Cover: Charles Bernstein.
This Friday, within the section Not All Who Are Here, we present the seventh list of contemporary American poets, which in turn complements the one published a few weeks ago featuring five major poets from the same country. Come in and read. These are the ones here this week, and those who are not yet will arrive.
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CHARLES BERNSTEIN
Charles Bernstein is an American poet, theorist, editor, and professor of literature born in New York in 1950. He is the author or editor of more than fifty books of poetry, essays, and opera librettos. His most recent works are Recalculating (2013) and Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions (2011), both published by the University of Chicago Press, and All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (2010) from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In 2013, Aldus published L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E CONTRAATTACK! (1975-2011), translations by Heriberto Yépez and others, with an introduction by Eduardo Espina. From 1978 to 1981 he coedited with Bruce Andrews the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. In the nineties he helped found, together with Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, Raymond Federman, and Dennis Tedlock, the Poetics Program at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In Spain, Kriller71 Ediciones published Blanco inmóvil in 2014. We present a poem with translation by Enrique Winter.
Gracias por dar las gracias
This is a poem
totally accessible.
There is nothing
in this poem
that is in any way
difficult
to understand.
All the words
are simple &
go straight to the point.
There are no new concepts,
no theories, no
confusing ideas.
This poem
has no intellectual pretensions. It is
pure emotion.
It fully expresses
the feelings of the
author: my feelings,
the person who now
speaks to you.
Only cares about
communicating.
From heart to heart.
This poem regards you with appreciation
& values you as reader. It celebrates
the triumph
of human imagination
over
obstacles &
misfortunes. This poem
has 90 lines,
269 words and
more syllables than
I have time to count. Each line,
word & syllable
has been chosen
to convey only the
intended meaning
& nothing more.
This poem renounces
opacity & enigma.
It hides nothing. A hundred
readers could
read the poem
in identical fashion & understand
the same
message. This
poem, like all
good poems, tells
a story with a direct style
that never leaves doubts
in the reader. Although
at moments it expresses
bitterness, anger,
resentment, xenophobia
& a hint of racism, at
its core its mood is
positive. It finds
joy even in
those malicious moments
of life that
you share with it.
This poem
represents hope
in a poetry
that does not turn its back on
the public, that
does not think of itself
as better than its reader,
that commits itself
to poetry as a popular form, like launching
kites or fishing with
a fly. This poem
belongs to no particular
school nor obeys
a dogma. It does not follow
fashion. It says
only what
it says. It is
real.
Edward Hirsch
ANDREA COHEN
Andrea Cohen is a poet born in Atlanta in 1961. She writes and swims in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Her poetry is spare and potent, ironic, self-reflective, and always dazzling. She is one of the most prominent poets on the current American poetry scene. She has published eight books of poetry, including more recently The Sorrow Apartments, Everything and Nightshade. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Threepenny Review, The Atlantic and Poetry, among many other publications. She directs the poetry readings at Blacksmith House in Cambridge (Massachusetts). In 2024, the first anthology of hers in Spanish appeared in Maresía de Pie de Página. We present two poems with translation by Eduardo Gregori.
A Dead Ant in My Salt Shaker
I also confused
the salt with the sugar.
The bright snowfalls
tempt you and blind you equally,
and once you acquire
the taste of that nectar
to stop desiring it
is impossible.
Learn the lesson:
if the path to sweetness
is broad and clear,
beware.
The guard of sweetness
is always protected, well armed.
And you must trust the other
to lower the drawbridge
of the castle.
At least that is my experience.
What does not mean
that if you had ended up in the sugar jar
and not in the salt shaker
you would not have died the same.
You would have died the same.
But the taste of sugar
lingers longer on your tongue
and it hurts less.
*
The Committee’s Intervention
I tell my mother
that I have just won the Nobel Prize.
Again? she says.
In what category this time?
It’s a small game
we play: I pretend
to be someone; she
pretends that she isn’t dead.
***
EDWARD HIRSCH
Gabriel: a Poem (excerpt)
The mortuary director opened the coffin
And there he stood, alone
From the waist up
I stepped closer to look at his face
And for a moment I was surprised
Because it wasn’t Gabriel:
It was only some poor boy
With a face like a room
That had been emptied
But then I looked more closely
Into his heavy eyelids
And the delicacy of his features
He who had always housed such a light dream
Now lay strangely still
My reckless boy
Dressed for a special occasion
He liked that navy-blue suit
And to display it before the mirror
They called to him Ey, colleague
On a street in Northampton
You look so elegant in that new suit
He loved how he looked
After leaving the pills
That fogged his mind
He kept staring open-mouthed
At shop mirrors and revolving doors
That returned his reflection
Now he looked rigid and distant
As if he were going to a funeral
On a late-September Friday
Laurie loosened the knot of his tie
And unbuttoned the top button
So I could breathe more easily
His face seemed waxen
And it shone
His skin was gray and paper-like
Why were there dark marks
Around his eyes
Already somewhat sunken
His nose a little deformed
A crust where his lip had bled
From having convulsions
He was still beautiful
With his hair freshly cut but something
Had broken, he did not move
He had never been able to stay still, but now
Something that had once been my son
Lay there, a restless spirit
That left the house on a rainy night
And never came back
Lost boy
Who will never be found again
Except in eternity
An uncontrollable youth in love
Who would rush into any room
Furious at whatever
Came to mind
The world was unjust to him
And that’s why he launched his diatribes
And disappeared
He had tattooed music in Japanese
On one arm and a Jewish star
On the other
It seems painted with a blue wax
And you will not carve scars into your bodies
Nor imprint any mark upon yourselves
I am the Lord, says in Leviticus
But something tribal had taken root
And he considered himself Jewish
He drank the four cups of wine
And he stood in for the afikoman at Passover
But he did not like the Days of Atonement
He found Sunday school uncomfortable
He was allergic to synagogues
I never saw him open a prayer book
When he was too young to resist
Janet dressed him for Purim
In a white and black shirt
That on his back read
The younger brother of Queen Esther
He rattled a noisemaker against Haman
I wonder what he would have thought
Of the short-sleeved shroud he wears under his white shirt
I hope the coffin is comfortable
He would have mocked the old Jewish man
We hired to spend the night beside him
Anna Moschovakis.
ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS
Anna Moschovakis is a poet, translator, and editor. Among her poetry books are I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone (2006), You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake (2011), which won the James Laughlin Prize, and They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This (2016). She is also the author of the novel Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love (2018) and numerous small poetry books, including The Blue Book (2005), The Tragedy of Waste (2007), The Human Machine* (2009), She Got Up (2009) and Anna’s Half / Anselm’s Half (2013, with Anselm Berrigan). Her translations include The Engagement (2007), by Georges Simenon; The Possession (2008), by Annie Ernaux; The Jokers (2010), by Albert Cossery; Commentary (2013, with Christine Schwartz-Hartley), by Marcelle Sauvageot; and Bresson on Bresson (2017). Moschovakis is a member of Ugly Duckling Presse, where she has served as editor, designer, administrator, and printer since 2002.
This might be a good moment, I think, to pose a question about the nature
of sentimentality. Is the man (read: person) who proclaims “Down with the gallows!” essentially the same man who proclaims
“Do not kill animals for sport?”
We do not yet know. Usually, the hunter tends to be more pragmatic than the anti-hunter
Is the person (read: person) who sits in a chair while someone else administers the injection
that causes him to collapse, blind, lost, gasping,
and vomit yesterday’s lunch, breakfast, and dinner,
with no one to help and no one to try,
until death arises as a singular desire,
the only possible escape from the aggravating situation,
a Heaven in itself,
in general less sentimental
than the other person, the one who administers it
and that other person in general
more pragmatic and
less sentimental than the people
who avert their gaze
or, while dining,
watch television?
The first truly reliable phonograph
the infamous Victrola Victor
won a patent war in 1901
and cost far more than $2.50
even when adjusted for half a century of inflation
Music more cherished than murder,
more cherished than blood