Archive for May, 2019|Monthly archive page
Bradford & Rad on House House Press
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: Anahita Jamali Rad, David Bradford, House House Press, literary publishing, poetry, poetry publishing, publishing
Leave a comment Back when David Bradford published his chapbook Call Out back in 2017, he was kind enough to answer a few questions concerning the book and his art and life.
Now, you can read, here, he and collaborator Anahita Jamali Rad answer some more queries concerning their House House Press, a publisher of
poetry chapbooks, pamphlets and ephemera that seeks out rigorous politics of peripherality, scaffoldings for debris, studies of mess, and everything in between, with a primary focus on radical BIPOC writing practices.
Budapest on my mind
A friend of mine recently shared Anya Silver’s poem “Doing Laundry in Budapest”, which brought to mind a thematically-related poem of my own, from my first chapbook Budapest Suites (Montreal: Pneuma, 1993) and first trade edition, Grand Gnostic Central and other poems. I share it here for my friend’s, and anyone else’s, pleasure.
“Apply what you know to what you feel that’s more than enough”
On Váci utca, mongrel pigeons, flapping,
Mount American-style shopfront windows.
Grey cops in pairs or trios patrol;
Country people bag handiwork, whistling.
At the end of Vörösmárty tér, a blind man begs fillérs at tables in Gerbaud—
A blond father yells No! at a Gypsy girl and daughter.
Behind me a woman asks for directions:
Bocsanat. Nem magyar. “Nem Magyar?!”
NOTES:
Váci utca is a famous commercial street in Budapest; Vörösmárty tér is a square at the end of the street; fillérs at the time (1991) were pennies; Gerbaud is a famous café on, I believe, the square; the Hungarian that ends the poem can be translated roughly as “Pardon me. I’m not Hungarian.” “You’re not Hungarian?!”
I am aware that the racial designation of the girl and daughter in line 6 might, today, be read as an epithet; I retain it here as an index of the time of the poem’s composition; its use, innocent at that time, was also prompted by the alliteration with ‘Gerbeaud’….
“We’re doomed.”
Filed under: Ecology, poems | Tags: ecological despair, ecology, ecopoetics, ecopoetry, global warming, insect apocalypse, Manu Saunders
Comments (1) ….or, as the refrain of another “Dark Mountain” climate change jeremiad would put it, “It’s worse than that.”
It is, surely, rationally difficult not to deny the gravity of global warming and environmental degradation in general and not to fall prey to anxiety or even despair. It is not irrational, however, to maintain an open, critical mind and culture hope.
For instance, even fairly responsible media sources distort the findings of ecological researchers. For example, two recent studies of declines in insect biomass inspired copy such as “insect apocalypse,” “global ecosystem collapse,” “loss of all insects within 100 years,” and “collapse of entire food webs.” However, learned reflection reveals the matter is less dramatic, far more complex, though hardly without concern. The same can be said for headlines about how humans have wiped out 60% of all animals on Earth in the last 30 to 40 years.
Much more could be said in this vein, but not quite eight months back, similar, dire and final pronouncements from Mayer Hillman prompted a number of poetic responses, of which the tersest and most direct was this:
Replies to Mayer Hillman
“We’re doomed.”
Your therapist would guide you
gently to see you’re fortune telling.
The dialectician would unfold the thought
that determination does not
foreclose unforeseen developments
being the condition of its own negation.
A happy chance slip of memory recalls
“What is real now was only once imagined”.
Poeta Doctus 