Poetry Life & Times

Nominated for the Push Cart Prize. Key of Mist. A Poem by Guadalupe Grande. Translated from Spanish.

February 11, 2019November 2, 2016 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

  Key of Mist is an excerpt from the collected poems Key of Mist
 


                                                                  KEY of MIST

Behind the fence there´s a ditch
and behind the ditch
there´s a chest devastated by the journey.

Who arrives here and how
and after perhaps?
Who arrives and says and names
and leaves their hands stuck to this fence
as stamps are stuck to envelopes,
to return where 
to return to then
to return to later, never again?

       The compass rose rolls amongst the rubble,
       rolls on the banks of gravel,
       on the edge of ash,
       and leaves its petals of distance,
       its shipwreck of durum-wheat and pollen,
       beneath the wheels of the car which has just passed.

Time for the word time
         amidst the rubble of the tower of babel.

But now there´s the ditches:
       water ditches
       light ditches
       gas ditches
       ditches for words.
I am spelling
while telling myself
that it can´t be today,
that there is too much rush,
that life´s a disaster
or nonsense
or a useless disquiet,
and due to that, today there´s no time:
                                                             time for nothing, time for what.

III

I open the door, switch on the light,
turn on the tap:
I´d like to know whom to call.
The sound of traffic enters through the window;
I hear the rumours of travellers
I listen to the sound of the inhabitants
         and builders
                           of this language without words.

I speak in gurgles
as if a key of mist
were laid across my throat,
a key fogged up by noise,
a key flooded by light,
      a gas key
      a water key
      a doorless key,
      a definitely shadowy key
buried inside my throat,
in the ditch of my bewildered throat.

Behind each fence there is a ditch,
behind each ditch there is a journey.

         The compass rose crosses
         the city tunnels:
         from its smoky petals it brings
         forth mossy farewells,
         the empire of forget-me-nots,
         paper for unwritten letters,
         humiliated stamps
         and a devastated chest in the building 
         of music
                       or language
                                           or city noise.

Under the asphalt of these roads
the tower of babel grows
sad and useful.

I turn on the tap in the kitchen
and while water runs through the sink
I wonder which words 
this thread of order and cleanliness is spelling,
which key I should switch to, to understand
the language of fences, the language
of ditches,
the underground sound
of migrating birds
opening without any key this city´s gates,
           without a key,
           at last, 
                                      at last.

LA LLAVE DE NIEBLA

Detrás de la valla hay una zanja
y detrás de esa zanja
hay un pecho desolado en el viaje.

¿Quién llega hasta aquí y cómo
y luego tal vez?
¿Quién llega y dice y nombra
y deja sus manos pegadas a esta valla,
como se pegan los sellos a las cartas,
para volver a dónde
para volver a entonces
para volver a luego nunca más?

Rueda la rosa de los vientos por los escombros,
rueda a la orilla de la grava,
al borde de la ceniza,
y deja sus pétalos de distancia,
su polen náufrago y candeal,
bajo las ruedas del coche que acaba de pasar.

Tiempo para la palabra tiempo
        entre los escombros de la torre de babel.

Pero ahora están las zanjas:
        zanjas de agua,
        zanjas de luz,
        zanjas de gas,
        zanjas para las palabras
que pronuncio
mientras me digo
que hoy no puede ser,
que hace mucha prisa,
que la vida es un desastre
o un disparate
o un desasosiego inútil,
debido a lo cual hoy no hay tiempo:
         tiempo para nada, tiempo para qué.

III

Abro la puerta, enciendo la luz,
abro el grifo:
quisiera saber a quién llamar.
Entra el sonido del tráfico por la ventana;
oigo el rumor de los viajeros,
escucho el sonido de los habitantes
           y de los constructores
                    de este idioma sin palabras.

Hablo a borbotones,
como si tuviera una llave de niebla
atravesada en la garganta,
una llave empañada por el ruido,
una llave anegada por la luz,
         una llave de gas,
         una llave de agua,
         una llave sin puerta,
         una llave definitivamente umbría,
enterrada en mi garganta,
en la zanja de mi desconcertada garganta.

Detrás de cada valla hay una zanja,
detrás de cada zanja hay un viaje.

         La rosa de los vientos cruza
         los túneles de la ciudad:
         trae entre sus pétalos de humo
         el musgo de las despedidas,
         el imperio de los nomeolvides,
         papel para cartas no escritas,
         humillados sellos
         y un pecho desolado en la construcción
         de la música

                           o el lenguaje
                                             o el ruido de la ciudad.

Bajo el asfalto de estas calles
crece la torre de babel
triste y útil.

Abro el grifo en la cocina
y mientras corre el agua por el fregadero
me pregunto qué palabras pronuncia
este hilo de orden y limpieza,
qué llave debo abrir para entender
el lenguaje de las vallas, el idioma
de las zanjas,
el sonido subterráneo
de las aves migratorias
que abren sin llave alguna las puertas de esta ciudad,
         sin llave,
         por fin,
                                por fin.

GUADALUPE GRANDE
Madrid, 1965.

She has written the following books of poetry: El libro de Lilit (1995), La llave de niebla (2003), Mapas de cera (2006) and Hotel para erizos (2010).

She has been translated into French in the book Métier de crhysalide (translation by Drothèe Suarez and Juliette Gheerbrant (2010) and into Italian, in the volume Mestiere senza crisalide (translation by Raffaella Marzano (2015). She made the selection and translation of La aldea de sal (2009), an anthology of Brazilian poet Lêdo Ivo, together with poet Juan Carlos Mestre.

Her creative work extends to the territory of photography and visual poetry.http://guadalupegrande.blogspot.com.es/

Amparo Arróspide (Argentina) has published five poetry collections: Presencia en el Misterio, Mosaicos bajo la hiedra, Alucinación en dos actos y algunos poemas, Pañuelos de usar y tirar and En el oído del viento, as well as poems, short stories and articles on literature and films in anthologies and international magazines. She has translated authors such as Francisca Aguirre, Javier Díaz Gil, Luis Fores and José Antonio Pamies into English, together with Robin Ouzman Hislop, who she worked with for a period as co-editor of Poetry Life and Times, a Webzine. Her translations into Spanish of Margaret Atwood (Morning in the Burned House), James Stephens (Irish Fairy Tales) and Mia Couto (Vinte e Zinco) are in the course of being published, as well as her two poetry collections Hormigas en diáspora and Jacuzzi. She takes part in festivals, recently Transforming with Poetry (Leeds) and Centro de Poesía José Hierro (Getafe).

Robin Ouzman Hislop is on line Editor at Motherbird.com, Artvilla.com & Poetry Life & Times, his recent publications include Voices without Borders Volume 1 (USA), Cold Mountain Review (Appalachian University, N.Carolina), The Poetic Bond Volumes, Phoenix Rising from the Ashes (an international anthology of sonnets) and The Honest Ulsterman. His last publications are a volume of collected poems All the Babble of the Souk & Key of Mist, a translation from Spanish of the poems by the Spanish poetess Guadalupe Grande, both are published by Aquillrelle.com and available at all main online tributaries. For further information about these publications with reviews and comments see Author Robin..

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Key of Mist. Guadalupe Grande.Translated.Amparo Arróspide.Robin Ouzman Hislop

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Announcement. Collected Poems. Key of Mist. Translated from Spanish

June 16, 2017October 21, 2016 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

GUADALUPE GRANDE
Madrid, 1965.

She has written the following books of poetry: El libro de Lilit (1995), La llave de niebla (2003), Mapas de cera (2006) and Hotel para erizos (2010).

She has been translated into French in the book Métier de crhysalide (translation by Drothèe Suarez and Juliette Gheerbrant (2010) and into Italian, in the volume Mestiere senza crisalide (translation by Raffaella Marzano (2015). She made the selection and translation of La aldea de sal (2009), an anthology of Brazilian poet Lêdo Ivo, together with poet Juan Carlos Mestre.

Her creative work extends to the territory of photography and visual poetry.http://guadalupegrande.blogspot.com.es/

Amparo Arróspide (Argentina) has published five poetry collections: Presencia en el Misterio, Mosaicos bajo la hiedra, Alucinación en dos actos y algunos poemas, Pañuelos de usar y tirar and En el oído del viento, as well as poems, short stories and articles on literature and films in anthologies and international magazines. She has translated authors such as Francisca Aguirre, Javier Díaz Gil, Luis Fores and José Antonio Pamies into English, together with Robin Ouzman Hislop, who she worked with for a period as co-editor of Poetry Life and Times, a Webzine. Her translations into Spanish of Margaret Atwood (Morning in the Burned House), James Stephens (Irish Fairy Tales) and Mia Couto (Vinte e Zinco) are in the course of being published, as well as her two poetry collections Hormigas en diáspora and Jacuzzi. She takes part in festivals, recently Transforming with Poetry (Leeds) and Centro de Poesía José Hierro (Getafe).

Robin Ouzman Hislop is on line Editor at Motherbird.com, Artvilla.com & Poetry Life & Times, his recent publications include Voices without Borders Volume 1 (USA), Cold Mountain Review (Appalachian University, N.Carolina), The Poetic Bond Volumes, Phoenix Rising from the Ashes (an international anthology of sonnets) and The Honest Ulsterman. His last publications are a volume of collected poems All the Babble of the Souk & Key of Mist, a translation from Spanish of the poems by the Spanish poetess Guadalupe Grande, both are published by Aquillrelle.com and available at all main online tributaries. For further information about these publications with reviews and comments see Author Robin..

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Key of Mist. Guadalupe Grande.Translated.Amparo Arróspide.Robin Ouzman Hislop

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Miriam C Jacobs Reviews All the Babble of the Souk.

April 14, 2016April 12, 2016 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

Poet Robin Ouzman Hislop’s first full-length collection, All the Babble of the Souk, is appropriately titled. With a remarkably consistent ear for the market’s noise, for “[t]he broken lights of the bazaar/spangled] with glistening promise/in the eyes of the dusky beggar …” (Laminations in Lacquer ) Hislop’s poems, many of them cinematic-style montages of sounds and images, show us the metaphoric souk of the world, on the beach or in the street, its glitter, its sadness, its ragtag glory:

“pets, flower pots framed captive in a moment
outside the house of the painter, a robot
in chains with an alms bowl” (“Departures”)

These impressions are not confined to the scenic. Individuals, too, flash like rich arcades:

“there is not time enough to love
before the tram whisks her away
a creature of the costume of the moment
in a parade of parts.” (“In the fish-eye window”)

So marked is Hislop’s interest in the external world, readers may long for a glimpse of the speaker. It comes rarely. There are one or two musings on the phenomenon and surprise of feeling oneself age, the odd disjointing of it, but otherwise these poems proclaim their perhaps unique impersonality. In “Laminations in Lacquer” we sight what is, perhaps, the poet, but in third person, one who rises, observes, and then folds in at last with the “throng”:

“Below the rift of its eye
the sealed beak that will open
gleams on the lee …
in a room that roams without corners
he must rise with a chalice of blood for lips of shades
where the vertigo edge of the flower distills the dish
together with the quantities of immeasurable throng
on watery groves billowing with ivy bowers
sprung over hidden lairs of concealed hoards.
Night begins and the dogs draw nigh
scavenging for scraps
yapping at the walker’s naked ankles
in the dust of unknown alleys.”

Among other reoccurring themes – shadows, mirrors, the moon – is Hislop’s interest in physics. In a variety of contexts he reflects on time and infinity, the imagination-daunting galaxies, quantum theory and space:

“Man cannot live on myth alone
he shall earn his soil somehow, between
the Big Bang, the Big Slam ….”

One admirable quality in this work is that souk places us firmly in the precariousness of the current moment in history. These poems are exactly right for the age, and who we are now, those of us born 1945-1960, with our particular view of past and present, our grasp of the sciences and technologies that have overtaken the known world in our lifetimes.

“The world is a patchwork quilt,” Hislop concludes in “Lucky hat day,”
‘stitched up to the hilt its seams/which we quarter in our dreams
on which our edifice is built …”

MIRIAM C. JACOBS is a alumnus of the University of Chicago and teaches college writing, literature and humanities. Jacobs is the editor of Eyedrum Periodically, the art/literature journal of Eyedrum Art & Music Gallery, Atlanta. Her poetry has appeared in Jewish Literary Journal, The East Coast Literary Review, Record Magazine, The Camel Saloon, Bluestem: the Art and Literary Journal of Eastern Illinois University, The King’s English, and Oklahoma Today, among other publications. Her chapbook of poetry, The Naked Prince, was published by Fort!/Da? Books in September 2013.

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Reviewed by Marie Marshall, Robin Ouzman Hislop’s 2015, All the Babble of the Souk. Collected Poems.

December 29, 2016December 2, 2015 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

Robin Ouzman Hislop’s new collection of poems – I find myself wondering instead of just reading on and enjoying the ride. Because Robin’s poetry is often just like that, a ride, which contains lines like –

The hag in her rags begs her bag
holding all shadows to account.

each a new thought after a pause for breath, or so it seems, each with an image that sparkles, almost with effrontery. That’s how I like my poetry – image, sound, and bare-faced cheek.
As the images pile up, or maybe I unearth more as I drill down, discovering depth in the poetry, the typographical puzzles pile up too, and I begin to wonder if they are deliberate cantrips on the poet’s part. I hope they are. I hope they are, because I want to trust the poet’s intentions. I know he’s not your average Internet Joe, but a man with a mean, keen pen. He knows how to play, how to make free, how to brew poetry:

Riding along in our dream machine
our virtual reality all but a scream
no exit
blood on the wind screen, faithful Fido’s gone
the machine’s a mess, – every where’s a gas.

A trickle through a diaphanous sheen
a thin crust peels, roll the dice
a question of ethics, the cost of life.

Y’know, somewhere along the line, Ezra Pound and John Cooper Clarke rolled dice for this man’s soul, and I can’t say who won. Maybe he walked away laughing while the bones still tumbled, soul intact. I hope so. He has the measure of our suburbs, seeing how

gleamed cleaned cars
the phallus of a Sunday afternoon

let us (you’re here too, and I have morphed into ‘we’) catch our reflection in that polished surface, wondering how to measure the depth of the shine. Meanwhile

Danger, Deep Water, Keep Out

As if we could. There are caesuras in this collection, but they almost seem accidental, as though titles, page breaks, and stars merely interrupted a flow of thought momentarily. The collection has the feel of a single work, as though the poet sat down, started at the beginning, wrote the middle, and stopped at the end. See? The golden arches of a fast-food outlet, the taunts of a cuckoo, big Sunday words like ‘bifurcation’, ‘pheromone’, and ‘olfactory’, all rub shoulders, and rub along. We ride. It’s the same ride all the time, but the scenery outside the window shifts, and fellow passengers come and go. Occasionally we get off, but only to stretch our legs

As we celebrate
life lies dead on the table
we eat it.

and then the ride starts again. But a short offering like that reminds me that on the return journey I must insist on long enough to read each poem on its own…
and I’m by myself again, closing the book at its final page. Second impressions:
The poet is aware of the shape of his work on the page, of its concreteness. The poet knows when to be serious and when not to, and he knows when to muddy the water of each with the other. When he says ‘Watch my stick’, you hear ‘This means you!’ The poet can make a dream return from the rubble of artifice. I know poetry when I see it.

Bio – Marie Marshall (3rd person)

MM is a middle-aged Anglo-Scottish author, poet, and editor, who says little about herself, preferring to let her writing speak. She has had three novels published, two of which are for the young adult / older children readerships. Both of her collections of poetry are currently in publication. Naked in the Sea (2010) in its 2nd imprint, is available in e-book form direct from publishers P’kaboo and in Kindle version on Amazon; the 1st imprint may still be available in print, if you enquire at Masque Publishing of Littlehampton. I am not a fish, nominated for the 2013 T S Eliot Prize, may be bought direct from publishers Oversteps Books. Marie has had well over two hundred poems published in magazines, anthologies, etc., but has not submitted anything since 2013. The most unusual places in which her poetry has appeared are on the wall of a café in Wales, pinned to trees in Scottish woodland, and etched into an African drum in New Orleans Museum of Art.

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Aquillrelle. Press Release. Robin Ouzman Hislop. Collected Poems. All the Babble of the Souk.

February 11, 2019November 4, 2015 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

All the Babble of the Souk

All the babble of the Souk
all the life of the planet &
so little part of it, that I breathe

Posted by Poetry Life & Times on Saturday, 31 October 2015

Also available at Amazon.com All the Babble of the Souk Robin Ouzman Hislop

All the Babble of the Souk
By Robin Ouzman Hislop
Aquillrelle, 2015

Norman Ball, writer, author of Between River and Rock: How I Resolved Television in Six Easy Payments–
Before I get to the book itself, I’d like to offer up a confession. Robin and I have, over the years, engaged in some fascinating discussions on such far-flung topics as Big Bang contrarianism, the mystery of consciousness, theories of memes, multiverses, Popper falsifiability and vitalism, just to name a few; in short, the usual water cooler chatter. Or maybe not. Robin’s a whole lot smarter than me. Nonetheless it’s a lot of fun trying to keep up. If you’ll forgive a mixed metaphor, we’re odd ducks of a feather.

For one thing, Hislop is not averse to the occasional Latinate or ism getting tossed into a stanza. Of course poetical exploration of High Concept puts one at odds with the prevailing penchant for concrete image and tactile adhesives. There are many in poetry today who insist that, if you can’t say something nice about a spatula, a garden hose or a lamppost, you have no business trafficking in periphrasis. Everything must be grounded in the real, they say—as if such a thing as the real really existed. If I may say, oh prevailing sentiment in poetry, get real.

So, perhaps All the Babble of the Souk is not for everyone. But then, what of any value ever is? Poetry marches under a Big Spatula and we all can’t be flipping fried eggs and hash. Besides, in the hands of a deftly abstract mind, abstraction is not exactly a kick in the head. Nor will it break the yokes and spoil your breakfast. What is a speculative poetic excursion, after all, but high imagination and eccentricity commiserating via language? Let the arbiters of bric a brac catalog the quotidian like good flea marketeers. Such people are born to rummage about in the attic and log their heirlooms on eBay. Hislop doesn’t trammel their kiosks. He has Big Thoughts to mull.

Fresh off a personally intense eye-mind exploration , I found myself greatly predisposed to ‘Maps’, a four-piece series of poetic aphorisms that offers some dazzling insights into how we demarcate our space, time and existence, and especially how these elements are conveyed, if not even defined, by our senses:

Time links the auditory, the visual cortices on the retina which maps a fission between the unseen form of sound, the unheard sound of seeing

This notion of time having a real job to do immediately put me in mind of John Archibald Wheeler: “Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.” Hislop may be onto something even more subtle: Does time keep chaos at bay, allowing time for our disparate senses to marry their qualia into a coherent universe? Perhaps those with Synesthesia are more evolved creators of worlds, their gaps between sound and vision less discontinuous.

‘Maps’ delivered me to a speculation I wouldn’t have reached otherwise. And I find that’s a critical function of Hislop’s poetry. It gathers, then points away. More important than the resolved landing place is how it offers a hospitable ‘symposium’, couching philosophical fields of inquiry within poetic metaphor from which the reader’s own speculative arcs can then rise and take tangential flight; speculations feeding speculations. What does resolution ever resolve anyway? Conclusions are overrated. The concrete of the concretists doesn’t exist in a world:

Imposed as
an impression
seeking an ineffable concrete
in an abstraction
which defies location.—from ‘Red Butterflies’

Tumbling down rabbit holes beats rabbit stew any old day, especially when the universe may have us fixed for the next tasty, sentient bunny-in-line. In this sense I would call Hislop’s poetry inviting, intelligent, and refreshingly non-binding.

In ‘From Here to Silence, three’, he sets up a free will versus determinism tug-of-war stalked by Nietzschean recurrence and Leonard Susskind’s holographic 2D picture-show. You got a problem with that, Rod McKuen?

Say we are not sui generis
(the cause of yourself)
we are homeostatic holographs
dimensions in spectral parallel membranes
our near eternal process to err
along such a line we pass time in, time out
but could we not cheat the butterfly effect?

The stanza ends on the plaintive hope, reminiscent of Kafka that our cycle of error could end if freewill achieved grace but for an instant. Let us hope that moment arrives as I’m so tired of breaking my shoelace the day before Thanksgiving forever.

Am I losing the yucksters in all the heavy universe lifting? Not so fast. Hislop can be funny too. ‘At a Slant’ has a droll quality that still draws a snicker if for no other reason than that we’re stuck, all together (‘but it’s the same for all of us!’):

The con of life

the weirdness of its melodramatic sham
how good we are at yesterday, tomorrow
always better than before
like, being had – in the process by it.

The juxtaposed tenses of being had cement the interminable predicament we share. No exit. But at least we perfect our yesterdays until such time as we resume them anew, becoming rank amateurs all over again. But amateurs with a difference, with a modicum of acquired wisdom and an almost imperceptibly elevated rank. Okay, so it’s bleak, black humor. But there are shafts of light. One day, though maybe yet a half-eternity away, some butterfly will escape the dark matter of our descending shoe. (Butterflies pervade Hislop’s poetry.) We’ll be released to the next pristine universe armed with a butterfly-brain’s worth of hard-earned prescience. So yes, each successive Big Bang is not an unadulterated singularity. Some kernel of hard-earned wisdom gets borne through. Each new universe is a tooth on a slowly revolving gear that turns towards…perfection? In short, something barely better.
Since Hislop asks, that’s what—I think, I hope—may be ‘next’:

Pack, the near infinite
(in—the moment before you munch)
take a bit of the biscuit
before the Big Crunch
it’s an eternal packet
& having all, what’s next?—from ‘Lucky Hat Day’

All the Babble of the Souk will have you pondering your predicament in a whole new imaginative light. Reflect well my friend, as mindless impulsivity, and materialist inanity, is precisely what dangles this eternity over the interminable abyss. Therein may lie our paper-thin chance for freedom: by insect increment, one pardoned butterfly per eon at a time.

—Norman Ball

Editor’s note: for more of this Poet/Writer’s scintillating script please do not fail to overlook the hyper-text link eye-mind exploration included in the above review.

NORMAN BALL (BA Political Science/Econ, Washington & Lee University; MBA, George Washington University) is a well-travelled Scots-American businessman, author and poet whose essays have appeared in Counterpunch, The Western Muslim and elsewhere. His new book “Between River and Rock: How I Resolved Television in Six Easy Payments” is available here. Two essay collections, “How Can We Make Your Power More Comfortable?” and “The Frantic Force” are spoken of here and here. His recent collection of poetry “Serpentrope” is published from White Violet Press. He can be reached at returntoone@hotmail.com.

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Poetry Life & Times Interview with Poet R.W.Haynes

June 20, 2015 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

R.W. Haynes teaches at a university and writes about literature for academic publications. His doctorate at the University of Georgia (1991) was on sixteenth-century classicism in England. He has taught at Texas A&M International University in Laredo since 1992.

His teaching focuses on literature ranging from the Greeks to the English Renaissance, most of it dealing with medieval material and Shakespeare. Two more recent dramatists, Henrik Ibsen and Horton Foote, have been the focus of his attention in recent years. His book The Major Plays of Horton Foote (Mellen 2010) will be followed next year by an anthology of criticism on the same author.

Here at PLT we have had the privilege of featuring several of his poetic works both in classical & free style form. Intrigued by his background as well as his work in the field of poetry, we have included him in our list of special interviews at PLT, where I would like to begin by putting these questions. Hello RW welcome to our PLT interview. A few questions via Robin Ouzman Hislop Editor

PLT- Which was your first contact with poetry?

RW- Both of my parents were teachers, and both loved literature. My mother wrote poetry and encouraged her children to do the same. I had the honor of reading one of my mother’s poems at my sister’s funeral not long ago.

PLT- Which style in writing defines you?

RW- I’m not sure. It might be easier for someone else to answer that. There are some poetic projects I’d like to try which may be very different from what I’ve written so far. And does one write to be defined? Perhaps one writes to elude definition, at least at times. Remember what Hamlet says to Guildenstern, “Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.” Not that I have any earth-shaking mystery in my poetic activity that it would be death to reveal. I do tend to work in more or less formal verse, which some editors and readers find insufficiently edgy or something. Different strokes. And not many of my poems have been long poems, possibly because of feebleness of mind. And sometimes the verse may be a bit angry, even though most of my sonnets are jokes to some extent. Well, anger demands expression, and, when it energizes a composition, that process governs the anger, I think, and wrath becomes something else, as it usually ought to do. To conclude the answer, I do what my Muse tells me to do, hoping all the while that writing about Downtown Waco or The Three Little Pigs or the Texas Campus-Carry legislation or the ghosts of people who aren’t dead yet isn’t some mad aberration arising from academic trauma or lack of tobacco or something.

PLT- Where is the germ of your creation? What triggers the poem?

RW- I join lots of poets in saying that the impulse to write is a constant presence. Perhaps it derives from a sense that language has a kind of magical potential to convey more in special moments than in ordinary ones. It isn’t always enough to yell “Caramba!” or to gasp “The rest is silence.” But let’s look at Shakespeare, whose sonnets show us something about how poetry does what it does. Can’t we say that in those poems there are motives we recognize with a distinct immediacy? Love, bitter disappointment, jealousy, humor, anxiety—all of which in their intensity are subjected to a presence of mind (if I may develop the usual sense of that phrase) and put before us as a kind of imaginative victory, if that is not too strong a word. So it seems to me that often the provocation to verse is a challenge to respond artistically to a moment deserving a poetic response. When the angel gives a command to Caedmon, he understands it is time for him to sing, despite his froglike voice.

PLT- Who were your educative poets?

RW- My mother, of course—Sarah Westbrook Haynes. My father also loved poetry. My older brother was, it seemed and still seems to me, a pretty good poet. Dylan Thomas, Pound, Eliot, Yeats. I majored in Classical Greek as an undergraduate largely because of Pound’s enthusiasm for Homer, but I also always read in the English poets, Chaucer, Spenser, Sidney, Donne. I liked the Romantics except for Wordsworth, whom I learned to respect at about the same time as I found I could read Wallace Stevens at last. I liked the work of a couple of poets, Marion Montgomery and Judith Ortiz Cofer, who were at the University of Georgia when I was there. Shakespeare finally became my job, and his work still amazes, and now as I write drama his skill seems even more unparalleled.

PLT- Do you handle an idea or an aesthetic intention when writing?

RW- I’m sure I try at times. Sometimes the ideas handle me. I won’t say the road to Hell is paved with aesthetic intentions, but I do think we need to reserve some modest disdain for glib or facile effusions that have nothing behind them but a kind of opportunistic exhibitionism. I like all kinds of poetry and poets, but not all poetry is equal in value. Do you remember Cinna the Poet in Julius Caesar? The crowd, infuriated by Caesar’s murder, seized him because one of the assassins was named Cinna. When he protested that he was a poet, the crowd tore him to pieces because of his bad verses. Perhaps the poet, like the blues musician, has to pay dues in one way or another before arriving at competence. On the other hand, youth, though sometimes blind or inconsiderate, can energize expression so much that impulse redeems immaturity and the claims of common sense appear pedantic. One doesn’t want to hear “I fall on the thorns of life!” every ten minutes, but Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” still opens a universe of poetic power.

PLT- What do you think of alternative resources for spreading poetical works?

RW- I’m for poetry, however access to it may be provided. Thank God for the Internet, which has done much to diminish the influence of certain kinds of editorial tyranny. I taught two classes today to begin the summer session, and in both I advised the students to write poetry, and I believe some of them took me seriously.

PLT- Do you think that poets, as such, have a special social commitment or that their sensitivity is more exposed to society´s predicaments?

RW- Life usually requires some toughness, no? I visited Poe’s grave in Baltimore a year or so ago, and, of course, it’s painful to reflect on gifted individuals whose artistic souls drive them through destructive experiences and social rejection. One thinks particularly of musicians, though the names of Hart Crane and John Berryman come to mind as well. It is good when such individuals find support and encouragement and can sustain life’s disappointments. Charles Baudelaire said that his humiliations were of the grace of God, and no doubt he derived comfort from that thought. As for social commitment, I’d like to think that a commitment to the pursuit of wisdom would suit poets very well. If we look at the political alignments of poets in the United States, I am sure that far more are Democrats than Republicans, but a review of history might indicate that such characters as the Beowulf poet, Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare aligned themselves with political power to some extent, and no doubt the same was true of Homer. It was in fact reported that it was Caesar Augustus who prevented the posthumous burning of Vergil’s Aeneid. Now that was a patron of the arts. Despite these observations, however, it is also true that heartless greed and meretricious machination do not tend to promote poetic values. Though Lord Byron facetiously claimed to have discovered a new vice in avarice, his sponsorship of Hellenic freedom showed his true feelings. In so far as poets subscribe to humane values, to compassion and respect for their fellow humans, a social sympathy can be expected from them, but, surely, there is a considerable variety in human perspective. Would one expect an insurance executive such as Wallace Stevens to be a great poet?

PLT- Which was the last poetry book you read?

RW- I tend not to read books of poetry by individuals very often. I’m not sure why. It may be that I think I get more from works considered individually or in small groups than in a dense assemblage of poems. So the last book of poetry I read was probably Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

PLT- According to your criterion, what living poet should be re-read nowadays?

RW- Judith Ortiz Cofer, who is a native of Puerto Rico, but who has lived for many years in Georgia. Her work returns the reader to the personal by celebrating personal connections, the kind of sometimes casual devotion that shapes family and the caring individual. Those in search of new variations of insanity have many options, but Cofer’s poetry effectively engages a rare quest for an emotional responsibility which arises from a kind of harmony of verse and perspective.

PLT- Thanks RW for your amazing responses, I hope our readership following will be as profoundly impressed as I am. Also, I must admit, I’m a great fan of Wallace Stevens, him & Samuel Beckett in fact. And thank you again for your recommendation of Judith Ortiz Cofer, I’m intrigued, does she write in her original language, presumably Spanish? Could we entreat of you a sample of one of her works perhaps, and what that means to you and the title of any recommended publication.

RW- Judith Ortiz Cofer writes in English. A collection of her poetry is the volume Reaching for the Mainland & Selected New Poems, Bilingual Press 1995. Her poem “Esperanza,” which can be found at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/240624 demonstrates her sense of the emotional implications of self-centered decisions. The young woman whose name means “Hope” is sketched in a few devastated lines as a person whose hope was cursed at her birth.

PLT- It wouldn’t be fair to wrap this Interview up without some further reference to your works other than those hitherto published here at PLT. So would you be so kind to leave us with one or more, perhaps a favourite of yours, if such a thing is possible.

The Peacock Lady’s Declaration

The lady with glasses put her crutch aside
And said, “I get so sick of parasites
Who think that what a real writer writes
Just kind of bubbles up neatly from inside,
As she stares off in space, then grabs a pen
And puts together a story like a box
With little hinges, snaps, and locks,
And then goes back and puts the symbols in.
Of course, parasites are necessary,
And some of them are pleasant enough to be
Good company, at times, but mortality
Shouldn’t be orderly, at least not very;
Writing here, with these crumbling bones,
Makes new life sprout between inanimate stones.”

The Tomb of Edgar Poe (2014)

Looking for the conference hotel,
I drove by Poe’s grave. Tap tap…
One should definitely shudder a little
At a contact so nearly missed.
Later I walked back, passing by
The Everyman Theater, colder
Than I’m used to being, tap tap,
Down home on the Rio Grande,

And on his stone a twisted wreath
Of pasts and half-recalled regrets,
A ribbon, a spoon, a ball-point pen,
Declare our junkie solidarity again.

Why wasn’t some demented witch
Out front pouring green lemonade?
A lean, blue owl on her shoulder perched,
Staring as though I, too, were cursed.

Tapped out, forget that dark flower,
Return to harbor past the Bromo-Selzer Tower.

R.W. Haynes

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Poetry Life & Times – An Interview With Author-Poet Aberjhani

February 11, 2019March 18, 2015 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

POETRY LIFE AND TIMES AN INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR-POET ABERJHANI

by Sara L Russell and Robin Ouzman Hislop for Poetry Lifetimes & Poetry Life & Times

Biography:

The American-born author Aberjhani is a widely-published historian, poet, essayist, fiction writer, journalist, and editor. He is a member of PEN International’s PEN American Center and the Academy of American Poets as well as the founder of Creative Thinkers International. He launched the 100th Anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance Initiative in 2011 and during the same period introduced netizens to concept of guerrilla decontextualization via a series of essays and website of the same name.

He has authored a dozen books in diverse genres and edited (or sometimes co-edited) the same number. His published works include the Choice Academic Title Award-winning Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, the social media-inspired Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry, the modern classic ELEMENTAL The Power of Illuminated Love (a collection of ekphrastic verse featuring art by Luther E. Vann), and the frequently-quoted poetry collection, The River of Winged Dreams.

Among his works as an editor are the Savannah Literary Journal (1994-2001), plus the Civil War Savannah Book Series titles: “Savannah: Immortal City” (2011), and “Savannah: Brokers, Bankers, and Bay Lane-Inside the Slave Trade” (2012). In 2014, Aberjhani was among a limited number of authors invited to publish blogs on LinkedIn. You can learn more about the author at Creative Thinkers International, on Facebook, Twitter, or his personal author website at http://www.author-poet-aberjhani.info/

The Interview

Sara: Firstly Aberjhani, what first inspired you to write poetry?

Aberjhani: What first inspired me to write poetry as a teenager were the power and the magic that I experienced through the works of the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, the Beats, and the Black Arts Movement. As I read and understood them, their voices dared to challenge power and rearrange worlds. I needed to discover that possibility because my own world was one ruled by poverty and racism, and it was very much in need of rearranging. Or remaking. But I have to say also that the notebooks of Albert Camus, the diaries of Anais Nin, and the essays of James Baldwin inspired me to write poetry as well because poetry was what I usually heard when I read their prose.

Sara: You have in the past stated that your network Creative Thinkers International is a reaction against what happened on 9/11; to embrace the world with positive creativity. Your poem “The History Lesson” (from “ELEMENTAL, The Power of Illuminated Love”) seems to bear this out. It speaks eloquently of unshakeable faith in times of conflict. I would like to know more about the ELEMENTAL book and some of the particular world events that inspired you to write it.

Aberjhani: ELEMENTAL is collection of ekphrastic poetry and essays based on the painted metaphysical meditations of Luther E. Vann and my own creative spiritual journey. It’s unique within the body of my works for that reason but also because Luther and I are connected to the Harlem Renaissance in some unique ways. He was taught by artists of the Harlem Renaissance and I had the honor of co-authoring the first Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. At this point he is one of America’s foremost visual artists so it is a true honor to co-create a book like this with him.

ELEMENTAL was written from 1991- 2008. That stretch of 17 years was filled with many powerful life-changing and world-traumatizing events. You mentioned the poem “The History Lesson.” In it, the late Michael Jackson is referred to as “a feather-throated songboy” who “screamed madness from atop his platinum-plated cross.” This was the decade of Bosnian genocide, race riots in Los Angeles after the beating of Rodney King, the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York the first time around, and when India and Pakistan decided they needed nuclear bombs in their diplomatic pockets like everybody else. But it was also the decade that Nelson Mandela was finally freed––after what, 27 years?–– to later become South Africa’s first black president, and when the internet started taking off like crazy. Those events and subsequent game-changing headlines like 9/11, for us, put the significance of art and poetry to the test in a big way. What was its relevance then and what is it now? We hoped and hope that ELEMENTAL demonstrates creative alternatives, which is why the subtitle is The Power of Illuminated Love. Love in the form of painted beauty, sculpted language, dreamed wisdom, chromatic prayers, and tear-varnished stanzas. The pages don’t deny the existence of brutality and chaos in the world but they don’t dilute the real potential of commanding grace in our lives either.

Sara: In your poem “Angel of Healing: for the Living, the Dying, and the Praying” the second stanza has four lines which are twice as long as stanzas 1 and 3. It occurred to me that this might be to represent the shape of outstretched wings. Am I right?

Aberjhani: They certainly look that way when you place the entire poem on a single page and view it horizontally. I often felt like I was taking dictation when writing the poems in the Songs of the Angelic Gaze series and Angel of Healing originally consisted of two sets of four haiku-influenced units that arrived over the course of a week. I thought it was complete when the attendant angel of those particular syllables insisted on adding the middle four lines of aphorisms, which some refer to as proverbs. Every time I took them out to make the poem more consistent they would come back. Consequently, along with that addition came the visual effect you’re describing. I’ve always taken it as an indication, or maybe an affirmation, that as painful as life can be at times for people all over the world there is some component of existence, or nonexistence perhaps, operating to implement a balance and give us an opportunity to turn the horrors we’ve forced upon each other into something more conducive to sustaining at least minimal degrees of sanity and love.

Sara: I really enjoyed reading “A Poet’s Birthday Dance Through Fire and Rain”. Gramdma Elsie appears very vividly in my mind’s eye from the way you describe her and her “gin-and-coffee” voice. I would like to know more about her; since she has some influence in your life and your writing.

Aberjhani: I don’t mean to sound evasive at all but the best way for me to respond to that is probably with this poem about her from The River of Winged Dreams:

Photographed Light of My Grandmother’s Soul

The black and white photo shows you seated  in a wooden chair on the porch of a cabin 
built likely by slaves, later inhabited by you:

Black American Woman Elsie Mary Bell Griffin.

One side of the image is shadowed
 like the memories, the love, and perseverance 
that shape your face into a hymn of quiet dignity.

The planks of the cabin’s wall are straight.
 Like the rows of crops you used to hoe.
 The window a rectangle of inked mysteries.  

From a western corner of the late summer sky
 light streams brilliant wonder into the picture, 
rushing through leaves to kiss your head and arms.  
Thus your eternal spirit confirms your weary blue bones.

  Nowhere in the photo do we see the chopped-off heads
 of snakes you later fed to the hogs. Their writhing corpses
would help explain the heavy boots that shelter your feet.

The news this year is a black man in the white house.
Perhaps when alive you shook his hand in a prophetic dream… 
Your tears bled yesterday sealed the victory claimed today.

The light somehow is like a gentle jealous god 
come to claim you solely for its own. The strength
of your calm gives you the power to surrender everything.

Bright rapture flows and you whisper, “Blessed be my Lord.”
 Radiance splits your heart and your soul explodes three new stars. 
Death rattles the tin roof and you command, “Peace, be still.”

© by Aberjhani

Sara: What is the main concept, or inspiration, behind your book “The River of Winged Dreams”?

Aberjhani: The River of Winged Dreams is about the journeys we undertake and the metamorphoses we experience when shifting back and forth between sacred impulses and profane indulgences as individuals and as a species. Instead of sacred and profane some might prefer the terms higher self and lower self, or enlightened mind and shadow mind. Most of us know that we can be better than what we are and do better than what we do, and a lot of us live in ways that oblige us to at least periodically make an effort. But the work required to move up from point C to point A, or to survive the drop from A down to C and begin all over again is rarely easy. So The River of Winged Dreams is about the mercies, hells, and revelations encountered in the midst of engaged passionate struggle sometimes relieved by moments of ecstatic tranquility. These might be the kind of poems and stories Sisyphus would tell himself while rolling his boulder up and down the hill of his determined resolve.

In a more concrete sense, the book is divided between very earth-bound poems like the one just shared, “Photographed Light of My Grandmother’s Soul,” and the Songs of the Angelic Gaze series that I mentioned earlier. The original series was written during what I call the Summer of the Angels following my mother’s death in 2006. I believe it’s in the gift edition of the book that my summer of the angels is humbly compared to Rainer Maria Rilke’s time in the Duino Castle (which was someplace between Italy and Austria) where he began writing his classic Duino Elegies during the winter of 1912-1913. Some might describe experiences of that kind as wrestling with angels of poetry and for me it very often felt that way. Once all the dust and feathers settled I found myself holding this somewhat unusual book.

Sara: Your poem / video “And Then The Rain God Screamed for Love” gets a lot of views on Poetry Life & Times, and is one of my favourite poems of yours. The collaboration with Nordette Adams works very well; her voice brings out the rich sensuality of the poem. Would you like to do more such collaborations in video / audio poems?

Aberjhani: Thank you, I didn’t know it had become that popular. “And Then the Rain God Screamed for Love” is from the book Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black. It was a favorite performance piece when I did open mic readings some years back in downtown Savannah, Georgia. Nordette Adams and I both recorded spoken-word versions of it for the Goddess and the Skylark: Dancing through the Word Labyrinth CD produced by our fellow AuthorsDen alumnus Mark Rockeymoore in 2006. Hard to believe it’s been that long but it has. The video was a product of Nordette’s independent creative genius. She also took it upon herself to turn my recording of “An Angel for New Orleans,” which is another track from the CD, into a gift video for the city on the ninth anniversary of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

At some point I do hope to record again and make videos, or hopefully write a full-length movie for that matter, but my primary focus right now is on completing some research and a couple of book projects. However, having said all of that, I should point out that the Goddess and the Skylark CD never did receive the kind of distribution or polished re-mastering that we intended so it is currently not available. I invite anyone with the professional know-how and resources for working with the files and helping us put a new edition out there to contact one of us. Since next year marks the 10th anniversary of the CD it would be nice to introduce it to a new audience.

Sara: Robin Ouzman has two questions to ask you…

Aberjhani: Hey Robin.

Robin: What do you think of the correct use of forms in Poetics & individual innovations from those forms that no longer correspond to their various criterion (& therefore arguably are not acceptable)?

Aberjhani: There have always been those poets who adhere to what is recognized as formal mathematical-based syllable counts, scansion, and classic themes, but at the same time innovators have made important contributions to poetry with their own reinventions and evolution of the craft. Poet John Ashbery once said he wasn’t sure that what he had written in his book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror was poetry but then he won not one or two major awards for it but three– the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Walt Whitman’s self-styled cadences and certainly the poems of E.E. Cummings map out their own literary territory and establish their own laws of poetics, yet their impact continues to endure and inspire. I believe the key for giving effective meaning to the distinction you make Robin lies within the individual poet’s relationship with language. Poets who endeavor to actually develop one–through reading, writing, listening, dreaming, crying a lot and laughing a little more—can break rules with some boldness while still conveying significance with clarity. And yet, going back to Ashbery, W.H. Auden selected his first book for the Yale Younger Series of Poets Award and then said later he didn’t have a clue what it was about. Above all else there has to be, I think, a sincere confession of individual intent to honor a purpose worthy of the deeper passion, beauty, and spiritual intensity which so many associate with poetry.

Robin: Have you ever or do you ever experience “Writer’s Block”; I mean in Poetics especially. Let me extend on that percept, do you find it easier or more difficult to write with age and do you think that Poetry improves with age in the Writer/Poet or that it somehow, I mean in Poetics, loses its initial flair?

Aberjhani: As a military journalist in my previous professional lifetime I was trained to produce stories whether I felt inspired or not. That initial training later combined with inspiration from my spiritual explorations to create a tendency to think in patterns like literary templates for stories as well as Poetics and other genres. I sometimes dream certain poems that I never write down because I believe they belong where they found me. I have also spoken poems over waves rolling in off the ocean and then watched their translucent lines float off without writing or recording them either.

Some form of creative composition is always taking place on some level of my consciousness so I cannot say that I have ever known what it means to have writer’s block. Having enough money in the bank to take the time to write as much as I would like is another matter altogether.

So far as what poets possibly gain from age is concerned, I would hope that it is a more refined informed perspective combined with a flexible use of form and a gentle radiant certainty about how and why poetry has become a permanent component, if not the definitive core, of what you come to know as your truest Self. Rumi spoke in poems right up until his physical death. What that means to me is that he won the ultimate prize bestowed by poetry, which I believe is the ability to consciously live one’s soul while still in the world. When that happens, the flair of poetics and poetry grows increasingly brighter throughout your life. The forms might alternate but the meanings grow deeper and the certainty, whether or not everyone agrees with it, maybe shines a little more brilliantly.

Sara: Are you working on any new books or multimedia projects at the moment?

Aberjhani: Being the literary workaholic that I have been most of my adult life, I’m currently working on two nonfiction books, a volume of continuous narrative poems, a play, and a magazine project. The nonfiction books are The Boy with the Guerrilla Decontextualized Face, for which there is a corresponding website (http://www.guerrilla-decontextualization.net/ ), and Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind, which is on the history and culture of my hometown of Savannah, Georgia. Two poems from the forthcoming collection were recently published in Black Gold: an Anthology of Black Poetry edited by Ja A. Jahannes. The play has been a work in progress for a couple of years and that’s probably the most I should say about it for the time being. I’m also working on a follow-up to my last book, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow with an illustrated edition called Tao of the Rainbow (http://the-journey-and-the-rainbow.weebly.com/blog-tao-of-the-rainbow ).

The magazine project is really the brainchild of light photographer Aurora Crowley. He’s working with the online Glassbook magazine to produce an art and poetry feature that combines my words with his light photography. I’ve seen some of the extraordinary things he can do with his subjects so I’m looking forward to seeing how the project develops.

Sara: Finally Aberjhani, what are your future plans for Creative Thinkers International?

Aberjhani: That is such a good question. When CTI was founded in 2007, above all else it was to affirm that members of the global community could somehow heal the extreme divisiveness caused by the intense fear, anger, distrust, and despair that followed 9/11. I hoped that those who joined could help show that exchanges of gunfire and bombs were not our only alternatives from that point on. We had not lost the totality of our humanity to a nightmare that came crashing out of the sky. The need to strengthen and sustain cross-cultural exchanges based on cooperation and expanded awareness of each other’s values and needs is still very real. The abduction of school children in Nigeria and the “Je Suis Charlie” massacre in Paris, plus the current racial tension in the United States, are just a few heartbreaking examples of that fact. We can see that almost every day from the failure of terrorists and diplomats to resolve conflicts in more humane nonviolent ways.

I believe CTI still plays a small role in fostering the will and ability to communicate past the blinding rage because we often share far more common ground in our cultural connections than we do in our political disconnections. I began partnering last year with Karen Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion organization, which was founded in 2008, in large part because it has many of the same goals as Creative Thinkers International.

My preference is to see the community continue to grow and evolve, which we have in fact been doing over the past year despite the inevitable technological glitches that come with upgrades. If, however, we reach a point where it becomes apparent that CTI has contributed all it can to our stated mission, and we need to leave whatever remains to be done up to everybody else, then we will close shop and invest our creative energies in other mindful pursuits. But for now we’re still doing what we can to help make a positive creative difference in a world that keeps getting hammered with negative actions and consequences.

Sara: Thank you very much for the interview, Aberjhani.

Aberjhani: Thank you Sara. From one 21st century creative artist to another, it’s been a pleasure and an honor.

Angel of Healing: for the Living, the Dying, and the Praying

1.

As you bury flesh––
honor spirit, savor hope,
cherish memory.

Consider heaven
 as a world-weary stranger asleep
in your heart.

Quote words that affirm
all men and women
are your brothers and sisters.

Pull the child away 
from feeding at the mule’s tail.
Give the baby food.

2. 

Compassion crowns the soul with its truest victory.
Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.
Souls reconstructed with faith transform agony into peace.
Wisdom applied internally corrects ignorance lived externally.

3. 

Dare to love yourself
as if you were a rainbow
with gold at both ends.

Write a soft poem 
to one you called bitch, shit head,
nigger, fag, white trash.

Live certain days dressed
in your lover’s smiling soul
while she, he, wears yours.

Imagine your mind
wings intent on expanding
and watch your joy fly.

© Aberjhani (from The River of Winged Dreams)

____________________________________

A Poet’s Birthday Dance through Fire and Rain

Lighting her pipe and puffing her years,
Grandma Elsie said, “When I was a girl
God showed me my whole life. Scared me.
Didn’t know what I was seein’ ‘til
all that time filled up like a fat man’s belly.
Now I know. Breaks my heart. Makes me so happy.”

Her gin-and-coffee voice wraps around me
like a cashmere scarf of spring and autumn.
I recall four innocent eggs from a pigeon’s nest
crashing at my guilty feet. Grandma was that
God revealing the fate of the two sons
and twin daughters I would never know?

Childhood was a slippery diving board
on which often my heart cracked, bouncing,
splashing, into piranha-hosted orgies.
Thrill of being noticed so intoxicating
that I didn’t mind being eaten alive.
The more my life bled, the louder it laughed.

At night words sneaked into my bed––
triple-sexed pronouns slurped my virginity.
My gypsy dreams spurted liquid ballads and
perfumed sonnets. A lexicon of hunger stained
fevered sheets with sticky genius and marijuana tears.

In daylight I tended carefully my garden of
darkness singing secret terrors to the earth.
Thus did language authorize my fear
to dismiss itself––and knowledge empower
my body to act with passionate wisdom.
Out of muddy turds flew freedomsongs of mystic blue.

Slouching towards manhood I dragged with me
a world as well as my dick but mostly––
a heart addicted to the scent of dreams,
arms libertarian in their will to embrace,
a soul eager to bear the sins of Love,
a mind unafraid to waltz naked in fire or rain.

© Aberjhani (from The River of Winged Dreams)

The History Lesson

This morning bombs ruined 
the back yard. Prophecies and
 rumors of prophecies all came true.
 A despot bound for hell 
took the long way to a very bad day. 
A feather-throated songboy screamed
madness from atop his platinum-plated cross.

But the temple of your presence?
It never shook once.

Biblical atrocities stormed chaos 
from New York to Bagdad to Freetown.
 The sun and moon of your face refused
 to hide behind Armageddon.
 Wisdom gushed like diamonds from your brow:

“Knowledge planted in truth grows in truth.
Strength born of peace loses nothing to hate.”

How many fears came between us?
Earthquakes, diseases, wars where hell
rained smoldering pus
 from skies made of winged death.

Horror tore this world asunder.
 While inside the bleeding smoke 
and beyond the shredded weeping flesh
we memorized tales of infinite good.

© Aberjhani (from ELEMENTAL, The Power of Illuminated Love)

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For Olga. A Poem by Blanca Andreu. Translated from Spanish by Robin Ouzman Hislop & Amparo Arrospide.

September 4, 2019January 16, 2015 by Robin Ouzman Hislop

This work comprises in an excerpt from the anthology on contemporary Spanish female poets entitled Las Diosas Blancas. Madrid, 1985. Copyright Ed. Ramon Buenaventura. Hiperion. This is an original and unpublished English version of the original poem written in Spanish. Translators Robin Ouzman Hislop and Amparo Arrospide would like to thank Casa del Traductor, in Tarazona and the British Literary Translation Association, East Anglia University Campus.

From this Spanish anthology –compiled by the well-known scholar and translator Mr. Ramón Buenaventura, whom we contacted earlier– a few selected authors were chosen for our joint translation work: Amalia Iglesias: Te buscare para decirte (I Will Find You To Tell You) , Ana Rossetti: Triunfo de Artemis sobre Volupta (Triumph Of Artemis Over Volupta) and Isolda (Isolda) , Blanca Andreu: Para Olga (For Olga) , Isla Correyero: Los Pajaros (Small Birds), Amparo Amoros: Midas (Midas) and Criaturas del gozo (Creatures Of Joy) , Rosalia Vallejo: Horno en llamarada (A Furnace In Flames) , Maria del Carmen Pallares: Sisargas (Sisargas), Margarita Arroyo: Era el mar lejos del mar ( It Was Sea Away From Sea).

We would like to thank Mr. Ramón Buenaventura and the above name poets, in advance, and let them rest assured that their work is protected by a legal Creative Commons Licence, by virtue of which the above named translators are willing to provide excerpts from their original translation work, provided that readers agree to use it under the terms of such licence. We strongly recommend reading the entire work and the poets’, who have continued evolving during these decades.

For Olga

Girl of delicately golden tresses,
girl obsession of the virgin stork
with tufts of damask feathers
that splashed death,
of the crazy stork with wings
of golden strychnine
which flew off leaving you with a corporeal perfume,
a neat smell of lilacs, already golden and rude dreams.
Girl who obeyed the apostle scops owl
and the murky look of real eyes,
with puerile drawings of Selene and the rest.
Girl of non-existent concert,
girl of cruel sonatines and malevolent books by Tom Wolfe,
or witch lace to bandage wounded deer ulcers,
of fallow deer gazing from mystical knolls,
or places like that.
Pluperfect girl, girl we never were,
tell it now,
tell it now, you, now that it’s so late,
spell out the sombre tempo,
spell me the tear
the purple silhouette of the mare,
the foal that lay at your feet waking up foam.

Abandoned recite the words of yesteryear,
shadow of Juan Ramón: Solitude, I am true to you.
Scornful recite the words of yesteryear,
but not that courtly verse,
don’t talk of queens white as a lily,
snow and Joan burning
and interwoven melancholy
of dear Villon,
speak clear verbs where you can drink the saddest liquid,
jars of sea and relief, now that it is already so late,
raise your tiny voice and summon up the song:
tell life that I remember her,
I remember her.

This small death is definitely lost in a nascent forest,
the shoot of an arrested comet,
that nobody saves
young volcano of novice gust and bones
made of bird, eyelid and thinking wave
that no stella book
no book painted with Italien solar gold,
no book of lava
will seal for me.

And so death so many times written
becomes radiant,
and i can talk
of desire and the unseeing beam of the lighthouse,
of the chimerical corpse of the crew.
And so death
becomes the story
of that mute girl who hanged herself
with boreal harp’s strings
because of nuptial poison on her tongue.
I definitely get lost cradling litters of rare epitaphs,
girl of golden tresses,
I will tell life that you remember her,
I will tell death that you remember her
that you remember their lines conjuring your shadow,
that you remember their habits and tempo solo,
bitter laurel, deep bramble, brazen error and sorrowful hordes,
while Ephesian cats are crying at my feet,
while lost silver cats
go curdling their ancestry in genealogical cypress and poplar,
I will tell life to remember you,
to remember me
now,
when I rise with loops and hair strings
up to the disaster of my head
up to the disaster of my twenty years,
up to the disaster, lammergeier light.

De una niña de provincias que se vino a vivir en un Chagall, 1980

Para Olga

Niña de greyes delicadamente doradas,
niña obsesión de la cigüeña virgen
con mechones de plumas de damasco
que salpicaban muerte,
de la cigüeña loca con alones
de estricnina dorada
que viajaba dejándote un corpóreo perfume,
un pulcro olor a lilas, ya dorados y rudos sueños.
Niña que obedeció al autillo apóstol
y a la mirada turbia de los ojos reales,
con pueriles dibujos de Selene y demás.
Niña de inexistente concierto,
niña de crueles sonatinas y malévolos libros de Tom Wolfe,
o de encajes de brujas para vendar las llagas de los corzos heridos,
de ciervos vulnerados asomados en los oteros místicos,
en los sitios así.
Niña pluscuamperfecta, niña que nunca fuimos,
dilo ahora,
dilo ahora tú, ahora que es tan tarde,
pronuncia el torvo adagio,
pronúnciame la lágrima,
la silueta morada de la yegua,
la del potro que se tendió a tus pies despertando la espuma.

Declama abandonada las palabras de antaño,
sombra de Juan Ramón: Soledad, te soy fiel.
Declama desdeñosa las palabras de antaño,
pero no aquella estrofa cortesana,
no hables de reinas blancas como un lirio,
nieves y Juana ardiendo,
y la melancolía entretejida
del querido Villon,
sino los verbos claros donde poder beber el líquido más triste,
jarros de mar y alivio, ahora que ya es tarde,
alza párvula voz y eco albacea y canta:
Dile a la vida que la recuerdo,
que la recuerdo.

Definitivamente se extravía en un bosque naciente esta muerte pequeña,
el brote del cometa detenido,
esto que nadie salva,
joven volcán de huesos y ráfaga novicia
hecha de pájaro y de párpado y de ola pensante
que ningún libro estela,
ningún libro estofado de oro solar de Italia,
ningún libro de lava
viene a sellar por mí.

Y así la muerte tantas veces escrita
se me vuelve radiante,
y puedo hablar
del deseo y del lacre rubio y ciego en los faros,
del cadáver quimera de la tripulación.

Y así la muerte
se convierte en historia
de aquella niña muda que se ahorcó
con las cuerdas boreales del arpa
porque tenía en la lengua un veneno nupcial.
Definitivamente me extravío acunando camadas de raros epitafios,
niña de grey dorada,
diré a la vida que la recuerdas,
diré a la muerte que la recuerdas,
que recuerdas sus líneas conjurando tu sombra,
que recuerdas sus hábitos y su carácter solo,
su laurel ácido, su profunda zarza, su descarado error y sus hordas dolidas,
mientras gatos efesios van llorando a mis pies,
mientras gatas perdidas plateadas
van cuajando su alcurnia en ciprés genealógico y en álamo,
diré a la vida que te recuerde,
que me recuerde,
ahora,
cuando me alzo con cuerdas capilares y bucles
hasta el desastre de mi cabeza,
hasta el desastre de mis veinte años,
hasta el desastre, luz quebrantahuesos.

“De una niña de provincias que se vino a vivir en un Chagall”1980

AUTHOR: BLANCA ANDREU (1959)
Bibliography:
– De una niña de provincias que se vino a vivir en un Chagall (awarded the 1980 Adonais International Poetry Prize) (Ediciones Rialp, Madrid, 1981).
– Báculo de Babel (awarded the Fernando Rielo International Poetry Prize) (Hiperión, Madrid, 1983).
– Elphistone (Visor Libros, Madrid, 1988)
– El sueño oscuro: (poesía reunida, 1980-1989) (Hiperión, Madrid, 1994).

Blanca Andreu (born 1959 A Coruña) is a Spanish poet. She grew up in Orihuela, where her family still resides, and attended El Colegio de Jesus-Maria de San Agustin, followed by studies in philology in Murcia. At age 20, she moved to Madrid without formally completing her education. Here, she met Francisco Umbral, who introduced her to the literati of the city.

In 1980, she was awarded the Premio Adonáis de Poesía for her work entitled, De una niña de provincias que se vino a vivir en un Chagall. Her use of surrealism is considered the beginning of the Post-Modern Generation. Her later work has tried to shy away from the surrealist tendencies of her early pieces.[2]

In 1985, she married novelist Juan Benet. After he died in 1993, she returned to La Coruña where she now lives a semi-reclusive life.

Awards

1980: Premio Adonáis de Poesía
1981: Premio de Cuentos Gabriel Miró
1982: Premio Mundial de Poesía Mística, Fernando Rielo
1982: Premio Ícaro de Literatura
2001: Premio Internacional de Poesía Laureà Mela

Translators:

Amparo Arrospide (Argentina) is a poet and translator. She has published seven poetry collections, Mosaicos bajo la hiedra, Alucinación en dos actos y algunos poemas, Pañuelos de usar y tirar, Presencia en el Misterio, En el Oido del Viento, Hormigas en Diáspora , Jaccuzzi, and Valle Tiétar, as well as poems, short stories and articles on literary and film criticism in anthologies and in both national and foreign magazines. She has received numerous awards.

Robin Ouzman Hislop is Editor of Poetry Life and Times ; his publications include

All the Babble of the Souk , Cartoon Molecules and Next Arrivals, collected poems, as well as translation of Guadalupe Grande´s La llave de niebla, as Key of Mist and the recently published Tesserae , a translation of Carmen Crespo´s Teselas.

You may visit Aquillrelle.com/Author Robin Ouzman Hislop about author. See Robin performing his work Performance (University of Leeds)

Editor’s Note: see also Poetry, National Literature Prize 2018, Francisca Aguirre, Translated from Spanish by Amparo Arróspide & Robin Ouzman Hislop

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