Please join us at Karma Bookstore for the launch of “Meret Oppenheim’s The Loveliest Vowel Empties” (World Poetry, 2023), the first English-language translation of the collected poems of the legendary Swiss Surrealist. A key figure of the Paris art scene in the 1930s, Oppenheim moved in a circle that included André Breton, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Elsa Schiaparelli. Oppenheim’s poetry − 49 poems written between 1933 and 1980 − moves beyond Surrealism to inhabit a voice all her own.

“To read Oppenheim’s lyric bulletins, conveyed tactfully into English, is to feel that we are plunging for the first time into the pure waters of poetry itself, impervious to fad. No dross, no affectation: instead, Oppenheim gives us strangeness, tone, translucency.” − Wayne Koestenbaum

Following a reading from the book, the translator Kathleen Heil will be joined by Wayne Koestenbaum and Lee Colón for a conversation about Oppenheim’s life and poems.

This event will be live-streamed by Montez Press Radio at radio.montezpress.com

Bios:

The Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim (1913−1985) was born in Berlin-Charlottenburg and died in Basel. Best known for Object, her fur-lined teacup from 1936, her expansive body of work included painting, works on paper, and object constructions, as well as jewelry designs, public sculpture commissions, and poetry. From 2021−2023 her work was the subject of a major exhibition, the first transatlantic retrospective of her work, a collaboration between MoMA, The Menil Collection, and Kunstmuseum Bern.

Kathleen Heil is an artist working with languages of the body and written word, whose practice encompasses dance/performance and the writing and translating of poetry and prose. Her work appears in The New Yorker, Fence, Two Lines, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. She is the recipient of grants from the NEA, German Translators’ Fund, and Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, among others. Originally from New Orleans, she lives and works in Berlin.

Wayne Koestenbaum − poet, critic, fiction-writer, artist, filmmaker, and performer − has published 22 books, including Ultramarine, The Cheerful Scapegoat, Figure It Out, Camp Marmalade, My 1980s & Other Essays, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Circus, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award). His first feature-length film, The Collective, premiered at UnionDocs (New York) in 2021. In 2020 he received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired his literary archive in 2019. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Lee Colón was part of the curatorial team that organized the traveling retrospective Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition in partnership with the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Menil Collection. Prior to joining MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture in 2018, she studied art history at Princeton University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Time: 6:30 PM — 9:30 PM EST

Free!

Registration