How To Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet (Nancy Campbell)

During 2010 I was writer in residence at Upernavik Museum in Greenland, where I began to learn West Greenlandic or Kalaallisut, the language spoken in the region. This evocative language, which has an unparalleled vocabulary for environmental conditions, had been added to UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger the previous year.

The artist’s book How To Say ‘I Love You’ In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet draws parallels between typography and topography, connecting the disappearance of languages and landscapes. But an abecedarium is also a tool for education, and the book aims to bring new voices to this Arctic language.

The book is currently being exhibited in Beyond Words: Artists and Translation at Amelie Gallery in Beijing, and an edition is forthcoming from MIEL editions in 2014.

-- Nancy Campbell

Three Poems (Susan Elbe)

Drifting

It's luck after all, and timing.

You can dream the world any way you want,

but crows wait, patient in the just-dark,

outside a ring of street light and too often

no one waits at home. Even when they do,

some sisters never make it back,

gone on frozen shoulders,

Sunday matinees stretching into nights,

bus after bus swishing by, empty,

and the kohl-eyed girls on stoops

with smoke snaking from their fingertips,

who drift from slattern streets

to the back seats of used cars

to drafty flats with bad lighting,

where kitchens idle with refrigerator-hum,

where it's too late when they realize,

like snow, they've drifted into corners,

all they know, two kinds of darkness:

in the popcorn-littered balcony,

white lightning on the new moon

of their rapt and upturned faces,

in bed, river-water running underneath

their fevered sleep, the false light

of white-bellied fish floating through.

From The Map of What Happened (Backwaters Press, 2013)
and first appeared in Crab Creek Review (Fall/Winter 2009)

The box this comes in is mine

                   C. D. Wright, Cooling Time

This is the shape of the block I grew up on,

the four-flat I lived in, the backyard I loved,

its iron birdbath, sheets snapping on lines,

threadbare and white as the pages of books

I got lost in. This is the shape of late winter

light pouring in on the rug. And this is

the shape of my mother's gravestone. Bless

this dear little box, the lines of remember

it holds, the corners of blank folded

down in the room of forget.

First appeared in The Map of What Happened (Backwaters Press, 2013)

[Some nights the trees]

glow, full of yellow eyes,

all of us purring

in the lap of dark

::

night used to be a comfort,

its idle fingers stroking

the slack silver of our bodies

::

nothing between us

and the huge arc of sky

its tusk of moon, wind

humming across

the maps of our ears

::

now we listen to

a different world press in

the jackhammer of its laughter

a growl of gears

the deep empty at its edge

::

not ours

but someone else's dreaming

::

we hear snow

slipping off the mountain,

its cold trickling

in the creases of our skin

::

we do not belong to the future

"Drifting" and "The box this comes is mine" are poems from my new book, The Map of What Happened, winner of The Backwaters Press poetry prize. The contest judge, David Clewell, says it better than I can:  "Welcome to the personal mythology of Elbe's Chicago...." "[Some nights the trees]" is part of a chapbook in progress "about elephants". You can hear me read my poems on Blackbird and read two more at Verse Daily.

-- Susan Elbe

Gennady Aygi tribute at BPJ blog (Alex Cigale)

Please forgive this commerical interruption (for a good cause). Simultaneously with Truck, this November 2013, I am doing a month-long residency at the Beloit Poetry Journal blog, paying daily tribute to the great Chuvash Russian poet Gennady Aygi. Please come have a look. Alex Cigale

Three Outtakes from The Rose of January (Geoffrey Nutter)

Qing Dynasty Vase

A giant cactus knocked over a building.

It smashed down rust-covered water towers

in the city’s industrial district

and obliterated the Globe Dye Works.

And then the huge scrap heaps on the outskirts

seemed to be providing a kind of food

for the quilled green body of the monster.

The cactus ambled along awkwardly

past the giant tile-green cylinders

of the processing plant, the loading docks,

and then turned its inexorable gaze

upon the prim, Easter-hat-like houses

on the east side of Periwinkle Bridge

and Oglethorpe Street.

That’s when the townspeople came together

and decided to unleash a weapon

hitherto untried in their long annals:

the Qing Dynasty vase called “Fire Cloud.”

Taken from its vitrine in the grim museum

and set atop the obelisk in city’s center,

its slightly bulging, pear-like form,

delicious, nearly edible in appearance,

its surface painted not with scenes

of future agrarian paradise

nor forbidden imperial cities,

but a fired-on glaze of bright red

clouding to light blue-green aqua,

at its base a narrow lip of apple-green.

Who first recognized how porcelain

could redden this way, cumulous,

full of wishing-thinking at sunrise,

the skipping dawn of the spirit?

Who first discovered its power

of saving the world?

Two ancient forces clash. Near sunset

a great chrysanthemum opens on the horizon.

The Corinthian

The Corinthian is characterized

by his having watched the sun set

in Corinth, the fountains of Corinth,

who has read the waterlogged book

of catenary dewdrops on a chain.

He is a Corinthian, a pragmatist

who knows this is not Salvador.

Many hands can make light work,

or many hands can strew red tape

into the sun, just as many shadows

falling on the evening hills will fuse

into a single entity called Night.

And in the night he is the watermark

of Corinth, barely visible but there,

barely there but present as the sun.

He is the sum of parts, and the sum

of parts barely his own, magnifico

of Coca-Cola signs erected in

the bright-backed rain, firearms

and wishful thinking, brilliant trash,

liquid sky for the indigo bunting.

And he has nerves of steel, piano

wire nerves, nerves of gold, he is wired

with gold leaf, nerved with blades

of ice-brook temper, and the earth

beneath his feet is nerved with microfiber

wrapped in zinc, and rays

of light pass through him.

Make not a gauntlet of the hedging glove,

Citizen, patrician of the Fog Book:

when you stare hard enough into the sky

the steeple’s narrow shoulders shadow forth

your glacial song of mediocrity.

To whom a thumb is given, much will be

required. To whom two thumbs are given,

a hand will be taken back.

Harvest Home

Great A came: alien, colossal, seemingly from nowhere. Have we done enough and seen enough? It feels like we have never been anywhere. It’s the same briar place by the hayrick and the burl you ran your hand across on her female skin in the autumn sun. For I have been a reader nearly all my life, ever since before I could speak even, I have been reading, been read to...have run across the Little B’s in their teeming countlessness, been subject to the purling forth of Big C, of Little D scattering from great purging fans, of myriad and shining E bending down the boughs, in harvest home, in seeding, in bringing forth, in the ripening purple grapes of wine trailing down from Wednesday’s briar, through the wandering ivy tendrils and the foxgloves.

Now the virgin returns, and now returns the reign of Saturn. O little boy, your small bed will break into blossom. Beyond the fields and on the waters we can see the sunrise-colored sails on the lacquered boats of Q.

G.N: These are a few years old, written while I was writing The Rose of January when we were often meeting for coffee here or at Indian Road Cafe. They didn't make it into the book while others did. But don't think of them as rejects--well, unless you reject them. A.C.: I think their form was, for better and for worse, what "doomed them," their "lack" of uniformity with rest of the manuscript. Please find Geoffrey Nutter's recent interview on Phantom Limb. His private study poetry workshops ----> HERE.

-- Geoffrey Nutter

My father, the great stone statue (Claudia Serea)

1.
My poems are my mistakes:
let me make them.

My friends are my mistakes:
let me have them.

So what if they are the sons of workers?
So what if they are not refined
and well read?

You can't keep me
in a tight-lidded jar.

Don’t you see,

I’m a five-alarm fire,

not a firefly.

And I don't wanna be a doctor,
I don't want to be
a doctor so you can show off
and climb the social ladder,

and if you need a doctor in the family,
I'll marry one.

I can't wait to marry
just to spite you,
the son of a peasant
just like you,

you, the great stone leader
on your pedestal,

with your raised hand
pointing to the brilliant future
only you could see.

2.
I lived in fear of you,
in a dictatorship

the size of our apartment.

I was afraid
but fought you anyway.

At 16, I waged
my own revolution,

the one of all the girls

in the world.

I chanted, screamed
and waived my flags
in the kitchen.

You were my huge Lenin statue
I tied with ropes,
pulled down,
and dragged away.

3.
Don't get me wrong,
I always wanted to be like you,
to be you.

I wanted to have your poise,

your walk,

your sure foot.

At 27, I needed to prove

that I've grown.

I broke the news
over the steaming food:
I got the visa today.

A cloud entered the room
and sat at the table.

And you, who always wanted to emigrate,
you couldn't ask me to stay.

You crumbled before my eyes.

You, the strong one,
distant on your pedestal,
broke down to pieces,

to dust.

A simple man

about to lose his child.

You cry too easily,
I said.

4.
I took your tears with me
and carried them 5,000 miles.

I owned my suitcase
and my mistakes.

My heart was a flapping flag
I rose in the new land

to claim it,
to make you proud.

Her latest book of poems, The System, recounts her father’s trials as a prisoner in the Romanian gulag during the 1950s and 1960s. An interview with Claudia Serea is here.  You can also purchase her previous book here, Angels & Beasts.

-- Claudia Serea

Two Poems (Lenny DellaRocca)

The Soft Wilderness Antelope stampede across dusty sunthunder days Copperhead twilight rusts in the sky- sandstone erosion of dry afternoon- The moon is a wild bone Hyena laugh in the dark Lions gone blind sleep without fire dream of strange drums that beat from beyond a four-day taste of blood
Murder of a pregnant baboon in thick treehouses of night Elephant skeletons- a bleached junkyard of graves Birds the color of ripe fruit cry a Tarzan language while insects the size of fists in spurts, buzz like hot transformers or saxophones of long jazz- Life is a stretch of perseverance, a sudden crack of cold lightning- the loud tumble of rain

Truck

I’m driving a truck, watch trees go by at night scratching the face of the moon, sound of water beneath wheels hissing like a mile-long snake. I’m not alone; clouds, stars and fences all around me. And I’ve got her, the one who appeared in a dream, riding the wave with me. This gravel road goes on through storms and cycles of the sun. Nothing in our pockets except our hands, loose change leftover from far away towns where people are named Lavender, Amber and Spiral, certain something has changed; the truck never runs out of gas, never needs repair. Entire countries reveal themselves as if cartography is something on the radio between stations. We know just ahead are all the pages of books we always wanted to read falling from the sky and we’ll ride through, hands out windows, stealing masterpieces. When the road runs out we’ll turn back take that left where the sign said: Quantum Coffeeshop Three Light Years. We hope it has a drive-thru. Marie smiles, reads aloud: Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful,

I took a 10-year break from writing, reading poetry and attending poetry events, and have recently returned to it. I wrote a handful of poems in the past two years, nothing much different from what I wrote years back. But in the last few months a certain something has changed. I began writing what I'd been calling Namedropper Poems, based on my experiences in the poetry world, the poets and the events. Most are pretty bad but a few I like and a couple I like a lot. And then another shift happened. In the past -- going back to the late 1960s -- I wrote poems mostly stream of consciousness, and then tried to form and shape them into something that meant something (though not always). Sometimes, I let it be what it was, all meaning aside. But in the last month or two, I've been writing with an idea in mind. I've always had the hardest time doing that. I've typically failed at putting anything good down. The new poems are sitting in the oven on warm. I've already deleted the worst of them....

-- Lenny DellaRocca

Four Poems (Rich Murphy)

World Series

“That's where the economic and political empowerment of the developing world--the ‘rise of the rest’ as I call it--comes in, . . . .”  Fareed Zackaria

Pitched until the mantle collapsed,

the two trophies disappeared beneath

jet engines and 3000 bodies.

iPhones in hands, “Why me?”

stepped from taxi cabs in suits

and shoes that shine. In league,

the world without a New York City

suffered schadenfreude in the dark.

Team America cried foul, and alarmed

referees chased the remote control pilot

and the drones into caves. A decade

later, bronze testicles wreathing

Wall Street melted into tears

for the taxpayer robbed by bankers,

and Asia jumped the starter gun

when airlifted cash on pallets landed

a baton. A relay circles the Earth.

The rest that rises in steel

and glass sees nothing to learn;

the sun casts light just so.

Western State Penitentiary

Entering the prison yard

by way of the womb

and leaving only as the fertilizer

for another civilization, first

the inmate toddles the grounds,

Columbus, Magellan.

He conquers his mother’s reach

and his father’s nature,

while planting his standard in the hands

of convicted murderers and rapists.

To ease his Atlas shoulders,

the natives prod him to where

the birds soar above a hut:

He has since flapped his arms

to the thought of freedom.

Leading his private expeditions

to death’s wall and to the curly locks

of the electrified mob,

he returns to the promises

iron balls deeded in the dust,

to the gates from which he came.

In the body salt on the grounds

beneath him, he tangles his feet

in longitude and latitude

so that he may eat where beyond

the topsoil traps for millennia

captured claws and paws.

Upon the mesh of rooted bones

he lumps himself, a stone

for crows, exotic dreams, and crimes

that only demise forgives.

Sulphur River Review 88

Anthem

From the mountains of wheat

to unmined coasts of milk and money

thoughts are empty of wailing bellies.

The air is grimy with snacks and booze

on the fat that belches townhouse and ranch

and movement cripples a creeping hand

while rocketing chains and expensive pain.

Among cropless bowls and wilting bodies

wall-to-wall living rooms a moment away are dragged

but not a kernel is shaken from wallpaper eyelids

left with magazine pinups selling soap.

In the churches of cones, gingerbread, and beans

the dieting and lonely gathering mid-week

cover their mouths with bored hands

and cups of decaf coffee.

Grand Street 86

City Welfare

The sky is threadbare these mornings.

When the horizons are put on,

the sun is out at the elbows.

Patches of haze, dirtying,

wrinkling the fabric of everything,

tear at hearts, the cowhides till pennies tinkle

down streets to save undeveloped land

of millionaires. When the occupants of the planet are

at their brightest and buildings

are hunching, everyone thanks each other

for their contribution.

Then the civilization exposes itself

to the evening wind, and vagrant shreds

of blue and gold are blown

like kisses around city squares.

New Letters 84

"World Series” is a poem from my collection Americana, forthcoming in 2014 from Press Americana. It is not about the Boston Red Sox, but an accounting of the fear of the international and economic threats that has taken hold in this country since 9/11, and that has made the idea of a post-American world possible. The fear instilled by Islamic terrorists was used to advantage by the Bush administration to cow the American population. To this day, workers don’t have time to be furious with government or banks or at having been duped by the economic elite. People are working two and three jobs to keep what they haven’t lost already. The lure into consumerism in the 1990s was countered with the fear of international terrorism and the terror of debt. A large segment of the population is as easy to manipulate as FOX News wishes. The poem "World Series" was composed after the manuscript was announced the winner of the Americana Prize, specifically for this book and brings the collection current. The other work in Americana spans decades of writing, mostly dating from the 1980s, a handful from the 70s. In 1980, I embarked on two projects. The first was to write poems that were “snapshots” of Americana: Diners (what was left of them), gas stations, automobiles, tenements, strip malls, etc. The second project was to explore whether Arnold Toynbee’s assertion that civilizations become so when they meet challenges with a successful responses. Since then, the collections came together and as a whole explores culture in America with Arnold Toynbee’s theory in mind, reminding us that we are already living in the “post-American world,” a time for the “rise of the rest” as Fareed Zackaria has phrased it. It seems to me to represent Americana as an artifact. [Among Rich Murphy's previous books, Voyeur is the winner of the 2008 Gival Press Poetry Award.]

-- Rich Murphy

Three Poems (Larissa Shmailo)

Date

Good morning, blind date; like Milton’s daughters, I will read to you.

Good morning, date from hell; why are you still here? I sent you a Dante with a map.

Good morning, birth date and the day that I’ll marry, or die; my biography will read, I was born.

Good morning, date that will live in infamy, or in Queens, which Fitzgerald called land of ashes, preferring East Egg.

Good morning, dried-apple & fig-leaf date that covered my foremother's love, this figured by Ussher as a fall.

Good morning, daylight savings time, falling, falling back, taking time from the bottom and cycling it up top.

Good morning, end-of-the-world and rapture date, since dying is a revelation (and a high).

Good morning, time, curving gently beneath my outstretched palms and slipping through my hands.

I have lost your fingers

Inspired by A. Cigale's translations of A. Ulanov

You are as thick as molasses, brown as oak, and your ears are crêpes suzettes; your cheerful legs are also thick. The pupils of your eyes are small bridges to disaster (after). Your cheekbones cut the cumulus clouds, and your toes are decimal wonders; your pancreas is a mighty fortress to our God. I remember your kidneys, plumlike, and shaped like violas. All your orifices tell of wonders; surely your ass is a wiry insect that I feel but cannot see (woe is me). Your breasts dance; your aureoles are gazelles that sleep in meadows more blue than green. Your vulva is an apple already peeled, as wet as a fresh moraine, alive as snow.

I have lost your fingers and must find them again.

Unglish Translation of “Dyr bul schyl” (Alexei Kruchenykh)

Zaum

Дыр бул щыл
убещур
скум
вы со бу
р л эз

English Translation

Dyr bul shchyl
ubeshchur
skum
vy so bu
r l ez

Translation of Zaum into Unglish*

Pot nag chog

anichat

blax

vo be na

t g id

*With thanks to mIEKAL aND

These three pieces—"Date," the ode to time; "I have lost your fingers;" "and the translation of Alexei Kruchenych's iconic poem Dyr bul shchyl into Unglish (not English)—will appear in Larissa Shmailo's new poetry collection, #specialcharacters, forthcoming from Unlikely Books in 2014. Larissa Shmailo is the editor of the new anthology, Twenty-first CenturyRussian Poetry and the founder of The Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses. Her poetry collections include In Paran (BlazeVOX) and the album Exorcism.

-- Larissa Shmailo

Toward a More Elegant Attention (Hannah Stephenson)

I.

Oh big branch in the river

who will get you out

who will fetch you

II.

When a dog holds a stick

in his mouth

moves it across the park

and leaves

the memory lives in the dog’s jaw

and in the fallen stick

But when someone burns that stick

and years later, the dog is gone

where can the truth survive

III.

Where did all of these sticks come from

you would think a whole forest

has been released

a passel of arrows

IV.

The remembered pets

how a human calls a human

who was a child alongside them

just to say

remember what a good dog she was

V.

The light

doesn’t want to say

anything to anybody

“Toward a More Elegant Attention” was composed on a walk I like to take through downtown Columbus, along an area called the Scioto Mile (on the Scioto riverfront). There are small, beautiful seating areas along the meandering path. My favorite things are these bench swings (think park bench + porch swings). This fall has been very full of projects, and taking weekly long walks has helped to keep me sane, and inspired. During one such walk, I was noticing everything more closely – the oranges and reds of the trees, the smell of leaves in the air, the scuffed up concrete, the dog owners walking with their dogs. The more I looked, the lovelier things became, even the not-beautiful things. The ordinary is elevated by our attention — certainly one reason art is valuable.

– Hannah Stephenson