Pitch of Poetry by Charles Bernstein

I love poetry, so I had to get the book. I started reading and although my english is really good, I couldn't quiet follow the reasoning of the author. The concepts were too strange, too far away from what I knew. But I finished the book, underlining large portions and after a day of rest I started rereading the book. And yes I am understanding more. I mark new thoughts. And I fell for the concepts about plagiarism, working on the basis of an older text, a preexisting text and taking away thoughts, words, and stealing from the source text... Charles Bernstein edited during 4 years with Bruce Andrews the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine.
The main slant is on making meaning, not taking for granted anything from vocabulary to process, program, nor subject matter. The poetry of the magazine was in stark contrast to the poetry of the time. It included critical writing by the poets of the magazine. Some names of poets I knew because I have participated in the MODPO course by Al Filreis twice, fascinated as I was by it and will follow it again... I learned that process, mood and inconsistency is more important than stylistic uniformity. The book also addresses translation and it problematic aspects. I have translated quite a lot from English to Dutch, from Dutch to English (not as much).
It is clear from the text that the civil right's movement had a deep impact. I was also happy to find a reference to George Lakoff and his theory of frames and reframing and oppositional poetry. I know language is not neutral...
If you're interested in poetry and the politics, the evolving views the do read this book.

The Sahara Testaments

Well, loyal readers of this blog on which I sadly haven't written too much, know that I have been working on the translation of "The Sahara Testaments" Luckily for a venture like this I am surrounded by smart and kind people. I started out translating all two hundred poems. And then slowly I realised that publishing the full translation in Dutch side to side with the English would yield over 420 pages. Apart from the translation there were many cultural references, landscape elements, even political events which needed explanation.
Frank Devos was my first proofreader, and since we worked well together we would take several afternoons and comb thoroughly trough the translations. We realised more and more that publishing the complete volume in both languages wouldn't work for any publisher. Thus we came up with the idea of publishing the three first chapters. Still 133 pages. I must not only thank Frank but also Joke Van Leeuwen, President of PEN-Flanders and of course Tade Ipadeola for having written something that managed to stay with me, something that taught me a lot about Afrika and about writing. Joke caught still a few slip ups or inconsistencies in my spelling. So I am grateful that the text is now presentable to a publisher... Tade thanks for trusting me with your text. When the translation of the three first chapters of your book is published, we hope that you can come over. It would be wonderful that for the presentation you would read your poems in English and I could present them in Dutch. I'll have to sit down with Joke and she said she would approach the publisher Harold Polis. A new player on the Dutch/Flemish publishing market.

De Groene Waterman

Dear Friends,
today is the day that Sven Peeters interviews me in "The green Waterman", the nicest bookshop of Antwerp. He will ask questions about my translation of Sherman Alexie's works from his four first books of poetry. Up to now the book has been well received and people who have seen it like it. So After the interview I will tell you how it went. We will start at 4 o'clock.

Poëzie = Woede x Verbeelding

Sherman Alexie

 Now I am off to the preparation of the interview... More tonight!

Sven is a great interviewer and he was truly well prepared. He asked  questions  about the terminology like what is the correct term for 'Indian'? Is an Indian Nation always called a reservation?
Of course it was the poetry who won the people over. Several people bought the book and I  was practicing finding the right words for each inscription for the enthusiastic buyers. I think the bookshop also was happy. A friend 'Kris' came in late, the train had two long stops on the way to Antwerp. The terror threat not quite over, we are at level three in Brussels now. In Antwerp, nothing bad is happening. In order to make more publicity for the book Kris will approach "The Limmerick" in Ghent and then he will be the interviewer. I am a neophyte at this, so I am learning as I go.

In the discussion after the reading some commented that his poetry is very different, sometimes close to prose. So I decided to read them the following poem:

Een Onvolledige Lijst Mensen waarvan ik Wens dat ze Indiaan Waren

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Adam

Muhammad Ali

Susan B. Anthony

Jimmy Carter

Patsy Cline

D.B. Cooper

Robert DeNiro

Emily Dickinson

Isadora Duncan

Amelia Earhart

Eve

Diane Fossey

Jesus Christ

Robert Johnson

Helen Keller

Billie Jean King

Martin Luther King, Jr.

John Lennon

Maria Magdalena

Pablo Neruda

Flannery O’Connor

Rosa Parks

Wilma Rudolph

Sappho

William Shakespeare

Bruce Springsteen

Meryl Streep

John Steinbeck

Superman

Harriet Tubman

Voltaire

Walt Whitman

And it worked. People were moved by the names, they understood that in the work of a great poet everything can be poetry.

I thank Sherman Alexie for his work, Robert Hershon his publisher for making this publication possible and Leo Peeraer the publisher of poetry in Flanders with the best series of translations.

Sven contacted a friend in the States and was told Sherman Alexie is really big in the States. I hope he will be as well know in Belgium and Holland now.

In gratitude to all,

annmarie

Hanging Loose Press and Robert Hershon.

I got to know of and know Robert Hershon because I had fallen for a poetry book by Sherman Alexie published by Robert Hershon’s Hanging Loose Press and doing what I do I had started translating some of the poems of  ‘First Indian On the Moon’ while in Chloride, Arizona. A coincidence was that I visited two friends living on Staten Island on my way from Chloride, Arizona back to Antwerp Belgium. They gave me a tour of New York. So I had made an appointment to go to Varickstreet, Manhattan to meet with the publisher of the book. I showed up and we went out for a cup of coffee. The conversation flowed easily, I saw a sharp and funny, intelligent and kind man, taking care of Hanging Loose Press, and a great poet in his own right. They published not only now famous poets like Sherman Alexie, Harvey Shapiro, Paul Violi and more… (It is not always easy to follow the contemporary poetry scene from Europe.) Hanging Loose also produced a magazine with the same title. Robert Hershon, doesn’t do this all by himself, originally there were four editors, none taking a salary for their work. I have six issues of the magazine in Europe. The first thing is the visual impact through the care given to the cover, happy, colorful, strikingly beautiful artwork: some names dropping starting with issue 93: George Green, Dick Lourie, Robert Hershon, Hal Sirowitz (former poet laureate of Queens, N.Y.) Marc Staman, Joan Larkin, Stephen Lewandowski, Anne Waldman, Breyten Breytenbach, Sherman Alexie, Donna Brook, Kimiko Hahn and in each issue also a section with ‘writers of high school age’ a really interesting feature encouraging young authors.

Robert Hershon, with 13 poetry books out now, was kind enough to mail me his two latest books of his own:

The German Lunatic (2000) and

Calls from the outside world (2006)

Both books contain wonderful, often funny musings stemming from a wry profoundness. A few e-mails and once in a while a telephone call have let me stay in touch. So I learned from “The German Lunatic” (2000) of his love for baseball, a love shared by Sherman Alexie. Luckily I have two baseball fanatic friends who come and stay the winters in Chloride. Coop and Irene have done their utmost best to initiate into the rules of baseball. I now understand the terminology and begin to appreciate the belly cramps at the ninth inning. I took it upon me to translate this section from ‘The German Lunatic”…

The presentation date for the Sherman Alexie translation “On the Backs of Salmon’ is October 2^nd,, , 2015 in the beautiful “Black Panter Gallery”, in Antwerp. This book isn’t the only one being presented: also a translation by Lucienne Stassaert of a book of poetry by Libanese Andrée Chédid. We will introduce each other. No learned professors, just the work we did. Her book is called (in Dutch) Existing is a blessing for me. Of course there will be a party afterwards.

Lucienne Stassaert and the translation of Emily Dickinsons poetry

Yesterday Lucienne Stassaert dropped in and after her visit I revisited some of her translations of Emily Dickinson. It is incredibly hard to translate Emily Dickinson's work since mostly she writes sparsely, just a few words - dashes - and deep thought. The difficulty in translating Dickinson's work is that the words she uses do double and often even triple duty. incorporating the resulting layers of meaning is sheer impossible. I admire Lucienne's reckless poetry and I see some of the traits of her own poetry showing up in her translations. Her double word formations really work as an enrichment of the language of her Dutch translation. Moreover Lucienne has created a free space of creativity and freedom yet still remains true to the great original texts.

Johan de Boose interviews Lucienne Stassaert

 This post is a little late, almost a week after the facts. As an interviewer of writers Johan de Boose is just great. He researches thoroughly and digs up interesting information. I remember it happened when he interviewed Marleen De Crée and now again with the interview with Lucienne Stassaert. I have known both authors for a very long time and yet he managed to surprise me. He reads thoroughly, and asks sometimes difficult questions. Of course the bio is dealt with: Lucienne started out as a musician, even participated in the Queen Elizabeth Competition. Yet it was her fathers dream, not her dream. She gave concerts till in the late sixties and then gave her piano to her daughter who is a singer accompanying herself on the piano. Lucienne now paints and writes prose, wrote radio plays, she translates and writes mainly poetry. 

As Dickinson would say:

I dwell in Possibility -                                                                                  
A fairer house than Prose -

Currently she is working on her memories...

In Lucienne a poem will usually come about because of a word she found, a word which opens the possibility of saying something new, or in a new way. Very often after the first poem a second poem will come and it might even turn into a cycle of poems, or even a whole book. She was part and parcel of several literary movements like Labris, yet she distanced herself from those, being too much of a rebel, of an individualist. With age comes more and more introspection and also loss. A poem in my translation from her last book: Nabloei 

I'll quarantine death
now the bleakness of a new season
robs the light of its overtones
when in the night a blackened child
closes off the crossroads where the past thrives.

So life, reckless as an endangered spring,
can shoot up in a wild bush
in all nerve knots
I give free passage to the word
raging in seas a self-lighting sea.

Words go their own way... Das Wort geht eigene Wege/Het wooord gaat eigen wegen

 Salon 12b invited a bunch af friends and people who love poetry for the presentation of a translation into German of a book by Annie Reniers: Het woord gaat eiegen wegen/Das Wort geht eigene Wege, published by world internet books. It is the first book in the wib classic series. The original Dutch book was published in 1981. Both poet translator read the section 'Japanese suite', having both been to Japan in the past, Fred Schywek knew what she meant in writing this section. Annie Reniers is a philosopher, and was professor in Esthetics at the Brussels University( VUB) and a well known poet.

As you can see all listened attentively. The reading in some solemn cadences and thoughtful phrazing was highly appreciated also by people who were not used to listen to rather abstract poetry.

 Some who could judge the quality of the German translation, praised it highly. Of course a salon  implies that at the end there is an open mike: Frank De Vos read, Fred Schywek, German author, read some of his own poetry, Silent Bear, Anne C. read a moving letter to Annie and also two poems in German remembering Reiner Kunze's eightieths birthday. Even I read a few poems...

There was cake and apple pie, deviled eggs and chicken and of course wine and cava and non alcoholic drinks...
Every body seemed to go home happy.