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Friday, December 20, 2013
From Dunya Mikhail's amazing "Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea"
P
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Poetry in the Everyday Project: "Hope is the Thing With Feathers"
This is from Deena Ibrahim, who made paper cranes with Emily Dickinson's poem known popularly as "Hope is the Thing with Feathers." It began as a project about Sadako, and morphed into this delivery system for poetry. Enjoy.
Monday, December 9, 2013
Friday, November 22, 2013
"Despite"
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Sunday, November 17, 2013
Naomi Ayala's "No. 13, for Remembering" (Split This Rock Poem of the Week!)
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Wednesday, November 6, 2013
"Two-Sided Story": listening to the other
The Parents Circle-Families Forum--an Israeli/Palestinian dialogue and grief group composed of people who have lost family members in the conflict was featured in the film, "Encounter Point" (2006), and is again featured in "Two-Sided Story." There are some who believe that such reconciliation groups are creating "normalization" when the conflict is still ongoing, a false personal peace; I hold with those who see such groups as laying the groundwork for a truly intercultural society which would include Israelis and Palestinians as full citizens.
In the film, Emmy award director, Tor Ben Mayor follows a group of 27 Palestinians and Israelis who meet under the frame of a unique project called "History through the Human Eye" led by Parents Circle-Families Forum - bereaved Palestinian and Israelis for Peace and Reconciliation. The project's goal is to acknowledge the narrative of the other. Together they create the conflict mosaic. Among them include Bereaved families, Orthodox Jews and religious Muslims, settlers, ex soldiers in the Israeli army, ex security prisoners, citizens of the Gaza strip, kibbutz members, second generation holocaust survivors, non violent activists and more. Each and every one holds his own historical truth, and carries with him his own emotional baggage.
They are not trying to convince each other that their narrative is right, nor are they seeking a political solution. They have simply been asked to listen, to clarify the differences between how they grasp reality and how they see the other side. The participants offer us an insight into their inner world; they share their personal experiences along with historical and political interpretation to key events in the conflict: The Nakba, the Holocaust, Occupation, bereavement, suicide bombing, Israeli army, the separation wall etc.
Will the group, in spite of the gaps and the natural tendency to stick to their former views, accept the reality that is reflected in the mirror of their colleagues? The same colleagues who outside are allegedly defined as their enemy?
Friday, November 1, 2013
"Love Song for a War God" by Maria Melendez
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Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Monday, October 21, 2013
Saturday, October 5, 2013
What We Owe Each Other: A Review of They Dragged Them Through the Streets (2013)
What We Owe Each Other: A Review of They Dragged Them Through the Streets (2013)
Flipping channels the other day, I was thinking again about
the strangely narrow window of representations offered by television. We are awash in reality stars, sundry undead,
goofy ensembles of the bourgeoisie, drug-addled gangsters, pathological
murderers, and quirky detectives. Not
only on TV, but in all the popular and literary arts, it is almost unheard-of
to see a thoughtful, rounded representation of a self-described progressive
political activist, someone who devotes their labor to societal change. Even rarer is the sight of someone working to
oppose war.
One can go back, of course, to The Iliad’s hump-backed Thersites—whose complaint against
Agamemnon’s war brings derision and a swift beating—to note a long history of
depicting anti-war voices as unwell, ugly, and deranged. A contemporary analogue was sent to me by a
Facebook friend when I asked for nuanced depictions of anti-war protesters: Rob
Riggle’s Daily Show send-up of hippies and Code Pink in “Marines in Berkeley.”
Modern literature and film has brought us its share of
anti-heroes and the occasional activist, but few anti-war activists or peace
workers. In literature, a few key
non-fictional works have explored the inner and outer lives of the anti-war
movement. Among the most remarkable,
William Stafford’s Down in My Heart
(1947), Norman Mailer’s Armies of the
Night (1967), Daniel Berrigan’s Trial
of the Catonsville Nine (1970) stand out as thoughtful depictions of the
lives and psychologies of people drawn to resist war. There have been some intriguing novels as
well, including John Irving’s A Prayer
for Owen Meany (1989), Sigrid Nunez’s The
Last of Her Kind (2006), Dana Spiotta’s Eat
the Document (2006), and Philip Roth’s American
Pastoral (2006), but they are rather exceptional.
By focusing entirely on the voices of these
activists—something I’ve seen nowhere else—Hilary Plum’s They Dragged Them Through The Streets (FC2, 2013) is a
revelation. Avoiding both caricature and
heroizing, Plum creates an intimate and ruminative portrait of five friends
whose activism against the Iraq War, spurred by the suicide of one of the
friends’ brother, turns to acts of violent sabotage.
The book begins with a news report of the death of activist
Zechariah Berkman from a bomb blast in his basement. The aptly-named Berkman (echoing the
well-known anarchist Alexander Berkman) remains the silence around which the
story turns. Has he died by accident, or
was his death a suicide?
Through first person narration, the four surviving
characters—A, Ford, Sara, and Vivienne—look back on what drew them together,
how they came to take their actions to a level of violence, and what tore them
apart. In deft fragments laid out in a
non-linear pattern, each character recounts their early passions, their
isolation, their growing disillusionment, and their eventual breakup. The novel is a postmortem in multiple senses:
it occurs after the death of Z, after the breakup of the group, and amid the
wider losses of the war.
The young activists, in their occupations and
preoccupations, demonstrate a surprising range of gifts, sensibilities, and worldviews. A has aspirations to journalism, Ford is a
scientist, Sara is a nurse, Vivienne is a writer, and Zechariah is a political
junkie. Plum captures the sense of
meta-excitement of being involved in a cause, as if they were characters caught
up in a larger drama:
our sense of ourselves as
protagonists: Ford stretched out on the couch, announcing his every idea;
Vivienne in a chair in the corner, her quick replies; Sara arguing on the floor
where she sat like a martyr she insisted on being—no, that was unkind; she
stroked the dog’s head and he loved her. And Zechariah on the wooden chair
pulled close to Vivienne, when he was not on the phone pacing the kitchen, his crisp
speech floating out to us. (3-4)
Even A’s revision enacts that sense of complexity of
character—that Sara may have occasionally had a martyr complex (as do some
activists), but she was also loving.
Such diversity of character and talent reminds me of
activists with whom I’ve worked, in Bloomington, Indiana, and Cleveland, Ohio,
people who came together to oppose imperial interventions. I think of Maria Smith, a lawyer, whose work
in Nicaragua with Witness for Peace crystallized her lifelong commitment to
nonviolence. And Penny Allen, a health
care provider, whom I saw birding one Saturday morning. And Kadhim Shaaban, an Iraqi-American
businessman who could not bear to see his people suffer under economic
sanctions and spearheaded efforts to send medical aid to Iraq. And Kathryn Bryan, who went to live in Rafah
refugee camp in Gaza. And Art Dorland, a
veteran, who left a flyer under my windshield when we parked our well-stickered
Honda at the Cleveland Metroparks.
Since 2001, I’ve worked on an oral narrative project called
“Stories of War and Peace,” and got to meet people from all walks of life who
opposed the Iraq War. They are people
who have lost family members to the violence of war; who have witnessed
firsthand the costs of war; who have religious or moral convictions about the
wrongness of killing; who have political disagreements with particular
conflicts; yet they all have seen themselves as agents of change, as small
characters in a large and often dismayingly distant drama.
It is this last point—that these activists have labored
distant from the scene of battle, and feel acutely their alienation and guilt
both from the chauvinism that fuels conflict and the conflict itself—that Plum
captures well. It is the state of living
at the center of empire, largely immune to its violence but complicit in
it. In Ford’s words,
I was never in that country, never
saw the faces and can’t pronounce the names.
I didn’t stand with the doctors, staunching, stitching. I wouldn’t know where to begin. But every day the war went on and so did
I. We were secured, allied in our
survival. I was there to tally each
day’s deaths. I was hungry for the
newspaper. Every day the war resisted
me, didn’t include me. You will live on,
it said, turning pictures toward me.
Limbs in ice, a foot protruding, absurd.
Soldiers’ faces turned skyward.
You will be fine. (63).
That maddening security, “allied in our survival,” with a
war that seems both real and utterly unreal, leads this group to try to breach
the very real distance between there and here.
This real unreality draws the characters together, to make
visible the invisible war, by choosing targets to destroy. But they fight over every possible target,
measuring the relative value and cost that each target might offer. Here, the activists seem lost, groping for
symbols, as locked in their abstractions as the war-makers themselves. This is a similar situation that birthed The
Weather Underground, in the wake of the post-1968 violence and the failures of
the nonviolent anti-war movement.
One of the characters even suggests blowing up a hospital,
though the idea is shouted down by others in the group. In fact, they agree on very little, except
the impossibility of living without making some kind of concrete action. But there always seems to be a reason not to
bomb. What makes them activists—their
ability to imagine, to witness even from afar, the physical and psychic damage
of violence—is precisely what makes it hard for them to bomb anything.
Some of the most powerful writing in They Dragged Them Through the Streets occurs around the characters’
apperception of the vulnerable human body, wrenched by war. If we could nurture a citizenry for whom the
bodies and minds of others are nearly as precious as their own, we would have
another world. In the words of
Sara,
So I’m here. All wars come to the
shelter in time. The skin smoothes over the nub of an amputation.
My parents think this is noble
work, but they don’t want to hear about it. If they ask questions I sanitize my
answers. There’s no way to say how beneath my hands I can always feel the hair
on the back where I press the stethoscope, the blood that browns around
sutures.
What I want to end with is not violence, but something
else. As Muriel Rukeyser wrote, in The Life of Poetry, the poetry of 1930s
social protest failed because of the “blood-savagery in it, ranging all the way
from self-pity—naked or identified with one victim after another—to actual
blood-lust and display of wounds…[it was] begging for attention and sympathy in
the name of art that was supposed to produce action” (211). Sometimes anti-war activists have relied too
much on shocking imagery of destruction, rather than offering an alternate way
of seeing and being. Or, as A says—after
watching a journalist’s carnage-filled presentation on the war, intended to
disgust people into opposition—we owe the victims more than a repetition of
their death or victimization:
I am no different from anyone, I
said, after a pause. I was thinking of
that journalist: I threw up outside after, he’d said, standing before the
slideshow, on the screen one body’s imperfectly closed eyes, lids too swollen. He thought we would sympathize. But you were one of the last people to see
them, I thought. Didn’t you owe them
more, than to let disgust be your last gesture, the last thing they were
offered? To sit and watch them, watch
the flesh bruise and dampen on the stone, that had been blossoming becoming
decay, no one coming through that place to tidy, and why should they be
tidy?—that’s not what we owe each other.
(120-121)
What we owe each other is the question of the book, and
indeed, the question of all ethical relation—and in a more intensified way in a
globalized world. The answer will not be
easy.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
“crying most of the way out and laughing most of the way back:” Bob Hicok’s Elegy Owed
“crying most of the way out and laughing most of the way back:” Bob
Hicok’s Elegy Owed
Review by Danny Caine
In his eighth book ElegyOwed, Bob Hicok cracks wise, especially when confronting death: a smartass
in the dark. “Love” contains this
symbolic anecdote:
After I told my wife the story of Lev and Svetlana, she went to the ground
and put her hands around a dead plant and screamed at it to try harder,
she looked foolish and I loved her even more and joined her in screaming
at death, it made me feel Russian, and obstinate and eternal, all good things
to feel
After I told my wife the story of Lev and Svetlana, she went to the ground
and put her hands around a dead plant and screamed at it to try harder,
she looked foolish and I loved her even more and joined her in screaming
at death, it made me feel Russian, and obstinate and eternal, all good things
to feel
That “screaming at death” makes the poem’s narrator “feel
Russian, and obstinate and eternal” could itself act as a review of this
collection. It’s a collection, after
all, that includes the line, “if this is the end, I have successfully / never
worn cargo pants.” Such levity in considering the specter of death is a
departure from Hicok’s previous book, 2010’s Words for Empty and Words for Full.
In that book’s section about the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech,
committed by one of Hicok’s students, Hicok turned a necessarily serious eye
towards life’s end. In Words’s “So I
know,” Hicok writes “You did not/do enough, I write to myself, about the
kid/who turned in writing about killing/a few buildings from where he killed.”
Such directness is absent in Elegy Owed’s absurd lyrics. The distinction stems from the books’
difference in how they approach death: in Words
for Empty, Words for Full Hicok writes of the tragedy of deaths that have occurred
and the question of whether anything could have been done to prevent them. In Elegy Owed, Hicok writes much of death
not yet happened, either his own or that of those close to him, which he finds
funnier because he knows he can do nothing to prevent it.
A particularly indicative example is the dazzling “To speak
somewhat figuratively for S,” which I will quote in full:
We went to the top of a building
to jump off.
She could no longer deal with
having been raped.
I was tired of falling asleep by
looking forward
to never waking again. It was a
perfect day
to watch a documentary on famous
parachute-
folding mistakes. Then we had a
final meal, final smoke,
final shower with the window open
and pigeons watching.
Are you sure you wouldn't rather
shoot the man
who did this, I asked, adding that
guns are easier to buy
than "get well soon or
whenever you want cards." Of course
I knew her mother would never
forgive her
if she shot her father. She'd have
to shoot her mother too,
which would anger her sister, also
raped, who'd wonder why
she didn't think of that herself.
The only time
they talked about it, they were
drunk on the steps
of our brownstone and throwing
peanuts at cabs
until one cab backed up and a man
got out
who was three feet tall but his
arms were eight feet long
and it was the arms that did the
talking. They ran.
A three-foot-tall man dragging
eight-foot-long arms
is an interesting nightmare to
watch run. They ran the whole night
together, all the way to Brooklyn
and bloody feet
and crying most of the way out and
laughing
most of the way back, I think
what's known as a bond
was formed. Still she wanted to
die and I wanted
to be with her, so we went up into
the winds
people don't realize are in love
with tall buildings
and debated a long time the
virtues of taking turns
or going as one by holding hands
and not shouting
Geronimo. I've often wondered why
people shout that
when they jump and not Ulysses or
Grover Cleveland,
I'm sure there's a reason like I'm
sure her father
could explain himself if she held
a knife to his dick.
We didn't jump—this is a poem—but
she's still raped
and I still wish I could
articulate the point
of breathing and her sister's
still fun to have around
because she juggles really well
and they lean
against each other in doorways
without knowing
they're the only two trees of a
very small forest,
in which I think of myself as a
wild animal
sheltered deep within their shade.
“To speak somewhat figuratively for S” demonstrates so much
of what makes reading Elegy Owed so
enjoyable. The plainness of the language paired with the seriousness of the
subject matter leads to more-complex-than-they-seem phrases like “She could no
longer deal with having been raped” and “I think what’s known as a bond/was
formed.” The dissonance between the
straightforward language and the tragic/comic subject finds a parallel in the
progression of the poem’s ideas: one of Hicok’s gifts is his ability to spin a
string of thoughts that shouldn’t make sense together but somehow do. This
poem, after all, includes parachute-folding mistakes, a short man with very
long arms, how winds are in love with tall buildings, and suicide, yet it never
doesn’t make sense.
In fact, “To speak somewhat figuratively for S.” is
surprising from its opening lines. The
scenario—two people walking to the top of a building to jump off—is shocking,
but also shocking in how straightforwardly it’s presented. There’s no
implication that this is an extraordinary act. Hicok accomplishes this feat of
obvious nonobviousness elsewhere in the collection: “A very small bible” begins
Jesus with amnesia walks
among the dead and wonders
why they don’t rise, at least
one of them, as he seems
to recall someone did
The reader has no time to get used to the idea of “Jesus
with amnesia;” the poem marches on, not indicating how ridiculous or unexpected
its own premise is. “Notes for a time capsule” opens, “The twig in. I’ll put
the twig that I carry in my pocket / and my pocket and my eye, my left
eye.” “Another holiday has come and gone”
begins: “It’s shoot-an-arrow / into-your-ceiling day, I’m out of arrows.” The way in which Hicok opens his poems by
presenting something extraordinary as ordinary creates a constantly surprising
reading landscape.
Yet poetry cannot live on surprising openings alone, and as
Hicok drives deeper into his poems they spiral into a world that’s clever, wry,
rooted in reality and absurd all at the same time: in short, Hicokian. Lines four through six of “To speak somewhat
figuratively for S.” demonstrate this: they begin in irony and progress to
something that’s half wisecrack, half elegy. Two characters prepare to commit
suicide on “a perfect day,” isolated by a line break. Then we realize they’ve watched “a
documentary on famous parachute-/folding mistakes.” Later, we see levity interrupted by menace
again as the poem’s “her” and her sister throw peanuts at cabs only to be
chased down the street by the ghoulish short man with 8-foot talking arms. In Hicok’s world, theirs is the attitude with
which we face death: “crying most of the way out and laughing/most of the way
back.”
Indeed, Hicok’s attitude towards death in this collection is
its most compelling feature. He seems to
dance around it, at times mournfully engaging with the idea, at others keeping
an ironic distance. The play is present
even in its titles: the collection has poems called “Elegy with lies,” “Elegy
to hunger,” “l ah g,” “You name this one,” “Elegy to unnamed sources,”
“Elegy’s,” and “Absence makes the heart. That’s it: absence makes the heart.,” Two
later poems, “Elegy ode” and the titular “Elegy owed” introduce a pun that
underlines Hicok’s shifting perspectives: are these elegies or odes? The presence of both modes allows Hicok to be
at once mournful and lyrical, elegiac and clever.
Again and again in the collection, the way out of the
problem of death is writing itself. The
final turn in “To speak somewhat figuratively for S.” is a clear example: “We
didn't jump—this is a poem.” In “l ah
g,” Hicok writes of “the dream / of the yellow pencil with which I wrote her
name / to keep it lithe in the body of cursive.” Often in Elegy
Owed, writing becomes embodied. In “Excerpts from mourning” Hicok writes of
“Wondering if I am inventing you/by remembering you or remembering you by
writing of you.” It’s as if he must write these poems to make sense of his
eventual death, and the deaths of those he loves. Yet the sense he makes
doesn’t make sense in any conventional sense. This is most clearly felt in “Sunny,
infinite chance of rain.” The poem
begins with the fear of some unnamed “her” dying: one of many instances in the
collection detailing the fear of losing a loved one. Midway through the poem,
Hicok presents yet another unobvious obviousness:
At
the funeral, she wore a tricycle being pushed by her father
when
she was five, her legs out to the side
Yet the next lines complicate and root the Hicok-reality to
actual-reality:
That’s only true
in this poem, like the cloud I’m looking at
Is
only true in the sky.
In
all other skies, this cloud is a lie.
It’s
about to rain, not in the poem but in the thinking
that
led to the poem,
the
poem that helped me recall
I
can still touch her entire body.
Ultimately, this is how Hicok anticipates and attempts to
cope with eventual loss: poems. Writing. Words. Fortunately for us, his words
are clever and almost always surprising, with a foot on either side of the
border between ironic and mournful. Though the truths of these poems may only
be true in these poems, there’s still truth in these poems.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
"A Poetics of Hiroshima" by William Heyen
“A Poetics of Hiroshima” by
William Heyen
Imperial Air Force pilot Sachio Ashida,
unable
to fly over the burning city to report
to his superiors what had happened to
it,
landed his plane, borrowed a bicycle,
& pedaled into it. He’d remember
a woman in front of her smoldering home,
a bucket on her arm. Inside the bucket
was a baby’s head. The woman’s daughter
had been killed when the bomb fell.
This is atrocity. You’ve just now descended
from a stanza wherein a baby’s head—
were its eyes open or closed?—was
carried
in a bucket by her mother.
An Imperial Air Force pilot stopped his
bike
in front of what had been her home.
I’ve wanted us to breathe ashes &
smoke,
but we cannot. This, too, is atrocity.
What’s true for me is probably true for
you:
I’m tired of trying to remember this.
Somewhere in Hiroshima the baby’s head
is dreaming, wordlessly. No, it is not—this, too,
is atrocity. Ashida went on
to live a long life. He felt the swing & weight
of that bucket on his arm. No,
he did not. He did.
He sometimes dreamed himself
pedaling backwards away
from that mother. I don’t know whether
he did or not. Meanwhile,
we rave about the necessity of a
jewel-center in every poem.
I’ve used a baby’s head
in a bucket on her mother’s arm. Whether
this is art, or in the hands of a master
could be, or whether
art is atrocity, or not, I’m sick of
being,
or trying to be, part of it, me
with my weak auxilliary verbs which
vitiate
the jewel-center, me
with my passives, my compromised
stanzaic integrity,
my use of the ambiguous “this”
which is atrocity. No, it is not. It is.
For years my old high school coach
visited my home
with dahlias in a bucket,
big red-purple & blue-purple heads
my wife & I floated in bowls on our
tables.
Have I no shame? This, too, this story
that evokes another, this narrative
rhyme, this sweet
concatenation of metaphor,
is atrocity. Coach fought on Iwo Jima
for ten days before & ten days after
the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi.
He returned there fifty years later,
brought me
a babyfood jar half-filled
with black sand from one volcanic blood-
soaked beach. He did.
But at Marine reunions,
he couldn’t locate any of his buddies
from his first outfit. No, he could not.
He once laid out on my desk aerial
photos of runways
the Japanese used to “wreak havoc”—his
words—
& said that hundreds of thousands of
GIs would have died
if HST had not given the order.
As a participant in necessary atrocity,
I agreed.
I still agree. But it doesn’t matter if I agree—
what matters is whether poetry itself
agrees. Incidentally,
Ashida was in training to become
a divine wind, a kamikaze.
1945. I was almost five. Col. Tibbets named
our Enola Gay for his mother.
The 6th of August. Our bomb, “Little Boy,” mushroomed
with the force of 15 kilotons of TNT.
“A harnessing of the basic power of the
universe,” said HST,
as though the universe were our
plowhorse.
In the woman’s home, her daughter was
beheaded.
I don’t know if Ashida learned exactly
how,
though we & the art of atrocity
would like to know.
In any case, what could this mother do?
She lifted her daughter’s head. She laid
it
in the aforementioned jewel-center.
She was not thinking of the basic power
of the universe.
Did she place oleander blossoms on her
baby’s face?
Did she enfold her daughter’s head in
silk, which rhymes with bucket,
& sick, & volcanic,
& wreak havoc? …
(Buckets appear often, as a matter of fact,
in the literature of exile, for example
in Irina Ratushinskaya’s prison memoir Gray
is the Color
of Hope—coal buckets & slop buckets,
ersatz food placed in what were toilet
buckets.
“Time to get up, woman. Empty your slop bucket.”
Irina drags her bucket daily to the cess
pit.
She doesn’t know if she can ever become
a mother.)
Ashida attained the highest black belt,
went on
to coach the American Olympic judo team.
He did.
I spoke with his daughter
at an event where I received a poetry
prize,
a check for a thousand George
Washingtons
& an etched glass compote
for a book on the Shoah. I said I once heard her father
lecture on Zen—the moon in the river,
River flowing by that is the world with
its agonies
while Moon remains in one place,
steadfast despite atrocity.
I remember that she seemed at ease,
she who had known her father
as I could never.
While teaching at the University of
Hawaii,
I visited Pearl Harbor three times,
launched out to the memorial
above the Arizona. Below us, the tomb
rusted away—a thousand sailors,
average age nineteen—for nature, too, is
atrocity,
atoms transformed within it, even
memory.
We tourists, some Japanese, watched
minnows
nibble at our leis.
No, we did not. This was my dream:
I knelt at a rail under a Japanese
officer with a sword,
but now there are too many stories for
poetic safety,
for stanzaic integrity—woman &
daughter,
Ashida at his lecture, my high school
coach carrying heads
of dahlias grown from bulbs
he’d kept in burlap to overwinter in his
cellar,
even persona Heyen at Pearl Harbor
bubbles of oil that still
iridesced the Pacific swells as
jewel-centers iridesce
our most anthologized villlanelles….
A bombing survivor said, “It’s like when
you burn a fish on the grill.”
I end my sixth line above with the word
“home.”
My first draft called it the woman’s
“house,” but home
evokes satisfaction, mmm, a
baby’s
contentment at the breast, the atrocity
of irony, & home hears itself
in arm, & bomb, & blossom,
& looks forward to shame &
tomb.
I cannot not tell a lie.
Apparently, I am not so disgusted with
atrocity
as I’d claimed to be—my atoms
to the mmm in time & come—for
closure,
as, out of the azure,
into the syntax of Hiroshima, “Little
Boy” plunges—
I’ve centered this poem both to mushroom
& crumble its edges—
& “Fat Man,” 21 kilotons of TNT,
will devastate Nagasaki. What is your history? Please don’t leave
without telling me. Believe me,
I’m grateful for your enabling
complicity.
I know by now you’ve heard my elegiac ē.
I hope your exiled mind has bucketed its
breath.
I seek to compose intellectual melody.
I fuse my fear with the idea of the
holy.
This is St. John’s cloud of unknowing
in me.
This is the Tao of affliction in me.
Don’t try telling me my poetry is not
both
beguiling & ugly.
“There was no escape except to the
river,” a survivor said.
but the river thronged with bodies.
Black rain started falling, covering
everything the survivors said.
I have no faith except in the half-life
of poetry.
I seek radiation’s rhythmic sublime.
I have no faith except in beauty.
I seek the nebulous ends of time.
This is the aria those cities have made
of me.
I hope my centered lines retain their
integrity.
I have no faith except in atrocity.
“A Poetics of
Hiroshima” previously appeared in Great River Review, in The Seventh
Quarry (Wales), and in A Poetics of Hiroshima (Wilkesbarre, PA:
Etruscan Press, 2008). Reprinted by permission of the author.
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Talking "A Concordance of Leaves" with Dee Perry, on NPR's "The Sound of Applause": Reading with Philip Terman at Mac's Backs This Saturday, August 17th, 7:30pm
I was grateful to get the chance to talk with Cleveland's own Dee Perry--longstanding supporter and promoter of the arts--on her NPR show "The Sound of Applause," about the recently-published A Concordance of Leaves, a book-length wedding poem and travel diary of a village in Palestine.
http://www.diodeeditions.com
Poet Philip Terman and I will be reading at Mac's Backs on Coventry this Saturday at 7:30, and talking Middle East peace.
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