Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov 2020). Her poetry collection, dor, won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize and is forthcoming in July 2021. Alina’s writing can be found (or is forthcoming) in diverse journals, including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as Poetry Editor for Pidgeonholes, Poetry Editor for Random Sample Review, Poetry Reviewer for Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Co-Director of PEN America’s Birmingham Chapter. More online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com.
TO MY LOVERS
Jean Follain, I tried to face the animal but blinked when confronted by the billboard
Anna Swir, I laughed in the Atlantic’s face while choking on the ocean inside me
Louis Simpson, one white naked bulb illuminates nothing. We cram our bodies
into dark houses together
Walt Whitman, the song of myself was stolen by little ones calling me mama,
meaning mammal lost to autonomous space
Judah al-Harizi, the mother’s lute is exquisite in portraits. I waited for the painter;
performed appropriated delight. When lies I’ve posed
for poems come back to taunt, speak to me of music
lacking instruments. Speak into brimming nights
Wislawa Szymborska, the grain of sand in my stomach keeps growing.
The courier calls from the kitchen. Who can swear to be
human in a fetal position?
Francis Ponge, give me one objet-jeu for the family road trip. One relief that isn’t acid.
Have you written the diaper, the carseat, the creamed-carrot mush?
Denise Levertov, what more to witness before absorbing the power
of pink linen apron and lingerie bootstraps, the soft
smothercraft of my gender’s clothes?
Li Po, I won’t devise lyrics to embellish the prison of sad american homes
Antonio Machado, the ride looks splendid from the window. The view is ideal,
as you are a man riding away in trains denied me
Gloria Anzaldua, I will crossroad my heart and never translate the key
O Gwendolyn Brooks, please guide my rock through this terminal hopscotch
Joseph Brodsky . . . stars twinkle, pillowcase tears, pinchmarks
Ana Blandiana, whisper my name in Romanian, the only poem I crave
from a grave forever
Czeslaw Milosz, give me a border, a beacon, a bough
from which to dangle this cradle. Teach me to rock it.
Show me the word for what happens
when all walls and demonic angels
tumble down.
In September-October of 1946, as the linden leaves swallowed sidewalks, the Bucharest Surrealist group exhibited a collaborative work titled “Infra-Noir.” It included pieces by Dolfi Trost, Gherasim Luca, Paul Păun, Virgil Teodorescu, and Gellu Naum. The text they selected to represent this event — “Chercher le triple sur les ruines du double” (i.e. “Seek the triple on the ruins of the double”) — opens a space of generative ontological rupture. I value the Bucharest group’s commitment to a permanent revolution of ruptures across various images and representations. And I value the revertebrations and fragments as well as the engagement with translation.
Replace the real by the possible and anticipate their confusion . . .
To forget forgetting, to triple the double, to void the void, is to
invent plenitude in its movement.
Gherasim Luca, Le Secret du vide et du plein (1947)
The 43 Infra-noir objects is a poetic series that includes collage forms. Each object contains traces from the writings of those who participated in the Infra-noir exhibit. Rather than invoke these ghosts by name within the poem, I engage them in the ruins of their own words, in the collision and collapse of meaning, in the images that continue to divide us. For example, Gellu Naum’s The Incendiary Wayfarer (1936) includes a poem where the streets are astonished by what happens on them. The streets hold new signs to sell new forms of exclusive belonging. The titular poems ends in the commitment of a poem to memory.
And this is where this series begins: in #1, which rearranges Naum’s words in the first line, changing the subject from wayfarer to skyline, and also later, where Naum’s “I’ll look down to learn by heart a few verses from Dante” is fragmented. In 2, the first line rearranges a line in Gherasim Luca’s “Poem of the Gentle People.” In 3, the red hare with the rainbow is imported from Dolfi Trost’s “Second Dream.”
Paul Celan enters this skyline by association, and through his friendship with writer Petre Solomon, who later published a memoir of their time together in Bucharest. Solomon notes that the first prose poem signed with the pseudonym Paul Celan, is also the only dated one (and he takes it to be “the first” partly because of this date). Was it November 3, 1947 when Paul Antschel became Paul Celan? Maybe there is no such thing as any one person.
Celan’s prose poem begins with the words: “A partisan of erotic absolutism, reticent megalomaniac even among the divers, at the same time messenger of the halo, Paul Celan.” This strikes me as the best place to end or begin.
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