Poems from Jorge Carrera Andrade’s Micrograms

Jan 152012
 

Poems from Jorge Carrera Andrade’s Micrograms

Translated by Joshua Beckman and Alejandro de Acosta

 

Newly released from Wave Books, Micrograms, by the Ecuadorian poet Jorge Carrera Andrade, pays meta-homage to the brief yet visceral impact of the microgram. Featuring a meditative body of short works translated by Joshua Beckman and Alejandro de Acosta, the collection also includes Andrade’s hermeneutical “Genealogy” of the microgram that serves as a primer to the form while simultaneously providing a substantive look at Andrade’s innately philosophical consciousness. In Andrade’s words, “The microgram is but the Spanish epigram deprived of its subjective hue. Better: an essentially graphical, pictorial epigram. Through its discovery of the deep reality of the object (its secret attitude) it arrives at a refined emotional style.”

As we learn in the translators’ introduction, Andrade was a world traveler who believed in a universal human solidarity that transcended borders and united him to all men. Evidenced in his introduction and his poetry, Andrade was also a tireless observer of the natural world who remained committed to illuminating the metaphysical through an examination of the miniscule. Micrograms, with Zen-like clarity, offers earthly, object-centric writing that informs our perceptions and emotions with refreshing brevity.

Jorge Carrera Andrade (1902-1978) was born in Quito, Ecuador, and was a diplomat as well as a poet, essayist and journalist. His distinguished literary career comprises a wide range of work, including editing, translation, criticism, and poetry. William Carlos Williams described Carrera Andrade’s images as “so extraordinarily clear, so connected to the primitive I imagine I am … participating in a vision already lost to the world.”

I have included a sampling of Andrade’s poems below along with one of the translators’ reinterpretation of Andrade’s Japanese to Spanish translation of Basho.

—Martin Balgach

WHAT THE SNAIL IS

Snail:
tiny measuring tape
with which God measures the field.

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Manufacturing Dreams: An Interview with Anthony Doerr — Richard Farrell

Jan 132012
 

 

In his 2007 memoir, Four Seasons in Rome, American writer Anthony Doerr describes his desire to see snow falling through the oculus of the Pantheon. “If it ever begins to snow, we should run to the Pantheon, because to see snowflakes drifting through the hole at the top of the dome is to change your life forever.” At the time, Doerr is living in Rome with his wife and twin boys after winning the Rome Prize, a prestigious award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. The Academy has provided him with a fully funded year in Rome, a studio, a place in a community of artists, and uninterrupted time to write, travel, read and think. Winter passes without snow and spring arrives in Italy. Doerr’s wife, Shauna, comforts him over the missed opportunity: “Sometimes, she says, the things we don’t see are more beautiful than anything else.”

Those of who have had the good privilege to read Anthony Doerr are fortunate.  Through his words, we have, indeed, seen the snow falling through the ancient dome. Crackling with beauty, intelligence, lyrical prose, heartbreaking characters and a rarefied wisdom, Doerr’s work challenges many of the basic traditions of contemporary fiction. His short stories often run unusually long, brushing up against such uneasy labels as novella. He writes about characters from other cultures, other races, other genders. His prose is dense, filled with science and history and more than an ample supply of the magical powders that make good fiction fly off the page. A reader might find herself in the Liberian civil war, on Caribbean beaches, inside memory (literal memory) stored on a computer disc. But it hardly matters. I’ve yet to begin a sentence of his and find myself disappointed.

I reach Doerr in December of 2011. Like in much of the nation, winter has yet to arrive to the Boise foothills. An uneasy tension seems to hang over the unusually dry, warm season. It is raining and chilly here in San Diego, where I am. We talk about the weather, about raising children, about Santa Claus and about trying to keep kids believing in magic and fat guys delivering gifts through chimneys without directly lying to those we love.

The fact that such an accomplished writer can be such a nice damned guy is very reassuring. Doerr retains the humility of a seeker, of a fellow traveler on the road to discovery, even if he is light years further down the path.

Doerr’s describes his process of writing this way (from Four Seasons In Rome): “…A story—a finished piece of writing—is for its reader; it should help its reader refine, perceive, and process the world—the one particular world of the story, which is an invention, a dream. A writer manufactures a dream. And each draft should present a version of that dream that is more precisely rendered and more consistently sustained than the last.”

Anthony Doerr’s short fiction has won four O. Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. He has won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, the Pacific Northwest Book Award, three Ohioana Book Awards, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award and the 2010 Story Prize. His books have twice been a New York Times Notable Book, an American Library Association Book of the Year, and made lots of other year end “Best Of” lists. In 2007, the British literary magazine Granta placed Doerr on its list of 21 Best Young American novelists.

—Richard Farrell

 

 Manufacturing Dreams: An Interview with Anthony Doerr

by Richard Farrell

 

Richard Farrell (RF):   The Paris Review once asked John Gardner this question: How do you name your characters? Is this something you think about as you write?

Anthony Doerr (AD): Names comes to me primarily through research. I’ve found last names on a gravestone and written on the back of a photograph and in the works cited at the end of a scientific paper.  And I’ve found first names in the fiction of other writers or overheard them in conversations.  For my short story “Village 113,” for example, I was reading lots of dry U.N. reports about the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, and whenever they would mention an engineer’s name, I would scribble it down. So for Li Qing I ended up simply mixing together two different names.

Right now, I’m writing a novel set in France and Germany during World War II, and am reading, among other things, a book called Voices From the Third Reich.  I’ll pull Uwe from Uwe Köster, who lived through the Hamburg firebombings as a young messenger, and Kühn from Klaus Kühn, who was Hitler Youth flak auxiliary during those same raids—and suddenly I have Uwe Kühn, a new person with at least a remotely plausible name.

That’s got to be a pretty common technique, don’t you think?  Once you have a name and you start spending months with a character, he or she begins to embody the name.  It starts to feel right; it starts to feel as though the character could never have been called anything else.  Like a child, probably.

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From “The Deep” by Anthony Doerr

Jan 132012
 

Herewith, an excerpt from Anthony Doerr’s award-winning short story, “The Deep.”  Recipient of the prestigious Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award in 2011, ”The Deep” is included in the paperback edition of Doerr’s 2010 Story Prize winning  collection Memory Wall.

Born with a heart defect in the early days of last century, Tom is told he will not live past the age of eighteen. His concerned mother protects him at every turn. ‘Go slow’ his mother says. But Tom discovers life in the midst of fainting spells and industrial collapse, falling in love with the beautiful, red-haired Ruby Hornaday, a girl who dreams of diving on the ocean floors. Set against the salt mines of Depression era Detroit, the reader is transported in time and space in this heartbreaking story of love, hardship and the irrepressible human spirit.

Listen to a reading of “The Deep” by the actor Damian Lewis at the 2011 Oxford Literary Festival.  Read an Richard Farrell’s interview of Anthony Doerr on Numéro Cinq.

-Richard Farrell

The Deep

by Anthony Doerr

 

Tom is born in 1914 in Detroit, a quarter mile from International Salt. His father is offstage, unaccounted for. His mother operates a six-room, underinsulated boardinghouse populated with locked doors, behind which drowse the grim possessions of itinerant salt workers: coats the colors of mice, tattered mucking boots, aquatints of undressed women, their breasts faded orange. Every six months a miner is laid off, gets drafted, or dies, and is replaced by another, so that very early in his life Tom comes to see how the world continually drains itself of young men, leaving behind only objects—empty tobacco pouches, bladeless jackknives, salt-caked trousers—mute, incapable of memory.

Tom is four when he starts fainting. He’ll be rounding a corner, breathing hard, and the lights will go out. Mother will carry him indoors, set him on the armchair, and send someone for the doctor.

Atrial septal defect. Hole in the heart. The doctor says blood sloshes from the left side to the right side. His heart will have to do three times the work. Lifespan of sixteen. Eighteen if he’s lucky. Best if he doesn’t get excited.

Mother trains her voice into a whisper. Here you go, there you are, sweet little Tomcat. She moves Tom’s cot into an upstairs closet—no bright lights, no loud noises. Mornings she serves him a glass of buttermilk, then points him to the brooms or steel wool. Go slow, she’ll murmur. He scrubs the coal stove, sweeps the marble stoop. Every so often he peers up from his work and watches the face of the oldest boarder, Mr. Weems, as he troops downstairs, a fifty-year-old man hooded against the cold, off to descend in an elevator a thousand feet underground. Tom imagines his descent, sporadic and dim lights passing and receding, cables rattling, a half dozen other miners squeezed into the cage beside him, each thinking his own thoughts, men’s thoughts, sinking down into that city beneath the city where mules stand waiting and oil lamps burn in the walls and glittering rooms of salt recede into vast arcades beyond the farthest reaches of the light.

Sixteen, thinks Tom. Eighteen if I’m lucky.

-Anthony Doerr

Prayers & Dreams: Poems by Denise Evans Durkin

Jan 112012
 

 

Denise Evans Durkin writes poems that glow with a gentle melancholy (all memory is tinged with melancholy) unexpectedly laced with joy and wonder. They are wonderful to read, not just for their warm humanity, but for their loving attention to detail, details that seem to accrete spirit and luminescence as the poems develop. Denise is a freshly-minted graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program.  She was raised in Brooklyn and lives in Putnam County, New York, with her husband. She wishes me to note that the poem “Letter to My Sister from Bellevue’s Prison Ward” includes a line from Gil Scott Heron’s “Dirty Low-Down.”  These are her first published poems.

dg

 

Prayers & Dreams

Poems by Denise Evans Durkin

 

Impedance
………(circa 1979)

 

The girl downstairs waits mostly. Sitting on her luggage
by the cattails, side of the road. Embroidered each star
on the velvet pillow of sky — they glitter
through the pin-pricks.

She waits, lonesome as the notions in her felted sewing box —
mismatched buttons, thimbles and threads in bright
remembered colors — bobbins and hat pins —
good things going away.

She’s there in the spaces where the dime store and
the pay phones used to be. The cart that sold ice-cream and
hot waffles. Relics.

Seeping cold. Click, drag, stop — over
imperfect stones. Her gradual world — ohms build
between receiver and vintage turntable on the dresser
in the bedroom she has not visited in thirty years.
Glass & leaves falling. Dust falling down in the hush —

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Turbulence: Paintings by Anne Diggory

Jan 102012
 

Here are a selection of stunning landscape paintings from Anne Diggory‘s solo exhibition Turbulence, currently on display at the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York (January 3rd – 28th). Not only do we get the paintings, but for Numéro Cinq Anne added reference photos and images of early versions of work and works-in-progress, delivering an amazingly revealing glimpse into the artist’s process and the provenance of these lovely paintings.

Anne Diggory has a BA in Studio Art from Yale and an MFA from the University of Indiana. We have been friends for years in the Saratoga Springs, NY, demimonde. She has been featured in Adirondack Life, American Artist Magazine, and The NY Times. She is known for her combination of accurate detail with expressive painting and strong abstract structure – an outgrowth of education at Yale and Indiana University and many years of exploring and painting the natural world. Her painting locations include the Adirondacks, the Hudson River Valley , Alaska and Arizona. A current series based on Lake George vistas was inspired by her research on John Frederick Kensett for an article that will shortly be submitted to the Metropolitan Museum Journal.

Diggory shows regularly at the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City. She recently had solo exhibitions at Fairleigh Dickenson University and Suffolk County Community College, Selden, NY. Those two shows focused on her hybird works that combine photography and painting in a multi-layered process.

Her work is included in many public and private collections including the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, NY, the Yale Art Gallery, and DePauw University.  Recent commissions include several large murals for the Adirondack Trust Company in Saratoga Springs (one is a 22 foot high mural of a waterfall), a collaborative commission of art work for the Saratoga Springs Train Station and a large interactive public artwork for the Albany Institute of History and Art.

Here is the text of the Blue Mountain Gallery press release for the show:

Shifting surfaces of waters and skies inspired the artworks for Anne Diggory’s solo exhibition, Turbulence, at the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York City that runs January 3rd – 28th,, 2012.  The exhibition includes motifs from the Adirondacks, the shores of Long Island and South Carolina as well as scattered tabletop arrangements.  Diggory’s preference for images featuring dynamic instability extends to her choice of medium in many works that combine sections of photography and painting in a multi-layered process. Further disruptions, slightly tempered by stable horizons, occur with deep spaces, off-kilter compositions and irregular perimeters that energize the work.

The artwork in the exhibition is mainly from the past year and a half. The title “Turbulence” is both a reference to the imagery and a reference to the process of making art, which involves disturbing the surface of the canvas or paper.

dg

 

Turbulence

Paintings by Anne Diggory

 

The Water Improvisation Series

While all representational painting is of necessity an invention in order to create illusion out of paint on a flat surface, some of these images are more fictional than others. Some started as plein air paintings that selectively used elements within a motif and were then finished in the studio.  The larger works and those with photographs inserted were started in the studio based on smaller works or photographs I had taken. The Water Improvisation series began with water-like patterns of paint and were developed from a well-informed imagination.

Cross Currents

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A Bargain, a short story by Dave Margoshes

Jan 092012
 

Herewith a gorgeous story from Dave Margoshes, who has contributed already two poems–”Theology” and “Becoming a Writer“–to these pages. I have long admired his work; I put him in Best Canadian Stories when I edited that estimable annual collection (over a decade of editing). “A Bargain” is excerpted from the author’s new collection A Book of Great Worth to be published by Coteau Books in April. A Book of Great Worth is a collection of linked stories based loosely on Dave Margoshes’ father. The title story was actually published in Best Canadian Stories, but in 1996, just before I took over.

Dave Margoshes is a Saskatchewan writer whose work has appeared widely in Canadian literary magazines and anthologies, including six times in the Best Canadian Stories volumes. He was a finalist for the Journey Prize, Canada’s premier short story award, in 2009. He’s published over a dozen books, including Bix’s Trumpet and Other Stories, which was named Saskatchewan Book of the Year in 2007. He’s been fiction editor of the literary magazines Grain and Dandelion, and was literary editor at Coteau Books for several years. He lives on a farm outside Saskatoon.

dg

 A Bargain

by Dave Margoshes

 

My father used to say that my mother was the one in the family who wore the pants. As he said it, he would invariably be wearing pants himself, either the pants of his suit or one of the Sears catalogue blue jeans my mother ordered for him, and she would be wearing one of her many flower-printed skirts, so the remark was surely meant to be ironic, though at the time, and until I went off to college and learned its delicious meaning, irony was a concept I was unfamiliar with, and what my father said was merely puzzling. The closest my mother ever came to wearing pants was the voluminous denim culottes she put on to tend her garden in the summer. Beyond those, and the one-piece swimsuit she wore when we went to the beach, I never saw her out of a skirt or dress, though she would occasionally walk around the house in her slip for a while after coming home from work. She was never embarrassed to be dressed that way in front of me, and so I in turn was never embarrassed to see her.

I think what my father meant by the remark was that my mother made all the big decisions in their life together. Another of his favourite remarks – again, ironically – was that he made the big decisions, on war and peace, world hunger, the economy and other weighty matters, while my mother contented herself with the small decisions, those related to the family and household, things like spending money, feeding and clothing them and the children, what movie to go to and so on. My father also often said that he and my mother did everything around the house together, with him doing the physical labour and my mother “supervising,” if it was something to do with the outside, and her doing the work and him supervising if it was inside – chores like the dishes and the laundry. All of these comments – conveyed in a joking voice but with a serious undertone – related to my father’s often-expressed grievance that my mother was “bossy.”

It was true that she almost always got her way. But not always. My father liked a drink now and then, meaning several times a day, I don’t know how many. She would have liked him not to drink at all. His concession to her was to rarely drink his preferred rye whisky in her presence – never at home, but he would let his guard down and have one or two at family gatherings where liquor was flowing. “I’m just doing this to be polite,” he would say, a little too loudly but usually with a wink, and the uncles would smile. But he kept a flask in the glove compartment of his car, a bottle in the bottom drawer of his desk at The Day, the Yiddish newspaper where he worked as a reporter and columnist, and during the course of his day he made occasional stops at barrooms where he was a familiar customer. At home, at night, usually seated at the kitchen table in his undershirt, he would have a glass or two of sherry or port, usually the cheapest brands. My mother bought it for him, and that’s what he specified, the cheapest, which, I imagine, also appealed to her own sense of frugality. This was her concession to him, these fortified wines, “a gentleman’s drink,” he would say when he unscrewed the bottle, as if to imply it was no drink at all then, and didn’t count.

Although I was a witness to them all through my growing up, this to-ing and fro-ing, these nuances of their life together, it wasn’t until I was grown and involved in a relationship of my own that I came to understand the delicate balance they had constructed and maintained. Well, not understand, but begin to.

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