Wednesday

Join Jennifer Scappettone and Carla Billitteri as they present four Italian poets “of research” featured in Aufgabe 7 for an evening of poetry and translation. Maria Attanasio is the author of five collections of poetry and four works of historical fiction. Her latest work, Il Falsario di Caltagirone, was the recipient of the prestigiouis Premio Vittorini. She was born in Caltagirone, Sicily in 1943, where she still lives. Giovanna Frene, alias Sandra Bortolazzo, was born in Asolo in 1968. Her books of poetry are Immagine di voce (1999), Spostamento (2000), Datità, with an afterword by Andrea Zanzotto (2001), Stato apparente (2004), and Sara Laughs (2007); and, as Federica Marte, the cross-genre “prosimetro” Orfeo e morto (2002). Her poems have appeared in a range of anthologies and journals in Italy, Germany, Mexico, Spain, and the US. Marco Giovenale, a poet, translator, curator, editor, cultural critic, and winner of the 2009 Delfini Prize, lives in Rome. His books of poetry include Il segno meno (Manni, 2003), Double click (Cantarena, 2005), and La casa esposta (Le Lettere, 2007). He editors and/or contributes to the periodicals il manifesto, Nuovi Argomenti, Poesia, Action Poetique, The Black Economy, and Atelier, and blogs at slowforward.wordpress.com and gamm.org, and his work has been featured and translated in a range of magazines and anthologies in Italy, France, and the US. Milli Graffi, Milanese, was born in 1940. She has produced works of sound poetry and four poetry collections, most recently embargo voice (2006), as well as a novella called Centimetri due (Edizioni d’If, 2004). She has translated Lewis Carroll and Charles Dickens, and has written on nonsense and the comic function in the early avant-gardes. She is editor-in-chief of the pioneering journal Il Verri. Carla Billitteri, born and educated in Italy, teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Maine. Her translations of contemporary Italian poetry have appeared in boundary 2, How2, and Fascicle, among other journals. A selection of her translations of Alda Merini’s aphorisms is forthcoming with Hooke Press. Jennifer Scappettone, guest-editor of Aufgabe 7, is author of From Dame Quickly (Litmus Press, 2009) and of several chapbooks, including Ode oggettuale, a bilingual edition out from La Camera Verde, and a forthcoming book for Belladonna’s Elders Series with Lyn Hejinian and Etel Adnan. She is working on the pop-up opera Exit 43 for Atelos, as well as a critical monograph on the place of Venice within the modernist and postmodern imaginary. She is an assistant professor of English and associate faculty of Romance Languages and Literatures and Gender Studies at the University of Chicago.

Co-presented with the Italian Cultural Institute, Litmus Press and Poets House.

The poets will also participate in a panel the night before. See info below:

Tuesday, May 26, 6:00pm
@ Italian Cultural Institute
686 Park Avenue (bet. 68th and 69th Streets)
Admission free