Another voice

Aside from reading heaps of poems for Versal during the submission period and trying to write poetry myself, I do a bit of teaching. A general writing course for the Royal Art Academy in the Hague, where I teach writing to very creative 3^rd year students and poetry master workshops in Amsterdam to some very talented local writers. I can’t complain and to be honest it’s great working amongst people for whom words are a priority.

My perfect little universe was rocked some months ago when Guster approached me about putting together and teaching (in Dutch) a poetry workshop series for elementary school kids though not just poetry but rap, ugh. Of course I was enthusiastic to do it, who can afford not to be and the next days were spent driving everyone crazy by trying to rap all I had to say.

I actually have taught poetry to young kids before at a school situated in the centre of town where the lesson was a smooth affair of metaphors and allusions. This other school was in a rougher neighbourhood as far as rough neighbourhoods go in Holland and the kids accordingly challenged every trick I threw at them. I had spent hours putting together a neat little curriculum, embedded with classic Dutch children’s poems hoping to pass them off as rap (I did tell them the truth latter). Though I had inward smile moments when the kids who felt Annie M. G. Schmid was too soft, still demanded that I glue her poem into their notebook, I basically had to abandon my lesson plan and guide their energy towards something written.

With in no time they got the hang of writing and did they have a lot to say! They made incredible leaps through language and rhyme, venting about the dangers in their streets, their families’ countries of origin, local and Middle East politics, peace in the world and of course crushes. I was overwhelmed with their continuous exuberance (I’m putting it mildly) but also with the quality of what they wrote. Even the shy kid in the group was listened to which induced that kid with a kind of glow and another inward smile moment for me.

During the last lesson as we sat around the table eating good-bye cookies and lemonade, one of the girls told me she hadn’t learned anything during my class and on the contrary felt she was the one teaching me. We had a good laugh, but in many ways she was right. All I did was open a door, point and they all entered, me at the rear. And yes she and the rest of the kids taught me about structure, control and voice all of which I plan to incorporate when the season starts up again in September.

Another first of many changes ahead

Change is slow at a volunteer-run, non-profit, office-less place like Versal, but it happens nonetheless (particularly under duress). Today we switched mail clients to upgrade our newsletter - heck, to make it work in the first place. Haven't been getting mails from us lately? Yeah...We were sending them. But they just weren't going anywhere.

Behold the new list!

Here are some things I'm excited about right now

The non-winter season in the Netherlands means more (sun)light. I'd call it spring if I felt like a summer were coming, but let's temper our expectations.

Light from 5am to 11pm or so is pretty cool.

And since there's more time, if time is the thing you get with (sun)light and/or the thing you get when you're not hunched over the production of a literary magazine, I'm reading again (yay!). Like, books from my shelves. And links tucked away on Instapaper.

So here are some things I'm excited about right now.

Super Arrow, how have I only just heard about this?
Caketrain chapbook contest (now all I have to do is write another chapbook)
things magazine, London represent!
I'm still excited by The Thing, except for the part where they published that Franco guy. Can someone tell me if his writing is actually any good?
This will come up later and somewhere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Astronaut
Shayna and I are off to Oerel later this month!
The Black Ocean 2012 sub is now on sale. Do it because it's that awesome.

There is one other thing I'm excited about that I can't reveal in public. Yet.

Who is left untouched by the world?

The following is the text which I presented Saturday, May 14 at the "Poetry & Translocality" panel at the Prague Microfestival. A fantastic discussion between David Vichnar, Louis Armand, Alistair Noon, Donna Stonecipher, and myself followed.

When I first encountered the term translocality some four or five years ago, and Alistair's treatment of it in the final issue of Bordercrossing Berlin, I was immediately intrigued. Indeed, here is a word that enhances our vocabulary, our ability to describe something, and it does so morphologically. What's more, it does so openly.

In his 2009 essay, "Transculturality as a Perspective: Researching Media Cultures Comparatively", professor Andreas Hepp describes the word as follows:

"Locality emphasizes that…the local world does not cease to exist. Irrespective of how far the communicative connectivity of a locality goes, this does not prompt questions of whether a person is living his or her life primarily locally…As a physical human being, he or she must reside somewhere. "Trans," as a prefix, guides the focus from questions of locality…to questions of connectivity. If research is centered on translocality this emphasizes, on the one hand, that those questions pertaining to all that is local still matter, but that on the other hand today's locales are connected physically and communicatively to a very high degree. And that is the reason why the local does not cease to exist, but rather, changes."

The word itself asks us to be wide, to widen, to be open, flexible, dare I say inclusive. Upon reading Alistair's essay and a few of his reviews circa 2007 and 2008, I felt that our treatment of the word needed to open up, and I began writing on it myself. I thought this for several reasons:

The first of these is: There is a distinction between the translocal writer as a political/social circumstance (and pertaining to the writer's career) and translocal writing, where translocal is an adjective and perspective that can be used to understand a text—indeed, perhaps, the way a textual line is even crossed.

This distinction is important if the term is to be applied to its full potential. On the one hand, limiting translocality to an author's certain set of circumstances is instructive if we're talking about what a translocal writer faces when trying to get published in her home country, for example. But when using the term as a tool to help reveal and unravel text, as a kind of handle into the workings of a line, obviously translocality offers us much more beyond an author's personal narrative or even beyond our current temporal.

Over the course of 2008 and 2009, I worked with this idea in many ways, including in the opening editorials of Versal 7 and 8. In Versal 7's editorial, I wrote, "Up to now, most of the monologue I've seen about translocal literature is restricted to the relationship between author and his (yes, his) narrative text: observations of a street scene in Prague by a long-time foreign resident (the author)—the locality itself becoming protagonist to the poem. This either reduces the self-sufficiency of a piece alone on the page—i.e. it is the author's biography that makes a piece translocal or not--or it limits it to narrative surveillance. Certainly not all poetry is traceable to a particular mise en scene, nor is all prose a story. The very pivot of translocality would indicate that there are many, many kinds of localities, and we need not focus solely on where our (or the author's) feet are standing."

Which brings me to my next point. Up until about 2008, the vocabulary of translocality was applied almost exclusively to narrative—and to some degree lyric—poetry, and as mentioned to works by people "living abroad". This goes back to the early conflation of the writer and the writing.

Indeed it may be said that translocality is on a scale, easily exemplified by what Alistair calls the "holiday poem" but treated with more subtlety and complexity in a book like Christian Hawkey's Ventrakle or much of Paris-based poet Jennifer K. Dick's work. The "move" into long-term residence abroad can change your writing fundamentally, not just your subject matter or references. It can change your writing at the level of the line. But it is only one of many pathways towards translocal writing. Learning another language can have this effect. Access to the media of our contemporary world can have this effect. Being from a family of multiple cultures can have this effect. Take filmmaker Ish Klein's poetry, for example [here I read "Lithuanian Sunset" from her first collection].

This is not to say we should not be talking about any of this here, just that we should open the dialogue to the full breadth of its instructiveness. Looking at literary production in a place like Amsterdam or Prague--places of high concentration of tranlsocal writers—can tell us something about the mechanisms of translocality, but it is not everything.

"Sites of translocal activity—Amsterdam, Paris, Istanbul, and elsewhere—are not the privileged spaces of translocal literary production, but they are its breeding grounds. What our relocated writers can offer us, if not manifestos and hundreds of poems about foreign street markets, is insight into the inner workings of the translocal line that can then be applied everywhere. How do they invite (or force) interdependence between a string of vocabularies from two (or more) languages within a single stanza? How is the distance of a line of poetry crossed in a translocal sensibility? How is this distance ever crossed? Watch what these heavy carbon footprints are up to, and this nascent translocality concept could very well become a crucible for understanding literary production in general." [Versal 7 editorial]

Which brings me to my final point. The application of the term to cities such as Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin and Prague has highlighted another issue: the prevalence of men in the local and translocal dialogue, at the readings, in the publications. For example, in Alistair's article in Bordercrossing Berlin, he names and quotes a handful of translocal male writers, yet he names only two women: Slyvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop. No living women writers are mentioned in the piece, much less as practitioners of or participators in translocality. The "numbers trouble" highlighted by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young in the Chicago Review in 2007 is no less of an issue in our translocal communities here in Europe, and certainly this state of affairs should not go uncriticized.

By being limited in how we talk about it—indeed, how we BEGIN the literary dialogue about it—we are putting translocality in the hands of a few, of a select. This is an oxymoron to the term, contrary to its very linguistic structure, and can lead to, for example, the omission of translocal women writers from literary history or literary criticism, the reduction of the field of inquiry from a translocal perspective, and even the rise of falsely-founded literary "movements" in its name. I'll end on a section from my editorial in Versal 8, which is a kind of call.

"The more geography and culture lose their grips on locality, the more the poles of discourse I’m used to holding become useless. And this is where translocality departs from dogmatic political, linguistic, or sociological artifices: it frustrates not only definition and literary explication but also the enclosures of manifesto and branding. We are all translocal, now. We can’t help but be. What is local and global in a given experience is becoming more and more difficult to discern. Who is left untouched by the world?"

Poems on vegetables

Some of the great word-strings that get you here.

So beautiful it needs its own shelf.

Breaking the radio silence with the lineup that makes 9

While Versal is at the printer, I usually go on hiatus. This year, I jumped in my buddy's van and we drove to Fontainebleau, France for 10 days of bouldering. Armed with my new La Sportivas and the good night's sleep you can only get in a tent, the closest I got to poetry for a good week and nearly-half were the names of the lines I tried to repeat: Lévitation, Égoïste, La Grande Marche. This hiatus is a quiet, temporary time that I imagine many editors feel as they wait in the between of their hard work and its object.

A few days away from the launch party now and I'm back-back in Amsterdam, and, shhh, I have a copy of the new issue. It's gorgeous. For just a few more days, Versal is in the world but not in the world, waiting at my house for the party and the envelopes and the planes carrying them and the letters and the reviews and the postings and the tweets. A few days of quiet, just me and the journal, secret-like. A tree in the forest kind of thing. It's not yet.

So on behalf of our entire team, I'd like to celebrate this momentary stillness by releasing the full list of contributors who have made and will make Versal 9. You can join in by preordering a copy. It's easy and quick and you'll get a free back issue, and while you do it the only sound you'll hear is the click of the mouse.

Versal 9 is/will be:

Maureen Alsop
Louis Armand
Stace Budzko
Gary Joseph Cohen
Rob Cook
Yago Cura
DAS BANALE DING
Julia Forrest
Francene
Brandon Getz
Nene Giorgadze
Brady Gunnell
Heather Hartley
Russell Helms
Rochelle Hurt
Timothy Kercher
Stacy Kidd
Kaisu Koivisto
Douglas Korb
Jane Lewty
Nate Liederbach
Amy Mackelden
Tony Mancus
Isabella Mara
Kyle Mellen
Antoinette Nausikaä
Alice Notley
Jill Osier
John Parker
Dawn Pendergast
Carmen Petaccio
Romy Pocztaruk
Meg Reilly
Steven Salmoni
Maya Sarishvili
Travis David Smith
Anne Kathrine Sørup
Lucas Southworth
Dariel Suarez
Ayumi Suzuki
Katarzyna Szu Szugajew
Laura Tansley
Lizzi Thistlethwayte
Amy Touchette
Benjamin van Loon
Juliette Vivier
Brad Vogler
Jacqueline Vogtman
Rebecca Wallace
Suzanne Warren
Sara ten Westenend
Ken White
Nicole Wilson
Jane Wong
Elizabeth Zuba