Broken Dolls Day

May 16, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

June 3, Japan

The stitched would never
heal. Nor could the smallest finger

missing of a hand be glued to a pudgy
plastic palm. She lies on her back—bye-bye

It is over. Around her those of the lost
screws, stuck eyes, detached

wires, burnt hair, punctured torso;
brother work, dog work, left out

in the rain. Played out. Over the wood,
wax, plastic, porcelain, papier maché,

straw, leather, resin & cloth,
the four-foot hunchbacked monk

bows his ancient bald head.
O broken ones, we are

the careless world—forgive us
for we wore you as ourselves.

by Jeanne Marie Beaumont

Notes courtesy of BOA Editions:

Jeanne Marie Beaumont earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University. Her first book, Placebo Effects, was selected by William Matthews as a winner of the 1997 National Poetry Series and was published by W.W. Norton. With Claudia Carlson, she co-edited the anthology The Poets’ Grimm: Twentieth Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales (Story Line). For seven years she was publisher and co-editor of the literary magazine American Letters & Commentary. She has also worked as a proofreader, a medical editor, and an advertising copywriter. She has taught at Rutgers University and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, and she currently directs the Frost Place Advanced Seminar and serves on the faculty for the Stonecoast low-residency MFA Program.

Burning of the Three Fires, from which ‘Broken Dolls Day’ comes, shows Jeanne Marie Beaumont using her characteristic variety of techniques: dramatic monologues, lists, prose poems, nonce forms, object poems, and ekphrasis, to which she has added an exploration of biography, elegy, and rites. Among its layered themes, this book takes a multifaceted look at womanhood: there are dolls, historic and modern girlhoods, mythic retellings of characters from Goldilocks to the Bride of Frankenstein, emotionally charged domestic trinkets, and even a conversation with Sylvia Plath conducted via an 8-Ball.

You can learn more about Jeanne Marie Beaumont from her website, and read and listen to her poems read by Garrison Keillor here (though you might have to download the free RealPlayer first).

BOA Editions, Ltd., a not-for-profit publisher of poetry and other literary works, fosters readership and appreciation of contemporary literature. By identifying, cultivating, and publishing both new and established poets and selecting authors of unique literary talent, BOA brings high quality literature to the public. Support for this effort comes from the sale of its publications, grant funding, and private donations. To find out more about BOA Editions, click here.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Sunflower in the Sun

May 2, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Do you see?
Do you see that sunflower in the sun?
You see, it didn’t bow its head
But turned its head back
As if to bite through
The rope around its neck
Held by the sun’s hands.

Do you see it?
Do you see that sunflower, raising its head
Glaring at the sun?
Its head almost eclipses the sun
Yet even when there is no sun
Its head still glows.

Do you see that sunflower?
You should get closer to it.
Get close and you’ll find
The soil beneath its feet
Each handful of soil
Would ooze with blood.

by Mang Ke

This week’s poem is taken from Push Open the Window: Contemporary Poetry from China, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in Summer/Fall 2011, and reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

The anthology, Push Open the Window: Contemporary Poetry from China, is edited by Qingping Wang. The translation co-editors are Sylvia Li-chun Lin and Howard Goldblatt. You can learn more about the new anthology here.

Notes courtesy of Copper Canyon:

Mang Ke, whose real name is Jiang Shiwei, was born in 1950. He began writing poetry in the 1970s, when, with the poet Bei Dao, he launched the literary magazine Today. He has published half a dozen collections of poetry, including Worries, Sunflowers amid Sunbeams, Time without Time, and What Day Is It Today? He has also published one novel, Wild Things, and a volume of essays. His works have been translated into several foreign languages. He lives in Beijing.

Translators’ biographies

Jonathan Stalling is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of Oklahoma, specializing in Transpacific poetry and poetics, and is the co-founder and Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Chinese Literature Today. Stalling is the author of Poetics of Emptiness (Fordham UP), Grotto Heaven (Chax Press) and the forthcoming books Yíngēlìshī 吟歌丽诗 (Chanted Songs, Beautiful Poetry): Sinophonic English Poetry and Poetics (Counterpath Press, 2011) and Winter Sun: The Poetry of Shi Zhi 1966–2007 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2011). He lives in Norman, Oklahoma with his wife and children.

Yibing Huang was born in Changde, Hunan, China and inherited Tujia ethnic minority blood from his mother. After receiving his Ph.D. in Chinese Literature from Beijing University, he moved to the U.S. in 1993. He holds a second Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. Under the penname Mai Mang, Huang’s poetry has been published in China since the 1980s. He is the author of two books of poetry: Stone Turtle: Poems 1987–2000 (2005) and Approaching Blindness (2005). He is also the author of Contemporary Chinese Literature: From the Cultural Revolution to the Future (2007), a book that presents case studies of the generation of Chinese writers which spent its formative years during the Cultural Revolution and focuses on their identity shift from “orphans of history” to “cultural bastards.” Huang is currently an Associate Professor of Chinese at Connecticut College.

Copper Canyon Press is a nonprofit publisher that believes poetry is vital to language and living. Since 1972, the Press has published poetry exclusively and has established an international reputation for its commitment to authors, editorial acumen, and dedication to the poetry audience. As the preeminent independent publisher of poetry, Copper Canyon Press fosters the work of emerging, established, and world-renowned poets for an expanding audience. Copper Canyon Press publishes new collections of poetry by both revered and emerging American poets, translations of classical and contemporary work from many of the world’s cultures, re-issues of out-of-print poetry classics, anthologies, and prose books about poetry. Click here to visit the Copper Canyon website.

on nomenclature

April 25, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

father knew his place
it was near the north gate
of the auxiliary winter capital
in the quarter of the middling sort

I climbed it for both of us
the mountain of graduated merit
to the thud of plummeting bodies
I examined away my youth
in the hall of indelible nightmares
to the accompaniment of terminal sobbing
then it was farewell happy father

my first posting was an assistantship
in the region of windswept borders
where I gave good calligraphy
in the third war of pointless encroachment

later in the capital
I enjoyed prestigious posts
keeper of the library of unlearned lessons
and later the first curator
of the burnt library museum
yes interesting times

when I was installed on
the committee of unthinkable thoughts
under the prince with the bees in his bonnet
a new title seemed to beckon me
till all that free-form thinking
triggered the great autumn purge
resulting in five uncomfortable days
in the chamber of extruded truth
before a ceremony-free award
of the brown fan of early retirement
second class

where I live now
the locals will direct you to
the famous mountain hut
of the retired administrator
but I’m always careful to point out
it’s really just my dwelling
that I’ve haven’t got round
to calling anything fancy
and my garden is not defined
by willows or chrysanthemums
or that big mountain it clings to

what I’ve learned I think is
how everything under language
slips and slides and bites
and how in the end
language makes its excuses
and leaves for the beach
where every wave is new and gone

and I sit late
night rises from the valley
and one by one the lights come on
like memories and stay
wavering like memories

and later one by one go out
like names

by Alasdair Paterson

Happy Easter to our readers! Remember that if you use social media, you can now find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Copyright © Alasdair Paterson, 2010. ‘on nomenclature’ is taken from the volume On the Governing of Empires by Alasdair Paterson, published by Shearsman Books, 2010. It is reprinted here by permission of Shearsman Books.

Notes courtesy of Shearsman Books:

Alasdair Paterson was born in Edinburgh and now lives in Exeter. He won an Eric Gregory Award for his poetry in 1976; On the Governing of Empires is his first collection for more than 20 years. The intervening time was spent directing the work of academic libraries in Britain and Ireland, and travelling to Samarkand, Salonika, Stamboul, Siberia, Swaziland, San Francisco, Sidmouth and many other places not beginning with an S. You can read more selections from his latest volume here and here, and keep up with him via his blog, ‘return of the crane’, here.

Shearsman Books is a very active publisher of new poetry, mostly from Britain and the USA, but also with an active translation list. You can learn more about the publisher here.

Serapis from a Postcard

April 18, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

for Zouzi Chebbi Mohamed Hasesen

Inventor-cool that Ptolemy –

smoothed down via dream-dictation,
he discovered the beard of Serapis,
and made dynastic the perfect lie.

Led to the unknown by the unknown,
(from Macedon to Alexandria)

for your face on this postcard, Mohamed,
Goddio’s magnetometer flashed green –

from the humming cave of a shiphead,
a four-month stint in the Grand Palais.

To Google –

Serapis the amalgamator,
the ghost-bearded messiah,

part-western bull part son of Geb,
a Jesus decoy agent.

From the ruins of the Daughter Library,
to the Yorkshire garrisons,

brushed / rebrushed
the bunko of his rock face.

Zouzi,

because the conclusiveness of one entity
is so crucial, so believed,

it carried Serapis from Alexandria
through Rome to the Bishops of Christ,

to these glassy banks of Petrovaradin –

where you are God of Fertility,
God of the White River –

Half-hierophant,
half-king of the deep.

by James Byrne

‘Serapis from a Postcard’ is taken from Blood / Sugar by James Byrne, and published by Arc Publications.

Notes courtesy of Arc:

James Byrne was born in Buckinghamshire in 1977 and divides his time between New York City and London. He is Editor of The Wolf, a poetry magazine he co-founded in 2002. His debut collection, Passages of Time, was published by Flipped Eye in 2003. He has translated the Yemeni national anthem and is currently working on a project to publish contemporary Burmese poets. In 2008, he won the Treci Trg Poetry Festival prize in Serbia. In 2009 his New and Selected Poems: The Vanishing House was published by Treci Trg (in a bilingual edition) in Belgrade. In 2009 his poems were translated into Arabic for the Al-Sendian Cultural Festival in Syria. He is the co-editor of Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, published by Bloodaxe, and is co-editing Paris and Other Poems by Hope Mirrlees (Fyfield Books, 2011). You can read other poems from his latest collection here, hear him read one of his poems at this link, and read more poems here.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc has adhered to its fundamental principles – to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. You can find out more about Arc by joining them on Facebook or by visiting the publisher’s website, where there are discounts available on Arc books .

the true color of the sea

April 11, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

sages’ gardens, ginger root, and siren
glow of mist, green tongues of light
smoke and portents arousing hungers
magnolia plumed gold moonstone heart
collecting rain in turtle shell hollows
of shoals and shelter, of stones that sing
of coral, of wine, of luminous unnamed

cinnamon groves, veil of monsoon
moonless midnight’s milky stars
the finest gold dust, tinder, mirror
of angels’ tears, of devils’ blood
of cooing doves, a child’s fine bones
of sugarcane, and fistfuls of salt
of silk brocade, of laughter, of waiting

by Barbara Jane Reyes

Notes courtesy of BOA Editions:

Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of two previous poetry collections including Poeta en San Francisco which was awarded the 2005 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. She was born in Manila and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She works as adjunct professor in Philippine Studies at University of San Francisco. You can read an interview with Barbara Jane Reyes here, and find out more about her from her website, where she frequently updates her blog. Reyes also recently contributed to Harriet, the news blog for the Poetry Foundation, and you can find her entry here. There are a number of recordings of Reyes reading at this site (scroll to the bottom of the page).

In her book Diwata, from which ‘the true color of the sea’ comes, Reyes uses such Filipino oral tradition devices as meter, repetition and refrain, call and response, incantatory verses which verge on song, and the pantoum (which has Southeast Asian origins). She frames her poems between the Book of Genesis creation story, and the Tagalog creation myth, placing her work somewhere culturally in between both traditions. Also setting the tone for her stories is the death and large shadow cast by her grandfather, a World War II veteran and Bataan Death March survivor, who has passed on to her the responsibility of remembering. Reyes’ voice is grounded in her community’s traditions and histories, despite war and geographical dislocation.

Invocation

April 4, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

These days they say she’s sometimes mistaken
for the revving of a little petrol engine –
her propulsive churr-churring lost in the dark.
But age-old tricks can still be made to work.
Launch a white handkerchief into the air
and – if you are lucky – she’s gliding there,
attracted to you like a catch in the throat,
summoned by signs of life – the hot, the salt
of sudden tears you’d rather were hidden,
making your nose run like a child’s again.
Or she’s drawn to the blood-spill of hurt
that opens flesh and bone. Or she will start
from the dusty roof-space above the bed,
find you wiping love from between your legs.
The white flag of individual weakness
is what serves always to conjure her best
as when old habits, uncertain eyes give out,
when it’s dark wherever they put the light,
she comes then – I think – and this time stays,
cover him, cover him, cover his face.

by Martyn Crucefix

A note to our readers: Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre has just joined the social networking site Facebook. Our page there will feature information about the Centre and links to stories about the poets and publishers we feature, as well as general poetry news that we can’t otherwise mention via the weekly e-mail. Such an interactive site matches our aims of encouraging connections between poets, academics, and readers of poetry, and creating space for discussion of issues surrounding C20th and C21st poetry, so we look forward to hearing from you there. If you are a Facebook user, please do ‘like’ us by clicking here, or by searching for ‘Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre’.

Notes courtesy of Enitharmon:

Martyn Crucefix has won numerous prizes including a major Eric Gregory award and a Hawthornden Fellowship. He has published five collections, including An English Nazareth (Enitharmon, 2004). His translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies was published by Enitharmon in 2006, shortlisted for the Corneliu M Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation and hailed as ‘unlikely to be bettered for very many years’ (Magma). Crucefix’s new collection, Hurt, from which ‘Invocation’ is taken, was published in 2010, and you can find more about it at Enitharmon’s page here, where you can also hear the poet read ‘Stag Beetle’. More of Martyn Crucefix’s work can be read at this link.

Enitharmon Press takes its name from a William Blake character who represents spiritual beauty and poetic inspiration. Founded in 1967 with an emphasis on independence and quality, Enitharmon has been associated with such figures as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Kathleen Raine. Enitharmon also commissions internationally renowned collaborations between artists, including Gilbert & George, and poets, including Seamus Heaney, under the Enitharmon Editions imprint. Discover more about Enitharmon here.

One with Others [a little book of her days]

March 28, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

There is black blood and white blood. There is black air and white air. And
this selfsame lie takes aim, even if by indirection, at the stifled lives of those
inflicting the harm, the lives of witting and of unwitting ignorance, and those
who must live among the stiflers, as if one of them, by all outward and visible
signs one of them, but on the reverse side of their skin lie awake in the scratchy
dark, burning to cross over. Not to become one of the harmed but to shed the
skin, you get my meaning, the tainted skin of the injuring party.

by C.D. Wright

This week’s poem is taken from the book One With Others [a little book of her days], and reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

Notes courtesy of Copper Canyon:

Investigative journalism is the poet’s realm when C.D. Wright returns to her native Arkansas and examines an explosive incident from the civil rights movement. Wright interweaves oral histories, hymns, lists, newspaper accounts, and personal memories—especially those of her incandescent mentor, Mrs. Vititow—with the voices of witnesses, neighbors, police, activists, and black students who were rounded up and detained in an empty public swimming pool. This history leaps howling off the page.

C.D. Wright has published twelve collections of poetry and prose. Reviewing her previous book, Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon, 2008), The New York Times noted: ‘C.D. Wright belongs to a school of exactly one.’ Wright is currently the Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English at Brown University, and lives outside Providence, Rhode Island.

One With Others won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a 2010 National Book Award Finalist. You can read a short interview with C.D. Wright here, learn more about her at this page, hear her discuss the book here, and hear her read parts of One With Others at this link.

Calligraphy

March 21, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Aha, I find the late fourth century pope Damasus
Had seen to it that the tombs of martyrs

Were given fresh distinction by calligraphy.
With a calligraphy from his own pen old stones

Were incised by a mason selected not only
For his dexterity, also for his sympathies.

How different it is, that order of things,
From the reburial, pronto, of carving dismembered

By the constructors of emporia and office blocks
Over the sunken city in modern Mylasa—

What do the planners care about things Greek,
Ancient inscriptions or extended gods

Who still cling with touches of sunlight
To fluted stone scheduled for reburial?

If mind did not become a Mylasa, who’d recall
The crates of American rifles in summer 1940,

And how the girls and boys of freedom lift
Those greased guns from the crates in England,

Old grease, with rags wipe every vestige off,
Clots of grease hidden in the dark magazines?

Plain or grainy, the wooden rifle butt,
Polish it up until it glows

Fitting snug into your skinny shoulder—
An age before you knew what calligraphy was.

by Christopher Middleton

Copyright © Christopher Middleton, 2010. ‘Calligraphy’ is taken from the volume Poems 2006-2009 by Christopher Middleton, published by Shearsman Books, 2010. It is reprinted here by permission of Shearsman Books.

Notes courtesy of Shearsman Books:

Christopher Middleton was born in Truro, Cornwall, in 1926. He studied at Merton College, Oxford and then taught at the University of Zürich, at King’s College, London, and finally as Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin. He has published translations of Robert Walser, Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Goethe and many contemporaries, receiving several awards, including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Schegel-Tieck Translation Prize. His poems, essays and selected translations are all published in the UK by Carcanet Press; his poems are published in the USA by Sheep Meadow Press. His most recent publications are: Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2008), The Anti-Basilisk (poetry, Carcanet Press, 2005—published as Tankard’s Cat in the USA by Sheep Meadow), Of the Mortal Fire (poetry, Sheep Meadow, 2003), Crypto-Topographia (prose, Enitharmon Press, London, 2002), The Word Pavilion and Selected Poems (Carcanet / Sheep Meadow, 2001), Jackdaw Jiving: Selected Essays on Poetry and Translation (Carcanet, 1998), Faint Harps and Silver Voices: Selected Translations (Carcanet, 2000). Christopher Middleton lives in Austin, Texas. You can find out more about his latest work here, hear him read from his work at this page, and read other selections from Poems 2006-2009 (in pdf) here.

Shearsman Books is a very active publisher of new poetry, mostly from Britain and the USA, but also with an active translation list. You can learn more about the publisher here.

Anniversary

March 7, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Didn’t I stand there once,
white-knuckled, gripping the just-lit taper,
swearing I’d never go back?
And hadn’t you kissed the rain from my mouth?
And weren’t we gentle and awed and afraid,
knowing we’d stepped from the room of desire
into the further room of love?
And wasn’t it sacred, the sweetness
we licked from each other’s hands?
And were we not lovely, then, were we not
as lovely as thunder, and damp grass, and flame?

by Cecilia Woloch

Notes courtesy of BOA Editions:

Cecilia Woloch was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up there and in rural Kentucky, one of seven children of a homemaker and an airplane mechanic. She attended Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, earning degrees in English and Theater Arts, before moving to Los Angeles in 1979. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University L.A. in 1999. A celebrated teacher, Ms. Woloch has conducted poetry workshops for thousands of children and young people throughout the United States and around the world, as well as workshops for professional writers, educators, participants in Elderhostel programs for senior citizens, inmates at a prison, and residents at a shelter for homeless women and their children. She is the founding director of Summer Poetry in Idyllwild and of The Paris Poetry Workshop, and is currently a lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of Southern California as well as a member of the core faculty of the low-residency MFA Program in Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University.

Well-controlled eulogies to her dying father in rural Kentucky, lush lyric and prose poems to lovers and former-lovers in Paris and various Eastern European countries, and compelling anaphoric-based narratives that meander between innocence and experience, body and soul – these are the motifs in Cecilia Woloch’s stirring collection, Carpathia, from which ‘Anniversary’ is taken. You can find out more about Carpathia here, and more about Cecilia Woloch here.

Ecology of the lichen

February 21, 2011April 12, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

We paddle head over ears in a field of yellow flowers,
with only heads surfaced in an unplanned discourse,
attuned, swimming in meadow meandering among
old crypts and tombs. I mistrust their shapes, their
sepulchral postures made of bath stone, chalked

extravaganza. You can tell, I haven’t yet wrapped bodies
in linen, you smile. It gives a shape like that, and facing
me you cut a sarcophagus out of the moist air crafting
the swift choreography of a corpse, outlining my outline.
These lime stones are hollow, look. We stare through

their tunnels, sliding our hands in their craters for names
and dates, for one or two initials; but none. Have you,
have you done it before? In the bare space only a slice
of a face, fraction of a glare, mouth half open, your voice
slips through. You laugh. Who do you think prepares them?

You dip your finger into a soft headstone coated with deep
pigments of lichen, orange, red and brown. Like catacombs’
network, complicated under the microscope’s lens. They live
with their photosynthetic partner – you say brushing yellow
pollen off my skin – who produces food for them from sunlight.

by Ágnes Lehóczky

Ágnes Lehóczky is an Hungarian-born poet and translator. She completed her Masters in English and Hungarian Literature at Pazmany Peter University of Hungary in 2001 and an MA with distinction in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2006. She holds a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing from UEA. She has two short poetry collections in Hungarian, Station X (2000) and Medallion (2002), published by Universitas, Hungary.

Ágnes’s first full collection, Budapest to Babel, was published by Egg Box in 2008. (Click on the link to hear her read from the collection, and to read more poems from this book.) She was the 2009 recipient of the Arthur Welton Poetry Award and the winner of the Daniil Pashkoff Prize 2010 in poetry. She is currently working on her second collection to be published by Egg Box in 2011, and her collection of essays on the poetry of Ágnes Nemes Nagy is to be published this year by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Ágnes currently teaches creative writing on the Masters course at the University of Sheffield.

Egg Box is a small, independent poetry publisher based in Norwich, run by poet Nathan Hamilton. It is rapidly establishing a strong reputation for its freshness of approach and keen eye for talented newcomers. Click here to visit Egg Box’s website.