Blog of The Word Works, a DC-based literary organization publishing poetry in collector editions and host of the monthly Cafe Muse literary salon and the eight-week summer poetry series at the historic Joaquin Miller Cabin in Rock Creek Park.
Word Works had a successful partnership with the National Park Service as we teamed up to present eight programs from June 9 to July 28 in the Rock Creek Nature Center planetarium in Washington DC. We had a great mix of familiar audience and newcomers. Here are some images from the July programs and a poem written by Rhonda Williford who attended every program!
Café Muse was sizzling hot for its July 18 program when Luis Alberto Ambroggio and Carlos Parada Ayala brought together luminaries associated with their new anthology Al pie de la Casa Blanca: Poetas hispanos de Washington, DC (At the Foot of the White House: Hispanic Poets in Washington, DC). The program opened with tribute to Egla Morales Blouin by her daughter Wendy Harmic Blouin and Egla Blouin’s best friend Dr. Miriam Davis. Blouin worked on Al pie de la Casa Blanca but did not live long enough to see the work in print. She also did translation work for DC’s Gala Hispanic Theatre.
Congratulations to Luis Alberto Ambroggio for his upcominginduction in the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language (an honor from the government of Spain). The ceremony will take place September 30, 2011 at the Library of Congress.
Congratulation to ReiBerroa for The International Poetry Award that will be bestowed to him by the City of Trieste, Italy in December 2011. The International Poetry Award is an honor that has been given to highly esteemed writers from around the world for each of the past 12 years in recognition of lifetime achievement.
Here is the list in the order of their appearance and the country of origin:
This poem is a translation of Sami Miranda’s word play poem “Como vino.” Word play is very difficult to translate, but this translation by Yvette Neisser Moreno seems to please those in the know.
WINDING UP HERE (“Como vino”)
Like wine.
Like red wine,
like white wine.
How’d a black man wind up here?
Wandering on a raft.
How’d he wind up here?
Like wine in a bottle,
a message crossing
the sea.
When I saw that
they didn’t want me,
I drank a bottle
of wine. So what?
Red wine.
White wine.
Black man came on a raft,
four days on a raft.
When the helicopter wound down
and took me to Guantánamo
I stayed.
They asked: How’d you wind up here?
Like a bottle of wine
crossing the sea
with a message
no one reads.
Since he had come,
I sat and talked with him.
We drank a bottle of wine
and when he asked:
How’d you wind up here?
I said, what does it matter if I'm already here.
‘Como vino’ by Sami Miranda
Translation by Yvette Neisser Moreno
COMO VINO
Como vino.
Como vino tinto,
Como vino blanco.
¿Cómo vino el negro?
En una balsa.
¿Cómo vino?
En botella,
un mensaje cruzando
el mar.
Como vi que no
me querían,
me tomé una botella
de vino. ¿Cómo?
Vino tinto.
Vino blanco.
Vino negro en balsa,
cuatro días en balsa.
Como vino el helicóptero
y me llevó a Guantánamo
me quedé.
Me preguntaban: ¿Cómo vino?
Como botella de vino
cruzando el mar
con un mensaje
que nadie lee.
Como vino,
me senté a hablar con él
y nos tomamos una botella de vino
y cuando me preguntó:
¿Cómo vino?
Le contesté, qué importa
si ya llegué.
bySami Miranda
About Al pie de la Casa Blanca: Poetas hispanos de Washington, DC:
The anthology includes the work of 24 of the most prominent Hispanic poets who have lived in the DC area in recent years, including Naomi Ayala, Quique Avilés, Rei Berroa, Consuelo Hernández, Gladys Ilarregui, Mayamérica Cortez, Arturo Salcedo Martínez, Alberto Avendaño, Marty Sanchez-Lowery, Milagros Terán and Vladimir Monge.
It also includes a pair of essays by the editors, putting in context the thematic and aesthetic development Hispanic poetry in Washington within American poetical perspectives and the local history of Hispanic-Latino poetry. The poetry is interspersed with photographs by the Spanish academic, writer and photographer Gerardo Piña Rosales, which offer a cutting-edge visual essay that creates a stimulating dialogue with the poetry. The English translation of this anthology is in progress now.
The NEXT CAFÉ MUSE program will happen August 1, 2011 and feature Poets Kyle Dargan & Lew Watts with tribute to Sterling Brown. Please join us for another outstanding program.
Our June16, Kathi Morrison Taylor & Deborah Ager presented Pia Taavila & Ian Williams. Pia gave us a look into deaf culture—she was raised by deaf parents and now teaches at Galludet. Ian gave us a 21st century look into the life of a single man but not before telling us the story about how his condo apartment house burned down days before he came from the greater Boston area to DC for his reading.
On June 23, Adam Tavel and Melissa Tuckey joined us in the Planetarium. We were also pleased to have The Word Works resident star-gazer Dr. Jim Beall who runs his own planetarium at St. Johns College.
June 30, we had a big crowd for Yvette Neisser Moreno and Iain Pollack. The heavens were rocking with lots of celestial imagery and sound effects.
If you missed any of these readings, you can still check out the books from many of these authors in the lobby of the Nature Center. It's not hard to get to the Rock Creek Nature Center by car or by public transportation.
How did The Word Works ever manage to spend 35 seasons doing poetry at the Miller Cabin? The answer: we had Jacklyn Potter running the show for 22 years and she loved the out of doors.
Moving the Joaquin Miller Poetry Series to the Planetarium of the Rock Creek Nature is clearly a heavenly graduation, especially on a day such as June 9, 2011 was with its 100 degree Fahrenheit reading, the oppressive humidity and annoying gnats. None of that inside the pleasantly air-conditioned Planetarium where Ranger Scott treated us to the night sky that Joaquin Miller saw over the cabin when it was still in its original location (now Meridian Hill Park).
Kelly read from two books, both of which are now being sold in the lobby of Nature Center for entire eight weeks of the Miller Poetry Series.
Here’s a poem from The Retreats of Thought, which is a collection of sonnets that according to Daniel Tobin “dares nothing less than ‘to drag truth from hiding.’”
This year at Café Muse, The Word Works has been paying tribute to poets whose bodily presence we miss. The programs have brought incredible audiences together. June 2011 in tribute to Lucille Clifton was especially poignant as we featured poetsMartin Galvin and Rod Jellema who created a poetic conversation as they went back and forth in their readings, sharing subject matter and their own poems that “talked to each.”
Jeffrey Coleman, a Saint Mary’s College of Maryland associate of Ms. Clifton shared his story about how she mentored him and how she sent out her graduating seniors with this poem:
Word Works author Donna Denize provided a humorous anecdote about how she came to sign a book
for Ms. Denize.
The open mic heard some new voices to our forum.
And outside the Friendship Heights Village Center after the program was done, Rod Jellema added a story about how her first book Good Times came to be published by Random House. It’s a story the remaining audience of a dozen people had never heard. Carolyn Kizer, who Rod Jellema called as strong as Sherman tank, by some chance read Ms. Clifton’s manuscript and asked if any of these poems had been published. Ms. Clifton responded none had been published because she didn’t know how to go about doing that. Ms. Kizer got on the phone and called Random House and said they must publish this manuscript, which, by the way, was only enough for a chapbook. However Random House published the manuscript with blank pages in between each poem to make up the difference. Good Times published in 1969, was cited by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of the year.
Don’t miss our July 18 program when Poets Carlos Parada Ayala and Luis Alberto Ambroggio read from Al Pie de la Casa Blanca: Anthology of Spanish-Language Washington-Area Poets with tribute to Egla Morales Blouin.
At the June 6, 2011 Café Muse program featuring poets Martin Galvin and Rod Jellema, the Word Works will pay tribute to the late Lucille Clifton, a beloved poet and teacher in the national literary scene. Café Muse located at the Friendship Heights Village Center, 4433 South Park Avenue, Chevy Chase, MD begins at 7 pm.
Participating in the tribute are Jeffrey Coleman who will speak briefly about Ms. Clifton’s accomplishments and Donna Denize, who will read a Lucille Clifton poem.
Michele Wolf is deeply amazed and grateful that her new collection, Immersion, was a poetry best-seller for distributor SPD Books in March, and that her new website, http://michelewolf.com, has received more than 1,200 unique visitors, including guests from Poland and Ghana. Of Immersion, Washington, D.C.’s examiner.comnoted, “Get immersed in Immersion…wonderful…very moving, very powerful….Every poem is delightfully unexpected, pulling the reader into the next poem.The poems are nicely crafted, tight with economy of words….Wolf has opened herself up to her readers, and provided them with a better sense of their own family belief system.” AARP the Magazine wrote, “‘Can you look at one face/For the whole of a life?/ Does the moon peer down/ At the tides and hunger for home?’ So asks…Michele Wolf, a poet of uncommon insight, inImmersion, her third collection. From family life to world events, her words will touch you.”
The gorgeous cover of Immersion--painting by Hellenne Vermillion, design by Susan Pearce--invariably draws attention. Wolf, who continues to teach at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, has a new blog post and three poems on the affecting site Poets on Adoption (http://poetsonadoption.blogspot.com/2011/05/michele-wolf.html). She wishes to fondly thank Nancy White, Karren Alenier, and Denise Duhamel for their support.
