Author Archives: Ann Kjellberg
Gro Dahle
I bend, cringe. I am less than a normal person. I am a child. Less than a child. I am an ape. I am a dog. Less than a dog. A cat. A rabbit. I am a turtle. A frog. No, less than a frog. A grasshopper. A …………….beetle. I am a wood louse that hides […]
P is for Poetry, a definition of sorts from Edward Hirsch
POETRY An inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language; an experience through words. Jorge Luis Borges believed that “poetry is something that cannot be defined without oversimplifying it. It would be like attempting to define the color yellow, love, the fall of leaves in autumn.” Even Samuel Johnson maintained, “To circumscribe poetry by a definition will […]
Welcome Derek Walcott!
Derek Walcott is arriving in New York for a week of readings, and we wanted to mark the occasion by rounding up all we have had to offer of his work over the years, for your delectation: • Poems in Issue #1 • Translation of a Christmas Poem by Joseph Brodsky • Performance of his play, […]
Marcelle Sauvegeot, “Laissez-moi”
A woman travels on a train from Paris to a sanatorium to be treated for tuberculosis. She is regretting leaving behind her lover; she doubts him. When she arrives she receives a letter: He is leaving her and marrying another woman. She ruthlessly studies their love, its exaltation, and the seeds of its destruction that […]
Sohrab Sepehri
This week in Little Star Weekly we feature a poem from the Persian of Sohrab Sepehri. Tonight I will say farewell. I have spoken to my neighbors through the wide-open window but don’t understand what they are talking about. Sohrab Sepehri was born in 1928 in Kashan, Iran, and was trained as a painter. In […]
Max Jacob Extravaganza!
In February 1912, the newly fledged Futurist painters (Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini—those who had signed the first two Futurist manifestos of painting), led by the poet and publicist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, had held their first Parisian exhibit, at the Galerie Bernheim, provoking several tart articles by Apollinaire. The […]
Pushkin Hills, by Sergei Dovlatov
At noon we pulled into Luga. We stopped at the station square and the tour guide adjusted her tone from a lofty to an earthier one: “There to the left are the facilities…” My neighbor pricked up his ears. “You mean the restroom?” He nagged me the entire trip: “A bleaching agent, six letters? An […]
Kantan, a story in English from a Noh drama, by Paul Griffiths
Kantan was a little place to pass through, perhaps to spend the night, at the inn a pleasant woman ran by herself. She had just the one guest room, with an alcove where the visitor could lie down, head resting on a pillow left by someone calling himself a magician. Whoever sleeps on this pillow, […]
One poem by Derek Walcott: Glyn Maxwell
Most poets, when they leaf back through their work to select the Best of Themselves, tend to want grown-ups around: poems from not so long ago, poems that show what the poet came to, what he or she did when he or she grew up, poems they can talk to. The awkward youngsters in the […]