Journal - Catch Up

The Gold County Paper Mill Presents:
Editors
Jeff Hipsher
Adam Day
Mark P Hensel
Design
Robert B Johnson
Cover Art
Michael Miles
www.catch-up.us
Contents
- Sec tion 1-
A aron B elz
Loggerheads
11
Enchanted Evening Together 12
A my L awless
Octoberfest 13
From Elephants In Mourning
From Elephants In Mourning
From Elephants In Mourning
From Elephants In Mourning
14
15
16
17
K yle M ccord & J eannie H oag
Keeping It Here For You
If Not Beside Me
19
18
S ebastian T umultuous
Beast
20
N oelle K ocot
Nature Walk:
21
L eigh S tein
Travel Brochure For The Future
Dispatch From The Future
W endy X u
22
24
A Poem About New York on Occasion of Leaving New York
D. A. P owell
My Life As A Dog
J ennifer D enrow
It’s A Long Time Ago
26
27
25
B en M irov
#90828
#23.77729
#0101030
D onald R evell
To Heaven
31
- Sec tion 2 G ary J ackson
Grace 34
Ms. Fortune’s Badasssss Song
M att B ialer
The Land Of The Lost
35
36
M atthew L ippman
In The Incubators Phd In Pelican
44
P aul M uldoon
Cleaning Up My Act
42
46
F ritz W ard
But You Could Ignore The Sky 48
M iranda F ield
Spring Clean-Up
S andra M eek
Cumulative Sentence
49
50
K aren W eiser
Suppose You Surrender Till We Hum
P aul C elan & Y ehuda A michai
The Interview 52
51
- Sec tion 3 C al B edient
Each Bound Of The Fiery Paper 61
J ulianne B uchsbaum
The Making Of The English Working Class
S teve H ealey
My Cousin Is Getting Breast Implants
J illian W eise
Here Is The Anger Andrew Asked For*
65
67
S uzanne W ise
Learning To Speak Is Like Learning To Shoot
S hane M ccrae
Daughter (Ann Parker) 72
C raig M organ T eicher
Narcissus And Me
74
-T r a n s l a t i o n s A ime ’ C e ’ saire
Translated By
C layton E shleman A nd A.J. A rnold
Permit 79
Forfeiture
81
J ose ’ A ntonio M azzotti
Translated By
C layton E shleman
1383
G ro D ahle
Translated By
R ebecca W adlinger
from
A Hundred Thousand Hours
62
84
70
A lexei P arshchikov
Translated By
W ayne C hambliss
Force 86
E va L uka
Translated By
J ames A nd V iera S utherland -S mith
Centaur
87
R ainer M aria R ilke
Translated By
J ohn F elstiner
The Pantherin The Jardin Des Plantes, Paris
O leha L ysheha
Translated By
J ames B rasfield
A mal
Marten 89
al -J ubouri
Translated from by
R ebecca G ayle H owell
with
H usam Q aisi
My Soul Before the Occupation 96
My Soul After the Occupation 97
- Sec tion 5 J ulia S tory
Red Town #6
P imone T riplett
99
Money Talks At The Beaux Arts Hotel
J oseph W ood
Xlii.
103
101
88
A my G erstler
Prehistoric Porn Film 104
E ric K ocher
When Your Loss Arrives On The Beach Like A Whale
R obert F itterman
Family Photographs
108
K en W alker
After This Second Season
M att H art
We’re Off To The Witch 112
111
105
A aron B elz
Loggerheads
The people who used to rent carriages
in the late 1800s and the people who
invented the typewriter were at
loggerheads over the phrase
“carriage return.” The former wanted
it for their signs at the airport
while the latter wanted it for,
you know the drill. I actually had a
friend in high school nicknamed
the Drill for his berserker-like skills
in a rugby scrum. He didn’t even know
how to play rugby, but he’d hear that
“crouch!” Then, “touch!” And then…
I’m tired of existing on the face
of this planet. I want to live deeper in it
like Boris Karloff or Michael Jackson.
I’ve grown too fond of dreaming.
You know the Drill.
11
A aron B elz
Enchanted Evening Together
Questions want to be asked.
Hence the question marks.
Such as: How are you doing, Max.
Max: There are no meadowlarks?
And: Something is happening later?
Symphony or symphonette—no.
Or: No? Not exactly French waiter,
but simplicity becomes you as you
become every question’s worst answer.
What IS it about her? they moo.
You have all the poise of a dancer,
but still, what is it about you.
A string part—a part for strings—
you play along on your air clavichord,
and so it wanders, fluttering its wings.
You order at last. The soup du jour?
We think of thousands of things.
12
A my L awless
Octoberfest
I dreamed you drew me onto a portico and said
This is for you. It was a beautiful necklace—thoughtpolished rock hanging below cardinal numbers zero
through nine. I held it and Thank you. You sat on a bench.
Walls closed around us like in a car. It felt better than
kissing some people but worse than kissing others. You can
do whatever you want, you said. This was an explicit reference
to your penis. I held it and said This is bigger than you’ve led
me to believe it would be. You can do whatever you want with it, you
said. I stroked it; eyes appealed. First, I picked off a fine
piece of crust.
13
A my L awless
from
Elephants in Mourning
When an elephant dies the lover takes the body and rolls it over and over.
When an elephant is dead it lies in a way that living elephants are not able to.
When an elephant dies he takes the body and rolls it over.
He scrolls his trunk and pulls his head back.
And some call that honor but it looks like someone who wants religion for a minute.
He does not X out the window.
He is someone who wants to be told that there is something else.
There is nothing else.
14
A my L awless
from
Elephants in Mourning
When an elephant dies it’s like having Mel Gibson in your house
during one of his episodes. He’s gotten you pregnant so you’re his
and he goes wild. When an elephant dies it’s important to know the
types of leaves there are in the world. The water in this elephant will
leave it and go into the leaves and also into our faucets. The water
will go into our water filtration systems. The water will go into our
clouds and will rain on our faces. The water will go into your sex
lubricant bottles because there is water in this product. The water will
go into the sewers of Dubai and the mountains of Africa. The waters
will go into the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado. The waters will go
to every hill and molehill of Mississippi. When an elephant dies it’s
important to list the four different kinds of leaves, which you can find
on plant matter and botany textbooks: fronds, conifers, angiosperms,
microphylls, sheaths, and specialized.
15
A my L awless
from
Elephants in Mourning
Sometimes an elephant dies and no one finds him and his flesh dries
off his bones and the bones slowly absorb back into the land and
later a farmer will till the land and grow crops and the crops will feed
the family and the family will grow up and old and no one will know
that they used to be elephants.
Sometimes a man dies and no one finds him and his flesh dries off
his bones and the bones slowly absorb back into the land and later
a farmer will till the land and grow crops and the crops will feed the
family and the family will grow up and old and no one will know that
they used to be man.
16
A my L awless
from
Elephants in Mourning
When an elephant dies you immediately want to hug everyone around
you. But first put the bone in your mouth and feel around for clues.
Was it a violent death? Was it natural? Yell something hurtful to your
brother because he isn’t even putting his hind leg against the edge of
the dried skin area of the head. He’s still smelling it with his tusk. If
you say something slightly hurtful to your brother he’ll stop slacking
off with the smell segment, which is an overrated line of analysis. We
find the important diagnostic cues by hind foot tapping and tasting.
My wife made a trumpet noise so at least she clearly gives a shit. This
is my daughter’s first dead body. This is how it’s done, sweety. We’re
going to find out who did this to this poor woman. Time did this.
Watch me kill time.
17
K yle M c C ord & J eannie H oag
Keeping it Here For You
Out of hard ground we
were born, not soil
Tiny trees only poles
and orange berries
Now weather approaching,
fields bloom dirt
it’s alright it’s dark
to the left
gates dried open
all night to welcome
dust garlic blooms
onion blooms tubers
torn & knit through screens
on the porch, old porch
where we would sit
18
K yle M c C ord & J eannie H oag
If Not Beside Me
Closing the interstate, the attic
taping the windows shut
each day here & you
and I’m afraid like ____
and about to ____
avalanches inside &
out the invisible
monsters, how places, how I’m
aluminum & caravans
of trucks
snows
waves
19
S ebastian T umultuous
Beast
I might as well be
an apple or a driveway
a lurid mammal
a maudlin beast
a cleavage of hills
drowning itself in the river
20
N oelle K ocot
Nature Walk:
Poem for Joshua Beckman
On His 39th Birthday
The poor chrysanthemums are bent and broken.
The crows grip the drooping trees. Yet there
Is an ecstasy here like none before, and the incidents
Of air and water fly freely over the dividing gray.
The study of forcefields here, in the prayerful air
Will not be mocked. Heaven opens to an intense
Sun on my back and adorns the fallen. Friend,
You are the one, your hand at my back at night.
The green strands in the intermittent wind produce
A paradox, a love of what swallows them. The
Naked spines of trees, the coolness of it all bends
Over the routine tasks of the day. I think I know
What makes us human, Joshua. A landscape. The
Blood that turns to wood smoke in a quiet kitchen.
21
L eigh S tein
Travel Brochure For The
Future
We have this lush AstroTurf here.
We have these incredible windows.
Forget what’s left to do at home.
We have sky.
We have what you miss about the past and
we have masks so you can dress up
like the person you wish you were. Name two
things you’d rather do than be here
with me, now, in the hinterland.
When the river floods, we’ll swim
to safety.
When the river floods, we’ll start
an ancient civilization.
Let’s call it Egypt.
Everything anyone has ever loved
about you has come from the future
22
in the form of a vision, a wish, or a sympathy;
that’s why they say I knew you would
do that, I knew we would end up
like this.
23
L eigh S tein
Dispatch From The Future
In the future, I’m your mother.
My name is Carol.
I hold you when you want me
to and I don’t ask
questions.
I never call your name
when I lose sight of you
in public.
In the future, we’re discreet.
We live forever
or seem to.
We upholster our lives with secrets
and our holsters are concealable.
When you want me
to, I hold you
like a wife
in Valparaiso.
You say, Tell me something
else, and I do
all sorts of tricks.
24
W endy X u
A Poem about New York on Occasion
of Leaving New York
Behold the future hypothetical: you exist only on airplanes.
You give your things to an attendant and they are sorted
by size, and the lesson: do not be too weighty, or be punished,
do not claim things you will only leave behind.
In the future reality you are at a zoo, and while it is time to look
at the zebras, you are in the aviary. You are asking a red-crowned crane
about total diameter of wing-span as it relates to flight.
To hollow out each bone, one by one. To loose yourself
from yourself, and the lightness of your absence be enough.
But by the time you know this, you will still be on the East Coast
not sleeping, pulling fabric from each window
as one exposes a wound,
denying the pillows their settling atop each other. O, how
you miss the companion you once had, but here is the truth:
while you wait for the morning you are waiting
for the phone, as you hear it now, it is not the city beneath the city,
the city which once carried you away.
25
D. A. P owell
my life as a dog
If I was a dog, the only three things I’d chase:
a firetruck, a ball, and my own tail.
If I was a dog, you wouldn’t be petting me
I might have rolled in something.
As a dog, I’d roll over for cheese. Not very good cheese.
I’d bark all night until you let me out.
You’d have to let me out.
Don’t worry, I wouldn’t chase anyone’s cat.
I’m sure I’d think about it. But I just wouldn’t.
Someone would have to hold me when I got my shots.
Would you hold me when I got my shots?
I’d sneak into the garden and eat the pears off the trees.
How would I do that? I’d be a dog. A crafty dog.
If I was a dog, I’d have run away by now.
I’d be a runaway. You’d think bad dog.
And when it was time to put me down, you’d be
a little blue. Then put me down.
26
J ennifer D enrow
It’s a Long Time Ago
I’m a long time ago. I come with snow all around me. These are
remarkable places, I say. I place a cow near another cow. I tell them of
sheep. They plead with me to stop. I lie down near the two cows and
whisper demands into their feet. Nothing happens. I think this must be
forever ago. I think we are alone in this. I open the ground until the cows
turn to ice. I say the alphabet. They disappear. I look around until even
the field disappears. A bureau of drawers come to make out what they
see. They say each part of what appears to them. They are tall and
attractive. I tell them about the cows. They laugh so much they fall down
and then apart. They go to dust. I hold the dust in my palm, regretfully. It
is soft. I feed it to myself.
27
B en M irov
#908
If they were never stoked
to return you phone call
they were never stoked
to begin with. One looks down
and selects from the many pieces of debris
some kind of shard from the hologram
that binds us to one another.
A jump-suit, a thermos,
an implacable passion for oceanography.
These are the tools given
to the wobbly one. The one
who stalks the earth looking
for pie and sex and a brief drive
through the vineyards at the edge of town.
Think of the beauty of the aqueduct.
Now return to your mountain of leaves
and shut the hatch.
28
B en M irov
#23.777
Sometimes I think every person
on television worships Satan.
I know that it’s not true.
Most people worship
a huge ball of light
passing through the trees
into the yard
onto the front porch.
I have no idea why the ball of light
always lands on the porch.
Just as I have no idea
why TV is full of people
who ignore the huge ball of light.
It’s clearly meant for them.
29
B en M irov
#01010
If you would like some kind of note
that will free you from your earthly responsibilities
including but not limited to:
building the death sled,
touching the buds that threaten
the indigenous rocks, looping
the rescue cord around the slot machine,
diving through clouds of volcanic ash
to reach the thermal vent
where one can harvest the heretofore unknown
boredom inducing polyps,
I cannot help you. I cannot even
help myself. I am alone in this
bible tent. My filigree is hidden
beneath a napkin.
30
D onald R evell
To Heaven
The working class is not a leaf. The leaves are leaves.
In oval portrait, child by child, the entire innocence
Of the world shrinks to nothing. Geminiani gone.
Dante done to death. I dreamed of a forest where my skin
Was gray and my loves were gray and all the leaves
Were golden. It was as good as an ocean.
No one said a word. There was nothing to explain.
I wake each morning much too early. The low moon
Accuses. The distant traffic noises and first airplanes
Accuse. I reach for my glasses in the half-light hoping
For a moment or two with the ovals by my bed.
There is a distant nude who was a baby. There are two
Children reaching upwards towards a golden leaf.
In forests hereafter, they take me back to sleep.
31
G ary J ackson
Grace
He may be able to crush coal into diamonds, but when I go to sleep at night, I can’t hear the
gunfire in Darfur.
– Stanley Pinion on The Atomic Man
During a wildfire in Santa Barbara, the high wind carries a single
tendril of smoke into a delicate loop, fragile as the three-legged dog
limping towards the back of the clinic after sixteen years of loyalty.
The murderer, strapped upright in the wooden chair, whispers a
prayer for forgiveness after the executioner gently sponges his head.
The victim’s family watches through glass too thick to carry whispers.
In Kansas City, a boy borrows his neighbor’s lawnmower without
asking. He’s beaten until his skin swells like tulips in full bloom,
mosquitoes drunk on blood. The sun sets, casting its glare on his
dying brown skin.
Today, while criss-crossing the New York skyline, I stop a kid
from shoplifting Hustler. Every cell in my body contains atomic
potential as I throw myself like Buster Keaton across the
world’s stage.
34
G ary J ackson
Ms. Fortune’s Badasssss Song
Whenever there’s danger, she calls the thunder,
transforms into me, her secret avatar.
One moment she’s walking to school,
the next
I’m rocketing down 3rd street
after the break-less bus,
halting steel with bare hands.
Late nights she creeps out the bedroom window,
the cacophony of cicadas witness the thunder.
I return at dawn in tired flesh, lacerated
with sweat and blood. We share nothing
but a body. In her waking
I’m a dream’s veil away. I know
where she lives, her mother’s maiden name,
the boy she longs to give her first kiss.
She knows my name from headlines:
Ms. Fortune foils bank robbery!
I’m a repressed memory, something
better forgotten when the day is hers –
the recollection of hauling a lava monster into the sun
like an itch in the back of her throat.
What will I do when she grows into a woman
naturally by age
instead of by absurd design?
35
Call the thunder no more.
M att B ialer
The Land Of The Lost
Dive off tree house
On to leaf piles
Jim’s underwear shows, always does
His clothing’s unwashed
Avoid dangerous Sleestak at all cost
Ancient race,
10 foot tall Reptile Men
With crossbows
Gurgling sounds
Like the murky fish tank
in Jim’s basement
Duck in to a Pylon
Dimensional portal – metallic obelisk
Larger inside than out
Matrix table studded with grid:
Colored crystals that we shuffle –
Summon electrical storms
Afterwards, Oreo cookies and milk
Take for ourselves His mom’s hospitalized
Anxiety attacks Stopped conversing
Jim – Mets cap over oily brown hair,
Galaxy Diner tee shirt Dunks and licks the moons out of middle
Tap on the fish tank
Neon tetras darting back and forth
Their eyes are prisms
36
Touch the parchment
Of his Dad’s constellation charts
Navigator during the War
B-29 Superfortress
Me, I love fighter planes
Give me Hellcats, Wildcats, Mustangs
-
Bet you an SR-71 rescues us from the Land of the Lost
-
A supersonic plane can’t jump dimensions
Speaking of that, let’s go to Hawk Rock
-
No, it’s getting too dark
II.
Monkey bikes fly through the woods
Near Route 301
Dive-bombing ships, bridges
Dark sky, no moon
But we know the way
By stone chambers
No one knows who made them
My Dad says they’re old root cellars
Jay says Druids thousands of years ago
-
-
-
There were never Druids here Jay
What about the UFOs
What UFOs
Approach chamber everyone calls
Mother Earth
Or Womb
37
Oval in shape, slightly underground
Slab roofed
Faint red glow
Coming from the inside
A hum like an electrical generator
Vibration
Do you hear that?
Drastic change in temperature
Freezing
Jay enters the chamber
I wouldn’t Jay! Shit!
I enter too
Noise stops
No red
All dark inside
Feel like someone watching
Force slams both of us
Knocked down, dirt floor
Look for who did it
No one there
What the fuck?
Slowly get up
Knocked down again
Unseen force
38
Stay down
Figure of very tall man
White robe
Eyes glow yellow
Looks at us
Then gone
Get up, run outside
Cloud of mist
White light
Very bright on hill
Like it’s in the air
Illuminating the trees
Whitish blue
Like a spotlight
Across
Moves up and down
Sky distorted like heat waves off tar road
39
We run
III.
Nearby, business trip
First time in more than a decade
Sell large private jets
Fortune 500 companies
NETJETS BE THERE
Rival trying to steal our client
My boss: You’re in a fishbowl
Have a morning to visit Jay
Took over his parents house
Single, never married
Discovery film crew
With him in the basement
Diagrams of stone chambers
Photos of saucers, amphibious alien heads
Middle grade science teacher
Paranormal Investigator
Mets cap over balding head
Red M.I.T. tee shirt
The Multiverse, String Theory
Beings From Other Dimensions
-They could be lost
Can’t get back
They could be observing us
The crew going back to Hawk Rock
Jay and a group, camp there
Wants me to come
Speak on camera, our experience
I won’t
40
-
Just people fooling us Jay
Back in my hotel room
Call my wife and daughter
I miss them
Half nod out
Running in the dark
With the lights,
Air shimmering
I see more of them
Swimming
In the distance, robes
Hooded figures
Their eyes are crescents
We’re in a fishbowl
41
M atthew L ippman
In The Incubators
I can’t figure out if I’m the sonofabitch
or if everyone else around me is the sonofabitch.
For instance, my daughter comes home from the barber, she’s five,
I say to her,
“That’s a weird hair cut.”
Then, later, when I turn off the stereo, she says, “I hate you, I hate you.
You you you.”
If it’s all about me, then it’s me that is the bad man.
If it’s not all about me, everyone else is the bad man.
I go to the synagogue, the school, the airport. I say Hello.
To everyone.
I go to the pizza place. There’s a guy with his kids.
He’s got orange shorts. They say Hobart Lacrosse.
I say, “You go to Hobart?” He says, “Don’t say another word.”
He’s right. I should be quiet.
I eat my pizza. It’s got pepperoni on it. It’s Saturday.
My people don’t eat pork. On Saturday
if the image of a cooked pig comes into the mind
there’s hell to pay.
I am that guy.
I’m tired of being that guy.
Maybe I have been that guy since I was a child.
Is this how the world gets in trouble?
Everyone gets born and all the babies in the hospital learn
how not to lick the tears of the babies
in the incubators next the them?
My five year old was born at home.
She can lick. She can say, I hate you I hate you. You you you.
Maybe she’ll become a sonofabitch
42
when she turns sixteen and has to go to the party
to meet all the boys, find a husband and move to Detroit.
Maybe she’ll move to Paris and talk French, never speak English again.
What’s the word for sonofabitch in French?
Robespierre? Camille Claudel? The French guy I know says
Fils de pute.
My daughter says:
Bonjour.
She’ll call me from Trieste. I’ll answer the phone, Bonjour, Papa, she’ll shout,
Bonjour, bonjour, bonjour.
43
M atthew L ippman
Phd In Pelican
You go to college now you’re screwed.
Better to hang out with the blue jays and mess up the neighborhood.
I know this guy, Jules,
can’t get a job slicing fish. I’m off to Nebraska, he says,
hang out with the tornadoes.
Least this way I can get me some cow.
In my neck of the woods
if you want to get a job
you’ve got to steal one.
Walk into a paint store,
find the guy mixing the Benjamin Moore Violet Smooth
with the Benjamin Moore Green Elixir
to make Fantasy Love.
Rip off his red apron with the nametag Trent
stapled to the front, scream,
You’re fired.
What’s a degree in Microphysics going to do for you anyway
unless your going down to the Gulf to save the pelicans? Hell,
even if you had a PhD in Pelican
what would that do for them anyway
but pray pray pray.
The college kids do it every day
in hopes that bowing to the Lord
will get them work-a job at the tar pit, the burger line,
in front of the blackboard
to teach the little kids, for Christ’s sake, that the ABC’s
are more important than the GNP.
My wife says, Obama’s got some crazy shit on his plate.
The coeds say, The Department of Treasury sucks ass.
44
But they are college kids, filled with sex and molasses,
hot desire and mud.
For them, even the unemployment line is a garden
filled with ripe tomatoes.
That is why they walk into the grid of the city
and pretend there are no more enemies;
that there are no more flying dinosaurs
to snatch them off the pavement as they strut
in their blue suits and silk tops
looking for the white picket fence
that has no more picket.
It’s a damn shame. It’s a rising deficit.
It’s a blank check that goes invisible.
Even still, they’re out there—dead broke—
pedaling like mad
on their souped up bikes
with the crazy pink banana seats,
going down the hill, up the ramp,
through a burning ring of fire
like it was the first goddamn day of spring.
45
P aul M uldoon
Cleaning Up My Act
THERE ARE NO GENTLEMEN
IN A GENTLEMEN’S CLUB
A DIRECT FLIGHT TO RENO
MAY STOP AT A HUB
I FLAGGED BEHIND MY FLAGON
OF COTES DU RHONE
YOU’D PASSED OUT IN THE PASSION WAGON
WHEN I ASKED YOU HOME
I TOLD YOU IT’S A CONDO
IT’S A COLDWATER FLAT
THE TRICKS I’VE PLAYED ARE DIRTY TRICKS
THAT’S WHY I’M CLEANING UP MY ACT
NOTHING IS A PROBLEM
TO A PROBLEM CHILD
THOUGH THE ISSUE OF LABELLING
SENDS ME HOG-WILD
I PICK UP THE PLOT THAT THICKENS
AROUND A FREE-RANGE PIG
I CHECK OUT A FRESH CHICKEN
TO FIND IT’S BEEN DEEP-CHILLED
WHEN DID YOU LAST HEAR A KETTLE
CALL A KETTLE BLACK?
I’VE BEEN DEFILED BY YOUR SALES PITCH
THAT’S WHY I’M CLEANING UP MY ACT
FOR I WAS TAKEN IN
BY THE IDENTICAL TWIN
OF A POLE DANCER FROM DENVER MY OH MY
AS FOR HER SKIN
IT WAS BARELY AS THIN
AS THE PRETEXT UNDER WHICH SHE ASKED ME WHY
46
THERE ARE NO GENTLEMEN
IN A GENTLEMEN’S CLUB
NO ROOM FOR NUCLEAR FAMILIES
IN A NUCLEAR SUB
A FLIGHT MAY RUN FROM RENO
TO A RENAL WARD
A TALL CAPPUCINO
TURNS OUT TO BE SMALL
MANY’S A MASS OF SUGAR
SELLS ITSELF AS LOW FAT
I’M HOPING TO BE FILTHY RICH
THAT’S WHY I’M CLEANING UP MY ACT
47
F ritz W ard
But You Could Ignore The Sky
East of Alberta, there’s a bridge designated
for the jumpers. Death Guaranteed,
the sign says, Science and Efficiency.
My father liked to say, You can’t
ignore the gravity of a situation.
And he said it slowly, making it last.
I loved him best when he got it wrong:
when the seven horses stumbled, when the butterfly
knife fluttered with blood, when the night refused
its endings. On the bridge, no one gets it wrong.
You empty your pockets of change—for a penny
is a head wound from heaven at such heights—
and you sign the name your mother gave you
when you left her flood.
And then you wait your turn.
48
M iranda F ield
Spring Clean-Up
I’m making footed pajamas
into 2-feet tall scarecrows, up-cycling
school blazers into mole shrouds.
I see you nailing a love-lies-bleeding wreath to the door
cut by your axe in the frozen waterfall.
Everything orphaned and adopted, forgotten and framed.
You see me leaning out the oeil-de-boeuf window
of the floating world’s beauty salon, I mean the bed of 10,000
peonies you made for me then ravished me in.
This is bliss! Songbirds are fracking
the rocks for us. Taking a break, they chatter on
about butterfly barrettes. You wouldn’t know anyone’s
children had teleported to the anti-matter
planet, a decade of lemonade stands
digested by forsythia.
49
S andra M eek
Cumulative Sentence
Mother of Coughed Blood’s Garnet Wings;
Mother of X-rays, of Cat-scans, of I’m-sorryto-say; Mother of The-odds-are, Mother of Who-cantell, Mother of Chemo, Crystal Pouch and Silver Tree;
Mother of Ambulance White-light, of Alarm-music;
Mother of Breathing Treatments, of Oxygen’s Umbilical Tubing;
Mother of Morphine; Mother of Cane, of Walker, of Wheelchair;
Mother of Powdered Rubber Gloves;
Mother of No, of Not-yet, Mother of Bedside Commodes;
Mother of The Body’s Tightening Prison, Mother of
Speed Dial, Mother of Ativan, Mother of Breathing Masks,
of the Flawed Weave of Air; Mother of Hospital Beds, Mother
of Adult Diapers, Mother of Keep-the-door-open, of Don’t-leave; Mother
of Pressthe-call-light, Mother of Call 911; Mother of No,
Not Yet; Mother of Graying Grace, Mother of the Pooling
Blood; Mother of Tearing, of What-time-is-it,
Mother of Fever and Chill; Mother of Now, Mother of Glass
Eyes, Mother of Open Mouth and Filling Lungs;
Mother of the Catheter Bag, of Deepening Topaz, Mother of the
Line
of No More; Mother of Bluing Skin, Mother of the Unspooled
Heart,
Mother of Flight and Burn, Mother of Cardboard
and Ash, Mother of Smoke, Mother of Air, Mother,
Mother—
50
K aren W eiser
Suppose you surrender till we
hum
After subtracting yourself from the experience, the remainder floats
above. It says: surrender as we hum about you. A way to work out
the meaning remains, but it slips undersea with occasional crater.
Suppose you surrender till we hum about you. The sea is an expanse
of remainders.
The above may sound irreverent. It’s irreverent to suppose that
humming means particular things, being more of a music. One sound
may mean many kinds of emphasis. We know the color beforehand,
though seeing it is a different matter. If we smell it is by intuition.
Come through to convert grace to surrender.
There I drift drawing a stammer. I mean: I am merely humming. It
will pass without artificial aid.
There is no softer real estate than the birth chamber. A day-long
stammer plus remainder.
The above may sound irreverent. It is irreverent to push a person
through. And reverent, pulling the seaboard to pasture.
But it’ll pass. There is no hypocrisy in humming. No consistency of
position when only a mouth vibrates the air. Suppose you note the
ripple effect of cross-bathos playing across its mechanism.
Is it ok if even mmm-tinually the air abandons its conversation with
you? It will give only a certain ineffable emphasis, at home in the vast
wall of bad cloud.
Humming about you.
51
P aul C elan & Y ehuda A michai
The Interview
An Exchange Between Two Great Poets*
Perhaps I am one of the last who must live out to the end the destiny
of the Jewish spirit in Europe.” Why “must”? Writing from Paris
in August 1948 to relatives in the new state of Israel, Paul Celan,
having survived the “Final Solution,” explains that a poet cannot stop
writing, “even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is
German.” This fateful pledge, from a brutally orphaned son whose
stunning poem of 1945, “Deathfugue,” intones, “Death is a master
from Deutschland” and threads an ashen-haired Shulamith into the
Hebrew Bible’s Song of Songs, throws a raking light over a recently
discovered exchange of letters between Celan and the Israeli poet
Yehuda Amichai.
Born to German-speaking parents in Czernowitz, Bukovina, an
eastern outpost of the Austrian Empire, Celan survived nineteen
months of forced labor, eventually taking exile in Paris. There by
hard degrees he became Europe’s most challenging postwar poet.
His first and only journey to Israel, in October 1969, had been long
deferred for fear of yet another exile from the mother tongue. In
Jerusalem, Amichai, who had left Germany as a boy with his family
in 1936, welcomed Celan into his home overlooking the ancient
valley across from Mount Zion.
In Hana and Yehuda Amichai’s kitchen, Celan gave a radio interview.
“I think that themes alone don’t suffice to define what’s Jewish,” he
remarked. “Jewishness is so to speak a spiritual concern as well.” His
term for “spiritual” was pneumatisch, “pneumatic,” where pneuma,
or wind, calls up the Hebrew ruach, as when God’s breath hovers
over the deep. Celan also stressed his Germanic patrimony: “Rilke
was very important to me, and afterwards Kafka.”
52
For a reading the next day, Amichai translated some poems of Celan’s
into Hebrew. “From time to time he surprised us by commenting that
we could be more precise,” says Shmuel Huppert, the interviewer.
“He would suggest some other root, which was stored in his
memory.” Amichai also inscribed a recent collection of his own verse
for Celan, in Hebrew, “with much love.” Celan read the book closely.
At the Jerusalem reading on October 9, Amichai and the poet
Manfred Winkler presented the distinguished guest. An overflow
crowd, including refugees and survivors from his homeland,
somewhat alarmed Celan, but his reading in German overwhelmed
them. In one poem he bound what happened in Nazi-ridden Europe,
his parents murdered in a Ukrainian winter, to his struggle for a fit
language: “Just like the wind that rebuffs you,/ packed round your
word is the snow.” The audience clamored for “Deathfugue,” but
Celan declined. He ended by speaking a Six Day War poem of intense
thanksgiving for “this piece of/habitable earth,/again suffered up
into life”:
Just think:
this came toward me,
name-awake, hand-awake
for ever,
from the unburiable.
A week later in Tel Aviv, thinking of the biblical tongue revived as
national vernacular, Celan told the Hebrew Writers Association: “I
take joy in every newly earned, self-discovered, fulfilled word that
rushes up to strengthen those who turn toward it.”
Back home, in “this cold city Paris,” Celan felt elated at having
dwelled in a free state--”No ghetto!”--with children chattering
Hebrew. He wrote a letter to Amichai in which his own loss of family
and homeland, his psychic wounds and postwar anxieties, twist and
53
strain these sentences addressed to modern Hebrew’s leading poet.
Avenue Emile Zola (15e)
Paris, 7 xi 1969
Dear Yehuda Amichai,
You would have had these lines long since, but I’d forgotten to make a note
of your address and so first I needed to check with a friend in Tel Aviv.
For me it’s a most heartfelt need to tell you how happy I was to meet you,
you and your poems, how glad I was to be with you.
I’m truly ashamed that I can find my way into your Hebrew poems only
with the aid of English translations. But I’ve a strong impression it’s just
this, finding my way, that affords me what’s most poetic. What really
belongs to you in your poems comes through with the most convincing,
most conspicuous force. You are the poem you write, the poem you write
is ... you yourself.--Right away I loaned the English selection of your work
to my friend André du Bouchet, who writes poems as well, and to my great
joy what had struck me came through to him too. Now this book is going
round to other contributors and editors of the magazine L’Ephémère
(I’m also among them). We’d be delighted to bring out a book of yours
in French translation--is there someone in Jerusalem or elsewhere who’s
translated you into French, or could do so?
Unfortunately I can’t offer you something similar where the German
language is concerned: for a long time now I’ve not contributed to any
German-language magazine. The changes that have happened there-involving not only the publishers’ mindset, though above all of course it’s
that too--they’ve blocked my access. But as for radio, I’d certainly find one
way or another--let me know about this? Manfred Winkler meant to send
me, through my Tel Aviv friend David Seidmann, some German versions
of Hebrew lyrics, including yours, but so far he hasn’t done it.
Dear Yehuda Amichai, let me here say again what came to my lips
spontaneously, in our conversation: I cannot imagine the world without
Israel, and I will not imagine it without Israel. That I would wish to see this
kept personal, not public, you no doubt understand: that way it acts with all
its intensity. With your person and your poems, you too make me think of
this over and over.
Heartfelt thanks
Yours
Paul Celan
54
Celan’s visit to Israel buoyed him, even to the point that he imagined
settling there. But this letter, written only three weeks after his return,
suggests why that did not happen. For one thing, this linguistic genius
makes a point of playing down his competent Hebrew. As a child he
had attended a Hebrew day school and celebrated his bar mitzvah
in 1933. His poems over the years often embed a key Hebrew
word or phrase. The Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, born on the
same street where Celan lived back in Czernowitz, remembers that
Celan’s Hebrew in Jerusalem was good. His script was fluent, too.
Ilana Shmueli, a childhood friend who had emigrated after the war
and with whom Celan now reunited, recalled that “he remembered
Hebrew quotations, and came up suddenly with difficult words and
sentences.” And a few months after this letter, he translated the
Hebrew poems of David Rokeah, an Israeli also born in the Austrian
Empire.
Why such diffidence about the holy tongue? Born in 1920, Celan
witnessed the rise of Romanian and German anti-Semitism. With
Nazism rampant in 1938, his father opted not to leave, and he went
to study in France. In 1945, although--or precisely because--his
mother tongue had overnight turned into his mother’s murderers’
tongue, he forged ahead writing in German. Friends asked, Why not
write in Romanian or French? The poet clung to his lifeline: “Only in
the mother tongue can one speak one’s own truth.”
Amichai also had a German-Hebrew upbringing, but he emigrated to
Palestine before the war. So the encounter between the much-loved
Israeli poet, who had transformed Hebrew verse by mixing the living
vernacular with the ancient biblical music, and the German-Jewish
poet spoken of in the same breath with Hölderlin and Rilke, must
have been fraught, daunting. Living out the destiny of the Jewish
spirit in Europe was a staunch task, Celan’s life’s work. Carving the
truth out of German in yet another exile, even the Promised Land,
would be something else.
55
In Celan’s letter to Amichai we have the courteous heart-cry of a
poet surviving through his (and his new friend’s) mother tongue,
while encountering the challenge of Hebrew in the person and the
poetry of Amichai. Two sentences betray Celan’s struggle to get
something crucial said. In tortuous German, one sentence says:
“What really belongs to you in your poems comes through with the
most convincing, most conspicuous force.” The implication is surely
that uprooting and transplanting himself to Israel might dissipate his
own force.
The other sentence derives from Celan’s oblique sense of Israel,
anxious and distant. Recrudescent German anti-Semitism after
1945, plus a bogus charge of plagiarism, had terribly exacerbated his
wartime trauma while stiffening his resolve. Persecution mania and
mental breakdowns brought long spells in French clinics. Declaring
to Amichai that he will not imagine a world without Israel, Celan then
feels he must withdraw a little: “That I would wish to see this kept
personal, not public, you no doubt understand: that way it acts with
all its intensity.”
A month later Amichai wrote back, immediately testing Celan’s stake
in him. The Israeli aligns his own destiny, in a nation welded to its
revivified language, with the diaspora poet’s desperate grasp on a
mother tongue. In slightly unaccustomed German, Amichai then
touches Celan’s genius as a writer for exposing human experience in
its molten form.
Dear Paul Celan,
I was overjoyed at your letter. It’s truly a heavy yoke you lay on me, to carry
all of Israel on my shoulders. Anyone who writes in Hebrew binds his own
existence with that of the language and the people. Israel’s downfall would
mean the downfall of my language. All the more so, with no consolation in
56
the permanence of the written word, of the spirit.
Dear Paul Celan, I frankly envy the way your art renders word and image
objective (with extremest subjectivity!). My poetry, which holds forth in
what’s real and is prompted pragmatically by events, stands in envy of yours.
My images are only the clatter of chainlinks that tie me to life’s happenings.
As far as translations are concerned, I joined up with Winkler. Alas I haven’t
yet found a French translator for my poems.
With best regards to you and please write me again or do come back here
from time to time.
Shalom!
Yours,
Yehuda Amichai
Celan did not come back. Four months after receiving this letter,
living apart from his wife and son, he walked from his apartment and
(apparently) drowned himself in the Seine. Amichai wrote two elegies
for him, one immediately, in a volume of poems that he published in
1971, and the other many years later, in his last book of poems. This
poem begins:
Paul Celan, toward the end your
words grew fewer
and every word became so heavy
in your body
until God put you down like a
heavy load,
maybe just for a moment,
to take a breather and wipe his
brow.
Paul Celan’s letter, from the Beinecke Collection at Yale University, was
published with permission of Eric Celan and Suhrkamp Verlag. Yehuda
Amichai’s letter, from the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, is published with permission
of Hana Amichai.
57
C al B edient
Each Bound Of The Fiery Paper
Who does me this I whistle you off
I am brazen as the green of the Palestinian flag
Strange wishful little books clot my fur
I do not labor except to season my domain
Through seven holes all things twitter
I reject the disjecta of allegory
A sluttery roller skate grips my shoe
Is there enough chaos in you to make a world?
The shit on the egg is the horse under the bed
The New England winter is still raw and long
The summer is intense and abandoned
61
J ulianne B uchsbaum
The Making of the English
Working Class
1.
I thought my brother would be among the monks
leftover in this world. With the shiny pallor
of a just-painted still life, he was good at keeping
quiet, warding off the sallies of someone strong.
It was mortifying, the mementos of his own
ascesis piled in little heaps inside his room, relics
of the kind of body that can go a long time
without sleep or food. He told me it was love
that made the world go round. Our mother
was a nun to him in her spotless cotton shirts.
She never cooked. Sometimes I am numb
to the world’s noise. And when we went
to temple, people sat in the pews like they were
at the movies, it made no difference to them.
My body was there, but my mind was elsewhere,
wandering through wealds where lives where virginal
and wild, wondering about the bodies of ancient
queens and where they were buried, maybe on beaches
62
where I wrote my name, improvident, and hoped
to be seen. If not now, in some other, quieter time.
2.
Have you ever loved so much the truth of your own
death came home to you? In Manchester, 1833,
half of the children born to spinners died. The pelvic
bones of girls who worked in the mills could not make room
for the new life coming through. Children given
dirty rags to suck were dying from disease.
It’s possible to die from not being touched, no one
knew that then, and the monks were not to be disturbed
in their dark adorations, their ancient formulas
for making something potent go away, be quiet, good.
Sometimes I sing when I’ve light,
but not in the dark; I dare not sing then.
3.
When a child’s skin is translucent, people think
he could be anything. I am learning even now
that this is not the case. Even when a page
is blank, certain things can and can’t be said.
63
My father was safe in his hospital lab, studying cells
gone awry in bodies and how to kill them off.
My brother taught me young that there are rules that are
heretical. Over the beaches of the Queen of Carthage
the sky must have been like a face with its features
rubbed out. If I keep my head down long enough
I’ll be there, in my longstanding withdrawal from
the present moment. And like the remnants
of an ancient still life, the stars still look at us,
safe in their monadic, monastic, inscrutable rites.
64
S teve H ealey
My Cousin Is Getting Breast
Implants*
It’s time to destroy or be destroyed by this genre.
Frederick Seidel, playboy poet, you can suck
my foreign policy. The Taliban? No problem.
Choose an item from the menu—I’ll make it go away.
How about an Egg McMuffin? You say Surrealism
is dead? Hell, it never existed. Back in the day,
we’d eat the placenta and just wait for things
to happen. Every morning the sun would rise,
I could go on and on. Can I get a little more me
in the monitor? Well, she’s not really my cousin,
but we’re super close. Did you hear that Sarah Palin
got a boob job too? Or was it just a good push-up bra?
Either way, it’s going to be a bloodbath. I promised
myself this wasn’t going to get confessional,
but before my parents even thought about having sex,
what was I doing? That’s right, cataloguing
my shame. And still I hate: a) myself b) my body
c) every part of my body including my little toes,
which have the ugliest little toenails ever
d) the dental hygienist who recently held a device up
to my mouth to measure the yellowness of my teeth
to convince me that my teeth should be whitened.
I could go on, but here’s the executive summary.
Consider adopting an orphan genre. Recycle
a used body. And tell that ecosystem to go
fuck itself—I need something to save. Seriously,
I love nature and Frederick Seidel, who is part
of nature. I love excellence and failed excellence.
Top 10 ways to win the war against mediocrity.
Ouch! You said it, not me. Genres are for sycophants.
Everyone’s doing it. And I’m starting to feel it
in my bloodstream. Rich mouthfeel, notes of vanilla
65
and placenta. Super value! Because I’m worth it.
Can I say anything here? There are poems
that remain unwritten. Okay, people, let’s get busy.
* I wrote this poem as part of an ongoing collaborative project I’m participating in with a
visual artist and two other writers. We set a series of deadlines on which we electronically
send everyone in the group something we’ve created (a poem, a collage, etc) in response
to submissions from the previous deadline. “Response” can mean whatever we want, but
typically it means borrowing some language, a theme, an image, a tone—whatever inspires
us. The project has been amazingly generative, and we seem to be creating this weird,
wonderful, rhizomatic field of pieces that are very different but also very connected. So the
poem published here owes a debt to my fellow project participants—Randall Heath, Kevin
Carollo, and Sarah Fox.
This poem emerged from a brief phase of the collaboration that tended toward the
“meta”—that is, we were making art and poetry that was about making art and poetry. I
think of “My Cousin is Getting Breast Implants” as a kind of poetry manifesto for a postmanifesto age, a manifesto that pokes fun at its own ambition and arrogance. I love the
political urgency of the traditional manifesto form, but in the twenty-first century it’s hard to
believe in the kind of absolute truths we usually associate with manifestos.
66
J illian W eise
Here Is the Anger Andrew Asked
For*
when he gave me the latest issue of P-Queue.
“I want the poems where you’re angry,”
he said. I read the magazine and I can tell
I’m not his type. What a luxury it must be
to not need sense. It must be like you already
have your civil rights and at least one friend
to call when your leg dies, except wait . . .
your leg never dies, does it?
Your leg never loses a charge. Last week
a girl, fifteen, in Abercrombie & Fitch
was thrown out because she has cerebral
palsy and her sister went in the dressing
room to help her try on a pair of jeans and
that’s against store policy.
If I wanted to write the poem for P-Queue,
I’d write it like this—
a dressing room / a girl / a sister
a try on / a messed up / thrown out
() () () () () () () () () () () () () () () ()
with Fitch / in against / its clothes
Abercrombie body / of was to
help her
67
--and while I agree the last line is not bad,
is that because it makes sense?
And do you think I’m naive for wanting
store policy change through poetry?
If not change, then just one electrical socket
attached by wire to one charger glowing
green attached by wire to one girl’s leg
(it doesn’t have to be my leg)
in at least one poem in the English language?
Look. The girl with her leg plugged in.
She’s in a poem now. She must exist.
The girl from the Abercrombie news clip
is not that store’s type. Maybe because
that girl never existed in a poem.
She hasn’t been poetry’s type. But I’m not
angry, Andrew. This isn’t anger.
This is a debate. I didn’t get angry until
I read just now in P-Queue this poem
by Divya Victor:
When the thighs are taken away, one is stumped. One can only / totter
away; a stumbledum, a tumbler brimming with demand. / Dimly, one
is the witnesses to an / uroboric outpour of bored / bodies. Herein,
the harkening of the sound of knock-kneed, one-legged pirating of a
floor plan drawn to the scale of the / bourgeois body.
68
Andrew—What is this? Did you pick it?
Am I a stumbledum? Will you ask Divya
if she thinks I’m a stumbledum? Here is this
from Divya’s Artist Statement
on the site Just Buffalo: “To write poetry
[...] is to accept our responsibilities of
making possible positive change.” Is this
positive change, Andrew? Divya?
*This poem was accepted for publication by Andrew Rippeon while he was editor of
P-Queue. He discussed the poem with Divya Victor who wanted to write a response.
Months later, the poem was dropped for publication.
69
S uzanne W ise
Learning to Speak is Like
Learning to Shoot
Some scientists tell us women have more attractive voices
when ovulating. Some scientists tell us it’s not eggs
but hormones that make fertile women happy
and thereby more attractive when speaking.
Who are these women
talking to and who’s listening?
I want to ask.
He hates the female voice
in his car’s GPS and has named her The Heifer,
says my female friend and I echo the echolalia
of her ha-ha-ha.
Was our laughter like a heifer mating with her first bull?
Or like a GPS that’s built to mislead?
Hasn’t everyone heard the story of James becoming Jennifer and learning to speak
in short bursts
of questions
followed by pauses
followed by non sequiturs?
As a little girl, I was a shirtless boy
with a silver pistol
copying my shirtless brother’s careful aim.
Learning to speak is like learning to shoot,
Alexander Graham Bell supposedly said.
70
Learning to listen is like learning to shoot
with a silencer I’d like to say but it doesn’t sound
convincing. Maybe learning to listen is like unloading
the gun to clean it carefully before reloading.
When puberty hit, the world sped up, and turning
on me, shot,
and my voice broke
and I had to hide
the shards in my mouth until menopause.
You better hurry up, you don’t have too many eggs left,
a man I worked with told me
twelve years ago.
You’re quite attractive,
except for your skin, he told me, encouragingly.
When I reread what I have written,
I hear the reader’s voice complaining,
I don’t know who the “I” is
or who the “I” is talking to.
Sometimes, the reader’s voice is male.
Sometimes, the reader’s voice is barely audible
and I decide it’s female and I ignore her.
Sometimes, I don’t know
which “I” pretends to listen and which “I” pretends
to go blind. Sometimes, I try talking back, only to discover,
my voice
is an ear.
71
S hane M c C rae
Daughter (Ann Parker)
I fell and broke
my arm some time ago
’Cause my right side am dead
and me
I tries to crawl / Off ’n the bed
I is a hundred three years old
When I gets back from the hospital
They ties me in this chair
/ I was a grown
Woman at the end of the war
The nigger boy
who helps me up and down
/ He wasn’t raised like me he don’t
Got the same manners but
We old ones know we still is got to be polite
To you white ladies
72
Daughter did I tell you
My mammy Junny was a queen
in Africa
/ And I ain’t had no daddy
’Cause queens don’t marry yes
She was a queen
and when she told them niggers what she was
they bowed
She told them not to tell it tell
The nigger boy
the master and they didn’t tell
who ties and / Unties the rope he
Says it don’t matter who my mammy was
now that we’s free
He fusses and I fight him
He don’t know what it means to be a slave
when you’re a queen
Daughter
I fight him
’cause I want to get loose
even if it’s just to fall
73
C raig M organ T eicher
Narcissus And Me
A reflection is irresistible because it is a paradox: an opposite that is the same, an other that is also clearly yourself.
-Daniel Mendelsohn
If they weren’t mine, I’d say
my eyes are beautiful,
like a riddle
to which I am the answer.
I’d say my eyes are green,
flecked with orange—women
have always admired my eyes.
My beard is a blazing
red, I’d say.
Some women admire it.
Even, perhaps, some men.
A vision overwhelmed him—
an empty hope,
a shadow mistaken for it’s body.
He gazed at himself, wonderstruck
and paralyzed.
He saw his own two eyes
74
like two green stars,
his beard divinely curling.
It was desire for himself
that seized him,
longing
to know the one closest to hand, farthest from reach.
I would say my eyes
are a woman’s eyes.
Even my beard, I’d say,
should grow on the face
of a woman.
Green is the color of springtime
and birth—
mine are the eyes
of a woman’s feelings.
And red is also a woman’s color,
like flowers and sex.
But my shoulders are broad
as a wall,
my gut as tough as a rock.
Only a thin, thin line keeps us apart,
more forbidding than mountains
75
or impassable gates.
I would ask,
what kind of man
has eyes so green?
I would look into my eyes
and ask to love.
But they are my eyes
and there are things I do not know
how to ask.
I am the cause
of the fire,
the fuel and the flame
it feeds.
76
77
A ime ’ C e ’ saire
Translated from French by:
C layton E shleman
Permit
and
A.J. A rnold
Easy prolongation of deglutition by the obscene trismegistic mouth
of a brown-bellied marsh
sticky sundews of a happy muck listening in their lips what fraternal
news their days are de rigueur in this world knotted by too much
smoky breath masking the peppery verve of the storm
Lean lean on the abyss on vertigo
lean lean on nothingness
lean lean on the conflagration
but even in midair I rediscover a thousand sharpened knives
a thousand keys to lassos a thousand priestly crows
howl strike the rock and the earth I people it with fish
let flags loom over the factories
and sound your cohort sound your renewal in flames
sound your silver dais
sound your array and disarray
sound your lightning-rod spoons
sound your onyx clogs
sound your arachnoid horizon
sound your cassolettes
sound your little glasses twisted by disaster
sound your groanings
sound your grenade shrapnel
I bear along the meridians the deaf procession of opulent pilgrims
made up of rabies-bitten forests
perturbation
79
Greenland
hyenas disdainfully sniff me I am not in the desert! the air pauses I
hear the grating of poles on their axles the air drones I impotently
attend the decivilization of my mind the air brings me the Zambezi
Bamboo stalks seem to be the multiple bones of an immense fish
skeleton planted in some geological age in the guise of a totem by an
extinct small tribe.
80
A ime ’ C e ’ saire
Translated from French by:
C layton E shleman
Forfeiture
and
A.J. A rnold
As soon as I press the little pawl that I have under my tongue at
a spot that escapes all detection all microscopic bombardment all
dowser divination all scholarly prospecting beneath its triple thickness
of false eyelashes of centuries of insults of strata of madrepores
of what I must call my niagara cavern in a burst of cockroaches in a
cobra twitch a tongue like a cause for astonishment makes the leap
of a machine for spitting a mouthful of curses a rising of the sewers
of hell a premonitory ejaculation a urinary spurt a foul emission a
sulfuric rhythm feeding an uninterruption of interjections—and
then right there pushing between the paving stones the furious blue
petroleum eucalypti that leave far behind them the splendor of
veronicas, skulls right in the delirium of dust like the jaboticaba plum
and then right there started up like the loud buzzing of a hornet the
true war of devolution in which all means are justified right there the
passenger pigeons of the conflagration right there the crackling of
secret transmitters and the thick tufts of black smoke that resemble
the vaginal vegetation thrust into the air by rutting loins. I count.
Obstructing the street a honey-colored armillaria lying dwarf-like
on its side a church uprooted and reduced by catastrophe to its
true proportions of a public urinal. I cross over collapsed bridges.
I cross under new arches. Toboggan eye at the bottom of a cheek
amidst woodwinds and well-polished brasses a house abutting an
abyss with in cut-away view the violated virginity of the daughter of
the house the lost goods and chattels of the father and the mother
who believed in the dignity of mankind and in the bottom of a wool
stocking the testicles pierced by a knitting needle of an unemployed
workman from distant lands.
81
I place my hand on my forehead it’s a hatching of monsoons. I place
my hand on my dick. It fainted in leaf smoke. All the deserter light
of the sky has taken refuge in the red white and yellow heated bars
of snakes attentive to the wasting away of this landscape sneered at
by dog piss.
For what?
The planets are very fertile birds that constantly and majestically
disclose their guano silos
the earth on its spit alternatively vomits grease from each of its facets
fistfuls of fish hook their emergency lights to the pilasters of stars
whose ancient slippage crumbles away during the night in a thick very
bitter flavor of coca.
Who among you has never happened to strike an earth because of
its inhabitants’ malice? Today I am standing and in the sole whiteness
that men have never recognized in me.
82
J ose ’ A ntonio M azzotti
Translated from Spanish by:
C layton E shleman
13
Ah throb silver molluscle follow your road *
God’s little animal said Friar Gómez *
The old man knows everything they say
Today he locked us up in his cell
It smelled of roses and tar
But we made love like two nits
And in the name of the Lord he pardoned us
Since then I am a saint
Not like Saint Tiváñez *
But like the Enlightened one
Who writes under the Moon and wastes saliva
Leaving his fingernails on the stalks
His clothes at home
Golden molluscle
Crawl through the brooks
Escape at dawn
Because it cures madness and turns you into a priest
Who learns how to perform miracles
With Orpheus’s paintbrush
And I write I write I write
Like the prisoner marking the walls
So as to count the days
83
G ro D ahle
Translated from Norwegian by:
R ebecca W adlinger
four poems
from
A Hundred Thousand Hours
My Momma. My lips flake for you.
My hands. My ears. You speak to me
through the chairs. Through the liver paste on the table.
You watch me from the milk glass. When I smile,
it stings my lips.
*
Outside the shadows mate on the lawn. Up until the evening
comes and makes all shadows into a body.
Inside, the standing lamp touches the chair’s back. It all trembles. As I
turn out the light, the sofa silently mounts the coffee table. And
the chairs ride each other without a creak.
*
84
—You pachycephalosaurus, I shriek. Civilization’s
shiny buttons are just for show. —You triceratops!
I scream as the bedrock rocks.
Afterwards it becomes so quiet. Then I hear
the crystal chandelier breathing.
*
I hear a knock on the window and run to look. It
is my friend Nobody who goes round the corner of the house.
—Welcome back, I call and lie down on the ground
to listen to the grass sigh. And the wagtail with the
black chest hacks at my wounds. Somewhere in my body
clocks chime.
*
85
A lexei P arshchikov
translated from Russian by:
W ayne C hambliss
Force
Flaring in epithelial darkness, as if bitten
by a rabid, magnetic gesture—
all at once—body, converted to hydrogen
all at once—hydrogen under pressure.
Magnetic pressures, within and without,
the bear hibernates in a lush’s cranium.
When the room starts to spin, the bear rushes out
and deposits itself for a glass of uranium.
You were the augury of the force that poured forth,
gilled and exoskeletal,
too busy with tumors to notice, of course,
numbering myelin fibers of muscles.
Nervous systems of mountains.
The planetoid’s purposeless drift.
Electrochemical contacts. Uncounted
dispersions. Petroleum. Radio bandwidth.
The force itself you recognized: a sharp fillip followed.
Total disjunction. No sound.
In an instant you were atomized, re-gathered. There followed
another fillip. And you found
a pair of old sneakers. A thousand scarred punctures of air.
Cognizant windows slithered like vipers.
And you entered the corridor,
cleft by darkness like a fallen cypress.
86
E va L uka
Translated from Slovak by:
J ames
and
V iera S utherland -S mith
Centaur
The centaur with a mysterious, wild body,
blackened by night music, with the look
of abandoned crows at the end of November, approaches
my house, in his mouth a silver
harmonica. He calls me out, the centaur does, dribbles
glittering spit, winds its threads round the corners
of my autumn dwelling, impatiently
tosses his head and pants behind the windows, a centaur
without time, without the will to wait,
without face.
So many times was I ready
to go out into the garden dusk,
to touch his chest, gaze at his dark profile;
so many times hidden in the heavy folds of the curtains,
did I watch him, how he shook his hips, how
his harmonica cast gleams of starlight
on his thick-haired sex.
Only at the moment I yield myself to the mercy of his arms, am I
covered
by shadows of the strange vaults that accompany him,
after his kiss I feel in my mouth
the taste of ginger and a dreadful forest, from my palm he carefully
bites out a pearl;
I return disordered, without the will
to wait, without time; like an eternal spider
I begin from within to spin around my house
with dark saliva.
87
R ainer M aria R ilke
Translated from German by:
J ohn F elstiner
The Panther
In The Jardin Des Plantes, Paris
His gaze against the sweeping of the bars
has grown so weary, it can hold no more.
To him, there seem to be a thousand bars
and back behind those thousand bars no world.
The soft the supple step and sturdy pace,
that in the smallest of all circles turns,
moves like a dance of strength around a core
in which a mighty will is standing stunned.
Only at times the pupil’s curtain slides
up soundlessly — . An image enters then,
goes through the tensioned stillness of the limbs —
and in the heart ceases to be.
88
O leha L ysheha
Translated from Ukrainian by:
J ames B rasfield
Marten
—You’d better go now and find your daughter..
Likely, she’s run to the woods.. I know
You’re both looking forward so much to my death..
—What are you crying for, she hasn’t gone far..
She’ll wander about and be home soon..
—My heart pains me.. Shouldn’t you leave now?
Hurry, bring back a bit of honey.. Maybe, I’ll get some sleep.
I brought her a spoonful
And placed it on the chair beside her bed.
She was lying with her face turned toward the wall,
Her hair darker now at her temples.
I stood close to her and leaned over:
—Want me to bring you more honey?..
She smiled at someone in her dream.
I stepped out and shut the door—
She’d sent me to the woods to find our daughter..
By now, it was past sunset when one can easily
Lose one’s way.. And as I walked,
Almost everything was slipping from my mind.
My daughter knew herself what best to do
—At ten her young head was a hundred..
No, a thousand times wiser than mine!..
The sun was setting straight above the road,
So low already, that one might simply
Enter it unafraid..
Some say a sunset cures a heart..
Yet that immense old heart never forgets
Our small, whining souls..
But one ought to give him a sign:
89
—Here I am.. already nearing..
But closer still, the forest
Overshadowed even the sun.
At that moment all roads seemed to lead there..
I may have had no right to turn that way
When each of my steps by then had been counted,
And to step into the shadow, then leave.. Wouldn’t take long..
Surely, they waited for me back there, where I departed..
And already I was stretching out my arm
As if to enter gradually and feel
How a shadow draws into itself a thin, bare arm..
Then suddenly little by little a bit farther off
A man walked out.. He wasn’t barefoot,
But he was quiet as a sleepwalker
With eyes open..
Amazed, I stood behind a tree and watched him pass.
He was sullen, dark, and stooped,
Covered with rust-colored stains.. No doubt
The forest had been dragging humbly behind him,
Who for a long time had been saying goodbye and stopped at last..
I touched the knife in my pocket
And only then did I step
Deeper into the shadow.. But who knows..
I hoped we wouldn’t see each other.. Yet
One might return home for just a little while..
Soon he might come back,
Then one must put the other off the scent,
Or else one of us won’t be returning..
And in the faint light, a thin knot of pale grass,
Thinner than the sedge under my bare feet,
Swayed over the nearly blue-black soil of the path,
Where a thick, half-chewed stem
Of fresh garlic lay, a drop of saliva still on it..
Its five, long leaves pressed
90
Deeply into a large footprint..
What did it mean, that half-chewed spit-out hand..
A sign of no way out?..
I looked up—a few steps by the path,
Hovering there was a heap
Of fresh pine branches..
Maybe their sharp smell had led me that far in
To the thick darkness of the woods..
Under the branches a tree trunk gave way at my touch,
My fingers fumbling down through the wood—
Oh well, but the branches seemed so fresh,
Altogether out of place, perhaps just to cover
That ancient, rotten pine that might otherwise be glowing,
Warmed by one’s breath in the darkest night,
A den gleaming under fat, paw-like branches..
All at once it seemed to lift itself and sigh,
Then lower itself and sigh again,
Alive, this jumbled heap of pine needles
Thrown quietly over the tree..
I waited in the deep shadow
A long time, but saw no one coming back..
Had permission for that make-shift shelter
Been given tacitly to another,
A still more disquieted soul?
Nonetheless someone would take my place,
Adopt here the warm air still in my body..
But where then might I find myself ?..
And who would just nod from there, gesturing to me?
High in the clear sky, treetops shimmered,
Unmoved, waiting,
Swaddling that heaven-like road
With the softest shoots from the branches,
Such a serene radiance..
91
And there, high overhead I saw in that instant
A marten returning home,
A large, dark body between her teeth,
Something larger than herself that she dragged along,
Dangling like a wet sack
Swinging against her breasts..
She was hurrying, unable to descend,
And arching her back, was leaping,
Leaping from one branch to another,
Each time deeper in and higher, lighting
On the waves of supple foliage
Darkening, sprinkled with dew,
She and her prey,
Like an offering heaving with blood,
Shielding her from the world..
I was deep below.
There at once with her desperate leaps
She was drawing me in,
As though drawing me deeper into earth..
Each leap conceived
So purposefully, so violently,
That no other way for her was possible,
And faster: She was merging with the sun,
Her long leaps tracing a route
Reminding her of her prey,
A sacrifice to the sun..
What was accompanying her? —Some large bird
That knew the way, straight up there,
Yet couldn’t fly?..
And for what was such a sacrifice to the sun—
For all of us?.. For my portion of time
Wasted in darkness?..
Clearly, I’d gone too far
92
And had lost the trail.. Or was it
Too soon for my bare feet to turn back?..
But then there seemed to be
A scent of smoke from a nearby house..
I followed that smell,
But such a strange smell—I had lost my way..
I came to backyards of a forest village..
Its empty streets cut through the woods..
Somewhere far in among the trees, a radio’s faint echo..
A crow called out.. Through low-hanging smoke
I came to windowless houses
And rusted tin roofs,
Iron fences around everything..
Yet I dared not enter anywhere.
That smoldering life was so different..
Near the far edge of the woods, by the last house
Leading straight into the forest, a woman was rocking,
Half woman, half child,
She wasn’t easy to see, so far away..
Her long skirt, a light scarlet spot
Up from the ground, was floating,
Turning on a rope swing,
And there too was a small child running, laughing,
Trying to catch the swing to stop her,
Then the child disappeared
And among the trees, evening entered the forest,
But the woman kept swinging
Slowly, swaying on and on...
I turned back
Then broke into a dead run
And ran and ran, stumbling on..
I found myself outside the forest
And embraced the last tree..
And then I saw a man approaching
93
94
Gradually, that sleepwalker
I passed upon entering..
He seemed to be searching for someone,
And staggering as if drunk
Or stunned by a heavy blow,
His arms spread wide,
One hand swaying as if raking the ground behind him
While above his head the other was lifted,
And from it I felt a knife..
A mal
al -J ubouri
Translated from Arabic by
R ebecca G ayle H owell
with
H usam Q aisi
My Soul Before the Occupation
was buried alive in the grave of exile
carried the savior in a barren womb
95
A mal
al -J ubouri
Translated from Arabic by
R ebecca G ayle H owell
with
H usam Q aisi
My Soul After the Occupation
escapes behind the walls of the Green Zone
that canopy sky, that stockade for regret
I hide my exhaustion, my yellowing blood
from my children’s cries my husband’s caress
97
J ulia S tory
Red Town #6
sir is a kind of person
I feel like a person today
birds spinning sky permanent
& lickable even feelings
eeking out a living
working backward from
a smoking oven
I guess how to walk
the twigs underneath
twigs under everything
the baby bison chewing
grass the mouse skipping
over the surface of
landscape technicolor
sea of prairie the church door
locked & a woodchuck
stuck to my hand
he is inside still &
I got out & I’m the last
one here a kind
99
of person a name
walking around
calling the things what they are
100
P imone T riplett
Money Talks at the Beaux Arts
Hotel
Got here at last like the others, agog.
Only to find how up close fat and personal,
I am these days, astrut in the gilded era. Here love cracks
open coffers, making me quite round,
you see, and the domed ceiling, like no
other in the world, is upended, suspended, painted fresh
as the front of an infant’s mind. They tell me
I took pains, dripping the tiffany torch lady into her bulby clusters,
setting this mirror-boweled lobby alit,
but I can’t say I recall. She was modeled
on dear Clio, no doubt. That girl, half
slattern, half muse of chronicles, her mouth
a happy diversion, when it wasn’t
simply ablab. Her skirts waltzed
white black black white when she walked,
carefully-repaired, of course, as a Turkish
tapestry, beckoning here, no there, no, both.
As for her bright, telegraphic
nubs, that bronzed hubbub
stutter-stepping matter once again,
it was like each peplum of her hips’ swing:
101
a bit gruesome, but upand-doingly so, endearing, oafish.
Always leading men’s attentions upstairs,
she was, to the close room’s tang
of carpet dust, ammonia, wet cigar.
I suppose any shelter comes with its own
occlusions, including myself. Out beyond
all this, past the boys shouting
telegrams and money, the carriages
meant for better passengers
still hiccup past my bronzed lions,
and at my entrance, a new current
eddies clockwise or counter in wind,
a veil of dirt at the edge of thought.
A hunter rises in night sky. It’s true I have
some fever; what, has not declared itself.
.
102
J oseph W ood
From The Vyvanse Triolets
XIII.
A verb is born—and will leave—my tongue
is not the subject. I’m an idiot—I mistook
ought to’s as is­. Thing about the old days: one
verb tense—will­—begets and leaves the tongue
wanting—what?—an eternal set of whale lungs
large enough to suck the night—by that brook
a fawn is born into a leaf bed. Its thin tongue
subject and verb—an id it’s not—no mistake.
103
A my G erstler
Prehistoric Porn Film
peaty clobbered meaty reek
thighs sticky, leakage streaked
matted fur (she has fleas)
sniffing/licks nuzzle/shove
scarred hides, pine bark rough
twigcrack, muzzle cuff
kicking, pinned down, legs entwining
mulchscuffle, bitemarks, whining
(his hair stinks of burnt dirt)
spectral whiffs of afterbirth
rubbing crux, muddy plunge
scabby itchy grubby scrunge
genitals’ wild dialect
dizzy sopping intersect
changing forms: tusks and horns
and beaks are seen at seizure’s peak
jerking squirt, quickly spent
(kissing’s not invented yet)
104
E ric K ocher
When Your Loss Arrives on the
Beach like a Whale
I.
The long upward slope of the continent
doesn’t seem at all unfamiliar,
even when the glistening skin of your
back rises for the last time above
the surface of the water and the barnacles
that have attached themselves
to your ventral side scrape hard along
the bottom—for even they seem to know
when it is too late—you continue to move forward.
And when you are lying there
on the beach, collapsing under the burden
of your own incredible weight,
you feel betrayed by whatever it was
that led you here, whatever current,
whatever instinct you trusted, however
it was the coastline seemed
not at all like the end of an ocean,
but as if it were the extension of one,
105
the possibility that things might go on
forever, and only to arrive
there on the shore, unable to move,
and find out that they do.
II.
Often, after the hours of digging and pushing,
after being stranded for so long and so close
to the water, many will return, only hours later,
to that same beach and insist on dying there,
and everyone who was digging goes home
feeling helpless and stupid for having believed
with so much of their bodies in being able
to give and give back. And it’s hard not to try
to understand, to imagine that one might actually
be sad, or alone, or lost, that one could make
the choice to live no longer and then somehow,
also, to arrive. To arrive home, as in, to get there,
to walk up to the door and stand in front of it
waiting but who knows, really, for what, to turn
and walk away down whatever road is available,
to keep walking and then to never go back. Or
was the door already opened? Did everything
seem heavy and slow? Like there was only
106
to give in and nothing else. Like everything
until this moment was suffering and the only
thing left to do was to go back in the morning
and push the big dead thing back out to sea,
and then, after it had disappeared, to understand
how things go missing, to try to follow it there.
107
R obert F itterman
from
HOLOCAUST MUSEUM
This space and time peculiar to the image is none
other than the world of magic, a world in which
everything is repeated and in which everything
participates in a significant context.
Such a
world is structurally different from that of
the linear world of history in which nothing is
repeated and in which everything has causes
and will have consequences.
-Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy
of Photography
Family Photographs*
Prof. Elster poses with his students at the Furstenberg Gymnasium in
Bedzin. [Photograph #16586]
The Tichauer family poses for a family photo in the German
countryside. [Photograph #57762]
Several Jewish families who are celebrating the holiday of Hanukkah
together, pose outside a wooden house in Eisiskes. [Photograph
#39001]
A group of friends goes sledding in the shtetl. [Photograph #39090]
108
Group portrait of members of the Hashomer Hadati Zionist youth
organization on an outing in the woods. [Photograph #05141]
Prewar portrait of the Kaufman family of Bedzin. [Photograph
#57905]
A German-Jewish family poses outdoors for a family portrait with
their dog. [Photograph #69297]
Members of five Jewish refugee families look out from the windows
of their adjoining apartments. [Photograph #24721]
A group of young people in Eisiskes. [Photograph #39164]
A group of young people pose outdoors in the snow. [Photograph
#39631]
Portrait of the extended Szwajcer family in Czerna, Poland.
[Photograph #25051]
The first grade class photo of the first coeductional Hebrew day
school in Eisiskes. [Photograph #39141]
A Saturday night party at the home of Dina Weidenberg.
[Photograph #39262]
Children from the Hebrew School work in the school’s garden in
preparation for immigration to Palestine. [Photograph #38940]
109
Young women sew in the workshop of master seamstress, Rochel
Szulkin. [Photograph #42288]
A meeting of the leadership of Hehalutz Hamizrachi in Eisiskes.
[Photograph #39509]
Prewar photograph of an extended Jewish family in Krakow gathered
around a table for a family celebration. [Photograph #74921]
Group portrait of the Ovici family, a family of Jewish dwarf
entertainers who survived Auschwitz. [Photograph #59966]
Family portrait of the Brandt family. [Photograph #21997]
Group portrait of Jewish youth in the Dabrowa Gornicza ghetto.
[Photograph #07131]
Fourth grade class picture. [Photograph #40640]
110
K en W alker
After This Second Season
for
Freddie’s, no longer at 6 Ave. & Dean St.
Katie called them “giraffes” because at night, on a few, well,
that’s what they look like. Electronic long necks out somewhere
toward Sandy Hook persuading the backlights on our rooftops. But,
we couldn’t quite figure what the “giraffes” ate, never knew you
murdered the grain pier.
Assume: cocaine has to hover in a price range, that
Hungarian women have to be stretched out like lamb on some hotel
bed for some senator, that none of this can halt the bigger rotation,
that your yachts need a safe place to dock and drink what laps
beneath them. And the hunt’s not over. Who killed you? In fact, the
free ferries, sober enjoyment, or the interviews we never had—ask
me any question and I’ll lie to you for the lack of this state check—
the promise that we’ll wear our backs on our shirts and speak some
other language but you won’t recognize the words. Like anyone else,
we’d rather be at the bar you knocked down so your professional
basketball game could be that much cheaper.
111
M att H art
We’re Off To The Witch
All the signs point to brutal. We may never
never never come home, but maybe that’s only
because we’re already there, and the house
looks like two eyes from the East with some teeth
on a mountain, or it looks like the place I left
this morning—kind of a wreck and the dishes
aren’t done, but they’ll get done tonight, and I’ll
pick up all my sweaters off the floor. I’ll wash
some clothes. The place we have to hang our heads
is also the place where we hang in the balance.
The scariest star spits, and the door mostly glows.
What I want is for the orange cushions on the couch
to move over and for you to sit down in the space
now an absence, the squirrels and the rabbits
in the flowerbeds amok. I don’t know why
I thought of that or of you sitting there, and how
It got mixed up with all the animals and muckiness,
but often it’s helpful to imagine what one wants,
no matter how that happens and regardless
of the interference. Clearly, I want you here beside me
where I falter, whether that’s home or whether it’s not.
The important thing’s knowing that the sun’s coming up
and going down with some frequency, and things
are in alignment, because there aren’t many facts
112
that I believe without blinking. This is the place
through which our hearts pass a lifetime.
We have some raspberries, and the furnace is working,
which is great since it’s cold. I could use something sweet.
The shriek in the ceiling, both a maze and amazed.
Looking out together is always better than never.
113
114
A. James Arnold is the author of Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry
and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Harvard, 1981), the editor of Césaire’s Lyric
and Dramatic Poetry, 1946-82 (Virginia, 1990), translated by Clayton
Eshleman and Annette Smith, and the lead editor of the Paris edition
of Césaire’s literary works (in progress). Clayton Eshleman is the cotranslator (with Annette Smith) of Césaire’s Collected Poetry (California,
1983) and his Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946-82. In 2001 Wesleyan
University Press published a revised edition of his co-translation of
Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.
Aaron Belz has published two books of poetry, The Bird Hoverer
(BlazeVOX 2007) and Lovely, Raspberry (Persea Books, 2010), both
of which have been well-received. John Ashbery writes, “Belz’s
poetry reminds us that poetry should be bright, friendly, surprising,
and totally committed to everything but itself. Reading him is like
dreaming of a summer vacation and then taking it.” For links to
poems, reviews, tour dates, and other information please visit http://
belz.net
Aimé Césaire (1913-2008), a member of the French Chamber of
Deputies from Martinique for nearly half a century, was a forceful
voice for decolonization in the 1950s. Following decolonization in
Africa he authored three plays that were critical of the direction
taken by the first generation of post-independence leaders. During
the second world war, however, and into the early 1950s Césaire
developed a radical poetics that adapted the techniques of surrealism
to an exploration of the colonized mind. The explosive poetry he
produced during that decade culminated in Solar Throat Slashed (Soleil
cou coupé) in 1948. This collection was subsequently bowdlerized by
the poet in the interests of his political agenda. The translators of
the Wesleyan University Press bilingual edition have restored the
collection to its original form, which has never been seen in English.
Alexei Parshchikov was born in 1954, near Vladivostok. He is
regarded as the major figure of the Metametaphorism movement.
In the last two decades, his work has been translated into fifteen
languages. His publications in English include Blue Vitriol, translated
by Michael Palmer, Michael Molnar and John High (Avec Books,
1994). He died in 2009.
Amal al-Jubouri was born in Baghdad. After studying English
language and literature she went to work for Iraqi television, where
she produced her own culture program. She also worked as a literary
translator and started a publishing house for literature.
Amy Gerstler is a writer living in Los Angeles. Her most recent book
of poems is Dearest Creature. She teaches at the Bennington Writing
Seminars at Bennington College, in the MPW program at USC and at
Art Center College of Design.
Amy Lawless is author of Noctis Licentia (Black Maze Books, 2008)
and a pamphlet of four poems from Greying Ghost Press (2011).
Her poems have most recently appeared in No, Dear, LIT, and Leveler.
Sometimes she blogs for Best American Poetry and at amylawless.
blogspot.com. She is from Boston, but lives in Brooklyn.
Ben Mirov was born in Northern California . He is the author
of Ghost Machine (Caketrain, 2010) and the chapbooks Vortexts
(SUPERMACHINE, 2011) I is to Vorticism (New Michigan Press,
2010) Collected Ghost (H_NGM_N, 2010). He is editor-in-chief of
LIT Magazine and general editor of pax americana.
Cal Bedient’s most recent book of poems is Days of Unwilling
(Saturnalia Books, 2008). He is a co-editor of the New California
Poetry Series and of Lana Turner: a Journal of Poetry & Opinion.
Clayton Eshleman’s most recent publications include a translation
of The Complete Poetry of Cesar Vallejo (University of California Press,
2007), The Grindstone of Rapport / A Clayton Eshleman Reader (Black
Widow Press, 2008) and Anticline (Black Widow Press, 2010). Black
Widow has recently published his translation of Bernard Bador’s
Curdled Skulls and will bring out his co-translation with Lucas Klein
of Bei Dao’s Endure in April 2011. In May 2011 Wesleyan University
Press will publish his co-translation with A. James Arnold of the
unexpurgated 1948 edition of Aime Cesaire’s Solar Throat Slashed.
Eshleman, a professor emeritus at Eastern Michigan University,
continues to live in Ypsilanti with his wife Caryl.
Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of Brenda Is in the Room, Cradle
Book and the forthcoming To Keep Love Blurry. He is a vice president
on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.
D.A. Powell’s most recent book is Chronic (Graywolf, 2009). He is
the McGee Visiting Writer at Davidson College in North Carolina.
Donald Revell is the author of eleven collections of poetry, most
recently of The Bitter Withy (2009) and A Thief of Strings (2007), both
from Alice James Books. Winner of the 2004 Lenore Marshall Award
and two-time winner of the PEN Center USA Award in poetry,
Revell has also received the Gertrude Stein Award, two Shestack
Prizes, two Pushcart Prizes, a PEN USA Award for Translation, and
fellowships from the NEA as well as from the Ingram Merrill and
Guggenheim Foundations. He is also the author of four volumes
of translation: Rimbaud’s The Illuminations (Omnidawn, 2009) and
A Season in Hell (Omnidawn, 2007), Apollinaire’s Alcools (Wesleyan,
1995) and The Self-Dismembered Man: Selected Later Poems of Guillaume
Apollinaire (Wesleyan, 2004). Revell’s critical writings include Invisible
Green: Selected Prose (Omnidawn, 2005) and The Art of Attention: A
Poet’s Eye (Graywolf, 2007). He lives with his wife, poet Claudia
Keelan, and their two children in the desert south of Las Vegas and is
a Professor of English and Creative Writing Director at UNLV.
Eric Kocher is currently pursuing his MFA at the University
of Houston. Some of his work has previously appeared or is
forthcoming in Boston Review, DIAGRAM, H_NGM_N, New York
Quarterly, Octopus, and Third Coast.
Eva Lukacová was born in 1965 in Trnava in Slovakia. She studied
English and Japanese at Comenius University in Bratislava and later
Japanese language and literature at Hokkaido University and Osaka
University gaining her doctorate there in 2002. Her first collection
“Divosestra” (1999) gained a number of prestigious literary prizes
including the Ivan Krasko Prize and the Maša Hal‘amová Prize.
A second collection, Diablon, in which Centaur appears, was published
in 2005 and her thjird collection, Havranjel, will be published this year.
Following the award of her doctorate Eva Lukacová lived with her
partner in Catalonia, but in the summer of the 2009 she witnessed
the murder of her partner at their home. She returned to Slovakia
and now lives and works in Trnava as a university professor.
Fritz Ward’s poems have appeared in more than sixty publications,
including American Letters & Commentary, Another Chicago Magazine,
Blackbird, and Hotel Amerika. He is a recipient of the Cecil Hemley
Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and was
included in Best New Poets 2007 (University of Virginia Press,
2007). His manuscript, Let Her, was recently a semi-finalist for the
Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Prize. His chapbook,
Doppelganged, is forthcoming from Blue Hour Press. He currently lives
in Philadelphia and works at Swarthmore College.
Gary Jackson is the winner of the 2009 Cave Canem Poetry Prize
for his first book Missing You, Metropolis. He was born and raised
in Topeka, Kansas, and received his Master of Fine Arts degree in
poetry from the University of New Mexico in 2008. His poems have
appeared in The Laurel Review, Blue Mesa Review, Iron Horse, Literary
Bohemian, Inscape, Magma, and he has been nominated for a 2010
Pushcart Prize. He has been a fierce lover of comics for nearly twenty
years.
Gro Dahle has written over 30 books in different genres, including
poetry and children’s books. Born in Oslo in 1962, Dahle lives and
works on the island of Tjøme. Her collection Hundre tusen timer (A
Hundred Thousand Hours) was released from Norwegian publisher
Cappelen Damm in 1996.
James Brasfield, author of the collection of poems Ledger of
Crossroads (LSU Press), has received awards in translation from the
American Association for Ukrainian Studies, the PEN American
Center, and Pushcart Press.
Jeannie Hoag’s as yet unnamed chapbook is forthcoming from
Agnes Fox Press. Her work is forthcoming or published from NOO
Journal, Invisible Ear, and Seeing Other People. She served as managing
editor for Slope Editions and now works at the Poetry Collection at the
University of Buffalo.
Jennifer Denrow has two chapbooks: A Knee for a Life (Horse Less
Press, 2010) and From California, On (Brave Men Press, 2010). Her
first book, California, is available from Four Way Books.
Jillian Weise is the author of the poetry collection The Amputee’s
Guide to Sex and the novel The Colony. Her essay, “Going Cyborg,”
appeared in The New York Times.
John Felstiner wrote The Lies of Art: Max Beerbohm’s Parody and
Caricature, Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu, and Paul Celan:
Poet, Survivor, Jew. He edited and translated Selected Poems and Prose
of Paul Celan, and co-edited the Norton anthology Jewish American
Literature. Can Poetry Save the Earth? / A Field Guide to Nature Poems is
now out in paperback.
José Antonio Mazzotti appeared in the Peruvian literary scene in
1980, when he received the first prize in a national poetry contest
organized by the University of San Marcos in Lima, for his first
book, Poemas no recogidos en libro, published in 1981. He is a member of
the so-called “Peruvian 1980s generation,” a group of writers marked
by the political violence and the dramatic migratory process that
the country lived during those years. He published his second book,
Fierro curvo (órbita poética), in 1985, and his third book, Castillo de popa,
in 1988. He has also published El libro de las auroras boreales (Amherst,
1995), Señora de la noche (México, 1998), El zorro y la luna: antología
poética 1981-1999 (Lima, 1999), Sakra Boccata (28 poemas) (México,
2006; Lima, 2007), and Las flores del Mall (Lima, 2009). He resides in
the United States since 1988, and currently is a Professor of Latin
American literature at Tufts University, Boston.
Joseph P. Wood is the author of two books of poetry, Fold of the
Map (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming) and I & We (CW Books). He’s
also the author of five chapbooks and has recently published poems
in Bomb, Boston Review, diode, Hotel Amerika, Verse, among others. He
teaches at The University of Alabama and lives in Tuscaloosa with
his wife and daughter.
Julia Story’s first collection, Post Moxie, was the recipient of
Sarabande Books’ 2009 Kathryn A. Morton Prize and Ploughshares’
2010 John C. Zacharis First Book Award, and was named one
of Coldfront’s Top 30 Poetry Books of 2010. Her recent work has
appeared in The Paris Review, Octopus, and Salt Hill. A native of
Indiana, she now lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Julianne Buchsbaum is the author of Slowly, Slowly, Horses (Ausable
Press, 2001) and A Little Night Comes (Del Sol Press, 2005). She lives
and works in Lawrence, Kansas.
Karen Weiser is the author of To Light Out (Ugly Duckling Presse,
2010). She is a doctoral candidate studying early American literature
in New York City and has just had her second child.
Ken L. Walker still has a Kentucky driver’s license and sadly
completed leading a poetry workshop at the Riker’s Island
Correctional Facility. He received his MFA degree from Brooklyn
College and has published criticism and poetry in the Boxcar, the
Poetry Project Newsletter, The New Yorker on-line, Lumberyard, The Wolf,
Crab Orchard Review. He is the features editor for Coldfront magazine
and curates the semi-annual Letter Home Reading Series.
Kyle McCord’s book Galley of the Beloved in Torment was the winner
of the 2008 Orphic Prize and was released by Dream Horse Press
in the spring. He has work forthcoming or published from Boston
Review, Columbia: a Journal of Art and Literature, Cream City Review, Gulf
Coast, Painted Bride Quarterly, and elsewhere. He’s worked for The Beloit
Poetry Journal, jubilat, and The Nation.
Leigh Stein is the author of four chapbooks of poetry and one
novel, The Fallback Plan (Melville House, 2012). Her work has
also appeared in Best of the Web 2010 (Dzanc Books). She lives in
Brooklyn, where she curates the Poets & Puppets reading series, and
teaches drama to children.
Matt Bialer is a literary agent at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates.
In addition, he does black and white street photography and has
work in the permanent collections of The Brooklyn Museum,
The Museum of the City of New York and The New York Public
Library. A book of his New York photographs entitled More Than
You Know was published by Les Editions du Zaporogue (www.lulu.
com) in 2011. In addition, Matt’s landscape paintings are featured
in two books: Best of America Watermedia II and Best of Worldwide
Landscape (Kennedy Publishing). His poems have appeared in or are
forthcoming from Green Mountains Review, H_NGM_N, Forklift Ohio,
BLIP, Scripts, Retort Magazine, Le Zaporogue. Stanza Press in the UK will
publish his first collection entitled Tell Them What I Saw.
www.mattbialer.com
Matt Hart’s most recent books of poems are Wolf Face (H_
NGM_N BKS, 2010) and Light-Headed (BlazeVOX, 2011). A new
book, Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless, will be published
next year by Typecast Publishing. A co-founder and the editor-inchief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial
Safety, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of
Cincinnati.
Matthew Lippman’s new collection of poetry, Monkey Bars, is
published by Typecast Publishing. His first collection, The New Year
of Yellow, won the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize, and is published
by Sarabande Books. He teaches at high school students at Beaver
Country Day School and lives with this family in the greater Boston
Area.
Miranda Field’s first book, Swallow (Houghton Mifflin, 2002), won a
Bakeless Literary Publication Award. Her work appears in numerous
journals, and several anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers:
American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande), and Not for Mothers
Only (Fence Books), and has been awarded a Discovery Award, and
a Pushcart Prize. Born and raised in the UK, she lives in Manhattan
with her husband, poet Tom Thompson, and their two sons. She
currently teaches poetry workshops at NYU and The New School. Visit her website at www.mirandafield.com.
Noelle Koct is the author of five books of poetry, including Poem
for the End of Time and Other Poems (Wave Books, 2006), Sunny
Wednesday (Wave, 2009) and The Bigger World (Wave, 2011). She is
also the author of a discography, Damon’s Room (Wave, 2010). She
has received numerous awards for her work, including those from
The Academy of American Poets, The American Poetry Review, The
Fund for Poetry and The National Endowment for the Arts. Born
and raised in Brooklyn, she lives in New Jersey.
Oleh Lysheha is one of Ukraine’s greatest living poets. His books
include Great Bridge; To Fire and Snow; A Different Format; Friend Li Po,
Brother Tu Fu; and Selected Poems, which received the PEN Award for
Poetry in Translation. He lives in Lviv Ukraine.
Paul Celan was born in 1920 in the East European province of
Bukovina. Soon after his parents, German-speaking Jews, had
perished at the hands of the Nazis. Celan himself was interned
for eighteen months before escaping to the Red Army. Celan’s first
book was published in 1947; it received very little critical attention.
His second book, Mohn und Gedaechtnis (Poppy and Memory), however,
garnered tremendous acclaim. In 1959, Celan took a job as a reader
in German Language and Literature at L’École Normal Superieure
of the University of Paris, a position he would hold until his death in
1970. In 1960 he received a Georg Buchner Prize. During the 1960s
he published more than six books of poetry and gained international
fame. In addition to his own poems, he remained active as a
translator, bringing out works from writers such as Henri Michaux,
Osip Mandelstam, Rene Char, Paul Valéry, and Fernando Pessoa. He
is regarded as one of the most important poets to emerge from postWorld War II Europe.
Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern
Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen’s University
of Belfast. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and
television producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Since
1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard
G.B. Clark ’21 Professor at Princeton University and Founding Chair
of the Lewis Center for the Arts. Between 1999 and 2004 he was
Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. In 2007 he was
appointed poetry editor of The New Yorker. Paul Muldoon’s main
collections of poetry are New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why
Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc:
A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 19681998 (2001), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Horse Latitudes (2006) and
Maggot (2010).
Pimone Triplett is an associate professor at the University of
Washington, where she is currently the director of MFA Program in
Creative Writing. The author of three books of poems, Rumor (2009),
The Price of Light (2005) and Ruining the Picture (1998), Pimone Triplett
is also coeditor, with Dan Tobin, of the essay anthology, Poet’s Work,
Poet’s Play (2008). She lives in Seattle with her husband and son.
Rebecca Gayle Howell’s poems and translations have appeared in
or are forthcoming from such journals as Ecotone, The Massachusetts
Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Poetry Daily, and her documentary
work has been collected in the anthology Plundering Appalachia
(EarthWise) and in This is Home Now: Kentucky’s Holocaust Survivors
Speak (University Press of Kentucky). She is also the author of The
Hatchet Buddha, a ltd. edition chapbook by Larkspur Press and the
translator of Amal al-Jubouri’s Hagar Before the Occupation/Hagar After
the Occupation, forthcoming from Alice James Books. Currently, she is
a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA.
Rebecca Wadlinger is a doctoral candidate in poetry at the
University of Houston. She works as the managing editor of Gulf
Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts.
Robert Fitterman is the author of 12 books of poetry. Recent
titles include: now we are friends (Truck Books), Rob the Plagiarist (Roof
Books), and Notes On Conceptualisms, co-authored with Vanessa Place
(Ugly Duckling Presse). He teaches writing and poetry at New York
University and at the Bard College, Milton Avery School of Graduate
Studies.
Sandra Meek is the author of three books of poems, Biogeography,
winner of the Dorset Prize (Tupelo 2008), Burn (2005), and Nomadic
Foundations (2002). Her fourth book of poems, Road Scatter, is
forthcoming from Persea Books in 2012. She is also the editor of an
anthology, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad (Ninebark
2007), which was awarded a 2008 Independent Publisher Book
Award Gold Medal. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry
Review, Agni, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, Conjunctions,
and The Iowa Review, among others. A recipient of a 2011 National
Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, she has twice been
awarded Georgia Author of the Year, in 2006 for Burn, and in 2003
for Nomadic Foundations, which also was awarded the Peace Corps
Writers Award in Poetry. Meek served as a Peace Corps volunteer
in Manyana, Botswana, 1989-1991. She is a Co-founding Editor
of Ninebark Press, Director of the Georgia Poetry Circuit, Poetry
Editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum, and Professor of English,
Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College.
Sebastian Tumultuous lives in Worcester, Massachusetts. His work
is slowly being archived on the internet by cartoonist/musician Sam
Gaskin at http://secretcuts.blogspot.com/
Shane McCrae is the author of Mule (Cleveland State University
Poetry Center, 2011), and two chapbooks, One Neither One (Octopus
Books, 2009) and In Canaan (Rescue Press, 2010). His work has
appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Best American Poetry 2010, Fence,
Agni, Denver Quarterly, Typo, Paperbag and others. He lives in Iowa City.
Steve Healey is the author of two poetry books, 10 Mississippi and
Earthling, both on Coffee House Press.
Suzanne Wise is the author of the poetry collection The Kingdom
of the Subjunctive. Her poetry also appears in the anthology Legitimate
Dangers: American Poets of the New Century and, more recently, in the
journals Bone Bouquet, Guernica, Green Mountains Review, Quarter After
Eight, and American Letters and Commentary.
Viera and James Sutherland-Smith: Viera was born in 1958 in
Prešov, Slovakia and James was born 1948 in Aberdeen, Scotland.
They both live and work from Slovakia. They have translated over
one hundred Slovak poets into English including the first anthology
of contemporary Slovak poetry in English, Not Waiting For Miracles
(Modry Peter, 1993). Individual collections from Slovak poets have
been published in Canada, Great Britain and the USA, most notably
from Ivan LauCík, Cranberry in Ice (Modry Peter, 2001), from Mila
Haugová, Scent of the Unseen (Arc, 2003) and from Milan Rúfus, And
That’s the Truth! (Carducci-Bolchazy, 2005). James has also worked
with Serbian translators on the poetry of Miodrag Pavlovic and Ivana
Milankova.
Wayne Chambliss was born in 1973. His translations of Russian
and Italian poetry have been anthologized in New European Poets
(Graywolf Press, 2008), the FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry
(FSG, forthcoming), and The Disappearing Pheasant: An Anthology
of Italian Poetry 1950-2000 (Agincourt, forthcoming). He lives in
Portland, OR.
Wendy Xu is a graduate of the University of Iowa, and will be
an MFA candidate in poetry at UMass-Amherst this fall. Recently
selected by D.A. Powell as the winner of the 2011 Patricia Goedicke
Prize in Poetry, her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming
from CutBank, Pismire, Drunken Boat, PANK, Coal Hill Review and
others. She is the co-founder and co-editor of iO: A Journal of New
American Poetry and maintains a collaborative book-review blog at
readthisawesomebook.blogspot.com.
Yehuda Amichai was born in Wurzburg, Germany, in 1924 and
emigrated with his family to Palestine in 1936. He later became a
naturalized Israeli citizen. Although German was his native language,
Amichai read Hebrew fluently by the time he moved to Palestine. He
served in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army in World War II and
fought with the Israeli defense forces in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
Following the war, he attended Hebrew University to study Biblical
texts and Hebrew literature, and then taught in secondary schools.
Amichai has published eleven volumes of poetry in Hebrew, two
novels, and a book of short stories. His work has been translated into
thirty-seven languages. In 1982, Amichai received the Israel Prize for
Poetry and he became a foreign honorary member of the American
Academy of Arts and Letters in 1986. He lived in Jerusalem until his
death on September 25, 2000.