Lev Rubinstein. Poetry reading (Hunter College, February 6, 2020)

Lev Rubinstein. Poetry reading (in Russian, with ENG translation). February 6, Thursday, 6 pm. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 HE). Co-hosted by Ugly Duckling Presse.
Born in 1947, Lev Rubinstein was a major figure of Moscow Conceptualism and the unofficial Soviet art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. While working as a librarian, he began using catalogue cards to write sequential texts. He described his “note-card poems” as a “hybrid genre” that “slides along the edges of genres and, like a small mirror, fleetingly reflects each of them, without identifying with any of them.” His work was circulated through samizdat and underground readings in the “unofficial” art scene of the sixties and seventies, finding wide publication only after the late 1980s. Now among Russia’s most well-known living poets, Rubinstein lives in Moscow and writes cultural criticism for independent media. His books in English translation include Here I Am (Glas, 2001), Catalogue of Comedic Novelties (UDP, 2004), Thirty-Five New Pages (UDP, 2011), and Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties (UDP, 2014), in which his note-card poems appear in their entirety.
Lev Rubinstein will be joined by the poet, translator and publisher Matvei Yankelevich, who will read the English translations. Yankelevich was born in Moscow and moved to the United States at age four. He is author of several books of poetry and prose, as well as translations from Russian into English, including Boris by the Sea (2009), Writing in the Margin (2001), The Present Work (2006), Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (2007). His translations have also appeared in Oberiu: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (2006), Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky (2008), and Alexander Vvedensky: An Invitation for Me to Think (2013). Yankelevich is a cofounder and co-executive director of Ugly Duckling Presse, where he edits books and curates the Eastern European Poets Series. He has taught courses in translation, publishing, and Russian literature at Columbia University, Colorado College, Hunter College, Wesleyan University, and Bard College. He lives in Brooklyn.