All posts tagged: Poetry

Four Poems by JinJin Xu

By JINJIN XU

Blue cover of There is Still Singing in the Afterlife

These poems are excerpted from the published work of JinJin Xu ’17, a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025Register for this exciting, 10th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.


 Table of Contents

  • “There They Are”
  • “To Your Brother, Who Is Without Name”
  • “The Revolution is Not a Dinner Party”
  • “Against This Earth, We Knock”

 

Four Poems by JinJin Xu
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LitFest 2025 Excerpts: Video Poems by Paisley Rekdal

Amherst College’s tenth annual literary festival runs from Thursday, February 27 to Sunday, March 2. Among the guests is PAISLEY REKDAL, whose book West: A Translation was longlisted for the National Book Award. The Common is pleased to reprint a short selection of video poems from West here.

Join Paisley Rekdal and Brandom Som in conversation with host Ruth Dickey, Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, on Sunday, March 2 at 2pm. 

Register and see the full list of LitFest events here.


Not

 

What Day

 

Heroic

 

Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction and seven books of poetry, most recently West: A Translation, which won the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award. The former Utah poet laureate, she teaches at the University of Utah, where she directs the American West Center.

LitFest 2025 Excerpts: Video Poems by Paisley Rekdal
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Mantra 5

By KRIKOR BELEDIAN
Translated by CHRISTOPHER MILLIS and TALINE VOSKERITCHIAN

Piece appears below in English and the original Armenian.

 

Translators’ Note

The pervasive sense of place in Krikor Beledian’s works was forged in the crucible of displacement.  Beledian grew up in the Beirut neighborhood of Hayashen, which was home to the waves of refugees from the Armenian genocide that Armenians refer to as the Catastrophe. 

The pre-eminent writer of Western Armenian literature, Beledian is a long-time resident of Paris, where he has authored more than 30 volumes, including poetry, a 10-volume novel cycle still in progress, literary criticism, experimental prose, and literary history.  And he has done so in the UNESCO-designated “endangered” language of Western Armenian. 

 “Mantra 5” is one of the 32 extended poems collected in Mantras. Beledian says that Mantra 5 was written from the tip of the Seine isle of Vert Gallant, which looks toward the Louvre and the metallic bridge of Pont des Arts. From this vantage point, the poem brings into its sphere multiple and often contradictory threads which are simultaneously at play, resulting in a fractured surface. Time and geography are superimposed on each other; just as the ruins of Palmyra appear in the Louvre, the shadowy dead of indeterminate origin course through the currents of the Seine and the Euphrates. The poem is both atonal dirge and palimpsest. 

In the Preface to Mantras, Beledian writes that “place is exile, and exile is the original catastrophe.”  The challenge of translating Beledian’s writing is its radical tenuousness—of place, time, and language itself.  This is a complex undertaking because Western Armenian belongs to a culture nearly obliterated in 1915, a Catastrophe bookended by centuries of displacement. English, particularly American English, belongs to the culture of conquest and certainty: How to render into English a poetic language which is acutely aware of its calamitous biography, its indeterminate attributes, and its mandate to give voice to the unspoken, unseen, unknown?

— Christopher Millis and Taline Voskeritchian

Mantra 5
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January 2025 Poetry Feature #2: Rafael Alberti in Translation

Poems by RAFAEL ALBERTI
Translated from the Spanish by JOHN MURILLO

From Rafael Alberti’s Concerning the Angels, forthcoming in March from Four Way Books.

Book cover of Concerning the Angels by Rafael Alberti

Poems appear in both English and Spanish.

Table of Contents:

  • Introduction by John Murillo
  • LOS ÁNGELES VENGATIVOS (The Vengeful Angels)
  • CAN DE LLAMAS (Hound of Flames)
  • EL ÁNGEL TONTO (The Foolish Angel)
  • EL ÁNGEL DEL MISTERIO (The Angel of Mystery)
  • ASCENSIÓN (Ascension)
January 2025 Poetry Feature #2: Rafael Alberti in Translation
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December 2024 Poetry Feature #2: New Work from our Contributors

New work by LEAH FLAX BARBERROBERT CORDING, PETER FILKINS

 

Table of Contents:

  • Robert Cording, “In Beaufort”
  • Leah Flax Barber, “School Poem” and “Cordelia’s No”
  • Peter Filkins, “Trains”

 

In Beaufort
By Robert Cording

At a rented air B&B, I am sitting on a swing
placed here just for me it seems,
or just to carry off my worries and sorrows
as I rock slowly, back and forth, taking in
the shifting colors of the Broad River that circles
this marsh pocketed with cut-outs of water
and long inlets that circle round and round
as if it were one of those spiritual labyrinths
that bring calm as the center is reached.

December 2024 Poetry Feature #2: New Work from our Contributors
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December 2024 Poetry Feature #1: New Work from our Contributors

Works by JEN JABAILY-BLACKBURN and DIANA KEREN LEE

Table of Contents:

  • Jen Jabaily-Blackburn: “Archeological, Atlantic” and “Velvel”
  • Diana Keren Lee: “Living Together” and “Living Alone”

 

Archaeological, Atlantic
By Jen Jabaily-Blackburn

A morsel of conventional wisdom: Never use the word
      boring in a poem because then they
can call your poem boring. The boring sponge can’t
      do everything, but can make holes in oysters, & for the boring sponge, it’s
enough. I miss boring things like gathering mussel shells
      for no one. I miss being so bored that time felt physical, an un-
governable cat sleeping over my heart. I have, I’m told, an archaeologist’s
      heart. I have, I’m told, an archaeologist’s soul. An archaeologist’s eye, so

December 2024 Poetry Feature #1: New Work from our Contributors
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November 2024 Poetry Feature: New Work from our Contributors

Poems By G. C. WALDREP, ALLISON FUNK, and KEVIN O’CONNOR

Table of Contents:

  • G.C. Waldrep, “Below the Shoals, Glendale”
  • Allison Funk, “After Andrew Wyeth’s Snow Hill
  • Kevin O’Connor, “The Other Shoe”

 

Below the Shoals, Glendale
By G. C. Waldrep

I am listening to the slickened sound of the new
wind. It is a true thing. Or, it is true in its falseness.
It is the stuff against which matter’s music breaks.
Mural of the natural, a complicity epic.
The shoals, not quite distant enough to unhear—
Not at all like a war. Or, like a war, in passage,

November 2024 Poetry Feature: New Work from our Contributors
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Waters of Reclamation: Raychelle Heath Interviews Caroline M. Mar

Headshots of Raychelle Heath on the left and Caroline M. Mar on the right.

RAYCHELLE HEATH sits down with CAROLINE M. MAR to discuss reconciliation, poetic form, and Caroline’s new chapbook, Dream of the Lake.

Raychelle Heath: Dream of the Lake is such a beautiful read, and I have so many questions. Our first encounter with the lake takes us through the stages of drowning. So I’m wondering, how do you see that as an entry point into the world of the book? And why did you want the reader to encounter the lake this way first?

Caroline M. Mar: That’s a good question. I had been trying to write poems about Lake Tahoe for several years and the poems were not working. They were very sentimental, or I couldn’t get beyond “Gosh, it’s so pretty.” Because it is really beautiful. It is spectacular in a way that defies description. It was easy for me to get lost in all of the beauty of it, but I knew that that wasn’t complicated enough. I knew that I was trying to ask some pretty complicated questions of myself, of my reader, and of the landscape.

Waters of Reclamation: Raychelle Heath Interviews Caroline M. Mar
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