40---> déborah & la fêlure par laquelle la lumière peut entrer

Prénom, Nom: Déborah Aboab

Ville natale: Aix en Provence, France

Ville actuelle: Paris

Travail: Enseignante

Âge: 45

Qu'est-ce que signifie, pour vous, la poésie? Un espace de liberté, la fêlure par laquelle la lumière peut entrer. (1)

Poète préféré/ poème préféré: Impossible de répondre par un seul nom….. Guillaume Apollinaire, René Char, Saint-John Perse, Henri Michaux, Robert Desnos….

Pourquoi aimez-vous ces poètes? Pour leur foi en une réalité …. poétique ! (2)

________________________________________________________________

Traduit du français par Carrie Chappell/ Translated from French to English by Carrie Chappell

(1) A space of freedom, the crack through which light can enter.

(2) For their faith in a reality...poetic!

39---> jean philippe & giovanni

Prénom, Nom: Jean-Philippe Sarcos

Ville natale: Saint-Denis sur l'Ile de la Réunion, France

Ville actuelle: Paris

Travail:  Fondateur et directeur artistique du chœur et de l’orchestre Le Palais royal

Âge: 52 ans

Qu'est-ce qui signifie, pour vous, la poésie?

La poésie est une fenêtre qui nous permet de voir, de comprendre et d'aimer le monde en prenant de la distance, de la hauteur. On ressent le monde d'un autre point de vue. (1)

Poète préféré/ poème préféré:

« Sous le porche des Rois » par d'André Giovanni (sonnet écrit en 1986) (2)

Sous le Porche des Rois

Ô combien j’ai de peine à voir languir ma France,

Paysages si doux sous des soleils si bleus,

Quand les nuages vont tissant le lin des cieux,

Au fil des belles eaux d’où les iris s’élancent.

Comme j’ai du chagrin que soient fauchées les lances

Qui se levaient aux poings de nos chevaliers preux

Dont l’image n’est plus que dans les livres vieux

Aux fermoirs entrouverts sur l’or de nos enfances.

Ô douleur de t’aimer quand tu ne t’aimes plus,

Quand les fleurs et les fruits sont jetés au talus,

Quand le vin que tu bois n’est plus de tes vendanges.

Tu ne sais plus ton nom, tu cries : « Ce n’est pas moi ! »

Pourtant dans les jours gris j’ai vu sourire un ange

A Reims il t’attendait sous le Porche des Rois.

—André Giovanni

(3)

Pourquoi aimez-vous ce poète/ce poème?

J'aime ce poème et ce poète parce qu'il me parle de l'essentiel. De l'essentiel pour moi, aujourd'hui, dans mon pays, avec les personnes que je côtoie chaque jour. Il est sensible et plein d'espérance. (4)

________________________________________

Traduit du français par Carrie Chappell / Translated from French to English by Carrie Chappell 

(1) Poetry is a window that allows us to see, understand, and love the world by giving us distance and height. We feel the world from another perspective.  

(2) "Under the Porch of Kings" by André Giovanni (sonnet, written in 1986)

(3) Under the Porch of Kings*

O how I hurt me to see my France grow weak,

Landscapes so sweet under suns so blue,

Where clouds go weaving the flax from the heavens,

Over the beautiful waters where irises soar. 

As I grieve over the mowed spears

That once rose to the fists of our knights

Whose image now lives only in old books,

In the gold clasps left ajar of our childhood.

O pain to love you when you love yourself no more,

When flowers and fruits are tossed to the banks,

When the wine you drink is no longer from my harvest.

You no longer know your name, you cry, "That's not me!"

Yet, in the gray days, I saw an angel smile

In Reims; she was waiting for you under the porch of kings. 

—André Giovanni

*(dans le but de garder le sens linguistique du texte, le traducteur a choisi de ne pas maintenir le schéma rimique et l'alexandrin du sonnet original. elle est consciente que la perte de la musique et du mètre dénature l'esprit original du poème. / in an effort to keep the linguistic meaning of the text, the translator chose to not maintain the rhyme scheme and alexandrine of the original sonnet. she recognizes that the loss of sound and meter distorts the original spirit of the poem.)

(4) I like this poem and this poet because he speaks of the essentials. What is essential for me, today, in my country, with the people that I stand next to each day. It is sensitive and full of hope. 

38---> sara & woloch

I’m not going to lie—I found out about Cecilia Woloch precisely because I was asked to contribute to Verse of April and on top of that the 20th anniversary of National Poetry Month. I had poets on my mind and spotted her work on a billboard in West L.A., the country of billboards. I’d like to say I had known of her for ages, heard of her “first,” or I was there at the start. But, nah, I just discovered her work a few weeks ago. And, how incredibly glad I am that I did.

“Postcard to I. Kaminsky from a Dream at the Edge of the Sea,” in its original form, is a prose poem. There is a precision to this piece that takes up little space, the size of a postcard, but also manages to encompass an epic sweep of time and movement, the external shift of relocation matched with the internal shift of, emotionally, coming full circle.

The narrator of the poem moves with his or her love, and there is a sense that this is not so much of a plotted and planned move as an attempt to run away to something or someplace better “leaving a country of rain for a country of apples. I hadn’t/ much time. I told my beloved to wear his bathrobe.”

It is also a doomed attempt (as most attempts to run away always are), since s/he packs her “own bags were full of salt, which made them shifty, hard to/ lift”. Like Lot’s wife, s/he needn’t look back. The figurative baggage is the literal baggage of the “country of rain”, moving with the pair to the fantasy place, “a country of apples” which will, of course, “fatten and fall”.

If I get hung up on that one word, “fall,” it is easy to read this as some sort of attempt to return to Eden, an unblemished state prior to gaining knowledge. The poem, in that way, evoked in me the emotional memory of a train trip I had taken last summer, from L.A. up the coast of California, through Oregon and on up to Seattle, traveling the “edge of the sea” through Washington state, the “country of apples.”

The video is mainly footage I shot on the train with my phone. If I am being honest, depression (a general feeling of doom compounded by a sense of nostalgia that I get whenever I stay put for too long) fueled the trip. I hoped for a reprieve, to feel a little moment of escapism in the movement of the train. Despite the fact that I had run out of running-away-type-moves at least a decade ago and realized that a vacation will never be the same as a grand exit. I wanted to get some distance from a one-sided relationship and see friends living in Seattle. But, I also wanted to see the land, and I wanted to rekindle the sense open road freedom I once had when I bounced around cities and states. The kind of escapism that stops working when the force of your life experience is no longer light enough to carry easily, bags get full of salt, shifty and heavy to lift. When you know, as fact, that the place ran to will always become the place left, and there are no more pre-fall moments of ignorance of that fact. But, that beginning, the sense of liberty that comes just from sheer physical momentum of travel, a train rocking, it compels like the deliverance to rewrite, even if only while traveling, any scripts that have become concrete.

I don’t believe that Woloch wrote a love poem to a person here, though there is a failed relationship at the heart of it. To me it ultimately becomes a love poem to land, to the “country that rose up to/ meet me [that] was steep as a mirror, the gold hook gleamed.”

Sara Paul is a writer and college English instructor living in Los Angeles. She owns a pair of happily bonded finches of mismatched breed but has yet to keep a fern alive. 

37---> anna & poetry in public

Every morning from approximately 7:25 to 7:31, I shiver at the corner of East Court and Terrace Street and wait silently beside unmet neighbors to step onto the Iowa City bus, receive a satisfying beep-greeting from the bus-pass-reading machine, and cramp myself and my bags into a seat next to another unmet neighbor.  Approximately sixteen minutes later the bus drops me off at Stop 7202, a stop sign at the bottom of the bluff of the Iowa River, a five-minute walk from my destination—the English-Philosophy Building—where I will teach a group of tired freshmen how to write and speak in college.

On this morning's sixteen-minute ride I was thinking, possibly for the hundredth time, what I could possibly submit to the Verse of April collection to which my dazzling poet sister-in-law generously invited me to contribute.  A Ph.D. student in English, I've been thinking a lot about questions like this lately: in what meaningful ways can I, a "critic," contribute in the artistic circles that feel so powerful, so moving to me?  When and why did the relationship between art and criticism become so divided?  Why does scholarship about literature often feel so disconnected from the art and craft of literature itself?  Why does what I do on a daily basis not feel more like art?  I want it to feel more like art.

Anyway, as I was sitting next to a reading stranger-neighbor on the bus, having this familiar conversation with myself in my head, I looked up and found my poem.  It was posted above the windows of the bus, discrete among the local business ads and rules for bus decorum that no one seems to notice. 

"Love that Dog" by Britney Jones

"Love That Dog" by Brittney Jones, a 13-year-old 6th-grader at Robert Lucas Elementary, is apparently part of a program Iowa City does called "Poetry in Public." The poem reads:

Love that dog like a cat, love to jump,

I said I love that dog, like a cat loves to jump,

I call him at night, "Hey there, Boy."

I think this poem spoke to me in this moment for several reasons.  First, it was written by a child of this City of Literature who hasn't yet encountered such complicating ideas about what art should or shouldn't be, can or can't be—these complicating ideas that I, for reasons that seem distant to me right now—came back to school to study?  

Also, it's got an attitude and an elusiveness to it that I really enjoy:

"Love that dog like a cat."  

Does she mean she loves that dog like a cat would?  Or is it that she loves that dog like she loves cats?  Maybe she's saying that the dog she loves is himself like a cat: "Love that dog-like-a-cat."  And also it's "that" dog.  We're supposed to already know him.  

Then, after "Love that dog like a cat," there's "love to jump."  

Does she love to jump?  Is this line a list of the things Brittney loves, which include "that" dog and "to jump"?  

There's a sassiness about it, especially in the ahem-excuse-me-LISTEN-to-me moment of the second line that, in my head, sounds like: 

"I said I love that dog! Like a cat loves to jump!" 

I love the world this poet lives in in which everybody knows that cats love to jump.

It seems to me like this sassy Brittney couldn't care less about what art should or shouldn't be—she just needs to speak her truth about that dog, about that cat that loves to jump. She needs to tell us that, at night, she calls that dog just to say "Hey there, Boy."  

The last reason I love this poem is just that it was there.  Hiding in that capsule of politely cramped neighbors bundling lunch bags, briefcases, their workdays in their laps, "Love That Dog" is shouting above the screeching of brakes, the beeping of passes, the groaning of the engine.  Poetry in public.  Hey there, Boy.

Anna Williams, MA, ABD, is finishing the third year of her doctorate program in English at the University of Iowa.  She lives with her husband (Joseph) and two cats (Louis and Clawdette), and she misses the Spanish moss and oysters of her Alabama homeland. 

36---> maurice & clifton

Growing up inside the patriarchy as a cis-gender male, the world taught me to objectify women and girls. This despite the fact that my favorite people were the women responsible for much of my upbringing, my mother and grandmother. When I listened to hip hop, the view of women was either derogatory or, at best, patronizing. TV commercials and movies featured women only as secondary characters as window dressing to the male gaze. I’ve been a musician my whole life. Somewhere, I learned to compare the hips of a woman to the pleasurably curvilinear shape of the instruments I played: the violins, basses, and guitars. Generally, the world had a difficult time passing the Bechdel Test. So did I. The world told me to see my sisters from the outside in. So I did.

Then one day, well into adulthood, I came across Lucille Clifton’s “homage to my hips.” I’d spent my life as an objectifier without realizing it. In the way that only a wonderful poem can, Ms. Clifton’s poem rearranged the furnishings of my mind. All of a sudden, I understood what I was missing, the great chasm between us (men) and them (women) was self-created, non-existent, the product of a failure to care. “Hips” was a declaration of agency in a strong, clear, voice. The connection between the strong women I admired and the countless women I failed to see. Clifton cut through my fog and allowed me to understand the object was actually the subject, the protagonist of her own story, and probably much more interesting than me.

“these hips are mighty hips.

these hips are magic hips.

i have known them

to put a spell on a man and

spin him like a top”

Photo by Che Yeun

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is a graduate of the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop and a member of the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance and the Melanated Writers Collective. Some of his work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Callaloo, Massachusetts Review, The Pinch Journal, The Knicknackery, Scars: An Anthology, and Unfathomable City: a New Orleans atlas edited by Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedecker. Maurice has work forthcoming in AGNI, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Situate Magazine. He is the winner of the 2014 Iowa Review Fiction Award, the 2014 So to Speak Journal Short Story Award and the 2014 William Faulkner Competition for Novel in Progress. Maurice was the recipient of the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop thesis prize in 2013 and the Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2015.

35---> cristina & bécquer

Name: Cristina Isabel Bardales Postigo

Hometown: Caracas, Venezuela

Current City: Paris

Occupation: Architect

Age: 34

What does poetry mean to you?

Poetry is an art form that charges itself to convey beauty using a particular medium: the word. The difficulty of poetry comes precisely with its choice of tool, dare I say this “vernacular tool” that humans have learned and manipulated since the beginning of our first organized human groups thousands of years ago. Our civilizations depend on the word. This doesn’t happen as much with the tools of other artistic expressions, like music or painting, where a specialized learning, a "savoir-faire" and even objects are necessary to begin the work of the art. Poetry, then for me, is a “natural” art that shares a similar level with singing, where we also see the voice as deliverer.

Favorite Poem:

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s “No digais que agotado”

Why do you like this poem?

It’s a poem about poetry, about art, about the moments that create poems. This poem works as a symbol of hope, or is it the reverse? It is a question about art that motivates me in various aspects of life, and I like to think of it with Becquer’s poem.

34---> thi minh trang & cendrars

Name: Thi Minh Trang Nguyen
Hometown: Hanoi, Vietnam
Current City: Paris
Occupation: Student and Creative Director of her own life

What does poetry mean to you?

Poetry is a special art form, literature that keeps you skipping a line to make your heart skip a beat. It’s also a soul connection built by a limited numbers of words, rhythm and metaphors.

Favorite Poem:

Blaise Cendrars’s  « Tu es plus belle que le ciel et la mer ». This poem reads like an intimate letter addressed to everyone, a letter in which the poet profoundly embraces the feeling of being alive, the joy of travelling around the world, the courage of stepping outside of your comfort zone to live all the adventures, to take all the risks and to live life to the fullest. 

Why do you like this poem?

Cendrars's subject is not new, but the way he conveys his love of life in this poem is distinctively impressive. The poem is a mix of tenderness and action, of nature and humanity, of the outside and the inside, of you and me.

Travelling is, in fact, a trade off between staying safe and taking risks. But the opportunities in travel are far more worth the sacrifice. Knowing that the world has so much to offer, you just go out there, just “know, sing, run, eat, drink, whistle and learn to travel”. “Just breath! Just walk! Just go!” 

Because you love the world and the world definitely, has been, still, and will love you back. 

It makes me think of the risk of travelling, as sometimes you have to pay the price of your own precious life. But even if you die, even if the risk is that big, would it be worth taking? Would you rather live a joyful adventurous short life rather or cope with the boredom of a life in which you feel lethargic and uneasy in the struggle with desire to step outside of your fears, especially when it’s breathtakingly beautiful out there?

"Tu es plus belle que le ciel et la mer" de Blaise Cendrars

Quand tu aimes il faut partir
Quitte ta femme quitte ton enfant
Quitte ton ami quitte ton amie
Quitte ton amante quitte ton amant
Quand tu aimes il faut partir

Le monde est plein de nègres et de négresses
Des femmes des hommes des hommes des femmes
Regarde les beaux magasins
Ce fiacre cet homme cette femme ce fiacre
Et toutes les belles marchandises

II y a l’air il y a le vent
Les montagnes l’eau le ciel la terre
Les enfants les animaux
Les plantes et le charbon de terre

Apprends à vendre à acheter à revendre
Donne prends donne prends

Quand tu aimes il faut savoir
Chanter courir manger boire
Siffler
Et apprendre à travailler

Quand tu aimes il faut partir
Ne larmoie pas en souriant
Ne te niche pas entre deux seins
Respire marche pars va-t’en

Je prends mon bain et je regarde
Je vois la bouche que je connais
La main la jambe l’œil
Je prends mon bain et je regarde

Le monde entier est toujours là
La vie pleine de choses surprenantes
Je sors de la pharmacie
Je descends juste de la bascule
Je pèse mes 80 kilos
Je t’aime

33---> jennifer & baus

In Eric Baus' poems, everything speaks. Baus renders the distinctions between animate and inanimate, human and animal, irrelevant. Sugar "suffers" as it dissolves in a glass of water. A shark preserved in a mason jar can still be "scared." Selves, never fixed, perform multiple transformations, often in a single poem. 

Baus’ willingness to embrace these fluid selves draws me to his work again and again. There’s a space for me—genderqueer, resisting taxonomy—in these poems.

Because I’m fascinated by the sisters-who-are-also-birds in Baus’ debut collection, The To Sound, I’ve written an imitation of his poem “[I was thinking birds with extremely long necks].” In it, my speaker finds out they have a “secret sister” in the form of an intracranial teratoma. 

When Justine Imagines Her Intracranial Teratoma as an Evil Twin*

by Jennifer Hanks

When Justine Imagines Her Intracranial Teratoma as an Evil Twin*

she irritates her body's                  a ball of moss                                  leaking

"gag reflex"                           tucked inside her                quail spittle

Misplaced

in her brain                             it became as human as it could

                                                you're looking toothy                      shiny sister

                                                creased portrait

a spongy locket        of brain tissue                               

tending your germ layers                           a tiny, terrible

misunderstanding

she wishes for ring fingers                                                the marzipan homunculus

sharp as paring knives                                                       shaved to almond slivers             

Instead the sister parts                            

fine, downy hair

                exposes a single           lash-cloaked          eye.       

*Throughout, language is taken from the Guardian article "Teratomas: the tumours that can transform into 'evil twins'" by Aarathi Prasa.

Jennifer Hanks is the author of Prophet Fever (Hyacinth Girl Press). They were a finalist for Heavy Feather Review's Double Take Poetry Prize, judged by Dorothea Lasky, and have two chapbooks, gar child (Tree Light Books) and Ghost Skin (Porkbelly Press), forthcoming in 2016. Their poetry and nonfiction appear or are forthcoming in Arcadia, Gigantic Sequins, Bone Bouquet, HOUSEGUEST, and elsewhere. An associate editor for Sundress Publications, they live in New Orleans with their fiancée and tweet @corsetofscales. 

32---> aran & kalytiak davis

Name: Aran Donovan

City: New Orleans, LA

Occupation: Bookslinger

What does poetry mean to you? 

Poetry is the dancehall where it all goes down.

Favorite Poet/Poem: 

Let’s go with Olena Kalytiak Davis. This poem: “sweet reader, flannelled and tulled.”

Why do you like this poet/poem?

I like Davis’s frank, wonky address. Her love of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Reading her reminds me of the possibilities in poems. Reminds me to stop being such a fuddy duddy and have fun.

Additional poetry loves—

I also love Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires. Anne Carson. John Berryman’s Dream Songs or Sonnets to Chris. Carrie Fountain.

Bonus: Poetry challenge! Memorize a poem this month! Go proselytize with some choice verses. Convert someone! Try Philip Larkin’s “This be the verse.”

31---> daniel & the elusive nature of poetry

Poetry has always eluded me.

When I was in college, I was in a tutorial that devoted a whole semester to Matsuo Basho’s haiku travelogue The Narrow Road to the Deep North. There were only three of us in the course, and we had a graduate assistant and two professors guiding us, so it wasn’t the kind of class where you could hide. 

I actually did all the reading, and I’m relatively sure my classmates did as well, but our responses must have been lukewarm because one week the professor paused the class and said, “I think you should all take another week and really read the text.” 

Which I did. Yet I still remember very little from it. Perhaps it was something about the translation. Perhaps it was my attention span at the time or the fact that I was more interested in modern Japanese fiction, but even when I did remember the content, the deeper meaning and implication behind the text felt just out of reach.

Thirteen years later the only thing that remains with me from that course is a single haiku:

石山の石より白し秋の風

Ishiyama no ishi yori shiroshi aki no kaze

Whiter still than the stone white of Stone Mountain, the autumn wind

The seasonal reference makes it a haiku, but the grammatical simplicity helped me quickly grasp the meaning, and more than anything the sound of the poem became an ear worm and nestled its way into my longterm memory. The repetition of the shi sound in the first two lines sandwiching the y-sounds, and subsequent absence of either in the third…it’s tantalizing. It almost feels like a disservice translating it into English.

Thus, despite being a Japanese literature major, this poem and Basho’s classic frog poem are the only ones I can recite from memory. But maybe this is the lesson about poetry I needed at the time and never realized, the reason why it’s so elusive to me: I’d been thinking about it too seriously, and in the end, it’s simply this—poetry = meaning + sound.

Yet this equation has a third side: poetry = meaning + sound = ___. The third side of the equation is not always balanced. It may be trite to say, but poetry is greater than a sum of its parts. It strives for something more. Basho captures a sense of the cutting autumn wind in this poem, associated with a specific location but also eternal and universal.

Deeper study can also improve understanding and enjoyment of poetry…and perhaps that’s also what I lacked at the time. For more on Japanese poetry, I recommend Ad Blankestijn’s blog Japan Navigator. Ad is currently blogging and translating his way through Hyakunin isshu, one of Japan’s most popular collections of poetry.

Daniel Morales is a writer and translator living in Chicago. He blogs about the Japanese language at How to Japanese (howtojapanese.com) and is a regular contributor to The Japan Times.

30---> deb & willem thies

Name: Debora van der Vliet

City: Amsterdam

Occupation: Visual Artist and Illustrator

The work "We melt into one" reflects on what fascinates me in poetry.  The interplay and, at the same time, the clashes that take place. It is a work in which sense, metaphor and symbolism play a big role; topics frequently visited in poetry. I think poetry makes great use of symbols through allusions which make metaphors come alive in many instances. This work reflects on the struggle between two strong emotions that takes place inside myself, and —I believe— in all of us. The constant choice between good and evil, positive and negative, both attracting, eliminating, and strengthening one another.

Reading poetry inspires me to look at the world from a different perspective, discover new metaphors and go along in the observational power of the poet. Instead of presenting facts, poetry presents symbolic connections, leaving the reader to draw his own conclusions and discover for himself what the poem is about. I try to incorporate this ‘abstraction’ into my own work as well, leaving the viewer to draw his own conclusions and discover a personal message in my collages.

The titles I give to my works are meant to create a certain atmosphere for the viewer. Each title serves to draw the viewer in, but not spoil the ‘story’ I personally had in mind when creating the work, thus letting the viewer discover his own. Art forms are combined, one illuminating the other and requiring the use of multiple senses. 

Favorite poem

Tegenslag
by Willem Thies

de korst op de wond wil maar geen huid
worden ik krab eraan en de korst blijkt
de kop van een spijkertje dat moet gebeurd
zijn toen ik ruim twee weken geleden die
sliding inzette en tegen dat hekwerk

ik werp een bus deodorant in het kampvuur
wat een teleurstellende steekvlam geeft

heb ik dáárvoor mijn kop onder de koude kraan gestoken?

toch flipt de gastheer fuck hem
en mijn vriendin is mijn vriendin niet meer
ze stinkt naar leugens en cigarillos
en doet ad infinitum auditie voor de rol van femme fatale
ze komt nooit verder dan de eerste ronde

dear poet survive by kelly jones

About the collage and process: The base image is a picture of a graffiti-ed hotel wall in a ghost town somewhere between San Diego, CA, and Roswell, NM. I was living in a van with my partner at the time. We were rootless then, just following the heat and sun away from the Pacific NW. We spent months visiting friends, exploring the country, and sleeping in state parks or truck stops. Having recently finished college and having passed up a full time literary job in favor of pursuing dreams and excitement, this message of survival that I stumbled upon in the desert spoke to me. I suppose it still does; all poets could use a bit of encouragement from time to time. Like poetry, the process of creating the collage is a bit muddled and layered for me. The idea of survival, especially when rootless and facing obstacles, is what brought forth the added images. The palms on the coast, the bridge leading out of it, and the boat adrift on the other side represent a journey and a searching of some kind. Which is really what I think poetry is about, a connecting of dots and an exploration of experience and ideas.

Kelly Jones spent her formative years living in her Grandpa's house in Apex, NC. Every few years she picks up and moves and has called the following places home: Raleigh, Seattle, Asheville, Paros (Greece), Carrboro, New Orleans, Greensboro, and (currently) Durham. A former college instructor, literary magazine editor, event organizer, and service industry worker extraordinaire, she currently pays most of her bills by working as a volunteer coordinator, adult literacy educator, and writer. Her first chapbook, Worry the Dead, will be out this summer. Her lease will also be up this summer, so she is taking suggestions on where to move next.  

29---> danny & brautigan

Name: Danny Caporaletti

Hometown: Richmond, Virginia

Current City: Richmond, Virginia

Occupation: Film Professor, Filmmaker, Writer, Camera Assistant, MFA in Fiction from University of New Orleans

What does poetry mean to you?

Compelling poetry distorts as much as it clarifies, and it expands the boundaries of language. A great poem, to me, explores a central idea or feeling by rendering a moment “still” with words, syntax, and structure.

Favorite Poet/Poem:

Richard Brautigan’s “I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone.” This is a bit of cheat, since most consider this a short story, but it reads like a prose poem to me, existing somewhere between poetry and flash fiction.

Why do you like this poet/poem?

The piece is one big nostalgic wormhole. The language is playful (I love the line “I think I was seven or eight or six”), and the tone is conversational, yet precise. Brautigan likens electricity with romance to explore the difficulty of describing love to another person. The lights turn on and off, the same way love can turn on and off.

Runner-Up Favorite Poem: Charles Bukowski’s “Young In New Orleans” because it’s hilarious and dark and true. Too true.

28---> melanie & encomium

Name: Melanie Janisse

Hometown: Windsor, Ontario

Current City: Windsor/Toronto Ontario

Occupation: Painter

Age: 44

What does poetry mean to you?

One time, now quite a number of years ago, I met Nicky Drumbolis at the bar of my old café Zoots. As our talk opened up, this topic opened up. What does poetry mean? We talked of the poem as a strange beaconing system. A map of signs and symbols that points towards the evidence of a realm different than here. A border to another country. A secret handshake from others that wanders off somewheres else. Poems are what is left. The husks and shells of some sort of rabbit run that is traversed. They seem to be like kneading bread these days. Or sometimes like forming muddy wet clay. My poems, that is. Others poems feel like roadmaps into some conceptual sphere, experience, ‘mark’ (a term my friend Stephen Pender uses to describe significant impressions). They are an invitation to try and meet there, in another’s rabbit hole, for a little while. Some make it easy to join, others guard their terrain with obstacles, but nonetheless, the poem is a way in to a way of seeing that is not my own, and not usually linear or necessarily straightforward. Poetry will upset my foundations and have me out visiting other brains. Some of the experiences match up with my worldview and some do not, but the overall experiences is a willingness to enter the poem, any poem and take the chance that there is something there to visit with that is extraordinary.

Favorite Poem/Why do I like the poem?

Lately, I have been returning to this particular Robert Creeley poem. It is an encomium dedicated to poet Eddie Linden—an Irish born poet who founded the acclaimed poetry magazine Aquarius. I became interested in the idea of the encomium—a poetic form of praise—after having a huge falling out with a friend last winter. It was a classic bus throwing under moment—one that happens all of the time in the world of art and poetry. I was made fun of for claiming the identity of a poet, in front of a table full of visiting poets.

‘Are you a poet?’

‘Yes I am.’

A snort.

‘I thought your were trying to be a painter these days.’

After this experience, I spent a bunch of weeks at my place on Ward Island, reeling. I had on my mind ideas of jealousy, insecurity, mean spiritedness. I had the task of trying to find a remedy for careerism, shade throwing and the way women just love to put each other back in a place of repression. The standards to which we hold ourselves up to and the force with which we will tear down another who commits to raising awareness and self-esteem within themselves. This poem to Lindon rang like a balm through that period of time. Such a simple and kind gift of friendship between two poets. A regard. It became the rallying point for my project the Poets Series. This poem was beginning research for an extended exploration into the consideration of others—a suspended meditation on the value of their contributions to poetry. What started out as a little bit of a fuck you to the person who humiliated me became a growing willingness to spend the time knowing someone, to utilize the form of encomium as an act of rebellion and redemption.

The introduction to the actual poem is of interest to me, first off, as Creeley asks his audience who has heard of Eddie Lindon. One can tell there is a show of one hand, as Creeley laughs and says ‘that makes two of us’. He goes on to speak of Lindon as a fine poet, a political radical in the Catholic Workers Protest Movement and claims that ‘no one has worked harder for a piece of his world’. I find this such a tender moment in the recording, I suppose because these are the moments where Creeley reaches past his own huge success as a poet and takes the time to give Lindon the brightness of the moment.

Within the poem itself Creeley nimbly lays out the contradictions of Linden—his fragilities and humanness are not swept under the rug in some anthemic epitaph to his good qualities, such as his activism. Creeley loves equally the nature of his drunkenness and that he is at the same time Catholic, queer, and a poet. All things are presented and examined, in such a way that the love and regard manifest within the reading and the words take the time to find all of the impressions of Linden available, the time to unearth the moment in the traffic, the offering of someone else’s cigarettes. The time is taken to paint the picture, so to speak.

In some ways, this poem to Linden created a revolution of thought within myself. Over time, my refusal to allow a certain kind of treatment in my life manifested into a refusal to engage in this kind of behaviour of my own. Over time, new friends appeared, friends who were graceful, kind and secure. There was a giant shift in the quality of my friendships and my thoughts and focus turned towards locations of new opportunity, new experiences. It’s been my reality these days to work kindly with others, to feel a part of a larger conversation of art and poetry. That came with the territory of the encomium. I have learned that no good can come out of shaming another poet or artist. It is always better to lift, to move over for a little while and let others have a moment of light. We all look for light and hope in others’ consideration. These days I can sniff out those who operate deeply within the paradigm of self-hatred/gatekeeping, and I can see how fiercely some guard the achievements they have by way of making sure that anyone threatening is given little voice or opportunity. It’s all so boring. I am finding that making my way towards marks of kindness paves the way just as well. Truly. Thanks Robert Creeley and Eddie Linden for the lesson of the year.

27---> carole & apollinaire

Name: Carole Stromboni

Hometown: Paris

Current City: Paris/Pantin

Occupation: Innovation Manager and Writer

Age: 39

What does poetry mean to you?

To me, poetry is beauty in words. It’s our imagination talking through (and from) nature, feelings, and childhood, everything that we are taught to control and not be controlled by.  Poetry is everything and nothing at the same time.

Favorite Poem:  I have many favorite poems, but today I am touched by “La Chanson du mal-aimé” by Guillaume Apollinaire. It’s the longest poem I know, used to know it by heart when I was younger. Now, only small pieces return to me: 

" Mon beau navire ô ma mémoire
Avons-nous assez navigué
Dans une onde mauvaise à boire
Avons-nous assez divagué
De la belle aube au triste soir"

And

" Amour nos baisers florentins
Avaient une saveur amère
Qui a rebuté nos destins"

And above all these lines:

"Et nos baisers mordus sanglants
Faisaient pleurer nos fées marraines"

Why do you like this poem?

“La Chanson du mal-aimé” talks with such tenderness about lost love, mad love, loss in general, death and passion. Plus, it is a poem with little punctuation allowing it to cruise, sound with a freedom despite the subject matter. 

26---> melissa & edna

When I think of Edna St. Vincent Millay, I picture her in wide pants, standing on a giant rock, looking as far as she can see into the Atlantic horizon, her hair blown back by a constant wind. Or, I imagine her at work, at a desk piled high with books, because she worked a lot. I like the rhythm in her name and admire the strength in her delicate phrases. Admittedly, I only recently learned of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I’m not sure how I missed her but our acquaintance happened in the way you learn a new word or concept, and then hear it again and again. She popped up in musings of girl bachelorhood, on a greeting card, and in between ads and articles. And when I finally picked up a few volumes of her work, I thought, really, I’ve always known her. The following “poem” is a quick collected rearrangement of some of my favorite verses and phrases and ways Millay has put words and images and ideas together.

For Witch-Wives

My candle burns a lovely light

The How and Why of all things, past

And never shall one room contain me quite

I saw and heard, and knew at last

Was it for this I uttered prayers

And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs?

We shall not feel it again

and be buried in the rain

Not for you was the pen bitten

And the mind wrung, and the song written

From the stone, as from the memory the heat of tears escapes

The lighthouse, and the boat on the beach, and the two shapes

More sea than land am I; my sulky mind

And present, and forevermore

And she never will be all mine

The Universe, cleft to the core

(From “Renascence,” “Witch-Wife,” “Grown-up,” “First Fig,” “Cap D’Antibes,” “The Cameo,” “Not in this chamber only at my birth,” “Justice Denied in Massachusetts,” “To Those Without Pity”)

Melissa Remark hails from a small Canadian town on north shore of Lake Erie. She has called Toronto, Los Angeles, and Gold Coast, Australia, home before settling in New Orleans where she teaches writing, literature, and film studies at Nicholls State University. A former editor at UNO’s Bayou Magazine, Melissa recently wrote and co-produced the short film Call Me Cappy, which premiered at the 25th Annual New Orleans Film Festival and has screened at film fests around the globe.

25---> miguel & benedetti

Name: Miguel Vallinas Prieto

City: Medina del Campo, Valladolid, Spain

Occupation: Artistic Photography

What does poetry mean to you?

All artistic expressions excite me as I'm a photographer, but in particular I like movies, music and literature. Poetry inspires my work quite a bit. I can read the same poem many times in a row if it conveys emotions to me. If this happens the excitement of reading a poem the first time is equal if not greater to the 300th time. I admire poets and the ease they have in expressing and sharing their feelings through words. I wish I had such an ability as a photographer to do the same.

Favorite poets:

For obvious reasons, I am much more familiar with Spanish poetry. As a child I recall reciting the poems of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer:

Rima I / Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

Yo sé un himno gigante y extraño
que anuncia en la noche del alma una aurora, 
y estas páginas son de ese himno
cadencias que el aire dilata en las sombras. 

Yo quisiera escribirle, del hombre
domando el rebelde, mezquino idioma, 
con palabras que fuesen a un tiempo
suspiros y risas, colores y notas. 

Pero en vano es luchar, que no hay cifra
capaz de encerrarle; y apenas, ¡oh, hermosa!, 
si, teniendo en mis manos las tuyas, 
pudiera, al oído, cantártelo a solas.

I lived in the city of Soria, so I'm very influenced by the verses of Antonio Machado, how well it describes our land of Castile:

A orillas del Duero / Antonio Machado

Mediaba el mes de julio. Era un hermoso día. 
Yo, solo, por las quiebras del pedregal subía, 
buscando los recodos de sombra, lentamente. 
A trechos me paraba para enjugar mi frente
y dar algún respiro al pecho jadeante; 
o bien, ahincando el paso, el cuerpo hacia adelante
y hacia la mano diestra vencido y apoyado
en un bastón, a guisa de pastoril cayado, 
trepaba por los cerros que habitan las rapaces
aves de altura, hollando las hierbas montaraces
de fuerte olor ?romero, tomillo, salvia, espliego?. 
Sobre los agrios campos caía un sol de fuego. 
Un buitre de anchas alas con majestuoso vuelo
cruzaba solitario el puro azul del cielo. 
Yo divisaba, lejos, un monte alto y agudo, 
y una redonda loma cual recamado escudo, 
y cárdenos alcores sobre la parda tierra
?harapos esparcidos de un viejo arnés de guerra?, 
las serrezuelas calvas por donde tuerce el Duero
para formar la corva ballesta de un arquero
en torno a Soria. ?Soria es una barbacana, 
hacia Aragón, que tiene la torre castellana?. 
Veía el horizonte cerrado por colinas
oscuras, coronadas de robles y de encinas; 
desnudos peñascales, algún humilde prado
donde el merino pace y el toro, arrodillado
sobre la hierba, rumia; las márgenes de río
lucir sus verdes álamos al claro sol de estío, 
y, silenciosamente, lejanos pasajeros, 
¡tan diminutos! ?carros, jinetes y arrieros?, 
cruzar el largo puente, y bajo las arcadas
de piedra ensombrecerse las aguas plateadas
del Duero. 

El Duero cruza el corazón de roble
de Iberia y de Castilla. 
¡Oh, tierra triste y noble, 
la de los altos llanos y yermos y roquedas, 
de campos sin arados, regatos ni arboledas; 
decrépitas ciudades, caminos sin mesones, 
y atónitos palurdos sin danzas ni canciones
que aún van, abandonando el mortecino hogar, 
como tus largos ríos, Castilla, hacia la mar! 
Castilla miserable, ayer dominadora, 
envuelta en sus andrajos desprecia cuanto ignora. 
¿Espera, duerme o sueña? ¿La sangre derramada
recuerda, cuando tuvo la fiebre de la espada? 
Todo se mueve, fluye, discurre, corre o gira; 
cambian la mar y el monte y el ojo que los mira. 
¿Pasó? Sobre sus campos aún el fantasma yerta
de un pueblo que ponía a Dios sobre la guerra. 
La madre en otro tiempo fecunda en capitanes, 
madrastra es hoy apenas de humildes ganapanes. 
Castilla no es aquella tan generosa un día, 
cuando Myo Cid Rodrigo el de Vivar volvía, 
ufano de su nueva fortuna, y su opulencia, 
a regalar a Alfonso los huertos de Valencia; 
o que, tras la aventura que acreditó sus bríos, 
pedía la conquista de los inmensos ríos
indianos a la corte, la madre de soldados, 
guerreros y adalides que han de tornar, cargados
de plata y oro, a España, en regios galeones, 
para la presa cuervos, para la lid leones. 
Filósofos nutridos de sopa de convento
contemplan impasibles el amplio firmamento; 
y si les llega en sueños, como un rumor distante, 
clamor de mercaderes de muelles de Levante, 
no acudirán siquiera a preguntar ¿qué pasa? 
Y ya la guerra ha abierto las puertas de su casa. 
Castilla miserable, ayer dominadora, 
envuelta en sus harapos desprecia cuanto ignora. 
El sol va declinando. De la ciudad lejana
me llega un armonioso tañido de campana
?ya irán a su rosario las enlutadas viejas?. 
De entre las peñas salen dos lindas comadrejas; 
me miran y se alejan, huyendo, y aparecen
de nuevo, ¡tan curiosas!... Los campos se obscurecen. 
Hacia el camino blanco está el mesón abierto
al campo ensombrecido y al pedregal desierto.

And I love the work of Mario Benedetti, the Uruguayan poet who lived in exile for a while in Buenos Aires and Spain before returning to his home country. Benedetti talks about everyday things, political and romantic struggle with deep yet simple feelings, with a clarity and concision that reaches so many different kinds of people. He gives us the passionate love we all think about but he does so in words; he is so evocative. I want to share with you these verses that for so long have touched my dreams before going to bed. Listen to his voice.

And this poem is especially emotional for me:

TÁCTICA Y ESTRATEGIA / Mario Benedetti

Mi táctica es 

mirarte 

aprender como sos 

quererte como sos

mi táctica es 

hablarte 

y escucharte 

construir con palabras 

un puente indestructible

mi táctica es 

quedarme en tu recuerdo 

no sé cómo ni sé 

con qué pretexto 

pero quedarme en vos

mi táctica es 

ser franco 

y saber que sos franca 

y que no nos vendamos 

simulacros 

para que entre los dos

no haya telón 

ni abismos

mi estrategia es 

en cambio 

más profunda y más 

simple 

mi estrategia es 

que un día cualquiera 

no sé cómo ni sé 

con qué pretexto

por fin me necesites.

I have not had the good fortune of the poet, to convey with skill in words my feelings. This need to emote is what has moved me to imagery. My biggest aim in artistic photography is to transmit emotion and feeling through my pictures. Here is some of my work:

"Root number 29" by Miguel Vallinas Prieto

"If Dream number 3" by Miguel Vallinas Prieto

24---> kelly & ginsberg

Name: Kelly Morton

Hometown: Philadelphia, PA 

Current City: Philadelphia, PA

Occupation: Bookkeeper (literally and figuratively) and Energyworker 

What does poetry mean to you? 

Poetry to me is the ability to take words like fruit and peel them of their rinds so that only the juice and pulp are left, the part that you can really taste. I love how poetry can get to the heart of a feeling or situation with an economy that’s not austere, but rather expansive. When I’m bogged down in the world of prose I love to take a break and read poetry, to see how something that might take a novelist a good three paragraphs to describe a poet can bullseye with five or six words.

Favorite Poem:

This is difficult. This is like choosing a favorite song. But I’ll have to go with "Song" by Allen Ginsberg because that’s the poem I end up writing on walls with chalk. 

Favorite Ginsberg lines chalked on the streets of Paris. 

Why do you like this poem?

I love that there is a direct sensuality to the poem but also a spiritual element that brings to mind the poetry of Rumi and Hafiz—their love poems to God. The line that kills me the most is "Be mad or chill, / obsessed with angels / or machines, / the final wish / is love." This reminder that at their core, everyone wants to be loved. No matter how independent or abrasive or unpleasant someone might seem, no matter what preoccupies their time and energy.

These two were my runner ups: 1)  "To All My Mariners in One" by Samuel Hazo, who was the first poet laureate of Pennsylvania. I ran across this poem in the Central Library in Philly because there was a display in honor of his work. This poem nailed me to the floor for a good 10 minutes.

And 2) "Prayer" by Arundhathi Subramaniam. I forget how I came across this poet/poem, but her use of language is like ether to me. I adore it.

23---> jennifer & haiku

Name: Jennifer Fields

Hometown: Hartselle, Alabama

Currenty City: Birmingham, Alabama

Occupation: Retail/Client Manager at Yellowhammer Creative

Age: 37

What does poetry mean to you?

Art is often telling the story of what is not there. Haiku forces one to pare down to the skeleton of a thought and let the reader flesh it out. 

"Jellyfish" by Jennifer Fields