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David Gershator




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REVIEWS



From MAG RACK, regular column for HOME PLANET NEWS:


MAG RACK

by Jack Alchemy and David Gershator

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.


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More to come....