Poetry International Contest 2010!!!

We invite you to submit to our 2010 Poetry Contest!

A prize of $1,000 & publication in Poetry International 18 will be given to the winner.

The contest will be judged by Bruce Boston.

The deadline for this contest is April 23, 2010.

To submit, please include up to three poems with a $10 entry fee (entrants may submit additional poems for an additional $3 per poem). Provide your contact information and titles of all the poems on the title page only—the author name and contact information should not appear on any of the poems. We accept simultaneous submissions, but we require notification if your poems were accepted elsewhere. For this contest, poems in translation are not eligible, unless you are author of both the original poem and the translation. For more information and guidelines, visit our website: http://poetryinternational.sdsu.edu/Prize.htm

Send your submissions to:

Poetry International

Department of English and Comparative Literature

San Diego State University

5500 Campanile Drive

San Diego, CA 92182-6020

*If you wish to receive the contest results by mail, please provide a SASE with your submission.*

Thank you for your interest in Poetry International!

http://poetryinternational.sdsu.edu/



Guest Writer’s Series #4: Jennifer Sweeney

Against Complacency

“Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well,” Mark Twain tells us, and he may as well be describing the writer’s life derailed.  I imagine all of us experience degrees of complacency in our writing practices, periods of time when initiative dries up or we backslide into the dreamy sense that life is long and we’ve plenty of time to get it right.  There will, we hope, be other moments, but when the daily tasks clutter the ideal conditions for creativity, it’s too easy to drift sideways into a state of continual procrastination. Myself included, many writers exert substantial energy in justifying a lack of production, the neglect of a project or the idea that more time away from writing will clear-cut the brambly consciousness for the moment when the great lightning strikes.  What we have are imperfect days that come with no promise of lightning.  This is when a healthy reminder of mortality is beneficial.  Three prominent experiences jolt me out of complacency and remind me that new work happens now and not in some windy-voweled future.  An owl.  A soldier’s uniform.  An internment camp. I’ll share them here with the intention that others may discover, or remember, their own lessons in urgency.

Two years ago, I went on an artist residency at Hedgebrook. Every day before a vigorous writing session, I headed out to Deer Lagoon to look for bald eagles and to view spectacular water birds including a regular group of herons.  I am told the collective phrase is either a hedge, a sedge or a siege of herons. I’m not sure any of those feel accurate, but the herons rose up out of the shallows with an elegant stoicism, often staying in the same place for over an hour before executing the perfect lash of their snakelike necks toward the insinuation of fish.

This was mid-February, and on Whidbey Island, the barred owls were mating.  The eight-note call has a mnemonic of “who cooks for you, who cooks for you-all,” although it’s hard to hear that phrase without also hearing a grandmotherly voice waving a wooden spoon at an ungrateful table of relatives who have lost interest in learning the old recipes.  It’s not an easy task to approximate nature.  The barred owls nested in tree holes lined with feathers or grass along the path I followed each evening to eat dinner, my head spinning the day’s new fragments around, slowly reawakening my senses in the cold snap of air.  It was such a night when I was struck upside the head and brought down to the forest floor.  Disoriented and dazed, I assumed fallen branch only to look up from my knees and see a female barred owl flying off, her three-and-a-half-foot wingspan sweeping slowly and silently through the alders.  I found out later that barred owls have fenestrated wings which make no sound, and I can attest that this is so.

The owl incident caused a stir among the other writers who were not as interested as I was in being hit in the head with an owl, but I appreciated the formidable bump blooming across the scalp, the desire to have an intimate experience with nature and being met with an ambush.  It seemed the perfect instruction for the writer, some totem of wisdom smacking any comfortable notions of progress upside the head, and saying Wake up, get with it. That night, I covered my cabin walls with If not now then when? on yellow sticky notes, and every time I felt the stale yawn of complacency, I revisited the mother owl knocking me back to the task. In the days that followed, I finished a memoir I had been working on for four years.
*

In San Francisco a few years ago, there was a wonderful benefit called Mutanabbi Street Starts Here.  Mutanabbi Street is the ancient nexus of bookselling in Baghdad, its name deriving from 10th Century classical Arab poet, Al-Mutanabbi.  I am told it was a curving street teeming with bookstores and outdoor book stalls and was “the historic heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community.” On March 5, 2007, thirty people were killed and one hundred wounded when a car bomb exploded on Mutanabbi Street.

The Mutanabbi Street Coalition was formed by San Francisco poet and bookseller Beau Beausoleil and printer and Professor Kathleen Walkup to memorialize the tragedy, the loss of life, history and text.  The coalition consisted of over forty letterpress printers. Together they represented a creative response to the tragedy by designing and printing the work of Iraqi poets on limited edition letterpress broadsides, the sale of which supported Doctors Without Borders.

I had the privilege of being part of a letterpress group that printed one of these broadsides for the benefit. Led by poet-printers Katherine Case and Annie Stenzel, our group of seven worked with a gorgeous poem by Abdul-Razzaq al-Rubai; translated by Salaam Yousif and Brenda Hillman.

The Grandchildren of Sinbad

When the boards of our broken ship were broken
And the horizon grew pitch black,
We gathered our tears
And the letters of the drowned
And we wondered:
Have we arrived on dry land
Or have we lit our night stoves
On the backs of whales?

As we primed the Vandercook press with indigo ink for our first night of printing at the San Francisco Center for the Book, Katherine told us of an amazing gift she had received.  A former U.S. soldier and paper maker from Vermont had returned home from his tour in Iraq filled with complexity and misgiving, grappling with a need to somehow change what part he had played in the war.  In response, he took his sand-colored fatigues and boiled them down, making an unusual thick and sturdy paper. He had heard about the Mutanabbi benefit and had sent ten sheets to San Francisco. It was surreal and deeply moving to roll what had been his worn uniform through the old press and watch the words etch themselves into the fibers.  A copy of the broadside hangs above my writing desk and holds within it the import of transformation, reminding me that what I do matters and that I had better do it right now.

*

I have one last kind of reference point, an even graver experience that drove home this sense of mortality.  Last summer, my husband Chad and I spent a month in Prague. We had the opportunity to go to Terezin, an internment camp outside Prague where prominent Jewish writers, artists, musicians, composers, playwrights, professors and opera directors were specifically concentrated.  These leaders of the fine arts were sent to live in cramped quarters for months or years before most were transported to termination camps.  While in Terezin, they continued to produce creative works with whatever means and materials they could scrape together.  Dramatists created a makeshift theater where the children of Terezin performed plays and musicals written collaboratively by musicians and playwrights. “Brundibar” was performed over fifty times by the children’s choir and troupe.  It told the story of a terrible ogre who had taken over a village but was stopped by the children’s cleverness.  There is a gallery at Terezin that houses vast displays of artwork both by children and adults, librettos and their songs being played overhead, scripts and costumes for the children’s plays, literary magazines and a wealth of poetry and fiction.  The body of work that was created under horrendous conditions in a brief time, and the portion of it that was somehow preserved, is staggering.

I’m not suggesting that it is appropriate to compare one’s comfortable contemporary American life to any of the artists in this tragic situation, but witnessing their work brought an indescribable awe and respect for the urgency and humanity of the creative process, and if it had anything at all to say to me about my life on the other side of the planet in a time of privilege, it was Try harder, you fool.

Jennifer K. Sweeney’s second poetry collection, How to Live on Bread and Music, received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of America Poets and the 2009 Perugia Press Prize.  Her first book, Salt Memory, won the 2006 Main Street Rag Poetry Award.  Nominated six times for a Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Southern Review, Hunger Mountain, Crab Orchard, Spoon River and Passages North where she won the 2009 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize. Sweeney holds an MFA from Vermont College and serves as assistant editor for DMQ Review. After living in San Francisco for twelve years, she currently lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she teaches poetry privately.

Guest Writer’s Series #3: Jim Schley

1989. . . . Twenty years ago,  this past autumn,  I was in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, making arrangements for an upcoming tour by a Swiss theater troupe with which I was performing. Amid the media fanfare for its anniversary, I’ve been thinking continually about that season of upheavals, which for me was a very personal apprenticeship in hope and daring.

Between 1987 and 1990 I made six trips to central Europe, first with the group Bread and Puppet Theater and then with a Geneva, Switzerland-based troupe, Les Montreurs d’Images. Both groups were very international in composition and outlook, and I toured with performers from France, Chile, Canada, India,  Mexico, Belgium, Spain, Czechoslovakia, the U.S., and Switzerland.

Known and emulated throughout the world, Bread and Puppet has vastly widened the theatrical vocabulary of “puppetry,” ranging in scale from finger puppets to towering pole-borne marionettes requiring half a dozen manipulators.  Our 1987 touring shows drew large audiences to an unpredictable mix of high and low — the circus mayhem of brass band and stilted dancers, and the ferocious political satire of a street show, juxtaposed with beautifully sculpted paste-and-paper personages clothed in cast-off fabric, rubbishy materials that anyone could find or make transformed into an exquisite panoply of forms and shapes. People came great distances to see us, often bringing food to share after the performances; one woman carried a kettle of soup on her knees through a long train trip. Meeting our audiences, we heard again and again how directors and performers were utilizing the presumed inanity and childishness of puppetry as camouflage to slip by government censors, who didn’t seem to recognize in puppet theaters any significance or threat, though the authorities seemed to be obsessed with the potency of poets, who were persecuted viciously.

When I left Bread and Puppet in 1988, I joined Les Montreurs d’Images, whose director and choreographer Monique Decosterd was attempting to use dance as adventurously as Bread and Puppet used puppetry, with masks and stilts, and hallucinatory pacing, and a sixty-foot tipi or “chapiteau” as a performance space; my contacts among venues in Central Europe were enthusiastic about bringing the Swiss troupe to Wrocław and Warsaw, Prague and Budapest and Brno, and we toured in 1989 and 1990 with several shows, including a piece chronicling the life of Joan of Arc, performed in French but very encompassing, visually and musically, and immediately recognizable to many Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians (though evidently not their censors) as the story of a person of conscience surviving a siege and then persecuted by a doctrinaire, repressive regime — not an intentional allegory for their situation, but a dramatic conception that kept on revivifying and ramifying for us with every show we did.

Ultimately, in the summer of 1990, Les Montreurs d’Images was asked to perform for the inauguration of Czech dissident playwright Vaclav Havel as president of a new Czechoslovakian republic; In less than four years we’d gone from clandestine performances in a tiny club to welcoming the crowds at the presidential palace, among the first visitors invited to celebrate the collapse of the old regime, along with Frank Zappa, Kurt Vonnegut, and the Dalai Lama. And those changes I saw, as only a visitor, were just a fraction of the transfigurations undergone by our Eastern European counterparts.   During an accelerating span of days, it was as if Alice’s looking glass had shattered and the far side of the mirror fused suddenly with the near side.

Prior to 1989, the societies of Central Europe could accurately be described as police states, organized polemically and functionally at each level to control the citizenry, from school children to pensioners. Yet we were welcomed with warmth and generosity by people whose friendship with visitors from the capitalist west put them in danger. The repression experienced at that time by dissidents in the old Soviet Union’s satellites wasn’t like that suffered by dissidents in Central America (the U.S.’s satellites) during the same era, Guatemalans or Salvadorans who might be murdered and mutilated by paramilitary death squads. The Central European regimes were decrepit and muscle-bound, with aging dictators and massive bureaucracies, but were still capable of “disappearing” an opponent, not typically by assassination but by erasure, the elimination of educational and professional options and endlessly various forms of house arrest. Think of the intellectuals (artist, philosopher, theologian, saxophonist) working on a trash-picking crew in the marvelous Jiří Menzel film, Skřivánci na niti (“Larks on a String”).   Art in such circumstances (even when exceedingly quiet, or oblique, or disguised as tomfoolery with puppets and masks) is politically insurgent, an expression of capricious imagining, of irrepressible delight, of thoughts not incarcerated but in action.

The old Central European regimes survived by creating a culture of ubiquitous suspicion and double-crossing, where anyone you knew — even a family member, certainly a neighbor or workmate or fellow student — was very likely to be spying for the government, for payment or to gain some advantage. So befriending someone was an act not only of amity and civility, but also subversion. Never before in my life had I been in a situation where friendship meant hazard or even punishment. In my mind’s eye I can easily see (and will never forget) the characteristic sideways glances through any conversation, as the one with whom I was talking (just talking) would repeatedly check the room or street around us to see who else was listening.

In that climate of potentially overwhelming paranoia and second-guessing, no one knew what the regimes were capable of doing if endangered. And no one knew how the Soviet Union would respond to signs of government weakness or outright insurrection, as began to occur among the Solidarność trade unionists. I remember being in Warsaw on the morning of June 4, 1989, standing on the sidewalk with a Polish theater director who had a transistor radio pressed to his ear, and seeing him blanch white as paper when he heard a BBC report of the massacre that had apparently just occurred at Tiananmen Square. . . . On that summer morning in 1989, a massacre of nonviolent demonstrators by Polish armored troops was likewise altogether plausible. Seemingly no one predicted the imminent dissolution of official communism. The changes that took place were cyclonic in speed and impact.

I always have a book in my pocket or bag, and during that time I made a practice of reading the authors of the countries we were traveling through, which often surprised and delighted our hosts, and which in the earlier visits required the hiding or caching of books to avoid likely seizures by the police who routinely stopped our vehicles and rifled through costumes and props and personal affects, searching for banned materials or even human stowaways, frequently with sniffer dogs. I felt I was living in the pages of Tadeuz Konwicki’s A Minor Apocalypse and Gyorgy Konrad’s The Case Worker and Josef Skvorecky’s The Engineer of Human Souls and Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind and Bells in Winter.

For me Milosz has probably been the most important writer of my adult life, but the author whose work best dramatized the self-deprecating but worldly, boldly associative character of so many of the friends I made among the Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians was Zbigniew Herbert. For years I carried and still treasure now a battered, travel-stained copy of his Report from the Beseiged City (Ecco, 1985) translated by Bogdana and John Carpenter.

I was told that Herbert withstood daily — sometimes more than once daily — arrivals and interruptions by the police, who would arrive and demand all his papers. Imagine, American writers —! Not only the disruption but the nerve-bending distraction of never knowing when your tormenters would hammer at the door, then confiscate any writing they can find. So, apparently Herbert developed a system for passing copies of his poems to friends and accomplices who would come by for tea and carry off (maybe memorized) sections of poems to be recopied and distributed surreptitiously, in a kind of visceral “publishing” whose intimacy and urgency we can’t comprehend in our book-glutted culture. A Czech friend showed me a samizdat “magazine” typewritten with carbons (five sets at a time could be typed, before the sheaf was too thick for the typewriter roller and the keystrokes too faint), passed around (with the obligation to pass them on, in three days), filled with original writings and translations from throughout the world — essays by Didion and Sontag, interviews recopied from Rolling Stone or Playboy from Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen or Patti Smith. After one of our performances I met a man (later the mayor of Prague) who had translated into Czech the poems of Plath, Lowell, Berryman and Larkin. I shared beers and bowls of soup with another man who was the Czech translator of Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, and Joseph Heller. I’d never encountered anyone anywhere for whom art and literature mattered as enormously as for those I met in Central Europe.

As for Herbert, when others defected and sought exile, he never left Poland. Like Herbert, my new Polish, Czech and Hungarian friends had chosen to remain. They weren’t revolutionaries in the declamatory sense but mischievously seditious, not smashers of the state but underminers of absurdity, as if they believed they could (together) wear away through small, improvisatory acts of defiance the mind-numbing frigidity of official repression.

The poet Herbert was able to break through the ice of indifference not with an axe but with warm, moist breath, steadily directed.

I now experience Herbert’s poems saturated with the accumulated power of years spent as his reader, and without that context I’m not certain how an example will come across. If Milosz is Whitmanic in some ways, Herbert is an heir to Dickinson’s sphinx-like obliquity and innuendo, epic in scope on a miniscule scale. Herbert’s persona Mr. Cogito is a guide to the universe, ancient or about-to-be. Like we’d imagine his creator to be, Mr. Cogito is rueful and erudite, blinking in the bright light and warily solitary, but also (often) very funny, a combination of Chaplin’s tramp and Montaigne’s scholar in a tower and Cocteau’s Heurtebise and Baudelaire’s flaneur.

At his death in 1998, what poems this man left us: quiet, just barely above the volume of a murmur; piercing in candor but assiduously, even painfully modest in demeanor, uncapitalized and unpunctuated; delicate, but like spider’s thread, strong as spun steel.

Here is Herbert’s poem “The Power of Taste,” in Alissa Valles’s 2007 translation (from The Collected Poems, 1956–1998):

It did not take any great character
our refusal dissent and persistence
we had a scrap of necessary courage
but essentially it was a matter of taste
Yes taste
which has fibers of soul and the gristle of conscience

Who knows if we’d been better more prettily tempted
sent women pink and flat as wafers
or fantastic creatures out of Hieronymous Bosch
but what did hell look like in those days
a mud pit a cutthroat’s alley a barracks
called a Palace of Justice
a moonshine Mephisto in a Lenin jacket
sent Aurora’s grandchildren into the field
boys with potato-eaters’ faces
very ugly girls with red hands

Truly their rhetoric was just too shoddy
(Marcus Tullius turned in his grave)
chains of tautologies a few flailing concepts
torturers’ dialectics reasoning without grace
syntax devoid of the beauty of the subjunctive

So in fact aesthetics can be an aid in life
one shouldn’t neglect the study of beauty

Before we assent we must examine closely
architectural forms rhythms of the drum and fife
official colors the homely rituals of burial

Our eyes and ears refused to submit
our princely senses chose proud exile

It did no require any great character
we had a scrap of necessary courage
but in essence it was a matter of taste
Yes taste
which tells you to walk out wince spit out your scorn
even if for that your body’s precious capital the head
would roll

Jim Schley lives in Vermont. He is the managing editor of the book publisher Tupelo Press, and his most recent book is As When, In Season (Marick Press, 2008).

Guest Writer’s Series #2: Dorianne Laux

The Art of the Student Broadside: A photo Documentary

I have always loved broadsides, and have collected quite a few over the years, many of them framed and hung around our home. These are poems I love to read and read again, Ruth Stone’s “Mantra”, taped to the side of a bookcase in the dining room, is one of 300 copies printed at Copper Canyon Press on the occasion of her winning the National Book Award for In The Next Galaxy. In the guest bedroom you can find Philip Levine’s “Ask for Nothing” under glass, designed and printed by Okeanos Press for Black Oak Books, signed by the author. “Beach Roses” by Mark Doty is also there, printed at the Elliott Press for a reading he gave at Pacific Lutheran University. In the kitchen, “Stay Still…” by Rilke, translated by my first editor the late Al Poulin and printed by Brighton Press, illustrated in green and red ink, an etching by the artist DeLoss McGraw, the 27th of 50 copies and signed in pencil by Poulin. As I move through the house, move through my day, I often stop and read a poem, stop, and read a poem. And my day grows larger in these moments.

I brought this love of the broadside into my classrooms at The University of Oregon and now here to North Carolina State. This line appears in every syllabus I have written over the past few years: Students will choose one poem from among the course offerings for memorization and recitation and will create a handmade broadside of their chosen poem. I email them an Internet guide to the history of the broadside as well as examples I have found on-line (see below). I then tell them they can do anything; there are no rules and no limits. If they want to write the poem in chalk on the sidewalk in front of the University, we will walk there as a class to view it, and if they want to print the poem on a t-shirt or a baseball cap, a pair of shoes, an arm or a leg, that is acceptable. I direct them to my facebook page where I’ve begun documenting their efforts so they can see what others have done before them. I save the classes near the end of the semester for presentations. The results are glorious, original, imaginative, humble, poignant, funky, elegant, always surprising, sometimes astonishing. Complex as a set of Chinese boxes or simple as a line drawing, origami-delicate to hood-of-a-car huge, you can see the careful thought and work that goes into these projects, these poems, poems that each student has gotten by heart and found a way to honor and display. Herewith, are a few photos of what they have made.

An Internet Guide to Information on Broadsides

The Word on the Street: A Short History of the Broadside

A history of The Ballad and Broadsides

On the Walls and in the Streets: American Poetry Broadsides from the 1960s

Author: James D. Sullivan

An interactive history from 1515-2000

History of Broadside Poetry

Scott King and Red Dragonfly Press: Foundry, the machines that cast type

Colored Horse: Broadside Books

Red Dragonfly Press: Type & Monotype Foundry Source:

http://www.coloredhorse.com/WritingPoetry/BroadsidesBooks.html

Red Dragonfly Press: Type & Monotype Foundry Source:
http://www.reddragonflypress.org

The special casting of 18 didot Menhart Italic is now complete. Two complete fonts (10A-30a) available at $120. The special casting of 18 didot Menhart Roman was completed before the Italic. A halfdozen complete fonts (12A-30a) are available for $120. …

Check out the blog and video’s below

Poetry Workshop Blogspot

Dorianne Laux’s fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon (W.W. Norton), is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award. Laux is also author of Awake, What We Carry, and Smoke from BOA Editions, as well as Superman: The Chapbook and Dark Charms, both from Red Dragonfly Press. Recent poems appear in Cimarron Review, Cerise Press, Margie, The Seattle Review, Tin House and The Valparaiso Review. Her fifth collection of poetry, The Book of Men, will be published by W.W. Norton in 2011. Laux teaches in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University.

We Have a Winner!

I’m pleased and proud to congratulate Rebekah Stout, winner of the Poetry International Prize 2009! Ms. Stout’s poems “Midas” and “In the Garden” will appear in Poetry International 17. We also take our poetry hats off to finalists Melissa Stein, Ann Struthers, Noreen Ayres, Sierra Nelson, and Michael Lee Phillips. Well done, poets!

Now through April 23, 2010, Poetry International will be accepting submissions for our 2010 contest. Please refer to our official website for submission guidelines.

 

Lisa Grove

Poetry and Risk Part I

A friend wrote me recently and said, It’s amazing how someone can go to jail, even be killed just for what he or she wrote in a poem, but I guess I see that when I read these poems you’ve sent me.  Maybe back then poetry was more feared?

I had sent him “Stalin’s Epigram” by Osip Mandelstam, as well as some poems by a few others writers.

Mandelstam wrote the following sixteen line poem in response to the famine in Russia. He was arrested for speaking out against Stalin’s atrocities. He would spend the rest of his days paying for his courage, ultimately with his life.

The Stalin Epigram

By Osip Mandelstam

Translated by W.S. Merwin

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.

At ten paces you can’t hear our words.

But whenever there’s a snatch of talk

it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,

the ten thick worms his fingers,

his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,

the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses

he toys with the tributes of half-men.

One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.

He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,

One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.

He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.

He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

Mandelstam wrote this piece in the fall of 1933. Within six months he was arrested and exiled to Voronezh, a province of Russia. Mandelstam is known for saying, Only in Russia is poetry respected—it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?

He died in 1938—his words could not have been more prophetic. On August 12, 1952 as per Stalin’s orders, thirteen Jewish scholars were executed. The Night of the Murdered Poets as it’s been named, was carried out because Stalin, a man who killed millions upon millions, tried to obliterate that which he feared.

Wislava Syzmborska used irony and humor as a cover for getting her poetry past the censors in Poland.  “An Opinion On The Question Of Pornography” deals with the corruption of ideas which makes using pornography an ingenious cover. She replaced free thought with pornography, and through her use of satire something far worse than pornography occurred. It’s interesting because this got past the censors in it’s disguise, yet the subject matter is quite serious. One must wonder how that was possible.

An Opinion On The Question Of Pornography

Wislava  Syzmborska

Translated by Clare Cavanagh

There’s nothing more debauched than thinking.

This sort of wantonness runs wild like a wind-borne weed

on a plot of laid out for daisies.

Nothing’s sacred for those who think.

Calling things brazenly by name,

risqué analyses, salacious syntheses,

frenzied, rakish chases after the bare facts,

the filthy fingering of touchy subjects,

discussion in heat—it’s music to their ears.

In broad daylight or under cover of night

they form circles, triangles, or pairs.

The partners’ age or sex are unimportant.

Their eyes glitter, their cheeks are flushed.

Friend leads friend astray.

Degenerate daughters corrupt their fathers.

A brother pimps for his little sister.

They prefer the fruits

from the forbidden tree of knowledge

to the pink buttocks found in glossy magazines—

all that ultimately simple-hearted smut.

The books they relish have no pictures.

What a variety they have lies in certain phrases

marked with a thumbnail or a crayon.

It’s shocking, the positions,

the unchecked simplicity with which

one mind contrives to fertilize another!

Such positions the Kama Sutra itself doesn’t know.

During these trusts of theirs, the only things that’s steamy is

the tea.

People sit on their chairs and move their lips.

everyone crosses only his own legs

so that one foot is resting on the floor

while the other dangles freely in midair.

Only now and then does somebody get up,

go to the window,

and through a crack in the curtains,

take a  peep out at the street.

Syzmborska’s poetry is filled with hidden meanings. She published it because she disguised philosophical and moral ideas behind irony and humor. Her poems are strong on their own, but when one looks into the deeper meaning, they are provocative and compelling, as well as cunning.

Perhaps poetry was more feared than it is today. It’s important to remember that countless numbers of people remain voiceless still.   Times are changing, certainly. There was a symposium on the new generation of Polish poets a few weeks ago in New York City.  Polish poetry is becoming more diverse than ever before.  For the first time, writers do not need to fear what they write.  They are able at last, to write what they wish to write without looking over their shoulders.  It will be interesting to see where that freedom will take them, what poetry it will produce.

Without censorship and fear, where would poetry be today? I cannot answer that.  John Felstiner asks in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan,

“Would we, if this were possible, trade Anne Frank’s diary for her life, give up those salvaged pages to let her survive unscathed in, in her seventies now?  And would we forgo Charlotte Salomon’s Life or Theater?, her 1941 autobiography in 760 watercolors, if in exchange she were not to perish in Auschwitz? Would we, in effect, do without such indispensable human documents, relinquish them so as to secure the undeflected lives their creators might have lived?

Why yes! it goes without saying.  But the question involves something more.” (Felstiner, xix)

This is the crux of poetry before there was freedom of language.  Those who were courageous enough to write, have left us with invaluable information.  In answer to my friends question, all I can say, is thank you to all those who wrote their truths.

Celan, Paul, Translated by Felstiner, John. Selected Poems And Prose Of Paul Celan. W.W. Norton: New York, 2001

Erika  Lutzner

Fall Guest Writer’s Series #1 With Nin Andrews

PIonline’s Guest Writer’s Series is a new series, featuring great writers writing about, well, just about whatever they want.  We’ll feature two separate runs, one in the fall and one in the spring, and we’re proud to kick things off with Nin Andrews and her frank commentary on “American Optimism.”  We’ve had the great pleasure of publishing Nin’s poetry in various issues of Poetry International; you can find more about that here and more about the author here.

American Optimism

Lately I’ve been thinking about a phenomenon I can’t quite name. Sometimes I think of it as American amnesia. Other times I think it’s America’s selective memory.  Or maybe it’s American optimism. Let me give a few examples to explain . . .

1. A year ago, November of 2008, I was at the Miami Book Fair, and I had the opportunity to hear Andrei Codrescu read.  He was reading poetry and talking a lot about Hurricane Katrina.  He was also selling a CD of musicians who were responding to the Katrina experience.  At one point he talked about what he called American optimism.

What do you mean by optimism? a woman asked.

Codrescu responded that Americans don’t really want to think about Katrina anymore. They want to believe everything in this great country is always getting better.

He seemed to imply that other countries accept their problems, their crimes, shadows, more readily.

2. A few weeks ago a friend loaned me some audio-tapes of Jack Kornfield.  On one of the recordings Kornfield said that he asked an audience of Americans how many of them believed that one day they would die.

A few hands went up.

3. A recent article in Grist, the online environmental magazine, by Jonathan Hiskes states that a new Pew poll “finds a significant drop in the number of Americans who believe global warming is happening, is human-caused, and is a serious problem.”

No matter how much scientific evidence pours in, Americans prefer to believe in a happier future for the planet.

4. A few years ago I gave a poetry reading and a talk in which I referred to Anwar Sadat.  I told the story of how my family had only recently purchased their first television when Sadat was shot.  It was October, 1981. I remember watching in horror as Sadat was shot again and again.   (Of course they were simply showing the assassination repeatedly, but I wasn’t used to television).

I added how the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 brought back the memory of Sadat.  How these political assassinations, especially those that are played in front of our eyes on television and are splashed across every newspaper in the world, stay lodged in our mind for ages.

A woman in her 50s asked, Who was Anwar Sadat?  Who was Yitzhak Rabin?

I asked the audience to answer her question.

No one volunteered an answer.

5. Last weekend I was at a conference run by Phillip Brady, the editor and founder of Etruscan Press.  Dr. Brady talked about the Etruscan publication of a book of poems on 9/11.

He said the book came out in 2002.  Major book chains ordered many copies of the book, but the book didn’t sell well.

Why?

He didn’t know.

The anthology, American Writers Respond, included poems and essays by Lucille Clifton, Tess Gallagher, Stanley Plumly, John Updike, Naomi Shihab Nye and many others.

A man who had worked in the corporate world and who was in the audience said the book probably came out too late.  Books that are timely are also time-limited.

By 2002 we had moved on.

6. During his presidency George W Bush censored all photos of the flag-draped coffins of American soldiers.
His mother, Barbara Bush, defended her son’s decision.

“Why should we hear about body bags and deaths?” Barbara said on Good Morning American on March 18, 2003.  “ It’s not relevant.  So why should I waste my beautiful mind on a thing like that?”

Maybe that is the question.

7. Why?

Perhaps this poem by Lucille Lang Day from the Etruscan anthology is the beginning of just one answer to that question.

Strangers

I didn’t know the man in black pants
who plunged headfirst
from the top of the north tower

or the young woman trapped
behind a locked door
on the eighty-seventh floor.

I never met the couple
crushed in their final embrace
and stuffed in one body bag

or the fire chief quickly buried
under tons of concrete,
steel, glass, and ash.

Nor did I ever say hello
to the blond woman
who called her husband to ask

what she should tell the pilot
standing beside her
at the back of the plane.

I never shared coffee
with the six-foot-four executive
who said, “If we’re going
to crash into something,
let’s not let it happen.
Our best chance is to fight.”

Yet I have felt sun on their skin
and tasted wine on their lips.
I have run using the long muscles

of their legs and felt air
rush into their lungs, their hearts
pumping in my chest,

and they have combed my hair
each morning, tasted
cereal from my bowl,

and held my children in their arms.
At night they have watched
stars shimmer through my eyes.

Now they have all returned
to earth and air, but I still feel them
stirring inside me, walking

the long corridors of my brain,
searching for something
irretrievable, precious, still there.

(from American Writer’s Respond, Etruscan Press, 2002, pages 88-89)

Nin Andrews received her BA from Hamilton College and her MFA from Vermont College. The recipient of two Ohio Arts Council grants, she is the author of several books including The Book of Orgasms, Spontaneous Breasts, Why They Grow Wings, Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane, Sleeping with Houdini, and Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum. She also edited Someone Wants to Steal My Name, a book of translations of the French poet, Henri Michaux. Her book, Southern Comfort, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press and her chapbook, Accidental Seduction, is forthcoming from Obscure Publcations.

Official Poetry International Tote Bags

Is this a familiar scene? You’re at a Poetry International reading, and the featured reader offers his or her book at a rate that is too good to pass up. You also see current and past issues of PI for sale, and the temptation of palatable poetry is too strong to resist. But your purse is too small, or you don’t have one at all. How will you transport your newfound treasures home?

Your troubles are over! Official Poetry International Tote Bags are now available at our bookstore for the reasonable price of $8 (add $3 for shipping and handling). Or get one FREE with a three year subscription! And you don’t have to use them only for poetry. These beauties accommodate fiction and nonfiction, function and non-function. Take them to work. Take them to the grocery store. Show them off as your friends throw jealous glances in your direction. When Halloween rolls around next year, dress as your favorite poet and take the bag trick-or-treating!

 

PI's Attractive New Tote

By Lisa Grove

 

National Writers?

For the last month,  I’ve been teaching classes in contemporary American and Romanian poetry in the American Studies program of the University of Bucharest, and that time has been well spent indeed, providing me access to new voices and perspectives on poetry and its place in both modern American and Romanian cultures.  We’ve had a number of lively class discussions, and I was especially interested in my students’ reactions to the news that Herta Müller had won the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2009. representing the first time (and long overdue at that) a Romanian writer had won the award.  Not so fast, though.  Müller writes (mostly) in German, the students reminded me, and she’d left Romania for Germany in 1987.  But hadn’t she been forced to leave, I countered, emigrating only suffering censorship and worse under Romanian communism (Müller recounts some of that vividly here)? Besides, while she writes in German, doesn’t that speak mostly to her having grown up in a German speaking town in Romania, and at a time when the country’s German minority lived under considerable duress?  In fact, doesn’t writing about those ethnic tensions, and almost exclusively about life in communist Romania, mark her clearly as a Romanian writer and a vital one?

The discussion led beyond Müller to the idea of writers and their national identity and whether these kinds of designations–”German writer” or “Romanian writer–” carried any real weight.  Many of the students concluded that Müller’s value resided in the bleak realities of communist reality that she portrayed in her novels and stories not in her nationality, and on a certain level this seems reasonable.  Something about it gives me pause, though.  Are there nothing more than bragging rights at stake in labeling Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson an American writer?  Are these terms only relevant when dealing with overtly political writers, like Victor Jara or Amiri Barka, and meaningless when dealing with the likes of Wordsworth or F. Scott Fitzgerald?  Is Herta Müller a German writer or a Romanian writer (or can she be both)?  Does it matter at all?  I have to think it does matter, though, as of now, I’m at a loss when it comes to explaining why.

by Martin Woodside

Martin Woodside

Cesar Vallejo Ahead Of His Time

César Vallejo, one of the greatest South American poets of the 20^th century, wrote about politics as well as spirituality and sexuality, and though he wrote just three books in his lifetime, he was a radical thinker, ahead of his time. He wrote about subjects such as love and death with intelligence and wit.  He made his own death seem somehow sensuous. “The Eternal Nuptial Bed” is a poem full of eroticism and surrealism, which becomes both absurd and calamitous.

The Eternal Nuptial Bed

Only when it ceases to be, is Love strong!
And the tomb will be a huge eyeball,
in whose depths the anguish of love
survives and weeps, as in a chalice
sweet eternity and black dawn.

And lips curl up for the kiss,
as when something full overflow and dies;
and, in convulsed conjunction,
each mouth renounces for the other
a life of moribund life.

And when I think this way, sweet is the tomb
where everybody finally interpenetrates
in a single roar;
sweet is the shadow, where everybody unites
in a universal assignation of love.

This poem mocks marriage to the point of saying that the only time love exists is in death. That’s morbid.  The poem is scathing too. A tomb as an eyeball in whose depths love survives is quite a commentary on matrimony.  The last stanza is cruel but funny.  Everybody interpenetrates in a single roar.  I can hear it now. Everybody unites in a universal assignation of love.  What kind of love would this be?  I think of lions, of masturbation, of not being in love with your partner, of narcissism—this poem gives the reader much to think about.  It’s a clever take on love, lust, and joining as one.   This next poem highlights Vallejo’s ability to write  about grim subjects in an alluring way.

Black Stone On A White Stone

I will die in Paris in a downpour
a day which I can already remember.
I will die in Paris—and I don’t budge—
Maybe a Thursday, like today, in autumn.

Thursday it will be, because today, Thursday,
as I prose these lines, I have forced on
my humeri and, never like today, have I turned,
with all my journey, to see myself alone.

César Vallejo has died, they beat him,
all of them, without him doing anything to them;
they gave it to him hard with a stick and hard

Likewise with a rope; witnesses are
the Thursdays and the humerus bones,
the loneliness, the rain, the roads…

This poem reminds me in ways of “A Song At The End Of The World” by Czeslaw Milosz because while it too, is a death song, it’s clearly hopeful and alive.  Vallejo is chronicling his own  death in this poem, yet, I want to dance in the rain.  It’s a poem about desperation and loneliness.  Elegies should be beautiful, celebratory even.  This piece goes beyond that though.  Vallejo succeeds in writing an elegy about himself that while obviously serious, is also seductive, almost like a lover, and quite appealing and musical.  This is what I want when I die, and I didn’t know it until Vallejo told me so. As I peruse these lines I have forced on my humeri and, never like today, have I turned, with all my journey, to see myself alone. He writes his elegy as he sits alone, forcing himself to put on his body, as we put on clothes.  A creepy yet erotic moment. Likewise with a rope; witnesses arethe Thursdays and the humerus bones,  the loneliness, the rain, the roads…The last stanza is powerful:

Witnesses are the Thursdays.
His humerus bones and the loneliness, the rain, the roads…

Such charged language, it hardly makes me think of death rather, of truly living.  As William Faulkner said,“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.” The last line, “the loneliness, the rain, the roads…” makes me want to do a pirouette with my umbrella in the rain. It’s lovely, spinning round so musically and physically. Vallejo has made death become a friend rather than a black cloak of fear.

For more, see: Vallejo, César, Eshleman, Clayton. The Complete Poetry César Vallejo. University Of California Press: Berkley, 2007

Erika Lutzner