Friday, October 25, 2013

Fairground Magician – Jelena Lengold

 

Fairground Magician, is an exploration of love told through a series of thirteen tales. Via these short stories the author examines, probes and delves into its various guises, revealing the conflicts that tear people asunder and the moments that, although go unnoticed, bind two individuals so that: “Soul and body have no bounds” * . Jelena Lengold uses various genres from realism through the use of thriller & eroticism to shade the nuances of the relationships, whether it’s the cold loss of a love unfulfilled, or that heat that first burns before leaving a tranquil euphoria in its wake.

On reading the blurb on the back cover, I was slightly worried with the idea of eroticism, purely because of the likes of fifty shades of grey & its ilk, I needn’t have been - although several tales explore the nature of sexuality - they do so as an integral part of existence & the erotic elements are like love, they have no safety net or get out clause. This is a sensuous, sexy, intelligent collection of tales that may shock, but will make you think, it has already won a number of European prizes including The European Union Prize for Literature (2011)3_the-fairground-magician-front-cover

Fairground Magician is a collection of thirteen tales revolving around the various faces of the Gods of love, whether this is Eros, who represents love, sexual passion and naughty thoughts or Yue-Lao, who binds two people together with an invisible red string - it  doesn’t matter, they will find themselves reflected within this book’s pages.

~

~~~

Jelena Lengold (1959) is a storyteller, novelist and a poet. She has published five books of poetry, one novel (Baltimore, 2003, 2011) and four books of stories, including Pokisli lavovi (Rain-soaked Lions, 1994), Lift (Lift, 1999) as well as Vašarski mađioničar (The Fairground Magician, 2008, 2009). She has been represented in several anthologies of poetry and stories, and her works have been translated into several languages. Lengold worked as a journalist and an editor for ten years in the cultural department of Radio Belgrade. She worked as a project coordinator in the Conflict Management programme of Nansenskolen Humanistic Academy in Lillehammer, Norway. She taught topics such as dialogue, interethnic tolerance, discrimination, negotiations, human rights and peaceful conflict resolution. She lives in Belgrade.

 

 

Istros Books

Jelena Lengold

European Prize for Literature 2011 PDF, containing  Wanderings a story from the collection.

 * W. H Auden

Friday, October 18, 2013

Pleasures Of The Damned <- -> Charles Bukowski (Poems 1951 – 1993)

 

the bluebird

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.
*********

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.
************

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
***********

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
***********
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
************

then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

 

Henry Charles Bukowski, was born Heinrich Karl Bukowski  on August 16,1920 a German-born American poet, novelist and short story writer. As a writer he used his home city of Los Angeles as his muse, writing poetry from the viewpoint of the poor, the homeless, the bums on skid row and the bar flies strung out on booze.  In his lifetime Bukowski wrote constantly, amassing thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, he would eventually publish more than forty-five books of poetry and prose - earning the title of the "laureate of American lowlife" from Time magazine.  In the poem “ A poem is a city” he states that:

“a poem is a city filled with streets and sewers
filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen,
filled with banality and booze,”

This seems to be an apt description of his poetry and as such came to define the man himself, as though he was setting himself up as the “eternal loser”, the patron saint of the lost and lonely –  yet  he goes on to say in this same poem

“and now I stick this under glass
for the mad editor’s scrutiny,”

Thus acknowledging his role in the process, as an onlooker, placing  an image onto a Petri dish magnified, dissected and defined for our perusal, a knowing glance at us the reader, of his own role in the drama on the page.

Woman on the Street

her shoes themselves
would light my room
like many candles.

*********

she walks like all things
shining on glass,
like all things
that make a difference.

*******

she walks away.

This is what makes Bukowski as a writer interesting, and makes me think that the first poem on this page sums up my perception of this poet, there’s a bravado, a vulgarity that is merely surface, whilst just below the surface is the real poet, trapped in a web of his own creation, although willingly.

about the PEN conference

take a writer away from his typewriter
and all you have left
is
the sickness
which started him
typing
in the
beginning.

Pleasures of the Damned , is probably the definitive collection of Charles Bukowski’s poetry, and as such will come to define any future perception of him as a poet.  This is not a bad thing as it was compiled by John Martin who was Buksowski’s editor for most of his career & also the man who convinced him to leave his post office job and become a writer. Publishing his work first as Black Sparrow Press and since it closed in 2002, for Ecco.charles-bukowski-pleasures of the damned

For this collection Martin read through over 2500 poems and whittled them down to around 270, which in his opinion constitute  the “Best of”, making The Pleasures of the Damned, a celebration of Charles Bukowski’s life and his poetry, raising a glass to the writer and the whores, hookers, barflies and bums who danced through his words.

Van Gogh

vain vanilla ladies strutting
while Van Gogh did it to
himself.

girls pulling on silk
hose
while Van Gogh did it to
himself
in the field

unkissed, and
worse.

I pass him on the street:
"how's it going Van?"

"I dunno man," he says
and walks on.

there is a burst of colour:

one more creature
dizzy with love.

he said,
then,
I want to leave.

and they look at his paintings
and love him
now.

for that kind of love
he did the right
thing

as for the other kind of love
it never arrived.

Charles Bukowski(Wiki)

Ecco - Bukowski

bukowski.net

Pages on Bukowski

Poemhunter

 

Poets.Org

Friday, October 11, 2013

Alone In Berlin <-> Hans Fallada

alone-in-berlin

Alone in Berlin, takes place during the 2nd world war, with Germany firmly under the Nazi jackboot. Because of the constant  fear of arrest by the Gestapo, with the threat of imprisonment, torture and death Berlin was a miasma of paranoia, fear and suspicion. In a world where a family member, neighbour or complete stranger can denounce you for a crime imagined or otherwise and even if you’re not condemned to death, you’ll find yourself classified an enemy of the state, ostracized and unable to find employment.   

Otto and Anna Quangel, are a working class couple, who were not interest in politics, and although they weren’t members of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, they had tacitly supported Hitler, even voted for him.

This was all to change – when one day a letter arrived, telling them their son had died a “hero’s death for Führer and Fatherland”. This shocks them out of their apathy and they start a campaign that explicitly questions Hitler and his regime, writing on postcards messages such as:

“Mother! The Führer has murdered my son. Mother! The Führer will murder your sons too, he will not stop till he has brought sorrow to every home in the world.”

These cards were then left  in the stairwells of apartment blocks, in locations all over Berlin, or dropped into post boxes. It wasn’t long before they caught the attention of the Gestapo. This takes takes the form of inspector Escherich, who is mapping the position of every card with the aim of pinning down the “criminals”. This being Nazi Germany, Escherich himself is constantly under pressure to get results or face the direst consequences: harried & abused by Obergruppenführer Prall, the inspector will try any trick - dirty or otherwise to catch the postcard writers. 

Although the postcards aren’t really successful, because the population is so terrified that they hand them straight to the Gestapo, or destroy them, the cards offend the authorities and the case becomes serious and failure to solve it is not an option and it’s just a matter of time before the Quangels become guests of the hellhole that is the Gestapo prison system and then it becomes a question of not will they survive, but how they die.

~ - ~

Alone in Berlin was originally called Every Man Dies Alone and was based on the true story of Otto and Elise Hampel a working class couple from Berlin, who came up with the idea of leaving postcards around their city denouncing Hitler and his regime. They got away with it for about two years, but were eventually discovered, denounced, arrested, tried and executed - beheaded in Berlin's Plötzensee Prison in April 1943. Hans Fallada was given the Hampel’s Gestapo files by Johannes Becher, a writer friend of Fallada’s, who was president of the cultural organization established by the Soviet military administration in the Soviet sector, with the aim of creating a new anti-fascist culture.

~ - ~

Sometimes you pick up a book that so engrosses you, that despite it’s subject matter you cannot leave it alone. You know that there will be no traditional happy ending for Otto and Anna Quangel, that  respect for humanity is not high on the Gestapo’s list of priorities, that it is when and not if they are caught and then that they will face every form of torture from humiliation to being treated like a rag doll in the mouth of a rabid dog. None of this matters, or more accurately despite all of it, this book is beautiful, a quiet book of common decency, that reaches beyond the subject matter to reach a grandeur that, although of a tragic nature, still lights up bright enough to shine through the deepest of hellholes and to depict in letters large enough to be seen from the stars stating that despite all evidence to the contrary the human spirit and decency is never ever totally destroyed.

~ – ~

Hans Fallada

Hans Fallada (1893 – 1947), born Rudolf Wilhelm Friedrich Ditzen in Greifswald, Germany, was a writer of the first half of the 20th century. His works belong predominantly to the New Objectivity literary style, with precise details and journalistic veneration of the facts. Fallada's pseudonym derives from a combination of characters found in the Grimm's Fairy Tales: the protagonist of Hans in Luck and a horse named Falada in The Goose Girl.*******************************************

Fallada was a man of many personal issues, including morphine & alcohol addiction, he had been both institutionalized and incarcerated during the Nazi era. At first he had no interest in writing this story, stating that he hadn’t fought against the regime, had even cooperated. However, unlike many writers and intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany, Fallada had felt too attached to the German language and culture to leave, despite the fact that he was urged to flee and had been blacklisted by the Nazis

Alone In Berlin was translated by Michael Hofmann (born 1957, Freiburg, West Germany) a German-born poet who writes in English and is a translator of texts from German.

Penguin

Hans Fallada (Wiki)

Michael Hofmann

Friday, October 4, 2013

Landscape With Yellow Birds

*****************************Selected Poems By José Ángel Valente

First Night

Extend your heart,
bankrupt it, blind it,
until in it is born
the powerful void
of what can never be named.

___

I know at least
the imminent
and spent bone

- - - 

Let there be night. (Stone,
nothing but nocturnal stone.)

****

Then raise your plea:
that the word be nothing but truth.

The poem above is from A Modo de Esperanza (In a Hopeful Mode) published in 1953 - 4, this was José Ángel Valente’s first published work and it won the Adonais Prize for Poetry, his next collection Poemas a Lázaro (Poems for Lazarus) won the Critics Prize. Born in Galacia, North-western Spain, Valente had studied romance languages and law, graduating from the University of Madrid (1953) at the age of twenty four. 

valente

Although initially a supporter of  Franco, Valente’s father had fallen out of favour with the regime, and Valente would spend many years in voluntary exile, at first in Oxford, where he taught Spanish letters and received a MA degree.

Later he would live in Geneva and Paris working as a translator for the World Health Organisation and Unesco. In 1972 he was court-martialed in absentia, for remarks critical to the regime.

He wouldn’t return to his homeland until ten years after Franco’s death. In 1988 his work as a writer was finally recognised when he was awarded the prestigious Príncipe de Asturias prize, followed by the National Poetry prize in 1993.

*****

Rotation Of Creation

The seed contains all the air;
a grain is but a buried bird;
cloud and root share a dream;
sap opens the palm of the flower's spike
where sun and rain recreate
and kneed warm bread with love;
the upside - down sky faces above
pointing to its dome of earth;
land rains birds upon the sky,
and, fertilized in springtime,
the sky multiplies its joyous light;
dream is a sleepwalking sentry
and awakening is your true dream.

****

In the green, profound eye of God
the first seed is still grasping for the bottom,
where everything rotates, from slime to man,
so that the world may yet begin
.

*******

Unlike many of his contemporaries, his poetry didn’t directly reference the political or social forces affecting his country. His concerns were with poetry itself – that poetry explored and transcended itself: poetry as knowledge, as truth -creating a meta-poetry, using the language, the logos as a means to define the essence, for Valente poetry was a material thing or a “material memory” (title of his 1977-78 collection) and writing was like ceramics, a shaping process. Poetry was not, as it was for earlier post-war Spanish writers, so much an act of communication as it was a process of discovery.  

*******

Desire Was a Still Point

The bodies remained on the lonely side of love
as if negating each other without negating desire
and in this negotiation a knot stronger than themselves
indefinitely bound them together.

******

What did their eyes and their hands know,
or their skin, which held a body
against the breath of another, and gave birth to
that slow immobile light,
the solitary form of desire?

******

This places Valente as heir to the Spanish mystical tradition, with his influences ranging from the Jewish Kabbalah, Iranian Sufism, and Christian mysticism (primarily through figures such as San Juan de la Cruz or Miguel de Molinos ), Taoism and Zen Buddhism, amongst others. In his later years this process would condense his poetry stripping away any excess, creating highly distilled and introspective prose that through the process of distillation created new vistas.

********

I see, I see. And you, what do you see? I don't see. What colour? I see. The
problem is not what is seen but seeing itself. The looking, not the eye.
What is before the eye. Not color but noncolor. Not seeing. Transparency.

***********

José Angel Valente, poet, born April 25 1929, died July 18 2000, published more than twenty books of verse as well as translating the poetry of writers such as Paul Celan , John Keats , Constantine Cavafy , Dylan Thomas ,Gerard Manley Hopkins , John Donne , Benjamin Peret , Edmond Jabes and Eugenio Montale. pi03bc3dec694fbbe1@large

Considered by many to be the major poet of post-war Spain, and yet Landscape With Yellow Birds is the first major selection of his work to appear in English, containing poetry from throughout his lifetime from A Modo de Esperanza written in 1953 to Fragmentos de un Libro Futuro (Fragments from a Future Book) 1991 –2000, tracing Valente’s journey as he sought to define and shape his reality through the crafting of his verse, to realise through this process ****

 “ An aspect of reality to which there is no means of access other than through poetic language.”

As Stated above, this is the first major selection José Angel Valente’s poetry to appear in English. Translated by Thomas Christensen and published by Archipelago Books, this is a wonderful, thought provoking collection of poetry and would make a worthy addition to any poetry collection.

Thomas Christensen is the author of 1616: The World in Motion and New World/New Words: Recent Writing from the Americas. He has translated, often in collaboration with his wife, Carol Christensen, works by Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Alejo Carpentier, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, among others. He lives in Richmond, California.

Poem

When there is nothing left for us,
the emptiness of what does not remain
could finally be useless and perfect.

****

José Angel Valente

Archipelago Books

Thomas Christensen

 

 

Thursday, October 3, 2013

NATIONAL POETRY DAY (UK)

NPD_Poster_HandFishsmall-212x300

National Poetry Day is a nationwide celebration of poetry for everyone, everywhere.The idea is to shake poetry from its dust-jacket and into the nations’ streets, offices, shops, playgrounds, train stations and onto the airwaves. It’s a chance for people to use poetry to say things that can’t be said in prose.

National Poetry Day was founded in 1994, and has engaged millions of people across the country with live events, happenings, classroom activities, conversations, broadcasts, semi-comprehensible tweets and spontaneous uncontrollable outbursts of poetry – whether vocal or in the form of pome-graffiti

From 1999 onwards, National Poetry Day has been loosely “themed”: the theme is not prescriptive but serves to fire the imagination.This Years theme is “water, water, everywhere”,in case you want to use it to kick-start activities or as a point of inspiration.

This is in homage to one of the nation’s best-known (and most-frequently misquoted) lines of poetry*.

 

To Start this celebration here is a poem 

Love, like Water

Tumbling from some far-flung cloud
into your bathroom alone, to sleeve
a toe, five, a metatarsal arch,
it does its best to feign indifference
to the body, but will go on creeping
up to the neck till it's reading the skin
like braille, though you're certain it sees
under the surface of things and knows
the routes your nerves take as they branch
from the mind, which lately has been curling
in on itself like the spine of a dog
as it circles a patch of ground to sleep.
Now through the dappled window,
propped open slightly for the heat,
a light rain is composing
the lake it falls into, the way a lover's hand
composes the body it touches - Love,
like water! How it gives and gives,
wearing the deepest of groves in our sides
and filling them up again, ever so gently
wounding us, making us whole.

************************************Julia Copus

This year’s excitements include poets writing in the London Underground, Jordan from Rizzle Kicks performing alongside Mr Gee at Wembley and the incarceration of four Welsh poets overnight, with pen, paper, coffee and orders to create 100 new poems.

Last year National Poetry Day reached 50 million people, for 24 hours. Why not more? We need your help to engage tomorrow’s poetry lovers, not for a day but for a lifetime.

A Glass of Water

Here is a glass of water from my well.
It tastes of rock and root and earth and rain;
It is the best I have, my only spell,
And it is cold, and better than champagne.
Perhaps someone will pass this house one day
To drink, and be restored, and go his way,
Someone in dark confusion as I was
When I drank down cold water in a glass,
Drank a transparent health to keep me sane,
After the bitter mood had gone again.

********************************May Sarton

NPD_logo_black_portrait

Resources

The Poetry Society

Scottish Poetry Library

Talking points

Lesson Plans

Posters

Audio + Video

National Poetry Day

Twitter(National Poetry Day)

 

Grab a poem, & someone you love, then read, whisper, sing, shout it to them. Say hi to a colleague – tell them about National Poetry Day, spread the danger…..celebrate the day……..

This poem ……….Elma Mitchell.

This poem is dangerous: it should not be left
Within reach of children, or even of adults
Who might swallow it whole, with possibly
Undesirable side-effects.If you come across
An unattended, unidentified poem
In a public place, do not attempt to tackle it
Yourself. Send it (preferably in a sealed container)
To the nearest centre of learning, where it will be rendered
Harmless, by experts. Even the simplest poem
May destroy your immunity to human emotions.
All poems must carry a Government warning. Words
Can seriously affect your heart.

Has nothing to do with water, but I just loved the idea behind it

Pomesallsizes

PARRISH LANTERN'S - Pocket Anthology

 

* The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

Celebrate National Poetry Day (03/10/2013)