Poetics of Poetry - Poetry of Poetics: Introducing José Kozer & Enrique Martínez Celaya

The Montgomery Fellows Program at Dartmouth College

May 2, 2017

Sanborn, The Wren Room

Poetics of Poetry - Poetry of Poetics

Introducing José Kozer

 & 

Enrique Martínez Celaya

Good afternoon!  ¡Buenas tardes! Welcome all! ¡Bienvenidos sean todos! My name is Keysi Montás, and I am the Associate Director of Safety & Security here at Dartmouth College: I am indeed the Associate Director of Safety & Security, but I am also what a friend from grad school would call “an independent scholar”.

For our program today, I want to start by thanking and acknowledging a number of people who have made this event possible:

-Prof. Raúl Bueno Chávez, form the Spanish Department and Prof. Lisa Baldez from the Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies Program for sponsoring José Kozer’s candidacy to the Montgomery Fellows Program. Thank you both!

-Prof. Klaus Milich, Director of the Montgomery Fellows Program, and Ellen Henderson, Program Coordinator.  Thank you!

-I want to thank Danielle Hussey, Josué Ruiz, Dennise Hernández, Jay Raju and Judith Hertog who will be reading the English versions of some of the poems which will be read today.

-And, finally, I want to thank each and every one of you, for being here with us!

Let me begin by providing a brief biography of our poets Enrique Martínez Celaya and José Kozer; then I will say a few words to mark the occasion, followed by a few words and poetic reading by Enrique; a reading in Spanish by José, with accompanying translations by our guest readers, and then, hopefully, we will have time for a brief Q&A session.

Enrique Martínez Celaya: (Palos, Cuba, 1964) at age seven his family relocated to Madrid, Spain, and a few years later to Puerto Rico. He initiated his formal training as an apprentice to a painter at the age of 12. In 1986 he received a BS in Applied Physics and a minor in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University; in 1988 he received an MS with a specialization in Quantum Electronics from the University of California, Berkeley. While a graduate student, he conducted part of his research at Brookhaven National Laboratory where he also painted the Long Island landscape. He completed all course work for the Ph.D. and a significant part of his dissertation before abandoning physics for art in 1990. In 1994 he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and in the same year he earned a MFA with the department's highest distinction from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Martínez Celaya is an artist and author who during the early part of his career worked as a scientist. His work has been exhibited and collected by major institutions around the world and he is the author of books and papers in art, poetry, philosophy, and physics. He is a Montgomery Fellow who was in residence in the summer of 2014, and is currently the Roth Family Distinguished Visiting Scholar here at Dartmouth College. He has been named the Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at the University of Southern California.

Having developed a practice influenced by and in dialog with literature and philosophy, Martínez Celaya has created projects and exhibitions from St. Petersburg and Berlin to Miami and New York. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., among others.

Please give Enrique a warm round of applause!!

José Kozer: (Havana, Cuba, 1940) the son of Jewish parents who migrated to Cuba from Poland (father) and Czechoslovakia (mother). He studied law at the University of Havana, left Cuba in 1960, and moved to the Village in New York City. He attended New York University and received a BA in 1965, and later received an MA and a Ph.D. from Queens College of the City University of New York, where, for 32 years and until his retirement in 1997, he was a Prof. of Spanish and Latin American Literature, specializing in Poetry and that is where I first met him in 1989.

He is a prolific writer, and for the past twenty years has been publishing an average of three books a year, with over eighty-five (85) books of poetry to date, published throughout the world, to include a most recent volume published in Brazil (Dec. 2016) of his Complete Works 1966-2015, containing 10,250 poems. He is a leading voice within the Neo-Barroco (or Neobaroque) movement. His poetry has been partially translated into English, Portuguese, French, Hebrew, Greek, German and Italian. His poems, journals and essays have been published journals and magazines in North and South America and Europe.

Kozer has translated prose and poetry from English to Spanish, with six published translated books of authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lafcadio Hearn, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Delmore Schwartz, Natsume Soski, Saito Mokichi and the medieval monk poet Saigyo.

In 2002 he made a historic visit to his native Cuba for the 2002 International Book Fair (first time a living Cuban writer in exile gets officially published in Cuba). In 2013, he was recognized with one of the most important literary prizes awarded in the Spanish speaking world: The Premio Iberoamericano de Poesía Pablo Neruda.

It is my distinct honor to welcome José Kozer to Dartmouth College as a Montgomery Fellow.

                                                                        

Here we have two individuals, who are stand-alone figures in in today’s artistic world, who have come together under the rubric of “Poetics of Politics - Politics of Poetics.” One is a poet, for whom poetry alone has been art and artistic tool; the other is a painter, a philosopher and a poet, for whom poetry has been the artistic tool with which, at times, he has been best able to theorize of the bridge between philosophy and painting.

In Politics, Aristotle said:

“Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either above humanity, or below it; . . . he may be compared to a bird which flies alone.”

In an interview in February of this year, at Biola University, Enrique said: “Art is a terrible way to do politics.” And in an interview in January, 2011, at Middlebury College, José said: “No tengo una poética de la política, yo estoy comprometido con el acto de la escritura” meaning: “I don’t have a poetic of politics, I am committed to the act of writing.”

Aristotle has been telling us that we are “political animals” and that is because, as socials beings, we organize under states that are political. At times, we can be political actors within the state, or the state can act its politics upon us; hence, by choice or circumstance, we can’t but be political animals.

Here is Enrique Martínez Celaya and here is José Kozer, both born in Cuba, both exiled, but immigrants. Most importantly, and thus the reason they are here with us today, they are titans of the arts. Are they birds who fly alone (as Aristotle might have put it) for not being political actors within the state and for proclaiming alliance to poetry, to art, and not to politics?  I beg to differ, and instead I submit to you that they are living proof that Poetry can do just fine without politics, but politics cannot do without poetry; else, as it is becoming increasingly evident in today’s world, we risk disaster!

Thank you.