After Miłosz: Polish Poetry In the 20th and the 21th Century Chicago, Chopin Theatre, 9/30 –10/3 2011 THE FESTIVAL The Chicago's literary festival titled After Milosz: Polish Poetry in the 20th and 21th Century is the largest presentation of Polish poetry in the United States this year. The festival celebrates the year of Czeslaw Milosz and commemorates the centennial anniversary of the birth of the Nobel Prize winner. The event goes beyond a familiar formula of commenting the work of the poet and offers a broader view on the contemporary Polish poetry. Besides the academic conference dedicated to Milosz's work, and a panel with the greatest America poets (Jorie Graham, Charles Simic) remembering the artist and discussing his influence on American poetry, the program includes readings of the most talented modern Polish poets of three generations. From the best known (Zagajewski, Sommer) to the most often awarded young writer nowadays, Justyna Bargielska. An important part of the festival will be two concerts: the opening show will present the best Polish rappers FISZ and EMADE whose songs are inspired by Polish poetry; another concert will present one of the best jazz singers in the world, Patricia Barber, who will perform especially for this occasion. The main organizers of the festival are the Fundation of Tygodnik Powszechny magazine and the Joseph Conrad International Literary Festival in Krakow, for which the Chicago festival is a portion of the larger international project for promoting Polish literature abroad. The co- organizer of the festival is the Head of the Slavic Department at University of Illinois at Chicago, Professor Michal Pawel Markowski, who represents also the Polish Interdisciplinary Program at UIC supported by The Hejna Fund, and also serves as the artistic director to the Conrad Festival. The festival After Milosz will take place in the Chopin Theater, one of the most independent and vivid cultural centers in Chicago. The festival is financed by the Polish Ministry of Culture and Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Complete information about the festival can be found on our website at www.aftermilosz.com. PROGRAM Friday, September 30, 2011 5.30 PM: Opening reception 9 PM: FISZ/EMADE: LIVE CONCERT. Best Polish rappers perform music inspired by Polish poetry FISZ/ EMADE Fisz (Bartosz Waglewski) is an award winning Polish rap artist. He is the son of musician Wojciech Waglewski and older brother of Emade (Piotr Waglewski). Studied in Europejska Akademia Sztuk (EAS).Musical style of Fisz is unconventional. At the very beginning of his career he started out as a Hip-hop artist, but went experimental soon after releasing Tworzywo Sztuczne - Wielki Ciężki Słoń in 2004. Fisz and his producer Emade seek inspiration in black music giving soul, funk and jazz touch to their projects. His lyrics are often based on wordplay.Internationally he gave concerts on stages of London, Berlin, Bordeaux, Calvi, Dijon, Marseille, Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Paris and Saint Vellier. Saturday, October 1, 2011 9 AM: Complimentary breakfast 10 AM: MIŁOSZ IN/ON AMERICA: A COLLOQUIUM Panel 1: 10:15-11:15 AM Clare Cavanagh (Northwestern), Milosz and Biography as 'Literary Fact' Oren Izenberg (UIC), Just One Person. Panel 2: 11:30-12:45 AM Mira Rosenthal (Stanford), The Making of the American Czesław Miłosz. Bożena Shallcross (University of Chicago), Signature Pieces. Lunch Break: 1-2 PM Panel 3: 2-3:15 PM Benjamin Paloff (University of Michigan), Czeslaw Milosz: Faith without Consolation Stephen Burt (Harvard University), The Paradox of Wisdom Literature. Panel 4: 3:30-4:45 PM Christina Pugh (UIC), Czeslaw Milosz and the Affinity for the Image. Michal Pawel Markowski (UIC), What is Objective Poetry Speakers: Clare Cavanagh teaches Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Northwestern University. Her most recent book, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (Yale UP, 2010), received the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Prize in Criticism. Recent volumes of translations include: Wislawa Szymborska, Here (Harcourt, 2010, with Stanislaw Baranczak), which received the 2010 Found in Translation Awards, and Adam Zagajewski, Unseen Hand (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2011). She is an associate editor of the revised Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012), and is currently working on a biography of Czeslaw Milosz for Farrar Straus and Giroux. Her essays and translations have appeared in TLS, the New Yorker, the New Republic, the New York Times, Poetry, and other publications. Oren Izenberg is the English Department Visiting Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His first book,Being Numerous: The Poetic Imagination of the Ground of Social Life, (Princeton, 2011) describes the ways in which 20th century poets responded to a century of crisis and rethought, by means of their art, the question of what counts as a person. A new project, Lyric Poetry and the Philosophy of Mind, proposes that the object the mind makes—principally, the lyric poem— might be better understood by giving some attention to our strongest recent accounts of the nature and structure of thought. It places poems alongside recent work in (analytic) philosophy, considering works of art variously as examples, dramatizations of, and experiments in the mind’s workings. Mira Rosenthal is the author of the poetry collection The Local World and the translator of several books by Polish poet Tomasz Rożycki. Among her awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN American Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Fulbright Commission. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Houston and will soon complete a PhD. in comparative literature from Indiana University. She is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Bożena Shallcross is Associate Professor of Polish Literature at the University of Chicago and the College. She is Director of Undergraduate Studies and Academic Advisor for the Interdisciplinary Program at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; she also serves as a member of the Board of Directors at the Chicago Center for Jewish Studies and Chair of Reading Cultures Core Sequence, as well as a faculty member in the Committee on Creative Writing and Program on Poetry and Poetics. Over the years her research interests have evolved from the interart studies to the culturalist approach to the Holocaust. This trajectory is exemplified in her book publications, including The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish Jewish Culture (Indiana UP 2011); Rzeczy i Zagłada (self-translated into Polish, Universitas 2010); Through the Poet's Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky (Northwestern UP 2002; 2008 2nd edition); and Cień i forma. O wyobraźni plastycznej Leopolda Staffa (Glob 1987). She also edited The Effect of Palimpsest: Culture, Literature, History (Peter Lang 2011; co-edited with Ryszard Nycz); Polish Encounters /Russian Identity (Indiana University Press, 2005; co-edited with David L. Ransel), Framing the Polish Home: Postwar Cultural Constructions of Hearth, Nation, and Self (Ohio UP 2002), The Other Herbert (Indiana Slavic Studies 1998), Dom romantycznego artysty (Wydawnictwo Literackie 1989). Benjamin Paloff grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and was educated at Harvard and at the University of Michigan, where he is currently assistant professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature. He is the author of The Politics, a collection of poems, and has translated several books from Polish, most recently Lodgings: Selected Poems of Andrzej Sosnowski. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Program, he is a poetry editor at Boston Review. Stephen Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. His books include The Art of the Sonnet, with David Mikics (2010); Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (2009); and Parallel Play (poems; 2006). His writings appear regularly in Boston Review, the London Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, and other venues in the US and UK. Christina Pugh is the author of two books of poems: Restoration (Northwestern University Press /TriQuarterly Books, 2008) and Rotary (Word Press, 2004), which received the Word Press First Book Prize. She has also published a chapbook, Gardening at Dusk (Wells College Press, 2002). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, and other periodicals, as well as in anthologies such as Poetry 180. Her honors have included the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Grolier Poetry Prize, the Illinois Arts Council’s individual artist fellowship in poetry, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, a Whiting Fellowship for the Humanities, and residencies at the Ragdale and Ucross colonies. Pugh’s criticism has recently appeared in Poetry, Verse, Ploughshares, and The Emily Dickinson Journal. She is an associate professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she is also Director of Undergraduate Studies in the English department. Michal Pawel Markowski is the Hejna Family Chair in Polish Language and Literature and Head of Department of Slavic and Baltic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is also the Artistic Director of the Joseph Conrad International Literary Festival in Kraków, Poland, and a Member of the Academic Council of the ‘Interzones’, the first Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Programme, selected and funded by the EU for its innovative and challenging approach to the Humanities. The author and editor of over twenty books on philosophy and literature, translated into several languages, including Black Waters: Gombrowicz, World, Literature (2004) and Polish Modern Literature: Leśmian, Schulz, Witkacy (2006). He also edited or translated works by Schlegel, Proust, Barthes, and Deleuze and received several important literary and academic prizes in Poland, including Kościelscy Prize (1998), and Kazimierz Wyka Prize (2011). He is now working on a collection of his travel writings and the book titled Dual Transmission: Subjectivity and Textuality in the Western Tradition.