Stella Beratlis

 March 23, 2022.

Modesto poet Stella Beratlis returns to the program to talk about her new collection, Dust Bowl Venus: Poems, just out from Sixteen Rivers Press.

"Sometimes the ground shifts under our feet and leaves us stumbling; our world changed. DUST BOWL VENUS documents that stumbling; that changed world; and also the regaining of a footing that; if not what we had hoped for; is what we live with. In her second powerful collection of poetry; framed by the lyrics of Modesto-based country-bluegrass songwriter; Hazel Houser; Stella Beratlis explores the landscapes of California's Great Central Valley; the landscapes of fear and hope in the cancer diagnosis of her daughter; and the landscape of regret--what we have let go and what we have gained from letting go. Beratlis pays her characteristic attention to detail; invoking; for example; Louis Armstrong's blue kitchen and the hinges squeaking on an ice chest lid; in order to create her complex; lyrical images. She writes that "ghosts / have always been walking / through the spaces of our home;" and she has listened to these ghosts. This book is filled with imagery and emotion that builds and curves and accumulates; leaving the reader breathless; glad for the shifting of the earth that gave us these poems."

 

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Wendy Graham

Simeone Solomon, Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene, 1864 Watercolour on paper, Tate Britain

February 19, 2020.

Wendy Graham, Professor of English and Chair of  the Department of English at Vassar College, talks about her latest monograph, Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity (Columbia University Press, 2017.)

Critics, Coteries, and Pre-Raphaelite Celebrity sheds new light on Victorian discourses on sexuality and masculinity through a thick description of literary bravado, the emotions of male bonding within cliques, and homoerotic frissons among the creators and reviewers of Pre-Raphaelitism. Graham threads together the qualities that made William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Gabriel Rossetti exemplary figures of aesthetic celebrity in the 1850s; Algernon Swinburne and Simeon Solomon in the 1860s; and Edward Burne-Jones and Walter Pater in the 1870s. The book documents the symbiotic relationship between periodical writers and the artists and poets they helped make famous, demonstrating that the origin myth of Bohemian artistic transcendence was connected with the rise of a professional class of journalists. Graham shows that the Pre-Raphaelites innovated many of the phenomena now associated with Oscar Wilde, arguing that they were foundational for him in forging an artistic and personal identity with a full-blown publicity apparatus. Wilde had models. This book is about them.

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Olga Bush

January 30, 2019.

Olga Bush, Visiting Associate Professor of Art History at Bard College, discusses her book: Reframing the Alhambra: Architecture, Poetry, Textiles, and Court Ceremonial (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). The book was a finalist for the College Art Association's 2019 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, which "honors an especially distinguished book in the history of art, published in the English language."

"The Nasrid builders of the Alhambra – the best-preserved medieval Muslim palatial city – were so exacting that some of their work could not be fully explained until the invention of fractal geometry. Their design principles have been obscured, however, by the loss of all archival material. This book resolves that impasse by investigating the neglected, interdisciplinary contexts of medieval poetics and optics and through comparative study of Islamic court ceremonials. This reframing enables the reconstruction of the underlying, integrated aesthetic, focusing on the harmonious interrelationship between diverse artistic media – architecture, poetry and textiles – in the experience of the beholder, resulting in a new understanding of the Alhambra."

Yvonne Elet

October 31, 2018.

Yvonne Elet, Associate Professor of Art at Vassar College, talks about Raphael as an architect and her book Architectural Invention in Renaissance Rome: Artists, Humanists, and the Planning of Raphael's Villa Madama.

"Villa Madama, Raphael's late masterwork of architecture, landscape, and decoration for the Medici popes, is a paradigm of the Renaissance villa. The creation of this important, unfinished complex provides a remarkable case study for the nature of architectural invention. Drawing on little known poetry describing the villa while it was on the drawing board, as well as ground plans, letters, and antiquities once installed there, Yvonne Elet reveals the design process to have been a dynamic, collaborative effort involving humanists as well as architects. She explores design as a self-reflexive process, and the dialectic of text and architectural form, illuminating the relation of word and image in Renaissance architectural practice. Her revisionist account of architectural design as a process engaging different systems of knowledge, visual and verbal, has important implications for the relation of architecture and language, meaning in architecture, and the translation of idea into form."


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Stella Beratlis

Photo: Jeremy Center (www.ogalthorpe.com)

November 16, 2016.

Stella Beratlis, Modesto California's Poet Laureate and managing librarian at Tracy Library of the Stockton-San Joaquin County Public Library, talks about poetry and librarianship, and reads from and discusses her new book of poems Alkalai Sink, (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2015).

57:45 minutes.

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