Welcome Basque Poet Kirmen Uribe

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on September 20, 2013

KirmenUribeLittle Star’s own Kirmen Uribe will be appearing at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, September 22, 2013 (12:00, noon, in the Brooklyn Borough Hall Community Room, 209 Joralemon Street). He will be reading and joining a panel on “Cities and their Ghosts, Past and Future: What phantoms continue to haunt the landscape of our cities and our dreams? And how will these apparitions appear to us in the future, in a world even more shrouded in mystery?” It’s moderated by Valeria Luiselli, who is also supposed to be great.

Read a poem by Kirmen in this week’s Little Star Weekly! In it he broods a bit on taking a small, old language new places.

Meanwhile—here is a list of his appearances in New York (See Euskal Kultura: Basque Heritage Worldwide site for more details):

Friday, September 20: CUNY Graduate Center, dialogue with Esther Allen (translator, by the way, of LS’s José Manuel Prieto) and Guz Jimenez, 6 PM

Sunday, September 22: Brooklyn Book Festival

Monday, September 23: Reading with Music, Poet in New York at the Bowery Poetry Club

How often do you get to hear poetry in Basque? Uribe’s first book of poems was hailed as a “quiet revoution” in Basque literature. It received Spain’s Spain’s Premio de la Critica and sold out within a month of publication. Its translation by poet Elizabeth Macklin, Meanwhile Take My Hand, was the first literary work translated directly from the Basque to be published commercially in the US; it was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.  (Read him on the centuries-old tradition of Basque poetry and the fate of the language today here.) He and Macklin collaborated on two CD/book compilations combining Basque poetry, prose, music, oral history, and video:  Zaharregia, txikiegia agian (Too Old, Too Small, Maybe) and Bar Puerto.

Uribe’s innovative novel Bilbao-New York-Bilbao also created a sensation in Spain (it was published simultaneously in Spanish, Galician, and Catalan translation) and won the National Prize of Literature in 2009. His most recent novel  is Lo que mueve el mundo (2013).

His translator, Elizabeth Macklin, is the author of two books of poems, more recently You’ve Just Been Told. She is currently at work on translations of his more recent poems (of which four appeared in Little Star #3 and one in the current Little Star Weekly) and his novel Bilbao-New York-Bilbao.

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Three Ways of Looking at Rilke: Cadora, Snow, Brodsky

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on September 13, 2013

This week in Little Star Weekly a new translation of Rilke’s New Poems by Joe Cadora, with an introduction by Robert Hass, prompts us to revisit one of its most startling and enduring poems, “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.”

We offer Cadora’s translation:

That was the fantastical mine of the soul.
Like the reticent ore of silver, like veins
through its darkness they sped. Among those roots
sprang the blood that flowed toward mankind,
appearing hard as porphyry in the darkness.
Else there was nothing red…

And also Edward Snow’s

This was the souls’ strange mine.
Like silent silver ore they wandered
through its dark like veins. Between roots
the blood welled up that makes its way to men,
and it looked hard as porphyry in the dark.
Nothing else was red…

Read more in Little Star Weekly

Snow’s version most recently appeared in a volume called The Poetry of Rilke (2009), with a beautiful introduction by Adam Zagajewski, from which we excerpted here on Little Star. Snow’s version first appeared in a two-volume hardcover edition of New Poems from North Point Press in 1984. 

Rilke’s New Poems famously came at the fertile moment in his career, when, in newly twentieth-century France, he’d just signed on as Rodin’s secretary and, flush with new realizations from the experience of visual art about creating a poetry bound to “thingness” (a Dinggedicht), was writing not only a new kind of poetry but also Letters to a Young Poet, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and his formative letters on Cezanne. The transports of the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus lay in the future.

Both North Point and Cadora’s publisher, Copper Canyon were smallish West Coast publishers with big traditions of publishing poetry and translation.  (North Point continues as an imprint of FSG, but its founder Jack Schumacher departed to found Counterpoint.) Both also, hurray, reproduce the German originals on facing pages. Here are a few lines:

Das war der Seelen wunderliches Bergwerk.
Wie stille Silbererze gingen sie
als Adern durch sein dunkel. Zwischen Wurzeln
entsprang das Blut, das fortgeht zu den Menschen…

We took our “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes” reflections one step further with some passages from a 1994 essay on the poem by Joseph Brodsky.  The essay appeared in his last book of prose, On Grief and Reason, along with considerations of poems by Frost and Hardy. Brodsky refers to J. B. Leishman’s 1964 translation, which has the distinction of preserving Rilke’s iambic pentameter (“That was the strange unfathomed mine of souls. / And they, like silent veins of silver ore / were winding through its darkness”). Auden praised versions of Rilke Leishman made in collaboration with Stephen Spender in The New Republic in 1939.

The poems Brodsky considers by Rilke, Frost, and Hardy all address a love that reaches across the boundary of death. One remembers Brodsky’s description of poetry itself as the extension of our cognitive reach into the inanimate—or infinite. In “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes,” the infinite turns its back on her addresser, and Brodsky catches in the moment the ache of the lover forgotten. As in another landmark poem for him, Milosz’s “Elegy for N. N.,”

No, it was not because it was too far
you failed to visit me that day or night.
From year to year it grow in us until it takes hold,
I understood it as you did: indifference.

For oblivion is “the first cry of infinity.”

—translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Lawrence Davis

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Mark Strand, visibly

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on September 3, 2013

Paintings by poets often present mysterious correspondences, and a new opportunity to consider these arrives with a show of Mark Strand’s collages, about to open in the Lori Bookstein Gallery.

The exhibition includes fifteen collages Strand made in Madrid and New York between 2011 and 2013. He makes his own paper at Dieu Donné with the help of master papermaker Sue Gosin, combining his own blend of linen rag and Abaca pulp from the Philippines and painting the still-wet paper with his hands, paint brushes, and squirt bottles, before drying, tearing, and assembling it into collages. (You’ll be seeing one on the cover of Little Star #5, out this November.) Strand’s collages have also been exhibited at the James Cohan Gallery in Shanghai.

One is reminded of a recent exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy gallery of the paintings of Elizabeth Bishop (considered here by William Benton), which seemed at once so familiarly hers and so startling and new. The Tibor de Nagy gallery, for its part, has a storied history of chronicling the shared destinies of poets and painters.

Strand-watchers, meanwhile, may remember the series of enigmatic island etchings that he exhibited in the late 1990s.  There are a few of them in Bowdoin’s art gallery, and a variant showed up on the cover of his book Blizzard of One (”to stare at nothing is to learn by heart / what all of us will be swept into”).

He has also written about Hopper, William Bailey, and figurative painting generally in The Art of the Real.  Hear him speak about Vermeer and Chardin in this lecture at The Frick in 2010. (Strand’s most recent book of poems is Almost Invisible.  Hear him read poems from it at a Little Star Salon in 2011.)

A common thread among these painters, Strand’s own art, and his poems might be found in a comment he made to More Intelligent Life a few years ago, “I do admire many of the same traits in poetry as in painting. Oddly enough, one of them is reticence.”

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Mark Strand, Collage (2013).
Courtesy Lori Bookstein Fine Art

See Mark Strand’s collages on the cover of Little Star #5 and on Little Star Weekly for March 6, 2013, and December 6, 2013

MARK STRAND: COLLAGES
September 05, 2013–October 05, 2013
Lori Bookstein Fine Art | 138 Tenth Avenue | New York, NY 10011 | 212.750.0949 | info@loribooksteinfineart.com

A full-color catalogue of the exhibition with an essay by Francine Prose is available. A book of Strand’s collages is to be published by Vif Éditions, Paris, later this year.

Online Exhibition Press Release

 

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Joy Williams, Argos—a new parable

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on August 30, 2013

I had waited for my absent master for twenty years and when he returned he came in the guise of a beggar, a mangy tramp, a bag of bones. This was calculation, this deception, the final triumphant wile of the wily Ulysses. I alone recognized him. I thumped my tail in joy though I hadn’t the strength to drag myself an inch toward him.

He did not acknowledge me. He did not place his hand on my bony head or stroke my withered flanks. A friendly touch from him would have meant the world to me of course. I had often dreamed of his return, which I had long associated with happiness. I cannot tell you why his wife and son did not take care of me those long years or why their servants were so cruel. There is much that animals do not understand…

Read more this week in Little Star Weekly

Joy Williams is the author of four novels and three collections of short stories, most recently Honored Guest, and has been a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize nominee. Her 99 Stories of God was recently released electronically as a Byliner original. “Argos” will appear next month in xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths, edited by Kate Bernheimer. (See our recent post.) We noticed a couple of years back that she kept showing up as a “favorite writer over forty” among The New Yorker’s “20 under 40.”

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The prodigious Kate Bernheimer

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on August 28, 2013

Kate Bernheimer, whose story “Goodnight” we feature in Little Star Weekly this week, has more going on than can possibly be expressed in one tiny author’s note.

First of all, her anthology, xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths, is due out in a month. It is a follow-up to her widely admired previous anthology My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales, which won the World Fantasy Award. Look at the writers she has lined up for this enterprise!  Little Star’s own Kathryn Davis, Joy Williams, and Sigrid Nunez, plus Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Neil Labute, Rikki Ducornet, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Chris Adrian, Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth McCracken, Michael Cunningham, Aimee Bender, Sheila Heti, and a whole lot more.

But she should know, as the founding editor of Fairy Tale Review.

Meanwhile, another section of the novel-in-progress, Happy Hour, of which her Little Star story is a part, will appear as a chapbook this fall under the title Floater from Origami Zoo Press, with illustrations by Noah Saterstrom. Happy Hour will join her four previous novels and two books of stories, the most recent of which, How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales, is due this spring from Coffee House Press.

Plus—pant, pant—her second children’s book (her first was a PW book of the year), The Girl Who Wouldn’t Brush Her Hair, will also be published this fall.

If all this sounds a bit exhausting for the last week of summer, just download Little Star Weekly and see how the ancient and the new coalesce in Kate’s lyrical, mysterious story.

It is most interesting to us at Little Star to see these old ways of telling stories revive themselves in new young voices.

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My Father’s Apartment, by Michael Kimball

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on August 22, 2013

Sometimes in the summer, my father would make us all get in the family car and then he would drive us around on these country roads. All I really remember from those drives is how each of us looked out our own open window—that and how loud the wind could be and how the wind would begin to sting my face after a few miles. Eventually, my father drove the whole family apart, but him being dead brought all of us back together again.
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In the Houston airport, I bought a Mars bar because I was hungry and because my father liked Mars bars. He used to keep them in the pockets of his sport coats.
I ate the Mars bar, but I couldn’t really taste it. It should have been sweet, but it tasted stale. I ate the whole thing anyway. I didn’t think to look at the wrapper of the Mars bar until I had finished eating it. The expiration date on the bottom of the wrapper had passed.

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In the Minneapolis airport, I was the first one at the gate for the flight to Lansing. I called home, but my wife didn’t answer. I left a message for her. I sat there in one of those hard airport chairs a bunch of empty airport chairs surrounding me. What I am trying to say is, right then, I felt really alone.

Read more in this week‘s Little Star Weekly

We were overwhelmed by Michael Kimball’s valedictory Us, published in 2011. Recently it was followed up by the equally unsparing Big Ray, out this summer in paperback, from which these passages are drawn. Have a look in Little Star Weekly. (See our complete table of contents here.)

Michael Kimball is the author of The Way the Family Got Away, Dear Everybody, and Us. He is also responsible for the project Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard) and a couple of
documentary films. “My Father’s Apartment” appears in his most recent novel Big Ray, recently out in paperback. He lives in Baltimore.

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author photo by Rachel Bradley

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Welcome Tim Rutherford-Johnson

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on August 22, 2013

Little Star is really pleased to announce the arrival of Tim Rutherford-Johnson as a new host for Little Star Radio, the weekly new music feature of our app, Little Star Weekly.

Each week Little Star Weekly brings readers a portable dose of poetry, prose, music, and art, delivered to your iPhone or iPad.  Issues can be ordered individually or by subscription in the app store. A directory of our back issues is available on our site.

As “The Rambler,” Tim has blogged about contemporary music since 2003. He is editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Music and is writing a book on modern music after 1989. He also writes regularly for New Music Box.

Here’s a recent piece he wrote for New Music Box on Steve Reich.

This here’s one from last year on music and silence. He’s putting on a concert drawing on that piece at Kings Place in London with Apartment House, September 22, 2013.

Our current issue offers his first installment, Richard Barrett’s “inward.” Download the app from the app store and have a listen!

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Tim Rutherford-Johnson and Apartment House

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Duplex, by Kathryn Davis

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on August 16, 2013

Now the streetlights came on. It wouldn’t be dark for a while yet, though the sky already felt like it was filled with coming darkness. Miss Vicks had gotten up from the bench and was preparing to cross the overwide section of road between the lot and the holly bush at the foot of the street, waiting by the curb to let the sorcerer’s car pass. She was pretending not to notice him, to keep her eyes cast down as if intent upon her dog, but he could feel the force of her interest. The sycamore trees were taller now, full of nests; the street was lined with parked cars and the sorcerer was driving too fast. He always drove too fast, not because he was in love with speed but because his mind was somewhere else.

Tonight the sorcerer’s mind was on Marjorie Vicks— dear old Vicky—whose presence in his life had aroused a problem neither one of them could have anticipated or understood the full implications of. The problem already existed, its dark taproot extending deep into the future, its immense bloom already a thing of the past. Their affair had been a mistake, the sorcerer thought. A little breeze blew open the door of the Darling house, letting out lots of children. The sorcerer drove over a pothole; a shadow leaped from between two parked cars. It was twilight and there was the sound of a bump. The papers on the back seat came flying in a white fan around him.

He turned off the engine. How could this have happened? The community association had tried and failed to impose alternate side of the street parking. Some people had too many children and some people didn’t have enough. There was no question the street had too many cars. The sorcerer stepped out of his car and looked to see if anyone was watching. There were procedures for fixing things like this but the last thing in the world he needed was an audience…

Read more in this week’s Little Star Weekly!

Kathryn Davis’s seventh novel, Duplex, will be published by Graywolf in September. She’ll be reading all over! Go have a listen:

Sunday, September 1st @ 2:30 PM / AJC Decatur Book Festival, Decatur, GA
Monday, September 16th @ 7:00 PM / Boswell Book Company, Milwaukee, WI
Wednesday, September 18th @ 7:00 PM / Magers & Quinn Booksellers, Minneapolis, MN
Wednesday, September 25th @ 7:00 PM / Community Bookstore, Brooklyn, NY
Sunday, October 6th, panel @ 12:00 PM, reading @ 2:00 PM / Wordstock Book Festival, Portland, OR
Monday, October 7th @ 7:00 PM / Elliott Bay Book Co, Seattle, WA
Wednesday, November 6th @ 7:00 PM / Left Bank Books, St. Louis, MO

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Days in the History of Silence, by Merethe Lindstrøm

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on August 12, 2013

I catch sight of the empty chair where Simon usually sits and sleeps. As recently as yesterday I watched him. His face, with sleep smoothing out all his facial features, I looked at the shoulders that seem shrunken, and the one leg he always stretches out a little, the hand with the wedding ring. When I left him this morning at the day care center, I felt an impulse to take his hand and feel it, I had the idea that if I held it exactly like that, it would be like an unbreakable bond, not skin and bone, but a different contact, that other contact, the one that has always been there. Before the silence. But I had problems holding his hand, I could not manage it because I was afraid of being seen or of seeing myself in that way. Perhaps it is only I who feels that gaze upon us.

It makes you feel naked, seeking out others and asking for help. Suddenly you are walking along unfamiliar corridors and opening doors. A group of people sits just waiting for you, but no one thinks there is anything wrong, at least anything unexpected. Only this silence.

I recall something Simon told me before he became old, before this irritating silence, that one of the earliest impressions he remembered clearly was the worn timber floor in the apartment where his family lay in hiding during the Second World War, how the rooms were tiny like boxes with doors, a playhouse where it was rarely possible to play. The walls of brown wood, the roof where he could lie looking up, with a feeling that everything was sinking or being sunk, toward them, inside them, through them, and everything linked to a feeling of guilt the origin of which he did not know, but that probably had a connection with his impatience at that time. The hiding place in a middle-sized city in Central Europe, a place where they stayed week after week, month after month. A place of safekeeping he could not endure and had begun to regard as a threat, since he seldom noticed anything of the actual danger. He quarreled with his parents, his younger brother, he was ten years old and hated being cooped up inside the tiny rooms. It felt as though the world had shriveled, as though it had contracted and would never contain or comprise anything other than these three small chambers, of a size hardly bigger than closets and the few people who lived in them, in addition to the helpers or wardens who came and went.

While they lived in this condition that has to be called imprisonment, Simon told me, they had to remain quiet. Silence was imposed on them, him, his brother, his parents and the two other people who stayed there. Their bodies had already adjusted to a subdued way of moving that never released its grip later, but became part of them, of their body language. They obtained a greater understanding of subtle changes in expression, becoming accustomed to observing others in that way, he noticed how his parents could look at each other as though they were able to transfer thoughts between them, nodding at what the other seemed to be saying; the adults could conduct what appeared to be lengthy conversations in this fashion, simply consisting of facial expressions, fleeting nods or other movements of the head or face, a raised eyebrow, a grimace. It was especially important at certain times of day when there were lots of other people moving around in the building, for example a physician whose office was directly below, who no longer had a large practice actually, but still received the occasional patient. At these times, that eventually stretched out to apply to the entire day, the night, they had really only each other to react to. Simon and his brother. The restrictions, being kept indoors, affected everything they did, everything felt constrained, everything they thought, drew, wrote, and tentatively played. 

Read more this week in Little Star Weekly!
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Merethe Lindstrøm is the author of several collections of short stories, novels, and a children’s book. She received the Norwegian Critics’s Prize for Literature and the Norwegian Youth Critics’s Prize for Days in the History of Silence, her first book to be translated into English. She lives in Oslo. Anne Bruce has previously translated the work of Wencke Mühleisen, Jørn Lier Horst, and Anne Holt.

 

 

 

 

Author photo by Ellen Lande Gossner

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The Impulse Wants Company: A new work in poetry, music, and dance

Posted by Ann Kjellberg on August 11, 2013

New York City Ballet’s Troy Schumacher founded BalletCollective in 2010 to stage collaborative works of art incorporating dance, music, literature, and visual art in an intimate setting with live musical performance.  Little Star Weekly this week features BalletCollective’s most recent work, “The Impulse Wants Company,” with a libretto by Cynthia Zarin, score by Ellis Ludwig-Leone, and choreography by Mr. Schumacher. Text, music, and choreography were composed collaboratively and evolve in performance. Read the poem and listen to the score in our weekly app.

Poet Cynthia Zarin, whose poems have appeared in our print issues and one of whose memoir-essays was serialized in the very first issues of the weekly, was commissioned by Ballet Collective to write a poem with a view expressly to its manifestation in dance: the performance does not literary represent the characters or narrative of the poem, but responds to the text as it might to music.

“The Impulse Wants Company” will appear at the Joyce Theater’s Ballet 6.0 Festival on August 15 and 16. Buy tickets here

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Photographs by Christopher Starbody

Cynthia Zarin is the author of, most recently, An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History and The Ada Poems.

Choreographer Troy Schumacher has been a dancer with New York City Ballet since 2005. He has created original works for the Atlanta Ballet’s trainee program, the 92nd Street Y Fridays at Noon series, and as a resident for The New York Choreographic Institute and the School of American Ballet.

Composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone has written for a wide variety of ensembles and soloists including The Declassified, JACK Quartet, Fifth House Ensemble, and Lavinia Meijer. He is the songwriter and bandleader for Brooklyn-based band San Fermin, whose self-titled debut LP will be released by Downtown Records this September.

Led by artistic director and cellist Clarice Jensen, the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME) is dedicated to the outstanding performance of masterworks from the 20th and 21st centuries, primarily the work of American composers.  ACME has performed at (Le) Poisson Rouge, Carnegie Hall, All Tomorrow’s Parties in England, The Kitchen, Whitney Museum, Guggenheim, and Stanford Lively Arts in California, among others.

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