We asked two poets to
exchange work and create interpretations of each other's poems. Click on the
links below to read the original texts and new interpretations, and then come
back to get the poets’ commentary on the process.
Stacy
gave me five or so one-page poems to work with, and as I was in an
emotionally agitated state I realized quickly upon making the plunge to
actually do the translation - without giving it much thought beforehand in
any planned sense (though anticipating the endeavor with solid excitement) -
that I was going to write off of each line in each poem and each word in each
line but not so much off of what I though the poems were trying to broadly
communicate. However, that kind of thinking does not, by my way of looking at
it, preclude working off of the experience of reading and engaging each poem.
I was not looking to write about the source of my agitation either, so that
provided some symmetry in the sense of Stacy's work having both my own
inability to be composed and my lack of desire to make said inability be a
subject between itself and my translation. Since I wrote all the initial
lines all over the pages Stacy gave me, there is this intimate document
somewhere, but that is not the actual translation. That's more of, like, the
literal translation vis-a-vis Stacy's english into my english, and is
therefore a disaster of accuracy.
Anselm was the first
poet that came to mind to be my partner in this project. I first heard him
read a few years ago in Milwaukee and was struck by the dense emotional gnarl
of his work along side his quotidian ease. As colleagues, we collaborate all
the time so I thought it would be nice to take that into a poem. Anselm gave
me a sheaf of “Have A Good One” poems, and I choose to work with one whose
beginning line hooked me: “Birdy shoots out from treetop.” I did a close
line-by-line reading and just started “scoring” the movements of my mind in
response to his language/images in characteristically, for me, short lines. I
was really into the birdy and the boy, so I kind of exaggerated that
relationship throughout.After I read
what I wrote, I also saw a representation of individual drama amidst a
thronging city, but kind of in a surreal pastoral mode. I wrote it in a solid
column and then added stanza breaks as an afterthought; a very subtle gesture
to the form of Anselm’s poem “Zero Star Hotel.” I think of this as an
exercise in distortion. I enjoyed sticking pretty close to his poem, but
heating and bending it into something that fits me, the poet.
**
Anselm
Berrigan wrote Some Notes on
My Programming, published by Edge Books in spring of
2006, as well as Zero Star Hotel and Integrity & Dramatic Life.
He's interested in the poems as an experience for whoever might read them,
but doesn't listen to what they say they want, though he likes them. Anselm
is attempting to write 200 poems called “Have A Good One.” Or so.
Stacy
Szymaszek is the author of Emptied of All
Ships (Litmus Press, 2005) as well as several
chapbooks. Sections from her long poem “hyperglossia” are forthcoming from
Hot Whiskey Press. She works at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and
curates their Monday Readings series. Editor of Gam: A Survey of Great
Lakes Writing, she is trying to revive and reconfigure it as a New
Yorker.
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