Special Collection during the Pandemic - Page 3

Via Mexico

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Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay is Profesor Titular, Departamento de Arte y Empresa, Universidad de Guanajuato, Salamanca, Mexico.
Positions held:

  • Fulbright Senior Research Fellow. University of California, Santa Cruz (2013-2014.)
  • Head. Department of English, University of Calcutta (2011-2013).
  • Robert Armstrong Fellow. University of Texas at Dallas (2002-2005.)
  • Lecturer. Presidency College, Kolkata (1996-2000)
Via Mexico

I now meet you at this cross
In this break…in this egg…in a forest
Here I am solitary…and interestingly neither you are here
You are…and aren’t…in the time junction
either you exist or not, near and far, absconding
In impossible being here and nowhere else or at once

You too are lost in the twilight forest
where only moment exists
The past has turned into a moment
What will happen is in a moment

What will happen will come from thought

What will happen is a foetus of thought,
Even thought may not seem to exist here

The Aztec kings’ bitch turns into butterflies

The butterfly is the lord of life…its wings flower out with colors of the alebrije

Aum..Oh love! aum I say.. .and chant..so your image is made with a vibe

You are not here but you might rile some other dimension and live

Ave Maria ! …I reach out …I touch you

Let it be let it be amen
My childhood disperses across breasts of terracota
I regress to your breasts like el señor

I wish to regress into unawakening
I will then stand on the eternal longitude of the bosom

Since no light enters here
Only a still ray of blue
And the birds fly on to the tranquil ocean…or towards the sky

Light from future steps on my heart

I protest
I shall tell them… annoyed
The taste of blood will run through a channel of darkness

I will stand with my banner close to your bosom
Playboys of the future will twirl a diadem over my head-
Mermaids rise from the ashes of mountains

Like daughters of another planet..they now to talk to me…
I never took the eucharist in the cup of my hands

I came to this continent hearing of the timeland

My friends sleep in the dust

I make friends with an old motorcar
I cross the trainline
I pass to a fabric of stars

I see your face and no more

I feel your touch…
I forget that your face never changed in nightmares

You never scream ever…you just go…
Since all differences unify

They make their home in the plenum
Where no differences exist your scarf becomes a banner of love

So I find you again in amitakkshara
Like Octavio Paz in an unperturbed evening
When the tree grew within everything
In the womb of the universe
Grows a tree, with twigs and petals, fragile and trembling

The day changes color with night in Quintana Roo
The evening turns white and the day blue
Cactus turns to magic in Mexico’s foamy sands…tathastu ..amen

Magic torches men and women in the dawn
UFOs visit nightly like points of feeling
They talk to you through dream
Through ether you feel life extraterrestrial

Sperm bursts in ether

I hear the breath of my child in ether

In Tulum and cenote and subterranean lake

Streams run like thieves in aquatic tunnels

They steal the jade and sapphire of the Atlantic
Nothing is transient where waves congeal like glass

This is my land painting
This is my landscape in entangled time
The cold is here

Via Mexico

Ahora te encuentro en este cruce

En este vacio… en este bosque
Aquí estoy solitario … y curiosamente ni pareces estar aquí

Ustedes son … y no son … en el cruce de las horas,
O bien existen o no, cerca y lejos, huyen

En la imposibilidad de estar aquí y en ningún otro lugar a la vez

Tú también estás perdido en el bosque crepuscular

Aquí sólo existe el momento

El pasado se ha convertido en el momento.
Lo que sucederá está aquí en una forma de un juevo

Lo que ocurrirá surgirá del pensamiento

Lo que sucederá es el feto dentro del mujer
Incluso el pensamiento no parece existir aquí

Los perros y perras de los reyes aztecas se convierten en mariposas

La mariposa es el señor de la vida … y toma sus alas con los colores del alebrije

Aum … mi querido aum lo digo y canto … así que su imagen se hace con un ambiente

Usted no está aquí pero podría penetrar en alguna otra dimensión y vivir

Ave María a ti … Te alcanzo … te toco

Dejad que sea amén

Que mi niñez se disperse a través de sus pechos de terracota

Yo también quiero regresar a tus senos como el señor

Yo también deseo regresar a una no despertar

Entonces me pondré en la eterna longitud del pecho

Porque no entra luz aquí.
Sólo un rayo fijo de azul

Y los pájaros vuelan hacia el tranquilo océano … o hacia el cielo

Las luces del futuro construyen sus pasos a través de mi corazón

Yo protestare
Les diré … no se molesten

El sabor de la sangre correrá por un canal de oscuridad
Me quedaré con mi estandarte cerca de tu pecho

Las bellezas del futuro girarán una diadema de metal sobre mi cabeza

Las sirenas del tiempo surgirán de las cenizas de las montañas

Como hijas de otro planeta … saben hablar conmigo

Nunca tomé la eucaristía en la copa de mis manos
Acabo de llegar a este continente escuchando el sonido … del timeland
Aquí mis amigos del pasado están durmiendo en el polvo
Y aquí ahora hago amigos con un viejo automóvil

Cruzo la línea de tren para pasar a un tejido de estrellas
Puede ser para tu cara y no más

Sentir tu tacto … olvidar por qué tu rostro nunca cambió en mis pesadillas
Por qué no gritas nunca … solo ve …

Dado que aquí todas las diferencias están unificadas

Las diferencias hacen su hogar en la verdad

Las diferencias no hacen construir viviendas unifamiliares

Y donde no hay diferencias … allí tu bufanda es una bandera de amor

Y aquí te encontré de nuevo en amitakkshara.
Como Octavio Paz el poeta aquí todo creció dentro

En el vientre del universo
El árbol, las ramas y los pétalos frágiles estaban temblando

El día cambió de color con la noche … como en Quintana roo

La tarde se volvió blanca y el día azul

Todo lo que aquí se convirtió en magia … tathastu ..amen

Dado que la magia hace que los hombres y las mujeres en el amanecer

Y los ovnis visitan todas las noches como puntos en el noroeste

¿Sabías que eran de otro planeta …?
Que podrían hablar contigo a través del sueño

¿Los has oído hablar a través del éter, la palabra

A través del éter sientes la vida dentro
A través del éter el esperma estalla hacia afuera

A través del éter se escucha el aliento de su hijo

Aar tulum hoe ote jogot … .cenote ek hrod …
Y el mundo se convierte en Tulum puede ser ….
Corrientes corren como ladrones en el túnel oscuro y sin manchas

Así en esta historia de caminar aparece el jade … y luego un zafiro

Nada más es … la onda transitoria congela como el vidrio

Esta es mi tierra, este mi mundo, esto y nada más en continua oscuridad

El frio esta aqui

Ben Mazer: Poems in Quarantine

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Ben Mazer was born in New York City in 1964. He was educated at Harvard University, where he studied with Seamus Heaney and William Alfred, and at the Editorial Institute, Boston University, where his advisors were Christopher Ricks and Archie Burnett. Following graduation, he entered the Editorial Institute at Boston University to focus on textual scholarship. He is the author of several collections of poems:

  • White Cities (Barbara Matteau Editions, 1995)
  • Poems (Pen & Anvil Press, 2010)
  • January 2008 (Dark Sky Books, 2010)
  • New Poems (Pen & Anvil Press, 2013)
  • The Glass Piano (MadHat Press, 2015)
  • December Poems (Pen & Anvil Press, 2016)
  • February Poems (Ilora Press, 2017)
  • Selected Poems (MadHat Press, 2017)

He is edited the following collections of poems:

  • Landis Everson’s Everything Preserved: Poems 1955–2005 (Graywolf Press, 2006), winner of the Poetry Foundation’s first Emily Dickinson Award.
  • Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (Harvard University Press, 2010)
  • The Collected Poems of John Crowe Ransom (Un-Gyve Press, 2015)
  • The Uncollected Delmore Schwartz (Arrowsmith Press, 2019).

He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is the editor of The Battersea Review. Contact: benmazer@aol.com

Special Collection: Creativity in the Time of the Pandemic 2020>>

Poems in Quarantine

Concerning Lviv

Inevitably and every night in dreams
I leave my home to seek some far off course
at a fast but investigative pace
surprised by vistas intimate and vast
along the way–some places I have known
or known by rumour or discovery
know as cognition. (The history picture books
imagining the disappearing cities
contend with the primary, the parental.)
Some third world country
a surprise return to England
or the vast reaches of the west–
generally by ship during tsunami
at the crowded and famous ports
filled with crooks and conmen
meeting for dinner in the Italian restaurant
of the port authority concourse.
Nearby, Boston’s chic buildings
and places for posh people gathering
of my father’s generation in the sixties
when he had an office there in Harvard Square
and drove a red MG convertible around Boston
with me in the sun to the buildings at MIT
where he posted an ad for the old volkswagen.
Or other–far–residential areas–where I
knew forgotten people of the ’80s or ’90s.
Strangely familiar sites of once incredible revelation.
A place to be returned to for the memory it gives.
A memory to be remade before the dream breaks.
A city to be rebuilt. Victoria Amelina’s “vanishing city”
is the city of artists, of those who find it difficult
to communicate or be truly understood
and therefore are duly traumatized angels,
inhabitants of Lviv’s censorious castle,
the loveliest of princesses who is my own ideal,
sheer capital of the world, Austro-Hungarian empire,
the vanishing jew, his salt and herring mania–
bloodlands that are lost to history,
unspeakable histories and no golden age.
But fighting now to get behind enemy lines
I have to find the one I am in love with
to bring her back over the border
but first a series of explorations of neighborhoods
to find the familiar old accommodations
or else in the parallel dream the mountainous regions
of the west shed odd demographic statistics
to give a strength to each one of my plans
so that they all tie together at the end.
There are visits to cultural institutions
where ballets are performed or multimedia film
at cliff’s edge reaching to a violet sea
where I declared my love once years ago.
And here with respite we meet for a bit
before the long journey all the way home
giving me time to make plans with Nikolayev
to score supplies and meet at ground zero
accommodations Katia and he inherited–
temporary, enough for a meeting of minds.
Then there are issues to be cleaned up
concerning chiefly the inevitable discovery of books
in old storage, famous and histrionic storage,
friends of Christopher’s, scions of the middle west,
old Cambridge hotspots long lain undisturbed,
this was just a town when I moved in,
old-timers who knew Delmore or Eliot,
laughing gas in damp and musty attics,
the unsealed boxes, now put up for sale–
titles forgotten, no example had ever existed,
titles never even recorded,
manuscript materials, clippings and newscuts,
ah, the locally privately printed.
These auctioneers are manuscripts themselves,
genealogical studies, men of fame,
coming from towns pf western Massachusetts
to smiling put their fathers up for sale,
bringing me in for the day from the distant township
(hard to find a coffee or donut at midnight)
recently arrived in turmoil and turbulent waters
eluding those who most would like to kill me
and finding signs of Philip in advance
(our true meeting will be understood
as eternity held in contemplation
in the hours before the sentencing of fate)–
when I wake, no memory of the ultimatum.

Poem

The backyard where I sat all night to write–
an ocean of green, green trees, green grass, bright lights
from all the windows surrounding me in sight;
ten years ago these were my favorite nights.
Scintillating and resplendent stars
align in pine cone silhouette or firs
or birds or squirrels, points the spectrum screens
for yellow and red dominating greens,
that lusher forest, yellow under the light,
writ for a woman, who was unduly light,
no matter at all, for I was in the glow
of happiness and reading, in the know
with great ideas, ways of feeling ill,
my patterned studies, incomparable still.

Poem

Oh man, that would be swell. Stray shards of glass
confining and consigning numbers in the light
turned it a hue of green. I wonder what you mean
to lament his death by drowning now
now I hear coughing in the other room,
his eyes were dead lights, cords of rope his arms,
the bloodless nerves raw and exposed,
eaten away by the sea, where children play
and wander too far to the great dark deep–
a shovel hits the bottom of the sea.
And bounces where two sharks swim blithely by.
This positive privation fills his mind
at day’s end, did I say it was day’s end?
Night after night his family pulled the blind
so autumns passed only by the slickering sound
of headlamps rearing round the window’s curve
in ghost glass covered by fishbowl curtain.

Poem

Poetry had stopped. The sky in the new city
was drained of color. Ice encased the trees.
The people slept. The sky was drained of sleep
and consciousness. It was the single witness
of all my little books piled in the dark
and candle-swirling light-storm of my room;
all night strange seas churned underneath the rug.
People who don’t exist meet, fall in love;
these parallels marked by an earlier time
have random places in time’s slow and sifting
annunciation of our proper tone.
The storm-starred mother hackles to the throne;
confessions broke off when Rimbaud arrived.
Invisible in the snow, the daily rounds,
to recognize the salience the rain spells.
Morning ascends. This caw caw almost spring
was early in our own day a beginning.

Poem

Bubonic man is doing what he can,
just like a New Yorker cartoon, a New Yorker,
on a sofa, with a dog, a mate, a martini,
going by day to the office, peering in bookshops, buying flowers,
in his middle of the night fantasies,
peering over the towering gates
of the millionaire’s identical estates,
for a view of the millionaire’s view;
it is his knowledge that we rue,
the loss of things held out of view.
We lived these things again and again,
deep in the mirrored and reversed
dividing corridor, cancelled, thrust
in a language that we detest
outside of caricature, to the fringe
of bent illusion, heaven-sent
velocity and its restraint,
pinhole pinnacle corporeant.
I am deriving into view
of the housewrecks that I knew;
upward lined along the sea,
cars stalled unto eternity.
The bearded men with backs burned red,
the babies screaming in the sun,
their mothers wiping them with cloth,
the furious traffic of each one.
Many a painting has evinced
this scene, all in museums now,
or in the hands of millionaires
who are not seen, conspiring to
effect a cold spring. When the furious sun
attacks with pleasantries those on the run
or murders nihilists with happiness,
we dare not ever think we shall surpass
the millionaire in privacy his loss–
his colleges, his papers, and his pass;
annually I pray he be my boss.
These ruminations mount on global stress.
It leaves a gold dust waning in its wake,
a wealth of wonder party to the take
of channeled numbers. Rivers calculate
access accessed in its frozen state
in berried bearings. Otters huddle low
in riverbank houses. Wagner whirls the stars,
effusions of the gong-like Hamilcars
that pierce the universe with echoings
the vast declining corridor still sings.
Take Hamlet peering out now on his break,
angry about Ophelia, OCD,
whose tread is somewhat silent for our sake,
what is the gulf-like stress, disparity,
reordering our minds that’s here at play,
fascinating, riveting, manhole covers off,
Chaplin escaping? Remember the policeman’s cough.
Lately the war news is not good. Humanity
is once again perched in convexity
with history. The numbers are not good
for scholars peering through a lens of wood.
Still, history tells us plainly, if we look,
and look with seeing, full of the landscape,
its predecessors, playing back the tape,
all eyes on Hamlet, watch him leave again,
it is his entrance, banishing the when
from Gulliver’s marble bathtub, rose scent soap,
the other travellers stay in this hotel
till they can’t pay or aren’t feeling well,
but those with serious intent find unused corners
to pen quick letters, sometimes one line warners,
plainly, plainly, time of the dispatch,
while people stand around and sometimes watch.

Poem

What is it? What is the wind doing? Nothing.
Open the door a little. I’m alone.
I want some fresh air and the sounds of birds,
on this back terrace. The rolling of the smoke–
to some it has become a party joke.
It’s rained for twelve days now. More. Fifteen.
The smell of flowers, then the wind dies. Wharves
down by the ocean where they sell fried fish
and baited hooks, old veterans took their looks.
Too ill with a nervous condition to reply,
I made a note of their particular forms
which informed nothing, and sank back where it came from.
I am well rehearsed at the old norms,
I am the purveyor of Romantic storms,
dry and classical in my ideal,
aesthetic and embodying what I feel,
in a rotation I wait for friends–
one by one we stroll and make amends
for being different, being late, for having missed you;
a greater weight comes when I say I kissed you.
But all is as it was so long ago.
I like the study of a little text.
A sentence or a phrase would suit me best
to nail ideas coming from the next
exemplary new world for which we test.
As I say, they rotate, one by one–
I wait for them to wake,
and wonder at philosophy for their sake.

Published on April 12, 2020. © Author. 

Poems in the midst of crisis

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237 views

Dr. Albrecht Classen is University Distinguished Professor and Undergraduate Advisor in the Department of German Studies, University of Arizona. Dr. Albrecht Classen was born near Bad Hersfeld in Northern Hesse, Germany. He studied at the universities of Marburg, Erlangen (Germany), Millersville, PA (USA), Oxford (Great Britain), Salamanca (Spain), Urbino (Italy), and Charlottesville, VA (USA). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1986. He has a broad range of research interests covering the history of medieval and early modern German and European literature and culture from about 800 to 1800. He has published more than 105 books, for articles: more than 710, and reviews: ca. 2600. Apart from his poems, he has also published two volumes with satires (2018 and 2020). He is the editor of Mediaevistik and Humanities- Open Access.Online, and book review editor of Trans-Lit2. He has served four times as President of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association.
In 2012 he published two new volumes of his own poetry in German:
(together with Th. Moedriach), sprachbrücken: Gedichte von Tucson bis nach Gottschee (II) (Gottschee: Thomas Schuster, 2012), 85 pp.
(together with Th. Moedriach), Grenzgänger: Gedichte von Tucson bis nach Gottschee (II) (Gottschee: Thomas Schuster, 2012), 91 pp.
A new volume, Hawaiische Impressionen, appeared in 2013. This was followed by a volume of his poems, Sonora, harte Klänge (2015). More at aclassen.faculty.arizona.edu>>

Special Collection: Creativity in the Time of the Pandemic 2020>>

Poems in the midst of crisis

April 2020

New work conditions

On the way
to my work
I bicycle alone,
in my office
I do not see anyone
all day long,
I reflect
by myself,
and write
silently
my critical text.
In the evening
I return home
without seeing
anyone on the street.

Santa Cruz

On the embankment,
ground squirrels scuffle
away into their holes
frightened by our steps.

The Jojoba bushes
bend in the gentle breeze,
and the Mesquite trees
plan their majestic coming out.

Dry riverbed,
where do you hide your water?
The near-by traffic
does not even see you.

We know
of the grandiose flow of water
after a roaring thunderstorm
here and in the distance.

Deceptively yawns
the gorge
deep below our feet,
but there are no clouds to be seen.

Quietly we wander
back to our car,
the April heat has come in,
when will the river wake up again?

Hidden Happiness

Every day
the same route
to my work,
every day
the same route
going home,
every day
I could get bored
and frustrated,
dreading the monotony
and emptiness,
the loneliness
and lack of hope.

But I am lucky,
every day
I see some new flowers
and interesting shades,
every day
I smell a new perfume
because petals have opened
and greet me with joy.
Every day
I see people jogging
and taking their dogs for a walk,
while I hear my lungs breathing
in the fresh morning air.

My glass of life
is half full
all the time,
and I drink and drink
in big gulps
this wonderful
fresh water.
There is music in the air
for those with fine ears,
and I listen and listen
thanking the great Lord.
Your piece of bread
will certainly suffice.

Haikus

Scare is everywhere,
blindness strikes, and so despair,
but what have we lost?

Evening

Deserted desert,
No one knows the direction,
Woke up from a dream.

Curfew

I thought of nothing,
my books at home gave comfort,
lonely in a cell.

Hope

My words and myself
play and live in unison
and create meaning.

Recycling weekly
people take dogs for a walk
what is going on?

I must keep writing
otherwise I would despair
my words console me

Wings of new virus
quietly cover the land
I do not give up

Evening setting
the moon rises behind clouds
spare me my dreaming

Fernweh I tell you
Heimweh I also feel much
at home and abroad

Local pantry here
a long line of hungry mouths
all humanity

Give me all your love
I’ll take it with me yonder
Together in flight,

True, I do not fear
my time is much too precious
We are here to live

Finally, sunset
what will tomorrow bring us?
there is always hope

The past is with us,
we cannot escape from it
painful memories

The bell is tolling
the morning is not waiting
pack your stuff and go

Cacti blooming fresh
none of the dying matters
life keeps going on

Hunger knocks on doors
needs no keys or my welcome
human suffering

Oh Haiku haiku
du musst wandern durch die Welt
gibst Trost und Segen

Javelinas trot
at night through the neighborhood
they are not concerned

The first pistachio
proudly displays its first leaves
the others will follow

Medieval Black Death
flight, no other remedy
and now, any change?

Darkness awaits us
daybreak arrives, rest assured
it’s all a rhythm

Do not trust the head
he does not know anything
oh bombastic fool

Day by day, we live
birds and sunshine remind us
let’s get back to work

Sing a song with me
the chorus always sounds good
we will achieve much

Does the virus smell?
How do the Acacia smell?
You choose what you like

Fern sind die Freunde
wir denken jetzt stark an sie
einsam ist keiner

So much doom and gloom
virus, we are not your prey
let’s fight, drink, and write

Do not give up hope
there is so much more to do
life is way too short

It’s tough, we all know
but we are tough as you know
let us win the war!

Moon and stars wonder
where have all the people gone
alone in hiding

City silhouette
morning sunshine fills the streets
there is no traffic
Wild flowers now grow
from every crack and hole
no one there to weed

No stopping of time
we all must grow and pass on
one chance, one life, now

And the moon rises
bright and clear above our heads
what only has changed?

Countless viruses
here on lonely Mother Earth
nine billion people

Why, if I may ask
why has this happened to us
life is contingent

Getting up at dawn
working until evening
routine and structure

St. Christophorus
pray for us in our need
we hold on to straws

Quirky internet
remains quiet, no e-mails
a pause in the world

If the Jesuits
had known of the pandemic
they might have stayed home.

Our bad politicians
have failed to act properly
their inaction brings death

The cat on the roof
has chased all the birds away
gazing down to us

Old death is passing
all cacti bloom carelessly
Spring is here to stay

Pick up the old book
wisdom is never aging
we learn from verses

Moon in the dark sky
sun in sapphire clothing
the flowers wake up

I just can’t help it
my words tumble forth in Spring
verses in the air

Published on April 12, 2020. © Author. 

 

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