New England Review

Two New Episodes of NER Out Loud

Michael McGriff and Jesse Lee Kercheval

Listen to two new episodes of NER Out Loud, hosted and produced by our summer interns Yardena Carmi ’23 and Rebecca Amen ’22.

Episode 16: Michael McGriff reads an excerpt from his poem “Questions for the Interrogation,” followed by an interview with Yardena Carmi. Their conversation explores the poem’s tribute to rural Oregon and Pablo Neruda, the limitations of memory and language, and Michael’s work as a translator of Tomas Tranströmer.

“From Questions for the Interrogation” was originally published in NER 42.1 (spring 2021).

Episode 17: Jesse Lee Kercheval reads her essay “Crash,” followed by a conversation with Rebecca Amen. The short essay interrogates the author’s memory of a shocking car accident that took place more than 50 years ago. In the interview, Kercheval further explores the nature of memory, essay writing in general, and her work as a translator of Uruguayan poetry.

“Crash” was originally published in NER 42.2 (summer 2021).

Visit NER’s podcast page here. You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts or listen on Soundcloud.

Wreckage

Home Burial

In a rare long review of a book of poetry, Jeff Gordinier praises Michael McGriff’s second book, Home Burial, in the NYTBR:

Wreckage is everywhere in these poems…He’s plunging into the depths of some underground waterway in the American psyche — what’s happening to the environment, what’s happening to jobs, what’s happening to families — and rising to the surface to show us the debris.

[read more]

On Tranströmer

Bookforum has Michael McGriff’s notes on translating Nobel Prize winner Tomas Tranströmer:

Like Andrei Tarkovsky or Arvo Pärt, Tranströmer has few works, each a distillation of a master image-maker and devotee of silence. I fell in love with Tranströmer’s poetry, like many Americans, through Samuel Charters’ translation of the book-length poem Baltics, which appeared with the incredible (but now defunct) Oyez press in Berkeley, California, in 1975. Here is the first stanza of the second section of Baltics in Charters’ translation:

The wind walks in the pine forest. It sighs heavily, lightly.
In the middle of the forest, the Baltic also sighs, deep in the
forest you’re out on the open sea.

[read the essay]

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