#taije silverman

[seasunandstar]

Maybe we don't bear the unbearable. Maybe we die with it. And in our place some larger, less impatient shape may then be granted space but I don't want it. I want my mother. Sometimes beside her in the bed while trying to tell her I'm okay, I start to weep. She watches me. Her eyes are distant now, gone deep inside some gravely gentle place where, with a stranger's curiosity, she seems to ask What can I do with your sadness? She has no use for it. We will lose what we love, and our suffering is useless, and by dusk all the crickets will thrum their one absence of warning. That trace of light against the hills will spread through trees, undo the ends of evergreen, then fall to fields. It will not hold. As if it means to urge us, look. Love's body must be manifold. Black cricket shell, new summer air, late light. The landscape's all ablaze with gentle strangers. Look. We're standing in a field.

-- From "On Joy", Taije Silverman

[putah-creek]

Armageddon, a poem by Taije Silverman

[themoodofthepeople]

Taije Silverman, "The Poem About Chuck E. Cheese a Friend Posted on Facebook" from Brooklyn Poets on Vimeo.

Brooklyn Poets Reading Series, 144 Montague St, Brooklyn, NY, June 9, 2023

[nyxbarb]

Maybe we don't bear the unbearable.

Maybe

we die with it. And in our place some

larger,

less impatient shape may then be granted

space

but I don't want it. I want my mother.

— by Taije Silverman; On Joy.

[allyourprettywords]

“Terezin,” Taije Silverman

—a transfer camp in the Czech Republic We rode the bus out, past fields of sunflowers that sloped for miles, hill after hill of them blooming. The bus was filled with old people. On their laps women held loaves of freshly baked bread. Men slept in their seats wearing work clothes. You stared out the window beside me. Your eyes were so hard that you might have been watching the glass. Fields and fields of sunflowers. Arriving we slowed on the cobblestone walkway. Graves looked like boxes, or houses from high up. On a bench teenage lovers slouched in toward each other. Their backs formed a shape like a seashell. You didn't want to go inside. But the rooms sang. Song like breath, blown through spaces in skin. The beds were wide boards stacked up high on the walls. The glass on the door to the toilet was broken. I imagined nothing. You wore your black sweater and those dark sunglasses. You didn't look at me. The rooms were empty, and the courtyard was empty, and the sunlight on cobblestone could have been water, and I think even when we are here we are not here. The courtyard was flooded with absence. The tunnel was crowded with light. Like a throat. Like a— In a book I read how at its mouth they played music, some last piece by Wagner or Mozart or Strauss. I don't know why. I don't know who walked through the tunnel or who played or what finally they could have wanted. I don't know where the soul goes. Your hair looked like wheat. It was gleaming. Nearby on the hillside a gallows leaned slightly. What has time asked of it? Nights. Windstorms. Your hair looked like fire, or honey. You didn't look at me. Grass twisted up wild, lit gold all around us. We could have been lost somewhere, in those funny hills. And the ride back—I don't remember. Why was I alone? It was night, then. It was still morning. But the fields were filled with dead sunflowers. Blooms darkened to brown, the stalks bowed. And the tips dried to husks that for miles kept reaching. Those dreamless sloped fields of traveling husks.  

[vecchiorovere-blog]

[Sto pensando a un amore che sta pensando al futuro. Sto desiderando quelle mani tra i miei capelli.] ... [Lei dorme un sonno conosciuto con nomi nei pozzi. Sfiora la superficie, senza peso.] Taije Silverman-Il sonno di lei, il sonno di lui e io sono sazia. 

Paul Schneggenburger

[peaamlipoetrydoctor]

Kay Ryan - The Best of It

Today's prompt was to write a poem after Kay Ryan. Or in the spirit of... so maybe not actually quoting or sampling so much as trying to pattern a poem after her style or her tone.

Still trying to figure this out and certainly on my first attempt I didn't get further than trying to keep the shape of the poem narrow, the language grounded, and the tone caustic.

Quoting from that review -

'Ryan has said in an interview: "I like the sound of facts, but I don't care about them as facts. I like them as texture." In this respect, and in the tight, narrow, spring-loaded forms of her poems, Ryan has learned a lot from Emily Dickinson. However, where Dickinson writes, "I heard a Fly buzz–when I died–", Ryan would write: "We hear flies buzz / when we die", preferring third and second person modes that include the reader.'

For this prompt, I decided to stick close to one particular poem, The Best of It, which worries away at the idea that "making the best of a bad situation" is either sensible or survivable.

I wanted to start with some sort of try-hard feel-good effort and cut away from it. Mine doesn't really manage to be ironic - a pretty straightforward contradiction between presentation vs facts.

But - not a terrible start... 5 or 6 out of 10??

I give you -

Sleight of Hand

Eyes and teeth! As you

shake-shake the mixer,

take aim with a flourish

at the icy cocktail glass

dead-centre on your Art

Deco mirrored cabinet.  

No amount of sparkle

will be able to conceal

that the drink is made

with flat fizz and sad

remnants of the mint.

[wcschutt]

My Life, I Lapped It Up: Selected Poems of Edoardo Sanguineti

Oberlin College Press, October 2018

Paper $14.95 (ISBN 978-0997335545)

My Life, I Lapped It Up is the first comprehensive English translation of one of postwar Italy’s most important poets. Edoardo Sanguineti (1930-2010) is best known as an influential member of the Italian intellectual avant-garde that rose to prominence in the 1960s. During his 60-year career, he published more than 20 volumes of poetry, as well as librettos, novels, plays, books of literary and social criticism, and translations. This collection highlights his most psychologically probing and approachable poems, featuring work from his mid and late career.

Praise for My Life, I Lapped It Up:

Edoardo Sanguineti remains as contemporary in 2018 as he was in 1963. Will Schutt's translations are a substantial delight, navigating both Sanguineti's acrobatic syntax and his unpretentious yet endless range of references. The tongue-tip pleasure of the original Italian is everywhere apparent in Schutt’s English, with colloquialisms like “a total sexy-booze and -schmooze” and “the muscle-mush of tourists” providing consistent and gleeful force. This selection conveys the irresistibly irreverent tone of a major modern Italian author, and elegantly recreates the invention and pathos for which Sanguineti is revered.

—Taije Silverman

One of the marks of a skillful translation, particularly of poetry in translation, is that the reader, reading along, simply forgets that it’s a translation. In My Life, I Lapped It Up, Will Schutt has achieved this end. Using a poet’s focus on sound and language, Schutt brings us (preserving parentheticals and the linguistic mash-up of the original) the wordplay, the anarchy, the skip and scrabble of Sanguineti. The speaker avers that “the Aeolian harps do not play for you,” but I’d beg to differ. “Let’s talk, please, about life’s pleasures”: “to sleep in the sun … to drink wine (French, if possible...)”—to find an important Italian poet rightfully rendered into spiky, readable, pleasurable poems in English.

—Moira Egan

Photo Credit: Giuliana Traverso 

[finita-la-commedia]

I took absence down to the ocean and because it is blind, I told it about the waves.  I held its warm hair. When it wept I placed my arms  around the wind shape of a cliff and felt for edges.  I walked beside absence in the streets at night  and I let it tell me stories.

Taije Silverman, from “Now you can join the others”

[oldmanshands-blog]

The Meteor

Giovanni Pascoli

Translated from the Italian by Taije Silverman

Blackout. Above me the sky shone a pale, clear blue.No one was there, no one near— except you,faraway Rio Salto, who flowed past my home.I didn’t hear you. All I heard was your road crewof frogs, out announcing the water and alwaysmore water to pulp mills and farms.I thought of the past. I recalled how,at twenty, still fearful of life, I felt I’d die tooin some blood-spattered way. And alone,late at night, I would come to this pathwhere my enemy might lie in wait in the dark.I walked slowly, so slowly, my heartin my throat while I feigned perfect calmso he would see I was brave (thoughI’d startle at wind, or a firefly’s spark):slowly, I crept, and my heart leapt ahead.And what then? A crash—laid out flaton the path, I’d be gasping, alone . . .but not alone. The graveyard is near.Memorial lamps dimly kindling stones.My mother would come, a handbrushing my skin, and I’d feel her tearson my wound like cool dew in the dark.The others, too, will draw nearerand gather me up from the pathand with faint cries, they’ll carry me offto their land, and they’ll care for methere—where you smile unendingabove your sloped pallet now paddedwith mosses and grass, like a nest.And musing I heard (beyond grapevinesand next to the edge of a ditch, by an elm)a rough hiss, and a flash, a blast . . . blastingopen, and glowing, and falling, fallenfrom the infinite flicker of stars:a globe of gold that dove mutely toward fieldsas if diving toward empty layers of mist,itself empty as mist—and insideits instant, it lit all the hedgesand trenches and huts, and clustersof forest, and night-drifting riversand the white, towered towns in the distance.Enraptured, I asked: Did you see?But there was only the sky, high and serene.Not the sound of a step, or silhouette.The sky, nothing more: dark sky,surging with huge stars; a sky in whichit seemed the world had been submerged.And I felt the earth inside the universe.Shaking, I felt earth as part of the sky. And sawmyself down here, bewildered and small,wandering on a star among stars.

[firstdraftpod]

Ep 193: Kate Spencer

First Draft Episode #193: Kate Spencer

Kate Spencer, comedian, author of Dead Mom’s Club: A Memoir, and co-host of fabulous podcast Forever35 talks about the never-ending quest for confidence, exorcising grief and pain through writing, and how a podcast about serums became a podcast about feelings.

Links and Topics Mentioned In This Episode

Amy Poehler, comedian, actress, writer, and director, who is not from the same town Kate is from, but they both grew up “outside Boston”

Early on in childhood Kate fell for The BabySitter’s Club books by Ann M. Martin, and the Sweet Valley Twins series by Francine Pascal, and then she fell for Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Revisiting The Boxcar Children, written by Gertrude Chandler Warner, with her daughter was a special bonding experience

Hatchet by Gary Paulsen and other “kids surviving intense circumstances” books are so fascinating, right?!?

Kate’s eight-year-old daughter is plowing through Raina Telgemeier’s graphic novels, including Smile, Sisters, and Guts

The Fear Street books by R.L. Stine, It by Stephen King, and V.C. Andrews’ books like Flowers in the Attic and Petals on the Wind

The film Grease is not actually appropriate for young kids, it turns out

When she moved to New York City, Kate signed up for classes at the UCB Theater and rose through the ranks in the improv community

I basically demand that Kate read Vacationland: True Stories From Painful Beaches by John Hodgman because she went to college in Maine

The two writers I mention who went to Vermont College for Children’s Writing well into their careers are Ally Condie, author of Matched, The Last Voyage of Poe Blythe, and more (listen to her First Draft interview here) and Brendan Reichs, author of Nemesis, Virals, and co-author with Ally Condie of The Darkdeep

On Grief by C.S. Lewis was one of the only books out there for people experiencing loss for a long time

The poet Taije Silverman has written about the grief of caring for her dying mother, and Kate found her work while grieving for her own loss

Kate and her Forever35 podcast co-host Doree Shafrir’s conversation on the By the Book podcast, in which Kate discusses finding Twilight by Stephenie Meyer while grieving and how it inspired her to write

“How I Finally Let Go of Grief for my Dead Mom,” Kate’s piece in Buzzfeed about the pain of letting go of grief

Holly Root, founder of Root Literary, is Kate’s literary agent

Kate’s husband is Anthony King, who has written for TV shows Silicon Valley, Broad City, Search Party, Playing House and more, and he co-wrote Beetlejuice: The Musical which has been nominated for eight Tony Awards, including best musical

Kate is writing in Scrivener, a writing program

Elana K. Arnold, author of Damsel, What Girls Are Made Of, Infandous, A Boy Called Bat, and more (listen to her First Draft interviews here and here) said in her interview with me that she feels like she might be ready to move on from writing about anger and feminism

A Cup of Jo is the website and newsletter run by Joanna Goddard that is packed

Kate wants to be up front about the fact that Vinter’s Daughter sent her their Active Botanicals Serum, she did not buy it herself

The Call Your Girlfriend episode that walked through an OB-GYN appointment

Cat Winters, whose recent book, The Raven’s Tale, called for her to research Poe a ton. In that process she discovered that Edgar Allen Poe’s #1 hater outlived him, then wrote his obituary and his first biography, which has shaped how we think about Poe to this day. (Listen to Cat’s First Draft episode here)

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[nyxbarb]

“Maybe we don't bear the unbearable.

Maybe

we die with it.”

— by Taije Silverman; On Joy.

[themassreview]

Congrats to MR poet Taije Silverman, who just won a Pushcart Prize for “Spiritual Evaluation” (Vol. 56, issue 2)!

[hush-syrup]

It isn't unhappiness, this feeling like rain in the bones.

From Poem to Keep What I Love by Taije Silverman

[bostonpoetryslam]

Will we be all right? The door closed click, shut. Ghosts cluttered the hallway. Inside me somewhere buried and lightless I was sobbing and would not stop, but in the mirror my eyes were dry. I asked to forget and be forgiven though I asked no one, and nothing.

Taije Silverman, "The Winter Before," published in Panhandler Magazine

[phunkmeisterphresh]

Poem to Keep What I Love, Taije Silverman

soon we shall know  if we have learned to accept that the stars  do not go out when we die

                                                      -- Abba Kovner

I.

Even at dawn while my mother turns in white quilted sheets for the last peel of sleep while the dog waits pure of heart for her door to open, my father already gone, circling the same blocks of empty buildings to check wet floors or new locks, even on Sunday, even at dawn--the birdsong's all reckless clatter, stacked against air like metal while cats hide under ferns and the petal-drunk cherry trees burn their new beauty to bits.   Spring slides down leaves.   Lilacs refuse every warning.   An old man in his good hat waves without joy and the women follow. Something falls inside, someone waking, a new day setting its small systems straight.   Birds insist on themselves.   Again again we learn forgetting, practice our goodbyes.  

II.

In the five minutes between here and there, Bradford Pears blooming round as balloons on the clipped blocks of dress shops, framed chattering white now by trees fat with air.   Poem to keep the Bradford Pears.   Poem to keep sleep, dreams that burrow under the skin with their knots of questions, dreams evacuating through the alarm's blind end.   Poem to keep the crowd of light by the open closet seen only as light upon waking and sourceless.   Source yields ending.   Poem to keep five minutes the sloped fields intact, the cows unhesitating the blooms fastened to branches completely.   Poem to keep patience protected.   Afloat. Without pull.   To keep stars we can't see from their myth-born explosions their traveling downward their endless arrival.   

III.

Against the black spine of fear that travels through countries, poem, keep what I love. Against the dreams, which kidnap me.   Against the silk hip of elsewhere, cities of still swans on black rivers, the lonely nights mapped neat by the windows of restaurants, poem, keep what I love.   Against days wound like toys then let loose, painted cars crashing hard what I love though unharmed into memory.   Against freedom's hummed lilt, tremulous, trapped in the cloaked sweetness of magnolias at the end of the street, the front door opening and closing, its greeting blind keep the thumped pulse of the dog's tail meaning yes, meaning here and so why won't the green shutters rack the glass with recognition, why won't the street turn to water and fall?   

IV.

After they've left for some other shore where the air gives off scent like a heat, sweet on the skin and blessed

dumb to the one empty house on its street in its town where its picture rich rooms have begun

to collapse.   Walls are lungs, losing breath. Walls are ribcages, necks.   Out of duty to grief the dog's starving to death.   And outside--

the world gives itself up like a sham.   Departure hangs loose, quivers bone white in place of the dogwoods.  

I am trying to take stock, walk through doorways before they dissemble.   I'm collecting the colors of windowsills, shutters.  

This is the green of new mint.   This gold is the dark gold of nightlights.  

Poem bring my love back.   Trace the shape of their absence to being.   Polish loss to its starless immutable sheen.   Demand freedom's retreat

from the air inside bones, inside fire, from the air.

V.

It isn't unhappiness, this feeling like rain in the bones.  

What I love lost to the last farms at the outer edge of the last towns. What I love sleeping unawares while I call to it: fern, jawbone, husk of the laugh. Warm fur in the sun, I am calling you. But what does the dream mean, the one where everything important is in danger and my voice gurgles to whispers that no one but danger can hear-- I want to tell you: this isn't unhappiness.  It's summer.   It's the last good light of the permanent afternoon. The bay window watching the lake. It is longing, and longing makes room.   And room makes the breath longer, the love patient and larger.  

I want to tell you.   Where are you?

VI.

When their absence hardens to air. When their absence is the absence my body leaves. When I will it gone.  

Gone the last day moonlight waiting in milk pods and gone the ringed oaks dropping dusk onto lawns.   Gone the light piled on doubtful black rooftops, the blithe blink of lamps spreading outward like palms.   And Nocturnes, or opera, blue candle wax sliding, glass table's goodbye dinner set for the deck.   The goodbyes caught

to collarbones.   The last day lost to sleep.   Lost as miracles must be to what we refuse to remember.   Only in grief will love speak

through memory: ribbon-thin language of nomads and thieves. Only in fear will it shapeshift, trade inherence for accident, the unforeseen.

Come back.  We're the bird song. Come back.  We're the hum of the house at night. Come back.   We're rain, lifting. Come back.   We're the whole of the neighborhood, just loosening. Just gathering dark.

VII.

Surf hum of an air conditioner cools the dark house. All along the block, honeysuckle drops scent, and the block takes it.   I accept love.  

Not its infinity, but its front porch. All along the block: women at windows in white nightgowns.   Vines climb a new trellis for air.

The kitchen's dimmed track lights unspool on the counter, thread magazines loose till they slip from their stacks.  

Water glows from the bottoms of glasses. And upstairs on a curtain: the yarn hair of lions. A dragon's green scales are sequins we saved.

Look, it's late. My mother's still reading on blue patterned pillows.   My father is dreaming of awe. His head back and mouth tilted upward

and open, as if in his sleep he were trying to catch snow.

VIII.

Let me tell you about the honeysuckle Dense            heavy like water     soon it will be gone  Let me tell you about my mother Standing in the kitchen

The world dissembles the window slides Nothing can harm me

Let me tell you about the peonies White apologies at the edge of yards

Let me tell you how goodbyes arrive Gray ships on gray water, enormous

Let me tell you about the peonies How the bloom wants everything

Let me tell you about my mother Her skin is peonies, honeysuckle, early summer light  one glass of water             one        kiss        goodnight                       

The air collides

(and where are the stars long lost to the impossible)

IX.

yes and the evenings                my mother says                              the moon!

once it decides                to get full it gets                              full so quickly

yes love                 keep you yes                              how the sleep

grows sweet                how the last                              days come

undone without                 regret, this scent                             of honeysuckle

too ripe for regret                though we dedicate it                              earnestly