AWP International Experimental Poetry Panel on ALTA Blog

Thanks to ALTA, the American Literary Translators Association, for listing our AWP event, Translating the the Untranslatable: A Reading of International Experimental Poetry with Marc Vincenz, Helene Cardona, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Michele Gil-Montero and moderated by me, on their blog.

Translation Events at AWP20

Posted on December 11, 2019 by rcldaum

Planning to come to San Antonio from March 4 – 7, 2020 for the Association for Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conference to enjoy North America’s largest literary conference? Then be sure to check out this list of translation-related events! Take a peek and get planning today. 

Thursday, March 5, 2020

9:00 am to 10:15 am

Room 211, Henry B. González Convention Center, Meeting Room Level. Translating the Untranslatable: A Reading of International Experimental Poetry. (Larissa Shmailo, Marc Vincenz, Hélène Cardona, Michelle Gil-Montero, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs) From the manifestos of Breton to the wordplay of Stein to the fantastical lines of Borges, avant garde movements have always driven poetry into revolutionary directions. This panel offers a panoramic view of international experimental poetries by noted world translators from French, German, Korean, Russian, and Spanish (Latin American) poets of the 20th and 21st centuries. Intercultural and intersectional issues in translation will be discussed as panelists read from a range of avant poetries.

TWO PANELS ACCEPTED FOR AWP20!

Thrilled that BOTH AWP panels I am participating in have been accepted for the 2020 San Antonio conference! I will be moderating "Translating the Untranslatable: A Reading of International Experimental Poetry" with Marc Vincenz, Helene Cardona, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, and Michele Gil-Montero. I will be a panelist on moderator Olga Livshin's "What Kind of Times Are These? Immigrant Poets and the New Politics of Resistance" with Valzhyna Mort, Anna Halberstadt, and Mariya Deykute. See you in San Antonio!!!!

Three poems in Eoagh

I am delighted to have THREE POEMS IN EOAGH. Thanks to editor/publisher Trace Peterson!

Clad, Clawed, Clandestine Eagly Pig
E
I
I
id
eye:
Lie as
eyes lie, I.
Delineating it,
disentangling inclines
in lies; incidentals cast a delicate sign.
Cling in line, eyeing diligent penalties, laws, claws: it’s eyes in lies.      
Anteceding id, laws distancing I, clasping ties, inspecting id, an eye, a lie; all ID, and stenciled, penciled eyes.
 
Anna Karenina
 
Oh, Merezhkovsky, she was a mare
too good for her rider; a man bare
of fine temperament, riding her hard,
playing her roughly, like a cheat’s card,
leaving her broken.
Vronsky, sad: beauty was given you, cad.
And you lived like a man only because of her,
you, a creature dead in soul, and she, you cur,
destroyed, no longer fit to ride:
You might have loved her still, your bridle bride.
 
Razors
 
Raze, or craze (he, her):
Says he? Misogyny
is craze (he) makin’
yours for the takin’
or not to put up with
mop or sop up with.
Deter-gent. She-esh.
 
Larissa Shmailo is a poet, translator, novelist, editor, and critic. Larissa’s poetry collections are Medusa’s Country, #specialcharacters, In Paran, A Cure for Suicide, and Fib Sequence. Her poetry CDs are The No-Net World and Exorcism and her new novel is Patient Women. Larissa’s work appears in Measure for Measure (Everyman’s Library/Penguin Random House), Words for the Wedding (Perigee/Penguin Putnam), Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive Press), Plume, Fulcrum, Journal of Poetic Research, Jacket, Jacket2, and others journals. Larissa translated Victory over the Sun by Alexei Kruchenych for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s celebrated reconstruction of the first Futurist opera; the text has been used for productions at Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Smithsonian, and the Garage Museum of Moscow. Larissa also edited the anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry and has also been a translator on the Russian Bible for the American Bible Society. 

Poems accepted for publication in RESIST MUCH / OBEY LITTLE: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance

Pleased that  my two poems, "Whorl's Eyelet Captured" and "Lager NYC" have been accepted for publication in Spuyten Duyvil's RESIST MUCH / OBEY LITTLE: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance. Here's "Whorl's":

Whorl’s Eyelet Captured

(Fibonacci Sequence Syllabic: 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89)

The number of syllables in the verses correspond to the Fibonacci number in the sequence. All words in the poem are made up from the letters of the title (except one).  

O

 

who? 

how?

you howl. . .

are holy . . .

you heal, are heard: hear: 

Whose pure eyes tear, red arcs wetted?

Whose heresy elects? Who will select? You, petted

Howl! Whose trolls rap westerly trochees? You are scared, secretly care, are hard (how? ow!), healed.

Wholly here! Whose loyal laps are spared hotly? You allot acutely, adeptly. React: you are a royal red crypt. Holy, haloed, sealed?

How! Who? OURS! YOURS! Adulterers captured, whorl’s eyelet pastured!

Decelerate! Whore’s eye red, pour the tears. Educate (traduce). Clatter or rapture, pastures or captures, whose red caps cater, a parted sea? The alehouse is here, heeled.

How, who? A red letter! The Dane utters WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS, or a puree, wetted, a treacle, a pact of red tears; they sear. Reduce (reeducate) your epaulets. Creep toward the words, curate the words, cure the words. Create heresy, push the crypts down. The tears of portly predators are sad, selected pees—ah, there is a who: you, a nascent howl, or two, healed.

New poems in Unlikely Stories

Pleased that my poems, "Mots Sinistres et Stupides d'Amour," "TOD (Time of Death)", and "Sunken Virgin" appear in this issue of Unlikely Stories
http://www.unlikelystories.org/content/sunken-virgin-mots-sinistres-et-stupides-damour-and-tod-time-of-death

Reprise: Skin

My tongue is bruised
My nude is creaky
Like a cabbage I sit and wait for you
I stutter like an old gun:
Take me
Know
The fast love of my hair.

Your beady little eyes transfix me
Like rats at the foot of my bed
Your limp pendant wrists still hang on my door
You snicker, get a grip.

Your skin is a labyrinth
I follow like a duct
I follow the duct of your eyes like a skein
To the comminatory bull
Eyes forward, now toward, where I leap for the horns;
Won’t you come in, he sighs.

You own too big a piece of me
Your eyes say spare some change and I
Don’t want to I
Take and give no quarter and I’ve
Already cut my hair.

Skin is just sausage we call home.
Skin is just sausage we call home.

Sea (Sic)

(Readers: Please read the stanzas in any order you like.)

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,

the order of my words.

                                This body, wholly

holy, sings as best it can, lisping the mantra

“sole.”

                              Alone. Why did the

singing stop, and why? 

                         No, I never broke

an honest sweat, did I think the ocean

would forget?

                       In the horizon’s glance

I see a wave rise, rise, rise and die,

out of nowhere again, but why?

From In Paran.

Bhakti 2

You will leave your wise men. Your mind, with no object to rest on,

I loved him so much that I followed him on mornings will ride on

when I could have slept, slept late, slept and not the horse of

felt the pain beside me, curled round my my breath.

body like a spoon. His body like a And you will be my

light in the bedroom, his smile body, ever returning.

like a dog in the bed. He shakes And if you miss

me with hugs, overwhelms me with salvation,

kisses. I raise my arms to embrace his neck; never

There is nothing in the day except him. returning, I will

offer it, Bhakti, ever returning, again and again and again.