March, 2013

FEATURED POET: Denis Mair:   In a suburb outside of all ring roads, so far from the capital it's in another province, fortune allows him to walk where houses are now planted, yet memory of turnips here is fresher than of orange groves elsewhere. Swaths of gentrification happened here with help of one-time payments, which even now are being gambled away over mahjong tables. He only knows this from the newspaper. As a matter of fact, his whole view of the world is imaginary, mostly mediated by signs, and sometimes he finds this amazing. He holes up in Gloaming Studio, waxing commentarial over gnarly symbols, but only as a hobby. When ridiculous words occur to him, he misses how his daughter would have laughed, but she is hitched to a native up Alaska way. On a gradient of freshness, he remembers clear lungfuls of L.A. air. Blessedly his orbit takes him at times to an inn in Shangrila, once even to a "Frozen Waterfall Festival and Cultural Conference." He has been allowed to spend whole days in company with the congenitally kind, and these same literati send him projects down an intermittent pipeline. His proudest prize is a goblet won on Poets and Painters Day at the local artists' village, for poems translated by a friend.

廢品店

     伊沙

 廢品店的生鐵
沈默地瞅著四周
剛剛被賣掉
經一個小崽子之手
被廉價地出賣
比人的骨骼還要堅硬的
生鐵 咽不下這口氣啊
今晚 倉庫頂上的月亮很高
他還沒有學會逃跑
只有沈默地等待
進一步地出賣
或者熔爐
或者有賊閃現
而此刻他已行動
一截生鐵渴望像一條蛇
那樣爬行
他艱難地爬向路口
當看倉庫的老頭出現時
他要瘋狂地撲上去
像蛇撲向
冬天的捕蛇者


THE REFUSE DEPOT

 

           by Yi Sha

 

Iron bar at the refuse depot

Peering about in silence

Was sold a little while ago

Unloaded by some punk

At a cheap price.

Iron bar is harder than human bones:

It can’t get over being slighted this way.

Moon high tonight over the warehouse,

Iron bar ignorant of escape

Only waits in silence

Waits to be sold more cheaply

Or thrown in a furnace,

Or maybe a thief sneaks in.

This is when it leaps into action,

Iron bar longs to crawl

The way a snake does,

Shakily it crawls to the intersection

Where the old warehouse guard appears.

It wants to strike

Pounce on him crazily

The way a snake wants to pounce on the handler

Who caught it in winter.

 

      Tr. by Denis Mair

WRITE YOUR POEM: 

Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat...they never tell you when to stop on those shampoo bottles.  With the powerful use of repetition, how does it function in your poem?  Like a gong in the distance?  Some Western poetic structures have it cleverly woven into the form, like threads in fine embroidery.  For some poems it is on key word that ends up as a punchline.  As you kick ideas around see what you need and what you can delete.  In any case, rinse and repeat, I mean write and repeat, write and repeat...