Poem: FIRST THOUGHT
Martine Bellen is the author of five collections of poetry including The Vulnerability of Order, Copper Canyon Press (2001); Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems, Sun & Moon Press (1999) which won the National Poetry Series Award; and Places People Dare Not Enter Potes & Poets Press (1991). A bilingual collection of her poetry will be published later this year in Germany by Verlag im Waldgut (translator, Hans Juergen Balmes). She recently completed her sixth collection, Living with Animals.
She has also written the libretto for Ovidiana, an opera based on Ovid's Metamorphoses (composer, Matthew Greenbaum) that has been performed in New York City and Philadelphia. Ms. Bellen's poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Convergence of Birds: Writing Inspired by Joseph DAP (2001). She has been a recipient of the New York Foundation
for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and the Academy of American Poets Award. Since 1988, she has been an editor of the literary journal Conjunctions. She is a contributing editor and on the board of directors of Web del Sol (webdelsol.com). Ms. Bellen
has taught at many colleges and universities including New York University, Hunter College, Brooklyn College, and Hofstra University. She lives in a farmhouse in upstate New York.
Poem: HALLUCINATORY GRATIFICATION
Rosmarie Waldrop was born in Germany in 1935. At age ten she spent half a year acting with a traveling theater, but was happy when schools reopened and she could settle for the quieter
pleasures of reading and writing which she has since pursued in and out of universities (earning her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1966), in several countries, but mostly in Providence, Rhode Island where she lives with Keith Waldrop (with whom
she also co-edits Burning Deck Press). The linguistic displacement has not only made her into a translator, but gave her a sense of writing as exploration of what happens between. Between words, sentences, people, cultures. Her books of poetry include A
Key Into the Language of America, Split Infinites, the trilogy, The Reproduction of Profiles, Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities, and Selected Poems, Another Language. Two novels,
The Hanky of Pippin's Daughterand A Form/of Taking/It All
have recently been reprinted in one paperback by Northwestern University Press. She has translated 14 volumes of Edmond Jabès's work (The Book of Questions, The Book of Resemblances, etc.). Her memoir, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, is coming out from Wesleyan University Press in 2002. She has also translated, from the French, Jacques Roubaud and Emmanuel Hocquard; and from the German, Friederike Mayroecker, Elke Erb, Ernst Jandl, Oskar Pastior, and others.
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