Archive for the ‘Guest Bloggers’ Category

Think poetry publishing is all about heartfelt discussions of metaphor and metrics while draped wistfully across chez lounges? Think again. Sometimes you’ve got to get into the dirt and wrangle with mega-corporations (say… I don’t know… UPS perhaps?) just to get your books to a reading on time.

Below is the one such tale of woe and suffering. In this case, we were shipping 20 copies of Carpathia to Cecilia Woloch for a reading in Paris. The story is told below courtesy of Cecilia’s host Adrian Leeds. 

Dear Parler Paris Reader,

My friend and poet, Cecilia Woloch, whose Paris Poetry Workshop is in full force as I write this, didn’t think anything of having 20 copies of her newest book, “Carpathia” (sent to my address in time for the “Writers on Writing” event at the American Library in Paris) last night. There was plenty of time, but her publisher sent them UPS at a huge cost to be absolutely sure they would arrive before the evening’s event.

Our dedicated guest blogger, BOA poet Keetje Kuipers, returns with a new installment dedicated to her passion for poetry, country music, and where the two meet: 

Last week I went home to Montana.  On the way there I stopped in Eugene, Oregon and gave a talk and a reading at the University of Oregon.  I also read in Portland and managed to squeeze in a trip to Orcas Island in the San Juans for a reading there.  I was treading familiar ground the whole way: I was born in Washington state and earned my MFA in Oregon, and Montana is the home-state I never had until I moved there after graduate school.  As I sped down the highway, I passed all the landscapes that I’m obsessed with, all the places that make me want to write poems: the dense, ferny forests of Oregon, the golden, rolling hills of eastern Washington, and the mountains—cast in the snow’s shimmering gray tones—of Montana.  And all those hours I drove from California to Oregon to Washington to Montana, I listened to the one thing that was on the radio everywhere I went: country.

I love country music.  I love the toe-tapping, guitar-string-plucking bravado of it.  I love the way it gives itself over fully to the sorrow or the joy of the moment.  I love its trash-talk and its sweet tongue.  I love it old and new, acoustic or amplified.  I love it almost as much as I love poetry, and I’ve always harbored the secret theory that my love of country music and my love of poetry come from the same place, that poetry and country play on the same parts of my heart, that they work the same sort of magic on their listener or reader.  But I’ve never understood exactly what they have in common until this last week when I decided that for my guest lecture at the University of Oregon I would talk about these two loves of mine.

In this blog post, I’d like to share part of that discussion with you, and use my recent trip through the Pacific and Inland Northwest as a kind of example of what I’m talking about.  I understand that many of you may still not be country fans by the end of this blog post, but I hope you’ll have a better idea of why it pulls on me with the same kind of fierce familiarity that poetry does.  My explanation starts a few months ago when a friend and fellow country music fan introduced me to a David Allan Coe song called “You Never Even Call Me By My Name.”*  The first few verses are in the voice of a lover who hangs around despite the fact that his beloved neglects and mistreats him, as well as never even calling him by his name.  When the song breaks for a moment, Coe keeps strumming his guitar as he says the following:

 “Well, a friend of mine named Steve Goodman wrote that song and he told me it was the perfect country and western song.  I wrote him back a letter and I told him it was not the perfect country and western song because he hadn’t said anything at all about Mama, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or gettin’ drunk.  Well, he sat down and wrote another verse to the song and he sent it to me, and after reading it, I realized that my friend had written the perfect country and western song.”

 Coe then sings the last verse:

 “Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison

And I went to pick her up in the rain

But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck

She got runned over by a damned old train”

 When I heard this song I finally understood why poetry and country hit me with the same kind of force: they’re obsessive art forms.  All the best country artists are obsessed with certain images, themes, and elements in their songs.  This makes each artist’s work familiar: When we listen to Johnny Cash, we understand the realm we’re entering.  Each artist defines their arena of conversation with homemade emblems they’ve hand-picked from their lives; each singer says, “This is what it means for me to be country.”  Cash is a classic example, a musician who returns again and again to confront the same images of drinking and jail time and trains.  New country musicians like Gretchen Wilson win over their fans in the same way, by providing a familiar backdrop for their music.  In Wilson’s case she returns to the images common in the life of a “redneck woman” (which, coincidentally, is also the title of her break-out single): trucks, honky-tonk dances, and cheap beer.  When I listen to a Gretchen Wilson song, I may not recognize my own life, but I recognize the one I know from her songs.

Poetry works the same way.  The best poets have an imagistic and thematic realm that they dwell in.  They’re not confined by it—it’s a space that grows and expands and embellishes on itself with each poem—but good poets return to the haunted places in their mind, they say, “This is what it means for me to be human, alive, a poet.”  And truly great poets not only return to their haunted landscapes, but (just like good country singers) they also utilize those haunted places and things to make the same arguments in their poems, to question the same conditions of our existence, to celebrate or repudiate the same elements of our lives.  The imagistic arguments that Johnny Cash makes about loneliness with his songs of trains and hard drinking aren’t very far from the imagistic arguments that Jack Gilbert makes about the necessity of fleeting love with his poems of Italian villas and Greek islands.  This is obsessive image as rhetoric, and it gets under our skin and stays there.

I’m not the first person to praise the obsessive use of images in poetry.  Richard Hugo (who I imagine was also probably a great lover of country music) famously extolled the virtues of returning (and returning) to the same imagistic ground in poems.  In his oft-quoted essay “The Triggering Town” he explains that “[y]our words used your way will generate your meanings.  Your obsessions lead you to your vocabulary.”  I would push this one step further: our obsessions lead us to our vocabulary, and that vocabulary leads us to the troubled arguments we’re interested in making in our poems.  The touchstone images that we return to in our poetry allow space for our logic to take place.  These haunted images endow our voices with authority and make our personal signifiers into universal objects of significance for our readers.

It doesn’t take long for a reader to understand that for Jack Gilbert, Pittsburgh (with its floundering factories of steel which reappear in his poems) is bittersweet, childhood joy refracted through the darkened lens of adulthood.  Likewise, any reader of my poetry will eventually realize that when I say “river” I mean “lonely road sweeping me along to nowhere.”  If poetry is a truck, then the use of obsessive imagery is the cab of that truck, a place where—when a poet shifts, rearranges, combines, or distorts an image—new arguments are formed in the light of the dashboard.  These days, when I want to write about isolation and loneliness (two familiar conversations that take place in my poetry), I find the same touchstone images entering my poems: deer, bats, rivers, and rifles.  Hugo’s poetry retreads the same imagistic ground many times in an attempt to trouble out his own arguments about disaffection and hard-earned contentment.  As Frances McCue notes in her fantastic new book of photographs, essays, and poems that revisit the struggling Northwest towns that Hugo loved, The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs, Hugo’s inquiry was “how we settle into and take on qualities of the tracts of earth that we occupy.”  In other words, how we obsessively come to align the rhetoric of our lives with the images that make the most consistent impact on the world around us.

These last two weeks on the road, watching clear-cut hillsides stream past my car window or driving alongside the blown-out spring rivers flushed almost pink with muddy run-off, I realized that I’ve been making my own emblems for a long time.  If I flip through my book, I see how in my poems I’ve utilized the images that have obsessed me for the last few years in order to create an imagistic space that my reader can enter with a sense of familiarity.  This space is where my readers and I have conversations, most often about the ways that loss takes its toll, and how we return from that loss.

As I traveled last week to all the places I call home, I revisited those obsessive images and themes that the poems in my book work through again and again. My trip read like a list of my obsessive images, and the things I saw out my car window worked like a sort of set list for the readings that I gave in each place I stopped along the way.  My next blog post will take you on this most recent journey of mine through the Northwest and will include that “set list” of poems recalled by the familiar images I re-encountered along the way.  So stay tuned for poems, pictures, and stories from the road.

 

* Though I’m a fan of this particular David Allan Coe song, I’m not a fan of his politics—which make a rather unwelcome appearance in much of his other music.

Here’s the next installment by our guest blogger Keetje Kuipers! Keetje’s Poulin Prize-winning book, Beautiful in the Mouth, was just published by BOA and Keetje has agreed to share her experiences as a first-time author. Enjoy!

My dad has a joke which, like all his signature witticisms, he likes to repeat whenever he has an opportunity to squeeze it into conversation. Someone I’d never even met once repeated this joke to me in a letter—that is, after he’d been seated next to my dad on a plane for three hours. Unfortunately, I have only myself to blame for this joke and its persistence in my life.

As most any poet will tell you, much of the “work” of writing poems happens in a nearly invisible way, or so it might seem to the untrained observer. I stare out the window, I take the dog for a walk, I make a cup of coffee—but really, I’m writing poetry. All writers are thieves and scavengers, and poets especially are always on the look-out for anything they can steal for their verse. While it might look like

Keetje Kuipers’ new book, Beautiful in the Mouth, is officially published by BOA this month! Her manuscript was selected by final judge Thomas Lux as winner of the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Lux said of the book, “I was immediately struck by the boldness of imagination, the strange cadences, and wild music of these poems. We should be glad that young poets like Keetje Kuipers are making their voices heard not by tearing up the old language but by making the old language new.”

In honor of the publication, we’ve asked Keetje to be BOA guest blogger for April. Here is her first installment:

When BOA asked me to blog on their website for the month of April, I knew exactly where I wanted to start: From 2006-2008, the poet Kate Greenstreet kept a blog (http://www.kickingwind.com/interviews.html) where she interviewed poets about the experience of publishing their first book. As she describes in her own interview, which concluded the series, “I was blogging and wanted to talk about new books… It occurred to me that I could interview the authors instead of trying to write critically about their books. Much easier, more fun! Also, my own first book was due to come out later that year and I wondered what would happen when it did. What had other people experienced?”

My own first book, Beautiful in the Mouth, is

Last Friday, I attended Traditions and Translations: A Celebration of Japanese Culture at the Memorial Art Gallery as part of BOA Editions. That’s me (Intern Liz Mullins) sitting next to Peter Conners, editor. We sat in the foyer of the gallery amidst others selling pertinent wares– traditional Japanese paintings, kimonos and sake, of course– as event participants browsed.

It was my first outing as a BOA intern and it didn’t disappoint. We were there from 2-5PM with several books of poetry by asian artists or in translation, as well as much of Lucille Clifton’s work. Some of our books found homes. A local artist whose studio is just down the hall from our office picked up something. One woman bought a copy of Blessing the Boats for an ill family member. Many simply stopped to look and ask questions.

The afternoon passed leisurely. Some told us about their experiences making origami, or learning about bonsai. Others leafed through our books and inquired about new manuscripts from established BOA authors. I managed to meet both the Director of the MAG, Grant Holcomb, and the Vice Chair of BOA’s Board of Directors, Boo Poulin.

Needless to say, I felt honored to be able to attend an event like this one, even if I only got as far as the atrium.

Poet David Kirby has been teaching Michael Blumenthal’s new book AND to his students at Florida State University – and the students have been eating it up. (What smart students!) In the process of teaching, David has been asking Michael, via email, to discuss some of his writing process on the book. I was fortunate enough to catch the tail end of that discussion and asked Michael to put together a concise paragraph that I could share on the BOA blog. Thanks to Michael for sharing these words on AND, which Publishers Weekly praised by saying, ” “Few new books of American poems have more unity—or more happiness—than the latest from Blumenthal…”

Michael Blumenthal on the writing of AND:

“I tend to be—as was my poetic “mentor,” Howard Nemerov—a “waiter” when it comes to the writing of poems, which is to say that I prefer waiting for something akin to inspiration, or at least the genuine spark of an idea or piece of language, before sitting down to write. I thus “waited” 18 years to write AND from the time the triggering idea first came to me, in 1989. It was then that I wrote the poem “And the Wages of Goodness Are Not Assured” (the title poem of my 1992 book, THE WAGES OF GOODNESS). At the time, I remember thinking to myself that I would one day like to write a book ALL of whose poems began with that wonderful conjunction. And so I waited until 2003-2004, when the poems began to “come.” In every case, the title came first, and then I simply allowed it to “flow,” relatively unmediatedly, into the poem until it had exhausted itself. There was, really, not much “editing” involved, nor much conscious reflection—I tend to think of these poems as what Yeats called “a dredging operation into the unconscious”– but the subjects themselves were issues I had, in some ways, been thinking about all my adult life. Then, around 2006 or so, the poems stopped, almost as suddenly as they came. This was exactly as was the case with my book-length poem LAPS, where 212 of those short poems originally “came,” then stopped. God,–or the gods– only know where it all “comes” from… but it does feel, without hubris, a bit like taking dictation from some celestial narrator, whoever he, she or they may be.”

BOA poet Matthew Shenoda (Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone) also serves as CalArts’ first Assistant Provost for Equity and Diversity. A major position with a big mission. To kick off Black History Month, Matthew wrote a blog for CalArts and based it around BOA poet (and newest Frost Medal Award winner) Lucille Clifton and her poem “jasper texas 1998″ which appeared in Lucille’s National Book Award winning collection, Blessing the Boats.

Read Matthew’s entry here [What Black History Month Means to me]

Thanks to Idra Novey for this next installment of her guest blog series on poetry and translation!

Five Poetry Translation Myths and Five Splendid Quotes to Counter Them

For this week’s post on poetry translation, I thought it might be fun to pair some of the most persistent myths about translation with some quotes from my favorite writers and translators and see what they had to say to each other. Here are the results:

Myth Number Five: Translation is a passive undertaking. It’s all about invisibility and deference.

An answer from Anne Carson:

And if there is a silence that falls inside certain words, when, how, with what violence does that take place, and what difference does it make to who you are?

“Variations on the Right to Remain Silent,” in the journal A Public Space, issue 7.

Myth Number Four: Poetry is all about language use, so shouldn’t poets writing in English concentrate on poetry written in English? Won’t that teach them the most about language and poetry?

An answer from Jane Hirshfield:

When I read, as one still can, some spirited defense of English iambic meter as a basic expression of human nature, I despair. How can the authors of such essays not acknowledge that great literatures have been made of other meters than our binary or triple ones? That not all languages are stressed?

“The World is Large and Full of Noises,” in Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (Harper Perennial, 1998).

Myth Number Three (thanks to Robert Frost): Poetry is what is lost in translation.

An answer from Charles Simic and Mark Strand:

Poetry is what is retained in translation…

All the poems in (this anthology Another Republic) are translations, yet have the authority of very good poems written in English…which says something about the poem’s ability to exist powerfully in a language other than the one in which it was written. How else are we to explain that there are young poets in the United States, say, whose work seems more influenced by poems of Popa or Amichai than by those of Stevens, Eliot, or any other of their American forebearers?

Intro to Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers (Ecco Press, 1976)

Myth Number Two: There are so many great collections coming out now by immigrant poets writing in English about the countries they’ve left for America. Their books speak for Russia as much as any contemporary Russian poet writing in Russian, right? Why read a translation when we can read of those countries from great immigrant poets who also understand American poetry?

An answer from Andre Dubus II:

“We are, of course, a country of immigrants. We come from the very cultures we no longer seem to know…We have never been less isolationist in the variety of goods and services we consume from around the world, and never have we been more ignorant of the people who produce them. This is, if nothing else, fertile territory for misunderstanding, unresolved conflict, and yes, war.

Intro to the anthology Words Without Borders (Anchor, 2007).

Number One Myth about Translation: Some books just can’t be translated.

An answer from Eliot Weinberg:

There is no text that cannot be translated; there are only texts that have not yet found their translators.

“Anonymous Sources,” Oranges and Peanuts for Sale (New Directions, 2009.)

On Poetry Translation, Health Care, and Conversations with the Visionary and Deceased

Have you seen a review of poetry in translation in a major newspaper lately?

I haven’t either.

Apparently, American aren’t interested in poetry from the rest of the world until the poet is old and bald or wins a Nobel Prize, but I wonder if that’s true. People love reading about the infra-realists in Bolano’s novels from an older Mexico City poetry scene. Isn’t it possible they’d also be interested in hearing about current poetry movements in China and Mexico, movements that reflect the huge changes happening in those countries, and which are changing things here, in our own?

Of course, to have more discussion of poetry in translation, we’d have to have more poetry translated. If it weren’t for university and independent presses like BOA, we wouldn’t even have the 57 books of translated poetry that came out this year in the U.S, and that’s 26 fewer books than in 2008. (For more info on these books, check out the blog Three Percent: www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=2370).

Our progress in the U.S. in bringing the rest of the world’s literature into our collective imagination is almost as slow as our progress on health care. In 1916, an American economist named Irving Fisher said he thought universal health coverage was just around the corner. And way back in 1827 Goethe predicted a world-wide explosion of poetry translations was bound to begin any moment.

What might Goethe say to Irving Fisher if they could see how much progress we’ve made on their predictions nine and eighteen decades ago?

Who knows, but below is an attempt to imagine it:

Fisher: Goodness, Johann. What do you think is taking them so long?

Goethe: View it to thy sorrow, Irving, grey thou’lt be tomorrow.

Fisher: What’s that?

Goethe: Small is the ring enclosing our life, dear Irving.

Fisher: Only if you can’t get a bigger, better ring, my good man. And isn’t the US all about bigger and better? I mean really, what’s the hold up? Look at your country, Johann. Germany set up a universal system in 1883. As an economist, I can’t understand how the US has let itself get this behind on so many fronts. How can the country stay ahead when we translate less than any other developed nation, and allow companies to charge so much for insurance 46 million people can’t afford it?

Goethe: The end of the castle soon gaineth.

Fisher: Well, I’m not sure what you mean by that. I do know I was also right about fruits and vegetables and the Americans are still struggling with that idea, too. At least they didn’t resist my idea for the Rolodex.

Goethe: Indeed, dear Irving, so why not let the wine unsparing run. And let it be our precept ever to admit no waverer here—for to act the good endeavor, none but rascals meek appear.

(Many thanks to Edgar Alfred Bowring for providing the translations for this interview, and to Jill Lapore, for her research on Irving Fisher in the December 7 issue of the New Yorker.)

–post by Idra Novey

We’re pleased to introduce our first guest blogger: Idra Novey! Idra translated The Clean Shirt of It by Paulo Henriques Britto. The Clean Shirt of It is the first English translation of a full-length poetry title by acclaimed Brazilian poet Paulo Henriques Britto. The book was published in a bilingual edition of English and Portuguese. As Idra wrote in her translator’s introduction, “No other contemporary Brazilian poets write like Britto. At least not with such a keen sense of the relationship between form and content, or pop culture and high art. However, the artistry of Britto’s poems is that a reader doesn’t have to recognize the allusions to appreciate the freshness of the imagery and layered meanings suggested in the poems.”

BOA Editions is proud to introduce American readers to the powerful poetry of Paulo Henriques Britto. And now we’re thrilled to share this guest blog by Britto’s translator, Idra Novey, with the intriguing title:

Translation and Bad Girls