Peter Vertacnik : part one

Peter Vertacnik's poems and translations have appeared in The Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, Poet Lore, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Water~Stone Review, among others. A finalist for the 2021 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, he currently splits his time between Idaho and Florida.

Photo Credit: Yifan Zhang 

What are you working on?

A few things. I’m revising what I hope, sooner or later, will be my first collection of poems, sending it out to contests and publishers. I’m also working, very slowly, on a complete translation of Rilke’s The Book of Pictures (Das Buch der Bilder)—a book that I think often gets neglected by readers, falling as it does between two of Rilke’s major early works, The Book of Hours (Das Studenbuch) and New Poems (Neue Gedichte). I’m also engaged in a co-translation project with a friend of mine, Yifan Zhang, which involves translating various essays and poems of the brilliant Taiwanese writer, Yu Kwang-chung (余光中), who died in 2017. All this is in addition to teaching and my work as a graduate student, which includes furiously composing and revising more poems towards a second manuscript.