Ekphrasis: Poems and Art (March 2023)

March 29, 2023 Brooke Palma

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art

Welcome to a new Mad Poets blog, to be offered quarterly.

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.

Each One Teach One: The Poetry and Art of Christina E. Johnson

***A House A Home A Journey: Variation of Housetop,*** Christina E. Johnson
(Exhibited at “Celebrating the Quilts of Gee’s Bend”, Swarthmore College, 2018)

One of Philadelphia’s local gems is Christina E. Johnson, a talented fiber artist, teacher and poet who lives in West Philadelphia. To quote her, “My art challenges traditional and stereotypical edicts, encouraging individual empowerment with the hope of assisting women to use their voices and art for continued social change. I believe in the motto, ‘each one teach one and then pass it on.’ ” (Philadelphia Folklore Project).

Christina’s artwork incorporates traditional African-American quilting techniques, for which she received a grant to teach and study in Ghana with local artisans. True to her values, she has spent years teaching and sharing her art in Philadelphia schools, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and other places. She has used her talents to create quilts and other fiber art pieces for children and adults with cancer as well as individuals with HIV and Alzheimer’s. She founded the Quilters of the Round Table and co-founded the Southeastern Pennsylvania African American Quilt Documentation Project to survey the region’s African American quilters.

When asked how visual art and poetry interact for her, Christina shared, “When I am particularly moved by something, my mind starts going about what I want to say to the piece that says something to me. I let the fabric speak to me. It’s a dialogue; we are speaking to each other and speaking to the public.”

Christina’s work is interactive. She is inspired by others’ visual art to write poems and her fiber art has spurred others in this vein. What follows is a sampling of her poetry and art as well as others’ ekphrastic poems that she has inspired.

Eye of the Storm
Swirling
Lifting objects too heavy for people to physically move
The air not contained by
Weather standards this time of year.

The Earth assaulted and wounded by an aerial attack
Round and round
Scary sounds, thumbing grinding and dissonant

The funnel, the funnel debris, water filled
Must land eventually
What damage done to all in view! Homes, cars, folks that could not hide.

Everything lost to a weather phenomenon
That strikes without warning and cares not for our fears or concerns.

No stability.
I am here.
Deal with me until I am gone
Only to return unexpectedly
Whenever.

Christina E. Johnson

Christina explores a variety of topics: family, aging and friendship as well as African-American history. She confided that for the first time she is being more political. Her quilt, “Mama Floyd” was recently accepted into a prestigious exhibit of African-American fiber arts (https://www.quiltmaniainc.us/content/uploads/2020/09/we_are_the_story_press_release_september_14_2020.pdf). “This quilt surprised me because it came from rage,” she said. Indeed, sharing it has led to deep discussions and sensitive writing by other poets.

Note to Mama Floyd
-after fiber art by Christina E. Johnson

Letters cut and stitched
like a ransom note, but no
this fading cry for Mama,

worth less than a twenty dollar bill,
blue knee unyielding as black asphalt
pressed against a neck.

These shreds of stitched fabric
shed as tears of another grieving mother
Justice never spelled at the grave.

Crowds gather flowers and signs
hard streets shout: Another Lynching!
Outrage and hope stir a courtroom,

a nation, whose unequal history
cries with the tragic gravity of bodies
begging the right to breathe.

Steve Pollack

***George Washington’s Slave***, **Christina E. Johnson**

Ona Judge, George Washington’s Seamstress Slave

Her face solemn
She watches, looking beyond the window
Where the wind has tossed aside the curtain.
She sees the road to be traveled.
Ready. Ready to move to a new home.
Her own home. A home without the
Hustle bustle of owners. Owners who bark orders.
Owners who do not pay. They just demand hours of hard
Menial work.
Though work she enjoys and will do when she is free.
Free to come and go
Free to charge so she might live.
There is luxury as she’s dressed for success.
She knows what she wants.
And the bird has sung. Gently, whispering a marching tune.

Christina E. Johnson

Blackbird Watching
(based on “George Washington’s Slave”, by Christina E. Johnson)

Blackbird watching from a sideways perch
Nameless creature within sight,
Let me listen to your silent song
Faceless soothsayer of night.
Buttoned, starched in proper dress
Cuffed for all to see,
Let me rise along your shadowed path
As I soar along with thee.
Blackbird warbling from a nearby branch
Open beak emits no sound,
Let me take your counsel deep within
Knees bent regally on ground.
Lace and trim I crisp for her
Fanning each appointed mark,
She is gowned, the lover known
While I await you in the dark.
Blackbird, teach me of your throated tune
Pray sing your song afield,
I’ll cloak you in my handiwork,
This craft I spin and wield.

Debby Swirsky-Sacchetti

Christina’s E. Johnson’s quilts have been exhibited at Art Sanctuary, the National Constitution Center, Swarthmore College, and Villanova University. She has received grants from the Leeway and Independence Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Humanities Council, and others.

Here are more links to the work of this wonderful artist. If you are moved to respond to her artwork with your own poems, please send it along to cpoems@gmail.com.

www.Blurb.com/bookstore/detail/440229

https://folkloreproject.org/artists/christina-johnson/

https://moodle.swarthmore.edu/pluginfile.php/436812/mod_resource/content/1/Swarthmore%20Gees%20Bend-Events.pdf

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.

Review of Over Clouds of Cotton by Emiliano Martín

March 22, 2023 Brooke Palma

Over Clouds of Cotton

Independently published

$13.00

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by guest blogger, Anthony Palma

When one thinks of clouds, the easy meandering, organic flow of nature comes to mind. This flow moves gracefully, easily, and without interruption. It is therefore fitting that Emiliano Martín named his new book Over Clouds of Cotton, a work full of grace, ease, and craft that reminds us just how talented a writer Martin is.

Over Clouds of Cotton begins with a statement about how the book addresses “a variety of themes dealing with poetry itself,” something that is very clear throughout the poems it contains. Poems like “Wisely” and “Simple Wannabe” bring us into the rooms where poetry is being shared, capturing the good and bad of poetry in performance. Others, such as “To Write a Poem,” more overtly address the act of writing as an almost Zen-like endeavor. This poem in particular subtly creates a brief snapshot of the author at work, showing us where Martín’s work comes from, not a place of anger or excitement, but of peace.

Poetry is not the only subject of Martín’s work. Much of this collection explores the poetry of living. The poem “Serious Feeling” describes how life appears to end, “when we happen to fall / off / the tree branch of tenderness,” and like many poems in this collection, connects love and creativity as necessary parts of the human experience. Other poems such as “Way to Miss Her” describe love, loss, and memory. It captures those moments when we look back and think about what could have been, moments and emotions that are instantly recognizable, and infinitely relatable.

Other poems provide meditations on existence and self. For example, “Effervescence of Bubbles” deftly identifies a simple, everyday act as a moment of pure existence. Like in so many poems in this collection, the author wrestles with ideas beyond words, but translates them into lyric moments that are at once simple and as deep as the ocean.

What most struck me about this collection was its tone. From the beginning, Martín offers his thoughts in a unique, tranquil way, regardless of whether he is offering social commentary or quiet musings. This is because Martin seems to feel that we all are after a common end. We all pursue peace and harmony, as stated in “Agree to Disagree:”

Then we could simply make a point
to agree to disagree
and keep on breathing at ease
while enjoying it in peace.

It appears that, to Martín, all of the nonsense that occurs around us distracts us from what is really important, that we spend most of our lives disconnected from the people and things we truly love. By heeding Martín’s call we cut through those distractions, and by doing so find ourselves closer to the existences we were meant to experience.

This collection is meant for the dreamer in us all. In this world of confusion, strife, and decay, Martín’s work offers us inspiration and the hope that despite all that we have suffered through, we will all find our way.

Anthony Palma’s work attempts to bridge the gap between poetry and other forms while addressing issues of social justice, identity, and existence. His work has appeared in publications such as Rue Scribe, Oddball Magazine, and the Show Us Your Papers Anthology. His debut collection of poetry, flashes of light from the deep (Parnilis Media), is now available on Amazon. He recently published Horror, a chapbook. His latest project is Palmoetry, a YouTube channel of his poetry and performances that are sometimes enhanced with music. Be sure to look him up on social media at anthonypalmapoetry.

POeT SHOTS - "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke

March 20, 2023 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.

The Waking

by Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

“The Waking” is a villanelle by Theodore Roethke which Brings us in touch with life and death as well as simply living. The villanelle has its roots in French folksong from around the fourteenth century. The form is used particularly well here by the poet. Another famous villanelle is “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas.

In this poem, Roethke asks us to “learn by going” as we move through existence. He celebrates life: “God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,/…” Roethke also discusses the mystery of life: “Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?”. Still there is the ultimate conclusion to life when Roethke explains that “Great Nature has another thing to do/ To you and me;…so take the lively air.”

This is one of the truly great poems of the twentieth century. Every time I read it, I am struck by the simplicity and elegance of the poetic statements found within it. Many of you may be familiar with it. “The Waking” causes one to remember to savor life as we live.

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 Museum of Things by Liz Chang

March 15, 2023 Brooke Palma

Museum of Things

Finishing Line Press

$15.99

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

It is inevitable as we move through our lives that we collect and dust off memorabilia that remind us of other people and other times. In Liz Chang’s riveting chapbook, she documents her Museum of Things. Each talismanic object, including a Peanuts lamp, wooden display shelves, and a children’s book, contains an art gallery tag listing the artist, active years, title, media, dimensions, provenance, and catalog number. By utilizing this format, Chang invites the reader to view her exquisitely rendered poems as pieces of art. Objects and lived experience fuse together in an distilled, intimate, and vital essence.

Chang begins with the poem, “It’s a Lamp, Charlie Brown.” Not just an ordinary lamp, this lamp of Peanuts characters symbolize her grandparents’ wishes “that I might always be/ uncomplicated, docile, faithful.” The lamp also serves as a magical vessel for her sorrows:

I do remember
gazing at the balloons that never rose
while my mother recounted how my classmate
in the hospital might die from third degree burns…
feeling grief
flow out of me and into
the balloons’ empty chambers.

As the narrator grows older, the lamp also carries scars in the form of shattered balloons:

My father claims he bumped the lamp
one night while we were “disagreeing”
but what echoes inside my head
my fault, my fault, my fault

Conveying a poet’s mastery, this poem takes you through early childhood to its end. Chang’s poem captures the worldly, whimsical, and melancholy wisdom of Peanuts characters perfectly.

In “She Couldn’t Quite Explain It/ [It] Had Always Just Been There,” Chang describes the history of a relationship through a wooden display shelf found in the West Village “scouring the sidewalks on springtime Tuesday evenings,/ picking through the well-off’s castoffs, their casual/ disregard, rather than face our own crumbling.” As the narrator picks up the worn shelves, her partner makes his disapproval known, yet she realizes “Everything permanent he’d let me bring/ into our space was earthtoned—it [mint green shelves] was defiantly wrong,/ too loud and odd like me.” In this poem, the abandoned shelves mirror the cooling of the relationship. The narrator’s partner is ecstatic to buy a used copy of Crash Test Dummies’ God Shuffled His Feet. “I accepted his token mournfully, thinking/ this is a gift you give your middle school carpool lead/ or a lab partner—not someone who’s carried and lost your child.” The power of this poem is how naturally and subtly Chang builds up to this line. It took my breath away and made me reexamine everything I had read before. She confesses to the reader “I lost that CD long ago,” but the shelves “hang in the only room that’s mine.”

Chang concludes her brilliant collection with the poem, “The Moon and the Sun.” This poem beautifully extols the necessity for a diverse representation in children’s literature:

My father read to me from his passed down library
of Golden Books—books for little American children—
and I learned that stories weren’t about people who looked
like us. I felt my Asian-ness a secret, one
that the authors did not know or understand.

The narrator discovers The Weaving of a Dream, a Chinese fairy tale featuring three sons, that does reflect her experience, or more accurately, her father’s.

Of course, it is the youngest son who stays the longest,
remains loyal and courageous. My father is the youngest,
and when his mother faltered, he did not hesitate
to knock out his front teeth, swallow his cries,
as he flew over fire, stifle screams as he lolled in a vast sea of grief.

At the end of her father’s/the youngest son’s journey following his mother, he discovers “a palace of fairies and monsters. At night,/ the most beautiful fairy hangs a pearl to work by as a lamp./ It is elemental as the moon, this love of art and beauty.” As a child, the narrator would always help her father replace their “moon,” or the streetlamp. When they moved and as an act of love for the narrator and her grandchildren, he “took down the globe” and

He fashioned a lamp base from a bottomless bowl,
rewired the moon so it would not glow too hot,
gifted it to me many years later so I can read

to my daughters at night
by its light.

Rich, evocative, it is hard to believe Museum of Things is only a chapbook, since it contains so much, like the Louvre. The reader could spend many happy and fulfilled hours wandering its rooms and viewing its contents. For fans of pop culture, object art, and poetry, I would very highly recommend Liz Chang’s Museum of Things. It is a stirring work of art.

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.

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

March 6, 2023 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.

MORE LIFE
by R.G. Evans

Whatever fire burns us first, they teach us the word No,
but on our own we learn the sweeter word More.
We cuddle with excess, shun moderation
(its skeletal cousin the scold).
Food comes first and lasts the longest,
even when lust crashes through like a lineman.
More cake, more kisses, more chocolate, more you.
In my time, I have wanted more days
to lie in the sand beside the warm Carolina sea.
I’ve ordered one more drink
when more was the last thing I should have.
Some years I have wanted more women
than any sane man’s life could hold.
And often when a sun like this one
slips down russet under a dark horizon,
I pray More time, the biggest no of all.
More. Say the word. A kiss into the air.
A gesture of farewell. O life. O now.
O every mortal gift. More, we say. O More.

It’s been an honor serving as the Mad Poet of the Year. Many thanks to the Mad Poets Society for the invitation and for featuring my poems each month. I end my tenure here with a poem from my first book, Overtipping the Ferryman, a poem that is a remembrance, a wish, an impossible dream—everything that makes poetry worth writing and reading.

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 American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide (edited by Susan Barba)

March 1, 2023 Brooke Palma

American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide

Harry N. Abrams Press

$21.60

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Jennifer Schneider

From Dolly Parton to Tom Petty and from Lady Bird Johnson to neighborhood garden clubs, the wildflower intrigues across time and often just in time. In its many forms, the wildflower has the potential to ignite and invite both imagination and exploration with and of all senses. It’s no wonder. Given their incredible ability to support ecosystems, pollinators, and awe – often all at once, as well as to ignite a full range of sensory experiences, the wildflowers’ variety is part of their annual and perennial appeal.

American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide captures and curates the wildflower and its many dimensions. The collection is edited by Susan Barba (also the author of the work’s Introduction (9)) and illustrated by Leanne Shapton. The 340-page anthology is a multi-sensory experience, with text as diverse (classic and contemporary authors across various genres, styles, periods, and places all sharing space and readership) as the work’s exquisite abstract watercolor illustrations.

Given the wildflowers’ broad appeal, it makes sense that so many authors have engaged with wildflowers through writing and in so many varied ways, including culturally, politically, and naturally. It similarly makes sense that one might choose the wildflower as the focus of a collection and field guide. What Barba has created and anthologized, though, is a bouquet of infinite surprises and that inspires both awe and admiration.

Henry David Thoreau (the subject of Lydia Davis’s essay titled Cohabitating with Beautiful Weeds (34)) may have “lamented that so few people noticed the wildflowers” (35), but Barba ensures otherwise. The collection offers opportunities and reasons to re-see. Pick one. Pick several. Pick all. No matter how many works one chooses and/or how one chooses to experience American Wildflowers, this collection will not disappoint.

The collection is as inspiring as it is informative, with authors that reach and teach with breadth as expansive as the wildflower itself. With pieces as varied as Sandra Lim’s Snowdrops (31), June Jordan’s Queen Anne’s Lace (39), Walt Whitman’s Wild Flowers (43), A. R. Ammons Butterfly weed (48), and Mary Siisip Geniusz’s Doodooshaaboojiibik (83), among dozens of others, the collection is both informative and inspiring. Organized by species and botanical family, the writings infuse connection with not only nature but also a diverse range of voices and perspectives, all while simultaneously highlighting the incredible breadth of nature’s work and wildflower-inspired writings. As Davis writes, every wildflower has a useful function (36), and the collection captures their utility along with their originality.

The work engages with the wildflower across seasons and at all stages of the life cycle.

From Devin Johnston’s Domestic Scenes (49):

A spray of toothbrushes,
stems in a mug:
a family portrait.

to Henri Cole’s Sunflower (67):

When Mother and I first had the do-not-
resuscitate conversation, she lifted her head,
like a drooped sunflower, and said,
“Those dying always want to stay.”

American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide offers an ideal reading for any season, stage, and state of mind. The anthology engages at the intersection of the breathtaking and the ordinary and straddles the lines often drawn between what is known and what is imagined. The collection delivers much more than a field of dreams. To read American Flowers is akin to taking a walk through a garden of finely crafted letters. The collection serves as a dictionary of both darling blooms and daring colors. The collection also offers a stem for all readers. Pieces vary in form (prose, poetry, letters, essays), time (the 1700s through the present day), location, and season. Readers can create then customize bouquets to suit all tastes as the collection’s pages bloom in unpredictable ways.

The work is also a testament to the power of nature, art, and the written word, in their many layers, hues, and shapes, to soothe, heal and unite – especially when cohabitating in similar spaces. The work is simultaneously contemplative and curious. The pages grow a garden of eclectic words, petals and ponderings, seeded with watercolor hues. Barba writes of a “hope that the anthology, devoted to writing about American wildflowers, will counter the ‘plant blindness’ of our dominant culture by exhibiting many of the flowers in the periphery of our vision” (10). Like with much of life. readers need only pause long enough, eyes open, to appreciate just how successful Barba has been. The collection not only brings plants at the periphery into lines of sight but also highlights the power of diverse voices united.

American Wildflowers is a field guide for all seasons. Both an experiment and a collection of experiments in form and function, the collection is timeless and timely -- a treat for all senses and seasons. Inhale. Exhale. Enjoy.

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.

Found in Translation

February 23, 2023 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.

Louise Labé, Love Sonnets and Elegies. Translated by Richard Sieburth, Preface by Karin Lessing (New York: New York Review Books, 2014).Jerzy Ficowski, Everything I Don’t Know: Selected Poems, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer (Storrs, CT: World Poetry Books, 2021).

Where had I heard of Louise Labé? – Right, in George Steiner’s often wonderful, often irritating book After Babel, where he says that Rilke’s translations of Louise Labé into German have superseded the originals. Surely Rilke wouldn’t waste time translating someone who wasn’t pretty good, even if he wound up superseding her, so when I saw this little book I picked it up.

Louise Labé was a sixteenth-century poet, born between 1516 and 1522 in Lyon: she would add “Lionnoize” to her name (Lionnaise, in updated spelling). Why on earth hadn’t I heard of her before? I mean, I took French all the way through junior high and high school, went off to college thinking I might major in French, and was never allergic to poetry. I *had* heard of Pierre Ronsard (1524-1585 – almost Labé’s contemporary), probably because some of his poems were set as madrigal lyrics. And you have heard of, or at least heard, a bit of Ronsard too: Yeats’s famous poem “When you are old and grey and full of sleep” begins as very nearly a translation of Ronsard’s 1578 poem “Quand vous serez bien vielle,” though Ronsard says his addressee will remember with regret that he once wrote her love poetry, while Yeats tells the addressee that she will look back to recall how beautiful she once was. (And Yeasts doesn’t namecheck himself in his poem as Ronsard does.)

But back to Louise Labé! The book is an odd combination, giftwrapped with additional texts, perhaps to serve poetry fans and more scholarly readers (students, teachers) at once. It opens with super-brief biographies of Labé, Sieburth and poet Karin Lessing; then an artsy (rather than scholarly) introduction by Lessing, adapted from what she wrote earlier as she was translating a bit of Labé. You’re sure to get an artsy introduction when you invite a poet to introduce a poet; this one cites liberally from the book itself, a kind of appetizer from bits of the main course. It also makes me think it would be worth reading some of Lessing. Then there’s a very detailed chronology that which includes not only events (some presumed, with very approximate years) from LL’s life but also historical events in her city of Lyon, achievements by other writers of the sixteenth century (mostly Italy and France: Lyon became not just a center of trade but also a passage of Renaissance literary culture Northward into France: translations of Petrarch etc.), and then after her death, for which we do know the year (1566), some history of her posthumous reputation—up to a 2006 book that proposes that Louise Labé herself was a mystification, made up by male poets in Lyon at the time and furthered by her publisher! The editor of the book (presumably Sieburth) just leaves that there for the moment, and the translations follow.

Richard Sieburth is a very erudite professor who has also translated Maurice Scève, a Lyonnais poet of LL’s era of whom no one has proposed that he was made up. I’ll leave the question of LL’s actual love life and its relationship to her poetry (as the sonnet is a genre of love par excellence)—but the book handles it in a way that doesn’t feel quite satisfying. Women written out of the record for all sorts of reasons, and Labé seems to have been discounted for some centuries due to a reputation for immorality, not poor literary quality.

The translations open with a long and somewhat tedious introduction by Labé herself, addressing her book to a well-educated younger woman whom she urges her to make good use of her advantages in this enlightened age to pursue knowledge. So at least if Labé was a fraud, the fraudsters were advancing a feminist program. She also points out that when you reread something written before you re-feel all that inspired the poem, not a typical thought about poetry.

The first of the love sonnets looks frighteningly Italian: Labé is showing that she can write in Tuscan, just like Petrarch. Lucky for me—lacking all but madrigal Italian!—the original poems start looking very French the moment the next page turns, though the original spelling is preserved. Sieburth strives to retain meter and rhyme, but not compulsively; plenty of lines don’t scan, but perhaps that’s all for the best in an anglophone translation today, where perfect regularity might become monotonous. He’s not padding lines to make them long enough, though there are additions here and there. As always in a rhyming translation words and ideas must change: compare

Labé:           Dans le mol lit le repos desiré
(literal:        In the soft bed the repose desired)
Sieburth:    The desired rest of my downy bed

Labé:           J’ai chaut estreme en endurant froidure
(literal:        I have heat extreme while enduring cold)
Sieburth:    The colder I feel the hotter I burn

Labé:           Puis quand je croy ma joye estre certeine
(literal:        Then when I believe my joy is certain)
Sieburth:    Then, convinced my bliss cannot be denied

-- You’ll notice how much better Sieburth’s line sounds than my literal (though it would scan better if he lowered stylistic standards and contracted “cannot” to “can’t”), and how nice “-vinced” sounds close to “bliss.”

All the original sonnets are in the classic decasyllable form, and Sieburth stays close. French metrical verse, then and now, both gives a syllable to “mute” vowels (final -e) and takes a single syllable for adjacent vowel sounds in separate words: “mon povre ame amoureuse” has only seven beats, essentially losing the “e” of “povre” and the “e” of “ame” but counting the final -e on “amoureuse,” enunciated with a sort of schwa sound in recited poetry. Somewhere Robert Frost claimed that Anglo poetry was all loose or strict iambics, pointing to how we don’t really notice the way a line opens even if it’s a formal poem. Sieburth will shift from iambic (starting ta-PUM) to trochaic (starting PUM-ta) as he moves down a poem, versus the French line that counts syllables. I admire Sieburth for (mostly) not adding words just to make up the syllable count, and for not using archaic syntactic inversions a rhyme to enable. On the other hand, Labé’s lines are all perfect… shouldn’t we get to enjoy that in English? Every time I paused in reading I felt my own thoughts start giving in to the seductive power of the decasyllable, which the Anglo reader perceives as pentameter, meter of Shakespeare and Milton. Labé uses it throughout the book, though the twelve-beat alexandrine would be preferred in the next generation and for hundreds of years after.

But here’s one example:

Pour le retour du Soleil honorer,
Le Zephir, l’air serein lui apareille:
Et du sommeil l’eau & la terre esveille,
Qui les gardoit l’une de murmurer,

En dous coulant, l’autre de se parer
De mainte fleur de couleur nompareille.
Ja les oiseaus es arbres font merveille,
Et aus passans font l’ennui moderer:

Les Nynfes ja en mile jeus s’esbatent
Au cler de Lune, & dansans l’herbe abatent:
Veus tu Zephir de ton heur me donner,

Et que par toy toute me renouvelle?
Fay mon Soleil devers moy retourner,
Et tu verras s’il ne me rend plus belle.

To honor the Sun upon his return,
Zephyr clears the sky with a gentle breeze:
Earth & water now wake from their sleep
In which one did cease its murmurings

As it sweetly flowed, and the other slow
To clothe itself in iridescent flowers.
The birds in the trees now sing for hours,
Easing the minds of those who pass below:

Now the Nymphs do dance & play about
In the moonlight, trampling the grasses down:
Zephyr, won’t you share your joy with me,

That I too be renewed by your company?
Zephyr, make my Sun turn his face to me,
And see how beautiful he’ll make me be.

(It’s weird to be reading something in older French: you sort of translate it into modern French as you read, so this bilingual edition feels like two versions with a third ghost version between them—be it in French or in the reader’s own reflexive English. And yet if you know French it’s pretty clear despite looking odd, right?) In the last line of sonnet XV, “Et tu verras s’il ne me rend plus belle” feels just like “And just see if he didn’t make me more beautiful,” though “beautiful” is hard to rhyme (“dutiful” won’t cut it here); I can’t help feeling that “And SEE how beautiful HE’ll make me BE” overdoes the EE sound. But my proposal, “And just see…” is too contemporary, whereas Sieburth gives us “the Nymphs do dance & play about”—nice old-fashioned syntax that fits well. Notice too that every time Labé uses only two rhymes for all eight lines of her first two stanzas—more than an English poem can manage without sounding forced. (The two final tercets share three rhymes, making for more variety.)

Here’s another lovely sonnet: “XXIII” (next-to-last in the cycle of XXIV):

Las! que me sert, que si parfaitement
Louas jadis & ma tresse doree,
Et de mes yeus la beauté comparee
A deus Soleils, dont Amour finement

Tira les trets causez de ton tourment?
Ou estes vous, pleurs de peu de duree?
Et Mort par qui devoit estre honoree
Ta ferme amour & iteré serment?

Donques c’estoit le but de ta malice
De m’asservir sous ombre de service?
Pardonne moy, Ami, à cette fois,

Estant outree & de despit & d’ire:
Mais je m’assur’, quesque pat que tu sois,
Qu’autant que moy tu soufres de martire.

What good is it now, that you so perfectly
Once praised the golden tresses of my hair,
Or that the beauty of my eyes you compared
To two Suns, from which Love so expertly

Drew the darts that into your heart did fly?
Where are those tears once shed & now no more?
Or that Death on which you solemnly swore
You would love me for the rest of your life?

Or was it all a cruel ruse on your part
To pretend to serve me, enslaving my heart?
Forgive me, Love, if I speak so free,

For I’m beside myself with rage & grief:
But I’d like to think, wherever you may be,
You’re every bit as miserable as me.

That nifty enjambment at the end between Labé’s first and second stanza feels very modern. The final line in Sieburth’s translation is good: the longer word “miserable” avoids the chunk-a-chunk of a too-regular iambic meter of too-short English words, and flickers between four and three syllables in length, further turning the metrics subtle.

Labé’s three Elegies follow the sonnets, and they’re enjoyable too, though more to chew than the poems of fourteen lines—each elegy goes on for three-plus pages.

Sieburth follows the translations with ten pages of notes, and then a 25-page Translator’s Afterward. Like Lessing in her Preface, Sieburth enjoys playing with language, and if you don’t mind that the afterward is both informative and enjoyable. referring again to the fact that Labé’s very existence had been doubted in a recent book, Sieburth declares that he does not disbelieve in Labé—both because it’s hardly plausible that a large number of people would have collaborated in a fraud without SOMEONE spilling the beans at some point, and more significantly because he finds no other poets in that era capable of writing what Labé has written: her personal approach comes through in the otherwise standard turns of the genre. He amusingly calls Labé, in her late twenties when her work was published, “an older woman.” On the whole, however, the book worth a read, especially if you are interested in French poetry, women’s poetry, or translation of metrical poetry.

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.

POeT SHOTS - "Today" by Daniel G. Hoffman

February 21, 2023 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.

Today

by Daniel G. Hoffman

Today the sun rose, as it used to do
When its mission was to shine on you.
Since in unrelenting dark you're gone,
What now can be the purpose of the sun?

This month includes Valentine’s Day. It is a time when some of us consider romantic love and what it means. This short poem by Dan Hoffman for me encapsulates love for a partner that is everlasting. The poem was written after the death of Hoffman’s wife of almost fifty years, Elizabeth McFaland, who was the poetry editor of Ladies Home Journal and an influential poet in her own right. While the poem is sad, it is loving at the same time. Love does end with death.

Dan Hoffman was the Consultant to the Library of Congress on poetry in 1973. This was before the position of Poet Laureate was created. Dan lived in Swarthmore and taught at the college there as well as The University of Pennsylvania. He was a great friend to Mad Poets and read for us a number of times before his death in 2013.

Think about your loves. Can you feel the way Dan Hoffman does about his?

Local Lyrics - Featuring Florence-Susanne Reppert

February 21, 2023 Brooke Palma

Mass-Produced Love Story
by Florence-Susanne Reppert

It starts and ends the same way.
Old words, new formations.
The dog eared,
sugar-lipped,
mass-paperback of our own creations. We are novellas.
Dramas.
Lines and lines of dictionary variations. So go on.
Open me up.
Bookmark your favorite parts with something that smears,
trail your greasy fingers over the coffee stains on my thigh.
Break my spine.
Leave me out in the rain or tear me to shreds with your canines.
Put me back together with tape and glue,
promise you will never do it again,
You wouldn't dare hurt me anymore.
I won't be neglected by your leather-worn hands. Replace my cover with something more aesthetically beautiful and tell me lies.
Only read the first page of all I have to offer and put me back on the shelf with the rest of your ‘Do Not, Could Not Finish’ collection.
Tell me you love me if only to ruin me.
I promise it’s all I’ve ever known anyway

Why do you write poetry? What are your poetic muses?
My reasons for writing are extremely abundant. But the ‘why’ always trickles to two that stand in the forefront. The first being my Mother. When I was a teenager I was sitting in front of our huge boxy Dell computer and, being a nosey kid, I was rifling through papers. I happened upon a small folder filled with poetry written by my mom. I never knew she wrote and I don't think we ever spoke about it again. But she had written a piece about what it felt like to be a bird stuck in a cage. I took it, kept it in a notebook and must have copied it a dozen times to work it into my memory. She later was angry I took it, but as an adult I understand a lot more about her because of that poem. The second why, is because growing up and well into my adulthood I never felt like I had an outlet for all the things I struggled with. I never shared how I really felt with anyone but my journals. To this day I still struggle with being transparent in my emotions but my writing has helped immensely.

My poetic muses are simply my experiences. There are a few poets I’ve had the honor to meet that inspire me and helped me find my voice, but at the end of the day it’s what I've overcome that pushes me forward in my poetry.

There are a lot of cityscapes and industrial themes in your work. Is this a product of where you live or where you grew up?
I've always been fascinated with buildings and history. Architecture is such a huge part of our world, for better or worse. I grew up in the country, on a cul-de-sac with a farm at the beginning of the street. I dreamt of the city and looking out over the buildings. Now I live in a small city and dream of the country.

You have a new chapbook out. Tell us a little bit about Trigger Warning.
Trigger Warning (published by the incredible team over at Two Key Customs) actually started as a very different project. I hadn’t intended to write a book about my trauma and more harrowing experiences until Steve and Lindsay of TKC reached out to me about the manuscript I was tinkering with. At the time, I was dealing with a multitude of things from my past and struggling with my PTSD. So when they reached out I knew they were people I could trust with the heavy stuff. What started as 2 poems I had written about domestic abuse turned into 14 really heavy pieces that I never thought I would write about. I am horrible when it comes to describing my own work, so if you want a more eloquently worded review of the book go to @tinamariecox on Instagram and check out her blog. She recently reviewed my book and I am grateful for her!

I believe you are also a photographer. Does poetry influence your photography? Does photography influence your poetry?
My photography and my poetry kind of bounce off each other in my mind. I've been doing both since I was about 10 but I always felt more of a deeper love for my photography. I tend to write more pieces about my photography than take pictures to go with my writing. I’ve just always been fascinated about capturing moments in picture form, taking a memory and making it permanent. I’ve always felt like I had the capability to capture a feeling with my camera better than I could ever try with my words, and sometimes, words aren't always needed or necessary.

What do you find most fulfilling about the writing process. Do you have any writing habits or strategies that help in turning the blank page into an artform?
The one thing that is always helpful when I'm in a writing slump is going to an open mic or picking up a book of poetry or, honestly, any book. Inspiration is all around us, in the abandoned garages in an alleyway in the city, in the scents floating on the air that triggers a specific memory, even something as simple as watching your cat attempt to be graceful and somersaulting his chunky butt off the couch. I wish I could say I sit with my laptop and a cup of tea while writing. However, most times I'm surrounded by the chaos of toddlers, power chugging a Monster energy drink and hiding in my bathroom to get the thoughts into my notes app. The most fulfilling thing about my writing process is that once I'm done hacking away at a piece I feel lighter. Almost as if the final poem was a part of a bloodletting ritual.

Where can readers buy your books/read more of your work?
If you want to buy Trigger Warning, go over to @twokeycustoms on Instagram and click the link in the bio! Or go over to CatchsteveZ on Etsy! (and please also check out the other books they've published! They do fantastic work!) If you're interested in either of my self published books (Love Lust and Misery or Poems from a schizophrenic mind) I am not so sad to say that I have pulled them out of circulation. BUT I'm rewriting some of the poems from those books for another project I have in the works! You can find my poetry on Medium! My name there is under Florence-Susanne Reppert, and I think it would be also super cool if you checked out our literary magazine,

Poetry as Promised! On, basically, all platforms! My photography can be found on Facebook under Florence-Susanne Photography!

Florence-Susanne Reppert is a 25-year-old Poet from Allentown, Pennsylvania. Their first publication was at age 12 (Eber and Wein poetry contests) and they've been featured multiple times in the past year and half at open mics spanning the New Jersey and Pennsylvania poetry scenes. They also, more recently, were published in Viridian door magazine as well as Soupcan magazine. They also co-edit and co-founded Poetry as Promised Magazine and Nowhere as Promised Open Mic. You can find them online at IG- schizo_trash_poet.

And in real life crying over all the books they will never be able to read before they die

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.

Fiction for Poets

February 16, 2023 Brooke Palma

Fiction for Poets

in which one poet writes to other poets about writing fiction

You know what you should always do? You should always ignore blanket advice about writing.

Have you ever written a poem – maybe it was a formal poem, maybe it rhymed – and had someone in a class or critique group respond with “There’s just no reason for a contemporary poet to write in form,” or “I don’t like poems that rhyme.” Perhaps you went the other way – did something loose or experimental – and got the “I’m not even sure this is a poem” response.

I’ve been workshopping my writing, mostly poems, for the better part of 30 years. I’ve also been working as a professional writer and/or writing instructor for 20 years (give or take a few). In that time, I’ve learned to be extremely skeptical of any critique presented as an absolute rule or overarching opinion because, in my experience, this feedback has less to do with my writing at all. It’s generally more about some rigid moral compass within the reader dictating what is always “right” or “wrong.” The thing is, I’m the kind of poet – nay, person – who believes there aren’t absolutes in writing.

Even still, I wasn’t quite prepared for this kind of feedback when it came to my fiction. Confronted with editors who told me to “do a find and delete for the words that and feel,” “don’t use a lot of semicolons,” and “use repetition sparingly,” I fell into a serious crisis of confidence. You may recall, I spent about 20 years convinced that I was constitutionally incapable of writing fiction. Add to that my pre-existing anxieties and imposter syndrome, and you’ll see I was extra sensitive to vague, sweeping advice. Beyond that, however, I was also vulnerable because I didn’t know the tropes of fiction critique and editing.

To be clear: I’m not talking about the generalized advice and lessons of classrooms, workshops, or writing guides. You know what I mean, tips like: strive to use active, engaging verbs; find concrete, specific nouns; and (everyone’s favorite) show don’t tell (though, I think I may need to devote an entire blog post to the dangers of giving this advice to a poet writing prose). This advice in those contexts is like preventative medicine.

What I’m talking about here are the blanket platitudes presented in response to a particular piece by an editor (or anyone you’ve trusted to offer honest, critical feedback on your WIP[1]). Things like:

You should never use _______.

My biggest pet peeve is ________.

I’m used to how these sound in the context of poetry. I can suss out what’s valuable and what isn’t. But in the context of fiction, it took me a little longer to figure that out. First of all, I haven’t been in a lot of fiction or prose workshops, so I didn’t recognize the kneejerk feedback – that automatic, almost mechanical advice some editors or publishers suggest to all writers, regardless of skill, experience, or the piece at hand. I’ve come to learn that “cut the word that” and “cut the word feel” are two such pieces of advice. I get it, there are times when “that” is implied and unnecessary. Likewise, I was told to avoid certain types of repetition: no need to say that someone nods their head; what else would they nod? likewise with shrugging shoulders. But as a poet, I sometimes include the “unnecessary” words because I prefer the cadence they lend to a sentence. Also, there are times when such words are necessary for clarity or context. My point is not that this advice isn’t helpful; rather, it’s not helpful to a particular piece without considering how the particular piece functions.

That brings me to “feel.” This one really burns me up. My novel is an especially emotional story; it’s got all of the feels. So I really took it to heart when an editor told me that “felt” is her “nemesis.” However, as I dug in, the advice became less and less useful as I realized her preconception and prejudice against that particular word meant she always read it the same way and failed to see how it might be useful or necessary.

Consider the sentence: I felt his body tense beside me. My editor suggested the straightforward change: His body tensed beside me. However, these two sentences are qualitatively different: The first is about the experience of the speaker; the second is an observation. The edit actually changes the meaning of the scene. So, applying a standard rubric – without even critically evaluating the context – means missing some of the subtleties of language, things that you don’t necessarily “know,” but you feel instead (oh crap, there it is again!).

Here is where I think I arrive at two of the fundamental challenges of being a poet writing fiction. First, poets (at least most of the poets I know) consider themselves artists. This is not to say that prose writers are not artists: I think many are. But I’m not sure how many of them see themselves that way. As artists, most of the poets I know (even those who love working in form) aren’t fans of absolute rules or rubrics. We see the purpose of our work somewhat differently than our fiction-writing counterparts. It’s not a simple binary, of course, but prose writers, especially writers of fiction, seem to be driven more by the bigger picture, the whole story, the arc. Poets, on the other hand, tend to focus more narrowly – individual moments, objects, and feelings. These two perspectives are not mutually exclusive; in fact, I’d wager the best of both fiction and poetry comes from their marriage.

The second challenge, in my opinion, stems from the first. Because of its smaller former and narrower focus, poetry uses words differently than fiction; it is concerned with beauty and musicality. Poetry is often about slowing to closely examine something. Fiction, on the other hand, is concerned with story and character and, by nature, requires more world building and development. Pragmatically, that means it also requires more words. Therefore, fiction can be (though it isn’t always) more concerned with efficiency and concision. Again, these aren’t binaries or mutually exclusive, but there is a tension in the space between the genres’ differing concerns.

Last fall, I went to an event at the Free Library of Philadelphia where two poets – Ross Gay and Major Jackson – were reading from and discussing their new books of prose. (It was magical, and I will be reviewing their books just as soon as I possibly can.) During the Q&A, someone asked how their poetry informed their prose, and they pointed to qualities like repetition, digression, and musicality. My heart sang when Ross Gay explained (and I’m totally paraphrasing from memory) he sometimes chose to write sentences in certain ways because the sounds of the words added a new, invisible layer of meaning. He said he might be the only one who even saw the layer or knew it was there, but it was still important and necessary.

I don’t know if prose writers think this way, but editors don’t seem to edit this way. So as a poet, some of the automatic feedback for fiction – with its focus on speed and streamlining – has felt antithetical to my very approach to the written word. This has, of course, forced me to approach feedback in the same way I approach most language: slowly, contemplatively, examining all the minute particulars.

Ultimately, I won’t throw away any advice – not even when it feels oppressively generic. Nor will I do a find and replace for individual words or phrases because they happen to be on some “never use” list. Instead, I will read and revise my novel (all 110K words of it) with the careful precision I take with a 40-line poem. I will find the places where the generic advice is applicable, and I’ll challenge the places where even the most specific suggestion doesn’t feel quite right. That’s what I’d advise anyone to do when revising. Then again, I’d also suggest you take any advice with a giant grain of salt.

[1] WIP: Work in Progress. Maybe it’s obvious, but as a poet this was not ever how I referred to my ongoing projects. On the other hand, it’s super common lingo among prose writers, especially in the age of social media.

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.

Review of the pause and the breath by Kwame Sound Daniels

February 8, 2023 Brooke Palma

the pause and the breath

Atmosphere Press

$15.99

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Katch Campbell

“ “Perception is not an act of Understanding.” ”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The early 19th century artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti describes one of the most useful powers of the sonnet “as the ability to keep a moment, to hold a feeling or experience and turn it around in the light of our awareness until many facets are evident. This multifaceted quality gives the sonnet a paradoxical feeling of freedom and expanse within confines.”

As humans we crave the known, but our brains are activated and more receptive to sensory input in the space of unknown. When blindfolded, our sense of hearing and smell is heightened. By utilizing the confines of sonnet structure, Kwame Sound Daniels provides the reader a safe space to sit next to, enter into, what is currently, less known.

Madness, Trans, Chronically Ill, and Black are the core ideas that drive the language and imagery of Kwame Sound Daniel’s, the pause and the breath, Atmosphere Press, 2023. Xir collection of forty poems utilizes the power of unrhymed sonnets to claim space for these ideas. In our conversation about xir intention, Kwame shared xir hope that we as reader might offer grace in the experience. An expansiveness that lends itself to look inside, self-examine, and ultimately see self in other.

But xe doesn’t ask the reader these things without having done the work xirself. Kwame, a painter, a poet, a student of Neo Slave Narratives, of Ancestral Foods, and of Herbalisim as worship and personal ceremony has scrutinized xirself as an act of self-connection and better understanding. Xe has grappled with self-ownership, the lack thereof in history, and its availability today. The reader can trust the journey through this collection as authentic and necessary. For example, Xe offers a universality of experience that quickly connects the reader to the speaker in the first quatrain of the book’s first sonnet.

MORNING
You weigh yourself. Put on your jacket. You
walk your dog. Drag her away from roadkill.
Pick up her shit. Put on a dress. Drive to
the grocery store. Get a few donuts. Eat

The second quatrain provides the first mention of trans experience and psychic momentum, the third builds upon it and the final couplet a volta toward calm.

them. Wait for the cramping. Take a shit. Weigh
yourself again. Think about how much lessyou will weigh without your breasts. Think about
your decision to grow your hair out and
how it feminizes you. Decide that
you can’t afford to care. Your hair journey
is too important. Loving your routines
is too important. Caring for yourself
is too important. Don’t think about work.
Just write. Just breathe. The day has just begun.

Subsequent sonnets take a more direct path to these ideas /experiences such as “COCSA,” “Body,” and “Couldn’t leave,” while others give a sense of the madness and confusion, including “Pronouns” and “TIME.” But hope and empowerment are incorporated deftly, requiring a second and third reading of the collection out of respect, as witness, and from the beginnings of internalization.

Hunger
I taught myself I had to be hungry
for my own gender, that I had to carve
out a bowl to hold androgyny
that I could never achieve being fat.
I painted myself with emphatic oils,
I fired myself in my own fear. Not once
did I crack under the heat. My hunger
was well-made, developed. There was no
filling me. I became content with what
I knew. I kept myself starved because it
was safer than knowing. My truth was in
the absence. Falsehoods were the feminine,
until the feminine satisfied the
appetite I cultivated for love

Kwame Sound Daniels’ generosity of experience and expression thereof, is the power of vulnerability and of one human’s willingness to do the work. At the end of our hour-long conversation xe asked, “How would it (the world) be if I didn’t invite you?”.

I believe, we are the richer for it.

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.

Mad Poet of the Year - R. G. Evans (February 2023)

February 6, 2023 Brooke Palma

THE INVENTION OF THE HEART
by R.G. Evans

God made a fist and that was that.
Watch this! He said to the archangels
and began pumping his fingers
the way a farmer might milk a cow
once He invented farmers and cows.
God marveled at how white his knuckles looked
when he squeezed them tight and trembling,
so He invented blood and filled his fist
with it like water in a balloon.
Soon God’s fist was pumping on its own.
It terrified Him the way it pulsed and throbbed,
so He threw it down into the dirt and covered it
the way He knew that cats would cover their waste.
Then, also like cats would do once He invented them,
He walked away disinterested.
But the fist kept right on throbbing,
and the dirt began to feel, to breathe,
to long for other piles of dirt
that did not pump in return.
God never looked back, leaving the dirt
to teach itself about the thumping it couldn’t prevent.
Soon God grew heavy bored,
found Lucifer, His brightest angel,
stretched one hand out in a way
that reminded him to one day invent Michelangelo,
and said, Luci, bubala, pull my finger.

This month’s poem: something for Valentine’s Day, something for lovers.

Review of Find Me in the Iris by E. Lynn Alexander

January 18, 2023 Brooke Palma

Find Me in the Iris

Collapse Press

$10.00

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Sean Hanrahan

E. Lynn Alexander begins her searing poetry collection with an epigraph comprising the first five lines of her powerful poem, “Bottles of ‘Were’”

Bottles of “Were”
Of regrets.
Something she said
That stuck with me.
What will the grief of me teach you?

With that haunting opening, Find Me in the Iris explores the relationships between mothers and daughter and the internal and external selves with laser-focused intensity. The speaker’s memory of motherhood and other women are contained in the lines:

Bottles. Corked. And closed.
Women. Mothers.
Suspended
In their ages,
Selves, the slurry sentiment
Their labels going brown.

One could readily imagine a trip to the Mütter Museum and seeing a specimen floating in a glass jar. The imagery contained in this poem is reminiscent of Edgar Allen Poe or Anne Sexton. The line length and rhythm illustrate a cutting precision, sharply contrasting with the peaceful sibilance that is also deployed. Alexander is a poet working at the height of her craft.

Specimen imagery continues in the evocative poem, “Frogs with Glowing Eggs in Their Bellies.”

Particle flecks, held up to the light
I see tadpoles
Larvae. Eggs. Algae.
Mother-moon
Alchemy

Once again in brief yet pregnant lines, Alexander can certainly pack a punch. The reader can visualize the mystery of nature, perfectly preserved in suspension. There is something haunting and visceral about lives that never were. She continues:

I see metals of industry
Poisons.
Run off from the lawns.
Toxins. Plastics. Bag Phantoms.
The ghosts
of Wants vs. Needs.

Alexander is such a strong poet that she can bring in a vast environmental awareness into a mostly confessional space. She can vividly illustrate for the reader the complex chain of events that led to the speaker witnessing a preserved wet specimen almost glowing with dead life. This poem is one of the strongest in the collection and once again queries, “What will the grief of me teach you”?

“Odd Jobs” is another tour de force in Find Me in the Iris. In this poem, she lists metaphorical jobs the speaker holds as a poet including chemist, doctor, artist, plastic surgeon, butcher, factory farmer, geologist, inspector, regulating entity, and priest:

I am a priest. Pin women
to my trays. I dissect them.
I display their hands
I verify stigmata
I name saints

She categorizes eyes: “Hazel/Brown/Blue.” Until finally, “I find my mother’s iris/And I hold it up to mine.”

Alexander ends this brilliant collection with the title poem. The speaker asks the reader, a lover, a dead mother, any sympathetic soul to

Find me in the iris
in the blue
in the storm’s eye
in the silence

What we find in Find Me in the Iris is a remarkably self-assured poet dazzling us with provocative language and exquisite poems. This collection will haunt me for a long time to come. For anyone who loves precise and surprising language, Alexander’s work is the perfect eye-opening treasure.

POeT SHOTS - "Fund Drive" by Terri Kirby Erickson

January 17, 2023 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.

Fund Drive

by Terri Kirby Erickson

She could be a Norman Rockwell painting,
the small girl on my front porch with her eager
face, her wind-burned cheeks red as cherries.
Her father waits by the curb, ready to rescue
his child should danger threaten, his shadow
reaching halfway across the yard. I take the
booklet from the girl's outstretched hand,
peruse the color photos of candy bars and
caramel-coated popcorn, pretend to read it.
I have no use for what she's selling, but I
can count the freckles on her nose, the scars
like fat worms on knobby knees that ought
to be covered on a cold day like this, when
the wind is blowing and the trees are losing
their grip on the last of their leaves. I'll take
two of these and one of those, I say, pointing,
thinking I won't eat them, but I probably will.
It's worth the coming calories to see her joy,
how hard she works to spell my name right,
taking down my information. Then she turns
and gives a thumbs-up sign to her father, who
grins like an outfielder to whom the ball has
finally come—his heart like a glove, opening.

This poem is a vignette about hope, youth and love. Many of us can relate to hawking a bit of nonsense for our causes as young people. But it is the spirit of the girl and her hopefulness as she prospects for a customer that punctuates various points in the poem.: “/She could be a Norman Rockwell painting/. “…Eager/ face, her-wind burned cheeks read as cherries?” /I have no use for s selling, But I/ can count the freckles on her nose, the scars/ like fat worms on her knobby knees…/. “. This child is a beautiful symbol of the hope all of us have for the future.

The girl’s father “waits by the curb, ready to rescue / his child should danger threaten…/ He is watching his child grow and learn with hope.” The poet thinks to herself she won’t eat the confections she buys although she knows she will. And she doesn’t care because the image of this child with her father is so poignant that she cannot say no. After getting the thumbs up sign from his daughter the father”/grins like an outfielder to whom the ball has/ finally come---his heart like a glove opening.” What more can one say about love?

Mad Poet of the Year - R. G. Evans (January 2023)

January 2, 2023 Brooke Palma

THE YEAR IN GOODBYES
by R.G. Evans

Poor Father Time. Every year kicks his ass.
He comes in fresh with his little sash
like a Best Baby Contest winner,
but leaves broken and bearded,
turning his hunched back
on the babe sent in to take his place.
That’s all we ever see.
The coming. The going.
The geezer and the babe.
What of the rest of the year?
The toddler in February
playing catch with Cupid’s darts.
The “whining schoolboy” of March,
praying the longest month will end.
The horny lad of spring,
flirting with April and May.
But he’s more than just the calendar.
Like us, all his lives are different.
He can feel a month’s headlines
in his arthritic knees.
Global news gives him lumbago.
Oh, and what some elections
do to his hemorrhoids.
When the whole thing winds down--
top 10 lists, the year in review and in goodbyes--
he looks back as well
at that apple-cheeked cherub
born in ignorance and hope, still
able to dream without meds.
There’s a knock at Father’s door.
On the other side, the new babe is waiting.
Some tongues,he knows,
have the same word for hello and goodbye.
How easily, he thinks, that sash
could become a garotte.
He and the innocent exchange a glance,
one of them suddenly lost in translation.

The media uses New Year’s Eve/Day to provide retrospectives of the past year’s events. Several years ago, I read of the year’s celebrity obituaries under the headline “The Year in Goodbyes.” That headline combined with a little tinkering with the figures of Father Time and Baby New Year, and voila!, this poem, which appears in my book Imagine Sisyphus Happy, was born.

POeT SHOTS - "When Giving Is All We Have" by Alberto Ríos

December 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.

When Giving Is All We Have

byAlberto Ríos

One river gives
Its journey to the next.

We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.

We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.

We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—

Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.

Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:

Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.

You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me

What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made

Something greater from the difference.

We are in the season of giving and receiving. This poem by Alberto Rios captures for me the essence of that spirit. Rather than analyze the poem and try to break down its components. I prefer just to read the poem and let sit with the spirit of it. Remember to give all the time, not just during the holidays. You will make “something greater”…” than yourself.

Happy Holidays!

Local Lyrics - Featuring Katie Budris

December 19, 2022 Brooke Palma

How to Survive a Blizzard
(first published in Mid-Bloom)
by Katie Budris

Outside, snow buries this Midwest winter,
the only remaining inhabitants a family
of cardinals, the ones who have been living
in the tree beside the window.

As the wind wages war,
biting through skin and feathers,
the bold red cardinals belly down
beneath the snow. They know

the best protection from a blizzard is not
to fly, but to burrow, escaping
the elements by surrounding themselves
in a cave to keep warm, wait out the storm.

How do you approach your writing? What are you interested in as a poet?
I’ve always been a “write when I feel moved to write” kind of person, for better or for worse. Sometimes that means I don’t write much for long periods of time, and then I write a lot at once. When I do write, it’s always by hand first and always in paragraph form. I like to get the words and ideas down on paper and then when I type them up I can start crafting it as a poem—putting in line breaks, trimming down for concision, playing with syntax and rhythm. That, to me, is really the fun part.

I’m primarily interested in writing narrative poetry, and almost always write from my own experiences. I’m not so self-centered that I think readers are all that interested in me. Rather, I think as people we have more shared experiences that we often realize, and I think narrative poetry can help us tap into those aspects of life that connect us, those experiences that remind us we’re more alike than different. I hope my poems can do even a little bit of that for others.

You recently published your second chapbook. Tell us a little about Mid-Bloom.
The poems in Mid-Bloom are a combination of poems about losing my mom to cancer when I was in high school, and then poems about facing my own cancer diagnosis at age 38. I’ve been trying to write about my mom for many years (with varying success) and so this chapbook came together pretty organically.

While I was undergoing chemotherapy, I really wanted to try writing a series of “Dear Cancer” poems, but the only thing I ever came up with was “Dear Cancer, F you.” So as I emerged from the haze of treatment, I realized what I really needed to write about was how the experience made me feel so connected to my mom even though she’d been gone for so long. It’s a really strange and surreal kind of grief and comfort all at once to suddenly feel so close to someone who’s not actually here, and for that to come through such a traumatic shared experience. The topics in the book are pretty heavy, but I think I’ve approached them in a way that is delicate and reflective while hopefully still giving an honest expression of what it’s like to lose a parent and what it’s like to face your own mortality through cancer.

You are a professor at Rowan University in the Writing Arts Department and Editor-In-Chief of Glassworks magazine. Does teaching writing to college students and editing a student-run literary journal influence your writing or writing style?
Absolutely! I am a better writer because of my students. There’s nothing like reading a line or a poem one of your students has written and thinking “why didn’t I come up with that?” They amaze me all the time. And they’re so eager to learn and inspired to write. Just the other day, they were doing a revision exercise in class, so I pulled a poem of my own up on my laptop and made some revisions myself. They push me to spend more time on my writing and to keep striving to write better lines, to come up with stronger metaphors.

Working with Glassworks also helps keep me immersed in the wider literary community. I love being able to publish so many talented writers, and exposing my students to the wonderful world of lit mags is truly the best part of my job. It’s always easier to see what’s working and what’s not in someone else’s writing, so I think being an editor gives me that unique perspective. And if I can take even a little of that back to my own work, that’s just a bonus.

What do you find most helpful to get yourself and your students actually writing?
I’m a big fan of prompts, actually. Not always a subject matter prompt, because we all have different obsessions and experiences to write about. But anything to get the juices flowing. We do a lot of brainstorming in my creative writing classes—make a list of emotions, then make a list of places you’ve been, now pick one from each list that don’t seem to go together and write about it—broad, open-ended prompts like that. I think trying to write within different forms and constraints can be helpful too, even if we ultimately abandon those constraints in revision. Interesting things come out when you try to write a sestina for the first time, or limit yourself to a specific word count.

In addition to a poet, you are also a tap dancer and Director of The Lady Hoofers Tap Ensemble. Do these creative pursuits influence each other? Do you find there are similarities between directing a dance troupe and editing a literary journal?
I don’t know how much they directly influence one another in my daily practice, but I do think the genres I’ve pursued are related. Poetry and tap dance are both very much centered on rhythm. I love to play with line breaks to create a varied rhythm in my poems, and maybe that’s not all that different from the ways I use syncopation in my tap dancing. Running the two organizations is very different logistically, but in both cases the goal is to give the audience a satisfying experience using rhythm, tone, imagery, storytelling . . . The more I think about this question, the more connected the two artforms seem to be!

Where can readers find more of your work? Buy your books?

I try to keep up with posting newly published work on my website at katiebudris.com and I’m also on Instagram and Twitter @ktb8482 and have a Facebook Page - Katie Budris Writer.

Readers can contact me through any of those sites to purchase my books through me directly. Mid-Bloom is also available at Finishing Line Press or on Amazon, and my previous chapbook Prague in Synthetics is on Amazon.

Katie Budris is a Senior Lecturer in the Writing Arts Department at Rowan University where she serves as Program Coordinator for the Master of Arts in Writing and as Editor-in-Chief of Glassworks literary magazine. She has published two chapbooks with Finishing Line Press: Mid-Bloom (2021) and Prague in Synthetics (2015). Katie holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Roosevelt University and her poems have appeared in over a dozen journals, most recently Deep Wild Journal, River and South Review, Philadelphia Stories, Border Crossing, Temenos Journal, and the anthology Crossing Lines (Main Street Rag). She is a breast cancer survivor living in South Jersey with her husband, Chris, and their English Mastiffs, Harper and Winnie.

Ekphrasis: Poems and Art (December 2022)

December 13, 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.

I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth: The Ekphrastic Poems of Cathy and Alexandra Hailey

Cathy Hailey has a long and impressive career teaching English and creative writing in Prince William County, Virginia schools, Johns Hopkins University and other institutions. Her teaching and writing has garnered many awards and prizes. I admire not only her work, but also the generosity and passion she brings to the poetry community. (https://advanced.jhu.edu/directory/cathy-hailey/ and https://cathyhailey.com).

This year, the Poetry Society of Virginia celebrates its centennial. As vice president of its Northern Region, Cathy recently organized an excellent online series of readings based on ekphrasis, “Where Art Meets the Line” (links below). Cathy experiments with ekphrasis, inspired by others’ paintings and photographs as well as her own, as can be sampled in her recent collection, I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth. Its vibrant cover displays one of her own images and this book is dedicated to another talented artist and poet, her late daughter, Alexandra “Zan” Delaine Hailey.

The poems of both Cathy and Alexandra display a fine sensitivity and lyricism in observing and sharing the natural world. Alexandra’s poem is paired with her own photograph and Cathy’s, with her own painting.

PRAYING MANTIS
Ridges ladder a slender
back perpendicularly lined
in burnt orange—he sways,
swinging forearms like a jazz

man on keys before stopping
to stare at a file folder
reflecting his delicate lime-
green structure; sweet sax
radiates through radio

before purifying white walls
with a touch of liveliness
right out of Robinson’s back
lily garden: tips dripping

orange neon from golden
nectar breasts. Mantis’ serrated
limbs climb to the ceiling
exploring spackled foam-core
that holds fluorescents in place—

the withered gleam, never
as warm as lamp light, works
for now, just as a picture speaks
so many words but never

does the moment justice,
relative to presence. A triangular
face waits patiently for clocks
to strike release—freedom
from stone walls that fracture

each passing day. Ink-crossed
calendar blocks roll, finding
fresh cycles endearing
and repetition swelling. See,

it isn’t time that changes
people; people change time.

Alexandra “Zan” Delaine Hailey

Ardea Herodias

Tribute to a Tall Friend

Oh Heron, where art thou?
I heard a tale of your trajectory across Burke Lake,
the glide path of your blue majestic wings.
In past years, I remember you standing statuesque—
the tallest bird on stage—towering over
a gaggle of green-necked geese
and a paddling of white-winged ducks
like those I see today choreographing dainty steps
as they glissade across slick glass surfaces.

I search for you in the canopy of trees,
along log-littered shorelines,
among swaying reeds circled by dragonflies.
Though I long to see you in your natural habitat,
I discover you only within me as I recall
snapshots of summer sojourns,
awe-inspiring recitations, scenes of influence
over a siege of admiring apprentices
eager to share a laugh, a skit, a song.

Oh Heron, where art thou
in the prophecy of our future?
Our retreats already too infrequent,
I will miss your grace and noble stature,
your wisdom, curiosity, strength,
and perpetual creation of light.
When I no longer find you in a familiar place
on our lake, on a campus home we share,
you will still be memorialized in art and word.

Cathy Hailey

Integrating poetry and art is one of Cathy’s favorite topics and processes. She shared that she has used different kinds of art throughout her life. Lacking expertise in drawing when young, she turned to other arts and crafts, especially jewelry making and gem cutting. She learned to cut cabochons and facet amethysts. Using sterling silver wire and sheets, she grew skilled in constructing pendants, rings, bracelets and earrings. These talents she continued growing at the Crafts Center at Duke University, adding new skills using a potter’s wheel to make ceramic cups, bowls, vases, and other art pieces. Clearly a lifelong learner, Cathy also loves working with weaving and hopes in the near future to get her table loom and other homemade looms out of storage.

Cathy shares with pride about her talented daughter, Alexandra, to quote:

Alexandra was an English/Creative Writing major at VCU and credits Gary Sange, Gregory Donovan, and David Wojahn with helping her hone her craft. Alexandra also took courses in the Fine Arts Department, talking her way into upper-level classes without the prerequisites. She took photography and a course that allowed her to paint and create sculpture, even design and produce furniture. She took a business art course that was very helpful for developing skills in marketing and entrepreneurship. She took other courses in the Communications Department that inspired creativity (including a Band-Aid project based on Noah Scalin’s Skull-A-Day project, and she frequently incorporated art and poetry in portfolios she designed whenever a professor would consider a more creative approach rather than the standard analysis paper. She learned and grew so much from these opportunities.

“Darwin’s law does not apply.
She lived as a butterfly.”
– Cathy Hailey, from “Flying High”

Cathy has taken advantage of prompts from several sources as a springboard for writing. She recommends: Rattle Ekphrastic prompts(https://www.rattle.com/ekphrastic/), The Ekphrastic Review (https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-challenges) and the Passagers Journal’s monthly ekphrastic poetry challenge (https://www.passengersjournal.com/ekphrastic-poetry-contest).

Review of JAWN by Mark Danowsky

December 11, 2022 Brooke Palma

JAWN

Moonstone Press

$14.99

You can purchase a copy here.

Reviewed by Katch Campbell

The etymology of the word JAWN is a JAWN.

Full of descriptions of everyday life in the city that birthed and holds captive use of its title, JAWN by Mark Danowsky, Moonstone Press 2022, is a collective rendering of qualia.

Simplistically, qualia can be described as the nature of what an individual experiences when they see, taste, hear, touch, or smell. Qualia is the content of one’s subjective experience. In other words, qualia are a JAWN, and Danowsky has invited us to enter his.

Danowsky wastes no time setting the scene and tone with a perfunctory comparison of Philadelphia in his initial poem. It is one stanza and compares Philadelphia, a city whose culture is difficult for even the deeply entrenched to describe, to Bangladesh. Crumbling buildings. Poor blameless victims. Trapped.
This initial poem’s mood heightens the readers readiness for this elemental depravity which continues to build in angst and emotive momentum through the third poem. “Sleep Deprived” juxtaposes scenes of homelessness with those of affluence which adds to the emotional dissonance.

Danowsky takes advantage of this tug-of-war like imbalance and places his longest poem, Snapshots, in the middle of the collection. This three sectioned poem re-builds the reader's hope with the infusion of Spring, bright colors, and the sounds of a community that retains small moments of innocence. While this isn’t the last offering of hope the collection provides, it is tempered by two nostalgic poems; one about Danowsky’s youth the other a musing:

and I double-take
wondering what kind of kid
he used to be
& what kind still dwells within

Danowsky’s JAWN is a conversation about the state of being in Philadelphia and gives voice to the unspoken traumas that equate to poverty, violence, and homelessness. It provides a prescient warning and is necessary reading for those who may prefer to look the other way.

Found in Translation

December 9, 2022 Brooke Palma

FOUND IN TRANSLATION

Jerzy Ficowski, Everything I Don’t Know: Selected Poems, translated from the Polish by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer (Storrs, CT: World Poetry Books, 2021).

I hadn’t ever heard of Jerzy Ficowski (1924-2006)until this fall—unlike a lot of other important Polish poets of the 20th century, until recently he hadn’t been much translated into English. His translators, credited above, did a tour of readings, I got a copy of this book, and even though I don’t want to harp on Eastern European poets as I’m reviewing poetry in translation I need to bring it to your attention. I might also note that one of the blurbs on the back of the handsome paperback volume (the front has a striking picture of Ficowski, hand covering half his serious, aged face) is written by Ilya Kaminsky—a Deaf American poet originally from Odesa.

The translators felt that Ficowski has remained relatively unknown in the Anglophone world because that great tastemaker of Polish literature, Czesław Miłosz, did not include him in the canon he suggested to Anglophone readers. Ficowski’s creative and personal biography is certainly catchy: he took part in the Warsaw Uprising; after WWII and some university study he wandered with Polish Roma and wrote a study of their lives and culture, compiled an anthology of Polish Jewish folk poetry, translated poetry from multiple languages, and collected materials by and about Bruno Schulz, on whom he published a biography in 1967. You would expect a life of such event to produce poetry on important themes, and it does, but some of the best work in this volume is quite individual and not bound to time and place. The volume does not include any poetry in the original Polish, so as you read there is no need to skip things to see the translation. On the other hand, if you do know Polish you’ll have to find Ficowski’s work elsewhere to compare it to the translations.

Here is the beginning of one:

O Drawer!

Shelter for the sinful world,
o drawer, odyssey so vast,
made of oak, Homeric!
You will be the coffin
that once served as a cradle,
sinister imagination’s respite,
a hollow for words
written in whisper […]. (p. 15)

The poem’s deeper meaning becomes clearer if we imagine Ficowski, unable to publish his poetry for many years in Communist Poland, writing poems that went into the desk drawer since they had no chance of appearing in print. The phrase “written in whisper” suggests that “whisper” is its own language, not the pitch of sound that “a whisper” would mean. Since Polish does not distinguish between “a” and “the,” this is clearly added value from the translators.

Another example, this one in the cycle “from the Mythological Encyclopedia,” and numbered “i”:

Burners
The aureoles of stovetops.
The kitchen’s rings of hell.
The trained hoops of fire.
Red-hot bagels
eaten by rust.
Horseshoes of galloping pots.
The poker’s lovers
grinding in the fire of damnation.
And we cook our roast on their fervor. (p. 27)

Every single line here, funny and yet also dark with hints of hellfire, describes the burners on my stove!—Or this poem, its original published in 1968: like many of Ficowski’s poems, it refers back to the Holocaust and all of the Second World War, both especially bitter in Poland, as well as the general tragedy that the past cannot be changed or redeemed:

Today a Long Time Ago

I’m opening the door now
thirty years ago

Today I found the key

I meet you by the window
thirty years ago
You haven’t been waiting long
You’re just now young

I must prevent
everything that’s happened

Only the future
can’t be undone (p. 51)

But then a moment of vivid impersonal observation in the first two stanzas of “The Bird Beyond the Bird”:

Look
the bird is escaping from itself
by flapping
it’s bursting out of the nest of being
it wants to take a break from feathers
to slip out of being a bird

But it’s unable
to outpace itself
by even a bird’s beak (p. 68)

Another, later poem also and more explicitly refers to the losses of the Holocaust and the desire of survivors to remember and treasure the lost:

A Gathering of Stones

For Bronisław Anlen

The stones are gathering
And who was to come here
When there is stone upon stone
it means they’re acquainted

Here a stone says
kaddish
with its weight
its multitude
and stones the place
in the painless grass

The stones are gathering

Here sometimes an old man
will lug inside him
feldspar quartz and burden
and a wisp of green
bloodied with a rose

he will place it exactly
anywhere knowing

that he’s put it right into the hands
of his daughter Rachel
because everywhere are the hands
of his daughter Rachel

And even if it’s Miriam who gets the flower
so be it she also deserves
a petal of memory
even by mistake

The old man goes away
A stone stands up (pp. 82-83)

And last but not least in my selection, I have to share this one that reminds me of some of our Mad Poet Amy Laub’s water poems:

Incantation

o water that takes your own
shape
when you are very small
o single-celled
your name is a drop
you persist from high to low
not knowing a vessel
o closed-within-yourself
you perish when you open
and you’ll give birth to the sea
and be greeted
by salt and dolphin and columbus
and by susanna wallowing
her hair in rainwater
o droplet with nothing
to differ you from droplet
hollower of stone (p. 107)

Jennifer Grotz teaches at the University of Rochester and also directs the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, which include sessions for translators as well as all the other good stuff. She was still something of a beginner in studying Polish when Warsaw poet, essayist and translator Piotr Sommer showed up as a visiting colleague, and they began working together on translations of Ficowski. Learning the subtleties of a language by working through translations (always “the closest reading”) sounds wonderful, and the results in this volume are generally excellent. Collaborative translation at its best sharpens the results, removing errors of understanding and drawing on twice the verbal inspiration. This book is highly recommended; I imagine that reading it would serve to inspire a poet as well.