Franck André Jamme has published numerous volumes of lyric and concrete poetry as well as collaborative works with artists, such as James Brown, Suzan Frecon, Jaume Plensa, and Jan Voss. He was awarded the 2005 Grand Prix de Poésie from the Société des gens de Lettres and is the editor of the 1983 Pléiade edition of the complete works of René Char. He has also curated exhibitions in Paris, San Francisco, and New York at venues including the Centre Pompidou and the Drawing Center. Siglio Press published his Tantra Song in 2011 and many of his books have been translated into English, including New Exercises (Wave Books, 2008), Another Silent Attack (Black Square/Brooklyn Rail, 2006), The Recitation of Forgetting (Black Square, 2003), and Moon Wood (Selavy Press, 2000). He is also the translator of John Ashbery’s Three Poems. Ashbery in turn translated his La récitation de l’oubli. He divides his time between Burgundy and Paris.

Norma Cole will present her translation of Jamme's recent work.

Norma Cole’s most recent books of poetry include Win These Posters and Other Unrelated Prizes Inside, Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems, 1988–2008, Spinoza in Her Youth, and Natural Light. Cole’s To Be at Music: Essays & Talks made its appearance in 2010 from Omnidawn Press and her collaboration with painter Marina Adams—Actualities—is forthcoming from Litmus Press. Her translations from the French language include Danielle Collobert’s It Then and Journals and Jean Daive’s A Woman with Several Lives. Additionally, Cole edited and translated Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France.

Cole has received awards from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, the Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Poetry, the Fund for Poetry, the Creative Work Fund, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Cole has taught at many schools, including the University of San Francisco, Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California, and San Francisco State University. She was also a Regents’ Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.

the scent of Eros


surely


the spirit


able
to dress in water
a body so singular

and this attraction
meanwhile
for a strange feeling
of indifference


or even absence


absolutely phosphorescent

Peter Gizzi is the author of six poetry collections, including Threshold Songs (2011) and The Outernationale (2007), and numerous chapbooks and artist books. He recently published a retrospective volume titled In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011 (2014). His honors include the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets and artist grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Howard Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2011 he was the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at the University of Cambridge. He works at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

We know time is a wave.

You can see it in gneiss, migmatic
or otherwise, everything crumbles.


Don’t despair.


That’s the message frozen in old stone.


I am just a visitor to this world
an interloper really headed deep into glass.


I, moving across a vast expanse of water


though it is not water maybe salt
or consciousness itself


enacted as empathy. Enacted as seeing.


To see with a purpose has its bloom
and falls to seed and returns


to be a story like any other.
To be a story open and vulnerable


a measure of time, a day, this day one might say
an angle of light for instance.


Let us examine green. Let us go together


to see it all unstable and becoming
violent and testing gravity


so natural in its hunger.


The organic existence of gravity.
The organic nature of history.


The natural history of tears.