Prins, Andrews, Barbarese, et. al.

Richard Prins on Translating Muhammad Kijuma:

These verses of Muhammad Kijuma were collected under the category “political songs” in Mohammad Ibrahim Mohammad Abou Egl’s unpublished thesis “The Life and Works of Muhamadi Kijuma.” Here Kijuma offers the porcupine as a metaphor for Kenya’s colonial government. His compatriots learn to make due with the sheddings of this pernicious creature, much as Kijuma himself learned to wield the workings of British colonialism to his own advantage. He often passed off his original compositions as anonymous literary artifacts, knowing he would be better compensated by his European clients. He also converted back and forth between Christianity and Islam multiple times over the course his life, in part to acquire paid translation work from missionaries. As a translator of Swahili verse, my preference is to follow the original prosody and rhyme scheme as closely as possible. To Kijuma and his contemporaries, I do not believe rhyme was an aesthetic choice so much as a worldview. Rhyme insists that a chaotic universe can be put into order – a crucial matter for subjects of colonization, existing as they do in the tumult of senseless laws written to harass them.

Nin Andrews on her poems:

I have been attempting (and often failing) to write autobiographically for the last few years, and I don’t seem to be getting anywhere.  I am still trying to decide what style and voice to use. The two poems in this issue demonstrate just two of my very different and incompatible approaches. In one, I simply write what happened in embarrassing detail. In the other, I describe my inner experience, or the dreamscape of childhood. The first poem, “Practicing Quiet,” was inspired by a photo of me, dressed in school clothes, leading my calf, Minty, around the yard. The second poem was inspired by a painting by Michelle Schleider of a girl in a feathered mask.

J.T. Barbarese on “Whirlybird”:

Leaving a hot shower, one fall day nel mezzo del camin‘, stepping into no dark wood but into a too-familiar second floor bathroom, in the single rear window overlooking a ratty tire swing, dying roses, cyclone fence threaded with kudzu, is a whirlybird, sycamore seedling, trapped in the sash. In the medicine cabinet mirror, the body re-embodied in mist, which is a transitory phase in the life of water, a self in steam. Obit Dante Alighieri, 700 yrs this month, September 1321.

Diane Martin on her two poems:

On Oxalis in the Ingleside:

I first wrote “Oxalis Pes-Caprae, aka Sour Grass” in April, 2010, two and a half years before we left San Francisco for rural west county Sonoma. We had already lived in San Francisco for 34 years and would eventually live twenty-four years in the Ingleside District, a little known area in the city’s southwestern corner. Our house, on a dead-end hill south of Ocean Avenue, was just up the street from Ingleside Terrace, with its wide lawns and flagstone paths, and “Urbano, / former racetrack, then pillared development, / first [district] in this back-patting town to sell to well-off Blacks / (Miraloma [district] asseverating Willie Mays was just too risky).” That quote was from an old version of the poem. Maybe all that history was too heavy for a poem about this shamrock-like weed. That—and the bit about the lady who couldn’t remember the name of my dog, Greta Garbo; the house with the fairy door; the conversation with a Hell’s Angel; and the undertaker family that lived across from the sundial and parked their pair of hearses there—came out in subsequent versions.
That Urbano was formerly a racetrack stayed in (we called it “the racetrack”), as did the existence of the world’s second-largest sundial in the fog. In Greta’s declining days (she lived 16 years), we used to take her around the racetrack in our old Radio Flyer red wagon and lift her out to sit among the oxalis and clover by the sundial.
Frankly, “Oxalis in the Ingleside” stayed in the Working folder of my MacBook Air for a long time. Some poems just need time to ripen. Then, shortly after the Richard Diebenkorn exhibit at the SFMOMA, I picked up a book of Diebenkorn’s paintings at a party. I knew Diebenkorn was from San Francisco and had painted the Ingleside, and the book had the pictures to prove it. I knew Diebenkorn belonged in the poem.

On Zucchini in August:

“Zucchini in August” plays with the idea that something happening to you (or near you), can all of a sudden, seem ubiquitous. That idea, called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, or the frequency illusion, is caused by our brain’s selective attention and fondness for patterns.
But of course the poem is a light touch on a serious subject. My friend for whom I wrote this was a little miffed, originally, that I seemed to make light of his cancer. Was it not something to worry about? I hope, by adding “take care,” I minimized that implication, because of course I care very much.

Maxine Scates on “Relapse”:

This poem was written, as were a several other poems in my new book, My Wilderness, while mourning the death of my friend Brigit Pegeen Kelly. I stopped drinking over thirty seven years ago, but I suppose when the word relapse appeared it came as a warning that just because I’d never relapsed didn’t mean that there wasn’t still time left for a relapse to happen, and, unlike many of the poems I write, the title came first. In the sections that followed the poem found its form, one which allowed me to write more meditatively and less narratively than I sometimes do. In that, I think I was trying to address my arrogance and my vulnerability and my anger at death all at the same time.

Carolyne Wright—Generating Endecasyllabics: About the Origins of “About the Women”:

When I was living for a few years in New Orleans with a fellow poet whom I had met at an artists’ and writers’ residency, he and I were asked to host another poet, whom I call “Alma” here, while she gave readings at universities in the area. Alma was a bit older, with a new, high-profile book and a compelling history—full of sun and dramatic stances and a heartrending love affair that had ended years before. We agreed to host her, and so for a few days we fed her, showed her around town, and listened to her stories. (The diction here is also interwoven with a few allusions to the work of Alma, our guest.) “Endecasyllabics: About the Women” began with the image of Alma sitting on our blue-flowered sofa, smoking, gazing up and into the scenes from her past, as my partner and I sat cross-legged on the floor and listened.

But this was New Orleans, so the spell of poetic tragedy conjured by our guest was broken by the abrupt appearance of an eccentric local character, Ruthie the Duck Lady, a figure ever-present in those days, roller-skating in and around the French Quarters, ducks in tow. Ruthie had her own comic and compelling energies, so her eruption into the scene was jarring but apt.

It was clear when I started this poem that it needed a flexible structure that would enable but not overly constrict the lyric-narrative momentum of recollection, so I found myself opting for “endecasyllabics”—eleven-syllable lines. This is a standard line length for much poetry written in Spanish, Portuguese and other Romance languages, and roughly comparable to pentameter, especially iambic pentameter, in English. Purely syllabic counts are almost invisible and inaudible in English, though, because English is such a heavily stressed language, relying on the “beat” of stressed syllables to measure the lines. But I have found that syllabics give a reliable strength in subtlety for the poet, even if nobody else notices the form—hence, I signal it in the title. (The regular spelling of this terrm is “hendecasyllabics,” but I prefer a spelling closer to the more familiar endecasílabo of Spanish.)

To the two sections of this poem I soon added two more sections (published in another journal)—about an encounter with Ruthie, and interactions with other women moving in the same social circles as the poet-couple, the speaker and her companion. I knew that this poem in sections would be included in my forthcoming Masquerade, a “memoir in poetry,” a love story in verse about an interracial couple in racist America. These endecasyllabics would evoke moments when the speaker steps beyond the intense, sometimes even obsessive, focus on the pleasures and tensions between herself and her companion. These poems “About the Women” are moments to observe and vibrate, in a quieter register, with the pathos of others, fellow women, and to recognize that they all have their own trajectories, their own dramas. I have never felt comfortable with the so-called “navel-gazing” of memoir, I have needed to glance away from the unrelenting intensity of the central characters’ dynamics, and look beyond, recall that others’ lives are equally resonant. Maybe Alma’s love affair that had ended years before, which would turn out to have deep parallels with the story in Masquerade, are what drew me to recall and explore this scene, and help to generate this poem.

Ellen Bass on “Lightning Streak of White”:

My beloved mentor, dear friend, and second mother, Florence Howe, died during covid. Like many others, I couldn’t go to her without risking my own life. But the choice was wrenching. I continue to feel the loss. Not only of our relationship—I met her when I was nineteen and she was thirty-eight—but also of the space I inhabited when I visited her. it was like going home. It still doesn’t seem quite possible that all of that is gone forever. But we get to keep the memories and poems are a way to live there again.

Julie Bruck on “Mr. Palomar’s Wave”:

“Mr. Palomar’s Wave” is a lament for a beloved aunt, for Calvino, for the New York of 40 years ago, and for my own cluelessness. As a third, and very late child, l was sheltered from encounters with death. At 12, I wasn’t even expected to attend my grandmother’s funeral, and readily complied with that expectation. At the same time, I had an inborn sense of anticipatory mourning, which has never left me. Even now, with losses having become so regular and real, I’m often ill-equipped, and still rail. I knew my aunt was ageing. If the heart of Calvino’s story slipped right through my airy young head, I must have felt its effect on her, though I’d never have had the words to say so. Perhaps I do now.

Julie Bruck on “Mr. Palomar’s Wave”:

“Mr. Palomar’s Wave” is a lament for a beloved aunt, for Calvino, for the New York of 40 years ago, and for my own cluelessness. As a third, and very late child, l was sheltered from encounters with death. At 12, I wasn’t even expected to attend my grandmother’s funeral, and readily complied with that expectation. At the same time, I had an inborn sense of anticipatory mourning, which has never left me. Even now, with losses having become so regular and real, I’m often ill-equipped, and still rail. I knew my aunt was ageing. If the heart of Calvino’s story slipped right through my airy young head, I must have felt its effect on her, though I’d never have had the words to say so. Perhaps I do now.

Katharine Rauk on “Early Explorers Sometimes Carried Watermelons Instead of Canteens” & “Close Your Eyes”:

I don’t remember exactly how “Early Explorers Sometimes Carried Watermelons Instead of Canteens” unfolded. The “Jack” in the poem is Jack Gilbert. Aren’t we on a first name basis with the poets we love whom we’ve never met? Gilbert’s poem “Trouble” appears on page 87 of Refusing Heaven: “The seriously happy heart is a problem.” That line gave me pause. I wrestled with it for a long while and am wrestling with it still.
Another example of how we are constantly engaging in a conversation with other poets: A few years ago, I participated in a workshop with Sara Eliza Johnson. She introduced the class to a set of surrealist proverbs written by André Breton and Paul Eluard (translated by John Ashbery) and encouraged us to generate a poem. “Close Your Eyes” was written in response to the following surrealist proverb: “Form our eyes by closing them.”

John Gallaher on “Encounter in the New World”:

“Encounter in the New World” is a fairly direct reading of my flipping through The Meaning of Your Name websites, and thinking of the various possibilities I could have ended up with. Maybe all the possibilities exist somewhere together deep inside us, wandering around, bumping into each other. I like that idea. I thought this poem was finished with that, and then, when thinking about it as finished, the last few lines jumped on. So really, nothing is ever really finished, of course, and naming is just another step of the process.

Author: Plume

Plume: Issue #122 October 2021