The Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York City has turned their poetic gaze inward this year, choosing to honor with placement in the cathedral's US national poet's corner a 20th century poet whose contributions toward making the place a landmark location for American poetry were profound. The 2021 selection, chosen by current poet in residence Marie Howe from nominations provided to her by 12 electors at the cathedral, is Muriel Rukeyser.

Rukeyser follows the induction of Audre Lord to the honored in he alcove of the cathedral that, since 1984, has become a touchstone to major American literary figures dating back to Anne Bradstreet and, year by year, tapping the shoulders of the true luminaries of American poetry and fiction over the course of 150 years.

As a lifelong New Yorker, she formed a relationship with the Cathedral towards the end of her life, becoming the namesake of the Muriel Rukeyser Poetry Wall. Today, the Poetry Wall continues to receive submissions of poetry from incarcerated people around the United States.

"I have known about Rukeyser's poetry, and her relation to the Cathedral, going back to when I came to Columbia in 1982," stated Howe. "In fact, I often quote from her before I do a reading of my own, particularly this quote which we have chosen for the stone we are placing in the poetry alcove: What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The universe would split open. I keep that quote close to my heart."

Howe is serving a five term as poet in residence at the Cathedral, and follows Marilyn Nelson, and before her Charles Martin and Molly Peacock, all of whom held five year terms with possibility of renewal, in that position.

A woman who biographers note grew up in what has been described as an 'assimilationist' Jewish household Rukeyser learned early a singular mixture of reticence and pride of family identity. "She grew to have an awareness of 'the silence about self in assimilationist families," notes the Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. Her mother, for example, insisted they were descended from Rabbi Akiba, the ancient scholar who was behind including the erotic Song of Songs in holy scripture. This penchant grew to an acute sense of the common unifying influence of a range of visionary figures in our shred history, " such as the physicist Willard Gibbs, the painter Albert Ryder, the composer Charles Ives, the labor organizer Ann Burlak, Rabbi Akiba, and Herman Melville."

Her literary associations were wide ranging and profound. Rukeyser met Robinson and Una Jeffers in 1944, when she spent the summer at the Carmel cottage of Ella Winter. This occurred a few years after Jeffers served on a panel of three judges who selected Poetry magazine’s first Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, and picked Rukeyser for the honor.

As a woman, Rukeyser was a courageous precursor to the feminist movement of the 1960s. She was independent enough to marry and divorce painter Glynn Collins (the marriage lasted only six weeks) and to give birth to William out of wedlock. Except for persons close to her, Rukeyser never revealed that William's father was Donnan Jeffers -- Robinson's son -- was Bill’s father, although she did write, poignantly, in her poem “The Gates”: “...I cannot name the names,/my child’s own father, the flashing, the horseman,/the son of the poet....”

The Gates was written in 1961 while Rukeyser was in South Korea protesting the imprisonment of poet Kim Chi-Ha. It is one of numerous examples of her fearless engagement in poetry of witness. Another major example of this is her poem cycle “The Book of the Dead” which recounts the story of what many consider one of the worst industrial catastrophes in U.S. history, the Hawk’s Nest tunnel disaster in West Virginia. Two other poems of Rukeyser's which show this profound sense of the relationship between a poet and the politics of her times are "I lived in the first century of World Wars' and 'For OB (a Spanish Civil War poem).

Excerpts of Rukeyser's long poem ‘The Book of the Dead’ (1938) in the ‘Historical’ section of The Ecopoetry Anthology (2013) testifies to the eco-ethical prescience of Rukeyser’s poem, which links working class and racial oppression to environmental damage, and demonstrates how poetry can be held responsible for social and environmental justice. She was also daring enough to write in the 1950s about such issues as pregnancy and the possibilities of loving another woman.

And in what is perhaps one of the most 'accessible' of anecdotes about Muriel Rukeyser, the Sarah Lawrence archives notes that she "knew full well that to produce something good involved on occasion producing something ‘bad’: ‘Being bad is part of it’, she used to say, ‘don’t erase the bad; let it be’.

All in all then, putting aside Rukeyser's initiative to create an 'open to all' poetry wall at the cathedral in the 1970s, the poet's work is "particularly deserving of installation here as a poet of the world," said Howe.

Since the 80s, the annual installation of a novelist or poet into the corner has grown in stature -- though interrupted by a catastrophic fire and more recently, the limitations imposed on gatherings due to the pandemic. Ceremonies and activities for such famed writers as Gertrude Stein, Emma Lazarus, Langston Hughes and WH Auden have become akin to symposia, spread over several days and filling portions of the cathedral nave for the major gatherings. And Howe is hopeful that, once the pandemic conditions allow,  Lourde and Rukeyser can be feted with similar 'joy and ceremony.'

CATHEDRAL OF ST JOHN THE DIVINE POETS CORNER INDUCTEES

1984 emily dickinson walt whitman, washington irving
1985 edgar allan poe, herman melville
1986 robert frost, nathaniel hawthorne
1987 ralph waldo emerson, mark twain
1988 henry david thoreau, henry james
1989 wallace stevens, william faulkner
1990 ts eliot, willa cather
1991 marianne moore, edward arlington robinson
1992 wm carlos williams, henry wadsworth longfellow

1994 hart crane, anne bradstreet
1995 elizabeth bishop, wm cullen bryant
1996 langston hughes, ernest hemingway
1997 louise bogan, ee cummings
1998 theodore roethke, william dean howells
1999 f scott fitzgerald
2000 edna st vincent millet
2001 gertrude stein

2003 robert lowell
2004 robert hayden
2005 wh auden
2006 emma lazarus
2007 robinson jeffers
2008 phillis wheatley
2009 tennessee williams
2010 sylvia plath

2011 james baldwin
2012 katherine anne porter
2013 john berryman
2014 mary flannery o'connor
2015 zora neal hurston
2016 eugene o'neill
2017 jean toomer
2018 carl sandberg
2019 ralph ellison
2020 audrey lourde

2021 muriel rukeyser

PRIMITIVE OF A NEW ERA: Remembering Aldo Tambellini

Aldo Tambellini, counter-culture icon and rebel of the '60’s New York No!Art art scene, died this month, leaving behind a lasting legacy of innovative work in film and the visual arts as well as other aesthetic forms.

Tambellini, whose death at the age of 90 was announced on Nov 12 was “a major catalyst for a lot of the expanded media and performance activity that was happening in New York City in the 1960s,” according to Stuart Comer, chief curator of media and performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“He was a rebel. He was a nonconformist,” said Anne Salamone, Tambellini's lifelong companion. “That was a position that he took in life.”

According to an obit in the Boston Globe, Aldo Tambellini was born in Syracuse, N.Y., on April 20, 1930 to John Tambellini, a hotel waiter, and Gina Puccinelli, a homemaker. When his parent separated, he went with her to Italy during World War II to live with her relatives and enrolled in art school in Lucca, Tuscany. There, wartime bombings that destroyed his neighborhood became embedded in his consciousness ("I saw the earth hurled by force/ in chunks lifting to the sky/ friends & neighbors died/ others survived deformed.")

After the war he returned to Syracuse, earned a scholarship to Syracuse University, studied at Notre Dame and taught high school until landing in the Lower East side in the late 50s in a volatile avante garde and countercultural arts world -- including the influential visual artist Boris Lurie, a leader of the No-Art movement and Buchenwald survivor, and poet Stanley Fisher, who as editor of "Beat Coast East: An Anthology of Rebellion" (Excelsior Press, NY 1960), adeptly negotiated an uneasy merger between NO!art's violent social criticism and the playfulness of young Beat writers.

The No!Art group produced a large body of confrontational works of art which drew on commercial images, pin-up nudes and photographs of war atrocities. Originally identified as the March Gallery Group, they espoused street art, graffiti and what they described as “violent expressionism.” These disturbing and powerful works were created in response to the contrast between the superficial consumer culture of the postwar era and the horror of the recent past, including the Holocaust and the atomic crises of the cold war.

In 1969, he created one of the first and best known short experimental film about television called Black TV. This film won the Grand Prix at the Oberhausen Film Festival, Germany. Grove Press, the distributor described Black TV in this manner: “The film is an artist’s sensory perception of the violence of the world we live in, projected through a television tube. Tambellini presents it subliminally in rapid-fire abstractions in which such horrors as Robert Kennedy’s assassination, murder, infanticide, prize fights, police brutality in Chicago, and the war in Vietnam are out of focus expressions of faces and events.”

Later, Tambellini moved to the Boston area and was a Fellow at MIT in the Center for Advanced Visual Studies and collaborated on several creative international telecommunications projects under the name of Communicationsphere.

More recently, "LISTEN," (winner, 2005 New England Film and Video Festival) demonstrated the continuing power of his voice. Based on Tambellini’s poetry, the experimental work was a continuation of his confrontational work, critiquing the contemporary political world situation through the spoken word, visu
al poetry, written text and mass media imagery appropriation. A segment included sound and video clips of the artwork of Iraqi children. James Wines, Founder of “Sculpture in the Environment” (SITE), New York City, called the digital video “a collage of powerful insights related to the war in Iraq and the issue of humanity’s destructive behavior in general.”

“The making of this film gave me the opportunity to combine my social and political poetry with my work with media," Tambellini told me in 2005. "Having been a victim of a war, what I look at was from the perspective of the innocent population called collateral damage.”

He was also a beloved elder to more than one generation of avante garde and countercultural artists in the New York and Boston area, through the continuing power and innovation of his aesthetic voice.

“We are the primitives of a new era,” a 37-year old Tambellini told The New York Times in 1967.

For nearly a half century after uttering that assertion, Aldo Tambellini could still lay claim to that title. “We are the primitives of a new era,” a 37-year old Tambellini told The New York Times in 1967.

Tiffany and Eric and Don Jr and Kim Guilfoyle say those opposed to daddy's form of government are trying to silence them. Well Boo Hoo to that.

 

So, Tiffany and Eric and Don Jr and Kim Guilfoyle say those opposed to daddy's form of government are trying to silence them. That it is radical and unfair to speak out against his style of political discourse; ie outright bullying, intimidation, either by proxy or by innuendo; or by anonymous 'followers' communicating death threats to those with opposing views. That it's left-wing political correctness to question midnight firings and elimination of government oversight, and the assembling of secret armies to attack peaceful protestors in the streets of America.

They say that they are being 'canceled' because some people dare to disagree with or question daddy, or call out his lies and smears and spurious plots of character assassination and secret alliances with dictators.

That daddy's name-calling and veiled threats and provocations are perfectly okay, but asking him to honor his oath of office or accepted levels of transparency and accountability in the people's government is not.

Well boo-hoo to that.

Tell it to Pocahantas. Tell it to Sleepy Joe and Crazy Nancy. Tell it to Crooked Hillary and Shifty Schiff. Tell it to That Woman From Michigan.

Tell it to Fredo and Crazy Megyn and Wacky Glenn and Low IQ Mika.

Tell it to Liddle Marco and Lyin Ted and Low Energy Jeb and Mad Dog Mattis and Wacky Amarosa.

Tell it to Dr Fauci who needs Secret Service protection around his family 24/7 because he contradicted your reckless Covid proclamations with solid science.

Tell it to the commentators, analysts, bloggers and elected officials -- and casual online social media messagers -- whose free speech is stifled by orchestrated campaigns of bullying and derision and shouting down.

Tell it to people of conscience who keep their mouths shut rather than risk being attacked by your conspiracy mongrels and character assassins.

Tell it to protestors at the University of Washington, where Elizabeth Hokoana allegedly shot someone in the stomach and her husband, Marc, allegedly fired pepper spray; and where the day before, according to police, Marc messaged a friend on Facebook stating he “can’t wait for tomorrow… I’m going to the Milo event and if the snowflakes get out off hand [sic] I’m just going to wade through their ranks and start cracking skulls.”

Tell it to the victims grieved and injuries exposed by Black Lives Matter, whose names you dare not utter for fear of undercutting your rhetoric of hate.

Tell it to Heather Heyer, age 32, run over and killed by one of your 'presumably fine people' in Charlottesville, for speaking out against the threat posed by torch-bearing neo-Nazis.

Tell it to Martin Gugino, age 75, pushed over by riot police and his head cracked open and bleeding on the pavement, for peacefully demonstrating against police violence.

Tell it to the black church in Charleston shot up. The Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh shot up. The pizzeria in Washington DC shot up. Gay night club patrons targeted in Orlando. Muslims targeted in Quebec City. Latinos targeted inside an El Paso Walmarts.

Tell it to the journalists ridiculed and corralled and called enemies of America and spat at by your crazed imbecile minions, for exercising the right of a free people to know what their government is up to.

Yes your deplorable minions, stoked on hate and fear. Your MAGA core, isolated from their fellow Americans, made bigoted and sadistic, just plain ordinary folk driven into a tailspin of authoritarian self-protective willful ignorance by your spiteful dogma, fueled by your thinly veiled violently confrontational contempt for a united citizenry, and your dangerous rhetoric of division and xenophobia.

Tell it to the witnesses smeared and intimidated by you and your henchmen in the halls of Congress. Tell it to the women reporters dismissed and derided as nasty, or having blood come out of their 'wherever,' for daring to ask you an inconvenient question. Tell it to the whistle blowers who have exposed wrongdoing, as they were sworn to do by their oath of office, and have as a result been outed for it and hounded from public service by your surrogate hitmen.

Tell it to Kaepernick. Tell it to Vindeman. Tell it to Marie L Yovanovitch and Sally Yates,

Tell it to Maxine Waters and AOC and Sahar Nowrouzzadeh and Kizhr Kahn.

Tell it to Goodyear.

Tell it to John Lewis, whose legacy you are trying to erase.

Tell it to John McCain, whose legacy you are trying to erase.

Tell it to Barack Obama, a sitting president hounded by you and your spurious one man Birther War; Barack Obama, whose legacy you have dedicated your entire twisted presidency to erase -- out of spite for a few jokes told at the annual press club roast, and out of envy for the fact that the American people and people of the world have bestowed their affection more generously on him than they ever will on you.

Tell it to every president in American history, all of whom you regularly diss with your grandiose and empty claims of having 'accomplished more than' them.

Tell it to every expert on law enforcement, the court system, trade, taxes, epidemiology, tv ratings, national defense, renewable energy, construction, technology, campaign finance, taxes, ISIS, foreign intelligence, social media and drones -- just some of the subjects which you claim to know more about than 'anybody...more than any human being on earth' -- whose opinions and advice you demean.

Tell it to the dead ignored by you and the living disenfranchised by you; the public health and safety willfully left unprotected, the integrity of the environment laid bare and openly compromised.

Tell it to the caged babies, to the innocent dreamers driven into hiding. Tell it to the undocumented workers picking lettuce and washing dishes and landscaping yards. Tell it to the phantom caravan of refugees seeking escape from destabilized lands, destabilized by you and yours; seeking asylum and opportunity in the Land of the Free; to all those at the border who you wanted to electrocute and maim, to set man-eating alligators on, to pierce bodily with medieval spikes.

Tell it to boogaloo provacateurs. Tell it to detainees subjected to systematic sexual abuse in ICE detention centers.

Tell it to the peaceful protestors clubbed by your cops. Disappeared by your secret army. Teargassed, shot in the face and trampled. Tricked by your agents.

Peaceful protestors who disagree with your daddy and his flirtation with fascism, his instinct for authoritarianism, his bumbling dictatorship; his obsession with slavish loyalty and his blind eye toward white supremacy, police brutality, racial injustice, corporate greed.

Peaceful protestors who won't be silenced -- who will come back and come back for more, no matter how you often YOU try to cancel THEM.

Why? Because it's better than bowing their necks to your infamy.

THE WOMB OF ALL LANGUAGES: Remembering Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke

Everything In Greece, said Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, is difficult, uncertain, unplanned or badly planned. 

“I’m leaving,” says my cosmopolitan self, “I can’t take it anymore,” she wrote in 2016. “And suddenly the day breaks, another door opens. Light, light everywhere from all around, in the mind and in the soul. Broad-leafed light. Greece. “I’ll stay,” I say, “I’ll stay a little longer.” (LARB)

Goddaughter of Nikos Kazantzakis, Fulbright Scholar, Ford Fellow, winner of the Greek National Prize for Poetry and the Greek Academy’s Poetry Prize, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke was a Greek poet til the end, passing away yesterday in Athens at the age of 81.

RIP, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (1939-Jan 21 2020). 

After studying foreign languages and literature at the Universities of Nice, Athens and Geneva, poetry at University of Iowa; after translating works of Beckett, Shakespeare, Mayakovsky and Dylan Thomas into Greek; after teaching at SFSU and Harvard; she returning to her homeland and the island of Aegina, outside Athens, where she lived the last years of her life weaving and unweaving the threads of her complicated life in poetry and prose.

The poet was praised by critic Stephanos Papadopoulos in the Los Angeles Review of Books for her “uncanny knack for getting to the heart of every matter or crisis at hand — with incredible humor and dangerous wit. Whenever I’m back in Athens, the first person I call is Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke.”

For American readers, the best introduction to her work is ‘The Scattered Papers of Penelope’ (Graywolf 2009). It is the first full retrospective collection available in English, and translated from the Greek by an array of noted scholars, including the editor Karen Van Dyck.

Of wide ranging interests and subject matter, there are many threads to follow in the selected works.

The influence of Kazantzakis is worth searching. In many of her poems, such as 'In The Sky of Nothingness With Nothing' (translated here by James N Stone in poeticanet), the strains of her godfather's philosophical inquiry are profoundly present.

I peer at life through a keyhole.
If I look closely enough, maybe I’ll understand
how life always wins
while all of us lose.
How values are born
and branded onto the body
which is the first to melt.
I am dying inside my mind without any hint of sickness.
I live without the slightest need of encouragement.
At least I’m breathing. Who cares
if I can almost touch warm things
about to go up in flames.
I wonder what other connections
life will invent between the trauma
of absolute disappearance and the miracle
of every day immortality.
I owe my wisdom to fear;
I dispense with petals, sighs, subtleties.
I clutch earth, air, roots.
The useless things can go, I say.
Let me in to the sky of nothingness,
with next to nothing.

Her sensibilities as a woman poet reveal themselves, and are of particular interest, in poems that re-examine Greek history and myth through the female body — the bodies of Penelope and Helen in particular -- and her own body, scarred by illness.

I wasn't weaving, I wasn't knitting I was writing something erasing and being erased under the weight of the word

Anghelaki-Rooke maintained a delicate engagement/disengagement with politics. Some of her poems take the form of a journal kept during the first Gulf War, and there are a number of prose poems about modern violence and dictatorship in her new and selected collection.

This subject -- Anghelaki-Rooke's refusal to cooperate with the junta during the military takeover of Greece in the late 60s -- was of particular interest to researcher Myrnah Kostash (Univ Alberta), who quoted her as saying this:

"For me it wasn’t politics, it was a disease, a disaster. When your house catches fire, that isn’t politics. You have to find some water and put it out.” 

If someone with pro-junta sympathies argued that the junta was doing some good (the trains ran on time), Anghelaki-Rooke told Kostash, she was unmoved. “If an angel with big white wings had come down, smashed open my door, entered my house, taken me by the hands, and told me he was going to save me, I would kick him in the balls...’ (Some Greek Writers, Their Memory, Their Politics, Their Art in the 1980s, Brick Magazine 2006)

For a full view of Angehlaki-Rooke’s writing, one must turn to her lyric descriptions of the domestic world on the island of Aegina. These poems, of great and profound beauty, help us to to comprehend her humanity and human understanding.

In the taverna garden
it is spring and the blossoming
chestnut trees lean attentively
over the pensioners.
Beards, mustaches, all white,
a little laughter in their faded
blue eyes peeking out behind the beer froth
the slender waitress
like a doll just out of her box
with the divine department store tag
still around her neck.
The brown spots on the old men's hands
- maps of an unknown geography -
the flowers scattered by the wind
on the wooden table
and suddenly I understood silence:
it is the womb of all languages.

fr Lipu Revisited

To read the work of Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke is to experience THAT Greece, with all its complexities. 

On a visit to the poet in Aegina, Kostash noted how the poet invited her in and offere her 'a jug of water, and a bottle of ouzo, a bowl of pistachios cultivated on the family farm... she has just returned from a reading and lecture tour of the United States, and she told me that undeniably, the international exposure is “exciting , but not crucial. Being a writer in and of Greece is."

Despite many years in America and international profile, poems like these illustrate that the poet remained at heart and to the end, a truly Greek poet.

Readers of Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke in America and worldwide are the richer for it.

To raise the shades, to look out into the New York City day

Birthdays Before And After, Puma Perl

Beyond Baroque Books 2019

 

For countless authors, New York City is a metaphor -- the overwhelming city, with its charms and caresses, its turn-ons and turn-offs, its nooks and crannies, its sheer titanic girth. Its opportunities and dangers, its callous and dismissive disinterest in anything but itself, the pure expression of itself, myriad, unassailable, New York.

 

But for Puma Perl, in her new collection Birthdays Before and After, New York City is more than a metaphor. It is a life itself – told from the inside out.

 

Intersectional New York City, with all its contradictions, and with all its scales pitched in perfectly cacophonous array. The New York City of railroad apartments and Coney Island chicken coops, where you grow up afraid to get a dog because they killed your cat. The New York City of speedballs and rainbow cookies, where love is ‘waiting on the corner in the drug dealer’s boots.’ Streets ‘smelling of blood, death, car wrecks and maybe a little bit of hope.’ The contradance of junkies and bill-paying American thieves, and beautiful lost poets who have lived so long writing poems for a gig in neat handscript (and then throwing them out) that life itself has killed them.

 

Old men playing dominoes in the park. Tattoo’ed girls proud of their shoulders. Vampire cups of coffee brewed at sunset. New York City -- where taxi vomit is for amateurs, where being homeless is ‘not the same as a bottle of Wild Irish and a doorway,’ and where vacancy is an art unto itself.

 

A city that lives above and below the radar, carrying on multiple simultaneous existences most of which are invisible to visitors and passers through.

 

Today is a New York holiday

The transplants are gone

Streets are deserted and promise nothing

Neither do we.

 

In her new collection Perl offers us a kaleidoscopic glimpse of it all. She prowls the streets of Gotham with the elusive skill of a tried and true ‘denizen’ of the city, and does not even bother asking if you want to tag along -- because obviously you do, or you wouldn’t be here. Living in a city like this, as she has, there are simply too many small matters in ordinary human existence to tally it all up like a waitress presenting the bill. Terrible and delicious matters, intrinsic to an overwhelmingly brutal and specific city, a city as uncertain as it is bold, a city as tantalizingly flirtatious as it is unforgiving.

 

Puma Perl’s poems possess a devotion to the discoverable in the ‘off-moment,’ a quest for aperture, a la Frank O’Hara, who knew how to find a revelation in a doorway, on one or another of his lunchtime strolls through midtown.

 

They also possess the gritty insistence on the possibility of hope in a seemingly hopeless city, a la Lou Reed, who claimed there’s a book on magic at the bottom of the garbage can, and if you can get hold of it and count to three you can disappear.

 

Birthdays Before and After, by contrast, is no disappearing act. What we have here are moments of clarity in an overilluminated world, approximating insight.

 

Drop a five dollar bill on a homeless girl if you want to, it ‘may or may not be her birthday,’ and it ought to make you feel good to do it. But know this -- the gesture carries in itself the very seeds of doubt and disappointment, and anyhow is little more than ‘a shot of dope/lasting a minute and then you’re back where you were//sitting on cardboard. ‘

 

Give away all your stuff – band shirts, tight skirts, silk dress, workout gear – to people more virtuous than you, and they’ll just worry and think you’re going to kill yourself. Of course you’re not going to do that:

 

“It’s been done

and 4 am phone calls and railroad

stations will haunt me forever.’

 

Though they do not attempt to shock or tease, these poems succeed as well as they do in part because they don’t have to go that route. There is a wry believability in these poems, a street-weariness told with survivor aplomb, and with an undertone of unextinguished resolve that makes it possible to believe that a person can swallow the indigestible and keep on going, can keep asking the unanswerable questions.

 

What does it mean to open your eyes in the morning to ‘bridges and rivers, trees hurting more than the ugly,’

 

What does it mean to ask ‘when do you cry? When do you stop?’

 

What does it mean to declare I’m not afraid of my city, and ask us to believe that the sheer pluck of saying so can make it true.

 

Here in 80-something pages is a life revealed with as much honesty as the facts themselves allow. Half a dozen lives really, rolled up into one, so far. Lived way beyond the punk thing -- an oversimplification of the author’s wide-ranging aims and attitudes -- that help to give dimension and full human context to the label ‘New Yorker.’

 

Though for those seeking a glimpse into ‘that’ scene, they’ll find much that is satisfying in this book. Deglamorized though, not your standard anti-glam punk chic. Punk made real. I have no doubt Perl could do a whole chapbook name-dropping punk celebrities -- but that would be doing it on the cheap and easy, and if this collection is any evidence, this is a poet who decidedly aims higher than that. 

 

And anyhow, if you hang around in New York long enough, brushes with celebrities are not the point.

What is the point is the way the human drama reveals itself, teetering on stilettos and dirty martinis, leaning against incoherent walls, doing shots with the girls, sprawled out blind in the middle of a party, spiked on LSD on some stranger’s couch. Shouldering onto some stage for a moment of tinsel glory before all the souls around you break into jagged pieces.

 

“We were all born broken,” observes Perl in an understated inner city drawl. “I was born broken too…

 

I break soft in hard places

I break quiet on rooftops and subways…

…Men slit their throats for me

 Each time I break.

 

This is neither bravura nor the stuff of leather femme fatale. It is cold, hard, authentic. Human. The kind of poetry that is only possible to write if you have lived it, been a citizen to it, part victim and part perpetrator, part instigator and part accomplice.

 

A world that offers a kind of transcendence to have simply survived another night of it, woken up with the eyes still in your head and a willingness to open them up and take a chance on another day -- the silences and the sighs, the curses and blessings littered among the sirens, the smacktalk and sidewalk lies.

 

‘Every morning I raise these shades and it’s still too beautiful not to hurt a little more.’

 

To write poems like these is to raise the shades and look out into the New York City day. And no matter the conditions of society or the weather, have the resolve to either plunge yourself back into it, or shut your eyes and save yourself for another day.

And along the way, put some of it to pen to paper.

 

“It isn’t depression,” writes Puma Perl “It’s August.

 

like a bad play that never ends...

Why bother to talk at all?

People’s intelligence rises

As temperatures fall

Look for me in February

I’ll be wearing boots and black jeans

Just like August but smarter.

SERGEI YESENIN: ‘THE LAST POET OF THE VILLAGE’

THE LAST POET OF THE VILLAGE

Sergei Yesenin, tr Anton Yakovlev, bilingual

Sensitive Skin Press 2019

 

In America today, there are a number of Russian poets of the early to mid-20th century who are famous enough to name drop comfortably in a literary gathering without drawing a blank stare.

And there are a couple of others whose names will be known enough that a person might feign familiarity.

 

And then there is Sergei Yesenin.

 

A man who declared 'if I hadn't been a poet I would have been a thief or a conman' -- but who, behind his prototypical revolutionary era belligerent street-tough image, offered a yearning heart-strong Russian populace with a romantic/nostalgic pipeline back to the lyrical wealth of 'old country' peasant Russia.

 

Sergei Yesenin -- part Mayakovsky, part peasant Pushkin. A poet whose words are on the lips and in the hearts of countless ordinary Russians -- for today’s discerning American readers, it's arguably not enough to feign knowledge of the man. You gotta know why his poetry’s so beloved.

 

The opportunity to find out why has just been presented to American reader anew, with the publication of Anton Yakovlev's fine book of translations 'The Last Poet of the Village’ (Sensitive Skin, 2019).

 

It worked for me. Cruising through this collection of shorter works by Yesenin, it became quickly apparent why the man was a giant figure on the literary landscape in his own country 'back in the day', and why his reputation has outlived him by going on 100 years in his own country.

 

Sergei Yesenin. Golden haired, blue eyed boy from the countryside. Part romantic part brawling counterculturalist. In life fawned over like a pop star. In death raised up to the pinnacle of fame, one of the most quoted modern poets among Russians today. And 'sadly neglected in the English-speaking world," says the translator.

 

With this book, Yakovlev declares his goal clearly -- a new 'first introduction' to the work of a beloved, necessary poet in the Russian canon.

 

If Yesenin's reputation has thus far failed to 'stick' in the poetry firmament for readers in America, but it is arguably to ourselves -- not him -- that we should ask why.

 

While the originating charisma and music in the man and his words may be unavailable to English speakers a century on, it is certain that Sergei's personal story is a colorful one. Raised by peasant grandparents in the holy Russian countryside (where he was made to chase game like a hound dog as a child) he began publishing romantic pastoral poetry at the precocious age of 15.

 

By his early 20s, he had rocketed to fame as an au courant, swaggering iconoclast... with a heart of peasant gold. By the age of 18 he had emerged in the turbulent streets of pre-Revolutionary Russia as one of the street-wise poetry toughs -- with a penchant for hooligan poetry and brash wise guy street talk -- but mixing in plenty of references to lime trees blossoming and nightingales singing.

 

And in the precious last few years of his life, he enjoyed a fast life as a pop idol, playing up to adoring female fans, marrying and divorcing with abandon (including a brief marriage to Isadora Duncan) -- dancing around the long tentacles of the increasingly intolerant Soviet state until his death at age 30 at the end of a rope, an apparent suicide, but quite possibly state assassination.

 

In this handsomely produced collection, Anton Yakovlev makes as good a case for us to fall in love in our own limited vashion with the poetry of this 'near-forgotten' man.

 

There's little doubt that Yesenin was good, early. 'Your harnessed horse drank from your palms/Reflections of birches broke in the pond.../I wanted, in the shimmering foaming streams, to rip a raw kiss from your scarlet lips' he wrote at the tender age of 15. Nothing maudlin or tawdry in lines like these.

 

But as early as 1916, and his attention turned to the turbulent streets of Moscow and St Petersburg, Yesenin's poetry began to grow in complexity.

 

I'm tired of living in my native land

Yearning for the vast fields of buckwheat

I'll leave my shack

To be a vagrant and a thief.

 

That's precisely what he did, mixing with the literary ruffians of the day, experiencing the highs and lows of street life -- living a raucous, sometimes miserable existence with untrustworthy comrades and women who turned him out of their houses.

 

Taking it all in and spitting it back out, with the bravado only a boisterous 20-something year old in the middle of the heady days of a revolution could muster ('This is nothing, he says, standing before the unfriendly, laughing rabble with a busted bloody nose...it'll heal by tomorrow').

 

I'm not a villain. I haven't robbed anyone in the forest.

I haven't shot wretches in dungeons.

I'm merely a street rake

Smiling at passing faces.

 

Dogs are recurring motif for him -- as they were for Mayakovsky, the best known of the poet cum werewolf of the era. Mayakovsky pushes the envelope hard, going so far as to declare that he has BECOME a dog and ending a poem about that with growls and barks.

 

For all his snarling, in the case of Yesenin there is less metamorphosis going on, and more return to his pastoral origins. ('I'm a good friend to animals/Healing them with my verses').

 

In particular, we find this in his early poem A Song About A Dog, a farm dog which has had seven pups, and must abjectly follow her master and watch as he drowns them in an icy river ('when she walked back, just barely/Licking the seat off her sides/She imagined the moon over the hut/to be one of her puppies').

 

This kindness to animals, with all its underlying boyish charm, takes on an appealing level of emotional complexity on a visit to the home of a famous poet, when he goes out back to make friends with the family dog (Give me your paw, Jim, for good luck/I've never seen such a paw/Let's bark together while the moon is out/At the quiet, noiseless weather'), and ask it to lick the hand of a woman inside the house.

 

She'll come, I give you my word

And in my absence, staring into her eyes

Please gently lick her hand on my behalf

For everything I was and wasn't guilty of

 

Sergei Yesenin -- a naughty reckless Moscow loner...known to every rundown hopeless jade in town, who would give his tie to a shaggy dog,;or take off his top hat, fill it up with gold oats, and feed the horses.

 

This is more than identification with animals in order to outrage the comfortable elite -- it is the wistful tenderness behind the mask of the tough guy poet, who cherishes the memory of his rural upbringing, and never really shake it off: 'how nice it is in the morning mist

 

To trace lines of grass with a scythe in a field

so that a horse and a sheep can read them.

 

That's memorable stuff, full of brilliance, audacity and charm -- and it is easy to see why a people big-hearted about the land which nurtures them, would commit it to memory.

 

Because all the while, the redemptive spirit of village and country life in Mother Russia -- where a revolution-weary citizen could celebrate 'a tender girl in white (singing) a tender song... the sweet happiness, the fresh blush of cheeks.'' Without pushing the analogy to far, Yesenin is a kind of tragi-romantic figure who tells us out loud 'There's no place like home' while falling further and further into the clutches of tragic demise. 

 

Yesenin says it, out loud. He can return home, he says, but it will be a poignant thing, tinged with something way past sadness, a homecoming in which he will find his former townspeople happy, but himself in misery, and he will hang himself and be buried plainly while the village dogs bark.

 

The moon will float up in the sky

Dropping the oars into the water

As ever, Russia will get by

And dance and weep in every quarter.

 

SF poet Jack Hirschman was on the money when he pegged Sergei Yesenin as 'Not really a peasant poet nor a Soviet revolutionary (but) a brilliant modern image maker, very Russian in a national sense." In poem after poem, Yakovlev presents a man who, rather than a competitor to the arch-decadent bad-boy Mayakovsky, is a persona in his own right, his maudit bravura palpable even though we never really lose sight of the wide-eyed peasant boy, golden haired and adorable, behind the pose.

 

Today in America there are a number of 20th century Russian poets whose reputation have eclipsed Yesenin. Mayakovsky. Anna Akhmatova. The three 60s dissident Russian writers who were popularized by City Lights in Anselm Hollo's pocket series book Red Cats (Yevtushenko/ Kirsanov/ Voznesensky). And there are a number of Russian poets whose names and works should be more familiar to American writers -- I could mention Burliuk, Kamensky and Khlebnikov.

 

But if Anton Yakovlev is right, there’s only one Sergei Yesenin.

 

With The Last Poet of the Village, he presents a new and compelling case for us to place the poetry of this tragic, beautiful Russian poet, at the very least, side by side with his peers.

DROP ON YOUR KNEES, PETALS OF DRIED FLOWERS: On the poetry of Tanya Ko Hong

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 If I could leave my senses

I would be no trouble.

You don’t give food

to the fish you’ve caught.

Fr Yeobo, 2015 (Rattle)

 

 

In the sometimes harshly direct and confrontational world of today’s American social dialogue, it is refreshing to experience the poetics of a writer and activist like Tanya Ko Hong. A Southern Cal Korean-American and émigré living in the rough and tumble of Southern California, she has achieved a remarkable feat – paying deference to a very confrontational American aesthetic environment while maintaining allegiance to the deftly symbolic indirectness of expression found in great Korean poetry of the last century.

 

Leonore Hildebrandt, Creative writing faculty, University of Maine, calls her work ‘sparse and precise.’ John Rosenwald, Co-editor, Beloit Poetry Journal, calls it ‘compressed and intense.’

Close. Ellen Bass gets closer than that, noting in Ko Hong’s poetry something ‘spare, elegant…beauty juxtaposed with pain so deep it’s almost impossible to put into words.’

 

What it is – the nearly inutterable tension of the 'Indirect Gaze' -- is a covert presentation of image with hints of socio-political intent beneath it. A veneer. The peasant rabbits lighting an artistocratic tiger’s tail on fire. A man exiled from his home and family who can’t go more than a couple of miles before his feet start to hurt.

 

A thing firmly rooted in traditional Korean poetry and folk art.

 

I know. In the 1970s i attained some fluency in Korean during a couple as a Peace Corps volunteer – and not incidentally, was exposed to the particular flavor of Korean arts - including the covertly suggestive folk paintings which ridiculed the aristocratic class; and more particularly, the rebellious political undertones of wanderer poets, set against the otherwise agrarian/Confucian world, in poems of Tae Hung Ha ( Zigzag we climb up Namsan Mountain/ Lubdub, lubdub, our hearts beat loud and fast/With hazy drunken eyes), and Pak Mok Wol (The hills surround me/and tell me to live my life/sow the seeds/till the land).

 

Through long winter nights in my little room in Suncheon, Cholla Nam Do, I read and reread the works of these 20th century authors in Korean and in English, and was struck by their remarkable ability to achieve socio-political impact through clear focus on natural imagery and folk scenes; and the careful use of those images to offer points of view on very specific social and political themes of their day.

 

In fact, this Indirect Gaze technique should not be thought of as terribly new to the student of poetry in America -- it goes back to the early 20th century, after all, and the Imagists/ Think Ezra Pound, and his exploration of the precise techniques he found in Chinese poetry, and attempt to represent -- in poems like River Merchant’s Wife (The paired butterflies are already yellow with August/Over the grass in the West Garden;/ They hurt me. I grow older).

 

Tanya Ko Hong – born and raised in South Korea, emigre to the United States at the age of eighteen, Antioch MFA grad and writer in both English and Korean -- brings all that to 21rst century Los Angeles. The traditions of Korean poetry and imagism find new ground, as Hong applies the fertile literary canon of indirect creative commentary to new social and political purpose.

 

To be sure she is capable of shooting straight from the hip on a variety of politically charged issues, including women’s rights and immigrant. More often than not, however, her poems are address her experience as a Korean-American -- as in this longish poem which recounts her family’s device for obtaining permission to come to America.

 

Rumor of war,

when the Korean President,

Park Chung Hee got shot.

Mother wanted us to go

to America,

the strongest, happiest and richest place.

But how to get us there?

Fr Look Back, II Paper Divorce, (Cultural Weekly ‘15)

 

Exploration of the immigrant experience is ‘in her wheelhouse,’ it would seem. In Generation 1.5, published in the 1990s, Ko Hong provides a full book of poems on the immigrant experience.

Just last year she hosted an event at Beyond Baroque providing a platform for fellow immigrant poets to tell stories of their journey to America – such as So Hyun Chang's poem "Sugarcane Arirang" recounting the first Korean Americans' long days in the sugar fields of their new country.

 

But Ko Hong's field of vision for choosing socio-political subject is broader than that, as we may see in her well-regarded tackling of the story of 'Comfort Workers,' the sexual enslavement of more than 200,000 Korean women by the Japanese during World War II.

 

In this carefully sequenced poem we can see the poet's ability to straddle the conventions of contemporary American directness with the more traditional indirectness, imagism and symbolism of Korean aesthetics.

 

Here’s a section from the poem, reproduced in full :

 

1939, CHINJU, SOUTH KYANGSAN PROVINCE

We are going to do Senninbari, right? No, Choingsindae, Women’s Labor Corps Same thing, right? Earn money become new woman come back home—

Holding tiny hands
red fingertips
bong soong ah
balsam flower red
together and colored by summer’s end
red fingertips

ripening persimmons
bending over the Choga roofs
that fade into distance

When the truck crosses over the last hill
leaving our hometown in the dust
Soonja kicks off her white shoes Ko Mu Shin

Fr Comfort Women, (LunchTicket.org, Beloit Poetry Journal ’14)

 

Ko Hong’s intent focus on ripening persimmons bending over rooftops (and the kicking off of white shoes by one of the women as the truck takes off, leaving their home town in the dust) is symbol and image at its best -- and firmly rooted in Korean poetic tradition.

 

Yet, in deference to her American audience which may be inured to the quietude of such writing, she has added a prefatory and italicized dialogue which grabs her audience’s attention.

 

An effective device to help explicate the more subtle, sidelong aperture provided by the poet’s careful choice of image and singularly nuanced voice. Just enough to grab audience attention, amid the cacophony and buffeting of a 21rst century poetry reading.

 

water is boiling in the rusty kettle

dark clouds cover half the moon

a yellow cab stops in the dark…

…drop on your knees

petals of dried flowers

--Fr. Mustard Flower, 2017 (Los Angeles Poet Society)

 

There are a lot of ways to get the balance wrong. Fortunately for those who know her work, often enough Tanya Ko Hong gets it right. And for this, those among us looking for a little nuance and indirection in the head-on world of rant and confrontation -- ie grace -- might drop on our knees, and give thanks.