I grew up wild and reckless in the land of desert nomads, In the arid lands that lie near the promised land and Egypt, That land of milk and honey they were saving for my brother And the land of Pharaoh’s bondage where my mother’s kin were born. I lived my youth near Canaan and the slaving lands of Egypt, I lived my life an outcast in the desert of Paran.
I grew up wild and stubborn: my hand against my father At war with all my kinfolk; my kin at war with me. I grew up wild and skittish, like a scared colt in a sandstorm I laughed at mules and camels that never could break free.
But I learned to run in sandstorms, and how to eat my water, And how to find oases, and how to take the heat. I learned to talk to demons, to tempters and to genies. I learned to talk to devils, to outcasts just like me.
I learned to love and pity my younger brother Isaac When they took him to the slaughter, not even asking why. God bade me make the manna for Isaac and his children. My demons said they’d be here, twelve tribes of them someday. In this land of desert nomads near the promised land and Egypt Near the land of milk and honey in the desert of Paran.
"In Paran" has appeared in The New Press Literary Quarterly, FULCRUM, The Enchanting Verses Literary Review, and in Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters (Penguin Random House).
The constantly best-selling author, James Patterson, is offering writing workshops. In his advertisements, he tells prospective students "to focus on the story, not the sentence."
I was a poet before I was a novelist, and this advice hurts my heart. We poets have to do a lot in a sentence, given our form, and novelists should, too.
Which story comprised of the following sentences would you rather read?
The doctor ran very quickly to his expensive car. OR The psychiatrist hurtled toward his Porsche.
(I'll leave the topic of using vapid adjectives and adverbs instead of strong nouns and verbs to another rant.)
What would have become of Nabokov, Joyce, Pushkin, et. al. if they followed this advice? Imagine Lolita without a master's eye to both sentence and story. And what about Finnegan's Wake? I shudder.
Dear novelists, please focus on your stories, but don't forget they are made of sentences. Make yours rambunctious, hilarious, poetic, unique.
They say that if you flirt with death You’re going to get a date;But I don’t mind---the music’s fine,And I love dancing with someone who can really lead. In Persian, translated by Mohammad Mostaghimi (Rahi): لاریسا شمایلو
My tongue is bruised My nude is creaky Like a cabbage I sit and wait for you I stutter like an old gun: Take me Know The fast love of my hair.
Your beady little eyes transfix me Like rats at the foot of my bed Your limp pendant wrists still hang on my door You snicker, get a grip.
Your skin is a labyrinth I follow like a duct I follow the duct of your eyes like a skein To the comminatory bull Eyes forward, now toward, where I leap for the horns; Won’t you come in, he sighs.
You own too big a piece of me Your eyes say spare some change and I Don’t want to I Take and give no quarter and I’ve Already cut my hair.
Skin is just sausage we call home. Skin is just sausage we call home.
André Breton (b. 1896) – French writer, poet, theorist of surrealism Excerpt from Breton’s 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism We are still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have been driving at. But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts relating directly to our experience. Logical ends, on the contrary, escape us. It is pointless to add that experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge. It too leans for support on what is most immediately expedient, and it is protected by the sentinels of common sense. Under the pretense of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices.
“Everything Has Become Masculine”— Hypermasculinity and War in Victory over the Sun. The first Futurist opera, Victory over the Sun (VOTS) by Alexei Kruchenych,is known as a brilliant linguistic, poetic, and theatrical experiment, an anti-opera which may have been the world’s first performance piece. The inspired shenanigans of VOTS even pre-date the antics of Dada. To test the bounds of metaphor and language, nothing in this avant-garde play was supposed to make any sense. However, the creators of VOTS – composer Mikhail Matiushin, painter, avant pioneer Kazimir Malevich, and poet Kruchenych – were Futurists with a definite artistic agenda. It is unlikely that the authors of a slew of manifestos and position statements such as “The Slap in the Face of the Public Taste” and “The Word as Such” would not use the bully pulpit of a sold-out show to opine, at least a bit. There is a message in VOTS, and a fairly distinct one, despite the disruptions of dramatic conventions. It is one born of the zeitgeist of the new era of technological war of the 20th century and the Futurist ethos, which eschewed the infirm past to seek greater human power, to become “awesome.” And this message is an antiwar one. To give a Marxist reading of Victory over the Sun, VOTS is the Russian Duck Soup, or given the chronology, Duck Soup is the American Victory over the Sun. Both works use hilarity and irreverence in a send-up of the hypermasculinity of war. The time traveler declares "Everything has become masculine" and even female and neuter nouns turn masculine and, suitably, “hard as iron” And then the most ridiculous and antic hell breaks loose.
Like the Marx Brothers, the Futurists trample over every ideal of masculinity that ever existed. They pillory war with energy, slapstick, and rudeness. Fat Turks with drooping flags give their adversaries flowers, like 1960s hippies, malevolents lurk, strongmen declaim. Perhaps Kruchenych's disjoint war, with its neologisms for code and poetic experiments for battle cries, is more like actual war, chaotic, insane, making no sense.
Kruchenych wrote, “We aim to emphasize the significance that all sorts of harshness… dissonance, and…primitive rudeness holds for art.” In Victory, there is razlom, breaking apart, and war on all levels—linguistic, semantic, syntactic, orthographic, metaphoric, dramatic. By boasting that he had created “the only opera in the world with no female part,” Kruchenykh subverts the hyperfeminine form of opera, as Eugene Ostashevsky notes. VOTS mocks the insipid feminine the way Groucho mocks Margaret Dumont. Like Dumont, francophone symbolists and tubercular Italian are a false and puffed up art that must be eliminated before a true feminine can emerge. Getting the Margaret Dumonts out of the way clears the way for Futurist strongwomen like Elena Guro, Kruchenych's sister in Troe. The early twentieth century and its devastating technological wars could be not be met with decadence, prudery, and cowardice. As Annie Finch has noted, all early modernism glories in its masculinity (i.e., Joyce praising Eliot for not writing girly poems), this perhaps because of the need for soldiering at this time. Victory over the Sun mentions Port Arthur, the first defeat of a European power by an Asian one, by the land, nota bene, of the rising “sun.” Our technology loving and machine-gun toting Futurists knew of the horrific war engines introduced in the Russo-Japanese war. They needed Guros and Akmatovas who could take the heat with them. In war, men are called upon to defend their women, their mothers, their daughters, their wives. Even Stalin dropped all talk of communist internationalism in World War II, calling upon soldiers to defend their Rodina, Mother Russia. Kruchenych's version of this was to throw Pushkin, the "sun" of Russia, whom he deemed too French, off the bridge of the ship of modernity. As Rosamund Bartlett points out, what he places there instead are the deep and ancient roots of the Russian tongue mined from Dal's dictionary. Kruchenych proclaims ZH CH SH, letters that appear in no non-Slavic alphabet, as phonemic battle cries. The war against the sun results in a peace of people prepared to be awesome; not all can handle the liberation of the world from gravity and the word from denotation. As Kruchenych noted, life is good after victory; little gold fishes swim and there is light. So all this hypermasculinity clears the way for a very female virtue, peace. I surmise that the Marx Brothers are indebted to Kruchenych for Duck Soup, which they must have read or intuited in the ether of early twentieth century theater. I posit that Kruchenych was a Slavophile. And conclude that women welcome the announcement that everything has become masculine when such masculinity clears the way for a powerful feminine. After all, when the male sun is overthrown, it leaves room for the female moon to romp.
A transcription of my presentation at the 2015 Association of Writers and Writing Programs convention for the panel "Russian Translation from Pushkin to Pussy Riot" chaired by Phil Metres.
Excerpt from Patient Women (Nora at 22) When it was slow, Nora told Billy the plots of Russian novels. They had just finished The Brothers Karamazov, which Billy enjoyed, and were now starting Anna Karenina. “Anna is a brilliant woman, “Nora told Billy, who was lying on the floor with a bottle of bourbon between her knees. “Most people don’t realize that. She can do anything, except speak up for herself.” Nora reached over and filled her tumbler from Billy’s bottle. “While she’s shacked up with Vronsky, she writes children’s books, she studies architecture, follows local politics; anything Count Vronsky does, she does too, and better. She even handles horses better.” The phone rang. Billy sat up. “Friends with Style”, Nora answered. She listened into the receiver for a few moments, then hung up. “Breather,” she told Billy. Billy lay back down. “So, why can’t she talk about herself?” Billy asked. Nora shrugged “Never learned. The men in the book do it for her. At one point, Dolly—that’s Stiva’s wife—tries to talk to her about what’s happening in her life and Anna just blanks. She starts to talk a little but then it gets onto abortion.” “They had abortions then?” Billy asked. “What do you think?” Nora replied. “Anna may have had one by this point in the novel, or may be planning to; it’s very strongly suggested. The thing is, she can’t talk about any of this stuff, not Vronsky, not leaving her husband; she just shuts down.” “So what happened to her?” Billy asked. Before Nora could answer, the doorbell rang. “Coming,” Billy called gaily. She looked through the peep-hole. But instead of a trick, a woman entered. She was about thirty years old, tall, big-boned and ungainly. She was wearing a plaid dress trimmed with lace and velvet; she had patent leather flats with bows on her too-large feet, with straps bracing the shoes. She looked, Nora thought, like a giant child going to a birthday party. “I’m here for a job,” the woman said. Billy and Nora exchanged looks. “The ad said you needed models,” the woman insisted. Nora sat her down to wait for the pimp and told her the rates: one hundred dollars for suck and fuck, two hundred for Greek, three hundred for dominance, no equipment. The women took half. “I’m working now,” the woman interrupted. “I have a job now.” She was rocking slightly, as if she needed to pee. “That’s nice,” Nora answered automatically. The woman smiled. “I know how to work,” she said proudly. “How much do you make now?” Nora asked, expecting her to double her take. “Five dollars,” the woman replied. “How much?” Nora asked in disbelief. The woman rocked harder. “I know how to work,” she said. “I make two hundred dollars a day. Two hundred dollars a day.” She looked at Nora. “I know how to work,” she repeated, “I know how to work, I know how to work, I know how to work. I know how to work, I know how to work . . . .” Patient Women on Amazon More about Patient Women
Deep in your heart, you always believedThere was a barrier, a secret shieldKeeping you safe from the streetSecretly, you knewYour good shoes and your warm lined glovesKept you apart, and safeFrom the man with the cup in his handAnd the boy with the cardboard signAnd the woman with the bloated legsAnd the girls with the begging eyesFrom the weathered madwomen railing at GodAnd the shadows at the ashcan firesFrom the need to ask, no choices left:Mister, can you please …? What did you, from the cushioned worldOf buffers, alternatives, other ways to turnOf loans from family friendsOf credit cards and healthy childrenOf grocers who smiled because they knew how well you ate:What did you have in common with the concrete world of need?Secretly, you knew, so surely you believedYou could never fall so low Welcome to the no-net world. Then I got fired one dayI got fired one dayLost my job and then my houseI got fired one day. Now your debts mount up like garbage and a layoff’s coming soonAnd you have to see a doctor and insurance just pays halfAnd your folks who lent you money just can’t help you anymoreAnd the loans are coming due; still, the force field is there,In the lining of the gloves, in the good if now used shoesYou will never stand like that goddamned bumHolding the door at the bankToo tired to whore or stealSaying, Please ma’am, please ma’am, please ... Then I got HIVI got HIVThey found outI lost my kidsI got HIV You would never seeHunger on the face of your childWhen she came home from school there would always beApples and rice and chicken and beansMilk and carrots and peasNow there’s two days left till payday and just one last can of cornAnd she’s home, laughing hungry, Hi, I’m home, Ma, what’s for lunch? Welcome to the no-net world Are you hungry? Good:Ready, set, line-up, let’s go:You can get on line on Monday for the lunch meal that’s on Tuesdayand the shelter line’s for Thursday but you have to sign up MondayBut you stayed there just last Wednesday so you can’t come back till Friday.
And the Food Stamps place is downtownAnd the welfare place is uptownAnd the Medicaid is westsideAnd the hospital is eastsideNo I can’t give you a token No I can’t give you a tokenNo I can’t give you a tokenDon’t you know you’ll only drink? Hell, yes. Like a child praying to GodYou believed in foreverYou thought home and hearth were,Not for everyone of course,But surely for you: Only in the nightmaresRare unremembered dreamsDid you stand by the door of the bankSayingYes ma'am, God bless you ma’amPlease. Don’t get sick.Don’t let anyone you love get sick.Don’t be mentally ill.Don’t lose your job.Don’t be without money for a second.Don’t make any mistakes. Welcome to the no-net world.
LETTER TO LERMONTOV You are distant, alone, and far on the horizon, obscured, almost nurtured, by the ocean's fog.Seeking and searching, you are always a stranger:What did leaving me, losing me, cost? I would swim with one foot on the sand of the dry land;I would wait for you, never explore.But you are the waves, and the wind and its whistle,and the storm you embrace far from shore. My few timid ships all cling to the shorelinetoo frightened to leave what they know.You laugh and command them: There is another shore;the second appears when the first is gone. So sing, my dear love, of the wide morning's gold sky,and the call of the azure strand,and the gull and the salt and the mast that pitches,and the lure of a foreign land. I will be your welcome, your country forever; I'll receive, then release you (adieu).I will be your native and nurturing homelandand wait to be called home by you. LOVE’S COMELY BEHIND Say, is not all love illicit and blind?True, it hides, undone, in the mind. Who knows Allah’s thoughts truly lovesthe Self that is Allah’s own wisdom to know,and you are Allah’s, my milk, sheep, and doves,unsure yet certain, a dervish in the snow. Did you, today, attend upon love?No, intent instead, you will not find. Who knows Allah’s thoughts truly lovesthe Self that is Allah’s own wisdom to know,and you are Allah’s, my milk, sheep, and doves,unsure yet certain, a dervish in the snow. Greedily, you eat and fruit is gone.Pulp devoured, you hold the rind. Who knows Allah’s thoughts truly lovesthe Self that is Allah’s own wisdom to know,and you are Allah’s, my milk, sheep, and doves,unsure yet certain, a dervish in the snow. You have lost your love? O, sing, fool: Now gaze upon love’s comely behind. Who knows Allah’s thoughts truly lovesthe Self that is Allah’s own wisdom to know,and you are Allah’s, my milk, sheep, and doves,unsure yet certain, a dervish in the snow. I love love’s desert and its snow.I, Larissa, dervish, a lover signed.
Vow We will love like dogwood.Kiss like cranes.Die like moths.I promise.
For Six Months with You For six months with you, I wouldQuit my loverLeave the citySell my books. For six months with you, I wouldLive in KansasJoin a carpoolShave my legs. For six months with you, I wouldBe an actressWait on tablesBurn this poem. But what if it doesn’t work out? If it doesn’t work out I’ll join a convent If it doesn’t work out I’ll cut my hair If it doesn’t work out I’ll leave the country If it doesn’t work out I still don’t care.
For six months with you, I wouldBreak the true lawBreak my poor heartBreak my vow. Now ask me what I’d doFor a year or two. Williamsburg Poem shaking like the El beneath the Williamsburg trainI wait for him to comebridge and tunnel meeting like the girders of the Elhis hard arms open my thighs in the hood they have names for himthe girls say his names:they call him dos cafes con lechethey sayruega para nosotrosthey say he’s yucca, white and shininglike the crucifix on your breastthey say he’s lucky like a spiderthey say he’s yucca, white and hard they watch himrun like a wolf on the rooftopsrun like a wolf on the rooftopsevery night rumbling like the train beneath the sidewalk and the El above my headencircled by these girders and his arms hewhispers spray paint and graffitipulls me down into the subwaypulls me down and up againlifts me to the bridge the girders tattooed light the open El his mouth burns the asphaltgraffiti burns my thighsand I run through the clotheslines that flap on the roofsI run through the night after him. the girls give me garlicthe girls all pray for meand I pray with the words from the spray-painted wallsand the girders that shake on the Eland I pray: he is my catholic con lechehe is my old native religionI pray: ruega para nosotrosI pray: ruega para mi. he is my brujo lobo blancohe is my amor y aranaand my prayers are as dark and as deep as his nightas the hole he will fill with his eyeshere in me laughinghe opensmy Williamsburg thighs.
QUANTUM LOVE The universe is hotExpandingImmediateAnd this explosion is a paradoxA particle and a waveDiscrete and continuousRelative, absolute, and real. Time itself surrenders to the Big Bang.Space finds new dimensionsAnd space-time curves like I doTo your energy, to your gravityTo our new age of relativityAnd our energy and our mass and our energy times lightAre exponentialDefying gravityExploding creationA unified field. YOUR PROBABILITY AMPLITUDE I glance and a boson blinks into view. A strong force beckons even as a weak force radios decay. The gravity of the situation the magnetism: I observe and my attention turns particles into power tracks into trails whims into waves.
You, volunteer:Reichsgeboren.You choose to be hereSelect. You, volunteer:You know the difference Between cause and effect:The people on the street Are too stupid to have homesToo filthy to washSee them root through the garbage Nicht essen aber fressenNi yest' a zhryat'They deserve to be thereThey deserve to be there Select. Concentrate:See the dark peopleSitting in the cellsThey deserve to be there They deserve to be thereAnd the women of the FrauenblockThe Fraulein triple XControl her, detain herPick her up Select.Cause and effect:You know which is which.Select. You, volunteer:We see youOn the job where you whisperHalf of what you thinkAnd none of what you feel. See the clock:The digital tattoo says run nowRush to the train the transportWho cares who gets inWho cares who gets outPush into the car the transportWho cares who gets homeWho cares who gets shotArbeit macht frei.You choose this You choose:Select. Hey, you, volunteerWe find ourselves together in the subwayThe Grand Ka-ZeZentral:Here in Ka-ZeYour face is not a face Ni litso, a morda:Your face is not a face But a snoutWe don't eat here, we devourNicht essen aber fressenNi yest' a zhriat We don't give an inchAnd we don't give a damn Only weaklings fall to the tracksGod knows the difference Between cause and effect. The selection is over:Look how it happened that you fell.You choose thisYou choose thisSelect.
To touch the sidereal limits with the hands— Otero . Gone are the stars that are not the sun That punctuate heights no longer heights, Heights become space. Things I will never know With my proximity senses are gone, all gone: I will never hear a star upon this earth, But I feel the warm gusts your wings stir up. If in the daytime I were to leave bread and fruit for you You might come again. I am not so different from The mangrove swamp where you play.
Russian zaum poem Дыр бул щыл убещур скум вы со бу р л эз English transliterationDyr bul shchyl ubeshchur skum vy so bu r l ez Translation of "Dyr Bul Shchyl" into Unglish* Pot nag choganichatblaxyou be nat g id
$ $ $ Today, Ritar watches television; soon there will be no cable, so she must watch and watch and watch, drinking the gin she buys instead of meat and vegetables. She sees that the reality shows have created a Malthusian generation. You’reeliminated. Fired. Out. Gohome. The reality shows train people in servitude as the 21st century wants it. Despite humiliating, impossible challenges, despite verbal and physical abuse, no one wants to go home. Perhaps there is no home to go to. And despite the horror of going home, as though all contestants were ACAs born into hellholes, no one cares when someone goes home. Contestants grovel before the judges and snipe at other contestants. Fired. Out. Gohome. Snipe willingly, enthusiastically and eagerly. Go home. “At least it wasn’t me.” They not only think, they say. DoittoJulia. Competitors detract from one another, the performances of other competitors. Their characters. Their looks. Meanly. It is, Ritar sees, class war: The judges are from the upper classes; contestants are usually poor. The shows deign to allow one working class hopeful entrée to their world, at least temporarily. Fame, if short-lived. The promise, if not the substance, of wealth. Temporarily, for a lottery time. Do it to Julia. As in the Project Runway episode with Team Luxe. In which the team, losing, made a pact not to “throw any of their members under the bus,” not to scapegoat anyone to go home. Solidarity, temporarily. And the persistent attempts, ultimately successful, of the judges to make them––the team, not the judges––choose someone to be sent home.“Someone’s goin’ down,” snarled Michael Kors, later characterizing the group’s attempts at loyalty and cooperation as stupid, explaining “You have to be more self-sufficient.” Betrayal and treachery, now termed self–sufficiency. “Who is the weakest?” “We don’t want to…” “WHO is the weakest?” “We…” “WHO…” “…Michael…” “Michael…” “Michael.” “Michael!” “MICHAEL!!!!!!!!!” Do it to Julia. And the winner of Season 7 tells the world that he is inspired by Russian and German military fashion, walking with his lead model, who is wrapped in a swastika. Do it to Julia. And the lexicon of all these shows, television staples in a time of unemployment, is:STEPITUP! Step it up. Work harder (for less money.).Because you are inadequate. Because your performance (painting, cooking, comedy routine, dance, enterprise, design, sewing, attitude) was not good enough. Was lousy, in fact. Should never have seen the light of day. Sucked. Ditto: your face, pores, hair, legs, teeth, butt, breath, facial expression, feet. Sucked. Your too-happy, too-sensitive, too-creative, too-too-too-too self. Sucked. Sucks. And it wasn’t because we asked too much. Gave humiliating tasks. Judged unfairly. IT WAS BECAUSE YOU WERE NOT GOOD ENOUGH. DIDN’T MEASURE UP. SUCKED. Ciao. Aufwiedersehn. Toodles. $ $ $
He follows her with his voice; she sees him with her skin, and drinks him with her hands, in the storm touch which will crush his chest against her breast. The poppies pour their juice in the red rain which will crack, in time, all o- ther things. She drinks him with her hands. He follows her to her breast. She sees him with his chest, in this bo- dy not her own, but which, in the night, is hers. Like the heat that swells all things, she sings the night with him. He follows her with his voice; she sees him with her skin
A recording of my mistranslation of Joseph Brodsky's poem "New Life" from the poet's last collection, Landscape with Flood (Paysage s navodneniem).Music is by the late Brant Lyon; produced by Jackie Sheeler.
The February issue of Plume is now live at www.plumepoetry.com With poetry by Gail Mazur, Kelli Russell Agodon, Alan Shapiro, Carrie Etter, Carol Frost, Barbara Hamby, Devin Johnston, Thomas Lux, Christopher Shipman, Ron Smith, Geoffrey Young, Hélène Cardona translates work by José Manuel Cardona, Adam Tavel reviews Greta Stoddart’s ALIVE ALIVE O. Featured: Emmanuel Moses translated by Marilyn Hacker.
Christ was born in a cave, dark, dank, and blind; The prophets imbibed hot pedal-pumped wine; In the sunstroke lands of mirage, drought, and thorn, Why, Nabi, were our "big" religions born?
