The Ritual Of Writing On Air……

Wheel With A Single Spoke

& Other Poems

Nichita Stănescu.

Loss Of An Eye.

I used to tap my fingernail until

no nail was left,

and my finger until

it wore away.

<<>>

But a blind man came

to me and said:

- Brother, leave your nail alone,

what if there’s an eye

on the tip

do you want to pop it?

<<>>

But still, but still

this door between you and me,

someone has to  knock it down.

 

Nichita Stănescu (niˈkita stəˈnesku) was born Nichita Hristea Stănescu on 31st  March 1933 in the city of Ploiesti (ploˈjeʃtʲ ) the county seat of Prahova County in the historical region of Wallachia, Romania, located about 35 miles north of Bucharest. His mother Tatiana Cereaciuchin, fled from Russia  and in 1931 married Nicolae H. Stănescu, which was something he commented on several times, stating that he had been given life by a Romanian peasant and a Russian woman. Ploiesti was overrun by Nazi’s during the 2nd world war because of it’s oil refinery, which was eventually put out of commission by United States bombers. Nichita finished high school in Ploiesti, before moving to Bucharest to study Romanian, linguistics, philosophy, and literature. In 1952 he married Magdalena Petrescu, although this was to last only a year and in 1957 he graduated. His literary debut was in the Tribuna literary magazine, followed by his debut poetry collection Sensul iubirii (The Aim/Sense of Love*) in 1960, this was a collection of love poems which explore the meaning of love. Poems from the volume were previously published in the Tribuna, no. 6, 17 March 1957, and Gazeta literară, no. 12, 21 March 1957.

End Of An Air Raid

              (April 5, 1944)

You dropped your chalk

and the splintered door beat against the wall

<<>>

the sky appeared, partly hidden

by the spiders

that fed on murdered children.

<<>>

Someone had taken away

the walls

……….and fruit tree

………………….and stairs.

<<>>

You hunted after spring

impatiently, like you were expecting

a lunar eclipse.

<<>>

Towards dawn, they even took away

the fence

you had signed with a scratch,

so the storks would not lose their way

when they came

this spring.

 

 

On June 6th 1962,  he married for the second time, to Doina Ciurea, the marriage seems to have lasted for only two years although it wasn’t till the around 1981 that they divorced and Stănescu married for the third time in 1982 to Dora (Theodora bran) whom he had met in 1978 when she was a student in Philology, in the Department of French. Throughout this period Stănescu was a contributor to and editor of Gazeta Literară, România Literară and Luceafărul, as well as creating a extensive body of  poetry, essays and Romanian translations of poets such Adam Puslojic and Vasko Popa. He also was the recipient of numerous awards for his verse, the most important being the Herder Prize  in 1975 and a nomination for the Nobel Prize in 1980.

Beyond the dry as bone nature of the facts, Nichita Stănescu comes across as an outgoing gregarious individual, he seems to dispel the image of the lone writer working at his craft, preferring the company of others. He spent most of his time residing in the homes of his friends, enjoying copious amounts of drink and could regularly be found improvising poems whilst his audience attempted to follow him and transcribe them at the bar. In fact the title of this post is called “ The Ritual Of Writing On Air” because that was how he described his technique, drawing inspiration from his immediate environment, and using that to craft his verse, stating in a Belgrade interview that:

  “Gutenberg flattened words out, but words exist in space … Words are spatialized. They are not dead, like a book. They are alive, between me and you, me and you, me and you. They live; they are spoken, spatialized, and received”

<<>>

While.

And yet, I have seen a bird

lay eggs while it flew --

And yet, I have seen someone cry

while he laughed --

And yet, I have seen a stone

while it was --

<<>>

In 1983 he died in Fundeni Hospital (Bucharest) after a liver condition he had had for some time worsened. He was posthumously elected a member of the Romanian Academy, although by this point he had a reached an envious  position where both the critics and the general public had declared him as one of the most loved and prominent writers in the Romanian language, a language that he had himself declared was “Divinely Beautiful”. Despite living through the second world war and Romania’s fall into an oppressive police state under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu, a regime characterized by an increasingly brutal and repressive apparatus and, by some accounts, the most rigidly Stalinist regime in the Soviet bloc. Stănescu was considered a metaphysical rather than a political poet, using this approach to examine the universe and humanity’s place within it, using various perspectives to voice the fundamental questions of his  and our time. Also by walking a line between what could and could not be said, he crafted a new aesthetic for his verse, one that in his own words:

“ while the poems, often lapidary, appear to indicate a sublimation of the senses, a tendency to crystallize into a symbol, an attentive reading unveils the opposite process, that is the symbol’s subtle disaggregation, its incorporation into matter, something like the fissuring into a star of a pane of glass, broken by an invisible stone” 

Meaning from the star, we notice the pane and intuit the stone. The pane registers the lines of fissure, which we might take as the lines of the poem, moving through the human language. We move from metaphor – the broken glass as star – toward the material yet abstract world, the stone that cannot be directly described in human language. (Taken from the translator’s afterword)

 

Sometimes you love something. Sometimes something hits you so hard that it becomes part of your DNA, you’re not sure why, there was no known defining moment -  it just is. But with hindsight-reasoning you try to define what it is that has affected you in such a manner and how it could have happened. Then using all your grandiose ideas on “the power of reasoning” you attempt to capture what was a moment, a word, the slightest shadow of a suggestion, but like with most nets, the minnows and microscopic organism pass through, leaving you with the big ideas and grandiose statements and still no idea why you loved this thing. This is how I feel about this collection. Of late this book has taken on the mantle of a personal talisman, always with me, being opened up at random, and the words, the verse, the poetry, it’s very language has worked it’s charm upon me. In a world whose very words of late have grown heavy, and cumbersome this has lightened them, in most senses of the word.

<<>>

 Wheel With A Single Spoke And Other Poems, celebrates the work of one of Romania’s highly loved  & critically regarded poets, one who Tomaž Šalamun, described as “The greatest contemporary Romanian poet” and one who is in the rankings as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. This dazzling collection of poems – the most extensive to date, was translated by Sean Cotter, who has chosen poetry from each of Stănescu’s books, although he concentrates on the specifically fertile period of 1965 – 1975, charting the emergence and growth of what would become his characteristic style, allowing us to see how his own distinctive voice developed.

<<>>

Knot 23.

I stole my childhood body,

I swaddled it

and put it in a basket of rushes, -

and threw it in the river

so it would go and die in the delta.

<<>>

The unfortunate, tearful, tragic fisherman, full of pity,

brought me the body in his arms

just now.

<<>>

Sean Cotter’s Translations from the Romanian include Liliana Ursu’s Lightwall and Nichita Danilov’s Second-hand Souls. His essays, articles and translations have appeared in Conjunctions, Two Lines and Translation Review. He is Associate professor of Literature and Literary Translation at the University of Texas at Dallas, Centre for Translation Studies.

 

Wiki (Nichita Stănescu)

Archipelago Books

Poem Hunter (Nichita Stănescu )

An Interview with Sean Cotter and Liliana Ursu

More Romanian Poetry (Of Gentle Wolves)

 

"The only real things which we take with us in the end are our own feelings, our loves, our hates and adversities. I ask myself: at the end of life, what will we leave outside? I suppose we can leave some feelings, less of hate, some of passion, but... especially of love.” – N.S.

A Virtual Love ~ Andrew Blackman

Those that have followed me for a while or that do so across the various forms of social media, are probably aware that my real? name is not Parrish or Parrish Lantern. Those that have checked out my "about page" will also know how a I came by this pseudonym. Like a lot of individual's over the years  I've had a few alter egos that - like "Parrish" - have been what I have described as my Spiderman, Batman, or Silver surfer (choose one) superhero guise, by this I   mean they represent a facet of my personality I like to think of as set free from those every day realities that shadow our personas, free from the 9-5 mentality that pays for the Spiderman costume. I raise this issue now because of a book sent to me by the writer and fellow blogger Andrew Blackman.

Jeff Brennan has multiple online personalities and finds switching between them easier than dealing with his mundane offline existence. Jeff, depending on who he is dealing with can be a caring grandson, a bored IT consultant, avid gamer or committed eco warrior, it is this last one that completely changes his life. Whilst on a protest with a friend he meets the gorgeous Marie, a young American woman who works with the homeless. After the protest Jeff and Marie are introduced to each other and she, who on hearing his name, mistakes him for a famous, yet reclusive political blogger of the same name. Jeff decides to go along with this as a ruse to get a date with Marie, but as they fall in love and develop a relation, he has to come up with increasingly more desperate measures to keep the illusion alive. This all comes to a head when the reclusive blogger decides to attend a protest and introduces himself to Marie. I won’t divulge any more of the story, I will just leave you with some questions.

Will Jeff & Marie’s relationship survive this?

Will Jeff survive this?

How will famous Jeff deal with the other Jeff?

How will Andrew Blackman tie all the ends together ?

<<>>

All this and much more make up the final section of this book and how Andrew brings it all together is as much fun as the book itself. A Virtual Love is an old, old tale told in new way, it is a tale of love and deception, but spun from new cloth, spun from Nano technology. In the modern world, where a great part of an individual’s life is played out on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Librarything or Goodreads etc. Where people whose interaction is more online whether this is purchase or play, what needs to be remembered - is how we relate to others and how we perceive those relations. In a world where one can form authentic relationships without physically meeting, one needs to occasionally remember that like all relationships -  how you  would like to be treated is how you should treat others. A Virtual Love is a great fun read that makes you smile whilst leaving you with a lot of questions.

 

Andrew Blackman is a former Wall Street Journal staff writer, now living in London and concentrating on fiction. His debut novel On the Holloway Road (Legend Press, 2009) won the Luke Bitmead Writer’s Bursary and was shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize.
His articles, essays and stories have also been published in Monthly Review, Post Road, Carillon and Smoke, and in books by Twenty Stories Publishing, Negative Press and Arachne Press, among others. He has a Bachelor’s degree in modern history from Oxford University and a Master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.

A Virtual Love has been shortlisted for the People’s Book Prize. check it out.

Andrew Blackman . Net

Legend Press

Andrew Blackman (Interview)

OUR OBSIDIAN TONGUES ~ David Shook

after Tecuani

Our tongues are neither spoons

nor arrows. Neither flower petals

nor leaves. Our tongues are

obsidian tongues, shorter than

the knives priests use to sacrifice

but equally sharp.Our tongues

flint sparks. Our tongues chip

thin flakes when stabs

aren’t straight and quick. Our

tongues are neither spoons

nor arrows, petals nor leaves.

Our obsidian tongues.

How one book/writer grabs your attention more than another can be quite shallow, can be an image or a connection with another already loved writer and to be honest when Eyewear Publishing, sent me this book to read I was immediately entranced by the backstory and the image. David Shook looks like he could be Jack White’s kin and on top of that, amongst his many translations (poetry, novellas etc.), he has translated Roberto Bolano’s Infrarealist Manifesto, also whilst Translator in Residence for the Poetry Parnassus, he premiered his poetry documentary Kilometro Cero about the the poet Marcelo Ensama Nsang, covertly filmed in Equatorial Guinea* . He is also editor of the online broadside Molossus and the publishing and film production house Phoneme Books.

All of this would engage my interest for a moment, I'd probably note the name and move on, and that is as far as it would go, if the poetry itself didn't deliver.

I Know your Body

after Victor Teran

>

If you were a city

I could give perfect directions

to wherever they asked me,

I could map your neighbourhoods &

catalogue your smells.

><

If you were a city

I would get lost every day

down some new corridor.

I would toss my map, hitchhike

your suburbs, wander your downtown.

If I were twenty years younger, I’d say “This man Rocks Poetry!”. So being an older more mature individual, I’m left with the poetry itself.  Our Obsidian Tongues, is the voice of a city, the voice of a million potshards screaming to be heard, it’s the sound of all a city’s fragments and minutiae distilled into words that then explode off the page. This is a violent, sexy restless poetry, that like the city itself cannibalizes it’s past to build new structures, to raise new edifices to the old and the new gods.

My Father had a vision

through the double-window of an airplane:

>

Aztec gods protecting their city, arms folded

like celestial bouncers.

>

Their listless kids swim, jump cannonballs

into sulphuric lakes, tickle volcanoes

>

until they laugh ash. At night they get high huffing

bus fumes, pheromones & sweat.

>

The sun rises each morning without human sacrifice

The misery of the city is enough.

 

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The Poet Jamie McKendrick, said of this collection:

“Our Obsidian Tongues has a tough, abrupt, incendiary quality. Its violent palette and its restless formal play – ‘postcard’, prose poem, epigram, ghazal – are not gratuitous but a response to the turbulent and vivid Mexico it describes. Nature and culture on a collision course: skies filled with volcanic ash and streets ranged by ravenous mutts but also the poverty and desperation behind the drug wars. It’s to the credit of this unusual first collection that these striking features still allow for quieter humour and tenderness”

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 

David Shook grew up in Mexico City before studying endangered languages in Oklahoma and poetry at Oxford. He served as Translator in Residence at Britain’s Poetry Parnassus at The Southbank (London) in 2012. His poetry, translations, and criticism have appeared in Ambit, Oxford Magazine, the Oxonian Review, Poetry, PN Review, World Literature Today, and many other reputable and disreputable magazines. A chapbook of his translations from the Isthmus Zapotec of Víctor Terán is available from the Poetry Translation Centre, a chapbook version of Oswald de Andrade’s Cannibal Manifesto is forthcoming from Manifestoh! (Insert Blanc Press), his translation of Roberto Bolaño’s manifesto Leave Everything, Again appears as an appendix to the new Picador edition of The Savage Detectives, and his translation of Mario Bellatin’s Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction is available from Phoneme Media. His work also appears in the anthologies Oxford Poets 2010 (Carcanet), Initiate (Blackwell), and the Los Angeles Telephone Book (ed. Brian Stefans). Recent forays into creative nonfiction appear in The Rattling Wall and Ambit. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review, Oxford Magazine, PEN International Magazine, Poetry, World Literature Today, on the Poetry Translation Centre website, and elsewhere. He now lives in Silver Lake, Los Angeles with his wife, the poet and pastor Syd Shook and their Chihuahua, Okie Doke.

David Shook.net

Poetry Translation: David Shook

*His account of being detained in Equatorial Guinea, whilst attempting this is available on   Kindle (UK) (.Com)

Marinko Koščec’s A Handful Of Sand.

A Handful of Sand, is a love story and an ode to lost opportunity. Written as a duet for two ill - fated lovers, we follow their individual voices as they struggle to define their  relationship beyond  the initial spark, beyond that first euphoric moment. Via alternate chapters each take a turn telling us their tale allowing us to learn about their past and how this has impacted on their present, both having on-going difficult relationships with their parents. This directly effects how they interact with each other, how they communicate beyond the physicality of their bodies. A handful of sand, has a lot to do with communication or it’s lack,  both sides trying to define through language, trying to find a path that will allow them to come together as individuals, to communicate beyond the safe harbour of words. This is a book where loneliness pervades every page, that haunts the lovers as though it were a ghostly third character showing itself in the guise of joyless love, Eros here is downcast, dejected and downtrodden.

A Handful of Sand is a beautifully written book, that explores themes such as parenthood, lost or absence of faith, that through it’s telling weaves the struggle for life in contemporary Croatia. That explores the fragility of love and how easily that moment of intoxication becomes one of incomprehension and love like sand slips through ones fingers.

This book came to me from Istros Books, and my experience of them is through poetry, having reviewed a book & promoted a poetry competition, so this was my first work of fiction and it was a fantastic choice, the book as stated before is beautifully written, and in a language that could be described as poetic, almost as though a little song to love lost.

Another thought is that this book reminded me of Kobo Abe’s The Face of Another, at first I wasn’t sure why, so I checked my post on this & came across the lines:

“An anonymous faceless eye observing without being seen, reduced to a voyeuristic gaze living among millions of strangers, who although close neighbours, are faces he does not recognise – symbolising  the fundamental facelessness of contemporary man lost in an ocean of complete anonymity.”

This seemed to fit, both characters as they struggled with their day to day existence, and the male character in both books seem to want to connect and yet have become lost within  the layers and barriers through which they peer, searching for a pathway back to when there was a connection, a point when the masks although not totally removed, were slid to one side and one glanced at the nakedness of the other.

I’ve just read this back and realised that I’ve made this book come across as though it were purely a doom-laden read, that would be doing this wonderful book a disservice like all that is shadow, it is revealed by light - meaning that there is humour in this book - it is brittle, sharp and it’s nature dark,  but it’s there and at times will raise more than a smile to your face.

Marinko Koščec is a Croatian author and lecturer in French literature at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. He is also an editor at the Sysprint Publishing House and teaches novel writing at the Sarasan Creative Writing Centre. He is author of five novels: Someone Else (2001) was awarded the Meša Selimmovič Prize for the best novel in the region, while A Handful of Sand, was nominated for the prestigious Jutarnji List award.

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If imagining parts of Eastern Europe conjures up images of grey tower blocks and pickled cabbage, Istros Books is here to change that.Their mission is to shine a light on part of that ‘other’ Europe and reveal its glories through the works of its greatest writers, both old and new. They endeavour to find the best from a wealth of local prose and poetry and to offer it to a new audience of English speakers.

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Marinko Koščec

Marinko Koščec

Istros Books