85---> nina & o'hara

Name: Some people call me Nina Zivancevic, some call me Lea, and very few Kunsang Palmo.

Location: I was born at the far boundary of the former Ottoman empire, in a city called Beograd ("White city"), former Yugoslavia, but I've lived most of my life in NYC and have been in Paris now for the last 24 years.

Occupation: I share my impressions about art, life, and literature with those who might listen to me at la Sorbonne in Paris.

Age: am 61

What does poetry mean to you?

Poetry means everything to me—whatever I do, breathe, sing and cook, growl, howl and whisper, I do via poetry.

Favorite Poem / Poet:

I don't have favorite poems or poets—all of them are dear to me, are my extended family—but if I were really pushed to whisper a name among the names I love in poetry it would be the name of the poet who metaphorically tapped my shoulder while saying "you're ok, just go on, breathe freely, in the street and in verse," Frank O'Hara, American poet of the 20th century who threw a challenge/glove in the face of Modernity and, alas, died very early.

The poem I would like to remember here and which means so much to me is "Meditations in an Emergency." I've held close to me a version in Donald Allen's edition of The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara, published by Vintage Books in New York, 1974.

Frank O'Hara's "Meditations in an Emergency" is a pivotal poem in the work of the poet. It's an ambiguous text which changed my youth and my poetry stance forever. I loved it so much that I even started writing a doctoral dissertation on it. Alas, I never finished this project and left it in the 1980s.

"Meditations in an Emergency"

by Frank O'Hara

          Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

          Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

          Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?

          I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

          Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.

          However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.

          My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I am curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has theiranxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.

          Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)

          St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and courses and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.

          Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!

          It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

          “Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too. —Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. —I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.” —Mrs. Thrale.

       I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.

Yet, first of all, this poem, which does not meet many typical definitions of poetry at all, changed my notion of the literary genre. Yes, O'Hara is funnier than Baudelaire. O'Hara imposes his wit on us, a quality so rare in poetry, perhaps only before found in James Joyce or Jonathan Swift. He starts in mock-epic and ends the poem in banal, noir thriller. There he says very little but claims a lot. Such as, he would like to trade the pillars of Modernism on a bright NYC sunny afternoon for the ladders of postmodern fragmentary joke.

But perhaps it is not so much humor but rather a tragic sentiment in his work. Especially when he examines the tradition of heterosexual courtly love (which had been rarely directly questioned in such a way in poetry at the time). He says, "Heterosexuality! you are / inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)."

O'Hara is an inveterate urbanite; he "cant even enjoy a blade of grass unless...there's a subway handy," a sign that "people do not totally regret life." What would go under the key of regretting? Meadows, trees, cottage-cheese, cows, quiet evenings, sunrise, sunsets, shady nights with a lot of rain, furtive kisses, etc. All of this does not belong to O'Hara's poetry. No place to run to, nothing to run away from, chiseled destiny, a poet who is ready to die young. And so be it.

The poet died young; he got killed by a beach buggy one summer on the beach, Coney Island of his mind. And then younger poets found him, followed him, built up temples to his verse, started a school known as the New York School of Poetry. OK, OK, Kenneth Koch was in it, too. John Ashbery, James Schuyler, but they lacked O'Hara's brilliant style, unobtrusive elegance, and the decadent wit of the simplest Irishman on Earth. And true, perhaps he was closer to O. Wilde, Joyce, or Jonathan Swift in regards to his ars poetica than to the legacy of his contemporaries.

Nina Zivancevic's The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara, Edited by Donald Allen.

PS: The cover of O'Hara's Selected Poems features his portrairt as painted by his friend and contemporary, the pop-expressionist artist Larry Rivers. 

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.

76---> todd & simic

Name: Todd Dillard

Hometown: Houston, TX

Current City: Philadelphia, PA

Occupation: Writer and Editor at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

Age: 35

What does poetry mean to you?

Before I describe what poetry means to me, I feel I should first establish what I think poetry is. Poetry is a form of entertainment that uses precise language (and images) alongside elements of musicality, such as rhythm and timbre. I recently read something that resonated with me too (I think originally said by Jericho Brown at this year’s AWP conference) about how a poem must be written towards mystery, and I completely agree: first, because it conjures up an idea that what is central to a poem must be revealed; second, because it notes a poem must possess movement. I think balancing clarity and inventive language with mystery, metaphor, and movement is the poet’s greatest struggle. Lean too far towards clarity, and the poem is prosaic. Lean too far towards mystery, and it’s effusive gibberish. Stay in one place (i.e., choose not to move), and the poem becomes transactional, episodic, journalistic even. Do all of these things, but fail to write something entertaining too—and, well, who cares!

It’s in balancing these elements that I find poetry’s meaning: poetry, to me, is connectivity. It’s a collaboration between poet and audience to erect a bridge made out of language that links something known or possible to the unknown or impossible. It means writing or reading something that is larger than itself; there is a moreness to poetry, an additional dimension or multiple dimensions that only through the poem we can glimpse. This is why I started with my definition: absent the things noted above, a poem fails to connect, we lose sight of what exists beyond the poem, and the art of the poem becomes meaningless or impenetrable. A poem that fails to connect can only be a polished draft, a hollow gesture.  

Favorite Book of Poetry: The World Doesn’t End by Charles Simic

The World Doesn’t End by Charles Simic is the book of poetry I have read the most, and lost the most, and given away the most, and purchased the most, which I suspect makes it my favorite book of poetry. (I currently own two copies: a mint-condition one I can give to friends or read at leisure, and a crinkly one I don’t mind reading in the rain.) These compact poems have within them everything I love about poetry: beautiful language, music, mystery, clear stories, stunning images, and depths that over my many readings I have yet to fully pierce. I will spend a lifetime returning to these words, and may never fully grasp their meaning. As a lover of language and mystery, this is pure delight.

From "My Mother was a braid of black smoke..." by Charles Simic

Why do you like “My mother was a braid of black smoke…”?

I chose the first poem of this collection because it is perfect. Its structure is so fable-like, with its breath-long sentences and matter-of-fact tone cleaved to fabulist images. It’s only when you learn about Simic and how he spent much of his childhood surviving World War II that the horror of the final line strikes you—the desperation to turn to the sky and scream for help, the terror of encountering the stars’ deafness. This terror then kicks up into the rest of the poem like river silt: the burning cities, the dead “many others,” the mother as a “black braid of smoke.” Simic here has achieved the impossible, lulling us with a false fable, giving us something paradoxically simple and sinister, writing text that is combustible, but only when we are already cradling it in our hands, our mouths, our eyes. All 64 words of this poem reach through my skin to touch my bones.

72---> lisa & ali

Name: Lisa Pasold

Hometown: Montreal

Current City: Paris, France

Occupation: Writer

Age: Nearly half a century
 

What does poetry mean to you?

Poetry is breathing with others.

Favorite poem:

“Tonight” by the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali—a poem which exists in several
versions and appears in his great collection of ghazals, Call Me Ishmael Tonight.

Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight?
Whom else from rapture’s road will you expel tonight?

I’ve reread this book every year since I first discovered it in 2004. This poem in particular
amazes me because I remain (after nearly 15 years of examining the work) moved to tears and
baffled by its exact meaning.

Ali wrote extensively about the ghazal—he translated them, wrote them, edited an anthology of
English-language ghazals, Ravishing DisUnities, and held strident opinions about how the form
should be treated by contemporary poets.

There are three specific aspects of the traditional ghazal form which interest me:

• the idea that a ghazal is a necklace, with each couplet an independent bead which can appear at any place on the strand

• its repetition—the last word or the last phrase appears in both lines of the first couplet is then repeated as the ending of the second line of each following couplet

• the poet must name themselves in the final line of the poem.

But these rules don’t capture the great “why” of this poem’s attraction for me. I keep coming
back to this poem because of Ali’s language, his sense of musicality, spiritual belief, loss,
beauty, and his commitment to the importance of poetry. His ghazal teems with layers of poetic
and literary references, which I only sometimes manage to remember and sort out. (See this excellent
analysis for more info).

Below, I have used roughly half of Ali’s original lines to build a poem about my mother’s death.

After Tonight

by Lisa Pasold

(after the work of Agha Shahid Ali)

Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight?
Whom else from rapture’s road will you expel tonight?

Those “perfect words” clogging my throat like crickets,
Jingling “universal language”—still possible tonight?

I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates—
A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.

I’ll fall on my sword some other morning—
Let me weep with no guilt, no expectations, tonight.

Why won’t you let me worship, clear-eyed,
Burning candles instead of books tonight?

Were those promises on the rocks just shrunken snakeskin?
Or did all the archangels—their wings frozen—fall tonight?

Lord, cried out the idols, Don’t let us be broken;
Only we can convert the infidel tonight.

Those veins twisting in languages I’ll never read,
They multiply across your skin as tattoos tonight.

He’s freed some fire from pop songs in Heaven.
He’s left open—for God—the doors of Hell tonight.

Your blood is still moving but your mind has frozen.
He’s promised that black curtain won’t fall tonight.

God limit these punishments, there’s still Judgment Day—
I’m a mere sinner, I’m no infidel tonight.

Executioners near the woman at the window.
Are we waiting blind for the baying dogs, tonight?

This business of forgiving gives me too many tunes—
Which prayers shall I use while on my knees tonight?

My rivals for your love—you’ve invited them all?
I’ll try standing alone, no shoulder to rest on tonight.

And I, Lisa, escaped alive to tell you—
No God waits, though he sobs in your exiled arms tonight.

________________________________________________________________________________

Lisa Pasold is originally from Montreal. Her fifth book, The Riparian, just appeared
from Frontenac House, Canada. She has been writing a poem every day for the past eleven years.

64---> ashley & clifton

Name: Ashley M. Jones

Hometown : Birmingham, AL

Current City: Birmingham, AL

Occupation: Creative Writing Faculty Member at Alabama School of Fine Arts, seminar instructor for the University Honors Program at UAB, Founding Director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, Board Member of the AWC, and touring poet!

Age: 27 years old

What does poetry mean to you?

Poetry means conversation, wondering, attempts at discovery, and exploration of the human condition. I started writing poetry when I was 8 years old, and I've never looked back! I find that writing poems is not only exciting for what I can do with language but also for my own exploration of history and my place in it. Lucille Clifton says that we write because we wonder, and there's just so much wondering we all do. Why not do it through poems?

Favorite poem:

My favorite poem "What the mirror said" is by my favorite poet Lucille Clifton. 

"What the mirror said"

By Lucille Clifton

listen,

you a wonder.

you a city

of a woman.

you got a geography

of your own.

listen,

somebody need a map

to understand you.

somebody need directions

to move around you.

listen,

woman,

you not a noplace

anonymous

girl;

mister with his hands on you

he got his hands on

some

damn

body! 

Why do you like this poem?

I love this poem because it affirms my existence, it affirms my somebody-ness. Most of us have struggled with identity and self-esteem and making a place for ourselves in this very confusing/painful/wonderful/thrilling world. This poem tells me that I'm not just a woman; I contain multitudes, an entire CITY. I am some damn body! Not only that, but it is yet another demonstration of how Clifton is able to do so much in a small space, with such small words. That's what keeps bringing me back and back and back to her work—she's so masterful with the small line, the tiny word that holds whole worlds. If you've never read her work, please hasten to it! 
 

Recent poems of Ashley M. Jones include "I See a Smear of Animal on the Road and Mistake it for Philando Castile" and "'There Is A Bell At Morehouse College.'"