Pratik Fall 2020 Issue released

 

Pratik

A Magazine of Contemporary Writing

XVI No 2, Fall 2020

Art, Poetry and Music collaboration

Dreams of a Sleeping World

Art of Oscar Oiwa

 Plus an interview with Hollywood Musician Chad Cannon

EIGHT POETS FROM VERMONT

Chard deNiord  David Huddle Tony Whedon  Major Jackson Cleopatra Mathis  Joan Aleshire  Kerrin McCadden  Karin Gottshall   Sydney Lea

DAVID B. AUSTELL

Marshaling the Milliards

A tribute to Harlem Renaissance Hero, James Weldon Johnson

 

Four Poets from Nicaragua

Ernesto Cardenal  Rubén Darío  Salomón de la Selva  Joaquín Pasos

 

A SHEAF OF OTTAWA POEMS

Shai Ben-Shalom  Seymour Mayne  Nicola Vulpe   

Betty Warrington-Kearsley  Erwin Wiens

 

ELEVEN  ITALIAN POETS

Claudia Russo   Flaminia Cruciani   Rita Stanzione   Zairo Ferrante  Paolo Staglianò  Antonello Airò  Cinzia Marulli  Gabriella Becherelli  Vittorio Fioravanti Grasso   Antonio Blund  Adriana Scanferla

 

Featuring

DAVID AXELROD  CHARLES BERNSTEIN  JILL HOFFMAN BILL WOLAK, MIKE GRAVES PATRICIA CARRAGON

Plus New Work by GLORIA MINDOCK & HOWARD PFLANZER

Afterlife:Two Poems by H.K. KAUL (1941-2020)

Now available on Amazon USA, UK, Canada and India, Links below:

Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08GZ23NSG?ref=myi_title_dp

Amazon UK:https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08GZ23NSG?ref=myi_title_dp

Amazon Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B08GZ23NSG?ref=myi_title_dp

Amazon INDIA; https://www.amazon.in/dp/B08GZ23NSG?ref=myi_title_dpUS

 

UPCOMING FALL 2020 ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS: Canadian Poet, Seymour Mayne's poems for Hebrew poet, Ronny Someck

Melech Ronny
by Seymour Mayne

King Ronny was loved by all his subjects.

And why, every other monarch ran into problems?

Ronny the First didn’t issue declarations,

he published poetry.

But the Prime Minister and his cabinet members

were definitely not amused.

How can we have a king who is also a poet?

We know how the Maccabees

came to grief,

ruling while also serving as priests.

With poets it is even more extreme.

So King Ronny abdicated…for the women

he loved.  They were all his Muses

and expected him home

every night of the week,

taking care to perform his conjugal duties

even though he was tired

from working hard all day now

as a fully employed poet.

(One of the Ronny Someck Poems featured in the upcoming Issue)

Photo credit: Sharon Katz

Seymour Mayne is a distinguished Canadian author, editor, or translator of more than 70 books. As the leading international innovator of the word sonnet, he has given readings and lectured widely on this unique miniature form. His latest collections include bilingual editions of Ricochet: Word Sonnets in Spanish and French, Auspicious Calligraphy: Word Sonnets, in Romanian, and Cusp: Word Sonnets whose sequences have also been published in French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish editions. His most recent is a book-length offering of new work, Perfume: Poems and Word Sonnets.

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American poet Hélène Cardona reviews Irish poet Anne Fitzgerald’s recent collection, "Vacant Possession"

  

Soul retrieval, deep healing 

Anne Fitzgerald’s recent collection Vacant Possession (Salmon Poetry) is exquisitely crafted, a beautiful, heartbreaking and haunting read, which begs revisiting time and again. It opens with a stunning, hypnotic love poem which casts a spell and sets the tone, for this is, above else, a book about love: From afar it comes like the smell of rain;

Anticipation

From afar it comes like the smell of rain

in off the sea, with an urgency of waves

breaking, you weaken at the thought

of it happening again, as naturally as heat

making its presence felt on the globe

of your palms, you spread your fingers

wide as water between two bodies

of land, trace boundaries, sea stacks ‘n’ coves

on the bend of where paradise might

be your judgement clouds like a compass

that’s let moisture in, devoid of magnetic

field you falter, give way to the rhythm

of waves as though sirens in pursuit of kelp

and driftwood like lovers on a beach.

In poems about redemption and a love that transcends all, Fitzgerald works to reconcile the world she knew with the world she lives in. She writes about finding her compass, her mother, her identity. From “Finding Myself in Werburgh Street”:

Theseus thread of Adriane, nurse Gallagher

cuts the chord, registers me by her own hand,

every slope and ink incline a natural fabrication

of this twenty-six year old’s maiden name, who

didn’t comfort me as my first tooth breaks through,

hold me at night as my breath is given over to

coughing for the loss of you, or watch me not fall

down as one foot follows the other in a gait you’d

half recognise disappearing into a crowd years later.

Instead you commend me into the geometry of a life

you’d not foresee, all the while, wondering from a distance.

And from “Bellybutton”:

my first breath-cry

clouds windows,

lines my lungs

with a dampness

my breathing

will carry like

the pain of arrival

and your departure

into thin air

born like the memory

of mist falling

on bracken,

suspending disbelief,

myinnie pit

our belly to belly

chord leaves,

is all that

remains

of our attachment.

When witnessing her mother’s death, she mourns, “When whiteness does hold / the world as I know it is no more.” … “a blizzard / of disbelief / whitens my / world as / I knew it.”

The triumph of Vacant Possession is that Fitzgerald, against all odds, deftly and with unparalleled grace, rediscovers and repossesses the lost parts of herself.For this is poetry as shamanic work, soul retrieval, deep healing and testimony, as well as a searing indictment of a society where mothers and their children born out of wedlock have been prey at the hands of the Catholic Church.

For this is poetry as shamanic work, soul retrieval, deep healing and testimony, as well as a searing indictment of a society where mothers and their children born out of wedlock have been prey at the hands of the Catholic Church.

Fitzgerald conducted astounding research. To quote her postscript, “From engagement with various State and Church agencies together with research conducted I can confirm that Éire’s Architecture of Containment thrives in matters pertaining to the release of Adoption Records in Twenty-First Century Ireland. A trinity of control and culpability pervades within the Catholic Church, the Irish Free State and its Religious Institutions specifically established to contain, to profit from and to manage the lives of those who bore children outside marriage and the little lives born outside of the bands of holy matrimony.”

At once lyrical and precise, Vacant Possession stands as witness, a heartfelt tribute to her mother and to all who underwent such fates. This is a powerful and necessary collection on the human condition that everyone needs to read.

Vacant Possession

by Anne Fitzgerald

Salmon Poetry, 2017

ISBN-13: 978-1910669976

€12; 146 pages

           

Hélène Cardona’s seven award-winning books include Life in Suspension and Dreaming My Animal Selves, and the translations Birnam Wood (José Manuel Cardona), Beyond Elsewhere (Gabriel Arnou-Laujeac), Ce que nous portons (Dorianne Laux), and Walt Whitman’s Civil War Writings for WhitmanWeb. Her work has been translated into 16 languages. The recipient of numerous honors, she holds an MA (American Literature, Sorbonne), received fellowships (Goethe-Institut, Andalucía International University) and taught at Hamilton College and Loyola Marymount University.  

Amazon Link

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0816X31BF?ref=myi_title_dp

From the Current Issue: Irish Poet Thomas McCarthy's "Yale Graduate and Bennington Graduate"

Yale Graduate and Bennington Graduate

He was sent back East to where gentlemen went

At a time when Senator Yeats was still in his tower;

East coast Anglophile grace for maritime power,

His family’s mercantile Pacific clout made absent

Deliberately as he plunged into the long haul

Of Professor Wade and Yale. Comfort became stone

And luxury as barren as a West Clare wall,

His dinner-jacket becoming frayed and undone –

Whereas, his grand-daughter sixty years on

Breaks her tanned ankle in a Co. Tipperary field

Just ten days after graduating Bennington;

Not that pain bothered her or that she’d yield

To any kind of self-pity or youthful stress.

Something from her grandfather was in her legs still

As she ran through a field of Tipperary wheat:

Wanting a Tolstoy feel, she said, not Yeats, not Yale.

A member of Aosdána, the Irish Assembly of artists, Thomas McCarthy has published many collections of poetry, including The First Convention, The Sorrow Garden, Merchant Prince, The Last Geraldine Officer, Pandemonium and Prophecy and two novels, Without Power and Asya and Christine as well as two works of non-fiction, Gardens of Remembrance and Out of the Ashes. He has won the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Alice Hunt Bartlett and O’Shaughnessy Prize for Poetry as well as the Ireland Funds Annual Literary Award. He was Editor of Poetry Ireland Review and The Cork Review.

From the Current Issue of Pratik: American painter Vivian Tsao's on her evolution as an Artist

Doorway at Dusk: From Jeddah to New York

One winter afternoon when I passed through the door to the room in the back, I saw that the sun had cast shadows of the brown door on the off white wall. A pair of tall boots stood next to the radiator. Outside the door was a bluish hallway. There were a small framed photo and clothing that was left on the rail. I suddenly saw a painting. I brought my easel to the narrow room and began the pastel.

In the moment to moment dialogue with light, I tried to capture what was in front of me. I discovered that the tones of the white doorframe kept on changing as the tones of the hallway continued to deepen. I did not work with any formula. Painting was like sailing out to the unknown.

I often worked in silence. In February, the symphonic play of color and light in pastel gradually took shape. One afternoon at the end of the session in 2017, I brought the easel back to the studio. In the bright light in New York, I studied the picture and realized that I had just added the last stroke to the new painting Doorway at Dusk. I put down the worn stick in my hand.

It was in late summer 1977 that I landed in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. I joined my husband who was teaching there. I had received an M.F.A. degree in painting from Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S. As if a dream had come true, I visited for the first time Paris and Rome on my way to the Middle East.

In the ride from the airport to our new home, I noticed outside the car window a giant setting sun. Its flaming red figure seemed to rest forever on the horizon. Yet suddenly, it left without a trace over the desert.

My sunny studio was on the second floor of an apartment building on the street corner. In early afternoon, a shepherd dressed in a robe often passed by with his goats. The melodic sound of the brass bells around their necks broke the silence of the sandy street.

As the package of my brushes and oil paints had yet to arrive, I thought of visiting the local graphic supply store. To my surprise, I came across a set of 200 pastels. Its fine gradations in red, yellow, blue and green impressed me. When I began exploring it the next day, I felt a strange familiarity with the new tool. I sensed that it opened a channel in blending and in creating the nuanced tones in my picture.

When I set up the easel in front of the mirror in my new studio, I noticed that the steady sun had outlined the features of the young woman in the reflection. The light in her eyes and the flowers on her veil intrigued me. I began painting without hesitation. In the process, I felt a sense of liberation. I was no longer concerned about the self. Ignited by curiosity, I used pastel and my finger to create on paper the tones and textures of my subject.

Several months after I arrived In Jeddah, I realized that I no longer tried to resolve my painting through theoretical thinking. In pastels such as Self-Portrait with Veil and The Poet, I jotted down my spontaneous responses to light.

When I saw for the first time the artworks by Spanish master Antonio Lopez Garcia in New York in 1986, I was struck by the intimate touch of his hand. The retrospective show included oils, drawings and sculptures by the Magic Realist. I felt an affinity with the works from life of his daughter Maria and of his uncle, painter Antonio Lopez Torres.

His nuanced drawings in pencil sometimes took years to complete. In infinite changing tones, he captured child Maria in a peacoat. Her presence was gentle, modest and contemporary. In the drawing  Antonio Lopez Torres’House, the elderly artist passed through the familiar interior in layered silvery light. The back of Torres in an overcoat drew me in as if in a dream. Whether a window scene of a street or a mural-sized cityscape, Lopez created images over long periods of observation. The emotions triggered by his brush were subliminal. They suppress yet transcend.

Recently, in the narrow room in New York, the afternoon sun from the two tall windows shined on the Chinese scroll on the wall. The rhythmic strokes of Chinese calligraphy by my father took me back to his study in Taipei shortly before I left for graduate studies in the U.S. He wrote the poem by Li Yi-shan in Tang Dynasty at my request. He carefully stamped his seal in red ink after writing. Nearby, the bronze-toned spines of the books World Art Series published by Kawade Shobo in Japan stood on the hand-made bookcase. Before I had a chance to see the original artworks by Corot and Cézanne, the series was my Western art museum.

My middle school was within walking distance from the National Palace Museum in Taiwan. I longed to visit the Museum in construction outside my classroom window. My first visit in 1965 led me to the discovery of the hand scroll by Emperor Hui-tsung of Sung Dynasty. In his personal slender gold style, he wrote the Poem. I felt transported when I read the last lines of his writing. On darkened silk, the bouncing strokes of the palm-sized characters read,

“ The dancing butterflies lost their way on the fragrant path

   Their wings chased after the evening breeze.”

The scrolls of Hui-tsung and of the landscapes by Chinese masters echoed the mountains and waters that surrounded my school. They and the Saturday art lessons in the studio of Prof. Sun To-Ze helped plant the seed for my journey in art across the oceans.

 Taiwan-born, American painter, Vivian Tsao has exhibited her oils and pastels in places such as the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Butler Institute of American Art, Tenri Cultural Institute, Queens Museum and Ceres Gallery in the U.S., and the National Museum of History in Taiwan. Her art is reproduced in books such as “Paintings by Vivian Tsao” published by the National Museum of History and “100 New York Painters” by Cynthia Dantzic.  She is also a recipient of Artist-in-Residence grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. 

Pratik Book Reviews: American Photographer and Art Critic, Williams-Krishnan on Contemporary Image-based Art

India/Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art, conceived and edited by Steven Evans and Sunil Gupta, (Fotofest, Inc. and Schilt Publishing), is a much-needed spotlight on contemporary image-based art produced by people of Indian origin. This book is the companion to Houston’s Fotofest 2018 Biennale which featured a show on this topic curated by Sunil Gupta in the Houston area during the Biennale.

Gupta and Evans have put together a group of 47 artists who visually represent current themes related to India and/or Indian identity in a variety of ways. Important to note is that this book (and exhibition) focuses on art made since 2000. Gupta curated a show of South Asian Art from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh for the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 2010 and he notes that this exhibition and book is the next installation of this effort.

Accompanying the work of the artists are four essays that shed light on the various practices in the book. Gupta writes about his own efforts to discover and uplift the voice of contemporary photography dealing with his country of origin. In a recent conversation with Gupta at a dinner in Cambridge, MA, Gupta told the small group that artists from non-western regions don’t need members of the West to speak for them or to ‘validate’ their work. He did, however, express the importance of inclusion in shows and gallery representation. This book and Fotofest 2018 provided Gupta and these various artists with a platform for exposure and an opportunity to edify all who engage with the work.

Three other essays accompany the work. Guyatri Sinha, critic, curator and founder of the Critical Collective forum writes about identity and self-representation in Indian photography through time. Curator Nada Razaalso considers identity but via the role of artists who utilize impersonation and imitation. Cultural critic and author, Zahid R. Chaudhary, looks at how politics and social friction are visually represented in the context of postcolonial and post-liberalized India.

                        Sunil Gupta

The photographers included in the collection represent a wide variety of approaches to themes and methods of expression. Some of the work is firmly rooted in interpretive documentation of India’s land and cultures. For example, Rishi Singhal’s A River Story is concerned with the sacred Ganga River and how it passes through the land and the heart of India. Gauri Gill’s series, Jannat 1999-2007 follows the life of a girl and her family living on the margins of society in a remote hamlet in rural Rajasthan. Including photographs of Jannat and her family, as well as images of some of her artifacts, Gill creates a touching story reminding us that many people remain vulnerable.

Other artists are working on issues of identity and social concerns within India. Mithu Sen has produced a very touching and poignant body of work, I Have Only One Language; it is not Mine. Sen has found a visceral way to visually represent the gaps in nurturing and memory that abandoned girls living in an orphanage in Kerala might experience. In the series, Where They Belong, Vinit Gupta has photographed Mahan, the the last patch of forest in a coal mining town in central India. Indigenous people have been in struggle with the State over the right to their land, which is being threatened by the State for its coal reserves.

Another genre of work investigates identity through performance. Chennai based Nandinni Valli Muthia, in her work The Definitive Reincarnate, for example, has recreated scenes in which her model represents Krishna and Vishnu with mythical references mixed with mundane details of the settings of daily life. New England based Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, in her series An Indian from India, creates self-portraits in which she references photographs of Native American Indians in the US. She presents the work as diptychs showing the original image of the Native American Indian and her performed self-portrait.

In summary, the 47 photographers represented in this book present many engaging approaches to issues important in and about India today. This collection of images, and the accompanying set of essays, is a welcome showcase of artists who are grappling with the dynamic, multi-layered cultures of India and the threads of Indian identity.

India/Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art,

Steven Evans and Sunil Gupta,

Fotofest, Inc. and Schilt Publishing, 2018

Julie Williams-Krishnan is a fine art photographer and the Director of Programs at the Griffin Museum of Photography. She has exhibited her photographs at the Cambridge Art Association, the Griffin Museum of Photography, the Khaki Gallery, and Zullo Gallery in the Boston region, the Colson Gallery in Easthampton, Massachusetts, The Center for Fine Art Photography in Colorado, the  A. Smithson Gallery in Texas, as well as other venues. Based in Boston Massachusetts since 2010, Julie lived in London, UK for more than 16 years and has traveled extensively.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0816X31BF?ref=myi_title_dp