Feb, 26th
Lyn Hejinian & Jennifer Scappettone
a lunchtime conversation between poets
University of Pennsylvania
Kelly Writers House
Philadelphia, PA
12:00 PM in the Arts Cafe
Moderated by: Rachel Levitsky
Jennifer Scappettone is the author of From Dame Quickly
(forthcoming from Litmus Press in 2008), and of several
chapbooks: Ode oggettuale, a bilingual poemetto translated
into Italian with Marco Giovenale (La Camera Verde, 2008);
Err-Residence (Bronze Skull, 2007); and Beauty [Is the New
Absurdity] (dusi/e kollectiv, 2008). She is at work on a
manuscript called Exit 43, an archaeology of the landfill and
opera of pop-ups, for Atelos. Other current projects include
Lagoon/Lacuna: Venice and the Digressive Invention of the
Modern, a critical monograph on the city of Venice as a
crucible for modernist experimentation; Neosuprematist
Webtexts, filmed phrasal stills; poetry for The Last
Performance [dot org], a text-visualization project sponsored
by the Goat Island Performance Collective; and a range of
translations from Italian. She was guest editor of Aufgabe 7,
devoted to contemporary Italian poetry of research. She is an
assistant professor at the University of Chicago.
Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her most
recent published book of poetry is Saga / Circus (2008). A
collection of collaborations written with Jack Collom;
Situations, Sings, also came out in 2008. Other books include
A Border Comedy (Granary Books, 2001), Slowly and The Beginner
(both published by Tuumba Press, 2002), and The Fatalist
(Omnidawn, 2003). The University of California Press published
a collection of her essays entitled The Language of Inquiry in
2000. Hejinian is also actively involved in collaboratively
written works, the most recent examples of which include a
major collection of poems by Hejinian and Jack Collom titled
Situations, Sings (Adventures in Poetry, 2008). Translations
of her work have been published in Denmark, France, Spain,
Japan, Italy, Russia, Sweden, China, Serbia, and Finland. She
is the recipient of a Writing Fellowship from the California
Arts Council, a grant from the Poetry Fund, and a Translation
Fellowship (for her Russian translations) from the National
Endowment for the Arts; she received an Award for Independent
Literature from the Soviet literary organization “Poetic
Function” in Leningrad in 1989. She has traveled and lectured
extensively in Russia as well as Europe, and Description
(1990) and Xenia (1994), two volumes of her translations from
the work of the contemporary Russian poet Arkadii
Dragomoshchenko, have been published by Sun and Moon Press.
Since 1976, Hejinian has been the editor of Tuumba Press and
from 1981 to 1999 she was the co-editor (with Barrett Watten)
of Poetics Journal. She is currently the co-director (with
Travis Ortiz) of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and
publishing cross-genre work by poets. Other collaborative
projects include a work entitled The Eye of Enduring
undertaken with the painter Diane Andrews Hall and exhibited
in 1996; a composition entitled Qúê Trân with music by John
Zorn and text by Hejinian; two mixed media books (The Traveler
and the Hill and The Hill and The Lake) created with the
painter Emilie Clark; the award-winning experimental
documentary film Letters Not About Love, directed by Jacki
Ochs; and The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective
Autobiography, co-written with nine other poets. In the spring
of 2007, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of
American Poets. She teaches in the English Department at the
University of California, Berkeley.