VALZHYNA MORT, POET

“Valzyhna Mort...can justly be described as a risen star of the international poetry world. Her poems have something of the incantatory quality of poets such as Dylan Thomas or Allen Ginsberg. But she is a true original.”
—Kevin Higgins, Cuirt International Festival of Literature

  “Valzhyna Mort is electrifying.” —Franz Wright

Blue Flower Arts is proud to introduce to the United States audience, Valzhyna Mort, born Valzhyna Martynava in 1981 in Minsk, Belarus.
At 26, a poet and translator, Valzhyna’s work has been translated into many European languages, the most recent being a book in Swedish, released in 2007. She has been published in various literary magazines and anthologies, including an Anthology of Belarusian Poetry (Sofia, 2002). Her first Book, Factory of Tears, is forthcoming by Copper Canyon Press in the spring of 2008, co-translated with Franz Wright. Valzhyna is famed throughout Europe for her remarkable reading performances, which display a talent not normally associated with one so young. She is the winner of several poetry competitions in Belarus, and in 2004 she received the Crystal of Velenica Award in Slovenia, which is awarded for reading performance. Valzhyna’s first collection, I’m as Thin as Your Eyelashes (2005), is startlingly assured and reveals a powerful poetic voice. She is the 2005 recipient of the Gaude Polonia stipendium. In 2006 she was a poet-in-residence at Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin, Germany. She currently lives in the United States.

Valzhyna writes in Belarusian at a time when efforts are being made to reestablish the traditional language, after governmental attempts to absorb it into the Russian language have been relinquished.  She reads her poems aloud in both Belarusian and English. In addition to poetry readings, Valzyhyna speaks brilliantly on The Politics of Language and The Poetry of Revolution.

“In the searing work of Valzhyna Mort, marvelously different in form and in delivery...dazzled all who were fortunate to hear her translations, and to be battered by the moods of the Belarus language which she is passionately battling to save from obscurity.” —The Irish Times

THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE & THE POETRY OF REVOLUTION
In these energetic and dynamic talks, Valzhyna Mort addresses the poetry of anti-communist revolutions in Eastern Europe from the 1970’s to the 1990’s, the time in the 20th century when poets became prophets for their nations; when a poem was the only voice of freedom--in such cases, poems were learned by heart and repeated like a prayer or rewritten many times and carefully hidden, because poetry was considered a sin; and when a poem was also a weapon, in many cases the only weapon available. In a humanizing and expanding view of history, Valzhyna looks at poems written at the times of Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and Solidarity movement in Poland, including the work of poets Adam Zagajewski, Ryszard Krynicki, Julian Kronhauser, Leszek Moczulski, Ewa Lipska and others. She talks about Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the current situation in Belarus, both the political and the poetic scene--and how the two overlap in the politics of language.

ABOUT Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press)
Factory is Tears is the American debut of Valzhyna Mort—and the first bilingual Belarusian-English poetry book ever published in the United States. There is an urgency and vitality to Mort’s poems, while intense moments of joy leaven the darkness. Set in a land haunted by the specter of a post-Soviet Eastern Europe, and marked by the violence of the recent past, the narrative moves within universal themes—lust, loneliness, the strangeness of god, and familial love. “Grandmother”—as person and idea—is a recurring presence in poems that question what language is, challenge the authority that delegates who has the right to speak and how, and fight to keep a mother tongue alive. Startlingly fresh images—desire as the approaching bus that immediately pulls away or pain as the embrace of a very strong god “with an unshaven cheek that scratches when he kisses you” —occupy and haunt the mind. 

The translation was in collaboration between Mort, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright, and Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright. The music of lines and litanies of phrases mesmerize the reader then sudden discord reminds us that Mort’s world is not entirely harmonious. “I’m a recipient of workers’ comp from the heroic Factory of Tears, ”she writes in the final stanza.  “I have calluses on my eyes… And I’m Happy with what I have.”  Engaged, voracious, and memorable, Factory of Tears is a remarkable American debut of a rising international poetry star.

"maybe you too sometimes fantasize," Words Without Borders