john guzlowski's Open Salon Blog

Stacy Szymaszek

Wed, 23 May 2012 11:05:40 -0400

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Stacy Szymaszek is the author of several books of poetry (Litmus Press). She is currently the artistic director of the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church in New York.

The following is an excerpt from her 2005 book of poems Emptied of All Ships

from "shift at oars"

water
relives
reservoir

boat
bottom
draft
displaced

º

lineal
thought
backward
body

no one
knows
the brains
I am now

_____

tree
an oar
origin

joints ruptured
soak in
deep ink

º

wallpaper
remnant
flower
float

chandelier

brief case
hundred words
logged

erode
my
Arabic

_____

congestion
of resin

person

forecasts
final position

restless sleep

º

width of
back
belted

sodium
poultice

exhausts
courtship

_____

agora

drain
a home
of you

wind
lashes
fronds

cellophane

º

where a
mammal
bled

activity
not yet
diffused

blackened
patch
of water

_____

weight
of oyster
in gloved
hand he
shucks

dented
pewter

º

assonance
her aspect

relocated

wind
shatters
plexi

phenomena
forgone
for me

shift
at oars

new
muscle
grown
bone

never
held
you

º

case
of dried
apricot

gorge

I am
summoned

___________________________

To read more about Ms. Szymaszek click here.

Give Peace a Chance--It's cheaper

Sun, 20 May 2012 13:05:12 -0400

How much have we put into the war in Afghanistan?

$530212045634!

I mean I can't even read that number.

Is that 500 billion?

50 billion? 500 million?

Give me a number I can understand!

$4.99?

I can understand that number and that's what I'm willing to pay for the war.

Call for Translators

Tue, 8 May 2012 08:05:00 -0400

Poet/Translator Leonard Kress is putting together an anthology of Polish poetry in translation. Here's the call he put out for translators and translations:

Translators! I would like to put together an anthology of Polish poetry (from the Middle Ages through contemporary poetry) with an emphasis on the poetic/literary value in English (no dual text). I'm thinking of work like W. H. Auden's translation of Mickiewicz's "Romanticism" or the Seamus Heaney/Baranczak versions of Kochanowski's "Treny." Before I attempt to shop this idea around, I'm curious if any of you have ideas or work you might like to see included. (I'm spurred on by the new GREEK POETS and the FSG ANTHOLOGY OF ITALIAN POETRY, though perhaps not as comprehensive. As far as I can tell there's not that much out there besides the Milosz Anthology of Modern Polish Poetry and the old Manfred Kridl Anthology of Polish Lit, etc. And though I'm surely interested in modern and contemporary, I'd also like to include lots from earlier stages. If interested, let me know and give me an idea of what poets you've translated. Please use this email address: leonard_kress@owens.edu.

___________________-

The picture above is of Adam Mickiewicz. Leonard Kress's translation of his Pan Tadeusz is available as PDF. Click here.

Time Between Trains by Anthony Bukoski

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:04:00 -0400

Anthony Bukoski's Time Between Trains: Stories, a collection of stories about working-class life in Superior, Wisconsin, was recently republished by Holy Cow Press. The following is a review of this fine book by Pamela Miller of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

It would be interesting to hit the main drag in Superior, Wis., stop a bunch of people and ask them if they know who Anthony Bukoski is. Odds are, they don’t, unless they grew up with him in that gritty, blustery town or took an English class from him at UW-Superior.

Superior is not exactly a hotbed of literati, but it’s not exaggerating to say that Bukoski is its Faulkner, and that this singular port city’s lack of refinement is one of the things he loves most about it. His collections of interlinked stories, set in its working-class homes, businesses, bars and social halls, some in the present era, some in decades past, are arresting and poignant, unsentimental but unabashedly tender.

Duluth’s Holy Cow! Press has reprinted “Time Between Trains,” the fourth of his five books, first published in 2003 by Southern Methodist University Press. Let’s hope that means more people discover Bukoski, especially the people of Superior, whom he chronicles and honors.

The book’s 13 stories are populated by rough-hewn blue-collar Polish-Americans, once the city’s

powerhouse ethnic group, for whom the harsh (but beautiful) landscape, soul-testing winters, defining ethnicity, passionate Roman Catholicism, hard work, strong drinks, vigorous polkas and a complicated mix of wistfulness and stoic acceptance of fate are defining forces.

In the title story, a quiet, self-contained rail inspector, one of the few Jews left in a town that once had a flourishing Jewish community, crosses tracks with a widowed middle-aged teacher in a beautiful and wise contemplation on self-containment, solitude, connection and chance.

In “Holy Walker,” incontinent and increasingly forgetful widow Mrs. Stella Pilsudski suffers both embarrassment and absolution at a meeting of her sodality, where she is congratulated “on her suffering and devotion to prayer.” In “Winter Weeds,” a priest is humbled by desire for a pretty Polish war refugee and expresses his forbidden feelings in the tangled religious language of sin and contrition. In “The Bird That Sings in the Bamboo,” a young man just back from Vietnam dreams of, then slowly forgets, the girl he seduced with his tales of home as they lay on China Beach.

The setting is almost always Superior, which, one character quips, “is a classroom for the study of failure,” but the stories, with their themes of love, regret, aging, disappointment and yearning, could be set anywhere, because Bukoski is a wise enough traveler in the human psyche to know that Superior, like any place well understood, can become the world.

That wouldn’t work if he were any less of a writer. His is a distinct and memorable voice, rich in wisdom and wonderment, humor and melancholy, disillusionment and hope. The Duluth press’ reprint might be just what’s needed to bring his work to the people of his beloved, complicated city, who will find in it both mirror and window.

Holocaust Remembrance Day 2012

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 11:04:13 -0400

Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah) begins in the evening of Wednesday, April 18, 2012, and ends in the evening of Thursday, April 19, 2012

I wrote the following blog a couple of years ago to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day

I can remember the Holocaust, but I can't do much more. I can't imagine it, I can't describe it, I can't understand it.

My parents weren't Jews. They weren't in the Holocaust. They were Polish Catholics who were taken to Germany to work as slave laborers in the concentration camps there. My dad spent four and a half years in Buchenwald, and my mom spent more than two years in a number of camps around Magdeburg. They suffered terribly, and they saw terrible things done to the people they loved. My mother's family was decimated. Her mother, her sister, and her sister's baby were killed outright by the Nazis. My mother's two aunts were taken to Auschwitz with their Jewish husbands and died there.

I remember asking my mother once if she could explain to me what she felt in the worst month of her worst year in the slave labor camps in Germany. All she could say was, you weren't there.

I wasn't there.

I've spent much of my life writing about the things that happened to my parents in the slave labor camps and reading about what happened in those camps and in the Nazi death camps in Poland where so many Jews died, and still I will never be able to understand or comprehend what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust.

I went to Auschwitz in 1990 with my wife Linda and our daughter Lillian. We walked around, took pictures, tried to imagine what had happened there. We couldn't. We were just tourists.

I wrote a poem about it:

Tourists in Auschwitz

It’s a gray drizzly day
but still we take pictures:

Here we are by the mountain of shoes.
Here we are by a statue of people
working to death
pulling a cart full of stones.

Here we are by the wall where they shot
the rabbis and the priests
and the school children
and the trouble makers.

We walk around some too
but we see no one.

Later, we will have dinner
in the cafeteria at Auschwitz.

We will eat off aluminum plates
with aluminum knives and forks.
The beans will be hard,
and the bread will be tasteless.

But for right now, we take more pictures:

Here we are by the mountain of empty suitcases.
Here we are in front of the big ovens.
Here we are by the gate with the famous slogan.

Here we are in front of the pond
where the water is still gray from the ashes
the Germans dumped.