February
15, 2002
Poet
Peter Filkins Continues Reading Series February 20
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Peter
Filkins
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Peter Filkins, the first poet in the MHC English department's
spring term series of readings by contemporary writers, will read
from his new collection of poems After Homer (George Braziller,
2002) Wednesday, February 20, at 4 pm, in Williston Memorial Library's
Stimson Room.
"I like the title After Homer," said Mary Jo
Salter, Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities. "It
reminds us of Filkins's work as a translator, of writing versions
‘after' poets in other languages. Yet there's another way
that the best poets are always acknowledging—even outside
of translation—that they follow after, and must transform
what came before. Peter does that admirably."
Among the writers Filkins acknowledges is the celebrated Russian
poet Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996). Brodsky authored nine volumes
of poetry and several collections of essays, cofounded the American
Poetry and Literacy Project, served as United States Poet Laureate
(1991–1992), and inspired numerous young poets at Columbia
University and at Mount Holyoke, where he taught for fifteen years.
Filkins, who was among Brodsky's students in the early 1980s,
is now a professor of writing and literature at Simon's Rock College
of Bard, an award-winning translator of works by Austrian writer
Ingeborg Bachmann, and the author of After Homer and What
She Knew (Orchieses Press, 1998).
Filkins's just-published collection is dedicated "to the
memory of Joseph Brodsky" and includes the poem "Elegy
for Joseph Brodsky," in which Filkins mourns the death of
his teacher, but finds comfort in the survival of poetry.
"Elegy" and the other poems of After Homer cover
some of the same concerns Brodsky was interested in, Filkins told
interviewer Derek Alger, notably "how different eras speak
to each other." The poems cover a broad range of historical
moments— from the death of Anton Chekhov ("The Death
of Chekhov"), to the sinking of the Lusitania by a German
submarine in 1915 ("The Manifest"), to the bombings
of the Persian Gulf War ("Dominion"), to the death of
Filkins's father ("In Lieu of Flowers")—but all
speak about loss and the survival made possible by love.
Filkins was born and raised in western Massachusetts. A graduate
of Williams College and Columbia University, he also studied at
the University of Vienna (1983–1985) while on a Fulbright
grant to translate the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann. His translation
of her collected poems, Songs in Flight (Marsilio, 1994),
received an Outstanding Translation Award from the American Literary
Translators Association. In 1999 he published a translation of
two novel fragments by Bachmann, The Book of Franza and
The Requiem for Fanny Goldmann, as well as a novel by the
contemporary Austrian novelist Alois Hotschnig, Leonardo's
Hands. Filkins's poetry, translations, and criticism have
appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including the New
Republic, the American Scholar, American Poetry
Review, and the New York Times Book Review. His work
has been supported by a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural
Council, grants from the Austrian Cultural Institute, the Austrian
Society for Literature, and residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and
the Millay Colony for the Arts.
The reading series will continue Wednesday, March 6, at 4 pm
with novelist Mei Ng, author of Eating Chinese Food Naked.
On Wednesday, March 13, poet Cynthia Zarin will read from The
Watercourse, and Brad Leithauser, Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer
in the Humanities, will read from his novel-in-verse Darlington's
Fall. Novelist Gloria Naylor is also scheduled to read; watch
for details.
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