The Stone of Language E-Book

Anya Achtenberg

• Herausgeber: Modern History Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 94

Beschreibung

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); and I Know What the Small Girl Knew(Holy Cow! Press). Her fiction has received awards from Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story, New Letters, the Asheville Fiction Workshop, the Raymond Carver Story Contest, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and more; andpoetry awards include first prizes from Southern Poetry Reviewand Another Chicago Magazine.Individual works of fiction and poetry have also been published in Harvard Review; Malpaís Review; Gargoyle; Tupelo Quarterly; The Mas Tequila Review; Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion; Hinchas de poesía; Poet Lore; Taos International Journal; Paterson Review; and numerous others. Prior to the 2004 publication of The Stone of Language, various versions of this manuscript won recognition as a finalist in five competitions: the Philip Levine Poetry Contest, the Hayden Carruth Award from Copper Canyon Press, the May Swenson Award from Utah State University Press, Cleveland State University’s Poetry Center Prize, and the Alice James Books Awards.
"Achtenberg is a poet of lyrical intensity... interested in detail for the wealth of revelation and music it will yield up"
-- Luis H. Francia, The Village Voice
"Anya Achtenberg's visionary workshops on writing for social change have received national acclaim. With this book of poetry, she practices what she preaches--redreaming a just world--in a way that is simply breathtaking."
-- Demetria Martinez, author of Mother Tongue
"Stunning and original! Powerful 'make it new' language"
-- Stratis Haviaras, founder and editor of Harvard Review

Leseprobe

The Stone of Language

Anya Achtenberg

Modern History Press Ann Arbor, MI

The Stone of Language

Copyright © 2004, 2020 by Anya Achtenberg. All Rights Reserved.

ISBN 978-1-61599-502-8 eBook (Kindle, ePub, and PDF editions)

Modern History Press

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Ann Arbor, MI 48105

www.ModernHistoryPress.com

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This eBook edition is officially licensed from West End Press, Albuquerque, NM.

Acknowledgments

“Torturer’s Resignation” won First Prize in Another Chicago Magazine’s Poetry 2000 contest, and appeared in the Fall 2000 issue, #37, of the magazine.

“River lament for those who knew Derek” was finalist in the 1998 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards sponsored by the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College, and appeared in Issue No. 28, 1999 of the Paterson Literary Review.

“Mother is carried off” appeared in Issue No. 9, 1998, of Blue Mesa Review (Albuquerque, New Mexico; University of New Mexico).

“Questions of War” appeared in Rooster Crows at Light from the Bombing: Echoes from the Gulf War, an anthology of poems and essays published by Inroads Press, 1992 (Knife River, Minnesota).

“Genesis” appeared in Life on the Line: Selections on Words and Healing, an anthology of poetry and prose published by Negative Capability Press, 1992 (Mobile, Alabama).

“Elegy” appeared in Spanish translation as “Elegia” in the 1991 issue of Punto 7 (New York City).

“Elegy” appeared in Issue No. 35, 1991, of VISIONS-International (Virginia).

“February” appeared in Issue No. 38, 1990, of Pivot (New York City).

“The Beginning of Night” appeared in the Spring 1990 issue of Caprice (Wichita, KS).

“Tirza in the Land of Numbers,” “The Street of the Lost Child” and “Shoes” appeared in the July-August 1990 issue of American Poetry Review (Philadelphia).

“These Snapshots I Have Lost,” a finalist for the 1990 Pollak Prize, was published in Vol. 12, No. 1—the Spring 1990 issue of The Madison Review.

“Breath” won the Guy Owen Poetry Prize (1st Place) and appeared in the Fall 1989 issue, Vol. XXIX, No. 2, of Southern Poetry Review (North Carolina).

“Occupations” won Honorable Mention in the 1989 Chester H. Jones National Poetry Competition and appeared in the anthology of winning poems.

“Man Behind a Store Window” appeared in Ailanthus, Winter 1986 (New Jersey).

Contents

Preface to the revised edition

City Poem for Hanuman, the Monkey Scribe

Entrance

Breath

The Beginning of Night

The Beginning of Night

Brooklyn

February

Genesis

News at the End of the Sky

Occupations

Occupations

Man Behind a Store Window in Spring

Shoes

Work Abroad: Riddles

Commerce: Boys

Torturer's Resignation

Performers at Cirque du Soleil

i. Contortionists

ii. The Strong Man

iii. Clown Trotting in His Horse Costume

iv. Lady in White

They are there, their song is there

Immigrants

Brixton Photo

Burning

Immigrants

i. Looking for the Angel

ii. Story

iii. Change

iv. Immigrants

v. Return

vi. Counting

vii. Flight

viii. History

The Street of the Lost Child

The Street of the Lost Child

Elegy

Paraplegia

River lament for those who knew Derek

Notes on a Phone Call

When We Can’t Speak

Mother is carried off

These Snapshots I Have Lost

“The woman seated made a sign of death”

These snapshots I have lost

Questions of War

from: September 11: “By 1740, one in every six New Yorkers was owned by another New Yorker”

i. The Fall

ii. The Climb

iii. The Burial

Easter Heart

The Stone of Language

Disappointment Island

Tirza in the Land of Numbers

crush

The Stone of Language

Notes

About the Author

Preface to the Revised Edition

Much time had passed since the original 2004 publication by West End Press (Albuquerque, New Mexico) of The Stone of Language, when publisher Victor Volkman of Modern History Press offered to bring this volume of poetry to more audiences through an e-book. (The Modern History Press imprint had published my novel Blue Earth and my novella, The Stories of Devil-Girl.) While I love physical books, I have accepted electronic forms in order to take many books with me everywhere, so I was thrilled to accept Modern History’s offer, and West End agreed.

West End Press was founded in 1975 in New York City by multicultural and class-conscious publisher John Crawford, purportedly at the West End Bar near Columbia University. After decades of work, John passed away in 2019. Among many very gifted writers published by West End, was dear friend and mentor Meridel Le Sueur, a prescient midwestern radical, a brilliant writer in prose and poetry, a class-conscious feminist who understood and communicated the history, oppression and strengths of women. Meridel was one of the first people to read in total the poems which would be collected in my first book of poetry, I Know What the Small Girl Knew, published by Holy Cow! Press. Her understanding and embrace of those poems shocked me, and opened a door for me into a dimension of enduring belief in my work. Meridel was born in 1900, and we lost her in November of 1997, but I periodically reread the typewritten and handwritten notes and postcards she sent me, and each time become more certain that what she knew of women’s consciousness is crucial knowledge.

Then the task, to update this book for electronic publication. When I looked back at the collection, after years of seeing it in print, two of the poems presented themselves as the whisperings of a difficult-to-decipher subtext, whisperings about why I belonged to poetry, while story, to which I have since delivered myself, must stolidly refuse me. Both poems referred to the constant slipping away of image, name, language, from the ability to hold onto coherent identity and coherent story; image, name and language, as inadequate instruments to bring forth my history, that which lives in my bones. These poems especially brought forward the impossibility of my having an in-category identity and sense of place. They held something of the consequences of my inherited sense of being refugee—a child of many silenced languages and many successive displacements, who had a terribly hard time reaching clear names for that fragmented state of being groundless and in motion. In a way, I saw my task in revision to bring these two longer poems a bit closer to clarity about the impossibility of arriving at clarity regarding identity and place.

I’ve needed language more than any other tool, not only a language which counted me as a member of the generation of first native speakers in the family, but a poetic language of which I was the first speaker…Long before these poems took their first shape in the open air, I spent a long time just trying to speak—chiseling away at, puzzling through—to break open that stone of language after long ages to relieve my silence and give me entry into the larger language. Now, here, is what that stone—in some moment of compassion, some breach in its unyielding husk—has given me lately…and, now, from my position as writer of stories as well as of poems, I hope that this stone of language offers a bit more clarity.

To me, the nature of story seems so profoundly kaleidoscopic; its causality, so clearly complex; its form organic to a voice fleeing, wandering, in flight; its knots, unable to be calmly disentangled on a pre-scheduled page. Stories often require a poetic vision, and poems often ache for story.

I had no easy solution for the two poems in this collection most difficult to write. The first, “These Snapshots I Have Lost”, was written after the many rolls of film I brought back from the Soviet Union, then in the process of perestroika or restructuring, were burnt black because of some defect in my new, untested camera. And the title poem, “The Stone of Language”, which continues to whisper to me that in the multiple origins and pathways of language; in the successive displacements of one language by another; in the multiple losses of languages; in the congealing of language by the harshness of life, labor, and violence, as by trauma, displacement and flight, and by the often grievous unfulfillment of our gifts—is hidden the key, not to going home—which may not be possible anymore—but to understanding what home might be.

The stone of language, I’ve been asked, what could that mean? Many survivors and descendants of current, historical and intergenerational trauma know that silent stone in a family that does not or cannot speak of their own history, in a country—in a world—that constantly erases it by means of historical amnesia, climate catastrophe, gentrification, ethnic cleansing, all manner of wars of ferocity and traumas of violence, loss, and violation; and even through continuing systems of classification that obscure, distort, erase us and our stories. The language left is one of bombed and bulldozed rubble, and the elaborate overlay of lies. Those who would cover it all up often prefer stories clipped to fit within the outlines of a single body on the pavement; stories of simple causality that highlight the most recent crime and a single befuddled or demonic perpetrator, rather than the embedded grand masters of crime. So, stories recede, and language congeals.

Stone.

It is, especially, these two revised poems that attempt to reachthrough layers of stolen history and lost migratory pathways to the wholeness we cannot touch, to the experience of multiplicity and motion that seems unutterable in any single, current language. Simple math. In language that would hold multiplicity, these poems attempt to approach a bit more closely that which I had only been able to fleetingly glimpse before.

Thank you for reading, in e-book form, this revised collection of poetry, which I still picture as print on paper between solid covers which you are holding in your hands.

Anya Achtenberg, February 2020

City Poem for Hanuman, the Monkey Scribe

You write in darkness of deep night,

eclipsed sun, black moon, stars falling,

or by light of catastrophe

with ink of river,

pen melting in flames

driving cries to paper.

You scramble over rubble

to the one breath still rising,

pull him to the top

and hiss life into his skull,

dip your tail into

the bubble of his blood

and disappear

to write of it.

The cameras have missed you

but mark his crimson work pants,

his satin flesh, the falling knees

of helmeted helpers,

as broken beams crash across

a hundred twenty-fifth street

to accuse another

vacant building trembling with shadows,

with confused lingering spirits,

and half a city crouches in the air

below its windows, makes fires

in the mesh of garbage, cooks

what the other half has left,

and beats on the pavement

a history of journey.

The city is falling.

You who knows shadow, blood and spirit,

hangs at its edge in silence,

tail fur bloody, shrill chatter buried,

tricks dropped from crossed arms,

a grim pouch on a tattered tree by the river.

Still, you will write.

Ink is abundant

and will not stop flowing.

Entrance

Breath

This is an ode to my breath

that circles the body and its stutter,

its ache and bend,

its opening and its bloodfall, its upheaval

and the long string of pleasure that falls from it

and is woven into the eye and hand of memory.

This is an ode to the darkness behind my eyes,