In this episode I had the opportunity to speak with Kristen Case. She is the author of two books of poems “Little Arias” and “Principles of Economics” and has a new manuscript “Daphne” looking for a home. An editor and a professor of English at the university of Maine, she wrote a fascinating book on the connections between philosophy and poetry called “American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice”.
In this second conversation with Michael Franco we explore the notions of delight and generosity in poetry. Without the constraints of a 27 minute live broadcast, we were able to dive into the deep waters of sound and meaning, community and experience, and much more.
Sosteniendo (por todos lados): una silla. Sostenida: una línea vertical recta
biseca el horizonte y el pulgar, sosteniendo el pulgar (sillas, una silla), dos pulgares.
Vi un lazo y una silla pequeña como un esbozo o como un perno brillante junto a una rueda. Secando, enroscándose. La temperatura. La piel
derramada en de mi torso. Capaz de –
no la x por la y,
la parte inmutable, ninguna joya para la membrana donde la membrana no se dobla – sin intervalos: la cadera, el puño, el día, el estómago, dos, las dos paredes. La cadera, el día, las dos paredes (lejísimos), dos estómagos, el estomago, las caderas, los puños, dos días, el trino, dos. Una piel suave
tocando un plato frío y el plato frío tocando dos paredes, agua sobre las paredes, las dos sillas tocando las dos paredes, el agua cayendo sobre las dos paredes tibias sobre las dos sillas, los dos pulgares, dos pulgares bifurcándose, la cuerda de la plomada, la que no pudo desdoblar la tela.
La cobertura
estaba secándose
en la vasija. Tres caras. Tres caras torcidas. Tres caras girando. Tres caras jalando, empujando. Tres paredes caminando. Tres caras volteándose, exprimiéndose (no lo hizo – tanto como – exprimiendo-se-lo) cambió la posición de mi boca con su pierna.
Traducción de Antonio Ochoa
Holding (everywhere): chair. Held: a straight vertical line
bisected the horizon and the thumb, holding the thumb (chairs, a chair), two thumbs.
I saw a loop and a little chair like an outline or like a bright pin next to a wheel. Drying and curling. Temperature. Skin
poured into my torso. Able to –
no x for the y,
the unchanged part, no jewel for the membrane where the membrane doesn’t double – no interval: hip, fist, day, stomach, two, two walls. Hip, day, two, stomach, hip, two walls. Have only. Hip, day, two walls (very far away), two stomachs, stomach, hips, fists, two days, a trill, two. Smooth skin
touching a cold plate and a plate touching two walls, water on the walls, two chairs touching two walls, water pouring down two warm walls onto two chairs, two thumbs, two bifurcating thumbs, plumb line. Plumb line couldn’t unfold the cloth. The covering
was drying in
the vessel. Three faces. Three faces bending. Three faces pivoting. Three faces pulling, pressing. Three walls walking. Three faces turning away. Wringing it out (didn’t – as – wringing – out – it), changed the position of my mouth with his leg.
Sam Cha was born in Korea. He earned an MFA from UMass Boston. A winner of two Academy of American Poets prizes and a St. Botolph’s Club Emerging Artists Grant, his work has appeared in apt, Anderbo, Better, Best New Poets, Boston Review, decomP, DIAGRAM, Memorious, Missouri Review, Rattle, RHINO, and Toad. He’s a poetry editor at Radius. He is the author of a chapbook, American Carnage, that was published by Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs in 2018, and of The Yellow Book, a full-length collection of cross-genre writing, forthcoming from [PANK] Books in 2020.
Donald Wellman has nine books of English-language poetry to his credit. He translates from several languages, German and French as well as Spanish. He is the English language translator of Antonio Gamoneda, Emilio Prados, and Roberto Echavarren. From German he has translated Yvan Goll’s Neila’s Evening Song: Last Poems of Yvan Goll; from French, Blaise Cendrars, The Prose of the Transsiberian and Little Joan of France. His academic expertise is in modern and contemporary poetry and poetics. His research and scholarship has concentrated on the works of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson and on figures associated with Black Mountain College and with emerging avant-gardes (conceptual poetry and language-centered poetry). Additionally, he has written on transnational literature, including the literature and culture of the Caribbean. A study of translation practice, Albiach / Celan / Reading Across Languages is available from Annex, 2017. His Expressivity in Modern Poetry is newly released from Fairleigh Dickinson UP, March 2019. Editing O.ARS, 1981-1993. Among the Neighbors, The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo is forthcoming.
His book of poetry include Fields (1995),a selection of twenty years previous work. In addition to a range of lyrics, Fields addresses themes related to childhood and youth in New Hampshire and Maine. It includes a “libretto” dedicated to labor history during the period of industrialization and establishment of the mills. An ethnographic bent characterizes much of his work, Baroque Threads and Prolog Pages were shaped from materials in the notebooks that were kept while living in Costa Rica, Mexico, and Spain. A North Atlantic Wall is drawn from pilgrimage experiences in Spain and Morocco, where he pursued portions of the Camino de Santiago and then continued to follow trails used by Albigensian refugees fleeing through the Pyrenees, at the conclusion of a 20-year crusade initiated by Pope Innocent III to eliminate Catharism. This soul journey concludes on the peaks of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. Working with a close ethnographic focus on the rural poor, Cranberry Island Series is a collection addressing life in the Gulf of Maine. Essays are interleaved with a sampling of poetry dating from as early as the mid1970s, including poems of mourning for lost companions. Roman Exercises and Essay Poems were released in the last three years. These works are long serial poems, mixing prose and verse composition.
Wellman was born in Nashua, NH. He also identifies with Cranberry Island, Maine, his mother’s home. He graduated from Stuttgart American High School in Germany and the University of New Hampshire. After military service in Germany, he earned a Doctor of Arts from the University of Oregon. He now lives in Weare New Hampshire. He has two loving and precocious children, each an accomplished scholar and creative talent. He has just returned from residence in Madrid and visits to Istanbul and Morocco. The profile would seem to be that of a wanderer, but he identifies deeply with each of the places that have shaped his life.
Links
antonioochoa.org 