84---> christine & reines

Name: Christine Herzer.

Poet. Visual Artist. Teacher. 

Lives and works in Paris.

What does poetry mean to you? 

Writing poetry is world-care.

Poetry = a commitment to living an 'examined life' (Louise Bourgeois)

Invitation to notice, to choose where our attention goes

'every rose pulses' (Carol Maso)

Ability to see/feel; 

Bewilderment as a way of entering the day as much as the work (Fanny Howe)

Relationship between space and silence, dying and speaking

I know who poetry can't accommodate: the tourist. I don't mean it is necessarily more highborn than shell art, though the effort, the ardor of it goes toward being borne up. But I believe it can't be identified with the compulsion to shop instead of the desire to touch, be touched.  (C.D. Wright)

Favorite Poet/Poet:

I don’t have a favorite poem or poet. I prefer ‘open texts’ [see Lyn Hejinian: Against Closure/Umberto Eco: The Poetics of the Open Work]. I value multiplicity, reading/viewing experiences that allow me to think/form my own thoughts/understanding; I value work which reveals its complexities & pleasures through re-reading where subsequent reading/viewing produces again an unforeseeable individual experience.

frank ocean, futura free

barry jenkins, moonlight

carol maso, ava

ariana reines, the palace of justice 

etc.

Paul Celan called poems porous formations,

I wrote PRISON last year at the desk of a job I had accepted to pay for my art.  Reines’s poem had been with me for years. I still remember what it felt like to read the poem for the first time, how drawn I was to the part that talks about loving someone so well that they would want to be free…I remember wondering if I would have been hired for the job and how turned on I felt by the intelligence of the poet and the enigmatic quality of the poem [that warden!].        I totally got the part about the lipstick… My drawing has its own context, it wasn’t intended as an homage to Reines or her poems; however, I did think about her poem while writing the drawing. Her poem ‘returned’ to me, in a context where poetry wasn’t valued, where a certain kind of freedom was at stake.

Writing/repeating PRISON, I felt the impulse to re-read "The Palace of Justice." I wanted to test its mystery, I wanted to test if I had figured it out after all, if some newly acquired life [prison]-experience had made me a better reader of the poem… a better lover. I felt the need to double check the title of the poem. I failed to remember the word ‘Justice’. The poem didn’t fail me. Its mystery remained intact, I came away feeling somewhat elated. Reines trusts her readers, her skill set is indeed special.

The prison is called The Women’s

Palace and it is a progressive prison

Whose warden

Truly loves her women

The palace being a prison for women

Who do not want to be free. I am hired

As the warden’s assistant, My skill

Set is special she says.

I want to believe her but I am not sure

She’s making fun of me. Still I’m hired.

I am charged to love the women in the palace

So well they’ll want to be free

I don’t know how to do it I say to the warden.

She smiles, a woman in her sixties in coral lipstick.

I don’t know how to do it I say again. I’m scared.

They probably don’t want to be free

Because they know more

About freedom than me

I say

To which she says nothing

For a while. You are stupider

Than you look she says

But I believe in you.

Get to work.

"The Palace of Justice" by Ariana Reines, Mercury [Fence Books]

________________________________________________________________________________

Christine Herzer makes work that offers the viewer a multitude of meanings, moods, and experiences with which to interact, draw nourishment, and form their own understanding. Using gestures of "overwriting," "covering up," "erasing," and accumulation, she explores questions of invisibility, alienation and agency. Christine is the 2018 Laureate "Ecritures" of a writing residency at La Cité des Arts, Paris, where she will be using her ongoing series of '‘Written Drawings" as a living archive from which to direct her investigations into such questions as: What is the role of repetition in the creative process? How to show caring/devotion for words, as well as their meanings (emotional centers) and [ab]uses? ORANGE, her new chapbook of poems, will be published by Ugly Duckling Presse (Brooklyn, NY) this summer.

79---> stephanie & radnóti

Name: Stephanie Papa
Current City: Paris, France
Occupation: Translator and Professor
Age: 30

What does poetry mean to you?
 

Poetry is everyday, the sea, a cherimoya, a thigh, a death, a memory, the truth. 
 

Favorite Poem: "Letter To My Wife" by Miklós Radnóti
 

Why do you like this poem?

Miklós Radnóti hasn't necessarily been one of my favorite poets. In fact, he's only recently had an influence on me, but I feel that it's necessary to honor him, especially his poem, "Letter to my Wife," which touches me so deeply. I'm drawn to poetry with a certain "negative capability," as Keats might call it: poems that can rise up from the gloom, that can survive and surpass even the most difficult moments. Radnóti, a Hungarian Jew, conjures up the image of his wife which pushes him to live a while longer, while on a forced march from a labor camp in Yugoslavia with 3,200 Jews. Like many others, he eventually collapsed on the road and was shot. This poem, among others, was found in his pocket after he was exhumed from a mass grave. Although Radnóti's story is one of extreme hardship, his writing is a declaration of love, humanity, and the will to keep going.

"Letter to My Wife"
By Miklós Radnóti
(translated from Hungarian by Zsuzsanna Ozsvath & Frederick Turner)

Beneath, the nether worlds, deep, still, and mute.
Silence howls in my ears, and I cry out.
No answer could come back, it is so far
From that sad Serbia swooned into war.
And you’re so distant. But my heart redeems
Your voice all day, entangled in my dreams.
So I am still, while close about me sough
The great cold ferns, that slowly stir and bow.

When I’ll see you, I don’t know. You whose calm
Is as the weight and sureness of a psalm,
Whose beauty’s like the shadow and the light,
Whom I could find if I were blind and mute,
Hide in the landscape now, and from within
Leap to my eye, as if cast by my brain.
You were real once; now you have fallen in
To that deep well of teenage dreams again.
Jealous interrogations: tell me; speak.
Do you still love me? Will you on that peak
Of my past youth become my future wife?
– but now I fall awake to real life
And know that’s what you are: wife, friend of years
– just far away. Beyond three wild frontiers.
And Fall comes. Will it also leave with me?
Kisses are sharper in the memory.

Daylight and miracles seemed different things.
Above, the echelons of bombers’ wings:
Skies once amazing blue with your eyes’ glow
Are darkened now. Tight with desire to blow,
The bombs must fall. I live in spite of these,
A prisoner. All of my fantasies
I measure out. And I will find you still;
For you I’ve walked the full length of the soul,

The highways of countries! – on coals of fire,
If needs must, in the falling of the pyre,
If all I have is magic, I’ll come back;
I’ll stick as fast as bark upon an oak!
And now that calm, whose habit is a power
And weapon to the savage, in the hour
Of fate and danger, falls as cool and true
As does a wave: the sober two times two.
 

________________________________________________________________________________

Stephanie Papa is a poet, translator, and educator living in Paris, France. Her work has been published in numerous magazine and journals. She is the co-editor of Paris Lit Up magazine. For more about her work, visit stephaniepapa.wordpress.com.

77---> marissa & girmay

Name: Marissa Davis

Hometown: Paducah, Kentucky

Current city: Paris area, France

Occupation: English teacher

Age: 22

What does poetry mean to you?  

Since the beginning, poetry, for me, has been an act of self-discovery. The page is where I learned that there is strength in vulnerability. It is where I learned to be proud of my heritage. It is where I build, re-build, deconstruct, shuffle, view from eight different angles, investigate, forgive, transform, and love the me I am constantly in the midst of becoming.

Beyond that, I’ve begun more and more to think of poetry as a spiritual act. For me, the meaning of spirituality is essentially a search for kinship—with other humans as well as the broader world. Metaphor and simile sit at the heart of poetry; I believe that to seek relatedness where relatedness isn’t “supposed” to exist—to find a reason why an oak tree is no different than my mother’s laughter; why a garden snake is no different than an unspoken grief—contracts the universe, bringing everything into more immediate connection.

Favorite poet: Aracelis Girmay

Why do you like this poet?

In one word, what draws me most to Girmay is her expansiveness. I think a lot of it comes from her style; often making use of lists and repetition, her work has an earthy, muscular, inescapable music that makes each poem a sort of sprawling incantation. She is a writer that embraces wildness.

Girmay is expansive thematically, too. Her writing often focuses on matters of identity, place, and heritage; daughter of immigrants from Latin America and eastern Africa, much of her body of work deals with political upheaval and displacement. Her writing is often simultaneously introspective and political; I feel that she accomplishes, in her poetry, the miraculous feat of looking so deeply inside herself she sees the outside world with new wisdom, new wideness.

Though her body of work certainly does not shy away from heavier subjects, it also takes time to examine the richness of life and the relationships within it. She revels in the joy and beauty of the everyday, writing odes to everything from watermelons to letters of the alphabet.

With this imitation, I chose to stick more closely to the style of poems such as “I Am Not Ready to Die Yet” and “Monologue of the Heart Pumping Blood”—both celebrations of life that are at once exuberant and unafraid of darkness. 

Prayer to a Nightingale

by Marissa Davis

after Aracelis Girmay

I have so many times stumbled into midnight

forgetting all the syllables of my name.

Sick with self-hate or slow

chemicals or wanting to make metaphor

of everything but the hands of a man I know

won’t love me or sometimes even

just with too much mixing June heat

with my natural lonesome.

Nightingale, remind me

that even the shadow is holy.

Your croon like black

soap & sweet almond oil. Like pale green skulls

of daffodils crowning

through the ice’s last skin. Like whistling

roots, & milk teeth, & cold grapes

crushed against milk teeth, all split & nectar,

& what I’m learning is if you walk straight long enough

there is always either birdsong or pink magnolia.

Not to say there are not evenings

I cry myself to sleep so hard

my nose bleeds poppies on the pillow;

mornings I spit & damn

the sun for having the nerve to keep rising.

My marrow trembles & I can’t say why--

except that once upon a far-off summer, I lifted

a chipped blade from my wrists & spared:

the torment of mirrors; at least four dog-deaths; eventually

those of my mother & father; a hiking quantity

of juvenile heartbreaks. But once upon a far-off summer,

I lifted a chipped blade from my wrists & spared:

breath & blue pulse & watercolors

& Spanish clementines for breakfast & backyard toes

drenched in wild violet & my cousin’s

newborn pillbug fingers

& the wet sun-high summer smell of my bones

when I lie down among the doe-stomped grasses.        

Nightingale,

some melodies fit best

inside the sunless hours. I carry

my body into this song. I have chosen

to be vein & flesh & eyeballs

 & one of the louder rivers.

Like you,

may my muscles’

darkest word be wind.

75---> olesya & mayakovsky

Name: Olesya Shchukina

Hometown: St. Petersburg, Russia

Current City: Paris, France

Occupation: Animation filmmaker and illustrator

Age: 32

What does poetry mean to you?

I’m a chaotic reader. I don’t read poetry that much, but there have been certain moments in my life when poetry books have popped into my hands. And they have struck me. So for a while I get obsessed with them. Inevitably, the passion fades, and I go back to fiction.

For me, the shorter the poem the greater its impact on me. Poetry seems to be an opposite to animation, both technically and conceptually. A poem exists on a page, like a quick gesture. An animated film demands days and months and even years of work to create something that finally moves for minutes on the screen.

Who is your favorite poet?

Vladimir Mayakovsky continues to be one of my favorite poets, no matter what. He is like an earthquake, that is vulnerable, honest, and completely unpredictable. His poetry (as any poetry in my opinion) should be read out loud. It’s like a loud dance with complex and striking rhyme that also has a huge visual power (even the way it’s laid out on the page). Mayakovsky had an art school background and worked, as what we would term today, an illustrator. That’s probably why the vision of his metaphors is strong and at the same time so full of sound.

I don’t know if Mayakovsky’s poetry has the same impact on the mind and ear when translated. I believe that translation is a never-ending pursuit of truthfulness. As I can’t learn to read all the languages I wish to, I'm grateful to those who work to find truths in languages for me and other readers.

Here’s an excerpt of one of Mayakovsky’s poems translated in English. It’s called "Kindness to Horses" (translated by Andrey Kneller):

The street, up-turned,

continued moving.

I came up and saw

tears, — huge and passionate,

rolling down the face,

vanishing in its coat...

and some kind of a universal,

animal anguish

spilled out of me

and splashing, it flowed.

“Horse, there’s no need for this!

Horse, listen,—

look at them all, - who has it worse?

Child,

we are all, to some extent, horses,—

everyone here is a bit of a horse.”

________________________________________________________________________________

Olesya Shchukina (Олеся Щукина) is an illustrator and animation filmmaker originally from St. Petersburg, Russia. Today, she lives in Paris, France, where she makes short animated films and drawings for web/paper magazines, especially oriented towards children's entertainment. She is also a co-founder of ko-ko-ko. In her personal and professional life, she likes to tell stories and make people laugh and tease the boundary between comedy and drama.

Her films are produced by Folimage (France) and Soyuzmultfilm (Russia). She also worked for Ma vie de Courgette (directed by Claude Barras) as a set painter and illustrator and for Miru Miru TV series (co-directed by Haruna Kishi and Virginie Jallot) as a background artist.