Reading of poems by Jonas Mekas

Thursday october 17 ; 6-9 p.m.

reading and presentation at 7 p.m.

With the participation of:

• Michaël Batalla, Director of the Cipm (Centre international de poésie, Marseille)
• Thierry Raynaud, actor
• Ainis Selena, translator

About the book :

Jonas Mekas, Debout parmi les choses (Poèmes, 1948-2007), a co-edition NOUS/ Cipm, 2024, from Jonas Mekas’ Poezija (éd.Julius Ziz), Odilé, Vilnius, 2021.

Traduction from Lithuanian: Stéphane Bouquet, Jean-Baptiste Cabaud, Miglė Dulskytė, Roxana Hashemi, Anne Portugal, Ainis Selena, Marielle Vitureau, with the participation of Tadas Bugnevičius.

Foreword by Michaël Batalla. Introduction by Stéphane Bouquet. Diffusion-distribution Belles Lettres.

Long-awaited by the many admirers of Jonas Mekas’s cinematographic work, this book will be a revelation for French readers and fans of the film-maker: that of the other Jonas Mekas: the poet. The Lithuanian-speaking poet, whom we had only glimpsed in bits and pieces through certain textual elements of his films, is finally revealed through this complete and entirely unpublished translation. It reveals a writer whose practice was constant and subterranean, from his early years in Lithuania to his entire life in New York. The book gives an account of a writing career, published discontinuously over almost sixty years, in which Jonas Mekas renewed his approach and his forms, where the long poems with a nostalgic tone of the first period gradually gave way to shorter poems capturing moments.