I have two new(ish) articles out that deal with Concrete poetry from different angles: one in German about Max Bense’s Terry Jo, and one in English in the Journal of Lusophone Studies that discusses Bense and Eugen Gomringer, with some connections to Brazilian Concrete poetry. A third is on the way…
My book Wireless Dada Telegraphic Poetics in the Avant-Garde is out now from Northwestern University Press. Read more about it on their website. You can order the paperback edition directly from the publisher at a 25% discount using the discount code NUP2019.
This Saturday I’ll be presenting at the symposium “Art and the Contemporary Refugee: Narratives, Memorials, Communities” at the Kemper Art Museum, an event organized by Sabine Eckmann and Svea Bräunert in connection with the museum’s current exhibition, Ai Weiwei: Bare Life. My talk is entitled “Imagining Migration: Human Rights and Refugees in Erpenbeck and Ai Weiwei.”
My translation of a brief essay by Jenny Erpenbeck on the fall of the Berlin Wall was published in The Guardian on November 9, 2019. Read it here.
My latest article, published in April in The German Quarterly, discusses Regina Ullmann’s fiction, a Heimatfilm called Hoch droben auf dem Berg, and contemporary digital art by Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg. It’s an exploration of how the concept of Heimat interacts with the idea of mediation, with the alliterative title “High‐Tech Heimat: Mountains and Mediation in Literature, Film, and Digital Art.”
“My writing began with reflections on borders, reflections on how we change over the course of our lives, voluntarily or involuntarily, reflections on what identity is, and how much we can lose without losing ourselves.” Read my translation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2018 Puterbaugh Keynote lecture, online in World Literature Today.
My latest article is now online (behind a paywall) in Configurations: “‘Do the New Poets Think? It’s Possible’: Computer Poetry and Cyborg Subjectivity.” Kurt Vonnegut, Alan Turing, Max Bense, computers writing poetry, disaster on the high seas, this article has it all.
On November 11 I’ll be at Deutsches Haus with Reiner Stach to read from and discuss his book Is that Kafka? 99 Finds. My English translation of the book came out this year and has gotten some excellent reviews. Admission is free, so please come join us!
My latest article, “Dada Futures: Inflation, Speculation, and Uncertainty in Der Dada No. 1,” is now online in the latest issue of TRANSIT journal: “the attitude that pervades Der Dada No. 1 is one that exploits the future’s inherent uncertainty, treating the future as such as a field for speculation and profit, transforming the future into futures.”
Chad Post on The Country Road: I don’t remember seeing a lot of coverage for this book when it first came out, which is both strange and disappointing. Her writing is weird in that way that a lot of literary readers and reviewers seem to enjoy. Robert Musil called her a “genius.” There are blurbs on the book jacket by Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, and Hermann Hesse. Kurt Beals won a PEN Heim Translation Award for this….
