Touchstone Poets Series: Marina Tsvetaeva by Vesna Goldsworthy

     If anyone were to trace my footfall in the poetry library in order to mark out my poetic “city state”, the map would show repeated visits to the collections of Akhmatova, Brodsky, Cavafy, Eliot, Rilke, Seferis, Tsvetaeva and Yeats. Poetry in my native Serbian remains a secret spot on the map. The names of my favourite Serbian poets – Crnjanski, Lalic, Dis – mean so little to the Anglophone reader that I hesitate even to mention them here. Theirs is the poetry I don’t need to revisit between the covers of a book because it lives inside my head. Instead, their lines arrive in unbidden snatches – when I am walking, taking a shower or making lunch – like palimpsest echoes of an earlier life.

     Russian poetry occupies a substantial quarter of this “city state”, a home from home. Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva are its chatelaines. If I were forced to choose one, it would probably be Akhmatova, but I reread Tsvetaeva’s Novogodnee (“New Year’s Greeting: An Elegy for Rilke”) at least once a year.

     Rainer Maria Rilke and Marina Tsvetaeva never met. They corresponded between May and December 1926. Rilke’s “Elegy for Marina” was written in June 1926, to accompany his gift to her, a copy of Duino Elegies, one of my favourite collections. In return, Marina’s elegy for Rilke, written in her Parisian exile on receiving the news of his death (he died of leukaemia on 29 December, having never told her that he was seriously ill) is a lament, an extended ululation which never fails to shake me to the core. It follows few poetic rules, but it defines a metaphysics of mourning.

     Tsvetaeva’s contemplation of the meaning of life, language, loss and love is too profound to do it justice in a blog. Joseph Brodsky only partly succeeded in analysing Novogodnee  in his glorious seventy-page essay “Footnote to a Poem”. Such is the complexity of Tsvetaeva’s verse that you can only ever succeed in part. Like the epiphanies that grow out of a painful life -- and few have known as much pain as Marina Tsvetaeva -- the poem is both staggeringly simple and resistant to periphrasis. It is also probably untranslatable from Russian, though its English translations are solid enough.

     The international translator who succeeded most fully, I believe, is the novelist Danilo Kis. His Serbian rendition of Novogodnee is one of the most beautiful poems of my mother tongue. I hear Tsvetaeva, even when I read her in Russian, through a gravelly, cigarette smoke stained gauze of Danilo Kis’s voice.

     Kis haunts my memories of my native Belgrade, propping up the bar of the Writers’ Club, or arguing something in one of the editorial offices of the many literary magazines which flourished on a shoe string in the dog-days of socialism. He was a symbol, an encapsulation of a writing life I had wanted to lead, a life now imbued with all the melancholy of a “future in the past”, a future which never happened.

     I met Brodsky once, in London, quarter of a century ago. Although our conversation was brief, I managed to eulogise Tsvetaeva’s poem, praise Danilo Kis’ translation most effusively, and not even refer to his “Footnote”. I no longer remember how we arrived at the topic. I suspect that I was no good at small talk with a poet whose verse had meant so much to me, yet I was also too self-conscious to flatter him. But this memory too is somehow in keeping with Novogodnee... it embarrasses me no more. 

Bio: Vesna Goldsworthy (née Bjelogrlić) is a Serbian writer and poet who lives in England. Her books include Chernobyl Strawberries, Inventing Ruritania, The Angel of Salonika (2011), a collection of her poems.^[1] Her novel Gorsky was published in 2015. In 2010, she presented a BBC radio 4 programme on finding one's voice in a foreign land. She won the Crashaw Prize in 2011 and is from Belgrade. She is a Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University. Previously she worked for the BBC Serbian Service as a journalist. 

Note: you can pre-order Vesna Goldsworthy's excellent new novel, Gorsky, from Amazon.com




© 2015 Vesna Goldsworthy

Touchstone Poets Series: "Returning to Canterbury" by Frank Mundo

  

   Back in school, my teachers swore that Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton (each of whom had entire courses devoted to studying his works) were probably the greatest poets who ever lived. My Chaucer teacher even went a step further, dropping the “probably,” and calling Chaucer the Father of English poetry and the greatest poet of all time.

     And, after taking this class, and another two courses all about The Canterbury Tales, I agreed. I enthusiastically agreed! Chaucer was amazing, and I was hooked. Why hadn’t I heard about him before? Why didn’t anyone write like this anymore? I wanted to write like this. I wanted to write something epic, too – not the shapeless, rhyme-less, craft-less, whining, coded, confusing and inconsequential stuff I believed everyone else to be writing at that time.

Geoffrey Chaucer 

     There was just one problem.

     I was one of them. In fact, I still considered myself mainly a whiny and inconsequential fiction writer, not really a poet at all, let alone a poet of any merit. I was a dabbler at best whose main poetic ambition was simply “to get girls,” so this connection was a true life-changer for me. Nothing, before or since, has had the same effect on me that reading The Canterbury Tales had – not after hundreds or maybe even a thousand or more books later.

     And it wasn’t just the sheer size and scope of the work. I actually related to Chaucer for some reason – unlike Shakespeare or Milton or seemingly anyone else, not to mention any of the modern poets either, who, in my mind wrote nothing like these greats. Truly unique, The Canterbury Tales was highly structured and formal and yet so easy and enjoyable to read and to understand. It was musical and funny and clever. The decasyllabic couplets and mostly iambic rhythm seemed perfect for this kind of storytelling.

     A couple more years of studying Chaucer and almost a decade later, I’d written what I considered my first “real” poem, The Brubury Tales, an homage to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales – a 65,000 word “epic” rhyming poem. Finally, I felt like I was a poet/storyteller, too. And while I’m no Chaucer and never will be, and no teachers care about my work enough to teach it to the future poets of the world, I still feel that strong connection to Chaucer and his work through my work. In fact, whenever I feel doubt about my ability (which is all of the time) or whenever my work gets rejected from journals or gets a bad review (which is all of the time), I can and do (and will continue to) return to Chaucer’s world for a little while to forget about the problems in mine.

 © 2015 Frank Mundo

Bio: Frank Mundo is the author of The Brubury Tales (foreword by Carolyn See), a modern version of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales set in Los Angeles just after the 1992 riots.

Visit Frank Mundo's Amazon author page.

Guest Blog: Annette Sugden reviews Rick Lupert's "The Gettysburg Undress"

When I was tasked with writing a review of Rick Lupert's latest book of poetry, The Gettysburg Undress, I was excited. Why? I thought it would be easy since Rick is one of my favorite poets, and a wonderful person who has done so much for the poetry community not just of Greater Los Angeles, but also worldwide with his Poetry Super Highway site, and phone in poetry open reading pod casts. Not to mention that he was the generous host of the long standing, but now sadly defunct open reading at the Cobalt Cafe, who made gorgeous broadsides for every featured reader.

Instead it's the opposite experience because how do I do justice to a writer I admire so much? Do I take off my clothes, but here in Phoenix, as I can't afford the plane ticket to Gettysburg? It is in the 90's here already. It could be refreshing. However, my thighs will stick to the chair, so I go hyper literal instead, and opt to write in pants, and a shirt.

It's a good thing I opted for clothes, since The Gettysburg Undress is an anthology of poetry about a family vacation that Rick Lupert took with his wife, Addie, and four year old son to Washington D.C., and other nearby historical sites in the Mid Atlantic states. Nudity just doesn't seem appropriate, even if there is a lot of potty type humor, and a few descriptions of actual bathrooms. In my defense there are a lot of body references, and one wish for nudity in Lupert's delightfully droll observational poetic voice.

Age Test with Rick Lupert

Do you feel your age?

asks one man. So I

take my hands and touch

different parts of my body,

pause to consider, then answer.

No, about ten years younger

which gives me an idea for a

new kind of Guess Your Age booth.

With section headings like "we arrive in Washington D.C. and do things which are documented on the following pages," brilliantly concise, laugh out loud pieces such as:

Children, Don’t Read This

I misread a sign that says Gusty Winds Area

as Guilty Winds Area and think

My God, who did they blow now?

        Lupert captures the associative absurdity of life as an adult, while flawlessly capturing the whimsical honesty of the inner smart ass child that never really dies in those of us who can keep from willingly jamming sticks up back door orifices.

Although most of the poems are short, and a few are only one line, there are longer pieces such as the fourteen stanza, At the Air and Space Museum, itself a microcosm of the experience of the reading of the rest of the book, with each verse a complete short poem in itself.

If you can't already tell, I love the book. Rick Lupert has such a distinct voice, and since I've seen and heard him read his work live, I could hear his voice in my head as I read. As a work of poetry, The Gettysburg Undress is highly successful, and as a piece of humorously honest travel writing, it far surpasses the popular prose author, Bill Bryson.

Somehow I turned very serious. I guess that can happen when one wears pants. Perhaps I should have at least gone braless. But now that this review is done, I can go disrobe. Although I do need to go to the library. Perhaps I should wait until later, so I don't get arrested.

The Gettysburg Undress, poems by Rick Lupert, copyright 2014, Rothco Press (http://www.rothcopress.com), ISBN-10: 1941519091, ISBN-13: 941519-09-7, 212 pages, $ 19.95

article content © 2015 annette sugden

poetic content © 2015 rick lupert

Walter Ruhlmann's "Crossing Puddles"

I’ve yet (and probably never will), write a book about my hometown; not the place of my birth, but where I spent my formative years, or those places which have had the greatest influence on me. Very few poets can do without opening the floodgates to melancholia, anger, and disappointment. These feelings are as much a part of ourselves as the earth we occupy, and we, as human beings, prefer to stay in control. Walter Ruhlmann’s newest collection Crossing Puddles (© 2015 Robocup Press), is a wonderful and highly pleasurable example of a poet who’s not afraid to explore this complicated transformation through a poetic medium.

Ruhlmann, an English teacher and publisher of mgv2, gives the reader an intense, parabolic travelogue with Crossing Puddles that begins in Normandy, then moves to Bresse (a region of eastern France that butts up against the Alps), and then into the asymmetrically precise and vast landscape of Ruhlmann’s consciousness. There’s loving (and not so loving), reminiscences in the first section titled “Normandy”, where Ruhlmann adroitly leads the reader through the labyrinth of his childhood and family memories. Nature darkly and deliciously haunts the early years of Ruhlmann’s incarnation on this earth, as in the poem “Another Bleak House”:

The orchard behind the house was even gloomier. Apple trees, pear trees,

quince trees, plum trees, thick grass and rhubarb, dahlias, daffodils,

gladiola, irises, and lilies. Peonies and chrysanthemums.

The fog often filled the garden, anti-Eden, anti-chamber of a past mixed

with industry, agriculture and trade. Trade mostly. Dirty money, stolen

goods, black market income, an inherited greed.

In the second section “Bresse,” Ruhlmann takes the reader through a series of defining crystallized moments, both quotidian (“Meat”), and sexual (“Jerking in the Bus”). This kind of subject matter is always in danger of becoming pedantic, and is anything but in the skillful hands of Ruhlmann’s poetry. Again, nature plays a predominant role in Ruhlmann’s work, and here, we glimpse a more robust and intriguing portrait of Ruhlmann the man, who, while reminiscing over an unforgettable and disturbing experience, finds his peace and pleasure in honest hard work, as in the poem, “The Crusty Dark”:

In the shed showing its inside

unscrupulously,

shamelessly,

I can see two saws -

a spotting that brings new thoughts:

soon these dry twigs and arms and boughs

will be cut off, dismantled, dismembered.

More wood to burn the fire next winter.

More blood will flood and whirl in my heart.

Winter has already started in Maore,

the island where I left my pride, my joy, and pieces of my mental health.

I hate to say this but bats are mad.

Other flying mammals - flying foxes - flowed high above,

wider, fluffy, somehow less disturbing than these fat dragonflies

who circle, twirl, swirl and whirl

chasing mosquitos, flies and gnats.

My late cat used to catch them from the balcony where I used to live.

I love to say this:

I love my worker’s hands

they dig soil and scratch and tear and plough.

Dark fingernails, large red scratches, abrasive palms.

The soreness cannot erase the pleasure throughout the day.

The last section, “Remote Places of the Mind,” reveals the open-ended resolution of where Ruhlmann’s traveled, along with the reader, into this present moment. Questions that were never answered regarding family (“Late Epiphanies”), love (“The Blue Tit’), and the identity (“Genesis Revisited,”), come to the fore in a disturbing and wonderful sequence of abstract poems. Who has Ruhlmann become? Or, more accurately, who is he becoming, as in the poem “I Wish It Would Snow for Christmas (Another Acrostic Poem from a Deranged Soul)”:

Sometimes life is so bitching you wonder why existence matters so much.

No trees, no garlands, no stupid baubles hung anywhere.

Other lands, dreamed and fancied, could give shelter to that deranged soul

of mine.

Why haven’t they sent me tickets to take that ghost train to hell?

Fallacy, false images, fake and fancy dressing for the forlorn.

Omens crash on that wrecked brain of mine,

restless, neurosis and neurasthenia, neuralgia won’t leave me in peace, just

bits and pieces that

clatter and eventually shatter.

Hummus will remain after the fall.

rotten skin,

inane limbs,

stained soil,

torn flesh,

meaningless,

awkward,

sick and sulfuric ashes blown away by the wind from the snowy eastern

border.

As an artist of any stripe, it remains a constant duty to one’s vocation to keep questioning, researching, and refining one’s identity. Ruhlmann’s Crossing Puddles pays homage to this courageous and ongoing process.

Crossing Puddles, Walter Ruhlmann, © 2015 Robocup Press, 73 pages, ISBN 978-1-32-098137-8, $11.99

poetry content © 2015 Walter Ruhlmann

article content © 2015 marie lecrivain

Zabrisky and Rogghe's GREEN LIONS

1. Is love an alchemical process?
2. Is it successful, and is it art?
3. Is poetic collaboration a good idea?

The answer to the first question is “yes.”

The answer to the second question are a bit more complicated. Love changes us, irrevocably, and most often times, not for the better, or that’s what the modern world would have us believe. The answers to the second question, at least, poetically speaking, are revealed in Green Lions (© 2014 Numina Press), a collaboration of love poems by Zarina Zabrisky and Simon Rogghe.

Green Lions employs the alchemical elements; water, fire, air, earth, and ether (or spirit), and the Major Arcana from the Tarot, to tell the story of two people who fall in love, where the process takes, and how it changes them. The voices of Zabrisky and Rogghe start off, predictably, as diverse as two people can be, with Zabrisky as the dominant voice, and Rogghe gentlemanly following in her wake. But as these two talented poets work their way into intimacy, and as the process of poetic courtship progresses, they enter into each other’s hearts and minds, and,the writing becomes much more unified in tone and language, as in the poem ‘Equestrian Seduction Duet” (This is Not a Poem About Horses)”:

I would like to know

how does it feel

on your fingertips

when you touch them

on the neck.

warm? soft?

scratchy?

do your fingertips tingle

with warmth afterwards?

would mine?

if you touch a brown horse

would your fingertips glow

with soft brown light?

Their skin is soft

Their neck is hard -

Running your fingers

Through a horse’s crest

Covers them with a sticky coat

You can roll in little clusters.

In the texture of reality.

The elbow grease of beauty,

The imprint of a friendship.

if you kiss a horse

between the eyes

do your lips feel salty?

To kiss a horse

Between the eyes

Is very much like

When you kiss a woman:

It may well turn its head

If it isn’t in the mood.

A horse kiss, rather,

is a gentle bite, a scratch.

But when your lips

Have grazed the surface

Of a horse’s face,

They know

A different kind of music:

I’ve kissed a horse

And tasted sweat

When riding in the desert;

One time

There was a pouring rain -

My lips seemed

To be stained with tears;

Another time

It was the dead of winter -

My mouth crackled

With the electricity

Of warm skin and dry air.

I want to know more.

tell me,

are horses

lonely creatures -

like people -

like islands -

like cities -

like lovers -

Sometimes a horse can’t eat

Because of mourning,

Just like we can’t

When we’re stressed out -

Maybe in love -

Do they

know how to be true friends?

Their conduct is impeccable:

Treat them right

And they will do the same.

Coupled with the simple, lyrical poems are Zabrisky’s lovely black and white illustrations, which nicely compliment the poetic discourse.

The answer to the third question is subjective in nature, but based on my personal experience, I’ve not read a collaborative work that came together so well as Green Lions, especially one that is so easy and profound to fall into, and is both unforgettable and entertaining.

Green Lions, © 2014 Zarina Zabrisky and Simon Rogghe, A Vox Nova Book, Published by Numina Press (www.numinapress.com), ISBN 978-0-9842600-6-5, 127 pages, $12.95

poetic content  © 2015 Zarina Zabrisky and Simon Rogghe

review content © 2015 marie lecrivain

Suzanne' Lummis' Open 24 Hours

A review by guest blogger, PeggyDobreer

     Open 24 Hours, winner of The 2013 Blue Lynx Poetry Prize is an extraordinary volume of poetry by one of LA's own; master teacher, poet, and cultural icon, Suzanne Lummis. This is a double sassy book of poetry that even so, teeters on the edge of historical fiction, and delivers a guised but sophisticated curriculum.

     A long time teacher for UCLA Extension and independent workshops, Lummis's #9 Broken Rules poems, as in Broken Rules #3, "No past tense permitted":

 "Or try this: package it,

Mark it Was. Leave it in a locker

At the Greyhound Bus station."

and pieces dedicated to various poetic devices as in “Sad Poem In Winter - With Assonance, Consonance and Other Occasional Effects,”

 "..like a dream

Of Hollywood. Meanwhile

The rain strikes swollen rags,

shopping carts, the essential smashed flat Styrofoam cup.

I want to burn like a saint,

but I can't, so I'll smoke

my last menthol down to the butt.",

are an education unto themselves and of benefit to writers. Lummis is always teaching, as in, “Broken Rules #5, How To Write the Love Poem”:

"Don't say My soul longs for you,

Say, In this life I am occasioning a body

That needs yours. And wants."

     She breaks it down to the easiest equation. Poet? Life coach? Solvable. Certainly, in print.

The poems in this book sizzle on the page like a neon sign in a neglected neighborhood after closing. Lummis' crisp, sometimes caustic voice, and quick wit put us on guard as though we are 'in danger' (the title of her earlier collection.)

     The characters reveal themselves in short visual clips, almost like the flickering of the aforementioned neon:

"His wife is this heart-shaped

metallic balloon that got loose

and bobbed up high over

the jammed intersection..."

     The poems compel us to continue, like a dark metal stairwell down which we can hear the sound of our own heels descending. They have no dreamy penthouse views, no highfalutin' family traditions.

     They are fire escape poems, rooftops that might house broods of doves, slews of unsavory situations, and characters standing on their own lean  shadows, falling prey without fanfare, not a shred of schmaltz. These poems are fearless jumpers without gear.

     If you love the seeded underbelly of the streets of L.A., spiffed up with the glamor and intrigue of Hollywood noir, you will love Lummis' sensibilities, and you will want to have her books. If you don't yet, get them for sure. Soon you will find yourself watching old Raymond Chandler movies and visiting unsung landmarks you had forgotten existed. The books will become your late night bedfellows.

     But don't be a wimp. Lummis won't hold your hand. And she won't give the plot away without an investigation. If you want to know who dunnit, you'll have to follow the clues, be careful not to trip over the casualties. 

Open 24 Hours, © 2014 Lynx House Press (http://lynxhousepress.org/books/open-24-hours), ISBN 9780899241388, 80 pgs, $16.95 (U.S)

review content and author photo © 2014 Peggy Dobreer

poetry content/book cover art © 2014 Suzanne Lummis and Lynx House Press