Sunday, September 26, 2021

HIGHLIGHT: Iranian American poet Sholeh Wolpé's "Unblinking Eyes" from Pratik's Special LA issue

 

Sholeh Wolpé

Unblinking Eyes

…and I thought, perhaps daddy was right.

 

 


At nine I imagined the dots

on our pet fish

as unblinking eyes, dark holes

that took in our distorted faces

through the sky of her plastic tank.

 

My brother’s fingers made waves

in her world, sent her scurrying

behind the plastic grass, the way his pounding

kicks on my bolted door sent me hiding

behind my rickety bookshelf, twirling

long strands of my wild hair

as I froze behind three rows

of storybooks and Persian poetry.

 

Every year, daddy replaced the hole-ridden

bedroom door, until one day he didn’t—

as punishment he said, because:

What do you do daughter to incite him so? Share!

 

I began to conceal the kick marks and dents:

Magazine faces thick with makeup,

curvaceous bodies in short skirts holding up

a box of detergent, a tube of toothpaste,

their impeccable orthodontic smiles… 

and I thought, perhaps daddy was right—

 

my brother was always after something:

the marble I found and claimed, the bowl

of cherries I sequestered, or those records

I played on my red turntable, refusing

to share that corner

of joy carved from air,

mine alone. Then, now. Last night,

at mother’s house, after a meal

of lamb smothered in saffron sauce, potatoes

fried to a crisp, rice slippery with butter,

my brother wanted again. He kicked

with his words, called me whore

because I live with a man out of wedlock.

 

What is he after now? Abroo?

That untranslatable un-wrinkling of honor,

“water on the face” that blurs sins

the way our courtyard pond hid its algae,

imagining itself the nocturnal rocking chair for the moon?

 

Or is my beloved brother

                                  (and believe me, he is beloved)

after something I can never fathom,

universally virile— something

perhaps only a fish with a hundred

unblinking eyes may see?

 

 

 

Sholeh Wolpé is an Iranian-born poet and playwright. A recipient of Mid-West Book Award, and PEN/Heim, her literary work includes several plays as well as 12 books of translations, anthologies, and poetry, including Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths, and The Conference of the Birds.

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Saturday, September 25, 2021

PRATIK LA SPECIAL: AMERICAN POET CAROL V. DAVIS POEM, "Backyard Alchemy"

 

CAROL V. DAVIS

Backyard Alchemy

 


He dug and dug, unearthing garbage

from a dump by the creek.

An old fuse, beer cans, a car jack.

Going for the big kahuna, he said.

He’d stir it, believing in a kind of alchemy.

Copper - like a man with body and soul.

Iron – in his blood, in the Virginia

clay of this red land.

Tunneling into the past a surgical

procedure to excavate the detritus:

washers, lawnmower blades, metal,

as if the scraps could be reassembled

into a Golem, life created from dust,

a second chance for these hills.

In the story, the Golem grows bored,

turns on the people it’s charged to protect.

Hadn’t this community too been betrayed before?

Suited officials who arrived in fancy cars,

promising jobs, money to support their families.

Later, the earth gouged, the miners’ lungs blackened.

Now no food or prospects.

The man peeled off sheaths of wiring until

three smaller wires are stripped naked for veins.

This has got to be good for something.

 

Carol V. Davis is the author of Because I Cannot Leave This Body (Truman State Univ. Press, 2017), Between Storms and won the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry for Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg. Twice a Fulbright scholar in Russia, she teaches at Santa Monica College and Antioch Univ. LA.

 

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Friday, September 24, 2021

Pratik's Special LA Issue Highlight: LOIS P. JONES' poem, "Red Horse"

 

LOIS P. JONES

 

Red Horse

 


No one understood this blood run

to the moon, this blaze

 

of you, red horse in a swollen sky.

How you turned loose

 

like a fistful of fire ants.

How your temper could burn

 

a field when there was too much

to drink. There were days we’d spread

 

the blanket on the grasses

near the sycamores and let the desert

 

air run through us,

let the sage burn our nostrils

 

as we sipped a silky rioja.

A wine you liked to translate,

 

as you decoded everything beautiful.

Your lips full and slightly curled

 

siempre, siempre: jardin de mi agonia,

tu cuerpo fugitivo para siempre,

 

always, always: garden of my last breath,

your body escaped forever,

 

Lorca in his red shoes

lighting our tongues, lifting

 

our hips until the sun

turned poppy and burst.

 

 

Lois P. Jones’s work was featured as a film adaptation by the Visible Poetry Project in 2019. Awards include the 2017 Lascaux Prize, the 2016 Bristol Prize judged by Liz Berry, the 2012 Tiferet Prize and winning finalist for 2018 Terrain poetry Contest judged by Jane Hirshfield.  Night Ladder was published by Glass Lyre Press in 2017.

 

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Monday, September 20, 2021

PRATIK LA SPECIAL iSSUE SPECIAL : AMERICAN POET JAMES RAGAN'S "Mugwampery"

 

JAMES RAGAN

 

Mugwampery

                                                to endeavor to put a respectable face on it.

 


I’ve watched the aging age, resigned

to the course of growing any crease in skin,

its browning galaxy of spokes

flamed out like a smoldering map

on the charred tree of the hand.

I’ve watched them limp into their borrowed knees,

cough their sneeze with choired spools of breath

as if rehearsing notes of spring or dispelling

a heard word that’s off-put and off-color.

I’ve seen them fall into a chair

like shafts of walking lumber.

I’ve watched them breed at chessboards

like birchbarks wintering away until they bald

to gray and patches of white. I’ve seen each

lope to the table on the half-arm like a flat-

tired jalopy that has gasped away its engine.

I’ve watched them offer all their will

to sight, voice, and half their weight

in trade to the charity of memory,

if once more they could stroke a son’s ballgame hair

or cup a daughter’s wedding cheek.

I’ve seen hope’s dream awaken

what, on the face of it, might seem

the heart’s need to make amends,

to live out the rest of my mind’s days

until I grow old enough to be young again.

 

James Ragan has published 10 books of poetry and is translated into 15 languages with poems in Poetry, The Nation, Los Angeles Times, World Literature Today and 30 anthologies. Plays produced in the U.S. Moscow, Beijing, Athens, Prague. Honors include 2 Honorary Ph.D’s, 3 Fulbright Professorships, the Emerson Poetry Prize, 9 Pushcart nominations, NEA Fellowship, the Swan Foundation Humanitarian Award, and the Platinum Prize at Houston’s Int. Film Festival as subject of the documentary, “Flowers and Roots, Ambassador of the Arts.” 


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Thursday, September 16, 2021

Pratik Weekend Special: Excerpts from the Interview with Slovenia's celebrated novelist, Evald Flisar

 

Slovenian Novelist & Playwright

EVALD FLISAR

On the Art of Fiction Writing 


“ ...it was India that gave the most distinct colouring to my prose, not only to the short stories I wrote for the BBC but also to novels that were becoming quite a success in Slovenia.”

 

Born in 1945 in Slovenia, then still part of Yugoslavia, Evald Flisar is an iconic figure in contemporary Slovenian literature. Novelist, playwright, essayist, editor, globe-trotter (travelled in 98 countries), underground train driver in Sydney, Australia, editor of (among other publications) an encyclopedia of science and invention in London, author of short stories and radio plays for the BBC, president of the Slovene Writers’ Association (1995 – 2002), since 1998 editor of the oldest Slovenian literary journal Sodobnost (Contemporary Review), he is also the author of 16 novels (eleven of them short-listed for kresnik, the Slovenian “Booker”), two collections of short stories, three travelogues, two books for children and 15 stage plays (eight nominated for Best Play of the Year Award, three times won the award).

 

Winner of Prešeren Foundation Prize, the highest state award for prose and drama, and the prestigious Župančič Award for lifetime achievement. His work has been translated into 40 languages. His stage plays are regularly performed all over the world, most recently in Austria, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, Serbia, Bosnia, Belarus, USA and Mexico. Attended more than 50 literary readings and festivals on all continents. Lived abroad for 20 years (three years in Australia, 17 years in London). Since 1990 he lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

 

His legendary novel, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, set in Ladakh and Zanskar, is the most widely read Slovenian work of fiction since World War II; still a “must-read” 36 years after its first publication, it will soon appear in its 12th edition. His novel My Father’s Dreams, published in 2005, has earned him a place at the European Literature Night, an annual event at the British Library that features 6 of the best contemporary European writers. Another of his novels, On the Gold Coast, was nominated for the Dublin International Literary Award and was listed by The Irish Times as one of 13 best novels about Africa written by Europeans, alongside Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Isak Dinesen, JG Ballard, Bruce Chatwin and other great literary names.

 

In June/July 2015 he completed a three-week literary tour of USA, reading at the Congress Library in Washington and SUA convention in Chicago, attending the performance of his play Antigone Now at the Atlas Performing Arts Center in Washington, speaking at the Slovene Permanent Mission at the United Nations.

 

His international success is truly astonishing: speakers of languages into which his works have so far been translated represent half of the world’s population.

 

PRATIK: During your early life you had to move out of your country to survive and to explore your element. Can you shed some light on those difficult days of lonely wanderings? How did those experiences shape your life and writing?

FLISAR: It wasn’t quite like that. I was born and grew up and lived until the age of 23 in socialist Yugoslavia, a non-aligned country, which was a buffer state between the West and the countries of Warsaw Pact, this side of the Iron Curtain. Thanks to American help, Yugoslavia had the fourth largest army in Europe and was relatively free; we had passports and could travel. Slovenia, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire for over 600 years, was by far the most advanced republic of multinational federal Yugoslavia and our literature was Western-oriented. I could have stayed and made a career as a journalist or a lecturer or even as a writer and editor, but (rather stupidly) I married at the age of 21, had a child a year later, moved with my wife (and the son) to Vienna, where my marriage fell apart and I moved to London to study English literature. There I married a Dutch girl, a fellow student from Amsterdam. We travelled together to Australia so I could get an Australian passport with which we could permanently settle in London, where we wanted to live. Our overland journey back to Europe lasted a year, and it was on this journey that I first encountered Nepal and India, which later became my favourite country. I’ve been to India 18 times. I also encountered Buddhism and Hinduism and other Eastern faiths and philosophies, and became fascinated by them. Although I’d published a poetry book and two novels before leaving Slovenia, it was in London that I took up writing seriously. Initially I wrote travelogues (my Dutch wife and I also spent six months exploring West Africa), but it was India that gave the most distinct colouring to my prose, not only to the short stories I wrote for the BBC but also to novels that were becoming quite a success in Slovenia. Later I had to supplement my income by editorial work, ending up as an executive editor of the Marshall Cavendish Encyclopaedia of Science, which made my life in London reasonably comfortable.

 

“I lobbied British parliamentarians to recognise the independence of Slovenia, took part at demonstrations on Trafalgar Square, even tried to get Harold Pinter to give his blessings to a new country, but he brushed me off rather rudely: “Come on, not every village can be an independent state!”

 

Meeting the King of Sweden and his wife at the Royal palace in Stockholm.

PRATIK: What made you return to your country and to your mother-tongue spoken by only 2 million people? Do you have any regrets? Or do you think you made the right decision?

FLISAR: There were three reasons. The first one was that my wife, at the age of 32, wanted a child, but I, having left one in Vienna, didn’t have enough courage; I didn’t want to repeat my first mistake. The second reason was that in Slovenia writers and other intellectuals have launched an independence movement, which resulted in a ten-day war with the Yugoslav Army but ultimately brought Slovenia freedom and statehood. I wanted to be part of that. My wife and I parted as friends and I went back to Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital. I kept my flat in London and still did occasional editorial jobs there (I needed the money!). For some years, I drove every other month or so from Ljubljana to London; the journey took me from seven in the morning till midnight. I lobbied British parliamentarians to recognise the independence of Slovenia, took part at demonstrations on Trafalgar Square, even tried to get Harold Pinter to give his blessings to a new country, but he brushed me off rather rudely: “Come on, not every village can be an independent state!” However, a highly developed Alpine republic of 2 million people was not a village and after we were recognised by the Vatican and then Germany and some other countries, the big powers, especially Americans, had to acknowledge the new reality and accept us as a nation with an independent state. That was 30 years ago, when we still believed that we could turn our “tiny Alpine republic”, as we were called by the BBC during the independence war, into “second Switzerland”. That didn’t happen, I’m afraid. Although the first Constitution was drafted in the Writer’s Association building, and although for some time after independence writers played an important part in transforming the society, the new, democratic social order was soon hijacked by bankers and neo-liberal businessmen; more and more it was money that people wanted, not culture. In today’s Slovenia, culture has been trivialized to a large extent, and the word of writers and intellectuals no longer means as much as it used to. The third reason for my return to Slovenia was the language. Although English is an amazing and probably the richest medium of expression, and although I could use it for writing with ease, even with a high degree of originality, I realised that with English I couldn’t reach my deepest feelings and memories, the world of my childhood, my soul. I remained bilingual, of course, and still find it easier to speak English than Slovene, but I prefer to write in Slovene, except stage plays, which I write in both languages simultaneously, however strange that may sound. That helps me cross-check my writing and correct mistakes. I can’t do that with novels, of course.


Chatting with Danilo Turk, former President of Slovenia and before that Kofi Anan's deputy at the United Nations.


PRATIK: How did you come to story/novel writing? What were your influences? How did you evolve?

FLISAR: I started early, as a child. I wrote poems and stories at the age of 12, wrote my first stage play at 13 and had it produced in the hall of the village fire brigade. But I started to write serious poetry at the age of 18, and had the first (and only) poetry collection published as a freshman at the Faculty of Philosophy in Ljubljana. Then, after translating Stefan Zweig’s collection of biographies Die Baumeister der Welt from German into Slovene, I came to realise that I really wanted to write prose. My first novel, A Swarm of Dust, came out two years later, and my second, Dying in a Mirror, a year and a half after that. By then I was already in London, where I started to write radio plays and short stories for the BBC. I did the same for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation during the three and a half years I spent in Sydney. While still in London, I also wrote my first stage play, The Chestnut Crown, based on the novel, A Swarm of Dust. It was presented by the Slovenian National Theatre in Maribor while I was sailing on the notorious steamship Achile Lauro to Australia, and later at Nimrod Theatre in Sydney, directed by John Bell, who later founded the famous John Bell Shakespeare Theatre Company. But after the long overland journey back to London, I started to write about my travels, both in travelogue form and as travel short stories. A collection of these stories, Tales of Wandering, was published in the US and India, and later in many other languages, including Arabic. (A selection of the stories related to India in Nepal was published in 2009 by Nirala Publications in New Delhi under the title The Price of Heaven: Travel Stories from India and Nepal.) Then, in 1985, I had a big break with The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a novel based on my wanderings with an Indian saddhu in Ladakh and Zanskar. In Slovenia, this novel worked like an explosion and in no time at all I became a household name. It sold almost 100.000 copies and is still selling 36 years later; the publishers are preparing the 12th edition. Regarding the population size, 100.000 copies in Slovenia would translate into 70 million copies in India! Following that I published a novel Crazy Life, which some literary historians regard as one of the beginnings of postmodernism in Slovenian literature. I am not entirely happy with it and will, if I live long enough, rewrite it. I am rather peculiar in this regard and would like, at least to some extent, rewrite most of my prose works. But not stage plays. With plays, the “big bang” happened for me in 1992, when two of my plays, What about Leonardo? and Tomorrow, achieved a resounding success and received, next to extraordinary critical acclaim, the Prešeren Foundation Prize, the highest state award for literature, with What about Leonardo? also receiving the Grum Award for the best play of the year. I continued to write plays, most were nominated for the best play of the year award, and two more received it, the last one, Comedy About the End of the World, in 2015. After that, my 15th play, I said good-bye to drama; theatre has changed so much that I can no longer see a place in it, the rest of my life I want to devote to writing novels. The plays, of course, continue to be produced by professional theatres round the world (UK, USA, Japan, Indonesia, Egypt, Taiwan, Belarus, Russia, Czechia, Austria, India …). In Kolkata, Bengali versions of What about Leonardo? and my first play, The Chestnut Crown, are waiting for a production which Covid has so far made impossible. My novels also started to travel round the world and into many languages, and continue to do so. A Journey Too Far, the sequel to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, describing the search for the Ladakhi guru throughout India with a young Indian woman Sumitra, was 20 years ago filmed on Indian locations as a 7-part TV series by the Slovenian National Television. Most successful of my subsequent novels, If I Only Had Time, My Father’s Dreams, On the Gold Coast, Words Above the Clouds, Look Through the Window, The Girl Who Would Prefer to be Elsewhere, The Dream Collector and Alice in Crazyland have, next to many other countries, also been published in various languages in India, in English, Bengali, Hindi, Nepali, Tamil, Malayalam. The publication of My Father’s Dreams in Odia is hanging in the balance. What I want to say is that my considerable literary presence in India, my favourite country, gives me great pleasure. Nepal, of course, I regard as part of the same great cultural tradition.

 


Meeting the President of India during his state visit to Slovenia.

PRATIK: How do you write? Is it a daily exercise? Can you shed light on your creative process?

 

FLISAR: This has changed through the years, which was to be expected, considering that at my age (76) I no longer have the same energy I had at twenty. When I was young, I would start at one o’clock and write until midnight or two in the morning. In my middle years, I still did my best work between four in the afternoon and midnight. But it all depended on what I was writing. In London, writing an additional volume of the Encyclopaedia of Mankind (subtitled “the history of everyday lives of our ancestors”) was such a huge undertaking that I worked on it from eight in the morning till midnight, with the assistance of strong coffee until noon, beer until six in the afternoon, and finally wine until midnight. How I survived the effort I have no idea, but it was the best paid work in my life. Fiction and drama, in spite of my international success, have not made me rich. After the age of sixty the concentrated time I could devote to writing began to shrink and today I’m happy if I find enough motivation to start. If I do (and I still do) I can put in four, maybe five hours of work a day, but not every day and not every week. It all depends on what you call “the creative process”. Ideas for writing a novel are not hard to come by, in fact I am surrounded by such ideas as by a swarm of bees. There is a constant buzzing in my head, even in my dreams which have helped me solve many problems when I got stuck during the writing of a novel or a play. But even if everything goes all right, writing a novel or a play is not easy, far from it. There are many traps one has to avoid, some evident and some invisible, and it rarely happens that one wouldn’t get caught in at least one of the invisible ones. Then you have to backtrack, make repairs, throw away pages that may be good, even excellent, but are more suitable for another, different novel. In spite of that, in most cases, the story you want to tell somehow succeeds in taking shape and reaches the stage at which further intervention would damage it. Then you must let go. And publish it. And be damned, as the saying goes.

 

From left to right: dr. Vasko Simoniti, Slovenian minister of culture, dr. Janez Drnovšek, President of Slovenia, and Evald Flisar, editor-in-chief of the oldest literary magazine Sodobnost (founded in 1933), jointly praying for the magazine's future

PRATIK: How do you see the reality of literature and art in the world today, in the light of everything that is happening, especially technological development and the rule of social media?

 

FLISAR: I’ve mixed feelings about the way things are going. With clever phones in their hands and a choice of social media, people have less time to read, especially fiction, and increasingly less concentration to read more than a few pages. We are bombarded by news, some important but mostly unimportant from all directions; more and more people are trying to tell us something, to sell us something, to force their opinions on us, to express their opinions, mostly half-baked or downright stupid and hateful, so the desire and the need for alternative realities offered by books, by stories and poems, by literature as we knew it are gradually waning. I fear that sooner rather than later, unless a miracle happens, literature will become a luxury for an increasingly smaller minority. Sad, but inevitable, I fear.

 

“Will someone, after reading this, feel entitled to demand that my books be taken off the shelves of bookshops and libraries? It wouldn’t surprise me. I ‘ve already been accused of sexism and even sexual abuse for telling a woman, out of politeness, that she is sexy and beautiful. The worst thing about these movements is that they can so easily (and so frequently) enable selfish individuals incapable of reasoned argument to destroy innocent people and to throw insignificant remarks into the same basket with the misdeeds of a Harvey Weinstein. Ghastly, the whole thing. Where is this going to end?  Immorality in the name of morality. Worse than Covid.”

 

PRATIK: There’s a great deal of talk of several movements, including #metoo and woke. Do you think these movements are tailored to seek prominence at the cost of successful people?

FLISAR: These movements, which started with “political correctness” but then generated into fascism, make me sick. Especially when I read what is happening in the world, mostly in the US and the United Kingdom. That an anonymous accusation can destroy a person’s career, that a university lecturer can be sacked for saying that not everything in the British Empire was bad, that statues of historical figures can be toppled as if this could change history, that practically any man can have his reputation ruined and his work cancelled by being accused of sexual harassment or even violence without the accuser having to provide proof (the rule that you are innocent until proved guilty no longer applies), that writers like JK Rowling can be disgraced and attacked for saying that biological sex cannot be changed, that one has to be afraid to pronounce an opinion on almost anything (because you are always in danger of being penalised for it by an aggressive minority), and that no distinction is made any more between the accused and his work – this, I am sorry to say, is how far things have gone in this selfish, stupid and vindictive assault on what we call civilisation. Will someone, after reading this, feel entitled to demand that my books be taken off the shelves of bookshops and libraries? It wouldn’t surprise me. I ‘ve already been accused of sexism and even sexual abuse for telling a woman, out of politeness, that she is sexy and beautiful. The worst thing about these movements is that they can so easily (and so frequently) enable selfish individuals incapable of reasoned argument to destroy innocent people and to throw insignificant remarks into the same basket with the misdeeds of a Harvey Weinstein. Ghastly, the whole thing. Where is this going to end?  Immorality in the name of morality. Worse than Covid.


PRATIK: Covid pandemic has paralysed the world. How did you (and how do you) deal with it? Has it impacted your writing?


FLISAR: It has, but not in a way that it would creep into the new novel I am working on. It’s too close for that, suitable for reports, not for works of art. And I’m not a reporter. However, in terms of the extra time for writing it has given me, its impact has been beneficial. When you can’t travel abroad, when you can’t walk the streets or visit theatres, when you are not allowed to leave the house, you write. I also have philosophical discussions with my 14-year old son, play chess with him, clean the house, do a bit of gardening. And I write. What else is there to do? But I am filled with tension that borders on depression, and I hope that this horrible punishment for our sins won’t last forever...

 

At Slovenian Book Days with Yuyutsu Sharma, Himalayan Poet and Editor of Pratik Magazine

PRATIK: Is there a distinct Slovenian style of fiction writing? Has Slovenian prose writing evolved its own art of storytelling that can be distinctly called or recognised as Slovene?

FLISAR: We have old folk tales and fairy tales that could be said to have a distinctly Slovenian tone, but literature in general is European, since we have been an integral part of European culture since our arrival in the Alps in the 6th century AD. We have been influenced by German, Russian, French, Italian and English literary forms throughout our history, so there is nothing purely Slovenian in our novels and plays, except the subject matter, of course, and the local settings of literary works. ,,,

To read the full version of Interview, go to Pratik’s Spring 2021 Issue



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Wednesday, September 15, 2021

PRATIK LA SPECIAL HIGHLIGHT : KATE GALE POEM, "In All the Movies"

 

KATE GALE

In All the Movies

 




Men push back the women, take the horses.

Women rake leaves, fill pails of water, stack wood.

Men ride off, row shallow boats, sail big ships.

Women crowd the marketplace, buy ribbons.

 

When the men come to a new town, they demand food.

Drinks, beds, music, stories. The women provide all this.

The men take their stories to the next town and sell them.

Sleep with new women. Eat their food.

 

Men thrust feet into boots. Walk all over God’s world.

Women corral their children, teach them to read.

Women plant roses and summer squash.

Men buy roses for other women.

 

We cry along the riverbank. Give us roses.

Give us stories and books, make us sing.

The men ride by, laugh, pause to see us wet.

Stooping to wash linens and catch fish.

 

We wave them on, Don’t stop and stare, we say.

Your rage is air.  Give us something we can taste.

Give us darkness between your legs, they say.

We’re all darkness we say, we’re nothing but darkness.

 

 

Kate Gale is Co-founder and Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, author of six librettos and seven books of poetry. 


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Saturday, September 11, 2021

PRATIK SPRING 2021 COVER STORY: IRISH POET PETER O’NEILL ON BAUDELAIRE 200 YEARS!


PETER O’NEILL

Baudelaire 200 Years!

During a global pandemic, when death is all around us, poetry takes on an even greater meaning than it does in normal times. When we talk of a poet and death, Baudelaire is one of the first in people’s minds.  

        



I had contacted Christine Weld, the Assistant Director and Cultural Manager of the Alliance Française in Dublin, only some weeks before Christmas last year. I had a new book coming out in France, the first of mine to be fully translated, and I wanted to see if the Alliance would like to support me. I can’t actually remember how the festival initially was brought up, but suffice it to say that within days I already had an exquisite line up of poets and translators from all around the world and who wanted to take part. I could have thrown my net even further, but we had over three continents covered and already one full day of events taking place, and in the middle of a global pandemic.

I have started off translating Baudelaire almost ten years ago. He may not be the kind of poet you might read every day of the year, but I would regularly find myself picking up Les Fleurs du Mal at least a few times every month. And every so often I also began to feel a need to keep a trace of those readings, they became like events to me. Heaney used to say this, that writing a poem was an event, or at least should be. The same can be said, of course, for translation.

Charles Baudelaire is one of the most translated poets the world over. So, why do we need more transversions of his poems, and translations? I think that currently, during a global pandemic, when death is all around us, poetry takes on an even greater meaning than it does in normal times. When we talk of a poet and death, Baudelaire is one of the first in people’s minds. Les Fleurs du Mal is full of it. Ordinarily, we push it out of our minds. DEATH. We don’t even wish to say it. The word. And yet, I remember as a very young man I would be obsessed with it, as perhaps only the young can be. It was one of the main reasons why I wanted to both read and then write poetry.

Now that I have reached middle age, the thought of death is even more prescient of course. Once you pass thirty, you have crossed over. You can no longer fool yourself that you are a youth, any more. And now, with even more virulent strains of Covid mutating, taking young and old alike, and countless ecological catastrophes opening up before us on the horizon, not to mention unending rumours of war, what better poet could one read than the immortal Baudelaire? After all, he is not promising me any illusions of a happier life. No sir! Nor, is he going to feed me any platitudes on equality when all about me the very facts on the ground would tell me differently.

There are so many poets, writers and artists now who seem to be more interested in modality – would, should and could! I am reminded of Samantha in Sex and the City who I am paraphrasing. In a time of pandemic, which we are living in today, in a time of unending darkness and suffering, one needs to turn to a voice that is strong, and enduring. One that speaks an indomitable truth. One needs to have access to auxiliaries – BE, HAVE DO. Forget old modes of being, tired from ceaseless habit, in order to venture bravely forward into the night. Fearlessly. Just like that face that Étienne Carjat immortalised back in 1863.



The Grounding 


The infinite position is the imminent peril of your emplacement,

Such should be your grounding at every encounter.

For from such a perspective can come the wholly equalling

Level of horizontality, allowing you to lie down with another,


Totally unencumbered by the impossible trappings

Of the forbidding echelons of absolute emptiness;

Doom spheres spawning vertical nausea.

Hourly calculations of liquid ice flows.

 

Sea changes involving continents of plastic,

Inside which swim fish with hardening anatomy.

The menu on offer will induce testicular cancer.

 

So, lie back with him/her and enjoy the tantalising notion

Of your sheer vulnerability; how they might kill you with but a word.

Or, for all your days, help you to finally reconstruct the world.

                                                                                                              – Peter O’Neill


 

Peter O’Neill is the author of six collections of poetry, the most recent being Henry Street Arcade, a bilingual collection translated into French by the poet Yan Kouton ( 2021); a novella More Micks than Dicks ( 2017), and a volume of translation The Enemy – Transversions from Baudelaire ( 2015). He has also edited two anthologies of poetry The Gladstone Readings Anthology ( 2017) And Agamemnon Dead ( 2015) and organised and hosted a number of festivals and readings, most recently Baudelaire at 200! For the Alliance Francaise.


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Tuesday, September 7, 2021

PRATIK LA ISSUE SPECIAL : LOS ANGELES POET LAUREATE LYNNE THOMPSON POEM, "Approach, memory"

 

LYNNE THOMPSON

 

Approach, memory 

 

 


As if I am ready

 

As if I am no longer seed

separated from her tree

 

As if any long, black night

 has her own intentions

 (although I am no longer

 bound by them)

As if I am a clock in Dali’s

 Persistence of Memory

 dripping from

 a thin, nude bark     then

 

Come with cumulus

in  your hands

 

Come as the stranger you

are to find me stranger still

 

Still, when you arrive,

notice the end of what was

just moments before

 

As you approach, ask what

is that scent: sky or rosemary

wet dog or wild hanker?

 

Lynne Thompson’s manuscript, Fretwork, was selected by Jane Hirshfield as the winner of the 2018 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize. Thompson’s also the author of Start With A Small Guitar and Beg No Pardon. Recent work appears in New England Review, Pleiades, and Colorado Review. She sits on the Boards of Directors of the Los Angeles Review of Books and Cave Canem.   Lynne Thompson was appointed Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles in February 2021.

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Saturday, September 4, 2021

PRATIK LA ISSUE HIGHLIGHT: DOROTHY BARRESI's Poem, "National Public Radio"

 DOROTHY BARRESI


National Public Radio

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?

                                                          --Matthew 10:29

 


After the torture segment—

 

a certain method, all politics aside,

produces the most actionable intelligence true or false—

 

bird biology.

 

What might we learn about ourselves

from the birds of the air?

 

Pulling a little Jesus out of the hat!  Or Saint Francis? One of those beards.

 

In drought, bird fights bird 

for every scorched seed ginned from the hull.

The rites of scarcity are held

 

most sacred in scarcity, science shows,

 

and, BTW,

birds aren’t sky jewelry.

 

More:  SS officers in the evolutionary doll-eyed army

of slicked backs and hard

beaks. Science shows.

 

But in times of extremity?

True extremity?

Juba, Aleppo, Fukushima, Flint—

forget Aristophanes. Hitchcock got it almost right.

One love bird eats the other love bird,

then eats the little girl.

 

Dorothy Barresi is the author of five books of poetry: What We Did While We Made More Guns; American Fanatics; Rouge Pulp; The Post-Rapture Diner, winner of an American Book Award; and All of the Above. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is Professor of English at CSU, Northridge.

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