• 2023-06-12, 7:30 PM
Kleines Parkett 7/5 € | Tickets
An encounter between the second and third generations of the New York School: Alice Notley (born 1945 Bisbee, Arizona/USA) and Eileen Myles (born 1949 in Cambridge, Massachusetts). A mentor-student relationship, though it isn’t always clear which is which. “I’m the one who has no / small feelings,” writes Alice Notley. Her poems are fearless, visionary, shamanistic, in lively exchange with the dead (Whatever I think is heard by the dead) and the collective unconscious. The Boston Review has written that Alice Notley has freed herself from any notion of what poetry should be in order to write what poetry can be. In this and every other respect, her work is unique: “I’m only alive and am my own guide.”
Notley has called Eileen Myles’ poems “heroic, monolithic, pure.” The haunting eloquence of Myles’s characteristically short lines (“My teeshirt / is good / my pen / works / I breathe”) has been compared to the rapid click of a camera shutter. No other poet can convey so immediately what it means to be alive, here and now. Who else would begin a poem with, “The vagina of my life / is so stretched / out?” Who else would write these lines: “Nothing / more trans / than taking / a shit in the men’s / room in / a hotel.”
Moderation: Shane Anderson
The event will be interpreted German-English.
With kind support by ECHOO Konferenzdolmetschen
Project Management: Matthias Kniep
Embassy of the United States of America. The 24th poesiefestival berlin is a project of Haus für Poesie in cooperation with Akademie der Künste and is supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds.