Category Archives: Poetry Journals

A New Ulster

A New Ulster Poetry and Literary Ezine

issue VI , A New Ulster

What distinguishes A New Ulster as poetry journal is evident also in Bone Orchard Poetry and in other Ezines that are led by artists and writers who respond with alacrity to a need for publishing platforms for new and established writers. When I started this blog  five years ago, I did a yearly review of what is offered to the poetic writer in the way of publishing platforms. The developing commitment of literary editors to the usage of online tools, such as Ezines, BlogZines, online-publication, and traditional publication was at an exciting point.  Jacket2, Harriet the Blog (The Poetry Foundation) and Poetry Ireland were busily adapting to and testing the poetic waters, as was UBUWEB . Editors have been using social-media tools to ensure that poetry is read, I find it strange that there appears to be an inherent distrust of the medium in some quarters here in Ireland. Under-utilisation of open-source systems and social-media strikes me as ungenerous.

The years began providing exciting new magazines and platforms and an increase in poetic-writing is showing itself in publications like Burning Bush 2, And Other Poems, Anon Publications,  Bare Hands and Southword, to name a few. The other side of the coin is how traditional publications are adapting to internet and using social-media to advance poetic-writers and audience. It may have been bold to claim a poetic-renaissance but I am sticking to it.

A New Ulster a publishing platform led by Amos Gideon Grieg and Arizahn, is that wonderful poetic-hybrid of traditional and internet publication that uses a wide variety of social-media platforms to generate audience and writer alike. Because the publication is writer-led, the editors bring in their skills as poet and fiction-writer, and their (hopefully not exhausted enthusiasm) for new forms and methodologies of communicating  literature with their readers. 

Poets featuring in a New Ulster include :

  • Issue  1 : Judith Thurley, Micheal Mc Aloran, Colin Dardis, Csilla Toldy, Cliff Wedgbury and J. S. Watts
  • Issue 2 : Micheal Mc Aloran, Alistair Graham, Heller Levinson, Inso, Jogn Liddy, Geraldine O’Kane, Aine MacAodha, Brian Adlai, J. S. Watts, Peter Pegnall and Peter Fahy.
  • Issue 3:  David McClean, Neil Ellman, Angela Topping,  Nancy Ann Miller, Christopher Barnes, Stella Burton and more.
  • Issue 4 , added as link
  • Homepage of a New Ulster
  • Aine McAodha on Poethead
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Ilya Kaminsky on Paul Celan, Poetry Magazine

Of strangeness that Wakes us by Ilya Kaminsky

Published Poetry Magazine, January 2013.  A Publication of the Poetry Foundation

Todesfuge, by Paul Celan is a poem that I have mentioned here on Poethead in a variety of guises since I first read the poet Paul Celan in Fathomsuns’ and ‘Benighted’ (Carcanet, Trans. by Ian fairley)

Later, I went on to acquire the book, Paul Celan  Poet, Survivor, Jew by John Felstiner which has a chapter entitled, ‘A Fugue After Auschwitz (1944-45 ) /your ashen hair Shulamith’, detailing Felstiner’s approach to the translation of Todesfuge. I blogged my reading of Todesfuge  here .

In many ways I do not feel as if I will ever finish with the reading of that poem. I feel that this blog space is too limited to write about Paul Celan and his dedicated translators including, Ian Fairley, Pierre Joris, and John Felstiner. However, when an interesting article or translation of Celan emerges I link to it here. Poetry Magazine (January 2013) has an article on Celan’s poetry, including some discussion of Felstiner’s translation of Todesfuge. The text of the Felstiner translation of Todesfuge is included in Of strangeness that Wakes us by  by Ilya Kaminsky.

Here Kaminsky discusses Celan’s alleged hermeticism , which the poet himself denied. He looks at the issues of expressing the experience of the Jewish poet Post-Holocaust and at Adorno’s exhortation that ‘it is barbaric to write poetry after the Holocaust’.

Poetry had to be written after the Holocaust, as art had to occur. Weil or Tuominen would describe poetry written in cataclysmic times as a poetry of necessity. 

The expression of the WWII diaspora poet in the great Todesfuge becomes, in Felstiner’s words an encapsulation of or/ the Guernica of Post-War European Literature. Those readers of Celan who come to Poethead to link to Celan’s works will be intrigued by Kaminsky’s discussion on Celan’s poetic-process, his approach to language, to the creative-process, and to his expressing of  human catastrophe

On Felstiner’s translation of Todesfuge Kaminsky says,

‘In my private library, this is one of the great translations of the twentieth century. But the word “translation” to my mind is misleading. This translation (or any great translation, for that matter) is not a mirror. While one appreciates Felstiner’s haunting use of German words interspersed with English, this striking and powerful juxtaposition of languages doesn’t happen in Celan’s poem.’ (Of strangeness That Wakes Us )

The sheer brokenness of the mother-tongue in Celan’s expression is precisely what allows for linguistic multi-layering within a translator-approach to the poet’s work. It is precisely this that Felstiner divines and uses in his translation, and whilst it may not appeal to the purist, it is that seamless juxtaposition and use of the German that gives the Felstiner translation its evocative quality.

Get Poetry Magazine and read the entire Felstiner translation which is embedded into his wonderful article on Paul Celan.

Note:  I linked a Pierre Joris essay on Paul Celan here in August 2010, regarding Todtnauberg , as well as numerous references to Celan’s work. Essays on Celan and his translators are too all-encompassing to limit to (or add to) existent blog-posts. I recommend that readers with an interest in Celan  visit Poetry Foundation, Pierre Joris’ Nomadics blog, and Jacket 2 for further discussion on the work of Paul Celan.

Poetry FoundationYouTube of Todesfuge.

Text Translation of Todesfuge

My blog on Todesfuge

Recours Au Poème ; Contemporary Poetry/The Poetic World


Irish Poets and Reviewers call-out.

Recours Au Poème is edited by Matthieu Baumier. Baumier is inviting contemporary Irish poets and poet-reviewers to consider submitting to the journal. There is a contact form link available in the base of this post for those who are interested in having their poems published in a modern multi-lingual contemporary poetry journal dedicated to excellence in poetry and review.

In order to give the Irish poet, poetic-reader, reviewer, and/or essayist an idea of the breadth of the site I am adding herein the index of Recours Au Poeme for issue #26. I suggest that the aspirant poet-writer would read some of the critiques and essays before submitting.

Below the index I have included some examples of works that I enjoyed reading recently. These include an essay on Poetry In Translation by Raymond Humphreys, a review of Surrealism, Underground Tour by Paul Vermeulen and the works of the two women poets, Marissa Bell Toffoli and Dominique Hecq

I am excerpting a teeny piece of Hecq’s , Canted bone poem here as a taster. The entire poem can be read at this link

Canted Bone Poem

‘Poems grow in the dark, trace
the descent of sound
into silence

This is a song of silence

This is the sound of the bone
breaking through the skin
of a slow waisting

 Canted Bone Poem is © copyright Dominique Hecq. Published, Recours Au Poème

  Recours Au Poème, Issue # 26  (index):

Rencontre: Jean-Charles Vegliante, traducteur de La Comédie, de Dante.
Focus :  Abdourahman Waberi
Poèmes: Cécile Guivarch, Laurence Sarah Dubas, Sonia Khader, Triunfo Arciniegas, Nikola Madzirov
Chroniques: S’ils te mordent, Morlay, la chronique de Christophe Morlay autour du Manifeste pour la vie d’artiste de Bartabas.
Notes pour une poésie des profondeurs (5) : Marc Alyn en présence de la poésie, par Paul Vermeulen.
Essai : Vu de New York : Is Poetry (Scene) alive in New York (and beyond)? par Maya Herman Sekulić
Le jardin des adieux : flux et reflux de la perte ou l’abandon lumineux, sur la poésie d’Alain Duault, par Sylvie Besson
Critiques Michèle Finck, L’élégie balbutiée, par Mathieu Hilfiger
Une syllabe, battant de bois de Mary-Laure Zoss, par Pascale Trück
Vision de Roger Munier, par Fabien Desur 
MIDRASH d’Eurydice désormais de Muriel Stuckel, par David Schnee
Mon pays ce soir de Josué Guébo, par Etty Macaire

The following are a collation of links mentioned in the post above. They are  to a review, an essay on translation, and links to the poems of Dominique Hecq and Marissa Bell Tofolli.

          Related Links

Thanks to Matthieu Baumier for requesting submissions and proposals regarding the work of some contemporary Irish Poets. I thought the best way to deal with a call-out to Irish Poets was to link the site (as I have done so above here) and see if any poets wish submit to it.

Note – I joined the Recours Au Poème mailing list in recent weeks. Weeks that have been incredibly busy, and in terms of collaborative and writing work both very interesting and fruitful. I sent along a few poems for consideration, and they will be published later in the year.

 

The Wild Pupil, a poem by Kathy D’arcy

 

The Wild Pupil

I have spent my life
squeezing my fingers between
vibrating leaves of costal bone,
insistently scraping fascia
from muscle from nerve,
unhooking your sternum
from your throat,
prizing apart
the wedges of your spine

to reach that precious bag of blood,
to quell its chaotic pulse;

to jump back
as your thorax springs open
like an eye,
your heart
the wild pupil.

 ‘The Wild Pupil ‘ is © Kathy D’Arcy , from The Wild Pupil, published 2012 by Bradshaw Books.

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The Wild Pupil

Kathy D’Arcy is a poet, workshop facilitator and youth worker based in Cork city. Originally trained as a doctor, she is currently writer in residence with Tigh Fili Cultural Centre. Her second collection, The Wild Pupil, was recently launched in Dublin by Jean O’ Brien and in Cork by Thomas McCarthy. She has just been awarded an Arts Council Artists’ Bursary to support the future development of her work.

 

‘Seed’, by Paula Meehan

” The first warm day of spring
and I step out into the garden from the gloom
of a house where hope had died

to tally the storm damage, to seek what may
have survived. And finding some forgotten
lupins I’d sown from seed last autumn
holding in their fingers a raindrop each
like a peace offering, or a promise,

I am suddenly grateful and would

offer a prayer if I believed in God.
But not believing, I bless the power of seed,
its casual, useful persistence,
and bless the power of sun,

its conspiracy with the underground,
and thank my stars the winter’s ended.”

‘Seed’ is © Paula Meehan, all rights reserved.

‘Seed’ is taken from  Mysteries of the Home by Paula Meehan, which will be re-issued in February 2013 by Dedalus Press. Dedalus release notes for Mysteries of the Home are added here. Mysteries Of The Home was first published in 1996 by Bloodaxe Books. It will be re-issued under the Dedalus Press imprint in February 2013.

Mysteries of the Home cover

Thanks to Paula Meehan for suggesting the poems and to Dedalus editor, Pat Boran, for facilitating my queries regarding having a poem by Paula on Poethead. I had wanted one for some time and I am delighted to add Paula Meehan to my Index of Women Poets.