Guillaume Apollinaire [Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitski] (France) 1880-1918

Guillaume Apollinaire [Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitski] (France])

1880-1918

Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitski was born on August 26th, 1880 in Rome, the son of an unmarried woman of Polish origin. His father had been a colonel in the Papal guard, which led Apollinaire to believe throughout his life that the father was a prelate of high standing in the Roman Catholic Church as a Cardinal perhaps or, as some suggested, the Pope himself.

   After a nomadic childhood, Guillaume along with brother Albert were sent to the Riviera for a Catholic schooling at Monaco, Nices and Canne. With his classmates, and free from parental restrictions, Apollinaire read Mallarmé, de Regnier, Racine, Corneille, de Gourmont, Verlaine, and Nerval among other poets. Sent out into the world at 18 to make his own living, he found a position as a tutor to the daughter of a German viscountess, which gave him opportunity to travel extensively about Europe.

    In 1902 he settled in Paris, working in a bank and living with his mother. Here he grew to be friends with many of the important young poets and artists of his time, including Pablo Picasso, Paul Fort, Max Jacob, Marie Laurencin, and Alfred Jarry. In 1903, in the name of Guillaume Apollinaire, he founded a literary review, Le Festin d'Esope, which further involved him in the literary scene of France. He wrote extensively, penning articles, stories, translations, theses of university students and introductions to special editions of erotic literature. His first major publication was a book of stories, L'Hérésiaque et Cie (The Heresiarch & Co.). In 1911 his first book of poems, Le Bestiarie was published with drawings by Raoul Dufy.

    Soon after the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre, and Apollinaire was arrested and held in prison for six days. Disgusted the experience and the publicity he received, Apollinaire began another review in order to bolster his reputation; Le Soirées de Paris was a great success, lasting until 1914.

    In 1913 he published Les Peintres Cubistes, the result of collaboration and discussions with Picasso, Braque, Gris, Laurencin, Picabia, Metzinger, Léger, Marcoussis, and many others. The book put Apollinarie in the position of being the Cubist movement's major aesthetician and defender. The same year his L'Antitraditon Futuriste, a futurist manifesto, appeared in Milan. And Alcools, his first major collection of poetry, was published by Mercure de France. Thus he was at the height of his literary and critical powers when he volunteered for French military.

    Throughout World War I Apollinaire, serving as a lieutenant with the infantry at the front, continued to write, reproducing a sheaf of verse in gelatin from the trenches. In 1916 he was shot in the head, and, although he survived, was returned to Paris, unfit for continued military service. There he took a job with the Bureau of Censorship and continued writing, producing his second collection of poetry, Calligrammes, and completing his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, billed as the first "surrealist" play. Apollinaire was also romantically in involved with several women, including a English governess, Annie, and the artist Marie Laurenicn. Other attachments followed his loss of Laurencin, serving as sources for much of his writing. In May 1918 he was married to Jacqueline Kolb, whom he had met while recovering from his head wound.

    The wound and his subsequent operations, however, began to undermine his health, and on November 9th of that year he died of Spanish influenza.

BOOKS OF POETRY

L'Enchanteur pourrissant (Paris, 1909); The Bestiaire ou Cortège d'Orphée (Paris: Deplanche, 1911); Alcools (Paris: Mercure de France, 1913);  Vitam impendere amori' (1917); Calligrammes (Paris, 1918); Il y a... (Paris: Messein, 1925); Julie ou la rose (1927); Ombre de mon amour (1947); Poèmes secrets à Medeleine  (1949); Le Guetteur mélancolique (1952); Poèms à Lou (1955); Oeuvres Poétiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1956); Soldes (1985)

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSATIONS

Alcools: Poems, 1989-1913 (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1964); Calligrams, trans. by Anne Hyde Greet (Santa Barbara, California: Unicorn Press, 1970); Selected Writings (New York: New Directions, 1971; reprinted as Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire, 1971); Zone, trans. by Samuel Beckett (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1972); Zone (Brooklyn: Zonepress, 1977); Apollinaire: Alcools: Poems (Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press, 1995); Selected Poems (London /Dover, New Hampshire: Anvil Press, 1986); Autumn: Twenty Poems (Belfast: Lapwing, 2003); Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913-1916) (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2004)

The Crocus

The meadow is poisonous but pretty in fall

The cows calmly
Poison themselves
The crocus ringed in color and lilacs
Like your eyes bloom
Violet as their rings and as autumn
My life sucks poison in

School children come in a fracas

Dressed like harmonica-playing gulps
To pluck crocuses just like their mothers
Daughters of daughters they share the color of your eyelids
Fluttering like flowers in the demented wind

Softly the cowboy sings

While the slow and lowing beasts leave
The land so evilly flowered by fall

                  —Translated from the French by Douglas Messerli

 (from Alcools, 1913)

Annie

On the coast of Texas

Between Mobile and Galveston there is
A grand garden filled with roses
There is also a grand house
Which is one big rose

A woman often walks

In the garden by herself
And when I cut cross the lime-bordered road
We come face to face
 
Because she is a Mennonite
Her roses and clothes have nothing to secure them
I am missing two buttons on my coat
The woman and I are of the same faith almost

         --Translated from the French by Douglas Messerli

 (from Alcools, 1913)

Snow White

Angels angels in the sky

One is dressed as officer
One is dressed as chef
And the others sing

Bright officer color of the sky
Long after Christmas spring will softly bring
A shining sun to regale you
    A shining sun

The chef plucks the geese
    Ah! the vault of snow
    The fall and no
Sweetheart to enter my embrace

               —Translated from the French by Douglas Messerli

(From Alcools, 1913)

      

Hunting Horns

Our history is noble and tragic
As a tyrant's mask
No drama of chance or magic
Nor the tritest of details
Turns our love to pathos

Here Thomas de Quincey drinks

Pure poison to poor Anne
Dreaming away his life
Let's move on, let's move on since everything must
I'll frequently turn back

Memories are horns of the chase

Which die when the winds stop

—Translated from the French by Douglas Messerli

(from Alcools, 1913)

VILLA AURORA--LOS ANGELES

Villa Aurora—los angeles

Operated by the Circle of Friends and Supporters of the Villa Aurora in Berlin and the Friends of the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, the former house of German novelist Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife Marta is host each year to numerous artists, musicians, and writers (of essays, fiction, drama and poetry), who stay for several weeks at the Villa creating and occasionally performing for local Los Angeles audiences. The house was built as a model house—in the style that is described as “a rambling, welcoming reminder of Italian villas”—in 1927. Its location in the Palisades above Sunset Boulevard overlooking the Pacific Ocean provides one of the most breathtaking of views from its windows and gardens of the city and ocean.

     Feuchtwanger and his wife moved to Los Angeles in 1941, and in 1943 bought the Villa, opening their doors to a host of other German émigrés and artists who had proceeded and followed them to Los Angeles, including Vicki Baum, Bertolt Brecht, Bruno Frank, Gina Kaus, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Ludwig Marcusse, and Franz Werfel. Other frequent guests at the Villa’s dinner and teas included Charles and Oona Chaplin, film-director William Dieterle and his wife, Hanns and Lou Eisler, Peter Lorre, and Arnold and Gertrude Schoenberg.

    Among the contemporary German poets who have been invited to the Villa and have written there are Austrian poet Oswald Egger, and German poets Dieter M. Gräf, Durs Grünbein, Michael Lentz, Said, Silke Scheuermann, Sabine Scho, Lutz Seiler, and Zafer Şenocak.

     In 2006, the American publisher Green Integer, published an anthology including these German writers who had visited the Villa Aurora, The PIP Anthology of World Poetry of the 20^th Century, Volume 7: At Villa Aurora—Nine Contemporary Poets Writing in German, edited by publisher Douglas Messerli

—Douglas Messerli

Robert Desnos (France) 1900-1945

Robert Desnos (France)

1900-1945

Poet Robert Desnos was born in Paris on July 4th, 1900. His father was a grocer, featuring game and poultry at the famed Halles market.

     Desnos attended commercial college and, after graduating, began work as a clerk, later becoming a literary columnist for Paris-Soir.

     His first poems were published in La Tribune des Jeunes in 1917, followed, in 1919, by work in the avant-garde journal Le Trait d'union (Hyphen) and in the Dadaist magazine Litttérature. His early book, a collection of surrealistic aphorisms, was titled Rrose Sélavy after the psedonym of French artist Marcel Duchamp.

     In 1919, Desnos met the poet Benjamin Péret, who introduced him to the Paris Dada group and Surrealist head André Breton, and soon after, the poet became active in the Surrealist group, showing a particular talent for "automatic writing."

     Breton included two photographs of Desnos sleeping in his fiction, Nadja, and praised him in the 1924 Manifeste du Surréalisme as a Surrealist "prophet." Desnos, however, disagreed with Surrealism's involvement with communism, and broke with Breton.

     He continued to write poetry and prose, composing his 1926 book, The Night of loveless nights in quatrains. That same year he fell in love with singer Yvonne George, writing the erotic fiction La Liberté ou l'amour! for her.

     In 1929 Desnos joined writer Georges Bataille in condemning Breton in Un Cadavre's "le boeuf Breton" (the ox Breton). And in the next year Desnos wrote several pieces on film.

     Throughout that decade he continued to write fiction, poetry, plays, and even a film script, L'Etoile de mer, directed in 1929 by photographer Man Ray.

      With the rise of World War II, Desnos joined the French Résistance (Réseau AGIR), publishing under several pseudonyms, and producting false identity papers. On Februry 22, 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz before being transported to Buchenwald and finally to Terezín in occupied Czechoslovakia, where he died of typhoid in the "Malá pevnost" cells for political prisoners. Only a few weeks later the camp was liberated.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Deil pour deuil (Paris: Editions du Sagittaire, 1924); C'est les bottes de 7 lieues cette phrase "Je me vois" (Paris: Editions de la Galerie Simon, 1926); The Night of lovelesss nights (Anvers, Belgium: privately printed, 1930); Youki 1930 Poésie (1930); Corps et biens (Paris: Gallimard, 1930); Corps et biens (Paris: Gallimard, 1930); Fortunes (Paris: Gallimard, 1942); Etat de veille (with Gaston-Louis Roux) (Paris: Robert-J. Godet, 1943); Le Vin est tiré (Paris: Gallimaard, 1943); Contrée (frontispiece by Pablo Picasso) (Paris: Robert-J. Godet, 1944);  Choix de poèmes (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1946); Les Trois solitaires (Paris: Editions Les 13 Epis, 1947); Les Regrets de Paris, poèmes posthumes (Brussels and Antibes: Collection de îles de Lérins/Cahiers du Journal des Poètes, 1947); Chantefables et chatefleurs (Paris: Gründ, 1952); Domaine Public (Paris: Gallimard, 1953); Mines de rien (Paris: Broder, 1957); Calixto, suivi de Contée (Paris: Gallimard, 1962); Destinée arbitraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); Récits, nouvelles, et poèmes (Paris: Roblot, 1975); Robert Desnos: Un poéte (Paris: Gallimard, 1980); Le Livre secret pour Youki (Paris: Editions des Cendres, 1999); Œuvres: Desnos (Paris: Gallimard, 1999)

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

22 Poems: Robert Desnos, trans. by Michael Benedikt (Santa Cruz, California: Kayak Books, 1971); The Voice: Selected Poems, trans. by William Kulik and Carole Frankel (New York: Grossman, 1972); Night of Loveless Nights (The Ant's Forefoot, no. 10 / New York: Coach House Press, 1973); The Night of Loveless Nights, trans. by Fred Beake (Bristol: Xenia Press, 1974); The Selected Poems of Robert Desnos, trans by Carolyn Forché and William Kulik (New York: Ecco Press, 1991);  Mourning for Mourning, trans. by Terry Hale (London: Atlas, 1992); Contrée = Country: Twenty-Five Poems, trans. by William Kulick (Iowa City: Windover Press/University of Iowa, 1994); The Circle and the Star: Selected Poems of Robert Desnos, trans. by Todd Sanders (Pittsburgh: Air and Nothingness Press, 2000); The Secret Book for Youki: And Other Poems by Robert Desnos, trans. by Todd Sanders (Pittsburgh: Air and Nothingness Press, 2001); Essential Poems and Writings by Robert Desnos, ed. by Mary Ann Caws (Boston, Massachusetts: Black Window Press, 2007)

For a sampling of Desnos poems in English, click below:

http://www.alb-neckar-schwarzwald.de/surrealism/surrealism.html

Paolo Leminski (Brazil) 1945-1989

Paulo Leminski (Brazil)

1945-1989

 Born in Curitiba on August 24195, Paulo Leminski led a life on the margins of society, working advertising and intermittent collaboration with newspapers and journals.

      Leminiski died in 1989 from alcohol abuse.

    Despite the difficulties of his life, he wrote several works of prose fiction and poetry. Among his works of prose as Catatau (1975), Agora é que são elas (1986), and Metamorfose (1999, posthumously published). His books of poetry include Quarenta Cliques em Curtiba (1979), Polonaise (1980), Caprichos e Relaxos (1983), Distraídos Venceremos (1987), and La vie en close (1991, published posthumously). He also wrote critical works, including Basho (1983), Leon Trotski, a paixão Segundo a revolução (1986), Cruz e Souz (1983), and Anseios críticos (1986).

     Leminski is now recognized as one of the most important poets of his generation. 

BOOKS OF POETRY

Quarenta Cliques em Curtiba (1979); Polonaise (1980); Caprichos e Relaxos (São Paulo: Eidtora Brasiliense, 1983); Distraídos Venceremos(1987); La vie en close (São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1991)

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

In Régis Bonvicino, Michael Palmer, and Nelson Ascher, eds. Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain: 20 Contemporary Brazilian Poets (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press), reprinted as The PIP Anthology of World Poetry of the 20th Century, Volume 3: Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain—20 Contemporary Brazilian Poets (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2003); selected poems in “Lies Abouth the Truth: An Anthology of Brazilian Poetry, ed. by Régis Bonvicino in collaboration with Tarso M. de Melo, in New American Writing, no 18 (2000)

Through

Through

magnolia

white

the

morning

blue

sees red

—Translated from the Portuguese by Michael Palmer

The Assassin Was the Scribe

My professor syntactical analysis was a so rot

nonexistent subject.

A pleonasm, principal predicate of your life,

common as a paradigm of conjugation.

Between subordinated oration and adverbial

Adjunct he had no doubts: always found an

asyndetic way to torture us with the appositive.

He married grammatical rectitude.

Was unhappy.

Was possessive like a pronoun.

And she was bitransitive.

He tried to go the USA.

No way.

They discovered an indefinite article in his suitcase.

His moustache’s exclamation point decline explicatives,

connectives and passives, forever.

One day I greased him with a direct object through the head.

—Translated from the Portuguese by Michael Palmer

pauloleminski

is a mad dog

that must be beaten to death

with a rock with a stick

by a flame by a kick

or else he might very well

the sonofabitch

spoil our picnic

—Translated from the Portuguese by Regina Alfarano

                  moon

did you shine like this

                  over Auschwitz?

   —Translated from the Portuguese by Regina Alfarano, with revisions by Robert Creeley

            

Els Moors (Belgium / writes in Dutch) 1976

Els Moors (Belgium / writes in Dutch)

1976

Els Moors (1976) received a warm welcome from Flemish and Dutch critics alike, as the first young Flemish poet to have appeared on the scene for a long time. Her debut Er hangt een hoge lucht boven ons (There is a tall sky above us; 2006) was nominated for the C. Buddingh’-prize and was awarded the Herman de Coninck prize for best poetry debut, where the jury described it as a, ‘debut of one’s dreams’.   
    

  "In There Is A Tall Sky Above Us a rather peculiar ‘I’ describes the ongoing amazement about a rather peculiar world. Important within this world are men; men who are constantly coming and going. In ‘de witte fuckende konijnen’ (the white shagging rabbits), the cycle at the heart of the volume, Moors convincingly shows that the urge is omnipresent and all consuming, showing man’s inner beast. One could say that the volume contains a high quantity of Sex and the City style within its pages, but this comparison would be misplaced. Moors’ humour has a bitter quality and is in no way expressed in one-liners. More often than not, the humour is found in the absurd nature of a situation or in the disruptive nature of an observation. Small, everyday scenes are dissected and then screwed back together again. There is a constant menace at work.

When at a garden party a cake is being cut, then this action appears as equally violent as the shower scene in Psycho. A violent atmosphere also permeates the poem in which a handicapped city pigeon ‘is put out of its misery’ while the main character seeks out this suffering with positive glee. In ‘the water floating by is the water’ loneliness and paranoia rule. The main character can only look at – the perhaps deceptive beauty of – the facades that float past her. She cannot go behind the house fronts, the fronts that will both reflect her voice and hide the people around her, the people that appear to have conspired against her so she will lose her compass north. In the final poem the protagonist does attain a certain sense of domesticity and happiness. Her homecoming is something of a relief. Yet while the inevitability of the Other is confirmed in the final verses, it seems at the same time quite a matter of course that this Other will disappear.

These somewhat sadomasochistic poems in a way resemble (expressionist) paintings. While sometimes appearing quite jumpy, Moors’ work shows evidence of a strong feeling for composition, both in content and in form. Note, for example, the continuing play between vitality and stasis and the continuing play between horizontality and verticality. The latter is already expressed in the title of the book, in which a ‘tall sky’ – Might we interpret this as a deep blue sky? As the column of smoke from the Bible book of Exodus perhaps? Or a whirlwind? – hangs threateningly above us. Undoubtedly this strong feeling for composition and the equally strong provocative nature of the poems are partly the reason why these poems are already deemed classics of the 21st century and Els Moors one of the rising stars of Flemish poetry.

In 2008 Els Moors made her debut as a prose writer with Het verlangen naar een eiland (Longing For An Island), a novel about love, sex and the yearning for the Other."

—Anneleen de Croux

BOOKS OF POETRY

Er hangt een hoge lucht boven ons (Amsterdam: Nieuw Amsterdam, 2006); Liederen van een kapseizen paard (2015)

Umar Timol (Mauritius / writes in French) 1970

Umar Timol (Mauritius/writes in French)

1970

Born on the island of Mauritius in 1970, Umar Timor, of Dutch background, writes in French. He studied literature at University College in London, and there became attracted to the writing of Baudelaire, particularly in that poet's heightened use of language.

     Timor's first book, La Parole Testament suivi de Chimie, published in Paris in 2003 uses language in a way inverts meanings, allowing new associations of come forward.

     His second book, Sang, inspired by the work of Aimé Césaire, is a long mystical love song composed in the Sufi tradition. His third collection, Vagbondages suivi de Bleu was published in 2009.

     He also wrote the text for a graphic, Les yeux des autres and his work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Visions of Africa. A novel, Journal de la vieille folle was published in Paris by Éditions l'Harmattan in 2012.

     Timol is a founding member of the Mauritian poetry journal, Point barre, which publishes international poets.

      

BOOKS OF POETRY

La Parole Testament suivi de Chimie (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2003); Sang (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2004); Vagabondages suivi de Bleu (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2009)

For a poem, published in Words without Borders, click here:

http://wordswithoutborders.org/contributor/umar-timol

For another poem by Timol, go here:

https://www.festivaldepoesiademedellin.org/en/Festival/25/News/Timol.html

Danielle Collobert (France) 1940-1978

Danielle Collobert (France)

1940-1978

Born in Rostrenen, Côtes-d'Amor on July 23, 1940, French poet and journalist Danielle Collobert lived out the war in her grandparents' house, since her mother, a teacher was forced to live in a nearby village. Both her mother and her aunt were part of the French Resitance.

     Collobert attended the university, but in 1961 abandoned her studies, joining the staff of Galerie Hautefeuilled in Paris. There she begin writing her work, Meurtre, and self-published Chants des Guerres (War Songs), years later destroying any remaining editions of the book.

     Collobert was involved in the National Liberation Front, involving herself in several missions in Algeria. After a self-imposed exile in Italy, she returned, collaborating with the magazine, Révolution Africaine.

     After the publishing house Les Éditions de Minuit rejected her book Meurte, noted author Raymond Queneau interceded on her behalf with the publisher Gallimard, which published the work in 1964.

     In 1968 she joined the Writers' Union, traveling to then Czechoslovakia during the Soviet backlash to "Prague Spring." From 1970 on she continued to travel, writing new works such as Survie (Survival), which was first translated into Italian before being published in France in 1978.

     Three months after its publication, Collobert committed suicide on her birthday in Paris. In the hotel room where she killed herself was found a small notebook which she was writing at the time. Notebooks, 1956-1978 was published in English, translated by Norma Cole, by Litmus Press in 2003.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Chants de guerres (Paris: Éditions P.-J. Oswald, 1961; reprinted by Éditions Calligrammes, 1999); Meutre (Paris: Gallimard, 1964); Des nuits sur les hauteurs (Paris: Éditions Denoel); Dire: I-II:+un-deux+ (Paris: Seghers/Laffont, 1972); Il donc (Paris: Laffont); Survie (Paris: Éditions Orange Export Ltd, 1978); Oeuvres I (Paris: P.O.L, 2004); Recherche; Oeuvres II (Paris: P.O.L, 2005).

ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS

It Then (trans by Norma Cole) (Oakland, California: O Books, 1989); Survival (trans. by Norma Cole) (Providence, Rhode Island: Burning Deck)   

Paolo Buzzi (Italy) 1874-1956

Paolo Buzzi (Italy)

1874-1956

Born on February 15, 1874 in Milan, Paolo Buzzi went on to study law, beginning his administrative career as the Secretary General of the Province of Milan.

    In 1886, Buzzi wrote a play. His first poetry offerings were linked to the Italian classicism of Leopardi and Carducci, Buzzi titling his first collection of poetry Poesie leopardiane, a work published in 1898.

    In 1905 Buzzi met the Italian futurist, F. T. Marinetti, soon after joining with the Futurist movement. The same year he won a poetry competition held by Marinetti’s and Sem Benelli’s futurist-based magazine Poesia with a long work written in prose titled "L'esilio" (“The Exile”) published in the journal in 1906. In 1909 Buzzi published his first major Futurist collection of poetry, Aeroplani, publsihed by that magazine’s book-publishing arm in 1909. The 1912 Futurist anthology contained several of his poems as well as his essay on free verse.

     Buzzi’s prose fiction, L’Ellisse e la spirale (The Elipse and the Spiral) followed in 1915, a work in the science fiction genre in which the poet employed Marinetti’s idea of “parole in libertà." Several other books of poetry, fiction, plays, and even films followed, including a war diary, Conflagration (Epic parolibera) 1915-1918, that employed collages and, once again, “free word associations,” a book which remained unpublished until after his death.

     In later years, however, Buzzi abandoned Futurism, returning to more classic poetic works. The poet also translated several works into Italian, including poems by Baudelaire.

     Buzzi died on February 18, 1956.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Poesie leopardiane (Milan: Galli e Raimondi, 1898); Aeroplani (Milan: Edizioni di “Poesia,” 1909); Versi liberi Treves (Milan, 1913); Bell cano (Lombardy: Studio Editoriale, 1916); Popolo, canta così (Milan: Facchi, 1920); Poema dei quarantanni (Milan: Edizioni di “Poesia,” 1922);  Canti per le chiese vuote (Foligno Campitelli, 1930); Poema di radioonde (1940); Atomiche (1950).

Bruce Andrews (USA) 1948

Bruce Andrews (USA)
1948

Born in Chicago on April 1, 1948, Bruce Andrews received his B.A. and M.A. from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and a PhD from Harvard University. In 1975 he moved to New York and there, with poet Charles Bernstein, Andrews edited the magazine, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E from 1978 to 1981. The magazine and many of the poets associated with it gave rise to a significant development in American poetics that became known as being language-centered.

 

    For that journal Andrews wrote several provocative essays on poetics, and over the years has written numerous other works on both poetry  and politics.

  Author of numerous books of poetry, both published and online, Andrews' work is loaded with politically and sexually loaded words that he collages to create strong connotations for his readers. As Andrews notes, from an interview in the Argoist: "I think that writing, to get any social change, needs to shake things up, needs to stir the beehive." In many cases, Andrews created words and word clusters on small cards, rearranging them and positioning them over months and years to create his works.

     From 1975-2013 Andrews taught politics at Fordham University, where he was sometimes publicly challenged by his students for his leftist views.      

     For the last several years he was worked with choreographer and dancer Sally Silvers as a composer and writer, some collaborations which we published by Roof Books as Ex Why Zee: Performance Texts, Collaborations with Sally Silvers, Word Maps, Bricolage & Improvisation in 1995.

BOOKS OF POETRY

Edge (Washington, D.C.: Some Of Us Press, 1973); Acappella (Ghost Dance no. 17, Fall 1973); Corona (Providence: Burnng Deck, 1974); Vowels (Washington, D.C.: O Press, 1976); Film Noir (Providence: Burning Deck, 1978); Praxis (Berkeley: Tuumba Press, 1978); Joint Words (with John M. Bennett) (Columbus, Ohio: Luna Bisonte Prods. 1979); Jeopardy (Windsor: Awede, 1980); Sonnets (momento mori) (Oakland, California: This Press, 1980); Legend (with Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery and Ron Silliman) (New York: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E/Segue, 1980); Wobbling (New York: Roof Books, 1981); R + B (New York: Segue Books, 1981); Excommunicate (Elmwood, Connecticut: Potes & Poets, 1982); Love Songs (Baltimore: Pod Books, 1982); 9 sections from I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism) (Elmwood, Connecticut: Abacus, 1986); Fractura (Madison, Wisconsin: Xexoxial Editions, 1987); Give 'Em Enough Rope (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1987); Both, Both, (London: Writer's Forum, 1988); Getting Ready to Have Been Frightened (New York: Roof Books, 1988); Executive Summary (Elmwood, Connecticut: Potes & Poets, 1991); Voodoo for Anti-communist Tourists (London: Writer's Forum, 1991); Standpoint (Oakland: Score Publications, 1991); Stet, Sic & Sp. (Salisbury, Connecticut: Case Books, 1992); I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up (Or, Social Romanticism (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon press, 1992); Excla (with Maggie O'Sullivan) (London: Writer's Forum, 1993); Divesture--E (Buffalo: Leave Books, 1993); Moebius (Mentor, Ohio: Generator Press, 1993); Tizzy Boost (Great Barrington, Massachusetts: The Figures, 1993); Blue Horizon (Hartford, Connecticut: Abacus, 1994); Strictly Confidential (Canary Islands: Zasterle, 1994); Divesture--A (New York: Drogue Press, 1994);  Ex Why Zee: Performance Texts, Collaborations with Sally Silvers, Word Maps, Bricolage & Improvisation (New York: Roof Books, 1995); Peril (online: TextThirtyOne: Potes & Poets, 1999); Danger (online: TextThirtyOne: Potes & Poets, 1999);

Only (Calgary: housepress, 2000); Prime Cuts (Calgary: housepress, 2000); Plans Carry Weight (Calgary: housepress, 2001); Lip Service (Toronto and online: Coach House Press, 2001); The Millennium Project (online: Eclipse, Princeton, 2002); Born in Chicago, Language poet and political scientist Bruce Andrews earned a BA and MA from the Johns Hopkins University, and a PhD from Harvard University. He moved to New York in 1975, where with Charles Bernstein he co-edited L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine from 1978 to 1981.

Andrews’ language-centered writing (a term he coined with Ron Sillimanin 1971) takes a modular approach to composition, shaking words and phrases free of their syntactical or narrative shells. As Andrews describes it, his process of composing poems was revolutionized with his acquisition of a paper-cutter, which he uses to create the small cards on which he continually records the “raw material” of words or clusters of words. He then stores these cards in boxes for months or years until, under the direction of a new project, he sifts and arranges the cards to create a new work. Through this process, Andrews sheds the original context of his words and is able to see them and arrange them as objects.

Andrews has published dozens of poetry collections including I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (Or, Social Romanticism) (1992) and Designated Heartbeat (2006) as well as several essay collections. Since the 1980s he has collaborated with choreographer Sally Silvers. In an interview with Dan Thomas-Glass for the Argotist Online, Andrews stated, “I think that writing, to get any social charge, needs to volatilize, needs to shake things up, needs to stir the beehive. So if you want to have a lullaby-like experience, and that’s your measure of pleasure, then the work I’m doing will seem off-puttingly difficult, but it is trying to be provocative and challenging, because that’s a) what I like as a reader and b) what I feel politically is required for readers to be in motion.” Speaking to the connection between Andrews’ approaches to poetry and to politics, Boston Review critic Brian Kim Stefans notes in a 2001 review of Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis, “Using the very language at hand—the words and rhythms of the poem itself—Andrews hopes to reveal, in as harsh a light as possible […] the complex social vectors underlying even our most mundane activities and assumptions.”

Since 1975 Andrews has taught political science at Fordham University.Mistaken Identity (online: Faux Press, 2002)

For a large selection of taped and recorded readings, click below:

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Andrews.php