News & Events | Page 268 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Doing a Dérive; Or, Walking 2.0

March 8, 2013 Essays

Late afternoon, late January. I need air, exercise, but my regular walk around Al Manhal Palace is too long; the construction en route to the Corniche too hazardous to navigate. I try to take comfort in the company of my own mind, but today I am a terrible person to be with. Wandering, uninspired, brain-stuck, I find myself in the middle of ten lanes of traffic on a median barely wider than a balance beam. Grumpy as all get out as hot exhaust blasts me by. I need to move, but I have nowhere to go.

A Painter Brought to Life

March 6, 2013 Dispatches

By TODD PITOCK

In Telč, a town about two hours from Prague in the Czech Highlands, rain beat down like a parade of drums. Zdenka Noskova, the woman I had come to see, arrived at my hotel in the main square to take me to a memorial she had created.
At 37, Zdenka had a demure manner. She wore her auburn hair short, and dressed in a long skirt. She worked in a print shop, though the lasting imprint she’d made had been a walking trail, and later, a memorial she’d created to the memory of a Jewish painter who died in the Holocaust.

Progress on the Subject of Interview, with Leslie Ullman

March 5, 2013 Interviews

MELODY NIXON interviews LESLIE ULLMAN

Leslie Ullman is a fluent, effervescent poet and author of the award-winning collections Slow Work Through Sand, Dreams by No One’s Daughter, and Natural Histories. She teaches poetry – although she considers that all of us, including her students, are “interdisciplinary beings” – at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is professor emerita at University of Texas-El Paso. Melody Nixon saw her read on the last day of 2012 in Montpelier, Vermont. Taken by the lyrical language of her poetry, she invited Ullman into an email dialogue about the light of New Mexico, absence, and the experience of being interviewed.

Melody Nixon (MN): Your book Progress on the Subject of Immensity will be released in August 2013. The poems in this book are highly lyrical, invested in the sounds of language and in the rhythm of words, while they also maintain a tight focus on subject. Can you talk about your relationship to rhythm and word sound?

Leslie Ullman (LU): My relationship to sound is so instinctual as to lie at some remove from my conscious grapplings with craft while I’m writing, though it does find a place in my intellect when I’m teaching. I dutifully have read and talked about meter without feeling much excitement beyond the satisfaction of fulfilling an obligation to my students. Other aspects of sound, however, such as the subtle harmonies achieved by repetition or near-repetition of vowel or consonant sounds, have interested me more, especially as they underscore meaning.

Poetry Reading

March 5, 2013 News and Events

Event Date:

Thursday, March 7, 2013 – 3:00pm

Location:

AWP Conference, Boston, MA

Poetry Editor John Hennessy will be reading for Ashland Poetry Press from his new collection, Coney Island Pilgrims, at this year’s AWP Conference in Boston.

Thursday, March 7, 3 PM
Patricia Olson Bookfair Stage, Exhibit Hall A, Plaza Level, BF17

Reading Place: Last Gasp of Winter

March 4, 2013 Essays, In House

By HANNAH GERSEN

This time of year, I’m always hoping for one last snowstorm or cold snap. I love winter, and am always sad to see it go. To give the season a proper goodbye, these links celebrate all things cold things cold and snowy:

The Fiction and Nonfiction of the St. Petersburg Pier

March 1, 2013 Dispatches

By SCOTT GEIGER

The modern novel is probably an unintended consequence of nineteenth-century European cities. James Wood glosses the idea in his handbook How Fiction Works. The breakthrough narration in Madame Bovary, for instance, a stylish authorial voice that seemingly dissolves into the consciousness of its subjects on a wash of image and detail, corresponds to a boom in European industrial urbanism. Its vector is the flâneur: the young and loitering, the unemployable café-sitters, the arcade-browsers. These onlookers adapted their eyes to the city’s “large, bewilderingly various amounts of detail,” says Wood.

Alaska, Massachusetts

February 27, 2013 Dispatches

By NAILA MOREIRA

Beyond the bridge of Highway 91, beyond the levee and the last line of houses at the outskirts of town, civilization goes to rural scenes. First you pass a patch of low trees; then a small paddock and barn where two horses live; and then you come to the cornfields — wide, flat, golden and stubbly by the riparian woodland of the Connecticut River. I’ve always wanted to come to these fields to see the stars, but the landscape is lonely, and I would be afraid to come alone at night.

Backlit Harbor (Pt. 2)

February 26, 2013 Essays

By ANNE WELCH

Sampling Thoreau

Part 2: Where I Live and What I live For

Inspired by rereading Thoreau’s Walden for the first time in 30 years, I am writing a series of essays—an attempt to sample Thoreau, and swing the rhythm. I want to honor the young idealist with echoes of his aphoristic style and, at the same time, challenge his lofty ideals with the experience of an older woman. Click here to read Part 1.

In the early years of our marriage, Andy and I used to rent a house for two weeks in the summer in Lubec, Maine, as far Down East as you can go and still be in the U.S. It was a canning town—sardines. We thought of it as a paradise that was our secret. We could ride our bicycles out to lighthouses in two different directions, walk through a bog full of the carnivorous sundew and pitcher plants and cross the bridge to Campobello Island, New Brunswick, where, sitting on the cliffs, we see could see Finback whales spouting and diving on the horizon. When we started going there, only one canning plant was still in operation. The last year we visited, that too was closed. On our walks through town, we found that nearly every other house was for sale; but when it came down to it, we couldn’t buy one. We’d always be from “away,” but we’d lose our status as strangers. And, there were the seven hours of highway between me and my sisters.

Review: Collected Body

February 25, 2013 Reviews

Book by VALZHINA MORT
Reviewed by PATRICK MEIGHAN

In the long prose poem “Aunt Anna” at the heart of Collected Body, the speaker muses, “so evasive is Aunt Anna’s body, it is impossible to hold a thought of it longer than an instant.” Throughout Valzhyna Mort’s first book of poems written in English, rather than translated by the poet and others from Belarusia as in earlier work, the reader finds that sense of commitment to recapture history, and thus the speaker’s own life.

Often, the point of departure on a journey into the past is the physical body. Gardens of an ancestral village “shrink by perspective into a single bush, as if it were the pubes of a woman, lying flat on her back, naked.” When Aunt Anna later in life walks from Siberia back to a childhood village, the speaker states, “This time she walked there for no man, for no village girl’s dream of the neighboring village; this time she walked for the memory of that pubes, for what it concealed – the source that her mouth was hungry to embrace.” More than only a springboard, a sensuous physiology becomes also the destination and the vehicle that carries Mort, and with her the reader, along on that journey.

The Hours

February 22, 2013 Poetry

By PETER FILKINS

Matins

in the indicative dark
somber houses
stand preoccupied