Last week Ammiel Alcalay, the current holder of the Lannan Chair in Poetics at Georgetown, gave a reading as part of the Lannan series - I attended this, as well as the seminar that proceeded it. It was a fascinating evening (albeit a bit hectic for me - as in between attending these, I had to run back to the library where I was holding office hours for my students) and one thing that emerged for me was the generosity of Alcalay.

To begin the seminar discussion, he read one of his poems from his book From the Warring Factions, a work that is dedicated to the memory of Srebrenica, and that is made up of collage - of the bringing together of fragments of found texts (from the Aeneid to speeches by Dick Cheney): this is prat of what he described as a long term project thinking through how to deal with documents. Having written a prior book that opened a space between the documentary and the created, but placing a narrator to create an intentional discrepancy, when he came to write From the Warring Factions he felt that the only way to write the book was if all the text were appropriated. The result is a polyphonic work that echoes not merely the conflict in Balkans, but that can be read in reference to other conflicts. The reading of this poem, and discussion of his method produced an interesting discussion in the seminar, and it left me wondering if in some ways the merit of Alcalay's working method lies in a certain instability in his text: that the polyphony could shift over time, and the amassed language be transferred, transformed for the reader.

Alcalay has done a lot of translating - he is probably best known as the translator of Semezdin Mehmedinović's Sarajevo Blues. During the seminar, he spoke about his involvement in translation (and the New York Translation Collective) and during the reading he read works by other writers he has translated, reading both poetry and prose.

He's also written essays, and I'm hoping to find some time to read some of these prose pieces in the coming weeks - while he's at Georgetown, I'm going to set up an interview with him too (check back... it may take some time, but it will happen) - but I want to spend some more time reading him, and the poets he has translated before I get to that stage.

It's got me thinking about lots of different things - as usual. Ways of experimenting with my own writing, subject matter, the importance of translation... The discovery of a new poet is a fascinating moment.