Note: Joy Harjo, originally scheduled to appear as the 2017 Jean Burden Poetry reader, was forced to cancel her appearance because of unforeseen circumstances.
Click on here to go to the Cal State LA Arts and Letters Facebook photo album for this event.
National Book Award winning poet Daniel Borzutzky will read from his works at the 2017 Jean Burden Poetry Reading to be held on Thursday, February 23, 2017. This event will be held in the Golden Eagle Ballroom at the California State University, Los Angeles. Doors will open at 5:30pm for a buffet reception and the program will begin at 6:30pm. This event is free and open to the public.
Daniel Borzutzky is the author of The Performance of Becoming Human, winner of the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry. His other books and chapbooks include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (2015), Bedtime Stories for the End of the World! (2015), Data Bodies (2013), The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011), and The Ecstasy of Capitulation (2007). He has translated Raúl Zurita’s The Country of Planks (2015) and Song for his Disappeared Love (2010), and Jaime Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl (2008). His work has been supported by the Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pen/Heim Translation Fund. He lives in Chicago.
This event is made possible by the College of Arts and Letters, the Department of English, the CSULA Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, the Cross Cultural Centers, Statement Magazine, the Statement Unbound Literary Society, the MFA in Creative Writing and Media Arts, the American Communities Program, and the Center for the Study of Genders and Sexualities.
For information on parking, please visit CSULA Campus Maps. For more information, contact the Department of English at (323) 343-4140.
About The Performance of Becoming Human
(from Brooklyn Arts Press)
Daniel Borzutzky’s new collection of poetry, The Performance of Becoming Human, draws hemispheric connections between the US and Latin America, specifically touching upon issues relating to border and immigration policies, economic disparity, political violence, and the disturbing rhetoric of capitalism and bureaucracies. To become human is to navigate these borders, including those of institutions, the realities of over- and under-development, and the economies of privatization, in which humans endure state-sanctioned and systemic abuses. Borzutzky, whose writing Eileen Myles has described as “violent, perverse, and tender” in its portrayal of “American and global horror,” adds another chapter to a growing and important compilation of work that asks what it means to be both a unitedstatesian and a globalized subject whose body is “shared between the earth, the state, and the bank.”
Excerpts from Articles and Interviews
(from Brooklyn Arts Press)
Chicago Tribune Interview:“To write “unpolitical” poetry is also a political choice. Where you position yourself in relation to the communities you occupy and observe is a political question. I’m not sure I could be lyrical or poetic or even interesting without writing politically about the things I care about. So, I’m not sure I’m serving two masters, since I can’t really envision myself writing a poetry that is not political.”
PBS Newshour: Can a poem make the world a better place by documenting the darknesses around us?
Elle, These Are 4 of the Most Important Books of 2016: “Writing for me creates a form of political and social memory, a memory that hopefully draws attention to those individuals that power forces try to make invisible…”
Poetry Society, Daniel Borzutzky on “Lake Michigan Merges Into The Bay of Valparaiso, Chile”: “I live in Chicago, and my family is from Chile. I’ve written before of the ways in which Chicago is a Chilean city: a city that has copied Chile’s extreme approach to privatization of public services as well as the Pinochet dictatorship’s approach to policing and torturing its own citizens…”