Lorca at Sevilla By B.Z. Niditch

Lorca at Sevilla                                                    (B.Z. Niditch)

By B.Z. Niditch

March Street Press

Greensboro NC

Marchstreetpress.com

ISBN: 1-59661-169-3

65 pages

$9.00

Review by Dennis Daly

These poems by B.Z. Niditch roll in at you like ocean waves with the incoming tide, one after the other, inexorably, reinforcing the poet’s internal imagery with an insomniac’s edgy persistence. Even the cover portrait of Frederico Garcia Lorca is repeated as the title page and again appears after the table of contents.

As a matter of fact, one of the poems in this attractive book entitled Memory is printed twice, first on page 16 and then again on page 64. I suspect this is simply a production error. Nevertheless, the logic of printing this particular poem twice does make odd sense, given its title and context.

Many of the poetic images also repeat, but with different twists and varying impacts. In the poem, The Disappearance, an anonymous child vanishes along with all connections to civilization,

the child disappeared

as the lasting echo

trembled in the wind

she or he was

as anonymous

as war itself

a town vanished

along with

an empty room,

an unmade bed,

sunglasses…

Yes, the sunglasses especially; the smallest details of human life have vanished from the landscape. Not surprisingly, the very sex of the child is undetermined in this wartime mystery.

The persona in the poem Missing Person has taken to sleepwalking.  Madness has supplanted humanity as he looks forward to deal with the reality of death. Even the sirens of memory are powerless over this morbid meditation,

With sleepwalking

madness,

daily nightmares cut off

infantilized cries

of every motioning memory…

Under the Marquee uses memory as a time machine to deliver the human reality of seemingly past, but still anticipated, moments,

beneath an oversized dark sky

waiting up for you

expecting your flattery

to make us human

if memory holds up.

As in this poem, Dictation, memories dictate the future and sometimes the future is not very pleasant,

…the pitiable

are hungry and cold

among grim neighborhoods

the future is crowded

with written promises

of wretched memory

on stone tablets…

Another disappearance takes place in the poem Absentia,

Fixing his torn scarf,

clothing words

in an open notebook

for a season

of scattered winds,

he forgets the universe,

and disappears.

Sleeplessness, bemoaned throughout this book, finds eloquence in this poem called Sleepless Poet,

you taste

a murdered blood orange

in the cool air

trying to capture

the A.M.

after hours…

In Mondrian Niditch speaks of the insomnia of the painter as part of a way of life, almost necessary to his art,

your painting disguises

then reinvents

an edgy maze

on a blinded surface

with an orange wash

along Dutch parchment

reminding the marred canvas

of dismantled visions

in your sleepless limbs

shaped by solitude

and traces of reveries.

The fears, the secrecy, and again the anonymity are palpable in Niditch’s poem, Budapest. I like this poem a lot. It not only touches on his continuing themes but it seems to add depth to the collection as a whole.  Here shadows from before wartime proliferate. The “lumps of sugar” in the last stanza really work for me,

Since I cannot

wake you

our fears

are battlefields

of a distant green

and we like angels

fallen in to lumps of sugar

only speak gravely

when the matre d’ leaves

Off the Cape combines a number of marine images to make the conditional point of nature’s enmity to man.  Between the morning’s coldness, the impotence of sails, and the jelly fish I’m convinced. The reddened sun desiring my friendship doesn’t warm me up.

The last poem in the book, Waiting Room, is Niditch’s masterwork. Like a number of his nature poems it is set in winter, only this time inside a hospital perhaps. It is the opposite of claustrophobic. There are empty chairs, that feeling of absence again, corridors that go on and on, and mirrors. There are white walls inside and there is snow outside. A Dali green vase with dried flowers sits strangely there. The poem ends with drama,

wishing to escape

on any trolley,

with an apple croissant

when my initials are called.

There is no unscathed exit this time from that drab institutional universe.  Timing is everything. Niditch understands this and writes about it in this book as well as any poet I know.

Sophocles' Ajax A modern translation Dennis Daly

Sophocles' Ajax

A modern translation

Dennis Daly

Wilderness House Press 2012

ISBN 978-0-9827115-6-9

“Athena! How happy I am to hear

your voice. The voice which of all

the gods is dearest to me.”

In the year 1980, restoration of the Sistine Chapel was

painstakingly begun. The general and not so general

public was dismayed by the clarity, the bright simple

colors that appeared from underneath the patina. We, as

an audience, to the masters paintings, fresco, thought

the build-up of dirt and dust that lay on the surface of

the fresco, was intentional and that the artist Michelangelo,

intended the effect that was being viewed. Perhaps, one

might view it as a natural intention and that would then

result in the decline of the pigment originally painted.
Personally, I reveled in the clean, unearthed images

in wonderful coral and blue pigments.

Daly's translation is indeed modern, not contemporary, but

modern in relating an ancient story/play that was meant

to be read and heard by a then modern audience. We being

the modern audience can now read what was then modern:

“Odysseus

… “I am on the trail

Of Ajax, possessor of the seven-fold

Shield. I've been following him for hours.

Last night he carried out an incredible

Attack against us. Or at least we think

It was he. The facts at this point are still

Not very clear. I have offered to track down

The perpetrator of the deed and discover

His motive. This much we know: our Trojan spoils,

All of our cattle and sheep, were found

Butchered this morning...”

After the controversy of the restoration of the Sistine

ceiling was lain aside, tourists once again gazed at a

masterpiece, in the knowledge, that what was being

seen, was indeed, the original Michelangelo.

Can we ever know, truly, if  Sophocles meant what

any translation tries to translate? My criteria for any

given translation is, is that the story or the play I'm

reading, is relate-able to my present or past circumstances

or experiences or to my cultural experiences. The trans-

lation needs to relate to the culture at hand, otherwise it

become lost in translation:

“Odysseus

I know of none greater. He is

My enemy and I hate him, yet I

Pity him also for his helplessness

In the face of misfortune and the shame,

The awful shame he will feel. For this touches

My condition as well. Are we-all living

Beings-mere phantoms, a moment's shadow?”

Daly has cleared away all the debris that so often falls onto

translations, that has fallen onto so many ancient plays. In

the introduction to Ajax, Daly writes.... “In Ajax, madness

leads to shame and shame leads to self-knowledge and

nobility...”  We come to a better understanding of

Sophocles, and his intentions in Ajax, because of the translation.

An account of nobility after a long traverse into madness,

the characters emerge clean, refreshed in understanding

the human directives as well as the feminine, higher voice,

Athena, that the characters participate with. The readers will

revel in the clear language and hear their own voices:

“Teucer

...O brother, let me

Lift you off this accursed weapon

Which boasts even now of your stolen breathe.

Did you guess that Hector, although gone

Before you, would be the parent of this deed?

How strange the fortune of these two men!

With the same girdle that Ajax had given him,

Hector was dragged to death under the wheels

Of Achilles' chariot. And this hateful sword

On which Ajax fell and died was a gift

From Hector. Only a Fury could have forged

This blade! Only the grim artisan

Of Hades contrived that girdle! These things

Like all others which torment men's lives...”

We the reader are in view of a great masterpiece, un-

covered, after many long years in obscurity, uncovered

after being buried beneath scholarship and rhetoric,

we the general populace, now get the gift of being

able to participate in this passionate work of art:

“Chorus

The matter of life a man may see

And from it learn a wisdom.

But who has sight enough

To envision the future

Or perceive his own fate?”

Irene Koronas

Poetry Editor: Wilderness House Literary Review

Reviewer: Ibbetson Street Press

FOUND IN TRANSLATION: Emerson Reading Series Presents the Pains and Pleasures of the Impossible Art

FOUND IN TRANSLATION: Emerson Reading Series Presents

the Pains and Pleasures of the Impossible Art

by Michael T. Steffen

     The Bright Family Screening Room drew nearly a full house last evening (3/12) for The Art of Translation, an evening in the Spring 2012 Emerson College Reading Series. And for good reasons. The topic is inexhaustibly interesting, and the participants, all familiar to the reading public, were generous, insightful and engaging.

     Each of the panelists were bound to address the difficulties of translation—or, one step further, the impossibility of a foolproof translation respecting the original’s multiple texts (pretext, subtext, context, para-text…), its nuances along with its literal sense.

At the same time, each of them agreed the nail-biting, hair-pulling endeavor of making a best translation (poet Michael Palma said, “It takes a hell of a nerve to do this kind of thing”) was, and each of them used the word, “pleasurable.”

     We were privileged to listen to DAVID FERRY at first lull us with talk about the inevitable differences between Latin and English, their syntactic estrangements, anapests and trochees, iambs and whatnot, only to burst into a passionate reading of Horace’s 

“O navis, referent in mare te novi/fluctus, o quid agis!” (“O ship, o battered ship, the backward running waves/Are taking you out to sea again! O what to do?”)

     Ferry spoke of the importance of “hearing” the cadences of urgency in the original, lingering on the Latin “fluctus, o quid agis!,” and suggested how he found his English equivalent in the exclamatory voice.

     MICHAEL PALMA, who has won awards bringing modern Italian poets to readers of English as well as putting out a fully rimed translation of Dante’s Inferno, argued on behalf of the “poetry” of poetry, its musical qualities, its rhythms and resonances as being every bit as important as its images and literal meanings. Palma spoke of Robert Frost’s famous definition: “Poetry is what gets lost in translation”; yet held firm that “good translators are good poets first,” and citing the artistry of Richard Wilbur’s work in formal renditions of formal poems, commented that “a good translation must be able to stand as a good poem on its own.” He aptly illustrated his argument: When he paraphrases passages from Shakespeare for his students, they often ask him why Shakespeare hadn’t just written it out that way to begin with…

     What reaction would we have to Ariel’s song, “Full fathom five thy father lies/Of his bones are coral made/Those are pearls that were his eyes…” if it had been written out as—

                        Your father’s corpse is gathering coral

                        about 8 or so meters underwater off the coast

                        and his faded eyeballs look sort of like pearls… ?

PETER FILKINS, a poet and translator of poetry in his own right, brought variety to the evening by discussing his work translating the novels of H.G. Adler, and “the unseen, invisible problems of translation.” It was eye-opening to hear Filkins point out the difficult task of “developing a voice” and maintaining “a consistent sense of tone and meaning” throughout a long narrative, while respecting the speaker’s unique character and point of view. With his colleagues, Filkins agreed that translation is full of thorns, yet pointed out that the problems of translation in particular made it a pleasurable pursuit.

     SHEILA FISHER, a scholar and author on Medieval and Renaissance studies, including The Selected Canterbury Tales: A New Verse Translation, made the ironic admission that she “translated English into English.” It bothered her that Chaucer wasn’t getting as much attention in the classrooms as Shakespeare and Homer, believing this so due to the difficulties of Chaucer’s Middle English (“So pricketh hem Nature in hir corages”). Alone amid her panelists, it was Fisher’s task to keep the original as present as possible in the translation, which led her through no fewer quandaries. Yet like Filkins, Fisher revealed the delight she found in working such problems as “brood, a thikke knarre” out as “and broad, a thick-thewed thug.”

     Many young faces were among the audience at The Paramount Center, aspiring writers and creditable students who were told how good a tool translation is in developing their own sense of the possibilities of language. David Ferry, elsewhere, has commented that the impossibility of getting a translation right has led him to much closer readings of texts than he would have had otherwise. And Sheila Fisher spoke of the “zillion tiny choices” translation confronts the writer with.

     So the evening came—time flying in the fun we were having—to what seemed an abrupt halt. So much having been said, with so much left to say: the original referable dilemma of translation.

     The Emerson College Spring 2012 Reading Series concludes with a reading by the poet CARL PHILLIPS on April 11 at 6:00 p.m. It will be held in the Bright Family Screening Room, 4th floor at The Paramount Center, 559 Washington Street in Boston.

THE BOSTON NATIONAL POETRY MONTH FESTIVAL--April 28 to 29, 2012

                 ( Left--Harris Gardner-- Founder of Festival)
                  Right-Sam Cornish-Boston Poet Laureate)

                                                            

                                                         2012 

         THE  BOSTON NATIONAL POETRY MONTH  FESTIVAL

                      Now In Its Successful TWELFTH!!! Year

CO-SPONSORS:  Tapestry of Voices & Kaji Aso Studio in partnership with the Boston Public Library, SAVE the DATES: Saturday, April 28th 10:00 A.M.- 4:40 P.M. OPEN MIKE: 1:30 to 3:00P.M.; & Sunday, April 29th^th, 1:10 to 4:30P.M. The Festival will be held at the library’s main branch in Copley Square. FREE ADMISSION

56 Major  and Emerging poets will each do a ten minute reading; ALSO

Featuring 6 extraordinarily talented prize winning high school students: from Boston Latin High School; Boston Arts Academy. These student stars will open  the Festival at 10:00 A.M.  SAM CORNISH, Boston’s current and first Poet Laureate will open the formal part  of the Festival at 11:00 A.M. 55 additional major  and emerging poets will follow with a

                                              POETRY MARATHON

Some of the many  luminaries include SAM CORNISH, Richard Wollman ,Christine Casson, Dan Tobin, Alfred Nicol, Rhina Espaillat , Jennifer Barber, , Kathleen Spivack , Doug Holder, Elizabeth Doran, Charles Coe,  Kim Triedman,  Ryk McIntyre, January O’Neil ,  Regie O’Gibson, Kate Finnegan (Kaji Aso Studio), Victor Howes, Susan Donnelly, Jack Scully, Rene Schwiesow, Chad Parenteau,  Tomas O’Leary, CD Collins, Marc Goldfinger, Gloria Mindock, Tim Gager, Diana Saenz, Stuart Peterfreund, Valerie Lawson, Michael Brown, Mignon Ariel King, Tom Daley, Molly Lynn Watt, Ifeanyi Menkiti, Lainie Senechal, Harris Gardner, Joanna Nealon, Walter Howard,   Susan Donnelly, Zvi Sesling,  Irene Koronas, Fred Marchant, Danielle Legros Georges, Robert K. Johnson, Suzanne E. Berger, and a Plethora of other prize winning poets.

This Festival has it all: Professional published  poets, celebrities, numerous prize winners, student  participation, OPEN MIKE.

Even more, it is about community, neighborhoods, diversity, Boston, and Massachusetts. This popular tradition is one of the largest events in Boston’s Contribution to National Poetry Month.  FREE ADMISSION !!!

FOR INFORMATION: Tapestry of Voices: 617-306-9484

Library: 617-536-5400

Wheelchair accessible. Assistive listening devices available. To request a sign language interpreter, or for other special needs, call 617-536-7855(TTY) at least two weeks before the program date.                                              

A Perpetual Symphony: Review of Elegy for Everyone by Alfred Nicol

A Perpetual Symphony: Review of Elegy for Everyone

Review By Prema Bangera

Elegy for Everyone

Poems by Alfred Nicol

Prospero’s World Press, Inc.

Flushing, New York

ISBN 978-0-9822028-1-4

Seldom do we find a contemporary collection of poetry which makes us hold our hearts, oozing out raw and pure emotions. However, Alfred Nicol’s Elegy for Everyone does just that, with each poem exposing our everyday honest human expression. The complexity of each poem shadows and mirrors our soul, whether it’s about heartache, nostalgia, whimsical humor, etc. We are transcended into our own minds, facing the words which reflect our own demons, our forgotten smile, and our need for imagination. 

The book opens to a poem reflecting an ancient Greek myth of Artemis and Actaeon, properly titled "Actaeon, After." While reading this poem, we are suddenly captured within Actaeon's body, undergoing his transformation:

No harm has come to me; I am another, not myself.

I might have leapt and fled among the trees. I did as well 

by keeping still. The fleetest deer cannot outrun its senses.

Or how should I unsee what I had seen, or gather in 

what seeing had drawn out from me? My self went out from me.

Now I am the blurred thrum of startled wings, and now

the tremor of a single leaf, the seam of parted air.

At once bereft and blessed with more than everything I had—

to see as in a dream the one I dared not dream to see—

if I were but the shadow of a reed I would be glad.

The beauty in the narrator’s vision is so clear and vivid—we are drawn into the Actaeon’s transcendence.

Similarly, we are lost in quiet and exquisite sorrow of the change which occurs through an altering life in “The Mistress to Herself.” The narrator wonders about this waiting game she has been playing with her lover:

While I am held more tenderly

than I’ve been held by other men,

he does not say a word to me

that he might not take back again.

He’ll keep me on a pedestal

until he puts me on the shelf.

So I can either wait to fall

or I can come down by myself.

I don’t know whether to be sad

by holding on or letting go.

A little love is what I had.

It did not seem a little, though.

We are overcome with the complex hollowness the narrator feels while struggling with the love she carries and that which might be tossed. This poetic monologue transpires into a speech every soul holds, this longing to love and to be loved—this waiting of the inevitable ending of a complicated relationship.

In wandering for this passion, we are awakened to the fear of love—the struggle of its aftermath in “I Go Near Love.” The sheer touch of this passion is longed for, but also dreaded:

I go near love advisedly.

Someone is there, expecting me.

She may not be as mindful, though,

Of consequence we cannot know—

With loss the only certainty.

She pictures love a tranquil sea.

I know how cold its depths may be.

Love is a place I would not go:

I go near love,

Where, looking in her eyes, I see

The soft flame burning quietly,

And my brief wings beat to and fro

About that mesmerizing glow.

Though I may fly I am not free:

I go near love.

Here, it’s evident how haunting the past can be—how anxious we feel in finding and losing any sort of love. The grief of a loss consumes our being.

The mourning of any being in also found in “Elegy for Everyone.” This poem reaps the embodiment of our everyday lives, our everyday song:

It’s best to read the obituaries first.

Wonderful people die most every day,

people you may only in passing

but that was always true of everyone…

It’s best to read the obituaries first,

Before the news and sports. They’re better written.

It comes of knowing rules of composition,

especially Beginning Middle End.

Sister Joan was ninety-nine years old.

Her story’s got a lot of middle to it…

Only human doesn’t get things done,

not the things that matter. Only human

sends a check and gets a calendar.

Only human gets enthusiastic

now and then. It never lasts. So what.

The things that matter always take forever.

Only human hasn’t time for that.

We are in awe of how strangers’ death goes unnoticed and their story is always overlooked. However, this narrator chooses to examine the seldom unexamined mode of nature, knowing that every story has a lot of middle to be told.

In the book, Elegy for Everyone, Alfred Nicol’s poems touch upon every human emotion. When reading any single poem, we are overcome with empathy for the narrator while finding a sense of self within each line. Each poem reveals the truth of the human condition, how every exposed heart carries joyfulness, grief, affection, and failures.

    *****Prema Bangera, a native of India, moved to Massachusetts in 1994. As an avid explorer, she has lived in Bombay, Prague, Boston, Erie, Seattle and visited many other cities. She was named poet of the month by Boston Girl Guide. Her work has been published in Quick Fiction and forthcoming in Ibbetson Street and Bagel Bards Anthtology. She is also pursuing the realms of theater and visual arts.

Ibbetson Street Press Book Release: The Music Man of Terezin: The story of Rafael Schaechter

Release date: April 19, 2012 (Yom HaShoah)

LOOK FOR BOSTON-AREA BOOK RELEASE EVENT ON SUNDAY, APRIL 22

Available for Yom HaShoah events and book readings (no charge to synagogues):

SusieDavidsonJournalist@gmail.com

The Music Man of Terezin:

the story of Rafael Schaechter

 

As remembered by Edgar Krasa

By Susie Davidson

Illustrated by Fay Grajower

Rafael Schaechter was a composer, conductor and pianist who staged musical and theatrical productions with the inmates at Terezin, a unique concentration camp where the Nazis imprisoned many of Eastern Europe’s most talented artists and musicians. Under starvation conditions, they continued to create works, and the camp became a façade, a cultural showcase promoted by the Nazis to convey a false reality of how well they treated the Jews.

This new book by Susie Davidson is based on the recollections of Holocaust survivor Edgar Krasa of Newton, Mass., who was a member of Schaechter's choruses. Schaechter, whom Krasa refers to as “a psychologist without a degree,” was able to uplift the spirits of the doomed Terezin prisoners by teaching and involving them in various musical productions. He is best known for staging 15 performances of Verdi's Requiem at Terezin, with shrinking casts each time due to deportations. It was secretly a defiant act, produced under great risk. By singing the Requiem’s verses about the final judgment day to the Nazis, the prisoners were able to denounce their captors. When Schaechter was asked to stage a performance for the Nazis, their invited Nazi guests, and a contingent from the Red Cross, the head of the Council of Elders advised against it, because if the Nazis learned the secret about the lyrics, he could be hung, and the prisoners could all be deported. He persisted, however, and after telling the singers about this risk, they unanimously agreed to continue with the production. It was their final, successful act of defiance. Shortly thereafter, Rafael Schaechter was deported to Auschwitz, where he perished.

For more information or to arrange book readings and events,

please search for The Music Man of Terezin page on Facebook

( https://www.facebook.com/TheMusicManOfTerezinTheStoryOfRafaelSchaechter), or visit www.SusieD.com

ISBN 9780984661404

2012, Ibbetson Street Press, Somerville, Mass.

Edgar Krasa is a survivor of Terezin and other concentration camps. He is on the board of the Terezin Music Foundation, which has established a Krasa-Schaechter Commission Fund for young composers. He often speaks at schools and community venues. “When I speak at inner city schools, I emphasize racial hatred and highlight tolerance. To music-oriented audiences,  I speak about music as an instrument of resistance and defiance. For religious groups, I highlight the impact of the Holocaust on my faith at various stages of my life.”

Susie Davidson is a poet, journalist, author, and filmmaker who writes regularly for the Jewish Advocate, the Jewish Journal, the Jewish Daily Forward, JointMedia News Service and other media, and has contributed to the Jerusalem Post, the Boston Sunday Globe, and the Boston Herald. She is the Coordinator of the Boston chapter of The Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life and the Brookline (Mass.) Library Authors’ Collaborative.

Other books by Susie Davidson:

“I Refused to Die: Stories of Boston-Area Holocaust Survivors and Soldiers who Liberated the Concentration Camps of World War II” (2005)

“Jewish Life in Postwar Germany” (2006)

“Selected Poetry of Susie D”

“In Gratitude and Hope” (collection of remarks made by former German Consul to New England Wolfgang K. Vorwerk at area Holocaust community events, ed.) (2008)

 (All Ibbetson Street Press, Somerville).

Fay Grajower, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, studied at The School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and holds an M.A. in Studio Art from New York University. Her works have been featured in galleries and museums in cities throughout the U.S. and abroad including in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Wash, DC, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Florida, and in Germany, Poland and Israel. Her work has been exhibited at the Auschwitz Jewish Museum in Oswiecim, and in Poland at the Biblioteka Slaska in Katowice and the Czestochowa Museum. She was an artist-in-residence in Boca Raton, Florida; in Mitzpe Ramon, Israel; and in Erfurt, Germany. Her commissioned works include a painted sculpted glass dedicatory wall at the JCC of Wilmington, Delaware, a Holocaust Memorial Sculpture Installation at the B'nai Torah Congregation in Boca Raton, a Holocaust Memorial at the Young Israel of New Rochelle, New York, and an installation for The International Women's Research Center at Brandeis University.

Conversation Pieces: Selected Interviews: Eric Greinke

 

Conversation Pieces

Selected Interviews

Eric Greinke

Presa :S: Press

ISBN 97831251-6-7

2012   $15.95

“I think there may be magic hiding beneath what

we normally consider the mundane. I think poetry

has a unique power to penetrate, to open doors of

perception into a deeper, more wholistic vision.”

Within the five interviews selected for publication, Eric Greinke

gives the reader a glimpse of how the small press works and it's

history as it relates to Greinke's involvement many years ago:

“Pilot Press began as a conscious effort to market

our writings...as we settled into it we centered on

those aspects of the art which we saw as having the

greatest moral value and aesthetic clarity.”

Each interview lends to an overall look-see at the poet

as publisher and writer.  Greinke journeys the reader

from beginning to the present day and his current,

Presa :S: Press success. His devotion and energy to the

poetic community is astounding and deserves praise:

“The small press today continues to be where the pure

poetry is published,...there is no way to become an

instant poet...MFA programs insulate students from

the struggle of real life to a degree, & also tend to

over-analyze & intellectualize what is essentially

a non-rational, creative process.”

Greinke tells us about his writing life as well as the

publishing life of a poet. What Greinke speaks about

applies now and will always apply because he is a

principled poet with a commitment to the community.

“In 'The Broken Lock,' the doors of perception opened...

I think one can approach poetry from either inside-out

or outside-in. The result is fundamentally the same.”

“The creative process is exciting to me and sustains

my interest as a means of transcendentalism. The more

I practice Zen self-discipline, the more naturally it flows.”

Irene Koronas

Poetry Editor:

Wilderness House Literary Review

Reviewer:

Ibbetson Street Press

Bernard Horn: A Poet and Professor Who Brings Us Our ‘Daily Words’

Bernard Horn: A Poet and Professor Who Brings Us Our ‘Daily Words’

Interview with Doug Holder

  Bernard Horn is the author of the award-winning poetry collection “Our Daily Words.” This English professor at Framingham State University in Massachusetts has had his work praised by the likes of Robert Pinsky,  and David Mamet. Irene Koronas, a reviewer for the online journal  “Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene” wrote of his work:

 “ We read each poem in the collection, because, it considers how far we dig to find a complete sentence, one that holds the earth, our experience, our dreams, then when the sentence ends, we feel complete, and only in a poem lies our daily refreshment.”

 Horn'S poems and translations are widely published, in such journals as “The Manhattan Review,” “The New Yorker,” “ The Worcester Review,” and others. Horn has taught at Haifa University in Israel and at the Radcliffe Seminars at Harvard University. I spoke with him on my Somerville Community Access TV Show “ Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder:  "Our Daily Words" is your first poetry collection and you have had a long and distinguished career. What took you so long?

Bernard Horn: I have been writing for a long time--it's a matter of the market. I have been in writing groups with people for years and I have been sending out poems for many years. I am slow at writing poems. It is a longtime between how a poem ends and begins, not to mention all my teaching and family responsibilities that takes away from writing time. However I get material from my family. A lot of my poems are about family. I have written a number of poems in the middle of family chaos.

DH: Your wife is an artist and recently retired from teaching at Endicott College. Does your work compliment or overlap each other?

BH: We just had a joint presentation.  A bunch of my poems were written in 2001 in Israel when I was teaching at Haifa University. At the time my wife ( Linda Klein) was doing these small gouache paintings. My poems dealt with terrorism--with the Second Intifada--as it was known. We didn't think there was a relationship between her paintings and my poems. But after looking closely at them I realized gouache looks like you are looking through a screen or veil at an object on the other side.  Sometimes it looks like you are looking through  barbed wire. I realized that even though I knew Israel fairly well, I was still looking at i through the 'veil' of being an American. Later we put these images in my poetry collection. We had a joint exhibit at the Marblehead Public Library. This was the first time we did this.

  Both my wife and I know as a painter and a poet respectively, that the moods we go through don't necessarily have to do with the ot her person. It is a valuable thing to know in a relationship.

DH: In your new collection you have a poem titled " The Smell of Time." As soon as I smell ethnic food like gefilte fish, I am transported back in time to the early 60's when I was a boy at my grandmother's house in the Bronx.  I wonder, if one doesn't have a sense of smell, could one still be a good poet?

BH: That's a terrific question. Memory is so bound up with smell. And my poems are so dense with memory. It is such a powerful thing--and at times more than anything else it tells you time passes. Place and memory are just as important; so it is a hard question to answer.

DH: You seem to work hard to find that sentence that captures our dreams, our experience,... our essence.

BH:  I am always taken with the power of a sentence rolling forward. It is a memory of a sensation, on top of a thought.

DH: You have translated poems of the famous Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. I read in an interview in The Paris Review with Yehuda that he believes all poetry is political. Poems are human responses to reality and politics is part of reality.

BH: I agree. There is a pressure in politics. When I was in Israel my poems were taking in the issue of terrorism. Then I found it hard to write my own poetry. What happens if you are writing during a time of terrorism people always call on you for solidarity. A place of solidarity--it is not a quiet place-it can be a very hard place to write in.

DH: You started out as a chemical engineering student at MIT, but you ended up as a PhD in Literature. How did you get to point A to point B?

BH: Well I think people who knew me were less surprised than anyone else. You just didn't major in the humanities at MIT. A friend's theory is that anyone who came of age during Sputnik--and were in sort of the middle between the humanities and the sciences chose the sciences.

This was in the early 60's, and I started out as a chemical engineer in West Texas. I tied to imagine myself in this job 10 years in the future. I couldn't. The rest is history.

To My Wife

Some times
when we grab an hour of love
luxuriously in the late afternoon,
the growly baby snoring in the next room,v her sisters at the mall,
I feel as if I'm robbing the gods, who have,
some say, all the time in the world.

--Bernard Horn

How Are Ya' Charlie? By Doug Holder

 


                                          Kevin White

                                            Jerry Williams       



I used to listen to the late Jerry Williams on Talk Radio years ago. I was fairly new to Boston, and Williams gave me his unique take on the city and all its colorful players. On many of his shows he would do this parody of Mayor Kevin White's decidedly strong Boston accent. Williams shouted over the air " How are ya' Charlie!" with a very pronounced emphasis on the "rs"--if you know what I mean. I thought at the time that White couldn't possibly sound like this--Williams was just trying to get his ratings up with this cornball sketch. So one evening while strolling down Charles St. on the foot of Beacon Hill I head a voice behind me sounding very much like the one I heard on the radio: " How are ya' Charlie!" I figured it was Jerry Williams doing his shtick on the damp cobblestone sidewalk. I turned around and it was the Mayor himself , in all his glory, calling to a friend in the distance. I never doubted Williams again--I can tell you that!

Doug Holder/ Somerville, Mass.