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- Herausgeber: Modern History Press
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
This early collection of Achtenberg's poetry treats the intersection of the inner and the outer life through issues of social justice that remain crucial, and the ways history and its traumas sit in us. Her themes include women's rights, poverty, war, racism, and sexual abuse. Her vision of concern spans the world, from her own inner city neighborhoods to the wider world, anywhere people are oppressed.
"I can't tell you how wonderful and naked these poems are and a rare thing for a woman to be able to give it. What you are writing is not just something for this day you are wringing ringing out a cry you are privy to a great cry out a wonderful vision of a woman's agony. You have a witch's terrible straight look and you must go on with this vision . . . to show the utter depravity and cruelty of the oppressors, amidst screams of destruction, the past and future hiroshimas. This is the poetry of our resurrection. For the blood, for the healing. For love."
-- Meridel Le Sueur (excerpts from letters to the author)
"I didn't know how much I needed this book until I read it. And I didn't know how much I'd been longing for a northamerican poetry that speaks with passion and authority of both the inner and outer life, as well as the point where they intersect; that place that is 'political' understood in its most fierce and fearful, sad and triumphant sense. Achtenberg's eye for detail is accurate and often startling, both compassionate and ironic; the rhythms of her language are resonant and complex beyond what we have come to expect from northamerican poetry. Anya Achtenberg's poetry gives both pleasure and courage."
-- Jim Moore, author of Invisible Strings
ANYA ACHTENBERG is an award-winning author of the novel Blue Earth, and novella, The Stories of Devil-Girl (both with Modern History Press); and poetry books, The Stone of Language (West End Press 2004; MHP 2020); and I Know What the Small Girl Knew (Holy Cow! Press; MHP 2020). Her fiction and poetry have received numerous prizes and distinctions, and been published in numerous literary journals, including Harvard Review; Malpais Review; Gargoyle; Tupelo Quarterly; Hinchas de poesia; Poet Lore; and many more.
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I Know What the Small Girl Knew
____________________________
Poems byAnya Achtenberg
Modern History Press
Ann Arbor, MI
I Know What the Small Girl Knew.
Copyright © 1983, 2020 by Anya Achtenberg. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced without permission from the publisher.
Photograph of Anya Achtenberg by Michael Barich.
Photograph on Page 52 reprinted by permission of The Guardian.
Cover design by Jim Dochniak; photograph prepared by Michael Barich.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications in which some of these poems first appeared: Lake Street Review, Sez/A Multi-Racial Journal of Poetry & People’s Culture, Summit-University Free Press, Sunbury, Quindaro, and Something to Say (West End Press).
Published by
Modern History Press
5145 Pontiac Trail
Ann Arbor, MI 48105
www.ModernHistoryPress.com
Tollfree 888-761-6268
FAX 734-663-6861
In memory of my mother, Rose Lewis Artenberg (1914 - 1993), and my father, Harry Artenberg (1911 - 1981)
for many friends, but especially Mary Joan Coleman, John Crawford, Jim Dochniak, Maya González, Jim Perlman, Paulette Jennifer Tabb, and the Boston Worker-Writers.
and for New York City, that wonderful monster that spit me out whole
Contents
Foreword by Joy Harjo
Author’s Note to the 2020 edition, during the Covid-19 pandemic
I.
what is this weeping?
Survivor
Autopsy
there’s a razor in your apple, child.
it is about
II.
for Maya
to hurl a flesh arc
message from the Virgin of Guadalupe
so many of us come from this
III.
A Little Night Story
the clerk speaks – 1
the clerk speaks – 2
a work story
the clerk speaks – 3
IV.
the women
The Mirror Woman
Ramona
Stauch’s Bathhouse
Summary of Attacks at 4, 17, 23, and 28
I Know What the Small Girl Knew
V.
a small history of a large debt
War and a Very Old Woman
Cassinga
La Prisionera
four minutes to midnight
no matter
Notes on the Poems
About the Author, 2020
FOREWORD
Anya Achtenberg’s book is a collection of poetry rooted out of many, many years of history, a history that frames two continents. It is born out of the heart of a little girl who stands in the dark, remembering. She is the child of Jewish immigrants, but she could be the child of poor Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, or Native Americans, a child of strugglers.
We are all born into this world by breath, a common originating point, and to use that breath to speak is a form of creating, and to go past that to where the voice sings means even more than survival.
These poems are a cry. It is a cry like weeping, mourning the pain of that little girl who looks out of the dark, the pain of nations, but it is also the cry of another sort, a song like the cry of a warrior who uses voice to call up memories that strengthen. Calls up the little girl into understanding. Calls up the grandmothers, the grandfathers, the oldest ones. Calls them not just for herself, but for us also, her listeners.
And she becomes strong, and so do we. And that is important, because we stand up.
— Joy Harjo
Author’s Note to the 2020 edition, during the Covid-19 pandemic
The release of my long ago first book of poetry in a new edition, including an eBook format, is something I celebrate, perhaps even more so as I am in quarantine, as are many of us who can be. Serious periods of homelessness, living in homes where it was not safe, born from refugees, I have a glimpse of how much harder it could be for me at this moment. But for us with technology and a place to rest, eBooks are wonderful things.
How wonderful for this book to have had a foreword by Joy Harjo, who at the date of this edition is the Poet Laureate of the United States. In it, she says that the poetry is rooted in “a history that frames two continents”. My understanding has grown since then: the ancestral journey across North Africa into the Iberian Peninsula, and centuries there under North African rule, must add a third continent tangled into these roots.
This book of my early poems is a kind of historical document indicating both the limits and the expansiveness of writing back then from a working class, partisan, traumatized consciousness, permeable to national and global suffering and struggles. What I did feel was how thin the membrane was between wars, between captivities, and how permanently ensconced the powerful seemed to feel. How much their art was taking; and ours, surviving.
It was written in “the good old days” of four minutes to midnight on the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists—at this writing, that clock says 100 seconds to midnight.
What strikes me about my juvenilia, besides the uneven quality of the poems! is the clear class consciousness, the strong feminism, the connection to the human issues connected to race and racism. But when these poems first emerged, much of this was considered a liability by what passed as a poetry establishment; on the other hand, there were those who considered me a “diamond in the rough” they could mold into writing poems that made unequivocally clear political statements. That wasn’t my work in poetry.
Because so many have done so much to make present and celebrated the literary work of writers from groups rarely represented when I began to be published, it might be hard to believe now, the pushback there was then, against poetry of class, race, gender, and international consciousness. But it was so in the United States. And writing this note in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic reminds me how dangerous, even suicidal, is holding back the truth, or making expression in art only strategic or agenda-driven.
