The Bridge, Wave Books, and Poets House present

Graham Foust & Samuel Frederick

on their joint translation of the poetry of Ernst Meister

Tuesday, March 19, 7PM

@ Poets House, Kray Hall

10 River Terrace/http://www.poetshouse.org/

$10 general admission, $7 for student & seniors, free for Poets House members

Graham Foust is the author of five books of poems, including Necessary Stranger (a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in 2007) and To Anacreon in Heaven and Other Poems (forthcoming from Flood Editions in 2013).  His poems, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including The Nation, Conjunctions, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Boston Review, American Letters and Commentary, A Public Space, Gulf Coast, New Ohio Review, Verse, and Fence.  A graduate of Beloit College, George Mason University, and the Poetics Program at the University of Buffalo, he works at the University of Denver.

Samuel Frederick is an assistant professor of German at Penn State. He is the author of one book, Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter (Northwestern University Press), and the co-editor of A Companion to Robert Walser, currently in preparation. With Graham Foust he has translated three volumes of Ernst Meister’s verse, the first of which, In Time’s Rift, was published by Wave Books in 2012, and the second of which will be published by Wave Books next year.

Ernst Meister (1911-1979) was born in Hagen, Germany, and studied first theology, then literature, art history, and philosophy at verious German universities. After the publication of his first book in 1932, Meister wrote “for the drawer” while the National Socialists were in power, and it was not until the 1950s that he began publishing again. During the prolific last third of his life, he produced more than sixteen volumes of verse as well as numerous other literary and visual works. Often compared to Paul Celan because of the brevity and difficulty of his poems, Meister tends toward a more abstract existentialism that renders his work both intensely emotional and inimitably strange. Having written outside the dominant literary circles of his time, he remains relatively unknown, though he was posthumously awarded the most prestigious award for German literature, the Georg Büchner Prize, having been informed of the honor just days before his death.

For more information about In Time’s Rift or Wave Books, please go to: http://www.wavepoetry.com/