Viscera: Poetry Workshop + Q&A
Join us for genre-bending poetry workshop centered onViscera: Eight Voices from Poland, including translator Małgorzata Myk, featured poet Natalia Malek, and editor Mark Tardi.
Viscera presents a selection of work by Polish women writers committed to experimenting with form while shaping vigorous political critiques. As Tardi writes in the Introduction, “Each of the writers’ work in this book frustrates the limits of particular poetic concerns and together their voices comprise an archival octet that hums in ‘the breath’s hidden fissure,’ full of counterpoint, semi-chords and shards, formal daring and unapologetic verve.
While the program will be conducted in English, writing prompts will be offered in both English and Polish. Participants are encouraged to pursue questions of translation, language, and form. Following the workshop section, there will be a bilingual Q&A with poet Natalia Malek. Newcomers to poetry, lifelong poets and readers all welcome!
PARTICIPANTS
Małgorzata Myk is a Polish literary scholar and translator. She teaches at the University of Łódź in the Department of North American Literature and Culture. Author of the monograph Upping the Ante of the Real: Speculative Poetics of Leslie Scalapino (Peter Lang, 2019). The Kościuszko Foundation Fellow in 2017/18 (UCSD) and Fulbright Senior Award recipient in 2024/25 (University of Utah). Her translation of E. Tracy Grinnell’s poetry appeared in Odmiany Łapania Tchu: Pięć Amerykańskich Głosów (Variants of Catching Breath: Five American Voices), edited by Mark Tardi (Łódź: Dom Literatury 2022). Her translations of Maria Cyranowicz’s poetry into English appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, AzonaL: Poetry in Translation, and ANMLY. She has recently translated Lisa Robertson’s The Weather, titled Pogoda (Kraków: LOKATOR, 2024). Her translation of Kevin Davies’s selected poems, titled Wczesna Muzyka Komputerowa, is forthcoming from Disastra Publishing. Her new translations of Maria Cyranowicz's poems are forthcoming from Litmus Press in Fall 2024 in Viscera: Eight Voices from Poland (ed. Mark Tardi). She lives in Warsaw.
Natalia Malek is a Polish poet, translator and literary curator. She has
published five collections of poetry: Obręcze (2022), Karapaks (2020), Kord (2017), Szaber (2014) and Pracowite popołudnia (2010). Karapaks, her fourth collection, won the 2021 Gdynia Literary Prize – Best Poetry Collection; Kord, her third collection, received the 2017 Adam Włodek Award for Emerging Writers. Her books have been shortlisted for major literary prizes in Poland including the Nike Literary Award, Wisława Szymborska Award and Silesius Poetry Prize. A graduate of English Studies at the University of Warsaw, she has translated the work of Sandra Cisneros, Marlene Dumas, Louise Glück, George Oppen, Tyrone Williams, and others, as well as art writings and criticism, occasionally reviewing art exhibitions herself. Her poems have been widely anthologized and translated into more than ten languages. She teaches creative writing and is particularly interested in the intersections of poetry and visual arts.
Mark Tardi is originally from Chicago and he earned his MFA from Brown University. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Harry Ransom Center, Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. His publications include the books The Circus of Trust, Airport music, and Euclid Shudders. His writing and translations have appeared widely in periodicals such as Denver Quarterly, The Millions, Asymptote, Aufgabe, Berlin Quarterly, Chicago Review, Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere. His translation of The Squatters' Gift by Robert Rybicki (Dalkey Archive) and Faith in Strangers by Katarzyna Szaulińska (Toad Press/Veliz Books) were published in 2021. He has also translated work by Olga Hund, Zofia Skrzypulec, Aleksandra Byrska, Kinga Piotrowiak-Junkiert, Miron Białoszewski, Kacper Bartczak, Monika Mosiewicz, and Przemysław Owczarek from the Polish. A former Fulbright scholar, he lives with his family in a village in central Poland and is on faculty at the University of Łódź.
