Saving Salt

I was shocked to hear that the relatively new poetry publisher Salt have found themselves in trouble through the recession. Without them and the even smaller but wonderful Shearsman British poetry publishing would have a lot less range. They've posted a very simple rescue plan: buy one of their books, asap!
Here's four I'd recommend:
1. The End of Limbo by Valeria Melchioretto. Absolutely unique. I won't give some spiel, just look at the poems on Salt and then buy it if you like them as much as I do.
2. A book by Vahni Capildeo, one of the poets writing in Britain I really like to read (and to hear: she's a very good performer, by the way)
3. The book I haven't read yet but want to, Lake Onega and Other Poems, so have just bought: by the experimental Finnish poet Leevi Lehto. I heard Marjorie Perloff talk about his poetry the other week, and lo and behold, he's a Salt poet too.
4. A book I've very much enjoyed, the Venezuelan poet Eugenio Montejo's The Trees. I'd never heard of this wonderful poet before Salt put him out.
In fact, one poem I liked so much that it found it's way in a re-working into one of my poems (that homage to Montejo is in the new Shearsman magazine, no.s 79/80, also worth buying!)

Let's hope Salt make it, for all the amazing poetry and short stories they can still bring to our attention.

party piece...

At the last big nosh-up at my place I read a few poems by Gertrude Stein that the Brazilian poet, translator, blogger, small press honcho and Simpoesia literary festival organizer Virna Teixeira had in her small press Arqueria's pamphlet That's Amore . Great to be reminded of the Stein poems, and it spurred me to quickly translate this poem by the contemporary Brazilian poet Angélica Freitas for the party. Appropriately enough, I had to lock myself in the bathroom to find the time to finish translating it.

In the Tub with Gertrude Stein

gertrude stein has a big bum move over gertrude
stein and when she moves over she makes a noise like
someone drawing a wet cloth over the enormous
glass pane of a public building

gertrude stein from here to there it’s you the flannel for washing
behind the ear is all yours from here to there it’s me the rubber ducky
is mine like that we’ll both be satisfied

but gertrude stein is a show-off she finds farting underwater
funny come on gertrude stein what about me? I can’t believe
someone gets such a kick out of making bubbles

and then because it’s her bath she pulls the plug and nicks
my towel

and leaves the house not wearing a stitch her bum enormous down
the stairs and into the streets of st.-germain-des-prés


By Angélica Freitas

Translated by Stefan Tobler

From the mouths of babes and drunks

Drunkards get to the point.
In The Harp just off St Martins Lane two nights ago, my friend Ernesto and I were accosted by an imposing Churchillian figure in faded denim, staring out the open window from his perch on a rather too small bar stool. 'Hey, you look like academic guys, with your beards.' We tried to wriggle out of the charge, but not quick enough to come up with alternative careers, owned up to our studies. G. was a chef.
When he heard I was studying and translating a contemporary Brazilian poet, G. the pissed Harpist stared goggle-eyed (was this good or bad?): 'Can you say some of it for me?'. I know his poetry, don't I? But I couldn't recite any. Was it the pressure? Only partly. I really haven't exercised that part of my knowing it. I've cut and pasted Antônio Moura's poetry hundreds of times, but here's someone who wants to hear it and I'm high and dry without a single line or two to croak out. Moura's last collection is Rio Silêncio, or Silence River, and for all my efforts his poems have returned to silence. He launches into his own whistle-stop tour through 'that Welsh eejit' Dylan Thomas' lesser known gems (he loves Thomas, and recites them all).
Quick-fire, out comes the next question, 'Where does poetry go from here?' I start to laugh - am I being quizzed?
'Don't laugh, don't laugh,' he says. 'This is serious.'

Yesterday I snatched a free hour or two to sit in the sun in Wellington Square and start Saramago's O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis). In one corner of the near circular lawn a couple were having a lavish picnic, laughter peeled from Korean students sitting on the far side, and a mother and toddler ran about in the middle. A couple stumbled in, dishevelled, all over the place, like the people that hang around outside halfway houses and drug rehab clinics. They plonked themselves down a couple of yards from me. Was I in their corner?
'What you reading, good book?'
'To early to tell,' I say. I'm on the second page. It's not too early to tell, but I want to carry on reading. That answer should do it.
Except he likes to chat, comes and asks what the book is, if Portuguese is a kind of Spanish, and then asks if I can help with something. A woman told him there's a word for when you can't find the words for what you're thinking, no, no, more than that, for your feelings too, your emotions. And now he can't remember it, and it's driving him mad. Do I know it? I don't, suggest he ask the dictionary makers at Oxford University Press round the corner. - Ah, they'll never let me in there! Well, probably not, I agree, but he could leave a note. - Yeah, it's driving me mad, that word.

Is there a word for that? Because it's what we've all got, isn't it?, trying to draw the right words out of the silence, and it's not just a light entertainment for the literati, it's serious. I don't know, that word isn't just one word, maybe it's just language.

We were in The Harp that night after the launch of Hearing Eye's beautiful book of Stephen Watts' Mountain Language / Lingua di montagna (in Cristina Viti's translation), a delightful, moving long poem written with something of a novelist's touch, such affection for the people in it, and lyrical perceptions of alpine life. And perfect 'illustrations' by Stephen too.
To give his poem the last words:

Forgive me, nonno, I cannot properly put
into words that which I meant to say.

What paulistanos read on the metro

In Sao Paulo last year (in our Northern summer, their Southern winter), I loved the book vending machines in the metro.
It seems a mixture of peaceful non-resistance, sly cunning and the law is what people want to get them through those commutes...
(The top right book is of Brazilian law, the middle shelf has Machiavelli and Gandhi, and Machiavelli's The Prince is below the Gandhi too:)