The Most Extraordinary and Beautiful Translation I Have Ever Seen (And You Just Might Say the Same)

Because of some recent whatnot & etc. this finds me flailingly behind with my email. Slowly but surely I am catching up; however you will never find me complaining about email when among the missives are such beautiful gifts as this, from American poet Hiram Larew:

Dear Ms. Mayo—

I thought you might enjoy these two clips.   

In a 2+-minute video, Eric Epstein offers his American Sign Language interpretation of Magic, a poem that first appeared in Orbis and then in my collection, Mud Ajar. Eric Epstein’s American Sign Language Interpretation of Larew’s Poem, “Magic” – YouTube

And, in a 4+ minute Behind the Scenes video, Mr. Epstein describes the process he used to translate the poem into ASL.

Behind the Scenes — Eric Epstein Discusses How He Translated “Magic” – YouTube

I thank Eric for his open, amazing spirit.  

To the magic of ASL and poetry!

Hiram Larew

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I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

Translating Across the Border

Spotlight on Mexican Fiction: “The Apaches of Kiev” by Agustín Cadena in Tupelo Quarterly and Much More

Q & A: Roger Greenwald on Translating
Tarjei Vesaas’s Through Naked Branches

From the Archives: Q & A with Poets Alenier, Anhalt, Crooker, Hill, Hutchison, and Mackay

This is my “hats off” to poets hat. It moonlights as my “armchair baseball expert” hat.

This fourth Monday of the odd-month, herewith, a bouquet of poets who have been so generous as to do a Q & A for this blog. My admiration, my thanks, and my hat off to all! May they inspire you to read more of their poetry— and perhaps also write some poems yourself.

Q & A with Karren Alenier on her New Book How We Hold On, the WordWorks, Paul Bowles & More (September 27, 2021)

“I have had numerous successful readings on Zoom… I like the platform and I have been making opportunities for other poets through Zoom. Yes, of course, there is a future in online readings. You get a bigger more geographically diverse audience. It’s exhilarating.”
— Karren Alenier

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Q & A with Diana Anhalt on Her Poetry Collection Walking Backward (June 24, 2019)

“After Mauricio and I left Mexico and the home where we had lived for many years, I’d wake up in the middle of  the night to go to the kitchen or the bathroom only to discover my feet walking  in the direction they would have taken in my Mexican home, not here in Atlanta. The title’s suggestion of walking and residing in the past was what I was aiming for.”
— Diana Anhalt

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Q & A with Barbara Crooker on the Magic of VCCA, Reading, and Some Glad Morning (December 23, 2019)

“If I’ve made the audience laugh in some places and cry in others, then I feel I’ve done a good job.”
Barbara Crooker

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Q & A with W. Nick Hill on Sleight Work and Mucho Más (March 25, 2019)

“I don’t know how it is for others who teach about literature, but for me, after a time, when you’ve dealt with so many accomplished, brilliant writers and poets, it wasn’t so much that I was influenced by anyone in particular. It was more that I admired specific characteristics, or that the history of genres of writing became clearer because of the way Vallejo, for instance, who did have a serious part to play in what I wanted to do with poetry, the way he broke down previous measures of value to challenge language itself served as a path. Similarly with parts of Neruda, whose Odes touched a thread with simple language anybody could understand, like that of the ancient Chinese in English though because their poems were formally complex and were sung.”
— W. Nick Hill

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Q & A with Joseph Hutchison, Poet Laureate of Colorado, on The World As Is (April 22, 2019)

“I’ve always thought that the way poetry is taught often ruins it for young readers.”
—Joseph Hutchison

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Q & A with Mary Mackey on The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, on Bearing Witness, and Women Writers’ Archives (November 18, 2018)

“I think it’s the duty of a poet to bear witness to her times, and that’s what I have done for over 40 years: bear witness.”
— Mary Mackay

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I welcome your courteous comments which, should you feel so moved, you can email to me here.

From the Archives: “The Essential Francisco Sosa or, Picadou’s Mexico City”

Poet, Writer, and Teacher Pat Schneider (1934-2020)

Meteor, Influences, Ambiance

Q & A with Poet Matthew Pennock on “The Miracle Machine”

This blog posts on Mondays. Fourth Mondays of the month I devote to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

“Many poets find their voice and stick to a sort of signature style their entire careers. That has never appealed to me. I’d get bored chewing on the same poem for eternity like an indigestible hunk of gristle. My eclectic nature in regards to style and voice remains driven by my eclectic reading habits. I like to read all sorts of things.”—Matthew Pennock

Last year my book, Meteor, won the Gival Press Poetry Award and, as per the contest rules, I served as the judge for this year’s award. In an impressive batch of finalists Matthew Pennock’s The Miracle Machine was the shining standout. Here’s my official blurb:

“With a craftsman’s deftest precision and a thunder-powered imagination on DaVinci wings, the author recreates a lost world within a lost world that yet—when we look—shimmers with life within our world. Elegant, wondrously strange, The Miracle Machine is at once an elegy and a celebration, tick-tock of the tao.” 
—C.M. Mayo

Matthew Pennock

By the way, the judge for the Gival Poetry Award does not know the names nor anything about the poets who submit their manuscripts. I only found out that the author of The Miracle Machine was Matthew Pennock—whom I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting in person—when Gival Press’s editor, Robert Giron, let me know by email. Well, it turns out that, no surprise, I had selected the work of one very accomplished poet. Pennock received his MFA from Columbia University and his PhD from the University of Cincinnati. His poems have been widely published in literary magazines, including Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Western Humanities Review, Guernica, New York Quarterly, and LIT, and his first book, Sudden Dog (Alice James Books, 2012), won the Kinereth-Gensler Award.

Dear writerly reader, this is one of the pleasures of hosting a blog: I get to talk to people I might not otherwise. Right now, of course, the covid makes most meetings impossible anyway. So here we are, and may you find Pennock’s answers as interesting as I did. And at the end, a treat: one of his poems.

C.M. MAYO: What was the spark— what inspired you to write these poems?

MATTHEW PENNOCK: With too many of my poems, television provides the spark. I had been watching “Mysteries at the Museum,” which is like the TV version of clickbait. They start an interesting little teaser story, and you have to wait through a commercial break (watching commercials, how novel!) to get to end, and then the process starts anew. I think I’ve seen every episode. 

Needless to say, I was lying there and this story came on the screen about an automaton in the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. I have always had a fascination with automata, like the miracle monk Juanelo Turriano created for Charles V, or the fraudulent Mechanical Turk, but I had not heard of this one. I did a little more research and found it on the Franklin’s website. I was delighted by the breadth and quality of the drawings it could create, and the fact that it wrote poems was the clincher. I felt I had to write a poem about the mechanical boy that wrote poems. One poem became two, and then I thought, why not a short series? The more research I did for the poems took me to new places and new characters, and the project just kept growing until it became its own book.

C.M. MAYO: As you were writing, did you have in mind an ideal reader?

MATTHEW PENNOCK: Not particularly. When I wrote the poems that comprised my first collection, I definitely knew who I was writing to, but this time was different. I wrote these for myself. By that, I mean I used them to make sense of the world as I saw it. This book began during a heated election year, not the 2016 election but the 2012. Due to the Trump era, I think many people have idealized the entirety of the Obama administration, and seemed to have forgotten how nail-bitingly close the 2012 election was until a few weeks before the denouement. That combined with the subsequent four years of obstructionist politics by Boehner and McConnell gifted us what seemed like a weekly Armageddon of debt ceiling crises and fiscal cliffs. In 2008, for a brief teasing moment, there was so much hope and potential for us to finally start tackling the ills that had so long plagued our country: healthcare, climate change, perpetual war, racism, etc. To have it all come to so little felt truly devastating. Then, of course, came Trump. I finished this book about a year into his reign, so I think that’s why the whole thing has such an elegiac tone. 

I do want to make clear though that this book is not solely a political work, I think that reading of it exists, but that’s mainly because of the atmosphere in which it was scrawled, but I hope that’s only one dimension of it. I poured all the angst and joy I had into it, so the book is deeply personal for me, and delves into my struggle with so many other things: time, and its passage; love; the nature of reality, and so forth.    

C.M. MAYO: Now that it has been published, can you describe the ideal reader for this book as you see him or her now?

MATTHEW PENNOCK: No, I can’t. I’m sort of a firm believer in once my work has entered the world, it has ceased to be mine. I really don’t have much control over what happens to it, and I’m fine with that. Every person who takes the time to read it has a right to see what they want in it. I really do not want to speculate who would get the most from it, or who would understand it the best. I’d inevitably be wrong, and I would feel like a parent telling my child that they must be a lawyer because I was a lawyer, or something like that. 

C.M. MAYO: Which writers and poets have been the most important influences for you?

MATTHEW PENNOCK: I always struggle with this question. I don’t have any writers I return to over and over like a blessing of personal Olympians to whom I must pray. In creative writing, it’s hard to get very far before you’ve heard someone talking about “finding their voice.”  A famous poet who led a workshop I was in during grad school once told me I’d never write a successful poem because I was too shifty and couldn’t stick to a consistent voice. I didn’t like that. Many poets find their voice and stick to a sort of signature style their entire careers. That has never appealed to me. I’d get bored chewing on the same poem for eternity like an indigestible hunk of gristle. My eclectic nature in regards to style and voice remains driven by my eclectic reading habits. I like to read all sorts of things.

In addition to fiction and poetry, I love narrative non-fiction about anything: history, science, politics, etc., and I get something from almost everything I read, or watch for that matter. The beautiful thing about writing a book like The Miracle Machine was that I did a good amount of research, and it took me so many places. I took influence from history books about pre-modern medicine, alchemy and mysticism; documentaries/movies like Ken Burn’s The Civil War, and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York; Novels like Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell; and still other things like Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffman. I studied epic poetry and other long form works of poetry. Too many to list really, A few favorites: The Ring and the Book, by Robert Browning, Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin, Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto, and of course, The Dream Songs, by John Berryman. 

C.M. MAYO: Which writers are you reading now? 

MATTHEW PENNOCK: Books that I physically have a book mark in right now an am switching between: The Path between the Seas, by David McCullough, Snake, by Erica Wright, Dream of the Unified Field, by Jorie Graham, and I just finished Number 9 Dream, by David Mitchell and Toy Medium: Materialism and the Modern Lyric, by Daniel Tiffany, which was recommended to me by the great Timothy Donnelly after he blurbed my book.  

C.M. MAYO: How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share? 

MATTHEW PENNOCK: I am not particularly prolific. I do not write every day, and I’m often distracted by all the shows I can stream, and podcasts I can listen to. Social media has never really appealed to me, so I am okay there, but other than that, someone needs to give me some tips about how to get a little more done.

C.M. MAYO: Another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. As a poet, at what point were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you or problematic?

MATTHEW PENNOCK: I kept a romantic attachment to paper for a little while, but once we got into the late aughts, and I made the permanent switch from having a home desktop to having a laptop I could carry around, writing directly on the computer became way too convenient. I can’t imagine going back to paper now. After all, the internet makes looking stuff up as you write so much easier. You never know when you might need to know an obscure fact about the health of Lake Champlain’s ecosystem, or whatnot. 

C.M. MAYO: For those looking to publish, what would be your most hard-earned piece of advice?

MATTHEW PENNOCK: I don’t think I have to tell anyone that getting published is hard, the odds are long and the expense is hard to justify. I really dislike it when people try to gloss over that fact, and paint a rosy picture of the contest model. I spent nine years with Alice James Books, six of those years as Chair of the Editorial Board, and during that time, I saw around a thousand manuscripts for various contests. The best advice I can give is be adaptable, never stop looking for ways to improve your book. I saw manuscripts reappear unchanged year after year, while others would continuously change and improve. Those in the latter category would eventually break through, if not with us, then elsewhere. Good work will find a home, but sometimes, it takes longer than any of us want.   

C.M. MAYO: What important piece of advice would you give yourself if you could travel back in time ten years?

MATTHEW PENNOCK: Forget about academia, go find something else to do to earn your rent.

C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you?

MATTHEW PENNOCK: I’ve been working on a manuscript for a novel. It involves an awful lot of research about foxes. 

BROADWAY & ANN
by Matthew Pennock
From The Miracle Machine (Gival Press, 2020)

Curiosity wins in the underground—

Tunnels serpentine, electricity,
occasional unnatural liquid—

Too much to bear in my so-long city.

At first surface, I keep in shadow, but people

throng with such grace,
a starling’s murmur twisting

at the behest of light.
Chaotic coordination,
I cannot help but join 

and walk openly among them. 

Focused on their gadgets,
no one notices just another synthetic boy
in his own 19th century,

enthralled by every last one of them:

their hair of colors and lengths; skin dappled, smooth, 
or freckled; every eye, liquid and light.

The Chinese believe when a tiger dies,
her eyes sink into the earth 
to become amber,

but death is not necessary for us.
We are already compressed light—

Infinite procession to the mouth 
of a hulking bridge.

Then absence becomes 

a poignant delicatessen, filled 
with a few unattended bottles, 
mustard hardening in the window.

No horses, banners, wood, 
No trace—she, me, never here.

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Q & A with Timothy Heyman on the Incomparable Legacy 
of German-Mexican Novelist B. Traven

Q & A with Diana Anhalt on Her Poetry Collection Walking Backward

Top 13 Trailers for Movies with Extra-Astral Texiness

From the Archives: Q & A with Roger Greenwald, Poet and Literary Translator of Gunnar Harding

Madam Mayo blog’s “madmimi” email sign-up is finally working, over there on the sidebar. Subscribe and each Monday you will receive the latest post (and nothing else– no spam). Mexico, poetry, rare books, Texas, translation, the typosphere, occasional pug-sightings– if these tickle your fancy this is the blog for you! Second Mondays are for my workshop students and anyone else interested in creating writing; fourth Mondays are for a Q & A with another writer.

It’s too long a story what happened to the Q & A for this month; however I offer you this fascinating Q & A from the Madam Mayo blog archives.

Q & A WITH ROGER GREENWALD, POET
AND LITERARY TRANSLATOR OF GUNNAR HARDING

(Originally posted July 1, 2015 on Madam Mayo blog’s original blogger platform. Madam Mayo blog has since migrated to this new self-hosted WordPress site.)

ROGER GREENWALD, POET AND TRANSLATOR
Photo by Alf Magne Heskja  

I got poet Roger Greenwald on my radar when we crossed paths at last year’s American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference in Milwaukee [see my post Why Translate?], and I began to read his gorgeous latest translation, Guarding the Air: Selected Poems of Gunnar Harding. (Greenwald’s latest book, actually, is Slow Mountain Train, more about that after the Q & A. Important point: I have always believed, for it has always been my experience, that the best literary translators are poets.)

Gunnar Harding, a jazz musician, painter, essayist and a translator himself, is one of Sweden’s leading poets. Surely Harding is one of Sweden’s most prolific as well; Greenwald has selected numerous poems from more than a dozen of his books. Strange, witty and jazzy, Harding’s poems wing from the moon’s Sea of Tranquility to nickels in a jukebox (“Rebel without a Cause”).  

GUNNAR HARDING, Swedish literary legend

> Visit Greenwald’s webpage for the book, which includes some of the poems and a video of the launch, here

Read the review by Christine Roe for Words Without Borders. “Spanning a lifetime of poetry, Guarding the Air pays homage to tragically under-translated Swedish literary legend”

Gunnar Harding on Swedish Wikipedia
(Note: I’m not a fan of Wikipedia, but alas I could not find much else on Gunnar Harding. Caveat emptor.)

ROGER GREENWALD attended The City College of New York and the Poetry Project workshop at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, then completed graduate degrees at the University of Toronto. His poetry has appeared in such journals as The World, Pequod, Pleiades, Poetry East, Prism International, The Spirit That Moves Us, The Texas Observer, Great River Review, and Leviathan Quarterly. He has won two Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Literary Awards (poetry and travel literature) and has published two books of poems: Connecting Flight from Williams-Wallace in Toronto and in April 2015, Slow Mountain Train, from Tiger Bark Press in Rochester, New York.

C.M. MAYO: In a sentence, why should readers pick up this book?

ROGER GREENWALD: This selection spans the whole career of a major poet whose work is accessible and appealing– and also strong in both idea and feeling.

C.M. MAYO: What were the challenges for you as a translator?

ROGER GREENWALD: First I had to understand each poem in depth, of course, and in this case that meant understanding not only the language and the “argument,” but a broad range of allusions to other literary works, paintings, recorded music, places, people, and so on. (I’ve put pointers to these in endnotes.)  

The biggest challenge, as always, was to write in English poems that had something like the voice and the music of the source. People assume that it is easier to translate poems written in a colloquial voice than to translate work full of neologisms, broken syntax, word play, and other notoriously “tough” features. But the fact is that those features give a translator license to be creative and sometimes to sound “strange”; whereas to translate a whole book in a colloquial voice, getting the literal sense and the line units and the music right while never once sounding odd or “translated” is just as hard or harder.

C.M. MAYO: What advice would you offer others who might consider undertaking a poetry translation?

ROGER GREENWALD: Translate into your native language. If you’re not doing that, you need to collaborate with a poet whose native language is the target language. Try to live for at least a year in the country that your poet and his or her language come from. Read not just the major works from that country’s literature, but some of what children read in school years, like fairy tales. Get to know some of the art and music. Watch TV and listen to radio. And ask a lot of questions, especially about the language, its idioms, its peculiarities. When you start understanding friends’ jokes, stand-up comics, and locally made comedy films, you will know your cultural immersion has worked.

C.M. MAYO: As a member of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), can you talk about what the benefits have been for you as a translator?

ROGER GREENWALD: The greatest benefits have come from sharing knowledge and experiences with other translators. Seeing and hearing their work and discussing how they approached certain texts gave me useful insights into practice. But it was also important to learn about how to navigate relationships with authors and their publishers, how to find suitable potential English-language publishers, how to present work to those, and how to avoid getting burned by unfair contracts. Simply hearing, in the Bilingual Reading series at ALTA conferences, a great range of usually unpublished work, some of it still in progress, has been an ongoing source of delight and inspiration. 

And beyond that, it’s worth saying that literary translators have to be some of the most interesting people in the world, with extremely diverse backgrounds, experiences of foreign cultures, and knowledge of wonderful writers who are little known in English, even if their work has been translated and published. So it has been great to get to know my fascinating colleagues!

C.M. MAYO: Are there are other associations you would recommend?

ROGER GREENWALD: None that I belong to. But I have had it in mind for some time to look into the Authors Guild, because it is focused on advocating for fair treatment of authors and translators. And this seems to be an issue of growing concern as digital media undermine publishing revenue, and as companies like Amazon demand deep discounts and exert downward pressure on the sale price of both paper and electronic books.

[C.M.: See my post Shout-out for the Authors Guild.]

C.M. MAYO: Where can readers find a copy of this book? 

ROGER GREENWALD: I’m happy to say that the publisher of Guarding the Air has excellent worldwide distribution. So readers can buy it directly from the press at www.blackwidowpress.com (choose “Modern Poets” or use Search); they can order it through any independent bookseller they care to support; or they can buy it on line from Amazon or Barnes & Noble

It’s also worth remembering that readers can ask their public library or their college library to acquire the book.

+ + + + + + + + + + 
+ + + + + + + + + + 

From Roger Greenwald’s new book of poems, Slow Mountain Train:

Next post next Monday.


Überly Fab Fashion Blogger Melanie Kobayashi’s “Bag and a Beret” (Further Notes on Reading as a Writer)

Using Imagery (the “Metaphor Stuff”)

Translating Across the Border

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.

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Q & A: Poet Barbara Crooker on the Magic of VCCA, Reading, and “Some Glad Morning”

This blog posts on Mondays. Fourth Mondays of the month I devote to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

“If I’ve made the audience laugh in some places and cry in others, then I feel I’ve done a good job.”
-Barbara Crooker

I do believe that a piece of heaven on earth is the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. That is where, one breezy evening by the grand piano, many years ago, I met Barbara Crooker and heard her read some of her beautiful poems. She goes to the VCCA more often than often, and whether there or elsewhere, she is prolific. Her latest book, Some Glad Morning, is just out from the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Here’s the catalog copy:

Some Glad Morning, Barbara Crooker’s ninth book of poetry, teeters between joy and despair, faith and doubt, the disconnect between lived experience and the written word. Primarily a lyric poet, Crooker is in love with the beauty and mystery of the natural world, even as she recognizes its fragility. But she is also a poet unafraid to write about the consequences of our politics, the great divide. She writes as well about art, with ekphrastic poems on paintings by Hopper, O’Keeffe, Renoir, Matisse, Cézanne, and others. Many of the poems are elegaic in tone, an older writer tallying up her losses. Her work embodies Bruce Springsteen’s dictum, “it ain’t no sin to be glad we’re alive,” as she celebrates the explosion of spring peonies, chocolate mousse, a good martini, hummingbirds’ flashy metallics, the pewter light of September, late NBA star Darryl Dawkins, and saltine crackers. While she recognizes it might all be about to slip away, “Remember that nothing is ever lost,” she writes, and somehow, we do.


Here’s her bio:

Barbara Crooker is the author of eight books of poetry, including Les Fauves and The Book of Kells. Her first book, Radiance, won the 2005 Word Press First Book Award and was finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance, her second book, won the 2009 Paterson Award for Excellence in Literature. Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian Americana and has received a number of awards, including the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.

C.M. MAYO: Of all the poems in this collection, which is your personal favorite? And why? 

BARBARA CROOKER: Well, the book just came out (November 5th), so I don’t have any favorites yet.  Plus, that question always feels like someone’s asking which is your favorite child (I have three, so all of them!).  Here’s what Garrison Keillor has chosen to read on The Writer’s Almanac: “Tomorrow,” “BLT” (in which I quote Warren Zevon!), “Poem with an Embedded Line by Susan Cohen,” “The New Year,” and “Home Cooking.”  I’m doing the first reading from the book this week; I’ll add to that “Regret,” “Big Love,” “Butter” (yes, I have an ode to butter), “Principles of Accounting,” “Drug Store” (based on a painting by Hopper), “Practicing Mindfulness,” and “Mid-November,” which got a lot of good comments when I posted it on my Facebook page.  Oh, and I can’t leave out “Big Man,” an elegy to my Zumba buddy and NBA star, Darryl Dawkins.  

C.M. MAYO: Which is your favorite to read aloud?
 

BARBARA CROOKER: I’m hoping all of these read aloud well; sometimes, the lyric poems don’t, so when I perform, I tend to pick the narrative ones. I won’t come up with my favorites until I’ve done 5-10 readings—sometimes, the ones you think will read really well don’t, and vice-versa. If I’ve made the audience laugh in some places and cry in others, then I feel I’ve done a good job.

C.M. MAYO: If a reader were to read one poem on this collection, which would you recommend, and why?

PRINCIPLES OF ACCOUNTING
by Barbara Crooker

Nearly summer, and the trees are banking on green,
calculating their bonuses in numerators of leaves.
Outside my window, the crows are ganging up
on someone, thugs in their hoodies of night.
I’m feeling the number of days begin to feel finite,
no longer uncountable as blades of grass.  
So I’m rounding off clouds to the nearest 
decade; tabulating interest from the sweetness 
in the air.  I’m going for broke, in the time
remaining, like the mockingbird letting loose 
his vocals, a Fort Knox of sound.  
I’m going to spend it all.
Not like our legislature, who can’t pass 
a budget, letting one year roll into the next,
while schools and social services borrow
to pay their providers, leaving even less
in the diminishing pot for those
who need it the most.  Road repair, bridges,
pre-K?  Not sustainable, say the fat cats,
lapping up their cream.  For the rest of us,
the dice are rigged, the loopholes big enough
to drive a camel through.  From this distance, 
the older I get, the closer I see the hand basket 
coming.  So let me lean back in this red Adirondack 
chair as dusk makes us all equal, happy for the blend 
of herbs and gin, pure sapphire, the dividend of olive
at the end.  Here comes the night, nothing
we can do to stop it, except tote up the stars
on a ledger sheet, and put every last one of them
in the plus column. . . .

BARBARA CROOKER: I’m going to pick this one because it hits a number of themes in this book:  transience, impermanence, plus my own peculiar hybrid of lyric political poetry.  I don’t think you can be a lyric poet in the era of the climate change crisis without letting politics seep into your poetry.  

C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about which poets have been the most important influences for you? 

BARBARA CROOKER: Early on, I’d say Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin.  But the one who made me fall in love with poetry, and set me on the writing path was Diane Wakoski. I came across a group of poems of hers plus an interview in a journal put out by Mansfield State Teachers’ College (as it was known then). I thought she was an undergraduate. (I knew nothing, like Jon Snow.) Had I known she was famous, I’d have been intimidated and never started, but I thought, “Hmm, if a college kid can write like that, maybe I can, too,” and dug in.  That’s been my method; I was never in a position to get an MFA, so I went to what I call “the MFA of the 3000 books,” reading and studying on my own. Fast forward to recently, and Diane Wakoski put this note under a poem I’d posted on Facebook: “I wish I’d written that.” I couldn’t ask for anything more.

C.M. MAYO: Which poets and writers are you reading now? 

BARBARA CROOKER: Christopher Buckley, David Kirby, Barbara Hamby, Linda Pastan, Sharon Olds, Betsy Sholl, Ted Kooser, Wendy Barker, Marjorie Stelmach, Anya Silver, George Bilgere, Ellen Bass, Jeanne Murray Walker, Dorianne Laux, Robert Cording, Gray Jacobik.  Plus I read every poem in every journal that I’m in, reading each journal (and each book of poetry) twice and taking notes.  Which is why my reading pile is so high, and why I never reach the bottom. . . .

C.M. MAYO: It seems a very important part of your process is VCCA. What brings you back there time and again? 

BARBARA CROOKER: I first went to VCCA in 1990, and have been back every 18 months since then (so 19 times).  Besides not having an MFA, I’m an outlier in the larger writing world because I’m not an academic (although I have been an adjunct at eight different colleges). Rather, I’ve been a caregiver, taking care of my mother for many years and also my son, who has autism. So the first time I went to VCCA and realized what it was like to reclaim my life, at least for a short period of time (I started out going for 9 day stays; I’m now up to two week ones) would, not to exaggerate, save my life, and so I’ve returned.  I’ve also had two residencies at VCCA in France (in Auvillar, near Toulouse) and two at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Co. Monaghan, Ireland. 

All of these places have been magical for me; I think it’s because when all you do for an entire day is write, read, talk about writing, take long walks and think about writing, you start drawing from a deeper well.  Also, time becomes elastic—those nine days are worth nine months “in the real world.”  It’s amazing how many hours there ARE in a day when you are not involved in food prep (planning, shopping, cooking, cleaning up, repeat three times a day).  When my son was eight, I discovered that a gluten and dairy-free diet made a world of difference, so I started making parallel meals for him, which was, and is, very time-consuming.  So colonies that provide meals are deeply appreciated. Also, when I’m away, I try to write outside as much as possible, let the world around me seep into my poems. 

At VCCA, where there are also musicians, artists, other writers, I like to let myself be open to the influences of the other artists—it’s such a rich, fertile community, and everyone whose path has crossed mine has added to my work, perhaps not in obvious ways, but I see the connecting threads. And the grounds and physical location  of VCCA is simply gorgeous. 

Whenever I enter the gates of Mt. San Angelo, I feel like I’m coming home. 

C.M. MAYO: You have been a prolific poet for many years. How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share? 

BARBARA CROOKER: I’m not sure I am prolific, just old.  I have a poem called “Twenty-Five Years of Rejection Slips” in my first book, and that pretty much describes my early years of writing but not getting published.  So I had quite a backlog.  This has also meant that I’ve never strayed much from my initial writing habits, which are/were to read, write, read, repeat.  Initially, email was pretty clunky—remember dial-up?  Those of us in the country used it for much, much longer than the rest of the country. So because it was time-consuming (and tied up our one phone line, I tried to limit my time online. Then I resisted using social media for a long time once we got a high speed connection, fearing it would be a time suck (it is!). I do try to answer emails in a timely fashion, but I limit Facebook to half hour sessions, confess that I don’t see the use of Twitter, but do use it to post when poems are online or if I have an event, and haven’t figured out Instagram yet. . . .  The good part about all of this (the Digital Revolution) is that I can easily share work, especially work that has appeared in print-only journals, with larger audiences. I maintain my own website (www.barbaracrooker.com), posting a new poem every month, plus links to poems published online. The downside of it is that I’d need to be cloned to really be able to be a big presence on social media. But I feel my real job is just to write poems, so I’m working as hard as I can to keep the rest of the “stuff” to a minimum.  

C.M. MAYO: Another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic? 

BARBARA CROOKER: Um, I’m still working on paper!  I do multiple drafts on paper, don’t turn to the computer until I feel ready to see how the lines look in type.  (I use both my ear and my eye in casting lines.)  For me, the connection between head and heart through the hand is important, and I like the physicality of the pen (roller ball, extra fine, .05) moving over the blue lines on the yellow pad. Now, since I have grandchildren, I know that cursive is no longer being taught in school, so I wonder how this will change writing in the future.  I’m not saying it will be negative, just that it will be different. Also, I went through both undergraduate and graduate schools using a manual typewriter (only rich people and secretaries had electric ones, and they were big and cumbersome).  Here’s a poem from Some Glad Morning about this: 

PROMPT
by Barbara Crooker
     after a poem by Alison Joseph

Write me a poem about
the manual typewriter,
the clip clop of fingers on keys,
the sleigh bell that rang when you
reached the end of the line.  Tell me
about the carbon that smudged your fingers
when you untangled jangled keys.
Remember life before Word Count, when 
a pencil mark reminded you to end the intro, 
start paragraph one. The other marks 
that kept you on the road, true to your outline.  
The finals streaks of graphite that said, 
Wrap it up, tie it together, lead it into the barn.
Those days when cut and paste
involved scissors and Elmer’s glue.
When making a copy meant
two sheets of paper with a leaf
of inky black sandwiched between.
No delete key, no white-out, no search
and replace.  So writing a paper
or a novel involved manual labor, fingers
dirty at the end of the day.  Write me
about how your back ached.  Tell me about
margins and tab sets.  The silver levers,
the roller bars.  Remember how faithful
it was, this coal black steed, the places
it took you to, far, far into the thicket of words.
And how it always brought you safely home again.

C.M. MAYO: What is the most important piece of advice you would offer to another poet who is just starting out? And, if you could travel back in time, to your own thirty year-old self? 

BARBARA CROOKER: Read.  Read constantly.  Read poets you like, and poets you don’t have a kinship with.  When you read a poem that knocks your socks off, see if you can figure out why, and then try and do it in your own work.  Buy books from that author.  Go to readings.  Go to museums.  Read. And write.   To my thirty year-old self, I’d say “Patience.”  As I mentioned above, it took me a long time to get a first book, and although I was a finalist many times over (it’s like Chutes & Ladders, if you don’t win, you go back to the beginning), for a while, I was thinking it might be posthumous.  Having nine full-length books (I also have twelve chapbooks) was never on my radar.  Nor was being solicited for The Pitt Poetry Series (my new book, Some Glad Morning—I’m still pinching myself over that!).  Or appearing fifty times on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac.  Or having people pay to fly me all over the country to read. (Am going to FL, OK, TX, WI, and CT this coming year).  This writing life is full of a steady stream of rejection (I always say that while it might seem that I’m successful, that’s just the little tip on the surface, and the Giant Iceberg of Rejection is looming far beneath).  One of my poems ends with “Something wonderful is just about to happen,” and I still need to remind myself of this on the days when the rejections are flying thicker than snowflakes.  And really, my goal is not to earn prestige or win awards; it’s to write a poem that somebody else will want to read, to make that human connection. All the rest is background noise.

C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you?

BARBARA CROOKER: Oh, boy, THAT’S a good question!  Up until this point, I’ve had completed manuscripts waiting for a publisher, or part of a project halfway done.  But when Pitt came calling, they cleaned out my poetry cupboard, leaving it pretty bare.  I’ve been looking at what’s left (and what I’ve done since), and have loosely gathered them in a binder, calling it (for now) Slow Wreckage (the body’s decline, what climate change is doing to the planet, the political situation—cheerful, right?)  But I think (or hope) that the political poems will be dated by the time I’m ready to send it to a publisher, so I’m trying to be open to letting air in, changing it completely as new poems come.  I’ve been working (slowly) on a series called “Late Painters” (Monet, Renoir, Matisse, so far), on how aging altered their work, and I’d like that to become a series or a section in a book.  I’m hoping to apply to the American Academy in Rome, thinking that may bring some new poems, new directions.  And I’m equally all right, if I don’t have seventy-five strong poems that hang together, to say that Some Glad Morning will be my last book.  But I’m not ready to say never, so really, the answer is, I’m back to square one, where I was when I started, just writing poems. 

Q & A with Joseph Hutchison, Poet Laureate of Colorado, on The World As Is

Top 12+ Books Read 2019

Meteor, Influences, Ambiance

Find out more about
C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.

“Meteor” + “Verde, que quiero tu guacamole verde”

Book reviews: I write them, for I consider reviewing certain books a vital exercise for finding clarity in my own thinking. However, I try not to read reviews of my own books because my book is already written, after all, and I wrote it the way I did because that’s what I wanted to do, that’s what I thought I should do, and I did it the best way I knew how (and who the hell is that schmo anyway?) If some random reviewer doesn’t like it, TFB (tough frisbees). But of course… it’s too tempting… Yeah, I read them. The pay-off for this foolishness is that once in while there is a review that makes my whole month, and not so much because it tickles my ego (although it does) but because the reviewer so profoundly understood and appreciated what I was trying to do. And this one review somehow, truly, makes writing a book, and bringing it into the world, feel… sigh. Maybe a little less quixotic. Dear poetically-inclined reader, I point you to Greg Walkin’s review of Meteor.


> The webpage for Meteor is here.

> A recent Writers’ League of Texas Q & A with me about Meteor & etc. is here.

#

These days I am not writing much poetry because I am working on my memoir / portrait of Far West Texas and related podcasts and essays. But the Muse has her whims and wiggly ways. This is what happened last week when, weirdly, I was thinking of Federico García Lorca’s “Romance sonámbulo” as I read Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archäischer Torso Apollos.” Typed on a 1967 Hermes 3000. It’s a macaronic.

UPDATE: Joseph Hutchison has posted his elegant translation of Rilke’s poem plus some fascinating links to read more about it here.

“What Happened to the Dog?”
A Story About a Typewriter, Actually,
Typed on a 1967 Hermes 3000

“Silence and Poem” on the 1967 Hermes 3000

Überly-über Fab Fashion Blogger Melanie Kobayashi’s “Bag and a Beret”
(Further Notes on Reading as a Writer)

Find out more about
C.M. Mayo’s books, articles, podcasts, and more.

“Advice for Writers”: Spotlight on US Poet, Playwright and Translator Zack Rogow, and His Mega-Rich Resource of a Blog

This blog posts on Mondays. Second Mondays of the month I devote to my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing. Welcome!

> For the archive of workshop posts click here.

This past spring I attended the Associated Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference and bookfair, where I read from Meteor, my book of poetry, as part of the Gival Press 20th anniversary celebration. AWP is not for the FOMO-ly challenged. In the crowd of 15,000+ conference-goers I missed many events and many friends, among them the poet, playwright and translator Zack Rogow. And it didn’t seem at all right to have missed Rogow for, the last time I was at AWP, it was to participate on his panel with Mark Doty and Charles Johnson, “Homesteading on the Digital Frontier: Writers’ Blogs,” one of the crunchiest conference panels ever. (You can read the transcript of my talk about blogs here.)

Should you try to attend AWP next spring 2020 in San Antonio? Of course only you know what’s right for you. But I can say this much: AWP can be overwhelming, an experience akin to a fun house ride and three times through the TSA line at the airport with liquids… while someone drones the William Carlos Williams white chickens poem… AWP can also prove Deader than Deadsville, if what you’re after is, say, an agent for your ready-for-Netflix thriller. The commercial publishing scene it ain’t.

On the bright side, however, Zack Rogow attends AWP. He is one of the most talented and generous poets and translators I know. Watch this brief documentary about his life and work and I think you’ll understand why I say this:

Rogow is also a teacher of creative writing, and for several years now he’s been blogging steadily with his “Advice for Writers.” It’s a terrific resource. I hope he’ll turn it into a book–the moment he does I’ll add it to the list of recommended books for my workshop.

Herewith a degustation of Rogow’s extra-crunchy posts:

Tips for the AWP Conference

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

The Importance of Persistence for a Writer

Why Write Poetry?

Using Poetic Forms

And, my favorite:

The Limits of “Write What You Know”: Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey

# # # # #

One Simple Yet Powerful Practice in Reading as a Writer

Q & A: David A. Taylor,
on Cork Wars: Intrigue and Industry in World War II

Recommended Books on Creative Process

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.


Q & A: Diana Anhalt on Her Poetry Collection “Walking Backward”

This blog posts on Mondays. Fourth Mondays of the month I devote to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

Diana Anhalt, author of Walking Backward

We have never met, but I feel as if we have. I think this is always true when one has read another’s such wonderful writing. But I did “meet” Diana Anhalt, in a matter of speaking, when years ago, she sent me a selection from her powerful and fascinating history / memoir of growing up in Mexico City, A Gathering of Fugitives: American Political Expatriates in Mexico 1948-1965. When, sometime later, I read the entirety of that beautifully written book itself–which I admiringly recommend to anyone with an interest in Mexico–I wrote to her, and we have kept in touch ever since. Apart from writing poetry and essay, we have this common: a lifetime, it seems, of living in Mexico City, and married to a Mexican. By the time we found each other’s work, however, Diana and her husband Mauricio had left “the endless city” for Atlanta, Georgia. (But ojalá, we will meet one day outside of cyberspace soon!)

Her latest, just out from Kelsay Books, is Walking Backward. From her publisher’s website, her author bio:

Diana Anhalt left Mexico over nine years ago following close to a lifetime in that country but claims her writing sometimes digs in its heels and refuses to budge. She continues to write about Mexico. Many of her essays, short stories, and book reviews have appeared in both English and Spanish along with her book, A Gathering of Fugitives: American Political Expatriates in Mexico 1948-1965. Since she first arrived in Atlanta, two of her chapbooks, Second Skin, (Future Cycle Press), Lives of Straw, (Finishing Line Press), and one short collection, Because There Is No Return, (Passager Books), have been published. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in “Nimrod,” “Concho River Review,” “The Connecticut River Review,” “The Atlanta Review,” and “Spillway,” among many others. She believes this is the first time her work has started to lose its Mexican accent.”
Source: Kelsay Books

Writes Dan Veach, founding editor of Atlanta Review, author of Elephant Water and Lunchboxes:

“The best way to visit any country is with someone who knows and loves it intimately. In Walking Backward, Diana Anhalt welcomes us graciously into the very heart of her family and her Mexico. With deep empathy and quiet courage, and always with a saving grace of humor, she shows us how to deal with love and loss, both on a personal and an artistic level.”

#

C.M. MAYO: What inspired you to write Walking Backward

DIANA ANHALT: I wanted to put together a collection—this is my fifth—which would include, for the first time, some of what I’d written following my husband’s death three years ago, but it couldn’t just be a book about death so I settled on including, as well, work focused on the family, on the past. 

MISSING
by Diana Anhalt

I walk my unwritten poems down La Reforma,
stop to buy La Prensa, scan the Want Ads. 
Missing bilingual parrot Inglés/Español,
answers to the name of Palomitas.

Se Busca María Felix look-alike for chachacha-ing
on Saturday nights. Extraviado/Lost  guitar case 
filled with woman’s shoes and toothpaste samples. 

In Search Of instructions on how to read divining bones.
Reward Offered for information leading to whereabouts
of Gabi Escobedo, missing since September. 

Attención Mauricio—You’ve been dead long enough. 
It’s time to come home.

Reprinted by permission of the author from Walking Backwards, Kelsay Books, 2019 Copyright © Diana Anhalt


C.M. MAYO: If a reader were to read one poem in this collection, which one would you suggest, and why?

DIANA ANHALT: The logical choice would be Walking Backward, the title poem and the first in the book. After Mauricio and I left Mexico and the home where we had lived for many years, I’d wake up in the middle of  the night to go to the kitchen or the bathroom only to discover my feet walking  in the direction they would have taken in my Mexican home, not here in Atlanta. The title’s suggestion of walking and residing in the past was what I was aiming for.

[SCROLL DOWN TO THE END OF THIS POST READ THE POEM, “WALKING BACKWARD”]


C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about which poets and writers have been the most important influences for you?

DIANA ANHALT: It’s changed, of course, over the years, but more recently I was very  fortunate to belong to a group which worked closely with the head of the Georgia Tech poetry program, the late Tom Lux, who became a mentor and friend. Tom facilitated our interaction with the poets Ginger Murchinson and Laure Ann Bosselar. Richard Blanco and a number of wonderful poets in our Poetry Workshop and others writing here in Atlanta have also influenced my poetry.

C.M. MAYO: Which poets / writers are you reading now?

DIANA ANHALT: Here: Poems for the Planet, a recent anthology, edited by poet Elizabeth Coleman,  Jo Harjo, our new U.S. poet laureate, and Land of Fire by Mario Chard. I’ve also been reading Jennifer Clement’s Gun Love and Fatima Farheen Mirza’s  A Place for Us.

C.M. MAYO: You have been a productive poet and writer for many years. How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?

DIANA ANHALT: You’ve expressed it well. It has been challenging to stay focused and I’m afraid that, as of now, I’m still incapable of using it fully to my advantage—I don’t use social media— but I do find the Internet extraordinarily helpful at times in establishing contacts,  finding venues and staying in touch.

C.M. MAYO: Another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic?

DIANA ANHALT: I had always worked on paper but once I began to write on the computer I found  the ability to make changes and save the many versions necessary in producing a poem very helpful. I  still  keep a notebook, transfer the notes to the computer, and do the actual writing on the computer. 

C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you as a writer / poet?

DIANA ANHALT: Now that Walking Backward is out I  will continue to produce for our monthly poetry workshop meetings, send my work out, enter a contest or two but I do hope to get back and revise my now outdated computer files for A Gathering of Fugitives: American Political Expatriates in Mexico 1948-1965. (Although I must admit that I’ve been promising myself to do that for years. Still haven’t.)

Use ‘heel’ and ‘toe’ as verbs

WALKING BACKWARD
By Diana Anhalt

Late each night I rose, woozy with sleep
and my bare feet traveled blind—knew
one room from the next through cracks
in the wood, space between floorboards,

sensed their width, breadth,  girth…
For forty years I called that same place home—
Left it, yet it resides in me. The feet are last
to follow. They fumble the unfamiliar,

reject the waxed surface of a new life, 
are the last to forgive my leaving, long
to return me to the old home—wet wash
pinned to a line in the courtyard, scent of chili

and cilantro wafting from the kitchen. 
At night they lurch backwards into the past, 
tread the dream halls where faces linger
in mirrors, Spanish echoes down corridors

into a past I thought I’d left behind—
And there you are. You wait in the doorway, 
lean against the door frame and ask: Como te fue
How did it go? Red wine or white?

Walking Backward

Late each night you rose, woozy with sleep,
the space your familiar, and your bare feet traveled
it blind—knew one room from the next through
cracks in the wood, space between floorboards,
splinters, sensed their width, breadth girth.

For forty years you called the same place home—
Leave it, yet it resides in you. The feet are last to follow.
They fumble the unfamiliar, reject the waxed surface
of a new life, are the last to forgive your leaving,
long to return you to the old home—wet wash
pinned to a line in the courtyard, scent of chili
and cilantro wafting from the kitchen. 

At night they lurch backwards into the past, 
tread dream halls where faces linger
in mirrors, Spanish echoes down corridors
into a past you thought you’d left behind—

And there you are.  You wait in the doorway, 
lean against the door frame and ask: “Como te fue?” 
How did it go? Red wine or white?

They cleave to familiar roadways. The late night path between bed and bathroom.
Your feet are the last to forgive you.
The feet are the last to forgive your leaving 
murky
Leading you down a hall you left behind. (no longer there)
You alongside

(forgive)

(home) in the cracks between boards. (where your Spanish song)

(And when you leave) The feet are the last to forgive your leaving home

Footsteps lurk in the past. My feet tread the past.
Your feet are the last to forgive you. (to forgive your wandering.)
You abandon your past

My feet still know a past when….
Tide erases footsteps on the sand.

Bare feet, it’s time to get used to this, 
this unknown space, a floor less friendly,
rougher on your soles, less familiar with
your tread, colder, tile not wood

The tug of familiar surfaces

Today after a deep sleep my feet walk me
Toward the door I left behind
down a hallway I left behind.
No longer there.

Xxxxxxxxxxxx
Late each night you rise, woozy with sleep,the space your familiar, and your bare feet travel
it blind—tread those same midnight floorboards
sense their width, breadth girth,
know one room from another through cracks in the wood,
They tread the past.

Lingered behind in the familiar 
Who thought to warn them? I forgot to warn them.(you) 

Late at night, woozy with (from) sleep
I forget to tread the slippery smoothness of new floors
(I forget and tread the old floors)
through hallways silenced by sleep, dizzy with sleep

Foothold, heel and toe
My body owns (keeps, retains) the compass, (encompasses)
Maps (traces) the floors I left  behind.
My footsteps tread  past.

retrace ones steps
(If you) live in the same place for 40 years. (Call one place home)
tread the same midnight floorboards
That place resides in you.
(When) You rise at night, the floor is your familiar
and your bare feet travel it—feel it’s width, breadth girth,
Know one space from another 
by the cracks in the wood,
a shaky floorboard,

(After years treading the same midnight floorboards)

Today, late at night, woozy with (from) sleep

After years of treading darkened halls feet knewthose floors and follow them. 
They seek the familiar groundwork of the past, late to discover it’s disappeared. 
(no longer there.)

I argue with my feet (An argument with my feet)
Earlier notes

I walk away from forty years of my life

Awakened to darkness, late at night my feet
refuse to travel,
walk the dark, down the hall you left behind
Remind me that I never thought to tell them:

For forty years you call the same place home
and each night, woozy with sleep, your feet 
tread those same midnight floorboards
until 

My feet still remember a past when

your feet 
tread those same midnight floorboards
until that place resides in you

Awakened from a deep 
Nudged into the past
Nudge words into meaning

When I left I forgot to tell (warn) my feet. They stayed 
Behind entrenched in the familiar streets of home

Go through the process of leaving

I forgot to tell you. (them) (warn them)
When I left I forgot to tell (warn) my feet. 
they linger behind

Behind 

Highways, biways.
At home on bicycle pedals.
My feet, unlike the rest of me, refuse to take the lead (to follow my lead)
Highways, biways.
At home on bicycle pedals.
My feet, unlike the rest of me, refuse to take the lead (to follow my lead)
When I rise from bed late at night in this new place
fuzzy (heavy) with sleep 
Feet speak a language of their own

The scurry, scrape against the floor
New territory (territorial)

I try to reason with my feet.

Abandon home after forty years, last to follow
are the feet. They fumble the unfamiliar, reject 
the waxed surface
of new floors. (newness)

They reject the slippery smoothness of new floors
They forget to tread the slippery smoothness of new floors
And fumble in the unfamiliar 
(I forget and tread the old floors)
through hallways silenced by sleep, dizzy with sleep
When you abandon (leave) home after 60 years. the feet are the last to follow.
Mine, at home in the past, learned (memorized) the floors—width, breadth, girth
Today, in this new place, they move (walk) (grope) backwards into (retrieving) the past late at night, woozy with sleep,
reject the slippery smoothness of new floors
forget to tread the slippery smoothness of new floors
fumble with the unfamiliar 
The late night path (track another word-meaning destination?) between bed and bathroom.
You abandon your past

Reprinted by permission of the author from Walking Backwards, Kelsay Books, 2019 Copyright © Diana Anhalt

>> Look for Walking Backward at amazon and at Kelsay Books.

>> See also Diana Anhalt’s guest-blog for Madam Mayo in 2015 on “Five Books that Inspire Poetry.”

>>More Q & As at Madam Mayo blog here.

Q & A: W. Nick Hill on Sleight Work and Mucho Más

Who Was B. Traven? Timothy Heyman on The Triumph of Traven

What the Muse Sent Me About the Tenth Muse, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.

Q & A: Joseph Hutchison, Poet Laureate of Colorado, on “The World As Is”

This blog posts on Mondays. Fourth Mondays of the month I devote to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

“I’ve always thought that the way poetry is taught often ruins it for young readers.“—Joseph Hutchison

The World As Is: New and Selected Poems 1972-2015 by Joseph Hutchison. Photo by C.M. Mayo. (My own fave is “Poem to Be Kept Like a Candle, In Case of Emergencies.”)

One of the blogs I’ve been following for a good long time is poet Joseph Hutchison’s The Perpetual Bird. We have never met in person but I feel as if we have; moreover, we have friends in common, among them, poet, essayist and translator Patricia Dubrava– and if my memory serves, it was her blog, Holding the Light, that first sent me to The Perpetual Bird. Here on my desk I have Hutchison’s collection of his works of several decades, The World As Is. From publisher NYQ Books’ catalog copy:

“In The World As Is Colorado Poet Laureate Joseph Hutchison gives voice to pain and passion, sorrow and joy, longing and exhalation. His poems seem to result from a wrestling with angels–the angels of transformation we all must confront to survive what Robert Penn Warren called ‘this century, and moment, of mania.'”

From The World As Is (originally in The Rain at Midnight), posted here by permission of the author.

THE BLUE
by Joseph Hutchison

In memory of Michael Nigg,
April 28, 1969 – September 8, 1995


The dream refused me his face.
There was only Mike, turned away;
damp tendrils of hair curled out
from under the ribbed, rolled
brim of a knit ski cap. He’s hiding

the wound, I thought, and my heart
shrank. Then Mike began to talk—
to me, it seemed, though gazing off
at a distant, sunstruck stand of aspen
that blazed against a ragged wall

of pines. His voice flowed like sweet
smoke, or amber Irish whiskey;
or better: a brook littered with colors
torn out of autumn. The syllables
swept by on the surface of his voice—

so many, so swift, I couldn’t catch
their meanings … yet struggled not
to interrupt, not to ask or plead—
as though distress would be exactly
the wrong emotion. Then a wind

gusted into the aspen grove, turned
its yellows to a blizzard of sparks.
When the first breath of it touched us,
Mike fell silent. Then he stood. I felt
the dream letting go, and called,

“Don’t!” Mike flung out his arms,
shouted an answer … and each word
shimmered like a hammered bell.
(Too soon the dream would take back
all but their resonance.) The wind

surged. Then Mike leaned into it,
slipped away like a wavering flame.
And all at once I noticed the sky:
its sheer, light-scoured immensity;
the lavish tenderness of its blue.

C.M. MAYO: You have been the Poet Laureate of Colorado from 2014. What does that mean, and what does that involve? (And how do you look back on that experience now?)

JOSEPH HUTCHISON: As I write this, I’m nearing the end of my Laureate term. It’s officially a 4-year term but mine was extended by a year to bring the selection of the next Laureate in line with Colorado’s political calendar. The PL is chosen by the Governor, and the organizations that administer the program—Colorado Humanities and Colorado Creative Industries—wanted to be sure the new Governor would have that opportunity.

Being selected was a great honor, of course, especially because it was John Hickenlooper who made the choice. He’s a real reader, an English major who started out with the aim of becoming a writer but decided early on that it wasn’t for him. Writing creatively, after all, is more of a calling than an occupation for most of us. If you’re not obsessed, what would be the point?

The best aspect of serving as the state Laureate has been traveling around the state and meeting lots of poets and poetry readers in communities large and small. I was born in Denver, which sits on the eastern plains at the foot of what we call “the Front Range”: 300 miles of the Rocky Mountains stretching from southeastern Wyoming to more-or-less the New Mexico border. Nearly the poets I knew coming up were in this region. So it’s been an exhilarating experience to find so many excellent poets within and on the western side of the Front Range. There is a poetic renaissance going on across Colorado, at the community level, and I’ve gotten to witness it close up. That’s been the main privilege.

I’ve also helped to shape the Poets section of the online Colorado Encyclopedia, which I’d never have been able to do without the PL cachet. The project is looking for more funding at the moment, but in the long run I’m sure it will serve as a resource for teachers around the state. I’ve always thought that the way poetry is taught often ruins it for young readers. It’s seldom taught the way fiction is taught—as a source of knowledge with deep roots in the human psyche; instead, it’s used as an instrument to teach about techniques: meter, rhyme, metaphor, symbolism … blah blah blah. No wonder so many people recoil from poetry once they’re out of school!


Anyway, I’m hoping the Encylopedia will help teachers connect with the poets in their own community and bring them and their work into their classes. I was 22 and in college before I saw a living poet—it happened to be Robert Bly; until then I’d been dabbling with poetry, but after that experience, after I witnessed what poetry could be, I was hooked. My fondest hope that my appearances around the state may have helped some fledgling poet discover that deeper commitment, and maybe encourage people in some community or other to honor that poet’s work when it surfaces in their midst.

C.M. MAYO: One of the things that struck me in your bio is that, although you teach in a university, you describe yourself as a community poet “using language that is at once direct and layered.” Can you talk a little about some of the poets you have taught and/or read who are not part of the academic world?

JOSEPH HUTCHISON: A quick sketch of my writing life. I started writing poetry in high school, continued in college, went on to an MFA. After grad school I floundered—too credentialed to teach in Denver area public schools (teacher glut), under-credentialed to teach full time in a college (no yen for a PhD). Wanted to be a working writer but could write only poetry, which as everyone knows pays nada. Worked in a college bookstore for a several years, buying used text books and later university press and mass market paperbacks. Got invited to apply for a writing job in a bank marketing department (7 years), then a real estate network (3 years), then a software company (2 years), then went out on my own for 2 years, then created a “boutique” marketing company with my wife which sustained us, more or less, for 22 years. All along I was writing and publishing poetry, giving readings, conducting workshops—and teaching off and on as an adjunct. It was only in 2014, just after I had turned 64, that I entered the Academy full time to direct a program in which I had taught as an adjunct once or twice a year for more than a decade.

My point is that I never been an “academic” poet and never written what I think of as academic poetry. To be honest, I’m not sure what academic poetry is, though—like pornography—I feel like I know it when I see it! Essentially, I think of it as poetry written for graduate students, which speaks to the concerns of graduate students: their fascination with “schools” and the recondite reaches of aesthetic theory. In The Satire Lounge I wrote a poem lampooning this kind of stuff, and not just for fun.

The fact that the audience for poetry seems to be growing is a testament to the resurgence of poets who reach beyond schools and theories to address readers where they live. The poets of Merwin’s generation did this—think of Levertov and Rich, Kinnell and Wright and Bly*—and I think we’re seeing a return (with differences, of course) to this kind of poetry.

[*W.S. Merwin, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Galway Kinnell, … Wright, Robert Bly- C.M.]

I have so many poets in mind that it’s probably best just to list some of them, including a few from my own generation: Ted Kooser, Louise Glück, Kay Ryan, Li-Young Lee, Bill Knott, Yusef Komunyakaa, Mark Irwin, Jared Smith, Carl Phillips, Ada Limón, Terence Hayes, Wayne Miller, Ilya Kaminsky, Tracy K. Smith, Wendy Videlock, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer….

This is kind of silly, now that I think of it. These are just some of my personal favorites. And who knows if they’d all get along if put in the same room together!

C.M. MAYO: How might you describe the ideal reader for your poems and, in particular, for your collection of new and selected poems 1972-2015, The World As Is?

JOSEPH HUTCHISON: Someone capable of being moved emotionally and intellectually by language that aims to express those moments with the inner world and the outer world meet.

C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about which poets have been the most important influences for you as a poet and writer—and which ones you are reading now?

JOSEPH HUTCHISON: Honestly, my earliest poetic influences were Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Joni Mitchell—I took up guitar but discovered I had little talent for it.

On the more formal side, I would have to say, in poetry and in no particular order: T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, William Blake, Robert Browning, Robert Bly, W. S. Merwin (both his own poems and his translations), Galway Kinnell, Denise Levertov, James Wright, Theodore Roethke, Rilke, Tranströmer, Neruda, Paz, Miłosz, Cavafy, Seferis, Zbigniew Herbert, Zagajewski, Szymborska.

In literature broadly speaking: Hemingway, Fowles, Márquez, Dürrenmatt, Cortázar (the short stories), Raymond Carver, Joseph Campbell, David Loy.

C.M. MAYO: What is the best, most important piece of advice you would give to a poet who is just starting to look to publish in magazines and perhaps publish a first book?

JOSEPH HUTCHISON: Consider your own reading passions among your contemporaries and the generation just prior. Pick maybe 10 whose aesthetic ballpark you feel you’re playing in yourself. Then look at their Acknowledgments pages and see where they’ve published. Track down those publications and see if they make sense for you. Then submit.Submit over and over. When a batch of poems bounces back (this willhappen), read them over, make any changes that have become obvious in their time on the road, then send the batch out again. Do this over and over and journal publication will almost certainly come your way.

I have no good advice for book publication. I despise contests, though I’ve entered them a few times and had a manuscript picked up only once. My other books have come about via query letters or by invitation from a publisher who saw my work in a journal or anthology.

I do recommend that you create a blog. I believe I would never have become PL without The Perpetual Bird, the blog I started in 2008. Since becoming PL, I haven’t kept up with it the way I should, and it’s one of the things I look forward to getting back to!

From The World As Is (originally in House of Mirrors), posted here by permission of the author.

CITY LIMITS
by Joseph Hutchison

For Melody

You’re like wildwood at the edge of a city.
And I’m the city: steam, sirens, a jumble
of lit and unlit windows in the night.

You’re the land as it must have been
and will be—before me, after me.
It’s your natural openness
I want to enfold me. But then
you’d become city; or you’d hide
away your wildness to save it.

So I stay within limits—city limits,
heart limits. Although, under everything,
I have felt unlimited Earth Unlimited you

“I do recommend that you create a blog. I believe I would never have become PL [Poet Laureate] without The Perpetual Bird, the blog I started in 2008.”

C.M. MAYO: If a reader who knew nothing of your work were to read only one poem of yours, which would you suggest, and why?

JOSEPH HUTCHISON: This is a tough one! I have personal favorites but have no idea what any given reader might think of them. Off the top of my head, I’d suggest “Touch,” from The World As Is. It’s a sestina, the only successful one I’ve ever written, and speaks on multiple levels to the political and cultural moment we’re in and have been in for a good two decades, if not longer. It’s one that audiences at readings always respond to, which is one indication that it may be worth reading on the page.

C.M. MAYO:  You have been a consistently and remarkably productive poet and writer for many years. How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share?

JOSEPH HUTCHISON: I wouldn’t say I’ve been consistently productive. I don’t have a writing routine, but when a poem does rear its Hyacinthine head, I become obsessive—preoccupied, distracted—and I pretty much stop answering emails. I have my blog set up so that my posts automatically flow through to a few social media sites, but I don’t generally visit those sites myself, even less so now that I’ve turned off notifications. Unfortunately, I follow numerous sites for political and poetical news, so that when a poem’s finished, I have to wade through days of unread articles. Overall, I’d say that I don’t feel much of a stake in social media, which is generally antisocial and trivializing. I don’t consider it a writerly medium.

“I don’t feel much of a stake in social media, which is generally antisocial and trivializing. I don’t consider it a writerly medium.”

From The World As Is (originally in The Earth-Boat), posted here by permission of the author.

GUANÁBANA
by Joseph Hutchison

After Hurricane Gilbert, this place
was only shredded jungle. Now
it’s Jesús and Lídia’s casa,

built by him, by hand, weekends
and vacations, the way my father
built our first house. Years

we’ve watched the house expand,
two rooms to three, to four, to five.
The yard, just a patch of gouged

sand and shattered palmettos once,
is covered now in trimmed grass,
bordered by blushing frangipani

and pepper plants—jalapeños,
habaneros—and this slender tree
Jesús planted three years back,

a stick with tentative leaves then
out of a Yuban coffee can, but now
thirty feet high, its branches laden

with guanábana—dark green
pear-shaped fruit with spiky skin
and snowy flesh, with seeds

like obsidian tears. Jesús
carves out a bite and offers it
on the flat of his big knife’s blade:

the texture’s melonish, the taste
wild and sweet—like the lives
we build after hurricanes.

C.M. MAYO: And another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic? 

JOSEPH HUTCHISON: I still work on paper. I write by hand, with different pens (ballpoint or felt tip, in various colors, depending on my mood), scribbling in notebooks—I sometimes have trouble reading my own writing—and get a poem pretty far along before I type it into Word; even then, I print out each draft and scribble in the margins, draw arrows, question marks, exclamation points, notes-to-self (“Look this up,” “Feels like a quote,” “Weak…,” “Expand…,” etc.): a physical dialogue with the page. I have tried off and on to write on screen but have never succeeded. I read every line aloud as I’m revising (I do this with most prose, too), which is why I end up revising in different locations: I move to wherever my muttering won’t bother my wife. So yes, paper is necessary. When I think of a great poet like A. R. Ammons composing on a typewriter, I confess to feeling baffled.

C.M. MAYO:  You have recently brought out a very unusual book, the bilingual Ojos del Crow / Eyes of the Cuervo . Can you talk about this a bit, and what prompted you to write it?

JOSEPH HUTCHISON: This is a bit of a long story.

To celebrate our first wedding anniversary, my wife Melody and I went to a beautiful, small seaside resort on the Caribbean coast of Yucatán called Capitán Lafitte, situated between Puerto Morelos and Playa del Carmen. We fell in love with it and started going back every year around our anniversary.

A few years into that routine, our business ran into some problems and we figured we’d have to forgo our annual trip. But Melody came up with the idea of doing a yoga retreat, which she called Yoga Fiesta. This venture essentially paid for our vacation.

When Capitán was severely damaged two years in a row, the owners sold the property, but one of them bought a less damaged hotel a couple of kilometers south, restored it, and opened up the following year as Petit Lafitte. All of our friends from Capitán came back to work at Petit, and Melody moved Yoga Fiesta there as well. (This April will be the 15thannual Yoga Fiesta!) Anyway, the two Lafittes have been inspirational for me, in terms of the natural beauty of that coast, the richness of Mayan culture, and the many friendships that we’ve enjoyed there.

Over the years, I’ve written many poems about the place and the people, and in 2012 a wonderful small press called Folded Word published a selection of these Mexico poems in a book called The Earth-Boat.

A few years later, Patricia Herminia, a former student and good friend of mine, who had been living in San Miguel de Allende and working as a professional translator, moved back to Colorado. She’d seen a copy of The Earth-Boat and wanted to translate the poems into Spanish. I revised a few of the poems and added a few more from my stash, then Patricia and I spent several months off and on bringing them over into Spanish. Another friend, the fine artist Sabina Espinet, provided some evocative illustrations, and Eyes of the Cuervo / Ojos del Crow was born. I consider it an homage to a region that is struggling to maintain its beauty and integrity against a tidal wave North American money.

C.M. MAYO:  What’s next for you as a poet and writer?

JOSEPH HUTCHISON: Over the years, as I pulled together poems for various books, I often found that I had to set aside poems that felt worthy but just didn’t fit into the arc of a particular collection. So I’ve “rescued” some of those older poems and am working to see what kind of book they make. So far, so good.

I’m also working on adapting some of my teaching materials into a small book on writing poetry. It’s always seemed to me that we try to use the vocabulary of criticism to talk about the creative process, but the terms are inadequate. Critics analyze (from the Greek root meaning “a breaking up, a loosening, releasing”), while poets synthesize (from the Greek root meaning “put together, combine”). These processes are opposed to one another, and it makes no sense to me that we should approach the creative process using the tools and concepts of criticism. On the other hand, who needs another book of this kind? 

*

C.M. MAYO: I recently posted on a visit to the home/ museum of Swiss German writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt [the post is here; scroll down to the end for the part about Dürrenmatt], which was prompted by Hutchison’s recommendation, so I asked him:

Which one of Dürrenmatt’s works would you recommend an English-language reader to start with?

JOSEPH HUTCHISON: I suggest The Judge and His Hangman and Suspicion, which are published together as The Inspector Barlach MysteriesDürrenmatt’s novels are addictive, frightening and comic by turns, as are his plays. His essays on art, literature, philosophy, politics, and the theater make exhilarating reading, too!

Q & A: David A. Taylor on Cork Wars: Intrigue and Industry in World War II

From the Typosphere: “Bank”

Q & A: Roger Greenwald on Translating Tarjei Vesaas’s Through Naked Branches and on Writing and OPublishing in the Digital Revolution

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.

Q & A: W. Nick Hill on “Sleight Work” and Mucho Más

This blog posts on Mondays. Fourth Mondays of the month I devote to a Q & A with a fellow writer.

I was delighted to get the announcement for Sleight Work from W. Nick Hill, a poet and translator I have long admired. Sleight Work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 License. The author invites you to download the free PDF from his website and have a read right now!

Here is one of the poems from W. Nick Hill’s Sleight Work which seems to me the very spirit of the book:

NOTICE
by W. Nick Hill

I live in a desert at the mouth of a mine.

The rocks and geodes I leave out on the sand.

If something fits your hand

Go ahead with it.

Here is his bio as it appears in Sleight Work:

Walter Nickerson Hill was born in Chicago, raised in São Paulo, Brazil, and has spent lots of time in Oaxaca, Mexico. He shared Latin American culture with U.S. college students for a long time. Author of numerous academic reviews and articles, he has also translated the work of noted Latin American novelists and poets including Alvaro Mutis, David Huerta, and Miguel Barnet: Biography of a Runaway Slave. His English versions of poems by Mexican Jorge Fernández Granados’ Principle of Uncertainty, appeared as Constructed on Coincidence (Mid-American Review 2010). He is currently translating Gary Lemons’ Día De Los Muertos into Spanish. Hill has one slim award for a chapbook and will have three collections of poetry after Sleight Work comes out in November 2018. He lives on the Olympic Peninsula with his wife. Visit http://wnickhill.net

Before we delve into the Q & A, another favorite from Sleight Work:

After Hyde’s The Gift
by W. Nick Hill

Breathe it in and with your panorama lit up just now to the scope
of the cherries’ effervescent blossoming into the ether,
their tiny china on a weather-beaten wrought iron pea-colored table with chair,
a scent of July in vague Lapins where the leaves would have been were it a Camellia sinensis whose tiny white flowers ain’t tea;

something you have to pass on, give away with an authentic gesture over palm fronds shadowed against the wall
in a mauve kind-of-awareness
that brings out Matisse in the Mediterranean,
probably at siesta like a breath you have to give away to make room for the next

and recognize that’s the way energy flows,
like the random steps of the Egyptian Walking onion,
its scallion agglomerations all over the garden in clumps the wandering Buddhist monk gave us an age ago
that continue on walking around us all this time.

Translate from the breath into an object of delight
like the scent of Japan in the white frills on a purple plum in the springtime when it should be
and make sure somebody else gets it.

C.M. MAYO: How might you describe the ideal reader for Sleight Work?

W. NICK HILL: My “cousin,” Quentin Deming, M. D., Chip, as he was known, and his wife, Vida Ginsberg, were role models. They treated Barbara and me like royalty, wined and dined us when we visited them in Manhattan and we knew from stories it was like that with any and all. Chip was gracious, cosmopolitan, much loved by his patients and colleagues, idiosyncratic, capable of skate boarding in his red suit on his 70th birthday, and always ready to explain how some part of your anatomy worked. His daughters called recently to tell us he had died peacefully at 99. And that a constant companion in the time up to his end was my book And We’d Understand Crows Laughing. Chip would have been the ideal reader of Sleight Work; Vida too, who was widely admired for her knowledge of theater and her sense of humor. Maybe their daughters, Maeve and Lilith, but I can’t say for sure.

C.M. MAYO: And that cover image!? 

W. NICK HILL: I write virtually every morning and those pages pile up fast! When I realized that I was working on something inchoate I began to shape the whole into a collection. Well that’s one of my principal ways of working. But in this case, I began then to look around for an image for the cover, all the while I was also investigating what would happen if I set off on my own, that is to “publish” it on my website.  The image on the cover was a cell phone picture I’d taken of a busker on the Andador, the pedestrian walkway in Oaxaca, the city center on Day of the Dead, November 2017. When I’d worked out how the pose was accomplished, I was ready for the fact that the trick was after the fact, your money already in his cup. There’s an easy congress between busking and begging that goes back certainly to the picaresque tradition, and probably from time immemorial. And busking in Mexico, as you know is a worthy art. I’ve seen a Statue of Liberty across the street from an Uncle Sam, Roman Centurions, and so on. Taking money for little work is also sleight work, it’s true, though not a comely used phrase. But there’s a kind of trust the busker maintains in day long poses that she will be supported with contributions, that their bowl will not often be robbed, a presumption not so easily believed perhaps today. And then I don’t mind at all that the cover image invites the reader to consider the relation between a gift economy and the industry of book publishing in which the value of words has become more perhaps than at any other time in history the value of commerce.

C.M. MAYO: Can you also talk a little about your previous book, Blue Nocturne, and the hexagram poems?

W. NICK HILL: At some point in 2011 I began to compose what I called hexagrams out of a need for a simple meditative practice of writing.  With the I Ching in mind, I tried to write those two three line terse stanzas called hexagrams like those I had thrown using coins in the 60s and 70s to find guidance in the words of that venerable book of ancient wisdom. At least I fancied it told me appreciable things. The hexagram’s inner dynamism could change very quickly depending on the lines that moved, so there was always the possibility of surprises, changes. It was known as the Book of Changes, after all. I have also kept up with reading Tang and Sung dynasty poets, though I claim no expertise. I’m just a serial reader of Li Bo, Wang Wei, and many others. That discipline of composition continued for more than 64 days in a row and though I have all of them, only 18 or 19, depending, appear in BN.

Those little poems themselves began to very lightly sketch a consciousness that was connected to mine but wasn’t exactly. I sensed that this individual wanted to take himself, or herself, away for extended quiet, as in a remote cabin in the mountains around here in the Pacific Northwest. The speaker’s gender seemed to be male but I don’t think that it’s so clear.  In the course of this quiet time alone, the speaker awaits changes for the better that may arise out of paying close attention to the surroundings, especially nighttime and dreaming, and to the writing every morning.

Another set of incidents became entangled with these six line practice pieces. During what has become my almost yearly visit to Oaxaca, specifically in 2000, a chance encounter with Una constelación de noches / A Constellation of Nights, a glossy illustrated book of an art exhibit that the Mexican poet Alberto Blanco put together in which he paired paintings and poems. That handsome coffee table book came into my hands in the quiet inner patio under a bougainvillea “roof” at the IAGO, the painter Francisco Toledo’s Institute for Graphic Arts. I have not since seen the book again, though I tried for several years to lay my hands on it. The theme of nocturnes, more easily found in music and painting of course, were still a small literary presence in my memory, particularly Alvaro Mutis’ atmospheric nocturnes that evoked his family’s coffee plantation in torrid lands. This all came together in a rush in 2013 as Blue Nocturne. The color blue, aside from the celestial, came from a personal myth. As a child in Sao Paulo, I found a book with a blue cover in a box in an unused room over the garage, the former carriage horse stable in the old house we occupied. I don’t think I read much of it then because my brother and our friends got our dad to make the space into a floor hockey rink. But the notion of that book surely underlies some part of my desire to make them.

C.M. MAYO: As a poet writing in English, which English language poets would you say have been the most influential for you? And as one who also reads Portuguese and Spanish, which poets in those languages would you say have influenced your own work?

W. NICK HILL: Allow me to answer both the above in one. In Sao Paulo, Brazil,  my school mates and I spoke a bilingual mix of English and Portuguese. I loved the way those sounds danced around together! I was very much at home in Brazil. Portuguese wasn’t taught in the high school I went to when I returned to the States, so Spanish became my other language. Consequently, when I read it wasn’t English writers alone that interested me. One of the defining moments in my early life with poetry came in a flash of understanding how García Lorca made a verbal image come alive in “Romance sonámbulo,” from the Gypsy Ballads.  So it’s somewhat of a twist to focus on English, but I did pay attention to Modernists, especially Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading, because I considered it a kind of (very opinionated) handbook of poetry in English, “The Seafarer,” and the ancient Chinese, in translation, of course, a reading habit I continue with Su Tung P’o, Hsieh Ling Yun, P’o Chu-ie, and so on. I also had a lot fun reading e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and for a time I thought a lot of Delmore Schwartz. Over time I went backwards, to Whitman, Dickinson, and sideways to the Beattles, Bob Dylan, and that would now have to include Leonard Cohen. 

Much later, I was able to participate in a poetry workshop for a heady week with Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, and Michael Harper. That experience invited me to be more serious about my own writing.  After that I did short-term workshops with Marie Howe, Cleopatra Mathis, and then, a chapbook workshop with Jason Shinder at the New School.

I had a career as an academic, Ph.D. in Latin American literature. I wrote a monograph, Tradición y modernidad en la poesía de Carlos Germán Belli that was published in Madrid. Belli is one of the fine poets Peru has produced. He writes about contemporary angst in Golden Age formalisms. I studied with Oscar Hahn, a powerful Chilean poet whose Mal de amor, Love’s Sickness, among many others, made a big impression.  Through Hahn, I met Chilean poets, Pedro Lastra, Enrique Lihn, Nicanor Parra, Lucía Guerra, Javier Campos, and others. Javier later became my colleague at Fairfield University. Lihn became a model for my writing for a long time. He and I had long loopy talks about modernity. I was fuzzy whereas he had a clear understanding, some of which rubbed off on me, of what people were calling the Post-modern. I also developed an interest in the Summa de Maqrol el Gaviero, by the Colombian writer Alvaro Mutis. My first serious attempt to translate from Spanish were poems spoken by the existential philosopher cum sailor, Maqrol, The Lookout.

I don’t know how it is for others who teach about literature, but for me, after a time, when you’ve dealt with so many accomplished, brilliant writers and poets, it wasn’t so much that I was influenced by anyone in particular. It was more that I admired specific characteristics, or that the history of genres of writing became clearer because of the way Vallejo, for instance, who did have a serious part to play in what I wanted to do with poetry, the way he broke down previous measures of value to challenge language itself served as a path. Similarly with parts of Neruda, whose Odes touched a thread with simple language anybody could understand, like that of the ancient Chinese in English though because their poems were formally complex and were sung. 

C.M. MAYO: Can you talk about writing your own poems in Spanish?

W. NICK HILL: I began writing poetry in my early 20s and those attempts were in English. After college where I studied sciences and social sciences, I went to Spain to teach English for a year and to try my hand at writing fiction. Literature of all kinds, in both English and Spanish, occupied my reading. Bilingualism was imprinted on me growing up in Brazil. Over the years I’ve drifted away from Portuguese. In any case, when I turned to my own poetry it came out mixed English-Spanish. I wrote a chapbook called Mundane Rites / Ritos mundanos that was third place in the 1997Sow’s Ear Poetry Review’s chapbook contest but they only published the winner. Some of the poems came out in the minnesota review, and others, and in the Américas Review under a pseudonym I quickly dropped, Nicolas Colina. Poems in my chapbook came directly from the Central American conflicts of the 80s and 90s, border issues, as well. One of them was an experiment in the subconscious dialogue between Cortés and La Malinche that interwove Spanish and English. I have difficulty separating my poetry from politics broadly speaking. Because bilingualism involving U.S. Latinxs is contested territory, I drifted away from “code switching,” though I continued to publish in Spanish in The Bilingual Review, Ventana Abierta from UC Santa Barbara, and in Chile. It became clear to me in my teaching that the up and coming programs of studies in the 3 principle groups of Spanish Americans in the U. S. –Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans– weren’t being represented culturally, in my university anyway, in their bona fide condition as USians who wrote as they lived, in English, Spanish, and mixed up all together. And that’s not even considering interesting writing by Central Americans, Dominicans, and others, nor much attention paid to American Indigenous languages. I got a fellowship to get caught up on Chicano Studies at Yale, and began to develop university courses that addressed those communities, in literary culture at least. After all, at Fairfield University I had a whole range of speakers in my classes: English only speaking Mexican Americans, fluent bilinguals from the Caribbean, and foreign students whose English was good. This was during a time in the 90s and early 00s that I intensified my trips to Mexico, pointedly to Oaxaca where a former student, Kurt Hackbarth, had gone to teach English. He subsequently became a Mexican citizen and writes in both English and Spanish, plays, fiction, and commentary.

I compose in Spanish, not in the same way as in English exactly, but directly, that is to say I don’t translate, though that too is inaccurate. There is a mental space, or a consciousness accompanied by intuition and emotion where languages intermingle. The closest analogy would be sexual. And it’s in that embrace of languages where I enjoy hanging out.

C.M. MAYO: What is the best, most important piece of advice you would give to a poet who would like to try translating another poet?

W. NICK HILL: After a career of teaching, I no longer want to tell anybody or teach anybody anything. But the practice dies slowly, so rather than begging off, I’ll offer thoughts based solely on my own experience.

I believe, with others, that bringing a poem into another language is a recreation and a service to readers. I have read that a translator of poetry should find work that fits their sensibilities. I’ve read the opposite too. I met someone awhile back who was translating Horace for fun. So that is probably a good start at advice. Do it because you’re wrapped up in the words, and the vision, and you like it. But this individual wasn’t going to try to publish.

“I believe, with others, that bringing a poem into another language is a recreation and a service to readers.”

If publishing is the aim, then get the rights!  There are a number of ways to do that, most of which mean convincing somebody, poet or publisher –whoever holds the rights– to let you do the work, or accepts the work you’ve done. To do that you have to become the ideal reader, critic, and boatwoman to cross the mighty river between languages. Understand where compromises are required in the target language and decide throughout how to compensate.  One way is to shift the untranslatable gerund over to another one that suggest a similar affect

C.M. MAYO: You have also done book length translations, for example, of Miguel Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave. Can you tell a little about this experience and how it affected your own work?

W. NICK HILL: I had been tried out so to speak on Barnet’s lesser testimonial novel, Rachel’s Song, the story of a dance hall girl before Sandy Taylor at Curbstone Press asked me to do Biography. I’m not certain I’d done a very good job with Rachel who was as shallow and frivolous as cabaret life allowed in Cuba in the 20 and 30s when it was a playground for privilege. But apparently it was good enough to give me a crack at Esteban Monetejo’s story. It was a daunting challenge. Esteban was an old man when Barnet interviewed him about the saga of how he ran away from slavery, lived alone in the bush, fought in the War of Independence, and watched the Cuban Revolution triumph before he died at 105 years of age. Esteban was uneducated of course, but he was smart, wily, curious, resolute, was steeped in the lore and rituals of various Afro Cuban spiritual beliefs, and he had a sharp memory. How does such a man sound in English? Though I read U.S. slave narratives, Montejo wasn’t going to sound like them. The details of everyday life he narrated differed greatly from slaves in the U.S. in large degree because Cubans were able to hold on to parts of their heritage from Africa.

As I progressed I realized that in a very real sense as translator I was mimicking Barnet’s role in his relationship with Montejo more closely perhaps than in other translations projects. Hence the confusion of titles between my version and the previous one by Jocasta Innes who knew a lot about ethnography and didn’t want to recognize the newness of what Barnet was doing. She published her translation in England as Autobiography, thus making Montejo into the sole author. What Barnet was after was to present the runaway slave’s voice as clearly and as transparently as white man could convey. And that’s what I tried to convey in the English version of the testimony of a man who was a character, a man of contradictions, tics in his speech, and great humanity, who gave convincing details of what life as a slave and as a free man in Cuba was like before the Cuban Revolution.

I made as literal a version as I could get and then worked to shape it within all the prohibitions and permissions I was aware of as a person who bridges the gap between slave and free, Cuba and the United States. I didn’t try to round Esteban out, I left phrases in Spanish or Yoruba that had no equivalent because the original already had a Glossary that clarified details of ethnicity, history, and the like.  I judged it to be acceptable to simply add to it.  In all, I tried to fashion a voice of great humanity in an English that was understandable but particular.  A new edition came out from Northwestern University Press in 2016, with a fine introduction by Professor Wiliam Luis.

C.M. MAYO: You have been a consistently productive writer for many years. How has the Digital Revolution affected your writing? Specifically, has it become more challenging to stay focused with the siren calls of email, texting, blogs, online newspapers and magazines, social media, and such? If so, do you have some tips and tricks you might be able to share? And another question apropos of the Digital Revolution. At what point, if any, were you working on paper? Was working on paper necessary for you, or problematic? 

W. NICK HILL: I have been much aided and hindered both by digital media. Before I left teaching I was deeply involved in using the web and programs like WebCT  –programs like Chalkboard today– to help students manipulate at their own speed the conjunction of sight and sound that is central to learning another language.

After I left academics, I really dove into writing poetry. I had already withdrawn from some of those very distractions you mention  because I could feel how they drew me further into time on computers and into a popular culture that relies increasingly on violence and the propagation of stereotypes. I don’t mean to say that there aren’t meaty blogs, You Tubes, and the like to enrich one’s thought, but even so it can be overwhelming, as you suggest. Thus, to say that I’m distracted from writing by elements of Virtual Reality would be erroneous however, because I’ve guarded against it.  In fact, the digital has benefitted my writing in two ways.

As I said previously, I published Sleight Work on my website to take advantage of the movement to ensure access to materials remains as open and free as possible. In the world of publishing today, there are so many access points to creative work it boggles the mind. At the same time, so much of it has been infused with commercialism that I for one find it disturbing. I’m sure there are exceptions, but much of the discussion of writing on the web and in print revolves around volume of sales, numbers of prizes, and other markers of what?  Subject matter? Craft? Raw writing as a practice? Justice? Art?

The second way that the Digital Revolution has not distracted me resides in the fact that I have made it a focus of my work. Awhile back I became intrigued by the Mesoamerican ballgame that was played in ancient times and is still played in some few areas of Mexico today. The game, variously called ullamalitzli, Pok-Ta-Pok, Tachli, was played with a heavy latex rubber ball five hundred years before Europeans came to colonize. I’ve been writing poems about the continuity of games in these lands. I have come to see that a continuity worthy of further exploration exists between the contemporary world of video gaming, itself a world apart, and those age-old games. This is a body of work that I’m still actively pursuing.

As for tips, I’d say the policy of following a middle course between Luddite no contact and game players who rarely see natural light is called for. And a good healthy skepticism about how electronics will deliver the biosphere from the predations of capitalism. Anthropologist David Graeber has my ear when he writes about anarchism in a compelling way in his Fragments of An Anarchist Anthropology.  

I have always written on paper first and then make hard copies of what seems interesting enough to work further. The most unsettling aspect of this practice is that the pages keep on piling up. Some small fraction of those words do get digitized. Apart from that who’s going to wade through all those pounds of paper if I don’t. Which would seem to be a good argument for going paperless though I can’t shake it.

C.M. MAYO: What’s next for you as a poet and translator?

W. NICK HILL: I’m preparing for another stay in my adopted city of Oaxaca, Mexico where I will finish translating Gary Lemons’ Día de los muertos that Red Hen brought out in 2016 as a coloring book. The chiste, the joke is that I’m translating it into Spanish. More realistically, I hope to polish enough of a sample to interest a poet in Mexico to sign on with me to make it ring true with the goal of seeing about a publisher.  I’ve already asked Jorge Fernández Granados, but it was a year ago and was put off-handedly so he’s probably not thinking about it now. I have published a handful of poems from his Principle of Uncertainty, so I’m hoping he is amenable. In any case, Lemons’ work dances with surreal abandon that juxtaposes eccentric, intuitive images of the splendor and suffering of creatures, from burros, to dusty young gringos, and sea tortoises, all creatures encountered in Oaxaca at various times between the late 60s and the 80s. A happy, hubristic effort of mine to render this whirling dervish of words into Spanish.

In addition, I’m going to double down on a bilingual collection of poems that builds on Mundane Rites / Ritos mundanos and will poke around in matters related to Americanismus, a tentative title, for new worldisms. What the adventure of website publishing has suggested to me is that no existing publisher I know of will chance it with a book for bilinguals not by a Latinx writer. I’m cognizant of the political nature of cultural work and don’t want to distract from worthy goals of U.S. Latin@s. At the moment only on the web could I present a book for bilingual readers who might understand what I’m celebrating. Perhaps this effort is akin to the recognition that jazz and blues are universal art forms that honor African American originators and share their creativity even in the midst of racism. And then there’s that ball game project at the end of a joystick. Thanks for giving  me the chance to share with you. Keep up the good work.

Q & A: Mary Mackey, Author of The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams,
on Bearing Witness and Women Writers’ Archives

Poetic Alliteration

Q & A: Sara Mansfield Taber on Chance Particulars: A Writer’s Field Notebook

Find out more about C.M. Mayo’s books, shorter works, podcasts, and more at www.cmmayo.com.