Sheep Meadow Press Presents Stephanos Papadopoulos and Christopher Bakken, Tonight Only!
by Ernie on 01/04/10 at 12:38 pm
Thursday, April 1st at 7PM
Founded in 1977, Sheep Meadow is a non-profit press dedicated to poetry, poets, and books of particular interest to poets. Sheep Meadow is attracted to poets of great merit who for one reason or another have been turned away from commercial publishers.
Unobtrusively but decisively, Stephanos Papadopoulos’ work is informed by various cultures: American, Greek, ancient and modern, French and English as distinguished from American. He follows other poets, but mostly he follows his heart. In his poetry the melancholy of the modern finds its beauty in loss itself. Papadopoulos catches this beauty in poem after poem, while his poetry swims for joy in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Aegean. This beautiful contradiction makes Hôtel Dieu a great pleasure to read and reread.
“When Virginia Woolf went to Greece in 1906, she felt that ‘all lumps in the earth here are but so much dust heaped negligently over some well-ordered temple or statue beneath.’ Identical treasure is inherent in the heroic soil for Christopher Bakken; this poet is nurtured by lithic yield: ‘Here I believe in stone, existence in the flesh…’ And with all the power of a burial that is yet a parturition, his book reads as a kind of tephromancy, a divination by ashes: ‘Since the earth is god I am not dust but god.’ It is not ‘questions of travel,’ or even the effects of an affinity these luminous poems afford, but a lasting procession. There is no ‘after Greece,’ nothing subsequent: the dust and what is beneath it are present forever in the poet’s mouth.” – Richard Howard
Stephanos Papadopoulos a Greek-American poet and translator, was born in North Carolina in 1976 and was raised in Paris and Athens. Educated in the US and Edinburgh, Scotland, he holds a degree in classical archaeology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work has been published in periodicals such as the Yale Review, Poetry Review, Stand Magazine, The New Republic and many others.
Christopher Bakken’s first book, After Greece, won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 2001. Bakken is also co-translator of The Lions’ Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios (2006). He received an M.F.A. from the Writing Seminars of Columbia University and a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing at University of Houston.
