Tara Hart's poem, first published in the LPR Spirituality issue, appears in the current Pushcart Prize anthology

As a young publication, Little Patuxent Review is more about publishing emerging writers and artists than about winning prizes. Still, toward the end of 2010, one of our contributing editors, Susan Thornton Hobby, nominated Tara Hart’s poem “Patronized,” which appeared in our Summer 2010 Spirituality issue, for a Pushcart Prize and--saints alive!–it won one. Tara’s 20-line poem consequently took its place in the 600-page tome, The Pushcart Prize XXXVI: Best of the Small Presses (2012 Edition).

Emboldened by our success, outgoing editor, Michael R. Clark, and our new editor, Laura Shovan, each nominated three pieces from our Winter and Summer 2011 issues, respectively. We are thus represented by Casey Cooke’s short story “Without,” Ann Eichler Kolakowski’s poem “Unmaking” and Gabriel Welsch’s poem “The Story of a River” from the Winter 2011 Water issue as well as Erin Christian’s short story “God Bless You With Rainbows,” Derrick Weston Brown’s poem “Touched” and Susan Thornton Hobby’s poem “Girl Queen of the Animals” from the Summer 2011 Make Believe issue.

Each year, most of the writers and many of the presses are new to the series. Therefore, we believe that each LPR-nominated piece has a good chance to win a prize and make its way into the next anthology. That each author has a good chance to follow in the footsteps of Raymond Carver, Tim O’Brien, Jayne Anne Phillips, Charles Baxter, Andre Dubus, Susan Minot, Mona Simpson, John Irving and Rick Moody, each of whom first gained notice through the Pushcart series. And that Little Patuxent Review can again join the hundreds of outstanding presses represented in each annual Pushcart publication.

Note: If you’d like a look at some of the contributors eligible for future LPR Pushcart nominations, join us this Saturday, January 28, at 2:00 pm at Oliver’s Carriage House in Columbia, MD for the launch reading of the Winter 2012 Social Justice issue.

JoAnn Balingit, Delaware's Poet Laureate

Like many Poetry Friday regulars, I often assign myself a blog project for National Poetry Month. In 2010, I took readers on virtual road trip around the United States, profiling each state’s poet laureate. (I made it as far as Idaho, 43^rd state.) Naturally, the tour started in Delaware, the first state to sign the US Constitution. That was my introduction to Delaware poet laureate, JoAnn Balingit. My NPM post includes a sample of one of Balingit’s works and a link to the rest of it. In 2012, her poem “Advisory” opens the Little Patuxent Review Social Justice issue.

Balingit’s latest chapbook Forage was the winner of the 2011 Whitebird Prize. The first section examines Balingit’s bi-cultural heritage. Her mother was born in the Midwest and, at age 19, married a 49-year-old immigrant from the Philippines.

“History Textbook, America” is one of the many standout poems. Balingit recalls finding scant mention of her father’s country of origin in history textbooks. That moment becomes a jumping-off point. The poet meditates on all that we lose when we emigrate, including a brother that she did not know her father had. Just days after her father died, “some man we didn’t know / called up. This is his brother, one more shock, / phoning for him.” The uncle does not have a chance to speak his name before the phone and, therefore, the family connection breaks: “a dial tone erased the Philippines.” The poem expresses our tenuous connection to others and to history.

Balingit’s mother speaks in “My Mother Explains My Father to Her Girls.” The poem describes growing up in the Midwest with a sense of connection to the Philippines. When the sun was setting on the family’s home, “his sky rose story-book, crammed with color.” The speaker’s future husband is “a man / from the islands with the climate of heaven…who grew up wearing hand-woven linen.” He wafts into her life, his voice, “fine as a line cast over water, / land and sink without a ripple.” A strong sense of longing pervades this poem, not only between the lovers but also in Balingit’s desire to understand her parents. Falling in love is beautifully described in the context of her father’s foreignness:

…You know
at dusk how sky melts with ocean into one
aqua plane from your toes
to the world’s curve you can’t tell

where you are from anything? So I fell
into your father’s voice—
…He glowed
like the boss’s mahogany.

The poem turns when the mother acknowledges the relationship will end in disaster, particularly for her daughters: “I know his silence / branded you as a vine over time will tunnel / the bark of a tree.” The speaker’s final request is that her daughters preserve some part of their father as they mature.

Even poems that don’t deal specifically with Balingit’s family history, such as “Never-Never Land,” refer to her background. “Never-Never Land” is subtitled “after Malay proverbs.” A list of folktale-like what-ifs, “where cats have horns / where turtles climb trees,” evolves into a real world indictment of the current global recession, “where the rich fall down / and the poor rise up like dough in earthenware.” There is a hint of anger in this poem, “the smell of fine clothing / graces an open fire” developing the title into an ironic statement about modern society.

The section closes with a series of poems that cross from imaginative into playfully surreal, including the flash piece, “The Pitch,” and the poem “My Life as the Fugitive, Tijuana.” Although several poems, including “Story I Learn at Forty-nine,” deal with family secrets and hidden stories, the theme is given a wild treatment in the final poem of this section, “Circus.” The speaker knows there are things she has not been told about her own history. Her reaction is both powerful and indicative of the strangeness of families.

I swallow my mother
like a sword in flames
and dare the lioness of her death to wake
me.

The duality of Balingit’s family has echoes in the second part of Forage. It opens with a series of nature meditations, of which “The Blue Spotted Salamander” is one of the strongest. In this section, animals, plants and rivers represent our wild selves, the part of humanity momentarily forgotten in the hum of technology but always available to an attentive mind. In “My Teenager Listens to his iPod as I Drive Back Roads to the Bus Stop,” nature symbolizes what the mother attends to and her child’s self-absorption:

If I take this curve slowly
we will hear the creek consulting on a fawn
that has shrunken to an acorn of thought
tossed in the roadside chicory.

Balingit's new poetry collection

Balingit expresses a longing for the days when, as parents, we constantly interpret and open the world for our young children. The speaker here wants to engage her silent teen in the natural world because that is what captures her own imagination.

At just 38 pages long, there is much to explore in Forage. Even the cover–the title is subtly separated into two parts and can be read as either “forage” or “for age”–plays with one of Balingit’s central metaphors. Landscape, whether it is a roadside creek or the colorful Philippine sunset, accompanies us through the stages and discoveries of life.

Note: JoAnn Balingit will be a reader at the LPR Social Justice launch event, held on January 28.

A journal like Little Patuxent Review requires a vibrant literary and artistic community to thrive–and even survive. In appreciation of the cultural entities around us, we present “Meet the Neighbors,” where we provide you with some personal introductions.

Recently, Little Patuxent Review partnered with Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, MD to put on a poetry contest like no other: the winning poem will not only be published in LPR and featured in a CityLit Festival reading but also enlarged dramatically for display in the library’s Cathedral Street windows. Last week, Lisa Greenhouse, a librarian involved in the poetry contest, gave LPR Editor Laura Shovan and Communications Coordinator Eva Quintos Tennant such a great tour of the Pratt that I thought you’d like a look around with her as well. So, please meet Lisa and see what she has to say:

Lisa Greenhouse

The Enoch Pratt Free Library’s Central facility is both the hub of an excellent urban public library system and the Maryland State Library Resource Center, a rich resource for all the libraries and library patrons of Maryland. It is an especially attractive destination if you care about poetry.

The Humanities Department should be the poetry-lover’s first stop. A walk through the long stacks (or guidance of a librarian) will reveal works of poetry representing all times and places, from Homer and Sappho in Greek to Derek Walcott and Anne Carson. The collection is strong in American, African-American and local poetry.

In each poet’s assigned Library of Congress call-number area, you will find the poet’s works, essays, interviews, biographies and critical works. Anthologies gather the best poetry, new poets, world poets, love poetry or Sufi poetry. If you need to write a sonnet or a pantoum or revise your poem, manuals such as The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetics or The Poetry Home Repair Manual can help. If you can’t remember where a nagging line of poetry comes from, one of the Granger’s indexes to poetry can come to your rescue. If you need a book that the Pratt doesn’t own, we can find it for you. Librarians love questions: please ask us!

The Pratt Periodicals Department holds more than 30 current English-language poetry magazines in print form and many more in electronic databases. From the British title Ambit at the beginning of the alphabet to the Yale Review near the end, browsing the Pratt current collection is a great way for aspiring poets to familiarize themselves with the gamut of publication options. The Pratt how-to guide Submitting Poetry for Publication in Little Magazines links to the submission guidelines of many of the magazines in the Pratt current collection.

Little Patuxent Review partners with the Pratt to put on a poetry contest.

Down in the periodicals stacks, the Pratt’s retrospective collection includes a full run of Harriet Monroe’s seminal Poetry magazine–from 1912 to the present–and a full run–1889 to the present–of Poet Lore, the oldest continuously published poetry journal in the United States. Pratt staff will be happy to retrieve these and other older works for any customer who wishes to peruse them.

The Pratt, which sponsored a rap contest that Tupac Shakur won at age 14, has a long tradition of celebrating poetic talent. The annual CityLit Festival, which the Pratt presents in partnership with Gregg Wilhelm and the CityLit Project, always includes a poetry component—this year, appearances by Edward Hirsch and Thomas Lux. The Poetry and Conversation series, an engaging mix of reading and Q&A, was launched in January. Future guests include Clarinda Harriss and Bruce Sager and two married couples, Jane Satterfield and Ned Balbo and Virginia Crawford and Sam Schmidt. Sonia Sanchez will visit the library on April 25, and Harriss will conduct free poetry-writing workshops on the first three Wednesdays in April.

With its colorful programs and deep collections, the Pratt is a poet’s or poetry-lover’s paradise. Come see for yourself. If you care for the near and far places where poetry goes, you’ll find our tag line to be true: “Your journey starts here.”

Note: If you’re a Marylander, it’s not too late to enter the Pratt poetry contest. The contest closes February 21.

Martin Luther King III (center) speaks at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in observance of King's 83rd birthday anniversary on January 15, 2012. (Photo: AP)

I wrote this on January 16, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. King would have been 83 had he not died at the hand of an assassin on April 4, 1968. I remember this as if it were yesterday. I was 12 years old when he was killed, and I saw my home city of Washington, DC go up in flames. When I previewed the Social Justice issue, I felt something awaken in me that was distinctly different from what I had ever felt when reading any of the other issues. I was brought to tears and filled with a kind of acute empathy that comes from reading and seeing the extension of a collective history and presence that is closely aligned with my own experience.

My childhood in the Sixties, like that of many of my generation born in any major city in America, was overshadowed by the daily struggles for social justice that sent many into the streets, hospitals and jails. In Southeast Asia, young soldiers and innocent people alike were dying in horrible ways from bullets, bombs and Agent Orange. Soldiers–family members–were returning home, many damaged both mentally and physically. Some of them became homeless, others drug addicts and still others committed suicide.

I also remember watching the August 18, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on my grandmother’s black-and-white television set and looking for my parents in that seemingly endless, indecipherable crowd. The energy was palatable even though I was separated from the crowd by miles and that TV screen.

Ralph Abernathy (center facing, short sleeves), leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, near the grounds of the US Capitol Building on June 24, 1968. (Photo: AP)

After King was assassinated, my folks took my sister and me to Resurrection City, the encampment on the Mall for the Poor People’s Campaign. This was the last major project King envisioned before he died. It took the fight for social justice in America beyond sit-ins to a well-orchestrated, well-thought-out “live-in” for thousands of people of all colors, some with families and children, seeking to bring notice to the plight of the poor. Resurrection City, documented by photographers, was designed by DC architect John Wiebenson and his students at the University of Maryland to function as a self-sufficient community. The press called it disorganized and dirty. For those who had trekked for miles to get to the Mall and dealt with the rain and mud, it was the last hope.

Today, information on issues affecting the health and well-being of individuals and nations is easily accessible through millions more pathways than in those revolutionary times, when so much acceptable toxic behavior was unleashed behind the locked doors of homes, institutions, corporations and governments and disguised as normalcy. Movements coalesced despite the absence of Facebook and Twitter, though. Stories were–and still are–twisted to suit the teller, but there were no eyewitness video hounds to disprove them on TV or in newsprint.

Unlike many children today, I heard and listened to the news. I heard about the riots in Chicago, Berkley and LA. The protests, the horror of the fire-hosings, the tear-gassing, the beatings of college students, women, anyone in the way of a police baton. I remember the sight of unarmed, defenseless people with blood running down their faces.

I knew who the Black Panthers were: a progressive, demonized group dedicated to social justice and change. I knew who Angela Davis, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Huey P. Newton and many of the other game-changers in the constant fight for social justice were and met both Davis and Newton when I became an adult. I knew about SNCC, SDS and what those students risked to change the world.

I often wonder whether other children of my generation growing up in urban environments felt the same kind of constant, deep-seated tension that I did–a tension that eventually became my normal for many years–or whether that tension was peculiar to me because I was a budding poet, acutely aware of the chaos in the world around me.

Now, my generation and our elders are witnessing a world where our memory of place has been bulldozed, redesigned, re-purposed, and where, in some locales, the schisms of the past are no longer recognizable. While we have evolved ever so brilliantly with our 21^st Century appendages that connect us at the speed of light to every corner of Earth, we cannot ignore the fact that many dwell in the most base level of humanity. Our top-rated entertainment is rooted in cruelty, torture, manipulation, debasement, greed and indifference. These are realities to many, who do not find them entertaining in the least.

Occupy DC protesters in 2011 with the US Capitol Building in the background (Photo: AP)

Storyteller and mythologist Michael Meade talks about people having to be in the “right kind of trouble in order to change their lives.” In this first decade of the new millennium, we have “the right kind of trouble” all over the planet. The range is vast and crosses political, socio-economic, racial and religious boundaries. The tensions mirror those of the Sixties, and the gift–now as then–is that we poets, writers and artists can dive into this trouble eschewing shame to bear witness to the sorrow, rage and futility of perpetuating cultural evolution based on injustice. We are the witnesses for those whose ability to argue has been silenced and the advocates for what is intellectually promising, what is spiritually and physically sane.

The gift of this witnessing as reflected in the LPR Poets for Social Change panel discussion at the 2011 Baltimore Book Festival, the LPR blog series “On Being Invisible” and the pages of the upcoming issue of Little Patuxent Review speaks to the remarkable and horrendous aspects of humanity and covers a vast territory. There is the sexual, mental and physical exploitation of women and children, immigrant and migrant people and the irreparable consequences of war. There is the mis-education and disproportionate imprisonment of males of African descent and the resulting growth of the prison-industrial complex in America. There is the damage caused by corporate irresponsibility and greed and the man-made environmental catastrophes. There is the homelessness, invisibility, poverty, famine and, as Howard Nemerov says in his poem “Magnitudes,” “disasters drastically different from those we have to know about.”

If you are a thinking and feeling person, I hope you won’t put down the Social Justice issue without being filled, stirred, angered, saddened and perhaps moved to create some action–however small–of your own to teach, reach and empower those you touch to advocate for a more equitable social and cultural evolution for future generations.

We look forward to seeing you on January 28^th  and welcome your comments once you have read the Winter 2012 Little Patuxent Review Social Justice issue.

This essay is part of a series inspired by our Winter 2012 Social Justice issue. The first one was posted September 2011, and all feature people who have helped make marginalized segments of our world more visible to mainstream America through poetry, prose and visual art.

Not long ago, I learned that Russia has the third highest incarceration rate in the world (542 prisoners per 100,000 population). Given my background, I can’t say that I was surprised. (I was born in Latvia around the time that Soviet soldiers were piling my compatriots, including my mother’s brother, into cattle cars and transporting them to gulags in remote regions of the USSR.) Nor did I find it particularly remarkable that Rwanda, site of the 1994 Genocide, comes in as second highest (595/100,000).

What did come as a shock was discovering that my adopted country–the United States of America, where I sought refuge at age five from war and oppression–ranks Number One (a whopping 743/100,000). In fact, while my fellow Americans represent only about five percent of the world’s population, about one-quarter of the entire world’s inmates are housed in US prisons. What was even more disturbing was that it seemed as though many of those inmates never had the same shot at the American Dream that my family and I did, even though we had arrived at Ellis Island bereft of all our material possessions.

Over 60 percent of the adults that the United States has seen fit to imprison read at or below the fourth-grade level; in other words, they are functionally illiterate. More than half have a history of drug abuse or addiction. And a disproportionate number are non-Hispanic blacks (39.4 percent of the 2009 prison population compared with 12.6 of the general population, according to 2010 US Census Bureau statistics). Many neither had the means to make it in American nor the wherewithal to voice the injustice of it all.

Apart from the occasional, well-publicized prison riot, most remain invisible in a place that Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky has characterized as being “essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time.” A fortunate few in Jessup, MD, however, have gained notice due to the efforts of Baltimore poet, former head of the Towson University English Department, publisher of BrickHouse Books and Little Patuxent Review contributor Clarinda Harriss. Here’s Clarinda, in her own words:

Clarinda Harriss, seen twice at the Minás Gallery in Hampden, once through the artistry of Minás Konsolas.

The most visible I ever felt was when I first walked up a flight of iron stairs inside the Maryland House of Correction in the early 80s as a guest of the newly formed MHC Writers Club. I was a woman. I was nobody’s girlfriend. And I was white. The residents–you do not say “inmates”–were all male, and about 95 percent were black. Many were gray-haired, gray-bearded. Residents of MHC, better known as “The Cut,” stayed there a long, long time, usually for life.

My initial job–actually, I was never more than a volunteer–was merely to provide a female voice for Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, read out loud in tandem with the Writers Club president. He wanted to convince the other members to work with him on a male answer to Shange’s choreopoem. The resulting For Colored Guys who Have gone Beyond Suicide + Found No rainbow became the best selling book that my venerable small press, BrickHouse Books, ever published and is about to go into a fifth edition. It has been performed on TV and stage and started me on decades of monthly visits to the Writers Club.

The Club owed its beginnings to a feminist scholar, Margaret M. Blanchard, who taught writing courses at The Cut, and owed its many years of flourishing to a visionary activities coordinator, Hannah Coates. Hannah said “yes” to things that other administrators said and are still saying “no” to. This is one reason why Margaret and I worked at the men’s instead of the women’s prison, where residents–then as now–were permitted far less visibility than their male counterparts.

The men at The Cut had figured out and were allowed to pursue a variety of ways to be visible: writing for the prison newspaper, The Conqueror, a mimeographed monthly that always struck me as remarkably uncensored; sporting interesting and highly decorative hairdos; fashioning beautiful hats from scraps of brocade and velvet gleaned from the prison’s upholstery shop.

At The Cut, I could communicate with Club members (and eventually other MHC writers as well) without having to include their DOC numbers on the envelopes. The administrators and guards knew them by name. Guards sometimes even sought Club members’ assistance in writing letters and papers. I witnessed more than one instance where a resident played Cyrano to a guard’s Christian. But, of course, those love letters went out under Christian’s name, not Cyrano’s. And many who died in The Cut ended up in anonymous graves.

The cover of the best-selling book of writings from inside the Maryland House of Correction

Amazingly, the handful of Writers Club members who created For Colored Guys… not only did not die “inside” but also (except for one, who got devoured by the street) defied prison statistics on recidivism to become solid, productive citizens “outside.” True, some deliberately maintain an aspect of invisibility, asking me not to emphasize their prison past when writing about them. That’s why their names don’t appear here.

But every one of them has his name on the cover of that book.

Clarinda’s fostering of American prison literature followed in the footsteps of authors like H.L. Mencken, who founded The American Mercury in 1924 and regularly published pieces by convicts, and Norman Mailer, who helped publish letters he had received from convicted murderer Jack Abbott as the 1981 bestseller In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison. Public support for such efforts, however, has waxed and waned.

The Great Depression brought suppression, with prison manuscripts perceived as profitable subversive tools. The social and political unrest of the Sixties and Seventies engendered a renaissance of sorts. Prison writing made its way into paperbacks, periodicals and even major motion pictures. Then, the trend reversed again. New York State passed the “Son of Sam law” in 1977, making it illegal for convict authors to profit from their writing. And later in 1981, Abbott killed a man during a fight only six months after his release on parole, which Mailer had championed.

These days, one of the few remaining sources of support is the PEN Prison Writing Program, which published the 2000 anthology This Prison Where I Live: The PEN Anthology of Imprisoned Writers that includes the Brodsky quotation cited above.

Still, those incarcerated in the US prison system have managed to produce an impressive body of literature over the years. Notable books include:

• Richard Wright, 1940, Native Son
• Martin Luther King, 1963, Letters from a Birmingham Jail
• Etheridge Knight, 1968, Poems from Prison
• James Baldwin, 1974, If Beale Street Could Talk
• Angela Davis, 1974,  An Autobiography
• Miguel Piñero, 1975, Short Eyes: A Play
• Gayl Jones, 1976, Eva’s Man
• Mumia Abu-Jamal, 1995, Live from Death Row
• Howard Bruce Franklin (Ed.), 1998, Prison Writing in the 20th-century America
• Leonard Peltier, 1999, Prison Writings: My Life is My Sundance
• Jimmy Santiago Baca, 2002, A Place to Stand
• Cristina Rathbone, 2006, A World Apart: Women, Prison, and Life Behind Bars
• T.J. Parsell, 2007, Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man’s Prison
• Michael G. Santos, 2007, Inside: Life Behind Bars in America

You are cordially invited to attend the reading marking the launch of the Winter 2012 Social Justice issue on January 28. Contributors presenting their work will include Clarinda Harriss, who has agreed to add a poem (“After Jessup”) about her experience at MHC to the one on Hurricane Katrina she is slated to read.  

This essay is one of a series inspired by the Little Patuxent Review Winter 2012 Social Justice issue. The first one was posted September 2011, and all feature people who have helped make marginalized segments of our world visible to mainstream America through poetry, prose and visual art.

Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka beside a plaque depicting American abolitionist John Brown and Polish poet Kamil Cyprian Norwid

When Swedish writer, poet and translator Tomas Tranströmer was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature, few in America were familiar with his work. And he was one of the fortunate ones, having had someone of the stature of poet Robert Bly to turn his words into English. Tranströmer’s poetry, all told, has been translated into some 60 languages.

Unfortunately, the United States–along with Britain–offers few foreign works in translation. While 70 percent of the books in Slovenia are translations and France and Spain come in at 27 and 28, respectively, we bring up the rear with a paltry two percent. This is a loss for us because it narrows our world view; it is also a loss for readers in other nations, since English is a global language.

Still, some here do participate in what Horace Engdahl, then Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, called “the big dialogue of literature” when he made his controversial 2008 remarks criticizing Americans for not translating enough. One of those is Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka, who shares the story of how she became a translator and, in turn, a poet:

I arrived in the United States on June 30, 1980, right after receiving my PhD in biochemistry from the Polish Academy of Sciences. A couple of months later, the Polish trade union Solidarity (Solidarność) was born. As a result, the Polish government allowed my husband to join me in the States in December.

My first trip to a Safeway in San Francisco was a shock: overstuffed shelves in long aisles, so many kinds of everything. Countless varieties of cooking oil and salad dressing from which to choose or five-pound sugar bags at a time when, in Poland, stores were empty and food was rationed. Excess, waste, I thought. Then and there, I decided that I didn’t need sugar in my tea.

At that time, I was a rare species from behind the Iron Curtain: a scientist with a postdoctoral fellowship. People seemed really interested in life in that communist country, even if they were not sure where Poland was. They asked me questions, they talked to me. There was so much to learn about our different worlds. They were learning from me, I was learning about them and the United States.

When my fellowship finished two years later, Solidarity was in prison and martial law was imposed in Poland. Flights were cancelled, mail and phone conversations censored. My husband and I stayed here. I was awarded my own research grants. Our son was born. I had a busy and successful career as an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University and University of Maryland in Baltimore until I couldn’t work anymore due to fibromyalgia.

Why did I turn to poetry?

In 1980, Czesław Miłosz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was right next door, a professor at Berkeley. My fellow researchers were amazed: Miłosz, a poet, from Poland. In 1996, Wisława Szymborska was awarded the same prize. My American friends started asking about the poet and her writings. Since her books were not available in English, I translated one of her poems, “The People on the Bridge,” for my friend Alice, whose grandparents had emigrated from Poland in the 19th Century. I enjoyed journeying from one language to another.

This adventure gave me the courage to translate poems written by Lidia Kosk, the author of ten books who is also my mother. Her poems reflect on Polish history, a passion that extended to a collaboration with her late husband, Henryk P. Kosk, on the two-volume Poland’s Generals: A Popular Biographical Lexicon.

As was typical for those of my parents’ generation, she grew up during World War II and survived first the Nazi occupation of Poland, then the Stalinist regime imposed on Poland by the Soviet Union. As a young girl, she was twice captured by Nazis in random round-ups of Polish citizens (she escaped both times), yet she still believes that human beings are inherently good, even though there is a part of us that is evil and can be activated by ideology. All these experiences have surfaced in her writing.

Once we had decided to publish a bilingual book, the pace of translation accelerated. I am now the translator of the two bilingual books of poems by Lidia Kosk, niedosyt/reshapings and Słodka woda, słona woda/ Sweet Water, Salt Water. I also edited the latter, which has been nominated for two translation awards.

I have translated other poets, including Ernest Bryll. He is the author of some 50 volumes of poetry, plays and prose and a co-translator of seven books on Irish literature. Some of his plays, such as Painted on Glass, have attained record popularity in Central Europe, and some of his poems have been turned into lyrics for hit songs sung by some of the best Polish singers. My various translations have appeared in over 50 publications in literary journals and anthologies in the States.

I was also writing my own poems. Sometimes, when a poem couldn’t decide in which language it wanted to be written, I painted it.

I have given countless readings of my poems. Usually, I include my translations, accompanied by the originals that I read in Polish. I also provide information on Polish history, literature and the poet in question. While presenting Lidia Kosk’s war poems, I have noticed that people appreciate hearing that World War II started in Europe on September 1, 1939, with the invasion of Poland. Afterward, somebody usually comes to confess that he or she is of Polish descent but does not speak the language. Or, like Alice, just a few words learned from her grandmother, Babcia, who did not speak much English. At that time, it was believed that speaking another language at home hampered one’s education and chances of success in America.

In January 2011, I joined Loch Raven Review, which has published my poems, translations and an essay on the translation process. As Poetry Translations Editor, I have focused on bilingual publications from upcoming or recently published books. My goal is to familiarize readers with lesser-known poets from all over the world. And with their translators, who work mostly for the love of poetry, poets and languages, all the while helping to spread the word about the less-noticed parts of the world. The spring issue presents a Venezuelan poet, the summer issue two Polish poets. The fall issue will bring together two Czech poets.

It is telling that Danuta elected to have a photo (see above) taken of her standing beside a plaque depicting both American abolitionist John Brown and Polish poet Kamil Cyprian Norwid. Norwid had composed the poem “To Citizen John Brown” after hearing about Brown’s 1859 Harper’s Ferry raid, an attempt to start an armed slave revolt. Excerpts in both Polish and English are included, the latter courtesy of translator Walter Whipple.

The plaque is located at the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature in Warsaw. Danuta believes that an identical one at Harper’s Ferry National Historical Park was probably the original. According to Park historians, no other non-American literary person is known to have responded to Brown’s monumental act.

To Citizen John Brown
Cyprian Kamil Norwid, trans. Walter Whipple

Across the Ocean’s rolling expanse
I send you a song, as it were a seagull, oh John!…

Its flight will be long to the Land
Of the Free–for it’s now doubtful whether it will arrive…
–Or whether, as a ray from your noble grey hair,
White–on an empty scaffold alights:
That your hangman’s son with child’s hand
May cast stones at the guest seagull.

*

Then the ropes will tell whether
Your bare neck is unyielding;
Then you will try the ground under your heels,
That you may kick away this debased planet–
And the dirt from beneath your feet, as a frightened reptile
Vanishes–

Then will they utter: “Hanged…”–
They will speak and wonder among themselves, could this be a lie?
Then, before they place the hat on your face,
That America, having recognized her son,
Will not shout at her twelve stars:
“Extinguish the feigned fires of my crown,
Night falls–a black night with the face of a Negro!”

*

Then, before Kosciuszko’s phantom and Washington’s
Quake–accept the beginning of the song, oh John…

For while the song matures, sometimes a man will die,
But before the song dies, a nation will first arise.

Note: Danuta has published poems in the Make Believe and Form & Structure issues of Little Patuxent Review. You can view videos of her readings by clicking on the links. 

We love getting your reactions to the material we post. If your message contains new information or images relevant to the one of our posts, we’ll even publish it as a separate piece. Here’s what one reader had to say about “Concerning Craft: Henry Niese (and William Carlos Williams).”

Ilse,

Just read your article. I quite enjoyed seeing how you unfolded the continuity between Henry Niese’s “Jersey Lyric” I and II with William Carlos Williams’ poem. Your word “evolved” descriptively connects us from painting to poem.

Henry Niese's watercolor with the red Venetian bottle

May I tell a story?

Two years ago my wife and I came across a painting while visiting a relative in the Florida Keys. A large framed watercolor hung on a crowded wall in a small room of an old used furniture store. Our find evolved into a delightful adventure. It led to Henry Niese, William Carlos Williams, a sketch from Ben Shahn, letters to Denise Levertov, an original Pulitzer Prize photo and a red Venetian bottle.

The watercolor was painted by Henry Niese around 1957 in his old farmhouse west of Hackettstown, NJ. It appeared in his 1st or 2nd New York one-man show. The red Venetian bottle in our painting has been interpreted by him in many of his works throughout the years and is shown brightly in his 2010 “Midnight Snow Blues,” as seen on Gold Leaf Studios’ recent press release and invitations.

Henry has been gracious in his correspondence with us. Our initial exchange of digital photos evolved into a number of timely and pleasant discoveries. These included what may be Williams Carlos Williams’ first written statement regarding Henry Niese, made in a letter written to Denise Levertov on June 13, 1956:

Saw some paintings of a young New Jersey painter who lives about 40 miles from us in country district about Lake Hopatcong that are quite marvellous today; thrilling work, actual records of life but NOT abstracted for a patterned to appeal to a geometric unity. Watch him, his name is Henry Niese.

We came across the letter on a website, which led to our reading The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams, edited by Christopher MacGowan. Evidently, this early description of the young painter from New Jersey was unknown to the painter himself. They rested quietly through the years from the subject of the pen. We passed them on to Henry, unaware he had not seen them. And were thrilled to hear his response.

1954 AP photo of Henry with Pulitzer notice, blinds in the background

Months later, during one of our interchanges, Henry noted that he had just seen a picture on the Web of him receiving notice of a 1954 Pulitzer Prize. The article appeared in the Newark Evening News on May 4, 1954. We asked him if he had a copy of the photo. He only had the newspaper clipping.

This original photo was one of two that were taken from different angles. The blinds in the background appear to be the same ones featured in a the 1955 painting “Window Still Life.” We were able to give him this original AP photo as we were fortunate enough to have seen it a few months earlier and had immediately purchased it.

Back to the watercolor.

Photo of Ben Shahn with self-portrait

The mystery for us regarding the man in the watercolor led to a slow evolving story that included a Life magazine photo of Ben Shahn holding a self-portrait and the memory of a sketch given to Henry by Ben Shahn.

Henry Niese represents such a breadth of time and experiences! I remind myself he is actually a member of a generation that students of art, literature and history read about. I hope his memoir, which I think is in a small box in the corner of a room in his old farmhouse, will not also remain quietly unread and unpublished! I’ve read an excerpt. A remarkable flight in 1950 taking Jewish refugees from Tehran to Israel in a worn-out C-54 flown by two ex-RAF pilots.

We look forward to making the trip to Gold Leaf Studios to see the “…Painter’s Palette…” firsthand and–who knows–maybe see the painter himself.

Over the years we have found many bottles in remote areas on the islands of Marathon. It has been our privilege and delight to have our journey evolve from a crowed wall in a small room of an old used furniture store in the Florida Keys, where we found a red Venetian bottle and the artist Henry Niese.

PS We live in North Carolina. We were having dinner with a 62-year-old friend of ours. She is from New Jersey and enjoys the arts, so I asked her if she knew of the writer William Carlos Williams. She said, “Oh yes, he delivered me and came out of retirement when I was twelve to remove my appendix. I kicked him in the stomach. My brother was the last child he delivered. There’s a picture of him holding my brother in Life magazine.”

Wouldn’t you know!

Ilse, If you made it this far, thanks for listening.

Doug Petty
Mills River, NC

The “Concerning Craft” series introduces Little Patuxent Review contributors, showcases their work and draws back the curtain to reveal a little of what went into producing it. In this case, that occurred in a rather roundabout way…

William Carlos Williams, Henry Niese and Flossie Williams, 1960

Right after we opened the submissions period for our Social Justice issue, I sent Henry Niese a message. I was thinking about starting a related series, “On Being Invisible,” for this blog and wanted to focus on Native American authors and artists first. In no time, he and I were off on various tangents taking me further and further from the essay I envisioned.

Among other things, I told Henry about arriving as a five-year-old war refugee from Latvia in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where all things related to the Odawa people played a prominent role. How I grew up believing that Indians, as well called them in those days, were much like my Latvian ancestors, who, no matter how urbanized they became, remained close to the earth and the old agrarian gods. How I’d set the novel I was writing in a place I called “Anishinaabeg,” loosely based on Petoskey circa 1950.

Among other things, Henry told me about a guy from Grand Rapids, probably a furniture manufacturer, who had bought a good painting at his first one-man show in New York City in 1957. He wanted to obtain a photo of the piece. Since Grand Rapids back then was The Furniture Capital of the World (as Detroit was then The Automobile Capital of the World) and my writer-philosopher father performed manual labor in one of those wretched factories, I found a far longer list of such facilities than Henry would’ve liked.

To get back on track, I decided to feature him in the “Concerning Craft” series. For this, I needed the manuscript of the essay published in our Spirituality issue. Responsive as ever, he sent me something. Instead of a delightful recounting of encounters with Jimson weed, it was an informative list of vegetables used as medicine by Native Americans. I asked him to try again, and he promised to figure out how the title I gave him “translates into my filing language.” After searching for an hour, he triumphantly sent me his take on Lakol wic’ohan, the Indian way of life. “Nice essay,” I wrote back. “But that ain’t it.”

By that time, I was more fascinated with things Henry and I hadn’t addressed. This fellow Marylander, who lived some ten miles or so up the road from me on a Glenelg farm, was a Lakota Sundancer trained in traditional medicine by Bill Eagle Feather, Henry Crow Dog and Turkey Tayac. He had studied painting at places like the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris and palled around with legendary painters like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline as well as world-class poets like William Carlos Williams.

A paragraph in the press release for his upcoming exhibit in DC caught my eye:

Niese’s 1960 painting “Jersey Lyric” inspired William Carlos Williams to write a poem with the same title. The exhibition includes a charcoal sketch of the painting and the original correspondence between Niese and Williams, in which they discuss three different drafts of the poem.

I asked Henry to send me anything he had on that.

Henry responded with a 1960 photo of himself with Williams and Williams’ wife Flossie sitting on Williams’ living room couch. “I was a baby-faced 36,” he wrote. “Bill was about 75. We lived about 40 miles apart, he in Rutherford, me in Hackettstown, NJ. In one of his poems, there is the line ‘Hercules is in Hackettstown.’ It wasn’t about me.” Later he added, “Somewhere I have a letter from him asking if I would sell him a small painting. I did. He bought a couple of them. Gave one to his daughter-in-law, Bill Eric’s wife.”

Henry Niese's "Jersey Lyric" charcoal sketch

Henry also sent me two digital images, one of the original “Jersey Lyric,” a monochromatic sketch, the other of the full-color oil, “Jersey Lyric II.” Rarely have I seen such logic in the evolution of a work. In the sketch, the three sets of elements–trees, “woodchunks” and wine bottles–seem unbalanced. There are many instances of the first two but only a single of the latter. In the oil, balance is attained through the addition of more bottles and some glasses as well.

...and "Jersey Lyric II," as an oil painting

Rarely have I seen such a perfect match between a painting and a poem. Or a painter and a poet. Both had an artistic and a medical bent–Williams was a pediatrician and a GP, who, according to Richard Colgan, “worked harder at being a writer than he did at being a physician.” Both created fresh, uniquely American forms despite their somewhat exotic heritage and education–Williams’ father was English, his mother Puerto Rican, and he had also spent time abroad.

The most remarkable link, after studying both the painting and the poem, seemed to lie in Williams’ stepped triadic line, a long line divided into three segments. Had I not know Henry’s painting came first, I could’ve easily assumed that the structure of the poem inspired his use of the three complete sets of elements in the oil. Instead, there seems to have been a congruence rather than an influence of style in either direction. “Bill Williams sent me 3 drafts of the poem ‘Jersey Lyric’ on 3 consecutive days in 1960,” Henry wrote me, “complaining about how hard it was for a man to change just one letter in a poem.”

“Is this what you wanted?” Henry asked me in conclusion.

“Perfect,” I replied.

If you want to learn more about the correspondence between Henry Niese and William Carlos Williams, you’ll have to visit Henry’s exhibit at Gold Leaf Studios in Washington, DC. It opens Thursday, September 20th and continues through Sunday, November 20th. If you’d like to read Henry’s essay “Physical, Mental, and Spiritual Plant Life,” you’ll have to buy a back issue. Sorry, we tried.

If you enjoyed reading about how one version of a creative work evolves from another, I recommend “Concerning Craft: Clarinda Harris,” which examines an earlier version of the poem “White Noise,” published in the our current issue.

Oh, yes, and if you’d like to see the text of William Carlos Williams’ “Jersey Lyric,” here it is, courtesy of Google Books:

LPR's Poets for Social Justice panel at the 2011 Baltimore Book Festival: (from left to right) Kathleen Hellen, Melanie Henderson, Linda Joy Burke, Truth Thomas, Derrick Weston Brown, Tony Medina and (center) Fernando Quijano III. (Photo: Dan Pendick)

As part of the lead-up to the launch of the Winter 2012 Social Justice issue, Little Patuxent Review sponsored the Poets for Social Change panel at the Baltimore Book Festival, moderated by the guest editor for the issue, Truth Thomas. Here are two interviews conducted afterwards: one on video involving all the participants, which you can watch by clicking on this link, and one you can read below, where Editor Laura Shovan continues the conversation with one of the panelists, Kathleen Hellen. Here’s some of what they had to say:

LS: When I’m working with elementary school poets, I joke about the assumption that all poems are about springtime, love and flowers. Why is it important for poets, in particular, not to look away from the difficult issues facing society?

KH: One of my favorite stories is about the poet Anna Akhmatova standing outside a Russian prison during Stalin’s purges. She had little food and almost no money. Her close friend and fellow poet Osip Mandelstam was sentenced to a labor camp, and he later died there. Her son was imprisoned. Somebody in the crowd had recognized her, asked her in a whisper if she could describe this. Akhmatova said, “Yes, I can.” For me, it is something like that. To be a poet is to be engaged with the world. To witness. Because I can, I must. How can I turn away?

LS: This was the first time we met several of the panelists. What did you enjoy about speaking with them? What part of the discussion did you find most valuable?

KH: Each poet brought to the panel a unique experience and yet it struck me that we were all one voice, speaking the same story, in the same tongue. In Melanie and Derrick, the younger poets, I heard The Dream, my own dream—the insistence on changing “what is” to “what can be”—re-visioned. It was deeply gratifying to know that despite the many troubles we face as a nation—the failures of the justice system, the failures of the educational system, the failures of the health system and so on—despite these encumbrances, the young poets on the panel seized the moment to speak their truth. They would not be denied. I find great value in that. Great hope.

LS: Were you surprised about any of the topics that came up during the session? Or surprised that a particular issue was not raised?

KH: No one addressed the wars. It was surprising, since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have exacted such a toll. The loss of lives, both here and there; the veterans who have returned to find themselves unemployed, even homeless; the devastating impact on the economy. But the majority of Americans do not think about the war unless they have a loved one in service, even though there are more Americans fighting in Afghanistan now than at the peak of the Soviet invasion. The war has receded in the collective consciousness; it has become backdrop for the present economic crisis.

LS: Lucille Clifton spoke at an LPR reading about a year before her death. I remember her talking about the film The Secret, to which she objected. Clifton said putting yourself in a happy bubble where you choose not to see problems and negativity didn’t sit well with her as a poet. Instead, she told us a poet’s job is to see and bear witness. Hearing these poets speak about social justice, what do you think the role of poetry is and will continue to be?

KH: There is a great tradition of activist poets like Clifton, both here and abroad. They recognize that the individual does not exist in isolation but rather is linked to all who share the human condition. Their poems bear witness for those who cannot do that themselves. As Clifton writes about the murdered and enslaved, she identifies with them. She is murdered and enslaved and thus gives them life again. This is the fundamental role of poetry. The word “poem” comes from the Latin poēma, which was derived from the Greek poíēma, meaning “something made.”

LS: At the end of the session, each of you read a poem. Yours (reprinted below) was a re-examination of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Why did you select that poem?

KH: Human rights is in peril throughout the world, and too many issues require attention—inequalities of income and outcome in education, health care, criminal justice, immigration, the environment. There has been and there continues to be a war on women. Because I am a woman, I need to speak for women.

In Keats’ poem, the urn provokes a meditation on a scene of “mad pursuit,” a scene “in midst of other woe” in which maidens struggle to escape the wild ecstasies of a rape. This is rape as historical narrative. This same scene has been “witnessed” in countless rapes from ancient Greece to the Japanese comfort women of World War II to victims of the war in Dafur. The idea of a women as a trophy, as property, as a concubine. Rape as a ritual, as an archetypal symbol, as an instrument of war.

The United Nations Commission on the Status of Women is still dealing with gender equality, including women’s exclusion from science and technology, which limits opportunities for employment and exacerbates exclusion from society. It is still talking about the elimination of violence against the girl-child, honor killings and female genital mutilation. According to one fact sheet citing a 2000 UN report, one in three women and girls globally is beaten or sexually abused in her lifetime and four million women and girls are trafficked annually.

How are we to answer when the poet asks, “What men or gods are these?”

Abducted from the Keats
Kathleen Hellen

He’d left her without breasts
stripped her like a tree like Ovid’s laurel
dumped her in a lake in a desert in a ditch—

A swan. A trope. An open book
A virgin with their meters blank as bone
shoved down her throat

Take Marie. Thirteen
A bone-yard of her kind at the border
Take Saramba. Four
Weaponed in the war. A tribe’s retaliation

Rape as displacement. Humiliation
First Night, First Right
First of many wives in Salt Lake City

Here’s what I’m given:
No point throwing stones
at glass that always breaks
Forgive infatuation
Forgive the saints
who drink you from a skull cup then repent
come Lent—kings
who feed you pearls in tales of take

Serial or strangler? What men or gods are these?

Note: Video clips of the panel proceedings, including readings by all the participants, are available in the Special Events section of this site.

Kathleen Hellen is a poet, educator and, as Shiori, author of The Girl Who Loved Mothra. Her work has appeared in Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, The Cortland Review, The Evansville Review, The Hollins Critic, In Posse Review, Prairie Schooner, RHINO and Subtropics. She has received a Washington Square award, James Still and Thomas Merton poetry prizes and individual artist grants from Maryland and Baltimore. She teaches creative writing and journalism at Coppin State University and serves as Senior Editor at The Baltimore Review. “Abducted from the Keats” was first published in The Broome Review.

Laura Shovan is the Little Patuxent Review editor. Her chapbook Mountain, Log, Salt and Stone won The Clarinda Harris Harriss Poetry Prize in 2009. She edited Life in Me Like Grass on Fire: Love Poems, featuring 50 Maryland poets. With Virginia Crawford, she coordinated the Living Poetry Flash Mob at the 2011 Baltimore Book Festival, part of the worldwide 100,000 Poets for Change event. A Maryland State Arts Council Arts in Education grant recipient, she is co-editing an anthology of student poems.

"Drawing Hands," a lithograph by M.C. Escher, first printed January, 1948

This story feels like an Escher drawing of hands drawing themselves: a blog post about a blog party in which writers talked about writing stories.

On August 11, HoCoBlogs hosted a meet-up for writers at the Stanford Grill in Columbia, MD. Of the folks clustered on the patio, some were ex-newspaper types, some were soon-to-be-ex-newspaper types (The Baltimore Sun just announced another round of layoffs and staff cuts) and others were runners, eaters or mathematicians who write about their passions.

Having that many writers in a room meant that the free food–love that key lime pie–went fast and the drinks came faster.

The party gave people who didn’t know they were neighbors a chance to talk about the escaped 3-foot-long monitor lizard in the village and a local businessman who shall remain nameless the opportunity to confess that triathletes are really not his tribe.

Jessie Newburn, co-founder and publisher of HoCoBlogs, stood with her long orange skirt dangerously close to a candle to pump up the crowd and announce the winners of a $100 Macy’s gift certificate: Thomas and Charles Regnante (ages 12 and 14, respectively) for their new teen food blog for Howard County, How2Chow.

Posted on the wall of the patio was a sheaf of papers with a typed question–“Why I Blog”–and answers scrawled in multi-colored Sharpies: “To learn, for fun, to help our community” (Trevor Greene of HoCo Politico) and “Catharsis” (Wendy Loraine of Life’s Little Comedies) and “So I don’t have to wear long pants to work” (David Hobby, my husband and founder of Strobist).

I wrote, “It forces me to write.” And it’s true. There are so many things that take me away from writing: laundry, paying jobs, kids, car pools, yard work, Mad Men, yoga. But in a recently taped edition of The Writing Life, HoCoPoLitSo’s writer-to-writer talk show, guest poet Martín Espada had some advice for writers. “It’s so simple it sounds idiotic. Write. Writers do everything else. We are in a state of perpetual distraction.”

So, it’s simple. Just write. And sometimes party.