https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2022-03-01 18:31:002022-03-01 18:31:00Selections from At Night I Sing My Heads to Sleep, by Matt Hart (Poetry ’02)
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2022-02-25 18:21:052022-02-25 18:21:05“The Father Becomes a Cloud,” by David Rutschman (Fiction ’02)
Drop it. Slowly. Let care go like a dirty hankie. Don’t pick it up. Who needs chivalry? They don’t see you: you’ve let your hair go grey. Who cares? Lose four committees. Lose raises after earning your degree. Lose all sense of ownership over the toaster waffles. Rule the house by order of the tumbleweeds. Grow accustomed to the truth: people will do everything better. Feel the dull scrape of mother over your gluten-free toast. Ambivalence is a crone’s disease. The gurgle of despair— the world, not your oyster, but someone else’s Dover Sole. Forget about it.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2022-02-24 18:02:002022-02-24 18:02:00“Ode to Ambivalence,” by Jen Ryan Onken (Poetry ’20)
In memory’s eye, I imagine my grandmother, lithe as a willow tree, swinging the vacuum across a high pile carpet, washing a dish in the sink overlooking the suburban marsh she never visited. Her life a stop sign to pleasure, hand held up to a subdued face, guarded.
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A weekend drive: and we got lost just west Of Waconia, near the lake whose name you couldn’t Pronounce, though we knew it sounded like “Whisby” or “Wherby,” and around then, cresting over a hill We came to a green stretch of somebody’s farm, The grass so saturated it might have been boiled In paint, and you said, behind the wheel, “What Have they done with the signs?” and sure Enough, someone or something had taken down The mileage marker to town X, also the name of the river Over whose chuckling rivulets we were now crossing…
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2022-02-21 17:39:002022-02-21 17:39:00“The Last Sign,” by Charles Baxter
In a field of snow, it’s a legitimate option to see the tracks made by the myth but never the myth itself. There’s nothing there.
No mysterious creature to ravage the livestock, assign paw prints to the barn doors, or claw marks to the black walnut trees.
The ghost that sings of lost love from across the lake? That sound can be explained by barometric pressure, the north wind, numbers on spreadsheets that bear no resemblance to the voices of the drowned.
There’s no mandate that requires you to inquire about the fate of [redacted] or the nature of [deleted].
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2022-02-16 17:49:002022-02-16 17:49:00“My Favorite Tin Foil Hat,” by Matthew Olzmann
Julie Swarstad Johnson: In your prefatory note to Gone to Earth, you describe the experience of writing a poem as “what the ancients called the muse, what Wanda Coleman called ‘zoning,’ a term [that] signals the opening to another zone or state of being.” Once the poem is finished, the poet becomes one of its readers and encounters it in a new way. As you came back to these early poems, fifty years on, did you become a reader of these poems in a different sense, given the greater separation across time? Had you returned to these poems in any significant way prior to this time?
Eleanor Wilner: At the time I wrote these, I think I read them with amazement at the work of imagination, and as guides, sometimes admonitions—a way forward through troubled times. And yes, altered by all these years, I read them now with different eyes, disinterested really, as if I were (and perhaps am) a different person, no longer with a personal stake in them. Yet, like old friends I hadn’t seen in years, I felt glad to see them; they had served me well.
To your second question: no, I had not returned to reread these poems in all the years since I wrote them. Perhaps because they did the work they were meant to, and so could be left behind.
A few of them, however, seemed fundamental to the work of poetic imagination and had remained in memory, not word-for-word but in their imagistic action. But when I unearthed them for this book, I discovered that those I remembered as illuminating and key to the process that followed, memory had simplified, made more emblematic—removing some of the ambiguities, the cross currents and complexity. In short, time and distance tended to exaggerate the positive, life-serving side of what transpired in the poems, which, in the long run, turned out to be true to their effect. And why shouldn’t hindsight create its own version of what mattered most?
Angela Hirons: You mentioned in an email that you see the translation process as a ‘collaborative’ one. Can you talk a little bit more about this? Is that a collaboration between yourself and the author, or more widely between yourself, the author, the editor and copy editor?
Abigail Wender: I think the collaboration is first with the text itself. What is its context and history? and more specifically what are the patterns and threads in the text? The Bureau of Past Management has so many intentional repetitions of words and syntactical chunks (as usual, forever and ever, in the past, essentially, and so on) – initially I just tried to notice these and understand what the patterns were.
I was lucky enough to work with Iris Hanika on the translation’s early drafts, which was a collaboration of another kind. The difficult, satiric chapter titled ‘Past Management’ would have been extremely hard for me to translate without our conversations about what the book meant to her and why she’d written it. The emotional engine of that chapter is fury; I’m not sure I understood that. Iris and I had so many conversations about the differences between German and English words, the nuances and references; it was helpful, of course, and also deeply fascinating to discuss the work with her.
The final manuscript was also a collaboration with the editor (Katy Derbyshire) and copy editor (yourself). I’ve worked as an editor and a copy editor and am grateful for the chance to have those discussions and corrections. It’s very easy to get something in mind and not see where you’ve made a mistake as a translator. Both you and Katy helped make the translation a better book.
