Dear Memory, p. 58

Self is really enjoying Dear Memory, the bursts of elliptical writing.

From the letter “Dear Teacher”:

• I stumbled into your poetry workshop even though I wasn’t studying poetry. I was one of the few graduate students there. I remember you at the head of a long, wooden table, presiding, as if your chair were a throne. The room was brown with wood everywhere. We were knights of poetry. Our plates were white sheets of paper filled with our own flesh. Your words were infinite. They were an entire country.

From Jail to National Power

Chapter 2 of The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World is about Turkey’s Erdogan.

Apparently, while Erdogan was mayor of Istanbul, he was forced to step down “for reciting a poem that judges said had incited religious hatred.”

The lines in question:

The mosques are our barracks
the domes our helmets,
the minarets our bayonets
and the faithful our soldiers.

Rather than ending his political career as Turkey’s secular establishment had intended, Erdogan’s four and a half months behind bars in 1999 helped to catapult him to national power.

— The Age of the Strongman, p. 43

I wonder if there is the possibility of something like this happening to Trump if he were arrested? Would he, like Erdogan, become regarded as a martyr? Since Joe is no slouch, does this enter into his thinking at all? Might there be a point after all to Merrick Garland’s deliberate plodding? You see how easy it is for my thinking to get tied up in knots?

Stay tuned.

Poetry Friday: Ivan Malkovych

Malkovych is self’s new favorite poet! His poem was included in the anthology Writng from Ukraine: Fiction, Poetry and Essays since 1965, edited by Mark Andryczyk

AT HOME

— translated by Bohdan Boychuk and Myrosia Stefaniuk

Again I’ll visit for a day or two,
won’t help with anything again,
nervous, distracted conversations
will just distress my parents.

What will I find next time
I come? Everyone there?
As I leave: father and mother in the window
like Hutsul icons on glass.

Note: Hutsul are an ethnic group of Ukrainian highlanders that inhabit the Carpathian Mountains in Western Ukraine.

Ivan Malkovych was born in Nyzhnyii Bereziv (Ivano-Frankivsk oblast Ukraine). At age 19, Malkovych was voted best young poet in a clandestine vote among several hundred Ukrainian writers.

Poetry Friday: Ivan Malkovych

The Man

— translated from the Ukrainian by Olena Jennings

He puts on a jester’s mask —
they recognize him.

He dresses in the robe of a merciless judge —
they implore:
“Stop it, you can’t fool us.”

He changes into a fox —
they yell:
“We recognized you long ago.
Enough.”

He wraps himself in Don Juan’s cloak —
they laugh:
“Wrong style.”

He stretches on a chameleon’s mask —
and tears off that facade himself:

comical
lost man —
he can’t understand
that every mask
has a slit
for eyes.

• Malkovych, who lives and works in Kyiv, is the author of seven poetry collections. His poetry has been translated into English, German, Italian, Russian, Polish, Bengali, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Georgian, Slovak, and Slovenian.

Poetry Saturday: Serhiy Zhadan

Excerpt from Alcohol

— translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps

On the terrace the left-over cups of tea
are filling up with rain water
and cigarette butts,
you and I share a cold
you and I share long conversations —
you don’t notice the morning rain
you go to sleep late
and you wake up late
I write poems about how I love
this woman, and I invent
newer and newer words
to avoid
telling her.

Serhiy Zhadan is the most popular poet of the post-independence generation in Ukraine. His work speaks to the disillusionment, difficulties, and ironies brought by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Poetry Saturday: Marjana Savka

Books We’ve Never Read (an Excerpt)

— translated from the Ukrainian by Askold Melnyczuk

Books we’ve never read are opening for us.
Towns shimmer in the night air.
Cold dawns. Warm autumn train stations.
The roads turn like pages. Eyes reddened by wind.

_____________

Marjana Savka is a writer, publisher, community activist, and chief editor and co-founder of Vydavny Staroha Leva (Old Lion Publishing House). Born in the village of Kopychyntsi, Ternopil oblast, she currently lives and works in Lviv. Savka is the author of the poetry collections Oholeni rusla (Naked River Beds, 1995), Hirka mandrahora (Bitter Mandragora, 2002), Kokhannia i viina (Love and War, 2002, together with Marianna Kiianovska).

Poetry Wednesday: Liu Xia’s “June 2nd, 1989”

Liu Xia is the widow of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. This poem was part of her collection, Empty Chairs, published in a bilingual edition by Graywolf Press.

June 2nd, 1989

— for Xiaobo

This isn’t good weather
I said to myself
standing under the lush sun.

Standing behind you
I patted your head
and your hair pricked my palm
making it strange to me.

I didn’t have a chance
to say a word before you became a character
in the news, everyone looking up to you
as I was worn down
at the edge of the crowd
just smoking
and watching the sky.

A new myth, maybe, was forming there.
but the sun’s sharp light
blinded me from seeing it.

Cee’s Midweek Madness Challenge, 14 Sept 2022: Bright Pink or Magenta

Posting for Cee’s Midweek Madness Challenge: Bright Pink or Magenta

Self painted this for an art project when she was in sixth grade at Assumption Convent in Manila. She brought it with her to graduate school in California. Last year, she pulled it from its usual spot (under the bed) and unrolled it. The colors were still fresh, after all these years! Amazing! She never put any kind of protection over the paint.

On the back, she had written:

If you have two loaves of bread
Sell one and with the other
Buy hyacinths to feed your soul.

She doesn’t know where the quote was from, so she decided to google. Found an article about the original poem in The Paris Review.

When she took it to University Art Center on El Camino Real to be framed, they asked the standard question: estimated value? Self responded, probably nothing. The staff person wrote down: Sentimental Value.

Stay tuned.

Poetry Friday: Palladas

‘Loving the rituals’

Loving the rituals that keep men close,
Nature created means for friends apart:

pen, paper, ink, the alphabet,
Signs for the distant and disconsolate heart.

— translated from the Greek by Tony Harrison

• Palladas was a 4th century AD poet. Greek, he lived in Alexandria.

Buglas, A New Literary Journal from the Central Philippines, Inaugural Issue

All the writers are from two central Philippine islands: Negros (yes, that IS the name of one of the islands, thank you Spanish colonizers who named it after the locals, who were “Negros” — dark-skinned) and Siquijor.

Buglas was the pre-Spanish name for Negros.

It is edited by writers from the Dumaguete Writers Workshop.

Self’s story Dumaguete is in it, which renders her speechless. Just speechless!

Welcome from the Editors.

Submission Guidelines here.