Reading at Bowery Poetry Club in New York

Carsten René Nielsen and David Keplinger read from The World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York April 2008. Carsten René Nielsen read the poems in Danish, while David Keplinger read the translations in English.

(24:21)

The World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors was published 2007 by New Issues and consists of translations from Carsten René Nielsen's three books of poetry published 1998-2005: Circles, Clairobscur and Forty-one Animals translated by American poet David Keplinger.

David Keplinger's third poetry book, The Prayers of Others, was published in 2006 and won him the Colorado Book Award. He has been awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts, and the Katey Lehman Foundation. His poems appear in Ploughshares, AGNI, Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review and many other journals. Keplinger teaches at American University in Washington, D.C.

Spider

A puppet theater composed entirely of spiders. It's Macbeth, performed by the fat boy of the class. He has dressed all in black and can hardly be seen behind his theater box in the darkened classroom. The rods from which the spiders are hung, and the many threads that steer their movements, he controls with fabulous precision, a cool passion, and he does all the lines himself in different voices. The witches are played by three fat garden spiders. »Fair is foul, and foul is fair,« they cackle, but none of the children pay attention. The boys are shouting, and the girls are screaming hysterically. Nor does the teacher see the beauty in the performance. In all the turmoil her only concern is finding the switch for the lights.

Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, New York.