News & Events | Page 283 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Escapement

October 5, 2012 Fiction, Issue 04, Issue 04 Fiction

Selkirk had never owned a wristwatch. It had never seemed  necessary to be in possession of one. What time it was had never been of any consequence to him in any part of his life. There was his childhood in Calcutta when time seemed lozenge-like, lickable—those long afternoons of lying still in shaded rooms, and then afternoon tea on the veranda with his mother, tapping out with her long nails the anguish of her most recent rebuff at one of the clubs on account of her lowly origins—and then, mercifully, his father, returning from a long day at work, the gentle grey-haired man who had rashly married this chorus girl in the throes of middle age, his father, still loyally serving the company he had joined as a young man in pre-Independence times and trying to make as good a life as possible for them all. When he unexpectedly keeled over, just a few months before he was due to retire, she did not hesitate to return to her old life, and Selkirk was promptly despatched to the boarding school that his father had attended, where time—to return to our original subject—was dispensed in quantities he could neither measure nor understand.

Omnipresence: A Poetry and Imagine Installation in Castiglione del Terziere, Italy

October 5, 2012 Poetry, Translation

Poems by LORIS JACOPO BOLLINI and art by ANDREA POGGIPOLLINI, with an introduction by MARTHA COOLEY

Andrea Poggipollini is a Bologna-based artist who works in multiple media. His summer-long installation “Omnipresence” in the medieval borgo (walled village) of Castiglione del Terziere in Lunigiana, Tuscany, featured sculpture, photography, video, and excerpts from poems by Loris Jacopo Bononi. Bononi, an Italian writer (earlier in his career, a doctor), writes poetry and prose; his work has been lauded by Pier Paolo Pasolini, among others. He is the author of Trilogia (Diario postumo, Miserere dei, and Il poeta muore), Libri e Destini, and other texts.

Viewers walked through the borgo to encounter Poggipollini’s and Bononi’s collaboration in unexpected places: on placards on walls high and low, windows, on the ground, and in cellars. Among the installation’s elements were life-sized sculptures of human figures in black or white—kneeling, standing, sitting—which materialized as unexpectedly as phantoms on stone walls, in a bell-tower, and on the balcony of the village’s once-grandest house, now abandoned. In a passageway between two buildings were photographs by Poggipollini of sculptures he’d previously made, to which Bononi’s poetry-excerpts are an implicit response.

The photographs of Poggipollini’s work are echoes of echoes of echoes, one might say.

Abu Musa

October 4, 2012 Essays

By TRICIA KHLEIF

I last spoke to Abu Musa in March 2003, the week the Iraq war began. It was late afternoon, Syria time, when I called from my apartment in Washington, DC. I waited several minutes while the shopkeeper across the hall—the only resident in Abu Musa’s building with a telephone—summoned my former music teacher from his apartment.

I might have caught Abu Musa in the midst of a nap; he made me repeat my name three times.

At last, he laughed. “It can’t be,” he said. His voice, low-pitched, buoyant, was thick with cigarettes and fatigue. “Where are you? Are you still in America?”

When I said I was, I felt him smiling in disbelief. “You could be next door,” he said. “You could be down the street.”

I Want What Comes After

October 3, 2012 Dispatches

By KELWYN SOLE

I want what comes after:

the first lifted bucket’s clang

once the rooster’s all crowed out,

a keen thirst for fresh water

as sequel to that sound

Where I Write

October 2, 2012 Dispatches

By NICOLA WALDRON

Writing in Place is a column in which authors published in our print and web pages tell us about their writing spaces.

I write in a glass-sided room, an addition to a 1950s brick bungalow, southern style. From the threshold that once led to the outdoors, it’s just one giant stride to my desk: space enough to tap at a keyboard, or lie down; for books and papers to breed, but not for dancing (a tiny tango when someone says yes).

Farting Knees II: Talking to My Lover

October 1, 2012 Issue 04, Issue 04 Poetry, Poetry

By MAKHOSAZANA XABA

When I vomit
it will be through my forehead.
Be warned, stand far off
because the vomit will not spare you.

Thank You Lee Smolin, Thank you Mr. Leibniz

October 1, 2012 Issue 04, Issue 04 Poetry, Poetry

By KAREN PRESS

So we’re monads after all,  that’s a relief, complete and separate
and also connected to every other agglomeration of fundamental particles
(aka pine cone, parking meter, vodka orange)
we’ve ever touched however tangentially,
boson from a breath of Plato’s used air
gone two millennia later into the feather of a chicken in Mumbai,
air I exhale full of fermions from the fourth king of Axum’s coronation dinner,
so that if you read any electron’s palm now you can tell
what it will be feeling in 4005.