Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Two poems by
Iranian-American Poet
Majid Naficy

To the Children of Prison and Exile

After the silence of firing squads
Still it burns in our hearts
And we carry their corpses
On our broken backs.
I want to turn this death into life.

How many companions,
Who in these years of defeat and execution
Created life from an embryo?
I am talking about the children of prison and exile:
Cheshmeh, Roza, and Sulmaz.

I want to turn this death into life
That like a jug of water
Becomes filled with the freshness of Cheshmeh,
And like a red rose
Blooms from the lips of Roza,
And like the word sulmaz
Becomes evergreen.
I will sift, grind, and soften this death,
Until the children of prison and exile
Mold it into playdough.
I am calling you,
O newborns of years of pain,
The crocodiles in your painting
Have no teeth,
Because the names of their friends
Never crossed their lips.

I want to turn this death into a poem,
That can be read like magic
When the corpse of a butterfly
Carried by ants
Makes you remember the dead ones.

I want to turn this death into life.

NOTE:
The names Cheshmeh, Roza, and Sulmaz respectively mean: "spring", "rose," and "everlasting."

Ah, Los Angeles

Ah, Los Angeles!
I accept you as my city,
And after ten years
I am at peace with you.
Waiting without fear
I lean back against the bus post.
And I become lost
In the sounds of your midnight.

A man gets off Blue Bus 1
And crosses to this side
To take Brown Bus 4.
Perhaps he too is coming back
From his nights on campus.
On the way he has sobbed
Into a blank letter.
And from the seat behind
He has heard the voice of a woman
With a familiar accent.
On Brown Bus 4 it rains.
A woman is talking to her umbrella
And a man ceaselessly flushes a toilet.

I told Carlos yesterday,
“Your clanging cart
Wakes me up in the morning."
He collects cans
And wants to go back to Cuba.
From the Promenade
Comes the sound of my homeless man.
He sings blues
And plays guitar.
Where in the world can I hear
The black moaning of the saxophone
Alongside the Chinese chimes?
And see this warm olive skin
Through blue eyes?
The easy-moving doves
Rest on the empty benches.
They stare at the dinosaur
Who sprays stale water on our kids.
Marziyeh sings from a Persian market
I return, homesick
And I put my feet
On your back.
Ah, Los Angeles!
I feel your blood.
You taught me to get up
Look at my beautiful legs
And along with the marathon
Run on your broad shoulders.

Once I got tired of life
I coiled up under my blanket
And remained shut-off for two nights.
Then, my neighbor turned on NPR
And I heard of a Russian poet
Who in a death camp,
Could not write his poems
But his wife learned them by heart.

Will Azad read my poetry?
On the days that I take him to school,
He sees the bus number from far off.
And calls me to get in line.
At night he stays under the shower
And lets the drops of water
Spray on his small body.
Sometimes we go to the beach.
He bikes and I skate.
He buys a Pepsi from a machine
And gives me one sip.

Yesterday we went to Romteen’s house.
His father is a Parsee from India.
He wore sadra and kusti
While he was painting the house.
On that little stool
He looked like a Zoroastrian
Rowing from Hormoz to Sanjan.

Ah, Los Angeles!
Let me bend down and put my ear
To your warm skin.
Perhaps in you
I will find my own Sanjan.
No, it’s not a ship touching
Against the rocky shore;
It’s the rumbling Blue Bus 8.
I know.
I will get off at Idaho
And will pass the shopping carts
Left by the homeless
I will climb the stairs
And will open the door.
I will start the answering machine
And in the dark
I will wait like a fisherman.

NOTES:
The Parsees are the descendants of Zoroastrians who emigrated from Iran to Gujarat, India during the Arab conquests. In 1599, Bahman Key Qobâd, a Gujarati Parsee, wrote an epic poem in which he depicts such a migration on a ship from the Straits of Hormoz in the Persian Gulf to the port of Sanjan in India.
The sadra and kusti are special tunics and belts worn by Zoroastrians after puberty.

Both poems reprinted with permission of the poet. Both poems appeared in After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo.

Interview with Majid Naficy

Majid Naficy

How did you come to write these two poems?

One of the three children whom I have named in “To the Children of Prison and Exile” is my niece Cheshmeh who was born in Evin prison in Tehran after his father was executed in winter 1983. By writing this poem, I wanted to honor her father and make life out of his death. In “Ah Los Angeles” I wanted to accept my new identity as an Iranian-American and after ten years in exile express my appreciation for Los Angeles.

How did writing these poems affect your recovery?

By writing these two poems as well as similar pieces I have been able to survive after so much personal loss back in Iran and facilitate the process of passage from self-denial to acceptance as an exile in the US.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped these poems come to life?

I did not do any thing special. They came on their own. I only made some changes later.

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you'd recommend to others?

I still read Walt Whitman now and then. He inspired me to write poetry when I was eleven years old. I also like to read classical Persian poets such as Ferdowsi, Rumi, Sa’di, Hafez Nezami, and Khayyam as well as contemporary Persian poets such as Nima Yushij, Ahmad Shamlu, Forough Farokhzad and Sohrab Sepehri.

What are you working on now?

I am making some changes in a poem which I wrote for my son Azad in 1995 in order to give it to him as a gift for his 24th birthday. It was first published in my collection of poetry Father and Son (Red Hen Press, 2003). I have renamed it from “We Are Sitting Next to Each Other” to “Haircut.” I wrote it when Azad and I went to Supercuts.

Majid Naficy, the Arthur Rimbaud of Persian poetry, fled Iran in 1983, a year and a half after the execution of his wife Ezzat Tabaian and his brother Sa’id in Tehran. Since 1984 Majid has been living in West Los Angeles. He has published two collections of poetry in English Muddy Shoes (Beyond Baroque, Books, 1999) and Father and Son (Red Hen Press, 2003) as well as his doctoral dissertation at UCLA Modernism and Ideology in Persian Literature (University Press of America, 1997). Majid has also published more than twenty books of poetry and essays in Persian.

Majid Naficy's poetry has been anthologized in many books including Poetry in the Windows edited by Suzanne Lummis, Poets Against War edited by Sam Hamill, Strange Times My Dear: The Pen Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature edited by Nahid Mozaffari and Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, Lounge Lit: An Anthology of Poetry and Fiction by the Writers of Literati Cocktail and Rhapsodomancy, Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians around the World edited by Niloufar Talebi, After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events edited by Tom Lombardo, Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing edited by Ilan Stavans, Revolutionary Poets Brigade Anthology edited by Jack Hirschman and Mark Lipman, and Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here edited by Beau Beausoleil and Deema Shehabi.

Majid is one of the six poets featured in the film Poetry of Resilience directed by the Oscar-nominated documentary film-maker Katja Esson. He was the first writer in residence in Annenberg Community Beach House, Santa Monica in 2009-10, and the judge for Interboard Poetry Community contests in 2009. Majid has received awards in two poetry contests, Poetry in the Windows sponsored by the Arroyo Arts Collective as well as Poetry and Recipe organized by Writers at Work in Los Angeles. His poetry has been engraved by the City in public spaces in Venice Beach and Studio City. His life and work was featured in LA Weekly, February 9-15, 2001 written by Louise Steinman, entitled "Poet of Revolution: Majid Naficy's Tragic Journey Home".

A documentary portrait of Dr. Naficy aired January 2014 on VOA in Persian and now is available with English subtitles at You Tube: Video Portrait of Majid Naficy.

Thursday, April 24, 2014

Excerpt from Martha Collins
New Collection Day Unto Day


from OVER TIME

      October 2004


1

Not much. Less. Slip
of a finger, diminished
interval, maybe third

of three or two.

Water mirrors house with high
green door opening out (no

steps) into pure air.


2

Air pockets three
hawks. Cat got
the bird got the cat.

Overflown. A habit
of flight. Worn cloud
on the edge of edge.

Wisps. Little tongues.


3

Tongues at work. Talk Today

She could did for an hour or more.
My first her, who gave me words.

Then at the end, before, merely Oh!

A moment of . . . of more, perhaps.

Oh sweet and blessèd could be.

Oh my soul


4

Soul slept, called in sick.

Late sun clouds
the lake with clouds.

Katydid down
to –did –did.

Nothing to be done.

Little sun, quarter moon.


5

Moon covered, un-
covered, covered again, cold.

Cold and hot, very and both.

Disturbed the Sea of Tranquility.

Distributed by the Moon Shop.

Distributed self in pieces.

Oh my broken.


6

Broken down, or out, as in
war, or into, soon: my own him.

How much we carry around
under our skins, many
we were, girls and boys

Now now

And then then.


7

Then gone and then to come:
all the time, except the split
second, except—

All the time in the world.

And out of this world?

Oh little heart on my wrist,
where are we going?

Reprinted from Day Unto Day (Milkweed Press) by permission of the poet.


Interview with Martha Collins

Please tell Poetry of Recovery blog readers how your new collection came about.

I began the book in 2004, and I wrote daily during a different month each year until I finally finish all twelve months. The first six parts of this project were just published as Day Unto Day by Milkweed Press this past March. I have two more months to go to complete the second half.

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you'd recommend to others?

As I said in a recent interview, I’ve been reading a lot of African American poetry lately, partly because of the writing I’ve been doing (see below). Beyond older poets like Carl Phillips and Marilyn Nelson, I’m been impressed enough with recent books by Thomas Sayers Ellis, Evie Shockley, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, and Major Jackson to review them in print.

Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens—and the Bible!—were early influences. Later John Ashbery gave me a kind of stylistic license (though my writing is nothing like his), and poets like Denise Levertov, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Muriel Rukeyser allowed me to pursue the kind of subject matter that is reflected in my recent books.

Martha Collins

What are you working on now?

My book Day Unto Day, just released, followed soon after my collection White Papers, which was a kind of follow-up to my book-length poem Blue Front. Two of my books focus on race: Blue Front on a lynching my father witnessed, White Papers more broadly on issues of race as seen from a critical white perspective. A friend once suggested that I must be writing some kind of trilogy, and I am working on a manuscript that might in some sense follow these two—-not focused so narrowly on race, but perhaps related in some way. Or perhaps not related at all.


Martha Collins is the author of Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2014), White Papers (Pitt Poetry Series, 2012) and the book-length poem Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006), which won an Anisfield-Wolf Award. She has also published four earlier collections of poems and three collections of co-translated Vietnamese poetry, most recently Black Stars: Poems by Ngo Tu Lap (Milkweed, 2013, with the author). Other awards include fellowships from the NEA, Bunting Institute, Witter Bynner Foundation, and Ingram Merrill Foundation, as well as three Pushcart Prizes and a Lannan Foundation residency. Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin until 2007, Collins is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Two Poems By
William Greenway


Pit Pony

There are only a few left, he says,
kept by old Welsh miners, souvenirs,
like gallstones or gold teeth, torn
from this "pit," so cold and wet
my breath comes out a soul up
into my helmet's lantern beam,
anthracite walls running, gleaming,
and the floors iron-rutted with tram tracks,
the almost pure rust that grows and waves
like orange moss in the gutters of water
that used to rise and drown.
He makes us turn all lights off, almost
a mile down. While children scream,
I try to see anything, my hand touching
my nose, my wife beside me—darkness
palpable, like a velvet sack over our heads,
even the glow of watches left behind.
This is where they were born, into
this nothing, felt first with their cold noses
for the shaggy side and warm bag of black milk,
pulled their trams for twenty years
through pitch, past birds that didn't sing,
through doors opened by five-year-olds
who sat in the cheap, complete blackness
listening for steps, a knock.
And they died down here, generation
after generation.
The last one, when it dies in the hills,
not quite blind, the mines closed forever,
will it die strangely? Will it wonder
dimly why it was exiled from the rest
of its race, from the dark flanks of the soft
mother, what these timbers are that hold up
nothing but blue? If this is the beginning
of death, this wind, these stars?

From Selected Poems (Future Cycle Press, 2014). Reprinted by permission of the poet.




Eurydice

When my wife woke from four months
of coma after a “massive” stroke,
with chances of recovery “minimal,”
and we had finally flown home
in a tiny jet around the polar horn
of Swansea, Cardiff, Reykjavik, Goose
Bay, Toronto, Cleveland, Youngstown,
I sat by her wheelchair in a class
like a kindergarten where kids of all ages
cut colored cloth, stacked blocks,
and pieced puzzles like a map
of the world. When they shook their heads
to lament how she couldn’t remember
anything or speak, I wrote
on a big pad in crayon, “Let us go
then you and I.”
After she had read it aloud,
she went on in her whispery voice
to chant, eyes closed, the rest
of the poem from memory while
the rehab staff in their green
and blue scrubs gathered around
and stood open-mouthed as something
odd and unintelligible, yet
somehow strangely familiar,
came to them from a far place,
deep and dark where she had been,
beyond the reach of light and love.

In 2008, Greenway's poem "Eurydice" appeared in the anthology After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events, which featured 152 poems by 115 poets from 15 nations.

Interview with William Greenway

How did you come to write the poem "Eurydice"?

It began after my wife’s stroke and subsequent two-month coma while we were in Wales on sabbatical.

How did writing "Eurydice" affect your recovery?

All through this trauma, I wrote poems as prayer, believing, as I always have, that poetry taps into a power outside of ourselves as well as inside. Both give us strength we don’t know we have or have access to until the trauma comes along.

Can you tell us something about your process of writing that helped "Eurydice" come to life?

Because I keep a journal, I’m able to objectify my experiences enough to get past mere self-pity and sentimentality and leave a sort of vacuum of emotion to draw in the reader’s emotions. I try not to hog all the feeling, and let the reader have some.

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you'd recommend to others?

William Stafford, William Matthews, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Sharon Olds.

What are you working on now?

Whatever comes my way. My life seems to follow paths that eventually become patterns that then become the organization of a book. My latest book is titled Tripwires, about those upheavals—some good, some bad—that we never see coming, but that change our lives, and us, irrevocably.


William Greenway

Greenway's collection Everywhere at Once (2008) won the Ohioana Poetry Book of the Year Award, as did his Ascending Order (2003), both from the University of Akron Press. He has published in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner. He has won the Helen and Laura Krout Memorial Poetry Award, the Larry Levis Editors' Prize from Missouri Review, the Open Voice Poetry Award from The Writer's Voice, the State Street Press Chapbook Competition, an Ohio Arts Council Grant, and was 1994 Georgia Author of the Year. He’s Professor of English at Youngstown State University, where he has been awarded a Distinguished Professorship in Teaching and three in Scholarship.

Sunday, April 13, 2014

William Greenway featured
on Poetry Daily Today

William Greenway's poem "Entrance" is featured at Poetry Daily today. You can find it at Poetry Daily: "Entrance" by William Greenway. The link stays live forever, so if you miss it today, please view it at your leisure.

The poem comes from Greenway's recently released Selected Poems.



"Everything I love about William Greenway's poems is here in spades: the self-effacing wit, the spritely erudition, and the serious charm. Like a wry descendent of Homer who 'woke up human and Baptist in Atlanta, Georgia,' Greenway discerns in the mundane world of barbershops and flu shot lines the guises of the mythic." —Lynn Powell, poet, The Zones of Paradise


William Greenway

Greenway's collection Everywhere at Once (2008) won the Ohioana Poetry Book of the Year Award, as did his Ascending Order (2003), both from the University of Akron Press. He has published in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner. He has won the Helen and Laura Krout Memorial Poetry Award, the Larry Levis Editors' Prize from Missouri Review, the Open Voice Poetry Award from The Writer's Voice, the State Street Press Chapbook Competition, an Ohio Arts Council Grant, and was 1994 Georgia Author of the Year. He’s Professor of English at Youngstown State University, where he has been awarded a Distinguished Professorship in Teaching and three in Scholarship.

In 2008, Greenway's poem "Eurydice" appeared in the anthology After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events, which featured 152 poems by 115 poets from 15 nations.

Monday, April 7, 2014

New Collection Bend to it
from Kevin Simmonds


Kevin Simmonds' new collection Bend to it was just released this Spring from Salmon Poetry. Kevin is an award-winning poet and musician who divides his time between San Francisco and Japan, and he's now at work on a theatrical collaboration with Theatre of Yugen, an experimental Japanese Noh theatre in San Francisco. Here's a sample poem from Bend to it.

Tono City, Japan
     December, 2000

Crows against snow

Beauty beaten on these anvils

A sky

Falling apart

Black anchors

Crows hawking

To god

To me

A moment's match

Pushing the light from itself

Pushing the light from its wings

Reprinted by permission of the poet.
From Bend to it (Salmon Poetry, 2014). Buy Bend to it at Salmon Poetry.

Interview with Poet Kevin Simmonds

Who are your favorite poets or poets new to you whom you'd recommend to others?
Lucille Clifton
Richard Ronan

What are you working on now?

My second collection, Bend to it , is out from Salmon Poetry, who also published my debut collection, Mad for Meat.

I'm at work on a new collection, tentatively titled Upright. At the same time, I’m processing Ota Benga, a river, a recent theatrical collaboration with Theatre of Yugen, an experimental Japanese Noh theatre here in San Francisco. I wrote the music and co-wrote the text. It was an eye-opening experience, and I won’t soon forget the challenges of creating a work that draws from Japanese and African-American musical conventions.

Finally, I just wrapped up The Nudists , a short experimental documentary about the nudity ban in San Francisco. I collaborated with designer and artist Nori Hara to create a protest pamphlet about this in 2012, shortly before it became law in February 2013. I’m hoping some film festivals will pick it up.



Kevin Simmonds is a writer and musician originally from New Orleans. His books include Mad for Meat (Salmon Poetry) and the edited works Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality (Sibling Rivalry Press) and Ota Benga Under my Mother’s Roof (University of South Carolina). He has composed numerous musical works for voice and chamber ensemble, as well as for stage productions such as Emmett Till, a river and the Emmy Award-winning documentary HOPE: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica. He started the first-ever poetry workshop at Singapore’s Changi Prison and founded Tono International Arts Association, an arts presenter in northern Japan. A recipient of fellowships and commissions from Cave Canem, Creative Work Fund, Fulbright, the Pulitzer Center, San Francisco Arts Commission and the Edward Stanley Award from Prairie Schooner, he divides his time between Japan and San Francisco.

Visit Kevin Simmonds web site.