92---> yelena & tsvetaeva

Name: Yelena Moskovich

Hometown: Kharkiv, Ukraine (former-USSR) and Milwaukee, Wisconsin (US), and a bit in Kiriat-Ata & Tsfat, Israel

Current city: Paris, France

 Occupation: Writer and artist

 Age: 34

What does poetry mean to you? 

A holy tear on a profane cheek.

Who is your favorite poet?

Many, many, many – and Marina Tsvetaeva. Particularly, “Nights without the beloved…”.

It's been on my mind recently quite a bit, perhaps because I also use part of it to open my second novel, Virtuoso (which came out recently, early 2019).

Why do you like this poem?

It’s about that longing that exists between devotion and disbelief, between innocence and skepticism.

It speaks so acutely of loneliness for me. Loneliness for love, for heroism, for a nation.

The poem is small enough to fit into your bedroom on a quiet solo evening, yet it unfolds centuries of nights.

When I recite the poem, I feel that I’m somehow accompanied in that loneliness, in that fall from faith in life, and in the simultaneous call for newfound hope.

“Nights without the beloved…”

Translated into English by Yelena Moskovich

Nights without the beloved - and nights

With the one you don’t love, and huge stars

Above the feverish head, and hands,

Reaching out to the one

Who hasn’t for ages existed – and won’t exist –

Who cannot exist – and must exist…

And the child’s tear for the hero,

And the hero’s tear for the child,

And massive, bouldering mountains

On the chest of the one who must - descend…

I know all that was, all that will be,

I know the deaf and dumb mystery,

That the dim and tangled

Tongue of the people calls – Life.

 -July 6th, 1918

(Marina Tsvetaeva)

The original:

Ночи без любимого — и ночи

С нелюбимым, и большие звезды

Над горячей головой, и руки,

Простирающиеся к Тому —

Кто от века не был — и не будет,

Кто не может быть — и должен быть.

И слеза ребенка по герою,

И слеза героя по ребенку,

И большие каменные горы

На груди того, кто должен — вниз...

Знаю всё, что было, всё, что будет,

Знаю всю глухонемую тайну,

Что на темном, на косноязычном

Языке людском зовется — Жизнь.

 -6 июля 1918

(Марина Цветаева)

91---> nathalie & cummings

Name: Nathalie Rozanes

Hometown: Geneva

Current City: Brussels

Occupation: Actress, performer, director, author

What does poetry mean to you?

It’s strange; it is difficult to put words to this. I’ll try. I feel poetry means to me a vacation to a territory beyond the boundaries of language and material meaning we mostly live in. When making poetry it means saying through the filter of an individual body (of experience) and when witnessing it, the relief of feeling a three-dimensional person behind an object. In that sense, poetry means an object that is connected to life and an escape from the dead materiality and flatness I feel we are mostly surrounded by. 

I think poetry is also the politics created through the tension between different shapes. So a politics that embraces multiplicity and complexity in its nature. I don’t really think of poetry as necessarily married to the form of the poem or even writing, but I do think of it as connected to some form of musicality and rhythm. I might mean by that, that I think of poetry as something that has a precise movement, a breath, a tension.

What is your favorite poem?

l(a

le

af

fa

ll

s)

one

l

iness

(e.e cummings)

Why do you like this poem?

I read someone a while ago who said that sometimes when you discover a piece of art, it’s as if you had been sitting in a dark room without knowing it and that someone suddenly turned the lights on. That’s exactly what certain encounters felt like to me and the first time that ever happened with a written poem (and I remember it happening) was when I was a teenager. And a strange one. A high school teacher, Mr. Stahl, introduced my English class to e.e. cummings’ poem “l(a.” The poem blew my mind. Even though I was drawing all the time, I had never thought of language visually or in graphics, nor experienced any type of man-produced writing that was open to so many layers of meaning. I remember being moved by its simplicity and at the same time in awe that one person with a pen and a piece of paper had made something so complete. I studied it religiously. The poem was an entity in itself and yet seemed infinite. It rebelled against (linguistic) limitations I thought were needed to make sense and spoke as it wished. I also remember it being a physical sensation. My body resonating with it. I felt like I had discovered a secret language that could express feelings I knew and had no words for. It made me want to write like that. Speak the words I read. Maybe at the time I also just needed to see the word “loneliness” cracked open somewhere. I am not sure if I can still say “l(a” is my favorite poem. Other voices have spoken to me since and been very important. Just like with people, sometimes you cross roads with a piece of art exactly when you need it, without knowing that you did. For example, I had extremely strong and direct sensations studying the first Duino Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke for a performance, or playing Andromaque and Phèdre by Jean Racine, or Cleansed and Crave by Sarah Kane, or listening to people like Ursula Rucker, or seeing the photographs of Francesca Woodman, or watching Elizabeth Ward dance, or a couple of years ago reading the fierce and elegant work of Ariana Reines for the first time was a shock (and I am so excited for her new collection A Sand Book to come out soon), or the beautiful texts of the Belgian/Albanian poet and director Sofie Kokaj who will direct a translation of hers of a play by Richard Foreman in the early summer in Brussels. They are tremendous and infinite territories of freedom and sanity to me, but “l(a” opened that door.

________________________________________________________________________________

Nathalie Rozanes (b. Zürich 1986) is an actress, director, and writer based in Belgium. As an actress she has performed across Europe for film and stage in projects by directors such as Claudia Bosse, Ziad Doueiri, Lucie Guien, Sofie Kokaj, Claude Schmitz, & Ted Tremper. Currently, she is writing a feature film project called Ushuaia produced by Neon Rouge Production. Her solo performance Francesca, a tribute to photographer Francesca Woodman, which includes translations of fragments of Ariana Reines’ Coeur de Lion and “An hourglass figure: On photographer Francesca Woodman”, premiered at Théâtre National in Brussels in 2016. Her performance March, a duet with dancer Elizabeth Ward with electronic music by Frédéric Altstadt was developed at workspacebrussels and will premier at Campo in Ghent in 2020. Nathalie graduated from INSAS in Brussels in 2011. She has written lyrics for various musicians such as Sanja Maas and Caroline Cohen. She has been published by Soirée Berkson (Vienna) and This Container Magazine (Stockholm).

 

90---> jennifer & niedecker

Name: Jennifer K Dick

 Hometown: from Minnesota, grew up in Iowa City, Iowa

 Current cities: officially reside in Mulhouse, France, but I am often “on the road”, running reading events in Paris, attending readings and conferences elsewhere, or searching out new adventures during the summer months. As a Sagittarius is want to be, I am endlessly prone to travel.

Occupation: Maître de Conférences at the Université de Haute Alsace

Age : going too quickly towards 50 !

What does poetry mean to you?

Everything. What occurs first? Breath, life, light, a window onto a world even when one is in the darkest of dank, dungeon rooms, a ticking bomb of thought excursions dragging me out of myself and into/through the others linguistically, historically, socio-politically.

Who is your favorite poet?

A poet I found hard to appreciate at first, and now admire: Lorine Niedecker.

Her work seemed too easy, until I started to play around with imitations—and dug into her deceptively simple complex style. Trying to write a Niedeker-esque poem reveals their hidden complexities.

For example, her poem (online at The Paris Review website, thank you to them):

Who was Mary Shelley?

Who was Mary Shelley?
What was her name
before she married?

 She eloped with this Shelley
she rode a donkey
till the donkey had to be carried.

Mary was Frankenstein's creator
his yellow eye
before her husband was to drown

Created the monster nights
after Byron, Shelley
talked the candle down.

Who was Mary Shelley?
She read Greek, Italian
She bore a child

Who died
and yet another child
who died.

For the anthology, I offer my attempt at a response to it. Here, I sought to comment within my poem on her poetry about reading and thinking about Shelley, and about my own not questioning or thinking about the things she was fascinated by:

While Reading Niedecker

 by Jennifer K. Dick

Talked the candle down

     Late with a dog-eared Frankenstein

Never questioning the origins of Shelley

     Or each child born, died, born,

Tattered pages turning, turning in the night.

In my experience of trying to write through Lorine Niedecker’s work, I found her “dense and fixed”, unmelting into the universe I sought to recreate, staking instead her own territory.  It is perhaps for this reason her work continues to appeal to so many readers, and has grown on me so that I, too, have come to a deep sense of appreciation for her work. Niedecker’s poetry carries me back to my own, Midwestern roots and times spent in Wisconsin. As for responding to her poetry, taking it into a new place, it seems to me that Niedecker herself was aware of how difficult it would be for her to be displaced, replaced in some present of my or another author’s choosing. As she wrote :

“Don’t melt too much into the universe, but be

as cold and dense and fixed as you can.”

________________________________________________________________________________

Jennifer K. Dick runs the Ivy Writers Paris reading series. She has 2 books forthcoming this summer: Lilith: A Novel in Verse (Corrupt Books, Luxembourg) and That Which I Touch Has No Name (Eyewear Books, London).