Week 11: Monika Rinck's "To Refrain from Embracing" (2011)

After the poetry of Philip Metres with its focus on Russia, and Caroline Bergvall's multi-cultural background, we stay in the European sphere with our next poet, Germany's Monika Rinck. Like Nicole Brossard, and unlike the rest of our poets, Rinck's another author whose foreign-language work we'll be reading through the frame of a translator. In this case, it's UK-born Nicholas Grindell, and our volume, 2011's To Refrain from Embracing (Burning Deck) is the poet's first English-language collection.

Born in 1969, Rinck spent her early years studying comparative literature and religion, both in Germany and the US, and these preoccupations are evident in To Refrain from Embracing (which takes its title from Ecclesiastes), where the texts are peppered with sly allusions to both high-minded literary texts and pop cultural touchstones. Her work can be highly personal at times, all the while engaging in surrealistic, dream-like imagery and confounding turns of phrase.

Here's our schedule for To Refrain from Embracing:

• Tues., November 4: "ways of cheering you up" and "what about the animals"
• Thurs., November 6: "counter-constellations" to "vaguer complaint"

And here are some supplemental links:

• Aditi Machado reviews the book in Asymptote
• Steven J. Fowler reviews the book on his blog
• Amanda DeMarco considers Nicholas Grindell's translation
• a profile of Rinck via Poetry International Rotterdam

Weeks 9–10: Caroline Bergvall's "Meddle English" (2011)

Our next author is Caroline Bergvall, and as you can tell from how I've listed her on the schedule ("France/Norway/England") it's not exactly easy to pin her down to one country. Born in Germany in 1962 to parents of French and Norwegian ancestry, Bergvall would travel extensively throughout her life (living in Geneva, Paris, Oslo and New York) before settling in London. This peripatetic lifestyle  has played an important role in the development of Bergvall's poetics and her approach towards language as a whole — language is first and foremost a constructed thing, and a living construct at that, ripe for deconstruction, contradiction, reconfiguration and rediscovery. Specifically, in Bergvall's hands, the English language is a most malleable medium, which is brought into contact with its own roots (both Middle English and the Latinate and Germanic tongues that helped shape it), yielding spectacular results. Admittedly, this might seem a little daunting at first, but luckily Bergvall spells out many of her ideas regarding language in the talk "Middling English," which begins the collection.

One other idea to bear in mind is Bergvall's multidisciplinary approach to poetry. She bills herself as both a poet and a text-based artist, and the spirit of live performance, as well as a responsiveness to texts of various media (cf. "Untitled" [53] and "Fuses" [55], which respond to song and film, respectively) permeate her writings.  Keep this visual/aural influence in mind as you read through Meddle English, and certainly take advantage of the many recordings — of Bergvall reading her work, along with several interviews — that we're able to offer on PennSound (there's a link to Bergvall's author page below).

Unlike the rest of the books we'll be reading this term, Meddle English is not a standalone volume of poetry, but rather a collection of Bergvall's "new and selected"work; however, unlike the venerable poet with a long career publishing a volume of "greatest hits," Meddle English, which mines only three previously-published books, essentially serves as a concentration of the various aesthetic threads running through Bergvall's writing, making her unique perspective even clearer to readers.

Here's our reading schedule for Meddle English:

Thurs., October 23: "Heaps" through "Shorter Chaucer Tales" (3-52) + "Via: 48 Dante Variations" (available here, starts on pg. 55)
Tues., October 28: "Untitled" to "Goan Atom (Doll)" (53-122)
Thurs., October 30:  "Untitled" to "Cat in the Throat" (123-159)

And here are some supplemental links for our time with Bergvall:

• Bergvall's PennSound author page — hosts a great many recordings of readings and interviews with the poet from 2000 to the present.
• Bergvall's page at the Electronic Poetry Center 
• Bergvall's personal website
• a 2010 interview with Bergvall that we published at Jacket2 
• Sina Queyras on Bergvall at the Poetry Foundation's blog, Harriet
• controversial excerpts from "Drift" published in Poetry — these led to many complaints from more traditionalist readers of the venerable journal about what constitutes poetry

Weeks 8–9: Philip Metres' "To See the Earth" (2008)

While our course this term is exploring contemporary world poetry, that's not so clear-cut a concept, particularly in a media-saturated world where national boundaries are no longer as neatly sealed as they once were. As we begin our time with Philip Metres, we'll find our definitions of "American" challenged in a variety of ways, though to be clear, Metres is no more or less American than the American poets we'll conclude the semester with — he was born in San Diego in 1970 — but he's also the product of a number of unique influences outside of America that shape his poetic perspectives.

Metres' father served during the Vietnam war and also volunteered at a Vietnamese orphanage while there. Upon returning home, his family played host to a family of refugees, making a big impression upon a young Metres: "I think that meeting them, and in some ways, growing up with them for those six months opened me up to some of the tragedies of the world and differences," he notes, "and that we're not all the same and we come from very different places and our houses will smell different, and the foods taste different, but those are things that are interesting, they're not to be feared." This spirit of empathy towards America's perceived enemies continues in Metres' post-college career, when he won a Thomas J. Watson fellowship to study poetry in Russia, a project which was not only eye-opening — as he interacted with everyday people struggling in the aftermath of the Soviet Union — but would also indirectly lead to his work as a translator of several volumes by Russian poets. Finally, there's Metres' ethnic background (he's half Lebanese), which has continued to shape his work in America's post 9/11 environment of hostility towards the Middle East (particularly the recent and much-lauded chapbook Abu Ghraib Arias).

When taken together, these factors reveal a close level of personal interaction with some of the most important socio-political forces within Metres' lifetime, and it's not surprising that he's become an advocate for human rights and social justice, an opponent of war, and a supporter of greater understanding between nations as well as individuals. And while his 2008 debut collection, To See the Earth, is largely comprised of poems written during the earlier half of the decade, their concerns and subject matter still seem very much a part of our contemporary discourse.

Here's our reading schedule for To See the Earth (be sure to check the notes at the end of the book):

• Thurs., October 16: "Primer for Non-Native Speakers" to "The Ballad of Skandar"
• Tues., October 21: "A House Without" to "Bat Suite"

And here are some supplemental links:

• Christopher Kempf reviews the book in Jacket Magazine
• Michael Leong reviews the book in Valparaiso Poetry Review
• PennSound's Philip Metres author page
• "Parsing Through: a Dialogue about Abu Ghraib Arias" at Jacket2