VANITAS 6: LATINITAS IS OUT!!

The sixth issue of VANITAS takes on the omnipresent influence of Latin language, thought, and culture in various vectors in the contemporary world. New poems and translations by Micah Ballard, Steve Dalachinsky, Clayton Eshleman, Elaine Equi, Alan Halsey, Bob Holman, Ron Horning, John Latta, David Lehman, Joel Lewis, Lyn Lifshin, Gerard Malanga, David Meltzer, Amanda Nadelberg, Stephen Ratcliffe, Ariana Reines, Raphael Rubinstein, Hal Sirowitz, Christopher Stackhouse, Mónica de la Torre, Tony Towle, John Tranter, Terence Winch, Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, and many more provide active exploration via works from the Ladino, Martial's epigrams, Baudelaire, divertimenti, Sakra Boccata, Brazilian desserts, the immigration problem, ars poetica, fragmentos ibericos, Mario Schifano, Elsa Morante, Lorca, Blanchot, Venice (CA), les demoiselles, sortes virgilianae, tango criollo, Ovid, Pamplona, and Pino Solanas. Featured artwork by Rafael Ferrer and Juan Uslé, plus works by Vivien Bittencourt, Saint Clair Cemin, Juan Gómez and Jan Henle. Available through Small Press Distribution.

Don't miss the VANITAS 6 launch reading!!

Featuring Elaine Equi, Adam Fitzgerald, Drew Gardner, Bob Holman, Joel Lewis and Tony Towle.

May 31, 2012
6:00 pm
FREE! 

The Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
(Between Houston and Bleecker)
F train to 2nd Ave, 6 to Bleecker
mail@bowerypoetry.com
Event Page

TC: Giuseppe Ungaretti: What would I want with images?

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Waves on sandy beach, Cabo Polonio, Uruguay: photo by Johntex, 2006

These wandering landscapes of the ocean's

Shifting surface, the incisive

Candour of daybreak on these

Or those leaves: these things no longer

Draw me; nor can my old eyes make

Out light from shade against the stones.




Forgot, what would I want

With images?

Leaves of European Birch (Fagus): photo by The cat, 2006

Non più m'attragano i paesaggi erranti

Del mare, né dell'alba il lacerante

Pallore sopra queste o quelle foglie;

Nemmeno più contrasto col macigno,

Antica notte che sugli occhi porto.

Le immagini a che prò

Per me dimenticata?

Foggy sunset with Brown Pelicans: photo by Mila Zinkova, 2009

Giuseppe Ungaretti: Poem IX (Non più m'attragano i paesaggi erranti) from Cori descrittivi di stati d'animo di Didone (Choruses Descriptive of the State of Mind of Dido), in La terra promessa (The Promised Land), 1950; translation by TC

TC: Ángel de piedra

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Angel: relief carving, 1689, above north entrance to Church of the Assumption, Anauri, Italy (image by Vladimir Shioshvili, 2006)

The angel asked, as his shoulders were pressed into the stone
Why me?  And taken from the inhabited body,
Like the lyric voice rustling from memory forests,
Childhood rushes toward death, a wind in those woods,
Crashing through trees, dying out,
Settling like a white mist over everything.

Angel: relief carving, Romanesque period (12th c.), Pécs Cathedral, Hungary (image by Takk, 2009)

TC: To A Certain Friend

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Forest area and prairie at Cooper Mountain Nature Park, Oregon: photo by Aboutmovies, 2009

Presence comes before everything, even before being
The you to whom everything once belonged
If by everything one means the fullness of nature's beauty
You must remember now that much has been taken from you
Grief too will go from you as from sorrowing songs
Sorrow goes, leaving nothing for you after a while
But the memory of the melody, some old familiar tune
That's lingered on long past the moment you first sailed
Gracefully into the room, as if all the modern languages
Were coming down to me so that I could say these things

Ercall Wood Nature Reserve, near Arleston, Telford And Wrekin, Great Britain: photo by Bob Bowyer, 2003



Moore Nature Reserve, England: photo by andy, 2005

TC: Les Etoiles

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Orion Nebula (M42 / NGC 1976): image made in 2006 from Hubble Space Telescope observations taken between 2004 and 2005 (NASA / ESA / M. Robberto)

These globes of gold, islands of light,
sought by the eye in dreams,
flash up from fugitive shadow
glittering dust on the roads of night,

and the breath of evening dying
blows them away

Heliosheath in Orion Nebula: Hubble Space Telescope image, 2006 (NASA / ESA)

TC: Bach's Booty

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Johann Sebastian Bach at age 61: Elias Gottlob Haussmann, 1748, copy or second version of painting made in 1746 (collection of William H. Scheide)

Three barrels of beer was Bach's pay. Still now
A dim shadow falls across the bright festal tone
As we follow the figured bass part down
Memory lane, where the art form's short term losses,
Simulating his disputes with authority,
Preclude the purple laurels victory brings.
Don't blow your wig, scholar. Let the beer fiddlers play
"The Warrior Minstrel of the Forlorn Hope."
Life remains long, but now and then as the silver
Chords gather and are sprinkled above the planet
Like sparks pinned to a blue velvet canopy
We get these inklings, self regard drifts away
From boreal night's cold lucid frame
Into postromantic darkness, and real stars come out.

Old man with stick leaning on a barrel: photo by Buschgens, 1943 (Deutsches Bundesarchiv)

TC: The Nelsons in San Roque

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San Roque hub: photo by John Wiley, 28 May 2010

Those bungalows of San Roque
so perfect yet oddly sad
(“a little wood & stucco
to keep the sun out”)
always remind me of
where the Nelson family lived
way back in the days of Hi Oz
Hi Pop Hi Rick Hi David.

Everybody in that family was Okay
every day for a whole decade.
And when Ricky turned out to be
a low rider, it was still okay.
And that’s the way it is today
among the petticoat palms
of Calle Noguera
and Puesta del Sol.

You can’t rain on the parade
of the petit bourgeois
because it doesn’t have one
except at Fiesta
when rain’s against the law.

Ricky, Harriet, David and Ozzie Nelson: photographer unknown, n.d. via lost in transmission

David, Ricky and Harriet Nelson: photographer unknown, n.d.

Lauro Canyon Reservoir and upper San Roque: photo by John Wiley, 18 April 2011