Sphere Of Words

January 25th, 2014 at 2:00 PM New York Public Library Stephen A. Schwarzman Building South Court Auditorium Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street New York, NY 10018 Russian-American poets and musicians will present the magnificent poetry project of the New York-based poet and journalist Gennady Katsov "SPHERE OF WORDS," consisting of 180 poetic meditations inspired by masterpieces of world art, from Trecento to the present. The bilingual multimedia presentation will include reading of poems from SPHERE OF WORDS, in Russian by the author Gennady Katsov, and in English by Alex Cigale, the translator. The presentation will be accompanied by the musical tribute from outstanding musicians Vadim Neselovsky and Julian Milkis, as well as the slide-show of matching paintings projected on the screen. - Gennady Katsov, Russian-American poet and journalist, a well-known figure in the 1980s Moscow literary circles and one of the creators of the iconic Moscow club «Poezia». He has been a journalist since 1993 and returned to writing poetry only in 2011, after 18 years of silence. - Alex Cigale, Russian-American poet, editor, and translator whose works appeared in such leading journals as The Colorado, Green Mountains, North American, Tampa, Tar River Poetry, The Literary Review, Drunken Boat and McSweeney's. His translations of Silver Age and contemporary Russian poetry also appeared in Literary Imagination, Modern Poetry in Translation, PEN America, Plume, Two Lines, The Manhattan, St. Petersburg, and Washington Square Reviews, and his versions of Gennady Katsov's poems in Cimarron Review and Verse Junkies. - Vadim Neselovskyi, a renowned piano player and composer, professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston and the winner of the legendary Thelonious Monk competition (Washington, DC, 2010) - Julian Milkis, internationally acclaimed soloist, chamber musician, recitalist, and jazz clarinetist, a true "cross-over artist" and Benny Goodman's only student. "A long-time journalist and observer of the popular and high culture scenes, with this book-length project, Katsov has returned to his roots in poetry. A life-long habit of looking and reading closely is everywhere in evidence in these ekphrastic poems. As has often been remarked about that hotter medium, the film screen, what a viewer faces on a flat, projected surface (the 180 poems of this volume might well stand in for 180 degrees) is simultaneously both window and mirror, so that what the watcher sees reflected therein are projections of her own self, as a sample of all humanity. At his best, Katsov "casts a cold eye on life, on death," as projected onto this canvas "through seven heroic centuries". In the most effective of these poems, he succeeds in establishing, in the voice of a guide or a confidant or a co-conspirator, a tone of intimacy with the reader so that we, looking along with him, are brought at the same time into a closer relationship with ourselves." Alex Cigale, poet, translator, editor

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