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Ninth Annual Dara Mandle Young Poets' Reading at the National Arts Club

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Dara writes:

On Tuesday, May 12, 2015, at 8pm, I am delighted to host the Ninth Annual Dara Mandle Young Poets' Reading at the singular National Arts Club. Yup, I've now got my name in the title! This year Paul D'Agostino, Tess Lewis, Andrea Monti, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips will join me on stage for a discussion and reading of poetry in translationFree and open to the public

Paul D’Agostino is an artist, curator, writer, translator and professor living in Bushwick. He holds a Ph.D. in Italian Literature and has taught at Brooklyn College, Fordham, and Rutgers. 

Tess Lewis has been awarded a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Translation Fellowship, and the Austrian Cultural Forum’s 2015 Translation Prize. She serves as an Advisory Editor for The Hudson Review and writes essays on European Literature for The American Scholar and Bookforum, among other journals. Ms. Lewis curates Festival Neue Literature, New York City’s premier annual festival of German language literature in English.

Andrea Monti is an Italian artist and curator who lives and works in Brooklyn. Monti has translated poetry from English and French, most recently for the Journal of Italian Translation. He co-directs Brooklyn’s Microscope Gallery. 

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of two books of poetry, Heaven and The Ground; a book of literary criticism, When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness; and a translation of Salvador Espriu's Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth. He is the winner of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers' Award, and the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry.

Come out for this free event and hear four great readers! Lively discussion followed by punch and cookies. 

Thank you to Cherry Provost, Alice Palmisano, and all the members of the literary committee of the National Arts Club for supporting poetry and particularly this event for nine years running.

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Tobacco Hour

"Tobacco Hour," poems by Dara Mandle, art by Brece Honeycutt, second edition

available for $10

Dara writes:

I have been overwhelmed by the support you've shown for my chapbook of poems, "Tobacco Hour." I am excited to announce the edition is now sold out, and I'm so happy the books are in such good hands! A second, unlimited perfect-bound edition is now available. Thank you to everyone who made it to Luhring Augustine Bushwick for the reading, to those who bought copies and ordered online, to our publisher Jason Andrew of Norte Maar, to my fellow readers John Talbird and Leslie Kerby, to the painter Philip Taaffe, and of course to my artist collaborator Brece Honeycutt

 

 

 

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pictured: Brece Honeycutt's ecodyed covers prepare to be hand-bound and stamped for Tobacco Hour. Photo: BH

We are delighted to announce the launch of Tobacco Hour, a limited-edition collaborative chapbook of poems by Dara Mandle and art by Brece Honeycutt published by Norte Maar.

Please join us for a celebration and reading of the book on Sunday, April 19, 4-6 pm, at Luhring Augustine Bushwick, 25 Knickerbocker Avenue, Brooklyn, New York.

Tobacco Hour is the product of a three-year collaboration between Dara Mandle and Brece Honeycutt. Published by Norte Maar in an edition of 75, featuring twenty new poems by Dara Mandle, each numbered copy of Tobacco Hour has been hand made by Brece Honeycutt.

Working together, artist and poet have designed Tobacco Hour to be an experimental cross between book printing and art making. Based in an 18th-century colonial farmhouse in Sheffield, Massachusetts, drawing on her impressions of Mandle's poems of devotion and desire, Honeycutt has used flora and found objects to dye and texture the covers of each book individually

The chapbook is the size of a small prayer book, linking it to the many prayer poems in the text, which Brece has hand-stitched without glue in a special binding. For the covers, barberry, goldenrod, mugwort, rhododendron, and mint, along with metal washers, were interleaved in between white sheets of paper, put between two sheets of copper, and immersed in a dye bath. This process, called eco-dyeing, uses materials from the land that are then returned to the land.

Norte Maar, the Bushwick-based nonprofit dedicated to collaboration in the arts, is publishing the edition as part of its series of artist-writer collaborations, which will also include A Modicum of Mankind, short stories by John Talbird with art by Leslie Kerby. 

The April 19 event for both books is generously hosted by Luhring Augustine Bushwick, where the exhibition Philip Taaffe: New Paintings will be on view. 

Dara Mandle earned her BA in English from Yale University, where she was awarded the Clapp poetry prize, and her MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her poetry has appeared in the Brooklyn Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Harpur Palate, among other journals. For the past nine years she has hosted the Young Poets series at the National Arts Club. She maintains a blog of her work at www.supremefiction.com.

Brece Honeycutt lives and works in Sheffield, MA. She makes history-based drawings, sculptures and installations. She received a B.S. in Art History from Skidmore College and a M.F.A. from Columbia University. Her installations have been placed in exterior locations including university campuses, historic houses, inner city parks and in office buildings, libraries, urban markets and galleries. She collaborates and works with the National Park Service, artists, students, historians, gardeners, non-profit organizations, poets, and dancers. In 2014, Honeycutt exhibited in New York, Massachusetts and Italy. She received two artist fellowships from the D.C.C.A.H. and an anonymous grant for an “artist working in a particular American vein.” She has served on the boards of the Arlington Arts Center, Arlington, VA, as treasurer and the Washington Sculptors Group. www.brecehoneycutt.com

 

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Brece and Dara look over prototype pages in production in the Sheffield studio. Brece's stand-alone paper sculptures hang on the back wall. Photo: JP

 

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Brece uses found objects as resists as she presses pages together to set overnight. When she opens them up, she discovers how foliage and other elements have left their marks on the paper. Photo: JP

 

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On one wall Brece has pinned prototype pages for the book. Here Brece has written out one of Dara's poems on hand-made paper (above) and hand-stitched the binding of some pages (below). Dara and Brece experimented with different page formats and worked through ideas of how best to translate Brece's handmade book art to multiple production. Photo: JP

 

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Folded covers for Tobacco Hour awaiting barberry bath. Photo: BH

 

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Goldenrod, drying in the attic, used for book's ecodyes. Photo: JP 

 

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Ecodyed covers prepared for goldenrod bath. Photo: BH

 

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Cover paper in Brece's press. Photo: BH

 

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Hand-bound copies of Tobacco Hour ready for release. Photo: BH

 

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A finished copy of Tobacco Hour. Photo: BH

 

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Tobacco Hour. Photo by Sharon Butler. 

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Translations in Livestream

In the spirit of the transnational exhibition "Exchange Rates Bushwick," the artist/translator/organizer Paul D'Agostino hosted "Renderings: Encounters & Translations" last Sunday at Livestream Public in Brooklyn. Now, thanks to Livestream, we can watch the full "series of readings and presentations of translations rendered, translations encountered, translations variably treasured."

Dara reads Kafka at 25:45 & Valery at 1:07:55. She is joined on stage by Paul, Matthew Rossi, Alice Lynn McMichael, Andrea Monti, Todd Portnowitz, and Cecco the Turtle. 

One of Paul's assignments was to compare translations. Dara picked "Les Pas" by Paul Valéry. Here is the original:
Les Pas
 
Tes pas, enfants de mon silence, 
Saintement, lentement placés,
Vers le lit de ma vigilance
Procèdent muets et glacés.
 
Personne pure, ombre divine,
Qu'ils sont doux, tes pas retenus!
Dieux!... tous les dons que je devine
Viennent à moi sur ces pieds nus!
 
Si, de tes lèvres avancées,
Tu prépares pour l'apaiser,
A l'habitant de mes pensées
La nourriture d'un baiser,
 
Ne hâte pas cet acte tendre,
Douceur d'être et de n'être pas,
Car j'ai vécu de vous attendre,
Et mon coeur n'était que vos pas.

Here is Dara's translation of "The Steps"

The Steps

Your steps, children of my silence,
Sacred, slowly placed,
Proceed icy and silent
To the bed where I wake.

Body pure, spirit divine,
How sweet, your discreet steps!
God! Every gift I find
Appears on naked feet! 

If, with your advancing lips
You prepare to appease me,
Consuming my thoughts
With the food of your kiss,

Do not hasten this tender act,
So sweet to anticipate,
Because I lived waiting for you,
And my heart was the steps you take. 

 And here is Paul D'Agostino's translation of the same poem, which he calls "Footsteps"

Footsteps
 
Saintly, slowly placed
Are your footsteps, those quiet kids,
Unto the bed where I lie awake,
They approach with muted skids.
 
Holy shade, person so pure,
Your paces so soft and sweet!
Dear god, the gifts I conjure
Coming to me on those bare feet.
 
And if, upon your lips
You pucker at their tips
The nourishment of your kiss
To sate my mind's hungered fits,
 
Let it be not an act of swiftness,
Sweetness of being and being not,
For I have lived to await your footsteps
That give form and beat to my heart.

For  commentary, here is James's coverage of the event in 140 characters or less

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