Thank you to the 2019 voices for writing your homage on the Verse of April street in the great Internet megalopolis. We love you and your poetry-breathing consciousness-es! The anthology is now 111 profile-tributes strong and is a collective illustration of the rich and diverse possibilities of the genre. Great continued thanks to the exquisite corpse 5th anniversary team for opening their minds and spirits to this year’s celebration! Thank you to all past contributors for what your entries continue to honor! Thank you to the readers and supporters! And forever gratitude to partner in visuals and production Baptiste de Chabaneix. We’ll see you next year! Hoorah!
Photo: Zsolt Sereghi
111---> marie & raworth
Name: Marie B. Borel
Current city: Lisbon
Occupation: Traveller, poet, reader, photographer, and more or less translator
Age: Born somewhere in the 1950s in Northern Europe
What does poetry mean to you?
La pluie et beau temps tiennent une très grande place dans ma vie.
Interesting because I never thought about it
Because it means something to me
Brings me loin des jaloux des tourments et des ego lego
Because it’s easy to travel with
No true travel without a poem (with no poem)
I’m happy that you lied
May every drug I ever took
Apples and tears
Heartquakes and sun
Smiles and rocks
Cries and sighs
Philippe Jaccottet
Cid Corman
Pierre Alferi
and flowing free
sky wide
blue. &; hair
bliss. your
tracks made
me see trees.
As far as LOIN* goes
I try to call and quote a train of thoughts
a train to an island an orchard or a shore
to summon a cosmology in reverse
where suns bloom and shed a light
to teach and stitch and mend and learn
the topsy-turvy ways of the world
Photo by Marie Borel
Who is your favorite poet?
My favourite poet would be Tom Raworth
The first poet I remember crossing my life was Federico Garcia Lorca
They are both the two sides of the same hope
Or perception or a given thing or despair
Despair whatever they said was not a sin
They offered me a world
Poetry is a word poetry is the world
Et que serait un monde rien de moins qu’un poème
Parce que le poème dit ce qu’il dit
L’herbe pousse
Le poème dit
Ce qui est parfaitement intelligible et néanmoins inexplicable
Penser les mondes du ciel
Donner une logique à l’absurde
Faire d’une souffrance infinie un art infini
Why do you like this poet?
“bird no sing in cage,” as Tom Raworth used to say
He took pleasure in making a new form each time.
He was not an academic, read only what would catch his eyes (no study, no
critique), and had absolutely no interest in literary canons.
“One writes because one likes to read: and because one doesn’t like to read shit one
attempts not to write it. I assume work improves with both reading and writing; and
by reading your own writing with the same sharp eye, ear and intelligence as you
read anyone else’s”
he said.
There are no rules (though many would like it if there were) regarding the essential
beauty of art. A place for everything and everything in its place.
Words are images.
-
I ‘m joyful and charmed, feeling pleasure and delight to share my own voice in April,
as a trace and a tribute to the idea of the outside and the inside, the proper purpose
of the world of poetry. Emotional distance remains the thread of some thoughts of
ideas made visible. It echoes, and shakes, and hurts, and heals.
Extrait de LOIN * (Éditions de l’Attente, mai 2013) par Marie Borel
la pluie horizontalement griffe la vitre
de la très grande vitesse d’un train toulouse
cyprès dans les parages octobre du rhône
l’ombre d’un homme qui monte l’escalier tombe
emporté prisonnier du lac gelé
près des pommes de terre
en ce pays le vent est blanc ardoise et cendre
aux alizés des rires
dans les pages erronées de plages brouillées
naviguer enfouir l’énigme des belles histoires dans l’herbe
quel manque d’oiseau à la forêt des équinoxes
têtes de loup sous l’ombrelle les jets d’eau disent
un peu seulement
le non-jour non-espoir non-printemps non-présent
la petite ourse me guide en aveugle
le vent gratte à l’auvent de l’automne
et parapluie noir le vœu en toi de mers et de mutisme
il fallut dénigrer le ciel
paradis déconsidéré
solitude des couleurs vert pur gris chance gris chancelant
les orangers les vergers de ta nouvelle zemble
où gisent les gris joyeux du temps
il viendra battre de chaque moitié du monde
et du regard tu fends la courbure de la ligne de l’eau
retourne à des durées chaudes et sûres
effacées les enfances les amours
le tilleul le faucon le miel
le passereau détrempé la boussole
tu deviens dans les jours je voyage
nage comme une écharde sur le miroir
l’ile émeraude sans doute jusqu’où je veux dire vois-tu
sans préavis n’importe quelle rose
sur n’importe quel rosier
est-il un exil qui fasse la terre étrange
eau air terre feu inversés avec patience
sans le secours de l’habitude
les yeux ennuagés d’alcool tu oubliais les cerises
lorsque lui sont posées des questions sur ton passé
une petite flamme s’y allume tristement
perse regardant le feu comme un être céleste
(jupiter feu céleste vulcain feu terrestre)
chef du monde pur et fils du grand dieu ormazd
est-ce loin est-ce ainsi sans souvenir sans vent
sombres tropiques
sous le vaisseau-soleil
(il disait que le soleil est un vaisseau)
-
Excerpt from FARAWAY, Translated from French to English by Carrie Chappell
the horizontal rain claws at the window
of the very high speed toulouse-bound train
cypress surrounds october on the rhône
the shadow of a man climbing the stairs falls
taken prisoner by the frozen lake
near the potato fields
in this country the wind is white slate and ash
in the tradewinds of laughter
in the misguided pages of hazy beaches
sailing burying the enigma of beautiful stories in the grass
how birdless are the forests of equinoxes
wolf heads under the parasol the water stream says
but barely
the non-day non-hope non-spring non-present
the little dipper blinded steers me
the wind paws at autumn’s awning
and the black umbrella the wish inside you of seas and silence
we had to decry the sky
paradise discredited
the loneliness of green pure grey lucky grey wavering
the orange trees the orchards of your nova zembla
where nearby the joyful greys of time lie
bringing earth’s two halves into battle
and in a glance you split the curve of the water stream
turn back to lasting warmths and certainties
the childhoods the loves erased
the linden tree the falcon the honey
the drowned sparrow the compass
you become through the days i travel
swim like a splinter on the mirror
the emerald island without a doubt just where i want to say don't you see
without warning whichever rose
on whichever rose tree
is there an exile that would make the world strange
water air earth fire reversed with patience
without the help of habit
your eyes cloudy from alcohol you forgot the cherries
when asked questions about your past
a small flame sadly ignites
persian watching the fire like a heavenly being
(jupiter celestial fire vulcan earthly fire)
leader of the pure world and son of the great god ormazd
is it faraway is it hence without memory without wind
dark tropics
under the sun-ship
(he said the sun is a ship)
110---> claire & acker, leduc, and bellamy
Name: Claire Finch
Hometown: Denver, Colorado
Current city: Paris
Occupation: Doctoral candidate in Gender Studies, University of Paris 8
Age: 30
What does poetry mean to you?
Poetry is a way to confront fear, to expand possibility, to enact rage for fucked up systemic power disparities, to imagine that there’s some version of the future that’s less cruel, filled with ecstatic and empathetic co-living.
Who are your favorite poets?
My favorite poets are Kathy Acker, Violette Leduc and Dodie Bellamy. The books I take everywhere: Acker’s My Mother Demonology, Leduc’s L’affamée, and Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker.
Why do you like these poets?
I cycle constantly through the three of them because each gives a way to explore what I experience as obsessive attraction and repulsion to the fem “I.” There’s this immense pressure to cut the fem “I” out because fem-first-person tends to be read as either autobiographical or irrelevant, definitely not experimental or artistic. Acker, Leduc, and Bellamy not only keep it, but expand it, throw it everywhere, and reading them gives me a lot of courage. I keep calling them poets even though none of them are typically classified as poets. Yet, they all practice a poetic project characterized by a precise attention to detail, sound, form, and syntax on the level of the sentence. Then they push each sentence into larger masses, investing the fragment into a long-term process of accumulation. We’re left with a weird residue. Maybe this is the shape of poetry outside of cis-masculinity.
I finished the below poem/portrait while thinking about my answers for Verse of April. It's part of a long-term, ongoing, and super long project (hundreds of portraits and counting) in which I manipulate autobiographic language and diary conventions. It's my version of experimenting with the fem-first-person that I'm following through Leduc, Acker, and Bellamy. Each portrait is a mix of life, porn codes (the ultimate present-tense), and stolen things.
Portrait #214 (Reading Violette, Kathy and Dodie while thinking about him, and you)
When we fuck lately it’s really quick so I ask, can we put some time aside, at least three hours? I want to fuck you for at least three hours. The length of a university seminar. If I don’t taste his pussy then it feels like it didn’t even happen. I am moving away from lowercase or small P politics : it is no longer sufficient just to have something in my cunt. As a nation we need the immersive unity of synesthesia. Whenever we aren’t together I’m worried that he never existed, but I try not to act crazy. There’s nothing to do about it, of course. Another contract named trust lines up next to bureaucracy and paperwork, and there’s always something going on in the background that you can’t control. I mean look at globalization. It’s been months since I’ve fisted him, and I’m out of good lube. Where do you get good lube in Paris anyway? I guess globalization’s failed because I still have to import my organic, unflavored, non-irritating, all-natural, paraben-free lube from San Francisco. I write porn as the café fills up. I want to make it all last longer. I need to pee but don’t move because I’m coming back for you. I want to lick every part of the right edge of your cunt. I want to never work again because I’m busy licking your thigh. I want to move toward your asshole, bite the thick skin of your asscheek, grab a handful of your hip, and crawl on your back. Now, I’m licking the back of your head, where your hair’s short again because you can get it cut for five euros in Belleville. I hope you don’t mind me licking the back of your head. We need more time. I know how to fix this: I put my right hand on your right shoulder. I move my left hand to your ass, move down, and find the opening of your cunt. I lick my fingers. I put four fingers into your cunt, and you’re stretched between my left hand, pushing hard into you, my right hand on your shoulder pulling you back into me. I want to lick the center of your back. I want to pull your ass up against me, push your head against the bed with my other hand. Push into me. Pressure is always double: force pushes force back. Sit back further on my hand my hand pushing into your cunt. Small P politics according to Emily Apter is the everyday form. But the unexceptional is the interesting. We’ve put too much into obvious forms, and we forget about all the other stuff happening in the meantime. I looked at the clock the other day, and I knew that as long as you fucked me for at least six minutes first, then, as soon as I started to touch my clit I was officially less than four minutes away from coming. See if you can get your hand all the way in, in under ten minutes. I want you to do it for me: if I outsource the touching of my clit to you then it all lasts longer. I’m running on the political platform that fucking you reinvents time and so reinvents labor. With you it’s big P Politics all the time: your Pussy makes me think we’re more resilient than we thought.
________________________________________________________________________________
Claire is a touring member of the fem/nonbinary/trans authors’ collective RER Q. You can follow more of her work at www.clairefinch.com.
109---> fanny & au travers d’une vitre, avec les mots
Nom: Fanny Garin
Ville natale: Sèvres
Ville actuelle: Paris, et surtout ailleurs
Travail: Ecriture, dramaturgie (et autres emplois plus alimentaires)
Âge: trente et un ans
Qu'est-ce qui signifie, pour vous, la poésie?
Je n’arrive pas à avoir de la poésie une définition raisonnée, hors de moi. Sans doute parce qu’elle est avant tout une pratique—intime, conflictuelle, peu saisissable car toujours mouvementée. Ou au contraire, immobile et bloquée, quand il est dur d’aller toujours chercher plus loin ou lorsqu’il devient difficile de trouver de la force ou du vide pour être attentif à ce qui apparaît, pour l’écouter. Peut-être parce qu’il s’agit toujours de saisir un inconnu ou une étrangeté, que ce soit dans la langue ou dans le sens. Mais ce quelque chose disparaît une fois saisi—il n’est plus étranger. Il faut alors recommencer, retrouver de la force après l’épuisement, se remettre à chercher—à moins d’avoir été mouvementée par un nouveau venant de l’extérieur. D’ailleurs, je crois que quelque chose se joue dans la rencontre (ou le fil tissé ou le choc) entre intérieur et extérieur. J’ai en tête l’image d’observer au travers d’une vitre, avec les mots. Parfois la vitre se brise ou disparaît, parfois elle se couvre de sueur ou de pluie. Alors apparaît quelque chose de l’ordre de la jouissance—une jouissance calme survenant après les mouvements, la nervosité, la chute—quand les mots et les sens parviennent à se saisir, s’attraper. Mais hors de soi et du monde, dans l’espace de la page, et presque miraculeusement.
Je réfléchis aussi en ce moment à la notion de scandale, de petits et parfois anodins scandales avec lesquels j’aime jouer dans l’écriture—entre jeu, sincérité et tentatives de formulation—et qui créent des sortes de « dommages » dans la norme, dans nos identités, dans la mienne, dans le maniement des mots et la formulation des affects. (1)
Qui est votre poète préféré?
Je ne crois pas avoir de favoris mais quelques noms et quelques vers me viennent. Anne-Marie Albiach, Eileen R. Tabios et deux vers de Dino Campana—poète que je connais peu mais cité par Amelia Rosselli dans La Libellule.
fabriquer fabriquer fabriquer
je préfère la mer écouter (2)
Pourquoi aimez-vous ces vers?
J’aime ces deux vers, que je trouve à la fois malicieux et existentiels. Il semble y avoir le choix seul d’écouter la mer, mais la répétition du verbe fabriquer critique autant la fabrication qu’elle la rend nécessaire, inévitable, tragique, essentielle, obsessionnelle—les sens se culbutent les uns les autres. Je les lie évidemment à un monde plein de carcans étouffant les perceptions mais aussi à la fabrication du texte poétique : fouiller fouiller fouiller. Et soudain, quelque chose s’entend. Entre nonchalance, paresse, existence et splendeur.
J’ai également souvent en tête ces mots d’Eileen R. Tabios.
J’envisage ma recherche comme celle d’une intimité implacable – menée contre l'encroûtement du cocon d'un coeur qui serait le mien. J’ai conscience de la manière dont une grille peut tuer le geste dans la peinture. Même si la peinture, finalement, doit retourner à sa nature et continuer de couler comme une menstruation – suinter d’une intensité visqueuse, que la géométrie n’adoucit pas
Cette question d’intimité implacable me paraît très forte, et je suis admirative de la façon avec laquelle elle mêle politique, intimité, subjectivité pour dire et formuler le monde. J’aime aussi que l’écriture poétique devienne aussi un outil pour se sauver soi, pour rester en mouvement—un outil de lutte contre la norme.
Ces écrivaines, comme Eileen R. Tabios ou Anne-Marie Albiach, sont (au-delà des quelques vers d’elles que je pourrais citer) des personnes qui me donnent en quelque sorte—par leur liberté, par leur statut de femmes et de poétesses—le droit d’aller fouiller dans de nombreux espaces, tonalités, etc. Tabios par son humour, sa sinuosité, son insolence, son travail autour du désir. Albiach par sa solennité, son lyrisme, son angoisse et la place extrême du corps dans cette mathématique des pulsions. J’utilise le vocabulaire de l’autorisation—ce qui peut paraître étrange mais ne l’est pas tellement quand on y pense, tant la poésie et son histoire sont pleines de carcans, sans cesse déjoués et reconstitués (par les règles et par les milieux artistiques) et tant il peut être dur aussi, en tant que femme, de s’emparer des question du désir, du corps, des affects, des pulsions, sans être accusée de mièvrerie ou de sentimentalisme, etc. Des interdictions naissent alors qu’il est important voire politique de s’en emparer. Et d’ailleurs pas seulement en tant que femme, en tant qu’humain tout court. Tout comme il me semble important et politique de s’emparer de tout sujet, de tout objet, tant qu’on le transforme, le creuse, l’approche et l’éloigne de soi—dans une tentative de justesse—pour tenter de transformer soi et le monde. Par de petits actes, des micro-visions, des distorsions à peine perceptibles de syntaxe. (3)
________________________________________________________________________________
Translation from French to English by Carrie Chappell
(1) I struggle to find a rational definition of poetry, outside of myself. Without a doubt, because poetry is, above all, a practice—intimate, conflicted, barely attainable as it’s always in motion. Or, on the contrary, stationary and frozen, when it is hard to explore, to forage deeper, difficult to find the strength or space to be attentive to what is there, to listen to it. Perhaps because it is always about seeking an unknown or foreignness, whether it be in the language or in the senses. But this something disappears as soon as it’s grasped—it is no longer unfamiliar. Then, you must start over, recover the will after exhaustion, go back to the hunt, or be moved by a new element that’s entered from somewhere else. What’s more, I believe that something is played out in this encounter (or the thread woven through, or the shock) between what is on the inside and what is on the outside. In my mind I picture it all through a window, but in words. Sometimes the window shatters or disappears, sometimes it is covered in sweat or rain drops. Then, a kind of joyful order occurs—a calm pleasure arising after the movements, the nervousness, the fall—when words and senses are ready to be seized, to be captured. But outside of one’s self and the world, in the space of a page, and rather miraculously.
At this time, I’m also thinking about the idea of scandal, of small and sometimes harmless scandals with which I like to play in writing—gambling sincerity and attempts at expression—and which create different kinds of “injury” of the norms that govern identities, mine included, in the handling of words and arrangements of affect.
(2) I don’t believe I have favorites but some names and verses immediately come to mind. Anne-Marie Albiach, Eileen R. Tabios, and two verses from Dino Campana—a poet that I don’t know well but who is cited by Amelia Rosselli in The Dragonfly.
create create create
I would rather to the sea listen (2)
(3) I like these two verses, that I find to be at once mischievous and existential. There seems to be only one other choice, that of listening to the sea, but the repetition of the verb create criticizes as much the act of creating as much as it renders it necessary, inevitable, tragic, essential, obsessive. The senses topple over themselves. Obviously, I link these lines to a world full of shackles that stifle perception, but I also link them to the creation of a poetic text: search search search. And suddenly, something is heard. Between nonchalance, laziness, existence, and splendor.
Often, I think, also, of these words from Eileen R. Tabios.
I imagine my journey as if it was one of relentless intimacy—driven against the crusted over cocoon of a heart that happens to be mine. I am aware of how the grid can destroy the gesture in a painting. Even if the painting, in the end, must return to its nature and continue flowing like menstruation—oozing with a viscous intensity, that geometry cannot soften
This question of relentless intimacy seems strong to me, and I admire the way in which she mixes politics, interiority, subjectivity to speak to the world. I also like that poetry writing would become a tool for saving one’s self, for keeping yourself in motion, for working against the norm.
These writers, like Eileen R. Tabios or Anne-Marie Albiach, are (beyond the few verses that I evoke) people who give me, in some way—through their freedom, their status as women, and as poets—the right to go about searching many spaces, tonalities, etc. Tabios, through her humor, her meandering, her insolence, her work on desire. Albiach, through her solemnity, her lyricism, her anguish, this extreme place in the body wherein lives a mathematics of impulse. And I use a word like authorization—which might seem strange but not so much to me, as poetry and its history is littered with shackles, constantly deconstructed and reconstructed (through form and through artistic circle) and as much as it can be difficult, as a woman, to pick up this question of desire, of body, of affect, of impulse, without being called insipid or sentimental, etc. Such bans arise when it is most important to pick up the questions. And not only as a woman but also, and most simply, as a human being. As it seems to me important and political to take up all subjects, all objects, provided that we seek transformation, that we dig in, that we scoot towards the issue just as we zoom out from it—in all hopes of accuracy—to tempt change of self and in the world. Through these small acts, these micro-visions, these sometimes barely detectable distortions of syntax.
Photo by Dino Ignani
108---> patrick & eliot
Name: Patrick Williamson
Hometown: Bath, UK
Current city: Paris, France
Occupation: Poet, translator, lecturer in translation
Age: 58
What does poetry mean to you?
Poetry is a courageous inner language, essential to human survival through defiance and overcoming limits, barriers, and borders, while at the same time giving voice to what is not yet fully understood or available to articulation. It plays an important role in mobilizing people to fight against the increasingly harmful currents of thought around the world, and to fight injustice. It acts as an alert; it wakes and strengthens cohesion between people and peoples. The language must reflect the present but not neglect the past, and must create the foundations for building the future. It revitalizes, maintains, and extends language, everywhere, and in a world where globalized tendencies are omnipresent and rare dialects and languages are threatened or almost extinct. It acts as a guide to the big questions that concern humanity about our existence and our reason for being, in a world where there are fewer and fewer landmarks. It can empower people facing grief, illness, and mental health problems and help those seeking meaning in a world of fragmented human relationships, where loneliness and isolation remain a major problem. It is a vector between generations, passing on memory. Poetry is a key element of our collective consciousness.
What is your favorite poem?
“The Waste Land” by T.S Eliot is a classic but timeless poem that provides continuous food for thought.
The Waste Land
BY T. S. ELIOT
FOR EZRA POUND
IL MIGLIOR FABBRO
I. The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
“They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed’ und leer das Meer.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!
“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”
Why do you like this poem?
I first read this work when I was very young ,and it is a poem full of vitality, notwithstanding some of its references that showed the young man I was that there is a cosmopolitan and sophisticated world outside my door and ready for the taking. It invites one to take up challenges. It encouraged me then, along with Ezra Pound's Cantos, to attempt a long ambitious poem full of references and quotes in foreign languages and one full of meditations on life, love, music and the injustices of this world. I was unable to sustain the same momentum, nor did I have the required learning (I was in my early twenties and always have had a lazy approach to erudition), nor, as in the case of Eliot, a mentor editor like Pound to shape and create this wonderfully powerful poem. It did however set me on the path to writing in more depth, as I got older and more relaxed and perceptive. Eliot's later work, Four Quartets, was also a great influence that rang true to my experience as a young Anglican in England, visiting small country churches with my father, and imbibing the stillness and spirituality of such places. This combined with the wet or sunny green and pleasant land that is England. This experience is often lacking in the current social media world, and this is why such poetry is so important as a place of inner reflection and sanctuary. I hope my own work reflects this at times.
Photo de Karima El Kharraze par Hélène Harder
107---> karima & nass el ghiwane
Nom: Karima El Kharraze
Ville natale: Evreux
Ville actuelle: Saint-Denis (93) / Casablanca (Morocco) / Colombus (Georgia)
Travail: Autrice / Metteuse en scène
Âge: 38 ans
Qu'est-ce qui signifie, pour vous, la poésie ?
La poésie est le pain qui m’a nourrie quand tout autour de moi était saturé de gris. À l'adolescence j'écrivais de courts poèmes où la vieille bouilloire cabossée une fois appelée SAMOVAR transformait le petit HLM aux murs décrépis où nous vivions à 8 en grande datcha. (1)
Qui est votre poète préféré ?
Nass El Ghiwane, groupe de musique marocain des années 70. (2)
Pourquoi aimez-vous ce poète ?
J’aime la force de l’incantation et la simplicité de leurs mots. J’ai grandi en France, mes parents sont marocains. A l’école, Jean de la Fontaine fustigeait avec ses animaux le pouvoir arbitraire de Louis XIV et à la maison Nass El Ghiwane nous nimbait d’une puissance propre à secouer le joug de tous les tyrans. Dans ma pièce Arable, le personnage de M rend hommage à Nass El Ghiwane en évoquant la chanson «Le Chamelier»: (3)
M
Tu es dans le noir
Tu as retrouvé une cassette de Nass El Ghiwane
Le groupe marocain des années 70
Que vous écoutiez dans la voiture avec tes parents
Pendant le voyage au bled
Tu es dans le noir
Tu t’allonges sur le petit lit de la chambre universitaire
Tu écoutes
La chanson qui s’appelle Le Chamelier commence
Tu écoutes
Et là tu as une révélation
Tu voulais réussir tes études
Tu voulais avoir un destin plus grand que celui de tes parents
Tu voulais quitter ta vie d’avant
Tu voulais que désormais la vie te sourie
Et là tout-à-coup plus rien n’a d’importance
Et là tout-à-coup tu as une révélation
Tu sens que tu es plus importante que tout le reste
Tu sens une grande force qui avance dans le noir
Tu sens que maintenant quand tu vas marcher dans la rue
Les montagnes vont t’accompagner
Peu importe que ce soient les Alpes ou le Toubkal
Maintenant les montagnes sont de ton côté
La voix qui interpelle le chamelier
La voix qui interpelle le chef du troupeau
La voix qui ne se laissera pas étouffer par les sabots des fantassins
Les fantassins de quelque empire que ce soit
La voix qui raconte cette grandeur passée dont on ne t’a jamais parlé
Dans le noir de la cité universitaire tu la fais tienne.
M
You are in the dark
You found a Nass El Ghiwane cassette,
The Moroccan group from the 70s
Who you would listen to in the car with your parents
During the trip back to the bled[1]
You are in the dark
You lie on the bed of your university dorm room
And you listen
A song called “The Camel Herder” begins
You listen
And, there, you have a revelation
You were trying to succeed in your studies
You wanted to have a destiny bigger than that of your parents
You wanted to leave behind your old life
To see what life had in store for you
But all of the sudden, all of that loses importance
And suddenly you have a revelation
You feel your importance
You feel a strong force advancing into the dark
You feel that now when you go walk down the street
Mountains accompany you
Whether those are the Alps or the Toubkal makes no difference
Now, the mountains are on your side
A voice that calls out to the camel herder
A voice that challenges the leader of the flock
A voice that can not be stifled by calvary hooves
Or the infantrymen of any empire, whatsoever
The voice tells of a past greatness that was never recounted to you
In the darkness of the university residence, it becomes yours.
(extrait d’Arable de Karima El Kharraze publié aux Editions Les Cygnes –
traduction de poème en anglais de Chanelle Adams)
[1] “Bled” is Arabic for rural area/village. In a migrant context it refers to the roots and to the country/region of origin of the family.
Au départ j'ai transcrit la poésie de Nass El Ghiwane en alphabet latin car je n'écris pas l'arabe, que j'ai appris uniquement oralement avec mes parents qui n'ont jamais été scolarisés. J'arrive désormais à déchiffrer l'arabe car j'apprends à écrire en arabe depuis peu. (4)
Ya Jemmal
Le Chamelier
The Camel Herder
Paroles de Nass El Ghiwane
Traduction en français, en anglais de Karima El Kharraze
يَا جَمَّالْ رْدْ جْمَالْــــــكْ عـْلِــيـنــَــا
Ya jemmal rd jmalek âlina
Chamelier retiens tes chameaux
Camel herder hold back your camels
راه احنا ولاد ناس وفي الخير تربينــــــــا
Rah hna ouled nass ou fel khir trebina
Nous sommes des enfants de bonne famille et dans l’abondance élevés
We are of good descent and raised in abundance
يَا جَمَّالْ رْدْ جْمَالْــــــكْ عـْلِــيـنــَــا
Ya jemmal rd jmalek âlina
Chamelier retiens tes chameaux
Camel herder hold back your camels
راه احنا ولاد ناس وفي العز تربينـــــــــا
Rah hna ouled nass ou fel êz trebina
Nous sommes des enfants de bonne famille et dans l’amour élevés
We are of good descent and raised in love
عـيونــــا علــى شوفـــة لَمْـلِيـحْ دَاوْ
Âyounna âla chouft lmlih dawe
Nos yeux au bien se sont habitués
Our eyes are fed with goodness
وانت ماشي زين لا ترمي لغبار ف عينينا
Ou nta machi zine la trmi lghbar f’êïnina
Et toi tu n’es pas bon ne jette pas de poudre dans nos yeux
And you are no good so don’t sully our eyes
يا جمال رد جمالــــــك علــيـنـــــا
Ya jemmal red jmalek âlina
Chamelier retiens tes chameaux
Camel herder hold back your camels
قلُـوبْـنـَــا ب كـلـمــة الـمـحـبة دواو
Gloubna bkelmet lmheba dwawe
Nos cœurs ont parlé le langage de la tendresse
Our heart’s motto is tenderness
وانت قلبك حجر . . . نوض اخطينــــــا
Ou nta guelbek hjer noud khtina
Et toi ton cœur est de pierre allez
And your heart is stone we want none of it
يا جمال رد جمالــــــك علــيـنــــا
Ya jemmal red jmalek âlina
Chamelier retiens tes chameaux
Camel herder hold back your camels
راه احنا ولاد ناس وفي الخير تربينــــــــا
Rah hna ouled nass ou fel khir trebina
Nous sommes des enfants de bonne famille et dans l’abondance élevés
We are of good descent and raised in abundance
لبسنا الحرير ورميناه كلمنا الحق وسمعنــاه لا ترمي لغبار ف عينينا
Lbessna lehrire ou rminah, kelemna lhak ou smânah la trmi lghbar f’êïnina
Nous avons porté de la soie et nous en sommes séparés
Nous avons convoqué la raison et nous l’avons entendue
Ne jette pas de poudre dans nos yeux
We threw away the silk we used to wear
We called to reason and grasped it
Don’t use your smoke and mirrors with us
يا جمال رد جمالــــــك علــيـنــــا
Ya jemmal red jmalek âlina
Chamelier retiens tes chameaux
Camel herder hold back your camels
شفنا الزين ودْحِينَــاهْ عْرْفْنَا لهوى وما بغيناه
Chefna zine ou dhinah, ârefna lehwa ou ma bghinah
Nous avons vu le beau et nous en sommes détournés,
Nous avons connu le désir éphémère et n’en avons pas voulu
We met beauty and left it
We knew ephemeral desire and didn’t want it
وتجي أنت يا جمــال وتدوز جمالك علينـا
Ou tji nta ya jemmal ou tedwez jmalek âlina
Et tu viendrais toi Chamelier et tu nous piétinerais avec tes chameaux ?
And you camel herder you come and want to trample on us ?
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Translation from French to English by Carrie Chappell
(1) Poetry is the bread that nourished me when everything around me was covered in grey. When I was young, I wrote short poems wherein the old, dented teakettle once called SAMOVAR transformed the dilapidating walls of our low-income housing into a big dacha where the 8 of us lived.
(2) Nass El Ghiwane, a Moroccan music group from the 70s.
(3) I like the power of the incantation and the simplicity of their words. I grew up in France, my parents are Moroccan. At school, Jean de la Fontaine lambasted us with his animals that portrayed the arbitrary power of Louis XIV, and, at home, Nass El Ghiwane cloaked us with power to shake off the yoke of all these tyrants. In my play Arable, the character of M pays homage to Nass El Ghiwane by evoking the song “Le Chamelier”:
(4) At first I transcribed the poetry of Nass El Ghiwane in the Roman alphabet because I didn’t know how to write in Arabic, had only learned it orally, in conversation with my parents who hadn’t themselves had a traditional education. Now, I can make sense of its letter forms as I’ve begun, quite recently, to learn its script.
106---> emily & rilke
Name: Emily Orfanides
Hometown: New Orleans, Louisiana
Current city: Kavala, Greece
Occupation: Educator, poet
Age: 24
What does poetry mean to you:
Poetry, to me, is where the artist meets truth at the point of contrast between light and dark, heaven and earth, matter and divinity. Poetry is a place that will hold you, when you are losing all sight of meaning, hope and certainty, in unconditional love and acceptance, never once questioning you or your reason. It won’t cradle you, but it will show you your own strength in how to hold yourself. It replenishes you with a deeper acceptance and brings to you a newfound stillness. Poetry is the place you come to, fallen, with a will and a determination to fly, when you have nowhere else to go, but within, to discover the magnificence of your own being in connection with that of existence. The beauty of poetry to me is that it holds the misses of humanity, as well as the alignments, but whereby the misses are so much sweeter, being that they are where we break open to greater possibilities within ourselves, where we obtain a greater capacity of expanding our visions of existence. Poetry can save you, sometimes from the cruelty and misunderstandings of the world, sometimes from yourself, and it can show you something greater, in mirroring yourself back to you, whereby you see the aching and terrifying beauty of all of existence and our human connection in all of it.
What is your favorite poem?
Sonnet 4
from Sonnets to Orpheus
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by M. D. Herter Norton
O you tender ones, set now and then
into the breath that takes no heed of you;
let it part as it touches your cheeks,
it will quiver behind you, united again.
O you who are blessed, o you who are whole,
you who seem the beginning of hearts.
Bow for the arrows and targets of arrows,
tear-stained your smile shines more everlasting.
Fear not suffering. the heaviness,
give it back to the weight of the earth;
the mountains are heavy, heavy the oceans.
Even the trees you planted as children
long since grew too heavy, you could not sustain them.
Ah, but the breezes...ah, but the spaces...
Why do you like this poem?
Rilke was introduced to me by my philosophy professor when I was in college, and since then, this poem has always been a significant place of spiritual solace, which has held my hand and made me feel like I belong somewhere, to something, even if only to my own feelings, to philosophical and existential questioning, to longing, to sensitivity, to poetry. The poem speaks about those who feel a deeper sensitivity, a deeper terror, a deeper transcendence, who carry the weight of the world, just within their single hearts. This poem has been a consolation to me because it addresses this individual on the line of contrast between light and dark, (mystical and temporal, spirit and matter, soul and mind), wherein he or she holds a heightened awareness and, thus, holds deeper capacities, not only for feeling (heart) but for enlightenment (mind and soul), which simultaneously bring him or her more heaviness and lightness. “O you who are blessed, O you who are whole, / bows for the arrows, the targets of arrows, / tear-stained your smile shines everlasting…” will forever be one of my most deeply treasured lines ever written.
Life Has Arrived
by Emily Orfanides
In homage to Rainer Maria Rilke, on Life.
Life has arrived to intervene
here, singing a crying melody
singing to me, crying herself to sleep,
longing for what life herself cannot give
to her conduits, not even to herself.
I’ve once tried to comfort her,
to hold her, here in the quiet, in the spaces
between my lungs and the veins that hold
my heart. But she is an entirety that will
never be grasped, that can never be kept.
She is a mystery that has painted eyes
on you, just to let you believe
you are seeing something into her.
And you will try to cling to her,
but she will leave you every time
in the remains of your own connection.
She gave you eyes
made of earth, and you might not
ever truly know her until the day
you lose them.
Life has arrived to intervene
here, and we are all lost
here, feeling our way through.
105---> sam & chen & gambito!
Name: Sam Herschel Wein & Chen Chen.
Hometown: South Bend, IN, & Amherst, MA.
Current City: Chicago, IL, & Waltham, MA.
Occupation: Writer & Writer.
Age: 27 & 30.
What does poetry mean to you?
We’ve been thinking about something that our friend and incredible poet, Emily Jungmin Yoon, said at an AWP panel on poetry, community, and history for Asian American writers: “Poetry is an act of resistance against the language that governs us.” For us, this statement rings true in a number of ways.
Sam says: Poetry connects me, through elegy, through apology, through handholding and rage-filled stomping, to those I’ve lost, or those who have hurt me, or those who have hurt our world. We are reinventing, building a new home, unlike the ones we already had. I’ve been writing poems about the conversations I haven’t been able to have, wondering, is there a space this can be said? This can be a form of healing, a grasp of elbows, a sprint together through so many Spring days, in the rain? Poetry, for me, is the bridge to these places, my first imaginations and my earliest selves, fighting for the space to be heard, to be understood, as we are often not. And, in this way, my poems become loose doorknobs, falling off the doors that swing open and won’t shut, that expand the amount of rooms in the house indefinitely, always, for guests, visitors, chosen family, biological family, as a place of return, as a place of peacemaking, resistance building, as a place for us to clasp each other’s legs, sitting on the floor, and say, we are here for each other.
Chen says: Poetry allows me to explore and also continually reimagine my selves, my pasts, my ways of knowing and not-knowing. Poetry is that unruly realm, where the preconceived must be shed, where the trees offer oolong boba tea, and I am falling in feverish love—but with whom, toward what? Poetry reminds me to stay restless in my questioning, including the question, “Can a poem be a place to rest?” I’ve been working and working these past two years, since my first full-length book came out. And I’ve been thinking about how the publishing and promoting side of poetry can be so draining. I’ve been feeling drained.
At the same time, I’ve felt so moved, meeting people, especially young queer people of color, queer Asian Americans, who’ve connected with my poems, who’ve found in my words nourishment and solace and, it seems, a form of relief, of rest. So I wonder, why haven’t my poems been like that for me? Reading others’ poems, I find relief and rest; I feel cared for and held. I think I need to return—or find some new way into writing where I’m giving back to myself a place to attend, to slow, to drink from those unexpected, strange sources.
What is your favorite poem?
Sarah Gambito! Poem: “Toro.”
Why do you like this poem?
We love the humor and the kingfisher, the blunt ache and the gleaming blue necklace. When the poem says, “He might plan to take us on a picnic. // We must be ready. We must be hungry,” we nod, understanding something about fathers and families that we didn’t know we needed to understand. We love how Sarah manages, again and again in her work, to excavate truths in a way at once absurd, delicious, and sharp. Sarah Gambito is co-founder of Kundiman, an organization dedicated to supporting readers and writers of Asian American literature. She is the author of three poetry collections; “Toro” comes from her second collection, Delivered (Persea Books, 2009).
Chen says: I started reading Sarah’s work after my first Kundiman Writers Retreat in 2014—that same summer, Sam and I met at Tent: Creative Writing, and I just had to share these blongy-beautiful poems with him. I’d read passages to him over the phone and we would laugh and laugh, connecting, “shivery, full of V-8.” Sarah’s work was essential to the beginning of our friendship and it continues to shape us as writers, as people.
Sam says: Sarah’s poems, mostly from Delivered, were the foundation for the friendship that Chen and I built together, which also hugely impacted my work as a writer, Chen being a friend and mentor simultaneously. Hearing Sarah’s poems over the phone, I felt permission to write the deep traumas of my life, as well as the joy, and humor, and silliness of the day-to-day, of its sincerity, of the way I hunch over, in heartbreak, in laughter. “I’m wicked lonely,” Sarah writes. And I call Chen, and say, so am I.
Our collaboration:
We wrote this poem in Portland, Oregon, during the 2019 AWP conference. This was our first AWP together and it was also the first time Sam met Sarah Gambito! “Hibiscus Knowledge” was inspired by Sarah’s newest book, Loves You (Persea Books, 2019), which Chen bought for Sam as a present, and also by Sarah’s effervescent presence.
Hibiscus Knowledge
To oogle-gay apps-may the nearest
park while finishing a bowl
of chicken livers, I asked
for the 14th time, is this green? Is this
hibiscus? I was getting very full. I was
confused by the handsome
helicopter overhead. & you, slurping
thick ice cream through a narrow
straw, the sound like two cars stopping,
not quite stopping, stopping, not
stopping. On the verge of love
or healing or brightest ancestral
burp. The apps-may couldn’t show me
so I had to show it:
My body by the water
like a dropped frisbee, waiting for
me to notice it, to attend a ceremony
of the first trees to startle,
not yet April.
Not even nameable. You, me,
elsewhomst, quite possibly your favorite
neighborhood mailman
in jogging shorts, but not jogging. Sitting
by the water. Holding
each other. Circulating a bushel
of how to heal in reverse.
A bushel of tea tongs.
104---> matt & edson
Name: Matt Broaddus
Hometown: Palmyra, Virginia
Current city: I just moved from Blacksburg, Virginia to Lakewood, Colorado
Occupation: Library Circulation Specialist
Age: 30
What does poetry mean to you?
Poetry means the possibility of breaking out of the conventional speech patterns that structure reality. Poetry, to me, is a means of using language to challenge the old, tired routine of traditional communication and move to a place where language is building new worlds and charting new ways of thinking. I love poetry because it’s the form that best understands language’s power as a material force. It can transform the way we see and hear and feel connected to one another.
What is your favorite poem?
The Taxi by Russell Edson
Why do you like this poem?
I love this poem because it is so full of wonder. The prose poem form gives it this propulsive power to move the reader through the poem in a rush of amazement. Each line that follows compounds the surprise and wonder of the line that preceded it. The images in the poem--the taxi crashing through the third story wall, the canaries assembling and reassembling into the shape of the driver--push on the limitations of the possible and move beyond those limits. The line that really makes me fall in love with the poem is toward the end when it seems as though this incredible event is going to vanish without a trace. But then the speaker says, “But I cannot stop what is happening [...]” I feel an enormous sense of recognition in this line; we cannot help imagining the things that will amaze us, that it’s ok to obsess and marvel over those things, that it’s good to let that feeling of wonder and amazement into your life.
The Taxi
by Russell Edson
One night in the dark I phone for a taxi. Immediately a taxi crashes through the wall; never mind that my room is on the third floor, or that the yellow driver is really a cluster of canaries arranged in the shape of a driver, who flutters apart, streaming from the windows of the taxi in yellow fountains...
Realizing that I am in the midst of something splendid I reach for the phone and cancel the taxi: All the canaries flow back into the taxi and assemble themselves into a cluster shaped like a man. The taxi backs through the wall, and the wall repairs...
But I cannot stop what is happening, I am already reaching for the phone to call a taxi, which is already beginning to crash through the wall with its yellow driver already beginning to flutter apart…
The above conversation arose from my wife's idea to do an interview. My wife, the poet Kodi Saylor, has always wanted to do an interview where the two of us talk about poetry, what it means to us, and how we think about poetry as writers and readers. We both thought up questions that we wanted to ask each other about poetry, some general, some more specific. Verse of April, with its focus on paying homage to poetry, presented us with a great opportunity to speak about the poets we love like Denise Duhamel, Nathaniel Mackey, Tomaž Šalamun, Terrance Hayes, and others. These poets allowed us to talk about musicality, playfulness, politics, and humor. Russell Edson came up toward the end of our conversation. His poem "The Taxi" helped us to speak a little about prose poetry and how great poems surprise us. My wife and I are big fans of the prose poem and hybrid form in general. In the interview, we talked to each other about the "materials" that we use to create poetry, and I think that's where you can start to see how different genres and different art forms and cultural entities creep into our minds and get us wanting to engage creatively with what we're encountering day to day. But because reading and listening to poetry especially has been so influential to our interest in writing poetry, we also wanted to talk about the connection between reading poetry and writing poetry. In some ways, I think the act of writing is always a response. As a writer, you're always putting your voice out there into a sea of other voices who have come before you or who are currently speaking. In the process, you're also picking up little bits of this cultural brain, this cultural soup that you're in and that's informing what comes out of you, what emerges. You're also maybe putting something out there, an idea, that someone in the future may pick up, interrogate, build on, or depart from. I love that about poetry especially because it's a medium that's so tied to language itself in a way no other medium is. The idea to have a conversation, as we've done here, kind of mirrors what we love about poetry, which is how poets engage in such unique ways in the act of putting words into verse.
________________________________________________________________________________
Matt Broaddus is a Cave Canem fellow and author of a chapbook, Space Station (Letter [r] Press, 2018). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Fence, Black Warrior Review, Sundog Lit, and Foundry. He’s currently working on his first novel.
Photo par Tineke de Lange
103---> marie & sappho
Nom: Marie de Quatrebarbes
Ville natale: Dieppe
Ville actuelle: Saint-Denis
Travail: Poète
« Qui plonge dans ses propres rêves avec une armure ? »
Monique Wittig, Paris-la-politique, P.O.L, 1999
Plus qu’un poète, c’est un poème que j’aimerais évoquer. “L'égal des dieux” de Sappho est peut-être, à bien des égards, LE poème c’est-à-dire qu’il est resté, ou qu’il n’a cessé de (re-)devenir, par-delà les siècles, le prototype du poème exact, implacable pour de nombreux lecteurs fameux ou anonymes. Transmises par les soins d’un pseudo-Longin qui les tenait pour l’exemple du sublime, reprises par Catulle, déplacées par Louise Labé, rejouées par Racine… ce qui frappe dans ces lignes de Sappho, c’est leur force traversante, comme une capacité à produire à l’intérieur de ses multiples variations une forme d’émotion unique, une signature qui nous inclut, nous projette des siècles en arrière en même temps qu’elle nous attache fermement au présent, rejouant le lien à nos propres désirs, et en ce sens toujours troublante.
Il y a quelque chose de presque effrayant à considérer le rôle du hasard dans la préservation et la transmission de ces lignes : le poème de Sappho aurait tout aussi bien pu ne pas nous parvenir. Bien sûr il est illusoire de penser que c’est par sa seule force qu’il a vaincu l’oubli. Mais je continue d’être surprise par le rapport (sans doute intriqué) qu’entretiennent la contingence historique de cette persévérance et l’effet de nécessité du poème justifié par une telle emprise culturelle. Je crois, en fait, que la force de ce poème est collective, qu’elle s’est constituée par accumulation de couches d’attention, par le soin de celles et ceux qui l’ont préservé en le réinventant.
Car c’est bien les réinventions multiples de “L'égal des dieux” qui lui donnent épaisseur et vie*. Comme si, à travers ce poème singulier, quelque chose se déposait dans et entre les langues, vivait dans les déplacements et les remaniements, non pas en dépit de ces derniers mais grâce à eux. Ainsi le poème se réactive, à chaque passage, il se densifie et se précise, il augmente son territoire d’expression. Peut-être que l’évidence que l’on ressent à la lecture d’un poème tient justement à sa capacité à accueillir la transformation, si bien que chaque mot du poème de Sappho semble pouvoir être changé, déplacé, et cependant quelque chose d’essentiel est préservé. C’est pourquoi il est salutaire d’en multiplier les versions, par le biais de la lecture, de l’écriture ou de la traduction, dans toutes les langues possibles et imaginables**.
*À propos des multiples versions du poème de Sappho, je renvoie au L'égal des dieux, cent versions d’un poème de Sappho, imaginé par Philippe Brunet aux éditions Allia.
**Sur les questions de traduction du poème, je recommande la lecture de l’introduction de Jackie Pigeaud à sa traduction des Poèmes de Sappho chez Rivages.
________________________________________________________________________________
Marie de Quatrebarbes est poète, elle a notamment publié Gommage de tête (Éric Pesty Éditeur, 2017) et La vie moins une minute (Lanskine, 2014). Elle a co-fondé la revue de poésie et de traduction La tête et les cornes et traduit Discipline de Dawn Lundy Martin (Joca Seria, 2019). Son prochain livre, Voguer, paraîtra en 2019 chez P.O.L https://mariedequatrebarbes.org/
________________________________________________________________________________
Translation from French to English by Carrie Chappell
“Who dives into their own dreams in armor?”, Monique Wittig, Paris-la-politique, P.O.L, 1999
Rather than a poet, it’s a poem I’d like to call upon. Sappho’s “[Like the very gods]” is perhaps, in many ways, THE poem, meaning it’s lasted, or it’s continued to (re-) become, throughout the centuries, the prototype of the perfect poem, unflinching for many known or unknown readers. Handed-down in care by a pseudo-Longin who held them up as an example of the sublime, taken back by Catullus, displaced by Louise Labé, reenacted by Rancine…what strikes in these lines by Sappho is their penetrating power, as in an ability to produce multiple dimensions of emotion within its structure, a signature that includes us, projects us into centuries past while simultaneously binding us to the present, replaying a connection to our current desires, and thus always troubling them.
There is something nearly frightening about the role of chance played in the preservation and transmission of these lines: Sappho’s poem could have just as easily failed to meet us here. Of course it is illusory to think that the sheer force of her lines is why they have escaped oblivion. But I continue to be surprised by the relationship (probably intricate) of the historical contingency of this preservation and the necessity of the poem itself that could justify its cultural hold. I do believe, in fact, that the strength of this poem is collective, that it has established itself in an accumulation of layers of attention, by the care of those who have cherished it by reinventing it.
Because these multiple reincarnations of “[Like the very gods]”give it thickness and life.* As if, through this single poem, something deposited itself in and between languages, living in the displacement and shuffle, not in spite of this but thanks to it. Thus, the poem reactivates, in each passage, becoming denser and more precise, increasing its territory of expression. Perhaps the access to a self-evident truth, that one feels in reading a poem, is proof of its ability to accommodate transformation, so well that every word in Sappho’s text is appears available to change, movement, and yet something very essential remains. That is why it is advantageous to have manifold versions—through reading, writing, and translating—in as many languages imaginable. **
* In reference to many versions of this Sappho poem, I turn to L'égal des dieux: Cent versions d’un poème de Sappho, produced by Philippe Brunet at Allia.
** Concerning the poem's translation issues, I recommend reading Jackie Pigeaud's introduction to her translation of Sappho: Poèmes at Rivages.
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Marie de Quatrebarbes is a poet, notably the author of Gommage de tête (Éric Pesty Editor, 2017) and La vie moins une minute (Lanskine, 2014). She co-founded the poetry and translation magazine La tête et les cornes and recently translated Discipline by Dawn Lundy Martin (Joca Seria, 2019). Her next book, Voguer, will appear in 2019 at P.O.L. https://mariedequatrebarbes.org/.
102---> nik & gregg
Name: Nik De Dominic
Hometown: Los Angeles, CA
Current city: Los Angeles, CA
Occupation: Assistant Professor, The Writing Program, University of Southern California
Age: 38
What does poetry mean to you?
Well, this question is much harder than the first five. Simply, a lot? It's still a weird thing, to say I'm a poet. Art and art making, I guess, I have guilt about. To make is to be selfish. To navel gaze. There's better shit I should be doing? I know it's not that simple, but I do certainly feel that way at times. Brendan Lorber, a poet, recently posted on Facebook, accompanying a recent publication of his poems: Have you ever traced the dark voyage of a person’s face as you tell them you’re a poet? It’s like saying you’re an alchemist or a wizard.
And I've always had difficulty both identifying as a poet and making poetry, partly because of that mystic-ness, other worldliness, and because of that, well, it's just not a thing people do. Too, its definition—what is poetry, what is a poem—is hard, slippery. Recently, Kaveh Akbar tweeted this: “If someone hands me a bag of dirt and tells me it’s a poem, it gets to be a poem. It might not be a poem that satisfies me intellectually or brings me any delight, I may not want to spend much time with it, but it’s a poem because the person who built it called it a poem.” And yes, I buy that; however, one of the snarky replies I saw was how absurd that definition is, that fiction writers don't run around calling donuts short stories. Do we need a definition? Is it ok that the definition shifts from poet to poet? Yes! Of course. For me, I look back on my 15 years of poems, and they are me figuring, figuring my self out on the page. They are a place to explore. What's that fancy word, interrogate? Yes, that, interrogate the self. And like through language and shit.
What is you favorite poem? Who is your favorite poet?
Both, too, are hard to answer. All of them? Like except the bad ones? I have been returning to Linda Gregg's work after her passing. There, yes, here, a favorite poem and a favorite poet:
Elegance
(as republished by Poetry Foundation)
By Linda Gregg
All that is uncared for.
Left alone in the stillness
in that pure silence married
to the stillness of nature.
A door off its hinges,
shade and shadows in an empty room.
Leaks for light. Raw where
the tin roof rusted through.
The rustle of weeds in their
different kinds of air in the mornings,
year after year.
A pecan tree, and the house
made out of mud bricks. Accurate
and unexpected beauty, rattling
and singing. If not to the sun,
then to nothing and to no one.
Why do you like this poem?
I think Gregg can help me with my shoddy definition above— that what poetry is and what it means:
Accurate
and unexpected beauty, rattling
and singing…
That is what I want from my work, all work. This is a poem.
Photo of Jessica Morey-Collins with a line of Dickinson's handwriting tattooed on her arm. It reads, "I'm Nobody! Who are you?"
101---> jessica & dickinson
Name: Jessica Morey-Collins
Hometown: Redlands, CA
Current city: Eugene, OR
Occupation: Planning Project Manager
Age: 30
What does poetry mean to you?
To me, poetry is a pedagogical catalyst and tool. Both writing it and reading it allow me to learn about the world around me and its inhabitants--poetry is my favorite way to engage with other perspectives and learn how people interact with their worlds.
Who is your favorite?
Emily Dickinson
Why do you like this poet?
I love that Dickinson does not shy away from any scale of attention—her poems allow themselves the grandeur of existential questions without losing connection to the cogs and leaves and droplets that comprise the sum of experience. As the daffodils assert themselves in my neighborhood, and I make the humbling move from one discipline to another, I think often of this tiny, huge poem of Dickinson's:
(361)
What I can do - I will -
Though it be little as a Daffodil -
That I cannot - must be
Unknown to possibility -
So often it feels like I can't impart the kinds of changes or do the kinds of work that I want to. This poem reminds me not to overlook simpler impacts—preparing meals for loved ones, offering a hug or a few moments of shared time.
Photo by Richard Dailey
100---> jason & rilke
Name: Jason Stoneking
Hometown: It's complicated, USA
Current city: Paris
Occupation: Writer
Age: 45
What does poetry mean to you?
It means a freedom of the mind. An escape from the drudgery of practical discourse. A voice for the deeper sincerity, swimming in the disorganized muck of preconscious thought, that so rarely finds expression in more strictly codified forms of writing. It means custom starlight pushed through a pen into unexplored personal darkness. It means an astronautics of inner space.
What is your favorite poem? Who is your favorite poet?
My favorite poems and poets are constantly changing, between my moods, memories, and shifting perspectives, and all the new voices appearing on the scene. It feels impossible to narrow them down. I have a new favorite every week or two, and more old favorites than I can fit on the nightstand. But it wasn't always like that. At the beginning, there were the first few poets who got to me, and the first few poems that touched me deeply. The ones that opened the prison doors. For this project, I will pay homage to a prose poem that was important for me quite early, and helped to lead me onto my path: Rainer Maria Rilke's "For the Sake of a Single Poem," as translated by Stephen Mitchell.
For the sake of a single poem
by Rainer Maria Rilke
from his novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, as translated by Stephen Mitchell
… Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) — they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you have long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else — ); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars, — and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves — only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
Why do you like this poem?
When I first discovered Rilke, everything he had written felt magical to me. His Letters to a Young Poet hit me like they were written with me in mind. They made me want to be that young poet who received them, and then become the older poet who had written them. The Selected Poetry (Stephen Mitchell translation) had a place in my bag at a time when one bag was all I had in the world. The reason this particular piece sticks in my memory is not necessarily that it is my favorite but that it encapsulates so much of what made the whole of Rilke's work so important to me when I was young. It helped me understand that to embrace poetry was to embrace a lifestyle, a calling, a deep and meaningful sacrifice. It was not just to sit in a classroom among dozens of others, going through the same motions and processing the same lessons. It was a hunger one had to have, to give their whole life to poetry, to risk everything for it. And Rilke seemed to promise that if we embraced poetry in this way, poetry would embrace us in return. I believed him then, and I still do now. Perhaps what inspired me most about this particular poem was noticing that although it cautions us that great poetry can only result from rich lifetimes of lived experience, this piece itself was printed when Rilke was only 25. Meaning that Rilke himself did not feel ready to write his mature work, but he already felt ready to give his whole way of being over to a lifelong process toward that work. It was a leap he took, and it made me feel like he was holding my hand when I leapt too.
For the sake of a single response poem
to Rainer Maria Rilke
by Jason Stoneking
Dearest Rainer,
As you warned me, the poems I wrote early in my life amounted to little. But, like you, I kept writing them anyway; and I set about the gathering of sense and nonsense, sweet and sour, experience with which to infuse my all-too-common emotions. I saw many cities, lived like an animal in their streets, flew like a bird in psychedelic ecstasies, watched flowers open, then smelled them, picked them, smoked them, and planted more. I met with strangers in suspicious alleyways, lost lovers and friends in predictable ways, and sacrificed my childhood on the altar of still-unexplained mystery. I hurt and frightened my parents, made myself many kinds of ill, transformed myself in loud rooms, lacking restraint, and traversed countless seas. I still fly with the stars, and reflect on nights full of love. I have helped to deliver a child, held the hands of the dying, and traveled thousands of miles with the Dead. I have forgotten many memories by which I have since been revisited, and I have felt my past inhabit me physically, erasing the boundary between memory and being. I am now older than you were when you wrote your words of advice, and all of the hours feel rare. I wait, in the same city where you lived then, for the first word of my poem for you to arise.
99---> jess & greenstreet
Name: Jessica Lee Richardson, but Jess is fine.
What does poetry mean to you?
It means the air has changed. It glints. I am somewhere I was always going, a place I know, but I have never been and will never return. Am I accidentally quoting someone here? I might be. . .
What is your favorite poem?
No, I can’t do it. Some poems have impacted me so much they’ve become a part of my life. So how about if I shrink the question? Favorite poem I’ve heard read (by a poet I didn’t know)?
I would pick this one by Kate Greenstreet. It stunned me when I heard it in Tuscaloosa sometime in the early 2010’s at Green Bar, surrounded by a big, quiet crowd:
our weakness no stranger
It must have been great at first. The gravel lane,
the white phone, the cakes. That lampshade,
we had. Absolutely exact.
A family was standing in a high place.
Down in the street, a car beeped
and then they all waved. You see what it becomes.
He was a boy once.
He remembers
his father. And all the men.
He rebuilds the maze, he’ll bring his son here.
Why do you laugh? are you afraid?
Will you sit here ’til I fall asleep?
She has her habit in the suitcase.
Even a stone can disappear.
And now this. This is really hard.
Yes. Or “be a man.”
Imagine how strong he’d need to be.
Please don’t tell me more about the future.
As you’ve heard
it has started to
snow
again
snow chains
on the mountain roads
chains are needed
What light!
He beats her.
And everybody knows.
Here’s the house, still white.
Arms
Sight
Absence
The life I’d have. Giant apples?
or the first red leaves? What else did he like?
Let’s go under those trees.
She looks after them
with concern. How long? Considering the ties
of that year. The knots. Was it just a sex thing?
We were looking for a street.
There had been
some kind of earthquake.
And I remember this part very clearly—
Something so familiar, not from now
but—it’s like dating a statue. I mean,
500 BC600 BCdating it.
There were no men. I don’t know why.
War.
Or just the time of day. Let me hear his name again.
I looked it up, but it wasn’t there. I got
“Do I have to use a condom?” and
“Your camera doesn’t matter.”
Promise.
Swear not to.
The shelves are empty. Everyone’s
lifetime.
I thought you didn’t believe in sin.
Statue burns down, we make another statue.
There’s a special name for
all of us are having the same dream.
Why do you like this poem?
It really arrested me when I heard it. It still does. Her voice. There’s no pushing. It’s hard and warm and creates an atmosphere that’s irreal even though it's authentic. It’s completely singular. But I recognize it. The clipping of thoughts. Endless conversations that can’t go on. The way trauma chops the memory, the sentence, the line.
Every simple word of this poem is charged. There is constant surprise.
What light!
He beats her.
And everybody knows.
The narrator is present here holding this devastation, saying, “You see what it becomes.” Saying, “Why do you laugh? are you afraid?” Or telling us where to look. “Let’s go under those trees.” There is a kindness and also a ferocity in the way it’s held. “Please don’t tell me more about the future.” We have a guide in this narrator, the only kind there is, the kind not pretending to be capable of the job, the one admitting the job can’t be done. But it doesn’t need to be, because you know the truth, don’t you? You coauthored this dream and the dream that allows this dream.
Not only can the metaphorical statue not be dated, it can be burned down, made anew. There is nothing to hold onto. Time is exploded at the end enacting this:
The shelves are empty. Everyone’s
lifetime.
It’s a terrible intimacy that’s created, this warmth constructed from eerily familiar scraps of reckoning. Statue making. Ligaments we know are erased. Halting lines encased in breath.
In the last line "dream" can be interpreted in enough ways to offer a glimmer of gritty hope, or at least wonder. The dream of the patriarchy is only one dream. There are others we can have. There is the dream of the poem. And then there are the ones at night and maybe we can meet up there and begin to remake.
________________________________________________________________________________
Jessica Lee Richardson is the author of It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides (FC2, 2015), which won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize and was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award in 2016. Poems have appeared in Posit, Sundog, Big Lucks and other places. She is from New Jersey, and spent her twenties in Brooklyn working in Off-Broadway theatre. Lately, she’s been writing about (and running from) record-breaking storms in the southeast.
98---> gabrielle & kearney
Name: Gabrielle Lawrence
Hometown: Southern California
Current city: Little Rock, AR
Occupation: Freelance Writer & Editor
Age: 23
What does poetry mean to you?
Something like water.
And a process by which I make sense of life.
Who is your favorite poet?
My favorite poet right now is Douglas Kearney. Though only recently exposed to him, I've been completely captivated by the energy and complexities of his work. By simply knowing his name I've been introduced to a whole world of poets and writers who directly activate the kind of childish exuberance and wonder I remember experiencing in my earliest reading adventures. I’ve learned about writers like Harryette Mullen, Duriel Harris, Quincy Trope, and several others. Every poem, essay, and interview I've been able to get my hands on by these incredible authors have felt like gifts, over and over again.
Why do you like this poet?
Every piece I’ve read by Kearney seems like a re-imagination of form. It feels free to me, which is something I’d like to cultivate more in my own practice. Even in his audio projects or readings, there’s depth and dimension but not in the ways I feel like I was taught to look for it. For example in sound, it’s not just the syllables and consonants matching or marrying on the page, but I get a clearer sense of how they relate to each other outside of the poem in a real(er) or otherwise lived experience.
I especially love the videos, the Tumblr sites, the recordings, the data, and all of the things feeding his projects that serve as companions to his more recent book projects. The multimedia notes for Patter (2014) are here. Mess and Mess (2015) also has a Tumblr site which you can find here. I’ve never experienced a piece of writing by Kearney without having a list of things to study and research afterward. That’s exciting to me. Even though we don’t always get to see the research going into a poem, I love that he brings his to the forefront and shares that information with people in an accessible way. His interviews are also gold mines.
Overall, I love how he plays with texture but in a physical sense, in a way that I think I’ve been craving for a while. I think he uses language economically. Making all parts of the word functional by bending, breaking, layering, creating new languages, interrogating their structure and purpose in a way that can conjure a world of translations even when static on the page. I like the way his work moves.
I also think reading Kearney, and authors like Kearney, is teaching me a lot about the difference between writers who know their “why” and those who aren’t quite clear on what that is yet.
"Hot Mess, Blue Smoke" by Gabrielle Lawrence
My collage "Hot Mess, Blue Smoke" is inspired not only by Kearney's writing and where I was when I started reading him but also by the schools of thought I was introduced to through his work. For me, a lot of the poetry I read (or was supposed to read) either shocked or sparked something in me. More often than not I experienced the shock, usually in the traumatic sense of the word. However when I experienced Kearney's work, I felt like I was being lit up from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head. It was electric and dynamic. Then, I followed up with my own research, which led me to even more poets whose work sparked my imagination and other parts of my brain that felt dead.
Making this collage was a reaction to feeling life where I hadn't in a while, or at least giving myself permission to. More specifically, I was motivated by these authors to become more active in my transmuting process, and given tools to transform my mindset about overstimulation into abundance.
________________________________________________________________________________
Gabrielle Lawrence is a writer and editor. Her writing can be found in Another Chicago Magazine, Rising Phoenix Review, The Squawk Back, Moonchild Magazine, Gravel Magazine, A Gathering Together Journal, Sundog Lit, and others. Even when she isn’t doing the most, she is still in the spirit of much. Follow her on Twitter @gabrielle__l or visit gabrielle-lawrence.comfor more info.
Photo by Jean-Philippe Cazier
97---> maël & la lorgnette du cinéma
Nom: Maël Guesdon
Ville: Paris
Qu'est-ce qui signifie, pour vous, la poésie?
Qui est votre poète préféré? Quel est votre poème préféré?
Pourquoi aimez-vous ce poète, ce poème ?
Si je pense à ces questions avec la perspective nécessairement un peu rétrospective qu’elles supposent, ce ne sont pas des écrivains mais d’abord des films qui me viennent en tête : précisément deux films que j’ai vus par hasard, c’est-à-dire sans avoir voulu les voir, au moment où l’on commence parfois à lire et où je ne lisais pas. Ce sont des films (peu importe les titres) qui n’appartiennent pas du tout au monde des enfants, sûrement les premiers films de ce type que j’ai vus. D’un coup, les images devenaient obscures, équivoques et floues. Elles ne promettaient plus un ailleurs, comme celui des contes de l’enfance. Elles étaient même très largement incompréhensibles. Mais ce sont par ces images (que j’ai aimées) qu’est venue la lecture, et en particulier, pour citer un « poète préféré », celle des articles de Serge Daney. La lecture est venue par la lorgnette du cinéma comme une manière de comprendre ce que ces images dans leur fragmentation montraient sans le raconter. Elle est venue comme une manière de voir ce qu’une image peut cacher de celles qu’elle recouvre, et comment elle les révèle ou les étouffe. Elle permettait surtout de comprendre comment ce geste de recouvrement concerne tous nos goûts, c’est-à-dire, pour ne prendre qu’un seul cas cher à Daney et qui concerne les années 1980 et 1990 dans lesquelles j’ai grandi, comment par exemple ce qu’on accepte et ce qu’on refuse de l’héritage des vagues synthétiques du Grand bleu renforce ou déjoue la plongée solitaire dans le recouvrement successif des clichés. C’est par cette pensée des images, par cette lecture des formes de la fiction (les deux films en question étaient inracontables mais analysables) que s’est construit, pour moi, un lien entre cinéma et poésie, avec un prix à payer : un certain abandon du récit en faveur de la description de ces régimes de recouvrement.
________________________________________________________________________________
Traduit du français par Carrie Chappell/ Translated from French to English by Carrie Chappell
If I think about these questions in the necessarily retrospective perspective they presuppose, I do not think firstly of writers but rather of films, especially two films I happened to watch, meaning two films I had not so much intended to see, at the time when one begins reading and I was not. They were films (no matter their titles) that do not belong to the world of children, surely the very first films like this I had ever seen. All at once, their images became confusing, unintelligible, and blurry. They no longer professed a beyond, like that which you find in fairytales. They were even largely incomprehensible. Yet, it is through these images (ones I liked) that I began to read, and particularly to name a “favorite poet,” the writings of Serge Daney. Reading came to me through the lens of cinema as a way to understand what these images, in their fragmentation, showed without telling. Learning to read through this lens was learning to see what an image hides in what it is itself laid over, and how an image can, in turn, release or stifle that. This reading practice allowed me, above all, to realize how the recurring act of image-overlay affects our tastes in every arena, namely, to take an example dear to Daney and that addresses the 1980-1990s when I was growing up, how one accepts or refuses the influence of the synthetic waves in The Big Blue reinforces or frustrates solitary diving in the successive overlapping of cliché. By thinking through these images, by reading through these fictional shapes (the two films in question were difficult to summarize but begged interpretation) that I constructed a link between cinema and poetry, with a price to pay: a certain desertion of narrative in order to describe the fabric and station of overlay.
96---> maia & stein
Name: Maia Elgin
Hometown: I was born in Blue Hill, ME, raised mostly in La Crosse, WI, and identify with New Orleans, LA.
Current city: Cleveland, MS
Occupation: Assistant Professor of English at Delta State University
Age: 31
What does poetry mean to you?
There are two river teeth (thanks, David James Duncan) that stick out from my developing poetic consciousness. The first happened when I was 10 and I wrote a poem after my grandmother died: “What I feel is emptiness / I can’t cry so I laugh / something is missing something strong / I know that something is gone.” I couldn’t name my “lost innocence” or “grief” in that moment; Grandma Smith was gone, but something else was gone, too, a part of myself, like “the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad feeling I sometimes get” (props to Judith Viorst for providing a name for my anxiety), so I wrote a poem and read it at her funeral. To name something is to understand it, and I still can’t do either for that loss. I find that the moment we think we understand anything, the meaning shifts. To name something is to (mis)understand it, but poeming something can help ease the unknowing.
The second tooth came much later, after I already had an MFA and a chapbook and was trying to convince myself that I could be called a poet. I saw a duck in City Park in New Orleans with a broken leg and I thought about its innocent suffering. I thought about the “immense suffering of all things” and “the problem with evil” and “the face of an immensely cold and cruel universe.” And every poem I’ve written since then has been about that duck.
Audre Lorde said, “it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt.”
Who is your favorite poet?
Why do you like this poet?
First of all, Stein was a revolutionary in her own right who has been barred by the great canonizers that be from the kind of recognition she deserves because she had a vagina. Yes, I’ve heard rumors that her womanizing also rivaled that of the men who attended her salons, but it’s her meaning making, in this case, that matters here. Her particular brand of modernism moved poetry closest to pure abstraction, and I see what she was doing in the terms of Wassily Kandinsky: we cannot express a spiritual truth with material imagery. Her work with connotation made language strange à la Shklovsky and brought new meaning and feeling when all the old words had become cliché. She taught me that there is (more) sense in unsense.
“to the road kill cat” is in some ways an imitation poem built off of the line “The difference is spreading” from “A Carafe, that is a blind glass.” Stein’s poems in Tender Buttons take the familiar and “rend” it unfamiliar, divorcing the referent from the word and creating (revealing) a simulacra of language, but I’m interested in the ways meaning can be restored, to language, to suffering...In this poem, which is also a process poem, I guess trying to (and writing, to some extent, about trying to) access the "nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt."
to the road kill cat
after Gertrude Stein
by Maia Elgin
the distance is rending
a light breeze—terrible
density creates
an unlikely orange mountain
a triumphant trunk
the tar the tar
of a teen-aged labyrinth
the nighttime shit-shadow
in the shape of a dog
and the homemade collage
becoming unfamiliar
a great parisian
liquidates the final soldier
a something is just
beginning to become
and not knowing a boulder
the looming
the looming and a sharp prick
to be human is to uncouple the stars
________________________________________________________________________________
Maia Elgin has recent poems in Tarpaulin Sky, InDigest, Ghost Town, and Glitter Pony. Her chapbook The Jennifer was published in 2012 by Birds of Lace Press. An assistant professor at Delta State University, she earned her MFA at LSU. She lives in the Mississippi Delta with her partner, two cats, and a dog.
95---> tina & kelly
Name: Tina Mozelle Braziel
Hometown: Pell City, AL
Current town: Remlap, AL
Occupation: Director of the Ada Long Creative Writing Workshop
Age: 46
What does poetry mean to you?
For me, poetry deepens experience. Offers new perspectives. Draws me farther into mystery. Gives pause. Lengthens moments. Reading, hearing, and writing poetry means savoring.
What is your favorite poem?
"All Wild Animals Were Once Called Deer" by Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Why do you like this poem?
I was never a fan-girl. I didn't cover my walls with posters of Madonna or of boy bands. In fact, my first (maybe my only) poster was of Dwight Yoakam. His cowboy hat tilted over his face. I didn't mind that. I wasn't imagining him, but his song "1000 Miles from Nowhere." And I liked how he looked in his jeans. But this poem made me swoon with an adolescent infatuation I had never experienced before. I was so ga-ga that my poetry professor and my boyfriend (he's now my husband) were concerned enough to talk to me about valuing my own voice. Why did I fall so hard? Because I've known such moments, quiet among other people in a rural neighborhood waiting for something or someone to pick me up, carry me elsewhere. Moments when the sublime crept up and took me deeper into where I was. It didn't matter that the landscape wasn't picture perfect. It was still gorgeous, still beautiful if brutal and threatening. And what solace in these lines: "The swan is made for the water. / You can't judge him out of it. He's made for the chapter / in the rushes."
________________________________________________________________________________
Tina Mozelle Braziel won the 2017 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry for her book Known by Salt (Anhinga Press 2019). Her chapbook, Rooted by Thirst, came out in 2016 with Porkbelly Press. Her individual poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Southern Humanities Review, Tampa Review, Appalachian Heritage, PMSpoemmemoirstory (where her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize) and other journals.
94---> matthew & brock-broido
Name: Matthew W. Baker (Matt for short)
Hometown: Lawrence, PA, in the suburbs of Pittsburgh
Current City: Reno, NV
Occupation: high school English teacher
Age: 30
What does poetry mean to you?
Writing poetry is a time-stop. The minutes melt off the space around me like rubber exposed to lava. I don’t notice the world around me, and I think that’s a good thing. As much as my writing tries to engage some of the larger questions we all have about the sociopolitical, environmental, and inter/intrapersonal relationships around and between us, being totally sequestered in time during this process helps me focus. I can spend a half-hour worrying about the order of words in a line; I can write, cross out, and rewrite a metaphor; and I can tinker with the idea of expressing something in a narrative way or an un-narrative way. Writing also lets me reclaim some of my life from the relentless pour of forwardness that comes with having a job and other non-creative deadlines. So often, I don’t feel like I have the space to write because a great deal of teaching requires a kind of giving up of myself. I love working with students and answering questions, but the tedium of grading and prepping for classes weighs down on creative-me sometimes. So when I write, I get a little bit of that time back, and I’ve realized it’s important to guard that time the more I advance in my professional career.
Reading poetry creates an intellectual and emotional link between me and other people and language. I don’t usually feel a 100% connection to the other poets I’m reading, at least not on a personal level. Instead, I engage more with their thinking and try to exercise my empathy muscles, but it’s dangerous for me, a white, relatively hetero male, to equate my experiences to many other people’s. Poetry, more than any other medium, allows me to approximate those folks’ lives as closely as possible without imposing my own sensibilities. The feel of words heightens this encounter, too. I love to read poems out loud in my room and hear rhymes and rhythms. If a poem employs a lot of alliteration and assonance, I get giddy. I pause and breathe deeply and read the line (or entire poem) over again. That sound pulls me into the scene or the emotional journey of the poem and helps me inhabit that event sometimes more easily than just understanding the meaning of the words themselves.
Who is your favorite poet?
Lucie Brock-Broido is a recent favorite poet of mine. It’s funny—I think all poets (and readers in general) have favorite writers of the moment. Brock-Broido is one of those poets for me, though I think her work will definitely stick with me for years to come.
I recently picked up her collection Stay, Illusion and had an awesome time reading it. One reason I feel connected to Brock-Broido’s work is because we are both originally from Pittsburgh (shameless hometown promotion). I never really thought anything cool happened in Pittsburgh when I was younger, and I certainly never thought anyone creative was born there. (I was a really disaffected, unobservant youth—I am sorry, Pittsburgh!) So when I stumbled upon Brock-Broido’s work after her death in 2018, it had this weird magnetic pull. Her work is mysterious because she hardly says things plainly, but not in an abstract, look-at-me-being-obtuse-to-be-obtuse way. Her metaphors are particularly evocative for this reason. I might understand each word individually, but the connection between the image and the object of the metaphor might leave me totally stumped wondering how one thing compares to the other. In a sense, I feel like I’m trying to piece a puzzle together, but I’m doing that work with a friend (which might sound weird since I never met Brock-Broido, but I think that’s the Pittsburgh connection at work).
One poem from this collection that stands out to me is “You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World.” The poem itself is a meditation on the concept that humans have tethered themselves so fully and absurdly to the earth in an attempt to remain alive even though life is only a brief guarantee. Brock-Broido also touches on the way people have created ecological devastation in the process of harnessing themselves to life. The first line of the poem sets up an honesty hard to come by in everyday life: “Tell the truth I told me When I couldn’t speak.” As if the speaker is reprimanding herself and demanding a type of hyper-focused reflection, the mood of the poem becomes immediately urgent, which makes the larger thematic concerns urgent, too. This honesty also allows the speaker to seem vulnerable when she writes, “According to the census I am unmarried And unchurched.” I feel the speaker’s concern here—what will happen to a woman who appears to be outside of these societal institutions that, many times, make a person feel like a seen member of society. What happens to someone who is alone, someone who doesn’t associate with religion? And as if the speaker answers herself, she says later on, “I am obliged, now, to refrain from dying, for as long as it is possible. / For whom left am I first?” Here is where the poem seems to turn. Even though the speaker might not necessarily subscribe to the fact that being single and un-associated with a church means she’s an outsider, she feels like she needs to hang on to the life she has, to stick around and make herself noticeable because there is this anxiety that maybe she isn’t this “first” idea (or any idea at all) that someone else keeps in mind. And while the speaker meditates, “big beautiful / Blubbery white bears” are holding onto disappearing patches of ice. While the speaker contemplates mortality, other species are left cleaving to their own tiny remaining pieces of life.
What mystifies me about this poem, though, and thus compels me to reread it again and again, is some of the imagery. In the middle of the poem, Brock-Broido writes, “The woman in the field dressed only in the sun.” In the context of the poem, this image comes after the speaker says she’s “unmarried” and “unchurched.” So, on a literal level, the image is just a lone woman standing with no one but herself in a sunlit field. Metaphorically, perhaps, the image highlights this feeling of people so singular that the only things left to them are the clothes on their backs and the feel of the sun on their skin—an aloneness that seems so stark and cold despite the warm light. So, sure, I know what the image “means,” but I don’t really understand how I should feel about it—I’m mystified. Dean Young writes in The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction, “Anything fully known offers us no site of entry, no site of escape, no site of desire” (85). A poem that just explains everything, or an image that just has one way of being interpreted, doesn’t encourage multiple readings and doesn’t allow the reader to puzzle. Because I don’t know how to feel when I read this image in Brock-Broido’s piece, I desire to return to it. I want to puzzle it out. Of course, I never really come to a conclusion any time I revisit this poem, so that sense of mystery I love in Brock-Broido’s work lingers.
What I love about this collection is that it makes me strive for a sense of ineffability in my own work. Reading Brock-Broido’s images and metaphors impresses on me that I need to let go of being so literal or so explanatory in my poetry. I want to create a “site of desire” in my work that readers respond to. And so as much as Brock-Broido is a recent favorite, I think this specific collection will be one of those books I keep on my shelves my entire life.
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Matthew W. Baker’s poetry has appeared in Sundog Lit, Booth, and Matador Review.
93---> gabrielle & cortázar
Name: Gabrielle Bates
Hometown: Birmingham, Alabama
Current City: Seattle, Washington
Occupation: Writer, Editor, Social Media Manager for Open Books: A Poem Emporium
Age: 27
What does poetry mean to you?
Poetry is the force around which so much of my life orbits. Reading it, writing it, and celebrating it has brought me so many opportunities and adventures in this life (not to mention the vast majority of my friendships). It gives my life, my thoughts, my unsayables shape and course.
What is your favorite poem?
It changes by the day, but right now I'm really into the poem "To Be Read in the Interrogative" by Julio Cortázar. In one English translation (I believe by Stephen Kessler) it goes:
Have you seen
have you truly seen
the snow the stars the felt steps of the breeze
Have you touched
really have you touched
the plate the bread the face of that woman you love so much
Have you lived
like a blow to the head
the flash the gasp the fall the flight
Have you known
known in every pore of your skin
how your eyes your hands your sex your soft heart
must be thrown away
must be wept away
must be invented all over again
Why do you like this poem?
I love how deceptively simple it is, how deft and surprising it increasingly becomes as the poem unfolds. It's the kind of poem I like to have memorized, so I can carry it around with me in the folds of my brain. I love how it reminds me to be awake and alive in my life.
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Gabrielle Bates is a writer and visual artist. You can follow her on Twitter @GabrielleBates and on Instagram @Gabrielle_Bates_.