Poets in New York: On City, Language, Diaspora (Hunter College, February 15 2017)
A bilingual poetry reading and book talk by Tomas Venclova, Vasyl Makhno, Anna Frajlich, Polina Barskova, Marina Temkina, Irina Mashinski, Julia Trubikhina, Anna Halberstadt, Bakhyt Kenzheev, Helga Olshvang and Andrei Gritsman. Poets in New York (ed., with an introduction and commentary, by Yakov Klots; Moscow: NLO, 2016) is a book of interviews with Russian and East European poets (Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine) about New York City, the immigrant experience and diaspora, native and non-native tongues, architecture and urbanism, geographical, political and semiotic borders, points of departure and intersection between different generations of literary diasporas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The “center of gravity” in each of these interviews is New York, its urban, literary and mythological landscapes, explored through the prism of language and poetic traditions and juxtaposed to other “harbors” of Russian and East European cultures at home and abroad.
A bilingual poetry reading and book talk by Tomas Venclova, Vasyl Makhno, Anna Frajlich, Polina Barskova, Marina Temkina, Irina Mashinski, Julia Trubikhina, Anna Halberstadt, Bakhyt Kenzheev, Helga Olshvang and Andrei Gritsman. Poets in New York (ed., with an introduction and commentary, by Yakov Klots; Moscow: NLO, 2016) is a book of interviews with Russian and East European poets (Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine) about New York City, the immigrant experience and diaspora, native and non-native tongues, architecture and urbanism, geographical, political and semiotic borders, points of departure and intersection between different generations of literary diasporas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The “center of gravity” in each of these interviews is New York, its urban, literary and mythological landscapes, explored through the prism of language and poetic traditions and juxtaposed to other “harbors” of Russian and East European cultures at home and abroad.