Matvei Yankelevich, Conversation



Matvei Yankelevich talks with Charles Bernstein about "Some Words for Dr. Vogt," his grandmother Yelenna Bonner and growing up in an American center of Soviet dissidence, the relation of Soviet samizdat and small press publishing in North America, the formation and operation of Ugly Duckling Presse, the importance of book design, Russian poets of the modernist period and of the 1920s, and 1930, wih special reference to Daniel Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky, and the translation into English of contemporary Russian poets, including Dmitri Prigov and Lev Rubinstein.

Yankelevich's most recent book is Alpha Donut from United Artists. His other books and chapbooks include Boris by the Sea (Octopus Books), The Present Work (Palm Press), and Writing in the Margin (Loudmouth Collective). Yankelevich‘s translations of Daniil Kharms were collected in Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Ardis/Overlook). He edited a portfolio of Contemporary Russian Poetry and Poetics for the magazine Aufgabe (No. 8, Fall 2009) and has written essays on Russian-American poetry for Octopus magazine online. He teaches at Hunter College, Columbia University School of the Arts (Writing Division), and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. He is a co-founder of Ugly Duckling Presse, where he designs and/or edits many and various books, is the editor of the Eastern European Poets Series, and a co-editor of 6×6. He lives in Brooklyn. For recordings at his PennSound page.
 

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Conversations and readings with poets and artists, produced in cooperation with PennSound and hosted by Charles Bernstein, the American poet, theorist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein was born in New York City in 1950. He is a foundational member and leading practitioner of Language poetry. Bernstein was educated at the Bronx High School of Science and at Harvard University, where he studied philosophy with Stanley Cavell and wrote his final thesis on Gertrude Stein and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

In the mid-1970s Bernstein became active in the experimental poetry scenes in New York and San Francisco, not only as a poet, but also as an editor, publisher, and theorist. With visual artist and wife Susan Bee, Bernstein published several now well-known poets whose work is associated with Language writing.
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