ISSN 2084-1124 Nr 3-4•2018
KRYTYKA LITERACKA LITERATURE • ART • PHILOSOPHY
ENGLISH ISSUE Patricia Carragon • Steve Dalachinsky • David Day • Isabella Degen Niels Hav • William Heyen • Peter Thabit Jones Adrian Ligęza • Erica Mapp • Harry Nudel • Yuko Otomo Erik La Prade • Tomasz Marek Sobieraj • Jacek Świerk Joanna Turek • Barry Wallenstein • Jeffrey Wright
__________________________________________________________________________________ Krytyka Literacka
ISSN 2084-1124 No. 3-4 (19-20•80-81) 2018 ENGLISH ISSUE № 2
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Tomasz Marek Sobieraj NEW YORK EDITOR Erik La Prade CONTRIBUTING EDITOR David Day ADDRESS ul. Szkutnicza 1, 93-469 Łódź, Poland E-MAIL editionssurner@gmail.com * KRYTYKA LITERACKA is a non-profit quarterly of literature, the arts and public affairs, published independently in Poland since 2009. The magazine is concerned with both Polish issues and international perspectives and open to different points of view. * Archival issues and library http://chomikuj.pl/KrytykaLiteracka Online reading rooms http://issuu.com/krytykaliteracka Internet http://www.krytykaliteracka.blogspot.com
22 Isabella Degen ON THE TRACES OF SALVADOR DALI 26 Barry Wallenstein POEMS 20 William Heyen ESSAY BEGINING & ENDING WITH POEMS FOR WHITMAN 37 Jacek Świerk POEMS 40 Jeffrey Wright POEMS 43 Peter Thabit Jones, Tomasz Marek Sobieraj THE ART OF POETRY (interview) 48 Peter Thabit Jones POEMS 50 Niels Hav POEMS
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53 Yuko Otomo POEMS
Front cover: Albrecht Dürer, The Women’s Bath, pen, 1496, Kunsthalle, Bremen
56 Harry Nudel TEDUCATION
CONTENTS 1 Patricia Carragon POEMS 6 Erik La Prade A POET’S FRIEND 8 Adrian Ligęza POEMS 12 David Day AN OPEN LETTER IN DEFENSE OF SUSAN SONTAG’S EQUATION: COMMUNISM EQUALS FASCISM 14 Erica Mapp POEMS 16 David Day POEM 20 Steve Dalachinsky POEMS
60 Joanna Turek PHILOSOPHY OF PHOTOGRAPHY, PHOTOGENICITY OF PHILOSOPHY 62 Tomasz Marek Sobieraj POEMS 54 RUSSIAN FILM FESTIVAL “SPUTNIK OVER POLAND”
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I N T R O D U C T I O N This particular issue of Krytyka Literacka is an all-English issue. It is the second time the magazine has been published completely in English and not Polish. The editor Tomasz Marek Sobieraj, spent a long time thinking of publishing this issue and asked the poet David Day, and myself, and others if it was a good idea. I know David and I both felt it was a terrific idea and I suspect other friends and contributors also encouraged Tomasz to do it. And now he has! Erik La Prade
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PATRICIA CARRAGON
Innocence Innocence came out to play and saw storm clouds instead. The fluffy days of childhood played tag with problems, but never could get the stains out as new problems settled in. We still wash our dirty laundry not expecting them to look squeaky clean. The more we scrub, the darker the stains after each rinse. We dry our clothes inside, never hang our history on a clothesline. It would only clash against the pretty greenery next door and the neighbors would complain.
Stranger on the Shore Pinot noir and jazz sang the blues on this cold mid-February night. I refilled my glass, let thoughts slow dance with the clarinet. As I lounged in midnight hues, the old LP played “Stranger on the Shore.” I took another sip, watched the glass fall.
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As the track turned bluer, thoughts bled Valentine red. When the record ended, all colors faded to black.
Thoughts and Prayers As the NRA nails another bullet in a child’s coffin, he who pulls the trigger won’t hear your thoughts and prayers.
Dandelion Child An umbrella spins like a kaleidoscope. A child plays tag with it— raindrops tease her skin. Her smile defies the weather. She scoots across with arms raised against etiquette. The umbrella dances under rain-washed sky. The child is like a dandelion— her seeds bounce like raindrops. Her sister joins in— the umbrella lands upside down. Her sister hides behind the azalea bush. They forget about their wet clothes and hair, dinner, and the umbrella. Their mother watches from the kitchen window and is not amused. She taps on the glass for the girls to come inside. Her persistence synchronizes with the thunder. Then the game ends
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as raindrops beat down on her daughters’ heads. The kitchen door slams and lightning breaks into a hundred forks.
The Palace The palace became a wreck in seconds— a child was caught in between the bricks, but he left the scene with minor injuries. Yet the palace was not destroyed, nor was the child hurt. In fact, there was no palace or child present— the palace was never built since there were no blueprints. There were no architects summoned to conceive the idea to build it. The child was never born since there was no conception. There was no love to build a family that would include him— imagination wrote this story to disturb my mind. Yet I read about it in a newspaper today: the palace became a wreak in seconds— a child was caught in between the bricks, but he left the scene with minor injuries— but some people say that the palace was not destroyed, nor was the child hurt. In fact, they say that the palace was never built since there were no blueprints or architects summoned to conceive the idea to build it and the child was never born since there was no conception or love to build a family that would include him. Yet the palace did become a wreck in seconds and a child did get caught in between the bricks, and he did leave the scene with minor injuries— and so it was, according to the newspaper and my mind. But the palace was not destroyed, nor was the child hurt. In fact, there was no palace or child present— the palace was never built
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since there were no blueprints. There were no architects summoned Humor to conceive the idea to build it. The child was never born since there was no conception. There was no love to build a family that would include him– imagination wrote this story to disturb me during sleep. I woke up and turned on the television. A house near Beirut became a wreck in seconds— a child was caught in between the bricks and was crushed to death . . .
Coming Home If I came home, would I find our make-believe kids, our nonexistent pets, our thoughts, our passion, our past, our lives, ourselves? But when I did, no one was at the stoop, or entrance, or in the hallway, or by the kitchen table, or near the bathroom sink, or sitting on the sofa, or resting on the bed, or standing by the shade. But your absence was everywhere; it even took over the lease.
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An Invitation to Taste Plums (for Linda Lerner and Austin Alexis) “I have eaten the plums . . . they were delicious/ so sweet and so cold” —William Carlos Williams She was a glass ceiling poet from Alphabet City—resilient like the studio’s steel beams and honestlike her graffiti beginnings. Her latest collection of prose attracted both academics and otherliterary aficionados. After the introduction, my guest turned her attention toward her mentor in thethird row. Her mentor, a former poet laureate, lived south of Fresno, California and had a grove ofplum trees on her estate. She gave her protégé an invitation to taste her plums for breakfast. Imotioned to the Californian to join us. But when she sat beside my guest, the interview switchedchairs. Sentences dripped in plums, William Carlos Williams, collegiate anecdotes, and book tours. All contributions from my end traveled in soliloquies. When the show ended, I thanked everyonefor the exceptional evening. A day later, I received their thank-you e-mails. Yet no invitation to taste the Prunus domestica.For breakfast, I had plums purchased in Brooklyn. This is just to say, they were delicious/ so sweet and so cold. Maybe too cold and not too sweet.
meltdown he claims that mercury retrograde lives inside your monitor and that your facebook wall contains secret minefields. she can argue about how emojis bring out his inner draconic child and why his fake news is feeding the trolls, not his kittens. the internet circus is not leaving the swamp, and we are as psychopathic as an orange tweet infected with the russian flu that has already consumed our interface. did you know that you and your option key will not be covered, and that you and your computer will not last for four years? —
Patricia Carragon's latest books are The Cupcake Chronicles (Poets Wear Prada, 2017) and Innocence (Finishing Line Press, 2017). She hosts the Brooklyn-based Brownstone Poets and is the editor-in-chief of its annual anthology. She is one of the executive editors for Home Planet News Online.
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Erik La Prade A POET’S FRIEND
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everal years ago I worked part-time in a bookstore, Left Bank Books, a used-and-rare bookshop located in Manhattan’s West Village. My job was selling books and talking to customers. Sometimes, I would occasionally make a trip to someone’s home with another employee or the owner, Kim Herzinger, to purchase a collection of books. Generally, if a person wanted to sell their library or a library they inherited from a friend or relative’s estate, they would call the store and ask if we bought books. Going on a buy, meant looking over a whole collection of books, or picking out certain titles that seemed most promising for their resale value. Kim would then negotiate a price with the owner and if it was acceptable, pay them and have the books carted back to the store. On a particular day, after I arrived at the book store, I saw a collection of books and ephemera inscribed by the poet James Merrill, the scion of the wealthy founder and partner of Merrill Lynch, for sale at Left Bank Books. This collection was on a display shelf, all addressed to a friend of Merrill named Charles Crawford. I was curious about how this material has arrived in the store and asked Kim where it came from. He told me the story. When Kim was visiting his family in Atlanta, GA, he got a call from the store manager of informing him a customer wanted to sell a collection of Merrill’s material. However, the customer lived in Conyers, GA, a small town outside Atlanta where the collection was housed. Mr. Herzinger made an appointment to visit the man’s house and after inspecting the material, made an offer and bought it. After Mr. Herzinger bought the collection, he searched extensively to discover who Charles Crawford was, but he couldn’t find any information on him. It appears both the seller of the collection and Charles Crawford, the person this material was inscribed to, were friends of Merrill’s family. Merrill was born in New York City, but his mother Helen Merrill, moved to Conyers, Georgia in the 1970s, and lived there full time. Merrill would visit her from Connecticut or New York, often. Helen Merrill was a kind of socialite and saloon keeper in Conyers. The poet Merrill would inscribe books to family friends and she would give them away as presents. One day, Crawford asked this customer to holds his books while he was out of town. Eventually, it seems Crawford just let them keep the material. Readers of Merrill’s poetry know how important A Ouija board was as an aid and source for him inwriting some of his books, most famously his sprawling epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover. The mystery of who Charles Crawford was a puzzle. Was Crawford an inspiring spirit for the poet as the Oujia board had been? The notes indicated Crawford was a close, personal flesh-andblood friend who stayed at Merrill’s New York apartment when he was in town. Kim and I found proof of this because in the collection, there is an empty envelope addressed to Crawford where a house key was left for him. Reading these notes offered me a sense of Merrill’s poetic humor. An undated Christmas card had a musical reference: “Nuts and a jingle—you’re really over-doing it! But both are delicious and greatly appreciated. Here is your comparatively uninspired CHRISTMAS TIE, which I ought to have stitched myself., though if I had you’d never want to be seen in it . . . “ [sic] Readers of Merrill’s work are familiar with his visits to Greece and how importantly his stays there also figured in his work. Another note described Merrill’s thoughts on locales both at home and abroad; “Dear Charles—I love the Greek Island calendar—perhaps next year we shall all spend the holidays there. They don’t take it very seriously, Xmas that is. Also, for the article on the Carlyle. I knew there had to be reasons not to live there, & those pages were full of them. Nancy Reagan indeed . . . . Signed; Happy, unOrewillian 1984.” The most amusing note in this collection was a half-folded loose leaf page. One side was a collage addressed “CHARLES from JIMMY Merry X—if this is too gaudy, take it back (The Shop
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is upstairs from sales in the Esplandade)—thank you for that terrifying choc. Sauce [sic]. One fingertip taste and I’m hooked. Happy 1985.” The reverse side amusingly referred to Merrill’s pet; “Charles: At night, fill the ice bucket full of ice cubes, set a cruet . . . of milk inside it, and leave on floor of HIP’s “cubbyhole.” The cup and saucer on her bathroom counter should be at hand. This way she can cope with breakfast by herself. J. M., Floor Nurse.” Eventually, most of these notes and signed letters were sold to customers who were Merrill fans. Certainly, they made interesting literary gifts for poets or book collectors. But we never figured out who Charles Crawford was. I used to think Merrill wrote these notes to himself as reminders but addressing them to Charles, his attendant spirit friend, but there is no way to prove this thesis. —
Erik La Prade is a New York-based poet, non-fiction writer, poetry editor and photographer. He received MA in English Literature from CCNY. Author of five poetry books and a collection of interviews with artists Breaking Through: Richard Bellamy and The Green Gallery, 1960–1965. He has published articles, interviews, poems and photographs in numerous literary and art magazines in the USA.
Tomasz Marek Sobieraj, from Banal Objects, B&W negative film, multiple exposure, 2006, 2010
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ADRIAN LIGĘZA
The Beating I remember how you would beat me. You had a purple face and blue lips, An unshaved beard under your eyes filled with madness, A belt or a clutch in your hand. You would hit blindly, anywhere, Head, kidneys, legs, The furies danced with you. The worst was to await the beating. Tightening your anus and gnawing at your fingers. Every tremble in me would beg for the lashing. You would hit me lost in a Bacchic orgy of your own demons. You would hit me in the same way I would beat the cat in my grandparent’s shed. With the same passion, I threw him at furniture whilst screeching spells prompting by a trestle. Just like myself, the battered animal had no where to run. Just like myself, it would return to play and cuddle. Just like myself, it would climb onto my knees and allow to be stroked. Why on a wild beach we stand opposite each other sunk in the warm Italian sea up to our knees why have you stopped, approached and embraced my face in your godly palms whatever prompted you, oh shining Apollo when you placed on my forehead a prolonged, soft kiss I am covered by tight skin, pale and soft I think its tightened by the genes of mussels and chitons far from these arms and torso calves and thighs lined with a chord on a weak bridge a fuliginous wreath curled up stems, squashed rosettes lost crowns of pink daisies it is mournful and quiet here below, the fertility goddess’s hip cushioned with cotton dipped in lard could give birth to children move planets, obturate volcanoes my back bent like the arch of a cot in which a vicious dog charges at me I keep my head low to protect my throat I avoid eye contact and curl my back
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sad sight I will never be you regularly decorated with simplicity with resin drenched shells and honey glazed pebbles I don’t like the sun especially the sun that bothers and strips of all you are cherished by photons’ prisms and waves you are licked by excited flames sad sight wipe the mark of your lips from me suck out the breath inhaled by nostrils keep the gift offered hastily too pale and shallow to be admired by critics too itchy and thorny to be easily forgotten
Telemach’s Curse search for your father, the goddess spoke, find him, go and so through the dark background my silhouette passes by for many, many years where are you creator, spirit, ghost . . . where day by day you make my thoughts flutter will I be able to catch the blowing wind in my palms I am close to using lover’s speech I am close to singing praise to you, to me, to this search louder and louder I can hear voices which were buried alive and dreams spit in my mendacious face that you are in me in each denied vodka shot in disgust with cigarette smoke and amateur fish keeping in despise for Bunsch books, Hoffmans films and bitter chocolate in escapes from challenges, commitments, conversations, self-development in submission to power and aggression towards weakness in quick decisions and heroic declarations in each sneeze, in yellowing teeth and in frequent unprovoked facial reddening that you are the reflection of my gaze in my child’s eyes when I run to scream at them in my spit reeling into a mirror, erectile disfunction and suicidal thoughts
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Gaze Birdsongs have ruined my sleep. Images from coffers have dropped one by one Streaks have fallen into deep voids. Figures in 3D—smoke—puff—the wind has slashed them. Gone—Not one figure is left. Only this terrible head Volcanic eyes gaze which destroyed me for life. But maybe this isn’t a birdsong, only broken screams in a bag of drowning kittens disappearing slowly under strong pressure in a tin bucket of submerged hands. All those boys, who diminished by the fire of a father’s gaze their bleeding gums thrust on pillow cases. Their hearts—cinder, souls—soot their pupils ripen, cold to cremate
Sheila you bustle about a narrow room like a little mouse through thick grass you wipe paw against paw, head scratched with your claw you are looking for a son your son was disembowelled by shrapnel in Iraq they cut the meat, threw it for the birds a generous feast of skin folds fluttered over Baghdad over the sweaty country of water cranes they had a short flight over scraps of uniform with the Union Jack do not misunderstand me he was not shot by bullets bombs or missiles sent by the enemy in the middle of the night at dawn or in open flight he was on his own near the camp dug himself a shallow hole filled it with berries his body covered the cold fruit covered with a hard shell each held from four hundred
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to seven hundred angular seeds twelve of these went missing from the army warehouse wrapped tightly in a ripped dressing gown little flowers, blue petals these must be forget-me-nots the ridged membranes of dying flowers one day an azure meadow spilling over petals and bark the total destruction of nature such view forces a grimace of fear and tremor you moved the plate away refusing soup these days you have no interest in it generally you lack appetite you wipe the spoon, your lips, your fingers all smudged by muck Translated by Mags Brady and Alicja Brady
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Adrian Ligęza was born in 1980. He has a Master’s Degree in Polish literature from Jagiellonian University in Cracow.
Tomasz Marek Sobieraj, from Banal Objects, B&W negative film, multiple exposure, 2006, 2010
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David Day AN OPEN LETTER IN DEFENSE OF SUSAN SONTAG'S EQUATION: COMMUNISM EQUALS FASCISM
S
everal months ago, at a Solidarity rally in New York City's Town Hall, Susan Sontag equated communism with fascism. Her statement provoked jeers and boos from leftists and liberals in the audience. In the weeks that followed, a veritable avalanche of articles and letters were published in the American press that donounced Ms. Sontag's eqation. The liberal establishment expressed its rage with one voice and one opinion. Ms. Sontag had betrayed the Left and must be punished. Since her denunciation of communism, Ms. Sontag has been ostracized by the liberal community, denied their support and been attacked by its members at every available opportunity. It was as simple as that. The liberal establishment had spoken and the liberal establisment had acted. I, for one, find it hypocritical that those who comprise the liberal establishment still call themselves “liberals.” There was nothing liberal about their reaction to Ms. Sontag's statement. Their reaction was in the totalitarian tradition. Drown out the speaker at public meetings if the speaker disagrees with your views. Dilute the truth by presenting a united front against it. Banish the nonbeliever and denounce him to the world. Be bold. Confuse the issue. Because of a recent trip to East Germany by Poland's General Jaruzelski, and for other reasons, as well, Ms. Sontag's equation about communism deserved further consideration. During his stay in the birtplace of Hitler's National Socialism, General Jaruzelski made a much publicized visit to shrines and monuments that honor World Two's victims of fascism. The following day a photograph of Jaruzelski appeared on page two of the New York Times. He had a solemn expression on his face and a wreath in his hand. The news story, accompanying the photo, explained that General Jaruzelski was “honoring” the victims of fascism. There was no mention about the victims of communism. I doubt if very many of Sontag's critics and Times readers are aware of General Jaruzelski's duplicity in World War Two. And, more important, I doubt if they know very much about the events orchestrated by the Soviet Union that led to the communisation of Poland and Jaruzelski's eventual rise to power. In 1944 Jaruzelski was a junior officer in one of the Soviet-Polish divisions, in the Soviet Army, that failed to reinforce the Polish Home Army during the Warsaw Rebellion. According to Winston Churchill, and other prominent historians, as well, the Soviet Army had agreed to coordinate its attack on Warsaw with the outbreak of fighting in the city. The two groups were in radio contact and the rebellion against the Nazi forces of occupation started as planned. At this point in time, the advancing Soviet Army halted its advance about fifty kilometers from Warsaw. Stalin had given his commanders orders not to reinforce the Polish Home Army. Once the German Army realized that the advancing Soviet divisions had halted their advance, and was not going to reinforce the Polish garrison, it enabled them to divert men and material from other battlefronts and crush the Rebellion. As a result of of Stalin's treachery, approximately 200,000 Poles were slaughtered in the fighting. The Poles who died in the Warsaw Rebellion were not only a victims of fascism, they were also victims of communism. Jaruzelski was an active and willing participant in these events which effectively eliminated an important segment of post-war opposition to communism and paved the way for the communist takeover a few years later. Communism did not come to Poland, as the liberal establishment would have us believe, through the collective will of the Polish people, as an expression of political choice. It was forced on them by the Soviet Union as part of a master plan to sovietize Eastern Europe. The news story in the New York Times that accompanied the photograph of General Jaruzelski, at a monument honoring victims of fascism, neglected to mention any of these unassasaible facts. The failure to do so was a distortion of the truth by omission. It can, and has, aided and abetted the great lies of our time. It has contributed to the boos and jeers that tried to drown out Ms. Sontag's denuciation of communism. There is no doubt in my mind, and the minds
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of countless others, about Ms. Sontag's equation. Communism is fascism. Our refusal to remain silent about its dangers is an attempt to halt the stampede of democratic societes into a totalitarian future. Unfortunately, those who comprise the liberal establishment have labelled many of our efforts as reactionary and fascistic. In their minds, they equate anti-communism with fascism. Ironically, their false line of reasoning has led them to endorno the political philosophy of Soviet Communism en masse, and to make them practitioners of totalitarianism. A perfect example was their attempt to suppress Ms. Sontag for her denunciation of communism. Ms. Sontag made her statement equating communism with fascism at a rally in support of Polish Solidarity. She made this equation because the Jaruzelski regime was suppressing 10,000,000 members of Solidarity, and 26,000,000 other Poles, for expressing their attitudes about communism. One of the primary tenets of fascism is the suppression of political opponents and their beliefs. The failure of the liberal establishment to relate its actions, and those of the Jaruzelski regime, to Ms. Sontag's equation is beyond our understanding. The connotation is obvious. We point this out for one simple reason. If those who comprise the liberal establishment choose to boo and jeer their freedoms away and march like automatons into the Gulag Archipelgos of tomorrow, that is their business. If they try to take us with them, that is our business. In concluding this letter, I am reminded of the closing scene of the play Danton's Death by Georg Büchner. In this powerful drama about the French Revolution, Danton has been sentenced to die for betraying the Revolution. On the steps leading to the guillotine, one of his friends, also sentenced to die, tries to embrace him. The executioner pushes them apart. Danton accuses the executioner of trying to be crueller than Death, but reminds him that he will not be able to keep their heads from meeting in the basket. If there is ever a world where communism prevails—and nothing but communism—those in the liberal establishment and in the anti-communist movement will meet in the same basket. History will have its way. 1982 —
David Day was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1939. He began working as a young boy and as he grew-up, he worked a range of jobs from truck driver, longshoreman, furniture mover, business man. He served two years in the U.S. Army, studied literature, history and economics. During the 1980’s, he was an active supporter of Solidarity and wrote numerous articles and letters for newspapers supporting the movement and participated in pro-Solidarity demonstrations. As of April 2016, he left New York and currently resides in Ostrołęka, Poland. He is the author of poetry books Five Minutes to Midnight (Editions Sur Ner, 2017) and Ulisses Homecoming—Wiersze wybrane (Editions Sur Ner, 2018).
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ERICA MAPP
The Feeder Wild birds like bread. I watch them line up for The scraps we save, placed on the garden wall. Some Palm Tanagers and a Big-eye Grive, Some blackbirds and a Blue-grey Tanager Vie with the Keskidees and Mockingbirds To see who will get the best of the feast. The Yellow Oriole seems to prefer Pigeon pea trees, and looks for insects there. The scraps are of different sizes, some so big The most aggressive bird must let them fall. The food then lands at the feet of the meek Ones waiting below. The meek will inherit the earth. I wish the world would always be as fair, But then we would not long to get to Heaven.
The Same Light The same light shining in your happy eyes It seems I've seen some time somewhere before. Perhaps it was in summer that I saw It in the sea reflecting sunlit skies. The shallows where the shifting water lies Limpid and clear green on its mottled floor I had loved then, but now I love them more, Because I see the same light in your eyes. And it appears in the magnolia tree; Leaves tangled in the sunbeam-spangled net That sunlight weaves, keep on reminding me Of you and the eyes I can't forget, And though, in truth, I loved them well before, Because of you, I love them so much more.
Melancholy Slow dripping, Muddening but musical, Each drop a note And many notes a little melody Tinkling on and on And on dementedly. Once fair Ophelia in her ecstasy To lull a sorrow that was bright and sharp As springing tears
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Went singing to herself and wandered by A melancholy stream that seemed to sing The same sad song. That fills my heart with such a poignancy That I could weep And weep And not know why.
Tell Me You Love Me Tell me you love me, say the words again, Say them again and I will hear you out; After the silence of the wilting drought There's music in the drip, drip, drip of rain. Tell me you love me, say the words again, As yet I hear them with a lingering doubt; There's unbelief in the first joyous shout Of those who prayed and thought they prayed in vain. Be patient with me, give me time to think, To let love sink deep in my consciousness; Sometimes the earth though thirsting cannot drink But there's no need to think things are amiss. It takes a little while but patient showers Find sweet response in myriads of flowers. —
Erica Mapp was born in Trinidad and lives in New York City. She has a Master's Degree in English Literature from Columbia University and is a freelance writer.
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DAVID DAY
Recipe for a Memorable Caffeine Experience For Erik La Prade, Matthew Bernosky and Larry Brooks
1. Find an old dirty pot rusting in a clump of weeds near the railroad tracks. Scour it clean with sand and leaves and if it doesn’t leak it will do just fine to fix coffee in. Fill it with water in the men’s restroom at a nearby gas station and take a sponge bath to get rid of some dirt, sweat and grime. A guy gets dirty riding on freight trains and sleeping in boxcars. Most of all, wash your feet and socks, they’re filthy and begining to stink. You’ll have to use your t-shirt as a washcloth and towel and put it back on wet, but it won’t take very long to dry in the sun. And after you brush your teeth and shave, you’ll look and feel like a new man.
2. Now carry the water back to the hobo jungle where you and four other hobos are planning to spend the night.* The five of you are waiting for a freight train that’s going into farm country. You learned from a bulletin at the local employment office that farmers are hiring pickers to help bring in their crops. The pay is 85 ¢ per hour. Right now there’s radishes, so that’s where you’re headed, to some radish fields about fifty miles northeast of Gallop, New Mexico. And if the train that’s scheduled to go there doesn’t have an empty boxcar, you’ll have to ride up top, on the boxcar’s roof, where there’s not much of anything to hang onto. So make sure you don’t lose your balance, or footing, on the curves and grades, because if you fall off of a moving freight train and land on your head or end up beneath the wheels, it’s usually “Goodby, Charley,” or “Adios, Amigo,” and you won’t be alive to hear who’s saying it.
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If they’re still hiring, when you get there, you’ll be picking at least ten hours a day, sleeping twelve to a room and eating Mexican. Mostly rice and beans, enchiladas, chilli, tortillas and not much of anything else worth mentioning. In a couple of weeks, after all the little backbreaking red devils have been picked, packed and shipped, you and your fellow workers will be catching another freight train, going to pick another crop of something else. And, if you didn’t spend all of your hard-earned wages on 60¢ wine and $2.00 whores, you should still have a few bucks left over for travelling money.
*Footnote for the first sentence of part 2 A hobo jungle is a campsite for homeless men called hobos. They are, for the most part, vagrants, vagabonds and migrant workers who wander from place to place and job to job riding the railcars of freight trains. Although this mode of transportation is illegal and highly dangerous, it is usually tolerated by the railroads and local authorities.
3. Heat the water over a campfire and when it begins to boil throw in a handful of ground coffee beans you filched from a roadside diner where you worked one day as a dishwasher. Let it bubble for a while and when it gets black as liquid shoe polish, but smells like coffee from ten feet away, Set the pot in the fire’s hot ashes and wait for the grounds to settle before you try to drink any. It will save you from having to spit them out later. By now, as you have probably guessed, there is no cream or sugar in a hobo jungle but there’s usually plenty of alcohol, so add a big dollop of whatever’s available. And whether it’s cheap muscatel, rotgut rye, or drugstore shaving lotion, each carry enough of a wallop to make you forget about wanting to add anything else. Back in New Orleans, the Frenchies in their fancy restaurants, call it Coffee Royale, spelled with a capital “c” and pronounced with a snooty accent.
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But out here in the Southwest, we just call it cowboy coffee or java with a jolt. Now for a few words of warning and some friendly advice: You’re going to drink from a tin can, that gets passed from man to man, so be careful not to burn your fingers or scald your lips on the hot tin And definitely don’t drink more than your fair share because, even in a hobo jungle, it wouldn’t be considered polite or right unless the alcohol was yours to start with. And if you’re so inclined to indulge in some nicotine, along with your caffeine, now is the perfect time, sitting by a campfire and having a few drinks with your buddies. So, go ahead and indulge all you want. Smoke, chew, or dip to your heart’s content. Here they’re all permitted and not frowned upon by doctors, do-gooders or politicians who always seem to be making new rules about almost everything. And after the can has been emptied, refilled and passed around a few times, and contains more alcohol than coffee, you’ll probably start socializing with your fellow knights of the road. Swap a few stories about where you’ve been and where you’re going. Boast the brag about your exploits and romantic encounters. And don’t hesitate to exaggerate or lie a little bit, we all do some of that, from time to time, to make our stories and ourselves more interesting than they really are. And when you finally run out of things to say, whether it be truths, lies or otherwise And silence reigns, except for the howl of a lost and lonely dog, stretch out next to the fire on a piece of dirty cardboard and fall asleep staring at the stars. If you’re lucky the night will stay warm and you’ll have a nice wet dream to keep you company, perhaps one with a beautiful nymphomaniac who owns a liquor store and falls in love with a handsome young hobo that just happens to be you. But if you’re unlucky, the weather will turn cold and someone, far less fortunate than you, will steal your shoes, unless you’re using them as a pillow or have them tied to you wrist by the laces.
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4. Follow this recipe in a hobo jungle, Somewhere west of the Mississippi and north of the Rio Grande, Where you’re waiting for a freight train to carry you into the future And causes you to look back, some fifty years later, And remember this experience as being far more memorable than any visit to Starbucks. Ostrołęka, Poland, 2018
Tomasz Marek Sobieraj, from Banal Objects, B&W negative film, multiple exposure, 2006, 2010
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STEVE DALACHINSKY
La Fenice you are dead now i do not deny this i have never traveled that far but in my mind i have never been to see you never groped your loins never grasped your voice looking upward i give the hot sky devil’s horns my 2 fingers tearing eye of radiance as i curse whatever useless being got me into this mess you were hurt badly even the criminal that did this could not deny it orchestra soloist arsonist no one could say no to you even the criminal must have known your audibly personal song the internal harmonies of your perfect acoustic heart history is an element made up of smuggled outtakes would that the wood tell all i am poet who plays the lyre while seeking the truth of life you a gypsy violin leave your tent for awhile travel across the canal to the place of birthing forget your discord & grief for a moment pick up your bow the hot sky turned night is waiting
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sunset: 3rd eye wrinkled by heat & dust clouds become sunset my 3rd eye slumbering with 3 eyes i watch night approaching eating rice balls passionate for another kiss 3rd eye awakens —
Poet/collagist Steve Dalachinsky was born in Brooklyn (1946) after the last big war and has managed to survive lots of little wars. His book The Final Nite (Ugly Duckling Presse) won the PEN Oakland National Book Award. His latest cds are The Fallout of Dreams with Dave Liebman and Richie Beirach (Roguart 2014) and ec(H)o-system with the French art-rock group, the Snobs (Bambalam 2015). He has received both the Kafka and Acker Awards and is a 2014 recipient of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His poem “Particle Fever” was nominated for a 2015 Pushcart Prize. His column “outtakes” appears regularly in the Brooklyn Rail. His most recent release is With Shelter Gone, a full length 12 inch lp on the German label Psych.KG. His latest book is Where Night and Day Become One—the French Poems (a selection 19832017) (Great Weather for Media, 2018).
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Isabella Degen ON THE TRACES OF SALVADOR DALI
“Go to Spain with me”—Dirk offered in a telephone call. Dirk is one of my friends. His job consists of presenting plastic arts. He is a hairdresser by trade, an artist by vocation. Some people ask: what does hairdressing have in common with the arts? Well, it seems it does. Dirk organises art exhibitions in his hair salon. He invites painters from all over the world—from America, Europe, Japan. Thanks to him our little town can experience something more than the natural art of the Eifel mountain. Several years ago Dirk became a permanent guest of Cadaqués, a lovely place at the Costa Brava coast. Exactly in the town that Salvador Dali spent most of his life; he lived and created there. In order to understand Dali's art one has to visit Cadaqués at least once. * We are en route to Spain. On the way we visit France. In the lovely town Cave lives the American painter Helen Gilber, we visit her in her atelier. Helen—a lady with charming light blue eyes— shows her years, nonetheless she is full of energy and joy of life. Now I understand why her works are so serene and full of light—they are a reflection of her personality. Her life partner Kenneth is also a painter. They make a good couple and are both lecturers at the Academy of Plastic Arts in Honolulu. We are going in four for a dinner to Fitu—a nice settlement placed in a very picturesque area. All buildings are made of faded sandstone; the restaurant is Provence-Katalonian-style. We are sitting in candlelights, it is intimate and romantic. I am listening to the conversation, though I do not understand much due to my poor English. On the next day we take our leave and head out to Spain. On the way we make a stop at a wine store on the roadside to stock up on wine supplies for long winter evenings. We taste various wines and after several sample swallows we are on a light rush—while we still have 120 km to Spain. * Figureas—a small life-pulsing town, the birthplace of Salvador Dali and the place where he spent the first years of his life. Dali's theatre-museum is the largest attraction there. In front of the museum there is a 300-metres long queue, but it is moving fast. No more than 500 visitors are allowed in the museum at one time. At first glance the building makes a surprising impression. Red brick, huge golden eggs on the roof. It is a former town theatre, which Dali rebuilt for storage of his works. After passing the threshold one can feel the incredible atmosphere and vibrant energy residing here. At the entrance there is a black Cadillac, where Gala, the muse of Salvador Dali, is greeting visitors and introducing them to the world of surrealism. On the side a boat positioned upside down is placed on a large pedestal made of tyres and bottles that symbolises the connection of the earth and heaven. All these works of surrealism bring the spectator in tune with his psyche. Dali liked when something was happening around him all the time, when something was in motion. He is buried here, in the museum, where day after day thousands of people come by. This crowd of people squeezed together and Dali's aggressive provocative visions make an amazing impression. Surrealism is generally soaked with thrill and mysticism. One can feel drunk from what one sees here. Everything is perverse and crazy. Did Dali have something in his eyes through which he looked on the world? It is like split truth, like a world of split brutal realism. Everything is touched by the stigma of the peculiar personality of this painter, which oscillates between the passion of desire and the frustration of unfulfillment. From every corner the museum spreads the spirit of psychoanalysis. I went through the narrow corridors, which from the bottom to the top are full with works by Dali and his friends. Each room is like a different dimension of
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the world of fantasy. Dali is like a drug, the more you watch his pieces, the more you want them. I left the museum overwhelmed by the incredibility of his works. * The road to Cadaqués is a large Pyrenean serpentine, first it leads up and then rapidely descends in a spiral. Overtaking is absolutely impossible, you can pay for it with your and tumble into the abyss like a stone. On one of the last turns we saw Cadaqués and its church, white buildings and a glimpse of sea. It all looked like a quarter of a sweet creamy cake. There was vacation chaos of an August Sunday. Queues of cars trundling at the speed of a turtle. It's tight, there are no car parks, everywhere is full of people. The town is situated on the rocks of Pyrenees. Streets are paved with natural rocks and run up and down. Buildings typical for the South—white houses with flat roofs tiled in fair beige. On the very top there is the Santa Maria Church with a wonderful baroque altar. For 100 pesetas the illumination of the altar is switched on for two minutes. This evokes an impression of pouring gold. There are two pictures by Dali, too. Dirk shows me everything patiently, although he had seen all of this a good several times before. We are going through the steep streets of the town to meet Dirk's friends. * In the evening we visit Carlos Lonzano's gallery. Carlos is an American, he had been living in Cadaqués for years. He once belonged to Dali's twelve disciples, to his apostles. There is an exhibition by Padora at Carlos' place. We received personal invitations for it. Pandora also belonged to Dali's circle, she was his model and friend. I met her three years ago at a vernissage organised by Dirk. She is a very exceptional person. She says of herself that she has something of a bird. Indeed, she is very tall, her long arms are like wings, her long legs are like those of a stork or heron, a very high forehead, eyes big on half of the face, and a large prominent nose like a beak. She is vegetarian, she doesn't eat eggs. The egg is a symbol of life for her. Carlos was glad to see us and he called for Pandora right away. She came with her friend, a charming American with beautiful chestnut hair. Margot is much younger (around thirty years of age). Greetings, joy because of the meeting, an exchange of handshakes, friendly words. We went together for a dinner to “Casa Nu“—a cosy restaurant, not too expensive. Real Catalonian cuisine, many fish dishes, and also vegetarian meals. We are talking, though I hardly speak English at all. It is strange but true: one is not competent in a language, but still feels and understands the other person. Tomorrow Pandora will be our guide (or rather mine) in the region, because Dirk knows everything already. Tomorrow we will follow the traces of Salvador Dali * Dirk's cabrio is not very suitable for this bumpy road. We get in with Pandora whom everybody knows here and greets her from afar. The sun is shining, the wind ruffles the hair—we are going in the direction of Port Lligat. There is a house, where Dali spent most of his life. Pandora doesn't like going there—it is sad to have lost somebody one adored. We make a stop just for a while, we are looking at the house from the distance, at willowy cypresses and large golden eggs on the roof. I pay tribute to the remembrance of the master and we are going further along the rocky coast. Curious colourful boulders, rocky beaches, picturesque precipices, small valleys covered with olive trees—one can recognise all that in Dali's paintings. Rocks of the Catalonian Pyrenees are rich— granite in every possible colour, crystal slates; I had never seen such a variety of colours in nature before. Painters live here, they derive from the rocks natural dyes for their paints and produce paintings in the colours of the Pyrenees. One of them is Wolfgang Berus. We moved forward through the wild landscape jumping from one stone to the other. Pandora guided us on Dali's route to the places where she used to go with him. She showed us various
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distinctive rocks that can be recognised in Dali's paintings. Sometimes we had to squeeze through rock breaches. At one moment this was beyond my capability, I rested on a rock and did not have the courage to go further. Pandora and Dirk went far down to swim in the sea. I used to admire landscapes, this encounter with nature was however an appalling one. I was sitting on the rock like a bird. Everywhere rock breaches around—on the one side the sea, on the other a precipice. We are going back. It's hot but beautiful. The sun underlines the colours—a whole gamut of terracotta, yellow, green and brown. I am not surprised at artists who live here—in this beautiful area full of stones one can easily find inspiration and create. We take photos. I know that I will return to this place again. * I spend the next day visiting museums. There are a few of them in Cadaqués. One museum was founded by the captain Perrot Morre who was a secretary to Dali. The Captain didn't have a good reputation. Allegedly—to put in mildly—he appropriated the works of the famous painter, which means he simply stole them. Now the entire museum is his property. It was opened in 1978, for the opening a small theatre room was built. Many world prominents performed in it for Salvador Dali. After that I go to the city's museum, where a retrospective exhibition called “Anthology 19161980” can be visited. The exhibition shows a cross-section of Dali's oeuvre, beginning with his drawings that he made at the age of 12—already at that time his works were exhibited in the building of today's theatre-museum in Figueres. Pieces from different life periods show the development of the artist in an excellent way. I was difficult for me to leave the museum. The siesta time set in. An employee of the museum ostentatiously took his bread, looked upon me and muttered meaningfully: “siesta”. In the museum there was nobody else besides me. In the restaurant around the corner a cosy atmosphere. I drank gaspaccio, a cold refreshing tomato soup, ate asparagus and Catalana cream with a real sugar crust. I went up to see Cadaqués from the top. In the evening we go to Carlos' gallery, Dirk makes his business, I can't resist to buy one of Pandora's paintings from the “Capitol” series. A women depicted has the head of a devil. To me it resembles the devil from the Tarot cards. This painting has something mystical, something terrifying or otherworldly. There is something surrealistic about Pandora as well. Aside from her incredible appearance she is surrealistic also in her personality and original manner. She is a free person, open to everything. In life everything is possible, what today is not, tomorrow can be. Barriers are set by people themselves. So, perhaps some day . . . —I hugged her.—We will meet again anyway . . . I felt strange, I don't know how to express it. I never felt sexually attracted to women, but she fascinates me. I don't speak English well enough to talk to her freely, but there is something about it. * We walk through the streets of Cadaqués. Pandora is guiding me like in a dance, like in a polonaise. I hold my hand on her straight raised hand, we are walking in the middle of the street. People and cars stop, Pandora is well-known here by the older generation. On the other hand young people are looking at us as if we were from a different world; apparently we look both like surreal angels from Dali's canvasses. We marched through all of Cadaqués and approached the coffee shop “Casino” on the main road. In one moment different people gathered around Pandora. Pandora started introducing them—these were Dali's friends, people belonging to his community. A half hour long the entire pleiad of Cadaqués' personages was introduced to me: altogether some 20 people, I am not able to recall all the names and faces: Bunuel's son and his wife were there, artists and painters—Helene Parades, Helene Accursi, Nabuco Kihira, and others. Everybody had something to do with Dali or lived in his shadow. Dali departed, but his shadow
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remained present in the town forever. It is a big experience to meet people from the circle of a great artist and walk the streets he used to walk. I have the impression that I had met him there in person, he became much closer to me in those days. I was always fascinated by his extravagance and provocative exhibitionism, by his peculiar surrealist visions inspired by the biological drive which ignore traditional value hierarchies. Those three days in Spain and the encounter with Salvador Dali convinced me that our life is pure surrealism. Only, nobody can see it with Dali's eyes, with the eyes of an eccentric and at the same time of a genius of our times. Cadaqués, August 1996 Translated by Adam Gałamaga
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Isabella Degen was born in 1946 in Olsztyn, Poland. Painter, writer, poet and journalist. Since 1987 she lives abroad, in Spain and Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Tomasz Marek Sobieraj, from Banal Objects, B&W negative film, multiple exposure, 2006, 2010
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BARRY WALLENSTEIN
How Fast One day in summer an alien from Mars or somewhere landed and spoke to me from his busy mouth: “Your hours, like rats will keep coming and pile high as Everest, before that long drop down, too fast for you to frame or see your minutes, their delights, as you fall.” Without a second to think, sweat, or parry, I reposted: “Remove your clock and your foul mouth too— back to Mars; I’ve hours enough in this world but not a minute to spare for your vision or venom.”
Framed Photographs In this enormous room photos of the dead and the dying brighten the walls. Maybe it’s the glass frames. Without names, without dates, there is no telling which is which or who’s who. Within this population there are the ebullient ones, fiery spirits who cover the planet, spread the word through their neighborhoods, juicy news to keep the blood up. The dying practice from the start; their last breaths copy their first, while the dead, framed as they are, handsome forever, compose the room.
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Topsy-Turvy Wandering lonely atop a cloud I fell into a turvy. A cart pulled by three dappled horses— one named Topsy one called Heat and the last one Miss Cool— passed me by, the iron wheels churning up a mist of dust. So here I am, in the mid-stride of my age all upside down in love. One day her smile is like a quilt cozy warm to slip under; the next day the grin askew with lust and discontent sends me into the spin of the tail. What to do when held by such a spell, with all those years behind me and none to speak of up ahead? I call her on the phone and my heart catches and rings with each brief bleat of sound. Her voice trills in the receiver, and I’m lost again to be found.
Observing a Twosome A man under his haircut walks into a house with blue music. No one there expected him or noticed his entrance. The particular one he came for, desired over all the others, is drop-dead plain but for her piercings and tats; her voice thrills him each time with its feather touches and frills, and he listens for her entrance and catches the drift of her scent. When she steps out from the small clutch of women, the two spy each other and lock in— icons of anticipation.
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The dance rhythms were too loud for any of us to hear their plot, or if it would unravel right here or on outside territory. I only know what I saw and wished I could twin myself and thus conspire with bold glances shot from my four eyes instead of just two.
A Seasoned Sniper Retired Now, at the end of his employment, his fingernails keep him awake. He envisions them growing faster, faster than grass, and his phobic block against clipping, he fears, will endanger how he’s remembered. Already they’ve grown beyond the short lives of his targets; soon his fingers will sport hooks at their ends. He’ll take those nails with him, he says, at the end of his day when new grasses will have come up, the lush coverall under which he’ll lie still, while the nails keep growing in the direction of evermore. His trigger finger’s useless, except to point or to scratch, and there’s not a target in sight.
Twins He was born a twin but solitary—brotherless, sisterless, an odd number, a one, but he developed to twin with every breathing thing— the mother, the father, a sleepy neighbor stopping by, the family cat, and as soon as they exchanged glances,
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they gained his look, his features, his budding frame, his attitude. All this before he was four. When they sit him down for dinner, cleaned up and rosy, all his twins imagine the child aging— their identical twin— their age somehow on hold. One takes on his lack of doubt, another—his bounding health, and the last, the cat, his bristling, burgeoning capacity to lick and to love. — Barry Wallenstein was born in New York City. He received his PhD in Literature and Modern Poetry from New York University in 1972. From 1965 until 2006 he taught literature and writing at the City College of New York where he founded the journal Poetry in Performance and the Poetry Outreach Center, which in 2012 celebrated its 40th anniversary. His poems first appeared in 1964, and since then he has published nine collections. In the early 1970's he began collaborating with jazz artists in the performance and recording of his poetry, establishing long term relationships with renowned jazz musicians, including saxophonists Arthur Blythe and Charles Tyler, and pianist John Hicks. He currently performs in New York City with pianist Adam Birnbaum and the internationally known French horn artist Vincent Chancey. Barry continues to collaborate with musicians internationally. In recent years, he has worked with Serge Pesce in France, Massimo Cavalli in Portugal, and the band Drastic Dislocations in Switzerland. In 2012 he composed lyrics for 8 ballads by the saxophone artist and composer, Pepper Adams. He continues to work on lyrics for jazz composers.
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William Heyen ESSAY BEGINNING & ENDING WITH POEMS FOR WHITMAN
I The Traffic Red lights pulse and weave in toward an accident ahead. Trying to leave Smithtown, I'm stopped dead here, where Whitman trooped to tally the eighth-month flowers' bloom. Diesels jam their bumpers together in a long line, gas and rubber heat wafts in like soup. A truck's exhaust curves up beside me like a swan's neck. I sigh, make a mistake, and breathe deep. Concrete, signs, and cars cloud: Lilacs utter their heart-shaped leaves, locusts spell their shade. The Jericho's air creaks with cartwheels, a carriage moves with the certainty of mirage. The Widow Blydenburgh flows to church, stoops to admire an iris, and to smell. A pigeon bends the slim branch of a birch. The Widow plucks the iris for her Bible. Horns soon blare me out of this. Trailing a plume of smoke, the trucker grunts his rig ahead. I accelerate past a cop directing traffic around the wreck. He asks if I'm all right. I nod and close the lane. Glass sparkles, a splash of blood still shines on the pavement, and time's itself again. Pressed against the porch of Whitman's school, the Dairy Freeze is booming, winks its windows tinted green, and cool.
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II Walt Whitman was born on Long Island, moved with his family to Brooklyn when he was four, attended public schools there, worked from 1830 to 1836 at various jobs in Brooklyn and New York, and then returned to Long Island to teach and work on Island newspapers for several years before returning to Brooklyn. "In 1851," says Gay Wilson Allen, "he was operating a small printing office and bookstore on the first floor of the three-story house he had built at 106 Myrtle Avenue." I was born in Brooklyn, spent my first years in a house on Myrtle Avenue. We then moved to Woodhaven (which was anything but wooded), near Jamaica, then to the wilds of Hauppauge in Suffolk County when I was four or five, and then further east outside Smithtown to Nesconset where I began, I believe, third grade. "O World so far away! O my lost world!" says Theodore Roethke. But Roethke knew, as did Whitman, that those worlds would always live inside him, that poems would flow out of those "lost" worlds. Long Island to Brooklyn in Whitman's case, Brooklyn to Long Island in mine, both of us children of carpenter fathers. Now and then, I tremble with connections. It's an ongoing privilege for me to feel so close, physically close, to the great world poet. At the same time, in any case, time and space avail not, as he says, and that New Jersey country pond he bathed in and wrote so beautifully about in Specimen Days (and even gave credit for his recovery to) is one of the ponds of his old Island, too. By school bus, or riding with my parents, or hitchhiking, or, as a senior in 1957 driving my brother's Plymouth—he was in the service—to high school on New York Avenue in Smithtown, I would pass through Smithtown Branch, under the huge locusts, past the Blydenburgh house. The Smithtown schoolhouse where Whitman taught in 1837-38 is just off the Jericho Turnpike in the area across from the old Presbyterian Church where 25A begins its winding to St. James, and Route 111 angles left to Hauppauge. Though it is half-hidden by a drive-in dairy food store, you can see it from the Jericho. Last I knew, it housed a lawyer's office. When I think of Smithtown, I first think of that place, that confluence. I didn't know anything about Whitman. When I remember myself as I was, I picture a boy wading Gibbs Pond in Nesconset, and other ponds in Lake Grove, St. James, Hauppauge, Ronkonkoma, the natural world bending in to him, as it did. I spent so much time at ponds, that this is the most enduring image I have of myself as a youngster, and now I know that Whitman saw me, and now I know that the presence I felt when I was otherwise alone at a pond or walking through woods or, later, clamming at St. James Harbor, was his, as he is abiding spirit, as he is the miraculous confluence of space and time within a human voice. Working on my poem "The Traffic," I was thinking of that busiest block of Bull Smith's town— in 1660 the Nissequogue Indians gave Smith, in exchange for trinkets and cattle and guns, as much land as he could encircle between sunrise and sunset while riding bareback on a bull. My speaker, "Trying to leave Smithtown," is stuck in traffic, "here, where Whitman trooped / to tally the eighth-month flowers' bloom." He is dizzied by a truck's fumes, and falls back into the past world of this same place: Lilacs utter their heart-shaped leaves, locusts spell their shade. The Jericho's air creaks with cartwheels, a carriage moves with the certainty of mirage. The Widow Blydenburgh flows to church, stoops to admire an iris, and to smell. A pigeon bends the slim branch of a birch. The Widow plucks the iris for her Bible.
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At the end of the poem, his head clear again, he glances to his right: … and time's itself again. Pressed against the porch of Whitman's school, the Dairy Freeze is booming, winks its windows tinted green, and cool. What is the true traffic? I am far from this poem now. It is as much any reader's as mine, as I try to hear it. The irony seems heavy, and intended, but I wonder if I was writing more than I knew. Earlier in the poem the speaker had compared a truck's exhaust pipe to a "swan's neck," and now, it seems to me, the Dairy Freeze windows, "green and cool," remind him bitterly of another world, the world of the sea and of ponds that we know is a part of his sensibility, in this one poem, or in the book Long Island Light in which this poem appears. But I wonder if the poem, with its lines juxtaposing Whitman's school and the Dairy Freeze pressed against it, isn't more, doesn't somehow find a kind of solace in the present traffic, doesn't somehow trust the "booming" future, as Whitman did. I notice, now, the cop's concern, the healing influence of the speaker's vision of the past, his humor, the blood-like body of the experience ("Red lights pulse and weave in"). I see now that "Glass sparkles," and now know—I don't know if I did when I wrote the poem— Whitman's poem "Sparkles from a Wheel" "Where the city's ceaseless crowd moves on the livelong day" with "Myself effusing and fluid, a phantom curiously floating."… On Island ground, having been everywhere, part of the traffic river flowing up against and through Whitman's world, my speaker may be curiously at home with himself. III As a child and young man, I had heard Whitman's name in grade school and high school. I remember that about the same time that we were reading Longfellow's "Evangeline" in seventh or eighth grade, we also read "O Captain! My Captain!", and it was from this same time that "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing" embedded itself behind my eyes. But, in general, I didn't read Whitman, but knew him, as any Island resident (even someone who has not read him) must know him when alone but feeling, in Whitman's word, some "impalpable" presence ("The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day" of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"). Sometimes Whitman says, as he does here in "Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand," that we must be alone with him to know him: (For in any roof'd room of a house I emerge not, nor in company, And in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead,) But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest any person for miles around approach unawares, Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea or some quiet island, Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you …. But alone or with others, impalpable, but tending toward him, all earthly things suffuse the power that sustains him, the physical world not only an emblem of benevolent spirit presiding and blessing, but spirit itself, indwelling, undivided soul and body of all being. It seems to me that sometimes Whitman protests too much, tries in strained keys to "show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future" ("Starting from Paumanok")—that overwhelming well-being I recently felt in the room in the Old Manse in Concord where Emerson, at white heat, wrote Nature. There is a bloated, declarative, Santa Claus quality in the unrealized work. But I care for Whitman all the more for this, his great humanity
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breaking through as he yearns to comfort and, often with sweep and subtler music, does. What he turns to, the force that will integrate all, solve all, resolve the knots of contrariety is, of course, love. (Were you looking to be held together by lawyers? Or by an agreement on a paper? or by arms? Nay, nor the world, nor any living thing, will so cohere.) ("Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice") Not "any living thing" will cohere without love, he says, in so many ways. Cells at the centers of things, atoms at the centers of cells, whole nations at the centers of cells are held together by love. Whether or not this is true, great poetry has never depended on literal, empirical Truth, but on a rhythmical and imagistic passion of voice that involves us in and makes us, at least while we are in its presence, believe its truth. Leaves of Grass itself coheres because the poet's love—variously diffuse, teasing, specific, all-encompassing, wrenching, erotic, quietly transfiguring, pounding, disguised, blatantly passionate—draws it together, despite our ignorance, despite contrary aesthetics coming toward it to tear it apart, despite the singer's heartbreak or even his beloved nation's Civil War. Whitman never wrote a poem that was not, at its center, a poem of love. IV Whitman is the poet, finally, who comes full circle, who includes everything, but he will not be forced. I think of Leaves of Grass as a necklace gradually becoming visible for me as I grow older, the necklace of "The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings" of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," each poem, perhaps, a bead of different size on the necklace, the necklace and the beads themselves, of course, shifting shapes in time and changing light. No single bead will be forced. Its facets and lines gradually impress themselves on me. I stare at them as Yeats in "Lapis Lazuli" stares at the stone, "Every discoloration of the stone, / Every accidental crack or dent," until he sees "a water-course or an avalanche, / or lofty slope where it still snows…." When I think of a single Whitman line, and repeat it to myself, one like "Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung" of that fathomless bead "Song of Myself" (a line prophesying the modern world, a line the angelic forefather of Eliot's dolorous "Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays" in "The Waste Land"), I can only shake my head in amazement and gratitude. When I roll one of the great shorter beads on my tongue, I know it will give of itself for as long as I live. When I think of Leaves of Grass, the necklace itself … V Just northeast of the confluence I've described is/was an estate of 37 acres, the Rockwell estate. Bull Smith obtained the land three centuries ago, and it was passed down through nine generations to Charles Embree Rockwell, sixty-one as of June 12, 1978, the date of a Newsday article sent me by a friend. Unable to afford twentieth-century property taxes, Rockwell sold 26 aces to The Point of Woods Construction Company of Massapequa. He donated one and one-half acres to the Town of Smithtown. And then he signed a contract of purchase for the remaining nine and one-half acres with Gordon and Jack Real Estate and Developers of Huntington. He plans to leave Long Island. Rockwell once came into my father's woodworking shop on the Jericho with a walnut log from one of his trees fallen in a storm. Rockwell loved his trees, my father told me. He could tell this by the man's eyes and voice. Rockwell wanted to know what could be made out of the walnut log.
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It turned out that much of it was rotten, but my father pieced together enough of it for a table pedestal. Rockwell's son Charles, asked how he felt when he was told that the land had been sold, said, "Well, it's as if I had been told someone in the family had died." I don't know the details of what is happening/will happen to that land. The two-story family house, built about 1750, is on the plot donated to the town. Near it is a large red barn built in 1850, and next to it a carriage house where "rows of cobwebbed carriages lie under decaying white dust covers." The Newsday article says that the town plans to move the family house but that the Smithtown Historical Society is against it, maintaining that its original site is the town's most historically important. Widow Blydenburgh's tavern stood on this land, too, and it was here that George Washington, on April 21, 1790, stopped to feed his horses and to thank Island residents for their support during the Revolution. The town may build a parking lot for the town library, if the Rockwell home is moved. It's interesting to think that people wanting to check out a book by Whitman, of course, will need a parking space. Says Town Historian Virginia Malone, "I consider that to turn into a blacktop parking lot the place where the first president of the United States once greeted the residents of Smithtown [would be] a desecration of the land." This complex story goes/will go on and on. Its repetition across America does not make it any easier to understand. No one knows what it means, not Rockwell or the Town Historian or the lawyers in Whitman's school. But as the farms are lost, as the maples, elms, walnuts, oaks, locusts, hickory are lost, the blackberry brambles and honeysuckle and laurel, the dogwoods and lilac and wild roses, the deer and smaller animals, those of us in the traffic flow in the intersections of new and old Island, that Island that is everywhere, bear witness with the center of our lives. There is no answer. I am not sure of the question. But we will come away from the Island with what we need for eternity. The undiminished poet insists that we open ourselves to the new day, and that we are forever able to reciprocate, to conduct the current. "Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sunrise would kill me / If I could not now and always send sunrise out of me." Despite whatever deaths we suffer, there will be compensation, in our knowledge of Whitman and Whitman's light. VI Witness We'd walked into the small warm shed where spring lambs lay in straw in the half-dark, still smelling of their birth, of ammonia, the damp grass, dung, into this world in the middle of a field where lambs bleating soft songs lifted their heavy heads toward their mothers, gentle presences within their wool clouds. Later, outside, as I watched, Wenzel wrapped his left arm around a sheep's neck and struck her with the sledge in his right hand. The dying sheep, her forehead crushed, cried out, past pain, for her mortal life. Blood flowed from her burst skull, over her eyes, her black nose. Wenzel dropped her to the grass. When I ran home, I struck my head on a blossoming apple-bough. Where was the dead sheep?
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What did I hear? Where is the witness now? I was nine or ten. Her cry was terror, so I lay awake to hear her, to wonder why she didn't seem to know her next manger, her golden fields. Her odors drifted through my screen— the hay at the roots of her wool, her urine, the wet graindust under her chin, her birth fluids hot and flecked with blood. I could hear her bleat to her last lamb, hear her heartbeat in the black air of my room. Where was the dead sheep? Why did she cry for her loss? Where is the witness now? Not to accept, but to awaken. Not to understand, to cry terror, but to know that even a billion years later, now, we breathe the first circle of light, and the light curves into us, into the deer's back, the man's neck, the woman's thigh, the cat's mouse-mossed tongue, all the ruby berries ripening in evening air. The dead elms and chestnuts are of it, and do not break the curve. The jeweled flies sip it, and do not break the curve. The great named and nameless comets do not break the curve. The odorous apple-blossom rain does not break the curve. The struck ewe's broken brainpan does not break the curve. Wenzel nor this witness breaks the curve. In the shed's dusk where spring lambs sang to their mothers, in my dark room where the dead ewe's odors drifted my sleep, and now, within these cells where her forehead blood flows once more into recollection, the light curves. You and I bear witness, and know this, and as we do the light curves into this knowledge. The struck ewe lives in this light, in this curve of the only unbroken light. Essay will be part of a book Yawp: Heyen's Whitman to appear next year for the Whitman Bicentennial, and will be available via Amazon.
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William Heyen is Professor of English/Poet in Residence Emeritus at the College at Brockport, his undergraduate alma mater. He received his Ph.D from Ohio University, & an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from SUNY. A former Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature in Germany, he has received NEA, Guggenheim, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Pushcart & other awards. His work
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has appeared in hundreds of anthologies, & in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Harper's, The Atlantic, The Southern Review, & numerous other magazines. He was the first Poet in Residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace on Long Island, & has lectured at Walt's Camden home. Heyen is the editor or author of more than thirty books including Noise in the Trees, an American Library Association Notable Book for 1975; Crazy Horse in Stillness, winner of 1997’s Small Press Book Award for Poetry; Shoah Train: Poems, a Finalist for the 2004 National Book Award; A Poetics of Hiroshima, a Chautauqua Literary & Scientific Circle selection for 2010. Three new books of poetry (Straight's Suite for Craig Cotter & Frank O'Hara, The Football Corporations, & Hiroshima Suite) & the first four volumes of his massive journal (The Cabin, Hannelore, Poker & Poets, and Too Many Angels), appeared 2013-2017 as did Crazy Horse & the Custers which includes 35 paintings in response to his poems by DeLoss McGraw. Etruscan Press published The Candle, a volume of 45 years of his holocaust poetry, in 2016. The Candle was a 2017 CLSC selection. H_NGM_N Books will publish the fifth of his journal volumes, The Presence I'll Be, in 2019, when MAMMOTH Books will publish a new collection of poems, Vehicles.
Tomasz Marek Sobieraj, from Banal Objects, B&W negative film, multiple exposure, 2006, 2010
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JACEK ŚWIERK
Happy Christmas! The child was born dead: All gold was used for the funeral. Balthazar left the stable With the gift of frankincense. Melchior hid the box of myrrh behind his back. The mother was howling of despair As if she was a wounded beast: God, you’re an oath breaker! While the father was demolishing the stable. The poet ripped all his carols to shreds And the grandparents threw Their Christmas spirit out of the window. The shepherds thought there’s no sense Falling to their knees to pay the child homage. The stupid donkey was trying to make The parents feel better. The camels: Our Lord never gives us More than we can handle. The angel Gabriel was keeping his head down. The King Herod wasn’t satisfied— Sent the parents to Egypt so they could rest there. The mother-in-law used to be over caring. After tonight, every day, She will whisper into her son’s ear: It’s all her fault the child is dead.
The Perfumed Believers Only One day I was stinking during Mass. People around me knew it was my foul odor—the smell of a sinner, So they covered their noses, Making faces and frowning. At first they left me all alone in an aisle. Then, on the church porch, stairs, in the gift shop. At last the sexton told me the Lord our God says; Hey, mister, get out of here or start to smell human. There was no next time. I’m still stinking Of my homelessness, gutter, despair, trash. Even my poetry has bad breath.
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The Parabole of My Good Parents They were always the first to save Anyone, anywhere. But life gave them a lesson. I saw them complaining and crying: The Good Samaritans did what belongs to their duties, Gave others what they should give And now they’re free to go, no longer needed. There’s an old Polish saying; Those with a soft heart need a hard arse. To be clear, I didn’t finish varsity. I’m neither a smart aleck nor a cynic. But I know all about bedsores, injection marks, Dirty diapers, trembling jaw, Boils, pain relieving patches, and so on. That’s my diploma.
The Humanity Pluto died in an odor of sanctity. He was curled up lying in a corner. His head and belly were bleeding And he was barking And looking at the wide open window. The vet said there’s nothing To worry about and there’s nothing He can do for Pluto. The vet injected him With a soporific drug, and after a while, with poison. The dog didn’t whine, not once. The syringes were thrown into the recycle can. His family buried him with honor In a cardboard box Under the bush where he loved to pee. The bent and rusty nails In the dog’s bowl remind us of that tragic day. The leash still hangs in the usual place But the lair was burned in the chimney. Pluto was trying to catch a Frisbee, Thinking it’s a holy halo. He was wagging his tail, asking for a slice of ham At the first communion party Of our boy, Leo, who’s a priest now.
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The inscription on Pluto’s grave: IN LOVING MEMORY OF PLUTO OUR DEVOTED DOG AND FRIEND KILLED BY THE EVIL PEOPLE. Let us love animals since they can be more human than humans . . . Translated by Jacek Świerk and Erik La Prade
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Jacek Świerk was born in 1981 in Poland; poet, farmer. He has studied Polish Literature at Rzeszów University. Author of poetry book Relacje na nieżywo (2017). Lives in Blizne village in Southeastern Poland.
Tomasz Marek Sobieraj, from Banal Objects, B&W negative film, multiple exposure, 2006, 2010
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JEFFREY WRIGHT
Six poems from REVOLUTIONARY LOVE GARDEN SONNETS; or, CHICO LIVES Written during the 3 year existence and demise of the Chico Mendes Mural Garden on East 11th Street in New York City Writing My Obituary Now I'm on pirate radio announcing the Garden Festival smoking Viceroys, drinking Dewar’s, running late as ever with these insipid dates— like April 15— guess what—go into hock again for Uncle Sam—scramble mad for cash as if I didn't have enough problems. Reading Verlaine, thinking of you, "fair, dark and sweet," then back in the street posting "Save the Gardens" cards, red on black like the Bessie Coleman stamp in the Black Heritage series I sent out tax checks with.
Dispatch Purple heliotrope, shy blue columbine, rows of white, pink and violet fox glove, chablis—you and me under the green arbor — choked with swollen primrose. Bleeding hearts advised us sincerely—not to put all all our stock into money. Our ears burned as early reports reached the capitol—broke and beautiful, the advance units had nothing on us.
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Command Control And now a black hollyhock stands taller than me and it is time to make a stand. I dreamed Lesley was naked and didn't give a damn. We handed out fliers at the demonstration and waved our flag. You brought brownies. Your brown eyes burned furiously. calmly exciting us all into a regular frenzy singing, "How I love you, Mammy." Full of defiance and utter devotion we race God to the finishing line.
Love Among the Runes for Agi Groff You see, we were living outside the thunder, a lightning-soaked handkerchief pressed close over our mouths, like the lost horizons of an eraser, rubbed out, our suitcase packed with sweet nothings, loping along the loading dock, tickets in our eyes, bells burning, as bronze tongues lapped the rims and sent out peals to our comrades in the fields and there among all the red flowers, no one fluttered my heart but you, chickadee.
Valentine’s Chief Long Wolf, the famous Sioux warrior who rode with Buffalo Bill, is buried in London, CBS reported today. Chardonnay. Wearing a black tie. Eating Dutch mustard cheese& liverwurst on Ritz. Ever leeryof the fuzz. Red roses. Red chrysanthemums. Red and black cashmere. Red gladiolas and dirty jokes.
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"Hey ho. Let's go.” Paul Revere and the Raiders on tv after school back when. Vicissitude be with me. Veritas Vincit. Come on. Be mine.
Howl a Day Pear trees glow white— the cherry, pink. I scatter calendula, hollyhock, poppy, nigella, and cosmos seeds at Dias y Flores and Chico West. Get yelled at for taking trash to illegal dumpsite across from garden. Get yelled at for building fires and howling on Friday nights, in church and out open windows in White Lincoln Town Car conmis amigos, LitaHornick and Allen Ginsberg. —
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is a publisher, critic, eco-activist, artist, and is best known as a poet. He is the author of 15 books of verse, including most recently Blue Lyre from Dos Madres Press. He has an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College where he studied with Allen Ginsberg and also taught. Recent poetry is included in New American Writing, 2017. For many years, Wright ran Cover Magazine, The Underground National. He has also been a community garden advocate, defending them from political and real estate interests and helping them to develop governmental proceduress and increase membership. Currently, Wright stages events showcasing artists and writers at KGB Lit Bar and La MaMa ETC in NYC, in conjunction with his art and poetry journal, Live Mag! He is a reguar contributor to American Book Review. Wright is a Kathy Acker Award recipient for 2018.
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THE ART OF POETRY Peter Thabit Jones interviewed by Tomasz Marek Sobieraj Sobieraj: Jones seems to be a Welsh name. You are an English poet, British or maybe a Cymry writing in English? Jones: Yes, Jones is a traditional Welsh name. I was raised by my maternal grandparents and was given their surname. I think of myself as a poet, if pushed I’ll admit to being a Welsh poet, certainly not an English poet. I dislike the terms Anglo-Welsh poet and Welsh poet writing in English. One does not think of Yeats or Seamus Heaney as Anglo-Irish poets. And, for me, Welsh poet writing in English sounds like a Welsh-language poet who happens to sometimes write in English. Sobieraj: Do you speak Cymraeg? Jones: No. I grew up in a non-Welsh language area, Eastside Swansea. I can only recall one Welsh-speaking family in the area. I did, though, teach aspects of cynghanedd (Welsh-language poetic devices) in English on one of my university courses for 22 years and I have given talks in America and Europe on cynghanedd. Sobieraj: Welsh literature can claim one of the oldest traditions in Europe, which stretches back to the 6th century. It’s a long way from Taliesin and Aneirin to Dylan Thomas, David Jones, Dic Jones and, of course, Peter Thabit Jones. I know, that you’re admirer of Dylan Thomas, not only because of local patriotism, as you both are Swansea born . . . Jones: Welsh-language literature and English-language literature have mainly developed on separate roads, but with some occasional literary travellers in both languages acknowledging those on the road opposite. It was the deliberate growth in an awareness of Welsh nationalism in the 1960s and onwards that made an impact on English language literature in Wales and, thus, among English language writers more of an acknowledgment of Welsh-language literature. I was never a part of the literary nationalist gang, though I truly believe in the importance of the Welsh language surviving. The death of any language, any dialect, is a tragedy. I fully support all efforts to keep the Welsh language alive. Yes, Dylan Thomas for me gave himself over to poetry 100%. I believe if you give yourself over to poetry, it will give you something back. He also believed in the importance of the musicality of a poem, which for me is a fundamental requirement. I believe in Eliot’s notion that “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood” and, for me, that can be achieved via the soundtexturing within a poem. Sobieraj: Ian Gregson says that “much of the most exciting poetry in Britain is being written in Wales.” Do you agree? If yes, tell me why Wales is so privileged? Jones: It is an interesting claim, though I personally think a lot of exciting poetry has also come via Irish writers, Scottish writers and, indeed, English writers. That said, I do, though, particularly like the impressive and innovative work by Ed Thomas, a Welsh dramatist. For me, he is the most exciting (living) writer Wales has produced in a long time. Sobieraj: What about writers who have influenced you? Jones: Welsh writers would include Dylan Thomas, R.S. Thomas, Vernon Watkins, Idris Davies, Alun Lewis, and Leslie Norris. English writers would include Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas
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(probably my favourite poet of all time and, of course, friend of Robert Frost), W.H. Auden, Ted Hughes, and Philip Larkin (mostly his approach to craft). Irish writers would include W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney. American writers would include Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Benjamin De Casseres, Theodore Roethke, and Stanley Kunitz (thanks to Stanley Barkan who gave me a book he published by Kunitz). European writers, mainly via translation, would include Federico Garcia Lorca (his dramas have certainly influenced my attempts at drama), Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Fernando Pessoa, Rilke, Czesław Miłosz, and Menke Katz, the great Yiddish writer (again via Stanley Barkan’s introduction). I was honoured to be asked by his son Dovid to write a blurb for a reprint of one of Menke’s books. There are obviously many others on my journey as a writer. Sobieraj: So where’s your place in modern Welsh poetry? You’re closer to Dylan’s modernism or romanticism (as some critics classify his poetry), to the First Wave’s poets like Idris Davies or to the modern Welsh poets, like Oliver Reynolds, Gwyneth Lewis, Stephen Knight. Or maybe you stand alone, refusing to align with any movement or group—or feel more a part of huge English Literature and don’t care about “small homeland”? Jones: I have always tried to stand alone: and I still try. I would prefer to be a small fish in a big pond, than a big fish in a small pond. I am not that much into groups and movements, though I can see why others need them. However, I feel the best way for me, obviously not necessarily so for others, is to develop as a writer off the main road, away “from the madding crowd.” It seems to me that to be a part of a group or movement can mean writing to the formula of that group or movement. It also seems to me that one has to play, even obey, the “politics” of that group or movement. I am really not interested in such things. My commitment is to poetry—100%. Sobieraj: Do literary communities in England and Wales differ from each other? Jones: I don’t think so nowadays. Both literary communities depend and thrive on funding from official bodies. Those bodies determine the window displays of literature, be it in England or Wales. One is either in or out when it comes to such official bodies. Sobieraj: Dylan wrote, that he wanted to write poetry, because he had “fallen in love with words.” Why did you start to write poetry? Jones: I would personally say when Poetry chose me. However, I use to sit as a very small boy on Kilvey Hill, a sulking hulk of a hill that darkened and dominated the row of houses where I lived in Eastside Swansea. I spent a lot of time up there, alone, looking and thinking. Even then, to misquote Edward Thomas, an English poet, I wanted, “To bite the day to the core.” Then in school Mr. James, my teacher, read out a poem, The Kingfisher by Welsh poet and tramp W.H. Davies. The opening line is: “It was the rainbow gave thee birth.” That word rainbow lit up in my mind. I suddenly saw what one word, all by itself, could do. It was the real beginning for me, when language became more than just a way of communicating in the ordinary world of relationships. Mr. James gave us an exercise to write a poem. I wrote one called The Canary (we actually did keep canaries in a shed in our garden). Mr. James took my poem apart BUT also showed me how to really put a poem together, with rhymes (internal and external). That, for me, was the beginning of the learning of the lifelong thing of craftsmanship. I realised the excitement of not knowing what was around the corner when one first received inspiration, when one first started to draft a new poem. Sobieraj: What is for you, essentially, poetry? Jones: It is everything. Without it I would find my own life less of an experience, less of a journey. A blank piece of paper and a pen are for me like a vast forest is to a man on the
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run, a scary adventure. I love the uneasy stir of a poem in the mind, a word, a phrase, an observation, a rhythm, the way all is ejected for the focus of shaping something, the taking away of everything that is NOT a poem, until there is a poem: on that sheet of paper, possibly forever. I believe a poem should “sing” as opposed to standard prose. As a Welsh poet I am very interested in sound-texturing a poem, “the colour of saying” as Dylan Thomas said. I use many devices, including an English-language version of cynghanedd, which is a complex rhyme and alliteration system in the Welsh-language. I particularly like self-made forms, which can use rhythm, rhyme and metre but in which you can also make use of weakened rhymes and other “tricks of the trade.” So even if I write in free verse I try to make the poem sound good, for it to “sing” when read aloud. My poem The Sea of Big Sur is a good example of what I try to do outside the traditional forms. I use to encourage my students to try the traditional forms because they are a good way to practice using language, to control words in to doing what you want them to do. I see traditional forms as an adventure and not a strait-jacket. The writing of a poem for me is everything. Publication is secondary. The fear and excitement of a blank page is still something I love. I feel craft assists in the communication, the connection, between writer and reader. One should use the available “tricks of the trade,” in other words the application of craft, to make a reader feel sorrow, sense a landscape of snow, hear the eternal engine of the ocean etc. The Welsh poet R.S. Thomas said, “Poetry is religion, religion is poetry.” I think he was echoing Wordsworth's “priest-like task.” Poetry for me is a vocation, like the priesthood, and I certainly believe a poet can have—to quote St John of the Cross—“a dark night of the soul,” when he doubts the importance of poetry, in the same way some priests go through moments of doubt about their faith. Alternatively, a true poet can experience visions of eternity, indeed “shoots of everlastingness.” Part of this commitment, for me, is trying to get over a real sense of the importance of the craft of poetry in the poems I write. Another Welsh poet, Vernon Watkins, Dylan Thomas’ much under-rated friend, said, “Cold craftsmanship is the best container of fire”—an important statement. It's craft that takes over from that initial and exciting spurt of inspiration; and it’s craft that leads to the musical aspect of poetry, “the colour of saying,” to quote Dylan Thomas. One definition of craft is: skill, technique. It is also linked to a calling, a trade, a vocation. The Irish poet and Nobel Prizewinner Seamus Heaney once said “Craft is what you learn from other verse. Craft is the skill of making.” And Dylan Thomas told an American student in 1951, “I am a painstaking, conscientious, involved and devious craftsman in words . . . I use everything to make my poems work and move in the directions I want them to.” So, for me as a poet, it is not just what one says in a poem but about the way one says it. I believe passionately in the music of poetry, the sound as much as the sense. I will use full rhyme, weakened rhyme, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, repetition, alliteration, indeed every trick in the trade to get as close as possible to the kind of poem I want to see on the page. Sobieraj: How do you start a poem and where do you look for inspirations? Jones: For me the bones of a poem come first, a word, a phrase, a line, or a rhythm, usually initiated by an observation, an image, or a thought. Then once I have the tail of a poem I start thinking of its body. Nowadays, within a few lines I know if it will be formal or informal. If it is formal, all my energies go into shaping it into its particular mould, a sestina or whatever. If it is informal, I apply the same dedication. Eventually after many drafts, a poem often then needs cutting back because of too many words, lines or ideas. R.S. Thomas indicated that the poem in the mind is never the one on the page, and there is so much truth in that comment. The actual writing of a poem for me is the best thing about being a poet: publication, if possible, is the cherry on the cake. My dear friend and mentor of the past 13 years New York poet, biographer, and critic Vince Clemente, often talks of the integrity of a poem being the integrity of the poet’s speaking voice. The application of craft, of course, must not impact on that internal voice, or internal voices.
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As the First World War British poet Edward Thomas said, “I should use as the trees and birds / A language not to be betrayed.” The betrayal of one’s own voice, in other words the falsification of one’s voice, or putting on a voice which is not your real voice, leads to false art. I think the finding of one’s own voice, or voices is the most important thing for a poet. The turning point for me was a deep personal grief in my life, the death of my second son, Mathew, when I was twenty-four years-old. I did not write for a long time, three years in fact. When poetry came back to me I knew I could not fall back on someone else's voice or experiences. To be honest, though, I think it is only in the last twelve years that I have really started to understand and use, as I would like to, my own voice. My dear friend and mentor, Vince Clemente, has helped me immensely since we first started corresponding—in 1997—and showing each other poems-inprogress. Sobieraj: What shaped your work and contributed to your development as a poet? Jones: “The eternal note of sadness,” to quote Matthew Arnold, the English poet and critic, and “The heartbreak at the heart of things,” to quote American poet John Hall Wheelock. I have always been interested in the undersong of reality, the “song-weary universe,” to quote my beloved American mentor Vince Clemente, poet and critic. I am interested in the cold, cold corner of being, the under-the-carpet view of the world. Those things shaped my work. Craft, the ever learning of it, continues to contribute to my development. I continue to try to grasp smoke— impossible, of course. Sobieraj: What should a good poem contain, according to you? What for you makes the difference between an ordinary poem and an excellent one? Jones: A good poem should contain the three main ingredients: a message or messages; imagery—or as I prefer mind pictures (imagery was originally referred to as mental pictures); and the texture of a tune, in other words musicality or sound-texturing. An excellent poem has “a ghost in the machine,” a touch of duende, the unexplainable, the atmosphere of a room just visited by an angel. The difference between an ordinary poem and an excellent poem is a bit like R.S. Thomas’s comment on translation—an ordinary poem is “kissing through a handkerchief,” an excellent poem is real kissing. Sobieraj: As a poet and a writer, are you frightened of the whole weight of what is called “English Literature?” Isn’t it paralysing to write under pressure of strong criticism and famous names? Jones: No, not really. This is my journey. I have to sing, must sing. Would a bird not sing because centuries of birds have sung? Sobieraj: Do you find yourself much in the company of other writers, of poets? Jones: No. I am very much a loner, despite editing a magazine and publishing books. I discovered long ago that most poets are interested in their latest book, their newest girlfriend (!) than talking seriously about craft. I prefer the company of books, a pad and a pen. Being among other poets is uncomfortable for me, a bit like working in an office with others—which I have done. Sobieraj: Is poetry now as vital as 50—60 years ago? Jones: Keats also said, “What canst thou do or all thy tribe to the great world? Thou art a dreaming thing.” And even Auden wrote, “Poetry makes nothing happen / it survives in its valley of saying where executives would never tamper.” Alongside money and politics, the two enduring gods of power and worship, poetry may seem rather impotent, rather unimportant. I believe,
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though, that as time-bound, flesh-and-bone creatures we will always sense something beyond us, something bigger than us, a sniff of eternity, and thus we will always be searching for the real reasons for life. That, for me, is where poetry comes in. Also, even non-poets turn to poetry, either by others or attempts by themselves, at times of grief, war and major catastrophes. It is words, not money or possessions, that sing to them at such times. “Words are the most powerful drug known to mankind” wrote Rudyard Kipling. Poetry is a way of ensuring words and language retain their real value, their real connecting, searching qualities. “Thou art a dreaming thing?” Well, as John Lennon said: “You may say I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one.” Keep dreaming, keep writing, is my philosophy. That is all we can do as poets. Sobieraj: Is there anything else you would rather have done than writing? If you could not be a poet or writer, what would you do? Jones: I have spent all my life, well since the age of ten, being a poet, so I don’t know what it is like to not be a poet. I think that maybe I would have liked to serve mankind in some way, maybe as an archaeologist or a voluntary worker in war-torn countries. I taught for over 30 years, 22 years at university level, but I often wished I could fly out of the classroom window and be somewhere more dramatic, more exciting, maybe even more valuable. Sobieraj: What can we expect from you for the coming time? What are you working on now? Jones: I received the Homer: European Medal for Art and Poetry in 2017, a great honour. My chamber opera libretto, Ermesinde’s Long Walk, for composer Albena Petrovic, premiered at the Philarmonie Luxembourg in 2017 and my full orchestra libretto for her, Love and Jealousy, premiered at the National Opera House Stara Zagora in Bulgaria in May 2018. Ermesinde’s Long Walk will also premiere at National Opera House Stara Zagora in December 2018. My drama, The Fire in the Wood, about Californian sculptor Edmund Kara, premiered in Massachusetts in April 2017 and in California in May/June 2018. My poem Lament for Soldiers of the First World War is featured in the film Bells on the Western Front, produced by Holly Tree Productions (Wales). The film has won several awards including First Prize in the 2017 Wales International Film Festival. My latest book is America, Aeronwy, and Me (due to be published in 2019). As for my writing, I am working on a literary comedy novel, which I started in the Big Sur cabin, where I have resided for two months of the year, thanks to American poet and artist Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, for the past eight years. I have written 250 pages and hope to complete it in 2019. It is set in Wales, Boston, New York, and Big Sur in California. I was commissioned to write a biography of Carolyn Mary Kleefeld and that should be published in 2019. New poems, I hope, will continue to come out—to me!—like bats at night.
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PETER THABIT JONES
Cante Jondo Listen to the loud wound Of Cante Jondo. It is being summoned, It is aching on the strings Of the saddest guitar. The bird of blackness Has poetry in its throat, The history of the outcast In the ascension of its song. The wailing theatre unwinds In the drama of the voice, A fountain of tears From the desert of the heart. The guitar is fragmenting All of Spain’s shadows, Dropping its blood jewels On the hidden pains of the past. Flamenco is flowing like the wine From green bottles, The sounds are dancing In the summer of the mind, Like passion and sorrow In a young woman’s brown eyes. Beneath the sharp sickle of the moon, A stream of laments wanders with Death Through the silent squares And the dark lanes of memories, To settle on the dead In a graveyard for gypsies. Note: Cante Jondo—(Deep song), a traditional form of Andalusian song/flamenco.
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I Hold Fire in My Hands I hold fire in my hands. It is not the machine gun That murders mothers and children. It is not the flung grenade That tears to charred pieces The grey smiles of old women. It is not the hard hot fist that brutally batters The grandfatherly face of old men. I hold fire in my hands. It is not the code That ignites the sly bomb That scatters human meat Across a Sunday street market. I hold fire in my hands. Fire that’s as tender as the warming flames In a cold house in winter; Fire as determined as the words Of the peacemaker whose Words are like poetry washing the crowd. I hold fire in my hands: A blank piece of paper Like a field of new snow And a pen that is filled With an ocean of peace.
Note: “Yo tengo el fuego en mis manos.” “I hold fire in my hands.” (Libro de poemas) – Federico Garcia Lorca —
Peter Thabit Jones was born in Swansea, Wales, in 1951. He is a poet, dramatist, publisher, retired Literature and Creative Writing tutor at Swansea University, author of fifteen books and co-author of the Dylan Thomas Walking Tour of Greenwich Village, His work has been translated into over twenty languages.
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NIELS HAV
A Secret Now when the idiotic rain goes on and we all are busy with dying I felt like a smoke. But smoking is not allowed at the airport in Belgrade. I asked one of the staff for advice. Smoking kills, he said. Yes, I agreed, but now it turns out that non-smokers die too. I can tell you a secret he said, Go to gate A6; underneath there’s a hidden toilet. That's where we smoke. I followed his directions, it works fine. I enjoyed the secret pleasure of doing what’s forbidden. Why should I deny people who read poems useful info—poetry is already full of esoteric wisdom. Translated by Heather Spears
November Visit He had begun to die! I visited my father in the hospital, he lay in a white bed which was clean and sinister. But he didn’t want to lie there, he wanted to get up again, get out of there. He was on the 6th floor, with a view; outside was a firestorm. Trees fell, road signs banged on their hinges Cars zigzagged below, as if everyone was dead drunk. But in here it was quiet, dead calm. My father’s lips, the sound of his hands against the duvet. We touched each other.
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He had almost used up all his words, the ones he had left meant: out, home, off to work. His innards were destroyed from cancer; the doctors had opened him and closed him again. Unbearable pain. He didn’t say that. He tried to fool the nurses, the doctor, himself. He rang the bell, and they arrived. I have to get up! He sat at the edge of the bed his white legs and a swollen hand dangling. Two nurses laid his arms across their shoulders to help him up. Their knees trembled beneath the burden. Pain screamed through my father’s bones, he grew white around his mouth, like a corpse. He wanted to get up. Stand! Later, in bed, he breathed in pain. I had to catch the train around midnight— walking about, smoking. We could say anything to each other now, but all words were crippled. Good bye! he said. His eyes said something more. Everything collapsed. I walked to the train station through empty streets, where the hurricane roared furiously, tore at houses, trees, my clothes. Debris slid across the asphalt, as if the world was being torn apart, or was tearing itself loose now. Translated by Per Brask & Patrick Friesen
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Uncommon Sense The most important is to avoid eternal things and existential issues. Let's talk about something ordinary, like bicycles and the rain. Or just about mosquitoes. About how you grow sleepy when it rains all afternoon, and you don't have to ride your bike to the beach. Best of all is to have a tool shed with a tin roof, or get married to a pianist playing Chopin. Maybe we're just getting dumber as we get older and our common sense is evaporating. Purity of heart is to will one thing, that we know. That's why young people make the best soldiers —they will one thing at a time. Just like mosquitoes on a rainy summer day. Translated by P.K. Brask, Patrick Friesen & Niels Hav
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Niels Hav in his native Danish is the author of six collections of poetry and three volumes of short fiction. His work has been translated into several languages such as English, Arabic, Turkish, Spanish, Dutch, Farsi and Chinese. In English he has We Are Here, published by Book Thug and poetry in numerous magazines.
Tomasz Marek Sobieraj, from Banal Objects, B&W negative film, multiple exposure, 2006, 2010
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YUKO OTOMO
Window An afternoon tedium, tinted green, throws an impression of flowers blooming in a craze in a garden into a closed window A will for “Self-Preservation” talks of its own personal history To look for the self without referring to oneself
Job Thinking of what has to be done, a man falls from a chair. At the instance, he wakes up. When a life philosophy becomes comical to this extent, You strangely become nostalgic for the materiality of what you wear. In the afternoon light, things which have to be done stand still.
Red Robe My heart, just like my eyes, takes a long breath with its own intimacy A red robe becomes my skin A remote scenery comes back to my palms
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Desire 2 A soft light shines on my back A desire takes the shape of a bird A red mark gets added to a map A slightly bent neck makes a faint shadow Both hands becomes free of things
Impression I give a serious observation on the reflection of a metallic surface of a thing. I summarize a theory on life in general. Colored paper, cut, gives away an impression of a remote trip somewhere. The sacred & the profane smile a slow identical smile. Night exceeds Day. Reason & emotion become one water.
Shadow First, you think of the material. Then, you think of its tactility.
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Reading a poem without singing a song, you come to appreciate an equilibrium made by a floor & a ceiling. Attaching silence to the back of the words, you remember the dream you had before. Feeling the actual physicality of your own bone structure, you praise a shadow you cast. & you sleep, lovingly hugging your both knees. —
Japanese origin. A visual artist & a bilingual (Japanese & English) writer. She writes poetry, haiku, art criticism, travelogues & essays. Her publications include Garden: Selected Haiku (Beehive Press), Fragile (Sisyphus Press), Small Poems, The Hand of The Poet, Study & Other Poems on Art (all by Ugly Duckling Presse), Elements (the Feral Press), Koan (New Feral Press) & Frozen Heatwave, a collaborative linked poems project with Steve Dalachinsky (Luna Bisonte Prods). Her poem “The Color(s) of The Day” was nominated for 2018 Pushcart Award.
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HARRY NUDEL
Teducation In memory of Ted Joans Ted Joanes—the only african-american surrealist-poet —André Breton I must have met have 1st met Ted in the Summer of '79. I was selling books on Soho-St . . . he came by & i gave him a copy of my book . . . 2 hrs later he was back “you WROTE this”? We hit it off. Ted who always needed a place to stay, lived with me for 3 weeks . . . he was the perfect houseguest . . . as if he was a pro . . . somewhere there's a picture he took of ladder, cat, book, me & Jess . . . my then 10 yr old . . . Once he brought up two gorgeous black Philly School Teachers . . . Ted could charm the snake . . . towel naked apres les bain . . . i had to mention i was married..tojours regret . . . Once we went to a po-reading at the Old West-End . . . i priggishly insisted Ted pay the 2 buck cover . . . “to support the art” Ted of no bread . . . the later Ted of “No Bread No Ted” pd up . . . In a copy of Flying Pyrana he wrote “good morning Harry How do you do? This is your surrealist black brother presenting this to you . . .” 30/July/79
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That summer I must have been in lv with some one . . . from a poem i gave Ted & which he returned to me . . . 10 yrs later . . . surreal castaway ALL SORTS OF 3rd St. Love I'd even give up Sleeping with you To be yr friend ... “Love” the cockroach After you kill'em ... No names please Mr. Sweetness/ Miss Light ... horny is as . . . 2 yrs later . . . he gave me & A . . . a cupcake and one of his books, What Else? as a present for our formal wedding . . . May 15 1981 4:30 PM Cuntgragulations on your new true day (of marital bliss So cock-a-doodle-do to two of you with Afrodisia Love Ted Joans & Alicia . . . (N.B. . . . the last name) Paris . . . 1983 in a copy of “sure, really I, IS” To Harry in Paris 1983 our Nesting Place amongst Palaces August
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Le Premier 1983 . . . Paris 1984 . . . in a copy of “The Aardvark Watcher Der Erdferkelforscher” To Harry in Paris where he walks and walks Sept '84 On a piece of my Stationary Ted Joan in Paris 1990 First Phone Jim Haynes 40 rue de la Montagne Ste. Genevieve . . . Write or leave Message Daily rendezvous at Cafe Le Roquet 4-6PM 188 Blvd Saint Germaine I sit on the left hand side of this cafe If you do not see me, ask the waiter In a copy of Jazz Museum Presents Ted Joans Il etait une fois poetry reading moi et toi Harry . . . avec amities may 19 . . . '90 (with drawing of 2 jazz figures) Afrodisia toujours . . . After i pick him and Laura up in my clunker car . . . lunch at Sylvia's and Langston's house . . . from his own Hipness Harry on Langston Hughes steps at 20 east 127th ST. Langston Hughes House with brother-love as Langston would have it . . . 29/9/92 '97...the beginning of the end . . .
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in a copy of Birth 3 two Rhinoceri Drawings & to Harry Nudel (sic) who has yet to sell “our ticket that could explode” 24/11/97 . . . All over all Over over a book and an ASS . . . Ted and Laura dressed as Twin Teducations Walk on By . . . I send him anon some Rhino stamps . . . From Vancouver the last letter 200 . . . “so i shall take the chance on straightening out the crooked curve that cause wrinkles in our brows . . .” Ted, the lecon of the master . . . you steal from the past esp. you own & don't hustle the hustler . . . drn/drn... —
Harry Nudel (Chaim Nadel) was born in 1946 in Gliwice, Poland (before II WW Gleiwitz, Germany) Since 1949 in the USA. Education: Salanter Yeshiva, Bronx High School of Science, CCNY (BA), SUNY Buffalo (PhD in English Literature). Soho bookseller, bibliophile, poet. Self-published circa 30 poetry books.
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Joanna Turek PHILOSOPHY OF PHOTOGRAPHY, PHOTOGENICITY OF PHILOSOPHY Banal Objects by Tomasz Marek Sobieraj
T
riviality is perceived to be the contradiction of art and it’s not far from the truth, since what meaning can an artistic work bear, if it does not conceal any secret about ourselves, has no trace of understatement or does not surprise with its form. However, it is no surprise that triviality quite often draws attention of artists. It requires sensitivity and skills to give the touch of the taste of poetry to grey, ordinary objects, so they can become sophisticated to us and gain a new, unpredictable meaning. Banal objects captured by Tomasz Sobieraj in his photography also constitute the name of the series. What experience, essential to us, can be sought by a poet or an artist in everyday reality and finity of life? The ordinary and common things usually do not typify art; do not fertilize our sensitivity, imagination or our thinking. Therefore we say that they are banal and—if they bear no use value to us—we treat them with despise. Banal may be stepped on, kicked while passing by, thrown somewhere, or at the most, indifferently passed by. Mockery or gracious indifference, this is what banal deserves in our eyes, provided it is noticed at all. I shall not risk a lot if I advance a thesis that the more indistinct a man becomes, the more banal the world perceived by the man becomes. Like Heidegger, in whose arguments I find confirmation of my assumptions, the more we are absorbed with the useable side of our existence, turning our everyday live into a habit—which being implicit per se—does not put difficulties before us, does not require any commitment or effort; the less we feel like subjects, and the smaller is our ability to experience and to be amazed, and therefore the more banal our world becomes. Our habits make us loose our authenticity, loose the “myself” in the anonymous “oneself”; it is a pseudo-life or a quasi-existence. Habits, routine and banal, shade the sense, obscure the truth about human. In their search we have to go beyond the obviousness. Philosopher may mention transgression, transcendence and the desire to discover the argument for the existence of all things, the source and the beginning of everything. Yet, do not let ourselves be misled, while imagining that the search is all about something which does not relate to our miserable and finite world, which—as perfect and infinite—is by far exceeding us that there is nothing left, as to accept the verdict condemning us to inferiority. I shall go back to Heidegger for whom the metaphysicality in us, the ability to transcendence, which is the most crucial for our self and our world of meanings, comes from experiencing the finity of life. Though it will be the best, if we ourselves start to search for the answer to the question about transcendence, about the meaning or meaninglessness of our finite world and our projects in it. The question, as well as the answer, do not require from us to separate from our habits, but they both involve our personal commitment. Our existence calls for awakening, as Heidegger put it. Its beginning is a surprise, while the first consequence of the surprise is detachment from the banal, from obviousness. Already Plato has been aware of this. He claimed that surprise is the condition for releasing oneself from the world of appearances. All human power is in amazement. Amazement, which is mentioned here, is not described by psychology. It has the ontological sense, as the necessity of being in the world, the condition of existence, which means our odyssey in the world of senses, possibilities and the world of our freedom. Tomasz Marek Sobieraj invites us to go for such a journey—writer and photographer in whose art the philosophy is still present. In this case, he points his photographic lens towards banal, worthless, insignificant and for many even unnoticeable objects. He sharpens, enlarges—like Antonioni—or decreases and blurs. He gives form, which in case of an artistic work becomes also the content, recalls objects filtered with his consciousness, which makes them not being limited by 60
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the Aristotle’s categories of substance and accident, in other words what is and what it is like. Appropriates the being, enforcing the poetic power to shape our view. While thinking, experiencing and imagining Sobieraj searches for the sense for himself and at the same time for us. Will he distract us from the ordinariness, from banal, from the world perceived from the perspective of “oneself?” Will we also recognize ourselves in the cracks, carved by Sobieraj in the being? Or is it enough if he just surprises us? Philosophy and art do not like ready answers. —
Joanna Turek graduated from University of Łodź and is a Professor of Philosophy, Ethics and Research Ethics at Medical University of Łódź, Poland.
Tomasz Marek Sobieraj, from Banal Objects, B&W negative film, multiple exposure, 2006, 2010
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TOMASZ MAREK SOBIERAJ
Cathedral I didn’t have a penny for a ticket to the temple. So I sat down at the foot of a petrified Jesus, took out a knife and bread. We watched the joyful pageants coming out of the cathedral. And she slept, under the eye of a soaring tower, lofty and strong, empty beautiful form, without God nor believers. Finale of the cross theatre completed.
Photograph There are many things invisible in a photograph taken with this old camera found in the attic. Such as body scent and the taste of lips, the rustle of hair on the pillow, the heat of the sun outside the window, snorting of horses, the sound of the shutter or the colour of walls so vague, that can only be present in houses in the countryside near Orvieto. The aroma of tea, the sound of a cup being put away. Jupiter and Antiope by Corregio over the bed, Resurrection by Bellini next to it (copies of course, not very good, by a local master). A drop of wine on the sheet. Thrill and ecstasy. Our breaths, thoughts, dampness of the skin. Even the sleepy birds' singing, and bells of the church in the nearby Prato.
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Only we know what really is in this photograph, and beyond its edge. Man in the Café Behind the window of a café at Rue d'Alger: a round table, a white tablecloth, a few tulips in a vase. He sits, reads poems of a young Rimbaud. The coffee gets cold in the cup. The waitress (just look at her legs!) smiles, approaches, replaces the ashtray. He is almost completly grey, but the skin on his face is quite smooth. And his eyes so shiny. He lights another cigarette, takes a sip of coffee, writes something on a little piece of creamy paper. Then, for a while, he talks with a lady at the next table; they seem to have known each other for ages, like old trees by the Seine. They leave together, buy newspapers and pistachios. On the way to the river they disappear behind a corner of Rivoli. Translated by Erik La Prade & Tomasz Marek Sobieraj
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Tomasz Marek Sobieraj was born in 1964 in Łódź, Poland. He received MSc in Geography, Hydrology and Statistics. Poet, writer, photographer, art-and-literary critic. His poems have been translated into English, Spanish, Russian, Korean, Ukrainian, Danish, Kurdish and Italian. Sobieraj’s last book of poems Fourteen Minutes will be published in the USA by Cross-Cultural Communications in January 2019.
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12th “SPUTNIK OVER POLAND” RUSSIAN FILM FESTIVAL November 8 – 18, 2018 – WARSAW November 2018 – April 2019 – other Polish cities The 12th “Sputnik Over Poland” Russian Film Festival will be held on November 8-18, 2018 at the Warsaw cinemas Luna, Elektronik and Iluzjon. Wider audience will have the opportunity to watch best Russian films at the reviews in numerous Polish cities from November to March 2019. The leitmotif of this year’s Festival will be “art in a broad sense.” Theater, dance, literature, music, painting, sculpture, circus performing art, illusion . . . are the dominant themes that will accompany us at the 12th edition of the Festival. The program includes a new “Ale sztu(cz)ka!” film section as well as film adaptations of outstanding Russian novels in the “Film Reading Room.” The program will also refer to folk tales and legends that still live vividly in Russian beliefs and traditions. We will reveal to the viewers the world of Slavic mermaids, forest nymphs, kikimoras, witch-healers and topielce spirits. The core of the program will traditionally consist of two competition programs: Feature Film Competition and Documentary Film Competition. The films from the competition sections will also take part in the voting for the Audience Award. New Russian productions, including blockbusters of the last year have been included in the “New Cinema Kaleidoscope.” We would also like to commemorate great women, directors: KiraMuratova and Vera Glagoleva. “The Best of Sputnik” film section will give you an opportunity to catch up with previous years’ “must-sees” by presenting the best titles of the past Festival editions. In cooperation with the Festival of Russian Films in Vyborg, Finland, we will open the “Window to Europe: a Coproduction Program.” The fans of short films will find something of their interest in the block “In short,” which will present the etudes of the best film schools in Russia. “Little Sputnik” will propose repertoires for three age groups: fairy tales for the youngest, big films for kids and movies for teenagers and entire families. The screenings will be accompanied by numerous cultural events: concerts, exhibitions, performances, debates and workshops. We will invite Warsaw residents to the concert of the Russian duet “Aigel,” the unique show where minimalist electronic sounds are combined with strong lyrics by Kazan poet, vocalist Aygel Gaysina and electronic musician Ilya Baramiya. An interesting visual experience will certainly provide the exhibition of Soviet Bus Stops by Canadian photographer Christopher Herwig, who visited 14 countries of the former Soviet Union and created a gallery of old Soviet stops, often being real artworks.The 12th Sputnik will also offer workshops—Jew’s harp, calligraphic and culinary workshops of the Buryat cuisine. Together with the Academy of Photography we will organize a photo competition and a post-competition exhibition “The Art of Everyday Life.”
www.sputnikfestiwal.pl
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Albrecht DĂźrer, Adam and Eve, engraving, 1504, Staatische Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe