Review of Casualty Reports by Martha Collins

November 2, 2022 Brooke Palma

Casualty Reports

University of Pittsburgh Press

$18.00

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider

In a world that doesn’t stop spinning amidst cycles of news (violence.loss.violence.loss) that don’t stop churning, sometimes memory is all we have. Both an anchor and a source of well-documented, research-based action, Casualty Reports grounds while simultaneously promoting change. The collection is both historical and future focused. The work prompts moments of pause amidst constant punctures of news (loss.violence.loss.violence). In a five-part collection that cycles through time, location, eras, and compounded casualties, Collins carves out space to reflect on the past and provides a toolbox that inspire future change.

I first read the collection about a week after the passing of Loretta Lynn. The film, Coal Miner’s Daughter, was still fresh in my mind. In a 2000 interview, Loretta Lynn said "I didn't think anybody'd be interested in my life". Lynn continued, "I know everybody's got a life, and they all have something to say. Everybody has a story about their life. It wasn't just me. I guess I was just the one that told it."

While Lynn may have been surprised at the interest others had in her life (Coal Miner’s Daughter was a hit, reaching number one on the Billboard country chart), she knew everybody has a story. In Casualty Reports, Martha Collins gives voice to stories too often silenced. She does so in varied forms, with a mix of stylistic variations that both personalize and distinguish the collection. Collins engages in story and takes on social issues across time and topic. Pieces offer commentary on coal mining (the collection’s two-part Legacy pieces), as well as gun violence, war, racism, and other social ills and ails.

Pieces are expertly researched and carefully detailed. From “first European sightings of coal” (A History of American Coal Through the Lens of Illinois 7) to the moment “when all the coal in the mine where it works will be exhausted” (Now That’s Big 37), the poems inform (resist urges to conform) and engage (sometimes enrage). The collection laments loss (physical, personal, emotional, geological) and, somehow amidst the plentiful layers of such loss, leaves readers hopeful that, perhaps, there is still time and a way to change the course of the future.

Often referred to as a “premiere lyricist”, Loretta Lynn “wasn’t afraid to … write about what she truly felt” (Vaughn 2022). Nor is Collins. Like Lynn’s lyrics, Collins’s words linger – in layers of Legacy (Parts I and III), Reports (Parts II and IV), “And Also” (Part V). Collins, like a coal miner’s daughter, crafts a revealing narrative on the history of coal while also mining a collection that moves far beyond coal and remains grounded in love and a commitment to the pursuit of justice for those we love.

My father’s father’s father owned the
had a share in the Enterprise mine the
Enterprise Coal & Coke Company 1871”
”(In Illinois”)

driving home from the grocery store with his girlfriend facing the cop with his hands up, stop don’t shoot
(“Four”)

In the child’s book, on the same page, it’s bedtime in one house, breakfast time in another. Stars here, sun there. There’s more and then there’s less again. Then more, if not so much. Not the end.
(“And Bright Stars”)

Collins pulls back curtains, layers language in a variety of compass directions, and reveals interactions, experiences, and sentiments that are sometimes infrequently recalled. The work, completed shortly before the first death due to COVID-19 occurred in the United States and dedicated (in part) to the virus’s many casualties, is simultaneously reflective and forward-focused. In addition to COVID-19, Collins dedicates the work “to the casualties of racism inflicted by the police and others; in the United States and throughout the world” as well as to the memory of her father, William E. Collins, and her friend, Lee Sharkey.

Just as memorable as the narratives are Collins’s careful research and varied use of space. All aspects of the collection are infused with both intentionality and originality. Many of the pieces – from the collection’s first piece (“In Illinois”) to its final (“Of Late”) – play with form and space as if to prompt proactive pause, reflection, and contemplation in contrast to what is often only reactive in the event of casualties. The collection’s pieces and the intimate narratives they reveal (“Du Quoin” and “Two Little Miners”), two of many examples) convey and reiterate a memorable truth. Ultimately, we all carry stories both original and universally relatable.

The collection is as much a repository as a reflection. From the origins, observations, and revelations of youth (One, Two, Three, Four, Five 25-29) to the finalities and questions of death (“For Gaza”). From the physical realities of latitude and longitude (“Cambridge 2019” and “L’Ultimo Viaggio”, two examples) to the recollections and connections of generations past (“Grave 33”). Casualty Reports digs deep and engages, then reengages, with life in its many dimensions. Of its multiple cycles. Of its never-ending questions. And, of course, its relentless casualties.

The collection is simultaneously personal and anonymous. Simultaneously of the past and the present. While many of the pieces celebrate the life of coal miners in Illinois (with many inspired by Collins’s family), one need not be from the region nor have any prior personal connection to coal mining to appreciate the power of the poems.

It’s deeply satisfying to read a work that inspires while simultaneously and consistently inciting fury – a work that prompts reflective melancholy and sentimentality while promoting action amidst agitation. Casualty Reports, by Martha Collins, is such a work. The work is honest, raw, and real. It is as informative (and carefully researched) as it is instructive (many of the pieces adopt unique forms). Readers will be moved on multiple levels - societal, literary, personal. Read it, then reread it – perhaps while listening to “Coal Miner’s Daughter” on replay. It’s a deeply worthwhile way to spend a day.

Jen Schneider is an educator who lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Pennsylvania. She loves words, experimental poetry, and the change of seasons. She’s also a fan of late nights, crossword puzzles, and compelling underdogs. She has authored several chapbooks and full-length poetry collections, with stories, poems, and essays published in a variety of literary and scholarly journals. Sample works include Invisible Ink, On Habits & Habitats, On Daily Puzzles: (Un)locking Invisibility, A Collection of Recollections, and Blindfolds, Bruises, and Breakups. She is currently working on her first series, which (not surprisingly) includes a novel in verse. She is the 2022-2023 Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate.

Fiction for Poets

October 27, 2022 Brooke Palma

Fiction for Poets

in which one poet writes to other poets about writing fiction

Plot for Poets

Plot – or more accurately lack of plot – is probably one of the main reasons why I write poetry. Action is not the point. A poet is rarely asked: “So… what happens in your poem?”

Sure, we get: “What is your poem about?” or “What does it mean?” And then we have to wrestle with an appropriately “poetic” sounding response: It’s about the time I narrowly avoided hitting a fox on my way to work. Or …the bond between humans and animals. Or …the existential angst of young motherhood. Or my personal favorite: I could tell you what it means to me, but I’m more interested in hearing what it means to you. In other words: I have absolutely no idea what it’s about.

The point is: when I write a poem, I don’t have to think about things like rising action or falling action, the three act structure, or (god help me!) the arc (at least not consciously… but that’s a conversation for another day). As far as I’m concerned, that’s a very, very good thing – because, of all the overwhelming, slippery aspects of fiction, for me plot is the most overwhelming and slipperiest. In fact, until a year and a half ago, I was pretty sure I couldn’t successfully plot a story about crossing a room.

But when I found myself writing a novel, I realized I was going to have to reckon with my fear of my plot, and I’ve done that by approaching it in the most simplified terms. To be clear: “Simplified terms” does not equal simplified stories. Rather I’ve found three approaches that seem to apply to almost every good story while also demystifying some of the circumspect, lit-speak that can be mysterious and intimidating.

So, here they are…

Three basic ways that I like to think about plot.

Individually and together, the three ideas below have expanded my understanding of plot – not just what plot is or how you do it, but why it’s important. I believe they’re analogous to the various camera perspectives in film – moving from the widest, long shot that takes in the whole thing without a lot of granular detail; to the medium shot that moves in closer, but is still focused on mostly broad strokes; to finally the zoomed in close up that really starts to hone in on details. I find this helpful in terms of thinking about whether a story is working overall and then considering how to refine and strengthen the way it works.

1. Energy transfer.

George Saunders describes plot as a transfer of energy. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (recommended in my first post), he writes:

We might think of a story as a system for the transfer of energy. Energy, hopefully, gets made in the early pages and the trick, in later pages, is to use that energy. (p. 35)

and

Energy made in the early pages gets transferred along through the story, passed from section to section, like a bucket of water headed for a fire, and the hope is that not a drop gets lost. (p. 54)

I love the idea of the energy transfer because it is something that we naturally sense – especially poets. As both a and a reader, I can usually feel when something has energy and is moving; I can also feel when it is losing energy (maybe going off course or becoming less interesting). Saunders’ explanation gives us the freedom to trust our writerly instincts without applying some rigid external rubric, model, or structure.

So... as you write, ask yourself: Is there energy here? Is it moving? Am I losing any of it? How do you know if there's energy in a story? Well, it’s not much different than knowing if there’s energy in your poem. Do you feel compelled to keep reading? Do you feel propelled forward? Does each line make you want to read the next?

As poets, we do this all the time – not necessarily in the same way, but we do it. The moment I realized that, I knew I had within me the power to make a plot work in my own way.

2. The Main Moves

A few years ago, I asked a friend of mine, a fiction writer, to explain plot to me. This was her response:

3. Story Beats: But... Therefore...

Everyone’s seen South Park, right? If you haven't, stop what you’re doing and go watch an episode – any episode will do. It’s an incredible show (however crass or offensive it may be at times), and it’s been around forever, partly because Matt Stone & Trey Parker know how to put together a solid story.

Check out this two-minute video in which they offer some of the most simple and useful advice available for thinking about and moving through a story.

"But... Therefore..." Matt Stone and Trey Parker (South Park) Plotting Advice

I find this helpful for both planning and evaluating. If you’re the kind of person who outlines, you can think about your bullet points as being strung together by but’s and therefore’s. Or, if you’re reading through something you’ve already written, ask yourself if it’s being held together by but’s, therefore’s, or and then’s. If we go back to Saunders’s idea of energy transfer being like “a bucket of water headed for a fire, and the hope is that not a drop gets lost,” we can see that these are the places in our stories where water is tipped from one bucket into the next. Every “and then” is a place where the water spills a little, the momentum is lost; those are opportunities for more causality, consequence, and ultimately tension.

As I said, poets are rarely taken to task about what “happens” in our poems, yet I believe most of us have a greater capacity for plot than we know. So much of poetry is a meditation on how and why things happen around us. As such, poets are keenly attuned to those moments in life where the energy transfers happen. If we take the time to try, I think many of us could plot – not just successfully but beautifully.

Autumn Konopka is a writer and teaching artist who enjoys coffee, running, and reggaeton. She's currently working on her first novel, which she expects to publish in early 2023. Find her online: autumnkonopka.com.

Local Lyrics - Featuring George Schaefer

October 17, 2022 Brooke Palma

CLEAR PATHWAY HOME
by George Schaefer

Quietly nursing a beer
anxiously awaiting a cup of chili
listening to two young ladies
that somehow lost their way—
couldn’t rent a car
couldn’t get a hotel,
missed a concert, had a 5 AM flight

a lot of porno flicks start out like that
but I’m not qualified to direct or star
I come up short
in both categories
no skill with a camera
and well, you know
we don’t need to go there
It’s not common decency
keeps me from posting dick pics

I wish I had words of wisdom
or at least some witty repartee
but I sit quietly sipping beer
a game is played by God knows who
airing on a flat screen TV
I feign interest in the action
It’s fucking baseball
I’d have a better chance popping a boner

watching paint dry on a fence

the two young ladies converse
with an elegant elderly woman
they’re having a good time
in spite their run of bad luck
I can see I’m not needed here
but the chili is warming
and I have a clear pathway home
and a dog waiting there
that actually does think I’m special

What calls you to write poetry? Why is it the medium for you?
I started out as a shy, lonely kid in high school. I started writing poetry in a desperate attempt to attract girls. Of course, it didn’t work. It probably made me even weirder than I already was. The girls still ignored me. That rejection did give me a lot of time to work on honing my craft and hopefully I’ve improved a little over the past 41 years.

Poetry has largely become my medium due to laziness. I tried my hand at writing novellas and longer prose works. I don’t have the attention span. Also, 90% of my writing is originally done longhand. Shorter works are less likely to induce carpal tunnel syndrome. I need my wrists healthy for other ends—but let’s not go there.

I really enjoy the haiku-style travel/journal logs you post on social media. Do you write everyday? How do you decide what to mold into poetry?
Do I write everyday? Fuck, No! I don’t even try. I’ll ride a hot streak while it lasts but it’s okay to take days or even weeks off. Americans don’t value vacations and relaxation. You need vacations from work to recharge your batteries. Personal days and vacation days away from the is also a pleasant respite.

Iridescent jewels lay buried deep within the soul waiting to be excavated. I struggle for the pure stream of consciousness as twisted ideas rampage through my mind. I recklessly splatter and sprinkle words across the page in mock rhythmic cadence. It’s been suggested in some circles that I am a poet.

Now when inspiration strikes, I usually let the words and images take over. They start writing themselves. I start listening to the words in my mind and that starts the decision on how it will take shape. I envision myself reading the words out loud as I write it on the page. Sometimes it can be a senryu or a tanka. Some works come out as haibun or free verse. Revisions are possible if I wake up the next afternoon thinking WTAF!

Many of your poems reference The Grateful Dead and the beat lifestyle that goes along with going on tour. How has the band influenced you?
There was a point in my life when I started to notice that as I was traveling around the country there was this band called the Grateful Dead that was following me around the country. But the adventures on the road were paramount and as G.G. Allin once noted, “The Dead are the true punks. All the punks were conformists getting tattoos and mohawks to assert their individuality by being like everyone else. The Dead did their own thing if was cool or uncool. It was their thing.” That’s just a paraphrase and not the exact quote from G,G but I think it speaks volumes about their influence and range of influence. It’s okay to be different than everyone else. There were many crazy moments in many cities across the country. What I remember gets committed to the page. I don’t fully trust my memory of said events but I’m not entirely sure how much it matters.

You live in Philadelphia. Does the city seep into your poems?

Don’t know what youze people are talking about. I drink wooder from a crick. I am quite fond of this town although I never booed Santa Claus, I still feel guilty about consorting with his wife. I don’t know if Philly seeped into my writing but I’d like to think that my writing seeped into Philly. I love when I can write something about Philly. Philly is rough around the edges and a bit funky at times, but it has its own pulse. I try to throw out props to many fine watering holes and restaurants and other city institutions. If I ever get outed on my love affair with Gritty, that could end up being a whole volume unto itself. I shall take the high road and say nothing about a city that rhymes with Alice.

Simple experiences seem to drive a lot of your writing (one of my favorites is Chicken Vindaloo from Thru Peripheral Vision). Do you consider yourself a practitioner of mindfulness?
I try to base my writing on my experiences-both real and imagined. The poetry is really a hybrid of fact and fiction. I’m not always sure where one ends and the other begins. I wouldn’t tell you if I did. As for mindfulness. Does dropping acid count? But seriously, I try to maintain an awareness of everything going on around me and finding ways to work it into my writing. I listen and observe. I warn people to copyright their life. I bloody well might steal it if you don’t.

As for the poem you cite, that one got rejected 4 times, but now I find out I was sending it to the wrong editors. Glad you like it. I try to write about my experiences and anyone sees me will know that I do enjoy food. I tend to just include everything since I’m the worst judge of my own work. Poems I think are throwaways get good commentary and resonate with different people. The stuff I really love and feel proud of is often ignored.

Where can readers check out more of work work/buy your books?
There are 8 titles available on amazon. More to come. I have nearly 3,000 poems and prose pieces on a website called postpoems.org. That site includes most of my published works. There are poems all over social media and other writing sites. There are also a bunch of chapbooks that I put together in my apartment when I get bored. They are available to anyone that visits my apartment or if I carry some in my backpack on my ventures.

George Schaefer is a would be raconteur born in the City of Brotherly Love. This poet, philosopher and prankster has been writing for over 40 years. He started out in an ill fated attempt to attract girls. He keeps writing since he doesn’t know what else to do with his mind. There have been various chapbooks and poetry titles published. Among poetry titles are Thru Peripheral Vision, Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Do Poetry Again and Choke the Chicken (Or Auto-Erotic Asphyxiation Gone Horribly Wrong. There is also a series of short poetry forms called Not So Fancy Tanshi. The first in the Not So Fancy Tanshi series is called Delightfully Weird.

John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey.” Currently, he works as a licensed clinical social worker and adjunct professor. He has been featured on Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM and several of his poems were chosen to be exhibited in Princeton University's 2021 Unique Minds: Creative Voices art show at the Lewis Center for the Arts. He has been nominated 3x for a Pushcart Prize and serves as the Local Lyrics contributor for The Mad Poets Society Blog. His debut chapbook Roadside Oddities: A Poetic Guide to American Oddities was released in early 2022 and can be purchased at www.johnwojtowicz.com. John lives with his wife and two children in Upper Deerfield, NJ.

Review of Crayon Colors for Serial Killers

October 13, 2022 Brooke Palma

Crayon Colors for Serial Killers

Finishing Line Press

$14.99

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Katch Campbell

“You’ve written a terrifying collection of images,” were my first words to Sue William Silverman when we spoke about, Crayon Colors For Serial Killers, 2022, Finishing Line Press. Sue, once my teacher, now colleague and friend, laughed for a moment then shared that she has always had a fascination for serial killers. Not in a voyeuristic sense, but in one that stems from a deep desire to acknowledge all that is human about us, including the possibility of redemption. Crayon Colors For Serial Killers, is Sue’s third book of poetry and if you are looking to wake up from the stupor that has been COVID isolation it will not disappoint. Written to address her fury at an America that has spun out of control, Silverman pulls from her studies of aberrant psychological behaviors and creates a harrowing parallel. The collection explores the complexity of a soul who started as innocent then took a wrong turn. A slant conversation on the origin of evil, the seed for forgiveness, and the unescapable truth that history rides roughshod between both. It is organized into three sections, Her Palette, Story Time, and Her Subjects and its speaker uses two main forms of expression; English Haiku/ Senryu in the first and third section allow the speaker to howl at life in quick succession:

Eat heart, soul, you sky-
eyed girl, ghost face unmasked glass
façade of cracked moon.

Maskless mouths, droplets
shearing tar roof, slanting to
blue-limbo silence.

And nine prose poems as part of, Story Time, the middle section, which advances the narrative with a poignancy evoking compassion:

She climbs the bus stairs, settles beside a boy with blonde hair. In her backpack are sharpened pencils, fresh crayons, and brightly colored safety scissors designed for little hands to manipulate and not get fatigued.

Silverman’s choice of Senryn and short prose are adeptly used and avoid indulgence or overcoming the reader. The “snapshot” like first and third sections can be read at varying pace as one would use a View Finder, lingering a moment to consider or move past quickly. The Prose section is experienced as a series of shadowboxes where the imagery is more fixed and gives the reader space to contemplate the complexities of one human life. Innocence. Isolation. Creativity. Violence. Loss.

The final Senryu:

Empty as sorrow
rivers floating lost dirge boats
no destination.

Crayon Colors For Serial Killers, is an invitation to consider that redemption exists for humanity. While sorrow offers no destination, hope offers us, a path back home.

Katch Campbell is a connector. With a master’s degree in Science and an MFA in poetry, she creates metaphors for her patients and others about the world around us. Her work is an inquiry on the atrocities we commit consciously and unconsciously against each other and the universe. Katch serves as Vice President and is a permanent faculty member at the River Pretty Writing Retreat, a bi-annual workshop in the Ozarks. She has co-led immersive poetry trips to Slovenia and Italy and used to edit for ZoMag.com.

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art (October 2022)

October 11, 2022 Brooke Palma

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art

Welcome to a new Mad Poets blog, to be offered every two months.

It’s a pleasure to write about the relationship between poetry and other art forms, to examine ways that a various creative arts relate to each other.

The term ekphrasis can be defined narrowly as writing that describes a work of art in another medium-- paintings, music, photography sculpture and the like. It can also refer more broadly to the alchemy that happens when one medium tries to define and relate to another. This could refer to poems inspired by the visual arts or music -- and also the reverse! To my mind, ekphrasis can also encompass hybrid works, like artists’ books, author/illustrator collaborations and graphic poems.

Many scholars have written about ekphrasis and there are great resources online. Though not scholar of the topic, I have had a practice of writing poetry and painting for many years. Both are essential to my creative life. These art forms interact, challenge each other and open up many questions and tensions.

My aim in this blog is to feature the work of various poets and artists, to let you know of interesting viewing opportunities and to provide some angles that might prompt your own writing.

The Poetry and Mosaics of Rabbi Gila Colman Ruskin

This August I attended a writing workshop centered around the work of poet, mosaic artist and rabbi, Gila Colman Ruskin. Gila is talented in many modalities and combines her experience as a rabbi and teacher with writing and art making. Her process embodies ekphrasis as she moves between traditional texts, imagery and her own words.

Her mosaics are stunning. A sampling of her work created over a number of years is currently exhibited on the walls of Mekor Habracha/Center City, a synagogue nestled in a Center City office building. Complex and arresting, these pieces have appeal for a wide variety of viewers, no matter their faith background.

Gila terms her approach “mosaic midrash”. Midrash has deep traditional roots and offers a way to interact with a formal text, for example, a line of a psalm or a passage in the Torah (or Bible). To create a midrash is a personal and interpretive act, a way to “add to the text,” Gila explains. A painting, collage or mosaic can be a midrash, likewise a poem.

This next mosaic of Gila’s incorporates a broken teacup once owned by a friend’s mother. It’s paired with one of her poems. The source of inspiration is “You are the portion in my cup”, a line from a Jewish prayer (Adon Olam).

Tessarae
Shards
careening across the kitchen
where we were just eating our Tuesday night pasta
Fragments of aqua and tiny pink flowers
now splashed and splintered with tomato and basil
Sighing, I grab the broom
Brusquely sweep up Nana’s china now a gory mess
I feel the eyes of the perpetrator upon me he sighs too waiting for rebuke
The soundtrack pulsates as the plot pivots
around this Milestone Mom Moment
So, I roll back my shoulders, face the kids and say:
“Tomorrow we can mosaic!”

Rabbi Gila Colman Ruskin

*Min Hametzar* (Out of the Narrow Place)

To view Gila’s artwork is not a passive encounter. Mosaics glitter on the walls, combining tiles, broken ceramics and found objects. The energy is palpable. Her images invite us to discover wholeness in the world’s brokenness. Walls are littered with prayers and texts -- an invitation for us to respond deeply, to write responses and share our own poems.

Gila mentioned to me that a viewer once told her he had never thought of his prayers as having a visual component before seeing this exhibit. For her, “It’s a moment of pure ecstasy if someone has a deep resonance with my work and with a text.” Indeed, she often shares the following poem to those who come see her work. It’s her own ars poetica about ekphrasis.

It Wasn’t Enough

It wasn’t enough to break the plates
And mix the adhesive
To assemble the palette
To find the pearl earring at the bottom of the bin.

It wasn’t enough to mold the hills
And modge-podge the sky
To attach fruit to the tree
To paint the dove’s wings with sparkling dew.

It wasn’t enough to form ancient letters
Of soul-comfort prayers
To clean off stray grout
To frame and to label and mount on the wall.

Don’t say: “what pretty colors”
Or ask me “how long did this take you?”
Or “did you sell many pieces?”
That’s not why you’re here!

You’re integral to the process,
Co-creator of midrash
Co-seeker of truth
Mining layers of meaning.

To me, you’re the essential
Co-repairer of the world
L’taken ha-olam
With shards and with words.

Rabbi Gila Colman Ruskin

I highly recommend viewing Gila’s wonderful exhibit in person or online and adding your own poems to the growing body of work that her imagery has inspired.

For more information or to contact Gila: https://www.facebook.com/mosaicmidrash or rabbigilaruskin@gmail.com.

Her poems can be viewed at https://ritualwell.org/?s=Gila+colman+ruskin.

Cathleen Cohen was the 2019 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA. A painter and teacher, she founded the We the Poets program at ArtWell, an arts education non-profit in Philadelphia (www.theartwell.org). Her poems appear in journals such as Apiary, Baltimore Review, Cagibi, East Coast Ink, 6ix, North of Oxford, One Art, Passager, Philadelphia Stories, Rockvale Review and Rogue Agent. Camera Obscura (chapbook, Moonstone Press), appeared in 2017 and Etching the Ghost (Atmosphere Press), was published in 2021. She received the Interfaith Relations Award from the Montgomery County PA Human Rights Commission and the Public Service Award from National Association of Poetry Therapy. Her paintings are on view at Cerulean Arts Gallery. To learn more about her work, visit www.cathleencohenart.com.

Found in Translation

October 7, 2022 Brooke Palma

FOUND IN TRANSLATION

I’m excited to get to write for Mad Poets about poetry in translation. If you’ve attended a lot of the First Wednesday readings at the Community Arts Center in Wallingford, you’ll have noticed that translators of poetry (often also poets themselves) present their work from time to time. It’s a task that fascinates me: the verbal texture of a poem is so important, but every language has its own, even languages as close as French and Spanish, or German and Dutch. Every language has things it does better than any other, and you can bet those things wind up in poems. How then can a translator bring the poem into a new language, keeping it a poem instead of a prose retelling?

And yet poetry has exerted huge influence through translation, from Classical Greek or Latin shaping the writing of the Renaissance—or Italian sonnets spurring Elizabethan writing—to the very spare form of haiku flowering in other languages, including American English. Look closely at any big literary movement, and you’ll find translation at its roots.

For my September review of poetry in translation, I picked up a newish translation of Arthur Rimbaud. Who better to appreciate in translation than Rimbaud—that punk, that proto-Surrealist and synesthete, sailor of the drunken boat? Rimbaud, of whom we hear when we’re just a bit older than he was at his best, so that along with the joy of his verse, en français or in English, we learn that we are too late to be poetic prodigies. Only Mozart and Yo-Yo Ma are more demoralizing. Yet his most famous works are entirely persuasive: he’s the real thing.

But I didn’t like these translations. Maybe in part because the poems are presented chronologically, so you have to wade through unimpressive stuff before getting to the great poems. But even more, because I disagreed with a lot of the translator’s choices. 1) The first cycle featured the word ’Neath, an old-fashioned cheat to save a syllable that gave that line a Victorian ring. Yes, those were the years when Rimbaud’s writing flourished, but weren’t you just trumpeting his avant-garde qualities in your introduction? Though of course there are translators who carefully consult old dictionaries to make sure the word they’re selecting is attested in the language in those years. Seems an ungrateful task to me, if you can’t pipe it into a lively poem! I thought: you can’t judge a whole book by one gaffe, these were his early pieces, and ploughed ahead. 2) Lo! R’s poem “Sensation” ends with the words “heureux comme avec une femme”—literally, “happy as if with a woman”— but our translator offers “as if with a girl.” Now, “as if with a woman” (given the young male speaker who describes himself going out into the world to feel sensations) suggests sexual possibilities that, if you change it to “with a girl,” are transformed either into a more tentative exploration, maybe more exciting but less comfortable/certain to lead to happiness, or else just icky. Our translator is a much older man than Rimbaud was as he wrote (older, indeed, then Rimbaud ever got to be), so perhaps wants the reader to think of adolescent sexual experiments rather than nature’s parallel to a mature woman, but it changes the effect a lot. 3) For all his avant-gardery, Rimbaud used rhyme in pretty traditional ways, but our translator is all over the place, switching from ABAB to AABB for no reason, it seems, other than that he managed to find a rhyme that worked there. If one of my students did these things, I’d want to hear why they thought it was a good idea.

Some translators hate the way a “foreign language professor” will land on a single word and criticize the whole translation based on that word, but in this translation I found that single words (’Neath; girl) caught my attention as they sort of crystallized what was going wrong in the translation.

So I skip ahead to my favorites. “Vowels”—better, though full of choices I would not have made: “E, candeurs des vapeurs et des tentes” is given as “E, white of vapors and tents,” not trying to find some more difficult word for “candeurs” (even “candors,” or any of the words from that root: candidness?—even though English has mostly forgotten the etymology of “candidate,” wearing a white garment to indicate one’s purity and honesty), and seemingly not trying at all to preserve that floating rhythm. “The Drunken Boat”—still better: several of the stanzas do rhyme (and better not to force the rhyme if you can’t make it fly), and the stylistic of the language is nicely elevated, but the rhythm is still all over the place. You’d think: if you’re going to describe a drunken experience, it's extra important for the language to convey intoxication as well as all sorts of interesting scenery and ideas.

And so on. I’m not going to give the translator’s name, since this blog piece will be online and thus searchable, and why hurt someone’s feelings? It would be different if the publisher had asked me to evaluate the translation, or if some journal had asked for a review, but I picked this one out myself. If you decide to go out and buy a book of Rimbaud in English, or to check one out from the library, I’ll be happy to tell you which edition to avoid, or to distrust. We could meet for coffee and compare the versions we like more or less. We could pick one favorite Rimbaud poem and hash out the way WE would translate it. And of course with a famous poet like this one it’s a good thing to lots of available translations: it might offer just what a reader would like.

All of which leaves the question: Why review a bad translation? Especially for the Mad Poets Society’s blog? Yes, there’s a kind of pleasure in feeling that you know better than the translator. (Plenty of translators of poetry or of prose will admit that they were inspired to get to work by feeling that they could do better.) But the know-it-all critic is not really getting the right things from an objectionable translation: after all, irritation may be found in so many other sources! What we want from poetry in any language is what real poetry gives us: picking the lock of our minds with the right words, the right rhythms, and getting inside to dance. Rimbaud certainly does that in the original incandescent French, and probably in several other translations into English.

Poet and translator Sibelan Forrester has been hosting the Mad Poets Society's First Wednesday reading series since 2016. She has published translations of fiction, poetry and scholarly prose from Croatian, Russian and Serbian, and has co-translated poetry from Ukrainian; books include a selection of fairy tales about Baba Yaga and a bilingual edition of poetry by Serbian poet Marija Knezevic. She is fascinated by the way translation follows the inspirational paths of the original work. Her own book of poems, Second Hand Fates, was published by Parnilis Media. In her day job, she teaches at Swarthmore College.

Mad Poet of the Year - R. G. Evans (October 2022)

October 3, 2022 Brooke Palma

The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have R. G. Evans serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2022.

COLD SOIL ROAD
by R.G. Evans

We lived in a house that had no name,
so we called it Charnel House.
We became the envy of Cold Soil Road.

Those busybodies across the street, the Bones,
peeked at our place through parted blinds.
Sid an Nonni Necropolis rerouted their evening

ambles to see our spread at sunset.
Soon, the neighbors named their digs as well:
Abattoir Acres. Knacker’s Knoll. Coup-de-grace.

But we were the first. We could feel the resentment.
When the Stillborn kids from down the block
egged our Charnel House, we really lost our cool,

tore down our name, went back to our old ways.
Mr. Ossuary, we see you there hanging
your shingle across the road: Hell’s Little Acre.

You can have this first swirl of October.
Me and the Missus can hole up here till Kingdom Come,
nothing between the two of us and you

but curtains.

I’d often pass by the sign for Cold Soil Road when I used to work for ETS near Princeton, NJ. The name always sounded a little spooky to me, so I had some fun turning it into a spooky (I hope!) poem which appeared in my first book, Overtipping the Ferryman. Enjoy what some call Spooky Season, but beware your pumpkin spice. Jack-O-Lanterns have teeth, you know.

R.G. Evans’s books include Overtipping the Ferryman (Aldrich Poetry Press Prize), The Holy Both, and Imagine Sisyphus Happy. His original songs were featured in the poetry documentaries All That Lies Between Us and Unburying Malcolm Miller, and his collection of original songs, Sweet Old Life, is available on most streaming platforms. Evans teaches creative writing at Rowan University. Website: www.rgevanswriter.com

Review of In memory, energy by Amber Renee

September 21, 2022 Brooke Palma

In memory, energy

Moonstone Press

$10.00

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

Regulars of the Philadelphia poetry scene have been the lucky audience members of Amber Renee’s spellbinding live readings that weave her poetry together with haunting music. It almost seems a disservice to her work to remove the unique and integral musical component. Note I used the world almost. Amber Renee’s In memory, energy creates its own spellbinding soundscapes through a multilayered and heady mélange of rhythm, rhyme, consonance, and alliteration. This is a gem of a chapbook that begs to be read aloud.

One of the most striking poems in this collection is “Newspapers//2020.” In this poem, the narrator navigates the pain of losing her mother while thinking about “driving my old delivery route/ again. I haven’t seen the starfall in/ 10 months now.” She documents the random thoughts or the animals she encounters in her way, “There were always deer on my route/raccoons & rabbits.” Spinning in concentric circles widening like a ripple in a pond as the poem continues, Renee finds a measure of solace in the animal kingdom through

cardinals, with their flashes of red
hair (??) --

(fluttering/troubled) me ,enough to spark
curiosity. Google says “the red cardinal is

representative

of a departed loved one’s attempting

contact.

By the end of the poem, the cardinals end up “blocking the road” a wonderfully poetic reminder that when loved ones leave us, their presence lingers.

“At 27” is another strong poem in the collection. An interesting facet of Renee’s work is how her poems seem to connect back with themselves in new and surprising ways. While the narrator relays her stay in the hospital, she is compelled to write “I filled 2 composition notebooks that way/ (Rules against spirals.)” This line effortlessly connects to a later stanza “I/ clutched that notebook to my chest and kept thinking/ until I spiraled. (Of this kind, allowed. But not/ encouraged.” Making new friends in an unlikely place, the narrator celebrates her 27th birthday ending the poem with the indelible lines “If I want to show/ these people (I may never meet again) my/ appreciation, wouldn’t it be great, to pick up a grocery store cake, at 28?” These lines show off Renee’s fine sense of craft regarding rhythm, line breaks, and near rhyme to great effect.

In this collection, Renee’s imagination is not merely earthbound but rockets to the cosmos in the powerful poems “& then there was light—” and “) )) Meteor Litanies )) *.” In a rhythmic and imagery tour de face, Renee write in “& then there was light—”
            Poke a hole in the moon,
            crater my face into freckles. Turn
            my hair to a spacetime;
            each curl/ a universe
            in a vast expanse of frizz.

This poem reminds me of Audre Lorde’s concept of biomythology examined in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Concluding the poem perfectly (a special Amber Renee skillset), she writes

            I long for the day I’m the painter &
            not the page. Iron-rich blood
            as the paint. & even the proteins & my
            DNA, came from space.

The title of this chapbook comes from the formerly mentioned “) )) Meteor Litanies )) *.” This poem weaves in an intriguing place where the surreal meets an intellectual melancholy. The lines whirl like galaxies seen from space

            Polycephalic //            (in that)
            there are many truths to this end.
            Each truth like a head/ from the body of *null
            creation, masterpieces
            humming vibration, strings in relation to multiverse
            making

The poem spirals (remember the earlier mention of spiral) until it reaches its end (or beginning?)

            In memory,
            energy/ follows the heart home like an imprint
            genetic             passed down heritage/ triggers
            the spiritual DNA not to
            go away, but, like a
            stain etched from fire, it
            stays.

This chapbook collection is one for the ages. I have read it several times, and it grows more glorious, more illuminating with each rereading. I do want the readers of this review to know I can only approximate how Renee’s poems look on the page—her typography is a work of art in itself, which I recommend you check out. In memory, energy is a book exploring love, loss, belonging, and literally the cosmos in an intimate, breathtaking manner. This collection no doubt ranks among the finest of Moonstone’s many chapbooks.

Sean Hanrahan is a Philadelphian poet originally hailing from Dale City, Virginia. He is the author of the full-length collection Safer Behind Popcorn (2019 Cajun Mutt Press) and the chapbooks Hardened Eyes on the Scan (2018 Moonstone Press) and Gay Cake (2020 Toho). His work has also been included in several anthologies, including Moonstone Featured Poets, Queer Around the World, and Stonewall’s Legacy, and several journals, including Impossible Archetype, Mobius, Peculiar, Poetica Review, and Voicemail Poems. He has taught classes titled A Chapbook in 49 Days and Ekphrastic Poetry and hosted poetry events throughout Philadelphia.

POeT SHOTS - '"Parkinson's Disease" by Galway Kinnell

September 20, 2022 Brooke Palma

POeT SHOTS is a monthly series published on the third Tuesday of the month. It features work by established writers followed by commentary and insight by Ed Krizek.

Parkinson’s Disease

by Galway Kinnell

While spoon-feeding him with one hand
she holds his hand with her other hand,
or rather lets it rest on top of his,
which is permanently clenched shut.
When he turns his head away, she reaches
around and puts in the spoonful blind.
He will not accept the next morsel
until he has completely chewed this one.
His bright squint tells her he finds
the shrimp she has just put in delicious.
Next to the voice and touch of those we love,
food may be our last pleasure on earth—
a man on death row takes his T-bone
in small bites and swishes each sip
of the jug wine around in his mouth,
tomorrow will be too late for them to jolt
this supper out of him. She strokes
his head very slowly, as if to cheer up
each separate discomfited hair sticking up
from its root in his stricken brain.
Standing behind him, she presses
her check to his, kisses his jowl,
and his eyes seem to stop seeing
and do nothing but emit light.
Could heaven be a time, after we are dead,
of remembering the knowledge
flesh had from flesh? The flesh
of his face is hard, perhaps
from years spent facing down others
until they fell back, and harder
from years of being himself faced down
and falling back in his turn, and harder still
from all the while frowning
and beaming and worrying and shouting
and probably letting go in rages.
His face softens into a kind
of quizzical wince, as if one
of the other animals were working at
getting the knack of the human smile.
When picking up a cookie he uses
both thumbtips to grip it
and push it against an index finger
to secure it so that he can lift it.
She takes him then to the bathroom,
where she lowers his pants and removes
the wet diaper and holds the spout of the bottle
to his old penis until he pisses all he can,
then puts on the fresh diaper and pulls up his pants.
When they come out, she is facing him,
walking backwards in front of him
and holding his hands, pulling him
when he stops, reminding him to step
when he forgets and starts to pitch forward.
She is leading her old father into the future
as far as they can go, and she is walking
him back into her childhood, where she stood
in bare feet on the toes of his shoes
and they foxtrotted on this same rug.
I watch them closely: she could be teaching him
the last steps that one day she may teach me.
At this moment, he glints and shines,
as if it will be only a small dislocation
for him to pass from this paradise into the next.

In this poem Galway KInnell finds a different way to look at one of the most debilitating diseases in the world today. The poet paints the scene with expressive language and let’s us know that the subject of the poem is loved:” While spoon-feeding him with one hand / she holds his hand with her other hand,…”. Kinnell goes on to chronicle the events he witnesses as “she” takes care of her father.: “She is leading her old father into the future / as far as they can go, and she is walking/ him back into her childhood, where she stood / in bare feet on the toes of his shoes / and they foxtrotted on this same rug.” The poet speculates on his own end of life where “ I watch them closely: she could be teaching him / the last steps that one day she may teach me.” Kinnell concludes that these last earthly experiences form a kind of “paradise” where one gets to take care of someone who once took care of you. The circle is complete.

Some have accused Kinnell of romanticizing a horrible disease. But isn’t that what we do as poets? Try to show a truth behind the horror? If one just accepts that Parkinson’s is a difficult disease at best and a terrible disease to watch then we might all as well just give up and wring our hands blaming God for all our troubles. There is no cure for Parkinson’s disease. Treatments can extend life, but it is always debilitating and fatal. But so is life. Isn’t wonderful to look at despair and find something positive?

To hear Galway Kinnell read this poem, click here.

Ed Krizek holds a BA and MS from University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA and MPH from Columbia University. For over twenty years Ed has been studying and writing poetry. He is the author of six books of poetry: Threshold, Longwood Poems, What Lies Ahead, Swimming With Words, The Pure Land, and This Will Pass. All are available on Amazon. Ed writes for the reader who is not necessarily an initiate into the poetry community. He likes to connect with his readers on a personal level.

Review of Steer into the Skid by Steven Concert

September 16, 2022 Brooke Palma

Steer into the Skid

North 415 Press

$20.00

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Abbey J. Porter

Why do the events of our childhoods—a relatively small sliver of most of our lives—hold such sway over the rest of our existence? And what explains the inexorable hold of family—the fact that no matter how poorly we’re treated by a family member, our tie to that person remains?

Steven Concert faces these issues in his recent book, Steer into the Skid.

Themes of early-life experience and family dysfunction are prominent throughout Concert’s passionately personal collection, in which he struggles to come to terms with the effects of an abusive and traumatic childhood.

The narrator’s father emerges as both angry and emotionally absent. The image of his swinging black leather belt surfaces and resurfaces. The mother—a far warmer figure—is physically absent from the time the narrator is 10, having died young.

The poet describes, early on, childhood sexual abuse at the hands of an older youth—"a teen-aged boy put his hard prick/into my seven year old mouth,” he writes in “The First Time.” This theme re-emerges in multiple poems. He alludes to sexual abuse again in “Greek Tragedy,” in which the narrator attends a viewing or funeral:

posed in an open metal casket,
lips stitched shut so you would not leave

your secret behind,

Later in the poem, he continues:

my upended world never right.
I should not speak ill of the dead.

And uncles should not molest nephews,
but they do.

Concert writes eloquently of the fear and trauma that accompany child sexual abuse in “The First Time Revisited,” in which he describes going on a camping trip with a church youth group. He wakes during the night to find an adult man touching his genitals. Concert writes,

I rolled away

and onto my stomach,
and slept that way for more than ten years.

One gets the sense of the narrator as a child abandoned in a world of people he cannot trust. He is left trying to protect himself even from his family, even from his siblings. “Cooking in an Italian Kitchen” 10 depicts a family dynamic riddled with conflict.

Rivalry of three sisters simmers

unattended on a back burner.
Over the objections of an estranged brother…

Heartbreak boils in our red sauce.

In “Arachnophobia,” the poet refers to “my discovery that people we know/can hurt us—” and the debilitating effect of that hurt:

As he pulls up his pants,
he steals my voice, tucks it away
in a back pocket, keeps it for decades

But Concert’s narrator eventually finds a way to fight back—through writing.

each consonant and vowel takes back
the secret one letter at a time—
beneath my feet,
I stomp him into the ground.

This book thus appears to embody an act of rebellion, of self-reclamation.

As a child, lost, Concert’s narrator cowers under the power of those around him. He details his struggle to emerge from that state, to find and establish an identity for himself.

In “Coming At It Sideways,” he describes how even his family’s identity was muddled.

My recorded lineage filled with descendants
of Poland, Wales and Germany,
and a great-grandfather who crossed the Atlantic

at the turn of the century—
our family name changed at Ellis Island
because his Italian
was too difficult to understand.

“I reside in the clash of Catholicism meets Methodist,” he says—an intersection that may show up in the Biblical references peppered throughout the collection.

Concert reflects on the lasting effects of his childhood experiences.

Man of few words spoke with his fist

when we stepped out of line—
his only embrace tinged with anger.

Dead nearly a decade, he grips me still.

In “Mechanical Breath,” he says, “I still submit to the safety of silence/which makes adult relationships difficult.”

The narrator appears to long for what he never had: a tight-knit, loving family. In “Empty,” he effectively describes one indicator of his family’s fractured nature—and its lingering effect:

not a single photograph exists
with all eleven of us together,
no physical proof we were ever
collectively a family—
we are invisible,
I am invisible.

In “Speaking in Tongues,” Concert also shares how the fear and distance in his relationship with his father stop him from sharing important information about himself.

I never told you I am gay…
feared you might beat
the faggot out of me.

Concert evinces a certain wistful sadness when he writes of the difficulty of connecting with his father, even into adulthood:

As adults, we hardly talked,
when we tried it emerged as though
we were speaking in different dialects,
which left me to wonder:
did we share the same language.

Concert has written with courage about difficult issues that I suspect—unfortunately—will resonate with many. His book is at once a lament, an exploration, and an act of self-realization.

Abbey J. Porter writes poetry and memoir about people, relationships, and life struggles. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte, an MA in liberal studies from Villanova University, and a BA in English from Gettysburg College. Abbey works in communications and lives in Cheltenham, Pa., with her two dogs.

Source: http://madpoetssociety.com/blog

Fiction for Poets

September 15, 2022 Brooke Palma

Fiction for Poets

in which one poet writes to other poets about writing fiction

I’ve been a poet for more than 30 years. Actually, I’m pretty sure poets are born, not made – so I’ve probably been a poet since before I could even form words, and I think that’s true of anyone who is willing to publicly declare themself a poet. Anyway… I published poems in grade school and high school. I studied poetry in college and grad school. I’ve written two poetry manuscripts. So, yes, poet. The last time I even considered writing a novel was when I was in the 8th grade, and I filled two marble copy books with stories about my imaginary boyfriend. (Insert photo of me hiding behind my hands.)

But somehow in January 2021, I started writing a novel. The how and why of it are not dissimilar to the how or why of writing poems – at least for me. I’ve got emotional garbage to process; words start flashing through my brain to help me along. Only this time, the words didn’t come like they usually do – in fragments and images – they came as fully imagined scene. It was one of the clearest things I’d ever seen in my brain, so I pulled myself up off the floor (literally), grabbed my computer, and started writing.

I had no idea what I was doing or what it would become, but in the year and half since then I have written a novel, and I’m expecting to publish it next Spring. The path hasn’t been easy, and I genuinely believe that writing fiction (or any longer creative prose) is different for poets than it is for those who use prose as their primary vehicle. Over this year, I’ve thought a lot about what makes it different. What are the challenges we face as poets? What are the things we don’t know – or that may not come naturally – if we haven’t practiced writing fiction? What are the things that we do know without realizing? And, perhaps most important, what are the particular strengths that we, as poets, bring to the art of fiction?

I’m grateful to the Mad Poets for giving me an opportunity to explore these ideas, share my lessons learned, and expand this discussion through this regular blog feature. In future posts, I’ll write about how I’ve come to peace with the idea of plot, my favorite thing about writing characters, and how I referee the battle between my poet brain and my novel brain.

I’d like to begin by recommending two books that I have found both helpful and engaging:

A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders, is a book based on a course that Saunders taught at Syracuse University in which he takes several classic Russian short stories and analyzes how they work. It’s not nearly as academic as it sounds. In fact, the thing I love about Saunders is that he is accessible, engaging, and just plain likable. If you’re so inclined, I recommend the audio version of this book because it includes actor narrators for the stories, followed by Saunders himself reading his own analysis/discussion parts. What’s more, beyond learning a ton about the craft of fiction, I was really surprised to find how much I liked these old Russian shorts. (Aside: if you haven’t read George Saunders’ fiction, you should.)

Steering the Craft, by Ursula K. LeGuin, is your more typical writing “manual,” with chapters on different elements of craft like point of view, narration, verbs, etc. This book includes clear examples and really helpful exercises. I used it often in an undergraduate Intro to Fiction class I taught this past Spring, and even the most “basic” lessons were really valuable to me as I was exploring new ways of moving through fiction. Like Saunders, this book also has an accessible tone – read: not pompous or pretentious – which I really appreciate because I hate when I feel like an author is just trying to prove how smart or talented they are. This is a great, easy reference to have on hand if you feel stuck, you want some pointers, or you’d like an exercise to help practice some particular element of fiction.

Lastly, if you want to write fiction, the best, easiest thing you can do is read fiction.

Duh, Autumn, of course!

We always say this: “If you want to be a good writer, you need to be a good reader.” But I didn’t realize how much I intuitively knew about fiction until I started writing it. I have read enough that I can feel when my pacing is good – or when it isn’t. I have a good sense of how to begin and end a chapter – even if I’m still not sure what my editor means when he comments, “This is good, all chapter comps are here.” (Components? Compositions? Comparable properties? Who knows… apparently I’m doing something right, and I’ll take the win.) And I know how to build characters, get in their heads, and move them through different situations. No one really taught me this; I didn’t go to those workshops in grad school. But my reading has given me the education I need.

Now I ask: what do you need? If you’re a poet out there, writing fiction or thinking about writing fiction: what do you want to know? What questions do you have? Thoughts? Feelings? Reservations? What do you want out of this conversation? Because that’s what I’d like this feature to be.

Please drop your thoughts in the comments. Or email me: autumn@autumnkonopka.com.

Found in Translation

September 9, 2022 Brooke Palma

FOUND IN TRANSLATION

Krystyna Dąbrowska, Tideline, translated from the Polish by Karen Kovacik, Antonia Lloyd-Jones, and Mira Rosenthal (Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press, 2022).

Who is Krystyna Dąbrowska? A poet, essayist and translator, born in 1979, who lives and works in Warsaw. As of late August, 2022, her Polish Wikipedia page shows four books of poetry (2006, 2012, 2014, 2018) and three books of translations, including works by Jonathan Swift and Louise Glück, as well as plentiful other translations that don’t comprise whole books.

Tideline is a bilingual edition, so anyone who knows Polish can enjoy the original alongside the translation in a typically handsome Zephyr edition: good paper, plenty of space in length and breadth for each poem (with the original facing the translation). As always, the bilingual edition can serve as a language-learning aid, or it can let the informed reader rejoice in the successful moments or grind teeth in the places where they could have done better. (How many translations have been made because the translator was disappointed in someone else’s effort? More than we might think, I think.)

Rather than an introduction, as many Zephyr bilingual editions provide, this one has analytic and informational vitamins packed into a thoughtful six-page Afterword (by Mira Rosenthal). That makes sense since someone of Dąbrowska’s age can’t yet be a Classic: it’s the poetic quality of 150 pages of poetry that buys our confidence and interest, so we’ll go on to read the Afterword. The Classic part may be coming, though: Dąbrowska has won (in 2013) the Wisława Szymborska Award and several other big poetry prizes, and her poems have been translated into 20 languages. (It’s interesting that in the U.S., where we give so little weight to translations, poets still get to list that detail: which languages we’ve been translated into. And if you, my poet-reader, haven’t yet been translated into a foreign language that you know well, it’s a very worthwhile experience.)

It’s a trick to have three different translators providing versions of the various poems—and not all are from one country: Antonia Lloyd-Jones is from the U.K. (and is one of the translators of the 2019 Nobel Prizewinner Olga Tokarczuk), while poets and Creative Writing professors Karen Kovacik and Mira Rosenthal are from the U.S. The results are pretty harmonious, nevertheless, with a consistent voice achieved across the volume. If I were a student at Indiana University, where Kovacik teaches, or at Cal Poly, where Rosenthal teaches, I would hasten to sign up for a class: the results speak for themselves.

There, the background is outlined and we can turn to the work itself. It seems clear what attracted this trio of talented poet-translators to Dąbrowska’s work. I don’t detect (with my limited command of Polish-for-reading) signs of great phonetic magic, but almost every single poem has a surprise—an unexpected detail or a proper “turn” as it unfolds. In the poem “Names” (“Imiona”), the nuns who staff a hospital each choose a watermelon in the gardener’s cold frames (yes, this one was translated by our British representative, Ms. Lloyd-Jones), each etching her name into the chosen fruit when it is still small. As the fruit grows, their names grow too (p. 13), sometimes to the point where the fruit splits and its fragrant red flesh is revealed. A pet tame hedgehog falls in love with a scrubbing brush (pp. 64-65). The poem “Security Questions” (same title in the original) opens with a list of security questions on a US embassy website, as the speaker is applying for a visa:

What was your family nickname as a child?
In which city did you meet your husband/wife?
What street did you live on at the age of eight?
What was your first love’s given name?

Noting that these are also “insecurity questions,” the speaker is inspired to think up a list of the latter:

The name of a person you’ve wronged?
Define in one word your most latent fear.
When (give year/month/day) did you find yourself waiting
for someone who meant everything but never arrived?

“The system doesn’t care” about the answer, in the end, but the insecurity questions underline the potential anxieties of a planned departure and the visa required to make that move.

Most of the poems don’t rhyme in the original (and so the translations don’t either, suitably), but when “Doormen” (“Portierzy”) opens with a more formal stanza Mira Rosenthal is on it:

Behind glass doors—they stand, obscure.
At revolving doors—they stand, demure.
At dubious gates—they stand, forbidden.
In the wide open—they stand, hidden. (p. 57)

This one goes on to note how many doormen are themselves refugees, whose relationship to doors and borders is forever complicated by that experience, even if now they can be calm and perhaps even nap behind the doors they guard.

As the book goes on, some of the poems become less lighthearted. “Siblings” (“Rodzeństvo,” pp. 76-77) describes an aged flamenco dancer, the brother of a woman (his former partner in “a celebrated teenage dancing couple”) who perished young during the war: “He told himself that if he survived/it was only to become her embodiment in dance.” Then the poem on the following page moves closer to the Holocaust in Poland:

Personal Items
The bedding is airing on the balcony.
Not her bedding anymore.
Not her balcony anymore.
Her mother’s finest eiderdowns.
Her mother who’s in a camp.
The whole family is in a camp
apart from her, she can look at her balcony,
not hers anymore, in a home that’s not hers.
Occupied by a German officer.
And his Polish lover.
Who stands before her in the hall
and shakes her head.

“I’ll give you back some personal odds and ends,
but the bedding stays.
Be glad, child, you weren’t in the apartment
when they arrested everyone,
and that I let you come here
and you’re leaving in one piece.” (p. 79)

Several of the poems make references to poet things, sometimes even to a poet: the speaker’s grandmother, out dining with a friend, is greeted by Tadeusz Różewicz (p. 84-85); we hear about doctor William Carlos Williams in his youth (pp. 136-139); the speaker comments on the authenticity of Cavafy’s bed in a house museum (pp. 100-101). That poem, “Bed” (“Łożko”), ends with four lovely, rhythmic lines describing Alexandria:

Lining the street, where boys for hire once lingered,
now theaters and fast food joints extend. Only the sea
hums like it used to hum between two headlands,
and like hands amid sheets flicker two small boats.

The later poems include addresses to a partner and poems inspired by travel (to Alexandria; to [former Soviet] Georgia; to Latin America). Rosenthal’s “Afterword” is finely and admiringly written: she is not just a fine translator, but a grateful and attentive reader, open to inspiration from the poet she is working on. Quoting Dąbrowska’s comment that she (D.) uses language as “‘a tool, a way of struggling with reality, not an end in itself,’” Rosenthal observes: “This quality poses a translation challenge: how to convey a controlled and elegant lyricism without burdening it with embellishment or mannerism” (p. 156). So many of the poems in Tideline are not only pleasing to read but also suggestive of what other poets might learn by reading them.

Review of Hollowed by Lucy Zhang

September 7, 2022 Brooke Palma

Hollowed

Thirty West Publishing House

$10.99

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider

Welcome to Hollowed, a perfectly sized and memorably seasoned platter of fresh poems guaranteed to delight readers and satisfy anyone with an appetite for an original take on identity, relationships, and reality.

Throughout Hollowed’s thirty pages, Lucy Zhang manages to recreate and reimagine the entirety of the egg (origins, opulence, forms of being) and associated concepts of life and life-cycles (beginnings, arcs, complementary pairings, expected arrangements, endings), in ways that crack all prior notions of what it means to be (alive, a daughter, a partner, a parent, a patient, a human being, and more). The collection’s poems number fewer than a dozen with a compact nine egg (eggscellent) pieces, each reflective of varying life stages and cycles. Despite (or, perhaps, in spite of) the thematic egg, the work’s subject matter extends far beyond the home and its perennial heart (the beat of a kitchen) to include worlds both real and imagined. Zhang cracks open questions of family, tradition, diet, and identity, and then whips, whisks, and fries (often upside down and in entirely original and unexpected ways) new visions of what it means to exist in a world that is ripe with tension and constant change. Zhang, though, does more than simply crack open history and questions of identity. The author creates entirely original ways of navigating the same, both known and inspired.

Throughout the entirety of the work, Zhang generously shares and provides access to possible answers (and newly prompted questions) on long-shared inquiries through original and unexpected descriptions (SOFT-SHELLED TURTLE: “The fairies play mahjong while I shower” 4) and explicit ponderings on tradition (CRACKED: “My parents send me dried bird’s nests, produced from a swallow’s solidified saliva” 13). The work blends introspection and instruction while also serving as a how-to guide of sorts on a range of topics. Equal parts explanatory and commentary, Zhang makes the hard work of crafting magic on the page appear light.

The pieces are highly descriptive and thought provoking. Themes include body, heart, and mind. The collection weaves tradition (CENTURY EGG: “Mother won’t let me eat century eggs because she says there’s lead in them” 6) and a hearty dose of history (ROOM TOUR: “My mom used to say that I had no ‘living standards’ because I don’t buy shrimp” 24) with both imaginative speculation (ROOM TOUR: “My lover from the future says I am dead in his time” 22) and reflective introspection (HOW TO MAKE ME ORGASM: “Close your eyes. When they’re open, I’m reminded of the head left on the plate of roast duck: bill opened wide enough to see down its throat, eyes bulging against the crisped skin.… You hear better with your eyes closed” 8). The prose is punctuated with surprise (lines of code in CODE BABY: “Uncaught exception: object cannot be nil” 17) and whimsy (STONE GIRL: “(Something else) Before the sculptor carves into her, he knocks off her limbs, positioning the point of a chisel against her elbow” 9). Each element is both delightful and daring. Pieces are a mix of coded prose and commentary both social and cultural.

Zhang does not hold back. The author mixes the mundane (shower) with the magical (fairies) and the familial (babies and births) with the fantastical (future lovers), Zhang masterfully engages audiences of all backgrounds, ages, and life stages, while weaving a complex web of mythology, customs, and cultural expectation in ways that are both gripping and memorable.

The work’s nine pieces span topics as varied as how to carry (then cook) a soft-shell turtle and how to maintain life (succulents, dogs, embryos). Following the collection’s theme of eggs, delicate shells, and life cycles, Zhang takes readers on a tour of tradition and timelines. Simultaneously touring the persistence of both tradition and expectation, Zhang masterfully balances past and future. Original interior graphics add to the work’s deeply personal feel. The collection explores the complex and cyclical nature of life. Topics include traditions passed down through generations, game making, and menstrual (as well as life) cycles.

Pieces bounce from birthing and engineering (CODE BABY: “I initialized constants for your name, variables for your height and weight, buffer sizes for your capacity to learn” 17) to egg-dropping (HATCHLING: “When the egg popped out of her vagina, the woman recalled their old chicken, Little Red, who’d lay one egg every two days” 19). Food, remedies (both evidenced- and culinary-based), and fantastic (also fantastical) imagery populate the work. With toggles between the traditional and the imagined, Hollowed digs deep and balances worlds (both personal and personified) and multiple origins.

The collection is as imaginative as it is inspiring. In Hollowed, Zhang has coded and crafted a work of admirable execution (with no identifiable or observable bugs). Never again will I think of an egg (or carton of eggs) in the same way. Hollowed simultaneously satisfies while leaving the reader hungry for more poetic bites. Add Zhang’s remarkable work to the top of your shopping (and reading list). You won’t be disappointed. It’s a darn good egg.

Mad Poet of the Year - R. G. Evans (September 2022)

September 5, 2022 Brooke Palma

Woman Dressed as Death
by R.G. Evans

One liked to pull shadows close around her shoulders like a shawl.
Young, pretty. Not too thin, not too pale. You can call me anytime,
she’d say. I’m always here in town. He treated her kindly as if she were the one.

He kissed the one from Georgia, long and open-mouthed.
Shouldn’t flirt, he knew, but he’d been too long alone, and her smell, my god, her smell . . .
Her tongue tasted of lingonberry. She had to go work the third shift.

The one in Aruba surprised him. To recognize her at all seemed too strange.
The just-there bikini and the tawny, languid tan. They sipped rum drinks
and envied the sun its brilliance, the few hours of it they had left together.

Brooklyn. Seattle. Santa Fe. At least one in every city. And sometimes,
Like Los Angeles, they circled him in droves, a chorus of black dresses,
whispers, and mascara. He touched them all—he couldn’t help himself.

At home, he spent nights dreaming of the one he’d not yet met.
Would he know her when she found him? Would she smell like smoke
and mirrors like the ones who weren’t real? His dreams held out white fingers

and he took them in his hands. He recognized the place they walked as somewhere
he once loved. A little creek. A sandy bank. The distant sound of trains.
He gave her hand a little squeeze and turned in her direction, the way he’d always done.

Gentle reader, a favor. Please read this poem before you read the comments below. I wonder how it will read differently before and after you know of the poem’s origin. Read it first cold. I’ll wait.

This poem from my first book, Overtipping the Ferryman, originated from a line from a New Yorker profile of Neil Gaiman from many years ago in which the writer, referencing a character from Gaiman’s Sandman comics, wrote, “Women dressed as Death are everywhere he goes.” I’ve never read the Sandman series, but I did watch the Netflix adaptation—the timely reason I’m sharing this poem here--with great relish.

Once at the Dodge Poetry Festival, the poet Donald Hall signed one of his books for me and turned to one of the poems and manually edited it with a Sharpie, saying the editors had ruined it in publication. I feel tempted to do the same with the ending of this poem which feels little flat, but I’ll leave it alone for now. I don’t want to tempt fate and risk a visit from a familiar woman in unfamiliar clothes.

Review of Plague Love by Louisa Schnaithmann

August 24, 2022 Brooke Palma

Plague Love

Moonstone Press

$10.00

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Autumn Konopka

Louisa Schnaithmann’s chapbook Plague Love, published by Moonstone Press in 2021, a series of poems about love in the midst of a global pandemic. It is just what a good chapbook should be – tight, cohesive, and powerful. More than that, however, this slim volume is something of an emotional antidote in a world where despair just seems to linger in the atmosphere.

Playful and sensual, honest and unadorned, these poems are refreshingly unapologetic expressions of longing, desire, and affection from one lover to her distant other. Though there are occasional moments of sentimentality, I was repeatedly struck by the uninhibited and expansive emotion in these poems.

From “The Unknown World”

In the unknown world,
each blown kiss
a holy gesture, we love
and love and love.
Reverent as always.

Holding out for tomorrow.

In contemporary poetry, where love so often feels tempered or dampened with sarcasm or grit, I see bravery in such a bold declaration of love.

I was likewise moved by the straightforwardness of “Every Name Has its Power,” which begins simply:

If there is a way
to get out of this
let it be love….

It goes on like that: compact and unadorned, this short poem got me in the gut with the rawness of its longing.

I also really enjoyed the way these poems play with reality and imagination in the use of sensual details. “Social Distancing,” the very first poem in the collection, begins with “A face on a screen–” and ends “The only body I touch is my own”; yet as we move through the poems, the imagery, detailed and visceral, leaves me feeling like these lovers are physically together, even as it’s clear that they’re apart. Consider these lines from “Liminality”:

Even in my dreams, the only
place I touch you…

My arms are your arms
our arms are real,
are the only arms
that will ever exist…

There is a slipperiness here, an intentional incongruity, that allows the reader to share in the emotional experience – desire so powerful, these lovers seem to almost conjure each others’ bodies across space and time. And wow! I am so grateful to have been invited into that: Love. Unironic. Uninhibited.

I will say it again: there is something genuinely brave in writing love poems with the vulnerability we find in Louisa Schnaithmann’s collection. It is, perhaps, the same bravery required to actually be in love – to risk looking foolish or getting hurt for the possibility of making the deepest possible connection. These poems do that. They connect.

In the final poem, “Attention” Schnaithmann writes: “When things lose meaning, the only / thing left is your heart.”

Over the past several years – through elections and changing laws and surging pandemics – meaning has certainly been hard to grab on to. Often it feels like all we can count on for certain are the people in our lives, the people we love. Even when things are difficult and we are distant from each other, the ones we love make us whole and keep us alive. It’s a simple truth, but I am grateful to this collection for reminding me of it.

Review of Poetry 2022 (PA Poetry Society Anthology)

August 17, 2022 Brooke Palma

Poetry 2022

Kindle Direct Publishing

$10.00

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Emiliano Martín

Not all poetry anthologies are alike. “Poetry 2022” is the title of a book made of sixty-five pages. A book sharing rhyme and free verse made of different styles and levels of intellect, and yet each poem reveal the moral qualities of forty-two poets not afraid to share feelings and thoughts that resemble freedom of the spirit penning down poetic words.

“Dawn enters its stages,
like a silent thespian
dancing in the footlight
of the drowsy moon.”

(From the poem “DAWN’S DANCE” by Connie Trump, page 45)

The book itself, an annual anthology published by Pennsylvania Poetry Society, Inc., contains a variety of subjects, and poetic topics that open the curiosity of any reader.

“The sound of air slamming
like ram heads together
this windswept weather
was wildly worrying.”

(From the poem, “TREES” by Thasia A. Lunger, page 30)

This new poetry book is a hidden treasure and historic achievement by the members of PPS. Individuals who believe in the power of poetic words. To all contributors and the editors... a well-deserved round of applause.

“I cast my dreams upon the wind
and hope they take flight
bobbing, dipping, swirling, soaring
like a little child’s kite.”
(From the poem, “THE SECOND WIND” by Philip McDonald, page 33)

Emiliano Martín, Spanish-born and longtime resident of Bucks County, PA., is the founder and former director of Philadelphia Poetry Forum and past president of the Latin American Guild for the Arts. Currently and since 2018, he is president of Pennsylvania Poetry Society. He has authored over a dozen titles of poetry (and prose), besides having been published in Mad Poets Review, Philadelphia Poets, The Lite Fuuse, S.V. Journal, US 1, The Swarthmorean, and other Spanish language publications in Spain, such as Mizares and Marejadas. He is the author of Footprints of Spain in Philadelphia (2020), and his latest book of poems is Caught Between Layers.

POeT SHOTS - '"Epithalamium" by Adam Zagajewski

August 16, 2022 Brooke Palma

POeT SHOTS is a monthly series published on the third Tuesday of the month. It features work by established writers followed by commentary and insight by Ed Krizek.

Epithalamium

by Adam Zagajewski

Without silence there would be no music.
Life paired is doubtless more difficult
than solitary existence -
just as a boat on the open sea
with outstretched sails is trickier to steer
than the same boat drowsing at a dock, but schooners
after all are meant for wind and motion,
not idleness and impassive quiet.

A conversation continued through the years includes
hours of anxiety, anger, even hatred,
but also compassion, deep feeling.
Only in marriage do love and time,
eternal enemies, join forces.
Only love and time, when reconciled,
permit us to see other beings
in their enigmatic, complex essence,
unfolding slowly and certainly, like a new settlement
in a valley, or among green hills.

In begins from one day only, from joy
and pledges, from the holy day of meeting,
which is like a moist grain;
then come the years of trial and labor,
sometimes despair, fierce revelation,
happiness and finally a great tree
with rich greenery grows over us,
casting its vast shadow. Cares vanish in it.

Recently I had the opportunity to honor a marriage. A love match that happened between two people I didn’t know very well. Adam Zagajewski’s poem “Epithalamium” came to mind.

In this poem the poet starts us out with the words, “Without silence there would be no music.” To me this is a profound statement. Of course it is true, and it is what one feels when moving from a solitary existence into a shared life.

An epithalamium was the ancient Greek wedding chamber. Edmund Spenser also wrote a poem titled “Epithalamion” in 1594. Spenser wrote it for his bride Elizabeth Boyle on their wedding day.

Rather than the ode to love that Spenser wrote, Zagajewski give us a more realistic depiction of romantic love. He shows us all the difficulties and distractions that arise when two people share their lives in a “conversation continues through the years”. He brings up the “anxiety” and “even hatred” that can and do arise in any long-term love relationship.

According to the poet “Only in marriage do love and time, eternal enemies, join forces.” He goes on to describe the reconciliation of these conflicts which over time produce a beauty like that of a “great tree with rich greenery”. A tree like Zagjewski describes can only be produced over time. When two people love each other and stay together “Cares vanish in it.”

To hear Adam Zagajewski read this poem, click here.

Local Lyrics - Featuring Maria Masington

August 15, 2022 Brooke Palma

Snow White Walks Home from AA
by Maria Masington

Leaves loosen their grip and float, dangle
like gems from her yellow skirt. Oak rubies and
birch emeralds cling to her black hair in a wispy
crown, like the lie of ‘Happily Ever After.’

Maple whirlybirds fly to her feet. Detritus dusts
up like chipmunks racing her along the path,
circling her like reel-to-reel tapes of long-ago
conversations with witches, queens, and small men.

Mushrooms freckle the forest floor. Resentments
pop up again and again, betrayal and injustices,
real and imagined. She believes everything she thinks,
a tale where she is cast as dupe instead of darling.

She tries to remember their names, the Seven. She
knew them before the Fall: Happy, Doc, Bashful,
Sneezy, Restless, Irritable, and Discontented. Miners
of seven deadly sins, we dig, dig, heigh-ho, heigh-ho.

She loses focus, her eyes jewelers’ loupes,
magnifying and misinterpreting outdated
conversations, tiny slights, and unintended harms,
rewriting history to suit her mood and attitude.

Acorns plunk like cocktail olives onto the trampoline
of the decaying forest floor. Squirrels’ trapeze above
her head, chiding her to face the girl in the mirror,
chattering that she should stop biting the poison apple.

Step-by-step, foliage crumbles under high yellow heels,
powdery remnants of resentment in the woods’ musty air.
A mile in her sober shoes, flakes of jewel-toned leaves
speckle her silk stockings and anger clings to her soles.

What are you interested in as a writer? What do you hope to bring forth with pen and paper?
I was a social worker for many years. I search for meaningful words to decrease the stigma of mental illness and addiction and give voice to those unseen and unheard. I write about single fathers on pediatric oncology wards, women who miscarried, and ignored seniors. The more we understand, the more inclusive we become. Poetry provides a framework to tackle social issues in ways that are honest without being lofty or preachy. The aim is always to be courageous. Many of my poems are written in first person - but they are not autobiographical - I just want people to connect and have a voice.

Your poems often deal in hard truths but still find space for humor. How do you balance these elements in your poems? Why is humor an important tool for you?
That's a great question. I like to think of my writing as "brave" but others have labeled it "dark." There's a limit to how much heaviness we can carry - as readers or audience - so I always bring in humor. Life is difficult, but I also want to celebrate through laughter. (and to be honest, not everyone agrees with me, but I think I'm funny).

Do you have any rituals or writing practices that you regularly engage in to jump start or re-engage your writing?
That's a hard "no." I have no formal training or education in writing. I have my own office with a desk but almost all the work is done the night before critique groups meet so I have something to bring to the table. It's not professional or glamorous - a couch, poodle, cup of coffee and laptop while low-rent TV plays in the background. I take a prompt or a note I wrote on a piece of scrap paper and patchwork together with whatever is causing me angst or amusement. I do attend critique groups religiously - that constructive feedback is essential - I usually do one edit, bring to a second critique group and then either edit a final time or ditch an idea. Would the work be better and more prolific if I was more disciplined? Probably. Am I going to change how I work? Probably not.

Your chapbook, Mouth Like a Sailor, was recently awarded 1st place by the Delaware Press Association. Can you tell us a little about the collection and how it came together?
A few years ago - I took a huge stab in the dark- and submitted for the Dogfishhead Poetry contest. A longshot but I scored an Honorable Mention - so thought maybe there was something there. I spent the next couple years learning about the arch of a book, etc....

During mandatory lockdown I was a featured reader at Mad Poets Livin' on Luck open mic. It was a rough time for everyone so I stuck to light, funny stuff. Matt Lake - who I'd never met- was in attendance and reached out asking if I'd be interested in working together toward a publication. I had to be honest and let him know that what he'd heard was not reflective of my work - so he may not be interested. He was still game and said to send him what I had - I was delighted when he offered to publish it as a book. Matt really championed me from there.

I planned to call it Destiny of the Modern Day Gladiola but did a Facebook poll with 4 options - Mouth Like a Sailor was the unanimous choice. When Matt found the postcard of the female sailor smoking - now the cover - I named her "Lenora" and knew we were onto something. So many people comment on the bookcover - Matt really hit a homerun with that choice.

You are involved with a number of writers’ organizations (including Mad Poets), writing groups, and even host an open mic. How to you balance being enmeshed in a literary life and actually finding time to write?
It's just luck - I started writing after getting a Delaware Division of the Arts fellowship to attend a poetry retreat when I was already in my late 40's and my youngest kid was almost done high school. I'm acutely aware of how fortunate I am - an empty-nester who lives with a super supportive partner and has a lot of work flexibility. I don't make an income from writing and I'm not trying to set the world on fire. I emcee both as a professional and volunteer - so unless it's a paying gig, I draw a boundary when the "writing things" stop feeling like artistic expression and start feeling like work - that's when I back off for a while.

Where can readers check out more of your work?

Mouth Like a Sailor can be purchased at Between Books in Arden - inside the Oddporium - Greg has been a big supporter. If you Google "Maria Masington Amazon" you'll find the book and most prose, anthologies, etc...

Maria Masington is a poet, author, and spoken word artist from Wilmington, Delaware. Her poetry has appeared in over thirty publications including Adanna, The News Journal, The Fox Chase Review, Gargoyle, The Broadkill Review, Earth’s Daughter, and Never Forgotten: 100 Poets Remember 9/11. She has had seven short stories published in both local and international press. Maria belongs to The Mad Poets Society, works as “your friendly emcee,” and is a featured performer on the local art scene. Parnilis Media, aka Matt Lake, released her first chapbook, Mouth Like a Sailor, in 2021. It was awarded first place by the Delaware Press Association and The National Federation of Press Women for poetry.

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art (August 2022)

August 9, 2022 Brooke Palma

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art

Welcome to a new Mad Poets blog, to be offered every two months.

It’s a pleasure to write about the relationship between poetry and other art forms, to examine ways that a various creative arts relate to each other.

My aim in this blog is to feature the work of various poets and artists, to let you know of interesting viewing opportunities and to provide some angles that might prompt your own writing. Here are opportunities of interest:

The Work of MaryAnn L. Miller

MaryAnn L. Miller is a remarkable poet, printmaker, and book artist. Her approach epitomizes the gifts of ekphrasis and creative collaboration; she connects her poems to her own in order printmaking process. Not only that, she generously partners with many other creatives publish artists’ books and fine arts publications. Miller demonstrates how collaboration across art forms and individuals can lead to riches. I admire her vibrant collages and prints, which can be viewed online at https://maryannlmiller.com/ and at her studio in Hunterdon County, NJ.

Miller’s artistic journey is wide and deep. Encouraged by family and teachers for her early drawing and writing, she went on to study art education and school counseling. This led to years of teaching art and reading in NJ public schools. She received an MFA, studying intensively with the poet David Wojahn, then went on to become Resident Book Artist at the Experimental Printmaking Institute at Lafayette College for sixteen years. Following this, Miller founded Lucia Press in Clinton, NJ. She has been a designer and binder for books by Faith Ringgold, Duncan Bullen, Sam Gilliam, Curlee Raven Holton, Barbara Bullock, David C. Driskell, Nikky Finney, Nene Humphrey, Alison Saar, Richard Viera. Sharon Olds, Lee Upton, Jim Toia, Ross Gay, Khet Mar, Janet Taylor Pickett, Nestor Gil, and many others.

Miller demonstrates sensitivity and skill in her published collections, Locus Mentis (PS Books, 2012) and Cures for Hysteria (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Some of these poems explore her experience of Hyperkalemia Periodic Paralysis. She writes movingly of this neuromuscular condition, which caused her unpredictable bouts of paralysis until properly medicated when she was an adult. This is not her only topic, however. Family history, lived experience and references to visual art are interwoven throughout.

In her artist’s statement, Miller explains some of her process:

When I begin a print, I make a serigraph from which I add or redact parts. I use parts of other prints to add to the base or cover redacted places. These parts take on a different identity and value. I spend time reflecting and rearranging before I glue them. It’s a slow process toward resolution and one I liken to writing lines in a poem. Revising along the way, laying down a layer, breaking it, tearing it, enjambing in a new place, caesuras all over the place. Empty spaces are silence, the more silence, the quieter the print, the slower the eye travels. One can’t make prints without sequential thinking, and thought being given to color, form, and composition.

Art in the Time of Savages
by MaryAnn L. Miller
Along the border all drawings have
been taken down not one left

to point a direction for our feet.
We might know the way if we had

wings to spread above the shining
twist of water.

The place of no location has flung
us away from Frida’s baby.

Don’t come here
lullabies are spiders in the bed.

They plan to rub us out
before we can make frantic art

in a jackal world.
Our scraping must matter

it reverberates like
a green poppy sending smoke.

(Published originally in Ovanque Siamo 2018 and nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize, this poem will appear in Time is Snake's Tongue, Word Tech June 2023)

*Art in the Time of Savages (MaryAnn L. Miller)*
Prints available through https://www.ravenfinearteditions.com/

I am learning so much from Miller’s discoveries and experimentation. I admire her collaging, her arranging and rearranging texts as well as visual images. Her generosity and collaborative vision have led to many interesting projects. For example, she worked together with the poet J.C Todd on FUBAR, a book project inspired by one of Todd’s war poems. Miller created monotypes that became images for the book. Another of their collaborations, On Foot/By Hand, began at an artist residency at the Ragsdale Foundation. Miller is currently working on a project for Raven Studios involving the prints of Ifyj Chiejina, a Nigerian American artist.

The following poem will appear in her next collection, Falling into the Diaspora.

Thunder Storms

Can peace be gained until I clasp my wombat?

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

A magnolia unfurls her robe
in the Italian sky above Benevento
a globe of air becomes

temporale. My mother sits
on the basement stairs in Western
Pennsylvania protected from lightning

by a rubber mat;
she prays to Saint Barbara
holding her children too close.

In mother’s head-longing
to be American
she left me

on the Appian Way
her teenage gollies and goshes
a dialect I didn’t learn.

I wanted the mother language
clasped to my neck like a furry
pet raised in a forever home.

(Published in Mom Egg Review 2020)

*Falling into the Diaspora*. (Cover Art by Will Hubsher)

I invite you to learn more about the vibrant poetry and artwork of MaryAnn L. Miller, a generous, wise, and multitalented artist. She will host an Open Studio on Friday, December 2, 2022 sponsored by THAT (The Hunterdon Art Tour). Her website is www.maryannlmiller.com.

Found in Translation

August 5, 2022 Brooke Palma

FOUND IN TRANSLATION

Miltos Sachtouris, Poems (1945-1971), translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2006).

I’ve praised the beautiful editions of poetry translations from the publisher Archipelago before, and when I saw this edition—new to me, though published in 2006—I knew I had to pick it up and review it for the Mad Poets Blog. Author Miltos Sachtouris (1919-2005) is a Greek poet I had never heard of, though he was much recognized with prizes in his lifetime. One blurb on the pack cover lists the “Pleiades of modern Greek poets” to whom Sachtouris should be added: Cavafy, Elytis, Gatsos, Ritsos, Seferis, and Sikelianos. I note that according to Microsoft Word only Cavafy and Elytis are familiar names; the others provoke that jagged red “error” underline. Sachtouris (I think that “ch” should sound like a German or Scots “ch”) was born and died in Athens—the same year as Robert Duncan, Laurence Ferlinghetti, May Swenson, for a bit of context.

The book includes poems from multiple collections (from 1945, 1948, 1952, 1956, 1958, 1960 1962, 1964, 1971)—you can see how productive Sachtouris was. It translates the original Ποιήματα 1945-1981, which was published in 1978 and has gone through a bunch of editions since. Sachtouris continued writing and publishing new stuff, too, but people seem to agree that his best and most influential work was included in the 1978 volume. The poems’ titles are mostly simple words or phrases (“Beauty,” “The Gifts,” “October”); some are more suggestive (“The Fish of Horror,” “Rehearsals for the Repetition of Night,” “A World Came Down Springlike and Strange”), and a few draw on the Greek context (“Pasiphae,” “The Metamorphosis”).

The translator of this volume, Karen Emmerich, is a poet herself and also a professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, specializing in English, Greek and Turkish. Istanbul was actually the cradle of the discipline of Comparative Literature, as erudite scholars fled there from Nazi Germany and other difficult parts of 20th-century Europe. Some of those early comparatists knew a stunning variety of languages, but now that readers have become aware of the poetic riches in all parts of the world it’s clear that no one can know all the languages you would need to read every important poet in the original. So good translation is important for scholars as well as for reading poetry for pleasure and for spiritual uplift—and Dr. Emmerich is an ace. She has translated a lot of Greek poetry—eleven volumes of it since this 2006 collection of Sachtouris appeared.

All right: the book is beautiful, as always with Archipelago. Unlike many books of translated poetry, it gives the poems only in English—without the original Greek. That’s too bad, because when you look at a language with an alphabet you can usually tell if the original rhymes. None of these poems rhyme, but they’re still lovely. Sachtouris’s work has a touch of surrealism, hardly any punctuation and only occasional capitalization, altogether a very modern feeling, and lots of darkness. The dates in the title cover all kinds of bitter moments in Greek history: WWII, civil war, juntas and dictatorships. The vocabulary includes lots of color, in particular lots of “blood” or “bloodied”—including the poet himself, and his parts. By the time Sachtouris published the final collection from which this volume was drawn, he was in his 50s but hadn’t yet gotten staid or boring.

The Sky

Birds black arrows of difficult sorrow
it’s no easy thing to love the sky
you’ve learned well to say that it’s blue
but do you know its caves its forests its rocks?
so as you pass like winged whistles
your flesh gets torn on its glass
your downy feathers stick to its heart

And when night creeps fearfully from the trees
you gaze at the white kerchief of the moon
the naked virgin shrieking in the sky’s embrace
the old woman’s mouth of rotting teeth
the stars with their swords and golden threads
the sky’s lightning its thunder its rain
the distant bliss of its galaxy (p. 48)

This early poem has striking images; the lack of punctuation makes the reader decide where to pause the stream of words. Emmerich has a wonderful ear for sound: the i and s sounds in “the distant bliss of its galaxy” seem to shift away from all the earthly details that came just before: shrieking virgins, old women’s rotting teeth, and stars that combine (masculine?) warlikeness and (feminine?) beauty or craft (the golden threads).

Some of the poems feature unexpected treatments of familiar characters:

The Sheep

My head full of dreams
my hands full of mud

Shall I too sing of the rain
when Pontius Pilate went out into the streets
no one recognized his face
in the darkness in the desert by the wires
when Jesus multiplied the fish
one man was leaning on a fence
another on a blind bridge
another on a crumbling house
when Jesus multiplied the fish
and the sea unleashed onto the land
her wild white sheep
Pontius Pilate went out into the streets
but no one recognized his joy
Pontus Pilate first mate of the river
with his cage his hungry birds
his garden his lost flowers
the two embraced on the hill
the two sighed in the arcade
the two swooned under the cypress tree
as the sea gathered up again
her wild white sheep
to lull them to sleep in her bitter embrace (p. 77)

Here the title does interesting work: a reader today might expect sheep to meant people deluded and misled; once Pontius Pilate and Jesus enter, it seems the sheep must be from a religious flock. But then it turns out to be the sea who releases the wild white sheep: a flood, with whitecaps on waves? The sea is feminine in Greek (thalasa), and the phrase “her bitter embrace” might remind us (given the religious figures in the poem) that “bitter” is the etymological meaning of “Mary.” So who knows how it is all connected. Like many of the poems, this one has lines that send the reader in unexpected directions: I suspect that the book as a whole would be excellent at stirring poetic inspiration in its readers.

There is also some effective ambiguity in the translations. In “Love slipped through your fingers” (p. 96), the last four lines are:

full
of shadows
of songs
of birds

—Does this mean “full of shadows, full of songs, full of birds” or “full of shadows of birds’ songs,” or some combination of these?

Sachtouris has occasional prose poems too, which are more traditionally punctuated:

On the Old Road

H.N.

A beast ate my darling. We had gone out for a walk as always, had seen the house with the meandering motif on its walls, and it had started to sprinkle. Then a clown came out dressed in all sorts of colors turning somersaults and laughing in the street and he wasn’t even asking for money. A little farther down a man was playing the violin while gazing up at some strange red clouds in the sky.

And when the rain grew stronger it formed lots of little streams that washed the blood away. (p. 148)

Emmerich avoids making the rhythm too pretty when it shouldn’t be: see from “The Mirror” (p. 160):

gleaming
and glowing
as the fire took it and made it
coal

the head whispered:
— The trees are burning leaving like hair
the angel flies off with scorched
wings

white pain
a dog with a broken leg
remains
remains

In the line(s) “an angel flies off with scorched/wings,” “scorched” has to be stressed because “off” and “with” can’t be, so the adjacent stresses of “scorched” and “wings” (a spondee, if we read “wings” as part of the same line), create a sort of painful effect, especially because the word “scorched” is so complex to pronounce.

Emmerich provides a brief afterword to the book—nice for a reader who doesn’t want to feel lectured to in starting a book, or who will feel guilty if they skip an introduction—especially since Sachtouris is not yet a Recognized Classic you’d approach as required reading. The afterword confirms the element of surrealism in his work and mentions a few of his Greek surrealist poet friends. (He also has a poem to Apollinaire, and one to Dylan Thomas.) Describing the challenges of her work, she writes, “In poem after poem, Sachtouris exploits ambiguities in the Greek language to confound subjects and objects, enabling multiple, often conflicting readings of particular poems. I have tried, wherever possible, to retain the oddness of Sachtouris’s syntax and the grammatical openness of his phrases” (p. 234). Indeed!

I need to cite just a few more:

The Inspector

The sky is a garden full
of blood
and a little snow
I tightened my ropes
once more I must inspect
the stars
I
heir of birds
must
though with broken wings
take flight (p. 125)

Sachtouris’s tactic of placing just a word or two beneath and almost at the end of a longer line, and of including very short lines, slows down the poems while leaving plenty of white space. In the next one it almost looks like two stanzas:

The Grave’s Bird Was Leaving
The grave’s bird was leaving
so small
red as mourning
vanishing
tenderly
over the sparse grass
with the eternal turtle and its silent
tread

the dead locust
and the bee
that had lodged itself
painfully
in the flower’s mouth (p. 183)

And a more surrealistic example:

We See With Our Teeth
The moon isn’t to blame for our bitterness
as it whirls furiously
                             in the phosphorescence
scattering its bones left and right
the moon isn’t to blame for the lemon blossoms
the moon isn’t to blame for the swallows
the moon isn’t to blame for Spring and the
                                                                   crosses
or that teeth sprouted from our eyes    (p. 201)

Finally, here’s one where Professor Emmerich had to pull out all the stops (…Microsoft Word went crazy with red underlines):

Zacchaeus
They named you well: Zacchaeus!
he said high up falling from the tree
holding a yellow flag

the motorcyclobicyclist
the hematocyclobicyclist
the motorcycollectogivetaker
the metelashster
the hemateyelockster
the motorcyclobicyclomarksman

the bandit

the bloodying (p. 219)

When I googled a bit, I discovered that many of the Sachtouris poems you might find online were translated by Karen Emmerich, and that this book was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. So I’m glad I finally found Poems, and you don’t have to take my word that it’s a good book of poetry in translation.