Samizdat was an international poetry magazine published in Chicago [1] from 1998 until 2004 and edited by the poet Robert Archambeau. It was noted for its unusual format, being printed on large newsprint pages. Contributors included Adam Zagajewski as well as Clayton Eshleman, Pierre Joris, Jerome Rothenberg, Michael Heller, Stephen Collis, [2] C.S. Giscombe, and others associated with experimental poetry. Eclectic and xenophilic in nature, the journal published work on or by Irish experimental poets, Eritrean poets, and new translations of poetry by Pablo Picasso and Paul Celan.
Special issues were devoted to Scandinavian poetry, the work of John Matthias, and the collaboration between Joris and Rothenberg.
The journal was named after the Russian underground literary movement. The Russian word "samizdat" translates literally as "self-published"; the word was chosen to reflect the journal's refusal of institutional funding.
Samizdat was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader. The practice of manual reproduction was widespread, because typewriters and printing devices required official registration and permission to access. This was a grassroots practice used to evade official Soviet censorship.
Paul Celan, born Paul Antschel, was a Romanian-born French poet, Holocaust survivor, and literary translator. Celan is regarded as one of the most important figures in German-language literature of the post-World War II era and a poet whose verse has gained an immortal place in the literary pantheon. Celan’s poetry, with its many radical poetic and linguistic innovations, is characterized by a complicated and cryptic style that deviates from poetic conventions.
Charles Bernstein is an American poet, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein is the Donald T. Regan Professor, Emeritus, Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E or Language poets. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. and in 2019 he was awarded the Bollingen Prize from Yale University, the premiere American prize for lifetime achievement, given on the occasion of the publication of Near/Miss. Bernstein was David Gray Professor of Poetry and Poetics at SUNY-Buffalo from 1990 to 2003, where he co-founded the Poetics Program. A volume of Bernstein's selected poetry from the past thirty years, All the Whiskey in Heaven, was published in 2010 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein was published in 2012 by Salt Publishing and Charles Bernstein: The Poetry of Idiomatic Insistences, edited by Paul Bovê was published by Duke University Press and boundary 2 in 2021.
Jerome Rothenberg was an American poet, translator and anthologist, noted for his work in the fields of ethnopoetics and performance poetry. Rothenberg co-founded the method of ethnopoetics with Dennis Tedlock in the late 1960s.
Zaum are the linguistic experiments in sound symbolism and language creation of Russian Cubo-Futurist poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh. Zaum is a non-referential phonetic entity with its own ontology. The language consists of neologisms that mean nothing. Zaum is a language organized through phonetic analogy and rhythm. Zaum literature cannot contain any onomatopoeia or psychopathological states.
Yuri Timofeyevich Galanskov was a Russian poet, historian, human rights activist and dissident. For his political activities, such as founding and editing samizdat almanac Phoenix, he was incarcerated in prisons, camps and forced treatment psychiatric hospitals (Psikhushkas). He died in a labor camp.
Tomas Venclova is a Lithuanian poet, prose writer, scholar, philologist and translator of literature. He is one of the five founding members of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group. In 1977, following his dissident activities, he was forced to emigrate and was deprived of his Soviet citizenship. Since 1980, he has taught Russian and Polish literature at Yale University. Considered a major figure in world literature, he has received many awards, including the Prize of Two Nations, and The Person of Tolerance of the Year Award from the Sugihara Foundation, among other honors.
Natalya Yevgenyevna Gorbanevskaya was a Russian poet, a translator of Polish literature and a civil-rights activist. She was one of the founders and the first editor of A Chronicle of Current Events (1968–1982). On 25 August 1968, with seven others, she took part in the 1968 Red Square demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1970 a Soviet court sentenced Gorbanevskaya to incarceration in a psychiatric hospital. She was released from the Kazan Special Psychiatric Hospital in 1972, and emigrated from the USSR in 1975, settling in France. In 2005, she became a citizen of Poland.
Pierre Joris is a Luxembourger-American poet, essayist, translator, and anthologist. He has moved between Europe, North Africa, and the United States for fifty-five years, publishing over eighty books of poetry, essays, translations and anthologies — most recently Interglacial Narrows and Always the Many, Never the One: Conversations In-between, with Florent Toniello, both from Contra Mundum Press. In 2020 his two final Paul Celan translations came out: Microliths They Are, Little Stones and The Collected Earlier Poetry (FSG). In 2019 Spuyten Duyvil Press published Arabia Deserta. Other recent books include: A City Full of Voices: Essays on the Work of Robert Kelly ; Adonis and Pierre Joris, Conversations in the Pyrenees ; Stations d'al-Hallaj ; The Book of U. His translation of Egyptian poet Safaa Fathy's Revolution Goes Through Walls came out in 2018 from SplitLevel. In June 2016 the Théatre National du Luxembourg produced his play The Agony of I.B.. Earlier publications include: An American Suite ; Barzakh: Poems 2000-2012 ; Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry of Paul Celan ; A Voice full of Cities: The Collected Essays of Robert Kelly and The University of California Book of North African Literature.
Sulfur: A Literary Tri-Annual of the Whole Art was an influential, small literary magazine founded by American poet and award-winning translator Clayton Eshleman in 1981 while he was Dreyfuss Poet in Residence at the California Institute of Technology.
Anatoly Kudryavitsky is a Russian-Irish novelist, poet, editor and literary translator.
Seth Abramson is an American professor, attorney, author, political columnist, and poet. He is the editor of the Best American Experimental Writing series and wrote a trilogy of nonfiction works detailing the foreign policy agenda of former president Donald Trump.
Alexei Khvostenko was a Russian avant-garde poet, singer-songwriter, artist and sculptor. Khvostenko is also frequently referred to by the nickname Khvost, meaning "tail".
Nicole Peyrafitte is a Pyrenean-born multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work in painting, action painting, writing, film, video, music, and cooking draws upon her eclectic history and the experiences of shaping identity across two continents and four languages. Her performances often include food cooked live and served to the audience as sustenance, from whipping cream, crepes and soups, to full dinners.
Chana Bloch was an American poet, translator, and scholar. She was a professor emerita of English at Mills College in Oakland, California.
Woodland Pattern Book Center is a nonprofit organization in Milwaukee, Wisconsin's Riverwest neighborhood that is dedicated to the discovery, cultivation, and presentation of poetry and the arts. The organization was founded in 1979 by Karl Gartung, Anne Kingsbury, and Karl Young, and was named after a passage in poet Paul Metcalf's Apalache: "South of Lake Superior, a culture center, the Woodland Pattern, with pottery but without agriculture..."
In 1935, Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, 53, temporarily ceased painting, drawing, and sculpting in order to commit himself to writing poetry, having already been immersed in the literary sphere for years. Although he soon resumed work in his previous fields, Picasso continued in his literary endeavours and wrote hundreds of poems, concluding The Burial of the Count of Orgaz in 1959.
Larissa Shmailo is an American poet, translator, novelist, editor, and critic. She is known for her literary translations from Russian to English, particularly her translation of Victory over the Sun and the anthology Twenty-First Century Russian Poetry.
Alexandra Gennadievna Petrova is a Russian poet and writer. She graduated from the Faculty of Philology at the University of Tartu. She lived in Jerusalem Israel from 1993 to 1998 and has lived in Rome since 1998. She was a finalist for the Andrei Bely Prize in 1999 and in 2008 and a Laureate of the Prize in 2016 for her novel Appendix.
Henry Fyodorovich Khudyakov was a Russian-American painter and Poet. He completed high school in Moscow in 1948 and graduated from Leningrad University with a degree in Philology in 1959. He wrote poetry in Soviet Russia as part of the Samizdat movement, creating poems that were both visually and audibly artistic. Henry emigrated to New York City in 1974, where he shifted his creative expression to mixed media on canvas, clothing and other objects. Henry Khudyakov’s works are part of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), Center Pompidou in Paris and others. He spent his later years living in Jersey City, New Jersey where he died on January 10, 2019.
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