD POETRY FOR YOU for Massimo Ferretti With quick sure strokes: I bring you my celebration, my celebrating of vain glory, in a spell cast by merchants and an industrious offspring. The giant bridges are dwarfs when I come down from my blessed roof, and advance, an entrenched avant-garde -(well-entrenched among the plebeians, a little mysterious to us). But having found you -intent on filing asphalts -, I roll out of my bed, climb to the roof and beat you up. Or else I stay up there, unsure whether to bless you or to possess you, in short promiscuously melded with the sky, that goatish as milk, promises nothing. And doesn't promise to cripple you: or to clone you, it asks only for a rematch, and to disown you. —Amelia Rosselli Anti-fascist, Jewish, multi-lingual, an experimental musician and a perennial exile, Amelia Rosselli is one of the great poets of the 20th century. Her tragic yet oddly consolatory voice is comparable only to that of poets such as Celan, Bachmann, Char, Pasternak, Akmatova, and Plath, all of whom she loved. … To read her is to embark on an unforgettable journey of suffering and esthetic redemption. —Lucia Re Amelia Rosselli's multiple linguistic identity (Italian, French and English) allows her to leave behind traditional logical syntax for a new, often disorienting, language. An array of astonishing verbal combinations characterizes verses where fragments of quotations, dreams and subliminal intuitions are thrown at the reader like a broken mirror. Her interest in music provides her poetry with a variable gamut of metric and rhythmic combinations; magically, then, order is born out of the chaos of this experimentation. This volume offers a vast sample of Amelia Rosselli's prolific production, and the translators have done an amazing job in rendering all the complexity, the nuances and the beauty of her poems. —Claudio Mazzola Past Events I presented at the Peaches and Bats3 Launch on January 4, 2009 at Gallery 1412, along with Rich Jensen, Stacey Levine, Will Owen, Brandon Shimoda, Simon Wickham-Smith. I have new work in Jennifer Borges Foster's handbound journal, Filter II. I read at the Filter release party on October 23, 2008 and even had a chance to tip in illustrations and punch holes for the handbinding at work parties. On May 31, Heide Hinrichs and I celebrated the release of our collaborative chapbook, Hunter Mnemonic Series, published by hemel press. Heide Hinrichs grew up in Oldenburg, Germany and studied Fine Arts in Kassal and Dresden. Her work has been exhibited in Belgium, Britain, Germany, and Poland. A catalog of her exhibition I Am Still in the Woods was brought out by Roma Publications in 2006. This past winter she collaborated with writer Elizabeth Haines on an exhibition entitled New Suns. In April 2008, I was a reader and workshop facilitator at Burning Word: The Festival of Poetic Fire on Whidbey Island. The workshop, "Writing Alongside William Blake," explored Blake's visual art and poems of innocence and experience to help guide our own writing. We discussed how the worlds of innocence and experience are, at heart, interdependent, with imagery shuttling back and forth to create a fully-dimensioned representation of the human soul. I recently had the pleasure of reading at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City and at the University of New Hampshire, my alma mater. The UNH website did a nice feature on me, though they couldn't decide which way to spell my last name. In Seattle I read from from my Hamlet poems in the Apostrophe Series at Gallery 1412. Later, I presented next door at Tougo Coffee House in a new series called Free Range Words. In January 2008, I gave a joint reading with Lana Ayers at Powell's Books on Hawthorne in Portland, Oregon. |
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