Of course, when I published my comic (but also more than comic) "List of Words Never to Be Used in Poems,"
people protested. Some sent me very good poems using some of the words from the list. But no one composed a work using all the words. That was up to my beloved friend of 45 years, Audrey Roth. Here are the original list and Audrey's beautiful composition. I love you, Audrey Roth!
In the past, date uncertain (the year 1968 is my recollection), I met a girl – a genius, a mensch – unique, with radiant auburn tresses, a wonder for life. A character. A seer.
I could relate. Our relationship was Darwinian; it transformed us. Mine? Evolution from chrysalis to butterfly. Hers? Lachrymose to laughing. From blank slates to palimpsests – essence a memory, a scent, a dream – our magic was – well – magical, with potential to render us omnipotent. Addictions? Poetry. Kafka –antihero, warrior. Buddha. (Oprah and Jerry were yet to be – we could not quote them.) We wandered the streets, sang Broadway songs at top volume, and shop…(lifted).
We would transcend sorrow – pain; loneliness, tragedy; moping; man’s inhumanity to men (to say nothing of woman) – at a remove. Carry them off in a wheelbarrow, light them on fire, watch them burn, flames consuming, ascending to the starry night. She wrote a missive: “I yearn for healing,” she said, “from father, mother, brother – the mélange of many humans who have formed me with their experiments -- used, usurped, my love, entered my tower, attempting to deluge me with their narrative.” She frowned. “Woe is hardwired in me. Longing. I want to live, hope for a future where I can breathe, sing like the lark, its birdsong a balm to my being, a breath to medicate my soul. I am a maid manquée.”
“I think I know how to help.” I thought, along avuncular lines, of the necessary ingredients – no software supporting my search. I would season her tears with understanding; parse her fine phrases; find a fusion of music and art for her learned brain; evoke a different knowledge –of insight, epistemological energy. “Let me save you. Tell me, show me, more – please,” I asked. My desire to teach, reify her abstract realm, free her from random recollections of living in days of yore. “But how?” I queried. My mission – of manifestly mad singularity – cease her shudders, her cries, her horror. Sire a sea of smiles, a theme of thrills, a new spirit for this star, this stellar survivor. Launch the missiles, the bombs – not one, but many. BANG!! Turn the page over; change her very DNA; transubstantiate! An alternative avatar would fly to the fore, exaltation in its eye. Ineffable - no number of adjectives could capture it.
Within my sight, a thrush settled on an elm tree (or an oak?) in a garden outside the café where we sat. Samovars surrounded. We were a rarity of cultural ecology, so right together. (A portent of our current omnibus of pharmacology?) The time was ripe. She morphed to marital bliss, complete with dacha (first making a trial run as a nun), I toward being a good queer. We spoke our last words while reading “To the Lighthouse,” – hers in verse, underscoring her native tongue – bowed; and wrapped our arms around each other.
Gulielmus, filius Johannes Shakespeare, was baptized in Stratford on April 26,1564; April 23 is traditionally celebrated as his birthday. Here is my favorite sonnet, number XXXV.
No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud,
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults, and even I in this,
Authórizing thy trespass with compare,
Myself corrupting salving thy amiss,
Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are:
For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense—
Thy adverse party is thy advocate—
And ‘gainst myself a lawful plea commence.
Such civil war is in my love and hate,
That I an áccessory needs must be
To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.
mood: like a monarch’s genitalia
labeled under glass, I miss yo(u).
when did you stop being my brot-
(her), my lover, my tramp, my sc(
am)p? Best incest, this fraternal/
maternal. Royalty did this, scions.
Now we are husband, huffed, and
Hera-scarum-wife-and-strife. désolé
de ne pas être avec vous today and
as we were, hymn/her, heard.
the fruit has turned again
alcohol fragrant
smile at the thought of them
lolling on a beach
inverted and drunk and certain of
turning right side again
every wave an ally
tomorrow the eggs will hatch and the young will
race to the sea, Darwinically pursued
by rapacious winged predators
half will die the rest will find the sea
and live
Thanks to Meredith Sue Willis for her review of #specialcharacters in Books for Readers #169 (April 17). She writes:
I thought this was going to be all poetry, but it is much more experimental than that, ending with a wonderful piece about a woman who is close to the end of the line with aging, mental illness, and poverty. It's called "MIRROR, or a Flash in the Pan." It is very close to fiction, although it certainly has passages of poetry. It's an excellent piece, crystal clear and shockingly honest. The collection also includes what is rightfully maybe Shmailo's most famous (popular?) poem, available to read on line, "The Other Woman's Cunt". This one is angry, raunchy, vicious and -- by the way! -- hilarious.
There is a fair amount of typographical experimentation and deep connections to literature and mythology, but at its heart, as a whole, the book has the remarkable quality of being extremely moving even when you aren't sure what's going on.
That's a serious statement, too, because you have the feeling that things that look like games on the surface – for example, a short poem called " t(his), (he)re" – are in fact the only way Shmailo could have written what she wanted to write. This is highly recommended as both interesting experimental work and for its powerful emotional connections.
.
The idiot girl @theParisReview says uncool:
that, to critique, the phrase, the trappings of,
is used by “100% pretentious hacks.” And
the editor @PoetryFound retweets her crap,
and an article on pooping, besides. I was
going to tweet a Baudelaire, from “Beauty,” line,
line by displaced line:
I am beautiful, o mortals, like a dream of stone
But thought better of it (a proscribed phrase?)
—an unpretentious #Stalinist might
tell me not to translate, or Baudelaire not to write.
(But what does this mean: Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes?
Is the idiot girl @ParisCool right?) No, she is
an idiot, disliking a history without her part,
as I dislike the way the young are heartless, mean,
calling it honest (and I was different @18?)
Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.
Steven Wright
My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something.
Groucho Marx
A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet.
Bob Dylan
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.
Walt Whitman
Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.
Carl Sandburg
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
E. M. Forster
Every old poem is sacred.
Horace
Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.
Spike Milligan
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
Paul Valery
mood: like a monarch’s genitalia
labeled under glass, I miss you (u).
when did you stop being my brot-
her (her), my lover, my tramp, my
scamp? Best incest, this fraternal/
maternal. Royalty did this, scions.
Now we are husband, huffed up,
and Hera-wife-strife. désolé de
ne pas être avec vous today and
as we once were, her/him, heard.
From #specialcharacters available now from Amazon and Unlikely Books.
*This poem appeared in MadHat 15: Eye on the World.
She rose from the floor like a stalagmite, an icicle staring crystals at me. I remembered every snowflake was unique, and that this coldness was only similar to the others that separated us, monoid fractals of intricate perimeter.
every happy family is warm.
every unhappy family is
cold in its own way.
Cold. That this frigidity was natural, not freon, made it hurt still more. I numbed and sank within myself. Alone, I fancied myself whole and warm. Heat rose from me like a Hawaiian island. I had become a geothermal vent, heating an artist’s garret, sparrows, and a topography of ferns. I soon became hydrogen, fusing to helium in the sun; I evaporated the infinite snow and the ice of her gaze. I was the water cycle, rising, condensing, immense as a hurricane, gentle as dew. I was salt, the origin of tears, the panacea of fear, and she was still cold.
From #specialcharacters, now available from Amazon and Unlikely Books.
KR: In my world, Language Arts and Mathematics are on opposite ends of the cognitive spectrum. In fact, numbers have never really registered on my poetry radar at all. Yet, in your book, #specialcharacters, you gel the two together so well, it’s like milk and Pepsi all over again. What gives?
LS: Language is an indispensable part of mathematics, be it the word problem (which is what I call some of my poems) or the narrative behind the Big Bang. Also, math and language centers are quite close in the brain, and math, according to neurologists, requires cross-talk.
Jung loved numbers, and so do I. Like him, I romanticize them and give them mythic numerological symbolism. The opening poem of #specialcharacters, "Aging," is based on the Fibonacci sequence, which creates the whorls of sunflowers, spiral galaxies, and many other beloved objects. The final piece, "Mirror, or a Flash in the Pan," is about that dominant number in many lives, symbolized by the $. Everyone gets that number.
KR: Aside from Jung, what other non-poet(s) most greatly influenced this particularly compelling poetry compilation?
LS: The late, great, and underrated David Markson, for his poetical prose in single sentences, which I tried to emulate in "Mirror" (I could not approach his encyclopedic and wickedly detailed knowledge of literature and the arts). Joyce and Joyce and Joyce and Joyce; although he is also a poet, it was Ulysses to which I responded multiply-orgasmically when I first read it two years ago.
Others: The Canonical Gospels, Tolstoy, Old Church Slavonic, The Paris Review, the PBS program Nature, and Blade Runner. But the people who most informed this collection are all poets, in one way or another. As was Jung, for that matter. I especially thank the Otherstream Poetry group (see the great new Madhat anthology, Shadows of the Future) for inspiring some of the experimental poems in this book.
KR: Ah, the experimental poems; those for which #specialcharacters is named, those challenges of the form, those teeming with special characters, and those, I feel, to be the most captivating. Tell me, if you had to define yourself, as a person, a poet, a lover, a friend, using only one such symbol, which would it be and why?
LS: &: The ampersand, meaning "and"- I am an and person, inclusive. I invite Peter and Paul to the party, I like vanilla and chocolate, I work on six projects at a time. And the character looks female, hippy, a plus size like me. The symbol is a ligature of the Latin et, and I am an etcetera person; I sometimes have the quality of too-muchness, but l contain multitudes (Whitman and I share the same birthday).
James Joyce b. February 2
Hamnet Shakespeare baptized February 2
Father of a ghost, but from the charnel dead!
Truepenny called, but bid his one son read
A woeful bedtime tale. So list: if Hamnet were
A suicide (the rest, what is the rest?); if Shakespeare were
Behorned by Ann (and her way hath will, clear)
And asked the poor young Hamnet now to kill the ‘dulterous peer,
(Perhaps to pour the poison in the porches of his ear?)
Cert, he would read just like a crab, ass backward and in fear:
Hamlet (his twin), ou le Distrait, une Pièce de Père Shakespeare;
Ophelia-like, rosemary clad, made mad with that despair.
Or … if the canon ‘gainst self-slaughter held fast,
Would he be murdered with all murdered at last?
And, scarred by family the most,
Who would rise to be his ghost?
From #specialcharacters by Larissa Shmailo, available from Amazon and Unlikely Books.
In honor of Women's History Month, I am excited to invite you to a special musical event to celebrate and empower women at the legendary Bitter End, 147 Bleecker Street (info: (212) 673-7030, info@bitterend.com) this Thursday, 3/20 at 9:00 pm.
A Night of Sirens is a concert featuring twenty singer-songwriters (and one poet, yours truly, backed by rock legend Lisa Bianco). The night will feature indie music, jazz, and good old fashioned rock 'n roll.
There will be performances by Arlene Gould | ארלין גולד, Becca Bernard, Chawa Lilith, Christina LaRocca, Dorothy Eagle, Dez Ismusic, Ellia Bisker, Erel Pilo, Ionie, Katie J Louchheim, Kjersti Kveli, Larissa Shmailo, Lisa Bianco, Lyndol Descant, Michael W McHugh, Nicole Lana Camacho, Peter Bliss, Rew AsteriCk, Sal Mastrocola & Erin Bagwell, and Stephanie Gandelman!
There is a $10 suggested donation which will benefit Made By Survivors, a non-profit charity dedicated to empowering women from around the world who are survivors of slavery, sex trafficking and other human rights abuses. Learn more about the great strides they are making here: http://www.madebysurvivors.com/
Please join us on the first day of spring to hear the song of the Sirens!
To see you is to see a warm brown bird
flash in a black night: I shudder.
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.
Dedicated to the victims of the Park Avenue gas explosion in El Barrio.
What happens to a writer when her favorite reader dies?
The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin said that poets need readers like drunks need vodka. As a poet, I can attest to the truth of this statement. On December 27, 2013, the unthinkable happened—my sister, Tamara Shanahan, champion of my work and my favorite reader, died of complications from a mass on her gall bladder. I lost a sister that day, but also something more. The loss of my sibling is compounded by the loss of a nigh irreplaceable set of loving eyes on my work and a precious and intimate communication through words, not only written, but also appreciated.
I called my sister Tamara “Theo,” after the equally supportive brother of Vincent van Gogh, who cared for his brother, nurtured his talent, and more than once sent urgently needed funds to the artist. Tamara was always available to listen to a new poem, and perhaps, just perhaps, over-praised a few. She also bought my books and CDs by the dozens, handing them out to her friends and neighbors; everyone at her chiropractor’s office got a copy of my CD, The No-Net World, special to us because its cover is a vintage photo of my parents.
Her favorite poem was about older women:
Ladybug
Ladybug, the autumnal, menopausal forest is aflame,
Burning with your yearning and desire: go home.
No season of mists or mellow fruitfulness for you, only
The hot flash of Eros dying, growing old.
Fall now, the deep loam envelopes your breasts,
Dugs that hang low. The crimson leaves as
Veined as your hands, varices red and blue,
Glitter with last dew, the brilliance before death.
Can you, withered Phoenix, rise?
Female over fifty, do you have your music too?
But she also liked my bawdy “The Other Woman’s Cunt” and encouraged me to be bold and perform and publish it.
Tamara used to liken us to “city mouse and country mouse,” with me living in Manhattan and active in various artistic scenes, and my sister living quietly in Queens, enjoying her family and neighbors. We attributed adventurousness to me, always seeking the new, and conventionality to her. Yet what seemed unadventurous in her was perhaps the greatest adventure of all, in her thirty-year long committed relationship with another human being, David Rosen, whom she loved with every particle of her being and was loved by in return. And that love also shone on her late daughter, Irene, and, no matter how obnoxious I was, on me, too.
Part of the balcony at my readings will never light again, a page from my manuscripts will always be missing. My favorite reader has left the house, never to return, and with her, a part of my literary courage and inspiration.
Dedicated to the memory of Tamara Shanahan (August 7, 1948–December 27, 2013).
- See more at: http://indiereader.com/2014/03/death-reader/#sthash.EmGhcqi9.dpuf
This is a thrilling book of femininity and magic. When it comes to capturing the intimacy of pain, This Larissa Shmailo is among the most daring poets of her generation. When speaking of human rights, she is a human flame. She is subtle and provocative, fresh and out of bounds. You will fall in love here, and you will be loved right back.
—Philip Nikolayev
At one point in #specialcharacters, Larissa Shmailo declares: “Mother Kali, you have made me what I am: feminine, brilliant, entirely without fear” -- and the rest of the poems in this collection prove this true. They run the gamut from being outspoken to outrageous, irreverent to downright heretical, taking gleeful pride in knowing exactly how far is too far – and then going even further. I see this work as a continuum in a long tradition of radical writing practices from Futurism, to Dada, to Oulipo, to Pussy Riot. Read it when you wish to be empowered. Read it when you wish to be entertained. Read it to rid yourself of the precious and polite.
—Elaine Equi
With #specialcharacters where even the title is special Shmailo has managed to split language into its common & least common denominators/principles: sound, meaning, symbol, feeling (text/ure) as well as providing us with a range of voices from child to adult & male to female within a range of styles & mannerisms from the ultra-experimental to quirky “innocent” rhymes like her sexy riff on “the 12 days of Christmas” in her classic “The Other Woman’s Cunt.” Her knowledge of the “WORD” & how to use it extends from darkly humorous to warm, lyrical, tender & painful. She explores every facet of lives lived, be it endangered turtles, abused women or battered men. Her passion & compassion know no bounds. “Between cause & effect…choose this” BOOK, at times a “woeful bedtime tale” & “a light in the bedroom” or any room, any space anywhere in the world. It is a book of verse one should return to “again & again.” A book about “creation,” “alive as snow,” these poems “glisten like apples in the dying sun.” When Shmailo refers to “Steven’s old bones” this “unorthodox jew” can only think of the pleasure his old bones derive from reading these rejuvenating pages. This is a major work by a major poet.
—Steve Dalachinsky
Thanks to Joani Reese for throwing the hottest off-site party at Seattle AWP, Hot Pillow, and for inviting me to read my reticent and reflective (not) poem, "The Other Woman's Cunt." Please copy and paste link if you don't require PC poetry.
Please join me for a reading in Cambridge launching my new collection, #specialcharacters featuring the Boston area's finest poets, editors, and publishers:
Philip Nikolayev and Katia Kapovich, editors-in-chief, FULCRUM: an annual of poetry and aesthetics; Gloria Mindock, publisher and editor, Červená Barva Press; Ben Mazer, editor, The Battersea Review; Zachary Bos, editor, Pen & Anvil Press; Audrey Roth, esq., ConvergentGC, and Annie Pluto, professor of literature and drama, Lesley Unversity.
And, of course, yours truly!
Wednesday, April 9, 7:00 pm
Sherrill Library
Lesley University
89 Brattle St
Cambridge, MA 02138
There is, as Bob Grumman termed it, the knownstream; then there is the otherstream, a raging subterranean river of literary lava. It bursts through to an unsuspecting public in Warholian, beat, and Dadaesque and Sadean eruptions— a few readers live to tell the tale and the rest never know what hit them.
Welcome to Shadows of the Future. Here you have Chris Mansel and his he/she serial killers, Marc Vincenz's Swiss-Chinese eyes, Sheila Murphy ripping zen a new one, C. Brannon Watts with blood in his mouth, mIEKAL aND's Unglish, Annie Pluto's words entwined like lovers, Camille Baco's spare music, Marie-Marcia Casoly's fleshy skeletons, John M. Bennett's muy orthography, Sarah Sarai's mellifluous light, and Joani Reese's evanescence. Carol Novack calls from from the other side and Jack Foley calls from any coast he wants. Jeffrey Side's words looks knowlingly upon the festivities, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen's poems pulse like his recordings, and Susan Lewis's pivots the prose poetics at impossible new angles.
And there are more of us, of course, because Otherstream is more, even de trop, or monk minimalist, as it wants. Ask Jake Berry, who rules our online haunts like a happy Pluto handing out inheritances.
Yes, we are legion. Like it.
Otherstream is where every significant literature was born, midwifed by a writer who asked, looking at a new syntax and/or semantics, how can I write like that, never worrying about the may. Like all poets, but perhaps more extreme, we seek the new perspective, though our sense, sounds, and sentences, broken or not.
what matters is not at what place but what moment
the uncoupling decoupling
of movement outward begins:
in December precisely in Okhta probably
identical buildings of crap leatherette
on which scars of SovHousewares glow in the night
meat vegetables footwear - abstract metamatter.
filth flies as galoshes gallop across
the wasteland: so earnest, you know,
such candor and cha-harm in those nightly sessions!
where the elevator drops you Dante-like circle by circle
to the basement where a blind cat gnaws on a piece of glass
or the anemic grove at the edge of the well-fed park
where a musing imbecile pisses on a rotting mat of leaves
with casual dignity like a faun perched on
one of Peterhof's fountains.
the boudoir protocol of familiar and formal address
eight poets one more monstrous than the next in his
despairing artistic malice,
the burning bush of crude come-ons
flares predictably with goodbyes -
again the deus ex machina misses his cue.
Morning, December, river.
laminated stamped
approved for the shining hell of resurrection.
Threaded through itself,
needle and thread,
dry hermit thought,
scant layer,
gently interleaving the air,
a bookmark for its pages,
beak askew, -
it, like a steeple of order,
or an axis,
or a blade drawn from its sheath
and driven into a pond, where fish,
where golden
halos circumscribe the scales,
where fear
is more circular and silent than a target,
and where one female with a singular
gaze skywards,
sharp-angle-browed,
stiller than all
stands, barely swaying, stiller than a shadow.
Then, lingering at the start,
that arrow,
biting into the air, into the light,
two wings
spreading-laboriously, definitively,
and letting drops fall from its claws-
flies
above the pond,-and in the egret's beak,
as a fish's mouth,
world opens wide and gapes dumbfounded.
The street collapsed like the nose of a syphilitic.
The river – sweet longing that spilled into spit.
Having shed their underwear down to the last leaf
the vulgar gardens have gone to seed in June.
I walked out onto the square
and put the desiccated neighborhood
on my head like an orange wig.
People terrified of me – out of my mouth
squirming with its feet an undigested scream.
But they won’t judge me, won’t bark at me.
As at a prophet, they will strew flowers in my wake.
All of them with collapsed noses know
I – am your poet.
As by tavern rot, I’m terrified of your terrible judgment.
The prostitutes will carry me alone in their hands
like a sacred relic through the burning buildings
and display me before God as their redemption.
And God will break down and whimper over my book!
Not words – shuddering, congealed into clumps;
he will race across the sky with my verses under his arm
and, all out of breath, recite them to his acquaintances.
"It's a lie!" we answered in unison, without arranging it.
"It's no secret that the image of an island counts among those I most despise. It seems to me that this image has accumulated exactly as much filth and falsity as is needed to form an island, blast it! What could be more natural than when, from all the trash (spiritual, cultural, and biological) poured in a heap, suddenly, as if by the wave of a conductor's wand, an isle appears? Here we cannot help but associate-by rhyme-our hot uninhabited isle with the awl, a sharp implement, and through it all sharp-tongued witticisms and pointed puns, the tools of rhetoric, even the sharp heat of island spices, and as a result we are lead to all the potential harm caused by the isle-awl: it all goes to the same place, into one heap, one atoll. The pun, as you can see, nauseates: I will be sick with all these endless islands, all seclusion, solitude and cosmic loneliness, I'll vomit them into the auditorium, were there an auditorium before me, or wherever, if it so happens by some inexplicable reason that the auditorium is absent. The inexplicable reason, by the way, can only be the following: that the auditorium is also an island, a diminutive isle of peace and calm in the stormy sea of modernity. And it's not possible that I would be sick into the very thing thing that makes me sick, isn't that true? I'm asking you: is it true?
The old ladies sighed—-what is going to happen?
The old ladies sighed—how’s it all going to end?
And I understood: They’re grooming me for slaughter
By some feeling of monstrous proportions.
But now, I am astonishingly old,
And that feeling never, never comes.
And I know—there are women who, to the last,
Will all rise up, every one of them,
And say, “We—we like our husbands
Better than Jeremy Irons!”
But I never saw their husbands,
Never took off their ties, never kissed their necks.
And that’s why it’s possible that
I don’t like anyone.
Except, of course, Jeremy,
Jeremy Irons.
Бабушки охали — что же такое будет.
Бабушки охали — как же все это станется.
И я понимала — меня растят на убой
Какому-то чувству чудовищного размаха.
И вот — мне уже возмутительно много лет,
А чувства такого все нет и нет.
И я знаю — есть женщины, из которых все до одной
Могут встать стеной.
И сказать — что мол «наши мужья нам нравятся
Больше Джереми Айронса!!!
Но я никогда не видела их мужей,
Не снимала с них галстуков, не целовала их шей.
И возможно поэтому
Мне так никто и не нравится.
Кроме, конечно же, Джереми,
Джереми Айронса . . .
An earlier version of this translation appeared in the anthology Contemporary Russian Poetry edited by James Tate.
I'll go where the snow,
Blue like the eyes of the Virgin,
Touched by an icy crust,
Palpable in relief,
Reigns in the fields of the night.
Where under the heavy conifer wings
Stands my abandoned house,
In which I no longer have faith,
It lives and ages with me,
Just like me, pleading for mercy.
Black boulders, cold foreheads exposed,
Are waiting for us to address them aloud,
As if they have found a solution
To the riddle of time immemorial.
It's terrifying when you realize,
That the trees, the lake, the snow, and the sky,
Holding the world in the grip of their workmen's gloves,
See through you, and are willing
To sell your soul for a song...
Yes, this - the only direction worth going in,
If one is to approach all that's mightier.
Encircling in love seems just as legitimate
As thirst for revenge, while to know
The name of another's God - is to win.
Let's walk, my friend, along an empty street
where frozen clementines of streetlamps hover
and snow covers the distance like a sheet
and all the stores have shut their doors forever.
Show windows, neon glow, ditches and pipes.
"It's all so gruesome, hopeless, literal.
And what do you, my friend, expect from life?" -
"Sadness: it's in the nature of the beautiful!"
All that being quite so, we pass black walls.
"What do you figure will happen to us tomorrow?"
A monstrous and eternal mannequin follows
us with two perfect eyeballs free of sorrow.
"Suppose he knows that storefront rose is dead,
or his own ugliness, or the world's fears?" -
"He knows that there is happiness, my friend,
yet you and I can't see it for our tears.
For six months with you, I would
Quit my lover
Leave the city
Sell my books.
For six months with you, I would
Live in Kansas
Join a carpool
Shave my legs.
For six months with you, I would
Be an actress
Wait on tables
Burn 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 would
Break the true law
Break my poor heart
Break my vow.
Dead roses, plastic tulips, dry immortelles-
he hated them in the German hotels,
drinking coffee from cups whose shiny backs
had been designed with swastikas of cracks.
He never settled down to sink his roots
in any fathermotherland. Old bear,
he wore the same old-fashioned English suits
that had traveled so far during the war.
His wife, his alter echo, read him books
as he lay ill in bed, prepared to die.
He knew by name all foreign lakes and brooks
as they passed by.
A man forgets men rather than forgives.
Laugh, Mnemosyne, healing muse of those
whose heads are crowned, but not with laurel leaves-
with the whispering reeds of other shores.
From an interview between Adam Weiner, chair of Slavic at Wellesley, and myself about contemporary Russian poetry:
AW: In your anthology I immediately noticed a very fine poem by Katia Kapovich, "In Nabokov's Memory." This poem flows so easily that you miss the first time through how rich it is with meaning and humor. The way the poet remembers Nabokov's famous penchant for "hating" things and applies it—in the second line!—to the flowers of the first, the discovered secondary sense of hating "dry immortelles," the way she turns his autobiography, Speak, Memory, into Laugh, Mnemosyne, and many more happy turnings.
LS: I love Katia's poem, which gives understated voice to the life of a literary expatriate, who learns the names of foreign brooks and lakes, perhaps for her new American readership, and perhaps simply for the words. Brodsky was such a "crowned head," our poet laureate. Our émigré bilinguals in Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry write of these "other shores" in bittersweet memory of home.
Even after death, he did not return
To his old Florence.
Leaving, he did not look back;
I sing this song to him.
The torch and the night and the last embrace
Beyond the threshold of fate’s wild lament,
He, from Hell, sent her a curse,
And could not forget her even in heaven.
But he did not pass, candle in hand,
In his penitent’s shirt through the Florence he wanted:
Faithless, low, and long-awaited.
As brave as a deciduous tree in winter,
with only its trembling to give, I live.
Leaves, ordinary, thin, brown, die;
dying, enrich the earth; I?
For the cruciform tree, a resurrection,
seasons, promise, a rebirth. There are no coincidences,
there is a plan, the hope of seedlings, again, again, again.
Not for me. For me, the responsibilities
of chaos. For me, the uncertainties of matter,
the randomness, the ecodisasters,
the blasted, dying trees, the impartialities
of space,
of place.
(They now find patterns
in nonlinear matter,
clinging to fractals,
still hoping to escape
random, null space
and soon
eroding
place.)
Even Heisenberg was certain
that matter would not die, but become,
if need be, E: the Einsteinian assurance.
But dying is no big deal: Only cockroaches live forever.
And matter, as we know it, must disappear.
The ultimate change,
called end, is embossed upon your genes.
And determined to live at all cost,
what freedom, what real,
if evanescent, truth
is lost?
James Joyce b. February 2
Hamnet Shakespeare baptized February 2
Father of a ghost, but from the charnel dead!
Truepenny called, but bid his one son read
A woeful bedtime tale. So list: if Hamnet were
A suicide (the rest, what is the rest?); if Shakespeare were
Behorned by Ann (and her way hath will, clear)
And asked the poor young Hamnet now to kill the ‘dulterous peer,
(Perhaps to pour the poison in the porches of his ear?)
Cert, he would read just like a crab, ass backward and in fear:
Hamlet (his twin), ou le Distrait, une Pièce de Père Shakespeare;
Ophelia-like, rosemary clad, made mad with that despair.
Or … if the canon ‘gainst self-slaughter held fast,
Would he be murdered with all murdered at last?
And, scarred by family the most,
Who would rise to be his ghost?
Happy birthday, James Joyce! Here is an erasure of The Lotus Eaters episode from Ulysses.
BY LORRIES ALONG SIR JOHN ROGERSON'S QUAY
past Nichols' the undertaker's. Eleven, daresay.
Sent his right hand with slow grace over his hair:
Where was the chap I saw in that picture somewhere?
Ah, in the dead sea, floating on his back;
It's a law like that. Curriculum. Crack.
It's the force of gravity of the earth is the weight.
Per second, per second. Postoffice. Too late.
Eleven, is it? I only heard it last night.
What's wrong with him? Dead. And, he filled up, all right.
Chloroform. Laudanum. Sleeping draughts. Phlegm.
Better leave him the paper and get shut of him.
A vacana for Mahadevi-akka, homeless wanderer, poet, patroness of women, and bride of Siva. Om namah shivayah!
Nataraja, white as jasmine, fill me.
Lord, hair matted from love, still me.
Indra Deva of the meeting rivers, kill me.
Let eight hundred forty thousand deaths take me,
As you, Bhadra-Bhima, won't forsake me.
Laugh, brother Blue Throat, for the poison we will drink.
Brother-lover-husband-son, I'll sing and will not think.
Shakra, Lord Asura, take the burden of my tears.
Now, Indra Deva, take the tribute of my years.
From Sensitive Skin #9, published by Bernard Meisler and edited by Ron Kolm and Rob Hardin
One of my favorite places in the world is the Russian Orthodox Cemetery in Spring Valley, New York, which is known as Novo Diveyevo. An Anglo, used to containing his dead in unrelenting grids of slabs of stone atop preternaturally manicured grasses, would have trouble envisioning it. For the Anglo, as Philippe Ariès has pointed out, cemeteries are frightening places that require control and taming. Hence, Anglos would be unprepared for the Slavic chaos at Novo Diveyevo, announced at first glance by the profusion and untrammeled growth of dogwood, maples, rose bushes, geraniums, wisteria, lilacs, spruces, marigolds and every other kind of plant imaginable. Like the death that is their ground soil, the plants grow everywhere, regardless of the boundaries of graves, the vehicle pathways or the buildings.
As for the graves, some are marked with simple wooden Orthodox crosses, the names long effaced by decades of weathering; some are huge marble monuments to heroes of the White army; atop one grave, one man built a small house with a bed and a chair and an embroidered rug for his extended visits to his wife (he doesn’t come any more; this is probably not neglect, I think, but the fulfillment of his obvious consummate wish, reunion). I have always loved this small edifice and its promise of eternal love beneath the weeping willow that shelters its roof, as well as the imposing neighboring grave belonging to General Bezsmertnye, as its tall granite monument proclaims, a name which means, in translation, “immortal.”
As the trees and uncut hedges grow as they please, so the graves are in lines or circles as they choose, and the wildlife goes about, oblivious of the black-frocked priests with their heavy iron crosses and the self-effacing nuns, the monashki, married to the priests. Raccoons lead their young across the small gravel driveway that serves as the entrance to Novo Diveyevo as the cars wait to park in the small places behind the church. Raccoons lead their young across the small gravel driveway that serves as the entrance to Novo Diveyevo as the cars wait to park in the small area behind the church. The church is mainly a site for funerals these days, with a dwindling congregation made smaller by every death. The current clientele of Nova Diveyevo is that greatest generation, veterans of the Second World War, and they arrive more frequently with every year of the new millennium.
Funeral masses are heavy with incense and read in Old Church Slavonic. There is crying, but little keening. Caskets are almost always open and we kiss the hands and the heads of our loved ones in parting, but feel a loss if, for some reason, we cannot. We feel comfort that we are putting our forefathers into the hands of the diligent nuns who will weed the graves and let us know if the gophers are eating holes under the plots and making them sag.
There is—and this is truly incomprehensible to the Protestant—an old age home on the premises; the monashki care for these aged. The place is free of the howling agonies of most age care facilities, where, as anyone who has ever been to one knows, the old lie screaming into the night, calling for their long-dead mothers. Here the old understand they are going to die and accept it, and are happy with the care of the meek monashki, so unlike the jaded, burnt-out nurses of clinical aseptic hospital wards, and with the physical beauty of the final resting place they have chosen.
I grew up with little fear of the dead. All my people—both sets of grandparents, and now both mother and father, other relatives—reside here and I take comfort in visiting them. When I was a child, before the cemetery grew large and woods—yes, even here—were cut down to make room for more dead, my father would take me walking by the woodland streams, showing me the small fish and salamanders in the rivulets and the mushrooms growing on the rotting carcasses of the old woodland giants. My mother would make a picnic. Camp survivors, they had learned to live, or at least make peace, with life and death both.
I said all my people were at Novo Diveyevo—not true. The most important of all, my godchild and niece (suicide? overdose?), chose to have her ashes scattered over the Long Island Sound. To me, a horror. How to visit? Where would be the lilacs and rabbits and raccoons to succor her, to succor me? Where, Lord, in that vast uncaring space they call the sea, would she be? My brilliant child, where are you? Damn you if you tell me she is in every sea breeze, in every mist, in the air I breathe. She is gone and yet I search for her as her molecules spread further and further away to the blank magnetosphere and into deeper space and finally into some accursed black hole. I have a brief with God: I demand habeus corpus.
At Novo Diveyevo, we could have talked, she and I, about this, about her death so unnaturally preceding mine. I could have bought a bench to plant next to the grave and, after many years, perhaps, we could have come to an understanding. If not understanding, then perhaps peace. But how does one come to terms with the sea? With the wind over the ocean? With ashes? With space?
I will do what I know how to do, what I have been taught. I will find a bench near that insatiable sea. I will look for the last molecules of my beloved. Maybe the gulls and terns and clams will take pity on me and guide me somehow to whatever is left of her whom I loved so.
This event celebrates Larissa Shmailo's new poetry collection #specialcharacters (Unlikely Books) with readings by Amy King, Philip Nikolayev, Steve Dalachinsky, Marc Vincenz, and emcees Ron Kolm and Jonathan Penton.
About #specialcharacters:
"This is a thrilling book of femininity and magic. When it comes to capturing the intimacy of pain, Larissa Shmailo is among the most daring poets of her generation. When speaking of human rights, she is a human flame. She is subtle and provocative, fresh and out of bounds. You will fall in love here, and you will be loved right back."
—Philip Nikolayev-
"I see this work as a continuum in a long tradition of radical writing practices from Futurism, to Dada, to Oulipo, to Pussy Riot. Read it when you wish to be empowered. Read it when you wish to be entertained. Read it to rid yourself of the precious and polite."
What happens to a writer when her favorite reader dies?
The Russian poet Alexander Pushkin said that poets need readers like drunks need vodka. As a poet, I can attest to the truth of this statement. On December 27, 2013, the unthinkable happened—my sister, Tamara Shanahan, champion of my work and my favorite reader, died of complications from a mass on her gall bladder. I lost a sister that day, but also something more. The loss is also of a nigh irreplaceable set of loving eyes on my work and a precious and intimate communication, not only written, but also appreciated.
I called my sister Tamara "Theo," after the equally supportive brother of Vincent van Gogh, who cared for his brother, nurtured his talent, and more than once sent urgently needed funds to the artist. Tamara was always available to listen to a new poem, and perhaps, just perhaps, over-praised a few. She also bought my books and CDs by the dozens, handing them out to her friends and neighbors; everyone at her chiropractor's office got a copy of my CD, The No-Net World, special to us because its cover is a vintage photo of my parents.
Her favorite poem was about older women:
Ladybug
Ladybug, the autumnal, menopausal forest is aflame,
Burning with your yearning and desire: go home.
No season of mists or mellow fruitfulness for you, only
The hot flash of Eros dying, growing old.
Fall now, the deep loam envelopes your breasts,
Dugs that hang low. The crimson leaves as
Veined as your hands, varices red and blue,
Glitter with last dew, the brilliance before death.
Can you, withered Phoenix, rise?
Female over fifty, do you have your music too?
Tamara used to liken us to "city mouse and country mouse," with me living in Manhattan and active in various artistic scenes, and my sister living quietly in Queens, enjoying her family and neighbors. We attributed adventurousness to me, always seeking the new, and conventionality to her. Yet what seemed unadventurous in her was perhaps the greatest adventure of all, in her thirty-year long committed relationship with another human being, David Rosen, whom she loved with every particle of her being and was loved by in return. And that love also shone on her late daughter, Irene, and, no matter how obnoxious I was, on me, too.
Part of the balcony at my readings will never light again, a page from my manuscripts will always be missing. My favorite reader has left the house, never to return, and with her, a part of my literary courage and inspiration.
Dedicated to the memory of Tamara Shanahan (August 7, 1948–December 27, 2013).
Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ
Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor
Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com
Alex Cigale’s translations from Russian, and his own English-language poems, have appeared in Cimarron, Colorado, Cortland, Green Mountains, New England, The Literary Reviews, Drunken Boat, Interlit Quarterly, Literary Imagination, Modern Poetry in Translation, and PEN America. He’s on the editorial boards of Asymptote, COEUR journal, The Madhatters’ Review, The St. Petersburg Review, Third Wednesday, and Verse Junkies. From 2011 until 2013, he was Assistant Professor at the American University of Central Asia.
Larissa Shmailo is the editor of the new anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry and founder of The Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses. Larissa translated the zaum opera Victory Over the Sun for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s landmark restaging of the work and has been a translator and writer on the Bible in Russia for the American Bible Society. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in The Common, Barrow Street, The Brooklyn Rail, Drunken Boat, Fulcrum, Madhat, Lungfull!, Jacket, and the anthologies Words for the Wedding (Penguin), Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive), and the Unbearables Big Book of Sex (Autonomedia). Her books of poetry are In Paran (BlazeVOX [books]), the chapbook A Cure for Suicide (Cervena Barva Press), and the e-book Fib Sequence (Argotist Ebooks); her poetry CDs are The No-Net World and Exorcism (SongCrew). Her newest poetry collection, #specialcharacters, is forthcoming from Unlikely Books.
Thrilled to have my poems "désolé de ne pas être avec vous" and "Selene and Endymion" in the brilliant new Madhat Annual! Viva Marc Vincenz and Jonathan Penton (Unlikely Stories) and Clare L. Martin and everyone!
http://www.madhattersreview.com/issue15/poetry_shmailo.shtml
You are cordially invited to the New York City launch of the new anthology
Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry
featuring readings by poets and translators
Alexander Cigale, Vladimir Druk, Dana Golin, Irina Mashinski, Misha Semenov,
Alexander Stessin, and Alexei Tsvetkov.
Sponsored by Intercultural Poetry at Cornelia hosted by Andrey Gritsman
and the Russian American Cultural Center.
Wednesday, December 11, 6:00 - 8:00 pm
The Cornelia Street Cafe
29 Cornelia
New York, NY
Contact: 212-712-9865
Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry is edited by Larissa Shmailo and published by Big Bridge Press.
Tarot, magic, and technology: My review of Elainé Equi's latest collection of poetry, Click and Clone, is now up at The Brooklyn Rail: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2013/11/books/a-spiders-mirror-click-and-clone
I hope you will join me for two extraordinary readings.
First, this Friday, November 1 at Unnameable Books, 600 Vanderbilt Ave, Brooklyn, I am delighted to be reading with:
Terese Svoboda, author of five books of poetry, six novels, the 2007 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize-winning memoir Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, a book of translation, and over a hundred published short stories. She recently published two novels, Pirate Talk or Mermelade (Dzanc Books, 2010) and Bohemian Girl (Bison Books, 2011).
Yuriy Tarnawsky, author of twenty collections of poetry, eight books of fiction, seven plays, a biography, as well as numerous articles and translations, his English language books include the novel Three Blondes and Death, a collection of stories Short Tails, three collections of mininovels The Placebo Effect Trilogy, the play Not Medea, and Modus Tollens (Jaded Ibis).
Marc Vincenz, author ofThe Propaganda Factory, or Speaking of Trees (2011); Gods of a Ransacked Century (Unlikely Books, 2013), Mao's Mole (Neopoiesis Press, 2013) and forthcoming, Beautiful Rush (Unlikely Books, 2014) and a meta-novel, Behind the Wall at the Sugar Works (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014).
Marthe Reed, author of pleth (Unlikely Books, 2013), (em)bodied bliss (Moria Books 2013), Gaze (Black Radish Books) and Tender Box, A Wunderkammer (Lavender Ink), and forthcoming in 2014 Nights Reading (Lavender Ink). She publishes Black Radish Books with Nicole Mauro and with Jonathan Penton is Managing Editor of the newly revived journal Fulcrum Poetry.
Then Saturday, November 2, a fabulous line-up of FIVE POETS at Sidewalk on Avenue A and hosted by yours truly!!
Marc Vincenz and Marthe Reed (see above) and:
Susana Gardner is the author of the full-length poetry collections
CADDISH (Xexoxial Editions, 2013), HERSO (Black Radish Books,
2011) and [ LAPSED INSEL WEARY ] (The Tangent Press, 2008). She recently left Zürich, Switzerland and moved to Rhode Island, where she also edits and curates the online poetics journal and experimental kollektiv press, Dusie.
Michael Ruby is a poet and journalist who lives in Brooklyn. He's the author of two poetry books, At an Intersection and Window on the City, and the editor of Washtenaw County Jail and Other Writings by David Herfort.
Ocean Vuong is the author of two chapbooks: No (YesYes Books, 2013) and Burnings (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2010), which was an
American Library Association’s Over The Rainbow selection and has been taught widely in universities, both in America and abroad. A recipient of a 2013 Pushcart Prize, other honors include fellowships from Kundiman, Poets House, and the Saltonstall Foundation For the Arts.
By popular demand (well, six people asked me), I am sharing my imaginary bios for the Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses, read 9/28 at Tribes.
Amy King won the Golden Globe for best leading role in the film version of I Am the Man Who Loves You. In September 2013, the artificial intelligence app she designed became self-aware when Goodreads, the Poetics List, and the Wompo group merged into a blog named Alias, which promptly took over the world and inherited a tidy sum to boot. According to Vida statistics, Amy is the poet most admired by female writers under 90. Amy is currently working on her memoir entitled John Ashbery Blurbed Me.
In 2013, Alexander Cigale translated War and Peace into Bashkir, the complete works of Osip Mandelstam into Chuvash, and 147 asemic poets from Smolensk into Old English. He is a professor at 14 Eurasian universities and is the translation editor for the Antioch Review, the Atlantic Review, the Antediluvian Review, and the Antidisestablishmentarian Review. In 2014, Alex plans to translate everything that begins with B.
According to the Boston Review, Sarah Sarai has a Beard of Bees, but sources at Literary Lambda say that this has not come out yet. In 2012, twelve people died of joy listening to her poetry. Sarah's poetic ear has been insured by Lloyd's of London for three million dollars. According to sources close to the poet, Sarah "writes what she likes."
Tim Trace Peterson is the editor of 19 prestigious journals, included EEE, and Agh, and e-i-e-i-o. Trace is the winner of four consecutive awards Transubstantiation Awards for enlightened poetic sensibility and best hair at a reading. A popular instructor of graduate students in literature, Trace has actually been known to demand equal pay for equal lecturing, which has earned Trace the nickname Third Wave Joe and Anita Hill. Trace's followers espouse Trace's radical thinking, which says people have the right to be who they want to be
Patricia Spears Jones is a Rhodes Scholar best known for her work on the ecology of the White Pine. In 2013, Patricia attended 4,827 readings in the New York City area, 4,826 of them as a featured reader. Patricia is known as Arkansas's sole cultural resource, and has received the Marx Award for best dactyl, the Veblein Award for assonance, Jeremy Bentham Award for Hidden Meaning, and three grants from the Society of Slant Rhymes. She will anthologize this reading.
Elizabeth Macklin won an Amy Lowell Traveling Poet Award, which she used to live among the Romani in Czechoslovakia, who consider the poet semi-divine. At the New Yorker, Elizabeth was used as an arbiter of taste, with the famous Macklin "no way, Jose Brodksy" being the final word on poetic acceptance. A strict editor of her own work, Elizabeth has been known to discard a book-length poem for one bad iamb. Currently, Elizabeth teaches songbirds to sing.
Dana Golin fled Tashkent when her cover as an university professor was blown and she was discovered to be leaking sensitive Uzbek intelligence to Wikileaks. Here in the United States, she is primarily known as a psychic who channels unpublished work of Anna Ahkmatova for literary circles. As a poet, she is best known by the moniker "Brodsky's kid sister." In 2014, she will teach the city of Hoboken Russian.
Audrey Roth is a poet who writes her work on baseball cards; informed sources say that her verse led the Miracle Mets to victory in 1969. Her friends wonder whether she is a mother or a lawyer, or a mother of a lawyer. A yoga practitioner, Audrey often stands with arms akimbo. It is said that Hilary is looking at Audrey for Vice President, or possibly just for vice. Audrey enjoys running with bulls and plugging dykes.
Susan Lewis is a poet and psychiatrist with a practice focusing on disturbed haberdashers. Sources close to Susan say she is responsible for curing the otolith issues of over three thousand experimental poets. Her additional expertise is in being another poet and in giving state of the union addresses. Friends posit that Susan will have edited 800 online journals by 2015.
I am thrilled to have my poems "Oscillation," "Shore," and "Williamsburg Poem" appear in the new anthology of the Otherstream writing group, Shadows of the Future, edited by Marc Vincenz and published by Jeffrey Side of The Argotist Online. I'm especially pleased to have three collaborations with Chris Mansel, written on Facebook, included in this book.
The anthology is free and you are welcome to disseminate widely and wildly.
(Note: Creation, as calculated by Bishop James Ussher, was the night preceding Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC —which means the fall, Eve’s fall, the day when she stared into the eyes of the saurian and said, yes, yes, I will, might have been an autumn day.)
Later that fall, knowing then the cold, the clothing of autumn air with leaves, always remembering the snake, his blandishments and begging, his coaxing: fall. And she goes down again to that place like warm down in the fallow recesses of this season of iridescent light playing on the water’s edge, dimming in the crepuscule over rotting apples, burst brown in the decaying arms of the fall; in this season unknown in the jejune days of the garden, where all was perpetually young, perpetually whole, without blemish or age, where gravity had no power and nothing needed to fail and fall in the imperfections of loss and overripe flesh.
The apples glisten in the dying sun. She sees a small viper dart into the pile of fruit.
Below please find a link to an interview on the Moscow-based radio show Russian Bookworld on Voice of Russia on the subject of contemporary Russian poetry and our new anthology, Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry. The interview is with myself, Larissa Shmailo, editor of the anthology; Marina Boroditskaya, a contributing poet to the anthology; and Philip Nikolayev, who contributed both poetry and translations. The interview was hosted by Konstantin Boulevich.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contacts:
Larissa Shmailo
(212) 712-9865
slidingsca@aol.com
Ron Kolm
(718) 721-0946
kolmrank@verizon.net
The Unbearables and The Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses Perform
for Global Event:100 Thousand Poets for Change
@ A Gathering of the Tribes
285 E. 3rd Street (between Avenues C and D), NYC
Saturday, September 28, 7:00 – 10:00 pm
Donation
New York City's irrepressible literary clans present writing on the theme of surveillance.
New York City: The Unbearables (“a drinking group with a writing problem”) and The Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses (“we live with the contradictions of feminism”) sound off at the Lower-East-Side literary landmark A Gathering of the Tribes on September 28, 2013, at 7:00 p.m. as part of the global arts celebration 100 Thousand Poets for Change.
With rants, humor, avant-garde poetry, and more than a little outrageousness, the two famous New York City literary clans will perform work on this year's theme of surveillance: "The Unbearables and The Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses Are Watching You! (Being Watched!)".
Curated by Ron Kolm and Larissa Shmailo, the show features a diverse group of noted poets and writers, including Amy King, Steve Dalachinsky, Yuko Otomo, John M. Bennett, Thad Rutkowski, Patricia Spears Jones, Mike Topp, Sparrow, Tim Trace Peterson, Sarah Sarai, Chavisa Woods, Alex Cigale, Susan Lewis, Lana Wiggins, and many others. The festivities are emceed by Jim Feast.
September 28 marks the third annual global event of 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a grassroots movement that brings poets, artists, and musicians together worldwide to call for environmental, social, and political change within the framework of peace and sustainability. There are over 500 events planned worldwide, including:
• a gathering of over 500 poets of the World Bangla Literature Council in Siranji, Bangladesh;
• 100 Thousand Mimes performances in Cairo, Egypt;
• over 25 events in Mexico,with flash mobs, movie screenings, slams, and installations;
• a three-day festival at 100 Thousand Poets for Change headquarters in Santa Rosa, with a heavy metal blowout, a March for Peace and Sustainability with Aztec dancers, marching bands, and Brazilian drummers, and a poetry marathon with over 100 poets.
Events are also scheduled in Greece, India, Pakistan, China, France, Tunisia, Guatemala, Morocco, Turkey, Sudan, Lithuania, Italy, and 100 other countries.
All are welcome to attend or organize a 100 Thousand Poets, Musicians, Artists, Photographers, and/or Mimes event. Those who want to get involved may visit www.100tpc.org to find an event near them or sign up to organize an event in their area.
Stanford University recognizes 100 Thousand Poets for Change as an historical event, the largest poetry reading in history, and preserves documentation of its readings and other events in that university's archives.
About 100 Thousand Poets for Change
Co-Founder Michael Rothenberg (walterblue@bigbridge.org) is a widely known poet, editor of the online literary magazine Bigbridge.org, and an environmental activist based in Northern California. Co-Founder Terri Carrion is a poet, translator, photographer, and editor and visual designer for BigBridge.org.
100 Thousand Poets for Change
P.O. Box 870
Guerneville, CA 95446
Phone: (305) 753-4569
www.100TPC.org
By Harriet Staff
From Russia: Beyond the Headlines, a great review of the new anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry, which is collected on the website Big Bridge and edited by Larissa Shmailo.
Contributors include Philip Nikolayev, Vladimir Gandelsman, Katia
Kapovich, Polina Barskova, Marina Boroditskaya, Dmitry Kuzmin, Maxim
Amelin, Elena Fanailova, Mikhail Aizenberg, Natalya Gorbanevskaya,
Alexander Ulanov, Ruslan Komadey, Vita Korneva, Alexander Stessin,
Andrei Sen-Senkov, Sergey Stratanovsky, Alexei Tsvetkov, Maria Rybakova,
Maria Stepanova, Alexandr Skidan, Bakhyt Kenjeev, Nariste Alieva, Felix
Chechik, Vadim Mesyats, and many more. Phoebe Taplin writes of the
anthology:
New York-based Shmailo first approached the webzine “Big
Bridge” in June 2012 “with the idea of an ultra-contemporary anthology
of Russian poetry.” The resulting collection is reaching international
audiences and there are plans to extend into a more comprehensive,
bilingual print edition.
The anthology celebrates the arts of translation as well as poetry.
Shmailo told RBTH: “the poem needed to be beautiful in English as well
as a good reflection of the original Russian.” She detects a new
excitement about Russian writing in the United States and believes “we
are all falling in love with literary Russia all over again.”
Shmailo has included “émigré voices with still-strong Russian roots,”
among them influential figures like Bakhyt Kenjeev. One of his poems
uses the timeless imagery of the wanderer: “argonaut” or “nomad,”
sailing to shore, or taking to the road. Another of Kenjeev’s
bittersweet elegies looks back at the icons of a Soviet youth (“Sputnik,
Laika,/ then Gagarin…”) and forward to an alien future.
Moscow and New York are home to many of the anthology’s poets and
translators, but there is a rich geographical diversity too, including
writers from Israel, Kyrgyzstan or Colorado. The poems are recent,
written since the year 2000, but the range of writers’ ages is
remarkable.
Some poets’ lives span the eras, like Arkadii Dragomoschenko who died
last year, or 77-year-old Natalya Gorbanevskaya, a veteran Soviet
dissident, one of eight courageous protestors in the 1968 “Red Square
Demonstration.” Others represent a new generation, like Ruslan Komadey,
born in 1990 in Kamchatka, whose thoughtful poetry reflects the slow
“cycles of the earth.”
“I wanted to include both established and emerging voices in a wide
range of styles,” said Shmailo. There are formal experiments, free or
fragmented verse, and poetic prose. But the themes echo through the
centuries: Love, death, pain and religion, the inner world of dreams,
the external realities of new homes, or native lands, and the tensions
of living between the two.
[. . .]
Shmailo writes in her preface: “what Russians from Rurik to post-post
perestroika have always done … is wrestle with the prokliatye voprosy,
the “accursed questions”…” Big, abstract themes may underlie them, but
the subtlest poems focus on barely visible details.
In one of Mikhail Aizenberg’s poems, translated by James Kates, “… a
tiny moth has come awake,/ and flies like a negligible feather/
reminding me of something about you.” Alexei Tsetkov’s “ashes” has this
shining glimpse of human delusion: “so we keep walking in the tall grass
/ where cats are chasing butterflies / and leap catching with their
paws / only the empty bright air.”
A rich and diverse feast of contemporary verse is available in
English and slated to be released in a bilingual edition in print.
The anthology celebrates the arts of
translation as well as poetry. Pictured: Dmitry Vodennikov. Source: Olga
Salij / PhotoXpress.ru
Poetry is not well represented in the global view of Russian literature,
in part because linguistic nuances
make poems harder to translate than a story or a novel. New York-based Larissa
Shmailo, editor of a groundbreaking anthology, hopes to change all that. “Twenty-first
Century Russian Poetry” tantalizes English-speaking readers with selected poems
from fifty writers.
Russia’s literary
heritage continues to inspire today’s writers. There is an ongoing tradition of
poems about other poets. Where once Akhmatova dedicated her verses to Blok (and
vice versa), now Elena Fanailova writes about Gogol and Irina Mashinskimourns the suicide of Boris Ryzhy, a young
poet from Yekaterinburg.
In her verses “In
Nabokov’s Memory,” Katia Kapovich pays tribute to those, like Nabokov, who: “… never settled down to sink his roots/ in any
fathermotherland.” Maxim Amelin, winner of this year’s Solzhenitsyn award,
celebrates a range of cultures in his rich, allusive work: “If we wipe our memory clean / of its
lingering garbage,/ what then will ever remain?”
Fusions and borrowings are everywhere. Polina Barskova, whose latest translated collection (“The
Zoo in Winter”) had a series of poems with epigraphs from Hamlet, also favors
classical references: “filching Orpheus or fibbing Odysseus.” Catherine
Ciepiela’s translations of Barskova are a sneak preview of “Relocations,” an
anthology of poetry by women due out from Zephyr Press next month.
Ruth Fainlight’s pitch-perfect version of Maria Boroditskaya’s poem to
Cordelia, playfully subverts gender and genre. She tells the daughter of
Shakespeare’s King Lear to reject her tragic destiny: “Like a puppy,/ Pull him by the leg of his pants with
your teeth/ Into the game, into comedy!” Emigrés and wanderers
New York-based Shmailo first
approached the webzine “Big Bridge” in June 2012 “with the idea of an
ultra-contemporary anthology of Russian poetry.” The resulting collection is
reaching international audiences and there are plans to extend into a more
comprehensive, bilingual print edition.
The anthology celebrates the arts of translation as well as poetry.
Shmailo told RBTH: “the poem needed to be beautiful in English as well
as
a good reflection of the original Russian.” She detects a new excitement
about Russian writing in the United States and believes “we are all
falling in
love with literary Russia all over again.”
Shmailo has included “émigré voices with still-strong Russian roots,”
among them influential figures like Bakhyt Kenjeev. One of his poems uses the
timeless imagery of the wanderer:
“argonaut” or “nomad,” sailing to shore, or taking to the road. Another
of Kenjeev’s bittersweet elegies looks back at the icons of a Soviet youth (“Sputnik, Laika,/ then Gagarin…”) and
forward to an alien future.
Moscow and New
York are home to many of the anthology’s poets and translators, but there is a
rich geographical diversity too, including writers from Israel, Kyrgyzstan or
Colorado. The
poems are recent, written since the year 2000, but the range of writers’ ages is
remarkable.
Some poets’ lives span the eras, like Arkadii Dragomoschenko who died
last year, or 77-year-old Natalya Gorbanevskaya, a veteran Soviet dissident,
one of eight courageous protestors in the 1968 “Red Square Demonstration.” Others represent a
new generation, like Ruslan Komadey, born in 1990 in Kamchatka, whose thoughtful poetry reflects the slow “cycles of the earth.”
“I wanted to include both established and emerging voices in a wide
range of styles,” said Shmailo. There are formal experiments, free or
fragmented verse, and poetic prose. But the themes echo through the
centuries: Love, death, pain and religion, the inner world of dreams,
the
external realities of new homes, or native lands, and the tensions of
living
between the two. Big themes; recurring dreams
Shmailo writes in her preface: “what Russians from Rurik to post-post
perestroika have always done … is wrestle with the prokliatye voprosy, the
"accursed questions"…” Big,
abstract themes may underlie them, but the subtlest poems focus on barely visible
details.
In one of Mikhail
Aizenberg’s poems, translated by James Kates, “… a tiny moth has come awake,/
and flies like a negligible feather/ reminding me of something about you.” Alexei
Tsetkov’s “ashes” has this shining glimpse of human delusion: “so we keep
walking in the tall grass / where cats are chasing butterflies / and leap catching with their paws /
only the empty bright air.”
Maria Rybakova’s
verse-novel “Gnedich” builds on the work of its namesake poet, one-eyed, dreamy
Nikolai Gnedich and his translation of the “The Iliad.” For Rybakova, like
Lermontov and others, dreams are a recurring motif, revealing an interior
world:
“… at night,/ when the
bed was rocking/ and calling itself/ in the false language of dreams,/ 'a
boat.'” Marina Boroditskaya, in Sasha Dugdale’s powerful translation, imagines
herself judged by the “heavenly medical board” and found wanting: “You will wake as a woman again/ With winter
upon you.”
The selected poems are brief, sweet tasters from a Russian feast; in its
current form the anthology is tantalizing and uneven. It might have been useful
to list the poets in alphabetical order and to provide a fuller introduction
that would lead new readers into the text. A slight sense of exclusivity is
reinforced by Eugene Ostashevsky’s
clever version of Igor Belov’s poem about translation, where knowledge of the
original (provided in Russian) is essential to get “the inside joke.”
But these are quibbles and
Ostashevsky’s heroic puns (“Hector/ hectors. Menelaus/lays many”) are worth it. Poetry has often
been poorly translated, Shmailo explained, because the translator lacked the
poet's ear. Gathering together “many superb poets fully bilingual in Russian
and English who are also experienced translators,” Shmailo and her team have
produced something unusual and fascinating: a contemporary Russian poetry
anthology translated by poets.
Thanks to Coldfront Magazine for this great interview with me about The Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses and our upcoming appearance at the New York City Poetry Festival. Representing the Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses this Sunday will be Patricia Spears Jones, Sharon Mesmer, Ron Kolm, Michael T. Young, and yours truly!
The Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses
Day: Sunday
Stage: The Algonquin
Time: 1:40 PM
Interview with curator Larissa Shmailo
1. Tell us a little bit about your organization.
Founded in 1993,The Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses are a loose
(sic) organization of men, women, and others who bring their wit and
wisdom to the poetic arts in their hometown of NYC. Together and
individually, the Feminist Poets have performed on behalf of Girls Write
Now, the Bread and Life Soup Kitchen, 100,000 Poets for Change, The New
York City Poetry Calendar, Share Our Strength/American Express, Poets
in Need, and just for the hell of having a good literary time. 2. Who is reading in your slot at the Festival and why?
Sharon Mesmer, because she has a book entitled Annoying Diabetic
Bitch and is the queen of flarf; Patricia Spears Jones, because she
gives us the credibility of her poetic stature; Ron Kolm, because the
Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses love the Unbearables (a drinking group
with a writing problem) which Ron founded; Michael T. Young because his
poetry is beautiful (read and listen!); and Larissa Shmailo, because I
founded the organization (my poetry is available on the Web and at the
links below).
. 3. Who else are you looking forward to seeing at the Festival?
The Poetry Brothel, Cornelius Eady, Dorothea Lasky, Todd Colby,
Miguel Algarin, and absolutely nothing can happen without Bob Holman! 4. Did you attend the festival last year? If so, what was your favorite thing about it?
Yes, reading with Susan Scutti and Yuriy Tarnawsky was a blast. 5. Why is live poetry important?
It doesn’t matter whether it is important or not: I can’t live without hearing poetry read by living poets.
I am proud to share this new online anthology of contemporary Russian poetry, Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry, which appears in the new Big Bridge edited by the visionary Michael Rothenberg.
The anthology features the work of 50 brilliant Russian poets
translated by equally gifted poets, including Boris Dralyuk,Stephanie Sandler, Alex Cigale, Philip
Nikolayev, Matvei Yankelevich, Elena Fainailova, Dmitry Kuzmin, Katia
Kapovich, Phil Metres, Maria Khotimsky, Elena Dimov, Maxim Amelin, Maria
Stepanova, James Kates, Polina Barskova, Eugene Ostashevsky, Oleg
Dozmorov, Alexander Ulanov, Sergei Gandlevsky, Irina Maximova, Alexander
Skidan,Tatiana Shcherbina, Vladimir Gandelsman, Olga Zilberbourg, Maria
Rybkova, Irina Mashinski, Alexei Tsvetkov, and many more.
I'm delighted that my poems "Vow" and "Personal" appear in the mass-market Penguin anthology Words for the Wedding. It is my first appearance in a multimillion-selling book, and I am termed a "contemporary American poet" - which is all I have ever wanted to be.
This book is a great gift for engaged couples and members of their weddings who want inspiration in selecting vows and toasts.
The Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses