Virtual Poetry Reading: David R. Slavitt and Julie Swarstad Johnson

Sunday October 31, 2021 – 2pm EST

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84532069956?pwd=c2VzQWMrWnN6a3oxR3ZvaVVEWS93UT09

Meeting ID: 845 3206 9956, Passcode: 704102

David R. Slavitt’s new book is Opus Posthumous and Other Poems ($19.95, LSU Press, 978-0807175668). He is a poet, novelist, critic, and author of more than 130 works of literature, in styles ranging from dramatic translations to pulp fiction. Despite the diversity of his literary endeavors, however, poetry remains his primary occupation. He has said, “There is almost always a longish project to which I can repair for entertainment and occupation. But I will put that aside, whatever it is, if a poem presents itself to me.” Like the rest of his work, Slavitt’s poetry is full of wit, though it balances satire with a sense of gravity. His new book, Slavitt traverses Africa, India, Israel, and the America in which he finds himself, complete with visits to zoos, casinos, baseball fields, and cemeteries, as he searches for clues from which he might learn at least a little. He translates verse from Yiddish and Provençal and offers commentaries on received wisdom, everyday events, and the vagaries of existence. Slavitt’s awards include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for translation, an award for literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Rockefeller Foundation artist’s residency. He currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“The power of narrative to transform the events it recounts is among the most rewarding mysteries by which we can be absorbed. David Slavitt is among the most accomplished living practitioners of that art, in both prose and verse; his poems give us a pleasurable, beautiful way of meditating on a bad time. We can’t ask much more of literature, and usually we get far less.”—Henry Taylor in Compulsory Figures: Essays on Recent American Poets

“[Slavitt’s] range in forms, tones of voice, and subject matter is wide and various. He shows that he can handle all kinds of tough, tricky forms, and that he likes forms. He is perfectly at home in many rhythms, formal and syncopated. The language is brilliant, the range almost complete (from Ronald Firbank to Lenny Bruce and Dave Gardner). He can be witty or can crack wise as the occasion demands. Above all, he can think in verse, thus inviting the reader to use his intelligence, too.”—George Garrett in The Hollins Critic

Julie Swarstad Johnson is the author of Pennsylvania Furnace (2019), editor’s choice selection for the Unicorn Press first book series, and co-editor of the anthology Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight (University of Arizona Press, 2020). She has served as Artist in Residence at Gettysburg National Military Park, which led to the chapbook Orchard Light (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020). She lives in Tucson and works at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

“In poems quietly fierce, meticulously observed, faithfully rendered, musically tempered; in the uncanny ability to evoke both the presence of the past, its once molten iron, and its abandonment by time, Julie Swarstad Johnson raises a ‘host of silent voices praising every shadow.’ In these graceful poems, Claudia Emerson has found an heir. Pennsylvania Furnace is fired by the haunting beauty and revelation of its resonant images, ‘finding use / not in the thing itself, but in what / it opened…’” —Eleanor Wilner, Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2017