Plume

Cecilia Woloch on translating Vasyl Lozynsky’s “untitled” and “On/Off” from Ukrainian into English:

Translating Vasyl Lozynksy’s poems into English involved a three-way collaboration. Vasyl is multi-lingual – he writes in both Ukrainian and German – but English is not his strongest language. Jessica Zychowicz is a native English speaker who is fluent in Ukrainian, and an accomplished American scholar of Ukrainian and Polish contemporary culture and literature, although not a poet. I’m an American poet with little understanding of the Ukrainian language but a basic grasp of Polish, another Slavic language. So, the three of us went back and forth between Jessica’s rough translations of the poems into English and the Ukrainian originals, trying to convey the way Vasyl’s poems use syntax – which operates so differently in Slavic languages from the way it operates in English – and what seems to me an inherent terseness in Slavic languages – with their consonant clusters and lack of articles – into English. The shorter of these two poems, while straightforward and even “simple” on its surface, was the most challenging because of the complicated interaction of the flow of information and the syntax.

G. C. Waldrep on “Darling Run Notebook”:

Darling Run is a tributary of Pine Creek in north-central Pennsylvania, what’s today known (a little extravagantly) as the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania. This poem began as notebook jottings during a walk along the Pine Creek rail trail on 11/22/22. I whittled, revised, and reworked this material for almost three years–I think the Darling Run pages went through 40-odd drafts, eventually settling into two poems, this one and one published earlier this year in Appalachian Journal. Once this poem was its own poem, I kept fiddling with that last line: “stealingly,” “healingly,” etc. As an articulation–the articulation that is the poem–“pealingly” won out. And as Shakespeare’s King Lear makes clear, nothing is ever really healed, in this case neither the land nor the body. Not healed, but changed. I suppose we use “heal” for the changes that seem reparative, that don’t draw attention to themselves as harm, that we feel comfortable with. But there are other changes, too.

Cynthia Adkins on “Poem with No Content”:

A year ago, FACEBOOK deactivated my account with less than 24 hours’ notice, with no explanation or recourse. The next day, the platform completely erased me. Not a death, ‘this account is locked,’ but a complete erasure of me and all my content—photos, publications. contacts, archives and people. I had been there for 15 years.  I was thunderstruck, devastated, mortified—a loss of hundreds of friends—many whom I had daily/weekly contact with. And no explanation to them at my abrupt disappearance.  I was just gone.    These social media lords lead us to believe we are curating our own special spaces, only to find out as painfully as I did—that they own every scintilla of our content.  What they did and how they did it, felt like an absolute rape of my intellectual property, personhood, identity.   But for a long time prior, I felt social media was stealing our souls. These days, we wake up and know what kind of muffin 500 people have had before our second cup of coffee.  We get a gluten-free fix of dopamine, only to be left even more lonely and isolated. We’ve become addicted, and it has stolen so much from us.  The whole ordeal made me realize how thin it all is. It’s all an illusion— A cloud held up by toothpicks.

This poem is a part of a series in which the poems use ‘Poem’ in the titles—”Poem with No Content,” “Poem Going Rogue,”, “Poem with A Ghost town” (PLUME)—to acknowledge the idea of a poem being a made thing.  This poem took on a life of its own.

Mark DeCarteret on “The Year I Went Without Retiring”:

Jay White on “Horse Under an Apple Tree”:

Many poems, like this one, begin with a question as well as stray images that eventually
seem to coalesce into a particular direction. I’m partial to the ghost
of a narrative driven by the personal “I” because I find that voice to be
the most vulnerable and trustworthy as a poem tries to locate the
foundation of its tone. Few subjects contain more unanswered questions
than aging which already holds the theme of time within its reach.
This poem, then, will introduce a bird at a window, a horse under
a wormy apple tree, and how night and day overlap and reinforce
the uncertainty about where in time I am at any particular moment.
My favorite part of any day is the dark before morning: roughly 5:30.
In its quiet, the expectant house is all mine. If I listen closely, I can
I imagine almost anything emerging from such a space. As Roethke
offers in The Waking, “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.”
I’m not opposed to a poem that also ends with a question. Said another
way, I’m drawn to entrances and exits that don’t fully reveal themselves
and I hope the reader will take a chance to keep going. What else can I do?
 

Author: Plume

Plume: