Poetry. TRANSLANATIONS ONE is the first major installment of William R. Howe's Emily Dickinson project, translanations. The collection is a homophonic, homolinguistic transformation of Dickinson's poems 500-599. Howe radically, and fantastically, re-invents Dickinson's lyrics while approximating those poems' sound and rhythm patterns: "Rather than just `translating' these poems from English to English," Howe writes, "I have written these poems to the tune of Dickinson, and through that music I am exploring our relationship with language." Listening to one of Howe's "translanations" is like hearing a Dickinson poem after it's been processed by a shrooming babelfish. "Dickinson said that it's poetry if you feel as though the top of your head were taken off. But what if it's the whole head, down to the shoulders?... Read this with a helmet on"--K. Silem Mohammad.

Author Hometown: CINCINNATI, OH USA



About the author: William R. Howe is an experimental poet, performer, artist and publisher currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. Most recently, he is the author/creator of TRANSLANATIONS ONE (BlazeVox, 2009). Older works include A #'S ONUS (Meow Press, 1997), Words Change (Crapper Editions, 1996), and tripflea: a book (tailspin press, 1994). He has given performances at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., Soundlab Buffalo, The Ear Inn NYC, Gallery 66 in Washington, D.C., Diverseworks in Houston, TX, and at many other international venues. Involved in contemporary poetry publishing for years, he is the publisher for tailspin press and Crapper Editions, the cofounder and coeditor of Essex Magazine, and cofounder and coeditor of Slack Buddha Press. He teaches Creative Writing, Book Arts, and Literature at Miami University of Ohio.