Panel #5 Session 1
Thursday 30 November - 9:00
Building 25, Room 1
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​Self-chairing
‘Talking’ Translation: Measuring Spaces of Poetry from Multi-disciplinary Angles
- Robert Barnstone, Tony Barnstone & Kimberly Williams
Whittier College & University of Canberra
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This proposed panel will investigate varying relationship spaces within poetry through different perspectives and disciplines. Robert Barnstone will present a series of text interventions which consider the potential of poetry to be part of a constructed work of art when placed in the public realm as objects of intrigue, creating a product that explores the relationship between reading, the object as a unique form of publication, and space. The more that viewers engage with the text, the more they will be displaced from the space of the garden to the space of the imagination. In this way, the poem extends real space to a limitless virtual plane.
Tony Barnstone’s presentation will consider how Ghazals are concerned with many of the same thematic questions that run through the American blues: a distant, uncaring God who makes the poet suffer; a distant, uncaring lover who makes the poet suffer; a lover whom the poet worships like a god; a god whom the poet worships like a lover. And the ghazal is equivalent to the blues in other key ways—: in its social function as an oral and musical tradition and in its basic rhetorical and formal structure. This talk will demonstrate how the American blues open up the Urdu ghazal in translation and allow the translator to translate not just what the poem says but what it does.
Kimberly Williams’s presentation will examine the idea of translating dis-placements—culture, language and geography—through a poem’s placement in white space. She will use poems from her book Still Lives to discuss the way in which the space of the page informs and interacts with other spaces: the space of the poem and geographical place, along with language, memory, and imagination
Robert Barnstone is a practicing artist and Associate Professor, with degrees in Sculpture and Architecture from Bennington college, Master of Architecture, Harvard. Art installations : Prone at the Socrates Sculpture Park in NYC, Once Removed, SXS, Bondi,2013, Line vessels, SxS Bondi 2014, Cleft WSU, Body shells, SxS Bondi 2016 ,Gene Rosa SxS 2018. Prize and collections: Wolliombi , Whittier College Collection, Narrative interventions, Cite University Paris, Western Sydney University, Mona Farms, Kerr Neilson collection.
Tony Barnstone teaches at Whittier College and is the author of 21 books, a tarot deck and a music CD. His books of poetry include Pulp Sonnets; Beast in the Apartment; Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki; The Golem of Los Angeles; Sad Jazz: Sonnets; and Impure. He is also a translator or co-translator of world literature, primarily Chinese but also Spanish and Urdu. His awards include: The Poets Prize, the Strokestown International Prize, the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, and The John Ciardi Prize. His new publications are a co-translation from the Urdu, Faces Hidden in the Dust: Selected Ghazals of Ghalib and a creativity tool, The Radiant Tarot: Pathway to Creativity.
Kimberly K. Williams completed her PhD at University of Canberra in 2023. Her creative thesis used mixed modes and hybrid poetic sequences to depict the experiences of the women ‘pioneers’ crossing the Great Plains of what is now the U.S.A. The analytical portion of her thesis studied space, time, and the restoration of marginalised voices in poetic long forms. She is the author of three books of poems, including Sometimes a Woman (Recent Work Press 2021), which won the WILLA Literary Prize in Poetry in 2022. Her third book, Still Lives (Gazebo Books 2022) won a Canberra Critics Circle Award for Writing and was shortlisted for the ACT Notable Book of the Year in Poetry.