22 Janvier 2008 with IVY Writers Paris

IVY WRITERS invites you to come out and hear Sarah RIGGS & Ryoko SEKIGUCHI

AT: LE NEXT, 17 rue Tiquetonne, 75002 Paris

le 22 Janvier 2008 à 19h30 (lecture starts promptly at 20h)

Lecture multilingue: Français, Anglais, Japonais avec les poètes Sarah Riggs (américaine, qui vit en france) et Ryoko Sekiguchi (japonaise, qui vit en france)

Bios:

Sarah Riggs, born and raised in New York, is a poet, translator, and visual artist. She has two volumes of poetry Waterwork (Chax Press) and 28 Télégrammes (Editions de l'Attente, trad. Françoise Valéry), and is the author of Word Sightings: Poetry and Visual Media in Stevens, Bishop, and O'Hara, published by Routledge in 2002. Chain of Miniscule Decisions in the Form of a Feeling is forthcoming with Reality Street Editions. The installation of her drawings, Underwritten, in collaboration with sound, video and cuisine, took place at the galerie EOF in 2007. An integral member of the bilingual poetry collective, Double Change, & director of the multi-cultural non-profit arts organization, Tamaas. With Omar Berrada, she teaches at Columbia University in Paris, and has translated Marie Borel's “Wolftrot” (La Presse, 2006), as well as works by Etel Adnan, Oscarine Bosquet, Isabelle Garron, Jérôme Mauche, & Ryoko Sekiguchi. About Waterwork, Ann Lauterbach said: “In five stunning sequences, Sarah Riggs has created a poetics of elastic migrations that imagines the world as clusters, skeins, and motions whose innateperil is miraculously saved in the act of naming…”

Ryoko Sekiguchi began to write poetry in both Japanese and French at an early age, & in fact elements of different languages are found fused together within the same sentence in her current works. When she was eighteen she received the Tokyo Literature Prize of ‘Cahiers de la poésie contemporaine’. Her books include ‘Cassiopée Péca’ (1993, originally printed in A2-Format), ‘(com)position’ (1996—in Japanese, this title is translated), Hakkouseï Diapositive (2000), Calques (2001), Le monde est rond (2004) & Héliotropes (POL, 2005). Her works have also appeared in the reviews Action Poétique, Dédales, and Po&sie. Since 1997 she has lived in Paris, where she studied Art History at the Sorbonne. Three years later she completed her doctorate in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Tokyo. Today she teaches at various institutes including INALCO, the Paris Research Centre for Oriental Languages and Civilisations. Sekiguchi has also translated the works of Gôzô Yoshimasu, Yoko Tawada and French authors including Pierre Alferi, Anne Portugal, and Atiq Rahimi. Sekiguchi’s poetry is striking in its composition, rejecting established formats and textual dispositions, creating a visual, poetic space via the typographical composition, in the form of variedly arranged text blocks – or labyrinths of lines. Sekiguchi has received numerous grants from the Japanese Foundation for Writing Arts and the Centre National du Livre, amongst others. Her poems have been translated into English, Korean, Swedish, and Arabic. The Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Maison des Ecrivains, the New York Library and the San Francisco City University are all institutions where Sekiguchi has been invited to give readings.