ALSCW Zoom Series
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October 14th, 6 pm EST: Marjorie Perloff in conversation with Rosanna Warren about her new biography Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters (Norton)
Marjorie Perloff is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities, Emerita at Stanford University. Her books include The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), The Futurist Moment:Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986) Wittgenstein’s Ladder (1996), The Vienna Paradox (2004), Differentials: Poetry,Poetics, Pedagogy, which won the Robert Penn Warren Prize for literary criticism in 2005, and Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2016). She is a former Vice President of the ALSCW.
Rosanna Warren is Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. She is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Ghost in a Red Hat (2011) and So Forth (2020).She has published a book of literary criticism and edited a volume of essays about translation, and has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, The American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New England Poetry Club, among others. She is a former President of the ALSCW. Her biography of Max Jacob will be published in October 2020.
As Picasso reinvented painting, Jacob helped to reinvent poetry with compressed, hard-edged prose poems and synapse-skipping verse lyrics, the product of a complex amalgamation of Jewish, Breton, Parisian, and Roman Catholic influences. In Max Jacob, the poet’s life plays out against the vivid backdrop of bohemian Paris from the turn of the twentieth century through the divisions of World War II. Acclaimed poet Rosanna Warren transports us to Picasso’s ramshackle studio in Montmartre, where Cubism was born; introduces the artists gathered at a seedy bar on the left bank, where Max would often hold court; and offers a front-row seat to the artistic squabbles that shaped the Modernist movement. Jacob’s complex understanding of faith, art, and sexuality animates this sweeping work. In February 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Drancy, where he would die a few days later.
More than thirty years in the making, this landmark biography offers a compelling, tragic portrait of Jacob as a man and as an artist alongside a rich study of his groundbreaking poetry—in Warren’s own stunning translations. Max Jacob is a nuanced, deeply researched, and essential contribution to Modernist scholarship.
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