The Best American Poetry

SAVE THE DATE ITHACA: February 27, 2020 David Lehman reads from "One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir"

Thursday, February 27, 2020 5:30 pm  Reading, Q&A, and Book Signing 215 N Cayuga St, Ithaca, New York 14850 607 273 8246 info@buffalostreetbooks.com

In One Hundred Autobiographies, poet and scholar David Lehman applies the full measure of his intellectual powers to cope with a frightening diagnosis and painful treatment for cancer. No matter how debilitating the medical procedures, Lehman wrote every day during chemotherapy and in the aftermath of radical surgery. With characteristic riffs of wit and imagination, he transmutes the details of his inner life into a prose narrative rich in incident and mental travel. The reader journeys with him from the first dreadful symptoms to the sunny days of recovery.

This "fake memoir," as he refers ironically to it, features one-hundred short vignettes that tell a life story. One Hundred Autobiographies is packed with insights and epiphanies that may prove as indispensable to aspiring writers as Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Set against the backdrop of Manhattan, Lehman summons John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Edward Said, and Lionel Trilling among his mentors. Dostoyevsky shows up, as does Graham Greene. Keith Richards and Patti Hansen put in an appearance, Edith Piaf sings, Clint Eastwood saves the neighborhood, and the Rat Pack comes along for the ride. These and other avatars of popular culture help Lehman to make sense of his own mortality and life story. One Hundred Autobiographies reveals a stunning portrait of a mind against the ropes, facing its own extinction, surviving and enduring.

"Lehman’s exquisite essays illustrate the ways that beauty can flow out of pain." Publishers Weekly 

"Lehman’s memoir pulses with life and memory." from "Writing In The Face Of Death,"Sandee Brawarsky, New York Jewish Week

David Lehman and Johnny. photo 2020 © Stacey Lehman

Squibs 381-387 [by Alan Ziegler]

381:
Everyone has stories to tell
Some big, some small—
Know someone long enough and well
You’ll hear them all,
Though details may blur as years swell
And tales grow tall.

382: Hey cowboys, a traveling tip: It’s better to ride off into the sunrise.

 

383: As I sulked, a swan came out of the river. I told her all about you, pointing to where you lay in the sun, eyes closed, pink sweater beside you. I mentioned your eyes and how they matched the grass. The swan started toward you. I told her you wanted to be left alone. She turned and eased back down into the river. Why, she hardly knew you — and understood so quickly it put me to shame.

384: “I’ve forgotten more than you’ll ever know!” I’ll take your word for it: the minuend (the amount you have forgotten) is greater than the subtrahend (what I’ll ever know). But is the minuend of what you still know greater than the subtrahend of what I know now?

386: Elegy for Phil Ochs (original draft written April 9, 1976). I hear the news, awakening from a nap to the radio. “Death of a folksinger,” the announcer says, and I tense waiting to hear which one. It’s you, Phil. I think of the first time I saw you perform, in 1963 at the Newport Folk Festival, how you strummed between songs and I got the feeling new songs were forming even as you performed the old ones. And the time you were sitting near me at a bar on MacDougal Street, talking politics with some people whose names I probably knew: “What we need is an armed army of Trotskyites,” you said, and I quoted you over and over as if you’d said it to me. Then there was your billed farewell performance a few months ago at Folk City. You did a perfunctory set, ending with a few lines of an unfinished song about Sonny Liston, who lost his heavyweight title rematch to Muhammad Ali after what some called a phantom punch: “Sonny, Sonny Sonny, why’d you have to take a dive...” After the song, you asked the bartender for “another vodka and orange juice” (I thought it strange but elegant that you didn’t ask for a screwdriver) and introduced Sammy Walker with, “This is my last night. This is his first night. I hope you don’t bother HIM.” And I was angry; we were your devoted fans, how did we bother you? Today you hung yourself in your sister’s closet; what did she do, other than harbor you through the dark days, which you'd convinced her were ending. Phil, Phil, Phil, why’d you have to take a dive?

385: Elegy for Laura Nyro (original draft written April 9, 1997). Laura, Laura, I say your name over and over as if singing a song for you. I have been listening to your first songs since I heard the news yesterday, the songs you wrote before you (and I) were twenty. I remember in 1967 thinking: Bill must be nuts to make you play the wedding bell blues, I’d love you when you cry and become a California shoe shine boy just to shine your shoes, even if you wound up hurting me (though you never meant to). I’ve been singing along with you all day—how did you know so much so young? Did you know there wouldn’t be much time, and wanted to take your freedom for as long as you be? And now you’ve had to go. As I walk on a Manhattan morning, goodbye Laura.

386: I tell the story counterclockwise, getting younger until “This is where I came in.” I continue. Not much to do now. I tire of being asked, “Who the hell are you?” If this thing ever kicks out of reverse gear, they’ll find out. Yes sir, they are in for some surprise, given what I know now.

387: Dogs spend their entire lives in assisted living.

 

 

Grace Schulman Remembers Harold Bloom

from the current issue of Literary Matters, this excerpt from Grace Schulman's eloquent "Remembering Harold Bloom":

<<<
Harold Bloom had been my friend since 1989, when I received bound proofs of The Book of J. David Rosenberg, who translated it for Harold’s interpretation, asked for a blurb, and I wrote one with deferential zest, feeling humble before it. My heart beat faster when I read phrases like “King David, open to more life, more grief, more guilt and suffering, more dancing in exuberance before the Ark of Yahweh.” Then I met Harold. I saw an amiable man with a delicate, Byronic profile and melancholy eyes over a substantial, Falstaffian body encased in a stylish leathery jacket. I heard his attractively high-pitched voice  talking, in carefully enunciated tones, about writers from Whitman to Anne Carson, and about professors he referred to as “uncle” and “aunt.” When asked to see one of my poems, he read it in minutes. I was suspicious of his enthusiasm, not yet knowing that he read at lightning speed. But yes, his response told me he’d taken in every word.

At that time, he taught at New York University as well as at Yale. His second home was in Washington Square Village, just a few blocks from where I lived with my late husband, Jerome Schulman. The four of us became fast friends. We went to see Shakespeare: The Tempest on Broadway, and Richard III, with Ian McKellan, at BAM. To my surprise, Harold was usually delighted rather than critical. We had dinners at neighborhood restaurants or take-out meals at home. Usually, that is: once or twice Jeanne led me on walks through Noho and Chinatown to shop for dinner, and, when I balked at women’s home-making roles, she replied, “No, we’re hunters and gatherers.”

Harold’s books filled our shelves. In them I found insights I’ve memorized. Like this:

Our lives are perpetually renewed by that
ordinary process of hallowing the commonplace
that Wordsworth had first described in poetry.

And this:

We are our imaginations and we die with them.

And this:

The Blessing gives more life, awards a time
without boundaries, and makes a name into
a pragmatic immortality.

I can’t say that they influenced my own work, at least not consciously. Once I showed Harold a poem I wrote called “Names” with an epigraph that he quoted from Nietzsche: “that which we find names for is that which  we cannot hold in our hearts.” His look told me I’d proved a point he’d made. “It’s a lovely poem, but you have Nietzche all wrong. The epigraph means the opposite of what you wrote.” When I recalled Harold’s theories of misreading, I dropped the epigraph.

I was never his student, but I did attend his lectures in New York. At the Fales Library, shortly after the publication of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, he woke a crowd by speaking of Shylock as a comic villain, who should be directed on stage to act “like a hallucinatory bogeyman.”  In a class he invited me to attend, I heard him talk on Wallace Stevens while looking closely at his students with occasional asides of how handsome they were. Once when he taught John Ashbery’s poetry, John, the poet himself, strode into the room. Students looked up from their books amazed, nudging one another. Was it pre-arranged? If so, it was successful.

Although Harold’s fame is widespread — his best-selling books, his adherence to the Romantic imagination, his original, often controversial, critical views — very little has been written about his wife, Jeanne Gould Bloom. Her mother was a sculptor, Dina Melicov, carver of weighty dynamic figures in bronze and wood. Much of her work was done for the Federal Art Project, WPA, a late nineteen-thirties New Deal plan to fund the visual arts. Jeanne went to the Little Red Schoolhouse in Manhattan, the first “progressive” school founded on John Dewey’s advanced principles, encouraging non-rigid, creative thinking rather than rote, and discouraging blind submission to the rulebook.

Jeanne attended Swarthmore and earned a Ph.D. at Yale, with a dissertation dealing with American colonial administration in the 17th century. She went on to win an M.A. in psychology and to work with students in the Branford, Connecticut, public schools. In New York, I’d seen her excited after attending a Metropolitan Opera matinee, which she did weekly. In Harold’s last months, when she became a hundred caregivers in one, driving, preparing meals, being mom to their two sons, she was still reading widely, and her insights into poetry were exquisitely sensitive.

Being a liberal Jew can be complex for any intellectual, and Harold was no exception. His allegiance to Judaism is legend. Raised in an Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish home of the East Bronx, he remained devoted to poets who wrote in Yiddish — his anthology, American Religious Poems contains work translated from the Yiddish of Moyshe Leyb Halpern and H. Leivick, alongside that of Whitman, Dickinson, and the Cherokees. His chapter on “The Hebrew Bible” in Ruin the Sacred Truths is deeply meaningful, and elsewhere he’s eloquent on the mysterious doings of Yahweh.

At the same time, he said repeatedly that he was not “a normative Jew,” which I interpret to mean acceptance of the freedom Judaism allows to follow as one can. For him it meant fealty to Gnosticism, the Kabbalah, the J text as he interpreted it. In that freedom, he resembled my husband, Jerry, a scientist who identified with Judaism but with neither standard belief nor observance. Once the four of us attended a synagogue where Harold was to talk on The Book of J. In the service that preceded it, the rabbi had the congregation stand for prayer. I heeded the command — but not my three companions.

Nevertheless, Harold was a man of great faith. In words. In aesthetic standards. In the power of books to make us think clearly, to know ourselves and others. “Poetry is awe,” he writes. “Read deeply, not to believe, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.” I’ll add that for him, poetry was love. And it was inseparable from his affection for those close to him. “Zumba!” he’d often exclaim, and though I never knew exactly what it meant, I heard his voice ring with zeal. As I was leaving New Haven one day, he took my hands in his enormous hands, looked into my eyes, and said, “Gracie, don’t ever stop coming to see me.” I didn’t, until he became very ill and I was told to put off my visit. But I’ll never stop seeing him, there, with Jeanne, surrounded by books, visiting students, friends. Their house is my temple.

>>>

For the rest of Grace's piece, please link here.

Grace Schulman has recently been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2016, she received the Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in American poetry, awarded by the Poetry Society of America. Her recent memoir is Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage (Turtle Point Press), and her seventh collection of poems is Without a Claim, (Mariner). Editor of The Poems of Marianne Moore (Viking), she is Distinguished Professor of English at Baruch College, C.U.N.Y. About her poems, Harold Bloom wrote, "Grace Schulman has developed into one of the permanent poets of her generation." Schulman is former director of the Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y, 1974-84, and former poetry editor of The Nation, 1971-2006.

A Grateful Reminiscence of Harold Bloom [by Willard Spiegelman]

The current issue of Literary Matters includes "A Garland for Harold Bloom."  For the other entries, click here.

<<<In one of my earliest years as an assistant professor, the man who hired me at SMU brought to campus Harold Bloom (his friend and former colleague at Yale) and Geoffrey Hartman, for a weekend of lectures, seminars, conversations, and meals.

After what was, for me, the intellectual wasteland of my graduate school experience, this weekend provided a shot in the mind’s arm. I was jolted, delighted to be in the presence of men thinking–to quote Emerson–and I was grateful to learn how greatness dealt with greatness, in this case Bloom and Hartman on the Romantic poets and their legacy. Harold had just published The Anxiety of Influence, so we in the audience felt that even in provincial Dallas we were close to the cutting edge.

Over the years, I saw and heard him occasionally. The last time was two weeks before his death, in New Haven. He was failing, but very much alert mentally. We made plans for a future visit, which, alas, never happened.

Mostly, I read him, sometimes with pleasure, sometimes with perplexity or frustration. He was large, of course, in many ways, and he repeated himself. As a writer and as a thinker he vacillated among three stylistic modes: the opaque, the vatic, and the epigrammatic. He did not, like John Hollander and Helen Vendler, “explain” things. Literary style was of little interest to him.

He remains a model of titanic energy, prodigious memory, and insatiable intellect, an example of a now seemingly old-fashioned, passionate commitment to literature as a high art.

-- Willard Speigelman. For other articles from "A Garland for Harold Bloom," click here.

"Why Rimbaud" [by David Shapiro]

Why Rimbaud

         for D. L.

Why Rimbaud, ambivalent boy 

Who renounced music

Geology, murder, adulthood,

throwing a stone at a stranger

A butterfly lands on his lapel

like a Jewish star.  No more music.

-- David Shapiro

from In  Memory of an Angel by David Shapiro (San Francisco: City Lights, 2017)

from "Literary Matters," A Poem by A. F. Moritz: "High Windows"

High Windows

This is the job
that finally
they gave me:
in spring, in autumn
to sweep up the bodies
of finches
around the bases
of the crystal-windowed
towers.

When I used to sleep
on the streets,
it was similar: one of us
died, the body
would be picked up
but as long as we lived,
never.

It was as though
there were someone somewhere
who said: Let them live.
Let them be
always. Let them
alone. Let us have them
with us
as they are
forever.

So strange it was,
and seemed, at first:
one of us disappeared,
no trace, or just
the filthy crumpled
bag of stuff
left in a corner,
but where was she?—until
it ceased to appear,
so often it happened,
a wonder.

Seasonal work,
a job for a while,
to search the long planters
and bases of the walls for birds
who break against windows
in the times of migration:
unable to see
the hardness in the shining
image of the new
more perfect world’s
openness.

In the future there are people
who will have to imagine
what world these
words of mine
are living in—imagine it
from their day
in which there is no longer
the knowledge of what
were towers.

A. F. Moritz's The Sparrow: Selected Poems appeared in April 2019. A Canadian poet, he has won the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Ingram Merrill Fellowship. His poems have appeared in Hudson Review, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, and several issues of the Best American Poetry anthology series. He is Blake C. Goldring Professor of the Arts and Society at the University of Toronto, Victoria College. 

A  question for the author: why the allusion to Philip Larkin?  

Click here for the current issue of Literary Matters.

BLESSED AS WE ARE: Happy 95th Birthday, Gerald Stern! (II) [by Mihaela Moscaliuc]

                                    What other poet
                                     is on his knees in the frozen clay with a spade
                                    and a silver fork, fighting the old maples,
                                    scattering handfuls of gypsum and moss, still worshipping?

                                                            Gerald Stern --“Making the Light Come”

Listen to Stern read “Torn Coat,” form his new collections: Blessed as We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000-2018 (W.W. Norton, 2020):

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/152229/torn-coat

 We continue the celebration of Gerald Stern’s 95^th birthday (February 22), with a few poems inspired by—and dedicated to — him.

Toi Derricotte

Thoughts on Jerry Stern’s 95^th birthday

I’m reading the
poem by Jerry in the new

New Yorker & right as I
read the last lines about the dead

warbler singing—

“and he sang from time to time, dead or not,
a ‘rising trill,’ as the book says,
in the upper levels where the worms are.”

the noon bells of the cathedral
bong out in agreement!  As if they want

it banged into my head:
The poems are always

with you. Lines like that
visit every day—comforting—

your wise, funny,
loving truths. But when they

put on their coats
to leave,

I hold tight & weep.

Jeff Friedman
The Long Heat Wave

                        for Gerald Stern                    

Give me back the long heat wave, the sweat dripping
from eyelashes, the stained blouses, the black windows,
the spiders dangling from their silver bridges,
the wasps lighting on the branches of the cedar bushes
as they waited for me to make a dash for the screen door.
Give me back Herman Meltzer, our upstairs neighbor,
who forged his last check with a flourish before the police
took him away in his checked pajamas, handcuffed.
Give me back Hanna Gorelick in her red satin robe,
her hair in rollers; and Cathy Cowser naked in front of the window;
and “A Day in the Life” with its scratches and pops,
John Lennon singing “I read the news today, oh boy…”;
and my thick brown hair—every morning
I brushed it down so hard my scalp stung, but the curls
sprung up before I left the bathroom mirror;
and my father warning the butcher at Sherman’s Deli
not to trim off too much fat from the corned beef.
And give me back Barbie Silverman’s long smooth legs
in her black short shorts, the Santa Maria rising from
the bottom of the river, the goddess undressing in the eye of the Arch
as the rabbis chanted to the brown muddy water.
Give me back the blue butterflies streaming
through the emptiness above the tall white sycamores,
the speckled blackbirds shitting on the Handshears’
new Oldsmobile, no matter where they parked.
Give me back my mother balancing her checkbook at the kitchen table—
“Everyone in Israel is beautiful,” she says; and
my father in his shorts, thumbing through
a thumb-size version of The New Testament and
marking in red the passages he would use to make his sales pitch to the goyim,
raising his fist to the TV tube every time he hears
another special report—“But is it good for the Jews?”—
and my sister with her thick black hair,
waiting by the silent phone for a date to call.
Give me back the burning red coils in the sky, the plague of locusts,
God railing into the wind, the dark news that floats through the windows,
the spark of light at the beginning of our world.

Kimiko Hahn: Birthday ode to Jerry
Ode to the Line "oh God of mercy, oh wild God"

You, capping some kind of unhinged sonnet (shops/pots, Philco/Bolero,
tie/automatic eye/1945); after list upon list (in fact, like a ship's listing);
you from a tiny room with knives flashing and red with laughter;
you from the scribbled ballpoint of a deity--I don't believe in God
but you I believe in, what with your 1945 ungodly
farting, screaming, dancing immigrant knowledge that
prompts me to ask of myself what could possibly
be my raging I have never seen X the way I did Y--?

(Note: the line is from "The Dancing" by Gerald Stern)

Jonas Holdeman
Stern Sonnet

                                for Jerry

I’ll bet you didn’t know Gerald Stern was born
on February 22, 1925, that his father’s real
last name was Dohlgypyat and if you did, I’d say
you need to get out more, and I’m sure you didn’t know
when Gerald Stern was 14 years old he rushed into
a burning tenement building, rescued a family of
Ukranian immigrants from certain death by conflagration—
and though that didn’t really happen,
I don’t think Jerry would mind if I told you that
or about when, at breakfast, he tapped the back
of my hand with an index finger, asked, Did you know
I ran the mile in high school? went on to tell how, every day
after classes, he hiked up Overlook Drive to Schenley Oval,
the abandoned horse track in south Pittsburgh to make two circuits
of the mile and a quarter, run until Harry, his father, came to get him
and I can see him now setting down his books,
walking the packed dirt freckled with chickweed and clover and violets
toward the grandstand, breaking into a slow trot,
rounding the first turn, churning into a canter, legs pumping
now into a gallop, surging the curves, plunging
headlong down the homestretch, hair flying wildly behind
as he tossed his head, screaming with pain or joy--
then he told me about a boy, an eight year old messenger,
blue wool jacket, red satin tie, funny grown man hat,
delivering messages, packages all over downtown
and how he had to go into the Asbury Hotel, how there was
a sign in the lobby, “No Jews and no dogs,”
that’s the way it was in those days,
asked could I imagine walking into that place every day,
every day seeing that sign and wondering,
What could they possibly have against dogs?

David Rigsbee
At Last a Meadow

                for Gerald Stern at 95

I drove down with Linda
to meet you in 1977, that tough year.
On the way back, careening through the Poconos,
we nearly soared off a cliff, when I launched 
into an inspired and definitive analysis 
of “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which she thought,
tossing her blonde mane, ridiculous.
It was the wild beginning of love,
two desperados, an ancient Mercedes,
and an underlined book by that old Nazi, 
Heidegger, tossed in the back.

You opened the door and greeted us, 
I remember, horn-rimmed and blinking.
That was the beginning.  When I visited again
years later with a different girl in tow, 
a picture of you with Paul McCartney
caught my eye.  It was a party, you said.
When he asked you what you did,
you replied, “I’m a poet.”  Then added,
“And what do you do?”  This led to a duet:
“Try a Little Tenderness,” which you correctly
 tied to Jimmy Durante, not Otis Redding.

There was an evening in San Francisco
when we went around the table:  Kizer,
Hirsch, Levine, Diane Johnson, Alice Adams, 
Schevill and the scholar fromage, Leon Edel.  
We were each to recite a poem from memory
and to keep going until we ran out of poems
or drink.  By the end of the evening, only you
endured, reciting with gusto any poem 
we mentioned. Even the most obscure.
I managed only one, the poem that ends,
“time will throw a dart at thee.”  

After I had returned from a summer in Rome,
you showed up at a reading I gave in New York
and cheerfully recalled how you had taken a piss
at the Arch of Titus, the original anti-Semite.
“I guess you could say it was an arch-piss,”
was how you put it, complete with a pause
to allow that to sink in.  Running into you
later at the Met, you recounted, underlining
your cleverness, how you had landed 
a two-week assignment, free of obligation,
at a balmy southern university for $35K.

But there was also the dog, the schnitzel,
opossums and Jack, whose first fame 
puzzled you, Jesus and Nietzsche, Galileo,
1945 and the world “at last a meadow,”
the pigeons and Sylvia, the shaking and sadness
but also the dancing, always the dancing,
and the atrocious singing, and the stories
of Stieglitz and Orwell, of saints forgotten,
of Pittsburgh and Paris, soot and snow,
love affairs, assignations, Poland and Germany
with the dead nearby, brilliant, and beloved.   

Karen Subach: From a postcard sent to Jerry from Rhodes in October, 1995:

Dear Jerry,

You would be walking around
with a sprig of thyme in your hand
and an olive wreath on your head.

You would be waving to Turkey from Rhodes Harbor
and wondering why there was so much bloodshed
when there was Homer
— and Cavafy,
and every lemon picker could recite a little Sappho.

Hurry up and buy your house on Samos!
Find a little door to paint teal—
and a patio with a mosaic
where you can write your poems.

Alicia Ostriker:

Into the Street

                    for Jerry Stern

Here comes the sun again
reminding everyone to rise and shine
so we pour the coffee and hear the news

we pick up the paper and sigh like arthritic dogs,
and we might like to blow our exasperated
brains out, when we think about the world 

then again we might laugh ourselves silly 
figure out how to profit by it
or wonder how to love it anyway

This is what freedom and consciousness are for
as if we are standing on the roof
of a very tall tower

looking at the complicated view
then taking the elevator
going out into the street

Lucky us

Michael Waters
Letter to Stern from Suceava

J:

           The waitress upon whom I’ve bestowed
A vulgar sobriquet, Titsecu,
If only to vex my faux-jealous wife
Who asks if I’d flirted enough to learn
Her name (I’d hunkered down to write a poem),
Would prod you to sing some ’40s standard
Or apt “Romania, Romania,”
Not because she doesn’t know how sorry
Her future in this town will be. She does.
She unbuttons her soiled, unisex smock,
Café Tzara sewn in cursive above
One sentry-stiff breast, just as her girlfriend
Skids the Ducati curbside. And she’s off.
I imagine you here among street kids
Who’d trail you, your rabbinical piping,
From train station and dump and sewer nerves
To the only crêpe stall that serves Gypsies.
Almost ninety, you’d boom out brotherhood—
That worn word—as your lice-ridden parade
Revved past pyramids of rat-gray rubble,
The lunar ruins of this post-comm muddle.
The waitress might hear you and, if she knew,
Almost forgive me. Titsecu, I tease
As my wife struggles not to unfrown.
Tough Titsecu.
                         Ever yr bad boy,
                                                    M                             

We are blessed to live in what your friend Philip Levine named “The City of Gerald,” a city-poem in which we can learn how “to see the universe in an acorn & hear the music of the lost in an empty Pepsi can,” and “where the imagination is king & the honey locust its bride.”

Happy Birthday from all of us poets, readers, students, friends, warbles and red maples!

For essays on Gerald Stern, see Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern (edited by Mihaela Moscaliuc, Trinity University Press, 2016)

"Arden of Faversham (after a dream I had close to Christmas 2019)" [by Molly Arden]

This year on her Saint's Day, Molly, whose name came from Mary, decided to be Mary Magdalene. She let her hair down, put on her chaste dress, which resembled a burlap sack, grabbed her grandfathe's stick with the carved snakes on it and went to the bar. On Sunday "The Silk Stocking," an establishment owned by two of her friends, opened at 11 for brunch. It had a black board in front that said, "Madonnas and Whores Happy Hour." Crespo, one of the owner was sleepy.

Molly what are you doing in that outfit?

Here to see the play.

What play ?

Andrew of Faversham.

Crespo opened her eyes wide. She was wearing a careless orange sarong.

Molly, that play was performed here in 1968! Our cafe didn't even exist then!

I was born in 1983, Molly said.

You couldn't have seen it then. I heard that this was a small theatre in the Sixities, a place for avantgarde plays.

"Arden of Faversham" is an Elizabethan play, directed by a young Romanian director.

That's possible, but you and I weren't even born when this play was perfomed.

Maybe it's a dream, said Molly. Maybe I'm dreaming I'm Mary Magdalene.

Would you like a coffee?

Yes, please, a grande skim latte with three shots.

I had the coffee and I woke up.

I wrote this in the third person but it happened to me.

Rosanna Warren on Harold Bloom [from "Literary Matters"]

A section of the new issue of Literary Matters (ed. Ryan Wilson) is devoted to elegies for Harold Bloom, who died last Autumn. Here is what Rosanna Warren wrote:

<<<<
In his writing, his speaking, his very being, Harold Bloom was a great Teacher: provocative, often outrageous, and to use one of his favorite words, daemonic. Expounding Shakespeare or Emerson, the Bible or Cormac McCarthy, he invited his listeners to scorch our hands in the fire of literature and to accept the elemental encounter. It wasn’t a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with Harold: it was a matter of participating. As he wrote in the just-published The American Canon, “Poems matter only if we matter.” His parting has made, as Shakespeare wrote in Antony and Cleopatra, “a gap in nature.”
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For the other pieces on Bloom -- by such as Grace Schulman and Willard Spiegelman -- gathered under the heading "A Garland for Harold Bloom," click here.

BLESSED AS WE ARE: Happy 95th Birthday, Gerald Stern! (I) [by Mihaela Moscaliuc]

  
                                                                        “….but show me two hands concealing

                                                                            love and you have the whole history of the human race there”

                                                                               -Gerald Stern, “Love,” In Beauty Bright

Jerry,

I open my eyes under the mosquito net and one mother is so close I can see my blood pulsing in her engorged abdomen. She can’t fly yet because she’s too heavy and still working on pumping out the unnecessary water; that’s how fresh our encounter is. I know my blood provides the protein she needs to nourish her eggs. I took what didn’t belong to me to nourish mine. Proof of it: my son is still asleep, serene, under his mosquito net. But I’m itching like hell. And my neighbor almost died of dengue. The mother senses my murderous intentions. I sense that.

It’s February 20, two days before your 95^th birthday. When given a choice of weeks to blog, I chose this one so I may say here, on Best American Poetry, “Happy Birthday” to you, our Best.

Jerry, I will not tell you how mother-mosquito and I settled it, but I can tell you that geckos have been proliferating insanely in this ocean-fronting apartment in Las Terrenas (Dominican Republic), and each day I pretend I have not given roaches an ultimatum, and have been working on my rages (sharpening them, yes) and complicities, and on the trickiest one, mercy.

I have been reading your newest gift to us all, Blessed as We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000-2018 (W.W. Norton, 2020) and your voice reading “Frutta da Looma,” “Adonis,” “Knucklebones,” and “Blessed as We Were” feels as close as it felt when I listened to them in December, in your apartment. I’m reading and re-reading you (you and the poems, you as your own poem) so I may love the world (its peaches and rain and goats and beetles and hollyhocks and cracks and sweet necks and green gracehoppers and live and dead warbles, the baby rat with empty eye sockets, and even every single human, at least for a bit) and love it despite its absurdities and murderous bent, and sometimes I repeat after you, “enough of pain, and down with / 666—I’ll take kindness, most of all / kindness, for love is the murdered thing,” and sometimes “the humming that is called poetry” is enough and sometimes not, and then too I return to your poems, so I may stroke the cicatrix over the dead bullet that’s made a home in your flesh.  

This week I tried to draft a poem for you. It turned into a poem about hot flashes, how they return me to my mothers, how they burn with love. You were in it, a matriarch. You showed me how to save a frog trapped in NYC traffic. Street vendors had run out of boiled chestnuts. You said Don’t ever stop. Walk backwards and forwards. Follow the smell of burned pretzels.

It was a bad draft. It will never be a poem, but you were so outrageously beautiful in it.

Beloved Jerry, here are a few poets sending wishes in anticipation of your birthday—with more celebratory thoughts and a garland of poems inspired by you, for you, tomorrow:

Chase Berggrun: Dearest Jerrele, your smile and song brighten my every day. Here's to 96, 97, 98, and 99. Love always, Chase.(Mihaela’s note: Read also Chase’s “Jerrele: On Being the Personal Assistant to Gerald Stern”:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2019/12/jerrele-on-being-the-personal-assistant-to-gerald-stern)

Jill Bialosky: From the esoteric of “Blind Nothingness” to the mundane of a “Plaster Pig” anything can trigger a magisterial Stern poem that transforms as it evolves.  From our days when I was your student at the Iowa Workshop where one of my nascent poems, “Oh Giant Flowers,” was inspired by your passionate impulse, to championing your later work at Norton, I have been blessed by your loving spirit and your big embracing poetic voice. You are the youngest ninety-five year old I’ve ever known with more brilliance to come. Blessed as We Were is a triumph. 

Kate Daniels: I first fell in love with the poetry of Gerald Stern in 1978 or ’79 shortly after he had published Lucky Life.  I was in the MFA program at Columbia University, and I recall that poets all over the city were talking about an unusual book which had won the Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets and was nominated for a National Book Award. It was a somewhat late-in-life second book. Jerry was 52 when it came out: a late bloomer, we younger poets mused. When I read it, I understood why it was the topic of so much conversation. From my first acquaintance with them, Jerry’s poems swept me away with their eclectic voice, magnanimous, even operatic vision, their boldly expressed intensities.  They made me rage and weep. I wanted to write poems like his – big poems capable of carrying big emotions, addressing big, important subject matter. There it all was in the pages of Lucky Life.

It was my infatuation with that book that would have taken me to hear him read at the old Donnell Library on 53rd Street.  While I deeply admired poets like Adrienne Rich and Robert Penn Warren, I was sometimes intimidated by the personae in their poems.  Jerry’s poems seemed to be speaking right in my ear, just to me, conversant with all my secrets and insecurities, giving me permission to be imperfect and unsure. All those years ago, when he stepped to the podium, unbuckled his watch and then tore off his jacket and threw it on the floor, and began reading and talking all in a sort of sweaty jumble, I just fell in love with the messy humanity of the poet himself which so closely replicated what I felt in the poems themselves. 

Since then, I am fortunate to say that I have known Jerry as both poet and friend for more than thirty years. He remains one of the enduring masters for me – of poetry, of course, but also of a certain way of being human that provokes both heartbreak and a warlike rebelliousness.  I am grateful for his longevity, and for the way his work continues.  His parlance – even as he approaches one hundred years old – still delights and staggers me.   Happy birthday, Jerry – you darling, you rascal, you brilliant and subversive old heartbreaker, you poet for the ages.                                                                                                                  

Lynn Emanuel and Jeff Schwartz: As blessed as we are to have you and your poetry. Much love and happy birthday.

Jeff Friedman:

We’re whirling and singing, our faces red with laughter,
our bones shaky, our trumpets blasting,
Colleen’s hair streaming, my dome with its single crater shining—
whirling and singing, doing the dance of freezing cold New Hampshire,
the furnace on the blink, icicles inside the windows,
the oven on for heat, Ruby barking your name,
the three of us chanting your poems into white clouds,
O glorious 95th, O beautiful Jerry,
With love from Colleen, Ruby and Jeff
And wishes for 5 more Jerry Stern books by your 100th birthday

Ilya Kaminsky: What a lucky life to have met the poet who knows, finally, the power of maples. To know the man who loves cows best when they are a few feet away--and he opens the dining room window, so cows reach in to kiss! What a lucky life! To be blest with everlasting music. Thank you for opening these windows for us, thank you, Gerald Stern.

Richard Katrovas: In the 80s, Jerry visited my first wife Betty and me in New Orleans numerous times. Betty, her mother Lynn, Jerry and I on a couple of occasions fell into one of the Greek bars on Decatur, I think it was the Delphi. The tinny Greek music, cranked up, as always, too loud, made it impossible to communicate without shouting. At one point, a thoroughly shit-faced sailor from one of the Greek merchant ships docked on the river tore off his shirt, jumped on a table, and danced, his face contorted with something part joy, part excruciating pain. Perhaps it was excruciating joy. I thumped my chest and shouted, though the music was so loud only Jerry could hear me, "My people!" Jerry leaned toward my ear and simply said, "That dance is thousands of years old," which was his way of telling me to show a little respect not for the drunk sailor, but for the ancient spirit that inhabited him and mandated that he dance. 

Joan Larkin: Thank you for all the songs––at supper tables, in taxis, in elevators––in all the rooms and on all the pages your voice brings alive. And for the way you wear your hat…  Love on your day and always.

Tony Leuzzi: Dear Gerald, one of the happiest days of my life was meeting you in Lambertville for an interview, followed by a lunch, and then an impromptu search for hats. I learned so much from you that day, not only about your own work, not only about your memories of Stanley Kunitz, and not only about your thoughts regarding Whitman's connection to the Jewish prophets, but also what it means to be immersed in a profession you love. You showed me the manuscript of your then book-in-progress, In Beauty Bright, which happens to contain one of my favorite poems of yours, "The Two Graces." But as I sign off, I must thank you for all of your work and, in particular, a poem that moves me more than all the rest: "Bela"--your tribute to Bela Bartok. As my favorite classical composer, he is perennially undersung by most. But your poem, filled with biographical information, is somehow intensely personal and moving in ways that have given me great joy. I salute you on your 95th!

Phillis Levin: Forever new, dear Jerry, in your ancient faith in the word, you remind us of why we are here and what we are here to do. Thank you for showing us a way to turn and tune one’s being into an instrument of praise. 

Lia Purpura: Happy day, Jerry! We share the same birthday — remember singing to me in the halls of EPB? From Baltimore, I’m singing to you. And with love.

Barbara Ras:    Dearest Jerry,

 If I could I would list 95 reasons why I love, admire, and cherish you. But space prevents that, so I will list 10-- one per decade, rounding up.

1. When your work appeared on the poetry scene, a ripple went through the Force, and poetry was changed forever by your exuberance and originality.
2. Your praise of the world makes me a better person.
3. Your laments urge the world to improve.
4. Your praise and your laments equal each other in beauty, subtlety, ferocity, and righteousness. I would miss them if they didn't exist.
5. Your voice is a song of prophets, Gypsies, cellists, philosophers, the stiff dog, the blind rat, and a universe of the living and the dead, many trees, and roses, just to mention a few.
6. Your music lifts my spirits to places I've never been before.
7. You are funny and wise.
8. Your memory exceeds the length of the Old Testament, which means you know a lot and share your knowledge generously.
9. Our long talks on the phone have been better than sex, though you would probably disagree. It’s okay--even when you disagree I love you.
10. Your friendship has been a miracle in my life.

David Rigsbee: You and your work have been on my mind for nearly 50 years, and I come back to your poems every year.  You have been one of the handful of poets who replenish my own imagination.  Thank you for that and for your kindnesses to me over the years and for your incomparably good company!  

Ira Sadoff: Sending love to my adopted Jewish uncle and dear friend for forty years, who's been so generous, who's inspired me (and countless others) and my work, and whose humor, whose passion for justice, his respect for history and nature has made him not only a great poet but the great person he is. Stay healthy, Jerry. We need you and love you.

Philip Schultz: At JFK waiting for a flight to Rome, remembering seeing you in the 70’s, you on Van Adam, welcoming me to the big city. Always so excited, bursting with joy and love of poetry, life. Such a dear friend, human, our walk in the park a month ago, the same twinkle in your eye. Much love, boychick!

Karen Subach: Blessings, Jerry, on the occasion of your 95th birthday! The times in the backyard of Governor with its tangle of green, you singing, “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens,” turmeric “sunflowers” across your white shirt during curry feasts— and other times during my sorting through your piles of letters on onion skin papers in the house full of quilts, you making your morning phone calls in your wool cap— “Phil! Phil!”— you telling Diane’s son Jason to stop killing mosquitos because each one has a soul—and you shouting from my truck at the homophobic Topekan Christian protestors of arts events: “F*ck all of you! I love sodomy!”— among so many moments of deep awareness, good counsel, father-daughtering, poet-to-poet listening, shared appreciation of absurdity, outrage at injustice, grief at parallel losses—come to mind as I recall you. I love your beautiful wildness— your fearlessness in love and in life. Thank you for your poems. Thank you for your teaching. Health! Peace! Joy! Much love—

Judith Vollmer: Happy Birthday, dearest Jerry, who showed me how to read a city, how to love mine/ours—Pittsburgh—unconditionally, and how to sing the strange music. Blaze on, beloved teacher, beloved friend.

Michael Waters: Your generosity, your poems, and your presence, Jerry, teach me how to be a poet. Your humor and rage given language and shape prod me toward better work. I read your new poems and hear you singing them and suddenly I'm inside your voice. It's a great place to be, a space like no other, distinctive, American, making and remaking itself word by word. Happy 95th, Jerry, and thank you for each of your remarkable gifts.

Ellen Doré Watson: Jerry! O thou of most ravenous & fertile mind—and a heart the size of Greenland!  Trickster, lover, singer, laugher, you have enriched us all with your words and self.  Thank you, in every language.

Afaa 尉雅風: Jerry, so how is it that you are both time traveler and carrier of a magic wand of tradition, crossing genres and generations? You and August Wilson in the same neighborhood? Amazing, my friend, and more amazing that you electrify the language now for nearly a century, a sign of certain immanence or shamanistic bond made in the breath of the three rivers’ air.

Dean Young: Gerald Stern has been a fundamental source of poetic vitality for as long as I have been reading poems.  Over the years, his gait may have changed, but his poems always leap and bolt with ageless energy and verve.  Obviously, Gerald Stern is one of our greatest renewable resources!

Photo of Gerald Stern at The Best American Poetry 2010 launch reading, September 2010. Photo credit: Lawrence Schwartzwald. 

Photo by Lawrence Schwartzwald of The Best American Poetry 2010 launch reading, with Thomas Ellis at the lectern and, in the front row, David Lehman, Amy Gerstler, Amy Glynn, Gerald Stern, David Shapiro. 

Photo of Gerald Stern, Sharon Olds, and David Lehman at launch reading. Photo credit: Lawrence Schwartzwald.

Met Percent: Week Sixteen [by Alec Bernstein]

And Away We Go

Model for a Proposed Monument to Commemorate the Invention of the Balloon, ca. 1784, Clodion (Claude Michel) French, gallery 552.

I had walked by this exuberant monument proposal without at first seeing its story. 

Consider this marvel: “This airy Rococo flight of fancy - in which putti pile bundles of hay to launch the balloon, guided by Fame and propelled by Aeolus - is difficult to imagine in marble. Gradually, hot-air ballooning spread to the point of being commonplace, and the project was dropped.” - MetText

This celebration of balloon flight seems a perfect opening to the ESDA department (European Sculpture and Decorative Arts): Hotel rooms, boudoirs, often gilded, and sculpture raw and cooked in bone, wood, silks, marble, crystal. . . and some with all of the above.

I knew there would be surprises.

 

Raw Ideas

Above: Children and Satyr Children with a Pantheress and Her Cubs, detail and (inset) complete, ca. 1781, Clodion (Claude Michel) gallery 552. Below: Pieta, 1864, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, France, gallery 552.

The terra cottas in gallery 552 feel like the first captures of ideas.

“Modelling in clay is to the sculptor what drawing on paper is to the painter… In the soft clay the genius of the artist is seen in its utmost purity and truth…”

 - Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of Art, 1776.

“Mounding the clay pellets and pressing them into shape in mere seconds, Carpeaux’s entire attention is on the Virgin Mary's maternal embrace, to the virtual exclusion of Christ's legs.” - MetText

It is my favorite 3D medium.

To be well read on the contradictions (classic theme vs. modern  expression) of art in the age of reason is one thing. To walk into a gallery and feel it is yet another. Is excluding Christ’s legs rational or raw?

 

 

Hyphen-Love

Le Trait d’Union, June 1872, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, France, gallery 552.

“The term trait d’union is French for hyphen, the sign linking the parts of a compound word. Here it poetically signifies the familial ties that were renewed when Carpeaux and his wife reconciled after their little son Charles recovered from terrifying convulsions. Amélie is on Carpeaux’s lap. Charles binds their heads in an embrace. The reconciliation was brief and Carpeaux himself was soon jealous all over again and already desperately sick.” - MetText

Poetic hyphen? Desperately sick? Again? On this text description, I would have preferred either much more or much less. Their arms, in this context, look like parentheses, which I love.

 

“Real” Portraits

Left: Hypocrite and a Slanderer, ca. 1770–83, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Germany, gallery 548.

Right: Child Portrait, Jean Antoine Houdon (French, Versailles 1741–1828 Paris) gallery 552.

After early commissions and rising stature, Messerschmidt’s late portrait sculptures were at first considered outsider art - exhibited as a freak-show attraction at a carnival - but much later seen as important precursors to both Modernism and Expressionism.

Houdon’s intense naturalism has an equally accurate sense of realism. His children’s portraits express Jean Jacques Rousseau’s “Childhood as a golden age of unconscious happiness”.

“What would you think of a man who refused to sleep lest he should waste part of his life? You would say, ‘He is mad; he is not enjoying his life, he is robbing himself of part of it; to avoid sleep he is hastening his death.’ Remember that these two cases are alike, and that childhood is the sleep of reason.” - Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile; or, On Education, 1762.

I feel like I am in a thought gallery. . . .

Valeria Giuga. How’s a 60s rockstar to be done on Airstrip One? [by Tracy Danison]

Valeria Giuga, “Rockstar” © Patrick Berger – Atelier de Paris

I found myself feeling slightly shamed to be clapping so hard and enthusiastically at the finish of Valeria Giuga’s clever and thoughtful dance performance Rockstar at Atelier de Paris/CDCN. Around me, too many fellow spectators showed off that peculiar form of un-enthusiasm that signals disapproval rather than, say, disappointment.

The mechanics of Rockstar work well.

It has all it takes and not too much of it, either. Rockstar is easy to enjoy.

The Rockstar scenario, its light, music and choreography all roll out smoothly.

An amorphous musical frame doubled by a soft-light visual frame supports a heavy-duty weft and warp of three danced all-time hit-parade toppers: Papa Was a Rolling Stone (The Temptations, 1972), Personal Jesus (Depeche Mode, 1989) and Fame (David Bowie, 1975). Giuga consistently creates an atmosphere that is playful and not-quite distracting, not-quite hypnotic …  

Come to think of it, her creation manages to evoke an emotional something very much like what rockstars create, at least the ones I’ve seen on TV…

Finally, a professional in full possession, Valeria Giuga dances supremely well. If her choreography got me thinking “rockstar”, her personal style got me feeling Peter Robert Auty’s version of “Walking in the Air”.

We’re floating in the moonlit sky/… I’m finding I can fly so high above with you/…

Suddenly, swooping low, on ocean deep/Rousing up a mighty monster from his sleep!

Resentfully, I redoubled my enthusiasm.

It happens to me often enough that I don’t appreciate what those around me seem to. Also, like other people, often enough I can’t say why I can’t appreciate a perfectly well-constructed piece.

The point of live work, after all, is that it’s fully and directly relational: feeling and sense before, during and after performance count. Like psychoanalysis, the underlying scenario of live performance is Life, capital L.

Sullenly mulling the contrast between my enthusiasm and other spectators’ un-enthusiasm got me associating that, when I was a little boy, I also used to feel shamed that neither of my grandfathers had gone asoldiering.

Feeling shamed is a fact, a natural fact, like fun.

A sculptor told me with a straight face he did wood because there warn’t no metal on Tobacco Road. He then threw back his glass of sparkling wine, with feeling.

I was born on Airstrip One. There shame and honor reigns. Going for a soldier was – to echo the Barry Goldwater slogan – a duty, not a choice. In those “post-war” days – before active shooter drills – cringed under my school desk, my cowardly trembling as I breathed hot and quick the air of Victory, Fire, Ash and Dust of the second world war shamed me too.

Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Mrs. Needoh, the fourth-grade teacher, worried aloud whether the nearby Vulcanized^Ò rubber factories had adequate ack-ack. Feu my brother was shamed for telling me, That woman is crazy. Was he shamed because he spoke out of turn, said the shaming phrase to littler boys, called Mrs. Needoh that woman or called Mrs. Needoh crazy? Yes, obvious, chastisement, inevitable.

Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

On Airstrip One, as victory is ashes, as success is just darn successful, time is as a seamless garment.

Seamlessness makes the present appear an obvious inevitability – shaming them as might not see it right off.

Valeria Giuga, “Rockstar” © Patrick Berger – Atelier de Paris 

Like lubricious Lenina’s zipless overalls, on the brave new world of Airstrip One, seamlessness facilitates successful pneumatics, whether worked on you or by you. Either way, it’s shameful to say.

Shame is as shame does. Seamlessness facilitates natural doublefeel by creating the past as just another unconscious space in which to displace the inconvenient part of mixed emotions.

Mixed emotions are also a fact, a natural fact. Seamlessly joined with the present as Eve to Adam’s rib, on Airstrip One the Past is that damned spot on a favorite dress concealing the ecstasy of unexpected love in a fog of anguished expostulation.

The glow of the Past is the waste heat of contradictory emotions, the product of doublefeel, feeling one thing while knowing everyone else’s feeling, one’s own racially-healthy feeling, must be true.

How can one personal feeling be so much at odds with obvious, inevitable Airstrip One?

What was that unnameable natural fact that kept my grandfathers – limber, stiff, generous, miserly, gruff, bluff, suspect, upright malchiks – from bounden duty on the Malabar front?

So was it that I felt shamed as I clapped hard for Rockstar; I was not of them but must feel with them even now that that I no longer have the energy for it. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

The point is that Rockstar doesn’t rockstar as it must. That’s where the un-enthusiasm comes from.

Rockstar (plural rockstars)

1. A member of a rock band, or a solo artist in the genre, especially one with celebrity
2. (figuratively sometimes used attributively) A person who is renowned or revered in his or her field of accomplishment. 
3. (figuratively sometimes used attributively) Any animal, plant, or other thing that is renowned amongst others of its type.

                        "Owls are the rockstars of the bird world".                                                                                                                                  - Wiktionary

Good show it may be but Rockstar does not feel “rockstar”, as a fixed term, an icon of canonical parts. Indeed, until that moment of shame and un-enthusiasm, I wonder if anyone had thought that this natural facts of the 60s had canonical parts.

Try these citations for rough analysis of what I mean:

“Rockstar”

1. A member of a rock band, or a solo artist in the genre, especially one with celebrity status : Papa Was a Rolling Stone ’s most salient line is “… and when he died, all he left us was alone”.
2. A person who is renowned or revered in his or her field of accomplishment : Personal Jesus hints at, among other unsavory stuff, commercialized dependency with, “Lift the receiver/ will make you a believer/ reach and touch faith”.
3. Any animal, plant, or other thing that is renownedamongst others of its type: Fame brings together you and he, megalomania and nowhere: “Fame, makes a man take things over/ Fame, lets him loose, hard to swallow /Fame, puts you there where things are hollow”.

                                "Vultures are the rockstars of the bird world."

Freddie Mercury? Mick Jagger? Cher? Patti Smith?

Maybe I and my fellow spectators discovered the dissonance all together and all at once, I feeling shame and they feeling sour. I can’t know.

What I can say is that Rockstar raised in me an interesting past and many interesting feelings that make it; it did that for my fellow spectators as well: Oceania has never been at war with Eurasia? Is that good? Or bad? And how is it?

For me, that’s certainly art or part of it. For that matter, so is my feeing shamed.

Remember that Australian bush hunter in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park?

Just before that frighteningly intelligent velociraptor rips him to hamburger, he admiringly grunts “Attagirl!”

Attagirl! Valeria.

 

 

 

"Everyone Says I Should Write a Love Poem" [by Didi Jackson]

 

Editor's note: this week we are highlighting some of the works appearing in the new issue of Literary Matters edited by Ryan Wilson. Click here for the table of contents.

Everyone Says I Should Write a Love Poem

but I am too busy. My dog is too loyal.
A war could break out any minute;
it might be a Civil War.
I don’t know how to make charms
and I’ve never owned an amulet.
These horns and hooves never let me
rest comfortably. It is better
when looking at sculpture and fine art
to keep moving. The moon is a pod
of milkweed, the seeds are the stars.
An emerald beetle is destroying ash trees.
Blood pools in surprising areas away
from the mortal wounds. In death,
his eyes were closed and glued.
He could not see me even when he
was alive. My father wanted to be a preacher.
So did his father. Now, when I make the bed
I have to tap his pillow four times
just like this:
……………………. I find clementines too bitter.
My son remembers the last words he said
to him. My scars feel like fish moving
under my flesh. The winds are too strong
in my new home. We lose power often.
I have fallen in love
………………………………. with the snow.

from the current issue of Literary Matters edited by Ryan Wilson.

Poetry in Times of Oppression/Virtual Poetry fest in honor of Ernesto Cardenal [by Mihaela Moscaliuc]

Poetry in Times of Oppression/Virtual Poetry fest in honor of Ernesto Cardenal

As I mentioned in yesterday’s posting, for the second year in a row, the International Poetry Festival of Granada, Nicaragua, now in its 16^th edition, will take place only in virtual format. As they announced the cancellation of the ‘physical’ event, the organizers explained that the current political situation in Nicaragua creates “no favorable environment for any festive activity.” According to the Human Rights Watch 2018 World Report, “Ortega’s government has aggressively dismantled all institutional checks on presidential power,” which has allowed his government “to commit egregious abuses against critics and opponents with complete impunity.” (https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/nicaragua). The same document reports that “a crackdown by national police and armed pro-government groups in 2018 left 300 dead, over 2,000 injured, and hundreds arbitrarily arrested and prosecuted.” The numbers quoted by other sources are even higher.

In the January 22/24 issue of Confidencial, writer and Festival board member Gioconda Belli declared that at this time the people of Nicaragua are in mourning for the deaths, dissapearances, and imprisonment of those voicing dissent. In this “jailhouse atmosphere” of repression and harassment, “the only poetry that fits,” Belli wrote, “is that of protest.” (https://confidencial.com.ni/the-daniel-ortegas-regime-ties-to-hijack-poetry-festival-in-nicaragua/). She also suggested that a celebration like that of previous years would be an affront to Nicaraguan people’s suffering. In past festivals, poetry events were interspersed with local music and dance, and integrated also into a day-long, spectacular carnival/traditional masquerade that celebrated life and death, and which always included a ritualized “burying” of a particular evil such “intolerance,” “hatred,” or “violence.” (Photos from the 9^th edition of festival & carnival: https://designyoutrust.com/2013/02/the-ix-international-festival-of-poetry-in-granada-city/

 

This year’s virtual festival will be honoring Ernesto Cardenal, one of Latin America’s most revered literary and revolutionary figures. Poets from around the world will be read a poem in his honor and the event will be streamed through Facebook from Feb 20-Feb 25. You may watch it at https://www.facebook.com/FIPGNicaragua

 

Cardenal was born in Granada in 1925. On January 20, he turned 95. Active in the Sandinista revolution that ousted Anastasio Somoza in July 1979, Cardenal served afterwards as the Minister of Culture, but gradually broke away from the Sandinista government, becoming an increasingly outspoken critic of the current Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his authoritarian rule. A prolific writer who has authored over forty poetry collections and whose work has been translated into dozens of languages, Cardenal has occupied, over the years, ideological positions that have at times stirred controversy. He has been hailed or criticized for being an iconoclast, a visionary, a mystic, a Marxist, and a leader of the liberation theology movement. In his writings, whether addressing injustice, corruption, greed, the world’s transient beauty, or love, he documents and witnesses with eloquence and urgency, often by bringing religion, politics, and science in conversation with one another.

 

Priest, writer, translator, sculptor, diplomat/politician, social activist, Cardenal founded both a spiritual/religious commune (Solintiname, on Lake Nicaragua) and a cultural foundation (Casa de los Tres Mundos, in Granada, where I met him briefly in 2017). He was declared person non grata by Samoza for seeking justice, ‘suspended’ by Pope John Paul II for being political, and reviled by politicians for prizing integrity.

 

I don’t see Cardenal as a poet of contradictions (as I may seem to suggest above), but of human plenitude. I admire his reverence for, and commitment to, the earth and the cosmos—a commitment reflected also in what he has called his work’s “exteriorismo” (which translates, in simplified terms, into a preference for direct observation instead of metaphorical articulation). Robin Bower argues, in an appraisal of Cardenal’s work (“Remembering things past: Reading history, writing memory, and the poetics of agency in Ernesto Cardenal”), that critics have often rushed to assign his work to reductive categories, and suggests that we look instead at how in Cardenal’s body of work “the denunciatory, the religious, and the epic are all part of a self-reflexive poetics grounded in a conviction of the transformative power of poetry itself in its capacity to refashion memory, subject, and society.”

 

Poetry as diplomacy, communion, individual and communal transformation--

 

Cardenal writes about pre-Columbian history or the U.S. imperialist interventions in Central American history (see, for instance, “La Hora 0” / “Zero Hour,” with its “trucks and trucks loaded with crates of arms/all marked U.S.A., MADE in U.S.A.,/arms to catch more prisoners, to hunt down books,/to steal five pesos from Juan Potosme”—tr. Donald D. Walsh) with the same frankness with which he celebrates bodies and stars or, as in “Zoológico de Iquitos” / “The Zoological Garden of Iquitos,” a Peruvian zoo’s “Amazonian animals”—"the great leopard in repose/ (…) / the papagayo birds draped in flags of color/the sloth with terrifying yet weak claws / (…) / the ecstatic tortoises, each on its own rock/the elastic otter.”

 

This poem takes its time honoring each imprisoned creature, then shifts the tenderness toward the “nine-year-old Indian guide” who

 

picked up from the ground an immense

                                    red petal

that had fallen from a tree

            and said to me:

‘Touch it; it’s as smooth as the leopard’s coat,’

and, indeed, it was as smooth as

            the silky fur with quadrilateral spots

                        that we did not touch.       (tr. David Draper Clark and Cesar Ferreira)

 

Protest poetry or politically-engaged poetry can feel like the only poetry ‘fit’ for certain times, absolutely. The months before and for many months after the U.S. 2016 presidential election, I did not write at all because I felt I needed to --and wanted to, and couldn’t--write only about what was happening. (Since then, a number of poets have confessed to similar experiences.) However, re-reading Cardenal’s work I was reminded that poems do not have to engage with politics or current events in order to do significant work and to benefit us during historical and political crises. I thought also of Neruda’s view of poetry as “an act of peace,” and how the metaphor itself posited writing as an engagement with conflict, and how it also conferred poetry-making the status of a political act. While not writing, I translated. In 2016 I was translating from the Romanian a collection of poems by our contemporary Liliana Ursu—Clay and Star, published this past fall by Etruscan Press (https://etruscanpress.org/shop/clay-and-star/). These were not poems of protest. They were not, by most measurements, even slightly political. Further, Ursu, like Cardenal, is a religious person, which I am not, and her poetry is deeply spiritual, while my own is anything but. One thing that had attracted me to her poems, I realized then, was precisely that they provided me, in disconsolate times, with possibilities for accessing hope where I saw none, and beauty when my own work could no longer contain it. This was not escapist poetry, but poetry that insisted that I learn to renew hope in our common humanity, and that helped me recharge emotionally and spiritually. I had also grown up in a political system (Ceausescu’s dictatorial regime) in which religious practices were akin to acts of dissent, so Ursu’s monasteries, nuns, and monks stood, if not close to God, at least far away from daily corruption and repression.

 

Though ostensibly radically different, Ursu’s and Cardenal’s works converge to engage each other. To honor “El Padre” Ernesto Cardenal, I will end with a poem Ursu dedicated to Thomas Merton--the scholar, poet, and monk under whose tutelage Cardenal lived in the Trappist monastery at Gethsemani (Kentucky) between 1957-1965.

 

 

Liliana Ursu (tr. Mihaela Moscaliuc)

 

The one who leaves few footprints in the snow

                                                                         To Thomas Merton

 

He splits wood,

leaves few footprints in the snow—

their life shorter than that of the small

pine tree fire

above which he warms his hands

before dovetailing

the icon frames—

before taking back to his hut an ice cube,

water he’ll use at twilight

to make coffee,

its black eye—sole indulgence,

its fragrant eye—sole gratification.

 

He leaves few footprints in the snow

and they’re quickly erased by birds

for whom he sows wheat and crumbs

under the window where he reads the Psalms.

 

Kentucky, Abbey of Gethsemani, January 21, 2000

           

from "Literary Matters": "In Memoriam" [by Chester Johnson]

from the current issue of Literary Matters, ed. Ryan Wilson.

<<<
Note: The following is an excerpt from Chapter 8, “In Memoriam”, from the book, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation by J. Chester Johnson. Damaged Heritage is being published in May, 2020 by Pegasus Books. The Elaine Race Massacre of 1919, which occurred one county removed from where the author grew up white in southeast Arkansas, serves as a backdrop for much of the book’s commentary. As an excerpt, the following article also contains certain clarifications, modest in size, to provide context and linkages that do not appear in Chapter 8 of the original work.

In October, 2010, I was in Fayetteville, Arkansas, located in the extreme northwest corner of the state and home of the University of Arkansas, to receive the University’s Distinguished Alumnus Award. As part of this campus visit, which lasted several days, the Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, an entity of the University, interviewed me through Scott Lunsford, associate director of the Center, for upwards of ten hours. At some point during the extensive interview, we began to explore the issue of race and its impact on my life, and as the discussion progressed, I veered toward the Elaine Race Massacre of 1919 that occurred among the rich cotton fields of Phillips County, Arkansas, in the Mississippi River Delta: more than a hundred and possibly hundreds of black sharecroppers and members of their families were killed. By this time, the Massacre had already begun to occupy a good deal of my intellectual attention, as well as my time, including a considerable amount dedicated to research on the particulars of the conflagration and its legally significant aftermath.
>>>

for more of this piece by J. Chester Johnson, please link here.

Johnson has written extensively on race and civil rights.  Several of his writings are part of the J. Chester Johnson Collection in the Civil Rights Archives at Queens College. Educated at Harvard College and the University of Arkansas, he is one of the fifteen writers showcased in October 2019 for the inaugural Harvard Alumni Authors’ Book Fair.

Poetry and Oppresion [by Mihaela Moscaliuc]

Poetry and oppression

Image:

https://havanatimes.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/12022018-PoesiaPort-Roberto-Fonseca-La-Prensa.jpg

In 2017, I was invited to participate in the thirteenth annual International Poetry Festival in Granada, Nicaragua. The festival, among the most well-known in the Americas, brought together over 160 poets from more than 60 countries who for five days recited poetry in plazas, cathedrals, schools, and from a platform along the route of the “Death and Poetry” carnival parade. Hundreds of people came out each night to absorb whatever poetry could offer—hope, refuge, pleasure, perhaps just a sweet distraction, most probably a sense of solidarity. They sat for hours on plastic chairs, listening to poetry (much of it in unfamiliar languages). Among them were families spanning three or four generations sharing paper cones of cut fresh fruit, vigoron (boiled yuca, pork rinds, coleslaw and pickled onions), fritos (fried plantains on a banana leaf, topped with grilled pork, beef or chicken), bunuelos (a version of doughnuts), or other local dishes purchased from vendors flanking the gathering. They too were listening. People did not shift attention to their cell phones if bored or disinterested.

One day during the festival a few of us hired a driver to take us to a butterfly preserve. On the way, the driver quoted lines from Rubén Darío, watching us in the review mirror, hoping, perhaps, that we would join him. I was ashamed I couldn’t. I remembered how in Izmir the Turkish hotel employee recited Hikmet at the first mention of poetry and how in Athens, as soon as he heard my husband and I were poets, the jewlery-maker broke into Cavafy and embraced us and then recited some more. This is the kind of work poetry can do. In Romania too, though perhaps decreasingly so, people of my parents’ generation will casually declaim entire poems by Eminescu. On the bus trip in Nicaragua, the fellow poet sitting next to me, the Honduran Rolando Kattan, recited “Autoportret” by the Romanian poet and philosopher Lucian Blaga (1895-1961): “Lucian Blaga e mut ca o lebada./ In patria sa/ zapada fapturii tine loc de cuvint…” I had not expected anyone beyond our national borders to know Blaga’s work, and definitely not by heart.

I do not mean to romanticize this, so forgive me if that’s how it comes through. Poetry is not food, no matter how fetching the metaphor is, and it’s not a substitute for opportunity, freedom, or other rights that help sustain one’s life, livelihood, or dignity. Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo are both poets, and a host of the world’s most beloved poets were/are deplorable as fellow humans. None of this escapes me.    

And there’s not a drop of nostalgia in my blood for the deprivations we, Romanians, experienced for a quarter century under Ceausescu’s despotic regime. (Well, I’m lying. I often find myself longing for the tyranny of no-single use, of having to return the empty glass jar or bottle in order to be able to purchase a full one.) As a guest of the Granada festival and as a tourist, I did not witness the escalating oppressiveness of the Ortega-Murillo regime, but could feel its presence.

 

I had never experienced the electrifying power of poetry as I did during that week in Nicaragua. The intensity reminded me how, as the situation worsened in the ‘80s in totalitarian Romania, poetry came to function as a touchstone for our humanity. When, in 1985/1986, a teacher risked losing his job, if not his freedom or life, by taking us (middle schoolers) to an unpublicized venue to hear poet Mircea Dinescu read poems that would soon place him under house arrest, I had little interest in poetry. I don’t remember the poems, but I will never forget the experience of listening (and trying the decode the political subtext), or the space of resistance listening created. Dinescu’s autographed “Rimbaud negustorul” (Rimbaud the merchant) that I slipped in the winter coat’s inside pocket on the way home did not make the rationed food lines the next day less interminable, but it fed daydreams, especially when rations ran out before my turn, and made me feel less isolated and slightly more human.  

It has become a cliché to state that democracy’s in severe jeopardy and autocracy’s on the way in when the freedoms of speech and press get curtailed. I’ll state it anyway: when you experience the cliché so intimately, you care a lot less about how you sound. In the absence of basic freedoms, poetry came to do the heavy lifting of keeping us sane. It also gave us means of preserving a modicum of dignity. Dissident writers became our consciousness, a stay against hopelessness. We turned to poetry for its potential for resistance and subversion, for its “aesopic” (Stefan Augustin Doinas) and cameleonic and mercurial qualities, for chances to laugh at ourselves (since we couldn’t openly laugh at the regime) and to endure, and make believe that we had mastered the art of “doublethink” (Orwell). It gave us the illusion that we might even be able to outsmart the regime. Fearing the resourcefulness of poets and their ‘collaborators’ (we, the readers), censors kept refreshing the list of banned words (some as innocuous as “balcony,” “coffee,” or “breasts”). Poetry kept them on their toes. And we Romanians kept poetry around like a life jacket. You did not have to be a poetry devotee to appreciate its power. You could listen and float, without sinking, at least for a while.

Due to the serious political crisis in Nicaragua, this year, like last year, the International Poetry Festival will take place only in virtual format, streamed through Facebook from Feb 20-Feb 25: https://www.facebook.com/FIPGNicaragua

On that, next.

 

Fashion and Beauty with Poetess Vinny: How to Attract That Special Someone [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Valentine’s Day has come and gone, but I know that many of you are still aching to grab the attention of that special someone, the person who will support you, challenge you, and ultimately, change your life forever. So if you are looking to impress that agent you’ve been emailing back and forth with for months, that editor who loves your work but hasn’t found a place for it yet, or if there’s simply a writer in your life whom you’d like to befriend, here are some tips for you!

Tip#1: Give the appearance of having everything under control.

Agents and editors are a unique bunch because so many of their relationships involve people and projects that they are interested in working with, and we all know that in the 21st century, people need to be as marketable as their products are. Which is not to say that the disheveled recluse type is out of style; it’s just that it tends to ward off potential connections who are looking for something and someone they can count on, and at the end of the day, aren’t we both just trying to make a little money for all the hard work we’ve put into our art?

1. Give yourself a fresh look by applying something cool to the face for 5 minutes before your morning routine. The cooling sensation brings down redness and puffiness and adds a few hours of sleep to your skin and blood vessels. Try a Gel Eye Mask ($10) for passive relaxation or a Rose Quartz Facial Roller ($20) for a little more fun.

2. Try some concealer, guys and gals! It’s a great way to brighten your eyes, which are in fact, the windows to the soul. Products to try include MAC Pro Longwear ($25) and Tarte's Shape Tape ($27). If you are in between shades, choose the lighter one, but try to match your skin tone as closely as possible. Dab three dots under each eye, and then blend down and outward.

3. Before heading out to the event where you might see your special someone, make sure that your clothing is free of wrinkles and pet hair. If you’ve read my column you’ve heard me say it before, but these little details really do make a difference, and looking well-put-together in this way does wonders on the subconscious minds of others.

 

Tip#2: Choose an outfit that treads the line between tradition and modern fashion.

Are you one of those writers who wears one of two colors of blazers to work most days, or one who wears all black, or one who just throws things together and hopes for the best? I’ve been there too, and luckily, this occasion does not call for a costume. Stick to your usual ‘look’ since that is the person you are selling, and the worst feeling in the (fashion) world is realize that you’ve been crafting a personal style that does not resonate with you. The trick to being simple and stylish?

1. Keep the color scheme of your outfit relatively limited, and have at least 3 pieces that are the same color (Example: watch, belt, and bag are all black; or, pants, blazer, and an accessory are all navy blue). If you have a patterned shirt or blazer or pant, keep that as the centerpiece by playing down everything else. That way, you can look fabulous while managing the risk of your outfit creating a sensory overload.

2. Add one thing that is slightly off. A pocket square, a pair of fun socks, statement shoes, a bracelet, a brooch, anything that provides you with a tiny bit of artistic flare. Not only do these function as a place to start conversation, but they also make the statement that, as articulate as you are, there are still a few things that shall remain an enigma (and more importantly, memorable!) like why you thought a jeweled evil eye bracelet would go well with champagne. 

 

Tip#3: It’s kind of corny, but, just be yourself.

Because at the end of the day, it is your writing that speaks the most about you, and that, more than anything, is the part of you that will survive the test of time much more than the outfit you wore to a reading that your desired agent invited you to perform at. Still, the point is to find as many ways to get your work out there as possible, to go to readings, to give lectures and talks, and to make your mark on others in a meaningful way, the same way our beloved writers have marked us. 

Writing is about communication, and so is fashion, so tie your tie, zip your boot, powder your nose, and make a statement that is purely you!

*

Got a question? Comment below! And for more work from Poetess Vinny, follow her blog, Vinny the Snail.

“The New Colossus” Translation Project [by Mihaela Moscaliuc]

“The New Colossus” Translation Project (spearheaded by Alicia Ostriker, Mihaela Moscaliuc, and Tess O’Dwyer and to be hosted by AJHS)

This past summer, faculty and students in the M.F.A Program at Drew University honored the formidable Alicia Ostriker for her work as poet, mentor, scholar, feminist, activist, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and New York State Poet Laureate. As part of the celebration, we had translated and read some of her poems in our native, heritage, or acquired tongues. Something magical happened within the walls of the room as it gradually filled with Spanish, Arabic, Yiddish, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Sicilian, French, German, Russian, Romanian. Afterwards, Alicia and I decided that we needed to replicate and extend that experience. It didn’t take much to realize how that polyphony was about more than sound and multilingualism. As we left the celebration, we stepped back into a world steeped in inflammatory nationalist rhetoric, a world that had incorporated monolingualism into its mechanisms of oppression.

I proposed we choose a poem and reach out to poets willing to give it life in other languages. Brilliantly, Alicia suggested “The New Colossus,” which had been resonating, for more than a century, with millions of people. Written by Emma Lazarus in 1883, as part of an effort to raise funds for the Pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, it was etched on a plaque and attached to the pedestal in 1903, seven years after the statue was erected. Alicia’s personal involvement with "The New Colossus" was lifelong. She knew the poem as a child, because her mother would quote it to her, along with poems by Tennyson and Browning. Like so many immigrants, her mother believed in America as "the melting pot," and the Statue of Liberty poem and its symbolism fit into that understanding. Alicia’s mother, and in fact all her grandparents, arrived in the New World at the turn of the 20th century.

I arrived from Romania in 1996, just a few years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and although my point of entry was not Ellis Island, but the Newark International Airport (NJ), I thought I had caught a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty before landing. I wanted to believe so anyway, as I had spent the last leg of the trip peering out of the small window, searching.

A month after Alicia and I first spoke of the “The New Colossus,” in an interview with NPR, Principal Deputy Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli argued that the Lazarus poem should be amended to convey that immigrants are welcomed only if “they can stand on their own two feet, be self-sufficient, [and] pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” This, he argued, was in line with the “American tradition.” Such rhetoric rendered our project particularly timely. “The New Colossus” was written in a time of acute nativist and anti-immigrant sentiment. We are reliving that time. The targeted immigrant groups differ, but the fervor of the rhetoric is strikingly similar. Our project became inevitable. An idea that emerged on the playground of translation took root in socio-political terrain. We sent a call out to poet-translators and the overwhelmingly positive response was encouraging. At this time Tess O’Dwyer, whose mother is Korean and her father Irish-American, and who is a superb translator and editor whose non-profit management firm works with various cultural organizations, joined our project. We received translations of “The New Colossus” into Yiddish, Hebrew, Spanish, Spanglish, Persian, Sicilian, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Romanian, Ukrainian, French, Albanian, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Basque, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Slovak, German, Swedish, Irish, Arabic, Bulgarian, Turkish, Czech, Haitian Creole, Argentinian Spanish, Filipino, Korean, Tamil, Bengali, Urdu, Esperanto, Greek, Shona, Kumanji, Turkmen, and Isthmus Zapotec. The poems are accompanied by the translators’ brief comments on their or their ancestors’ immigration experiences.

Tess O’Dwyer was instrumental in helping us to secure a host. Here are her words on the process: As soon as I heard about The New Colossus Translation Project, I contacted the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), which hosts the Emma Lazarus Project. Amidst their Lazarusian archival exhibitions, curricula, and poetry contests, I saw a heart-snatching video of talented children writing poems to The Statue of Liberty today—and that cinched it. 

The New Colossus Translation Project has joined The Emma Lazarus Project at AJHS (https://ajhs.org/emma-lazarus-project) and will launch later this spring. It will be an integral part of public programming for the exhibition “From the Sitting Room to the Soap Box: Emma Lazarus, Union Square, and American Identity,” and part of their permanent archives.

The forty plus trove of translations (including an intersemiotic one into a musical composition) gifts the Mother of Exiles with the ability to welcome migrants, immigrants, and refugees in their own native or heritage tongues. Such a gesture of unconditional hospitality might remain, especially in the current political climate, utopian. The radical multilingualism of Mother of Exile is a metaphor. Metaphors, however, are not without agency.

As Alicia Ostriker points out, in a world of escalating tensions, of fear of (im)migrants, and of xenophobia, this poem remains radical. What’s significant too is that the poem doesn't attack the haters; instead, it offers an alternative ideal. Also, think of the thousands of heroic statues of Men on Horseback. "Mother of Exiles" may be a stereotype, but she's a new, exciting one: a female hero.

Years ago, when invited by the Library of Congress to record something for its “Poetry of America” project, Alicia chose this sonnet and talked about it as key to defining who we were. Then in 2018 she quoted it as part of a lecture on “Poetry and the City,” mentioning that it was a perfect refutation of Auden's famous pronouncement that "Poetry makes nothing happen": Auden is wrong! When France gave us the statue, its official name was "Liberty Enlightening the Nations," and it was all about how America and France were allies; we were both republics that had overthrown monarchies. It had nothing whatsoever to do with immigration.  But the poem changed all that. It transformed the meaning of the statue, the meaning of the Port of New York, and ultimately the meaning of America. It directly opposed the pervasive sentiment that saw immigrants as dirty and diseased criminals.  It insisted on re-defining us as a nation of immigrants.

We hope the project grows (through further ‘installments’) and that, in time, the Mother of Exiles acquires enough languages to speak to all minority groups in the U.S. and beyond. Tess, who is herself a consummate translator (see her translations of Alberto Blest Gana’s Martin Rivas and Giannina Braschi’s Empire of Dreams and Yo-Yo Boing!) remarks upon the already impressive range of our collection: As an indication of linguistic range, the project features Emma Lazarus’ biographer Esther Schor translating “The New Colossus” into Esperanto, Israeli-based poet Karen Alkalay-Gut rendering it into Hebrew, Rose Waldman into Yiddish, Ming Di into Chinese, Dunya Mikhail into Arabic, and Emma Asonye into Igbo. The range of artistry is inspiring. With Spanish, for example, we have Argentine poet Lorraine Healy translating crisp to the literal edge of each line, while Puerto Rican poet Giannina Braschi riffs metaphorically on “The New Colossus” as though it were an arrangement of a song to American immigration in the Obama and Trump era, rather than a sonnet addressing immigration in the Cleveland and Roosevelt era. 

We have been asked, at various points, to comment on the translations themselves. That is beyond the purpose of our project, although we hope for opportunities (perhaps through the AJHS platform and/or other online venues or discussion panels) to engage our contributors in discussions about the process. Each poet-translator approached the highly formal qualities of the poem (a Petrarchan sonnet whose diction may feel highly elevated and antiquated) on their own terms. I assume choices were informed by multiple factors, including the nature of the synergy between the host and guest language, the translatability of form and music, personal aesthetics, and/or politics. Some initial contributors withdrew when they realized how impossible a task preserving the sonnet’s formal qualities might be, while others declared themselves surprised by how amenable their mother tongues had turned out to be to those same qualities. Others sensed right away that they needed to do away with the sonnet form and compensate in other ways. We imposed no restrictions and provided no particular guidelines, choosing to trust instead the craftmanship of the contributors from whom we solicited work.

Alicia mentioned in a conversation that for her this project was not about “making artistic judgements,” but “about getting at a significant human experience.” I agree, and also embrace Tess’s view of the project as having the potential to provide a deeper understanding of translation as an art form. Tess writes: Literary translation is a living artform.  I have always shied away from the concept of definitive translation. Translations are originals in the same way that arrangements of songs or symphonies are originals. You can recognize the origins of a composition, thought, concept, while simultaneously recognizing what is original in the tempo, tone, feeling, imaging, etc. That space between history and creation is where translation thrives. Let there be many more translations of this poem into other Asian, African, Scandinavian, and indigenous languages. Let readers appreciate that the new does not void out the prior. Let there be a wider understanding that literary translations contribute not only to the evolution of poetry, but to language itself.

Stay tuned for news about the launch of The New Colossus Translation Project on the AJHS site and for a call for further contributions.

Two articles of interest accessible online:

• David Lehman’s “Colossal Ode,” Smithsonian Magazine, April 2004

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/colossal-ode-103151288/

• Walt Hunter’s “The Story Behind the Poem on the Statue of Liberty,” January 16, 2018 https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/01/the-story-behind-the-poem-on-the-statue-of-liberty/550553/ 

Mihaela Moscaliuc, Guest Author February 17-21

photo © Valentin Moscaliuc

This week we welcome Mihaela Moscaliuc as our guest author. Mihaela was born and raised in Romania. She is the author of the poetry collections Immigrant Model (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and Father Dirt (Alice James Books,2010), translator of Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015) and Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star (Etruscan Press, 2019), and editor of Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern (Trinity University Press, 2016). Her scholarship explores issues of representation, appropriation, cultural identity, exophony, and empathy. She has published essays on the works of Agha Shahid Ali, Kimiko Hahn, Shara McCallum, Colum McCann, C.K. Williams, Gerald Stern, and in the field of Romani Studies. The recipient of two Glenna Luschei Awards (in poetry and prose, respectively) from Prairie Schooner, residency fellowships from Chateau de Lavigny (Switzerland), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a Fulbright fellowship to Romania. Moscaliuc is associate professor of English at Monmouth University (New Jersey).
You can find her most recent article, "Accessorizing (with) 'Gypsyness' in the Twenty-first Century" here.
Find out more about Mihaela at her website here and on her faculty page here. 

Welcome, Mihaela. 

-- sdl

Poetic License [by Jim Cummins]

 

I booked a four-way once.  I was sitting in a bar when War & Peace sidled up and sat down on the stool next to me.  "Gotta light?" she asked in a heavy Moscow accent.  "I don't burn books," I replied; she laughed a long, low, melodious Russian laugh.  "Actually," she said, "I only smoke afterwards," and winked, as she gently dragged a long blood-red fingernail across my cheek.  "Have you met my friend, Naked Lunch?"  I'd been so transfixed by the Russian beauty--there was so much of her!--that I hadn't seen the thin, waif-ish tart slipping up behind me.  She looked like a walking STD--tattoos, piercings, nose & navel rings, wearing a black leather jacket that couldn't conceal the fact she had nothing on underneath.  She must've seen the involuntary look of revulsion that passed over my face before I could readjust my bar mask.  She looked hurt.  "I know," she whispered, "but I bring a lot of coke to the table."  I hadn't thought of that; this could be my lucky night!  We continued to drink until W&P suggested we go over to her apartment and "sort things out."  I agreed, but Naked Lunch said, "First we need a little spice."  We pretended we didn't know what she meant but she knew we did.  So we looked around the room.  I saw Beloved sitting at a table with The Bluest Eye, but NL pointed out that Beloved was too old and TBE a little too young.  War & Peace agreed.  She said, "I met The Intuitionist at a signing once," motioning with her chin toward a table in the corner where TI sat, drinking alone.  "Whoa," I said.  "That's too spicy for me!" and we all laughed.  "How about a poet?" Naked Lunch asked.  "Don't turn around but Thomas & Beulah is sitting a few tables over."  T&B was writing assiduously in a notebook, next to a half-empy (or half-full, depending on how you looked at it!) glass of wine.  "I'm in," I grinned, and W&P and NL flipped a coin to see which one would make the approach.  As it turned out, T&B was more than eager to join us--and in fact, showed us all what "poetic license" really

meant, "all night long," as the song goes.  Damn, I love curling up with a good book!

A Few Love Poems for Valentine's Day [by Nin Andrews]

How can I resist? It's a day for love, so I feel compelled to post just a few love poems here. First off, from one of my favorite poets, Shivani Mehta:

The Butterflies

You unzip my dress, a curve from the side of my left breast to the top of my hip. My body is a column of butterflies. One by one, roused by the light and cool air, they wake from sleep. One by one they open their wings, answering the instinct to be free. They scatter in all directions; I learn what it means to be in many places at once.

            -- from Shivani Mehta’s Useful Information for the Soon-to-be Beheaded, published by Press 53

 

Next, from Dante di Stefano. As a Parton fan, I love this poem.

While Listening to Dolly Parton Sing “Lover’s Return,” I Imagine the Girl in You Talking to the Boy in Me

The old gods gather in my chest and throb
the miracles of flame and rusted fender,
composing a ballad for blue flowers
and grandmas toting shotguns up the hill.

I arm my grievances with handwritten
recollections of twirling skirts, moonlight,
hot mouths coming together in the dark,
the burning rafters of adolescence.

Call my kiss a romp through threshing machine
and clawhammer me up a sweet cudgel 
of melody as plain as a mattress
filled with straw tick, where we can trundle on

the big feelings of us joining as one
against the hogtied malice of the world.

            --from Ill Angels by Dante di Stefano, published by Etruscan Press

 

I am so looking forward to Nicole Santalucia's next book, due out this month. Here's a poem from that collection:

Keystone Ode to My Wife after Reading Anne Bradstreet at a One Hundred and Three Year Old Farm House

Between two clouds
and two seedless grapes
and two dandelions,
there are days that fall.
Between two horses
or two farm dogs
or two blackbirds,
there is breath.
Between two mice
or two lightning bugs?or two blades of grass
or two fallen crab apples,
there is a silent place to love.
Between two yellow wildflowers
or two fox kits or two red oak leaves,
there is energy that crashes.
Between two frogs and two trees,
there are two rain drops and two gusts of wind
that blow through darkness,
where two stars
and two far away planets
light up the sky.

            --from The Book of Dirt by Nicole Santalucia, published by NYQ Books

 

Then I think A. R. Ammons, who makes me laugh. 

Their Sex Life

One failure on
Top of another

 

Tryst

I’m going to see you tonight:
birds that know where to fly
are loose under by ribs:

your eyes fly here to my mind’s
eye: I dwell on them;
what if I’m frozen

when I see you; what if I burn
completely up: the birds
may break out and go

too soon; too bad
if my self flies to you
early, and I can’t follow.

            --from A. R. Ammons, The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammon, published by W.W. Norton & Company

And finally, a few translations from the wonderful Mexican poet, Ulalume González de León that remind me of the Ammons' poems. 

Bird

More song than body
More flight than time
It doesn’t fit in itself
or in all its days

Tired of All Metaphysics

Simply put
           I think of sex with you.

            --from Plagios/Plagiarisms Volume 1 by Ulalume González de León,  translated by Terry Ehret, John Johnson and Nancy J. Morales, published by Sixteen Rivers Press.