Poets & Writers Theater

“I’ll dig in, / into my days, having come here to live, not to visit.” The late Denise Levertov reads poems from her collections Evening Train (New Directions, 1992) and Sands of the Well (New Directions, 1996) in this video from a 1993 event at the Lannan Foundation in Los Angeles.

“[The Congo] is the heartbeat of the world, and it’s never recognized as a central heartbeat,” says Will Alexander about the focus of his most recent collection, Refractive Africa (New Directions, 2021), a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, in this Poetry.LA interview with Douglas Manuel about the intuition he follows for his writing. “I’m not colonized by cognitive expertise,” says Alexander.

“We in the fields, the watchers from the burnt slope, / Facing the west, facing the bright sky, hopelessly longing / to know the red beauty…” In this 2011 PBS NewsHour video, Jeffrey Yang reads William Everson’s poem “We in the Fields” along with other poems published in Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems From New Directions, an anthology edited by the poet celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of New Directions. Yang’s new poetry collection, Line and Light (Graywolf Press, 2022), is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Malina, the 1971 novel by Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann, was rereleased by New Directions in May with a revised translation from the German by Philip Boehm and an introduction by Rachel Kushner. A screening of the 1991 film adaptation of the novel, directed by Werner Schroeter, was recently presented in celebration of the book.

“I believe literature should always start from zero. So, I write stories in both languages on purpose.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Yoko Tawada speaks in German, English, and Japanese about thinking and writing in two different languages and about her novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear (New Directions, 2016), translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky.

“Yesterday I lost a country. / I was in a hurry, / and I didn’t notice when it fell from me...” Dunya Mikhail reads her poem “I Was in a Hurry” in Arabic and English, accompanied by the National Arab Orchestra. Her fourth poetry collection, In Her Feminine Sign (New Directions, 2019), is featured in Page One in the July/August 2019 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Forgive / yourself, they say, but / after you forgive / what you have lived, / what is left?” At San Francisco State University’s Poetry Center, Forrest Gander reads “Stepping Out of the Light” from his collection Be With (New Directions, 2018), for which he won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize award in poetry.

“Take a microscope to the face of a beautiful woman and tell me it isn’t grotesque. Poetry is such a broad genre, it covers so many ways of looking.” Kim Hyesoon talks about her newest collection, Autobiography of a Death (New Directions, 2018), translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi, what it means to be a female poet, and why she thinks poetry is disappearing in this 2018 interview with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.

Luljeta Lleshanaku reads from her collection Haywire: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011) in English translation and in the original Albanian, and talks about how history, politics, and religion have informed her writing. Lleshanaku’s new collection, Negative Space (New Directions, 2018), translated from the Albanian by Ani Gjika, is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this video, John Keene reads from his short story “Cold” from his collection Counternarratives (New Directions, 2015) at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. Keene is a 2018 recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize.

“When you write a poem in your language, you write it one time. And when you think in the other language, and try to write a poem in the other language, I feel as if it’s a new poem. They say ‘lost in translation’ but also there are things found in translation.” Dunya Mikhail, author of The Iraqi Nights (New Directions, 2014), translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, talks about the duality of living with multiple homes and languages, and how her journey from Iran to the United States affected her evolution as a poet. Mikhail occasionally translates her own work.

“Like two personalities, they didn’t want to be one. They didn't want to tell one story. I couldn’t put them together.” Following the launch of her twenty-third book, The Naked Eye (New Directions, 2009), Yoko Tawada talks about thinking and writing in both German and Japanese. Tawada’s forthcoming novel, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, is translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky and will be released in November by New Directions.

"The difficulty was that different people liked different parts of the book." In the Paris Review's "My First Time" video series, Helen DeWitt talks about the many challenges she faced before the publication of her first novel, The Last Samurai, which was rereleased by New Directions in May 2016.

"The reason she's legendary is that she has this work that is extremely weird... she wrote like nobody else." Benjamin Moser, editor of The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector, published by New Directions this month, talks with Open Letter Books publisher Chad Post about the appeal of Lispector's writing.