May 2007
VOL XV, Issue 5, Number 169
Editor: Klaus J. Gerken
Production Editor: Heather Ferguson
European Editor: Mois Benarroch
Contributing Editors: Michael Collings; Jack R. Wesdorp; Oswald Le Winter
Previous Associate Editors: Igal Koshevoy; Evan Light; Pedro Sena
ISSN 1480-6401
INTRODUCTION
3 Poets
CONTENTS
Ivan Blatny
Roman Catholic
Another honor for my saint
La verre
Both
High Class
Ba, Ba, Black Sheep
Priroda
Jessica Tong
Fifty-nine
Observations of my Doctor at nineteen
Blue cheese
The amputation
Transformations
The love bird
Making a cake
War child
Constellations
The music of your leaving
My little doll
The medicine rounds
Last dance
The bedroom
Motherless scars
Silver parchment Act two
Without the city
Rodney Nelson
AUBADE
MY PLACE
RIVER LOOK
PATH
WHITE EASTER
POST SCRIPTUM
Biographical & bibliographical information
This issue brings together the unpublished English poems of Ivan Blatny
(1919/1990), and recent new works by Jessica Tong and Rodney Nelson.
Editor's Note: The Blatny poems are published as a historical document to
augment the Blatny collection, The Drug of Art, forthcoming July 1, 2007
from Ugly Duckling Presse (Eastern European Poets Series #15). See the Post
Scriptum for more information.
I have left the spelling as the author intended, having only cleaned up a few
foraign characters that would not display properly at the suggestion of the
publisher. KJG
UNPUBLISHED & UNCOLLECTED POEMS
by Ivan Blatny
(written in English, as printed here)
Roman Catholic
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To pope John Paul the Second
Why shouldn't I be a Roman Catholic?
It is so nice to believe in angels
it is so nice to have a pope above
pontifex maximus
Salvator Dali had an audience with him.
Least said, soon mended.
Another honor for my saint
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Francis of Assisy has been declared the patron saint of earth oekology
the cage without frontiers
the sweet community of plants, animals and people
yes, he was preaching to birds
What about rivers? They are living men
old father Thames is rolling along.
La verre
~~~~~~~~
The pink cover-spring of my first book Pani jitrenka
wasn't what I expected
I wanted to be published exactly like Baudelaire
like Svata Kadlec Baudelaire
Teiner be Svata Kadlec,
the lunatic
Translate me into english
I want to be read by Valentine Penrose
In the book it is Petorose and spoils the rhythm
Brousku, budte priste opatrnejsi.
Both
~~~~
If it were morning in the Pines I could take gun-powder
it is afternoon on Bixley
or at Bixley
the praepositions in english are a trouble
God never made a serious error or blunder
"on" or "at" I think both are right.
Nižina
The mountains are questioned by the mountain-climbers
but there is no answer
there are no disciples
but St. Bernard's dogs will reach you
and tell you at once to return to the valley
and never more to climb.
High Class
~~~~~~~~~~
Prince Philip is a great gastronome
he instructs a brigade of cooks
The archipelago of Palau has the richest marine life in all the Pacific
I remember only molluscs feeding on algae
vzpominúm si jenom na mlže
maji filtr
Prince Philip wouldn't like to live in underseas chambers
he prefers Buckingham Palace and the Queen.
She has got one.
Ba, Ba, Black Sheep
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The mountain black sheep descended to the valley but Rosa Bonheur can't paint
them black is the colour of death and there is no death in the universe
luckily enough, because I enjoy life
pendling between the table and the television
Be quiet sister
a monad can die
I¡ll stay
a bit selfishly
thinking only of the coloured cover of my book on the table in my workshop.
Priroda
~~~~~~~
The number of ringlets on the wasp means the number of its marriages
they don't have a queen they mate freely
Eckelhaft sagte die Arbeiterin Biene
and threw out the drone
But he, finding his greatest pleasure in dying
said thank you darling it was worth it.
Come on you lazy censors
confiscate my poem
put a dark oblong in its place
I wanted to say black
black jako na úmrtnim oznúmeni
Jessica Tong
Fifty-nine
~~~~~~~~~~
Fifty-nine headstones
And sand rash and
White electrical snow
Falls, falls
And covering the dead face
Of thirty years.
Fifty-nine graves.
The screaming Japanese crane
Dances on the rocks.
She turns her back to us and we move
Like solid rips wanting to touch,
To cage the warm salt and
Rotten eggs.
Fifty-nine land sharks
We grin, grin like floral broaches
As she digs a grave and we gather
In our rooks, feathers fluffed
Like pillows.
The nearest light wanes like a great candle,
Such a mournful moon.
Observations of my Doctor at nineteen
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It is not a Sistine chapel. The room is very small
Like a match box. Here I am
Beast of fire, fleshy revolver.
Here I am stripped like a ripe fruit
Dripping, dripping my blood and brains
Onto your dry cleaned coat.
I am twenty soon. The screaming child will
Not wait. Do you see her?
Like a tree, the other self?
I am left to baby-sit her throat like a cheap
Wine brought back from your cellar
In a serious box.
I can not let her words escape me and
Into the sea with its suicidal mermaids
And queer guards.
Oh, what a queen I am. What a tart.
He gives me a pill, white as salt.
An attendant jerks her shoulders like a pair of electrical wings
As I swallow one whole, the other is dissolved
Like snow in a glass.
His corridor is a mile long with curtains tacked to birds
They squeal when I step on their tails. I laugh.
He pushes me along into an open room that smells of
Medicine, it leaches into my cheeks, congeals to a mole.
They are stained yellow but no one here seems to mind
With their eyes dusted in dreams, dreams.
I soon learn that it is a favourite past-time of the
Grey lidded guests exhibited in their stiff pens.
My Doc, my Doc and the machine that makes
His bread are us. Mad, mad
Put her in a cage with out any air and see if
She lives. I come up shrieking,
The witch is I.
Cart her off with the rest, those women with the bobs.
Now listen up if you touch me again with
That cattle prod I'll pour cyanide down your throats,
Watch you buck like a Spanish bull in the heat of those crowds.
You like us.
Blue cheese
~~~~~~~~~~~
This week oranges are in season
But ours are dusted with a blue drug
That makes my heart swell like a sponge
Under a tap. Is it not sweet?
But how blistered in your fist
I huddle like a quiet mouse.
We have a routine, an almost ritual
Of you and I in our white robes
Reading the paper. A tragedy on the front page
Blinks like a red light. A woman died.
The words are right.
A woman drowned over our pot of tea and
Cold toast.
You turn the page. What a sound
Slicing the air like a knife and falling into
Its spine. See, even that page has a place and that
Woman, a place.
But my fingers, the flows of the dead seem to sit
And shift around the plate
Dancing into your light as yellow beans.
I have many things to do today but I am not sorry
To tell you that I would prefer to lie in bed,
Neglect all of my chores
And eat blue cheese.
The amputation
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
An explosion and then the pearl white cuff
That nurses her wrist is peeled back
Like a lid. The tresses of blue veins rise
In perfect order, greeting the warm stars.
Lying stiff as a seed the trees shake their gloom
From beneath bored fruits. They are black, the insides
White hot and blank as carbon.
It tastes like nothing. If you try to match it
With food its blotched limbs will shriek and
Swing on a hinge, a hinge of knuckle bones
On hands that set down children.
The evidence is under the light, it is in my
Missing breast with its smile and angry red face.
It is here to trick you. So young, younger then the ring on my
Left hand spinning its little cleaver.
Transformations
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Can you believe that she is dead?
That I will not be giving birth to her,
Or hanging her from my breast like a picture.
I can not argue with the child. She is like
A dried fig in a shoe box. Pouring water onto her
Will not puff her up or out. Let me ask you this
Can you hold a funeral for a cell?
I will not open my mouth, some door that revolves.
Is this why I am so full of words?
Words that glitter on young leaves.
I woke in the hospital. White is a terrible feeling
The way it swells and is worn by women who
Fill me with spiders.
I used to be fat as a globe and inside of me a person
Opened their round hands like a cornflower.
But now I am her coffin.
Drumming up woods, so dark and thorned.
I am afraid that the vines may take me,
Curl their limbs into my hair and my sockets
Like trawling nets. This is akin to grief?
Does it have a mouth? I do not think it has
But I idle in its rain like an engine.
I am sent flowers and terribly silly cards that
Bleed words like an acrid perfume.
It is always cold here. I am the mother of a corpse and
These are my fingers sewing new eggs and blue
Linen death rags.
Sadly, I am a blank person, similar to paper.
The longer I lay here being kept from my home the more
My bones become breadsticks for the birds to pick at angrily.
I miss my garden, the silent arch that holds the night in a raw carpet.
Perhaps if I were allowed to go home this death will divorce me.
If I were to go home, to sleep in my own bed maybe these drugs will
Unloosen me from their seams
And I will fly out from under them like a moth
One whose wings glitter as if being dipped into gold.
The love bird
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Morning sizzles, an egg in a thick black pan.
A one woman figure steps out of the shower,
That woman, love is I.
Skin haunted by disease, dresses cast to their stone beds.
I keep a single photograph of Paris, in it
A face is lowered to mine like a collection plate
And a woman is dripping with scarfs.
She is a candle stick agonizingly melting
But leaning as if woken from a beautiful sleep.
And then there is us. We are identical,
Porous stars eaten wholly by the harsh sun
Clearly these thighs need to be introduced
And lived all their life between yours!
I am at the cauldron end with night.
You have been gone for two days
And all the feathers have left me,
The last century has become a blackened bird
Flickering in the branches like small eyes.
My bones love, are arranged neatly
And in order like dewed treats.
Drag me to the tune, though my legs are useless.
Dress me when you come home and in the eaves
Leaves expose their doped nerves to water
And I win a writers prize but it means nothing without fingerprints.
Clearly I am afflicted. Haunted like a grave and drawing you up
Through these dead bones.
Making a cake
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I have no other name. My kitchen lives around
The three married daughters, their fine funeral heads
Roll as though they are on stems tuned towards the long inescapable winter.
Trees lean on their elbows, suck in the warm flame of the stove fire.
The windows seem bleak, from here the night is black and
Reveals itself childless. It is always orbiting, and the local women
Wrap their bones with wool and take to the lighthouse, take to the
Rocking sea and her doomed grey ends. In the morning they wash up
On shore like black coral. They have escaped the cake fair and
Like a fool I am waiting for the flour to make a sound. Nothing follows the broken
Eggs. The sugar, the metric cups. I had an aunt who went mad while making
Exactly the same cake. Cinnamon rolls danced, danced, danced!
She took a knife and opened her arm like a tree pod. She found herself to be
Very black inside and the pulse bored and too tired to think.
People try very hard to die. They cut key holes
In themselves. They make themselves like smoke and fly through the
Trees in bird costumes. They ruin cakes.
This gothic moon remembers us and the tools she used and the eye you
Saw from. In its pearl socket you are a boat with paper oars, you are being
Dragged by the tide towards those same floured rocks.
War child
~~~~~~~~~
Some men
Called me a witch. I should
Have been burnt at the stake
Beside Joan.
But I am still alive
And boy folk proudly show off their
Cocks like ornaments while trying to kill me.
A war is never enough for a man
It is early ejaculation
Being unshaven with a girl's waist.
These men, these men
With guns and armies
And boots taken from off dead feet.
The camps where you tried to kill me
Were stuffed of bones and hearts that
Failed in the heat. I wore a dead Russians
Clothes and cut my hair. Every one has left here.
They are flat lining the building where we were held
And my dead mother rises in the ashes. She has a number.
Get in line. You promised me Christ but gave me a man
With woman's hair wearing a woman's dress.
He bears guns.
He speaks war.
You fear me like the red of communism.
You left me alive and hungry, this was your mistake!
I bear guns.
I speak war.
Constellations
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
.1.
The children all run around me. Their bald feet
Drift and skirt on the lithe foot hills.
The smallest boy is you lowering a terrified kitten into a
Bucket of water. Face garlanded and insane.
I react, quick as a bullet casting him with wax!
He runs terrified into your body. Between us he is a dozing scream and
You are the rival. The burning cigarette put out
On my calf. How is it that the sun extends her ladder
And only you can climb and I must sit here
Babysitting the tree house, air shy?
.2.
Out on the strip young people pull down the churches.
Glossy foreheads alert the moon of smiles and hips dressed with
Dark lace. Where did the house come from?
Most nights I wake up in tears
And the moon gleams in silk, runs to my feet like water.
The trees, I know are only temporary and you are a father
To the girl up the road. Your little boy sleeps in a coffin
And visiting him sucks the air from my body
Leaves me to the mercy of fire. I crackle like a dry cob
And he holds a torch in his sister's blind eye. You say nothing.
.3.
This child does not want me as his mother
And the bleak heart is gasping under his bony fist,
Flipping about on his hook.
I can simply not see a land. The entire world is being dissolved,
Soon I will be on the edge, apart from love. Some women
Are just not mothers, it is not in me to perform.
The constellations have drifted into a birthmark that scatters
When I wash. Our sex has grown boring and without a ringleader
I am best left under your daughter's bed to rot.
All ready it is a frightful smell, heavy at our necks.
.4.
My mother did the same to me, so why can I not do it to you
And the death in the ground?
I can not face the cloth of your sperm annihilating his name,
And my womb, it is as good as dead. Completely uneventful.
Figs fall from me. A small bell tolls, in another city
I am creeping from the remains of his bed. The stars look on,
They do not judge or fold me back into the garden.
A small job waits. There is a frill in the deep. An open window that hooks the sun
And returns it to my body, frozen over. I never meant to become so stiff,
To plough your son into the earth while I escaped.
The music of your leaving
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Simply these duel mothers will
Have to pinch us both
Between their thighs
Like shop tapestries.
We will have to share them.
Imply ease. Pretend to uproot
Arms and ribs from these twitching nerves.
I am sick in this heat. My veins rupture
And spill into the moons shadow,
It is dragged by a white horse.
It is taken to the orchard next door and hung
Against the figs and grapes.
Let yourself in. Walk down the hall
Monitoring the guests. Slip into my
Room, and into my bed like a silver thief.
I have loved you since the womb.
My heart knocked in its chest, my bones,
Became petrified, likened to a barbarous skull.
My little doll
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(Inspired by Baba Yaga)
I woke in time to see the third knight riding past
On some crested white beast, my daughter carried on his back
Like a sack of wheat.
Ten years old and she is off to marry her father,
To anoint his chapped hands with her smiling hips.
Her and that knight dragged the day with them like a
Woman who bedded a Nazi on parade.
I witnessed the trees, once completely alive savaged in veils.
One by one, rolling moist eyes from their pits.
Snuffing out the sun like a match.
I was left with my young face, an apple peeler.
First I took off my breasts, my thighs, lastly my heart.
I ground them like cloves with my pestle and sent them off
Towards the palace gates in a tea where my daughter
Shall be turning sixteen. Her sweet skin blushing like a lantern.
Rushed to her bedside, removable as Gods eye
My daughter will gobble it down, her father adoring such a
Doll sized waist.
My little doll eat and drink your mother, wear me in your stomach
Like an earring. I will swim, malignantly as cancer
And eat out your womb that is knitting its first child.
You see, my mother died as well and I summoned
The dragonflies to us and they gave me you,
New and wet, and smelling like clover.
My little doll, I fed you so you would speak.
I nailed rattling bones to the gate to let death know
That he already lived here. I impaled chicken feet to the house
So you would not have to walk.
I even gave you my bed and took to the stove.
I brushed the snow from the earth to give you summer.
I allowed the knights to decide each season and hid you
In a box so you would not blacken.
Oh! How ungrateful you both are binding my hips with wax, sealing my
Fruited gender in studded pins.
I will fly through the purple hazed sky and find you locked elsewhere
To the body of your father. Limbs knotted, you both oozing with sex.
I will tear you back into me like a hair my kitten,
Grating your ovaries into apple peel.
I will commit murder. You both have to die.
There is no other way for me to live.
Now that my face is known to the blue glazed crooks
I have sold many mirrors; I have melted down a million spoons
For fear that I one day will be fingered like a key hole.
The milk, little doll that you left in my breast has crinkled me
Worn me into a weathered house emptied of nests.
No man will summon me. No child will come but only the moon
In her full enormity will guide me like a silver map.
You see little doll, how you strangled my beauty
With a phone line, so now I have to eat children.
I have to lure them into my garden like a dying bird.
It is the only way I can posses anything young.
When their mothers turn up at my door
Crystallized tears in eyes opened by groaning nails
I invite them in and feed them their own child.
Poor, dead little doll
I live for this banquet.
Screwing you and the father both.
I will suckle their hides like a wild honey.
I will feed delightfully from their bones
Making ashtrays from their hands.
Every child little doll is you
And I will exact my revenge, targeting you in my scope.
I will use tooth picks from your bones!
The medicine rounds
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I have become my own nurse.
I am writing my own
Prescriptions
With the degree of Herr Docktor.
I
Can
Visit
Any man
In a
White coat.
He will
Stuff me
With a years supply
Of drugs.
The pharmacist
Will not think twice
Of my hands
That flutter
Like dewy winged monarchs.
Herr Docktor
I am down to my final
Glass of water,
My final pill.
Ten mgs is all it takes,
Then the electric shock
Of white powder.
It is my husband that suffers.
The sticky tar
In my heart that muddies your stethoscope.
This is madness
Dressing wounds
With your magic tricks.
Sawing me in half
But still I step out whole
Without a stitch.
Last dance
~~~~~~~~~~
Death is an infection that grows in the mind
Like an undiagnosed tumour.
It buds on the cross, opens its soft legs
Curiously.
Gripping his hand, kissing his mouth
Death took me to Belsen, to the rind of the end.
We made love in the racks, against trees that cast no fruits.
I felt a chill right through and my heart, that fluttering pulse
Let the birds out in me and he tried to cage everyone.
To put moss in my heart! To stuff me so full of old bones
That car engines wait as executioners and ovens leave
Their mouths open, like the moons humility
Rancid and empty, inviting me in.
The bedroom
~~~~~~~~~~~
Part one: a saint in the house of woman
I cut of all of my hair. Cut of my arms,
My legs, lastly my heart.
They no longer assume that terrible shadow
Of fat bulbs or planets that grieve
For their names to be scientific.
I am a bleeding stump. I age like every other woman.
Like a web, knotted in polluted dust and dead insects.
Do you not walk on me?
Your feet quietly involved with my hair.
Do you not miss the weight of my arms?
And my legs, that would twine about your neck
Like twin vipers.
The olive leafs are plump, they shine in the night
Like eyes. You were my father long ago.
You came and bundled me up in soft cotton and took me
Back to Paris where your mother lay as a crippled ladder
In a box.
Her bald white skin came from a country that the Germans hated.
She didn't speak. The ground held her tongue in a clip.
Part two: at the cinema
The women in the stage house rocked as bald sea lights
Gathering a shinning coin from each of us.
We walked, bent legged to our seat,
Filed in as centipedes.
My dress strap was torn in the front row.
A boy held onto me. He thought I was a gay boy.
So he was rough with me.
Bruised my lips with stones and your face, father
I know could have been his.
Part three: a man in the boat of woman
I am eating plate fulls of orange quarters.
I am visiting your girlhood. I see you, father
Sneaking behind the chairs like a threatened
Cockroach.
I feel sorry for you so I let you walk me home.
The grasses screamed. My stomach swelled as you
Drove a piston through me.
I remember the pollen scattering lightly as
Flour onto our dark heads.
You said I had a halo.
You lied! You lied!
Motherless scars
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Return me to the ground
Because love has campaigned
The edge of the river.
Because the trees no longer find themselves
Outdoors but in rootless museums.
When I was eight a man
Took me to the waters edge and held me under with his fist.
I did not grow gills so
The water filled my lungs like a basin,
The water filled me like a vase.
When I was ten the man told me
How he wanted to fuck.
I tied a ribbon around my waist
And prayed to god
Oh please don't let me be pregnant.
Silver parchment Act two
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1.
Your wife beats on a drum, she makes smoke signals.
I am her but thinner
She is a born talker swallowed by her latest pregnancy.
Flowering cotton pinned over a fat thigh.
We do not know one another but share you
Like a soap.
Soon she will seed.
She will become a tree
And I will collect my lemons and walk cautiously
Around her flaking trunk with an axe.
For I am the other woman and she is red faced
And clutching a gun.
She is full of anaemic threats.
2.
My love. Your wife is on to us.
She has gathered her army of children
And will soon be here
To unpin your flapping body from mine.
I will wear floral. I will give birth under a tree
Howling as if pain had a face to break.
I will blaze like an oil burner when she takes you
Back to her country.
I will hold my children like flags.
I will take milk and grow hips
I will fill a scrap book with loves evidence.
3.
You have chucked me like an old shoe.
I am pregnant.
You must give every woman this disease.
You placed a branch in each pot. The bees came.
They planted a speck of pollen in us both.
You took me down, old love into the death hour
Covering the faces of your family from me against
Our dead one.
I let you pay for the operation.
Turning my head into yours.
Netting you once more like a fish.
I rocked against your wife like a light house,
Good as dead.
Without the city
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The grasses are tickled with silver. The thick dew
Freezes over night forming
A crystal blanket.
In the morning I walk among them. Sneaking through a vest of nettle,
A pouncing fist of jasmine, tugging fox paw from my jacket.
Blue fields yawn and the house which stays empty between them
Loses chairs and whispers.
The windows seem to be searching. The lace of an iris pulls me down
And out of the sea-green eye where my body sinks into blackness.
I am home.
*
Rodney Nelson
AUBADE
~~~~~~
I got up in the morning did not have to but did
but could imagine having to get down in it on
a desert getting down to fend what might wait at the
roadside which might not do it anyway but I got
up on a prairie in the morning to meet the warm
and color of how many a spring had there been did
not have but wanted to but could imagine wanting
to get up from the tatter of me on a desert
road in the March morning wanting and not having to
MY PLACE
~~~~~~~~
Our purpose is to govern ourselves with one eye
dreaming and one on the difficult balance at hand.
George Evans
We would be cold into bed a
thick foam pad on the rug
narrow but good
you would watch me ease up out of
it and hear my knee crack when I stretched
in
a room an apartment with no tele-
vision only the memory of a
reader's pipe smoke
would you look with
sorrow at the predawn luminescence
in my window or would you vault
to the day
your body's glad prime too much
for any second thinking no
matter that the man of your moment
might
not last it
I would be making
antioxidant green tea not a meal
would take my antihyperten-
sive medication later
once we had
done our rollick out in some
light field of green or snow having had not
much choice but to live in and for
the now
once I had returned on my own
to the neighborhood of the old
quotation from "The Lightning Field" by George Evans,
in The New World, Curbstone Press, 2002
RIVER LOOK
~~~~~~~~~~
Fat smooth river the
Red
in June heat
we
moved to its bank when I was
four and I looked on the wealth of green
that drooped into such muddy al-
most nonmovement
did so the other
day and knew that my first look had
not had to do with anything but
the river
and me
not a walk
in the oxbow almost wildwood or
a crow or snapping turtle
I had taken or met soon enough
nor what I
had gone through there as
the
kid
in a young pied family
no it had
happened between me
and the river
a meeting that con-
tained no memory and that
I would be able to relive at
any time
not of time
I ranged
into the whiff the
look
of its al-
most attractive yearning presence
PATH
~~~~
Thick dark June leaves crowding in
on the river bypath where
it has a turn are lovely
and I know of words that would
make the noon of them twitter
and be unending for you
but I do not have any
that would tell how much I miss
your unafraid look or how
absent you are on the path
WHITE EASTER
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Flood margins in the park acreage had gone to ice
and only the main of the river moved where we saw
until we heard the gray honkers that flew down in it
might have been delight but in the oppressing north wind
no resurrected sun or god thereof could make a
new time happen
what were they doing here
oh it did
have heat enough to cut into piled snow at a brick
south wall where a fraught robin was taking old seed head
that trees had dropped in another time and what were we
who needed none of this doing here
the wind butted
the current and it did all seem that we were doing
*
Biographical & bibliographical information
Ivan Blatny (1919-1990) is one of the most significant Czech poets of the
twentieth century. Having achieved acclaim at a young age, Blatny defected
shortly after the 1948 Communist coup. He was declared dead on Czechoslovak
radio and his poetry was officially banned. Blatny went on to spend the rest
of his life in obscurity in England, continuing to write with little prospect
for publication. In the 1970s and 1980s some of his later poems made it into
print thanks to the efforts of samizdat and exile publishers, but only after
1989 was his work made publicly available again in his native country.
The Drug of Art, forthcoming July 1, 2007 from Ugly Duckling Presse (Eastern
European Poets Series #15) is the first major collection of Ivan Blatny's
poetry to appear in English. It presents an overview of the poets' work,
including early lyrics, later multilingual poems, a long poem in prose, and a
selection of poems written mostly or entirely in English.
The Drug of Art is translated by Matthew Sweney, Justin Quinn, Alex Zucker,
Anna Moschovakis & Veronika Tuckerova and includes an introduction by Veronika
Tuckerova, a foreword by Jesef Skvorecky, and an afterword by Antonin Petruzelka.
The Drug of Art: Selected Poems of Ivan Blatny can be ordered through the web
(at http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/page-blatny.html) or by check for $15
(made out to Ugly Duckling Presse) mailed to the following address:
Ugly Duckling Presse
at The Old American Can Factory
232 Third Street, #E002
Brooklyn, NY 11215
*
Jessika Tong
My name is Jessika-Pearl Tong` and my origins lie in Paris and Kent but
I was born in New Zealand beside the first fake snow machine of the
North Island. I grew up among a Pine forest, thus my company for trees.
When I was ten my family relocated to Australia where I now still live in
Brisbane with my cat and lover studying a Bachelor of fine arts.
I am twenty-three and won my first poetry prize when I was eleven, it
was a sad little purple bike which was later donated to fire.
I have been published in the Westerly, Polestar, The New England
Review, Arrow Publishing, The Taj Mahal Review and the Speed poet's zine.
One editor commented "she has the gift of seeing beyond the banal and
weaving ideas, people and images in a haunting, evocative manner."
I write what I feel, what I am. A recovered anorexic, a case file in
hospital records "border-line personality disorder, tut-tut", an ex self
harmer, a survivor of sexual abuse, a book worm, still thin but
healthier writer, sometimes human being, completely moody, messy female.
Writing is the most natural form of a self, it glues a society
together, it elaborates. Bodily, it is a cage to hang ones self in.
*
Rodney Nelson
Rodney's Nelson's work got into print in 1970 (Georgia Review, Nimrod),
and chapbooks followed; then he turned to fiction and plays, not writing a
poem between 1982 and 2004. A lifelong nonacademic, he has worked as licensed
psychiatric technician and freelance copy editor in California and Arizona.
Now he has returned to his native Great Plains. All of the poems are new that
have been appearing in such zines as Cipher Journal, Big Bridge, and
Archipelago. It was as editor and novelist that Nelson was invited into the
2000 edition of Who's Who in America.
All poems copyrighted by their respective authors. Any reproduction of
these poems, without the express written permission of the authors, is
prohibited.
YGDRASIL: A Journal of the Poetic Arts - Copyright (c) 1993 - 2006 by
Klaus J. Gerken.
The official version of this magazine is available on Ygdrasil's
World-Wide Web site http://www.synapse.net/~kgerken. No other
version shall be deemed "authorized" unless downloaded from there.
Distribution is allowed and encouraged as long as the issue is unchanged.
COMMENTS & SUBMISSIONS
* Klaus Gerken, Chief Editor - for general messages and ASCII text
submissions: kgerken@synapse.net
Or mailed with a self addressed stamped envelope, to:
