|
|
|
From MAG
RACK, regular column for HOME
PLANET NEWS:
MAG RACK
by Jack Alchemy and David Gershator
-----------------------------------------------
STONECUTTER: A Journal of Art and
Literature. Katie Raissian, Ed.
Brooklyn, NY. Issue 3. 2012. Biannual.
$15.00. www.stonecutterjournal.com
Coming out of Brooklyn, an
avant-garde powerhouse these days, is
a beautifully produced literary mag
whose most striking feature is its
art. In this issue, the paintings,
drawings, photos, and woodcuts are by
artists Asher Katz, Bri Hermanson,
Naomi Kamat(plus interview), Hélène
Akouavi Amouzou, Pat Perry, and Chris
Russell. The art alone is worth the
price of admission. The poetry stands
out, too, with an international cast.
Facing page translations of Coral
Braco (from Mexico) and Dunya Mikhail
(from Iraq). A sample from Mikhail’s
work:
A song from another time
survived with me.
It follows me wherever I go.
It runs after me.
I crumple it into a piece of
paper
and throw it away.
I unfurl the paper,
smooth it out,
whenever I remember
a dead friend.
All in all a rich 144 page issue, with
an excerpt of “Phaedra Backwards,” a
play by Marina Carr, a translation of
“The Pianist,” a short story by
Ricardo Piglia, and poetry ranging
from the experimental language of
Christopher Middleton to the linked
sonnets by the late Nicholas Moore.
Originally published in 1944, here’s
Sonnet VII:
The woman on the shore weeps in her
mind.
It is a mind of diseases. Birds
Fly from her hair. There are no
words
She knows that have not been
unkind.
It is a stolid mind. If, as she
weeps,
She dreams of any heaven, it is
A heaven where the whole world
sleeps.
She has no other thought of
happiness.
Children? A man? A man lies,
children
Die. And war. And pestilence.
And promises.
The soft winds brush the shore.
Her eyes are hidden
Under her hair and her hat. She
never is
Anything more than a phantom of
flesh, a great
Rhapsodic image of the world’s
defeat.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
FROGPOND: The Journal of the Haiku
Society of America. Haiku Society of
America, PO Box 31, Nassau, NY 12123.
Vol. 36:3, Autumn 2013.
$14/back issues, $35/3 issues and
membership.
www.hsa-haiku.org/frogpond/index.html
Poetry is a small world & haiku is
its smallest poem. FROGPOND, along
with MODERN HAIKU
(www.modernhaiku.org/), are good
starting points for discovering the
form, going well beyond the artificial
strictures of 17 syllables and 3
lines. Here’s one by Tom Tico, a whole
novel in 11 syllables:
her letter...
I’d forgotten
paper can cut
And one liners on aging by Margaret
Dornaus:
hide and seek the ring around
her memory
and Haiku Elvis:
hole in my hourglass i slip in a
little more sand
The mag also offers a section of
haibun (prose plus haiku), book
reviews, announcements re haiku
competitions, and articles/essays such
as John Stevenson’s “Haiku as
Dimensional Object” and Michael Dylan
Welch’s on “Getting Started with
Haiku.” 148 pp.
---------------------------------------------
LIVE MAG! Jeffrey Cyphers Wright,
Editor. PO Box 1215 Cooper Stations,
NYC 10276. Issue 9, 2012. $5.00, or
read on-line: http://livemagnyc.com
A shout out for the spirit of LIVE
MAG! Thirty six staple bound pages,
about a third of them black and white
art repros, including an aluminum
sculpture by Carol Ross and a painting
from the “Menopausal Series” by
Elizabeth Cope. No notes on
contributors, but a few stalwarts of
the NYC poetry scene are represented.
Jack Alchemy envisions Bob Holman’s
“Water Man” and David Kirschenbaum’s
“daily poems” read aloud on stage:
performance poetry is a focus of LIVE
MAG’S activities (see the website for
performance videos, artwork in color,
plus Issue # 10). Poetry selections
run the gamut from Janet Hamill’s
surrealism to Hal Sirowitz’ punchy
short takes. An excerpt from Hamill’s
“Ashes”:
Sweet bird flushed with
arrival
how high can you
fly in a lifespan
a ready nest is built
flame up in desert
crimson
shitting seeds to multiply
coded letters on the stars
Hal Sirowitz has a fan in Jack
Alchemy, dead or alive:
“Playing Dead”
Looking through
old family photographs,
There’s a good one
of me playing dead.
Was I practicing
for the future?
Or was it my one opportunity
not to be photogenic?
****
|
|
BOOK
REVIEWS
FLOWERS OF PERHAPS:
A Bilingual Edition of Selected Poems
By Ra’hel
translated by Robert Friend with
Shimon Sandbank
The Toby Press, PO Box 8531, New
Milford, CT O6676-8531,
2008, 104 pp, paper, $14.95.
The title FLOWERS OF PERHAPS is rather
awkward in English but it has a buzz
in Hebrew and a personal resonance for
this reviewer.
Ra’hel, who
went by her first name only, wrote
most of her Hebrew poems in the1920’s
and was the first major woman poet to
write in a secular, colloquial Hebrew.
Her poems are simple, brief,
accessible, at once old fashioned and
eternally young. Her lyricism goes to
the heart. Maybe I’m not objective.
Maybe I don’t care if I’m not
objective. I can’t read Ra’hel in the
original Hebrew without getting
emotional, without hearing my parents
singing “And Perhaps” to me as a
child. The time of dreams and the
dreams of time can bring souls to the
brink of tears. Certainly this one
poem set to music was and is a
signature piece for more than one
generation. “And Perhaps” became part
and parcel of Israel’s folklore.
Our poet was
born in Russia in 1890 to a secular
family and came to Palestine, then
under Ottoman Turkish rule, at the age
of nineteen as a tourist. She stayed
on as a worker on a small commune
called Kinneret. The Kinneret (the
Hebrew name for the Sea of Galilee)
and its surroundings became her song.
What were the
main influences on her style? Some of
the Russian moderns: Akhmatova,
Alexander Blok, Yesenin. The
pastoralism of the French poet,
Francis Jammes. Here is an excerpt
from a brief self portrait called
simply “I”:
Quiet as lake water--
this is the way I am:
fond of children’s eyes, daily
tranquilities,
the poems of Francis
Jammes.
Along with
Chaim Nachman Bialik and Saul
Tchernichovsky, Ra’hel occupies a
special place in modern Hebrew
literature. She is one of the language
pioneers who brought Hebrew back from
a liturgical and moribund state and
made it the living, vibrant language
of a modern state, an unusual feat not
even the Irish nationalists could pull
off in their attempts at reviving
Gaelic. In just a century Hebrew went
from its original 8,000 word biblical
and Mishnaic vocabulary to over
130,000 words, the number growing by
the day.
Speaking of words spoken and words
unheard, the poem “I told all of
myself” brings Emily Dickinson to
mind:
I told all of myself to the very
end,
brought to the wine-press all
my harvest of grapes,
and fell silent.
Will you hear my silence,
You who never heard my words?
Ra’hel is the preeminent modern Hebrew
poet of yearning, loneliness, and the
mystical earth: the beloved biblical
soil. Her most famous song/poem, “And
Perhaps” or, as it’s titled here, “Was
it only a dream...?” unfortunately
contains a blooper in the very first
and best known stanza (“fill” may have
been a typo for “till”):
Was it only a dream? Was it I?
Was it I who long ago
rose with the dawn to fill the
fields
by the sweat of my brow?
.................................
A literal translation would
read:
And perhaps these things never
happened,
perhaps
I never got up at dawn to go
into the garden
to work by the sweat of my
brow.
Nitpicking
aside, this is a creative and gifted
translation which leaps over cultural
barriers. Since most of her poems are
rhymed, the translator, the late
Robert Friend, assisted by Professor
Shimon Sandbank, reconstructed them to
create a viable rhyme scheme and meter
in English. It works and works well,
despite Bialik’s frequently quoted
view that translation is like “kissing
a woman through a veil.” The book also
contains a few notes and excellent
introductions by Linda Zisquit and
Robert Friend, though more amplified
notes on text and context would have
been helpful.
A poet of the
land, Ra’hel was also a poet of love
and its ups and downs. As the other
woman or unrequited lover she writes a
timeless confessional poem, “His
Wife”:
She turns and calls him by name
with the voice of every day.
How can I trust my voice
not to give me away?
In the streets, in the full
light of day
she walks by his side.
I in the dark of the night
must hide.
Bright and serene on her hand
is the ring of gold.
The iron fetters I wear
are stronger, seven fold.
For its
pathos, Ra’hel’s life seems to be an
early Zionist version of “La Boheme.”
She died young in Jerusalem. She was
all of forty. TB, which she had
contracted while working with WWI
Jewish refugee children in Russia, was
still a common killer.
Some eighty years
after her death, her grave site in
Kibbutz Kinneret is a place of
pilgrimage for school classes on an
outing and the young of all ages and.
I saw the site by chance in 1981 when
I visited relatives living in
Kinneret. Nobody told me my cousins
had a son, a pilot shot down over the
Sinai in the 1970 War of Attrition.
His grave is nearby. Of her own time,
also cut short, Ra’hel writes in “To
my country":
I have not sung you, my country,
not brought glory to your name
with the great deeds of a hero
or the spoils a battle yields.
But on the shores of the Jordan
my hands have planted a tree,
and my feet have made a pathway
through your fields.
****
|
More
to come....
|
|
|