Join Marilyn Hacker, one of the most celebrated figures in American poetry, and Karthika Naïr, known for her dynamic work at the borders of dance, poetry, and the visual arts, as they discuss the many migrations of the poetic voice. When confinement forced artists into their homes, Hacker and Naïr adopted an ancient poetic technique, the renga, in order to co-author A Different Distance: a poetic exploration of distance, written at a distance, as a way of understanding and overcoming it. Hacker, an award-winning translator of French into English, and Nair, known for adapting narrative into dance performance, are masters of movement. They will consider the poetic act as that of bridging distance between disparate and linked images, sounds, languages, cultures, and forms.

Learn more:

A renga is a special kind of poem that’s created by multiple poets working together. It’s like a poetic conversation where each poet adds lines to build a poem that flows from one part to another. Read excerpts of Hacker and Naïr’s renga, A Different Distance. 

Marilyn Hacker won the National Book Award for her first book, Presentation Piece. She is known for writing about identity, womanhood, sexuality, illness, power, and social issues such as the AIDS crisis. A.M Juster has claimed that “there is no poet writing in English with a better claim for the Nobel Prize in Literature than Marilyn Hacker. Discover her incredible career. 

Naïr works with choreographers to script dances, taking into consideration the different ways environment, soundscape, and movement can combine to tell a story. See examples of this: a performance of her book Until the Lions, and a queer reimagining of Madame Butterfly. 

About the speakers: 

Marilyn Hacker is the author of nineteen books of poems, most recently, Calligraphies (2023), and translator of twenty-three books of poetry and essays. She has received the Lenore Marshall Prize and the Voelcker Award from the Poetry Society of America, the PEN Award in Translation, the Audre Lorde Prize and the National Book Award. She was editor of the Kenyon Review for five years, and on the editorial collective of the French journal Siècle 21 for eight.

Poet, librettist, and fabulist, Karthika Naïr is the coauthor of A Different Distance, renga written with Marilyn Hacker. Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, her reimagining of the foundational South Asian epic in multiple voices, won the 2015 Tata Literature Live Award for Book of the Year, and was highly commended in the 2016 Forward Prizes. The dance performances Naïr has scripted and co-scripted have been staged at venues across the world. These include Akram Khan’s multiple-award-winning DESH and Until the Lions, and Carlos Pons Guerra’s Mariposa, a queer reimagining of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly.

Important information: The discussion will be available both online and in person. While the conversation will happen in person (Hacker and Naïr will appear in the Reading Room), the Library will stream the conversation on Zoom for a live viewing experience. Both in-person and online attendees will be able to pose questions.

Attendance at this event constitutes permission for your photograph or video to be taken at the event and used by the American Library in Paris for marketing, promotional, pedagogical, or other purposes.