“Poetry and Poetics” with Sean Bonney, Eugene Ostashevsky, Cia Rinne, Sophie Seita, Daniel Tiffany and moderated by Barry Schwabsky
Sean Bonney is a contemporary English poet. Bonney was born in Brighton and brought up in the north of England. He now lives in Berlin. His publications include Notes on Heresy (Writers Forum, 2002), Poisons, their antidotes (West House, 2003), Blade Pitch Control Unit (Salt, 2005), Document: hexprogress (Yt Communication, 2006), Baudelaire in English (Veer 2008), Document: poems, diagrams, manifestos (Barque 2009), and The Commons (Opened 2011). He edits the press Yt Communicationwith Frances Kruk. He was a regular attendee at the Cobbing-led Writers Forum workshop. Together with other UK based poets, his work marks a progression and continuance of the British Poetry Revival. In Autumn 2006, he was a guest lecturer at the University of Roehampton. In Autumn 2011 he ran a seminar on Poetry and Revolution at the University of Cambridge.
Eugene Ostashevsky, born in 1968 in Leningrad, USSR, immigrated with his family to New York in 1979, and currently lives in Berlin. He writes in American English destabilized by puns, sound play, and foreign words. His latest book of poetry, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, published by the New York Review of Books, contemplates the challenges of pirate-parrot communication. It was been translated into German by Uljana Wolf and Monika Rinck for release by KookBooks as Der Pirat, der von Pi den Wert nicht kennt.
Cia Rinne, born in Gothenburg/Sweden, MA in philosophy (Frankfurt/Main, Athens, and Helsinki), is a poet based in Berlin. Readings, performances, and exhibitions of translingual minimalist and concrete poetry a.o. at the Grimmuseum Berlin, Bielefelder Kunstverein, Signal Malmö, Overgaden Copenhagen, Fondation Louis Vuitton Paris, CNEAI Chatou, ISCP New York, and INCA Seattle. Her latest publications include l’usage du mot (Héros-limte/Genève, Gyldendal/Copenhagen, and kookbooks/Berlin 2017), Skal vi blinde os selv og forlade Theben(Shall we blind ourselves and leave Thebes, Virkelig/Copenhagen 2017) as well as notes for soloists (OEI Editör/Stockholm 2009; Gyldendal/Copenhagen 2018).
Sophie Seita is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, researcher, and translator. Her performances, lecture-performances, and videos which visualise, embody, or translate text via poetic dialogue, sculpture, costume, installation, and choreography, have been (or will be) presented at Art Night London, Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge), the Drawing School (London), the Royal Academy, Bold Tendencies (London), the Arnolfini (Bristol), La MaMa Galleria (NYC), Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), Parasol Unit (London), Company Gallery (NYC), Neue Töne Festival (Stuttgart), Tactic Gallery (Cork, Ireland), and elsewhere. She’s the author of the poetry and performance books Meat (Little Red Leaves, 2015), Fantasias in Counting (BlazeVOX, 2014), and the artist book 12 Steps (Wide Range, 2012); the translator of Uljana Wolf’s Subsisters: Selected Poems (Belladonna*, 2017); and the editor of a facsimile reprint of The Blind Man(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017). Some other writing, translations, and interviews have been featured in Best American Experimental Writing 2018, The White Review, Bomb, Emergency Index, Lana Turner, The London Review of Books, and 3:AM. As a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge, she’s currently finishing her critical book Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital (working title), which is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in late 2019. Recent critical writing includes an essay on contemporary post-digital publishing in Chicago Review, a chapter on multilingual poetry and poetics in Reading Experimental Writing (forthcoming from Edinburgh UP), and, with Danny Snelson, ‘Lodging & Dislodging the Little Magazine: A Google Document Conversation in Fifteen Parts’ published by Hotel.
Daniel Tiffany is a poet, theorist, and critic from Los Angeles, whose work examines the correlation of poetics and other disciplines. He is the author of ten books of poetry and literary criticism. Among his critical works are Infidel Poetics : Riddles, Nightlife, Substance (University of Chicago Press) ; Radio Corpse : Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Harvard UP) ; Toy Medium : Materialism and Modern Lyric (University of California Press) ; and My Silver Planet : A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch (Johns Hopkins UP). His collections of poetry have been published by presses including Action Books and Omnidawn. His most recent collection (with BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP), The Work-Shy,was published last year in the Poetry Series of Wesleyan University Press. Work from this project has been exhibited in numerous museums in the U.S. and adapted for theater and performance. His poems have been published in Poetry, Paris Review, Tin House, Bomb, Fence, jubilat, Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, Iowa Review, Lana Turner Turner, Chicago Review, and many other journals. In addition, Tiffany has published translations from French, Greek, and Italian. He has been a recipient of the Berlin Prize, awarded by the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
ABOUT SFSIA
Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art (SFSIA) is a nomadic, intensive summer academy with shifting programs in contemporary critical theory. SFSIA stresses an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relationship between art and politics. The program consists of seminar-style lectures, deep readings, and workshops. An evening lecture program is free and open to the public. Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art was founded and is directed by Warren Neidich and is co-directed by Barry Schwabsky.