Poems for Earth Day

Degree

Look up, the water is rising again; the ocher ocean

is warmer today. The sea mists rise, form grey clouds

named Harvey and Irma and Jose and they reign,

mad royalty, over earth. Hush: The brown waters

rush into tributaries, to rivers, to the troubled chopped 

sea, where carbons heat the surface of salt; one degree,

and it rises hotter, wetter, wilder, whipping waves

of wind, winding toward us, a Kitty, Leo, Marie; a child,

looking at the sea, will die today, Noah, alee.

Plate Histrionics

  

He throws a gold-lamé wedding-set saucer

at me, and spits, “There is no

 global warm-ing.”

Today, Irma evacuates Sarasota as b-

rother Harvey peers and jeers, Ozymandiu-

s-like, Houston and Florida, look upon me.

A-s th-ese li-nes are bro-ken, so the dream-

s of cities, and those hamlets and towns a-

way where we settled to breathe, hear our-

selves think.

Cat 5, there is no stronger. An

evil fidget spinner, Irma swirls out of a wet

hell, and I holler CLIMATE CHANGE.

It is the

imitation

Wedgewood gravy boat, h-

e throws that next, jjjjjjjust before she

A Sonnet Affected by Climate Change

The Earth is mud and shale gas, molten magma, metamorphic—

Oh Sis, Oh Bro—and igneous, blast changing in its last tic,

with a heady burst of ozone, all zones, a corpse that ends in water.

Without us, climate will survive, change fast, outlast—Oh Daughter:

The equatorial world endures, we fall, all bone, all copses sick. 

Paleoclimatology predicts our fate.

Put the conundrum on another generation’s plate?

No, it’s now: in Africa, desertification scorches,

torches farmland. (HUNGER!!!!)

And the people learn of a Great Satan, a nation

that throws away food. Do you see

that they will fight because they must?

Whom will they trust? What is terror after you’ve

watched your child die in the land’s rust?

An Attack on Justice?

As of today, Mitch McConnell will not permit legislation protecting the Mueller investigation to go forward. House Republicans are demanding former FBI Director James Comey's unredacted memos from Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein (evidence in a live investigation); Rosenstein's refusal may be cause for Trump firing him and installing someone who will fire or limit Mueller. In New York, the temporary Attorney General is recused from the Michael Cohen case and his term is up May 3; Trump may install someone who will impede the Cohen trial. The groundwork is being laid for a multilateral attack on justice; contact your legislators before the fix comes in.

Poetry Productive: Write to Publish

Poetry Productive: Writing to Publish 
Eight sessions:
Tuesdays 5:30 – 7:30 pm 
June 5, 12, 19, 26
July 10, 17, 24, 31
No class Independence holiday week.
$400.00
212-712-9865
Class Description: Our focus in this workshop will be on writing to publish in journals, for chapbooks, or toward full-length manuscripts. Instructor Larissa Shmailo will share formal and experimental poetic techniques to add to your repertoire and help edit your poems. We will write in-class to evocative prompts and maintain a supportive atmosphere to encourage creative risk. Each class will include a discussion of where to publish your poems/books. 

Location: Safe and comfortable home environment in accessible elevator and doorman building, near numerous bus and train lines.

Instructor: Larissa Shmailo is an award-winning poet, novelist, editor, translator, and critic. Her poetry collections are Medusa’s Country,#specialcharacters, In Paran, the chapbook A Cure for Suicide, and the e-book Fib Sequence; her latest novel is Patient Women. Shmailo’s work has appeared in Plume, the Brooklyn Rail, Fulcrum, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, the Journal of Poetics Research, Drunken Boat, Barrow Street, and the anthologies Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters, Words for the Wedding, Contemporary Russian Poetry, Resist Much/Obey Little: Poems for the Inaugural, Verde que te quiero verde: Poems after Garcia Lorca, and many others. Shmailo is the original English-language translator of the world's first performance piece, Victory over the Sun by Alexei Kruchenych. Shmailo also edited the anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry and has been a translator on the Russian Bible for the American Bible Society. Please see more about Shmailo at her website at www.larissashmailo.com and Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larissa_Shmailo.

Call 212-712-9865 to register or for more information.

 

NYPL Reading - Shmailo and Kostos 3/24

"Larissa Shmailo, in Medusa's Country, and Dean Kostos, in Pierced by Night-Colored Threads, engage in the dance of Eros and Thanatos. Jung and his archetypes populate the terrain of metaphor, loss, and regret. These brave poems risk articulating what society tends to silence. However, as Pluto is the ruler of the underworld, his name also means "The Rich One." Hence, there is richness to be found in exploring the dark and painful recesses of the unconscious."

NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY MARCH 24 2-4 PM FREE

https://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2018/03/24/poetry-reading-dean-kostos-and-larissa-schmailo 
3/24 NYPL EVENT

 

Shmailo and Kostos at the Mulberry Street Library 3/24

This Friday at AWP!

Reading at the Mulberry Street Library March 24 - Save the Date

Click for program info:
Shmailo and Kostos at NYPL March 24

THREE ECOPOEMS IN ECO-POETRY

I am honored to have a page at Eco-Poetry.org with three of my ecopoems: "Degree," "Plate Histrionics," and "A Sonnet Affected by Climate Change." Thanks to visionary editor Daniela Gioseffi!

SHMAILO ECOPOEMS

PLUME, WHITE PINE, MADHAT READING AT AWP

THE CULT OF TRUMP

The attachment of Trump supporters to a venal, self-serving, obnoxious man is not unprecedented. Trump supporters display the same psychodynamics as the cult followers of Jim Jones or David Koresh. They systematically reject any information that conflicts with their delusion of a powerful father figure who loves and protects them, even at the expense of their health and welfare. These people will support Trump even if, as he has said, he shoots someone in broad daylight, or even shoots them.

Get your poetry manuscript published!

PUBLISH, DON'T PERISH! 
Feel like you'll never get your poetry manuscript published? Don't despair! I (an award-winning, Wikipedia-listed poet and poetry editor) will lovingly edit your work and suggest appropriate publishers for you. Call me at 212-712-9865 for a free consultation. http://larissashmailo.com/bio

HOT EMPOWERED WOMEN

SEE US IN TAMPA THIS MARCH!

For Holocaust Remembrance Day, "Kalinivka, Prmysl, Dora"

Kalinivka
Kalinivka, Kalinivka: The ground over the mass graves is hard, the soft grass grows. The Ukrainian Guard, boy and girl, make love, happy to be alive. In the Ukraine, collectivized, they walked on corpses. And the Germans alone protest, her father tells the girl. Siberia, purges. Like the Irish, their parents collaborate; Hitler fights the Russian and English masters of their rural lands. Now here, Kalinivka. The mass graves crack with green life. 1941 is forgotten in the summer of ’43. She is 19, pregnant soon.

Prymsl 
By1943, the ghetto holds the few not deported, living in tunnels, basements, caves, the hiding ones, the ones who know. All the rest to camps in Poland, Germany, or dead. The boy no longer likes the girl, but through her, he got his Kapo job. Even his mother says, marry. Have a child. The female Kapo bears a boy through the camps, Prymsl, through the unknown tombs of Poland, the unmarked graves, the walls marked with Jewish blood, the bloody broken nooses, the dark rain. She wants the boy to marry her, he makes excuses, says, the Germans won’t permit. That the child will die soon after the war, that she will beat her head upon the grave until it bleeds, that sorrow is unknown. The death of the Jewish children is unseen. Poland is always green.

Dora 
Germany, Harz Mountains. The Germans turn now, now SS. The war is failing. Fewer the slaves to command, the girl, heavy with child, translates, working, starving, carried in rail carts for miles to build the V-2s. A rachitic Jewess cleans the barracks, the boy’s eye turns, with pity, with lust; he gives her bread. From Erfurt to the extension camp, Buchenwald’s new Dora, Northausen. Here they spare the rope to hang. All are hungry, the Germans too. The Allies bomb the industrial camp. Liberation. Rows of corpses, the eternal rows, line Northausen. The Germans are forced to respect the dead. Kalinivka, Prymsl, the unseen dead, now here in respectful symmetry, no longer piled in heaps, but rectangular, marked. The flowers grow, the burghers sing, “After every December, there comes a new spring."

TEXT OF "I BLAME LOUISE HAY FOR TRUMP"

Larissa Shmailo

I am listening to Abraham Hicks, whom the well-loved New Age maven Louise Hay, may the Universe rest her soul, calls “one of the best teachers on the planet.” Abraham is an “ascended” energy being channeled by a woman called Esther. She is touring the country, orating in impassioned spurts marked by anaphora. Tonight, Abraham is advising her enthusiastic audience that they must seek their bliss. She tells them to find a personal frequency, assuring her listeners that everything they could ever want is being stored up for them in their very own “vortex.” All they need to do is think positive thoughts.

So what’s new? A medium is promising people that she can make them rich and happy. Hasn’t this always attracted the needy and the greedy and the seedy? Why is this different? Because uncritical positive thinking has led us to Donald Trump.
Positive thinking has traditionally been reactionary. Go back, for example, to the 17th century to the first new age thinker, Gottfried Wilhem Leibniz (1646 – 1716), philosopher, polymath, and an inventor of calculus. Leibniz believed that God was good, and therefore, all was for the best in the world. Voltaire parodied this philosophy in Candide, or Optimism; Dr. Pangloss, Candide’s tutor and the Leibniz figure in the book, intones “All is for the best in this best of possible worlds” as he, Candide, and Candide’s love, Cunégonde, undergo war, earthquake, pillage, and cannibalism. For the victims, the Leibniz school recommends prayer.

Voltaire

Hay also believed that all is well and perfect in the world, or would be if our thoughts were sufficiently positive; even earthquakes and bad government, says Hay, are caused by faulty thinking. Affirm Donald Trump is loving and honorable and he will be, since thoughts create reality. To that end, both Abraham and Hay urge their followers not to watch the news so as to remain in positivity. Seekers must also not involve themselves overmuch in the problems of others; this, according to the Ayn Randian Abraham, causes you to leave the “high flying disc.” Followers must seek to inspire rather than lend a hand.
At a time of extreme income inequality, class struggle is discouraged by the New Age. Hay suggested that the ambitious let the enormous yachts and other conspicuous consumption of the wealthy give them pleasure. The idea is that if you don’t admire the rich, you might not become one of them. And followers should not look at statistics about poverty: There is plenty for all of us, every prosperity talk insists, and all economies are personal. Collective bargaining, even standing up for abused co-workers, is a no-no.
No one who has sat by an ocean at twilight, breathing its air and listening to the gulls cry as they fly by, can doubt the perfection and majesty of the world. And positive thinking, faith in oneself, and a belief that life is good are healthy outlooks. However, constant meditation on unreal thoughts, saying bad is good, fat is thin, poor is rich, is Orwellian doublethink, doublespeak. And it has prepared us the climate of lies we live in today.
Affirmations are absolute, employing words like all, always, everything, only (“Everything I need is coming to me easily and effortlessly; all my desires are met before I even ask; only good comes to me now”). The gradations of experience, its nuances and subtleties are lost, like rare species of Amazon frog in a pink bulldozer of unreality. And positive thoughts alone are dangerous: Negative feelings, verboten in the New Age sphere, have survival value; anger, which Hay and the 12 Step programs would banish altogether, lets people know when their boundaries have been crossed, when they must stand up for themselves, and most importantly, that they are worth defending.
Thinking in absolutes, affirming what is, isn’t, not defending your point of view (Deepak Chopra advises this), idolizing the rich, staying positive no matter what, and never getting angry is a formula for a mystified and de-hormonized generation, it might be said, a Trump generation. Such people will never be empowered to “create their reality,” as the gurus suggest, especially if that requires conflict, struggle, or effort. It is also painful that people with inadequate medical care are urged to rely on affirmations in times of serious illness, even told their thoughts have caused their sickness.
I think a red light flashed the first time I heard Hay affirm that it was good to take a five-minute break from work every two hours. I grew up in a union household and, as I recall, it was 15 minutes every two hours, not five. No matter—if your work situation is poor, it is because of your thoughts, so get cheerful.
At the end of Candide, Voltaire has his character say, “Il faut cultiver notre jardin”—“We must cultivate our garden.” We are responsible for creating our reality, but not in the atomizing, anti-worker manner Hay and Abraham suggest. And nowadays, negative emotions are highly appropriate. Because if you are not pissed off nowadays, I’m not sure I want to know you.

–Larissa Shmailo

The Sour of Positive Thinking: "I Blame Louise Hay for Trump"

My article, "I Blame Louise Hay for Trump," which traces the positive thinking movement from Leibniz on, is now up at Sensitive Skin Magazine.

READ IT HERE:  I Blame Louise Hay for Donald Trump
https://sensitiveskinmagazine.com/i-blame-louise-hay-for-trump-larissa-shmailo/

This Saturday . . .

Come out of the darkness about depression this holiday.

Over

On the perfect roof, near a perfect ledge,
A small terra firma with a narrow edge,
No temporizing with last-minute balance,
No handhold, no foothold, no anchor, no ballast.
And once committed, once into the air,
No hovering, no kiting, no waiting there.
The polygonal street and the shining dark cars
Attacked at meters per second squared.
Once over, soon over: a thing done just once:
Like fireworks and New Years’ bells, fast and intense,
Quite finite, soon finished, thought long, slow begun,
And forgotten by others like the old year now done.

Auld Lang Syne

Robert Burns (Scotland, 1759-1796)

Auld Lang Syne

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, 
And never brought to mind? 
Should auld acquaintance be forgot, 
And auld lang syne!

Chorus:
For auld lang syne, my dear, 
For auld lang syne. 
We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet, 
For auld lang syne.

And surely ye'll be your pint stowp! 
And surely I'll be mine! 
And we'll tak a cup o'kindness yet, 
For auld lang syne. 
For auld, &c.

We twa hae run about the braes, 
And pou'd the gowans fine; 
But we've wander'd mony a weary fit, 
Sin' auld lang syne. 
For auld, &c.

We twa hae paidl'd in the burn, 
Frae morning sun till dine; 
But seas between us braid hae roar'd 
Sin' auld lang syne. 
For auld, &c.

And there's a hand, my trusty fere! 
And gie's a hand o' thine! 
And we'll tak a right gude-willie waught, 
For auld lang syne. 
For auld, &c.

(1788)

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Vulnerability

I am not surprised that the word *vulnerable* is banned at the CDC; this seems a logical extension of the Trumpian worldview. There are no vulnerable persons to a bully; there are simply weaklings, crips, marks. The compassionate person sees vulnerability and says, this person needs my help; the Trumpian sees vulnerability and says, this person can be taken.
 
Auden put it best in "The Shield of Achilles" :
 
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone, 
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

Skin in the Game

As a person with a mental illness, I have skin in the game of the Trump resistance. Nazis (now, sweethearts, is there really any lingering doubt that Trump is a Nazi?) routinely gassed mentally ill and other disabled people. As eugenicists and ableists, fascists exterminate you if you can't be used for free or cheap labor. Remember that loud dog whistle to the base, Trump's gleefully mocking the New York Times reporter with ankylosing spondylitis, and see Jeff Session's recent attack on regulations protecting disabled people. Not to mention the wholesale Republican war on Medicaid and Obamacare. They will be coming after the Americans with Disabilities Act next, and I intend to fight them every step of the way.

A Brodsky Nativity Poem: Christmas Star

Christmas Star

by Joseph Brodsky
Tr. L. Shmailo
In a cold time, in a place accustomed more
To scorching heat, than cold, to the flatness of plain,
than hills: A child was born in a cave to save the world.
And it stormed, as only winter desert storms can.

Everything seemed huge to him: his mother’s breast,
The yellow steam of the camels’ breath. And from afar,
Their gifts carried here, the Magi, Balthazar, Melchior, Caspar.
He was all of him just a dot. And that dot was a star.
Attentively and fixedly through the sparse clouds,
Upon the recumbent child in the manger, through the night’s haze,
From the depths of the universe, from its end and bound,
A star watched over the cave. And that was the Father’s gaze.

CAPITALISM IS SOCIALISM FOR RICH PEOPLE

Rich people are rich more because of your efforts than theirs. It's pretty simple. You are paid a fraction of what the product you produce is worth. Your boss pockets the rest. You also pay taxes for the roads and bridges and transportation and construction that business uses; they get a chunk of your sales taxes, too. And you pay for their employees' education. *And* you contribute to government tax breaks and incentives, especially nowadays. Many other freebies. When it comes to the one percent, you support them, not the other way around.

If you say this, you will be attacked. You will be called a loser and accused of envy. You might lose your job. But it is true. Capitalism is socialism for rich people.

Trump Is Winning and We Are Wimps

Trump is winning and we are wimps. He owns the Internet now, will control 72 percent of television now that DOJ has approved Sinclair's acquisition of Tribune (not counting FOX), owns the courts, has taught local police to be brutal, has listed Black Lives Matter and other black organizations as terrorist groups, has successfully incited Nazis, KKK, and other gun-toters to violence, and has triumphantly dominated the Republican Party. And like any good fascist, he has cemented his relationship with business with his tax bill. He's right - he and his generals really have done more than any other dictators in one year. We have been outmaneuvered, and better wake up to that fact going forward.

FASCISM 101

FASCISM 101
1. Establish charismatic leader.
2. Acclimate populace to propaganda and lies.
3. Undermine democratic institutions.
4. Attack opposition, especially media, intellectuals, minority groups.
5. Start hauling away #4 to concentration camps.
6. Leave behind a cult-like nation of troglodytes to inform on one another.
7.Go down in history as an abomination and an object lesson that some may learn from, hopefully.

MadHat Poets Shmailo and Kostos Read Jan 6!

Nora at 13 from Patient Women in Unbearables Anthology

Delighted that an excerpt from Patient Women, "Nora at 13," appears in the new Unbearables anthology, From Somewhere to Nowhere: The Death of the American Dream. Thanks to editors Ron Kolm, Jim Feast, and Shalom Neuman!

This Is Different

The lip service to democratic values is gone, the judiciary is a tool of the executive, the media as watchdog is vastly undermined, propaganda is rife (Sinclair with the merger will reach 72 percent of TV households), the government is a white supremacist one, fascist governments are our models, right wing evangelicals are successfully taking evolution out of our schools and now, with the tax bill, can wage political campaigns without losing nonprofit status, climatology and other sciences are under attack, so much more. This is not business as usual; this is fascism and we have to fight with all our might now, literally all our might all the time, or else.

World AIDS Day Poem

LISTEN HERE:
Johnny I Love You Don't Die

"Soon" Is Now

In every political campaign, every hustings, when we bring up women's rights, we are told, "Let's just win this district, this election, get this candidate in, and we promise, you are next, soon, soon." Well, thanks to the courage of the women who have confronted their sexual abusers, "soon" is now. The battle to secure our persons against battery and rape and demeaning harassment has been joined. Equal pay and full reproductive rights have to follow.

Elephants, Sexual Predation, The Mob

Donald Trump, Jr. killed a rare bull elephant just to cut off its tail and hold it in his filthy, guilty hands. Trump senior is a sexual predator and a white supremacist. Ivanka exploits slave labor and fronts for the crime-filled dirty money of Trump Panama. And they are all guilty of treason. What a disgusting mob the Trumps are!

The Banality of Evil

One meaning of the phrase, "the banality of evil," coined by Hannah Arendt reporting for the New Yorker on Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem for war crimes, is that the evil do not always give the appearance of monsters. Arendt saw no satanic genius in Eichmann, just an ordinary man, perhaps even a clown. And now we see our clownish, banal, very ordinary president and his banal, ordinary cabinet and banal, ordinary Republican henchmen rapidly erode our freedoms and democracy. Time to fight vigorously now, as Trump et.al. most heinous actions are normalized for a very ordinary and banal third of the electorate.

Hitler's Cookies

Hitler's followers baked cookies, played sports, loved movies. Most, I'm sure, loved their families and were kind to their pets. None of that remains. We feel only contempt and loathing for these fascists. Trump supporters, nothing of your legacy will remain except your support of an evil leader. Absolutely nothing else.

Film of poetry recital for IN PARAN

This is a poetry recital for my first full-length collection. Film by Mitch Corbr.
IN PARAN RECITAL

Review of MEDUSA'S COUNTRY by Meredith Sue Willis in Books for Readers

Medusa's Country is more stunning poems from Larissa Shmailo. She is endlessly surprising, riffing off other literature-- an erasure poem using lines from "The Lotus Eaters" section in Joyce's Ulysses; one called "My Vronsky" with reference to Nabokov's failure to understand Anna Karenina-- but also about a relationship destructive to the narrator. There is also a poem called "Daddy's Elusive Love" with short lines and hard-hitting rhymes like 's Sylvia Plath's famous "Daddy." Shmailo's Daddy,. though seems to have hidden his love.

I looked for it in boxers;

In the dumps of ten detoxes;

In the roll of rundown rockers;

In anal & banal boys.

There is, of course, a lot more Here, as in her previous books, we have passages of her personal story of living on the edge and in the lower depths as in the "The Trick Wants to Go to Plato's," the old Plato's Retreat sex club where single men aren't. The narrator, who is indeed in the sex business, says " I sign a document attesting that I am not a prostitute; my whore name is Nora."

These poems alternate with ones using myth and rhyming patterns and parody (See "Fragment from the Ilatease of Homey, from a Recently Discovered Mycenaean Test." The final poem of the book, the title poem, about Medusa, ends

But once a man stood like a statue

Before my cave of trees

His eyes transfixed by my serpents

That hardened, froze, and pleased.

You will never be bored by Larissa Shmailo's poetry. I don't suppose that sounds like much of a recommendation to read it, but what I want to say is that her inventiveness and wit are only matched by her searing life experiences and her observation of death.

She surprises over and over.

Bernstein, Nurkse, Equi, Shmailo, Kostos, Vincenz, Sala, Bliumis-Dunn