Conversation with the Night Woman
Translated by Inara Cedrins
I am the boat with lifted oars, which the swarthy night
woman slowly releases into the stream toward morning.
On the oar paddles pulse bluish stars. This boat is
tightly nailed, no leaks, no dents, no crevices. The well
tarred boat toward day melted in fire.
Yield, says the night woman, keep straight.
There’ll be three merging place, crosscurrents, rapids.
At the first rapids you’ll lose the horse.
At the second rapids you’ll lose yourself.
At the third rapids you’ll be given yourself back.
There beyond the bend waits the day woman. Then you’ll
become a brigantine. The figurehead will have sharp teeth
and eyes of mountain stone. The heart in the breast—a
forged metal partridge, that toward evening disintegrates
to ash. Trust to the flow of time and the alternating
hands, that will fondle you and betray you. That will
tar and burn you.
And then I will appear again, says the night woman.
I’ll gather you into my apron, melt down the fragments, make
a boat. Fall will come, there’ll be a terrible winter. But
don’t you be afraid, be at peace. The bird in your heart
will sing every fall and die every winter fifty-seven
times more.
I have only one question, I say; what will happen
at the first rapids to the horse, which I led like a white
god, I, in the fast, well tarred boat? Will it unfold wings
and fly off sadly as a crane, promising to return
sometime, plucking at my hair and whispering in my
ear like always: take heart, little fool . . . Everything
happens as it must. And nights aren’t at all eerie.
You said, at the third rapids you’ll give me back
to myself?
But who will give me back my horse?
Read more poems from Inga Abele.
A Conversation with Dana Levin
By KR Editor-At-Large G. C. Waldrep
[This interview is part of a series of conversations with authors who have work in KR. It is funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.]
G. C. Waldrep: In her introduction to In the Surgical Theater, Louise Glück asserts that you write as one in the grip of an image, rather than in the grip of a story. What do you make of this? What is the relationship of story to image, of image to story?
Dana Levin: I am often initially inspired by an image (encountered, dreamed or imagined) rather than an idea or narrative, though, interestingly, ideas propel more poems now than they used to. And I suppose, when I say “idea,” I mean a conscious thought, as opposed to the inscrutable gifts of the unconscious (my favorite kind).
In the early 90’s, when I was still in grad school at NYU, when Surgical wasn’t even a thought in my city-addled mind, I found myself assailed by the same image: a human chest burst open. And each time the chest opened, it revealed anything but a heart: a human eye, Eye of Horus, a bird, a spiral galaxy, a gallery of objects in rotation; I would walk around the city with the constant question of why the image was so persistent, why the chest’s contents were so strange, what they might mean.
The image is a message; why leads the poem. Composition is an attempt to understand what the image wants to say: its what, its why, its story. In that respect, for me, the relationship of image to story is psychological.
Read the rest of this interview.
Eric Vrooman - Hybrid Taxidermy
Kelly Ga-Lei Gilbert - Beatitude
Review of John Rybicki's We Bed Down into Water
Triquarterly, $13.95 (paperback)
The title of John Rybicki's third collection of poetry, We Bed Down into Water, partly deceives. These poems will not cool or be cooled. The collection boils around Julie, Rybicki's wife, suffering from cancer. From the bone marrow unit to home and back, the voice in these poems is ravished by fear, rage, love. Rybicki’s work is hyperearnest, each stanza building a residence where the bed sinks but poetry circulates like blood.
There is no tenderfooting around cancer, here: "2:15 am and her breasts fall out." The barbaric treatment and the barbaric disease seep into the romance, and vice versa. In the long, luminous "Her Body Like A Lantern Lying Next To Me," the poet watches without flinching his wife's belly "pregnant with cancer, / more like a little rock wall / piled and fitted inside her / than some prenatal rounding." In other poems he is all flinch: "I'm worried that writing about cancer, / thinking about cancer / will start cancer / growing again inside her" he writes in one.
Romance is the force exploding in Rybicki’s work. Julie is Dame, Lass, and World. Their home is transformed by her voice: "Dude, I'm still here, she says at last, / then the sound of her / stretching her branches, and from them / the rain falling thick through our house." Rybicki’s housekeeping is steady work, full of powerful feelings unfettered by any fixed self-consciousness about his heartbreaking and staggering endeavor. Hair, lanterns, boyhood, light, hollows, holes: Rybicki's charms recycle. Even the moon gets gently used but its reappearance doesn't deflate what he is making.
Review of Margot Singer's The Pale of Settlement
University of Georgia Press, $24.95 (hardcover)
I should confess at the outset that some of my enthusiasm for Margot Singer's Flannery O'Connor-prizewinning collection of linked stories, The Pale of Settlement, stems from a deep sense of connection: I identify with Singer's protagonist, Susan Stern, a Jewish-American woman who is a grandchild, on her father's side, of German Jews who fled their native land in the late 1930s, and who has matrilineal roots in Eastern Europe, in that old "Pale of Settlement."
But when my family members left Europe they came to the United States; Susan's went to Palestine. Israel—and Susan's connection to it as the American-born daughter of Israelis—is central to this book: Israel is setting, character, conflict, and theme, all wrapped together. And if the larger issues that frame these nine stories—history, memory, identity, family—are questions that have always preoccupied me, I suspect that others share these obsessions and will become as immersed in Singer's elegantly-constructed stories as I have.
One of the book's most striking aspects is the extent to which the fictional narrative is tied to moments in recent history. The first story, "Helicopter Days," begins in Israel during the 1982 war with Lebanon; the story moves forward to Susan's grandfather's death "one month after Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion in Kuwait." As the book progresses, time moves forward too, to the post-9/11 world and to the endless violence cycle spawned by the al-Aqsa Intifada that Susan, a journalist, reads about on the wire and must grapple with at her desk, and in her heart.
James Wood and the Pitfalls of Writing on Writing: Review of James Wood's How Fiction Works
How Criticism Serves: Review of James Wood's How Fiction Works
Review of Mary Jo Salter's A Phone Call to the Future: New & Selected Poems
On Louise Glück and the Yale Series of Younger Poets
Review of Peter Stanlis's Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher
Review of Brian Hall's Fall of Frost: A Novel
Review of Sarah Manguso's The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir
Review of Daniel Hall's Under Sleep
For Form's Sake: X. J. Kennedy's In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955 - 2007
A Brief History of Hungarian Food
In the Nagycsarnok, or Central Market, in Pest, vendors sell mounds of plump cherries and apricots, asparagus and lettuce. Stacked jars of pinewood, aster, and milkweed honey. Small plastic bags of yellow Hungarian saffron, bright red cans and jars of paprika, stacked as tall as the men selling them, and braids of dried red peppers.
My husband Todd and I explored the market, watching as women pulled carts and bought bags of cherries. German, Japanese, and American tourists pointed and marveled at the wares; children followed behind their young mothers; young men stood in the upstairs stalls eating sausage and bread. Surrounding everything, wafting in the air and hanging on clothes and hair, like a spice leavening the crowd, floated the sharp, pungent smell of paprika.
And at the heart of the market were the meat stalls, filled with thick loins, steaks, and chops; whole chickens covered with fresh feather holes; streaked and mottled sides of beef.
Across the street from the csarnok, my grandmother had told me. The Wagner & Son Deli. I found the street a few blocks from the Danube, running along the east side of the market. Pipa utca, or Pipa Street, where the deli would have been, at least until it was looted and burned, the windows smashed, the paprika spilled on the ground like blood, a yellow Star of David painted on the wall.
It was a quiet, narrow brick street, with a cell phone business, apartments, a hair salon, and no sign of a deli.
Disznósajt, or head cheese, is a popular Hungarian deli meat that combines meat from the feet, heart, and head. Véres hurka, or blood sausage, is made from a heady mixture of blood, meat, and spices.
The most common seasoning for meat in Hungary, paprika, is made from ground, dried sweet red bell peppers. It’s sautéed with onions, garlic, and peppers and used to flavor goulash, paprikás, pörkölts, and other Hungarian meat dishes.
Doppelgangers
I’m standing in line for the bathroom at the Silhouette Cocktail Lounge. After about five minutes, the guy standing behind me taps my shoulder. I look him over. He’s stocky, red-faced, shiny as a peeled onion and smiling wider than an ass crack. A white ball cap sits on the very top of his head. He sticks out his chest, points to the door of the only working restroom and asks, “What do you think they’re doing in there?”
I ignore him. I am bitter, kicked out of the apartment I share with Marshall so he could host a bachelor party. Tourists usually stick to traps like the Hard Rock, so it annoys me to see one in the Silhouette. It makes me paranoid that more will follow, taking advantage of discounted beer and pool when they can afford so much more. Think about it. This guy comes into my regular bar and thinks he’s walked into one of those scary stories he heard about Miami. But it’s only vacation for him. Within a few days, he will return to the cubicle—wide-eyed and bragging.
What I hate most is how he’s acting so comfortable, like he fits right in, when really he’s the whitest guy in the place. Illegal immigrant dishwashers and line cooks pack around the pool tables, smelling of plantains and grease. Their mouths chew cigarettes and snap Spanglish into the air. The stripping pole is bare, though usually at some point in the evening some drunk skank will climb up and improvise. This is obviously not his scene. For me, it’s the backdrop, the soundtrack. I don’t choose the places that feel like home; I end up there. Like I wanted to fail out of college, wait six double shifts a week, get kicked out of my apartment to make room for strippers, and stand here in tuxedo pants and an undershirt spotted with salad dressing. My problem is that I only know what I don’t want.
I feel a second tap at my shoulder.
Rebecca McClanahan - Our Town, His: Paul Newman’s Curtain Call
Fady Joudah - In Memory of Mahmoud Darwish
Scott Knickerbocker - Organic Formalism and John Witte’s The Hurtling
John C. Orr - Back to the Future: The Continuing Appeal of The Education of Henry Adams
Colleen Kinder - One Bright Case of Idiopathic Cranofacial Erythema
Brian Doyle - A Note on the Misuse of Adverbs
Alfred Corn - Existentialism and Homosexuality in Gunn’s Early Poetry
Kevin Stein - Death by 0s and 1s: The Fate of Paper Manuscripts and Drafts
KR Online
|
KR Blog
|
About KR
|
Order
|
Issues
|
Info For Writers
|
Workshops
|
Interviews
|
Other Programs
|
News
|
Links
|
KR Site Info
|
©2008 Kenyon Review | All Rights Reserved
|
