Jennings, Brittany – Page 31 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 63: Robert Lopez

About Robert Lopez

Robert Lopez is the author of two novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River, and two story collections, Asunder and Good People. Among other places, his fiction has appeared in the American Reader, BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, Hobart, Indiana Review, Literarian, Nerve, New York Tyrant, Vice, and the Norton anthology Sudden Fiction Latino. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches fiction writing at The New School, Pratt Institute, Columbia University, and the Solstice MFA Program at Pine Manor College.

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A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Uniforms”

“Uniforms” is an excerpt from Kamby Bolongo Mean River, a novel that was published by Dzanc Books in September, 2009.

Kamby Bolongo Mean River started as a short story. I liked the voice and thought it could be sustained for something longer so I returned to it at some point and wrote another ten or so pages but had to put it away when life interceded. Another year passed and when I had the next chance to work on this now longer story the sentences poured out and it turned into a novel. Everything I’ve happened to write comes from language and in this case I started with the line, “Should the phone ring I will answer it.”

Notes on Reading

Samuel Beckett’s Molloy changed the way I looked at language, sentences, and what a narrative can include and exclude. I’ve said before that reading Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” made me want to write a story and reading Raymond Carver made me want to be a writer. I haven’t re-read Carver in years. I might take something off the shelf and skim a few pages, that seems to be the extent of my attention span lately. I do the same with Leonard Michaels, Grace Paley, Borges, Wallace Stevens, many others. I hope to start reading and re-reading again in earnest soon. I do read friends’ work and that I always enjoy.

“Uniforms” by Robert Lopez

Found in Willow Springs 63 Back to Author Profile an excerpt from Kamby Bolongo Mean River Uniforms are always good and I have always enjoyed wearing uniforms whenever I am allowed to … Read more

“Vaya con Huevos” by Robert Lopez

Found in Willow Springs 58 Back to Author Profile Two despicables in conversation. Tempers flare. I’m the one under the oil painting. The oil painting is mounted on a wall too … Read more

About Miguel Murphy

Miguel Murphy is the author of Detainee (Barrow Street Press, 2016). He teaches at Santa Monica College and lives in Los Angeles, California.

A Profile of the Author

“Chico the Child-Eater” by Miguel Murphy

Found in Willow Springs 55 Back to Author Profile I spit one seed of the watermelon to the floor it shakes its six legs & walks back into the ear of … Read more

About Emperor Li Yu and Francis Blessington

The Emperor Li Yu was a poet, calligrapher, and painter who gathered an accomplished court and encouraged Buddhists. He ruled the short-lived Southern Tang dynasty until 975 CE when he was captured and imprisoned in the Song capital of Bianjing. In prison, he wrote many poems about the death of his son and beautiful, artistic wife and the loss of kingdoms. He was forced to commit suicide in 978 CE.

Francis Blessington teaches major books of the past as aesthetically interesting in themselves and as relevant to the modern world: the Greeks, the Romans, the Bible, and Milton, especially Paradise Lost. He also teaches seventeenth-century British literature, a major period for great lyric poets, like Donne and Ben Jonson, and for styles of writing prose.

A Profile of the Author

“From Prison” by Emperor Li Yu

Found in Willow Springs 54 Back to Author Profile When shall spring flower, autumn moon cease? Past gold days are endless. East wind last night at my tower cell. My head … Read more

About Khaled Mattawa

Khaled Mattawa was born in Benghazi, Libya, in 1964 and immigrated to the United States in his teens.

His collections of poetry include Tocqueville (New Issues, 2010), Amorisco (Ausable, 2008), Zodiac of Echoes (Ausable, 2003), and Ismailia Eclipse (Sheep Meadow Press, 1995). He is also the author of Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet’s Art and His Nation (Syracuse University Press, 2014).

Mattawa has also translated many volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry and coedited two anthologies of Arab American literature. His many books of translation include Adonis: Selected Poems (Yale University Press, 2010), Invitation to a Secret Feast (Tupelo Press, 2008) by Joumana Haddad, A Red Cherry on A White-Tile Floor (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) by Maram Al-Massri, Miracle Maker, Selected Poems of Fadhil Al-Azzawi (BOA Editions, 2004) and Without An Alphabet, Without A Face: Selected Poems of Saadi Youssef (Graywolf Press, 2002), among others.

A Profile of the Author

Cairene Sloth Song by Khaled Mattawa

Found in Willow Springs 33 Back to Author Profile By the time basil grew on my shoulders I had become a sloth Listening to the gold beaked-angel Fight it out with … Read more

About Yusef Komunyakaa

Yusef Komunyakaa was born in 1947 in Bogalusa, Louisiana, and raised during the beginning of the civil rights movement. He served in the United States Army from 1969 to 1970 as a correspondent, and as a managing editor of the Southern Cross during the Vietnam War, earning him a Bronze Star. Komunyakaa is one of America’s most prolific and important poets, having received the Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his book Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, as well as the Wallace Stevens Award for lifetime achievement from the Academy of American Poets. He is a Distinguished Senior Poet in New York University’s graduate creative writing program, where he’s taught since 2006.

A Profile of the Author

Three Poems by Yusef Komunyakaa

Found in Willow Springs 21 Back to Author Profile The Cops Call Him Charlie An olive grove’s heavy greenness remains his only country & flag. Without family or friends, fifty … Read more

Issue 59: A Conversation with Yusef Komunyakaa

Interview in Willow Springs 59 Works in Willow Springs 23 and 21 April 21, 2006 Jeffrey Dodd and Jessica Moll A CONVERSATION WITH YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA Photo Credit: dodgepoetry.org CONTRIBUTING TO A … Read more

About Tomaž Šalamun

Šalamun is the author of more than 40 collections of poetry in Slovenian and English. He published his first collection, Poker (1966), at the age of 25. His poetry, using elements of surrealism and polyphony, was influenced by the work of Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Charles Simic, and Charles Baudelaire. His collections of poetry in English include The Selected Poems of Tomaž Šalamun (Ecco Press, 1998); The Shepherd, the Hunter (Pedernal, 1992); The Four Questions of Melancholy (White Pine Press, 1997); Feast (Harcourt, 2000), Ballad for Metka Krasovec (Twisted Spoon Press, 2001, translated by Michael Biggins), Poker (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2nd edition 2008, translated by Joshua Beckman and Šalamun), Row! (Arc Publications, 2006), The Book for My Brother (Harcourt), Woods and Chalices (Harcourt, 2008, translated by Brian Henry), There’s the Hand and There’s the Arid Chair (Counterpath, 2009), and On the Tracks of Wild Game (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012). His poetry has been widely anthologized and translated into more than 20 languages.

Michael Biggins is a native of Kansas and was educated at the University of Kansas. He has translated from Slovene previously and is currently at work translating satirical stories of the sixties and seventies from Russian. He teaches in the Modern Languages Department of Knox College in Galesberg, Illinois.

A Profile of the Author

Two Poems by Tomaž Šalamun

Found in Willow Springs 20 Back to Author Profile The Cross I’ll draw a cross Serpentines on my rocking chair How pathetically the shirt hangs Once the body has left … Read more

About Roberto Juarroz

Roberto Juarroz published fourteen volumes of poetry in all, numbered successively 1 to 14, under the general title “Poesía vertical”, the first appearing in 1958 and the final one posthumously in 1997. A fifteenth volume was edited by his wife, the poet and critic Laura Cerrato, and published after his death. W.S. Merwin published a bilingual selection of Juarroz’ poems in 1977 (Kayak Books) which was re-issued in an enlarged edition in 1987 (North Point Press), both volumes entitled Verical Poetry. In 1992 Mary Crow published her translations of the later work as Vertical Poetry: Recent Poems (White Pine Press), which won a Colorado Book Award. In 2011 Crow’s translations of a selection of Juarroz’ final poems will appear as Vertical Poetry: Last Poems (White Pine Press).

W.S. Merwin’s first poetry collection, “A Mask for Janus,” was chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1952. Merwin is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, for his collections “The Carrier of Ladders” and “The Shadow of Sirius.” His work is noted for exploring the individual’s relationship to both political and natural landscapes. In addition to his poetry, Merwin is the author of two memoirs; several books of prose; and translations of Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, and Dante, among others. He has received numerous honors, including the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a National Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement, and a PEN Translation Prize. Merwin was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1988 to 2000, and has been named the first Laureate of the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award. From 2010 to 2011, he served as the seventeenth Poet Laureate of the United States.

A Profile of the Author

Vertical Poetry by Robert Juarroz (Translated by W.S. Merwin)

Found in Willow Springs 19 Back to Author Profile Labyrinth of the bitter and the sweet, of the ripe seasons before the harvest, of the mistaken expressions in the exact forges, … Read more

About Agha Shahid Ali

Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi on February 4, 1949. He grew up Muslim in Kashmir, and was later educated at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, and University of Delhi. He earned a Ph.D. in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984, and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1985.

Ali received fellowships from The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and was awarded a Pushcart Prize. He held teaching positions at the University of Delhi, Penn State, SUNY Binghamton, Princeton University, Hamilton College, Baruch College, University of Utah, and Warren Wilson College. Agha Shahid Ali died on December 8, 2001.

A Profile of the Author

Homage to Faiz Ahmed Faiz by Agha Shahid Ali

Found in Willow Springs 16 Back to Author Profile Homage to Faiz Ahmed Faiz (d. 20 November 1984) “You are welcome to make your adaptations of my poems.” 1 You … Read more

About Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after Czech poet Jan Neruda.

Neruda wrote in a variety of styles such as erotically charged love poems as in his collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, surrealist poems, historical epics, and overtly political manifestos. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.” Neruda always wrote in green ink as it was his personal color of hope.

A Profile of the Author

from La Rosa Separada by Pablo Neruda

Found in Willow Springs 15 Back to Author Profile IV MEN We are the clumsy passersby, we push past each other with elbows, with feet, with trousers, with suitcases, we … Read more

About Al Young

Poet and novelist Al Young was born on May 31, 1939, in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. He attended the University of Michigan and received his BA from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1969.

A Profile of the Author

Other Works

His volumes of poetry include Something About the Blues: An Unlikely Collection of Poetry (Sourcebooks MediaFusion, 2008); Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons: Poems 2001-2006 (Angel City Press, 2006); The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems 1990-2000 (Creative Arts Book Company, 2001); Heaven: Collected Poems, 1956-90 (1992), The Blues Don’t Change: New and Selected Poems (1982), Geography of the Near Past (1976), Some Recent Fiction (1974), The Song Turning Back into Itself (1971), and Dancing: Poems (1969), which won the Joseph Henry Jackson Award.

Three Poems by Al Young

Found in Willow Springs 14 Back to Author Profile Transformations for Ann Hinkel At Ann’s place, even before you arrive everything’s OK, everything’s peaceful. The apartment air is impregnated with peace … Read more