Book giveaway - 3 days left

Win a free copy of MEDUSA'S COUNTRY, "a new book of searingly intelligent poems from a uniquely eloquent poet." Three days left!

ENTER THE MEDUSA'S COUNTRY GIVEAWAY HERE!

Goodreads Giveaway - Win a Copy of MEDUSA'S COUNTRY

This week only, enter the Goodreads Giveaway to win a free copy of MEDUSA'S COUNTRY, a poetry collection that says #metoo with a kick!  Time and number of copies are limited, so enter today!

ENTER THE MEDUSA'S COUNTRY GIVEAWAY HERE!

Baudelaire, “Beauty,” from Fleurs du Mal

Beauty

I am beautiful, o mortals, like a dream of stone,
And my breast, where each one has in his turn shattered,
Is made to inspire in poets a love
As mute and eternal and silent as matter.

I reign in the azure like a sphinx out of mind;
I unite a heart of stone to the whiteness of swans;
I hate the movement that displaces the lines,
And never do I laugh and never do I cry.

Poets, before my grand attitudes,
Which I seem to assume from the proudest statues,
Consume their days in austere études,
For I have, to fascinate these docile amants,
Pure mirrors which beautify everything they see:
My eyes, my great eyes, of eternal clarity.
Tr. L. Shmailo

La Beauté

Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre,
Et mon sein, où chacun s'est meurtri tour à tour,
Est fait pour inspirer au poète un amour
Eternel et muet ainsi que la matière.

Je trône dans l'azur comme un sphinx incompris;
J'unis un coeur de neige à la blancheur des cygnes;
Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes,
Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris.

Les poètes, devant mes grandes attitudes,
Que j'ai l'air d'emprunter aux plus fiers monuments,
Consumeront leurs jours en d'austères études;
Car j'ai, pour fasciner ces dociles amants,
De purs miroirs qui font toutes choses plus belles:
Mes yeux, mes larges yeux aux clartés éternelles!

Happy birthday, Vladimir Mayakovsky!

On the day of his death, Vladimir Mayakovsky visited his tailor, wrote this poem, played Russian roulette, and lost. Happy birthday, Vladimir Vladimirovich - we celebrate your life.

It's after one. You've likely gone to sleep.
The Milkway streams silver, an Oka through the night.
I don't hurry, I don't need to wake you
Or bother you with lightning telegrams.
Like they say, the incident is cloved.
Love's little boat has crashed on daily life.
We're even, you and I. No need to account
For mutual sorrows, mutual pains and wrongs.
Look: How quiet the world is.
Night cloaks the sky with the tribute of the stars.
At times like these, you can rise, stand, and speak
To history, eternity, and all creation.

Translated L. Shmailo

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY RUSSIAN POETRY AT THE POETRY SCHOOL

Delighted that the Poetry School is using Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry,  the

 anthology of ultra-contemporary Russian verse I edited, as the basis of their course, 

Transreading Russia.

https://poetryschool.com/courses/transreading-russia/

Description:

‘We are Russian and we have extra genes for compassion and asking unanswerable questions,’ writes Larissa Shmailo, editor of Twenty-First Century Russian Poetry. This online anthology of 50 poets in English translation becomes our essential reading in the course that invites us to look at present-day Russia through its poetry, beyond the looming news of Putinism. We will write our own poems in response to the ‘accursed questions’ posed by contemporary Russian poets about ‘the meaning of life, love, suffering, God and the devil.’ As the anthology boasts a wide range of approaches, from experimental to lyric to language poetry, we can expand our own repertoire of engaging with similar questions: by offering tentative answers or formulating new questions. To celebrate creative writing as translation and translation as creative writing, we will be joined by our special guest, Sasha Dugdale, poet and translator from Russian, who will talk to us about her work, also as the editor of the Russian and Ukrainian focus of Modern Poetry in Translation. In cooperation with the journal, we will create new poems inspired by this themed issue – the texts will be published on the MPT website as a featured project.

Contemporary Russian Poetry in Search of a Global Poetics: The Poetry of Alexander Skidan

The program for the Association of Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies Conference is now available. My panel, Contemporary Russian Poetry in Search of a Global Poetics, will take place December 9, 8:00 - 9:45 am. Chair: Vladimir V. Feshchenko; Panel: Eugene Ostashevsky, Evgeny Pavlov, myself; Discussant: OIga Sokolova. I will be speaking on global prosodies informing syntax and semantics in the experimental poetry of Alexander Skidan.

Contemporary Russian Poetry in Search of a Global Poetics
Sun, December 9, 8:00 to 9:45 am, Boston Marriott Copley Place, 1, Columbus II
Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description
The focus of the panel is on contemporary Russian poetry's conscious quest for a global poetics. Specific case studies of several key poets, both living and recently deceased, conducted in the panel contributions will raise a number of important questions, ranging from linguistic to philosophical to political ones. What does it mean to be a global Russian poet today? How do globalised poetic strategies of Russian poets compare to the Western ones? What are the antecedents of the today's poets' globalising attitudes? What are the theoretical challenges of conceptualising a global poetics in the Russian context?

My review of Marc Vincenz's LEANING INTO THE INFINITE

I am not a fan of the unadorned vernacular in poetry, no matter how sincere its sentiment or pertinent its message. In my book, what a poet should do is invent wonderful turns of phrases, new syntax, head-turning semantics. There should be a dialectic of differences which interacts to ­­create the magical, entirely new, entirely necessary synthesis. A poet should bring brilliant LANGUAGE to the reader, by which I more nearly mean semiotics, meaningful, culturally rich, innovative signs that the reader gets to deconstruct time and time again. If you are tired of reading monosyllabic laundry list poetry, then you will be delighted by Marc Vincenz, a poet who trucks in the unpredictable and unexpected, and who conjoins words like gems for jewelry.

In Leaning into the Infinite, Vincenz displays a magical imagination that mines from three continents and a dozen cultures. The language is literate and sparkling. Look at a typical title: “When Uncle Fernando Conjures Up a Dead-Bird Theory of Everything,” where Fernando is “Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa and his many alter egos . . .  written under more than seventy heteronyms.”  Other inspirations are Li Po, Wang Wei, Kafka, Paracelsus, Heraclitus, and Robert Bly. If Auden multitasked, if cummings studied alchemy, if Borges reincarnated into a Hong Kong-born British-Swiss living in America on a green card, you might get a Marc Vincenz.

Vincenz’s Infinite is a poetry of mind, a garden of images and ideas and characters that is uncannily aware of its reader. Perhaps all good poetry has this in common, this drawing of the reader in, like an accomplice to its art. Vincenz’s poetry engages and questions, implicitly and explicitly: “How?” “Should I?” “Who?” In “Unreliable Narrator,” he asks “Should I be / stumped / by the greatness / of God . . .”

Who then is

the protagonist

when trillions

of single cells

all think

for themselves?—or together?—

The poet asks and the spare Basho–like verses —and rich longlined poems later in the collection—wait for answer. The poet’s elegant use of line breaks and sculpted white space seem to invite readers to reply, to mark Leaning into the Infinite up with all kinds of marginalia.

We have a tradition in the European canon of the philosopher-poet, in which a poet offers insights into the human condition. Modern poets do so ponderously as a whole. Vincenz’s touch on this is so light and his language so original that you scarcely know you are being enlightened. His temporal range is from the nascent prehistory of cave paintings to the post-relativistic twenty-first century. His worlds are populated with extraordinary beings, including the aforementioned Uncle Fernando and his interlocutor, the oracular Sibyl. In “Uncle Fernando & Sibyl Exchange Curt Words,” Fernando asks for “that mythical moment” and the oracle replies, “Hush,”:

Carbon first.

Then light.

Sibyl, Vincenz’s untamed muse, also appears in dialogues between Prometheus and Orpheus:

Orpheus:                                             Prometheus:

The voice                                             & what

of time                                                 is that perfume—

 …                                                       . . .

within the planes                                 the word made

of being                                               Thing

…                                                        . . .

Sibyl:

whenever I start

to try & explain it

I forget words

altogether

My favorite characters in Leaning into the Infinite include a finch singing to his mate from a tree-top which he thinks is a mountain, the Tree God Saluwaghnapani, and Milen, a Filipino wet-nurse who sings a song she “claimed drove off demons that grew within Javan / smog clouds: Ai-Li-Ma-Lu-Ma-Nu — . . . “

Leaning into the Infinite ranges from Olympus to “The Penal Colony” and is vivid and visceral:

Not from the gagged mouth—it knots & tangles in the larynx

& the chain simply groans: ‘Have done it.

Have it etched to the bone.’

 It’s all in the pointed nib of the writers’ dark truth.

 In an enlightened moment the Bewildered gasps alone—

The Orwellian/Kafkaesque boot stamps:

Just                 Be                     

a        

      good Citizen

Be                    Just

And then the poet escapes to his natal Asia:

O to be born reforested in Borneo

 where water doesn’t run off in disappointing sloughs,

 but cascades & careens within the bejeweled heart

of a single fruiting tree, where a child is a rambutan

(or the fleshy dumpling-pulp of a mangosteen)— . . .

Vincenz speaks to the childlike longing in us to have a storyteller/mentor introduce us to the world’s mysteries, to share its secrets:

If only I had a good uncle to sit me down at an uneven hearth

with a hot cup of mulled wine, a twinkle in his eye

& this background whiff of ancient pine:

To hear how the world begins green, fresh, tabula rasa:

& late at night or early morning through air still as glass,

to eavesdrop upon the grasses & their endless philosophizing.

You have this uncle in Marc Vincenz. Drink up.