Vladimir Mayakovsky: My Discovery of America (1926/2005) [Russian/English]

Touring the United States in 1925, the Russian Futurist poet and propagandist Vladimir Mayakovsky observed at first hand what he considered to be the model for Soviet technological development. Writing in his typical declamatory style, he found much to celebrate in the modernised, industrialised America of the 1920s – creativity and advancement, a ‘primitive futurism’. But he also decried the social injustices of uncaring capitalism, losing no opportunity to propound his own political beliefs.

Presented here in full for the first time in the English language, My Discovery of America forms a series of humorous sketches, thoughts, jottings and poems, the significance of which resounds from the early twentieth century through to our own times.

First published as Мое открытие Америки in Russian in 1926
With an introduction and translated by Neil Cornwell
Foreword by Colum McCann
Publisher Hesperus Press, 2005
Modern Voices series
ISBN 1843914085, 9781843914082
138 pages

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Marshall Berman: All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982–) [EN, ES]

The political and social revolutions of the nineteenth century, the pivotal writings of Goethe, Marx, Dostoevsky, and others, and the creation of new environments to replace the old-all have thrust us into a modern world of contradictions and ambiguities. In this fascinating book, Marshall Berman examines the clash of classes, histories, and cultures, and ponders our prospects for coming to terms with the relationship between a liberating social and philosophical idealism and a complex, bureaucratic materialism.From a reinterpretation of Karl Marx to an incisive consideration of the impact of Robert Moses on modern urban living, Berman charts the progress of the twentieth-century experience. He concludes that adaptation to continual flux is possible and that therein lies our hope for achieving a truly modern society.

First published by Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1982
This edition with a new preface published in Penguin Books, 1988
ISBN 0140109625, 9780140109627
383 pages

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All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (English, 1982/1988)
Todo lo solido se desvanece en el aire: La experiencia de la modernidad (Spanish, trans. Andrea Morales Vidal, 3rd ed., 1988/1989, added on 2014-6-2)

Marjorie Perloff, Craig Dworkin (eds.): The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound (2009)

“Sound—one of the central elements of poetry—finds itself all but ignored in the current discourse on lyric forms. The essays collected here by Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin break that critical silence to readdress some of the fundamental connections between poetry and sound—connections that go far beyond traditional metrical studies.

Ranging from medieval Latin lyrics to a cyborg opera, sixteenth-century France to twentieth-century Brazil, romantic ballads to the contemporary avant-garde, the contributors to The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound explore such subjects as the translatability of lyric sound, the historical and cultural roles of rhyme, the role of sound repetition in novelistic prose, the connections between “sound poetry” and music, between the visual and the auditory, the role of the body in performance, and the impact of recording technologies on the lyric voice. Along the way, the essays take on the “ensemble discords” of Maurice Scève’s Délie, Ezra Pound’s use of “Chinese whispers,” the alchemical theology of Hugo Ball’s Dada performances, Jean Cocteau’s modernist radiophonics, and an intercultural account of the poetry reading as a kind of dubbing.

A genuinely comparatist study, The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound is designed to challenge current preconceptions about what Susan Howe has called “articulations of sound forms in time” as they have transformed the expanded poetic field of the twenty-first century.”

With contributions by Marjorie Perloff, Craig Dworkin, Susan Stewart, Leevi Lehto, Yunte Huang, Rosmarie Waldrop, Richard Sieburth, Gordana P. Crnković, Steve McCaffery, Christian Bök, Charles Bernstein, Hélène Aji, Yoko Tawada, Susan Howe, Rubén Gallo, Antonio Sergio Bessa, Johanna Drucker, Ming-Qian Ma, Brian M. Reed, Kenneth Goldsmith

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2009
ISBN 0226657434, 9780226657431
352 pages

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