poetry in action features work by poets from around the world, translated into English.
It has three rallying cries:
Poets of the world, unite and take over!
Resist the oppressive constraints of good, publishable poetry established by mainstream literary venues!
Only poetry in translation, all the time!
Coming at you on the 20th of each month.
poetry in action’s July and August installments feature the debut of Donna Stonecipher’s translations into English of Mayröcker’s Cahier :
Friederike Mayröcker was born in Vienna in 1924 and died there in 2021. Starting in 1956, she published over 80 works, including poetry, prose, radio plays, and children’s books, and she is widely considered one of the most important Austrian poets of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her work was honored with many prizes, including the Georg Büchner Prize and the Peter Huchel Prize, and has been translated into many languages.
Donna Stonecipher is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Transaction Histories, which was named by The New York Times as one of the 10 best poetry books of 2018. She has also published one book of criticism, Prose Poetry and the City (2018). Her translation of Friederike Mayröcker’s études, for which she received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, appeared in 2020. She lives in Berlin.
poetry in action is an Action Books blog feature curated and edited by Katherine M. Hedeen (@kmhedeen) with web editing by Paul Cunningham.