Wieczór z kanadyjską poetką Lisą Robertson

Since the early 1990s Robertson has published nine books of poetry, three books of essays and one novel, as well as contributed to many artist’s catalogues and monographs. Her book Anemones: A Simone Weil Project (If I Can't Dance, 2021), an annotated translation of Weil’s 1942 essay on the troubadour poets and the Cathar heresy, is the most recent outcome of wide rime, her ongoing study of troubadour poetics. 

She has been a Visiting Poet and Professor at Princeton University, University of Cambridge, University of Chicago, University of East Anglia, UC Berkeley, Piet Zwart Institute and California College of the Arts, and lectures widely in Europe and North America. In 2017 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Letters by Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and in 2018, the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts in New York awarded her the inaugural C. D. Wright Award in Poetry. 

Her novel "The Baudelaire Fractal" was shortlisted for the 2021 Governor General’s Award for Fiction in Canada. Currently she is continuing her work with wide rime, and composing a novel sited on the Bièvre river, a disappeared industrial river in Paris.

Programme of the meeting: 

Part I: A roundtable. 
Special Guest: Lisa Robertson 
Participants: Dr hab. Małgorzata Myk (University of Lodz), Dr hab. Kacper Bartczak, Associate Professor at the University of Lodz (University of Lodz), mgr Mark Tardi (University of Lodz), Dr Joanna Mąkowska (American Studies Center, University of Warsaw). 

Part II: Lisa Robertson: Poetry Reading 
[Event Moderation: Dr hab. Małgorzata Myk] 
Language of the event: English 
 

MAŁGORZATA MYK teaches at the University of Lodz at the Department of North American Literature and Culture. She is the author of the monograph "Upping the Ante of the Real: Speculative Poetics of Leslie Scalapino" (Peter Lang, 2019). She is the Kościuszko Foundation Fellow in 2017/18 (UCSD) and the Fulbright Foundation Senior Award recipient in 2024/25 (University of Utah). Her translation of E. Tracy Grinnell’s poetry appeared in Variants of Catching Breath: Five American Voices, edited by Mark Tardi (Lodz: Dom Literatury, 2022). She translated Lisa Robertson’s The Weather, titled Pogoda (Kraków: LOKATOR, 2024, forthcoming) and Kevin Davies’ selected poems, titled Wczesna Muzyka Komputerowa (Poznań: Disastra Publishing, 2024, forthcoming). Her translations of Polish poet Maria Cyranowicz's work are forthcoming from Toad Press in the International Chapbook Series 2024/2025 and from Litmus Press in Viscera: Eight Voices from Poland (edited by Mark Tardi) in the Fall of 2024. 

KACPER BARTCZAK is an Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Lodz. He is the author of In Search of Communication and Community: Poetry of John Ashbery (2006), Świat nie scalony (2010) and Materia i autokreacja (2019). As a poet, he is the author of several volumes one of which, Wiersze organiczne (2015) was finalist in two major Polish literary awards Silesius and Gdynia. His volume Widoki wymazy (2021) was finalist for the Lodz award “Plastry kultury”. He was a Fulbright scholar (twice) and a Kościuszko Foundation scholar. In English translation, his poetry has appeared (or is forthcoming) in Poetry, Denver Quarterly, Interim, Berlin Quarterly, Aufgabe, Jacket2, and Lyric. He also published collections with his translations of selected poems by Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein and Peter Gizzi. He lives and works in Lodz where he is the Head of the Department of North American Literature and Culture. 

MARK TARDI is a writer and translator whose recent awards include a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Translation fellowship. He is the author of three books, most recently, The Circus of Trust (Dalkey Archive Press, 2017), and his translations of The Squatters’ Gift by Robert Rybicki (Dalkey Archive Press) and Faith in Strangers by Katarzyna Szaulińska (Toad Press/Veliz Books) were published in 2021. His recent writing and translations have appeared in Poetry, Conjunctions, Guernica, ANMLY, Interim, Cagibi, Denver Quarterly, and in the anthology The Experiment Will Not Be Bound (Unbound Edition Press, 2023). Unsovereign by Kacper Bartczak (above/ground press) and Viscera: Eight Voices from Poland (Litmus) are forthcoming in 2024. He is on faculty at the University of Lodz. 

JOANNA MĄKOWSKA is an Assistant Professor at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. Her research interests include twentieth and twenty-first-century literature in the United States and Canada, poetry and poetics, documentary and protest writing, American ecocriticism, and posthumanist and feminist theories. She has published in Arizona Quarterly, Modernism/modernity, Women’s Studies, James Baldwin Review, and the Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics, among other venues. She was a Fulbright Scholar at the State University of New York at Buffalo and a Kosciuszko Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Duquesne University. She is also a literary critic and a translator: recently, she brought into Polish Natalie Diaz’s collection Postcolonial Love Poem (Współbycie, 2024). 

The event is part of the Spring School Event Series 2024 sponsored by the EUTERPE project, carried out at the Faculty of Philology, University of Lodz, and curated by the Women's Studies Centre at the University of Lodz.

Edit: Communications and PR Centre, University of Lodz