Writer James Crews (photo courtesy the author)

James Crews’ latest collection, The Book of What Stays, is full of evocative landscapes and secret lives. There is the old woman in Chernobyl who refuses to leave her home and the bent, one-eyed swallows. There is ice fishing with Patsy Cline and a pack of Coors. There is “the purpling, churning CGI sky” over I-80 out West. There is both a farmer’s wife, and an arsonist’s wife. Crews’ poems have a silent power that sneaks up on you.

But it was his series of poems about the Cuban-born visual artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres that left the deepest impression the first time I read The Book of What Stays.

In my experience, poetry about visual art rarely succeeds, perhaps because it is difficult for text to compete with the original work of art. (Poet and art critic John Yau is the rare exception—a writer who can use visual art as a jumping off point to make something original and brilliant).

Crews’ series on Gonzalez-Torres succeeds because it inhabits the life and work of the artist and his partner Ross, who died of AIDS in 1991. In other words, the poems are an exercise in both empathy and imagination.

The 20 poems that comprise One Hundred Small Yellow Envelopes are a “speculative narrative.” “They have been imagined from the life and art of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and are not meant to be strictly biographical,” James explained to me via email.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres and cat Maria, New York, New York, August 3, 1995. (Photo by John Jonas Gruen via jonno.com)

Crews’ poems actually add to our understanding of Gonzalez-Torres and his work. After all, biography, criticism, and the art itself are simply facets of a larger story. Crews’ poems flesh out sides of Gonzalez-Torres that might have remained hidden were it not for this imaginative narrative.

Reading Crews’ book reminded me of a conversation I had recently with an artist friend who lived in New York through the 80s, and is still there today. “You have no idea how horrific the AIDS epidemic was,” he told me. “There were funerals every week. I lost so many friends. New York became a city of ghosts, and it still is in many ways.”

One Hundred Small Yellow Envelopes, which makes up the heart of The Book of What Stays, taps into this sense of grief and loss, much like the art of Gonzalez-Torres. But neither artist morbidly fixates on death. Instead, both Crews and Gonzalez-Torres focus on the temporal nature of life—it’s beauty and it’s brevity.

I saw Gonzalez-Torres’ piece Untitled (Placebo) at MoMA last year and immediately fell in love with the giant rectangular carpet of silver candy. Gonzalez-Torres made a number of these works comprised of 335 pounds of candy wrapped in silver paper. Many museum-goers are shocked to learn that the artist intended for them to remove a piece of candy from the installation.

Feliz Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Placebo), 1991. Candies individually wrapped in silver cellophane (endless supply). (Photo taken at MoMA in New York City, 2012 by Michelle Aldredge)

Feliz Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Placebo), detail, 1991. Candies individually wrapped in silver cellophane (endless supply). (Photo taken at MoMA in New York City, 2012 by Michelle Aldredge)

Many of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ works are temporal in nature. In this 1991 untitled piece, viewers are encouraged to take a page of the art work with them. (Photo source unknown)

Here are six works from the One Hundred Small Yellow Envelopes series, most in the imagined voice of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (note that “Letter to Felix” is in the voice of his partner Ross). As James explains in the notes section of his book, two monographs, one edited by William S. Bartman and the other by Julie Ault, were the primary inspiration for the series, as were certain pieces of visual art, mostly by Gonzalez-Torres himself.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Golden), 1995. Plastic beads and metal rod, variable dimensions. (Photo by Thorsten Monschein © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York)

Felix Gonzales Torres, Untitled (Placebo – Landscape – for Roni) detail, 1993,
Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York (Photo by Andre Morain © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation)

The one exception is the first poem (Gold Field), which conjures the close friendship and artistic collaboration between Gonzalez-Torres and Roni Horn. John Curcio explains their connection further:

Gonzalez-Torres first became acquainted with Horn’s Forms from the Gold Field during her 1990 solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Gonzalez-Torres was thoroughly impressed by the simplicity and beauty of the work and shared the impact that the work made on him when the two artists met in 1993. As a gesture to their newfound friendship and shared sensibility, Horn sent him a square of gold foil just a few days after they first met. Being struck by the gesture, he created Untitled (Placebo – Landscape – for Roni) (1993), an endlessly replaceable candy spill of gold cellophane–wrapped sweets.

Whenever a poem was inspired by a specific piece of art by Gonzalez-Torres, a corresponding photograph is included below the poem. The poems are meant to stand on their own (and do), but the photos may help you flesh out your understanding.

It’s important to remember, however, that Crews is not attempting to reduce or translate Gonzalez-Torres’ art into language. Instead, he is illuminating it, like someone turning on a light in a dark room, Crews’ speculative narrative reveals things we might never have seen without this elucidation.

But perhaps the best insight about poetry, life, and art comes from Crews himself in his poem “An Unexpected Warm Day in Wisconsin”: “Choose your views,” Crews insightfully observes, “or they will choose you.”

A special thanks to artist Corwin Levi for introducing me to the work of James Crews. It’s been a pleasure.

(The Gold Field)

Wandering through the museum today, Ross and I came upon a piece called The Gold Field, a slice of a slice of sunlight installed in its own white room. We memorized it, this blanket made of real gold foil, still creased as if from its last body. It was the rectangle of yellow when Ross pulled up the shade this morning. Was each small plot of scorched grass at the cemetery in San Juan where my mother brought me each month. Never step there, she said once, pointing at my foot that had come to rest on a pile of fresh dirt.

The sculpture didn’t need words. It lifted us above the jobs, the small rented rooms, the small minds. I leaned in, as close as I could get without touching it just to be near its heat. I put my hand on his shoulder, wanted to curl up with him right there on the floor and rest. Every sunrise and sunset from now on, I thought, will spread this field of golden light across the bed as we wake up together.

Roni Horn, Gold Mats, Paired—for Ross and Felix, 1994–95. Gold, edition number three of three 49 x 60 x .0008 in. each. Gift of Muriel Kallis Newman in honor of James Cuno. (Image © 1995 Roni Horn courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago)

(Letter to Felix: Ross)

For Keats too, it started with sore throats,
fevers. What appeared to be mere cold
wound tighter in his chest. That night
at Brown’s, after only the slightest
cough, he saw it: a single drop
of red on the bedsheets. Bring me
the candle, he said. Let me see this.
His eyes were glass in the dim light
but clear: I know the color
of that blood, he said, then fell
into the dream of writing a letter
to Fanny Brawne, the paper slipping
into the ground instead of her hands—
everything he’d ever meant to say
but had saved and saved for later.

(Perfect Lovers)

Our bodies moved like two ticking clocks:
not sick, not sick, not sick—

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1991. Clocks, paint on wall, 14 x 28 x 2 3/4 in. (Photo © 2013 The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York via MoMA.org)

(Aparicion)

This morning, in a blur of orange
and gray, a robin landed
in our blackberry bush.

He pecked and pushed
what was left until he freed
a fat berry we’d forgotten to pick.

He took it gingerly in his beak
and spread his wings.
I half-expected it—overripe—

to burst before he lifted off,
but it didn’t. He knew
something about gentle, about relish.

He drifted up into piled clouds,
a further blur except for
the tuft of orange on his chest.

He was a speck against the gray
of hidden sun. He was gone.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Aparicion), 1991. (Photo © 2013 The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation)

(Fan Letter)

I went to your exhibit last night,
saw the installation where you’d taken
your own weight and your lover’s
before he’d died of AIDS and made
the pile of silver licorice snaps
that matched the 355 pounds exactly.

I loved the way the candy
spilled from the corner of two white walls
and I was about to walk away
when the guard explained that the artist
asked that everyone take a piece with him.
I thanked her but said I couldn’t,
didn’t want to ruin all your hard work.

Later on, after I’d left the gallery,
I stood outside to get one last look
when I saw a man bent over your sculpture
popping piece after piece in his mouth
chewing and sobbing.

I want to tell you that
if I could go back now, I’d take
as much of the licorice with me as I could.
I’d do exactly what you wanted.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Lover Boys),1991. Endless supply of candies individually wrapped in silver cellophane. (Photo source unknown)

(One Hundred Small Yellow Envelopes)

Tonight was your last wish.
I used a teaspoon to scoop you
into each of the yellow envelopes
you chose and addressed to our friends.

I worked all night, watched what everyone
insists on calling your cremains
fall into the mouths of the envelopes,
some of the ash as fine as sugar,
other bits as coarse as salt.

I don’t know what to do
with the one marked, Felix.
I want to rip it open
like a packet of instant drink mix:

Pour into your favorite cup
your lover’s ashes. Add hot water,
stir until the cup is as warm
as his skin once was against yours.

Sip slowly, this simple solution.

About James Crews:

Writer James Crews

James Crews was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and attended Webster University where he studied with the recent Poet Laureate of Missouri, David Clewell. He has an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is at work on a PhD at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of three chapbooks, What Has Not Yet Left (Copperdome Prize) Bending the Knot (Gertrude Press Chapbook Prize) and One Hundred Small Yellow Envelopes: A Poem After the Life and Work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Parallel Press). His poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2006 and 2009, Ploughshares, New Repbulic, Columbia, and other journals. His first collection, The Book of What Stays, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize for Poetry and was chosen as a Foreword Magazine Book of the Year. Crews has been writer-in-residence at Kimmel Harding Nelson Center and Caldera and is the recent recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.

An Update on the Gwarlingo Membership Drive

Thanks to all of the readers who have contributed to the Gwarlingo Membership Drive. Instead of selling out to advertisers, I’m “selling out” to my readers instead! 128+ Gwarlingo readers have contributed so far and $12,000 of the $15,000 goal has been raised. If you haven’t donated yet, you can check out my video and all of the member rewards, including some limited-edition artwork, here on the Gwarlingo site.

Stay up on the latest poetry, books, and art news by having Gwarlingo delivered to your email inbox. It’s easy and free! You can also follow Gwarlingo on Twitter and Facebook.

Browse all of the Gwarlingo Sunday Poets in the Sunday Poem Index.

All poems © James Crews. These poems appear in The Book of What Stays (University of Nebraska Press, 2011) and were reprinted with permission from the author. All Rights Reserved. 

Liu Bolin, Hiding in the City No.93 -Supermarket No.2, 2010. Photographs by the Chinese artist are on view in Brattleboro, Vermont, through June 23rd. (Photo Courtesy Eli Klein Fine Art © Liu Bolin. Click to Enlarge)

The summer art scene in New England presents a special challenge. On the one hand there is almost too much going on, particularly with outdoor events. And yet it’s not the season when we can expect the best films or museum shows, which are typically reserved for the fall. But this doesn’t mean there aren’t standout events to be found.

On Wednesday I had a chance to share a few of my own recommendations for summer arts events in New England on New Hampshire Public Radio’s Word of Mouth. (It’s always a blast to work with the show’s host Virginia Prescott and producer Taylor Quimby.)

If you missed the segment, you can listen online here.

Here’s a look at the New England arts events that I’m most looking forward to this summer, along with a few suggestions I didn’t have time to mention on the show…

Michelle in the New Hampshire Public Radio studios (Photo by Taylor Quimby)

Zach in the control booth at New Hampshire Public Radio (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

Word of Mouth host Virginia Prescott and Michelle just before their live segment on NHPR (Photo by Taylor Quimby)

Ed Ruscha at the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts

The Rose had a firestorm of bad press back in 2009 when the former President Jehuda Reinharz announced plans to shut down the Rose and sell the collection in order to shore up  Brandeis’ University’s plummeting endowment. The news enraged faculty, alumni and the art world. But the museum has a new president now and the Rose, luckily, has been preserved.

The museum is back with a vengeance showcasing the work of renowned pop artist Ed Ruscha, the first large-scale solo show of the artist’s work in the Boston area.

Ruscha is all about Southern California–cars, billboards, film, and Los Angeles. His best known work may be his artist books 26 Gasoline Stations and Every Building on the Sunset Strip, seminal works that inspired countless imitations.

“Standard Station” (1966), a screenprint from the exhibit “Ed Ruscha: Standard” at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University.

Ruscha’s 1966 screenprint called Standard Station (shown above) is a pop art masterpiece. The artist is a genius of word play. “Standard” is not only a gas station, but also a mark of quality. Ruscha is also making reference to John D. Rockefeller’s oil company, Standard, which was dissolved by an antitrust ruling in 1911.

The Ed Ruscha show, also called Standard, contains 70 pieces and covers 60 years of the artist’s career. The exhibit ended up at Brandeis thanks to Christopher Bedford, the Rose Museum Director, who used to work at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where the Ruscha show originated.

You’ll need to act quickly though because Ruscha’s Standard is at Brandeis only through June 9th. Visit the Rose Art Museum website for more details.

Liu Bolin, Hiding in the City No. 99 – Three Goddesses, 2011 (Photo Courtesy Eli Klein Fine Art © Liu Bolin)

Contemporary Chinese Art at the Brattleboro Museum and Mass MoCA

Liu Bolin at the Brattleboro Museum of Art in Vermont

This summer New Englanders have not one but two rare opportunities to see the work of two important Chinese artists, both working out of Beijing.

Photographer and performance artist Liu Bolin is sometimes called “The Invisible Man” because he creates photographs of himself blending into various settings around Beijing. Whether he is standing in front of demolished building, a piece of Chinese propaganda, or grocery store shelves lined with soft drinks, Liu (with the help of his assistant) finds creative ways to disguise his body with paint and other materials in order to make himself “invisible.”

Liu Bolin, Hiding in New York No. 7 – Made in China, 2012. (Photo Courtesy Eli Klein Fine Art © Liu Bolin)

In 2005 the Chinese government destroyed Suo Jia Cun, the artist village where Liu’s studio was located. In response Liu started the Hiding in the City series as a way of protesting artists’ troubled relationship with the government and their physical surroundings. Through his elaborate photographs, he embodies the role of the conflicted citizen in a country torn between tradition and “progress,” communal interests and individual freedom.

Liu is an important Chinese artist and it’s a rare event to have his work at the Brattleboro Museum in Vermont through June 23rd.

Also, on Sunday May 26th at 3 p.m. Taliesin Thomas, director of AW Asia, will discuss the emergence and evolution of Chinese contemporary art from the end of the Cultural Revolution to the present day. More information about the talk is available on the Brattleboro Museum website.

A close-up view of Xu Bing’s Phoenix, on view at Mass MoCA through the end of October (Photo by Greta Rybus via Word of Mouth on NHPR)

Xu Bing at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts

On view at Mass MoCA through October 31st is a selection of work by Chinese artist Xu Bing, including two 100-foot, 20-ton Phoenix sculptures made of demolition and building debris from Beijing. This is the first time the work has been seen in the U.S.

The installation was originally commissioned for the glass atrium connecting the two towers of Cesar Pelli’s World Financial Center in Beijing, but the installation raised a lot of loaded questions about Chinese labor and the destruction of old neighborhoods in favor of what is jokingly called tofu construction in China.

Xu explained the origin of the piece in an interview for The New Yorker:  “I went to a construction site and I was shocked. China has so many modern buildings, but you can’t imagine how poor the working conditions and primitive living situations were. I think there is a huge contrast. That was when I decided to use waste materials. I wanted to use the waste materials from the building construction to create a piece of work that hangs inside the building itself. I thought that could have meaning, because this new building was extravagant. As I saw it, using garbage and construction waste to make a piece of work would make the building look even more extravagant. They complement each other. The material would make the building look grander, and this grandeur would make the phoenixes look even rougher and more authentic.”

Because of the political message, the Chinese government wasn’t so keen on having this sculpture on display at the WFC, and as a result Phoenix was left without a home. Fortunately, we can now see the installation here in Massachusetts along with other works by Xu, including 1st Class, a faux tiger-skin made of half a million cigarettes.

For more information about the Xu Bing exhibit, visit the Mass MoCA website.

It took half a million cigarettes to make Xu Bing’s 1st Class. Check it out in the mezzanine of Mass MoCA’s Building 5 gallery. (Photo courtesy Mass MoCA)

A page from Tom Phillips’ artist book A Humument, now on view at Mass MoCA (Image © Tom Phillips)

Tom Phillips and Johnny Carrera at Mass MoCA

I was very sorry that I didn’t have time to mention this show on NHPR, because I’m a huge fan of Tom Phillips.

I’ve written about Phillips’s artist book masterpiece A Humument before in my post on Mary Ruefle and erasure poetry,  a tradition of poetry and visual art that makes new work out of existing texts.

Tom Phillips is an English artist, but also a musician, and was actually Brian Eno’s teacher back in the day. In 1966 he bought the 1892 Victorian novel A Human Document for 30 pence in a South London junk shop and used it to create an entirely new series of works by altering every single page of the 367-page book through painting and collage.

Mass MoCA’s show Life’s Work is a rare chance to see Tom Phillips’ seminal artist book A Humument in person. This photo, taken by Phillip’s occasional collaborator composer Tarik O’Regan, shows the exhibit on opening night. (Photo by Tarik O’Regan)

A Humument is now one of the best known and most highly regarded of all 20^th-century artists books and has inspired many other postmodern works like it. The first version was published in 1973 and Phillips has since created four revised editions. (I encourage you to buy a copy of this gorgeous work from Thames & Hudson at your local bookstore or online). But to see these works in their original form and displayed so beautifully at Mass MoCA is a rare opportunity. The museum has over 1,100 individual prints from Phillips’ A Humument, including the original untouched book alongside the first and fifth editions on display.

Johnny Carrera is best known for his 400-page alteration of the 1898 edition of The International Dictionary, a work that is very much in the tradition of Tom Phillips. Carrera’s art will also be featured in this Mass MoCA exhibit. Life’s Work is on view at Mass Moca through January 20th. You can also check out the fabulous Sol LeWitt wall drawings while you’re there. More information is available at the Mass MoCA website.

Wilco’s highly popular Solid Sound Festival return to Mass MoCA June 21st (Photo by Mike Wren)

Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival

Mass MoCA is also welcoming back Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival this summer. Solid Sound is turning into a semi-regular, must-see event here in New England. It’s an off-beat mix of art, music, food, installations, and family activities. This year’s festival features Wilco, of course, and artists like Neko Case, Low, and a live performance of RadioLab. Also Yo La Tengo will be performing, and there will be a screening of Sam Green’s live film The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller with a live soundtrack by Yo La Tengo, which I’ve written about in depth here on Gwarlingo.

Sam Green and Yo La Tengo will be performing their live film The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller at this year’s Solid Sound Festival in North Adams. (Photo by Sam Allison courtesy Sam Green)

Wilco front man Jeff Tweedy with a raptor at the 2011 Solid Sound Festival (Photo by Austin Nelson courtesy Solid Sound)

Wilco band members will create some of their own sound installations, and there will also be family activities like urban birding, birds of prey, guided star gazing, an environmental film series, and a “make-your-own musical instrument and jam session” for kids. This year they’re also throwing in demonstrations on home brewing, raising backyard chickens, and making hot sauce.

The festival runs Friday June 21st through Sunday the 23rd. This is a hot ticket though, and the tickets are selling out fast so you have to act quickly to get the remaining 3-day and 1-day passes. More information is available on the Solid Sound website.

The affordable art fair *broke, a popular event at The Thing in the Spring Festival, offers prints, collages, wearables, and other art all under $50. Last year’s festival also featured art and murals by MacDowell Colony fellow Luke Ramsey, shown here on stage. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge, 2012)

The Thing in the Spring Festival in Peterborough, New Hampshire, & New Art by Anna Von Mertens

June 6th-9th the Thing in the Spring Festival will be returning to Peterborough, New Hampshire, for its 6th year. The festival is run by musician Eric Gagne and artist Mary Goldthwaite Gagne. This year’s festival features music by Sam Moss, Peter Broetzmann and Joe McPhee , 23 Quartet, Adeem, and more.

Performance and video artist Rachelle Beaudoin will return to the festival, and MacDowell Colony fellow Anna Von Mertens will be presenting her work throughout the weekend as stage installations for the Peterborough Town Hall concerts.

Von Mertens’s breathtaking quilts track the movement of the stars, ocean currents, and other natural phenomena, and have been shown at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the MFA in Boston, the Berkeley Art Museum, the deCordova Museum, and the Sara Meltzer Gallery, among others. (I also highly recommend Anna’s show at the Boston Center for the Arts, on view through June 16th. You can meet Von Mertens and see the show at the closing reception on Friday, June 14th. More details here.)

Anna Von Mertens, Migrations, Invasions, Plagues and Empires : Roman Empire 228-345 AD (East). The artist’s quilts will be on view at the Thing in the Spring and at the Boston Center for the Arts this summer. (Photo courtesy Anna Von Mertens)

Festival organizer and musician Eric Gagne (left) and artist Emily Drury (right) at the 2012 *broke art fair (Photo by Michelle Aldredge, 2012)

But the most anticipated event at Thing in the Spring may be the return of the popular affordable art fair *broke, which offers prints, collages, wearables, and other art all under $50. The multidisciplinary fair will be at the Peterborough Town Fall from 10-4 on Saturday, June 8th. Admission is Free.

You can buy tickets for the festival at the Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough or at Brewbakers in Keene (weekend passes are also available in Keene). Or save yourself a drive and purchase your tickets online at the Thing in the Spring website.

Picnic tables on the lawn of The MacDowell Colony on Medal Day in 2012 (Photo © Joanna Eldredge Morrissey courtesy the photographer)

Stephen Sondheim at The MacDowell Colony’s Medal Day in Peterborough, New Hampshire

Arts lovers come from far and wide to attend The MacDowell Colony’s annual open house each August. Medal Day is a rare chance for visitors to tour the grounds and gardens of the nation’s oldest artist retreat, to meet the artists in their studios, and to see the presentation of the Edward MacDowell Medal, a lifetime achievement award given to an artist who has had a major impact on his or her field.

This year’s medalist is Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics for West Side Story and the music for Sweeney Todd and Sunday in the Park with George. He’s the first artist to be given the medal in musical theater. Sondheim has won every major award in the book—an Oscar, 8 Tony Awards, 8 Grammys, a Pulitzer, and now he adds the MacDowell Medal to his trophy case.

Stephen Sondheim is the 54th Edward MacDowell Medal winner and will accept the award at the Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, on August 11, 2013. (Photo by Jerry Jackson)

Pulitzer-Prize-winning writer and MacDowell Chairman Michael Chabon with his daughter Sophie and son Zeke at Medal Day in 2012 (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

Medal Day attendees will also have an opportunity to tour the Colony’s new library, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the architects of the new Barnes Museum and the former American Folk Art Museum in New York City (Tsien/Williams drawing courtesy The MacDowell Colony)

Chairman of the Board Michael Chabon will also be on hand to give opening remarks at this year’s ceremony, and New York magazine Writer-at-Large Frank Rich will introduce Sondheim at the ceremony.

Medal Day attendees will also have an opportunity to tour the Colony’s new library, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. The architects have been in the news a lot recently because of the controversial new building for the Barnes Museum in Philadelphia and the recent outcry over MoMA’s announcement that it will demolish the designers’ decade-old American Folk Art Museum building in New York City in order to make way for yet another expansion.

Medal Day is free and happens on August 11, 2013. The ceremony takes place at 12:15 p.m. followed by a picnic lunch on the grounds at 1:15 p.m. (you may bring your own or reserve a lunch  from the Colony here for $20). Open studios and self-directed tours of the grounds, gardens, and historic sites are from 2:00-5:00 p.m.. More information is available at the Colony’s website. Donors also have an opportunity to attend a special cocktail reception and dinner with the medalist, MacDowell artists, staff, and board members the night before the big event. You can make your contribution here.

Composer Lou Harrison in 1983 performing on a metallophone during a musical session at the home of Betty Freeman. Two pieces by Harrison will be performed at the 2013 Monadnock Music Festival in Peterborough.
(Photo by Betty Freeman Courtesy of Los Angeles Philharmonic Archives)

The Monadnock Music Festival

Speaking of MacDowell Medalists…I’m also looking forward to hearing the work of the late Lou Harrison performed at the Monadnock Music festival on Saturday, July 27, 7:30 p.m. at the Peterborough Town House. We don’t often have a chance to hear Harrison’s work here in New Hampshire. Harrison drew on Eastern musical traditions and incorporates instruments like the gamelan, so be prepared for something compelling and very different. Harrison’s “Suite for Violin with American Gamelan” and La Koro Sutro for Mixed Chorus, 6 Percussion, Organ and Harp are on the program.

And if you haven’t ever attended one of the free community concerts Monadnock Music gives in churches and alternative space around Southern New Hampshire, I encourage you to give it a try. These concerts are a relaxing way to spend an afternoon, are free, and usually contain an interesting mix of contemporary and classical works.

Monadnock Music’s new season kicks off Sunday July 14th at 3 pm at the Peterborough Town House with male soprano (yes, MALE SOPRANO!!) Michael Maniaci performing Mozart. There will also be a special performance of Stephen Sondheim’s work on Saturday, August 10th at the Peterborough Town House in celebration of MacDowell’s Medal Day. You can access the full schedule and purchase tickets on the Monadnock Music website.

This wall installation by Andy Goldsworthy can be seen at the Storm King Art Center in New York State (Photo by David Sauvé)

A Road Trip to the Hudson River Valley

Road trips are a perfect way to spend a summer weekend. I love choosing a destination, usually arts related, finding a new cafe or restaurant, and exploring the area.

I have two special spots in the Hudson River Valley to recommend to arts lovers…

The first is the Storm King Art Center, a 500-acre open air museum in Mountainville, New York. The unique sculpture park has work by 20th and 21st century artists like Isamu Noguchi, Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Louise Nevelson, and Andy Goldworthy. Storm King offers rental bikes, artist talks, special exhibits, and events for all ages. You can learn more at the Storm King website.

The works of Richard Serra on view at Dia:Beacon (Photo courtesy The Art Escape Plan)

Also, if you love modern art, particularly the work of minimalist artists like Agnes Martin, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Fred Sandback, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson, don’t miss Dia:Beacon on the Hudson River in Beacon, New York. The museum is housed in an old Nabisco box printing factory and is one of my favorite museums. Period. (If I lived closer, you’d probably find me there once a week.) The Dia Art Foundation has 240,000 square feet of space to showcase its collection, which is comprised of work from the 1960s to the present. There are also plenty of interesting shops, galleries, and restaurants in the town, so be sure to put Beacon on your summer to-do list. More information about the museum and its exhibits is available here.

A work by Robert Smithson at Dia:Beacon (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries, 2002. (Photo by Michael Govan. © Dia Art Foundation)

An Update on the Gwarlingo Membership Drive

Thanks to all of the readers who have contributed to the Gwarlingo Membership Drive. Instead of selling out to advertisers, I’m “selling out” to my readers instead! 125+ Gwarlingo readers have contributed so far and $12,000 of the $15,000 goal has been raised. If you haven’t donated yet, you can check out my video and all of the member rewards, including some limited-edition artwork, here on the Gwarlingo site.

Stay up on the latest poetry, books, and art news by having Gwarlingo delivered to your email inbox. It’s easy and free! You can also follow Gwarlingo on Twitter and Facebook.

Poet Diane Lockward of West Caldwell, New Jersey, discusses her work at Chatham High School (Photo by Stephen Briggs)

Diane Lockward’s latest collection of poetry, Temptation by Water, is a book of dualities. These closely observed poems, which are largely free verse, are both witty and fierce and explore themes like domesticity and sensuality, grief and humor, aging and reawakening.

As Marjorie Tesser writes in the Harvard Review, “the theme of this book, set out in the epigraph and title poem, is temptation. In the first poems, desire has led to disaster. In ‘Imploded,’ the heart is compared to a destroyed building, ‘Just the soft mushroom of dust and ash, / the quiet collapse inside.’ Soon, the sources of hurt and disappointment become apparent: a lover who proved more flash than substance, a beloved child whose addictions have caused pain, a parent who is aging.”

“There are many temptations in these pages,” writes Barbara Daniels, “including a too-expensive sexy red dress and disturbing, desirable men, one of whom is so dangerous he comes with a warning label: “all trans fats and palm oil,” “a four-hour erection,” “the Mickey Finn of obsessions” (“Side Effects”).

Much has been lost and broken in the world of these poems, including a family that cannot be mended despite a repair crew that comes in to sew a woman’s mouth shut and teach her son how to shoot, and most tellingly, the spouse or lover who leaves despite prayers for a miracle. Lockward forces readers to look when they might not want to—at terrifying dreams, poisoned starlings plummeting from the sky, and the rosy anus of a beloved infant, “the lilliputian donut hole, / the dark star puckered like a kiss” (“It Runs This Deep”). She gazes unblinkingly at the bleeding leg of a young raccoon, young neighbors passionately tangled in each other’s arms, and dying butterflies captured for a science project. If a kill jar and a pin through the thorax of a butterfly are necessary, so be it, Lockward implies.

Here are four of my favorite poems from Lockward’s collection.

Enjoy your Sunday and happy birthday to Diane, whose birthday is Wednesday, May 15th!

Diane Lockward

Implosion

Today an abandoned power plant in Tampa.
Beautiful, really, the way the building fell in
on itself, enveloped in a plume of smoke,
bricks tumbling like disaster in slow motion.

Convergence of math and physics,
this fine art of blasting.

Not one person hurt by flying debris,
epitomic destruction of what’s not needed—

like the small building of the heart,
its pumping machine grown idle,
furnace snuffed, the years of vacancy.
Grief, a vagrant huddled in the corridor.
Brick edifice fragile as shells.

Comes the condemnation, the inrush of air,
the structural blowdown.

This is the way a heart melts.
No fire, no flames, no heat.
Just the soft mushroom of dust and ash,
the quiet collapse inside.

How Sarah Wins the Essay Contest

A significant prize is at stake,
but the topic’s complex: Chaos and Order
and How They Relate to Creativity.

She’s only 12 and knows nothing of chaos,
though her father has left with the woman
her grandmother calls that whore and her mother
can’t get out of bed for days at a time.

She has not created anything yet,
barely feels the little seeds inside,
the occasional blip blip of something
like an elevator rising and dropping,

does not know the coming chaos
of sweating, cramps, and blood, the schedule
off kilter, the skittishness of desire.

All she knows is what she’s been told—be logical,
orderly, systematic, begin at the beginning,
an Introduction with Attention Grabber,
maybe a dictionary definition:

Chaos: a condition in which chance is supreme;
inherent unpredictability; a state of utter confusion,
Order: an arrangement in sequence; a proper,
orderly, functioning condition; a state of peace,

and next the Body, each part bolstered
with details, like flesh added to bones.
But what to say? that once the house was full
and then it wasn’t? that something inside

the house had broken? that sometimes the house
was so quiet she couldn’t hear anything except
the low hum of breathing?

and after she’s done with the Body, a Conclusion
that pulls the parts together, extracts meaning,
and ends with a Clincher, something derived
from the soft shuffle of her mother’s feet.

The Jesus Potato

. . . the sight of their savior in a potato has
reinvigorated their faith and their desire to help others.

—FoxNews.com

She wants to believe in miracles—
Mary in a grilled cheese or Jesus in a potato
once intended for a picnic salad.

Her doubting spouse says those weren’t miracles.
If Jesus hid in a vegetable, it wouldn’t be a potato.
For a second coming, he’d pick something less solid.

She’s as likely to find saints or martyrs in marbles,
he adds. She skins, boils, and cubes potatoes,
and silently craves a man less stolid,

one who’d lift spirits, not simply pass the Miracle
Whip and karate-chop potatoes.
She remembers their salad

days, so raw and green it seemed a miracle,
and the Sunday joy of a thick potage,
the dressing on their salad,

and then the undressing, the miracle
of their uncanonized bodies, the piety
of two pairs of lips sealed,

St. Elmo’s Fire on the skin, as much a miracle
now as stigmata or Christ on a potato,
altered, anointed, and dumped in a salad.

She envies women the signs in their munchibles,
the St. Petersburg woman who saw Jesus in a potato
chip, crisp wafer preserved like a relic, but salted.

She needs no Michelangelos,
just a split bagel imprinted with a pietà,
served with flutes of wine, Salud! Salud!

She looks for the Virgin cradling Jesus on pretzels
and chicken breasts with the face of the Pope,
and she prays for vegetables maculate and soiled.

Seventh-Grade Science Project

I ran in a field of wildflowers,
               waving a butterfly net, three
                              yards of gauzy fabric stitched

                              to the looped rim of a hanger
               stapled to a broom handle.
By summertime my father

had already left with his
               beautiful mistress. Mother
                              stayed inside and loafed, said

                              she could not watch my tiny
               murders. The field held lemon
lilies, daylilies aflame in orange

and red, buttercups, purple
               clover, and wild roses with
                              thorns that cut my arms.

                              I caught a black swallowtail,
               monarch, fritillary and mourning
cloak, a painted lady. I learned

how to sneak up on a butterfly,
               its long tubular tongue uncoiled
                              inside a flower, and pinch the

                              folded wings between my thumb
               and index finger. I dropped each
hostage onto a wad of Clorox-

soaked cotton inside the kill jar.
               I observed the flutter of wings,
                              the wiggling thorax, and when

                              the wiggling stopped, I placed
               the butterfly on a felt mounting
board. I stuck a straight pin

precisely into the center
               of the thorax and eased
                              the wings apart. Broken

                              wings or missing antennae
               would lose points. I prepared a
data label for each butterfly—name,

date of capture, location—then slid
               the bodies inside a shadow box.
                              The pin-pricked fingers, wasp

                              stings, and blood on my arms
               were what I paid for my first
A in science. All that summer

I ran like something wild and left
               my multi-colored fingerprints
                              on everything I touched.

About Diane Lockward

Diane Lockward

Diane Lockward is the author of three poetry books, most recently Temptation by Water. Her previous books are What Feeds Us, which received the 2006 Quentin R. Howard Poetry Prize, and Eve’s Red Dress. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Against Perfection and Greatest Hits: 1997-2010. A craft book, The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop, is forthcoming (Wind Publications, 2013). Her poems have been included in such anthologies as Poetry Daily: 360 Poems from the World’s Most Popular Poetry Website and Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times, and in such journals as Harvard Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac. She is the recipient of a Poetry Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the first place winner of the 2012 Naugatuck River Review’s poetry contest.

For more information about Diane Lockward and her work, please visit her website. You can also find her on Twitter and Facebook.
 

An Update on the Gwarlingo Membership Drive

Thanks to all of the readers who have contributed to the Gwarlingo Membership Drive. Instead of selling out to advertisers, I’m “selling out” to my readers instead! 125+ Gwarlingo readers have contributed so far and $12,000 of the $15,000 goal has been raised. If you haven’t donated yet, you can check out my video and all of the member rewards, including some limited-edition artwork, here on the Gwarlingo site.

Stay up on the latest poetry, books, and art news by having Gwarlingo delivered to your email inbox. It’s easy and free! You can also follow Gwarlingo on Twitter and Facebook.

Browse all of the Gwarlingo Sunday Poets in the Sunday Poem Index.

All poems © Diane Lockward. These poems appear in Temptation by Water (Wind Publications, 2010) and were reprinted with permission from the author. All Rights Reserved. 

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson.

“Never try to convey your idea to the audience,” said Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, “—it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life, and they’ll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it.”

Tarkovsky is best known for such cinematic masterpieces as Solaris, The Mirror, Andrei Rublev, and Stalker. Tarkovksy’s vision was unique as a filmmaker; he favored long takes and leisurely scenes that explored the beauty and mystery of everyday life.

“We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means,” Tarkovsky explained in an 1983 interview with Hervé Guibert in Le Monde.

I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it’s a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Stalker (still), 1979.

Andre Tarkovsky on the set of Mirror.

Tarkovsky’s unhurried, profound films explore themes like memory, childhood, and dreams, and are the antithesis of the Hollywood obsession for rapid-cut editing. He was a master of time and rhythm, which he believed was “the dominant, all-powerful factor of the film image.” This is cinema that captures the intimate ebb and flow of everyday life. Here is Tarkovsky explaining artistic approach to filmmaking:

I think people somehow got the idea that everything on screen should be immediately understandable. In my opinion events of our everyday lives are much more mysterious than those we can witness on screen. If we attempted to recall all events, step by step, that took place during just one day of our life and then showed them on screen, the result would be hundred times more mysterious than my film [Stalker]. Audiences got used to simplistic drama. Whenever a moment of realism appears on screen, a moment of truth, it is immediately followed by voices declaring it “confusing.” Many think of Stalker as a science fiction film. But this film is not based on fantasy, it is realism on film. Try to accept its content as a record of one day in lives of three people, try to see it on this level and you’ll find nothing complex, mysterious, or symbolic in it. (Andrei Tarkovsky Talking, 1981)

“Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [of us all],” the director Ingmar Bergman once said, “the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.”

Andrei Tarkovsky, Ivan’s Childhood (still), 1962.

Sven Nykvist and Andrei Tarkovsky (Photo by Lars-Olof Löthwall courtesy of Nostalghia)

Andrei Tarkovsky and Margarita Terekhova on the set of The Mirror.

While I was familiar with Tarkovsky’s films, I had never seen these luscious Polaroids taken by the director until today. (Thanks to Sigrun Hodne who writes the Sub Rosa blog in Norway for alerting me to Tarkovsky’s still images).

These 60 photographs were made by Tarkovsky in Russia and Italy between 1979 and 1984 and have been compiled in the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids. As you can see, Tarkovsky was just as adept with still Polaroids as he was with film. His careful eye is in evidence in these Russian and Italian landscapes with their deep shadows and glimmering sunlight, as well as in the intimate moments Tarkovsky captured with his wife, son, and dog.

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson.

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson.

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson.

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson.

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson.

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson.

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson.

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson.

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson.

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson.

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson.

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson.

Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson, 2006 (Photo courtesy Constellation Cafe)

This excerpt from the introduction of Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids written by Tonino Guerra describes Tarkovsky’s fascination with the Polaroid:

At my wedding in Moscow in 1977, Tarkovsky had a Polaroid camera in his hand and he moved about happily with this instrument which he discovered only recently. He and Michelangelo Antonioni were my witnesses at the wedding, and as the custom then, it fell to them to choose the music for the band to play when the time came to sign the marriage certificate. The chose The Blue Danube.

Antonioni, too, made great use of a Polaroid at the time, and I remember that during a reconnaissance in Uzbekistan for a film that in the end we never made, he wanted to give three elderly Muslims a photograph he had taken of them. The eldest, after casting a brief glance at the image, gave it back to him, saying: ‘Why stop time?’ We were left gaping in wonder, speechless at this extraordinary refusal.

Tarkovsky often reflected on the way that time flies and this is precisely what he wanted: to stop it, even with these quick Polaroid shots. The melancholy of seeing things for the last time is the highly mysterious and poetic essence that these images leave with us. It is as though Andrei wanted to transmit his own enjoyment quickly to others. And they feel like a fond farewell.

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson.

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson.

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson.

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson.

Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson, 2006 (Photo courtesy the Belgrade Bookshop)

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson.

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson.

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson.

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson.

Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson, 2006 (Photo courtesy Constellation Cafe)

“Modern mass culture, aimed at the ‘consumer’, the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls,” wrote Tarkovsky, “setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.”

Tarkovsky’s work is infused with spirituality—a larger sense of connectedness, a sense of found beauty in an imperfect world.

“What is art?,” asked Tarkovksy. “Like a declaration of love: the consciousness of our dependence on each other. A confession. An unconscious act that none the less reflects the true meaning of life—love and sacrifice.”

If you’d like to explore the world of Tarkovsky further, Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids and Sculpting in Time: The Great Russian Filmmaker Discusses His Art are available here or in your local bookstore.

An Update on the Gwarlingo Membership Drive

Thanks to all of the readers who have contributed to the Gwarlingo Membership Drive. Instead of selling out to advertisers, I’m “selling out” to my readers instead! 125+ Gwarlingo readers have contributed so far and $12,000 of the $15,000 goal has been raised. If you haven’t donated yet, you can check out my video and all of the member rewards, including some limited-edition artwork, here on the Gwarlingo site.

Stay up on the latest poetry, books, and art news by having Gwarlingo delivered to your email inbox. It’s easy and free! You can also follow Gwarlingo on Twitter and Facebook.

Writer Kate Kingston lives in Trinidad, Colorado (Photo by Ron Thompson)

“When my youngest son was a teenager, he told me me, ‘No one over thirty can snowboard.’ I said, ‘Do you want to make a bet?’ We did. I won. I was in my forties, and by the time I was fifty I gave up skiing and have been snowboarding ever since. Why? It’s more poetic. More in tune with the mountain.”

I met Kate in April at Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts where we were both writers in residence for a month. Kate is not only a talented poet, but she also has a zest for life that is contagious. She is always up for an adventure, whether it’s snowboarding, skiing, riding horses, traveling to Spain or Mexico, or teaching Spanish to a room of rowdy high school students. We were hard-pressed to keep up with Kate’s bottomless well of energy.

Kate Kingston during her residency at Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Saratoga, Wyoming. A small-world coincidence: the cowboy who took us riding turned out to be a former high school student of Kate’s from Colorado. (Photo courtesy Kate Kingston)

The sense of wonder and freedom we once knew as a child can be hard to rediscover. Playfulness is literally schooled out of us. Physical education and the arts are the first things to go when education funding is cut. And as adults, we wear our busy schedules like a badge of honor, as though the fullness of our calendar has a direct correlation to our own self worth.

But as artists, we must play in order to survive. Without it, there can be no receptivity, empathy, or happy accidents during the creative process. Play puts us in a state of readiness for the act of making our best work. I thought of this each time I saw Kate Kingston cross-country ski by my studio window. What may look like “goofing off” to an outsider is actually a critical part of the creative process. The boundary between life and art is really non-existent. Kate’s gliding through snow beside the gushing creek was its own form of poetry.

Michelle riding a horse during her residency at Brush Creek Ranch in Wyoming. The hat was on loan from Kate! (Photo by Eun Young Lee)

Kate reading her poems to the other artists in residence during her open studio at Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts. Composer Eun Young Lee looks on. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

One snowy night during her open studio, Kate revealed more details about her writing process. So many people think that poems just appear, fully formed, she said, but they actually require a lot of gestation, work, and revision (as well as play). Stacks of paperback journals covered a table in Kate’s studio. These notebooks, where she records daily encounters, observations, and thoughts, serve as inspiration for her poetry. Kate read a sample page from her journal—a description of an afternoon spent skiing in Colorado. The prose was vigorous, astute, and surprisingly eloquent for a journal entry.

Many writers use daily journals and diaries as inspiration for their prose and poetry. (The writer David Sedaris has been keeping a diary obsessively since 1977 and has described its importance to his own writing process: “That’s how I start the day — by writing about the day before,” he recently told Fresh Air’s Terry Gross.) Like Sedaris, Kate also begins each day with free writing.

The notebook excerpt Kate read to us that night contained the seeds of future poems; already she was making creative connections and recording scenes with language and imagery that were original and unexpected.

This process has its advantages—it allows an artist to capture a moment while the experience is still fresh and unfiltered. It is awareness in a raw state, before the critical mind can interfere. When a writer like Kingston or Sedaris returns to those journal pages days, weeks, even months later, there will be a sense of distance between the writer and the words on the page (a writer needs distance as much as freshness, after all). Kate’s writing process creates a special convergence between raw experience, intellect, critical judgment, and intuition.

Kate uses a journal like this one to record her daily encounters, observations, and thoughts, which serve as inspiration for her poetry (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

 
Originally from Wisconsin, Kate has called Colorado home for many years now, and her work resonates with landscapes, stories, and images from the American West. Her adopted home suits her, for she brings an outsider’s eye to the lives of Native Americans, Hispanic women, mothers, daughters, bullfighters, and hardscrabble pioneer women. Spain and Mexico also feature prominently in her work, as does her love for the Spanish language.

Wyoming is like no other place I’ve been: the big sky, the snow-blindness, the antelope and elk, the desolate state highways that close for days on end when snow and wind turn roads into deathtraps for truck drivers. New Englanders have a reputation for self-sufficiency and independence, but until you’ve stood in the middle of a desolate Wyoming prairie with the biting, icy wind freezing your face and hands, you can’t imagine the courage and self-reliance those early Western settlers possessed.

It is observations like these that Kingston captures beautifully in her writing. Kate’s poems vibrate with history, but also future possibilities. She understands that awareness is everything in artistic practice, just as it is in daily life. To inhabit the lives of others through imagination is one of poetry’s special traits, and as readers, we’re privileged to experience the world through the eyes of Kate Kingston.

For today’s Sunday Poem feature, I have five poems from Kate’s latest collection, Shaking the Kaleidoscope (Lost Horse Press, 2012), to share.

Enjoy your Sunday.

The artists in residence at Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in April of 2013. From left to right: Visual artist Roger Feldman, composer Jeffrey Roberts, painter Anne Connell, poet Kate Kingston, interdisciplinary artist Corwin Levi, writer Michelle Aldredge, composer Eun Young Lee, and painter Sarah Fagan (Photo by Beth Nelson)

The main entrance to Brush Creek Ranch in Wyoming (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

Shaking the Kaleidoscope

I cannot recall violence,
only cigar smoke
and the ruined air of traffic,
exhaust
filling my nostrils, cannot
recall pistachios,
the way the shell cracks
between my teeth,
or myself dropping
from a metal
bar chipping my front
tooth on happiness,
the stain of blood in sand,
nothing like the matador
gored in the groin,
so that my lament rises
up next to Lorca
and smells of wet ashes.

I cannot recall the sound
of the trolley, its chime
diminished by cathedral bells
nor the prints my knees
left in sand when my mother
lifted me to the car,
cannot recall the taste of honey
nor the voice of the vendor
selling split melons,
nothing like the pigeon,
guttural warble echoing inside
the jojoba, iridescent neck
collecting sunlight, not unlike
this street woman asking
me for pesetas, her shoes
as silent as the voice
that refuses. Not violence
to refuse a woman a handful
of coins for her story
spelled out in the sad leather
of her everyday shoes.

I cannot recall violence,
but one morning my son’s face
turned blue. I forced
my own breath into his lungs,
cannot recall the sound of waves
claiming shore or the way
his feet toed-in, only the cadence
of silence, nothing like
the chain of mountain peaks
suffering from lack of rain.
I cannot recall the way a knife
slices coconut into quarter-moon
wedges, cannot recall cleats
biting into cobblestone, nor the bull
lifting his horns to the groin,
the matador spilling onto sand,
nothing like the pomegranate
or the blue face of a child
when his lungs will not pull air,
nothing like exhaust filling
my nostrils or pesetas
dropping into an open palm.

I cannot recall the taste
on my tongue when I was saved
by the skin-of-my-teeth, nothing
like a-nick-in-time, the sharp
rasp of tooth against metal
punctuating sand with red, nothing
like the matador lighting his cigar,
the infirmary bed vibrating
under his weight, nothing like
the word Olé etched in sand as bells
shake the sky from its reverie
of white distance, nothing like
the dog with no collar sniffing
my left foot, the dog who stole
the eyes of the beggar woman. Pesetas
are not like violence, they make no
sound unless you drop them
into a cup, nothing like the girl pulling
a balloon by the string. Her father
calls, Marí, ven aquí, and the balloon
rises to the cathedral spire.

I cannot recall violence,
how it wears a red hat and stands
on the corner selling news,
lives on the beach in corrugated
cardboard, changes its name
to Passion and stays out
long after midnight, cannot recall
violence, but by the crack
of my teeth on metal, I knew
the world resonated with chipped
porcelain, that I would go crazy,
have fun with it, shake it up,
and return to the sound of cathedral
bells slicing sky into bite size
pieces, nothing like the woman
on the corner of Canal and Recreo
peeling mangos into ripe moons
that resonate on my tongue.

Riding the Blue Bus

Granada, Alicante, Molina de Segura, Spanish towns
strung like rosary beads in my mother’s hand. Albacete,
all the ahs of Spain roll off my tongue like the Hail Mary
my mother repeated, her fingers tender on each bead. Molina
de Segura, I look for the windmill of safety as radio crackle
infiltrates the Eagle’s song, This could be heaven or this could
be hell, all the way from Baja to Murcia. Welcome to the Hotel
California, repeats itself like the phrase Now and at the hour
of our death, which I should never mention while traveling,
nor should I mention the scorpion that raised its spear-like
tail, sensing my bare foot. Fortuna Archena. Good fortune,
and a chain of arches, how names conjure shapes as we travel
through lemon orchards, their yellow eyes surrounding the bus.
The radio turns to the Monkeys, I’m a Believer, and I know
I am. Windmills revolve, change wind to electric. Now Simon
and Garfunkel harmonize, I am leaving. I am leaving. The windmills
stay behind touring acres of sky, tender blue cielo. Tierno
como un beso, the Bimbo bread sign reads. Tender as a kiss,
I translate. Now we pass Yecla, Jumilla, like the names of sisters,
then Mula, and I think of burlap sacks bulging with oranges
slung over the mula’s spine. I think of my mother’s hips bracing
laundry, grocery bags, the everyday weight of children. But I
am a woman made of chalk and pencils, who carries a notebook
filled with names of Spanish towns, a woman who listens
to the bus radio blow static in one window and out the other.

History of My Body

Once this body went into treason, the flat-chested girl
pushed Willie Wall into the thorn bush, and never
stopped riding her pogo stick up and down the driveway
until her brother broke it. The history of this body
is the angel in snow working her arms and legs in long
slashes. The history of this body is like breaking up
a jigsaw puzzle, then letting the pieces float in the river.
Have I told you I’m the hero of this body? I’m as
fluid as water spilling into the boat. I could save you,
but first, you almost have to drown. Once a botfly
laid eggs in this thigh. Hatched larvae trekked
pink stripes across my skin, newborn veins radiating
from the mother egg. The history of this body
has a housefly in its ear, buzz ricocheting like geometric
lace. Take this history back to the tonsillectomy,
back to ice cream in its swollen throat, back to the way
these lips enter a room full of men. Take this ear,
a barrage of spider veins trapping sound. History
of my body inhales secondary smoke from my father’s cigar,
inhales primary perfume from my mother’s neck, inhales
the broken leaves of autumn crushed beneath my boot.
That pile of minuscule hands pries at the lawn
until I sweep them into a heap and plow through
like a sorceress with conical hat and faithful broom.
This body remembers trick-or-treat, its Snicker bars
and bruised apples. This body remembers the way dried leaves
scratch the skin when I somersault into the pile
of tattooed veins—oak, elm, maple—then wrap myself
in a sarong of silver water. Inside this body, flies buzz,
this body with cake on its tongue.

I Cannot Name this Place

I live in the plaza of pigeons—orange necks, turquoise
feathers, pink claws tracking the grey rasp of cobblestone.
I live with cathedral bells, how they harbor the voices
of saints, the mewing of kittens. Wind enters like a rumor
tugging at the pages of my notebook, reminds me
of the swamp where I buried my feet in black mulch
up to my calves while a snapping turtle buried her eggs
in sand. I care about winter and my own mother hooked up
to the machine of morphine good-byes, but it is my daughter
who paces the floorboards. I want to circle the plaza,
walk into sunshine and traffic on Calle de Insurgentes, smell
acres of corn roasting. I want to taste licorice and wear
taffeta. I want the sound of engines to stomp out the ashes
of a memory where my daughter wrestles, her throat gripped
by that crazed boy who dragged her up a flight of stairs
by her neck. Her cousin saved her, ran to her own mother
and said, Jason’s hurting her, while I was out alpine skiing
the slopes, blue Utah sun in my hair. Now she has become
the asphalt I dream on, that warm place under the plaza bench
where I store my cigarettes and empty bottle, the place
where pigeons never enter. Their cooing fills me with stones.

Gravity

Sometimes you slip when you swing out over the lake,
                   your fingers clenching a frayed rope, your legs dangling.
The cold splash. Water up your nose. Or on the frozen pond
                   you slip on the tail of crack-the-whip, your figure skates
gliding out from under. Sometimes you slip when you balance
                   just so on the kitchen stool reaching for the cinnamon
rolls Aunt Ila tucked behind the saucers, or you slip when
                   you cross the metal pole in the closet, hand over hand,
you slip and land in a pile of rubber boots with metal clasps
                   that jangle and scratch the back of your legs.
Sometimes you slip when you cross the monkey bars, your front tooth
                   cracking on metal as you fall, or when you follow
your brother and Eugene up Big Hill, you slip and gravel
                   bites into your knees, so they know you are there,
but they let you climb with them anyway, if you carry the bottles
                   of Coke in your pack and don’t tell anyone.
Sometimes you slip when you walk from the church to the rectory
                   with a basket of donuts for the priest, you slip
leaving streaks of pink frosting in the blades of grass. Sometimes
                   you slip when Bobby holds your hand
and roller skates around the rink, you slip and feel the wooden floor
                   heave and buckle under his laughter as he reaches
with both hands to pull you up, or when you drive the icy roads
                   of Wisconsin with your new license, you slip and the Chevy
spins into white powder. Sometimes you slip when you descend
                   the backstairs with a suitcase headed for college
or when you walk down the aisle, everyone in town watching
                   the back of your head. Sometimes you slip when you pull
your daughter across a white field on her new sled or when
                   you lean over the edge of a canoe on Silver Lake, you slip
in over your head and almost drown from laughing so hard,
                   water up your nose.
Sometimes you slip when the trail up to Devil’s Causeway
                   is muddy, you slip and fall all the way back to the trailhead,
to your red Subaru parked in the shade of a willow. Sometimes
                   you tumble past your car back to the highway.
You hear blue jays recite your name backwards in the juniper,
                   but you keep rumbling with gravity. You roll back
into town, and spin recklessly around a curve, tumbling
                   down Main. You pass Jimmy just home from Vietnam,
and your mother clothes-pinning sheets in the sun.
                   You tumble past your brothers playing baseball
behind the Point Brewery and your sister whispering secrets
                   in front of Woolworths. The scent of greasy
burgers wafts from the open door. You reach out to grab
                   old friends, but their fingers come off in your grip,
and now you are somersaulting down Iverson Hill.
                   The momentum reaches a crescendo. You are a musical
note piercing the sound barrier. Gravity has you in the thick
                   of its fingers. Dawn sheds graffiti on your battered
limbs as you somersault over the Wisconsin Street Bridge
                   and come to a halt Sunday morning on the freshly
poured sidewalk of Saint Stephen’s Church. Father McGinley
                   blesses you with holy water. Sister Veronica washes
your wounds. You leave an imprint of your face in concrete.

About Kate Kingston

Kate Kingston cross-country skiing in Wyoming

For more information about Kate and her work, please visit her website. You can also follow her on Facebook.

An Update on the Gwarlingo Membership Drive

Thanks to all of the readers who have contributed to the Gwarlingo Membership Drive. Instead of selling out to advertisers, I’m “selling out” to my readers instead! 125+ Gwarlingo readers have contributed so far and $12,000 of the $15,000 goal has been raised. If you haven’t donated yet, you can check out my video and all of the member rewards, including some limited-edition artwork, here on the Gwarlingo site.

Stay up on the latest poetry, books, and art news by having Gwarlingo delivered to your email inbox. It’s easy and free! You can also follow Gwarlingo on Twitter and Facebook.

Browse all of the Gwarlingo Sunday Poets in the Sunday Poem Index.

All poems © Kate Kingston. These poems appear in Shaking the Kaleidoscope, published by Lost Horse Press (2012), and were reprinted with permission from the author and Lost Horse Press. All Rights Reserved. “History of My Body” originally appeared in Rattle. “Shaking the Kaleidoscope” was originally published in Nimrod International Journal. “Gravity” was first published in Margie and Words and Images.

Concrete Sound (Photos courtesy Audra Wolowiec)

 
Last year Gwarlingo readers responded enthusiastically to Mary Ruefle and Jen Bervin’s erasure poems. Today’s Sunday Poem features another unique project that defies categorization—a collaboration between interdisciplinary artist Audra Wolowiec and poet, critic, and artist Christine Shan Shan Hou.

In conjunction with her one-person exhibition, Concrete Sound, at Norte Maar Gallery (shown below), Wolowiec worked with Hou to create a publication that is an extension of her installation. The limited-edition artist book, also called Concrete Sound, is based on a series of email exchanges of images and text between Wolowiec and Hou over the course of a month.

The result is a beautiful, handmade book that explores the idea of call and response, as well as other sound-related themes, such as deep listening and interpersonal communication. The hand-stitched volume uses collage and vellum to great effect. The transparent pages create not only layers of text, but also layers of meaning.

“Do we want concrete?” Hou writes in the unconventional introduction, printed on a single folded page, “As if uncertainty looms unconventionally like a black skirt in the corner. Sound waves its left hand amongst tremors. The women in search of an echo may unhook themselves from the mirror…Can personal history be detached from the body?”

The limited-edition artist book, Concrete Sound, is based on a series of email exchanges of images and text between Wolowiec and Hou over the course of a month and is an extension of Wolowiec’s installation by the same name. (Photo courtesy Audra Wolowiec)

Based on acoustic foam used in anechoic chambers, Audra Wolowiec’s installation, Concrete Sound, is etymologically linked to language as explored through concrete poetry and the role it played in early communication devices. On the coasts of England, large cement domes called ‘acoustic mirrors’ once used to detect sounds from oncoming troops, now lay dormant as reminders of the tactile nature of analog technology. (Photo courtesy Norte Maar Gallery)

Christine Shan Shan Hou reading from Concrete Sound at Norte Maar Gallery in 2011. (Photo courtesy the Norte Maar Gallery blog)

The last 10 copies of Concrete Sound are available for purchase from the authors. (Photo courtesy Audra Wolowiec)

To better showcase Concrete Sound, I’ve made a special page on the Gwarlingo website with full-screen scans from the book. This will allow you to read the poems and view the pages in more detail.

Audra and Christine have also created a video that will give Gwarlingo readers a better sense of the project and it’s unusual features, like its vellum pages, photographs, and collages.

You’ll notice that certain text and poems appear lighter than others as a result of being viewed beneath the transparent vellum. Such subtleties don’t translate digitally, but 10 lucky Gwarlingo readers can purchase the last copies of this limited-edition book directly from the artists for $20 + $2 shipping and handling. (Note: The first edition of Concrete Sound has sold out, but Christine and Audra have just issued a second edition of the book, now available for purchase!)

View the video and read full screen-excerpts from Concrete Sound here.

About Christine Shan Shan Hou

Christine Hou

Christine Shan Shan Hou is a poet, critic, and artist living in Brooklyn, New York. Publications include Accumulations (Publication Studio, 2010) and Concrete Sound (2011), a collaborative artists’ book with Audra Wolowiec. Additional poems appear in Weekday, EOAGH, Critical Correspondence, Bone Bouquet, and Belladonna #148. Her awards include The Flow Chart Foundation/The Academy for American Poets and the Zora Neale Hurston Scholarship. Her criticism has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, The Performance Club, Hyperallergic Weekend, IDIOM, and Fake Pretty. For more information about Christine and her work, please visit her website. 

About Audra Wolowiec

Audra Wolowiec (Photo by Katarina Hybenova)

Audra Wolowiec is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York, whose work oscillates between sculpture, sound, text and performance. She received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and has shown work at Norte Maar, Magnan-Metz, and Art in General. Her work has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail, textsound, and Thresholds (MIT Dept of Architecture). She currently teaches at Parsons in the Art, Media and Technology Department. For more information about Audra and her work, please visit her website.  

 
View the video and read full screen-excerpts from Concrete Sound here.
 

Writer Franz Kafka

“Don’t bend; water it down; or make it logical; don’t edit your soul for fashion. Follow intense obsessions mercilessly.”

Spot-on advice for all artists from the writer Franz Kafka.

Mari L’Esperance (Photo by Martin Takigawa)

“My hope is that my readers approach a poem – any poem – in order to be transformed in some way,” says Sunday Poet Mari L’Esperance. “Not dramatically, but to feel by the end of the poem as though something has shifted for them internally so that they then perceive themselves and the world a bit differently. That’s what I want as a reader: to be changed by a poem.”

Mari’s most recent collection, The Darkened Temple, was awarded a Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. The collection explores a landscape of loss—loss that is both personal and political. There is war, displacement, illness, imprisonment, violence, and a mother who has disappeared without a trace, but there is also redemption in these straightforward, lyric poems.

“I’m essentially a lyric poet,” L’Esperance explained in an interview with Ashlie Kauffman, and it’s the form that most appeals to me in the work of others. The form allows for an intense concentration of sense, sound, and image, as well as the ability to make leaps in the same that don’t feel as possible in other, more expansive forms.”

L’Esperance’s mother vanished in 1995 leaving no clues to her whereabouts. Some of the strongest poems in  The Darkened Temple explore the mourning and trauma of losing a loved one under such strange and mysterious circumstances.

“The central theme, which I believe is fairly obvious, is the disappearance of my mother (when I was 33 and a student at NYU),” L’Esperance told Kauffman. ”But my hope is that the manuscript as a whole, even individual poems, manage to transcend mere autobiography, as reducing it to the fact of my mother’s disappearance would be just that—reductive. I have also concluded (and I’m going to get archetypal here) that the book says something about the devaluation of the feminine in our culture—that the ‘disappeared mother’ also represents the feminine that has been exiled or subsumed in favor of the masculine ethos (in both men and women).”

The Darkened Temple is divided into three sections, which Mari describes in her interview with Kauffman:

“The first is a circling or gathering, featuring poems that address traumatic loss from personal, cultural, and historic perspectives. The poems in the second section take the reader down into the depths of the speaker’s experience of traumatic loss and focus on the central theme. Finally, the third section relieves the intensity and pressure of the second section with poems that embody a sense of emergence and release. Taking the manuscript as a whole, there’s (to me) a sense of having descended into the underworld and then returned to some semblance of hope by book’s end.”

Mari’s influences are wide-ranging. Brenda Hillman, Stanley Kunitz, Jean Valentine, Philip Levine, and William Stafford are among the poets she most admires, but as she explained to Kauffman, her Japanese heritage has also impacted her writing:

“My mother was Japanese (born and raised) and taught me much about Japanese culture and the arts. I visit Japan as often as I’m able—every other year or so—and it’s a place that is very close to my heart… The Japanese value sadness—in fact, beauty and sadness go hand in hand. Films and stories have indeterminate, often sad endings, which can frustrate many Westerners. I think this intrinsic valuing of sadness and beauty, combined, is what fuels many of the poems in my book. And the Japanese are also stoic and value endurance, accepting what life has handed to them…which, on a collective level, has been a hindrance to them as a nation. But this endurance and acceptance are part of my poetic sensibility.”

“I do believe in inspiration,” L’Esperance told How A Poem Happens, “but that rarefied and somewhat altered state can only sustain itself for so long; it must be corralled, brought down to earth, and channeled into language. I’m a slow and undisciplined writer and often allow long periods of time to pass between poems, so perhaps I rely too much on inspiration and not enough on ‘pot scrubbing,’ as my friend Sage Cohen has called the largely messy, unglamorous, and plain old hard work of writing.”

I have five poems from The Darkened Temple to share with you today. If you enjoy Mari’s work, please consider sharing it through email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Enjoy your Sunday!

Returning to Earth

When Emperor Hirohito announced
Japan’s defeat over national radio,
his divinity was broken, fell away
and settled in fine gold dust at his feet.

His people understood the gravity
of the occasion—a god does not speak
over the airwaves with a human voice,
ordinary and flecked with static. A god
does not speak in the common voice
of the earthbound, thick with shame.

At the station, my mother, a schoolgirl,
looked on as men in uniform lurched
from the platform into the path
of incoming trains, their slack bodies
landing on the tracks without sound.

Prayer

Bring it up from the dark, bring it all up,
the spiny fish with their needle teeth
and wands of phosphorescent light,
all that is waterlogged, heavy with its own
unbearable weight, all that is strange,
malformed, lying in shadow—that
crawls and humps and drags itself
along the muddy bottom, making
guttural sounds no human can imagine.
Haul it up into the light as the rusted
pulleys and frayed ropes creak and groan
with their burden—crates of skulls, broken
cars and bodies, sacks of stones, their
horrible tonnage, the lost and discarded, all
that we would rather forget: our angers
and fears, the lives we betrayed, the souls
we abandoned while we looked after
our own comfort and gain. Let’s see them all,
here in the open, unbound and pulsing
with that which was never extinguished,
which survives even death itself, brave
flicker at the black gate of our oblivion.

As Told by Three Rivers

Eight a.m., up too late the night before
learning the nose and throat, the bones
of the hand. Rounding a corner
on the seventh floor of Eye & Ear, the view
from the window takes you by surprise:
the city of Pittsburgh fanned out before you,
its verdant wedge of land softened
by the arms of three rivers, their names alone
like music—Monongahela, Allegheny, Ohio—
threading their slow eternal way home,
knowing. You think of Naipaul’s book, how
that distant mythic river in that distant
unnamed place reminds you somehow
of these three rivers meeting, the purpose
in their joined ambition as it should be,
how their journey tells the same story,
a story of becoming, of knowing one’s place
in the world. Standing there at the window
you see how everything that’s come before
has brought you here, how it all makes sense,
these three timeless rivers moving forward,
deliberate and without question, telling the story
of the life you have chosen, of the life
you could not help but choose.

The Choices Not Made

They breathe in the seam between
the stove and refrigerator, in the muck
and detritus of years of cooking meals.

They clamor in the corners of closets,
from between garment bags smelling
of mothballs and another year spent.

They call to you from under the bed,
nearly overcome by dirty socks
and abandoned newspapers. On fair days

they fairly scream at you from the kitchen sill,
where they’ve set up camp among
the potted plants and the spice mills.

Some night, late, nearly asleep in a chair,
you may feel a familiar pull—something,
you don’t know what—and then it passes

as you rouse yourself, move through rooms
turning out lights, trying to step lightly
so as not to wake the house,

and maybe they watch you from under
the stairs, and maybe they sing a little song,
soft and low, inaudible under the rasp

of windblown eucalyptus against the shingles,
and you pause there for a moment
as if you’ve just remembered something:

a scrap of melody, dusk light on the river,
a field you can almost picture but cannot name.

Grief Is Deep Green

In the season of roubai, nothing answers.

New leaves sprout along the sapling’s
wet branches, tiny wings of hope—

Two spades make a hole for planting.

We bury the roots with a poem folded twice
and ladle water over tamped earth.

The garden fills with rain and distances.

Perhaps this is how it ends—little ceremony,
the lost mother permitted to return home.

Grief is deep green and carries a sharp scent.
Memory and rain are like nothing that keeps.

She disappeared in the season of roubai.

Crows drift above the darkened temple,
their ragged cries and the falling off after—

It is the falling off that I want to hold on to,

yet the notes smear and fade, so I reach
for something that might choose to stay.

The missing are restless. They wander
between two worlds and belong to neither.

In the season of roubai, she does not answer.
How does it begin and where does it end?

What I mean to say is: There is
no fathomable point of entry—

What I mean to say is: she was of this world
and then was not.

About Mari L’Esperance

Mari L’Esperance

Mari L’Esperance was born in Kobe, Japan, to a Japanese mother and a French Canadian-American father and was raised in Southern California, Micronesia, and Japan. Her full-length collection The Darkened Temple was awarded a Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry (2008 University of Nebraska Press). An earlier collection, Begin Here, was awarded a Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press Chapbook Prize. With Tomás Q. Morín, she’s edited the essay collection Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine (2013 Prairie Lights Books, an imprint of the University of Iowa Press).

L’Esperance’s poems and prose have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Many Mountains Moving, Poetry Kanto, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Zocalo Public Square, The Prairie Schooner Book Prize Tenth Anniversary Reader, and elsewhere, and her poems have been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize.

A graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University and a recipient of awards from the New York Times, New York University, Prairie Schooner, Hedgebrook, and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, L’Esperance lives in Los Angeles.

You can read more about her at her website. She can also be found on Facebook.

An Update on the Gwarlingo Membership Drive

Thanks to all of the readers who have contributed to the Gwarlingo Membership Drive. Instead of selling out to advertisers, I’m “selling out” to my readers instead! 120+ Gwarlingo readers have contributed so far and $11,650 of the $15,000 goal has been raised. If you haven’t donated yet, you can check out my video and all of the member rewards, including some limited-edition artwork, here on the Gwarlingo site.

Stay up on the latest poetry, books, and art news by having Gwarlingo delivered to your email inbox. It’s easy and free! You can also follow Gwarlingo on Twitter and Facebook.

Browse all of the Gwarlingo Sunday Poets in the Sunday Poem Index.

All poems © Mari L’Esperance. All Rights Reserved. These poems appear in The Darkened Temple  (University of Nebraska Press, 2008) and were reprinted with permission from the author.

Singer, writer, and performance artist Joseph Keckler (Photo by Gerry Visco courtesy of Joseph Keckler)

Few things are as fulfilling as seeing a large, creative project finally reach completion. For many artists, finishing can be as difficult as starting. Artists often toil away for months, even years on a project with no reassurance that the work will find an audience or receive any critical attention.

That’s why I was thrilled to see a number of artists who have been featured on Gwarlingo receive some well-deserved attention from the mainstream press this past week. I remember when these projects were nothing more than an idea, and most of these films and performances were years in the making. (Perseverance is an often overlooked element in the creative process.)

No. Not all deserving artists receive the attention they deserve. But creative projects can’t stay in “the draft” stage forever. They need audiences and feedback in order to have any hope of making an impact.

Here are just a few of the Gwarlingo artists who have been in the news recently and who currently have new work on view in New York and other cities….

Joseph Keckler will perform his new work I Am An Opera at Dixon Place in New York during the month of April. (Photo by Gerry Visco courtesy of Joseph Keckler)

Performance Artist Joseph Keckler

When I first saw Joseph Keckler perform two years ago, I was immediately convinced that he was going places. It was not a matter of “if,” but “when.”

Keckler’s new show I Am An Opera, which can be seen in New York City through April 27th, recently received press from both Interview! and the New York Times.

Joseph’s new song and video “The Ride” has just been released and will be performed as part of I Am An Opera. (The video is a collaboration with filmmaker Laura Terruso, musician Dan Bartfield, and performer Edgar Oliver, a favorite on The Moth).

In his interview with Gerry Visco in Interview!, Joseph humorously describes the evolution of the song and video:

I envisioned the driver as an almost Charon-like figure. We called Edgar Oliver and asked him if he might want to play the part. He replied in his extraordinary bass-baritone voice, which is simultaneously soothing and foreboding, “Oh yes, I love the idea… but I only have a learner’s permit. Can I take you across the river Styx on a… learner’s permit?” [laughs] I was trying to think about purgatory, in between states. For some reason, this song came out of that. I was making work in between forms and I was trying to make work that was about being in between worlds…

I wrote it over the course of a couple weeks in the La Mama ETC Theater rehearsal studio on Great Jones Street. I didn’t know how to sing it; I was approaching it with a big lounge-singer baritone. Eventually I tried it in my falsetto voice, which I’m using more and more of for “pop” songs.

Joseph Keckler will perform his new work I Am An Opera at Dixon Place in New York during the month of April. (Photo by Gian Maria Annovi courtesy the artist)

Joseph Keckler in his new show I Am An Opera (Photo by Gerry Visco courtesy of Joseph Keckler)

Joseph’s work may be difficult to categorize, as the Times acknowledges, but for my taste, this is what makes it so unique and unforgettable. A fascinating blend of actor, pianist, opera and blues singer, performer, cabaret act, and storyteller, you can get a taste of Keckler’s unusual style in these video segments featured on Gwarlingo back in 2011.

As the Times article explains, I Am an Opera is largely autobiographical and a mix of song, text, and video. According to the Times, the piece “has been nearly two years in the making and has garnered no small amount of buzz along the way.”

You can watch “The Ride” here and reserve tickets to the Dixon Place performance online. I’m looking forward to seeing this show myself on April 26th!

Writer, performance artist, and actor Edgar Oliver in Joseph Keckler’s video for “The Ride” (Video still courtesy of Joseph Keckler)

Filmmaker Jem Cohen

Filmmakers Jem Cohen and Sam Green

Two of my favorite filmmakers, Sam Green and Jem Cohen, were also featured in the New York Times last week in an article about the revival of live cinema titled “Movies that Spill Beyond the Screen.”

Jem Cohen’s new project, We Have an Anchor, is now at the top of my “Must-See” list for the fall:

For the filmmaker Jem Cohen, who has long straddled the film and music worlds, live cinema has the potential to induce “a kind of primitive enchantment,” he said in a recent e-mail. While most movies are too predictably scored, and while projections at concerts tend to double as “moving wallpaper,” as Mr. Cohen put it, live cinema permits “a more equitable balance or dialectic between sound and image.”

Mr. Cohen’s new live project, “We Have an Anchor,” which will be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music next fall, combines multiscreen projections of Nova Scotia landscapes with live accompaniment by musicians from Fugazi, the Dirty Three and Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

“As an environmental portrait I wanted to make something fully immersive,” Mr. Cohen said.

Sam Green and Yo La Tengo performing the “live documentary” The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller at the ICA in Boston (Photo by Sam Allison. Click to Enlarge)

Part TED Talk, part travelogue, and part Japanese benshi, Sam Green’s The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, is like no other film screening I’ve been to. (Photo by Sam Allison)

Sam Green and Yo La Tengo’s live film, The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, which I wrote about in-depth a few months ago, was the central focus of the Times piece on live cinematic experiences:

In an age of instant access and shrinking screens the insistence on cinema as a communal experience can only be called utopian. “I’m very interested in the interaction between the audience and the work,” Mr. Green said. “And not to sound too much like a Northern Californian hippie, but there is an energy in the room when you’re up there that is very meaningful.”

As Sam points out in the article, live cinema can also be more lucrative. “While filmmakers earn screening fees of a few hundred dollars, Mr. Green said, performance fees can be in the thousands: ‘The performance world still has an economy that hasn’t been imploded by the digital revolution.’”

Sam and I delved into these topics in more detail in my interview back in January: “More and more we are watching films (and having other cultural experiences) on our laptops while checking email, or on an i-Pad while riding the subway,” Sam told me. “I have nothing against the internet, …but these ways of watching films are not the way I want my work experienced.”

One thing is for certain: the old models of filmmaking are changing quickly, and no one knows what’s next. But Green and Cohen are on the right track.

Filmmaker Cindy Kleine and theatre director and actor André Gregory at a special screening of Kleine’s new film Before and After Dinner at Film Forum (Photo by Daniel F. Oliverio courtesy of Film Forum)

Filmmaker Cindy Kleine and Director André Gregory

When I met filmmaker Cindy Kleine at The MacDowell Colony many years ago, her idea for directing a documentary about her husband, actor and theatre director André Gregory, was just that—an idea. But the project came together like all ambitious projects: minute by minute, day by day, one small task at a time.

Kleine’s new documentary, Before and After Dinner, is finally making the rounds at the festivals and art houses. Martin Scorsese has given the film an enthusiastic plug, along with Variety magazine. Adam Gopnik also covered it this month in a Talk of the Town column in The New Yorker.

Gregory is best known for his starring role in the film My Dinner with André, which also features his close friend Wally Shawn. (Or, at the other end of the film spectrum, he is also known as the warden who has his eye gouged out by Wesley Snipes in Demolition Man).

Wallace Shawn and André Gregory in the film classic My Dinner With André

Performing is really about “the art of being,” says André. To inhabit such a place as an actor, writer, or director requires both space and a sense of safety, an atmosphere Gregory is clearly skilled at creating within his company. (Photos courtesy Cindy Kleine and Atlas Theatre Company)

My Dinner with André is a radical piece of cinema because it isn’t doing everything for you as a viewer. Instead, it’s activating your imagination. “If you like the movie,” says Gregory, “it’s waking you up, which was one of the intentions of the movie.”

“The film is about men, because men tend to be so hidden,” Gregory adds. “And Wally is hiding behind silence. I’m hiding behind words. The progress of the movie is that Wally is able to come out and start revealing and I’m able to to listen…These were radical actions as characters.” If you haven’t seen the film in some time, it’s definitely worth revisiting.

Gregory has had numerous film acting roles. He played John the Baptist in Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ and appeared in Woody Allen’s Celebrity and Peter Weir’s The Mosquito Coast. Louis Malle, Wallace Shawn, and Gregory also collaborated on the film Vanya on 42nd Street with Julianne Moore. But it’s his work as a theatre director that has left a large mark on the New York theatre scene.

“In 2009, as Mr. Gregory was about to direct Mr. Shawn’s play “Grasses of a Thousand Colors” in London, his brother Alexis called to tell him about a document implicating their father in a Nazi plot to destroy the French franc…The possibility of a connection still haunts his imagination.” -Stephen Holden in the New York Times (Still from Before and After Dinner courtesy Cindy Kleine and Atlas Theatre Company)

Kleine’s dual role as wife and director gives us a unique perspective on André. We see him in some of his most intimate moments—making breakfast, bending over a steam inhaler, frolicking naked in a hot tub with a puffy shower cap on his head. (Still from Before and After Dinner courtesy Cindy Kleine and Atlas Theatre Company)

Filmmaker Cindy Kleine and editor Jonathan Oppenheim in Kleine’s Tribecca studio (Photo courtesy Cindy Kleine and Atlas Theatre Company)

By the time I saw a rough cut of Kleine’s film, Before and After Dinner, in July of 2012, editor Jonathan Oppenheim, along with Kleine, had chiseled away hours of footage into an entertaining, moving documentary that is part love story, part mystery, part biography, and part exploration of the creative process. (If you missed the in-depth piece I wrote about André, Cindy, and their new film Before and After Dinner, you can read it here.)

On February 25th I attended a special screening of Before and After Dinner at Film Forum in New York City. Artists, friends, supporters, and those who participated in the film were out in force that night.

Before and After Dinner is difficult to pin down, for it is not a traditional documentary. The film has more in common with French director Agnes Varda’s experimental works (like  The Beaches of Agnès) than conventional American documentaries. The film’s unique spiral structure, which mimics the loose, fractured nature of human memory, is a risk for Kleine, for American audiences often prefer their films linear in narrative and easy to categorize. But the risk has paid off. The final cut of the film is humorous, moving, and also tighter than the earlier rough cut I saw.

On February 25th I attended a special screening of Before and After Dinner at Film Forum in New York City. The film is on view at Film Forum through April 16th, with special appearances by Kleine and Gregory on April 11th, 12th, and 14th (Photo by Daniel F. Oliverio courtesy of Film Forum)

Artists, friends, supporters, and those who participated in the film were out in force during the February screening of Before and After Dinner at Film Forum (Photo by Daniel F. Oliverio courtesy of Film Forum)

Last week Before and After Dinner was chosen as a Critic’s Pick in The New York Times. Here is Times critic Stephen Holden:

[Wallace] Shawn is also Mr. Gregory’s dining companion in Louis Malle’s 1981 classic, “My Dinner With André,” a revelatory personal and philosophical dialogue between Mr. Gregory, who plays a version of himself as a risk-taking psychic adventurer, and Mr. Shawn, who champions comfort, continuity and simple pleasures. “Before and After Dinner,” which includes wonderful excerpts from that film, feels almost like a sequel.

The preparations for “The Master Builder”…are one strand of the documentary, which Ms. Kleine narrates in a friendly, welcoming tone. Another is the story of their happy marriage. Mr. Gregory was 63, and she was 39, when they met. Their bond was instant. Mr. Gregory is 78 now, and his only complaint in the film is the difficulty of physically keeping up with her; he is shown training in a gym and doing yoga…

As Mr. Gregory demonstrated in “My Dinner With André,” he is a spellbinding raconteur who exudes the same sorcererlike aura that he emanates while directing Ibsen. His tone is confidential but genial, and you have the vaguely uneasy feeling of being manipulated by an extremely charming trickster. That impression is augmented by a masklike face, with hooded eyes and a sly smile, and by Mr. Gregory’s dry, slightly sinister cackle.

You can’t help wondering to what degree he is exaggerating for the sake of a good story when he describes “The Shining” as “a documentary about my childhood.”

He is particularly obsessed with his manic-depressive father, a man he recalls as having no empathy and who, despite being a Jew, may have had connections to Hitler…

“My theater work,” he says, “is an ongoing meditation on the most frightening person in my life: my father.”

If you’re in New York, you can see Before and After Dinner at Film Forum through April 16th. Kleine and Gregory will be on hand for special live appearances on April 11th, 12th, and 14th.

The film will not be released until fall of this year, but readers who donate $100 to Gwarlingo will receive a signed copy of the film when it’s released, along with an interactive profile on the Gwarlingo Member Page.  To donate and receive a signed copy of the film, click here.

Self-portraits by actor and theatre director André Gregory (Photo courtesy Atlas Theatre Company)

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Russian writer Marina Tsvetaeva in 1914

“I am happy living simply/ like a clock, or a calendar,” Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva wrote in 1919.

Tsvetaeva’s life was anything but simple, for she had the misfortune of living through some of the most turbulent years in Russian history.

She married Sergei Efron in 1912, but was soon separated from him during the Civil War. She had a brief love affair with writer Osip Mandelstam, and a longer relationship with Sofia Parnok. She nearly starved to death in the Moscow famine and lost one daughter to starvation. The family fled to Berlin, Prague, and Paris, where they lived in poverty. Tsvetaeva, Efron, and her two remaining children returned to the Soviet Union in 1939. It was a fatal decision, for Efron was arrested in Moscow and executed, and her surviving daughter, Ariadna, who had been imprisoned in the 30s, was sent to a labor camp. Their son Mur soon died in World War II. Marina Tsvetaeva hanged herself on August 31, 1941.

Tsvetaeva with her daughter Ariadna

It is because of the efforts of Tsvetaeva’s sister, Anastasia, who served two terms in labor camps, and her daughter, Ariadna Efron, that we have a rich collection of Tsvetaeva’s poems, notebooks, and manuscripts today.

With Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (Alice James Books, 2012), Russian poet Ilya Kaminsky and American poet Jean Valentine have created a brilliant collection of “readings” of Tsvetaeva. These are not translations in the strictest sense, but renderings of a small selection of Tsvetaeva’s poems, journals, and prose. The book also includes a CD of fifteen Tsvetaeva pieces read in the original Russian by Polina Barskova and Valzhyna Mort.

For a reader like myself, largely unfamiliar with Tsvetaeva’s vast oeuvre, Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva is the perfect introduction to this unique, passionate voice. Through their astute selection of passages, careful arrangement, and sharp, empathetic ear, Jean and Ilya have made Tsvetaeva, the most mysterious of Russian poets, more alive, while also giving us a glimpse of the everyday life of women during these “terrible years” of Russian history. Here is a passage from Tsvetaeva’s poem “The Desk”:
 

I’ve loved living with little.
There are dishes I’ve never tried.
But you, you people eat slowly, and often;
you eat and eat….

You—with belches, I—with books,
with truffles, you. With pencil, I,
you and your olives, me and my rhyme,
with pickles, you. I, with poems.

When Tsvetaeva writes, “My little thefts in the Commissariat: two gorgeous checkered notebooks (yellow, bright), a whole box of quills to write with, a glass bubble of red English ink. I am writing with it now,” there is a special intimacy to her words. Kaminsky and Valentine are like guides, leading us to a beautiful, but somewhat mysterious place. With skill and brevity, they reveal the essence of Tsvetaeva, and in doing so, create a deeper understanding and connection between the Russian poet and her English readers.

The book’s superb afterword, written by Kaminsky, is a work of art in and of itself. Kaminsky’s experimental essay weaves together fragments of Tsvetaeva’s writing with facts about her own life story, along with Ilya’s own thoughts and impressions of the poet.

Kaminsky helps us understand (through Tsvetaeva’s eyes) that language, like silence, is powerful, most especially in a culture where there is no free speech. This is why in 1922 “the Communists ordered two hundred philosophers, scientists, and writers to board a ship. Subsequently called The Philosophers’ Ship, it included every single prominent non-Marxist philosopher in Russia. All were sent into exile.” That same year Tsvetaeva also left Russia for Berlin.

Here is Kaminsky quoting Tsvetaeva:

“My motherland is any place with a writing desk, a window, and a tree by that window.” She wrote in exile: “For lyric poets and fairy-tale authors, it is better that they see their motherland from afar—from a great distance…”

“Russia (the sound of the word) no longer exists, there exist four letters: USSR—I cannot and will not go where there are no vowels, into those whistling consonants. And, they won’t let me there, the letters won’t open.”

As Kaminsky explains, Tsvetaeva almost starved to death after the Revolution. Believing that her two daughters would be better fed and cared for, the poet left her girls in an orphanage. Despite her efforts, the younger daughter, Irina, died of starvation. When Tsvetaeva learned the news from a stranger on the street, her response was to live in silence for three months.

Again, Tsvetaeva: “not a word of death—to anyone—so she [the child] did not die finally, and still (in me)—lived. This is why your Rilke did not mention my name. To name [call/speak]—is to take apart: to separate self from thing. I don’t name anyone—ever.” As Kaminsky notes, Tsvetaeva’s silence is a remarkable fact: “Marina Tsvetaeva, the poet so obsessed with the Russian language, the Russian poet of her generation, the poet who wrote elegies for everyone else—including the living—at her own elegiac moment, chose not to speak.”

Sergei Efron and Marina Tsvetaeva

For Tsvetaeva, poetics were not only political, but also extremely personal. She didn’t translate Rilke, Pushkin, Shakespeare, and Lermontov as much as rewrite them. According to Kaminsky, “Scholars call her best work of translation—her take on Baudelaire’s ‘Voyage”—a work translated ‘not from French into Russian’ but from ‘Baudelaire into Tsvetaeva.’”

And this is, to some degree, how Kaminsky and Valentine have chosen to approach Tsvetaeva herself. “To imitate Tsvetaeva’s sounds produces just that: an attempt at imitation that cannont rise to the level of the original,” writes Kaminsky.

“To translate is to inhabit. The meaning of the word ekstasis is to stand outside of one’s body. This we do not claim. (We wish we could, one day.) Jean Valentine and I claim we are two poets who fell in love with a third and spent two years reading her together….These pages are fragments, notes in the margin. ‘Erase everything you have written,’ Mandelstam says, ‘but keep the notes in the margin.’

This “homage” to Tsvetaeva captures moments, lines, and fragments the way a talented artist captures an individual with a few well-placed strokes of charcoal. As artists understand, a faithful rendering is not always the best way to capture an individual, a scene, or an idea. It is not completeness or precision that are most important, but instead, intuition, empathy, and artfulness. And in this sense Dark Elderberry Branch succeeds brilliantly.

Not only does this extraordinary book allow us to sit across the table from one of Russia’s greatest poets, but we enjoy this privilege with two gifted guides at our side—guides who are geniuses of language in their own right. We would be remiss not to pause and pull up a chair.

from Poems for Blok

Your name is a—bird in my hand,
a piece of ice on my tongue.
The lips’ quick opening.
Your name—four letters.
A ball caught in flight,
a silver bell in my mouth.

A stone thrown into a silent lake
is—the sound of your name.
The light click of hooves at night
—your name.
Your name at my temple
—sharp click of a cocked gun.

Your name—impossible—
kiss on my eyes,
the chill of closed eyelids.
Your name—a kiss of snow.
Blue gulp of icy spring water.
With your name—sleep deepens.

APRIL 15, 1916

Assassination Attempt on Lenin

Evening of the same day. My roommate, communist Zaks, bursting into
the kitchen:

“And are you happy?”

I look down—not from shyness, of course: afraid to offend him. (Lenin
has been shot. The White Army has entered the city, all the communists
have been hanged, Zaks first among them.) Already I feel the generosity
of the winning side.

“And you—are you very upset?”

“I?” (Tremble of shoulders.) “For us, Marxists, who don’t recognize
personal identity in history, this, in general terms, is not important—Lenin
or someone else. It is you, the representatives of bourgeois culture,” (new
spasm), “with your Napoleons and your Caesars,” (a devilish smile),
“. . . but for us, us, us, you understand . . . Today it is Lenin, and tomorrow
it is—”

Offended on Lenin’s behalf (!), I say nothing. Awkward pause. And then,
quickly-quickly, he says:

“—Marina, I’ve got some sugar here, three-quarters of a pound, I don’t
need it; perhaps you would take it for your daughter?”

DAYBOOK, MOSCOW, 1918-19

from An Attempt at Jealousy

How is your life with that other one?
Simpler, is it? A stroke of the oars
and a long coastline—
and the memory of me

is soon a drifting island
(not in—the ocean—in the air!).
Souls—you will be sisters—
sisters, not lovers.

How is your life with an ordinary
woman? Without the god inside her?
The queen supplanted—

How do you breathe now?
Flinch, waking up?
What do you do, poor man?

“Hysterics and interruptions—
enough! I’ll rent my own house!”
How is your life with that other,
you, my own.

Is the breakfast egg boiled?
(If you get sick, don’t blame me!)

How is it, living with a postcard?
You who stood on Sinai.

How’s your life with a tourist
on Earth? Her rib (do you love her?)
—to your liking?

Is it life? Do you cough?
Do you hum to drown out the mice in your mind?

How do you live with cheap goods: is the market rising?
How’s kissing plaster-dust?

Are you bored with her new body?
How’s it going, with an earthly woman,
with no sixth sense?

Are you happy?

No? In a shallow pit—how is your life,
my beloved. Hard as mine
with another man?

1924

from Poems for Akhmatova

I won’t fall behind you. I’m the guard.
You—the prisoner. Our fate is the same.
And here in the same open emptiness
they command us the same—Go away.
 
So—I lean against nothing.
I see it.
Let me go, my prisoner,
to walk over towards that pine tree.

JUNE 1916

The mysterious disappearance of the photographer on Tverskaya Street,
who long and stubbornly took (free) pictures of the Soviet elite.

EARTHLY TRACES, 1919-20

Not long ago, in Kuntsevo, I suddenly crossed myself when I saw an oak.
Evidently, the source of prayer is not fear, but delight.

EARTHLY TRACES, 1919-20

About Ilya Kaminsky

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union in 1977, and arrived to the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government.

Kaminsky is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), which won the Whiting Writer’s Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry magazine. Dancing In Odessa was also named Best Poetry Book of the Year 2004 by ForeWord Magazine. In 2008, Kaminsky was awarded Lannan Foundation’s Literary Fellowship

Poems from his new manuscript, Deaf Republic, were awarded Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize and the Pushcart Prize.

His anthology of 20th century poetry in translation, Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, was published by Harper Collins in March, 2010.

His poems have been translated into numerous langauges and his books have been published in Holland, Russia, France, Spain. Another translation is forthcoming in China, where his poetry was awarded the Yinchuan International Poetry Prize.

Kaminsky has worked as a law clerk for San Francisco Legal Aid and the National Immigration Law Center.

Currently, he teaches English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University.

For more information about Ilya and his work, please visit his website.

About Jean Valentine

Jean Valentine (Photo by Max Greenstreet)

Jean Valentine was born in Chicago, earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College, and has lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry, Break the Glass (2010) from Copper Canyon Press, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965 – 2003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Her latest chapbook is [The ship] from Red Glass Books.

Valentine was the State Poet of New York for two years, starting in the spring of 2008. She received the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, a $100,000 prize which recognizes outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Valentine has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, The New York Council for the Arts, and The New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, and The Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize in 2000. She has also been awarded residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Ucross, and the Lannan Foundation.

Valentine has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.

Her lyric poems delve into dream lives with glimpses of the personal and political. In the New York Times Book Review, David Kalstone said of her work, “Valentine has a gift for tough strangeness, but also a dreamlike syntax and manner of arranging the lines of . . . short poems so as to draw us into the doubleness and fluency of feelings.” In a 2002 interview with Eve Grubin, Valentine commented about her work, “I am going towards the spiritual rather than away from it.” In addition to writing her own poems, she has translated work by the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva.

For more information about Jean Valentine and her work, please visit her website.

An Update on the Gwarlingo Membership Drive

Thanks to all of the readers who have contributed to the Gwarlingo Membership Drive. Instead of selling out to advertisers, I’m “selling out” to my readers instead! 115+ Gwarlingo readers have contributed so far and $11,500 of the $15,000 goal has been raised. If you haven’t donated yet, you can check out my video and all of the member rewards, including some limited-edition artwork, here on the Gwarlingo site.

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Browse all of the Gwarlingo Sunday Poets in the Sunday Poem Index.
 
 

All poems © Ilya Kaminsky, Jean Valentine, and Marina Tsvetaeva. These poems were published with express permission from the authors and Alice James Books. All Rights Reserved.