Madinat Khalifa South

 

Mohammed El-Kurd, Social Media, Poetics, Resistance, Save Sheikh Jarrah

Anyone keeping up to date with the events in Sheikh Jarrah, even if it be a curious click during their daily media social scroll, is very likely to come across a video, interview, commentary, or tweet of the young writer and activist Mohammed El-Kurd. He and his sister, Muna El-Kurd, have become vibrant voices for Sheikh Jarrah. They are truly fearless grassroots forces in the #SaveSheikhJarrah and #freePalestine movements. As young 23 three-year-olds, both brother and sister are in the thick of it; not limiting their action and resistance to screens, but physically confronting Jewish settlers and Israeli forces in their home and neighborhood Sheikh Jarrah. Despite recent detainment and constant threats of violence and defamation to their property and bodies, they continue to participate in Instagram live sessions, and attend interviews, while unceasingly engaging their massive followings across Twitter and Instagram with first-hand information and from the ground. They advocate for an alternative narrative– the current displacement is a continuation of systematic ethnic cleansing strengthened by myopic historical narratives and continued approval of political policies that disregard international law.

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Publishing on the Margins: A Conversation with Argentine Artisan Publisher and Poet Eric Schierloh

 

I first came across Eric Schierloh’s multifaceted cultural artisanry imprint Barba de Abejas (Bee beard) when I was gifted a copy of Richard Brautigan’s Please Plant This Book. Eager to read the poems in Spanish, my then one-dimensional approach to books, I carefully opened the object unable to overlook the detail in each item. To my surprise, out fell eight envelopes from a peculiar binding that had subverted the traditional text block. Each side of the envelopes donned a poem in either Spanish or English enfolding a seed between each version of the text. Also included was a book of Schierloh’s own poetry written while representing Argentina at the Guadalajara International Book Fair and a hand-painted watercolor portrait of Brautigan. Perusing this offbeat compilation became the defining moment that began to expand my relationship with books, the written word, translation, and the circulation of it all.

Reaching ten years at the end of 2020, Barba de Abejas has released forty-six titles of more than thirty authors, and around 6,600 books along with 1,900 chapbooks—each one made by hand and including ancient text to contemporary poetry. Eric was willing to answer a few questions to discuss artisan publishing and his advocacy for publishing on the margins, outside of the industrial publishing complex.

 

Paul Holzman: What was the tipping point to go DIY and to bring the entire process into your home? Tell me about the moment you decided to plan, lay out, print, and hand-make your first book.

Eric Schierloh: It was at the end of 2010, and it had to do with two things: a certain “disappointment” regarding the dynamics of the industrial publishing system and having come across, by pure chance, the case of Ulises Carrión while in Guadalajara, Mexico. A very talented artist who transcended the frontiers of literature in order to make the manufacturing and publishing of things almost intrinsically linked to writing, Carrión speaks of the modern writer in terms of someone cut off from the material conditions of book production, and that was the exact split I had experienced publishing industrial books in small independent publishing houses. It took me a year and a half to get a grasp on all this and to teach myself the craft of editing (which includes publishing and distribution), the designing of books, and bookbinding.

CONTINUE READING HERE

Review: A Sleepless Man Sits Up in Bed

A Sleepless Man Sits Up in Bed by Anthony Seidman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Anthony Seidman’s third collection of poetry, A Sleepless Man Sits Up In Bed, unveils a liminal space parsimoniously claimed by many as a border and invites the reader not only to cross over, but to perforate the concept itself. This collection builds around objects that are seemingly mundane, like an “Uncapped Pen,” until it reaches profundity. Seidman takes something explicit and sublunary – “Coatlicue, Whose Name Means ‘Serpent Skirt’” – and sends the reader on a journey through the ancient and the modern, the past and future, the present and the nostalgic; ages, visions, and states converge in an ornate poetic wandering, submerging the reader into the ebb and flow of continuity and transformation.

Seidman’s liminal space awakened a memory of my days at the university, when I studied border cultures – specifically, the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, with its focus on the (im)possibilities of borderlands, a geographical area sensitive to hybridity. However, Seidman manifests a different approach to dialoguing about the possible domain of the borderland and proves that poetry is a veritable and noble way of engaging the linguistic hybridity, creating a completely autonomous dialogue that can flow independently. This book is a sustainment, or maybe a suspension, of this liminal area, held by a long thread stitched with poems that share rhythm and structure, with repetitions of certain words establishing a thematic backbone. Examples include the black dog, which appears multiple times in the collection – in one instance, as the soul of the poet in “2300 BC Emperor Yao” – and fronds, which recur in descriptions of a goddess’s brow and in those of a verdurous jungle.

Continue reading at the online magazine Entropy and / or View all my reviews

Poetry in translation :: Confetti-Ash Selected Poems of Salvador Novo

Buy at SPD Books!

Confetti-Ash Selected Poems of Salvador Novo

The online literature magazine Circulo de Poesía offers a glimpse into 15 of the selected poems from Confetti-Ash translated by Anthony Seidman & David Shook. The print copy, which can be purchased at SPD Books, also includes my translation of Jorge Ortega's rapt introductory essay.

read the poems

Stomach, mind, & headed to the Chino

Lists are made and
the checks go in
the boxes, please.
The comforts of order
are simple reminders,
a string on the finger,
a note on the fridge–
reminders of all the
chaos that swirls in
the sky, in the bowls
of cereal & toilettes,
the winds at the tops
of the trees, and the
flurries of our minds.
Lists of acrylic paint
secrete the fantasies
portrayed as realities,
to build us a quaint,
simple, devout Family.

Review of Uyghurland: The Furthest Exile

from Phoneme Media 

"home becomes an abyss, a perpetual flux . . ."

Spanning two decades of poetic creation, this collection of poems carefully presents Ahmatjan Osman to the Anglophone reader. Fortunately, this bilingual edition from Phoneme Media encourages the reader to take a calm and patient approach guided by a concise and chronological distribution of the author’s poems.

Initially it is hard to scope Ahmatjan Osman residing in Canada, working a blue-collared job– fork lift operator to be precise. Through a veiled and dark imagery,  the exile motif that permeates throughout the book, challenges the reader to discover. He rightly utilizes the juxtaposition of the occidental and oriental to do so. Like an invocation, Osman boldly poeticizes the seemingly mundane and marginal Western life of an outsider, an immigrant or refugee; demonstrating that this predicament cannot cage and execute the emotion, passion, and assertiveness acquired when leaving home– despite assumptions that it may dilute or be catalogued as forgotten.

The tones of desperation, nostalgia, and anxiety bleed from these pages creating a strong and potent memory or even prophecy. However, the tones are more like oil to the water– the oil as poetry and the water the milieu of the author. It is fascinating that his exile to Canada acts as crucible to forge a poetic language that characterizes the Uyghur language, and the place– or places– which it represents and remembers.

The author lacks a refuge story for the front pages, however, his voice blends an alienated world into a not so extraordinary landscape of Canada for the English reader. Osman summons a memory of home that appears to not exist, or results as mystical and oneiric. He speaks a language only known to the transparent and invisible stories that walk amongst the many oblivious denizens of the world that claims to have a home, country and nation. Unfortunately, the Westernized citizens tend to only look Far East if a garish headline story peaks the interest of the entertainment world. Ahmatjan Osman challenges this with his poetry to listen to the depths and of the common cry in all who are exiled. How many more voices could be echoing or joining this cry in the Western world? 

Uyghurland: The Furthest Exile does not depreciate, (what was mentioned as “story”); rather its poems bring a depth to all matters of modern migration that is relevant in today’s world. The rhythm and song of this collection does not clarify this abstruse theme, nor should it.  The ebb and flow of the collection declares that many exiles exist and they will not end until death, continuing on in an eternal resonation.

What happens with the displaced when justice is reached? What is the outcome when the misplaced are placed? In the shadow of these questions, Ahmatjan Osman gives voice to a being and spirit subject to undefined and dark realities that are constantly imposed upon them and become individuals exposed in foreign circumstances yet granted  the oddness place of exile. The injustice culminates in generalizations and other evasive definitions that, unfortunately, are commonplace in mass media and pop literature; from the most conventional to the most venerable.

The poet’s patience in the shadow of this predicament, and his longing to genuinely search for a new language in light of the refugee, the migrant, the foreigner, place, and home; are felt and prominent throughout this book. Furthermore, the rigorous translation of Jeffrey Yang falls nowhere short of what seems to be a noble and never-ending process. These lines and stanzas travelled thorough self-translation by Osman himself, were passed along to Yang, whom the author trusted for his refined poetic knowledge in the English language, and concluded in a fluid exchange of reciprocity and established trust that is rampantly characteristic in the entire collection. The book is a pure and timeless creation between two dedicated individuals that are bound by a sturdy trust. This indispensable relationship between Yang and Osman present the poems to the curious and novice reader with an experience of reading Uyghurland with a clear sense of familiarity; breaking borders and resonating in a liminal space– possibly named exile. This accessibility does not yield any attraction to a seasoned reader of Uyghur literature or poetry. Phoneme Media’s bilingual edition will more than satiate a reader of a more seasoned familiarity.

In a time when so many humans out of dire need due to horrific circumstances are fleeing one physical place for another; “home” becomes an abyss, a perpetual flux, much like the displaced, misplaced, or place itself. Home never disappears as the memory is a powerful faculty, despite suppression and oppression. This book will take you by the hand and guide you to a place that glimpses these notions in a unique and different way. It honestly searches and cares for the vulnerable beings of this world, not turning a blind eye like the systems and institutions tend to do today.  These poems are subversive without surrendering to exclusion or boxing any individuals in. The poetry of Ahmatjan Osman is an invisible hope that guides the reader throughout its lines and words. Never did a reader expect such modern words to create an arresting ancientness coupled with a welcoming to join the exile. Can a homogenous white Caucasian North American really resonate and fall in synch? Can he or she glimpse into the world of exile? Yes. And there is something strong, declarative and inclusive in Ahmatjan Osman’s following line: 

“Refugee water in all of us.”

October, 2015.

Poking at Memory: A Conversation with Rocío Cerón and Anna Rosenwong | World Literature Today

Poking at Memory: A Conversation with Rocío Cerón and Anna Rosenwong | World Literature Today 

During the month of June and trickling into July of this year, I had the opportunity to interview Rocío Cerón author of Diorama, and translator Anna Rosenwong. Fortunately, World Literature Today was gracious enough to run it for their column Translation Tuesday this past week. The link above will take you to the interview.

I have now read through the book of poems 4 times. Over the months I have been browsing it's pages from time to time in search of the stubborn melodies and rhythms that will not leave me and contrarily have nestled into my mind hoping to find them again amongst the stanzas and lines. Diorama seems like a hallucinogenic journey with no end. It has not ended for me despite putting it down. The pauses, the imagery, and the allusions are palpable and visionary to the happening of daily life here in Buenos Aires. My notion is that this could be said for other places in Latin America and possibly in regard to other metropolitan cities where migration is constant and growing; not to exclude the spaces where the transitory individual is commonplace (That is if all spaces are not so). Honing in on the liminality of the book's landscape, both political and social, it is important that the reader notice the rich language and potent call to listen. This is enhanced when Cerón invites the Paraguayan writer, and friend, Cristino Bogado to translate a repeated refrain into the Guaraní, extending the book deeper into a frontal reality of Latin American that is so often boxed in as anamorphic due to generalizations and misinformed interpretations. Confusing and hard to capture its coherence at times, the modern urban setting of Latin America is difficult to sketch, interpret, or process, much like the first couple readings of Diorama. However, Cerón exercises her style to corral the elements of such a world by transposing it all to paper by virtue of her visual and symphonic poetics. To the readers' excitement, they will notice that Anna Rosenwong's translation is peerless and nothing short of honest, careful, and symphonic in and of itself.

 As Rocío says, "[Diorama]is a listening book; that´s to say, a book that is influenced by the voices, images, and truths of a nation, a continent. Thus the voices, like in a symphony concert, mix; they meet in a polyphonic composition."