Stingy Kids

PEN World Voices: Poetry Reading

Blurry photo of Wayne Koestenbaum and Nicole Brossard reading "Transcreation." 5/1/09

poem to understand
how people bend
before an idea
their hair barely brushing the depth of silence

Poem(é), Nicole Brossard

5/1: After "Discovering Unbearable Truths," I headed to the Bowery Poetry Club for two events: Poetry Reading  and The Translation Slam.  This post will address the reading.  The slam requires it's own space (you'll soon understand).

What drew me to the reading, honestly, was the opportunity to hear Nicole Brossard, one of my favorite writers, read her work in person.  I've heard that she's a charismatic and dynamic reader of her own work and she did not disappoint.

My notes are very fragmentary.  I would jot down, quickly, a few observations or lines after each author finished reading.  Looking back on my notes, I find myself scratching my head.  Why did I write "nice belly"  with regard to Brossard?  I realize that most of my notes have more to do with the performance of the poems than what the poets actually read.  And what they wore.  Here you go:

PEN World Voices: Discovering Unbearable Truths

Uwe Kolbe and Uljana Wolf in conversation with Susan Bernofsky

I arrived late, after Uljana Wolf had read her poems, but in time to hear Uwe Kolbe read "Fathers and Sons."  The panel description tells us that "These two writers from Germany woke up one day to realize that their lives were built on some terrible lies. Uwe Kolbe discovered that his own father had been spying on him for the Stasi, and Uljana Wolf had a similar awakening. Find out how they put the truth of their lives back together, came to reinterpret their pasts, and how these understandings influenced their writing."  From this description, one can draw a connection to Kolbe's poem, even though it doesn't read explicitly autobiographical.  

Wolf and Kolbe offered reflections on their status as post-war writers, though they represent different  generations.  Kolbe was already an adult in 1989; Wolf, a ten-year old child.  Their perspectives and experiences may differ but they acknowledge that so much remains to be uncovered and understood with regard to East Germany, and their works respectively emerge from this desire to make sense of the past.  They continue to breathe the "air of suspicion," as Kolbe calls it.  At the same time, their work has also moved in other directions, to other times and places.

Q&A: An audience member was not pleased by what she perceived to be an evasion of the original topic.  "Can we address the topic of the panel?" meaning, I suppose, the personal 'unbearable truths' hinted at in the description.  I understand that hearing these personal narratives may have motivated attendance but the question also missed the point, which is how these true stories find expression in or shape their poems.  Someone at the festival said "poetry concerns itself with the truth."  This isn't a point I care to argue, but the panel highlighted a familiar tension between talkshow truth and partial truths.  How does poetry concern itself with what is unbearably or unbelievably true?  Maybe like this:

FATHER AND SON

Keeping the distance 
and staying close together 
with dangling arms. 
The father the uniform, 
the son with Rasta hair. 
The Father's got Prussia in his rucksack, 
the son on the surfboard 
towards the mouth of the river. 
The Father travelling, 
the son the internal emigration. 
The Father the letters, 
the son doesn‘t speak. 
Father, who takes it easy, 
son to his heart. 
Fighting each other without rules, 
more seriously than anytime at the playground, 
longer than lifelong. 
The Fathers never die, 
one hears since ears have existed, 
and seldom do the sons live.

© Translation: 2001, Sapphire/Ramona Lofton

What is the true story:  In 1989, after the Wall came down, some artists were "invited" to see their Stasi files.  It was discovered that the poet Sacha Anderson, a friend of many East German artists, had been a Stasi informant.  "Like a spider sitting in a net."

In 1992, Kolbe was able to read his file.  "[It was] like someone wrote you a biography, and autobiography, yet you had no idea."  He flipped through the pages, and came upon a few written in familiar type.  He recognized it as his father's typewriter print.  Kolbe was estranged from his father, and when he confronted him, his father defended his actions, claiming that the information he provided kept the Stasi from engaging in more extensive investigations.  "I defended you," his father said.  Another informer was a good, older friend.  According to Kolbe, that betrayal carried more of a sting.

Citing Gabriel García Márquez as an example, Kolbe remarked that "most of what 'real' literature is is telling your own story."  Post-war writers "are just telling their own story, coming from different places...east or west, or whatever." 

From where I was sitting, I had trouble hearing Wolf and didn't take as many notes when she spoke.  Her poems are wonderful, mesmerizing.  Here's a link to a few from DICHTionary, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky.

Noted

I'm wiping old files from my computer and trying not to be too sentimental.  But I'm struggling with "Notes," a file that I created a few years ago and in which I stored numerous text clippings.  Half of them don't open any more.  The rest belong to some train of thought that I can no longer reconstruct:

"It has become apparent to me that my son will not be walking out of the river. It is now time to make plans to celebrate a life that was golden." No such memorial details have yet been announced.

but how many roles are out

A small jewel

This lovely little thing is like a perfect shell you find on the beach. It had been advertised as a "modern musical." I tried to think of a musical it owed anything to. No luck. It took a couple of days but then it came to me. It's a reach, and for some of you, a reach too far, but to find the same simple, fragile story, a story touches your heart, you have to go all the way back to City Lights. Amazing. Now I have not only the simple little tune from Once in my head, but it seems to be mixed in with "Who'll buy my violets."

I pray you, recommend me unto my good lady of Salisbury, and pray her to have a good heart, for we never come to the kingdom of Heaven but by troubles.

Daughter, whatsoever you come, take no pain to send unto me, for if I may, I will send to you.

Your loving mother,

Katharine the Queen.

I think I was 8 or 9 when I had a f*cking mad thing for Marilyn Monroe. I used to leave Smarties, the Irish equivalent of M&M's, under my pillow with a little note saying, "I know you're dead, but these are very f*cking tasty, and you should come have a few. I won't tell anyone."

He Fortells His Passing

Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.

Katharine the Quene.

Once you get it, you don't want to be without it again

The fact that "it worked before and doesn't now" of course suggests that "something new has happened" since you upgraded. But the thing that has happened could be any of a vast array of issues, 

The Man at the Wheel. The Fisherman was sculpted by Leonard Crask and dedicated in 1923 and states: "They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters: These see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep. For he commandeth and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof. They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble. They reel to and fro, and stagger like drunken men and are at their wits end. Then they cry unto the lord in their trouble, and he bringeth out of their distress. He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves there of are still. Then are they glad because they be {quiet;} so he bringeth unto their desired haven. Oh that man would praise the lord, for his goodness and for his wonderful work to the children of men."

Take a deep breath and persevere - you'll get it working. 

Short Stories @ PEN World Voices

May 2, 2008

Short Stories
Scandinavia House
Participants: Young-ha Kim, Dafna Zur, Etgar Keret, Abdourahman Waberi and Ingo Schulze (Moderated by Radhika Jones)

"Short Stories" was an outstanding panel.  Jones asked very direct questions that not only got the writers talking about their work but also generated discussion between writers.  I'm sure that these writers have talked on numerous occasions about their interest in the short story, its status among other literary genres, and the different ways they approach writing.  Even so, there were numerous moments of "thinking out loud," of discovery and unveiling.

PEN Worlds Voices 2008

I just got around to organizing my notes on the PEN Worlds Voices Literary festival, which took place last week in NYC.  It's an amazing gathering of writers, publishers, translators and readers.  The only drawback: there was just too much to do and so many good things overlapped!  Here are my notes from the panels and readings that I attended--my notes on the panel "Short Stories" will appear in a separate post:

Wednesday, April 30

Rewriting Family
Housing Works Bookstore Café
Participants: P.F. Thomése, György Dragomán, Yael Hedaya (Moderator: Stacey D'Erasmo)

Dragomán is a Hungarian novelist and translator who was born in Marosvásárhely/Târgu Mureş, Romania in 1973.  As a literary translator, he's aware of the limits of translation but doesn't let them become an excuse for not translating.  So let's say you can only get 90%, he said, that's something!  He also conceded that the kinds of limits or problems that one translator faces may be entirely different for another.  If you can't find the solution, someone else will.  This is a very generous and optimistic approach to translation and I thank Dragomán for it.  An audience member asked about the different between translating poetry and prose and remarked that poetry, in particular, tends to be untranslatable.  Dragomán smiled and told us that his wife is a poet and frequently works with translators.  "First, the rhyme goes,  second, some of the meter....but it's ok!  Something stays and that's what's important."  I really wish more readers and critics would focus on how much remains in translation rather than fixating on "losses," which I put in quotes becomes often those who assert that something has been lost in translation 1) haven't read the original or 2) haven't/won't read the translation.

He has a fantastic author website (authors, take note!), where he's posted excerpts from and links to a number of interviews.  I recommend highly his interview with James Smith in which he discusses at length his relationship with his translators and how he approaches the task of translation.

Collectibles

Nicole Krauss, author of the bestselling novel The History of Love, used to write poetry.  You can listen to her read "Valparaiso" and "The Idea of Helen" at The Paris Review's website.  "Your Watch" was published in 2000 in a Ploughshares issue guest edited by Paul Muldoon.  "Becoming Domestic" is linked to on Krauss's Random House author page, which also features an interview.  Krauss was asked to describe the transition from poetry to fiction.  Her reply:

For a long time I only wanted to write poetry. But it's hard—a hard life, I mean. There's that thing Auden said, about how a poet only believes himself to be a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. "The moment before, he was still only a potential poet: the moment after he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever." With a novel it's somehow easier: the duration of the writing is so much longer, and the unhappiness of the in-between less frequent.

In a 2005 interview, Krauss remarked that at one point for her poetry felt like "the great goal of the language" but quit soon after completing a research project on Joseph Cornell (connection?).  According to the interviewer, poetry represented for Krauss "an impossible quest for precision."  She refused to show him her poems.  This part of the interview intrigued me so I set off looking for her poetry on line and found the four poems I link to above. 

I'm glad that it was with Corey Mead and not Nicole Krauss that I raised my "poet identity anxieties" about three years ago.  I met Corey at a poetry reading that featured Jorie Graham and--Stingy Kids favorite--Laura Sims.  Corey is married to Laura and, at the time, was a couple of years into a grad program.  He asked me if I wrote poetry and I went into this long explanation about how graduate school took time away from writing and how difficult it was to balance competing identities (academic, creative, blah blah blah), etc.  Corey's response:  "It's just poetry."  Not long after that conversation, I started writing poems again.

Corey has been working on a fantastic series of poems titled "The Book of Edgar," parts of which have appeared in print.  The only poem from this series that I could find on line was "Barn Songs," which was published in 3rd bed. 

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Kottke recently linked to a post on the Virginia Quarterly Review's website that tracked the correlation between cliché usage and publication.  It turns out that clichés are very publishable.

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I came across this wonderful Flickr image:

The artist is the daughter of poet Anne Boyer.  I looked up some of Boyer's work and was immediately dazzled.  "A Romance of Happy Workers" and "Larks" were published in different of issues of Typo. She also has a chapbook out with Effing Press (which can purchase via the Effing Press blog) and a crazy website.

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More from Flickr: paper_wings(butterf ly), "coexisting" (photography and Alice Notley's "In the Circuit")

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Belladonna* has a new website.  This probably happened months ago but I just noticed.  I love it!

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Sarah Horowitz makes gorgeous books.  Poetry, nature and personal memories inspired her work on Paper Towers and Mohn, which include poems (in English translation) by Kadya Molodowsky and Paul Celan respectively.

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"Like, the more they talk/ never having"--Corey Mead, "Barn Songs"

 

Notes: AWP Panels

Notes: AWP Panels

I found my notes/fragments from the AWP panels "The Disabled Body Poetic" and "Writing as Translation."  They are far--very far--from being extensive or coherent.

from "THE DISABLED BODY POETIC"

Gregory Fraser

--brother had spina bifida
--"to strike poses on the page"
--poetry's "obsession with the material nature of language"
--"hyper-material"

William Carlos Williams--focuses on the thing of language

FORM: Hugo's choice of villanelle
      meter
      terminal rhyme

--using orderly form (ironically) to encase the representation or voice of disorderly bodies
--playing on expectations of how poems should look and behave

Paul Guest

--to rest on a bag of sand
--"the brain left to believe that something has vanished"
--"the rest of me floating away"
--spinal fluid coming out of the nose

Susannah B. Mintz

--"poems as representations of self experiencing can be though of as happening randomly"
on Fraser--brothers hips are "where his knees should be"
--loving what is wild, even in one's mind
--poetry not redemptive--writing doesn't repair, heal--rather it represents this intensity, this wildness

Jim Ferris

--how is disability useful--for a poet?
--structure of rhythm of body on the poem
--tides, sun, season--rhythmic workings that are ubiquitous ("waxing and waning of the desert")--the pacemaker, metronome
--the novel is always about disability, the breaking of norms (didn't catch the source he quoted)
-- promote a "disability aesthetics"--that isn't apologetic

from "WRITING AS TRANSLATION"

--"the tentacular relationships between all of our cultures" (Hugh Ferrer)
--lyric poetry is a translation ("one doesn't go around walking or humming in meter"--not sure who said this)

2008 AWP

My winter conference season finally came to an end with the AWP, the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.  This year's AWP took place in NYC and I was urged by many friends to give it a try, "if only for the bookfair."  As far as conferences go, this one was pretty laid back for me.  I didn't give any papers or feel compelled to attend many panels.  I spent my mornings working at the American Literary Translators Association table, raising visibility for my beloved organization, and my afternoons at the occasional panel or reading.  But most of the time that I wasn't with ALTA, I was at the bookfair.  The bookfair involved the participation of the usual suspects--mass market and university presses--but the real draw for me was the opportunity to support my favorite small and independent presses and to discover new, emerging publishers.  One thing that I noticed is the increased interest in translation, which I found very encouraging both as a translator and scholar of translation.  Action Books, in particular, stood out for me as a small publisher committed to English translations of contemporary writing.  At their table, I picked up Jen Hofer's translation of Laura Solórzano's Lobo de labio and had a nice chat with Johannes Göransson, Action Books co-founder and editor and a translator of Swedish literature into English.  He remarked that their decision to publish a translation is rarely guided by what is canonical.  Their manifesto declares "We want poetry that goes too far," and that commitment to bold, experimental writing carries to their translation choices. 

If you take a look at my book list (see post below), you'll notice quite a few purchases from Etherdome and Belladonna*, two presses that promote work written by women (in fact, only four of the books I acquired were written by men).  Etherdome publishes two chapbooks a year and each one is stunning.  I love the simplicity of their books--the layout of the poems is uncluttered and the covers always feature a delicate print in monochrome.  Belladonna* refers to its chapbooks as pamphlets or "chaplets" and they have more of a classic zine feel to them than the Etherdome books.  But belladonna* publishes with greater frequency, usually timing their chaplets for a poet's reading, and the range of the work they promote is more extensive (including poets like Marcella Durand, Alice Notley, Laynie Browne, Jen Benka).   They also publish translations, most recently a gorgeous English translation of Lila Zemborain's Malvas orquídeas del mar (Mauve Sea-Orchids).  (On 2/12, belladonna* is hosting a reading with the poets Barbara Cole and Elizabeth Robinson, who is one of the editors of Etherdome.)

Word and Birds

Shonagon had a passion for lists: the list of "elegant things," "distressing things," or even of "things not worth doing." One day she got the idea of drawing up a list of "things that quicken the heart." Not a bad criterion I realize when I'm filming; I bow to the economic miracle, but what I want to show you are the neighborhood celebrations.

He wrote me: coming back through the Chiba coast I thought of Shonagon's list, of all those signs one has only to name to quicken the heart, just name. To us, a sun is not quite a sun unless it's radiant, and a spring not quite a spring unless it is limpid. Here to place adjectives would be so rude as leaving price tags on purchases. Japanese poetry never modifies. There is a way of saying boat, rock, mist, frog, crow, hail, heron, chrysanthemum, that includes them all. Newspapers have been filled recently with the story of a man from Nagoya. The woman he loved died last year and he drowned himself in work—Japanese style—like a madman. It seems he even made an important discovery in electronics. And then in the month of May he killed himself. They say he could not stand hearing the word "Spring."

Chris Marker, "Sans Soleil"

Once, in 1946, while still an adolescent, I was to sign my name on the other side of the sky during a fantastic "realistico-imaginary" journey. That day, as I lay stretched upon the beach of Nice, I began to feel hatred for birds which flew back and forth across my blue, cloudless sky, because they tried to bore holes in my greatest and most beautiful work.

Birds must be eliminated.

Yves Klein, "The Chelsea Hotel Manifesto"

The Context of Art

In January, Joshua Bell, a renowned violinist, spent forty-five minutes of his morning busking at L'Enfant Plaza in Washington, DC. A recent Washington Post article describes his reception by DC commuters, many of whom walked by without a glance. The article has sparked many interesting observations and discussions on the relation between context, meaning and value in art. Even my favorite NYC busker, Natalia Paruz (aka The Saw Lady), weighed in. The Post article speculates that the general disinterest of the passers-by is not due to a failure to appreciate good art but rather that our perception, reception and appreciation of art has much to do with context. On the whole, this does seem to be the case. It's interesting to watch those videos of Bell playing at a metro station and to observe the number of children who hang back for a moment to take in another glance. It made me think of a something a professor recently said to me: "students learn what they are not supposed to know." In other words, we learn through the years to discriminate and judge not only the things that surround us, but also our ability and capacity to understand what is unfamiliar. A few years ago, a friend asked me to read a poem and tell him if it was any good. He refused to reveal the name of the author. I read the poem in a state of panic. "I don't know," I said. "I don't know if it's any good." Without a context, without a way of positioning the author in a critical tradition, I felt completely lost. Context is our comfort zone, our security blanket. To be "taken out of context" is largely a negative condition. It is "out of context" that things get mangled, distorted, mistranslated. But the terrain of "in context" hazards its own risks--a distrust of one's own perceptions, that quicksand of "what we are not supposed to know"