Rodger Kamenetz

FLOTATION

—for Kit Robinson

     I live inside a thought balloon. As my words float upward ever upward I too float inside myself. The land is good strong with stones and dirt. It is good to walk between the bite of the tortoise and the voice of the turtle. I hear the psalm rasp in my inner ear how the wicked lie on their beds at night plotting damage. Someone should throttle them. I float through scumbled clouds. I was drawn by an erratic hand. The cartoon of goodness is too simple I need vermilion and crimson. I need auras around the tree frogs. You cannot touch me inside this dream impregnable and pregnant. After a pause I will fall to earth again the wicked shall vanish like smoke. I breathe the grey air walk barefoot through a broken land.

     A harsh song will speak for me a broken psalm will repair my torn balloon.

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Statement of Homage

Kit Robinson is a friend who I first met when we were both undergraduates. The poem "Other Planes of There" quotes a line from one of his poems— don't ask me now which!— and is somewhat written in his laconic style. So it is an homage in several senses. Thought Balloon is a recent book of his and I liked that title and somehow it popped into my poem and asked to be taken for a spin. So I thought it only right to dedicate that poem to him as well.

Kit Robinson

San Francisco Bay Area poet Kit Robinson was born in Evanston, Illinois, and earned a BA at Yale University. He is the author of two dozen collections of poetry, including Thought Balloon (2019), Leaves of Class (2017), The Crave (2002), and The Dolch Stanzas (1976). Robinson lives in Berkeley, where he works as a freelance writer and marketing consultant and plays Cuban tres guitar in the band Calle Ocho.

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THE COMMA AND ME

—for Sabine Huynh

There is enmity between me and the comma staple in the page prongs up alien quibble from the book of rules & small hatreds. Why periods why question marks why any at all? Roaming hallways and attics following my dog into the basement where he disappears into a moving pile of rocks shouldn’t a sentence be like that with no warning no stage directions just a sudden drop into nothing and then —

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Statement of Homage

Sabine Huynh is a wonderful poet and translator. She translated my most recent book Dream Logic (Logique onirique) for the TO series from Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre (PURH). In the course of corresponding back and forth about the translation, she asked me about the lack of commas in my prose poems. My feeling is I want to disorient the reader, dislodge the reader from the presumptions of ordinary prose and challenge the reader to sort out for herself where the pauses are. So I avoided the commas. I explained that in a letter but the poem did its own thing. I owe the poem to that conversation so I dedicated to her.

Sabine Huynh

Sabine Huynh was born in 1972 in Saigon, Vietnam. In 1976, her family immigrated to France. Huynh writes poetry and prose works (novels, essays, short stories, diaries), mostly in French. She has been back in Israel since 2010, where she happily lives, in Tel Aviv. Since 2011 (her daughter’s year of birth), she devotes herself to writing, literary translation, working as a proofreader and copy-editor, teaching writing workshops, as well as literature and French, and working with literary journals as a reviewer and a translator (Terre à ciel, Terres de femmes, Recours au poème, Phoenix, Europe, La Nouvelle Quinzaine littéraire, Diacritik, Nunc). She has been the co-founder and editor of the bilingual French-Hebrew literary translation magazine Peham since March 2019 (with Israeli writer Haggai Linik).

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SUBPOEMS

—for Bill Lavender

Held under breath like raw sodium under oil. Unformed as larvae proto-legs curled in heads tucked down they cry into their own sleep marvelous. They dream of being spoken as infants dream in wombs. But not yet born they only hear themselves, dissolve under tongue as crystals of medicine. The disease they would cure is sleepwalking.

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Statement of Homage

Bill Lavender is a poet and friend I've known for years here in New Orleans. We've also spent time together in Prague and in Mexico. He is also a poetry publisher and published my book Yonder in 2018. I think the sense of a poem as sublingual medicine somehow reminds me of Bill but I can't explain it logically.

Bill Lavender

Bill Lavender is a poet, editor, and publisher living in New Orleans. He is the author of 14 books, including the innovative verse memoir, Memory Wing (Black Widow, 2011), surrealism (and bi-lingual Spanish edition, surrealismo), and, in 2019, My ID, from BlazeVOX. Three Novellas: Q, Little A, The Private I is scheduled to be published by Spuyten Duyvil in early 2020. Poems and essays have appeared recently in Southern Review, Xavier Review, Hurricane Review. Scholarly theoretical writings have been published in Contemporary Literature and Poetics Today, among others. He is the publisher at Lavender Ink / Diálogos Books (lavenderink.org) and the co-founder, with Megan Burns, of the New Orleans Poetry Festival.

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