KS: Accents is a great name for a press. What does the name mean to you?
KSK: Ah, well. That is quite personal, actually. Before there was Accents Publishing, there was (and still is) the Accents radio show. I speak English with a foreign accent; I will always have it, since I was born in Bulgaria and lived there until age 24. So I was to be on the radio, and I thought that since I couldn’t get rid of my accent, I could at least try to really own it. You know what software designers say—it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. So, on the first episode of Accents, I publicly announced that I love accents so much that I developed a fake foreign accent to use on the radio! That was in January 2009. A year later, in January 2010, Accents Publishing was formed, and I never considered another name.
KS: Tell us about Accents Publishing’s newest title, Mother, Loose by Brandel France de Bravo.
KSK: Mother, Loose is the winner of our 2014 chapbook contest. Brandel’s manuscript was selected as the Judge’s Choice by Patty Paine. Let me quote a sentence from her intro: “These jewel-like poems—both in their precision and beauty—are as dazzling and intelligent as they are entrancing and enthralling.” I am in complete agreement with Patty’s words, although I feel that some of the brilliance of the book is probably lost on me, because it works with childhood rhymes and tales that I am not as intimately familiar with as someone who grew up in the United States would be. But I still love the work! I was proofreading (again!) the typeset book last week and (again!) kept gasping at the beauty and the depth of the poetry. But don’t take my word for it; let me offer you a poem:
I Regret to Inform You
I regret knowing, the way it changes
everything and nothing. I regret
cell death and its absence. I regret I am
the person you think I am. I regret
the days turned years waiting
and the luminous arriving
always eclipsed. I regret having
no sense of humor, feeling like Haiti
when I’m Liechtenstein, just as tiny but,
thanks for asking, fine. I regret
showing you what I am unable to see,
my wattled profile, baldly appraising gaze.
I regret leaving the back door open
and I regret closing it. I regret the odor
of obligation, being the small hair
that will not budge and the tongue
that must protest it. I regret
the tumor’s intelligence, the way
it dodges the needle, pretends
to swallow poison. I regret this broken
mask and I regret your looking.
I regret waiting until now
to wait on you, not anointing your feet
with oil sooner. I regret the raspberries
I failed to feed you with a spoon.
I regret that after our meal
I will be left to clear the table.
KS: That’s a great poem. So many shifts and so much at stake.
It’s interesting that you and Patty Paine are both poets and editors of presses and living in countries you didn’t grow up in. Poetry seems particularly challenging to translate or comprehend, more embedded with connotated meaning and conflation of tradition.
Over the holidays I began reading Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, and just read the passage about the Turkish journalist living in exile in Germany who begins writing poetry. He’s aware that his poetry is understood by the other ex-pat Turks, but not by the Germans, and he seems to feel a kind of wall of silence around him in Germany.
Does poetry and publishing poetry serve to deepen your connection to your chosen community? Or does it remind you that there are an infinite number of details to learn about an adopted culture and language?
KSK: I feel a lot more fortunate than Orhan Pamuk’s character. I write poems in English for the English-speaking readers, I write in Bulgarian for the Bulgarian audience. I translate everything I can between the two languages. There are some occasions, very irritating, when I write something that is both untranslatable and written in the “wrong” language. For example I have poems in English that address life experiences that are understandable only to a Bulgarian audience and not as relevant to the American reader. Luckily, many Bulgarians know English, my own language and poetry community. A friend summed it up once as he was introducing me to someone : “This is Katerina Stoykova. She is a poet, but you haven’t heard of her because she lives in America.” Things changed for me, though, because during 2012 and 2013, I edited and (largely) translated an anthology of Bulgarian poetry. This project put me in contact with hundreds of authors, I became closely familiar with what Bulgarian poets write at the moment, and in the process, I established new friendships. I think the most productive way to feel connected to a community is to work to serve it, to give of yourself. Along these lines, yes, publishing absolutely deepens my connection to my chosen community.
But (call me a Gemini) I want to serve both the Bulgarian and the American literary communities. I want to help them be relevant to one another, and at this point, I don’t want to choose one over the other. I can’t.
KS: Your own book How God Punishes has just won a prestigious Bulgarian award. Congratulations! Tell us about that book, and the award.
KSK: How God Punishes was published in June, 2014 by a new, boutique press called ICU. This is a book about truth-telling, regret and ego, and it walks the reader through poems about several stages of personal development. It’s organized in seven parts and an epilogue. The tone is self-ironic. All poems are untitled, and each refers back to the title of the book. I have the poems in English as well, and I hope in 2015 to be able to finish the manuscript in English.
For the past twenty years, Bulgarian publishing house Zhanet 45 has been sponsoring the Ivan Nikolov National Poetry Award. It is considered the most prestigious annual poetry prize, and a jury selects the winner(s) and distributes the monetary award of 10000 leva.
I was overjoyed to see How God Punishes among the finalists, and then winning really made my year. The first place was split between my book and Poems by Vasil Balev. I was happy for myself, my book and my publisher. I don’t live in Bulgaria and cannot connect to the Bulgarian audience on a regular basis, so winning gave my book a level of publicity that I couldn’t possibly have achieved on my own.
KS: Accents Publishing released 8 titles in 2014. What are their commonalities?
KSK: I’ve always thought that our books differ quite a bit from one another, but now that I’ve really thought about your question, I have to say that they have a lot in common.
Two of these are anthologies, which reflect the personal tastes of their editors. All the rest of the books are poetry collections that carry a single, clear and well-explored theme. Beloved Kentucky poet Jane Gentry, whom we lost in 2014, says that all poems want to tell a story, and I agree with her. I think many poetry books are in fact short story collections. Each of the books we’ve published this year operates much like a linked short story collection. For each book you can immediately describe in several sentences what it is about, at least on the surface.
For example, Square Feet by Lori A. May explores the marriage and domestic life of a childless couple. Pendulum by Eric Scott Sutherland focuses on the social issues of poverty and homelessness in the setting of a downtown public library. And Childhood by Emily R. Grosholz explores adopting and parenting of young children. Incidentally, Childhood is our first and only (so far) book that includes color images. Several paintings by Parisian painter Lucy Vines interact with Emily’s poems and, IMHO, make for a richer experience for the reader.
KS: The covers are impressive, as well. What goes into creating a cover composition?
KSK: We all have different tastes in art, and even what we call art differs from person to person. When we were creating the concept of Accents Publishing, one my guiding principles was to build a press that I would want to be published by—a press that is compassionate to its author. It is important to me that the authors we publish like (if not love) their covers, so we work with them. They have input on the images we select, and our designer takes over from that point on to build a complete cover that says “This is an Accents book.”
KS: Tell us about your current project translating Bulgarian poets.
KSK: Ah! Well, this was a totally spur-of-the-moment idea that just took over me, and I announced it publicly before I could talk myself out of it. What can I say—I love translating poetry. I think it teaches me a lot—about language, about my own personal tastes, about culture, about poetry in general. I do it almost daily anyway. I translate poems by Bulgarian poets and then submit them to magazines for publication. A few get picked up, but as you know, submitting and publishing is a time- and effort-consuming endeavor. I decided that I’d rather spend my energy and time on selecting and translating the poems and posting them on my own blog. So far it’s been a total blast. I pasted a little calendar on my wall and started scratching off each day I’ve posted a translation. So far—12 days—I have 100% coverage! I think keeping the translations together on a blog makes reading them a more special experience—something like an evolving online anthology of translations. I did edit and publish an anthology of Bulgarian poetry already, for which I translated 29 of the 32 included authors. It was an extraordinary amount of work, my most difficult project to date. It took two years, one of which was consumed almost entirely by translating and editing the translations. This time I want to take a more fun and leisurely approach to translating Bulgarian poetry and making it available for English-speaking readers. If anyone is interested in reading the blog, here is a link: http://katerinaklemer.com/ownaccent/
KS: Do you think American readers have a good amount of access to work in translation?
KSK: I’m not sure. The decision on what gets translated is a function of many variables. Some are political, some financial, some a matter of taste. But I feel that Americans read less translated poetry than they actually have available. For example, during the first several years of hosting the Accents radio show, I asked each guest to spend some time talking about a foreign poet—a poet who is not American or writes in a language other than English. The guest was supposed to mention someone they admire, read a poem and say a few words about why they like this particular poet. After the first several months of doing this, I had to explicitly ask guests to avoid mentioning Anna Akhmatova and Pablo Neruda, because they were very nearly the only ones selected. Many guests even declined to participate in the segment because they weren’t sure whom to pick. Eventually I stopped doing this segment.
I think that university libraries have a lot of translated poetry books that one can look through. Small presses take chances on anthologies with contemporary translated poetry. My mentor Molly Peacock once said, “There is nothing more exciting than the work of your peers.” Poets who work outside the US are also your peers—see what they write!
KS: Let’s get the conversation started. Name five poetry books in translation American readers should read this year.
KSK: I don’t dare tell the American readers what they should read. I’m afraid I’m neither that well-read, nor sophisticated. That said, I can mention the five poetry books in translation that have been personally important to me and have inspired me to either translate or to publish translations. In alphabetical order, these are:
Anxiety of Words: Contemporary Poetry by Korean Women (Zephyr Press, 2006) By Ch'oe Sung-ja, Kim Hyesoon, and Yi Yon-ju. Translated from Korean by Don Mee Choi.
Cry of a Former Dog (Ivy Press, 2000) By Konstantin Pavlov Translated from Bulgarian by Ludmilla G. Popova-Wightman
Hagar Before the Occupation / Hagar After the Occupation (Alice James Books, 2011) By Amal al-Jubouri. Translated from Arabic by Rebecca Gayle Howell and Husam Qaisi. Foreward by Alicia Ostriker.
Homage to the Lame Wolf: Selected Poems (Oberlin College Press, 1987) By Vasko Popa. Translated from Serbian by Charles Simic.
Talking to My Body (Copper Canyon Press, 1996) By Anna Swir. Translated from Polish by Czeslaw Milosz
Every one of these books has given me something to aspire to and has shown me what is possible. I admire every one of these poets, translators and publishers.
KS: Thank you!
Two more questions before I let you go: Tell us about Proud Citizen. And also, what is the Lexington-Louisville area doing so right that fosters such a dynamic literary arts community?
KSK: Proud Citizen is a feature-length narrative film, shot almost entirely in Lexington, Kentucky, with a local cast. It is a film about human connections, forgiveness, friendship and family. It is a very writerly film, because it tells the story of a playwright’s visit to Lexington, and the lead actress recites about a dozen poems as voiceovers. Now, I happen to be the lead actress and these happen to be my poems, so that makes the film so much more personal. Film Director Thom Southerland had a vision of creating a film that shows Kentucky through the eyes of a visitor. He invited me to work with him, and we jointly developed the story. Being able to participate in this kind of project gave me the opportunity to be creative in a different way and showed me the true creative power of collaboration. It has been an unbelievably awesome experience that I will cherish for as long as I’m able to remember. Since July, 2014, the film has been screening at festivals and has even won a few awards. If you are curious to see a trailer and further information, please take a look at our website: http://proudcitizenthemovie.com/
Literary life in the Lexington/Louisville area is thriving, and everyone seems to be enjoying it! Neil Chethik, Executive Director of the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, was first to claim Kentucky as the Literary Arts Capital of Mid-America, and now other voices are joining the chorus. We have so much to be proud of and to celebrate—award-winning writers, innovative literary presses, institutions, organizations, reading series, universities, MFA programs, enrichment grants, conferences, adoring audiences. So we have the infrastructure and a critical mass of intelligent people who are devoted to the arts. I think that to a large extent, the impetus for this creative boom is the literary community itself enjoying the realization of its own potential. Certain things have no substitutes and cannot be funded—true friendships and the sincere support that writers give to one another, the genuine care and interest they show for each other’s work. During my radio show, I ask all my guests who teach creative writing what the most important thing they teach their students is. I’ll give you the answer from writer Brian Leung, who at the time taught at The University of Louisville. He said,
I teach my students that their interest in their pursuit in their writing and publishing is necessarily coequal to their interest in serving and assisting other writers. And that can manifest itself in varieties of ways .... There are a lot of ways that I teach them to be of service to other writers … anything to encourage the idea that the creative writing enterprise is not just about serving one’s creative ego.
(The complete sound clip can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/accents-publishing/brian-leung-writer). And I think this is what seems to be happening in Kentucky on a larger scale than ever before. It is a beautiful moment, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer is the author of several poetry books in English and Bulgarian, most recently The Porcupine of Mind (Broadstone Books, 2012, in English) and How God Punishes (ICU, 2014, in Bulgarian), which won the Ivan Nikolov National Poetry Prize. She is the editor of The Season of Delicate Hunger: Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry (Accents Publishing, 2014), for which she also translated the works of 29 of the 32 included authors. She hosts Accents – a radio show for literature, art and culture on WRFL in Lexington, Kentucky. In January 2010, Katerina launched the independent literary press Accents Publishing. Katerina co-wrote the independent feature film Proud Citizen, directed by Thom Southerland, and acted in the lead role.
Karen Schubert's most recent chapbook, I Left My Wings on a Chair, wasa Wick Poetry Center Winner (Kent State Press, 2014). Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Louisville Review, American Literary Review, diode poetry journal, and Extract(s) anthology. Awards include a 2013 residency at Headlands Center for the Arts and 2014 Pushcart Prize nomination. She is a founding member of Literally Youngstown, a center for the literary arts.
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