Tag Archive - Wave Books

The Sunday Poem : Jorge Carrera Andrade’s Micrograms

July 28, 2012 in Sunday Poem, Words with 6 Comments

 

Ecuadorian poet, historian, author, and diplomat Jorge Carrera Andrade

 

“The images of Jorge Carrera Andrade are so extraordinarily clear, so connected to the primitive I imagine I am…participating in a vision already lost to the world. It is a place melancholy but grand.”      — William Carlos Williams

 

 

Largely overlooked by American literary critics, Ecuadorian Jorge Carrera Andrade has long been considered one of the most important poets in Latin America. He began publishing poems in his teens, and his distinguished literary career spanned a wide range of work, from editing and translation to criticism and poetry, much of which was published internationally.

When Jorge Carrera Andrade was appointed Ecuadorian General Consul to the United States in 1940, he moved to San Francisco and quickly established friendships within the American literary community. He corresponded with a number of American writers including John Peale Bishop, Archibald MacLeish, Thomas Merton, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams.

Throughout his life, Andrade was a bridge between disparate worlds. As Steven Ford Brown details in Drunken Boat, during his childhood Andrade developed sympathetic relationships with the Indians who worked the land on his family’s country estate. His father’s views from the judicial bench — very liberal for this period in South America — were also sympathetic to the plight of the Indians. This empathy and impulse towards universal understanding would become an integral part of Andrade’s writing, as well as his work as ambassador to Japan, Peru, Nicaragua, the U.K., France, and other countries.
 

Jorge Carrera Andrade

Joshua Beckman and Alejandro de Acosta have recently translated Andrade’s Micrograms into English and republished the book as it appeared in the original 1940 edition. Micrograms is part essay, part poetry, and part anthology. It’s entirely unique and also oddly postmodern in its structure.

As Beckman and de Acosta write in their introduction, for Andrade “the international was less about crossing boundaries and more about disregarding them in the name of the universal.”

“[Andrade] writes, ‘I try to testify to an ordinary man’s orbit in time. At first he feels as a stranger in the midst of a changing world but later receives the visit of love and discovers deep within himself a feeling of solidarity with all men of the planet. In this sense I have traversed new countries in different latitudes and have returned to others already known, in a pilgrimage as passionate observer rather than as curious traveler.’”

It is from this ‘worldly’ perspective and influence that Andrade’s writing emerged, and maybe the most fascinating of these works is his Micrograms.

What exactly is a microgram? Here is Beckman and de Acosta…

“The microgram is a poem usually between three to six lines long and about little natural creatures (both flora and fauna) and their existence in the universe…While formally unique, it presents its newness with the gentleness and grace of a conversation on a shared idea. Using the most subjective of personal histories (few were as international)… [Andrade] sees and calls for an objectivity—a generous objectivity of the individual eye.”

 

 

Andrade saw hidden potential in poetic short forms that many contemporary American poets have not. The author’s thoughts on Pierre Reverdy’s writing is also the perfect description of Andrade’s own work.

“[Reverdy] does not sing agonizing mythologies, nor does he dress up in mystical robes: his voice is that pure and simple poetry that escapes the ordinary—and also mysterious—life of men…Reverdy’s technique is personal, and his greatest secret lies in the stripping away of all decoration: the cult of naked and simple expression.”

 
For today’s Sunday Poem, I’ve chosen five of my favorite micrograms by Jorge Carrera Andrade. If you’re intrigued by these poems, I encourage you to pick up a copy of Joshua Beckman and Alejandro de Acosta’s translation ofMicrograms from Wave Books. I’ve never read anything quite like these poems before, and Beckman and de Acosta have given us a marvelous introduction to Andrade’s work.

“To identify a history is to create a history,” Beckman and de Acosta write, “and to create a history is to say that a history can be created. To create a form is to see a form and to share a form, but it is also to suggest that there is something in the world to be seen a new way.”

Enjoy your Sunday!

 

 

 

 

Kernel of Corn

Every morning
in the rooster’s beak
each kernel becomes
a cob of song.

 

 

 

Oyster

Two-top clam:
your calcium coffer
keeps the manuscript
of some shipwreck.

 

 

 

Typewriting

Late Night Toad: your little
typings strike
the moon’s blank page

 

 

 

What the Snail Is

Snail:
tiny measuring tape
with which God measures the field.

 

 

 

Definition of a Seagull

Seagull: foam eyebrow
on wave of silence.
Kerchief of shipwreck.
Skyroglyph.

 

 

 

About Jorge Carrera Andrade

Jorge Carrera Andrade (1902-1978) has been recognized in Latin America as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. He was born in Quito, Ecuador, and was a diplomat as well as a poet, essayist and journalist, and he encountered many literary communities as he served appointments in Peru, France, Japan, and the United States. The originality of Carrera Andrade’s poetics is rooted in his experiences abroad as well as in the rich culture and natural landscapes of Ecuador. His distinguished literary career comprises a wide range of work, including editing, translation, criticism, and poetry.

He is a poet who remains difficult to categorize, though scholars and critics have drawn comparisons between his poetics and American imagism, Spanish ultraism, the Latin American Indigenous school, and the Japanese haiku form. William Carlos Williams described Carrera Andrade’s images as “so extraordinarily clear, so connected to the primitive I imagine I am … participating in a vision already lost to the world.”

 

 

About Joshua Beckman

Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of nine books, including Take It, Shake, Your Time Has Come, and two collaborations with Matthew Rohrer: Nice Hat. Thanks. and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He is an editor at Wave Books and has translated numerous works of poetry and prose, including Micrograms, by Jorge Carrera Andrade, 5 Meters of Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) by Carlos Oquendo de Amat and Poker (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008) by Tomaž Šalamun, which was a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Award. He is also the recipient of numerous other awards, including a NYFA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Seattle and New York.

In his introduction to Things Are Happening, poet Gerald Stern noted the “openness” of Beckman’s poems: “His identity is through affection. That is his print.” In a review for Coldfront magazine, John Deming commented: “Beckman’s traditionally a master at converting the personal to the existential in a deceptively plain-spoken way.”

 

 

About Alejandro de Acosta

Alejandro de Acosta attended Hampshire College and received his Ph.D. in Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture from SUNY-Binghamton. Recent publications include Micrograms, by Jorge Carrera Andrade, a translation of Carlos Oquendo de Amat’s Five Meters of Poems, and numerous contributions to anarchist anthologies and websites. He currently lives in Austin, Texas.

 

 
 
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“Kernel of Corn,” “Oyster,” “What the Snail Is,” “Typewriting,” and “Definition of a Seagull” appear in Micrograms by Jorge Carrera Andrade, translated by Joshua Beckman and Alejandro de Acosta Copyright © 2011. Used by permission of Wave Books. All rights reserved. Biographies are also courtesy Wave Books.

 

The Sunday Poem : Noelle Kocot

April 21, 2012 in Sunday Poem, Words with 3 Comments

 

 

Noelle Kocot’s latest book of poetry, The Bigger World, is a collection of  character sketches. Told in a straightforward, surreal style—one that recalls folktales, ancient myths, and fairytales—Kocot has stripped each piece down to its essentials. These short, accessible poems are funny, moving, and sometimes absurd, but always entertaining.

“I wrote these poems in fifty days,” Noelle explained in an interview with the Rumpus Poetry Book Club. “It was a grueling process, because I had stopped writing at that point about my husband’s death. It was a purifying experience, in which I was psychologically processing a whole lot of stuff, and letting a whole lot go.”

The original working title was Gnomon, after a concept in James Joyce’s Dubliners, where people were incomplete, like a missing piece of a shape in geometry. “I titled it The Bigger World because it was an exit from Sunny Wednesday, my previous book, which concerned my husband Damon’s death. Frankly, I needed to get out into the bigger world myself, so it is a hope, an expectation.”

Noelle says that she is always writing poetry, “consciously or not, 24/7,” but that her first love is music. “I started out playing musical instruments, listening to all kinds of music, and then I married a great composer/pianist, and had access to so much great music.” Sonic Youth, Xenakis, Beethoven, Debussy, and Coltrane are some of her favorites. “I love music. It flows DIRECTLY into the affective sense. Poetry does not.”

When the Rumpus Poetry Book Club asked her to share some advice for young writers, Noelle offered this guidance:

“Keep writing no matter what. Never let ANYONE push you down. I went to a VIOLENT graduate program, but instead of getting discouraged, I wrote more, and I threw it in their faces. Write out of spite. Write out of love. Just keep going, and don’t let this world system take you down. Get your reading in young, because you are going to be busier as you get older and not have enough time to read. Live without worrying about money—skim the bottom. It’s the best way to be a writer.”

Here are two of my favorite poems from The Bigger World—“Fugue” and “Marie.” Thanks to Wave Books, Matthew Zapruder, and Noelle Kocot for sharing these poems with Gwarlingo. Enjoy your weekend!

 

 

 

Fugue

 

A flash of sudden joy
From the solar plexus
Where fear usually resides,
She knew she’d be okay.
“There is no other life
Apart from this one,” she
Said to no one in particular.
The building gleamed
In the midday rain.  The cats
Ate their turkey dinner.  She
Screened phone call after
Phone call.  A wild loneliness
Descended like a flock of
Robins drained of their red.
Nothing seemed to matter
Anymore, not the past with
Its ax of granite nor the future
With its watery punctuation,
But the moment, yes the moment,
She was forced into it like
So much dough between
The fingers.  “God bless us all,”
She said aloud to everyone and no one.
There is no other life.

 

 

 

Marie

 

She was the one who noticed
The first forsythias bursting
From their sacs outside her house.
Her brown curls were thinner
Than in the pictures
Taken just a few months before
Beside the horses in the shows,
The moss-grown houses
Of her ancestors, the rising
Shoots of their tombstones.
They talked about her chemo,
The nights she spends throwing up
While her husband sleeps
In front of the T.V.
She assures Donna he means well
When he gathers pamphlet
Upon pamphlet on the myths
Of nausea that tell how the sickness
From the treatments can be eased.
She shows Donna more photographs,
This time of her youngest son’s wedding.
The baby is coming in July.
In the pictures it is a small snowdrift
Under his wife’s white dress.
At the end of their talk,
An old deacon comes to the door.
The week before, he gave her
A statue of St. Patrick.  She
Can tell by the chips in the saint’s
Green robe that it is a family heirloom.
She wants to give it back.
But no, he won’t take it.
He has come to give her Communion,
Which she takes daily now.
So Donna tells her they’ll see each other
Again and she smiles.
Fifty years old, kids gone,
Cradling stiff laughter in her arms,
She smiles at her, as if to say,
A mother of death is still a mother.

 

 

 

About Noelle Kocot

Wave BooksNoelle Kocot is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems (Wave Books, 2006), Sunny Wednesday (Wave, 2009) and The Bigger World (Wave, 2011). Kocot has also translated a book of poems by the French poet Tristan Corbiere, Poet by Default (Wave, 2011).  She is the recipient of numerous awards, including those from The Academy of American Poets, The National Endowment for the Arts, The American Poetry Review and The Fund for Poetry.  Born and raised in Brooklyn, she now lives in New Jersey and teaches writing in New York.

 

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“Fugue” and  ”Marie” appear in The Bigger World. Copyright © 2011 Noelle Kocot. Used by permission of Wave Books. All rights reserved.


The Sunday Poem : Gennady Aygi, Translated by Sarah Valentine

April 7, 2012 in Images, Sunday Poem, Words with 1 Comment

 

 

Gennady Aygi (1934-2006) is widely considered to be one of the great avant-garde poets from the former Soviet Union. He was born in Chuvashia, a territory located in the western part of Russia. In 1958 he was expelled from the Literary Institute in Moscow for his first book of poems, which was condemned by the censors as “hostile poetry” because it was written in Chuvash. Being an outsider in the Russian empire had a profound impact on his life and poetry. His poems are infused with an elemental sense of life, mortality, and humanity.

As scholar and translator Sarah Valentine explains in the introduction of her new book of Aygi translations, Into the Snow, “much of Aygi’s poetry is written against darkness, against institutionalized evil, against our tendency to constantly undermine our own humanity and the humanity of our fellows through violence, nationalism, propaganda, and war.”

“I came into contact with Aygi’s poetry in a contemporary poetry course in my PhD study program in Russian Literature at Princeton,” Valentine told me this week via email. “I was so enamored of his work – but also somewhat baffled by it – that I decided to write my dissertation on him and began translating many of his poems in the process.”

“He has a very unique aesthetic among 20th century Russian poets (and among Russian poets in general) and part of the challenge for me has been to articulate exactly how/why it is different and what implications that has for Russian and world poetry/literature.”

Aygi is “an important voice in the poetry of witness of the twentieth century,” says Valentine. ”His status as a Chuvash writer writing in the Russian/European traditions, his blend of avant-gardism and spirituality, and his dedication to confronting institutionalized evil while refusing to play into easy dissident politics make him a critical and fascinating voice at the confluence of many traditions.”

 

Scholar, poet, and translator Sarah Valentine

Valentine’s artful translations are an excellent introduction to the Russian poet, and her informative preface sheds light on Aygi’s role as a writer within the larger Soviet culture. I found Valentine’s analysis of poetry written in America versus poetry produced in totalitarian societies particularly insightful:

“Though Aygi was a committed experimentalist in his relationship to language, canon, and convention, he was deeply connected to a fully humanist understanding of the purpose and value of poetry. His work bears the mark of deep spirituality in which the poetic process becomes a space for meditation and worship—of our human capacity for creation as much as for otherworldly divinities. Thus the creative force of language is always linked in his work to creation on a cosmic scale.

I think many poets in the United States today struggle with a feeling of irrelevance, of impotence in the face of global-scale crisis. Sidelined in a mass-media, technology-driven culture, the American poet seems to have a slim chance of connecting with an audience, and even less of a chance to effect large-scale change through poetry. But elsewhere in the world many poets, like Aygi in the Soviet Union, wrote and continue to write poetry at the risk of losing their lives and livelihoods. For them poetry is an ethical act, an act of humanity, regardless of the cost. Many of Aygi’s poems confront the political and social crises of his age, but many others are small poems about the beauty of fields and flowers,the birth of a child. Some consist of only a few lines,  few words, or a single word, or a single letter.

Why bother? What difference could jotting down a few lines about flowers possibly make? The answer, I think, for Aygi was that each word of each poem was part of a grander project, and exploration of the nature of existence, of our place in this universe—whatever that is—of what lies beyond the limits of our knowing, and of how, through a humane art, we can maintain our connection with all of it. Also, and perhaps most importantly, each poem is a celebration of mystery, of the fact that, though we pursue these questions, life in all its forms is a mysterious gift.”

I have two of Valentine’s translations to share with you this Sunday. Both poems appear in Into the Snow: Selected Poems of Gennady Aygi, now available from Wave Books. Happy Easter!

 

 

 

 

Silence

 

1

in the invisible glow

of pulverized melancholy

I know uselessness like the poor know their last piece of clothing

and old utensils

and I know that this uselessness

is what the country needs from me

reliable like a secret pact:

muteness as life

indeed for my whole life

 

2

Muteness is a tribute—but silence is for myself

 

3

to grow accustomed to silence

like the beating of one’s heart

like life

as if a well-known place there

and is this I am—as Poetry is

and I know

that my work is both hard and for itself alone

like the sleeplessness of the night watchman

at the city graveyard

 

 

 

 

from Twenty-Eight Variations on
Chuvash and Udmurt Folk Songs

 

XIX

And in the fog

the green oak

has nothing stronger than a branch

to sing with

 

XX

These hands and this head

will remain with those who died in a foreign land—

smoke from the locomotive hits us in the face,

to rob us of memory once and for all.

 

XXI

And suddenly—peace, as if

I were alone in the world,

and the blizzard out the window, blizzard in the garden,

blizzard in the fields.

 

XXII

And the day fell silent, like something

meaningful in it had died,

and the fox sleeps in the foothills,

covered by its red tail.

 

XXIII

Between the Kazakh and Chuvash lands

did you see the post that marks the boundary line?

It is not a post; it is I standing there, petrified

from sadness.

 

 

 

About Gennady Aygi

Gennady Aygi was one of the outstanding Russian poets of the 20th century. His most important works remained virtually unpublished in the Soviet Union until the 1980s, by which time he had been published and translated in more than 20 countries and several times nominated for a Nobel prize.

He was born in the remote village of Shaymurzino in the Chuvash republic, a land with a Turkic language, some 450 miles east of Moscow. His original name was Lisin, which he changed to the older family name of Aygi (meaning “that one”). His father, a teacher of Russian, was killed in action during the second world war. His mother was the daughter of a peasant, one of the last “priests” of the ancient pagan religion.

Showing a precocious gift for poetry, Aygi went to Moscow in 1953 to study at the Literary Institute, and stayed in the writers’ colony of Peredelkino, where Boris Pasternak was a neighbour. He became close to Pasternak, who encouraged him to write in Russian and whose love and gratitude for life remained an inspiration to the younger poet.

From 1960, all Aygi’s major poetry was in Russian. His friendship with Pasternak, at that time being harassed by the authorities, and his own innovative poetics made him persona non grata in Chuvashia. Even so, the fields and forests of his native land permeate his work, and he remained deeply attached to his ancestral culture, striving to give it a place among the cultures of the world. He translated poetry from many languages into Chuvash and produced an Anthology of Chuvash Poetry (published in English by Forest Books in 1991). Eventually, after the perestroika of the late 1980s, his work was acclaimed in his homeland and he became the Chuvash national poet.

His main home, however, was in Moscow, where in the 1960s he found a much-needed support system among “underground” writers, artists and musicians, who together were discovering the forbidden fruits of western culture. For 10 years he worked at the Mayakovsky Museum, acquiring a deep knowledge of the Russian avant garde of the early 20th century. Modern French poetry (above all Baudelaire) was another essential influence, but his personal pantheon also included Nietzsche, Kafka, Norwid, Kierkegaard and many religious writers.

Aygi quickly became known abroad. In 1972 he won a prize from the Académie Française for his Chuvash anthology of French poetry. More dangerously, he was published in the émigré journal Kontinent, which made him a target for attacks at home. During the Brezhnev years he led a precarious life, subsisting mainly on his meagre earnings from translation. He lived in a series of small flats in the outskirts of Moscow, close to the fields and woods.

Perestroika brought radical changes. Aygi was now published in Russia and recognised as a key figure in the Russian avant garde. He was also able to travel widely, he was further translated, received many honours and was invited all over the world to poetry festivals and symposia. He made four visits to Britain, feeling a particular affinity for Scotland, where he made a pilgrimage to the grave of Robert Burns, and for London, the city of his beloved Dickens. Six volumes of his poetry have been published in English, the most important being the bilingual Selected Poems 1954-94 (Angel Books, 1997) and Child-and-Rose (New Directions, 2003).

Aygi remained a controversial figure. For some readers his free verse (still unusual in Russian poetry) was too much to take, and there were accusations of cosmopolitanism and wilful obscurity. His work was highly unusual; writing, as he put it, on the borders of sleep and waking, he created a medium full of ambiguities and silences to suggest visions, anxieties and joys that defied direct statement. His poetry was quiet and simple, refusing the rich vocabulary and rhetoric of some of his contemporaries, yet it was also intensely oral – audiences were overwhelmed by his powerful incantatory delivery.

He wrote from a deep awareness of the losses and destructions of the 20th century. Though many of his poems were devoted to victims of oppression, from Raoul Wallenberg to Varlaam Shalamov, the great writer of the Gulag, his work was not political. It was tragic in essence, yet he always resisted the poetry of despair. One of his collections bears an epigraph attributed to Plato, “The night is the best time for believing in light”, and like Pasternak’s (from which it differs in manner) his poetry was a poetry of light, seeking to assert the values of human community and oneness with the rest of creation.

(The above biography was taken from Gennady Aygi’s obituary in The Guardian, which was written by Peter France and published February 24, 2006.)

 

 

About Sarah Valentine

Sarah Valentine’s first book of translations, Into the Snow: Selected Poems of Gennady Aygi, is a collection of poems translated from the Russian-language poetry of Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi (1934-2006). Individual translations have been featured in the Two Lines anthology Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, as well as in journals such as diode, Circumference, and Redaction: Poetry and Poetics. Sarah has a BA in Russian Studies and Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD in Russian Literature from Princeton University. She has received a Templeton Foundation grant for her research at Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Religion and a prestigious Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at UCLA. Sarah lives and Los Angeles and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside, in the Department of Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages where she teaches Russian literature, comparative literature, film, and critical theory.

 

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If you enjoyed the work of Gennady Aygi, you may also like this Sunday Poem by Russian poet Anzhelina Polonskaya, translated by Andrew Wachtel. You can read Gwarlingo’s entire Sunday Poem series here.

 

 

“Silence” and  ”from Twenty-Eight Variations on Chuvash and Udmurt Folk Songs” appear in Into the Snow: Selected Poems of Gennady Aygi by Gennady Aygi, translated by Sarah Valentine. Copyright © 2011 The Estate of Gennady Aygi and Sarah Valentine. Used by permission of Wave Books. All rights reserved. Sarah Valentine biography also courtesy Wave Books.