The World Cup

The 2010 FIFA World Cup begins in South Africa on Friday June 11th. A fever is coming like a fiend in anguish; waiting, anticipating, even watching the glitchy, snow storm looking Spanish channels for whatever obscure match will pass the time.

Football. Soccer. Fútbol. The words mean the same. Words for ‘the beautiful game.’ The World Cup is the most watched event on Earth, surpassing the likes the Olympics, Super Bowl, and women’s Roller Derby Finals.

Nelson Mandela remarked that “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to unite in a way that little else does.” Perhaps this is why every four years nearly all nations attempt to qualify for the World Cup, regardless of civil war, political strife or being governed by a despot.

The scope and reach of the game is stunning. While every country has its soccer pitches, from the greenest grasses to a dirt patch with sprinkles of broken glass, every country also has its poets.

In anticipation of the opening match which features Mexico vs South Africa, here are a couple poets of those respective countries, as found in The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry edited by J.D. McClatchy.


Firewing

when you think of your country
you see
plaits and glasses; an old dog full of blood;
and a horse drowned in the river; a mountain on fire;
a space and two people without teeth in bed;
dark figs against sand; a road, poplars,
house, blue, ships of cloud;
reeds; a telephone;
you see

when you think of your country
you see
we must be strong; guts full of craters and flies;
the mountain is a butcher’s shop without walls;
over the thousand hills of Natal
the fists of the warriors like standards;
prisoners lie in the mud: you see
mines bursting with slaves; the rain
spatters high like sparks against the evening;
amongst the reeds the skeleton of the dwarf rots

when you think of your country
it is the end of all thought;
if it’s bright outside you throw the windows open;
you see the stars are arrows in the void;
you hear, as quiet as a rumor, don’t you?
“we are the people. we are black, but we don’t sleep.
we hear in dark how the thieves guzzle in the trees.
we listen to our power they cannon know, we listen
to the heart of our breathing. we hear the sun
shaking in the reeds of the night. we wait until
the devourers rotten and glutted fall from the branches–
a glutton will be known by his fruits–
or we’ll teach the pigs to climb trees.”

- Breyten Breytenbach, South Africa, translated by Ernest van Heerden


Along Galeana Street

Hammers pound there above
pulverized voices
From the top of the afternoon
the builders come straight down

We’re between blue and good evening
here begin vacant lots
A pale puddle suddenly blazes
the shade of the hummingbird ignites it

Reaching the first houses
the summer oxidizes
Someone has closed the door someone
speaks with his shadow

It darkens There’s no one in the street now
not even this dog
scared to walk through it alone
One’s afraid to close one’s eyes

- Octavio Paz, Mexico, translated by Elizabeth Bishop*

*I am a blog novice. The formatting on the Paz poem is not correct, I've been monkeying around with it for 30 minutes and still can't get it right. Many apologies, so sorry -- Jerry

Sugar House Review & Weston Cutter on Verse Daily

Weston Cutter's superb poem "I Want You," (from issue #2 of Sugar House Review) is today's poem on Verse Daily.

Thanks Verse Daily! You have spectacular taste.

Rane Arroyo: 1954 - 2010

My contact with Rane was limited to a handful of email correspondences. But it didn't take much to be struck by his generous nature and candid personality. I'm saddened by his death.

Sugar House Review was brand new. We existed only as a web page and (I think) a listing on Duotrope.com. In fact, at that point, we weren't "relevant' enough to have our own Wikipedia entry. Believe me. I tried.

So I'm not sure how or where Rane heard of us, but he e-mailed and introduced himself (he had spent a lot of time in Utah) and asked if we would be interested in considering some of his work for our magazine. I admit, at that time I wasn't very familiar with Rane's work. But I knew of him. I knew the University of Arizona had done a couple of his books. And that was enough for our brand new magazine to be excited.

The more familiar I become with Rane and his poetry, the more lucky I feel that he found us and that we had the chance to include his poems in our debut issue. Rane's poetry exhibits a fearless generosity that never becomes tired. It is both musical and accessible, personal and universally relevant.

After Rane received his contributor copies he conveyed a deep satisfaction at being published in a Utah poetry magazine--a sort of peace-making with the Utah of his past. His words ring with me. I find that poetry, or probably any creative endeavor, can serve as a way to link us to our former selves, to look into the eyes of--even if we can't make peace with--our past.

Rane said it best in the conclusion to his poem, "Always" (linked here), What an education: / poetry always demands all my ghosts.

Thank you, Rane. Rest in Peace.

--Nathaniel Taggart

******

Flowers in Florence

Two of the daffodils are dressed
in glowing faces; three of them

grimace in gold masks: resurrection
poses. What's not to love, this

half-spent day? These blossoms are
alternative suns on a cloudy

noon: five sisters gossiping with
spring's army of gray. The astral

plane must be beautiful in order
to tempt some of us from this ache

we call yellow that is in and of this
world. These flowers possess the plain

grace of specificity: five
gold coins not long for my cold hands.

--Rane Arroyo
___________________________
from The Portable Famine
BkMk Press, 2005

Pushcart Prize!

Paul Muldoon's "Capriccio in E Minor for Blowfly and Strings"--the 1st poem printed in the in the debut edition of Sugar House Review--will be included in the 2011 Pushcart Prize Anthology.

Whilst we realize that most of this is due to incredible luck--mostly the luck inherent in getting that lovely poem from Muldoon--we can't help but feel a need to celebrate.

Yay!

We're not sure about the exact volume of submissions that the Pushcarts receive, but we know it's a lot. Most literary journals and small book publishers nominate work they've published (up to 5 pieces a year). For the 2010 edition, 63 pieces were chosen for inclusion. We imagine the number will be similar for 2011. The fiction, poems and essays contained within the anthologies is one of the most esteemed encapsulations of great work for that year. The anthologies are also widely available (in terms of literary anthologies) at booksellers and news-stands.

Here's more about the Pushcart Prize Anthology.

Gratitudes:

Thank you Paul Muldoon. So much.

Thank you to our subscribers and contributors and all of those that allow us to review their work for publication in our little magazine.

And thank you Bill Henderson and the editors/advisers of the Pushcart Prize.

A capella Zoo: another journal you should check out.

If you haven't seen A capella Zoo, you should check it out. Colin Meldrum and staff are doing a superb job of gathering work that fits within the realm of magical realism. Sample content for their new issue (#4) can be found below. Be sure to check out "Two Evenings" by R. Matthew Burke. If'n you dig, subscribe, and support independent publishing!

Check it out.

History of Hurricanes by Teresa Cader 

(2009, Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press)

Reviewed by Michael McLane

Early in the first and title poem of Teresa Cader’s third collection of poetry, History of Hurricanes, we are thrown headlong into the conflict that haunts nearly all the poems that follow:

No whirling dervish on the radar, no radar, no brackets
no voices warning—no Voice—fugue of trees, lightning

Because we cannot know, we imagine 

What will happen to me without you?

That final question, posed within the context of the impending hurricane season, opens the door to countless other impendings—seasonal change, aging, children growing and, of course, death—and places the poems in History of Hurricanes securely within the lyrical realm and, more specifically, in the long tradition of the early Latin and Anglo-Saxon ubi sunt form. The ubi sunt relies upon the question “where are those that came before us” and Cader not only poses this question in various ways throughout the text, but attempts to answer it in ways that are equally compelling. Much like the hurricane that becomes conspicuous in it absence in the above passage, many examples of the form feature a presence, whether abstract or personified, that looms over its protagonists. What is off the radar or forgotten is what most endangers us. That is not to say these things are repressed in Cader’s poems. Rather, she names them. There is nothing rhetorical to questions posed and nothing sentimental in fears and flaws confessed. This is particularly true in “Blue Table With Pomegranates,” where Cader writes of a table a couple has
decided to give away and concludes:

I know how your hands smooth skin, stroke hair.
   That much I allow myself to imagine of your body
                                                             Taken from me someday, 

                                                             And the table—

         Already spoken for by a young couple at the iron gate—

or in “Petrified Light” where, upon seeing a large-scale museum display of a black widow, the speaker admits:

…Whoa, I said to my ordinary. To my stubborn. To fear’s
Onion smell welling up in my armpits. What we have here is a body
Created for me. A creature of wild and deadly desire. Bad.

While both passages contain a powerful confessional element that is poignant in its simplicity and expertly woven into deceptively mundane contexts, what is perhaps most interesting about the two poems, and nearly all the poems in the book, are the contrasts they create, the vacillating between fear of the deaths and losses we are helpless to stop and the pain and traumas we are capable of and culpable for.

The poems in History of Hurricanes are, for the most part, firmly rooted in the domestic. Whether walking the dog, watching birds through a bedroom window, or taking a trip to the museum, family, lovers, children, and home are all thrown perpetually into focus. Even when poems gesture towards seemingly larger historical events or figures is always a result of some more localized trigger, as in “Burying Ground,” where the speaker’s daughter discovers the graves of six children lost during the Revolutionary War including a boy just under 3 years old:

She asked, “What does ‘wanting 8 days mean’?”
Eyes wide: “What happened to them?” 

War in Lexington. Fear. Near starvation.
In eighteen days the deaths of six children. 

Disease. Epidemics. “Could be smallpox,” I said
“Don’t worry it’s been eradicated.” 

She wasn’t worried. Summer’s rebound
beckoned for another bike ride into town. 

But I went back to read the stones more closely.

Cader’s speaker, like any parent who has not lost a child, finds herself in the disorienting position of explaining away the fear to her own child while internalizing the tragic potential of a world that had been so average only moments before. The presence of death is realized in a far more concrete way later in the book in the poem “Habits”, which stands out both as the longest poem in the book and, in many ways, as its climax. Cader writes of dealing with both her mother’s death from what is presumably lung cancer, and her ashes which the family plans to use to fertilize a memorial tree:

I cannot watch again. I will not water the pitted 

ground with my prayers, or spend nights in the garden
singing to the god of drought. Have you watched a tree die?
Pathetic fisted leaves, cocoons like burial shrouds. 

How much should I save, one pound, or two?

What is so stunning about Cader’s poems is how much mileage she gets from absence, how much she does with so little. Like the hurricane alluded to in the first poem, these poems are all quiet nods to the inevitable, to moments we can neither predict nor prepare for. The poems are mostly short and even the longer poems are surprisingly stark. There are few grand gestures or metaphors made in the book and few of the poems call attention to themselves in a way that says “Look at me, I’m important, I’m a crux.” Instead, the connections between poems are clear, the conflicts are consistent, the craft impressive in its subtlety. History of Hurricanes reads as a poignant meditation on love and family that, time and time again, is interrupted by moments of doubt, an ode written and rewritten, but like that songbird bringing good news in “Aria” is silenced “by the swift and deafening, a spring downpour.”

Ken Brewer video

Here's a video about Utah's former poet laureate, Ken Brewer. We had three of his poems in our first issue. He was a great poet and great influence on Utah's poetry community.

A Song for Ken Brewer from USU Extension on Vimeo.