By JUAN ANTONIO GONZÁLEZ IGLESIA
Translated by CURTIS BAUER
Álvaro Mutis habla lentamente.
Una entrevista en un canal hispano.
Me interesa el desgaste de las cosas.
S. TREMAINE NELSON interviews JOSHUA MEHIGAN
Joshua Mehigan, whose poems “How Strange, How Sweet” and “Believe It” appear in Issue 06 of The Common, was born and raised in upstate New York. His poems have been published in a variety of journals and magazines, including Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, The New Republic, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, and The New York Times. His most recent book, The Optimist, was published in 2004 by the Ohio University Press and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prive. His second book, Accepting the Disaster, is forthcoming in July 2014 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. The exchange below took place over email while Winter Storm Janus snarled the streets of New York City.
Hello, everybody. My name is Julia, and I am becoming an Internet genealogy addict. I don’t believe in higher powers, except, like, the NSA and the IRS. So I must rely on my failing willpower. Unless you find a rich uncle, Internet genealogy is hard to justify as useful. Why should I care that four hundred years ago, some remote ancestor was a rabbi in Moravia? Geni.com, where I listed my family tree, says it has 74,346,170 people on its site. I’m already up to 1,820 blood relatives.
There was a pile of old vines and twigs in the vineyard. We lit a bonfire and the flames licked daylight into the night sky. Next morning there was a gray and black patch of coldashes, perfectly round. It looked hard, like crushed marbles, so I stepped on it. My boot sank deep into tiny feathers. A gray boot and a brow none told me I should have known better.
From the elevated train in Queens, I’d glimpse the phantasmagoria that was 5 Pointz. A riot of color and occasional faces covering every inch of the old, block-long factory, it felt hallucinatory. In a minute—not enough time for the eye or brain to take it all in—the images vanished and the train rumbled underground, heading to Manhattan.
We met friends north of Seattle, then drove to catch the ferry to Orcas Island and talked about Washington’s bikini baristas. It would be another three hours before the ferry left, so we walked through cars and trucks parked in lanes straight as garden rows to the snack shop and overpaid for sandwiches, a banana, soda. You sat on the asphalt behind a Chevy Tahoe, petting a pit bull someone had tied to the trailer hitch, and I took your picture.
Conversation and knowing there was no option but to wait made time pass easily. When the boat departed, we sat on the observation deck and cruised west into the pale sun and gray gauzy clouds, toward forested islands rising black from the sea. It was cold.
Join The Common for postcard readings, cocktails/ aperitivos, music, and dancing inspired by a night in Italy!
Join us for a reading (and for drinks!) celebrating work published in The Common‘s Dispatches column this past year; our featured writers will include Katherine Hill, Ira Sukrungruang, Margot Schlipp, Kurt Caswell, Brandi Katherine Herrera, Jeff Muse, and Hannah Gersen. These poems and essays take us coast to coast with their unique evocation of place.
Editor’s Note:
In October I had the pleasure of hearing the young Polish poet Tadeusz Dąbrowski read his poems in a bilingual performance at Atomic Books in Maryland, a stop on his recent tour of the United States. TC readers will no doubt join me in appreciation of his poems, which are simultaneously deeply moving and surprisingly comic. Hopefully you will also relish my aggressive effort to deliver his work to you. As soon as the reading was done I pursued him to the sidewalk, where I procured a promise that he would send us poems to publish. His word’s as good as his work: we’re offering four of his poems here, and three more will follow in the print issue.
Dabrowski is only thirty-four but has already published eight books of poetry; the list of his prizes is longer than the ingredients for plum pudding. His work has been translated around the world—into twenty languages—and his readership continues to grow. Another German collection is due out very soon, and Antonia Lloyd-Jones’ second volume of English translations is well underway—these poems come from that. He’s drawn high praise from Adam Zagajewski in his homeland, and in the US his Anglophone debut, Black Square, was hailed by Timothy Donnelly as a “brilliant, unforgettable book.” We welcome his work to our pages with sincere excitement.
By NINA PURO
Details Concerning the Individual Denizens and Their Residences
In New Mexico, days end with soaking the frijoles for tomorrow. They start with a lump of bacon grease sizzling in a cast-iron pan, with chipping a chunk of green chilé from one of the blocks in the freezer. People like food that hurts them as they eat it. Even the cocoa has chilé in it and a Spanish name and must be beaten to a froth.
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Celebrating 15 Years