Some Poems in a Different Genre

I'm always interested in fiction writers who do interesting things with the form of a story. One such writer is Icelandic, Jón Kalman Stefánsson.  I loved his newly translated book, Your Absence Is Darkness. The form of the novel has taken on a pattern, musical and certainly poetic. The pattern isn't exactly repetition, but resonance.  It's sort of like the difference between a metaphor becoming a transforming metaphor.  Music is a part of the stories in this generational saga, since some of the characters are literary and some are musicians.  Also, we do get to know what's on this author's Spotify channel, Death's Playlist.   

I look forward to more of his works becoming available in English. His book The Fish Have No Feet was nominated for an International Book Prize 2016.  Here's a quote from Heaven and Earth, due out in English translation in February 2025.  I've borrow the quote from a book review of this upcoming novel.  

“Some poems take us to places where no words reach, no thought, they take you up to the core itself, life stops for one moment and becomes beautiful, it becomes clear with regret and happiness. Some poems change the day, the night, your life. Some poems make you forget, forget the sadness, the hopelessness, you forget your waterproof, the frost comes to you, says, got you, and you’re dead.” (p.85). 

  --https://tonysreadinglist.wordpress.com/2013/08/12/heaven-and-hell-by-jon-kalman-stefansson-review/

NYTimes Review of Your Absence is Darkness by Daniel Mason:https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/03/books/review/jon-kalman-stefansson-your-absence-is-darkness.html

Shortlist for the Booker Prize: https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/fish-have-no-feet

Get the book: https://bookshop.org/p/books/your-absence-is-darkness/19657447?ean=9781771965811

Why do art or writing?

Is it useless, the time you spend writing things that you realize are likely not to be published or read by many or any?  The feeling is common to most writers and artists.  

What art does is to coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous. The so-called uselessness of art is a clue to its transforming power. Art is not part of the machine. Art asks us to think differently, see differently, hear differently, and ultimately to act differently, which is why art has moral force. Ruskin was right, though for the wrong reasons, when he talked about art as a moral force. Art is not about good behaviour, when did you last see a miracle behave well? Art makes us better people because it asks for our full humanity, and humanity is, or should be, the polar opposite of the merely mechanical. We are not part of the machine either, but we have forgotten that. Art is memory — which is quite different [from] history. Art asks that we remember who we are, and usually that asking has to come as provocation — which is why art breaks the rules and the taboos, and at the same time is a moral force.

—Jeanette Winterson, author of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

quote from her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Photograph of Winterson by Michel Delsol

Exhibition: Mine - What Is Ours in the Wake of Extraction

Exhibition of Art & Video

(this exhibition includes my poetry video, My Geology, a poem from Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range)

September 3-December 13, 2024

February 4- May 15, 2025

University of Delaware, Mechanical Hall Gallery

https://exhibitions.lib.udel.edu/mine/

Image & Poetry

 

Images are a crucial component of poems. 

“Images are not concepts. They do not withdraw into their meaning. Indeed, they tend to go beyond their meaning….If the image that is present does not make us think of one that is absent, if an image does not determine an abundance—an explosion of unusual images, then there is no imagination.”

Gaston Bachelard, French philosopher, 1884-1962l 

Moving Words: Writers Across Minnesota

Join Us for Moving Words

Thursday, April 25, from 6:00-7:30 p.m. 

Aitkin Public Library 

110 1st Ave NE

Aitkin, MN 56431

Sheila Packa and Kao Kalia Yang 

https://thefriends.org/event/moving-words-writers-across-minnesota-aitkin/

The program will last approximately an hour and a half, with a conversation and/or reading followed by
a question-and-answer session.

Listen to the writers on these radio conversations: 

https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2023/04/17/duluth-poet-sheila-packa-shares-her-favorite-poetry

https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2024/03/29/kao-kalia-yang-channels-her-mother-in-the-memoir-where-rivers-part

MINE: What is Ours in the Wake of Extraction Exhibition Opening September 4, 2024 University of Delaware

Good news! My Geology, a poetry video, has been accepted for the exhibition this year: MINE: What is Ours in the Wake of Extraction

https://vimeo.com/101956156

Exhibition Opening: 
University of Delaware, Mechanical Hall Gallery 
September 4th, 2024 - December 13,  2024  

An interdisciplinary multimedia experience bridging art and science to address climate and environmental justice issues by amplifying the voices of underrepresented communities impacted by extraction.

MINE draws parallels between geographic locations with a shared extractive impact. 

A Song Cycle: Surface Displacements

Composer Wendy Durrwachter created a song cycle for the title poem in my book, Surface Displacements. It premiered on Saturday January 13, 2024 at the Weber Music Hall on the University of Minnesota Duluth campus.  

The songs were performed by soprano Jennifer Lien while Ms Durrwachter played the piano, and the music reflected the landscape of Lake Superior and the waters and landscape of northern Minnesota.  

 

Twin Cities Book Festival 2023

The TCBF is sponsored by Rain Taxi, and it was held in the Progress Center at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds in St. Paul, Minnesota.  Besides 80 exhibitors (Graywolf, Coffee House Press, Holy Cow! Press, Minnesota Press, Magers & Quinn Bookstore, St. Paul's Midway Books, the College of St. Catherine, the University of Minnesota MFA program, Hamline University MFA program, and many other writers and writing-related business, there were several authors reading excerpts of their work through the day's event.  Truly it was the literary event of the year!  

My photo was taken by David Beard for the Perfect Day Duluth website.  The photo of Mary Bode and Julie Gard was taken by me. The two were representing the Lake Superior Writers organization.   

A Song Cycle: Surface Displacements

 I'm so excited about the music that composer Wendy Durrwachter has created for the title poem from my book, Surface Displacements. She has preview concert in Grand Marais on October 21, and a premier at the Weber Music Hall this winter in 2024. To learn more about the composer, go to https://www.wendydurrwachter.com/

Refresh with Tranströmer

A playlist of Tomas Tranströmer: https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/the-blue-house-playlist-by-patty-crane/

Allegro 

by Tomas Tranströmer

trans. by Ingar Palmlund

I play Haydn after a dark day


and sense an honest warmth in my hands.

The keys are willing. Mild hammers strike.


The tone is green, lively and still.

The tone says that freedom exists


and that someone does not pay the emperor tribute.

I push the hands deep into my haydnpockets,


mimicking one who quietly watches the world.

I raise the haydnflag — this means:


“We do not surrender. But want peace.”

The music is a glasshouse on the slope


where stones fly, stones roll.

And the stones roll right through


but each pane remains whole.

 

Original poem in Swedish

Jag spelar Haydn efter en svart dag


och känner en enkel värme i händerna.

Tangenterna vill. Milda hammare slår.


Klangen är grön, livlig och stilla.

Klangen säger att friheten finns


och att någon inte ger kejsaren skatt.

Jag kör ner händerna i mina haydnfickor


och härmar en som ser lugnt på världen.

Jag hissar haydnflaggan — det betyder:


“Vi ger oss inte. Men vill fred.”

Musiken är ett glashus på sluttningen


där stenarna flyger, stenarna rullar.

Och stenarna rullar tvärs igenom


men varje ruta förblir hel.

 

From Den halvfärdiga himlen, Bonniers 1962

Copyright © Tomas Tranströmer 1962

And finally, this lovely and refreshing poem:  

Tired of all who come with words, words but no language
I went to the snow covered island.
The wild does not have words.
The unwritten pages spread themselves out in all directions!
I came across the marks of roe-deer’s hooves in the snow.

Language but no words.

Tomas Transtomer, Trans. John F. Deane from Selected Poems 1954-1986 – Ed. Robert Hass, The Ecco Press, 1987 p.159