Little Star Journal | A journal of poetry and prose

“for the marathon dead and wounded,” James Stotts

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on April 21, 2013

mid april
passing manchester
the cherries have
no stones
washing their wings
in the river
wind
not nearly
as material as
those bald
merrimack pylons
i am the maculate
receipt
of bestial capital
and care
barely thirty
but i can already
feel the worms
between my legs
the black mold
fastened
to my bones
and in my memory
it was
the same hour
as the cherries
the finish line
burst into flower

Also by James Stotts
Poems in Little Star #1 (2010) and Little Star #2 (2011)
Poems in Little Star Weekly #3
Since, O’er Books, order here

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Welcome Les Murray!

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on April 18, 2013

photo by Graham Carter

Les Murray is in the States on a rare visit of reading and teaching. He will appear at the Poetry Foundation on April 25, details here.

Little Star has been honored to publish lots of recent poems by Les Murray. To celebrate his visit, we reproduce the whole crop in the current issue of our app.

Here is “Daylight Cloth,” the very first poem in the first issue of Little Star.

Daylight Cloth

September morning. White is salient.

The unfocussed wet hover of dawn

has cleared the treetops. In high bush

the ski season packs up, tent by tent,

and the Cherokee rose, its new seams

hitched up rather than pruned

overlaps its live willow easel,

a daylight cloth pelted in white creams.

Minute blossoms of fruit

emerge from lichen’s brown wheeze

that has gathered in their trees.

Burnt-off paddocks have gone out

and the sky is bluer for it.

Beyond the sea coast, rebirthed

4-wheel drives tilt, below,

on the tail ends of big seas.

Les Murray lives in New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Taller When Prone, which appeared alongside an updated edition of his 1996 memoir, Killing the Black Dog. After reading this book, it is impossible to read his work, or that of any other major poet, in the same way again. Read a portion of it on our blog here.

He has been honored by the Australian government with the Medal of the Order of Australia for his services to literature, and in 1998 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry for the British Commonwealth.

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Different Animals, a new play by Abby Rosebrock

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on April 12, 2013

JESSICA
Obviously I’ve heard that story since I was a kid, but the way you told it, I felt like I knew him—

WILL
Peter? That’s pretty high praise—

JESSICA
Like when people kept asking if he was with Jesus, and Peter kept being like, I don’t even know that guy.

WILL
(Agreeing) He was being kind of a jerk—

JESSICA
And how Peter’s in this sort of daze, like he’s being reckless, and he doesn’t even realize what he’s doing, when he’s denying Christ—

WILL
It’s brilliant, right? The psychology’s so modern, if you think about—

JESSICA
I bet it really hurt Christ’s feelings when Peter did that.

WILL
Well. Probably not as much as the Romans did—

JESSICA
I bet Jesus was really upset about it. Like, Man, I put so much time and effort into this guy, and he just gives me nothing in return. It’s like we don’t even have a legitimate thing going on, because he won’t acknowledge we’re like… special friends.

WILL
I’m sure Jesus got over it.

A short pause.

JESSICA
You think he was married, like people say? To Mary Magdalene?

WILL
Oh yeah, they picked a china pattern and everything. With those little fishes on it—

JESSICA
Because I wonder. Was Jesus good to her? Or was he this rugged, sorta hipster-y, intellectual… a-hole… who had everything figured out and just never felt the need to make any manner of commitment to the woman he was sleeping with?

WILL
He was pretty busy, saving mankind—

JESSICA
I mean yeah, when people called her a prostitute, I’m sure he loved getting up on his soapbox and being like, That’s not cool, guys; love your neighbor. But when they were alone together, and she was like, Okay Christ, we need to define this relationship—

WILL
Jess—

JESSICA
He probably just said some mess about not believing in labels, made her split the check at dinner—

WILL
Maybe he was a feminist—

See Abby Rosebrock’s Different Animals at the Cherry Lane Theatre, April 20 through May 26

Read a bit over the next three issues of Little Star Weekly

Read her fantastic poems in Little Star #3 (2012)

See Abby Rosebrock as Molly in her new play, Different Animals, at the Cherry Lane Theatre

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Bumper crop of classical Japanese verse in English

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on April 12, 2013

Suddenly this spring, an unexpected flowering of Japanese verse in English.

Two Copper Canyon editions of W. S. Merwin: Ten years in the making, the first complete bilingual edition of haiku from Yosa Buson (1716–1783), the successor to Basho and one of the great Haikuists of the Edo period, translated in collaboration with Takako Lento

Plus a reissue of of Merwin’s 1989 translation, with Soiku Shigematsu, of the work of zen monk Muso Soseki (1275-1350), with an extensive introduction by Merwin describing Soseki’s singular career as a monastic, advisor to emperors, and poet-gardner

Meanwhile, just published, David Young’s new translations of poet–vagrant Matsuo Basho (1644–1694)

And, coming in August, Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years, edited by Jim Kacian, Philip Rowland, and Allan Burns, with Pound, Stevens, Reznikov, Winters, L. Hughes, Cummings, Ginsberg, Kerouac, R. Wright, Dag Hammarskjöld (!), Ammons, Wilbur, Ashbery, Heaney, Muldoon, and of course Merwin, Rexroth, and Snyder.

A great chance to compare and consider the translation of very resistant genres. Here, for example is an interesting solution by Merwin and Shigematsu: they break down the lines of the traditional four-line gatha, a poetic form that followed Buddhism from China to Japan, into three parts, reflecting how the poems would have been chanted by Zen monks, and still are:

Cradled in the breast of this mountain
I have forgotten
its original wildness

Day after day
watching the sea
I have never seen its depths

From #8, “Thanks for Daisen Osho’s Visit,” Sun at Midnight, by Muso Soseki, translated by W. S. Merwin and Soikuy Shigematsu

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Our new app Little Star Weekly is here!

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on April 9, 2013

A mini mobile literary magazine for your iPhone or iPad.

In each issue:
Little Star Radio: A musical selection by critic Alex Ross
Little Star Gallery: An image from painter Mary Weatherford
A poem, a piece of prose, and a literary serial, plus or minus

Issue #1
James Kelman
Seamus Heaney
Cynthia Zarin (Part 1)

Issue #2
Gerbrand Bakker
Paul Muldoon (songs)
Cynthia Zarin (Part 2)

Issue #3: AWP special
Collage by Mark Strand
Rosanna Warren on Max Jacob, Evan Rehill, Alice Fulton, James Stotts, Melissa Green , Glyn Maxwell
Cynthia Zarin (Part 3)

Issue #4
Lydia Davis
Eliot Weinberger
Nikolai Leskov, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky

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“Story,” by Robert Walser

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on April 5, 2013

A girl and a young man were very unhappy. He was supposed to abduct her, but hadn’t quite made up his mind. She wanted to be abducted, but already suspected how difficult this might be. I don’t know in what era this transpired; at any rate, a decision was made, the hour struck, it was nighttime, of course, wind howling, the nearby woods dark as can be. Moonlight was supposed to gleam, but alas, this was not the case. And what did our lovers do? They gazed at one another for a long time, their eyes filled with doubt and apprehension. Finally they took flight, but it was as if they were fleeing their own uncertainty, and in what direction? They came to a field, the grass was fragrant, it was the time of the hay harvest. Already they began to grow weary and to feel a bit bored…

Margaret Weatherford

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on March 29, 2013

At home, we are a normal family: my parents, my brother, and me. We don’t live in Los Angeles, actually, but in Norwalk, next to the freeway. We live in one of those houses you see as you speed by or sit still in traffic, suffocating. A cracked cement patio, baby clothes stuck to dry in a chain link fence, a lemon tree black from the exhaust of a million trucks. You think, Who lives there? Who can have that life?

We don’t dry our laundry in the fence. We have a clothes line from the lemon tree to the house and a sprinkler that waves its arms like a sea anemone.

But the trucks roar by all night, my lullaby. At first they looked like devils hurrying north in their peaked, demonic wind foils. But they are so lost, so repetitious and unaware. I feel sorry for them.

You grow up thinking this is the world—heat, exhaust, a trickle of dirty water in the concrete riverbed. But how different the rest of the world must be: pebbled roads and wet sky, women in funny shoes, and the moist faces of angels looking down on you from every building and fountain.

Read more Little Star Weekly (#6)

Also in Little Star Weekly this week: Poetry by Philip Levine, a dark journey with Jeet Thayil, Little Star Radio with Alex Ross, and the Pueblo potter Maria Martinez

Margaret Weatherford’s work has appeared in Zyzzyva, Paris Review Daily, and Little Star. She died in March 2012.

Posted in News | Tagged American, Fiction | Comments Off

James Kelman coming to New York!

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on March 25, 2013

Little Star loves James Kelman. To our eye he is one of the most lyrical, subtle, inventive craftsmen of prose today. His new book, Mo Said She Was Quirky, which inhabits the mind of a woman croupier for a single inverted day, is a miracle of sympathetic intelligence. He is making a rare visit to New York this spring and we are very fortunate that he has agreed to read from the book with us in a place we love and cherish: the St. Mark’s Bookshop.

That Kelman writes in Scottish is well known, hear how he reads! And show the flag for our friends at St. Mark’s.

May 1, 2013; 7 PM
St. Mark’s Bookshop
31 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10003

James Kelman was born in Glasgow in 1946, left school at the earliest opportunity, and began working life in a factory aged 15. Emigrated with his family to California in 1963, returned to Scotland 1964. Kelman has worked at a variety of jobs ever since. He began writing while living in London aged twenty two and later met Texan writer Mary Gray Hughes. With her support his debut story collection, An Old Pub Near The Angel was published by Puckerbrush Press, Maine, in 1973. His fourth novel, How Late It Was, How Late, won the Booker Prize in 1994. His recent publications include story collections Busted Scotch and If it is your life; and novels, You have to be careful in the Land of the Free, Translated Accounts, and Kieron Smith, boy. Kelman has taught at the University of Texas in Austin, and San José State University, California.

His story “this has no title,” appeared in Little Star #3 (2012) and portions of Mo Said She Was Quirky appeared in the premiere issue of Little Star Weekly.

Kelman and his wife live in Scotland, not far from their two daughters and two grandchildren.

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Bartleby Unveiled, by Prudence Crowther

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on March 24, 2013

Bartleby laid down his pen with finality. Did he mean to finish, I asked? He would “prefer not to.” And though I promised he needn’t meet his daily quota of 7,200 words but could stick to drawing up simple eviction notices, that month he wrote no more.

Desperate to recharge the clerk’s former industry, I asked the senior scrivener, “Turkey” by nickname, for advice. His moniker derived from an ale he favored and which, with a snort, he readily recommended for what “ailed” Bartleby. I let the pun pass, for besides fair penmanship the scriveners had few other outlets for a humanity I had small objection to. But as Turkey’s sobriety was a concern, I consulted next the apothecary at No. ___ Fulton Street. His sarsaparilla had saved me once when my bowels could not finesse a goulash the landlady swore by as a specific for bachelor solitude.

The old pharmacist listened thoughtfully while I described Bartleby’s indifference to the copy he used to go at with such relish and his obsessive-compulsive need not to perform certain actions over and over. Disappearing briefly, he returned with what he called a new Wretchedness Inhibitor, made from an extract of cannabis I could bake into small cakes myself, according to the recipe he wrote out on the spot. Bartleby’s work ethic might not return, but the morbidity, he believed, would pass. I thanked him and set out to buy a mortar and pestle in the mortar-and-pestle district, then on Pearl Street.

Monday morning came and went, as was its wont. At length, with a feigned casualness, I set out my brownies…

Read more in Little Star Weekly (#5)

Prudence Crowther works on the copy desk of a business magazine in New York.

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Two American Landscapes: Lydia Davis, Eliot Weinberger

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on March 15, 2013

No Meeting
Lydia Davis

The hour of nine passes; then ten, and half past,
and there is no sound of the church bell.
Not only is there no bell on the old meeting house,
but there is also no meeting there,
for the aged pastor Underwood has retired,
the venerable figure I barely remember.
And these Sabbath days without a meeting
followed one another for weeks and months and years…

The degenerating influence of neglected ordinances
was, after a while, apparent even to myself.
A wider range was given
to my Sabbath day walks
as well as to the Sabbath reading.
A ramble to the Long Pond, halfway to Brewster,
and to the seashore on the south
were none too much
for a boy of 12 or 13 years of age.
Yet they were always taken alone.
The presence of a single person
would have broken the charm of my reveries
and disturbed my conscience.
I avoided all roads,
and the only limit of my walk
was the southern shore of the Long Pond.
From that high bank,
at whose foot the small waves were dashing
over the loose boulders of all sizes
and making their own peculiar music,
I surveyed, by the hour,
that clear sheet of blue water, three miles long,
with its high, wooded bluffs on the Brewster side.

The mothers of Israel mourned over the desolation,
and a movements was set on foot:
we engaged Mr. John Sandford of Bridgewater to preach to us.

Our Village, a memoir by Sidney Brooks (1813–1887), Lydia Davis’s great-great-grandmother’s younger brother, was among the family papers inherited by her father, and took the form of three handwritten school copybooks. Eventually donated by her father to the Harwich Historical Society, it was faithfully transcribed by volunteers, who reproduced its occasional errors, repetitions, and cross-outs, and published in 1995.

from A Journey on the Colorado River (1869)
Eliot Weinberger

And still new beauties may I see,
and still increasing light

The wind annoys us much today. Piles of broken rocks, a long line of broken cliffs, stunted cedars – ugly clumps, like war clubs with spines. A region of the wildest desolation; we name it the Canyon of Desolation.

Read more of both in Little Star Weekly (#4)

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A journal of poetry and prose