Sometimes art brings you somewhere you haven’t been – helps you understand something you haven’t yet understood or think something you haven’t yet thought – and sometimes it does that by bringing back a memory, complete with a new understanding of the past, the present, the time in-between, or a trajectory. This kind of thinking is good for the soul. The busier I get, the more I realize how important it is to take time to let my mind think. Sometimes I’ll look at a picture or piece of art and let the feelings and memories it evokes play in my mind and heart for a while. This is one of the great things about being an artist – fully engaging in that kind of thinking, even if it’s sometimes painful. I’m glad to be able to promote that kind of thinking, in both artists and readers, by sharing artists’ work with you each month. I hope their work alights the same kind of thinking in you. One of the best ways to channel this type of thinking is by translating work. I’m so happy to be able to share with you translations by one of my favorites, Claudia Serea, who has translated into English poems written by Romanian poet Ana Dragu. These poems are rich to the tongue and ear; the language is delectable, dancing, forceful, and deliberate. The poems and their words demand attention; they demand that you not sleep through them, a recurring subject of the poems. They put me on guard against wasting life. And I’m touched that in this community of poems is one in which poetry enters in an ars poetica of sorts, as a savior of sorts, though not as we might expect. These poems are powerful; they affect me.
Associate Editor Mia Avramut shares the work of a stunning poet, Derek Pollard, this month, with a very interesting interview on a wide range of topics – a wanderer’s home; writing with another until disoriented; becoming ordained as a matter of convenience; and more, all from a writer of sparkling work. Mia writes:
Let Pollard’s poems sink into the deep recesses of your mind, and undermine your worldview. They will do this with ease and grace. Just surrender.
Ms Avramut also shares wonderful prose poetry by James Claffey with us this month. Of his work, Mia writes:
Claffey’s poems, written in a bold and imaginative voice, cross all frontiers and loom over the subconscious with an undeniable force. His poetic language springs from well-digested experiences on two continents, to illuminate, in a mélange of humor and rigor, the ponderous realities of human condition.
Associate Editor Doug Van Gundy brings us an interview and authoritative poetry from poet Robert West. Doug writes:
I greatly admire the poems of Robert West, which seem like origami boxes to me – they appear simple enough until you unfold them, and then you can begin see their hidden complexity, even if you can’t quite figure out how they were made. In the accompanying interview, we discuss economy, writing rhyming poems, and why poets who specialize in shorter poems end up getting short shrift.
Associate Editor JP Reese brings us work by two wonderful poets this month. JP writes:
Rose Hunter's work has appeared in Connotation Press previously, and we welcome her back with an interesting poem this month called "Primavera." This is a poem less about taking steps at a beginning than tripping down the road toward some inevitable ending. Sometimes, language is so dense and interesting in a poem that it just pulls you along. The final line is perfect and sent a shiver through me. Enjoy.
Michelle Valois' poem "The Arbitration of Disease" is a love song to the human spirit and the desire to triumph against steep odds. Her use of personification, repetition, and most of all, irony, as the cost of what the speaker has lost mounts, is spot-on in clarifying how human beings manage disease in order to fight its ravages as best they can. This prose poem is both a hopeful and a sad paean about the struggle many people face when they are forced to experience a situation that at first may appear insurmountable. The poem contains echoes of Elizabeth Bishop's sensibility in her famous villanelle, "One Art." It is brutally honest but the in-your-face brutality is softened by the speaker's ironic sense of the absurdity of it all.
Be sure to take some time for your thoughts today. You’re welcome to start here. Come on in!