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Photo essays, interviews, travelogues and more
Scroll down for Palm Beach Poetry Festival Ekphrastic Poetry Contest Winners
SoFloPoJo & The Betsy Hotel's Poet-in-Residence Mary Galvin
What Saves Us - Very Possibly It's Poetry by Francine Witte
Humanism and the Question of Identity in Hungarian Poetry by Peter Hargitai
A Poetry Visit to the Rio Grande Valley by George Wallace
In Memoriam John Arndt
Click here for excerpts from Omar Pimienta's Album of Fences
Translated by Jose Antonio Villarán with review by Arturo Desimone
CONTENTS: Interview with a Poet * Reviews * Visual Art * Video * Special Section * SUBMIT * POETRY ISSUES: #1 May 2016 * #2 Aug 2016 * #3 Nov 2016 * #4 Feb 2017 * #5 May 2017 * #6 Aug 2017 * #7 Nov 2017 * #8 Feb 2018 * #9 May 2018 * #10 Aug 2018 * #11 Nov 2018 * #12 Feb 2019 * #13 May 2019 * #14 Aug 2019 * #15 Nov 2019 * #16 Feb 2020 * #17 May 2020
Palm Beach Poetry Festival's Art Couture Ekphrastic Poetry Contest winners 2020
First Place:
Erika Michael
Erika Michael
Adhesif, by Caroline Dechambay
Shtick, A Riff on Adhesif
French for glue, the picture sticks to the mind’s recollection of
collecting, those black-framed rectangles on the white stucco
walls of Dutch rooms, Vermeer’s interiors with maps and bricks
and such, old spatial tricks like seeing through a darkened box,
how Piet the painter morphed branches and trunks into webs like
leaded edges of stained glass in churches around Paris when he
lived in the digs of the Theosophical Society, Mme. Blavatsky’s
psychic order of occult spiritual views inspiring his theory on the
use of hues that can’t be mixed from others — put a lid on green --
and were not to drift beyond their grid. Some dodged those picky
rules, no mentor’s such a fool they don’t occasionally push the
edge of self-restraint and break the code, but only when their Shtick
sustains the neoplastic look of it. Oh, Broadway Boogie Woogie
killed it with those bits of tape applied in rhythm rows — all that
frenzied beat of drums from Broadway clubs & shows. The tape
suspended from the artist’s fingertip, what role d’you think it plays
as she surveys her wall. Rebirth of Montparnasse? Not a bad call!
This Mondrian thing flows — nifty rigor of her tresses, outfit’s hot,
a twenties take on sixties Saint Laurent. De Stijl still rocks. I like
the flawless fit around her derriere. Neo-neoplastic bonding there.
About the winning poem Contest Judge Stephen Gibson says, “What a riff this is, taking us through works by Mondrian, segments of his life, places, art, influences—those on him and him on others—the lines in this poem sticking like adhesif, “French for glue” (line 1), as the picture by Caroline Dechambay sticks, “to the mind’s recollection of collecting” (lines 1-2), as we, like the model, regard art, and then us regarding her as part of that, as being that, those “black-framed rectangles on the white stucco/walls of Dutch rooms” (lines 2-3), that are “Vermeer’s interiors with maps and bricks/ and such” (lines 3-4), Mondrian’s beginnings, the “old spatial tricks like seeing through a darkened box” (line 4). The poem spills forward, textured and rich in sound and image, like “how Piet the painter morphed branches and trunks into webs like/leaded edges of stained glass in the churches around Paris when he/lived in the digs of the Theosophical Society”( lines 5-7), the poem enriched with Mondrian biography, and then enriching us with more of it, “Oh, Broadway Boogie Woogie/ killed it with those bits of tape applied in rhythm rows” (line 13), and then at the end returning to Mondrian as Dechambay’s Adhesif, “De Stijl still rocks. I like/the flawless fit around her derriere. Neo-neoplastic bonding there.” Style in that closing couplet does still rock. Wonderful.
Erika Michael is an art historian and poet living in Woodway, Wash. With a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, she’s taught at Trinity University, Oregon State and the University of Puget Sound. She has participated in workshops with Thomas Lux, Carolyn Forché, Linda Gregerson, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Tim Siebles, and Major Jackson. Her work has appeared in Poetica Magazine, Cascade: Journal of the Washington Poets’ Association, Drash: Northwest Mosaic, Mizmor l’David Anthology, Bracken Magazine, Bracken Anthology, The Winter Anthology, The Princeton Institute For Advanced Study Letter, Belletrist Magazine, and elsewhere. She received honorable mention in the 2018 Palm Beach Poetry Festival's Looking Glass Ekphrastic Poetry Contest.
French for glue, the picture sticks to the mind’s recollection of
collecting, those black-framed rectangles on the white stucco
walls of Dutch rooms, Vermeer’s interiors with maps and bricks
and such, old spatial tricks like seeing through a darkened box,
how Piet the painter morphed branches and trunks into webs like
leaded edges of stained glass in churches around Paris when he
lived in the digs of the Theosophical Society, Mme. Blavatsky’s
psychic order of occult spiritual views inspiring his theory on the
use of hues that can’t be mixed from others — put a lid on green --
and were not to drift beyond their grid. Some dodged those picky
rules, no mentor’s such a fool they don’t occasionally push the
edge of self-restraint and break the code, but only when their Shtick
sustains the neoplastic look of it. Oh, Broadway Boogie Woogie
killed it with those bits of tape applied in rhythm rows — all that
frenzied beat of drums from Broadway clubs & shows. The tape
suspended from the artist’s fingertip, what role d’you think it plays
as she surveys her wall. Rebirth of Montparnasse? Not a bad call!
This Mondrian thing flows — nifty rigor of her tresses, outfit’s hot,
a twenties take on sixties Saint Laurent. De Stijl still rocks. I like
the flawless fit around her derriere. Neo-neoplastic bonding there.
About the winning poem Contest Judge Stephen Gibson says, “What a riff this is, taking us through works by Mondrian, segments of his life, places, art, influences—those on him and him on others—the lines in this poem sticking like adhesif, “French for glue” (line 1), as the picture by Caroline Dechambay sticks, “to the mind’s recollection of collecting” (lines 1-2), as we, like the model, regard art, and then us regarding her as part of that, as being that, those “black-framed rectangles on the white stucco/walls of Dutch rooms” (lines 2-3), that are “Vermeer’s interiors with maps and bricks/ and such” (lines 3-4), Mondrian’s beginnings, the “old spatial tricks like seeing through a darkened box” (line 4). The poem spills forward, textured and rich in sound and image, like “how Piet the painter morphed branches and trunks into webs like/leaded edges of stained glass in the churches around Paris when he/lived in the digs of the Theosophical Society”( lines 5-7), the poem enriched with Mondrian biography, and then enriching us with more of it, “Oh, Broadway Boogie Woogie/ killed it with those bits of tape applied in rhythm rows” (line 13), and then at the end returning to Mondrian as Dechambay’s Adhesif, “De Stijl still rocks. I like/the flawless fit around her derriere. Neo-neoplastic bonding there.” Style in that closing couplet does still rock. Wonderful.
Erika Michael is an art historian and poet living in Woodway, Wash. With a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, she’s taught at Trinity University, Oregon State and the University of Puget Sound. She has participated in workshops with Thomas Lux, Carolyn Forché, Linda Gregerson, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Tim Siebles, and Major Jackson. Her work has appeared in Poetica Magazine, Cascade: Journal of the Washington Poets’ Association, Drash: Northwest Mosaic, Mizmor l’David Anthology, Bracken Magazine, Bracken Anthology, The Winter Anthology, The Princeton Institute For Advanced Study Letter, Belletrist Magazine, and elsewhere. She received honorable mention in the 2018 Palm Beach Poetry Festival's Looking Glass Ekphrastic Poetry Contest.
Second Place:
Vivian Shipley
Vivian Shipley
Meghan, by Rick Lazes
An Old Husband’s Tale
Daedalus was not a man, Icarus no boy. That’s a myth.
Without a husband to bind her, Daedalus turned nature
inside out, taught her daughter to fly from earth; after all,
men couldn’t fence air. Feathering Icarus in sequence
as a panpipe rises, Daedalus twined quills to mold two sets
of wings sealed in an icing of white wax, stiff as bridal lace.
Daedalus hovered, warning: Keep mid-way; water weights
and sun burns. Always follow me. Icarus rose or was pulled
up, casting her shadow on a ploughman, head lifted from
his rut, who grumbled, A woman’s place is in the home.
The mother tried to lift her arms higher to buffer her daughter
but blue enveloped Icarus who cried, Let’s fly all the way
to Trinacria. Knowing Samos was north and Calymne east,
Icarus ignored the earth’s warning being traced out for her
by the sharded coast of Crete. Unlike the moon that eclipses
the sun, filial duty cannot blot desire. Hopefully, the joy
gleaming in Icarus’ green eyes flashed, mercifully blinding,
and blocking the sight for Daedalus: her only child encircling
wings, writhing like a corn snake carried aloft by a hawk.
Imagine the girl, her mother’s support failing, the aerial lift
and impulse spent. Dripping to the sea, only the wax
hissed, floating as islands do. Daedalus did not fly again.
Unused, feathers yellowed; wax stiffened in her wings
that stretched out more like a shroud than a swan in flight.
Says Contest Judge Stephen Gibson, “It’s easy to see how Rick Lazes’s Meghan inspired “An Old Husband’s Tale.” This narrative is a wonderful, and chilling, retelling of the Daedalus-Icarus myth, this time with both characters being female, mother-daughter rather than father-son, and, with this version, though being perhaps more liberating initially, is, in the end, as with the original, cautionary.”
Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor, Vivian Shipley teaches at SCSU. She was awarded a 2020-21 COA Artist’s Fellowship for Poetry. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, her 12 book, An Archaeology of Days, was published by Negative Capability Press in 2019 and was named The 2020-21 Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist. The Poet (SLU) and Perennial (Negative Capability Press, Mobile, AL) were published in 2015. All of Your Messages Have Been Erased, (2010. SLU) won 2011 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement, NEPC’s Sheila Motton Book Award , and CT Press Club’s Prize for Best Creative Writing. Shipley won 2018’s Steve Kowit Poetry Award for “Cargo” and has also won Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Prize, Robert Frost Foundation’s Poetry Prize, University of Southern California’s Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, Marble Faun Poetry Prize from the William Faulkner Society, New England Poetry Club’s Daniel Varoujan Prize and Kent State’s Hart Crane Prize.
Daedalus was not a man, Icarus no boy. That’s a myth.
Without a husband to bind her, Daedalus turned nature
inside out, taught her daughter to fly from earth; after all,
men couldn’t fence air. Feathering Icarus in sequence
as a panpipe rises, Daedalus twined quills to mold two sets
of wings sealed in an icing of white wax, stiff as bridal lace.
Daedalus hovered, warning: Keep mid-way; water weights
and sun burns. Always follow me. Icarus rose or was pulled
up, casting her shadow on a ploughman, head lifted from
his rut, who grumbled, A woman’s place is in the home.
The mother tried to lift her arms higher to buffer her daughter
but blue enveloped Icarus who cried, Let’s fly all the way
to Trinacria. Knowing Samos was north and Calymne east,
Icarus ignored the earth’s warning being traced out for her
by the sharded coast of Crete. Unlike the moon that eclipses
the sun, filial duty cannot blot desire. Hopefully, the joy
gleaming in Icarus’ green eyes flashed, mercifully blinding,
and blocking the sight for Daedalus: her only child encircling
wings, writhing like a corn snake carried aloft by a hawk.
Imagine the girl, her mother’s support failing, the aerial lift
and impulse spent. Dripping to the sea, only the wax
hissed, floating as islands do. Daedalus did not fly again.
Unused, feathers yellowed; wax stiffened in her wings
that stretched out more like a shroud than a swan in flight.
Says Contest Judge Stephen Gibson, “It’s easy to see how Rick Lazes’s Meghan inspired “An Old Husband’s Tale.” This narrative is a wonderful, and chilling, retelling of the Daedalus-Icarus myth, this time with both characters being female, mother-daughter rather than father-son, and, with this version, though being perhaps more liberating initially, is, in the end, as with the original, cautionary.”
Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor, Vivian Shipley teaches at SCSU. She was awarded a 2020-21 COA Artist’s Fellowship for Poetry. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, her 12 book, An Archaeology of Days, was published by Negative Capability Press in 2019 and was named The 2020-21 Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist. The Poet (SLU) and Perennial (Negative Capability Press, Mobile, AL) were published in 2015. All of Your Messages Have Been Erased, (2010. SLU) won 2011 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement, NEPC’s Sheila Motton Book Award , and CT Press Club’s Prize for Best Creative Writing. Shipley won 2018’s Steve Kowit Poetry Award for “Cargo” and has also won Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Prize, Robert Frost Foundation’s Poetry Prize, University of Southern California’s Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, Marble Faun Poetry Prize from the William Faulkner Society, New England Poetry Club’s Daniel Varoujan Prize and Kent State’s Hart Crane Prize.
Third Place:
Sheila Kelly
Sheila Kelly
Expensive Taste, by Becky Rosa
Skin
after “Expensive Taste” by Becky Rosa
Supple voluptuous sac I put my vitals in.
Consummate suit.
See me strip to a syncopated rhythm.
All hail, drool, salute.
Tuesday’s torture is Wednesday’s delight.
Make captive. Skin is elegant bait.
Moan spells pleasure/pain alike.
Eviscerate.
Hermes, Fendi: Fat me.
Shear then stretch me.
Dry me. Dye me. Pattern, cut me.
Stitch & praise me.
Better than some, my luxurious fate.
Swallow, wallow in. Spend till you sate.
In the words of Contest Judge Stephen Gibson, “Becky Rosa’s Expensive Taste gives us a woman in close up, actually not a woman but a mouth with its tongue licking a melting shopping-bag dripping like a scoop of ice cream atop a cone, the shopping-bag-ice-cream dripping over the slender, curled fingers and polished fingernails holding the cone. The poem “Skin,” a sonnet, is a terrific response to and exploration of that work. The “expensive taste,” of course, is not the dripping cone but the woman, the mouth, and so the sonnet gives voice to that mouth, to what it craves, and to tell us what we crave, wanting it.”
Sheila Kelly leads generative writing workshops in libraries, community centers, art galleries, and the University of Pittsburgh’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. A retired psychotherapist, she believes in the healing power of writing in a supportive group setting where writers can connect, experiment and develop their uninhibited voices. Kelly’s poems have been published in journals, anthologies and a book of craft; most recently in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicineand Diane Lockward’s The Practicing Poet.
after “Expensive Taste” by Becky Rosa
Supple voluptuous sac I put my vitals in.
Consummate suit.
See me strip to a syncopated rhythm.
All hail, drool, salute.
Tuesday’s torture is Wednesday’s delight.
Make captive. Skin is elegant bait.
Moan spells pleasure/pain alike.
Eviscerate.
Hermes, Fendi: Fat me.
Shear then stretch me.
Dry me. Dye me. Pattern, cut me.
Stitch & praise me.
Better than some, my luxurious fate.
Swallow, wallow in. Spend till you sate.
In the words of Contest Judge Stephen Gibson, “Becky Rosa’s Expensive Taste gives us a woman in close up, actually not a woman but a mouth with its tongue licking a melting shopping-bag dripping like a scoop of ice cream atop a cone, the shopping-bag-ice-cream dripping over the slender, curled fingers and polished fingernails holding the cone. The poem “Skin,” a sonnet, is a terrific response to and exploration of that work. The “expensive taste,” of course, is not the dripping cone but the woman, the mouth, and so the sonnet gives voice to that mouth, to what it craves, and to tell us what we crave, wanting it.”
Sheila Kelly leads generative writing workshops in libraries, community centers, art galleries, and the University of Pittsburgh’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. A retired psychotherapist, she believes in the healing power of writing in a supportive group setting where writers can connect, experiment and develop their uninhibited voices. Kelly’s poems have been published in journals, anthologies and a book of craft; most recently in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicineand Diane Lockward’s The Practicing Poet.
Fourth Place:
Michelle Winkler
Michelle Winkler
Dorian Gray, by Sonia Sanchez Arias
Sonnet for 2020
Will you speak for us all, dear Dorian?
Of days gone by, of now… and what comes next…
For you, too, perfect attic mannequin
Enveloped in the grays of time and sex.
Beneath the resilient bow of hope and fears
Headdress of femininity and fields-
Behemoth shadow of lecherous jeers
And all the cold-weighted chains history yields.
Linked maille bodice, slight antebellum waist,
O keeper of secrets, millennials’ muse,
Your sultry slit will be slut-shamed in haste
But your daughter is heir to sensible shoes.
To be clear: backhand equity will be fought
And pride reclaimed… whether you tell or not.
Contest Judge Stephen Gibson says, “This work, as the gown-on-mannequin construction that it responds to, is formal to the point of mannerism, with that formalism-mannerism, as in Sonya Sanchez Arias’s piece, undercutting each other. The gown is late 19th century, as is the Dorian Gray title and Oscar Wilde allusion, but the material of it is not. So too, the poem: a conventional-looking sonnet that strikes at the conventional: the past may try to hide but will give up its secrets.”
Michelle Winkler is a Professor of English at Palm Beach State College. She holds an MA in English and a Doctorate in Education.
Will you speak for us all, dear Dorian?
Of days gone by, of now… and what comes next…
For you, too, perfect attic mannequin
Enveloped in the grays of time and sex.
Beneath the resilient bow of hope and fears
Headdress of femininity and fields-
Behemoth shadow of lecherous jeers
And all the cold-weighted chains history yields.
Linked maille bodice, slight antebellum waist,
O keeper of secrets, millennials’ muse,
Your sultry slit will be slut-shamed in haste
But your daughter is heir to sensible shoes.
To be clear: backhand equity will be fought
And pride reclaimed… whether you tell or not.
Contest Judge Stephen Gibson says, “This work, as the gown-on-mannequin construction that it responds to, is formal to the point of mannerism, with that formalism-mannerism, as in Sonya Sanchez Arias’s piece, undercutting each other. The gown is late 19th century, as is the Dorian Gray title and Oscar Wilde allusion, but the material of it is not. So too, the poem: a conventional-looking sonnet that strikes at the conventional: the past may try to hide but will give up its secrets.”
Michelle Winkler is a Professor of English at Palm Beach State College. She holds an MA in English and a Doctorate in Education.
Fifth Place:
Django Bisous
Django Bisous
Adhesif, by Caroline Dechambay
Modern Masque for Mondrian
Piet indeed
No piety here.
Her soft edges layered
On hard edge technique.
Abstraction of abstraction
So representational.
The artist with the art,
in the art, the fiction complete.
The photographic reflection,
One dimension, two dimension,
Three dimension, four.
Primary colors
Primal desires.
According to Contest Judge Stephen Gibson, “This spare, brief, thirteen-line poem delightfully engages the art work—and the reader’s ear, with its slant rhyme use used to slant meaning in relating its sly view of Dechambay’s equally sly piece.”
Django Bisous is a Canadian and divides his time between Toronto, Europe and Key West. Poetry is a relatively new pursuit for him, with most of his creative time usually focused on writing creative non-fiction or fiction in the short story format and keeping a blog for his friend. His current major undertaking is the completion of a book in the epistolary style. His work can be read at djangobisous.com
While submitting his prose for publication and to various contests has been an active pursuit over the last several years, this is the first ekphrastic poem he has written, the first poem acknowledged by a judge and first publication of any kind for Django. Accordingly, he cannot stop grinning.
Piet indeed
No piety here.
Her soft edges layered
On hard edge technique.
Abstraction of abstraction
So representational.
The artist with the art,
in the art, the fiction complete.
The photographic reflection,
One dimension, two dimension,
Three dimension, four.
Primary colors
Primal desires.
According to Contest Judge Stephen Gibson, “This spare, brief, thirteen-line poem delightfully engages the art work—and the reader’s ear, with its slant rhyme use used to slant meaning in relating its sly view of Dechambay’s equally sly piece.”
Django Bisous is a Canadian and divides his time between Toronto, Europe and Key West. Poetry is a relatively new pursuit for him, with most of his creative time usually focused on writing creative non-fiction or fiction in the short story format and keeping a blog for his friend. His current major undertaking is the completion of a book in the epistolary style. His work can be read at djangobisous.com
While submitting his prose for publication and to various contests has been an active pursuit over the last several years, this is the first ekphrastic poem he has written, the first poem acknowledged by a judge and first publication of any kind for Django. Accordingly, he cannot stop grinning.
Honorable Mentions
Five HONORABLE MENTIONS were selected: henry 7. reneau, jr., “Jackie Kennedy in Pink Chanel” and Susan Carroll Jewell, “Georgia O’Keeffe Buys a Pink Suit” (both inspired by Timo Weill’s Pink Suit); Victoria Otto Franzese, “DGS” and Amalia Mavrafrides, “The Dress” (both inspired by Sonia Sanchez Arias’s Dorian Gray); and Stephen Mead, “Yum” (inspired by Becky Rosa’s Expensive Taste).
SoFloPoJo & The Betsy Hotel's Poet-in-Residence Mary Galvin
Mary Galvin lives in Lake Worth, Florida, and has been reading and writing poetry since she was a child. Her poetry has been published in Southern Women’s Review, Homestead Review, and East Coast Literary Review. In addition to being a poet, she is the author of Queer Poetics (Greenwood/Praeger, 1999), a critical study of Modernist women poets. Mary holds a Doctor of Arts from the State University of New York at Albany, and is currently a Professor of English at Palm Beach State College in Lake Worth.
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The first partnership between SoFloPoJo and The Betsy Hotel took place Sunday, February 16, 2020. The Betsy Hotel's Writer's Room offers residences for poets, writers, musicians and artists. Mary Galvin spent about a week working on her poetry and enjoying the spectacular ambience of the The Betsy.
Fans and poets from Palm Beach County came down to South Beach to listen to Galvin read new work as well as older poems. Among the poets were: Judy Ireland, Cara Nusinov, Jennifer Greenberg, Margie Schnabel, Jennifer Litt, Stephen Gibson, Holly Jaffee, and Lucia Leao. The Betsy's showrunner Sandra Rovira was our gracious host. (Pictured with Galvin above left). The Betsy is a cultural treasure in South Florida hosting poetry readings and books signings in association with SWWIM Everyday, O, Miami and The Academy of America Poets. https://www.thebetsyhotel.com/explore/about-us
Fans and poets from Palm Beach County came down to South Beach to listen to Galvin read new work as well as older poems. Among the poets were: Judy Ireland, Cara Nusinov, Jennifer Greenberg, Margie Schnabel, Jennifer Litt, Stephen Gibson, Holly Jaffee, and Lucia Leao. The Betsy's showrunner Sandra Rovira was our gracious host. (Pictured with Galvin above left). The Betsy is a cultural treasure in South Florida hosting poetry readings and books signings in association with SWWIM Everyday, O, Miami and The Academy of America Poets. https://www.thebetsyhotel.com/explore/about-us
February 2020 issue 16
What Saves Us - Very Possibly It's Poetry
by Francine Witte All photos by Mark Strodl
by Francine Witte All photos by Mark Strodl
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Martin Espada & Gabriel Ramírez
Kathy Engel & Rich Villar
George Wallace & Audience
Readers at the Lincoln Center’s David Rubinstein Atrium
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What does it mean to live in a country that won’t call you a citizen? A country at odds with its own symbol of welcome in New York Harbor? A country whose president throws rolls of paper towels in response to a hurricane? These were just some of the questions asked in the form of poetry on November 8, 2019 at the launch reading for What Saves Us published by Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press and edited by Martin Espada.
The reading took place in Lincoln Center’s David Rubinstein Atrium to a standing room only crowd. Hosted by New York City Poet, Rich Villar, one by one, poets ascended the stage to ask difficult, searing questions, each reading their entry in the anthology. Lincoln Center seems an odd choice for a reading of dissident poetry, when you consider it is one of America’s foremost symbols of wealth and privilege. The Atrium was on 62nd street, but a mere block or two away, the well-heeled were dropping upwards of 200 dollars to listen to a three-hour opera, or watch ballet. How can the questions of a handful of poets share the same air, much less rise above it loud enough to be heard? Simple. It’s the roar. It’s the roar of poems spectacularly crafted and sharp. The lion himself, Martin Espada, bookended the reading with two such poems. Ending the reading with “Letter to my Father,” he remembers his father and the hard lessons he learned from him, “you taught me there is no God, no life after this life.” This poem was met with a well-deserved standing ovation. Denice Frohman elegantly read her poem “Puertopia,” speaks of Puerto Rico after Maria. “now/the beaches are gated & no one knows the names of the dead.” She goes on in this poem to talk about the vulture-like nature of investors who, like with Katrina, swoop in to buy the land cheap. This poem’s roar was a bit quieter, but no less heard. Another standout performance was given by George Wallace, who delivered his “I am sorry Diane Di Prima,” with his special combination of soft growl and rising incantation. This poem apologizes for the revolution we did not have, how “we cleaned things up just/enough to carry on.” A poem like this crystalizes the whole mission of the evening, to rebel in words. It says yes, we have it good, but is that a good thing? And the audience got it. The audience got it. Poets continued throughout the event poking and challenging with their words, their voices. Poems about absent fathers, and living in Section 8 housing and revolutions that didn’t happen, but should have. This beautiful space, this seat of luxury suddenly became an arena for what needs to be talked about, a symphony of grit and reflection. And, of course, the book itself only continues this. What Saves Us features the work of many notable poets, but what was clear on this chilly night in November, was how ideas and powerful words have a voice no one can silence. |
Humanism and the Question of Identity in Hungarian Poetry
by Peter Hargitai
Peter Hargitai "addresses nationalism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc. and all the shit going on in the World According to Orban and Trump" in his eye-opening essay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLaSmb7wUV0
Peter Hargitai is the first Poet Laureate of Gulfport, Florida, senior lecturer, and retired professor at Florida International University in Miami.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLaSmb7wUV0
Peter Hargitai is the first Poet Laureate of Gulfport, Florida, senior lecturer, and retired professor at Florida International University in Miami.
A POETRY VISIT TO THE RIO GRANDE VALLEY by George Wallace
SLIDE SHOW: (3 men) Edward Vidaurre, Octavio Quintanilla and George Wallace ; (Group at table) Viktoria Valenzuela, Alexandra Van De Camp, Sheila Fiona Black, George Wallace, Edward Vidaurre, Harold Rodinsky, Wendy Barker and Natalie Trevino; George Wallace on Los ebanos ferry.
In time history will no doubt recall 2018 as one year in a terrible sequence of years for America, with deep threats to human dignity and progress, and callousness in its corridors of power.
With efforts by the current administration in Washington to dismantle progressive policies affecting everything from civil rights and protection of the environment to immigration and refugee issues – not to mention attacks on a free and independent press, an independent judiciary, and the right to vote -- what more appropriate time to huddle with and see where leading American poets of conscience stand on these matters?
In this case, that process began at a gathering in San Antonio, Gemini Ink's 2018 Writing The New Century July 2018 conference. Close to the borderlands, which are in some ways at the heart of America’s current zero-tolerance immigration policies -- notorious and draconian practices that include forced family separations, internment of refugee children and blanket criminalization of the displaced, the asylum-seeker, and the refugee as a pretext.
San Antonio, only a few hours by car to the lower Rio Grande Valley (RGV), “rooted in its founding in New Spain, it give us another version of the American origin story, born out of Tenochtitlán rather than Plymouth Rock,” notes John Santos, who serves as Distinguished Scholar in Mestizo Cultural Studies to the Honors College at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
The Valley. Gloria Anzaldúa's herida abierta (open wound), where 'the third world grates against the first and bleeds'. But also where long cultural admixture has produced a vibrant new cultural consciousness. Not Mexican or American, but a new and sacred cultural entity— the mestizaje, a mix of ancestry and culture, distinct and rich in ways that render obsolete 'us vs. them' thinking. An indigenous consciousness that, with its notions of decolonization, resistance, identity and migration, flies in the face of the current administration's stoking of nationalist fears and ethnic mistrust in service of their power.
This is the borderlands that Anzaldua, throughout her major works, spoke of, seminally articulating a “borderlands identity.”
At the risk of stating what is fully understood by those who study the border situation or live it, it should be pointed out that the people of the border are distinct from the current flow of refugees and asylum-seekers coming from certain countries in Central America. They are a people whose home has been the Rio Grande Valley—characteristically both sides of it—for generations, a people for whom the border is an artificial construct created by distant nationalistic forces and enforced with the barrel of a gun. A border which crossed them.
Gemini Ink, a literary arts non-profit based in San Antonio, brought in authoritative voices who forcefully addressed issues of migration, assimilation, resistance and identity—figures like Martín Espada, Debra Monroe, Veronica Golos, Norma Cantú, Vijay Seshadri, Anel Flores, and Carmen Tafolla.
Panel presentations, including Writing Resistance/Embodying Diversity and Carolina Cisneros-Hinojosa’s Writing as Liberative Praxis: A Latina Narrative, advanced important ideas on decolonization, diversity in an age of divisiveness, and speaking truth to power.
Presentations and panels are rewarding and necessary methods to promulgate the conversation among writers of conscience coming together anywhere in America, or for that matter beyond US borders, these days. And Gemini Ink's gathering in San Antonio was an estimable opportunity to enlarge that conversation.
But while the process began in San Antonio, my journey of learning ‘found its feet’ with a post-conference road trip to 'la frontera’—the lower Rio Grande Valley—with San Antonio poet laureate Octavio Quintanilla, to meet first hand with some 'on-the-ground' writers of the valley, and experience a little of the multi-layered, dynamic culture in which they work.
To the Valley itself, McAllen, Tx, and a few miles of riverside east and west, where ICE blimps float over the river, and groups like Poets Against Walls organize and rally to speak out against harsh border policies and reclaim the river as a community resource. Where immigration officials set up checkpoints to stop and examine the credentials of travelers on highways. Where local poets organize slams and children's writing anthologies, all in the English and Spanish mix that Anzaldúa hailed as a synthesis of Spanish and the Anglo- American influences, enabling the development of new terms in both.
The Rio Grande Valley, home to a people who first passed through in the 16th century, historically no stranger to terror or the capricious and violent use of power.
A world that Santos notes has been a destination and a platform for migrations for millennia-—indigenous first and later mestizo peoples—the borderlands as a homeland reaching from Mesoamerica to the American Southwest.
The core of the trip, aside from roaring rides up and back through mesquite and scrub, was a performance and poetry gathering at the historic Cine El Rey, in downtown McAllen, a colorful location for a diverse presentation of voices in and of itself, organized by McAllen poet laureate Edward Vidaurre—and the site of many political rallies of late—and as an arts venue.
Being a product of the Valley himself, Quintanilla knows his way around, and took pains to add into my experience some deeply revealing metaphors for the complexity of the border experience. Among them:
—a river crossing at Los Ebanos on the only hand-pulled ferryboat which still crosses the Rio Grande, but one—a quick peek, just downriver, at a bend in the Rio Grande where for years, another poet's father used to swim back and forth, regularly and unimpeded, to visit relatives;
—a second border crossing, by car this time, over an international bridge between Progreso and Nuevo Progreso—(the border guard at this bridge eyed me carefully, asked me my business in the area. When I told him I was reading poetry he went into his booth, checked me out on Google and with a broad smile wished me well, said he was sorry to have missed my reading, and waved us on);
—a visit to the Basilica of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle, but one of many indications of the deep and multifaceted spiritual underpinnings of border culture. The iconic characteristics of the Virgen as they attain functionality in border country is of particular note and are quite specific, notes San Antonio poet Natalia Treviño.
“The role of the sacred in this land has a material, not esoteric value,” she notes. “Guadalupe as the goddess is in the daily lives, the illnesses and the small triumphs of her people—never vengeful or jealous like Hera, not vain or petty like Venus, but a powerful whisperer who gets things done like nobody’s business.”
As I say, a lot to absorb. An understanding of border culture is way beyond a quick visit, or a several book deep reading of the literature of the region. The Valley's history and culture, its sister brotherhood, the intersectionality of gender with multi-layered ethnicities, is nuanced and rich beyond simplistic iteration or quick appraisal.
One example: Quintanilla has this year embarked on daily drawings of visual poems he terms FRONTEXTOS. In one he recently completed we see a triad of women figures iconic to the region—The Virgen of Guadalupe, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Selena. In creating this triad, Quintanilla compiles one group from among the diverse influences on border culture—the amalgamation of Aztec/Spanish religious traditions; the emergence of intellectual giants defining the border culture; and the palpable contributions of a pop culture icon whose meteoric career as the 'Queen of Tejano Music' is but one indication of the dynamism of culture which has emerged.
There are a lot of ways to look at a border. For a person like myself, looking in from the outside—from a privileged position in terms of race, gender, wealth and sexual orientation, and a goal to extend my voice in solidarity with those who live in and call the RGV their home —it is a flashpoint for a political and moral conflict that challenges our devotion to the cause of humanity.
For those who are living ‘the frontera,’ however, there would appear to be more of Anzaldúa's generative admixture at work than some might at first realize.
For sure, it is a complex admixture—the outrages committed against the Mestizo people who preceded what amounts to expropriation by settlement and takeover of the region by Anglo-America, are well documented.
That includes murder and theft by extra-judicial and extra-legal means, on the part of the Texas Rangers. Millions of acres stolen through unethical taxing methods and other expropriatory tactics of early 20th century ‘shoot first and hang the rest’ Anglo-Texan policies —brutal terror, violence and trickery as part of the border legacy.
Tales of such wild west justice are indicative that there are precedents to the current and hotly contested practices of the Department of Justice when it comes to the vicious separation of children from families as a way to control the oppressed. One of them, of course, is no further away than Américo Paredes’ seminal story "The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez," made into a popular film in 1982.
However, as Paredes astutely notes in his anthropological introduction to the ‘With his Pistol in his Hand,’ the 1958 book in which he has retold the Cortez story, there is in border culture a palpable capacity to ignore the overlay of dominant cultures to the north or south when it suits people.
The people of the border, he insists, have a capacity to 'simply ignore strangers, except when disturbed by violence or some other transgression of what he believed (is) 'the right'...the swirl of events and the coming and going of strangers (is) but froth on the surface of life."
Treviño sees this trait in how the people of the region have adapted to the sometimes difficult weather conditions, “the palpable heat and humidity—a presence that the border population deflects, with its righteous power, by late night life prepped by quiet afternoons— slowing down—to be ready to savor the night after a very hard sonofabitche day. (see Anzaldúa‘s poem ‘el sonofabitche’)
A border may be a river or it may be a wall. Sometimes you can get across it by wading, or on a ferryboat you can help pull across a narrow stretch of water. Maybe you have to pass over a bridge with a checkpoint to get somewhere to work for a living or go shopping, take care of your medical needs, or visit with a member of your family.
Giving voice to the conditions of living at ‘la frontera’ is more than confronting the fact that the place you live is, in a very real sense, a flashpoint of national contentions. It is a matter of affirming the rich, unitary, delicately nuanced character of the people you are from— people who live on both sides of the border—and adding your poetic voice to enunciate and interpret the daily experience of living in a place a border runs through.
Because on either side of the border at the Rio Grande, life goes on—lo cotidiano, an 'imperative concept toward understanding the liberation of the oppressed and the subjugated' as noted by San Antonio poet Carolina Cisneros-Hinojosa, referencing Mujerista Theologian Ada Maria Isasi-Díaz.
Or as Natalia Treviño put it, addressing the quotidian is an imperative, “a reminder to all poets and artists about our role to move stones—more important than ever in an age of concrete wall-builders—by our capacity to bind, become water, and sway.”
And particular, the poets of the RGV—not as Americans, or as Mexicans, but as citizens of this historically distinct, emergent, beautiful place. The lower Rio Grande Valley. Anzaldúa's borderlands.
George Wallace is editor of Poetrybay, author of 33 chapbooks of poetry, and writer in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace.
With efforts by the current administration in Washington to dismantle progressive policies affecting everything from civil rights and protection of the environment to immigration and refugee issues – not to mention attacks on a free and independent press, an independent judiciary, and the right to vote -- what more appropriate time to huddle with and see where leading American poets of conscience stand on these matters?
In this case, that process began at a gathering in San Antonio, Gemini Ink's 2018 Writing The New Century July 2018 conference. Close to the borderlands, which are in some ways at the heart of America’s current zero-tolerance immigration policies -- notorious and draconian practices that include forced family separations, internment of refugee children and blanket criminalization of the displaced, the asylum-seeker, and the refugee as a pretext.
San Antonio, only a few hours by car to the lower Rio Grande Valley (RGV), “rooted in its founding in New Spain, it give us another version of the American origin story, born out of Tenochtitlán rather than Plymouth Rock,” notes John Santos, who serves as Distinguished Scholar in Mestizo Cultural Studies to the Honors College at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
The Valley. Gloria Anzaldúa's herida abierta (open wound), where 'the third world grates against the first and bleeds'. But also where long cultural admixture has produced a vibrant new cultural consciousness. Not Mexican or American, but a new and sacred cultural entity— the mestizaje, a mix of ancestry and culture, distinct and rich in ways that render obsolete 'us vs. them' thinking. An indigenous consciousness that, with its notions of decolonization, resistance, identity and migration, flies in the face of the current administration's stoking of nationalist fears and ethnic mistrust in service of their power.
This is the borderlands that Anzaldua, throughout her major works, spoke of, seminally articulating a “borderlands identity.”
At the risk of stating what is fully understood by those who study the border situation or live it, it should be pointed out that the people of the border are distinct from the current flow of refugees and asylum-seekers coming from certain countries in Central America. They are a people whose home has been the Rio Grande Valley—characteristically both sides of it—for generations, a people for whom the border is an artificial construct created by distant nationalistic forces and enforced with the barrel of a gun. A border which crossed them.
Gemini Ink, a literary arts non-profit based in San Antonio, brought in authoritative voices who forcefully addressed issues of migration, assimilation, resistance and identity—figures like Martín Espada, Debra Monroe, Veronica Golos, Norma Cantú, Vijay Seshadri, Anel Flores, and Carmen Tafolla.
Panel presentations, including Writing Resistance/Embodying Diversity and Carolina Cisneros-Hinojosa’s Writing as Liberative Praxis: A Latina Narrative, advanced important ideas on decolonization, diversity in an age of divisiveness, and speaking truth to power.
Presentations and panels are rewarding and necessary methods to promulgate the conversation among writers of conscience coming together anywhere in America, or for that matter beyond US borders, these days. And Gemini Ink's gathering in San Antonio was an estimable opportunity to enlarge that conversation.
But while the process began in San Antonio, my journey of learning ‘found its feet’ with a post-conference road trip to 'la frontera’—the lower Rio Grande Valley—with San Antonio poet laureate Octavio Quintanilla, to meet first hand with some 'on-the-ground' writers of the valley, and experience a little of the multi-layered, dynamic culture in which they work.
To the Valley itself, McAllen, Tx, and a few miles of riverside east and west, where ICE blimps float over the river, and groups like Poets Against Walls organize and rally to speak out against harsh border policies and reclaim the river as a community resource. Where immigration officials set up checkpoints to stop and examine the credentials of travelers on highways. Where local poets organize slams and children's writing anthologies, all in the English and Spanish mix that Anzaldúa hailed as a synthesis of Spanish and the Anglo- American influences, enabling the development of new terms in both.
The Rio Grande Valley, home to a people who first passed through in the 16th century, historically no stranger to terror or the capricious and violent use of power.
A world that Santos notes has been a destination and a platform for migrations for millennia-—indigenous first and later mestizo peoples—the borderlands as a homeland reaching from Mesoamerica to the American Southwest.
The core of the trip, aside from roaring rides up and back through mesquite and scrub, was a performance and poetry gathering at the historic Cine El Rey, in downtown McAllen, a colorful location for a diverse presentation of voices in and of itself, organized by McAllen poet laureate Edward Vidaurre—and the site of many political rallies of late—and as an arts venue.
Being a product of the Valley himself, Quintanilla knows his way around, and took pains to add into my experience some deeply revealing metaphors for the complexity of the border experience. Among them:
—a river crossing at Los Ebanos on the only hand-pulled ferryboat which still crosses the Rio Grande, but one—a quick peek, just downriver, at a bend in the Rio Grande where for years, another poet's father used to swim back and forth, regularly and unimpeded, to visit relatives;
—a second border crossing, by car this time, over an international bridge between Progreso and Nuevo Progreso—(the border guard at this bridge eyed me carefully, asked me my business in the area. When I told him I was reading poetry he went into his booth, checked me out on Google and with a broad smile wished me well, said he was sorry to have missed my reading, and waved us on);
—a visit to the Basilica of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle, but one of many indications of the deep and multifaceted spiritual underpinnings of border culture. The iconic characteristics of the Virgen as they attain functionality in border country is of particular note and are quite specific, notes San Antonio poet Natalia Treviño.
“The role of the sacred in this land has a material, not esoteric value,” she notes. “Guadalupe as the goddess is in the daily lives, the illnesses and the small triumphs of her people—never vengeful or jealous like Hera, not vain or petty like Venus, but a powerful whisperer who gets things done like nobody’s business.”
As I say, a lot to absorb. An understanding of border culture is way beyond a quick visit, or a several book deep reading of the literature of the region. The Valley's history and culture, its sister brotherhood, the intersectionality of gender with multi-layered ethnicities, is nuanced and rich beyond simplistic iteration or quick appraisal.
One example: Quintanilla has this year embarked on daily drawings of visual poems he terms FRONTEXTOS. In one he recently completed we see a triad of women figures iconic to the region—The Virgen of Guadalupe, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Selena. In creating this triad, Quintanilla compiles one group from among the diverse influences on border culture—the amalgamation of Aztec/Spanish religious traditions; the emergence of intellectual giants defining the border culture; and the palpable contributions of a pop culture icon whose meteoric career as the 'Queen of Tejano Music' is but one indication of the dynamism of culture which has emerged.
There are a lot of ways to look at a border. For a person like myself, looking in from the outside—from a privileged position in terms of race, gender, wealth and sexual orientation, and a goal to extend my voice in solidarity with those who live in and call the RGV their home —it is a flashpoint for a political and moral conflict that challenges our devotion to the cause of humanity.
For those who are living ‘the frontera,’ however, there would appear to be more of Anzaldúa's generative admixture at work than some might at first realize.
For sure, it is a complex admixture—the outrages committed against the Mestizo people who preceded what amounts to expropriation by settlement and takeover of the region by Anglo-America, are well documented.
That includes murder and theft by extra-judicial and extra-legal means, on the part of the Texas Rangers. Millions of acres stolen through unethical taxing methods and other expropriatory tactics of early 20th century ‘shoot first and hang the rest’ Anglo-Texan policies —brutal terror, violence and trickery as part of the border legacy.
Tales of such wild west justice are indicative that there are precedents to the current and hotly contested practices of the Department of Justice when it comes to the vicious separation of children from families as a way to control the oppressed. One of them, of course, is no further away than Américo Paredes’ seminal story "The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez," made into a popular film in 1982.
However, as Paredes astutely notes in his anthropological introduction to the ‘With his Pistol in his Hand,’ the 1958 book in which he has retold the Cortez story, there is in border culture a palpable capacity to ignore the overlay of dominant cultures to the north or south when it suits people.
The people of the border, he insists, have a capacity to 'simply ignore strangers, except when disturbed by violence or some other transgression of what he believed (is) 'the right'...the swirl of events and the coming and going of strangers (is) but froth on the surface of life."
Treviño sees this trait in how the people of the region have adapted to the sometimes difficult weather conditions, “the palpable heat and humidity—a presence that the border population deflects, with its righteous power, by late night life prepped by quiet afternoons— slowing down—to be ready to savor the night after a very hard sonofabitche day. (see Anzaldúa‘s poem ‘el sonofabitche’)
A border may be a river or it may be a wall. Sometimes you can get across it by wading, or on a ferryboat you can help pull across a narrow stretch of water. Maybe you have to pass over a bridge with a checkpoint to get somewhere to work for a living or go shopping, take care of your medical needs, or visit with a member of your family.
Giving voice to the conditions of living at ‘la frontera’ is more than confronting the fact that the place you live is, in a very real sense, a flashpoint of national contentions. It is a matter of affirming the rich, unitary, delicately nuanced character of the people you are from— people who live on both sides of the border—and adding your poetic voice to enunciate and interpret the daily experience of living in a place a border runs through.
Because on either side of the border at the Rio Grande, life goes on—lo cotidiano, an 'imperative concept toward understanding the liberation of the oppressed and the subjugated' as noted by San Antonio poet Carolina Cisneros-Hinojosa, referencing Mujerista Theologian Ada Maria Isasi-Díaz.
Or as Natalia Treviño put it, addressing the quotidian is an imperative, “a reminder to all poets and artists about our role to move stones—more important than ever in an age of concrete wall-builders—by our capacity to bind, become water, and sway.”
And particular, the poets of the RGV—not as Americans, or as Mexicans, but as citizens of this historically distinct, emergent, beautiful place. The lower Rio Grande Valley. Anzaldúa's borderlands.
George Wallace is editor of Poetrybay, author of 33 chapbooks of poetry, and writer in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace.
In Memoriam:
John Arndt
Friend, Playwright, Actor, Poet,
SoFloPoJo Associate Editor
John Arndt
Friend, Playwright, Actor, Poet,
SoFloPoJo Associate Editor
John Arndt was, in all respects, a Renaissance Man. Born to a brick mason in Pipestone, Minnesota, John was his high school's star football player, who later earned a degree in Theater, becoming a playwright and actor, who both studied and drank with, Tennessee Williams. Johnny was also a poker player (whose poker buddies included Bruce Willis,) a sheet-rock schlepper in Portland, MN., a closet installer in N.Y.C., and, my best friend for over half my life.
When Ulysses S. Grant was asked about his friendship with George Tecumseh Sherman, Grant replied, we are friends - I stand by him when he's crazy, he stands by me when I'm drunk. Few friendships have compasses so reliable, they locate and maintain such stable ground. Ours did; and for that, I shall be forever grateful and blessed.
-Stacie M. Kiner
When Ulysses S. Grant was asked about his friendship with George Tecumseh Sherman, Grant replied, we are friends - I stand by him when he's crazy, he stands by me when I'm drunk. Few friendships have compasses so reliable, they locate and maintain such stable ground. Ours did; and for that, I shall be forever grateful and blessed.
-Stacie M. Kiner
The Speed of Light
by John Arndt
I clutch at you like precious bits of tender
Gems fallen into hand by chance
Caught on the sleeve of happenstance
To lose you all at once and forever by simple neglect
In that push through the crippled bones of disappointment
Everything moves on, into distance and gone
You remain apart to fill slack and tattered sails
Gust of laughter, whisper of touch, full blown gale of comprehension
Years pass, moments collide, collect in the shadows
Fester and evolve into monstrous knowledge
Barbed sorrow travels lifetimes, into decadence
Deeper into the drunken darkness of failure
Further still to the dregs of what will never be
You will find me there, in that gloom
With a bottle and a dream
Crying out for what can not be given
Holding on to the thing that was taken
Waiting for light that moves too slow
by John Arndt
I clutch at you like precious bits of tender
Gems fallen into hand by chance
Caught on the sleeve of happenstance
To lose you all at once and forever by simple neglect
In that push through the crippled bones of disappointment
Everything moves on, into distance and gone
You remain apart to fill slack and tattered sails
Gust of laughter, whisper of touch, full blown gale of comprehension
Years pass, moments collide, collect in the shadows
Fester and evolve into monstrous knowledge
Barbed sorrow travels lifetimes, into decadence
Deeper into the drunken darkness of failure
Further still to the dregs of what will never be
You will find me there, in that gloom
With a bottle and a dream
Crying out for what can not be given
Holding on to the thing that was taken
Waiting for light that moves too slow