Halpern, Woloch, Lippman, et. al.

Daniel Halpern on “50 KILOS, c. 1939”:

I thought I would write about this poem because it’s a poem I thought could work as a poem when I heard it on Scott Simon’s NPR Weekend Edition show.  It amazed me to hear of someone so committed to their art they would do what this young musician did when he was about to be carted off to the Terezín concentration camp.  As the poem says, he was allowed to take 50 kg of whatever he wanted to bring with him.  I imagined most people brought clothes, medication, photographs, cured meat, and so on.   But he chose to bring something actually verboten — a musical instrument.

As I listened to the program, I wondered what else he could possibly bring if he was including a cello — deconstructed as it was.  So I did some research, which is always a good idea if you’re writing about a subject you know nothing about, and discovered that a cello weighs only 2-3 kilos, which happily left him many free kilos.  But his was not a quantitative decision.  It was certainly in his mind that without his cello life would not be worth living, regardless of the situation (thus the Victor Ullmann epigraph).  This part of the poem I’m obviously imagining, since I wasn’t there and didn’t know him.  Friedrich Löwy was his name.

Research, even writing a poem, I find to be an extremely comforting experience. It allows you to feel confident that what needs to be factual in the poem is factual — not that factual is the point in much poetry.

I had to look up the names of the parts of the cello and read a few passages from books about cellos, to make sure the details were accurate — for example, the Pernambuco bow and other parts:  frog and screw.

And then I wondered how he was allowed to reassemble the cello once he entered the camp, when music by Jewish prisoners was not initially allowed in the camp.  Anyway, I did my best to check some of the details and hope it’s mostly accurate.

The point of a poem, of course, does not necessarily have to do with the facts.  The point is to make the poem the fact.  To turn the facts and relevant details into something living on the page.

In this poem, I wanted to invoke this young man’s love for music, which eventually he was allowed to share with the other prisoners, along with their Schutzstaffel guards.  I don’t think I’ve ever written a poem quite like this one, and thanks to Scott Simon, this poem found its way onto the page — hopefully assembled.

 

 

Cecilia Woloch on translating Krystyna Lenkowska:

For the past several years, I’ve lived part time in Rzeszów, a Polish city near the Ukrainian border. I’m fortunate to be part of a small, lively literary community here, and particularly lucky to have the Polish poet and translator Krystyna Lenkowska as a neighbor. We’re both fascinated by the translation process, probably because we’re both obsessed with the nuances of language, and we began translating one another’s poems as an extension of our conversations about the translation process. Krystyna’s English is excellent, so she always does a first draft of her own in English, and then I work with that draft, going back and forth with her about nuances of meaning, and sound, and context. This is challenging, of course, because Polish and English have very different sonic qualities, and they operate very differently, grammatically. And while Krystyna’s poems might, at first glance, seem very direct and straightforward, when I start to work with her on a translation, I’m always startled all over again by how layered and complex her poems actually are. And then historical and cultural contexts have to be taken into account, and “carried over,” too, if possible, from one language to the other. It’s a delicate process, but wonderfully rich, both frustrating and deeply satisfying for someone who’s in love with language.

 

 

Matthew Lippman on “THE INSURGENCY OF TEARS IS TO ERADICATE SADNESS AND HOLD JOY AS CLOSE AS THE MOON”:

I started writing a book about crying, about a year ago, about people who cry and why they cry and it’s a book about everybody.  It’s called Cry Baby Cry. The premise of the book is simple. Ask people to send me a sentence or two on crying then write a poem off of their thoughts. A collaboration of sorts. A riffing. So, I was at MacDowell Colony in January working on the book and my best friend, Michael, sent me a quote he read at The Whitney by the painter Henry Taylor and that inspired the poem, THE INSURGENCY OF TEARS IS TO ERADICATE SADNESS AND HOLD JOY AS CLOSE AS THE MOON.

What I remember about writing the poem was sitting at this desk in this cabin in the middle of the woods in Peterborough, New Hampshire on the MacDowell property. There was snow everywhere and a family of deer outside and I felt so blessed I could barely handle it–given this opportunity to do nothing but focus on poetry. I also remember looking at an image of the painting, Wegrett, and listening to Sigur Ros’ just released record, Atta. I was thinking about mothers and getting to joy through tears and, again, imagining Michael at The Whitney standing in front of the painting and thinking of my project and, in the most sentimental way, not taking for granted how much I love him and how silence is the best instigator for crying and for joy.

 

 

Lisa Rose Bradford on translating Juan Gelman:

Argentine poet Juan Gelman’s book Bajo la lluvia ajena (In Foreign Rain) is a meditation on political exile, particularly of South Americans in Europe. It captures a double-edged vision of wonder and disgust for the cradle of Imperialist glory, along with the feeling of defeat and sadness for those who perished during the military dictatorship of Jorge Videla. This collection of prose poems was first published in 1980, shortly after Gelman was forced into exile and lost his son in the “dirty war.” The book was reissued in 2009 with heart-wrenchingly grotesque illustrations by Carlos Alonso, whose daughter was also disappeared in 1976.

Apart from its characteristic experimentation with grammar and neologism, much of Gelman’s poetry also contains a torturous kernel within a musical tone, and the joy of translating these poems is intimately bound to the challenge of recreating this dissonance. The present selection showcases both his customary wordplay and musicality and his discordant use of affectionate diminutives and excruciating imagery that reflect the solitude of his situation.

In “VI” we can observe that just as elements may be lost in a translation, the regeneration often produces new riches, as in the case of the word “tier.” This pun arose in my rendering but doesn’t occur in the original. Read aloud, a first interpretation might lead to “tears,” but the Spanish word only means “layers”: “On the tiers of experience. Certain modes of speech may stroke one tier or another.” In the same poem, much of the musicality derives from alliteration, and I hit upon a couple of felicitous phrases to emulate these sounds: “Brood bitch barking at the moon, deaf from her defeat, a satellite, poor deadling”; and “so much blood now roams this new rain, clean, cool, clueless.”

Gelman’s creation of neologisms, his use of slashes, and the mood formed by the diminutives, all so characteristic of Carta abierta (Between Words: Juan Gelman’s “Public Letter” translated by Lisa Rose Bradford, 2010), which he was writing in the same period, demand special care so as to ensure the mothering tone in the two works coincides. In “Public Letter” we find “hijito,” “zapatito,” “aguitas” (little son, baby shoe, tiny waters). For instance, here in “VI,” we find “muertita,” referring to a small, deadened moon, for which I created a neologistic phrase, “poor deadling.” In “XXII” for “lunita,” which is a little moon, sounding loving though ultimately ironic, I considered “tiny moon,” “moonling” and “my little moon,” choosing the last rather indulging option— “don’t lose heart, my little moon”— to accentuate the ambivalent image of the beauty of Sappho’s vision of the moon and this silent moon in Rome, after it shamefully shone on Dock Sur while his son was being executed.

 

 

Nin Andrews on her Four Poems:

I wrote these poems when I was going through a health scare, when friends and family were offering me “their thoughts and prayers.” At times like that, I feel like the proverbial witness, looking at my life from afar. Or like an astronaut looking down at Planet Earth and admiring/ maybe even loving it more than when they are actually here.

 

 

Alexander Long on “Autobiography” and “Primo”:

Getting sober is weird. How am I supposed to write about that? Why bother? It’s all been done, and better. And why, sweet Jesus, the prose poem? I don’t know. I hear something, and I follow it. Let the smarter ones figure out why. How about: I can’t lie in a prose poem, for one thing. How about: I can’t hide in one, for another.

So, here “I” am: sober, unadorned, uninteresting. What the hell do I do now?

Since I can’t lie nor hide, and Clarity isn’t exactly a friend, maybe using negative space instead of punctuation could free me up in some other ways. Maybe I could maneuver in and around syntax, shape its motion and direction a little differently. Maybe I could bury and disguise some meters and rhymes in there. A prosody of floating in and out, in and out. Like breathing, blinking, consciousness, clouds. Why not? There’s something satisfying, damnit, about the poems not being bolted to the page by punctuation, convention, expectation, tradition, if only for a few seconds. But, look: they’re still here, the poems, swaying like a small patch of dead roadside dandelions a few seconds before a gust from a passing truck takes the tops of their heads off. Ugly. Resilient.

Enough poetics.

“Autobiography” owes as much to Berryman’s “Dream Song #14” as it does to horrible decisions, genetics and Kierkegaard.

“Primo” is about the Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi, a compassionate, lucid survivor-witness of The Holocaust.

 

 

Christopher Brean Murray on “The Town of Horne”:

Many years ago, in a small town in Montana, I encountered a little one room museum. I seem to recall that under glass was the petrified clubfoot of a long-deceased resident. Had he been a criminal? I’m not sure. I’m not sure that I saw the petrified clubfoot at all, for when I wrote the poem “The Town of Horne,” I used the memory of that museum but altered it for my poetic purposes. Now I can’t remember precisely what I saw in that museum. I just know that I perused a room full of remnants, and that the residue of that experience stayed with me for years until the night I wrote the poem. The poem is a product of the imagination, but something about that visit to the museum stayed with me and was crucially involved in the production of the poem, though it’s now largely lost. The poem remains.

 

 

Lisa Rosenberg on “Is a Rose”:

This poem began en route to an essay. A series of essays, actually. I’d just read Richard Feynman’s quote about ways of knowing a rose, which broadly contrasts the scientist’s ways with those of the artist, and could barely contain my upsurge of reactions.

Enter an idea (not typically the birthplace of poems) for short essays on well-known works in varied disciplines, organized around a single concrete object. Rose-related works could create a multidisciplinary romp with more playfulness than explicit argument.

Lack of time and (what is more scarce) headspace meant slow progress on the essays. I had Feynman’s quote for physics, Edith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose” for music, and famous lines from Shakespeare and Gertrude Stein. I wrote beginnings of quasi-essays for each of these, as I looked for more pieces from art or science. It wasn’t until I came upon Georgia O’Keefe’s 1927 painting “Abstraction White Rose” that musical language and images intervened. And what arrived was a line of assonant pentameter, “opens in the troposphere, blooms like smoke,” trailing cosmic structures along with it, as well as openings for wonder with varied tonal possibilities. The momentum of this line and what followed felt like prose-poetry, a relatively new form for me, with many ways to play. I could swerve to the plaintive, as in “Only the lone spiral of everywhere,” and “Poor you…” Piaf’s well-known refrain even invited punning, where fleur/coeur with qui bat shift grammatically into a question.

As the sections built out and fell together, the challenge of sequencing them surfaced. They lack a logical sense of sequential links compared to traditional stanzas, narratives, or lineated free verse. I tend to favor rhythmic and tonal considerations, anyway. And although Feynman’s words set this piece in motion, O’Keefe and Shakespeare are better known and more accessible.

There was an additional closing section at one point, blending both Stein’s “Rose is a rose is a rose…” and a phrase from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but that seemed too much of a meta stretch. Further listening showed that Stein’s line alone, truncated, would make a fitting finial to the assemblage.

In terms of writing time, this unfolded over a period of weeks once the poem-ness emerged, with small changes during subsequent months and throughout roughly a year of submissions.