Poetry Foundation & POETRY magazine

–Bertolt Brecht translated by Adam Kirsch, Poetry, June 2011

Translator Adam Kirsch describes how he came to Brecht’s work:

I first encountered these poems by Brecht as the texts of songs by Hanns Eisler, a German composer who was exiled from Nazi Germany on account of his Communist politics, and spent the war years composing music for Hollywood films…

Open Culture points to an archival video of Bertolt Brecht testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947, and notes that Eisler was also called to testify:

HUAC, fueled by postwar Communist and subversive paranoia, investigated dozens of artists and provided the model for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts of the 1950s.

–Bertolt Brecht, Poetry, December 1947

Poems by Bertolt Brecht, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Lewis Carroll, W.B. Yeats, Anne Sexton, and more are set to music this weekend by The Crooked Mouth. Purveyors of original music with roots in vaudeville, The Crooked Mouth performs at the Poetry Foundation on Saturday at 7pm and Sunday at 3pm, free admission, details here.

(Source: poetryfoundation.org)