Arne Weingart - "Concentration" - S.L. Wisenberg
Arne Weingart will discuss Concentration. He will be joined in conversation by S.L. Wisenberg
This event will be held in person at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore. At this time, masks are required for in-store events.
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About the book: Suppose that a young Central European poet were to have been swept up into one of the World War II death camps. There were many such young women and men in the camps – the sheer numbers make the argument. Concentration is an attempt to stand alongside them, three generations removed, with short, spare, yet formally coherent poems that serve as a kind of journal – an entirely imaginary response to all-too-real and yet unthinkable events. In 1904 Rilke wrote (in Letters to a Young Poet) that the highest human courage was to be found in our willing embrace of what is most strange, grotesque, or inexplicable in our lives. Years later, in the most exigent of circumstances, a young poet writes back.
About the author: Arne Weingart's poetry collections include Levitation for Agnostics, winner of the 2014 New American Press Poetry Prize, and Unpractical Thinking, winner of the 2019 Red Mountain Press Poetry Prize. Prizes for individual poems include those offered by The Sow's Ear Poetry review, the Frost Foundation, and The Moth's Nature Writing Competition (judged by Helen Macdonald). Work has been anthologized in Border Lines, Poems of Migration (Knopf), and Poets Meet Politics (Hungry Hill Writing). He and his wife Karen live in Chicago.
About the interlocutor: S.L. Wisenberg is the author of the new book, The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home, winner of the University of Massachusetts Juniper Prize in nonfiction. She's also the author of a short-story collection, The Sweetheart Is In; an essay collection, Holocaust Girls: History, Memory, & Other Obsessions; and a nonfiction chronicle, The Adventures of Cancer Bitch. She is a fourth-generation Texan who lives in Chicago and edits Another Chicago Magazine. She is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She has published prose and poetry in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Narrative, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, and many other places. Her work has been widely anthologized. For ten years she was co-director of Northwestern's then-MA/MFA in Creative Writing program and was a graduate faculty recipient of a Distinguished Teacher Award.
Related Titles
Suppose that a young Central European poet were to have been swept up into one of the World War II death camps. There were many such young women and men in the camps – the sheer numbers make the argument. Concentration is an attempt to stand alongside them, three generations removed, with short, spare, yet formally coherent poems that serve as a kind of journal – an entirely imaginary response to all-too-real and yet unthinkable events. In 1904 Rilke wrote (in Letters to a Young Poet) that the highest human courage was to be found in our willing embrace of what is most strange, grotesque, or inexplicable in our lives. Years later, in the most exigent of circumstances, a young poet writes back.