Julien Poirier and Matvei Yankelevich: March 6, 2014

The Poetry Center presents a reading and conversation with Julien Poirier and Matvei Yankelevich. Poirier and Yankelovich are both founding members of Ugly Duckling Presse, as well as prolific poets, with Poirier having published numerous pamphlets and books, such as El Golpe Chileño (Ugly Duckling, 2010), from which he reads here, and Yankelovich numerous books of poetry, including Alpha Donut (United Artists, 2012) and Some Worlds for Doctor Vogt (Black Square Editions, 2015), and many translations from 20th century and more contemporary Russian poets and prose writers.

Poirier goes first, reading a multitude of his poems in rapid succession, littered with humorous lines and cultural references. Yankelevich follows, reading two poems he translated by Russian authors Alexander Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms, and then from his own works.

Poirier and Yankelevich then sit down and take questions from the audience, ranging from the founding of the Ugly Duckling Presse to how each of them find time to write.

Publisher
American Poetry Archives
Location
The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University
Date
2014-03-06
Event Run Time
01:27:00
Contributors
Steve Dickison
Rights

©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu.

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Julien Poirier (00:31:52)

Poirier begins his reading with the poem "Cardboard Rock," followed by "Sweet Shot Obit," "Two Words," "Shades of the Genie Genre," "In The Soup," "The Remake," "Colombus," "Red Dawn," "Your Place Too," and many more.

Matvei Yankelevich (00:29:41)

Yankelevich begins his reading with two works that he translated by 20th century Russians, Alexander Vvedensky and Daniel Kharms, both writers unpublished (except for their children's works) in their lifetimes. He reads Vvedensky's "An Invitation For Me To Think," followed by a prose work by Kharms beginning "How easy it is for a person to get tangled up in insignificant things...."

He then reads his own poems, from Alpha Donut, and "Winter's Landscape," from outside that book, then follows with three sections from a new long poem, Some Worlds for Doctor Vogt — being "an attempt to write from the point of view of the drawings" of Korean artist Koo Jeong A, whose work the poet had been asked to write about.

Conversation (00:19:12)

Poirier and Yankelevich sit down and take questions from the audience, ranging from the process of translation, the founding of Ugly Duckling Presse, and where their time for writing comes from.

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