Zoland Poetry Congratulates Vol. 4 Contributor Tracy K. Smith on Winning the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

27 Apr

Tracy was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her most recent book, Life on Mars. The following poems appeared in Zoland Poetry #4:

 

Everything That Ever Was

 

Like a wide wake, rippling

Infinitely into the distance, everything

 

That ever was still is, somewhere,

Floating near the surface, nursing

Its hunger for you and me

 

And the now we’ve named

And made a place of.

 

Like groundswell sometimes

It surges up, claiming a little piece

Of what we stand on.

 

Like the wind the rains ride in on,

It sweeps across the leaves,

 

Pushing in past the windows

We didn’t slam quickly enough.

Dark water it will take days to drain.

 

It surprised us last night in my sleep.

Brought food, a gift. Stood squarely

 

There between us, while your eyes

Danced toward mine, and my hands

Sat working a thread in my lap.

 

Up close, it was so thin. And when finally

You reached for me, it backed away.

 

Bereft, but not vanquished. After it left,

All I wanted was your broad back

 

To steady my limbs, Today,

Whatever it was seems slight, a trail

Of cloud rising up and off like smoke.

 

And the trees that watch as I write

Sway in the breeze, as if all that stirs

Under the soil is a little tickle of knowledge

 

The great blind roots will tease through

And push eventually past.

 

 

–

 

At Some Point, They’ll Want To Know What It Was Like

 

There was something about how it felt. Not just the during—

That rough churn of bulk and breath, limb and tooth, the mass of us,

The quickness was made and rode—but mostly the before.

 

The waiting, knowing what would become. Pang. Pleasure then pain.

Then the underwater ride of after. Thrown-off like a coat over a bridge.

Somehow you’d just give away what you’d die without. You just gave.

 

The best was having nothing. No hope. No name in the throat.

And finding the breath in you, the body, to ask.

 

—

 

The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

 

The first track still almost swings. High hat and snare, even

A few bars of sax the stratosphere will singe-out soon enough.

 

Synthesized strings. Then something like cellophane

Breaking in as if snagged to a shoe. Crinkle and drag. White noise,

 

Black noise. What must be voices bob up, then drop, like metal shavings

In molasses. So much for us. So much for the flags we bored

 

Into planets dry as chalk. For the tin cans we filled with fire

And rode like cowboys into all we tried to tame. Listen:

 

The dark we’ve only ever imagined now audible, thrumming,

Marbled with static like gristly meat. This is for keeps.

 

A chorus of engines churns. Silence taunts: a dare.

Everything that disappears disappears

 

As if returning somewhere.

 

 

 

 

 

:

 

 

ZOLAND IN CONVERSATION: The Last Books of Héctor Viel Temperley

2 Mar

Zoland correspondent P. Scott Cunningham, the director of the O, Miami Poetry Festival and the author of Chapbook of Poems for Morton Feldman (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2011) sat down with Stuart Krimko and Arlo Haskell of Sand Paper Press to bring us an in-depth look at their new translation title, The Last Books of Héctor Viel Temperley. Enjoy!

 

 

PSC: I met poets Stuart Krimko and Arlo Haskell in 2010 at the Key West Literary Seminar, where Haskell lives full-time and serves as the festival’s Media Director. Krimko, the Director of David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, was in town for the Seminar and to help with release of three new titles by the publishing imprint they run together: Sand Paper Press. Last year marked a milestone for Sand Paper; they published the first collection in twenty years by American Oulipo legend Harry Mathews, and now Haskell and Krimko have just released The Last Books of Héctor Viel Temperley, the press’s first book in translation. Krimko, who travels each year to Buenos Aires, translated the poems, while Haskell served as editor and publisher. The following exchange took place over email during the first few days of 2012.

 

PSC: I don’t think it makes any sense to talk about this book without first talking about Sand Paper Press and, by extension, small presses in general. Tell me how you two met, and how that led to the creation of Sand Paper Press.

 

AH: Stuart and I met at Bard College in the fall of 1996. The following year we both took Ann Lauterbach’s class on 20th-century American poetics. I think for both of us this was a transformative experience, the first time either of us had read in a serious and substantive way poets like Wallace Stevens and Charles Olson, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Ezra Pound, then up through so-called New York schoolers like Frank O’Hara, Ron Padgett, John Ashbery, and James Schuyler, as well as the writings of influential non-literary types like John Cage. By the next semester we were pretty hooked, and we ended up in Ashbery’s poetry workshop together, where we learned about obscurer writers like Pierre Martory and Carl Martin, and were given assignments to write poems based on Oulipo constraints and zodiac signs. As a result of both of these classes, and I suppose as a result of being 20 and in that first flush of adulthood, we developed a great sense of camaraderie among poets, a great feel for an audience and the impact a poem could have one one’s life and one’s friendships. Stuart was living off campus with David Janik, who is now our designer, and they’d invite a bunch of us over to share a handle or two of cheap wine and we’d sit around and read poetry in their living room. It was an amazing group of poets, and when Ashbery showed up and shared some jug wine and read some new work with us, you know I think we felt like “we can do this. We are doing this.” As the years went on we kept doing it, kept wanting to do it, and it turned into making books, small ones at first, my Fool Proof, Stuart’s Not That Light, handmade things that took incredible amounts of time to fold and stitch and assemble, and then we decided we wanted to step it up, print more copies, save ourselves the work of assembly, and keep pushing the work out there. The Press is an extension of our friendship, really, and it’s an effort to make more friends out there in the world, to find a handful of like minds and do something cool that they will like and that may form the basis for new friendships. It’s all about living, and living a satisfied life, and for both of us I think the key to that is in placing art at the center of one’s life and one’s relationships.

 

PSC: Tell me about who Héctor Viel Temperley was, both as a person and as a poet, and how you, Stuart, discovered his work and took an interest in it.

 

SK: I learned about Viel Temperley’s work when I studied at the Universidad de Buenos Aires en 1999. Hospital Británico was assigned reading for the Literary Theory and Analysis course I did there; the Argentine educational system is modeled after the French, Napoleonic model, so this incredibly rich and complex course, in which there were three simultaneous sections devoted to completely different sets of readings, was what the first thing that first-year students encountered. In addition to high level theory (the Russian Formalists through Derrida, and at breakneck speed), students were introduced to literature chosen especially to challenge them. I describe this scene because it gives you an idea of Viel Temperley’s reputation in Argentina. He is beloved by a knowledgeable few, considered outside the mainstream in every way, and yet for all its strangeness, the poetry is open and accessible enough for first-year literature students to approach it.

 

Viel Temperley himself came from a prominent family. His first book, published in the mid 1950s when he was in his early 20s, won an award, and his second was published by the same house that was publishing Borges at the time. However, he never joined Argentine literary society as such. This must have been a conscious decision, as he seemed to be set up for success, and there has long been a remarkably active literary community in Buenos Aires. He made his living as the owner of an advertising firm, he  fathered seven children, and he continued to write poetry. But he also developed a highly personal brand of faith that cannot be considered either purely poetic or purely religious; by the beginning of the 1980s, he lived in his own apartment and spent much of his time in solitude, writing and praying, occasionally making a trip to a monastery outside of Buenos Aires, where he had a number of friends who were monks. The late books, for which he is best, known, were essentially self-published. Though he was a dedicated athlete he also smoked, and by the mid 80s he had developed lung cancer, which spread to his brain. He died in 1987, just after publishing Hospital Británico, which, because it draws text from each of his previous books, is a kind of cathedral-like summation.

 

PSC: “I am the place where the Lord spreads out the Light that he is,” Viel Temperley says in Hospital Británico, a phrase that could come right out of a Baptist service in Mississippi. Are we more tolerant of Viel Temperley’s religiosity because he’s dead? Because he’s Argentinian? Do you think that an extremely well-written, formally ambitious book of poems would have less value if it espoused the values of Pentacostalism or another far right Christian sect? Or is it the strangeness of H.V.T’s Christianity that makes such statements tolerable to non-believing liberal poetry readers like myself?

 

SK: Poetry to me is religiosity. Some of my favorite poets are manifestly religious. I named one of my own collections after George Herbert, who was a pastor and only wrote about religious themes. In the interview I translated as an appendix to his books of poems, Viel Temperley insists that he is not a religious poet, by which I think he means that he is not espousing anything. This is investigative work, full of shades and mysteries and questions rather than assertions or claims to visions. So for me his poetry does not require tolerance, it elicits desire –– it is full, after all, of hookers and pregnancy and sex. The strangeness comes from the unity of desire and sanctity, passions we are not accustomed enough to describing in the same breath. But think of someone like Judee Sill, or St. John of the Cross, whose embodied, nervous Christianities are forms of mysticism. Also, art, like mysticism, is designed to topple any sense of right and left.

 

PSC: I love Herbert, too, particularly because I think he is trying to convert me, a condition I tolerate (1) because he’s dead and (2) because he lived in a world very, very different from my own. No matter how hard I try I cannot replicate the degree of faith Herbert possessed, and so I find him interesting specifically because of how differently he organizes his passion.    

 

SK: Essentially I think that what separates the bad Bible-thumpers from the good ones is the presence of hubris. The best poetry dismantles hubris. If you can preach me your God and make me feel the debilitating and dwarfing sense of the arbitrary that even the archest atheist must also share, then I will pull up my chair and listen. That said, I disagree about the intentionality of Herbert’s poetry. He was trying to convert himself, which is a different thing. Herbert, like Wallace Stevens, for instance, lived at the precipice of disbelief but could never quite throw himself over. In the poetry he challenges God –– actually I think he tries to throw himself over, but each time a gust in the shape of a hand or a poem puts him back up on the cliff. Regarding living proselytizers, I have a distinct weakness for Christian-period Bob Dylan, so perhaps I’m not the best person to judge here. I was also going to mention the Ol’ Dirty Bastard of songs like ‘I Can’t Wait,’ but then I remembered that he too is no longer with us. Doesn’t seem possible.

 

PSC: Despite the formal range of contemporary American poetry, there’s a few topics that dominate: the self, art for art’s sake, the trap of language, etc. and when a book breaks out of this theoretical vortex, it immediately becomes recognizable. I feel that way about Viel Temperley and his Christianity—is that part of what drew you to this project?

 

SK: Yes, what you describe is very much part of what draws me to Viel Temperley’s poetry. Perhaps not his Christianity per se, though that too, but his spiritual openness; the willingness to put real faith up against original formal structures; the over lit, beachy surrealism, its visionary reverberations; the sense that this man was writing for his life, not out of despair or desperation, but out of ecstatic sensitivity to the potential for the world to be miraculous. The work is also full of humility: this is what might set it apart more than anything else. I won’t go so far as to make sweeping judgments about American poetry, except to say that among poets there are too many artists and not enough practitioners of radical and generous humility. That said, God, or at least divinity, appears in some of the most interesting poetry being written in the United States. I’m thinking of people like Dorothea Lasky and Ariana Reines.

 

PSC: Reines is a great comparison. “God” is a very complicated character in her work, and certainly mixed up with desire. Do you see any specific affinities between her and Viel Temperley?

 

SK: For me they’re two poets who are current ‘favorites’ in the sense that Elizabeth Bishop describes in the stunning fragment called “Writing poetry is an unnatural act…”: “…not [necessarily] the best poets, whom we all admire, but favorite in the sense of one’s ‘best friends’…” Interestingly, one of Bishop’s ‘best friends’ was Herbert. In the same piece, she says that the three qualities she most admires in poetry are “Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery.” (Italics are hers.) That seems about right to me; Viel Temperley and Reines have these. Bishop’s “The Roosters” is a great Christian poem, by the way.

 

PSC: Speaking of “best friends” versus “best poets,” there’s a certain sexiness to those “undiscovered” poets and to “lost” books in general. Why is that?

 

SK: It’s important to note that amongst poets in Argentina these books are not lost. Thanks to the people at Ediciones del Dock, who were also supportive of this project, the complete works were brought out in 2003. So Viel Temperley is read and known. Poetry being poetry, most poets are in some way undiscovered. But of course there’s a thrill in being able to introduce a writer to new audiences, for whom he’s certainly undiscovered because they can’t read the language he wrote in. The sexiness must come from the happy feeling that there was someone doing something you care a great deal about, even though you didn’t know about it. It’s like they were thinking of you without having met you, which is like hearing from a friend that a person you find attractive has been mentioning your name. In this case the translator and editor are that gossiping friend.

 

PSC: Do you find these books to be formally inventive? If so, how? And if so, why is that important to their value? For instance, could you talk about the organization of “Crawl” and its relation to Viel Temperley’s passion for swimming?

 

SK: Yes, I think the books are formally inventive. Particularly Hospital Británico, in which Viel Temperley makes use of self-appropriation in a way that feels inevitable and necessary. But for the reasons discussed above, they don’t rely upon formal invention. In some basic way poetry at its best is about the integration of both accepted and idiosyncratic forms. The idea that one might take lineated verse, haul it over the line into the world of prose, and then use it to built this stunning edifice that allows you to reassess the way you lived and wrote your life––it’s a quietly radical and iconoclastic thing to do. Crawl too is quite particular, formally speaking. As you note, Viel Temperley was a dedicated swimmer. He arranged the lines on the page, and the breath of the poem in sonic terms, according to the rhythm of swimming the crawl. I think he was interested in placing his experience of his body, in action, in the midst of the poem. The book’s refrain (‘I come straight from communion and I’m in ecstasy’), however, suggests a more profound reason for using the breath as a structural element. For Viel Temperley, a single moment of ecstatic revelation can be repeated in the framework of poetry. Each time he revisits this moment, it leads him through a different chain of images. As I mentioned earlier, Viel Temperley was not interested in a definitive religious experience. Even a standalone instance of communion with God had to be reimagined and relived. Formal innovation allowed him to do this. 

 

PSC: In the short bio of Viel Temperley you mention that he never gave readings, yet the poems sound gorgeous when read aloud. Do you know if he ever composed aloud? 

 

SK: In the interview Viel Temperley describes the composition of Crawl, part of which involved laying fragments of text out on the floor and standing on a chair to see how they looked and felt from above. And Hospital Británico is such a readerly act of literature. This leads me to believe that his mode of composition mostly involved written text.

 

PSC: “…water so blue that the moon / entered into it and breathed.” Despite being gorgeous, this line struck me as descriptive of the writing of poetry itself, or rather, how poets themselves feel about it: that if we can just get the words to be clear enough we can live inside of them and thereby, they’ll save us. Was ars poetica one of Viel Temperley’s concerns?

 

SK: Inasmuch as he recognized the difference between poetic and religious experience, yes. In other words, there was something particular to poetry that he felt it was crucial to enact. Given that he included religious imagery and sentiment in his poetry but went out of his way to assert that he wasn’t an explicitly religious writer, he must have felt that the attention to language brought about by poetry itself added something important to his life. I don’t get the sense that he thought poetry would save him, just as I don’t think David wrote the Psalms to avoid God’s wrath. If poetry spares us pain, it is only because of its role as entertainment. And in the array of entertainments available to us, certainly poetry is one that has been historically linked to the divine. But that’s just because it entertains God too. When Leonard Cohen sings ‘I’ve heard there was a secret chord that David played, and it pleased the Lord, but you don’t really care for music do you?’, I think the you he refers is the Lord, who can take the chord or leave it, even though he does find it pleasing to hear.

 

PSC: There are a few very strange figures in Hospital Británico, including a dwarf and a character named “Christus Pantokrator.” Could you explain their presence in the poems?

SK: If we take Viel Temperley at his word, the dwarf is a surreal figure who functions momentarily as his guardian angel because he allows him to see a crusader (it’s only the dwarf’s ring) making his way through a spiritually destitute world. As I explain briefly in the introduction, Christus Pantokrator is a depiction of Christ often found in Byzantine churches. As opposed to the wounded Man of Sorrows, the Pantokrator is understood to be omnipotent; he is often shown holding a book, so he represents knowledge too. This is a stern, hyper-masculine Christ, so he fits in with the boxers and sailors that populate Hospital Británico.

 

PSC: What were the technical challenges in translating Viel Temperley?

 

SK: I don’t think the poems presented any severe technical challenges. I was grateful for the luxury of time––I’ve been working on drafts of these poems since I was a student at Bard College in 1999––as well as Arlo’s collaboration and close reading, which allowed me to develop ever-clearer translations in many passages. I was surprised to note that as I read and reread the poems over the last decade, each time they felt plainer, simpler, and more forthright. I’m thinking particularly of Hospital Británico, which is the work of a dying man coming to terms with his vanishing place in the world. So I wanted to make sure  my translations reflected that evolving sense of the work as nothing more than writing. I found myself stripping away ‘creative’ or ‘poetic’ solutions that had some whiff of my own invention attached to them. I feel that the current vogue is for translations that tend toward the literal, and I agree with it (Lydia Davis is the most eloquent recent proponent of this). I am adding nothing to the conversation by saying so, but I want to point out that even the literal has its limits, and, though I tried my best to avoid them, there are numerous instances in which I was forced to rely on my creativity to render the text fluently in English.

 

PSC: Tell me about the poet Cecilia Pavón assisted in this book, and how Argentina itself plays into the narrative.

 

SK: Cecilia is a great friend, an excellent poet, and a professional and gifted translator. So her assistance was indispensable. There is nothing like having such a person show up as a convenient green dot in the chat feature of Gmail when you are racking your brain over a translation problem. Not only can you discuss the problem immediately, but it’s fun and collegial, and it often leads to delightful conversation about any number of other topics. I also relied on the advice and knowledge of Francisco Garamona on many occasions.  He knows Viel Temperley’s work inside and out, owns all of the rare first editions, and is himself a poet and editor, as well as the publisher of Mansalva, in my mind the best Argentine literary imprint. Soledad Viel Temperley, the poet’s daughter, was a great resource, and answered many of our questions about his life and the way he worked. A project like is a great way to collaborate with far-flung friends and make new ones. It provides an excuse to travel. In this sense, Argentina is everywhere in this book. In terms of Argentine writers in general, Viel Temperley is atypical, but exceptions prove the rule. With regards to Cecilia in particular, it’s interesting to think about Viel Temperley as an important precursor to the mysticism and spirituality that appears both in her own poetry and in the collaborative Belleza y Felicidad project she shared with Fernanda Laguna. God appears in their work with some frequency, and though it’s not the Christian God that Viel Temperley evokes, their willingness to confront the divine in explicit terms would probably have intrigued him.

 

PSC: Tell me about your upcoming projects, and the future of Sand Paper.

 

AH: The next book is Belleza y Felicidad, a collaboration between Fernanda Laguna and Cecilia Pavón, the two Argentine women Stuart was just talking about. It’s a sort of anthology, with poems, stories, and other texts, and is loosely modeled on a zine that Cecilia and Fernanda put out called Ceci y Fer. The two are close friends and frequent collaborators—the title draws from the name of a gallery they ran together for several years in Buenos Aires which is also the name of the small press they run (an outfit that publishes tiny photocopied editions of incredible Argentine writers, including César Aira). They often reference one another as characters in their poetry and fiction, both of which have an amazing transparency and directness. I think this book is going to be pretty revelatory for people. We were talking about Ariana earlier, and I think there’s a parallel between her work and theirs—in terms of putting the heart into it, and of restoring the idea of direct communication to lyric poetry. It’s also a very fitting project for Stuart and me, as it was the Viel Temperley book that brought us into Cecilia’s and Fernanda’s orbit in the first place. So it’s a manifestation of what I was saying in the beginning, about using the work as a starting point for new relationships.

 

Beyond that, the first thing on the horizon is a book of essays by poet Christopher Stackhouse. Beyond that, who knows exactly? We’re in conversations with a few other people but nothing’s for sure yet. We take the books one or two or three at a time—Stuart and I both work full-time in addition to the press, and we both have busy lives, friends, a fiancée, a girlfriend, the 162-game baseball season, etc., so it’s an ongoing struggle to strike the right balance. But we’ll be here making books for years to come, so long as we both may live, I hope. Sand Paper is what we do; it’s who we are.

 

 

Translator Stuart Krimko is the author of three collections of poetry, including The Sweetness of Herbert (Sand Paper Press, 2009) and Hymns and Essays (Mal-O-Mar, 2012).

Arlo Haskell is the publisher of Sand Paper Press and the author of the poetry collection Joker (2009), as well as a director of the Key West Literary Seminar and author of their online journal and podcast series.

ZOLAND IN CONVERSATION: Jeffrey Yang

7 Feb

Jeffrey Yang, our first featured poet of 2012 , is the author of the poetry books Vanishing-Line and An Aquarium. He is the translator of Su Shi’s East Slope and Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies; and is the editor of Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems from New Directions and, with Natasha Wimmer, Two Lines: Some Kind of Beautiful Signal. He works as an editor at New Directions Publishing and New York Review Books.

Yang took some time to talk with Zoland Poetry this January about his forthcoming books, his thoughts on translation and process of writing. We hope you enjoy the resulting conversation, the first of many interviews planned for 2012, and please visit our Featured Poet page for a sample of Jeffrey’s poetry and translations.

 

ZP: You have two new books out, Vanishing-Line, your second book of poetry, and The June Fourth Elegies, translations of recent Nobel laureate, Liu Xiaobo (to be released in April). Could you discuss any reverberations that might have happened in the writing and translation of these works, between Vanishing-Line, where the poet speaks as supra-witness, and in Liu Xiaobo’s case where the poet speaks as infra-witness, indivisible from the fabric of his immediate experience?

JY: As far as reverberations during the writing/translating of these two books, it could only go in the direction of the Elegies, as I had long finished writing Vanishing-Line before I started translating Liu Xiaobo. The first poem of V-L dates to around 2000, and it expanded and contracted over the years, off and on, until it felt done sometime in 2010. And they’re really such different books, thought the mode of both is primarily elegiac. I actually find it fun to translate something wildly different than anything I could possibly be able to write myself—on one level it forces me to suspend any prejudices I may have about certain styles, aesthetics, ideas and to listen more closely to the original. But I think as one translates, everything one has read or written before echoes in the brain, consciously or unconsciously.

As far as supra- versus infra-witness, I think I understand what you’re saying as Liu’s book of poems is so intricately connected to the June Fourth Movement and his involvement in it. And yet the poems in Vanishing-Line are also indivisible from the personal experiences that shaped them. In that sense we’re both writing about what we’re seeing and feeling in relation to what has happened in the past, even the distant past as its experienced through words and the present. But part of what drew me to Liu Xiaobo’s poems was certainly his terrifying need to turn to poetry during a time of personal/historical anguish…. that the poems in June Fourth Elegies are always pointing to the circumstances and reasons for their existence.

ZP: So much can be deduced about a poet from the work that they choose to translate. Could you tell us how the Liu Xiaobo project came about?

JY: Actually, it was by accident, fell from the sky into my lap. I owe this to David Haglund, the managing editor of PEN America, and Larry Siems, the director of the PEN America Center’s Freedom to Write Program. David had asked if I wanted to translate some of Liu Xiaobo’s poems for the magazine, and sent me some poems Liu had written to his wife, Liu Xia, while he was in prison. Then later Larry asked if I’d translate another poem to be read at the opening of the PEN International Fesitival in 2010. A few months later Larry visited Liu Xia in Beijing, who gave him a copy of June Fourth Elegies, which he then passed on to me. I sent a sample to Graywolf Press and to Liu Xiaobo’s current U.S. agent, Peter Bernstein, and on we plowed.

ZP: You have also published several volumes of Classical Chinese translation (Su Shi’s East Slope, and selections from the Qian Jia Shi, Rhythm 226). Could you speak about the experience of translating the work of poets long gone versus that of a living poet? How did your sense of responsibility differ?

JY: Actually, that was the whole of the Qian Jia Shi (a Song Dynasty anthology of classical poems) I translated, initially as an exercise, then ended up publishing myself in four little volumes/seasons, the first “summer” volume for my wedding where we gave out copies to our guests. Propaganda!

You have to be as careful translating a living poet as a dead poet, but the living poet can actually smack you in the face if you get something wrong. For me, the responsibility’s the same for both as you want to make the best poem in English out of the template before you, either way. Still, there is a deep tradition of translating long-dead Chinese poets beginning with Ezra Pound where one can chop up one poem and paste a stanza of it into another poem, or read phonetic radicals as pictographs for more polysemous renderings into English, etc.—all for good, specific, historic reasons of course, one of them being ignorance. But it’d be ridiculous to be such a close imitator of Pound in this way, unless the tradition and work you’re translating allows it. Try to be so interpretively loose and inspired with the work of living poets and they’ll probably end up finding your body afloat in the Hudson, or some other river.

ZP: In my experience translation has always been an exercise in awareness, not just of the original work and the other but most importantly (most beneficially) of the familiar, the home language, and on an intimate level my own work; it gives an objectivity to the poetic decisions I make, the voice with which I speak. How does your work as a translator affect your poetry and your perception of yourself as a poet?

JY: I totally agree with you about translation as an exercise in awareness. I think translating a poem reminds me that a poem I’m writing myself is just as provisional, subject to change and transformation, even after the “final” draft. I mean, the work says “let go” at some point, but after a book’s published I still find lines I could change. I think of poets like Elizabeth Bishop and Octavio Paz who were so open to the poem’s continuous transformation, the circulations of the song. At the same time, translation also slows me down as a poet, forces me to be more mindful of word choices and lines in my own work. Life would be easier and more comforting without both, but it’d also be lifeless.

ZP: Could you discuss the evolution between your first book, An Aquarium and your second, Vanishing-Line? What was the journey from the interiority of An Aquarium and its enclosed microscopic examinings to the exteriority of Vanishing-Line and the outward spill of its perpetually retreating horizon?

JY: Well, I actually started writing Vanishing-Line long before An Aquarium was ever conceived. The title of V-L was there from the beginning but the structure changed drastically over time, lots of it was cut at one point, then rewritten. Then I got stuck, so I put it down and the idea for An Aquarium popped into my head so I started working on that until I finished it. Then I returned to Vanishing-Line and the whole finally made sense. I seem to work on a couple things at once, then one thing eventually needs to be put down which allows me to finish the second thing. Each specimen or poem of the aquarium embodied a measure of distance already so it was easier to approach, and fun in a scientific experiment kind of way to write, though by “Zooxanthellae” I was an ecstatic wreck.

At times writing Vanishing-Line was more like squeezing water from a stone—it’s filled with the dead who were close to me, and it took much longer for me to get right in my mind. That said, there’s a stanza about a hermit crab in V-L that could be in An Aquarium, while the latter contains its share of vanishing: themes do overlap in the two books, but structurally and emotionally they’re quite different.

ZP: Finally, would you be so kind as to share with us a small personal truth that has allowed you to persevere in this profession?

JY: A profession in the sense of a principal (or even principle) calling. And I still believe Ruben Darío: La poesia existirá mientras exista el problema de la vida y de la muerte. [“Poetry will exist as long as the problem of life and death exists.”]

 

Anne Porter (1911-2011)

6 Dec

Continuing with my selection of poems from the Zoland annuals I turn to Zoland Poetry #2 for a poem by Anne Porter. Anne died recently at the age of 100. We will miss her, but her poems live on.

 
Like Birds in Summer
by Anne Porter

Anna you stayed
In your huge frozen country
When it was filled with prisons
Your only child
Was held in one of them
 
You lived as close to suffering
As eagles to the sun
And out of this
You made your poetry
 
Reading your poetry
I felt ashamed of mine
Till I remembered
There is a way in which
All poetry is one poetry
All poets one
 
There’s Christopher
Consigned to Bedlam
For praying in the street
 
There’s the executive
Behind his office desk
Secretly writing, writing
Stretching his words until they touched
The edge of madness
 
And there’s the the doctor
Who spent the night
Delivering an infant
 
He left the Housing Project
Just as night was fading
The street-lamps all went out
And in the paling sky
Above the city
He saw the morning star
 
We have his greeting
To the morning star
 
And there’s young Helena
In the Gestapo prison
Scratching her prayer to Mary
On the wall of her cell
 
Forty years later
Her words were found there
Shining, immortal
 
Whether we’re whispering, chanting
Or shouting, cursing, screaming
We are opposing the numbness that’s
Our mortal enemy
 
Though there are times
When we will sing for joy
 
And it’s as if
Our poetry were gathered up
And given to the earth
So that the earth may cry
And sing with human voices
 
It is as if
We were a choir
A carillon, a chorus
 
Like birds in summer
When the sun comes up.
 

The State of Poetry

25 Oct

The sad state of affairs is that an increasing portion of the print devoted to reviewing literature is delegated to fiction and non-fiction with only a dwindling and meager slice left for poetry, if that. The fact that national venues for the review of poetry are so few does not mean that the review of poetry books is not necessary, or irrelevant, (how can it be given the growing swarm of newly released poetry books and new poetry presses?) only that the competition for mention has become that much more severe. The fact is, if the number of poetry books published every year is greater than it ever has been, the role of the reviewer in highlighting the interesting, the promising, the worthy in this avalanche is more vital than ever. At the most a poetry review can help a book sell and draw attention and support to the poet, at the least it can extend the dialogue and focus on a work and prevent it from being swallowed by the sheer numbers of its counterparts.

In another professional capacity, like many poets I wear many hats, I was working on the coordination of the Massachusetts Poetry festival. In preparation for the event, meetings around the state were conducted to speak with publishers and poets and publisher-poets about their perception of the state of poetry in Massachusetts. One of the most telling comments I heard in this process was from a small press publisher. After a few hours of discussing program ideas, cross-promotion possibilities and suggestions on how to bring aspiring writers into the poetry community, this publisher respectfully pointed out that what she needed was not more poetry writers, what she needed was more poetry readers and what as a festival celebrating poetry were we going to do to address that. It is probably the most important question we were asked, and it is one that we are still working to address.

The poet and the poetry reader have become so conflated recently as to become one, as most who read also write. Whatever the implications of this phenomena, the bottom line is there should be a balance between production and digestion, a balance between the plethora of new presses and new books and venues to discuss and digest their wares. At Zoland, as a staff of poets in the publishing business, we are dedicated to supporting both sides of the coin. Since beginning the annual in 2005, we have run this series of online reviews with the intention of profiling work that we found compelling and supporting the efforts of small presses and poets. Now that the annual has come to a close with our fifth and final volume, we are looking at ways to keep the Zoland spirit alive through our website and other endeavors.

You may have noticed two new features on our website in the past few months. The first is a small press review which will be included in each series and which will spotlight a range of recent publications from a different small press each round. Our inaugural review was of Boston-based press, Pressed Wafer and this round we are happy to showcase a few new titles from Counterpath Press. The second is a featured poet page, a space where we give poets a platform to share a sizeable sampling of their forthcoming work. This feature will expand to include interviews as well in the near future.

Enjoy and stay tuned…

Zoland Reunited

13 Oct

Our very own Translation Editor, Christopher Mattison, will be stateside again this week and in Massachusetts no less. This Friday October 14th at 3pm he will be will be discussing his new multimedia project, Mapping Hong Kong, at Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room as part of the Omniglot Translation Seminars. Roland Pease editor of Zoland Poetry will introduce. Please come join us in celebrating his return.

More information can be found here: http://hcl.harvard.edu/poetryroom/events/index.cfm

Poems from the First Annual

22 Sep

In rereading Zoland Poetry #1, I came across a few poems I want to spotlight. Obviously I like all of the poems in the book or I wouldn’t have published them in the first place, but from time to time I would like to bring back some of the poems from the five volumes for new readers to enjoy. If you like these poems please search out more of the poets’ work, in ZP #1 or elsewhere.
 
 

Sixteen Shades of Gray
by John Maloney

The angle opens, the horizon
vanishes. Still, for the ten-
thousandth time I work
separations onto a surface.

If there were some resolution,
I could understand, but nothing
shows, nothing moves from head
to heart to hand, but blood.

I stop, and watch intensity
diminish on the glass. Nothing
is detected, the screen oblique,
deflection of an artificial edge.
 
 

The War on Terror
by Rachel Loden

Satellite beaming
on the rose-
twined cottage:

no chains required
when slavegirl’s
in the mood.

Only your birthright
for a mess
o’pottage,

and a barrelful
of sweet,
light crude.
 
 

Calm is the tree standing straight or twisted
by Raymond Queneau, translated from the French by
Daniela Hurezanu & Stephen Kessler

Calm is the tree standing straight or twisted
Calm too is the bush in its mediocrity
Calm is the proud horse untouched by froth
Calm is the mushroom and its wife the moss
Calm is the little spring calm the torrent too
Calm is the set course removing me from Time
Calm is the dying flower Calm the growing grass

Sustaining Translation

3 Aug

We need a more sustainable form of publishing to forward the cause of literature in translation, though as margins in book publishing continue to be cinched more tightly, such “sustainability” is a difficult venture for independent presses.

As most readers are well aware, a majority of literature in translation first hits shelves through independent presses or smaller arms of the large houses. In the case of independent presses, this only can happen because of funding from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, various state cultural organizations (which are funded by the NEA), and private foundations such as Witter Bynner and Lannan.

Over the last few years there also has been an infusion of support (in terms of finances and publicity) from fantastically important organizations such as the Polish Cultural Institute, Romanian Cultural Institute, Korean Literature Translation Institute, and the Chiang Ching Kuo Foundation. What this has meant practically in the U.S. is that prose and poetry in translation from these various literatures are popping up in the list of a number of independent and university presses. In theory this should be a good thing, though I’m not yet convinced that the support is always used properly by the beneficiaries, because, in reality, what it has meant is that one Taiwanese poet appears in a catalogue next to ten regional Midwestern neo-confessional poets. And more times than not, there is no continuity between the translated poet’s work and the remainder of the Press’ list. A few hundred copies are sold, and then the Taiwanese work disappears deep in some back list as the subvention received from the cultural organization was just enough to cover the cost of the printing and (possibly) a small translator advance. The Press can’t or won’t afford any additional time or resources, and the title dies. Related to this, there are any number of presses that have initiated a contemporary series of literature in translation, but generally there is only external funding for 3-4 titles, and as soon as the subsidy dries up, no more energy is put into the series. The model should be sustainable funding and not required subvention.
 

Selection

In terms of my current location within the world (Hong Kong), I am particularly interested in the “fate” of Chinese literature in translation (specifically from the Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan). There’s, of course, the global question of why certain works are chosen over others for translation – is it primarily an issue of choosing titles that “work” with a particular English-speaking audience? A literary ouija board?

The best editors act as curators, considering both the gallery space of their pre-existing lines and the shifting interests of readers/viewers. However, I also know that a certain percentage of editors are directed by finances rather than aesthetics, and that in the case of Chinese literature, since at least the late 1980s, the error has been in focusing on “dissidence” rather than “dissonance”. Instead of judging a work based on literary merit and doing something new, editorial focus groups are run to ascertain which work will sell best, based on the current political climate. This is not something specific to Chinese literature, though with China often at the forefront of world news, it will more than likely continue to be a reality for years to come. Similar trending followed the rise and fall of Russian literature in translation throughout the Cold War and into the birth pangs of Glasnost, and there was a lot of very bad Russian literature translated because of certain authors’ socio-political importance.

As a practical example of what’s now, in looking at a selection of titles being published in an upcoming season by 100 independent presses based in the US and UK, with 25 of these being presses that regularly (or at least occasionally) include translation in their lines, fewer than 15 out of more than 500 books are works in translation. In terms of Chinese literature — only one of these books is by a contemporary author and the other three Chinese titles are retranslations of Tang classics and Confucian standards. If an independent literary press can sell through 1,000 copies of an unknown contemporary author in translation over a couple-year period of time, the press has done relatively/very well with that title. In most cases, the combination of university libraries and top independent accounts will account for 300-400 copies. In a best-case scenario, the press then hopes to double that amount when adding in individual bookstore and online buyers and events.
 

Who

So, end on an up note and bring it all together. Let’s have three who are doing good for Hong Kong?

MCCM Creations
Since entering the world of book publishing in 2001, MCCM’s aspirations have remained consistent – to bring readers original and inspiring books from authors and designers who share a passion for books as objects, as well as a strong desire for exploring hybrid concepts. Cross-disciplinary realities are at the core of MCCM – fusing illustration, the visual arts, design, architecture, photography, sociocultural criticism and literature.

Dung Kai-Cheung
A longtime literary light of Hong Kong, Dung Kai-Cheung’s novel The Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City will be hitting the world in English translation through Columbia University Press in 2012. Translated by Bonnie McDougall, Anders Hansson, and the author, reserve your copy[ies] now.

“Dung Kai-cheung (1967- ) was born and raised in Hong Kong. He first achieved literary fame in 1994 by winning first prize in Taiwan’s Unitas Eighth New Writer’s Award with his novella Androgyny: Evolution of a Non-Existent Species (Anzhuozhenni: yige bu cunzai de wuzhong de jinhuashi). Since then, almost all of Dung’s works were published in Taiwan. Dung Kai-cheung is a theory-minded writer. The Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City is a perfect example of how Dung utilizes his academic training in creative writing. The novel combines various Western sources: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Umberto Eco’s On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1, and Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. The word “archaeology” in the subtitle naturally brings to mind Michele Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge. In terms of defying conventional genres and confusing the boundary between the factual and the fictional, Dung also has Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths in mind. The Atlas is a hybridized text not only because of its diverse sources but also because it ruptures generic boundaries.” [Revised slightly from Chen, Lingchei Letty, Writing Chinese: Reshaping Chinese Cultural Identity. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).]

Muse Magazine
At first, one of the finest print mags in Hong Kong on the art, culture and literary scenes, and now migrating primarily online, with the possibility of books and other non-digital objects in the future. Check back often to see where things are headed.

Bookstock Festival – July 29-31

8 Jul

From July 29-31 the third annual Bookstock Festival will take place in Woodstock Vermont (www.bookstockvt.org). It will begin on Friday by having an opening at the ArtisTree Gallery with an exhibit of creations by artists that challenge the concept of “The Book.” This was a juried contest. I have  to tout the work of one of the artists, my wife Lori—www.loripease.com, who has two ceramic books included.

On Saturday, poets and writers such as Thomas Powers ( The Killing of Crazy Horse), David Budbill, Sharon Olds, Weslie McNair and Cleopatra Mathis will read from their works. This book fair is not to be missed if you are in the area.

Jean Garrigue

8 Jul

Jean Garrigue (1912-1972) was the first poet of note I met and got to know. She was my friend Lisa’s godmother, and lived on Harvard Street just outside of Harvard Square in the late 1960s. I was in my early 20s, living on Dana Street a few streets over, and would see her from time to time. I was—and still am—impressed by her poems ( I highly recommend looking up her work). I knew next to nothing about poetry at that time, so I’m sure I didn’t talk to her about her poems, but I remember we once shared a train ride from Hartford to NYC and we both smoked like chimneys. People did back then. We discussed politics and the Vietnam war. I knew I was in the company of an important person. A poet. Someone I admired.

 

 

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