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. 

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.

82---> jeremy & robertson

I came to Lisa Robertson’s work not long ago and the sensation was one of uncanny discovery, that rare-but-sought-after feeling we have as readers when we say, “oh I have been looking for this, exactly this, for such a long time, without ever knowing it.” This first, powerful impression remains the best explanation I have for why I love Robertson’s poetry, and everything else I have tried to say to express it has just been embarrassing (“this poetry is so smart, I feel clumsy as a chaperone at a high school dance,” or “the classical is beautiful, but so is raunch—let’s go for a walk”).

My attempts were doomed from the beginning, of course, because anything shy of Lisa Robertson that tries to approximate Lisa Robertson is bound to come up short, because how could approximated Lisa Robertson be satisfying when we can just read Lisa Robertson? Which means excerpting her is almost as quixotic an enterprise, because one poem, or even a handful, could never do justice to the intelligence, the humor, the pure bounty of language, the depth of the art, the sense of receiving a gift that comes to you across the reading of a full volume. Here, thought and intimacy are allowed to share the same body! Here, desire is not only the vectors but the bodies that create them! Here, the present tense is an always-renewing abundance of possibility! Let’s go for a walk!

The futility of presenting an excerpt aside, this lovely moment from “Third Summer,” in 3 Summers (Coach House Books, 2016), is one I cherish:

Actual living trees are cinema

I rode through the practical and mysterious tunnel on a borrowed bicycle

many kinds of space are possible

if they are possible, they are also very probable

it was beneath the river and very cool and even

the sociality was held temporarily in abeyance

it is in itself possible

the form of a hare

is the place in the wheat where she pauses

or rests

(like a grid of empty shoes

at République)

as outside – a ways off – a stand of pine

croons winter

in this way I come to perceive my life

as parody

________________________________________________________________________________

Jeremy Allan Hawkins was born in New York City and raised in the Hudson Valley. He has been the recipient of a grant from the US Fulbright Program and teaching fellowships from the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project and the New York City Teaching Fellows. He is the author of A Clean Edge, selected by Richard Siken as the winner of the 2016 BOAAT Chapbook Prize. He lives in France.

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.

73---> laura & citino

Name: Laura Citino

Current city: Kalamazoo, Michigan

Occupation: English instructor, gifted learners program

Age: 29

What does poetry mean to me?

As a prose writer, I often feel extremely, and overly, process-oriented with my stories. Figure out the characters and the plot, assemble the conflict, decide the point of view by dartboard, arrange everything in a neat little tableau, draft. There is an end goal I have in mind, and it’s all hack-and-slash to get there. (Not always, but sometimes.)  Poetry helps me feel lighter, more playful, stranger, and a little looser with my relationship to language. Less managerial, more collegial; poetry assists me in seeing the words as allies in the work, not adversaries. My feelings toward poetry are almost always in a state of “I should be reading it more” because it does so much for my writing process, likely even more so because it’s not my primary genre. Poetry (and poets!) remind me to be an artist, not only an architect.

Favorite poem or poet:

I have spent a good chunk of the latter half of my twenties (re)discovering the fact that my uncle, David Citino, was a prolific poet. He published ten books of poetry and not a small amount of critical writing. He died when I was a senior in high school, basicially just as I was growing up and into the knowledge that words and language were my tools for understanding the world. Reading his work now is a headtrip. First, because I have this incredibly intimate window to get to know a person who loomed so large and brightly in my childhood but who died before I could really meet him as an adult. Another reason is that his poetic subjects—the body, sex, weather, the Rustbelt and the Midwest, heritage, family, time—are also my writerly obsessions and concerns. Reading his work now is like seeing myself in the past and the future at the same time.

This poem from his collection The House of Memory has been a favorite for a long time; it hits all of those favored subjects above. The line “Here’s my heaven: Ohio, bitter enough / to set teeth on edge” encapsulates the feeling of living in the Midwest in a handful of words better than any novel I’ve ever read.

"One Hundred Percent Chance of Snow, Accumulating Six to Eight Inches by Morning"

by David Citino 

 Snow billows over cracked blacktop

in parking lots of K Mart and Whirlpool plant,

plexiglass domed roof of Southland Mall

where young and old cluster and dissolve

in weekend conspiracies.

Snow blows over churches downtown,

each spire and arch shaped by antique disputes

concerning the shape or taste of God

obliterated now by tons of lovely nothing.

Here’s my heaven: Ohio, bitter enough

to set teeth on edge and turn my face red

as litmus paper. Still, for all

our dirty profits, there’s more love

than I can use, and more cold.

Near me beneath the ice run

the Olentangy and Scioto. So much

of our lives gets named by what’s fallen.

I think of the ruddy women and men

whose teeth and bone lie arrayed in strata

beneath me, earth of their every fire dark

as obsidian. I step over burrows

where they weather forever’s winter.

I’m coming soon, Grandparents.

My feet leave lines of script to mark

my progress, each step a fossil moment,

no two the same, lines that sing

my stride to anyone willing to follow

before this pure and ruthless beauty

disproves that I was ever here.

________________________________________________________________________________

Laura Citino is a fiction writer from southeastern Michigan. In 2013 she received her MFA in fiction from Eastern Washington University, where she was also Fiction Editor for Willow Springs. Her work has appeared in numerous journals in print and online, including Passages North, cream city review, Sou'wester, Gigantic Sequins, Pembroke, and others. She currently teaches in a program for academically talented youth and serves as Managing Editor for Sundog Lit. She lives in Kalamazoo, MI.

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.

71---> jennifer & lee

On the creation of the video: Li-Young Lee's "From Blossoms" provides a landscape in which everything and anything is possible. For me, it brings me back to very specific memories of my childhood summers—sweating, running, swinging, eating, dreaming. I felt invincible and carefree. It can be hard to return to that place, but this poem activates it through so many of the senses. With this video, I wanted to pay homage to that feeling of hope and growth and renewal.

"From Blossoms"

by Li-Young Lee

rom blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the boy

at the bend in the road where we turned toward   

signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,

from sweet fellowship in the bins,

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into   

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

________________________________________________________________________________

Jennifer Huang is a Taiwanese-American writer and artist, who prefers to work in verse. Her poems have appeared in The Blueshift Journal, tenderness yea, and The Oakland Review, amongst others. She is an Assistant Poetry Editor at Sundog Lit and lives somewhere between her mind and the horizon. 

70---> kathryn & hogan

Name: Kathryn Julian

Hometown: Birmingham, Alabama 

Current town: Northampton, MA 

Occupation: Visiting Professor

What does poetry mean to you? 

As a historian, I can’t help but think of poetry first and foremost as a poignant expression of the lived experiences of people past and present. Poetry reflects the textures and nuances of particular places and temporalities. Poems relay myths and truths of the collective and individual human past: the medieval mystic’s prayer, the red clay and hot summers of adolescence, the present earthy chill of New England spring. Poetry is collective memory and collective forgetting, the extraordinary and the mundane. Poems are a resource that help us understand the complexities and contradictions of being human.

Favorite Poet:

I'm currently working my way through Linda Hogan's collections of poetry. Her poems highlight the alliance between ecological activism and spiritual awareness. Hogan's poetry encourages me to think about the intersections of culture, the environment, eco-feminism, theology, and the every day. Her words create a sense of urgency to live within nature. 

“To Be Held”

by Linda Hogan

To be held

by the light

was what I wanted,

to be a tree drinking the rain,

no longer parched in this hot land.

To be roots in a tunnel growing

but also to be sheltering the inborn leaves

and the green slide of mineral

down the immense distances

into infinite comfort

and the land here, only clay,

still contains and consumes

the thirsty need

the way a tree always shelters the unborn life

waiting for the healing

after the storm

which has been our life.

________________________________________________________________________________

Kathryn Julian is a historian based in western Massachusetts. She writes and reads about sacred spaces, ecology, and religion.

69---> nordette & brooks

Name: Nordette N. Adams

Residence: New Orleans, Louisiana

Age: Hacker-evasive

Occupation: Instructional Designer

What does poetry mean to you?

Poetry is a force that possesses my body now and then and has done so since I was four years old. To steal a bit from Emily, poetry “is a thing with feathers,” and, for me,  a thing that swims in the sea / that sits with you at the bottom / when you’re sunken in misery, / or you can sit with it / as its verses sit with you, / expanding your mind and mood / until it’s that thing you do.

Favorite Poet:

Gwendolyn Brooks is still my favorite because her earlier work appears simple, but it’s not. Her work is sly with depth. I wish I were as gifted and linguistically clever. She was also a listener who was willing to learn from others, even those younger than she. She aspired to speak about more than herself in her work and was successful in doing so. What good is an insular, inaccessible poet? Also, I’ve read that she was generous, always willing to help and promote other poets.

One of my favorite poems of hers is “A Lovely Love,” which I recorded for Valentine’s Day for a Poetry Foundation promotion, but I also adore “VII. I love those little booths at Benvenuit’s” and “The Anniad.” Let me stop before I list her entire oeuvre.

"A Lovely Love"

by Gwendolyn Brooks

Let it be alleys. Let it be a hall
Whose janitor javelins epithet and thought
To cheapen hyacinth darkness that we sought
And played we found, rot, make the petals fall.
Let it be stairways, and a splintery box
Where you have thrown me, scraped me with your kiss,
Have honed me, have released me after this
Cavern kindness, smiled away our shocks.
That is the birthright of our lovely love
In swaddling clothes. Not like that Other one.
Not lit by any fondling star above.
Not found by any wise men, either. Run.
People are coming. They must not catch us here
Definitionless in this strict atmosphere.

________________________________________________________________________________

Nordette N. Adams is a published poet, fiction writer, and journalist. She grew up in New Orleans, moved away at 20, and returned in 2007. Listen to a recent interview with Adams, Andy Young, and Julie Kane on Sue Larson’s radio show, The Reading Life, WWNO.