Where American Poetry Ended Up and How Polish Poetry Started Again

26 Sep 2011 - 16:00 / 26 Sep 2011 - 16:00

Emmanuel College, Room 302
Near Victoria College, U of T
Toronto

The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
and The Centre for Comparative Literature present

A public lecture by Piotr Sommer

Where American Poetry Ended Up and How Polish Poetry Started Again

Piotr Sommer, editor of the Warsaw-based journal Literature in the World (Literatura na Swiecie) , divides his time between writing poetry, writing about poetry, and translating Anglo-American poetry into Polish. He is the author of over a dozen volumes of poetry, including “Things to Translate” and the career-spanning collection “Continued,” and books of literary essays. As a translator, he has produced editions of D.J. Enright, Seamus Heaney, Frank O’Hara and Charles Reznikoff, and has rendered into Polish the poetry of John Ashbery, John Berryman, John Cage, Kenneth Koch, Michael Longley, Robert Lowell, Derek Mahon and James Schuyler. The 1986 issue of Literature in the World on the New York Poets became the most influential collection of American poetry on the Polish literary community.