Peter Finch in Budapest

an interview with Peter Finch

by lloyd robson

Cardiff, 1947. Heavy snow on the ground. On the hill between the crass and the class, a babe is born. The parents name their boy-child Peter. Peter Finch. Little did they know their little Peter-Rock would not grow up to be a hard-drinking, hell-raising, movie star like his namesake, but he would grow up to be poet extraordinaire and, as is often the nature of these things, poetry entrepreneur, guiding the lost tribes through the wilderness of Wales’ excuse for Modernism into the unnervingly mild climate of the 21^st century. This might not be gospel, but it’ll do. Roll thunderclap.

In those hazy-crazy 1960s, Finchy emerged from under the bushel of his daytime persona – the mild-mannered, grey suited, pen-pushing public administrator – to smoke cigarettes and edit the poetry magazine Second Aeon (or, for the frivolous of lexicon, Second Ian, Zecondeon, Suck on Deon). The magazine’s influence was not to be sniffed at but the cigarettes were to be coughed at, either way, both came and went. As did the day job.

In the flaring 70s, el Fincho grabbed the chance to take a role at the Arts Council of Wales’ little side-street bookshop, Oriel, from where he would expose the innocent to poetry of challenge; poetry that amused, bemused, questioned and really pissed some people off. It was called Modernism, and Wales didn’t like it. Sound, concrete, open field, performance – far from the maddening crowd of odious ode-eus poetry recommended by our Anglo-Welsh betters. Secretly, in their covens and huddled masses of seven, even eight at times, some local poets really got off on it.

As Oriel grew through the 80s and 90s it became a haven, a sanctuary, an ʻAlāʼ ad-Dīn’s cave for thieves in need of bizarre syntax and structure, but every goose lays its last and it couldn’t last for ever. From the heady heights of being one the most highly regarded poetry bookshops in the world, Oriel slid the slippery slope of commerce, and poetry was all but kicked out. There’s just no money in it, my love.

Peter Finch on stage

Having a good old sniff at which way the wind was blowing, The Frinch upped sticks and took on a new challenge, one that saw him clamber above many geographically tribal and poetic Welsh rivalries to head-up the completely revamped Welsh Academy (duw, wash your mouth out when you speak it’s name) – a previously useless organisation that claimed to represent Welsh writing but did little of the sort. We paid the piper, Finchorica blew his horn, and the walls of Mount Stuart Square came tumbling down. All hail the new beginning – finally, a poet was in charge. The resonance created by the quivering lips of every poet in Wales was enough to force a surfable bore down the Severn. They quivered with excitement, they quivered with fear, they quivered, each with the very same question. Dare we state its name? Yes, we must; it will be safe on the page. That heart-stopping question was complex in its simplicity: ‘Yes but what will Finch do for me?’

In his new position as CEO of the rebranded Academi (later, Literature Wales) Finchetto took on an administrative role and used it to wield influence over how poetry was funded, presented and, therefore, perceived. And by whom. He gerrymandered boundaries to override artificial restrictions placed upon the art of writing and upon its practitioners and purveyors. He also kicked poets’ arses by demanding a higher level of professionalism. Not everyone liked it, not everyone felt they were getting their cut, but there was a new sheriff in town and he knew more about poetry – the art and the industry – than you did. God damn his sorry eyes. Finchino created and filled a role that made him one of the most influential figures in the whole history of Welsh literature. And then, last year, after a jolly good innings, he retired.

Peter Finch: poet, performer, psychogeographer. Known to his rivals as That Fucker Finch and to his friends as Pete. Known to me as Fincho, Finchero, Finch-a-roo, Finchella, Fincharillo, Pedro El Finchy; Pecky Frinilla the seed-eating passerine; Ah! von Finchy Hugo SliceyTidy River Rivet Pedro. PF, for short. We lived barely a mile apart, just across the railway tracks. We rarely socialised. We’re on the same page, just not the same book.

So Mr Finch, what’s changed?

I think I’m enjoying more acceptance in Wales than I have ever had before. The battles in the 60s, 70s, 80s had clean and clear lines of demarcation which have massive overgrowth now, so it’s not quite the same today as it was.

The position of poetry has shifted. Early on I had this Blakean belief that poets were somehow seers, that they were in society’s avant-garde – not meaning they were revolutionising things but they were up the front, seeing which way it was going. That implies this should still be the case now. I somehow don’t think it is. At least society does not recognise the poet in that capacity. When poets die hardly anybody notices simply because we don’t hold a position. Yet paradoxically the art of verse is more accepted now than it has ever been. There are more public poetry readings, more visits by writers to schools, more kids involved in verse in some way or another, they just don’t call it verse. Funding is available to writers in a way that’s never been possible before; art has entered areas of our life in a way that never happened before – public art, interventions with public services, the health service… unless you were really exceptional, to make a living out of verse used to be impossible whereas now you can.

But which poets make the living? The greatest writers or the greatest careerists?

If you had said, “Yes, this improves the careers goals but what does it do for the art?” I would say it leads to a blanding in certain strata, it leads to the work of a number of individuals being apparently elevated beyond their work’s status – wouldn’t have got there otherwise. It’s led to the emergence of the individual known as the ‘non-poet’ or the ‘non-writer’; somebody who is great at all the things necessary to engage with the disadvantaged youth at the top end of the Rhondda or to work in the health service, to deal with poetry classes for accountants, to work up poetry that pulls together contributions from a broad sector of the public, but who can’t write a bloody thing themselves. Now that’s troublesome. There’s too much of it.

Some would argue that so-called performance poets are just as damaging, reducing the noble word art to petty crowd pleasing? Where do you stand on page versus stage?

Page versus stage, what is the argument? It’s absolutely clear that if you have a good voice and delivery you can take something that’s not all that clever and make it sound a lot more clever. Performance adds dimension, but in recent times it’s more than just added dimension, performance is the dimension.

I would argue that, in the 21^st century, writing that starts off being called writing but is actually performance is a very valid form. There are always going to be people who are not that shit-hot as writers but are pretty good on the stage. Equally there are going to be people who can craft verse well, so that it works when you read it to yourself, but who are not going to be the best people to deliver it. There are always going to be those differences, and there always were.

Now my own position on this, as someone who’s worked in both these forms, is that I never enjoyed the idea that I would move beyond the piece of paper. All of what I do goes back to some form of written text. I never felt happy doing things by rote because that is the start of this separation. However, I have felt very happy with varying what’s on the piece of paper so that when it’s performed, when it’s read, it’s not the same as the version on the page.

At what point, when we write the poem, are we considering where it is going? Is it a question of ‘we don’t care’ or are we pointing it at an audience? Sometimes there’s a requirement, like if it’s a commission then it’s clearly for the audience. Other than that, maybe it’s not, maybe it’s ‘who cares if anybody reads this?’

What about the page as stage? The Dadaists took pleasure in the page and Charles Olson claimed the blank page was an electric grid and therefore everything on it should be charged.

Mallarmé would say the same thing, this idea that when you open a book the concept of the page itself changes. Now prior to that I really hadn’t got my head around the concept of the page and here was Mallarmé talking about how, when you open a book, you have this big expanse over which the eye would travel; the eye would shift from the left hand, the space, the gutter in the centre, right away across to the right hand and it all had a context, they affected the way the reader would perceive.

It’s been claimed you lead, as a writer, with your intellect rather than your emotion. Is this a fair comment?

Not always, no. I know I did early on, that’s absolutely true, but as you go through life you encounter life’s wonders and difficulties and you end up writing about them. Until you’ve had tragedy in your own life it’s difficult to write about tragedy and to make much sense of it. Everyone needs a bit of the difficult with the not difficult, but until that’s arrived there’s not much you can do to lead with your emotions because they don’t mean too much. Do I lead with my intellect now? That’s hard to say.

What do you think of this idea that it the poet’s role to record or reflect the human experience and therefore great poets and artists must suffer for the greater good?

I think something has to happen to the artist; there has to be an experience for the artist to make something; something must happen because if nothing happens then there’s nothing to say, really. The implication is that art is to do with experience and one could argue that you could make art out of no experience at all, and again there’s elements of truth in that.

There’s that classic concrete example where there’s a dot of red on a white background. If you were being an expressionist you would call it Sun Blazing at Noon; if you were being a concretist you would call it Red Dot on White Background. The former has an element of experience and possibly emotion attached to it, whereas the latter has neither of those.

It’s easy to say that until you’ve suffered you can’t produce anything, and people will point at these examples of nations that have been torn apart and the great works that have come from them, versus nations where that isn’t happening. If we look at Welsh writing versus Irish writing in the last 150 years you have an example of Irish writing which is raging and exciting and Welsh writing which is not quite those things. In Ireland terrible things have happened and continue to happen whereas in Wales this isn’t the case, so you could point to that.

You could say it’s more interesting to go where something is happening – Robert Minhinnick did this; he didn’t go to a Caribbean resort he went to the Middle East, he went to Iraq, he went to have a look, to where it was dangerous, to see what was going on and his writing has benefited as a result. But every time you have an example of that you then find somebody who hasn’t done those things and is still managing to produce exciting work.

It seems an increasing number of poets are comfortably trapping themselves with certain ‘golden rules’ – Ginsberg’s ‘first thought, best thought’, Pound’s ‘make it new’, etc – and some writers and academics love to dismiss the work of others with a cynical “it’s been done before”. Your appreciation of Dadaism is pretty well documented but that movement’s not far from being a hundred years old. Surely you should’ve dismissed all that Dadaist stuff as ‘having been done before’?

Do things have their time? Would I be finding something embedded in the past or would I really be just treading over ground that had already been trodden over? That idea has always haunted me. And still does to an extent.

When I look back at the origins of concrete poetry I think, how much relevance does it have? Then I think, well I’m working in Wales and there’s a different context here because Wales managed to ignore virtually the whole of the 20^th century, the Modernist art developments, and was occupied by an intellectual elite who celebrated the fact they were not interested in anything that seemed to be going on in the rest of the world. So I’m correcting that; I’m putting that wrong right. And maybe I can make something of the putting of that wrong right.

Then there’s the gaps – there are always gaps. You look and say, have Dada and other Modernist art movements reached a dead end? Well no, I don’t think all of them have, and there are ideas in there which you can pull out and extend, or alleyways you discover that somebody didn’t go down, so you might as well go down them. There’s also a kind of cultural amnesia where people you think would know have forgotten, so you do it again, as Gertrude Stein suggested, and do it again and do it again and doing it again is what it is: doing it again. It becomes new just because you’ve pulled it back out and waved it about in the air.

And then, finally, there’s the Post-Modernist idea that Post-Modernism is really the entire Modernist movement and all its facets reborn and reactivated simultaneously rather than sequentially. In which case one is perfectly at liberty to come up with a bit of Dada as long as you’ve got some other stuff around it which isn’t Dada.

I’m interested in the whole idea of sequences, variations, and that idea is as old as the hills. Bach did it with music. You get a simple piece of music then you get it with a bit more altered then you get another bit altered as the creator goes through the variations to see what would change each time. I think that’s a perfectly valid thing to do. Now that means you’re producing things that are not necessarily new, they are variations on something that already exists, so while that’s true, and does inform a lot of what I write, I still rather like the notion of making it new because, as Clark Coolidge said, in creating writing you don’t really need any new words, you can use all the stuff that’s already around as long as you put it in a different order.

Would you say that ‘Clatter’ was a good example of your variation poems?

“Yeh, yeh, perfect example of something that was absolutely deliberately a sequence; a series of variations upon a single idea. This conversation, this climbing up the steps on the bus, each component of it with a different variation and some in different voices. What could I do with this? How far can we get away from the original one while maintaining, or retaining I should say, all the original components because that’s what I did there. I didn’t, as one might do, write a whole sequence from different points of view in which you bring in new language, I started off with the same set and varied that same set on each occasion. And that form, and variations on the form of variation, still interests me now.

For all this ‘make it new’ malarkey (it’s not the thought that bothers me, it’s the incessant bleating of it), what do you think have been the greatest developments in poetry?

One of the things that has most interested me is what was known as vers libre or ‘free verse’, which is a horrible phrase – it didn’t really match what it was describing, even when it was in action back in the era when Baudelaire was writing prose poems. It certainly doesn’t work today, although Welsh-language writers use it like it has current currency but anyhow, the freedom of verse to exist outside the confines of traditional metrical form was, I think, the first great liberation, that verse could work without having to have a metrical pattern behind it. Coupled with William Carlos William’s invention/discovery that you could make poetry out of speech, out of speech patterns, you didn’t necessarily have to elevate the language or change it, you could make poetry from the way people spoke and what they said.

Also, the thing that came into being that led us to understand that poetry could be a visual medium. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy – one of the earliest examples of the novel – contained techniques that were visual. Uncle Toby goes through a state of confusion and that’s represented by tipping into the book a piece of marbled end-paper to represent his confusion. Later on he doesn’t know what to say, and that’s represented by the insertion of a blank page. These techniques, which then went through the development of visual and concrete poetry, were a huge development.

In Welsh literature, it was the slow slow slow dawning amongst what were known as the Anglo-Welsh writers that it was possible to make a verse in Wales that didn’t necessarily mention cariad, bwthyn, or Owain Glyndwr.

What keeps you writing?

I keep writing the prose books because I’ve got a market for it; I’ve been contracted to write. My psychogeographies uncovered a much wider audience than I’d ever reached before and that was quite exhilarating, encountering this much much larger audience, and that took my eye off the poetry ball. Would I write the same things if there was no contract? Probably not.

With poetry it’s slightly different. Poetry has a niggle that rides with it, and that’s the feeling that it’s a fluke; the feeling that next time it’s not going to work out because the previous time, when it did work out, that was a sort of accident. Even though, for me, I’ve got decades of those accidents actually working, I can’t ever rely on it, I can’t ever think I’ve done it before so I can do it again. Can I do it again? Self-doubt, self-doubt. So you do it to find out, to prove to yourself that you can still do it, and you’re permanently in fear of what ability you’re supposed to have draining away into the sands.

There’s an element of exorcising some sort of demon, the demon that won’t leave you alone; there’s also the genuine interest in the art itself, which I still have now as I had before. The voyage of discovery, the reading of new writers, finding out something you didn’t know, and seeing how you can reshape it and how it might reshape your own way of approaching the world.

Which would you prefer, to be a damn fine poet or to be perceived as a damn fine poet?

When you’ve written something you know on a certain level when it’s worked – no, not worked, you know when it’s congealed. I was asked, “What do you enjoy about writing?” It’s the 25 seconds after you’d finished – I think that’s the state of grace, so that would lead me to say, of the two alternatives, I think it’s the former. Achieving is most important.

“If you wanna be famous…”

Don’t do poetry.

Do you ever regret being a poet?

No. No. I regret not having pushed myself earlier perhaps. I’ve watched others who have set goals for themselves but I felt more that writing was something that you did and if these things were going to happen then they would.

So Pedro el pinko Fincharillo, let’s clear this up once and for all: apart from helping to drag Welsh literature into the 20^th and then 21^st centuries; apart from giving us some exhilarating, amusing, challenging, provocative and sometimes bizarre poetry and poetry readings; apart from widening the territory; apart from encouraging us to all come and play, what exactly did you do for me?

I would like to think that during my time with Academi I did a huge amount in changing the situation for the writer in Wales. I took a vaguely amateur situation where the writer was not treated as a proper professional and I cranked it up so the writers became professionalized, there was a system in place, and the amount of work that went to writers could increase, and it did. It went from a comparatively low level of engagement with writers back in the late 90s to the huge amounts of work by the time we got to 2012. I brought into being any number of projects and systems and I brought writing and the credibility of writers to the attention of politicians. I made sure that the Welsh Assembly Government, when it came into being, engaged with writers. I went to them and made presentations on literature; I read them poems.

Did your own writing suffer as a result?

William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies while working as a teacher, with two children under the age of three, living in a bedsit above a shop. His circumstances were not good for writing a novel yet that’s when he wrote it. Sometimes it’s true: if writing’s going to get done it’s going to get done and the circumstances that surround it will either be ignored or they themselves will help to contribute to it.

In my previous life, running a million things at the same time, it was necessary to operate under a massive discipline to find one or two hours next to each other in which to write. And those occasions were pretty spread out. Now I write every day. Which means something’s happened which never happened before: I have the ability on day two to pick up an idea from day one and continue working with it… This has led me to greater dissatisfaction with what I write. I write it, I’m pissed off with it, I don’t like it. I want to change it. I won’t leave it alone. My personal jury is still out as to whether I’m doing the right thing. I’m worrying it, or am I going back to Ginsberg’s ‘first thought, best thought’? What’s best thought after that one?

Family (2008), by Hagop Hagopian, courtesy of the artist, http://www.hagopianart.com

by Catherine Fletcher; poetry co-edited by Lola Koundakjian.

The years from 1915 to 1921 were the turning point in modern Armenian history.  During 19th century Ottoman and Russian domination, Armenians experienced a cultural revival and increasing nationalistic leanings, stirred by their intellectual community and increased literacy.  In 1915, on the eve of the First World War, Turkish nationalist reformers responded by rounding up 250 writers and intellectuals in the Western community and began what is now known as the Armenian Genocide.   In the East, amid the power struggles of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Democratic Republic of Armenia formed.  The republic came to a quick end, however, when it was annexed by Soviet invasion in 1921.

Exile was not new to Armenians and goes back to the eighth and ninth centuries according to the Armenian writer Vahé Oshagan.   But for the more than a million Armenians who were displaced by these events, both the scope of the emigration and the trauma that accompanied it were unprecedented.

For Nigoghos Sarafian (1902-1972), the first of three poets profiled here, this phenomenon of exile meant a new Western Armenian language and new poetic forms must be created.  Thirteen at the beginning of the Genocide, he escaped to France, where he made this reinvention his project.  His work is characterized by crisp language and a keen expression of sensation.  Whether journeys to the sea or meditations on a Paris park, Sarafian’s poems included are both lyrical and anguished, with shifting perspectives and convey the experiences of a man meeting himself.

Born after the upheaval of the First World War, Paruyr Sevak (1924 – 1971) lived most of his life in Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia.  Though a member of the party-sanctioned literary community,  Sevak’s individuality and frequent “ideological deviation” got him into trouble with the authorities.  Sevak’s subjects ranged from a challenge to the computers of the world to his beloved Sulamita to the commemoration of the Genocide.  He used traditional forms such as the ghazal while, as translator Dora Sakayan has noted, also being known for inventing compound words and new turns of phrase in Eastern Armenian. The poems here focus on interpersonal relationships and reveal the quality that appears again and again in his work: his humanity.

Zahrad (1924– 2007), a Western Armenian poet who was born and lived in Istanbul, saw the end of the 20^th century and the beginning of the 21^st.  His poems often celebrate that city and depict observations and reflections from its daily life: an encounter between a woman and an awkward man in an elevator, a woman cleaning lentils, his surprise at his admiration for his wife of many years.  His language is deceptively simple and his tone wry; other poems, including his Gigo cycle, reveal an absurdist view.  During his early years as a poet, Zahrad’s style ran counter to literary fashion with his poems of short, unrhymed lines.  By the end of his life, his modernist experiments had significantly reshaped Armenian poetry in Istanbul.

Modern Armenian poetry is subject to a world of influences and highly diverse.  This brief selection of poems, along with the interview with the Armenian Poetry Project’s Director Lola Koundakjian, offers a sampling of the richness of that writing in this Year of the Armenian Book.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: The editors wish to thank the following for their assistance with research and translations: Christopher Atamian, Diana Der-Hovanessian, John Greppin, Dora Sakayan, and the Zohrab Center.

by Hilary Kaplan

Translations from Marília Garcia’s 20 poemas para o seu walkman and Engano geográfico. By Hilary Kaplan.

Image by Marília Garcia

The poems in Marília Garcia’s 20 poemas para o seu walkman (20 Poems for Your Walkman) (2007) turn our everyday senses inside out, suggestively unsettling even our sense of certainty in language and place (if anything is left of it). Through evocations of Paris, London, and Barcelona set against Rio de Janeiro, through waves of memory and time, these poems lead us on a journey of disorientation and discovery. Engano geográfico (Error of Geography) (2012), Garcia’s most recent work, extends this journey in the form of a book-length poem based on the poet’s trip to meet Emmanuel Hocquard at his home in Mérilheu, France, an adventure she undertook as Hocquard’s Brazilian translator.

Garcia’s poetry has been translated into English, Flemish, French, German, Spanish and Swedish. A Spanish translation of 20 poemas para o seu walkman (trans. Mario Cámara, Diana Klinger, and Paloma Vidal) is forthcoming from Vox Ediciones (Argentina). Garcia has read her work in Argentina and at the 2011 Europalia festival in Belgium. She co-edits Modo de Usar & Co., a print and online poetry journal, and blogs at le pays n’est pas la carte. Her work always in dialogue with French and U.S. poetry and with the mode of translation, the title of Garcia’s blog comes from a French translation of Jack Spicer’s “The Territory Is Not the Map.” A former editor at 7Letras press, Garcia is a professor of literature in Rio de Janeiro.

*Video: Marília Garcia reads “Aquário,” “é uma lovestory e é sobre um acidente” and “lovestory, de a-z” at the Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM), Rio de Janeiro on January 26, 2012.

Hilary Kaplan received a 2011 PEN Translation Fund award for her translation of de-ital Rilke Shake, a book of poems by Angélica Freitas. Her translations appear in Litro, PEN America, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from San Francisco State University and is completing a PhD in comparative literature at Brown University. She writes about Brazilian poetry and poetics for Jacket2.

An Interview with Christopher Merrill

by Rebecca McKay

I loved reading your new poems for the issue. Can you talk a little bit about your interest in the prose poem as a form?

In the fall of 1989, which seems like a lifetime ago, I began to experiment with the prose poem, writing, sometimes automatically, the first draft of what by fits and starts became Necessities, a book-length improvisation due out next year. These pages, which combine surrealist imagery, elements of fable, and meditations on the language, opened a new vein in my work, which I have been exploring ever since. From the beginning I was influenced by various French masters of the form, including Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Breton and Saint-John Perse, as well as by writers like Kafka and Calvino, Merwin and Simic. And I continue to be inspired by the inventiveness and energy on display in the prose poems of many contemporary American poets. This is a good time to see what can be done in lines that go all the way to the right-hand margin.

On a similar note: You’ve written both poetry and prose. What do you find yourself getting out of each form? Are you always working on poems, even as you take on your next big prose piece?

There was a long period of time, when I was covering the war in the Balkans and then writing a pair of books about it, that I lost hope of ever finishing another poem. This persisted into the last draft of my next prose book, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, when out of nowhere, so it seemed, I found myself composing verses and prose poems. Now I find myself increasingly writing both poetry and prose, drawn to the first by music, by cadence and sound and song, and to the second by a love of stories and an allegiance to facts. I save my inventions for poetry, though, whether in verse of prose.

These recent poems seem to take on the political in a number of ways, but most noticeably through allegory. Do you consider these poems of witness?

Not necessarily. I am deeply interested in politics, and indeed I often address political matters in my nonfiction. But in my poems, even those that seem to be political in nature, it is the structure of political life, the way it shapes our thoughts and emotions, that most interests me. Generally speaking, it is difficult to make the substance of politics endure in literature; hence the allegories of power that I write examine movements of the heart, which I take to be timeless.

I was on a panel at AWP in which Doug Unger bemoaned the lack of world literature being taught at American universities. Through your work with the International Writing Program at Iowa, you’ve taught world literature in a unique way. Can you talk about that experience?

International Literature Today is an undergraduate class, offered during the fall residency, which features presentations by the visiting writers on their work, homelands, and literary traditions. I teach with Natasa Durovicova, editor of our online journal, 91^st Meridian, and on the first day we tell the students that we cannot predict what the writers will talk about—that in fact we will be learning alongside them: one of the pleasures of the class. Indeed many of the writers attend the class to hear what their colleagues have to say, which makes for a rich learning experience.

Similarly, you’ve been instrumental in getting the participants in the IWP matched up with translators. Some of these matches have been incredibly fruitful. Can you describe the process of pairing writers with potential translators? I believe you once compared it to an instant blind date, or something like that.

In this interactive translation workshop, we pair off IWP writers with graduate students from our MFA programs in Literary Translation, Nonfiction Writing, and the Writers’ Workshop, and over the course of the semester they bring into English poems, fictions, and excerpts of plays, many of which are eventually published. It is a fascinating process. Some students know the language of the original, some must rely on an English crib, and all have the chance to ask the writers questions about what they intended to do, where their work stands in relation to their literary tradition, and what effects might be preserved in translation. There is an element of chance in the match-making between the students and the writers, which sometimes leads to marvelous connections.

Does your own work as a translator affect your voice as a writer, and/or vice versa? Do you find your voice creeping into your translations, or the voice of the authors you work with inhabiting your own?

Translation must influence my writing, and vice versa, though I cannot say precisely how. I do know that I try to keep my voice out of my translations—invisibility is what I seek in my effort to serve the poet’s vision—and that in my poetry and prose I hope to incorporate some of what I have learned from the work of the poets that I have tried to bring into English.

Becka Mara McKay is Assistant Professor of Translation and Creative Writing at Florida Atlantic University. She earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington and an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa, where she also received a PhD in comparative literature. Her first book of poems, A Meteorologist in the Promised Land, was published by Shearsman Books in 2010. She has published three translations of fiction from the Hebrew: Laundry (Autumn Hill Books, 2008), Blue Has No South (Clockroot, 2010), and Lunar Savings Time (Clockroot, 2011). She has received awards and grants from the Seattle Arts Commission and the American Literary Translators Association, and a Witter Byner Poetry Translation Residency. In 2006 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poems and translations have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, ACM, Third Coast, The Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Rhino, Natural Bridge, Rattapallax , and elsewhere.

by Craig Epplin

Meena Alexander opens her recent Poetics of Dislocation (2009) with these words:

The new American poet thinks in many tongues, all of which flow into the English she uses: a language that blossoms for her. Places stick to her and with them histories, strands of local knowledge. She is aware of violence and warfare, she has experienced multiple dislocations, not uncommon now in our shared world.

The distant echoes of Walt Whitman, the topic of another essay in the same volume, resound in this fragment. The poet’s labor outlines a rich site of encounter, forging a vehicle for the multitude. The local and the specific are not synthesized and certainly not elided: they are watery strands within a turbulent flow, tributaries of a river that is not one but many.

The language of the poems and notes presented here is like that. Not so much because it multiplies voices and perspectives, but because it grapples with the question of what a voice is—or rather, from what place a voice might speak. The language of these texts runs over the complex ecology of institutions and land, walls and benches. And as it runs, it is transformed, acquiring new cadences and tonalities along its path.

In the texts that follow, we follow that path through Palestine. In April 2011, Alexander was a poet in residence at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem. These poems, travel notes, and photographs came from that experience, and the interview is a reflection on it. Together, they outline some of the immense complexities of the present.