People have signature moves, which collapses the argument that you can’t or don’t dance. There’s a proscenium that is not a dance floor––it’s wherever you exist in space, with weight, timing and energy. Rudolph Laban codified these four aspects of human movement in his theory of Effort/Shape: use of space is indirect or direct, sense of weight is strong or light, timing is quick or sustained, flow is free or bound. During my dance therapy graduate studies at NYU, we hit the pavement in Greenwich Village to watch people walk and do ordinary things––through the lens of Laban’s theory. Later, we would apply this lens to special populations in places like Bellevue Hospital, Bronx Psychiatric Center, and the Lighthouse for the Blind. Charles Simic observes like a dance therapist in this poem (from Classic Ballroom Dances published by George Braziller):
Classic Ballroom Dances
Grandmothers who wring the necks Of chickens; old nuns With names like Theresa, Marianne, Who pull schoolboys by the ear;
The intricate steps of pickpockets Working the crowd of the curious At the scene of an accident; the slow shuffle Of the evangelist with a sandwich board;
The hesitation of the early-morning customer Peeking through the window grille Of a pawnshop; the weave of a little kid Who is walking to school with eyes closed;
And the ancient lovers, cheek to cheek, On the dance floor of the Union Hall, Where they also hold charity raffles On rainy Monday nights of an eternal November.
Coincidentally, the poem’s first verb “wring” is one of Laban’s eight “Efforts”, characterized by indirect, sustained, strong and bound movement. Germane as it is to human action, it can also be laden with emotion. In a written scenario, it gives a visceral response. And what about the Flamenco version of “wring” in this photo of my friend Gabriela Granados, director of American Bolero Dance Company?
Look through the technique and virtuosity of the art form––the expressivity that is dance has subtle beginnings, inherent to being human.
Stephanie Adams-Santos’ collection of finely-wrought, barbed, numinous lyric poems weaves from “a few warbled jags of wind” a laurel for all searchers enthralled and menaced by the beauty of a world “full of strange experience.” These are poems composed “in the tight sling of the chrysalid,” “belted to the bolt of being,” where every word sounds “lassoed to a bell.” Adams-Santos pitches her poems between chrysalis and swarm, self and world, I and thou, aware “of the secret lathe / now turning in the pulp / of our living.” “Tongue,” a representative poem from the middle of the collection, reads:
Loin of the skull
who lives in the bell of my bone,
little black place of music—
If you have vespers, O won’t the toad come?
Swarm Queen’s Crown presents for our inspection real gardens with imaginary toads in them, the voluptuous gasp at the center of a thorny prayer.
Echolalia in Script gorgeously collects Sam Roxas-Chua’s asemic writings in a gallery of images contextualized by the title poem. The stunning examples of open form writing in this book are “flawed disiderata,” failed cartographies, “troubled cantatas,” “true languages born of beak & exhale.” As Roxas-Chua notes in the introduction, his interest in wordless open semantic forms of writing parallels his work as a poet and stems, in part, from his personal history: “born to Filipino parents, adopted into a Chinese family, and then later immigrating to America resulted in a number of displacements that prevented me from taking claim to country or language.” Echolalia in Script is a book of elemental, angelic, visionary beauty rendered in the illimitable shorthand of the divine, an austere infinite tracery, a singing Forever composed of untranslatable Nows.
Each poem in David Giannini’s Porous Borders unfolds as “a gymnast who somersaults from a balance beam, but never lands; instead she becomes that somersault.” These, as Giannini calls them, “vertical prosepoems,” spin out from the mundane, through “a place of lyric dissociation,” “smuggling the invisible over the borders of normative prose.” The poetry in this collection is luminous and strange, as if cribbed from a dream of Paul Valery assayed and translated by Russell Edson. With élan and slapstick precision, Gianinni’s poems bristle like porcupines “in an unlit cellar full of inflated balloons. Porous Borders is a particularly vibrant addition to the history of the American prose poem.
Nin Andrews’ funny, buoyant, joyous, and deeply intelligent chapbook, Our Lady of the Orgasm, picks up where her collection, The Book of Orgasms, left off when it was published seventeen years ago. Like her two most recent full-length collections, Why God Is a Woman and Miss August, Our Lady provides further proof of Andrews’ mastery of the prose poem. In Andrews’ work, the vocation of the poem and the orgasm are the same: “it is their job to keep the sacred balance, to keep us all from curling inward like a scroll, never to be read or known.” With great skill, Andrews’ poetry sorts through the disparities between real and potential, between form and freedom, between fiction and nonfiction, between prose and poetry, urging her readers away from solipsism and superficiality, from the theoretical to the angelic. Reading a prose poem by Nin Andrews is like learning how to fly through a blizzard, or like growing gills and remembering how to breathe underwater.
Martha Rhodes newest collection of poetry, The Thin Wall, trains the compound eye of the lyric on the burdens of inheritance that constitute selfhood. Through the thin walls of these poems, angles of vision go askew, family histories and relationships snare and fracture, forgotten “greenesses” pop up, and the dead “take all we have.” Each poem in this collection is a door leading to another door, a kafka-esque series of routines “all seen clearly from this place we want to remain / inside forever, place of Etcetera.” The Thin Wall posits all remembering, and indeed all perception, as tenuous, fraught, and wildly shifting. Martha Rhodes’s poetry is uncompromising, febrile, night bound, visceral; she offers no balm. She provokes. She unsettles. She makes you feel the disappointments and disruptions of everyday life flying in your knuckles.
Paterson Light and Shadow pairs the poetry of the city’s finest living poet, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, with the arresting tonalities of Mark Hillringhouse’s photography. The conversation between Hillringhouse’s stirring black and white images and Mazziotti Gillan’s deeply moving autobiographical poems brings to life the vibrant history of one of the first cities of American poetry, birthplace of Allen Ginsberg and muse to William Carlos Williams. In “December Dusk,” Mazziotti Gillan writes: “A precariousness steals over things / at dusk when darkness bleeds the light away / and our shadows stretch their long fingers.” An exquisite precariousness steals over the graffitied factories, the abandoned boxing gyms, The Great Falls, the diners, the side streets, the public schools, the crumbling monuments, and the dilapidated stoops enshrined in the pages of this book. For Hillringhouse and Mazziotti Gillan, Paterson is a place both haunted and sacred; at any moment the drab and ramshackle might give way to memory’s “dizzying panorama, luminous / and vast.” Paterson Light and Shadow is a love note to an archetypal American place unfolding in the dialogue between word and image; to eavesdrop on the discussion between Mazziotti Gillan and Hillringhouse is to understand more deeply their charged and fortifying relationship to this remarkable city.
Just Another Day in Just Our Town is Bruce Bennett’s second New and Selected, picking up where Navigating the Distances left off in 1999. Throughout Just Another Day Bennett weds his technical mastery to a big-hearted embrace of the quotidian; he marshals sonnet, villanelle, and a variety of other measured forms to explore the ever-shifting and diaphanous contours of his life as a poet, professor, and husband. Bennett’s verse bears the fingerprints of the poets he lovingly parodies in the selection culled from Loose Canon: Christina Rossetti, Poe, Robert Browning, Hardy, Burns, Yeats, Frost, Bishop, Williams, Pound, and Dickinson. In “I Dwell,” Bennett writes:
I dwell in Gullibility – A fairer House than Doubt – That gives me lots of Choices – That I can’t live – without –
Bruce Bennett’s true abode is in the sonorous notes of the poetic line. These poems are proof of a life lived with Blakean exuberance and Keatsian beauty. Whether meditating on the life of his father, imagining swimming in a watering can, or railing against Donald Trump, Bruce Bennett’s Just Another Day in Just Our Town offers a selection of poems both timely and timeless.
How does a poet know how to phrase writing? How does a dancer know how to phrase movement? In a turning point of enjambment the phrase hangs in mid-air…this sounds like dance, and this is poetry. The poetic term enjambment comes from the French “jambe” for “leg”. Lines have legs. They reach and extend.
If you’re beginning to experience a blurring of poetry and dance, this is my intention. The vocabulary of both includes: line, phrase, rhythm, sequence, punctuation, spacing, form, narrative, and so on. There’s the blank page and the empty stage. The oft quoted “dance is poetry in motion” could be inverted as “poetry is dance motioned into word”.
As for those opening questions, they aren’t exactly rhetorical but they are akin to trying to solve a mystery. The best answer I can give is: attention to timing and artistry of creating suspense. Other poets have taught me, by their example, the brilliance of a line without an end stop, a comma or period. And choreographers have demonstrated during rehearsals, calling out, “no stopping, don’t let it stop”. The feeling of sustainment as a dancer is sublime––it’s like the breath that hovers around a dangling phrase of a poem, until continuation allows the exhalation of completion. When you watch the great ballet dancer Nureyev on archival footage (I did see him once live, near the end of his career), you will see that his phrasing is relaxed within the demands of his craft, and full of surprise.
This week we welcome Charise M. Hoge, MA, MSW, as our guest author. Charise is a dance/movement therapist, performing artist, and writer. Her work in arts and healing has brought wellness programs into hospitals, prisons, counseling centers, museums, and businesses. Her dance performance career spans four decades across several U.S. cities. She’s a third culture kid (TCK), military spouse, and co-author of the book A Portable Identity: A Woman’s Guide to Maintaining a Sense of Self While Moving Overseas. Her first poetry chapbook, Striking Light from Ashes, is available from Finishing Line Press (July 2017). Her poems are featured in various journals and platforms, as well as her own blog mixandmosspoetry.com. Find out more about Charise here.
Here are two poems by Bob Holman. You are asked to choose between them. Much depends on your choice. For it has been said that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who favor Brumal (“(Do Not Leave Out) The Invisible Line”) and those who prefer "The Tyranny of the Poem." In which category do you fall? Are you an Alice or a Mabel? As for me, I take refuge in Kierkegaard. I know the right answer but am honor bound to keep it a secret. -- DL
(1)
Brumal (“(Do Not Leave Out) The Invisible Line”)
Solstice Day incites play in my poetic driveway I get the picture -- take down the light fixture The posse be sleepin by the chimney with care A flashlight app blows up their green blacklight hair
So what if it's short? Fine poetic consort And cold? Dusky dank? Take that to the bank
Let us sing to the balance of moon and sun To the invisible line that connects everyone
(2) The tyranny of the poem
It will never end You will never be alone again Beware Everybody’s hand on the big pencil Pushing out the first letter Of the first word of the poem Then go on from there Go ahead Go on into the theater Never to return to this poem Yet the poem waits for you Right here where you left it It is the tyranny of the poem You can leave the poem But the poem will never leave you You will never be alone again
It was bound to happen: no sooner did I publish my last post than I realized that there was already a wonderful series of posts on this very blog by Tess Callahan about the power of constraints to spark creativity. She's even given a lovely TEDx talk on "The Love Affair Between Creativity and Constraint." My contribution this week is to direct you to her "Unleash Creativity" posts, especially "Give Students Chains to Break" and "Impose Time Constraints."
In other news, my Older Kid (who is college age, a fact that continues to strike me as rather bizarre) informed me today that he has created a multiplayer, multimodal game for his friends--a sort of scavenger-hunt-slash-role-playing-game--that involves video, text messages, and real physical "plants" of things and people. He told me that he has not felt this good, mood-wise, in a very long time. I gently suggested that this was an example of the healing power of creativity, rigorously supported by research, in action. Since he is on break from classes until the end of the month, we talked about how he might manage to schedule time for his game creation when the new semester starts, and really commit specific hours of the week for musing and engaging in this flow-producing activity.
Speaking of classes, preparation for teaching my honors course, Creative Imagination: Theory and Process, at FIT this semester I've been immersing myself in research on design thinking. Stay tuned for a post (or more than one) that connects this popular series of strategies, which emerged from Silicon Valley and is taking all domains by storm, with the art of poetry.
Finally, I'm stoked to participate in another of Geoffrey Nutter's Wallson Glass poetry seminars tomorrow. I first learned about this miraculous enterprise from Kathleen Ossip, who mentioned that her brilliant poem "Your Ardor" was first drafted in one of Geoffrey's classes:
At the end of a semester when I’ve taught a lot, I like to go be a student, for balance. Last May I ended up in Geoffrey Nutter’s wonderful private class in upper Manhattan, which centers around a magical pile of source texts strewn across a long table; at that table, I wrote ‘Your Ardor.’ So there are images and language from those texts in the poem, and ardor was very much on my mind at the time.
Here's to more ardor, more balance, and many, many poems!
Last summer I launched a small press: Poets & Traitors. The first book was by Ahmad Al-Ashqar––Advances in Embroidery: Poems, with Translations form Mahmoud Darwish––and it set the template for the kinds of books I've always wanted to publish: hybrid volumes of original and translated poetry by one poet-translator. Poets & Traitors Press wants to demolish the barriers between creative writing and translation by publishing books that cultivate a dialogue between the two.
The name of the press comes from that old chestnut that translators love to hate: Traduttore, traditore (Translator, traitor) — an accusation made by Italians against French translators of Dante. But much of the inspiration comes from something the poet/translator Octavio Paz once wrote: “Baudelaire said poetry is essentially analogy… Between the language of the universe and the universe of language, there is a bridge, a link: poetry. The poet, says Baudelaire, is the translator.”
From poet vs. translator, we arrive at poet=translator. But then, if we complete the syllogism, maybe poets are traitors, too. What, if anything, could that possibly mean?
That question led me to revisit an old poem of mine, "Your Worship," published in The Boston Review a decade ago:
I am your pilgrim, who wanders
to stay home; your monk,
who keeps silent when you demand
confessions and theology.
You are too difficult to love
directly; you have no roof
or floor, and I am too pious
for your rain and mud.
So I keep your shrine, the best of you,
the clean, the singing rest of you.
I am a stubborn priest, who knows himself
only in the dwindling oil of you,
the weeping and rebellious flame
about to die.
"Your Worship" got picked up on Poetry Daily, a few random blogs and pinterest boards, an anthology called the Poet's Quest for God, and was translated into Arabic––probably because it means whatever one wants it to mean. One blogger liked its formal but (according to him) unforced use of paradox. Sure. Is it about God? Is the title sincere or sarcastic? Yes. Is it about a complicated lover? Is it about a creepy stalker? Is it a whimsical rejoinder to Billie Holiday's "All of me"? Absolutely. Yesterday, it reminded me of Haddaway's "What is Love."
Today, I've decided "Your Worship" is about translation. Isn't the translator an oddly peripatetic, stationary pilgrim, a lover building a shrine to the beloved original? This reminds of something the author-translator Alice Kaplan wrote after her own disastrous experience with an impossibly overbearing translator. She describes "the intense critical response one can have to a book one is in the process of translating":
We translators can love, but we can also see every flaw, every mistaken fact, every awkward transition in the work we are translating. I also recognized in him, again in exaggerated form, something we might call the 'depit amoureux' of the translator: the desire to get into the skin of a book, the desire to become its author––to create, not just translate. We translators ought to defend ourselves by claiming rights that are akin to rights of authorship: the right to innovate, the right to create, the right to be considered a writer, rather than merely a clerk. But translation is also, by definition, a crossing of boundaries––a stranger entering into a literary space and claiming it for himself. Here is where intangible emotions––love, envy, generosity, competition, and combat––come into play for the translator. X approached my texts a conqueror, and he violated my boundaries. And that experience, for this author, was something I can only describe as 'creepy.'
In other words, translation is a form of loyalty that travels a narrow bridge between over-identification and betrayal.
Osip Mandelstam, a poet who–like many 20th century Russian writers–was also a translator, likewise partook of this problem of ecstasy and translation in a powerfully ironic way. Here is my recent translation of one of his poems from May 1933, which I plan to include in my own forthcoming book for Poets & Traitors, Relatives & Genitives: Poems, with Translations from Mandelstam and Mayakovsky:
Do not partake of foreign dialects, instead try best to let them pass,
For all the same your teeth will never learn to bite a piece of glass.
A flight of foreign screeching, an offering of agony––
An evil fate is what shall guard against illegal ecstasy.
Because you know: a foreign name won’t save your dying heart
And your thinking and immortal mouth the moment they forever part.
And what if Tasso, Ariosto, those charmed enthrallers of our minds,
Are little more than monsters, with azure brains and scales of humid eyes?
And for your punishment, you prideful and persistent audiophile.
Accept this sponge of posca for your treasonable lips so vile.
Posca was the vinegar drink that was given on a sponge by Roman soldiers to Christ on the cross. Mandelstam is wise to warn translators of their fate! Nobody knows what it means to translate a poet. But this is only because, like most things worth pursuing, verse translation is a utopian project. Nabokov, suspicious of anybody else’s utopia, insists that the “clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.” Useful to whom? Certainly useful to the scholar already interested in the poetry in question (the scholar who might indeed be aroused by the “footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers,” desired by Nabokov), but useless to anyone else, who is obliged to take the word of the clumsy literal translator that there is a poem here, somewhere. The first step of any good praxis of translation is to convey genre and quality: Reader, this is a great poem by a great poet! If the wicked “pretty paraphrase” leaves the reader at a distance from the original, at least this poor reader might now be motivated to learn the language of the original. In this effort of seducing readers on behalf of another poet and another language, no tool, including outrageously literal translation, should be neglected. This is a moral and not simply an aesthetic issue: the translator has debts to the writer, to the reader, and to oneself. As far as the writer and reader are concerned, it is simply wrong to turn something beautiful into something unlovely, however well-documented. (Just as it is to turn something deliberately grungy into something clean and pretty––the patina is everything, as the Antiques Roadshow has taught us.) And for the translator to tie one hand behind the back with the waxed twine of a theory of translation––well, that is a form of self-abuse. But this is no plea for the "free translation" that Nabokov associates with “knavery and tyranny.” Instead, I am suggesting a translation of obligations, in which the translator is never off the hook and must carefully compensate the author for some of the effects lost in the new version: a nervous, decidedly unfree translation that shuns the clean comfort of scholarly explication.
Then again, this is also how one could describe poetry––a free and presumptuous assertion of the right to take on infinite obligations. I will sign off my sojourn on Best American Poetry with "Of the Father Tongue," a poem I wrote in 2001 in Petersburg, smothered by poplar cotton, in response to Mandelstam's warning about foreign dialects:
Never tempt a native language.
Its roots are thin and deep.
Just when you think the old words
have forgotten you, then
the summer poplars burst and you
are tarred and feathered in a snow
of slurry endings.
Genitive, genitive, who owns whom?
This is late June in Petersburg,
there is no night to hide in here.
In any case you live under the name of the father,
like an eel darting from its rock at curious hands.
And now you’ve come back,
quick, open wide while the potato
words are hot. Repeat after me:
Preposition accepted, I take it all back,
Petersburg, I don’t want to be born
just yet.
Val Vinokur is the author of The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas (Northwestern University Press, 2009), a finalist for the 2009 AATSEEL Award for Best Book in Literary/Cultural Studies. His poetry, prose, and interviews have appeared in The Boston Review, McSweeney's, Zeek, Common Knowledge, The Literary Review, New American Writing, The Massachusetts Review, The Miami Herald, Public Seminar, and LitHub. His co-translations, with Rose Réjouis, from French and Creole have been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Lewis Galantière Award. Since 2001, he has taught literature at The New School, where he is chair of Liberal Arts in the BA Program for Adults and directs the minor in Literary Translation. His annotated translation of seventy-two stories by Isaac Babel, The Essential Fictions (Northwestern UP), was published last fall. Vinokur is also the founding editor of POETS & TRAITORS PRESS, which publishes hybrid books of original and translated poetry.
"It is the opposite which is good for us." –– Heraclitus of Ephesus
I grew up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, in a country that was afraid that its citizens would leave and wary of foreigners somehow contaminating or stealing something from the homeland. As we were preparing to leave Moscow forever (we thought) in 1978, my grandmother's little brother, whom she had raised back in the shtetl, a rail engineer who had been briefly jailed under Stalin on suspicion of sabotage ("wrecking," it was called), called from Vladivostok to condemn us for abandoning our motherland.
We could not bring rubles with us and were obliged to buy vast quantities of tchotchkes that we could supposedly sell abroad. For three months in Italy and for many years in Miami, we lived surrounded by Russian folk kitsch that nobody would buy: lacquered chess tables and chairs and coffers, infinite nesting dolls, wooden motion toys consisting of bears roasting mushrooms or playing tennis. After a while, getting rid of them became unimaginable. The bears would hoist their little wooden buckets to remind us of who we were and who we weren't: not Russian enough for Russia, and forever Russian in America.
The Soviet Union was a fortress, a place embodied by its border guards. It even policed the domestic travel and migration of its own citizens. In the correspondence between Stalin and his chief henchman Lazar Kaganovich, one finds the following remarkable response from June 23, 1923: "1. We should limit ourselves to establishing one more Donbass district in Ukraine. 2. Regarding the grain exports, our recommendation is to reduce sharply the Rozengolts plan (for the third quarter). 3. In my opinion [Isaac] Babel is not worth our spending hard currency on for his trip abroad. --- I. Stalin." Such was the profound concern of the Soviet state for the travel plans of individual citizens.
One of the first things that struck us about the United States was its relative lack of borders. If you had an American passport or green card, you could pretty much come and go as you pleased. Visiting Canada was perfectly banal. We even visited the Soviet Union in 1989; it seemed that nearly everyone there at the time, Jewish or not, wanted to come back with us. After each trip abroad one would be welcomed back into the United States with a smile, or at least without any reproach about whether you liked it better somewhere else.
Of course, this wasn't true for everybody. Never true for Haitians or "economic" refugees from Latin America--and before that for Japanese Americans interned during World War Two. But still, compared to the world's many fortresses, the United States could still lay claim to being a gateway, a window, a country of immigrants and free movement. After 2001, however, the balance began to shift towards Homeland Security, and after the 2016 election, it is clear to me that we are quickly becoming a nation ruled by Customs and Border Protection. For now, we can still leave, but we are now treated a bit shabbily when we return. Flying into Miami or JFK from abroad, one is confronted with the multi-step, biometric, hi-tech, low-tech disaster called Customs and Immigration, in which CBP personnel herd the disembarked into a bewildering labyrinth of queues as though this is the first time they have ever done this––as though you are really putting them out by trying to re-enter the country. Look at you with the fancy passport! You went abroad, and now you want back in, huh? Sad!
The walls of the fortresses are rising. It's a good time to be a border guard. Only 36% of American citizens have passports for foreign travel, shockingly low for a developed country, so perhaps this shift towards nationalism was inevitable. 200,000 Salvadorans and 47,000 Haitians now face deportation after years of temporary legal status in the U.S. The Department of Homeland Security has referred 1,600 cases to the Justice Department as part of Operation Janus--an effort to revoke the citizenship of immigrants whose naturalization is deemed retroactively illegal. Iran's leader Ali Khamenei, faced with a fresh wave of protests, has banned English instruction from primary schools, decrying "cultural invasion." The United Kingdom is Brexiting its way into disunion. In a throwback to the Franco years, the Catalonian government is in exile again, threatened with arrest upon return to Spain.
How is a translator and teacher of literary translation supposed to feel? As I said in my introductory remarks at the Open Forum on Literary Translation, Publishing, and the University last month at The New School, I have been fortunate to find a refuge in the translation workshops I teach. What makes the experience of the translation workshop so unique in this historical moment so fraught with respect to the ability of language to conjure any kind of experience held in common? We are living in a strange moment when everybody feels they can mark off and assume their own set of facts and ignore facts that they don't like or understand. At the same time, literature is being taught in American schools in an increasingly literal-minded way, as though it is identical to experience or testimony, held as truth transparent, as though fiction were really just fancy non-fiction with a message. This world strikes me as being very different from the microcosm of the workshop, which brings together people translating from a wild array of languages and texts, translators coming from different gender, religious, cultural, social and political backgrounds and assumptions--all of which are at once made visible and then sublimated in the purely practical and collaborative process of understanding what a text is saying, from the inside out, and how this may be conveyed in English to as many different kinds of readers as possible. What are the relevant contexts and subtexts that reveal its meanings? How and why do different languages allow for different ways of meaning things? In the age of Customs and Border Protection, the workshop celebrates difference, opposition, obstacles, and weirdness as material that are transformed into the bridge that is literary translation.
Final reading of the Fall 2016 New School Literary Translation Workshop
This week we welcome Val Vinokur as our guest author. Val has been published in such venues as Common Knowledge, The Boston Review, McSweeney's, LitHub, The Russian Review, Zeek, The Massachusetts Review, Journal of Religion and Society, The Literary Review, and New American Writing. His book, The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas, was published by Northwestern University Press and was a finalist for the 2009 AATSEEL Award for Best Book in Literary/Cultural Studies. He has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in support of his and Rose-Myriam Réjouis' translation of Marie Vieux-Chauvet's trilogy Amour, Colere et Folie -- a lost classic of Haitian literature -- for Random House Modern Library (2009). Rejouis and Vinokur have also translated two novels by Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo Magnificent and Texaco (Pantheon Books, 1997). His translation of Isaac Babel’s stories (Northwestern, 2017) is now available.
The voting goes on as we try to find the top ten poems of 2017! A lot happened last year and a lot continues to surface, but at the very least, our poems will remain a constant reminder of why we write: not only for the necessary revision of art, but for the necessary preservation of the past.
This week's winner puts a spin on resolutions, reminding us to plan on the unexpected.
"Surrender" by Diana Ferraro
Resolutions take resolve, thus I prefer to evolve in more natural, unthought ways while time wanders on its unpredictable, unsteady path, bringing a not requested broken fifth toe, an eye going blind, and the punctual failures of age.
The joy of basking in the unexpected, relieved of all tasks, all chores.
Not waiting, surprised by the late bloom of the perfect, undreamed flower, child of an unknown resolution in the past.
Visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post, and to find out the prompt for next week!
The event that occasions my guest bloggery for BAP is the recent publication of my annotated translation of seventy-two stories by Isaac Babel, The Essential Fictions. Anyone who knows a little about Babel will note the pun in the title of the collection. For Babel, fiction was essential to real life, which, in his words, "wants nothing more than to resemble a well-made story," and real life––or at least Babel's deployment of "autobiography"––was also essentially fiction.
About ten years ago, in my book The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas (Northwestern, 2008), I wondered about why Babel never wrote poetry. Now seems a somewhat propitious time to revisit and reassess what I wrote then. To paraphrase: You could argue that Babel, who composed his stories on tiny strips of paper, was really a poet. It's even been suggested that he wrote prose as a somewhat mercenary adjustment, to fulfill the young Soviet establishment’s desire for a “Red Tolstoy,” and that Red Cavalry was Babel’s version of Tolstoy's debut, The Cossacks (1863). Perhaps the assumption here is that only a repressed poet could compress a 150-page draft of “My First Goose” into a few sheets. But I would offer another view: Babel was a committed writer of prose, one who admired Tolstoy’s obsession with fiction as a mode of seeking the truth, of following the aesthetic and ethical imperative to love experience—an obligation that compels narrative. Tolstoy and Babel shared a specific kind of curiosity, if utterly different temperaments. As Babel once put it: "When you read Tolstoy, you feel the world is writing, the world in all its variety, . . . [but] although I am a devotee of Tolstoy, in order to achieve something I have to work in a way opposite to his. . . . Tolstoy was able to describe what happened to him minute by minute, . . . whereas I, evidently, have it in me to describe the most interesting five minutes I’ve experienced in twenty-four hours."
No, Babel’s world does not “write itself”; and in a certain sense, Babel’s condensed art may be more humble and honest than Tolstoy’s "loose, baggy monsters." I also wonder if Babel’s “most interesting five minutes”—released from the formal parameters of the realist novel—are a response to Dostoevsky’s novels, which are strung together from scores of intense five-minute encounters. But if it's true, as George Clay once helpfully put it, that "Tolstoy is what happens the most and Dostoevsky the most that can happen," then maybe Babel’s Dostoevskian “five minutes” are taken from Tolstoy’s “twenty-four hours.” In other words, where Dostoevsky, according to Babel and others, offers us a revealing (but often unkind) intensification of the human condition, and where Tolstoy is the apotheosis of a transparent (and often overbearing) objective descriptiveness, Babel arrives at a poetic and narrative distillation of the world as it is––"the essence of things," in his words. Babel’s best fiction reduces the world to its irreducible ambivalence—but it is a passionate ambivalence that will forever call out for some kind of ethical and aesthetic commitment. To remain in some kind of decadent poetic indifference would be to misread Babel’s lyrical reduction entirely. Poetic precision in fiction, besides having aesthetic force, often cuts with more ethical depth and subtlety, just as a faint light shining through a pin-prick can have a more interesting intensity than a fluorescent lamp. Why didn't Babel write poems? Perhaps he needed to move past the stasis of the purely lyrical, past its prophetic eruption and otherworldly challenge. Maybe only prose can move beyond the daughter’s implacable demand at the end of “The Crossing of the Zbruch,” the first story of Babel's Red Cavalry: “I wish to know where in the whole world you could find another father like my father . . .” There might be a simple reason why Babel did not write poems: prose takes you places.
Well, that's what I thought ten years ago. My broad-brush description of "poetry" seemed strange to me even then. Richard Pevear has described the translation of prose fiction as more like writing poetry than anything else: "A good prose writer has to make a house, put furniture in it, open doors, bring people in, give them hair and eyes and clothes. They have to make a world and populate it. For a translator, that’s all been done.” That's exactly what translating Babel felt like. I spent days rubbing, teasing, tweaking every phrase as if it were a beloved rosary––knowing full well that my work would be compared with a half-dozen other translations. Was I fixing Babel's prose––his "army of words," nimble as the tachanka machine-gun carts of the Red Army––into some kind of lyrical stasis?
This is a tachanka! Note the pointed hat, known as a budennovka (in honor of Semyon Budenny, who organized the 1st Cavalry Army), similar to one I liked to wear as a young boy in the Soviet Union. Babel describes the tachanka: "Hay carts are prepared for battle and seize towns. A wedding procession approaches the local district council, opens concentrated fire, and a puny little priest unfurls a black flag of anarchy, orders the authorities to serve up the bourgeois, the proletariat, the music, and wine."
Val Vinokur is the author of The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas (Northwestern University Press, 2009), a finalist for the 2009 AATSEEL Award for Best Book in Literary/Cultural Studies. His poetry, prose, and interviews have appeared in The Boston Review, McSweeney's, Zeek, Common Knowledge, The Literary Review, New American Writing, The Massachusetts Review, The Miami Herald, Public Seminar, and LitHub. His co-translations, with Rose Réjouis, from French and Creole have been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Lewis Galantière Award. Since 2001, he has taught literature at The New School, where he is chair of Liberal Arts in the BA Program for Adults and directs the minor in Literary Translation. His annotated translation of seventy-two stories by Isaac Babel, The Essential Fictions (Northwestern UP), was published last fall. Vinokur is also the founding editor of POETS & TRAITORS PRESS, which publishes hybrid books of original and translated poetry.
I called her Gina Lollobrigida, I saw her on the street, I said, ‘Hey, Gina Lollobrigida.” She said, ‘Who is Gina Lollobrigida?’ I said, ‘She is Gina Lollobrigida.’ She said, ‘Okay, I will Google her.
The best of the popular American Scholar weekly contest gathered in one book:
Hey, #mla18 attendees: A free advance reading copy of NEXT LINE, PLEASE: PROMPTS TO INSPIRE POETS AND WRITERS edited by David Lehman (@BestAmPo) to the first person who comes to @CornellPress booth 213 and can tell me what a sestina is. pic.twitter.com/P5DFemgSVa
(Ed note: Last summer, Ron Padgett allerted us to his wonderful essay about his great friend the poet and artist Joe Brainard. I'm posting an excerpt below with a link to the full piece. Thank you Ron. sdh)
Untitled (Pat), June or July 1961, oil on pressboard, 15 ¾ X 15 inches (c) Joe Brainard
Joe Brainard in 1961-63 by Ron Padgett
Because documentation has been lacking, relatively little has been written about two crucial years in Joe Brainard’s life, 1961 and 1962— just after he moved at age 18 to York City (December of 1960) and just before he moved to Boston (January of 1963). Joe did not keep a diary, nor did he write letters to his closest friends, who had come to New York about the same time as he. His letters—the few that survive—to his parents and aunt back in Tulsa consisted of perfunctory reassurances that he was all right. Recently, however, a group of his letters has surfaced, providing new and important details on this period.
The letters and postcards were addressed to Sue Schempf (1918–2009), a woman he met in Tulsa when he was still a high school student or a very recent graduate. Schempf, a decent Sunday painter, had signed on as a patron; that is, in the early 1960s she was sending him five dollars per month. The financial arrangement appears to have been vague: at several points Joe mentions owing her money and at others he gives the impression that she is due work in exchange or that he is going to repay her. Regardless, the monthly arrival of five dollars was important to Joe.
The first piece of correspondence (postmarked December 15, 1960), addressed to Schempf and her husband, is a postcard announcement of Joe’s modest solo exhibition at a place called The Gallery, in a small shopping center in Tulsa, to take place on December 17 and 18. The announcement is addressed in the hand of someone other than Joe, who was either in Dayton or New York City at the time. Over the course of the next year, Sue Schempf herself would open a frame shop, which would also be available for small shows.
At some point she bought one of his collages, a 1960 work that not only reflected the structure of the cover design he did for The White Dove Review a year or so before but also proved to be a harbinger of his collages to come 15 years later.
Fig 01 Mixed media collage, 1960, coll. E. G. Schempf 25 × 22 inches
Find Ron Padgett's essay along with a beautiful gallery of Brainard's work here.
Happy 2018, friends in BAP-land! Like many of you, I'm sure, I have resolved to create more in 2018. For me that means going back to time-tested tools like morning pages, crazy exercises like copying random lines from someone else's books and writing my own lines around them, and even (gasp) collaboration.
So far the plan has not been going well, due to a three-stop, five-state Family Holiday Auto Tour extravaganza, and a three-day recovery period during which Younger Kid refused to fall asleep before 2 a.m. and thus missed the bus and had to be driven to school.
Then, the Polar Bomb Cyclone or whatever-the-hell arrived in all its bombasticity....my overtaxed brain was nearly frozen to a halt.
Never fear, 'tis Friday, and that means I got a groovy email in my inbox from Austin Kleon. He's the author of Steal Like an Artist, so I'm sure he will understand my shamelessly poaching one of the links from his newsletter for my post. This article, from Inc. of all places, is a bit of a mishmash but has some nuggets we can take into our daily practice. News flash: constraints are good for creativity.
We poets already knew that the strictures of line, rhyme, and meter, the rules of word-games like anagrams and abcedarians, all can forge a spark and pop up some language we might otherwise not have brought forth in quite that way. How many of you have written a sestina or villanelle that surprised you and took you beyond the "control zone"?
It occurs to me that the CDC Poetry Project offers an incredible opportunity to tap into this principle, requiring as it does poems using 7 particular words. Hundreds of poets all over the world are giving it a try. In our inaugural week we've published Kathrine Varnes, Patricia Spears Jones, Lesley Wheeler, Lisa Fay Coutley, Margot Douaihy, and Bri Hermanson (whose word poem/illustration graces this post). All of these pieces were composed within 10 days of our putting out the call; my co-editor Sarah Freligh and I have marveled not only at the volume of submissions but at the variety and vigor of the poems, all of which adhere to our constraints.
"Innovation is [the] creative person's response to limitation," according to the Inc. article. Put in a box? The better to think outside it, the cliche goes. Freedom is not Slavery, as Orwell's Big Brother would have it. But a little bit of restraint can loosen the mind to break through barriers, literal or metaphorical, and allow the poem to sing, clear and free.
photo (c) Evelyn Horowitz. From left to right: Michael Malinowitz, Chard deNiord (now, poet Laureate of Vermont) and of course John. The background is a carpet bought from David Kermani.
From Michael Malinowitz:
So many of my memories of John are of John and David and Evelyn and me and all of the friends and acquaintances that entail and entwine the enduing friendship of the 40 plus years I knew John. So, I thought Evelyn's photo and words would be a fitting tribute. Yet, I was a student in John's first class at the MFA program at Brooklyn College (where I met his adjunct, David Lehman), and for me it's where my JA voyage started. Aside from tutorials where I became acquainted with Dame Edna Everage; Pachelbel's Canon in D; Marias' Sonnerie de Sainte Genevieve; the Perfect Bombay Gin and Vermouth with cucumber Martini, and any poet worth mentioning which to John it seemed to me was almost everyone, it was also where John teased me about the "write a poem in a poetic form" assignment I handed in to him. I wrote an acrostic starting with J and titled it, The Casey Stengel of Poetry. He said he thought of suing, but I'd probably win the case on "coincidence." The last line of the poem--- "You traveled a sweeping pathway."--=well, I'm glad for that line.
As always and with gratitude to you both and giving us a chance to say Thank You John, Michael
From Evelyn Horowitz:
I first met John at a dinner given by the writer Jill Hoffman. She had been a colleague of John's at Brooklyn College and a teacher of the poet Michael Malinowitz, whom I had just started dating. My second meeting was in the summer of '78 at Bennington College. John read and after the reading I offered him some Grand Marnier. John later told Jill he liked me as I had nice liquor.
We both returned to Bennington the next summer, I as the "go for" girl for the writer's program and assistant to the poet Stephen Sandy (who died late last year). While killing time before he read, John, a student (Synn Stern), and I sat around a living room and played twenty questions. I don't remember whom Synn or I chose but I do remember John's.
Care to guess?
Broderick Crawford
I took the picture that same summer. From left to right: Michael Malinowitz, Chard deNiord (now poet Laureate of Vermont) and of course John. The background is a carpet bought from David Kermani.
[Note: In early 2013 Jennifer L. Knox asked a bunch of people to name and say a few words about our favorite chick flick.' This is what I wrote. for other entries, see Jennifer's blog "Delirious Helm"]
My favorite chick flick is "Brief Encounter," David Lean's black-and-white 1945 tearjerker starring Celia Johnson as a respectable middle-class housewife and Trevor Howard as the married doctor whom she meets in a train station. The first meeting is accidental, the second is deliberate, the start of a love affair, intense though not quite consummated, that is told from Celia Johnson's point of view and in her voice, to the lush romantic strains of Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto. (And btw, according to the London Telegraph of 25 April 2011, Rocky's Second remains the United Kingdom's favorite piece of classical music, besting anything by Beethoven or Mozart, undoubtedly because of this film.) Railway stations, and the tea rooms in them, which were still ubiquitous in my own time as a grad student in England, are a perfect setting for the lovers' furtive meetings.They are dreary, ordinary, impersonal places, although back then, in even the meanest of them you could get an excellent cup of brewed tea rather than the teabag variety. The love affair is, in effect, an interruption, a delay, and a slight detour in the journey of two lives that will never again intersect. The restraint and dignity of the characters (and the actors who portray them) give the film its terrific resonance. No clothes get taken off, yet there's heat. The adulterers communicate that something significant is at stake: the movie pushes the idea that in the matter of sexual relationships between consenting adults, there is no free lunch (and if there is, it isn't love). A psychoanalyst would argue the picture illustrates Freud's assertion that the repression of instinctual desire, no matter what the cost to the psyche, is what allows civilization (and two marriages) to exist. My wife singles out the last meeting of the lovers, which gets interrupted by an insipid, yammering woman who has spent the day shopping. We also like what happens when Celia Johnson returns to her amazingly compassionate husband, who intuits what has happened, though she has said nothing. An incidental pleasure is hearing, in the background of one scene, Schubert's "Marche Militaire," which I have never been able to resist.
For the first post of the new year, we have a post full of double alliteration poems, written by the very faithful and talented Next Line, Please contributors. An interesting theme brewed which balanced reminiscence and hope, mingling the past and the present in an exploration of language which is, as always, a real treat to read.
In light of the beginning of another year, I chose this journey poem as my favorite:
Robert Albrecht's "Journey East"
Journey east, my young friend, Before jeunesse escapes you. Away from judging eyes, And jabbing elbows, Journey east.
Journey east with intention To the country of Jowett’s enchantment, Where the sermons of Jonathan Edwards Still judiciously echo. Journey east.
Journey east with humility, And put a just end To this jealous enmity For those juntos eclectic Who’ve since journeyed east.
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later to the greatness of Teddy Wilson "After You've Gone" on the piano in the corner of the bedroom as I enter in the dark
