Issue Three Contents

Everywhere
by Perpetual Murray
Boiled Drinking Water
by Krishna Ramanujan
Poems for Tonight
by Yusef El Qedra
Free World
by Suzanne Dottino
The woman and the young man
by Chahla Chafiq
2 poems
by Ruth Madievsky
The Mysterious Queen
by Nory Steiger
3 poems
by Gabriele Frasca
2 poems
by Valentino Zeichen
Frogpondia
Poetry
by Valentino Zeichen
translated by Douglas Basford
Valentino Zeichen (born c. 1938), is an Italian poet and writer. He began to write poems at the age of 18, influenced by surrealist authors like Breton and Prévert. His first work was published in 1969 in the literary review Nuova Corrente. Zeichen's first novel, Tana per tutti, was released in 1983. Zeichen's poetry has been praised for its wit and subtle humor. He is considered among the finest poets today in Europe. An annual literary award in Rome, the Premio Zeichen, bears his name.

Douglas Basford's poetry, translations, and critical prose can be found in Poetry, Subtropics, Narrative, Zymbol, Ambit (UK), H_NGM_N, Diagram, The Tampa Review, Two Lines, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. He has been awarded fellowships, prizes, and honors by the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers' conferences, New England Poetry Club, Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Foundation, Southwest Review, Smartish Pace, Paumanok Poetry Awards, Robert Frost Foundation, and other journals and organizations. He teaches at the University at Buffalo, co-edits the online journal Unsplendid, and is Italian language editor of the new translation venture Coeur Publishing.

Analogies between Cinema and a Painting by Anselm Kiefer – Sternenfall

Youth Hostel

Analogies between Cinema and
a Painting by Anselm Kiefer – Sternenfall

I Without a bill of lading it filters down from opalescent skylights in the Galleria d'Arte Moderna, a canvas descending from the sky; a cosmic champion of Falling Star that I would have gladly copied had Kiefer's ingenuity not anticipated me. But the museum could have mistaken this for a Cinemascope or a picture frame of nothing. On the galactic background an opaque material, on the first floor grimy ideas tarred until it's art; stellar wars under way, carbonized zodiac, planetary geometries reduced to livid plasters, votive daubs in neon; absence of color, negative of the universe, triumph of cremation; dissuasive of the hopes of the spatial idealists? II What the Starfighter calls "night vision" during take-off is plasma of the dark, parasite of the light that pierces the ether and deprives us of the view until when the interval lasts between the two times of film. What's this painting represent? a universal catastrophe or whatever movies Hollywood, Cinecittà, Bollywood are like? Matter is sizzling falls along the skirting board: ashtray of the universe, urn for "stardust." In the Major constellations the planetary colonies boast the names of celebrated directors, others are called by film titles and for sure the names of minor gods contend with each other. From space we're inundated by sonorous columns from films that the A/V thieves engrave in the minidisks of planetary rings. III The spectators fall, old film buffs pass on, while the Romantic poets contemplate the sky for free from the castle of Lerici; two centuries later their ghost-soldiers preside over stands in the stadium still, assiduous in the infinite screen of the cinema universe. Science flings wide open a new branch of knowledge: spatial archaeology. After Hollywood, Brakhage; celluloid's gravedigger superimposes still frames and jokes about with acids. The cinemas are temples also known as planetary and the screens altars. We are stuntmen devotees of a cult, assiduous presences. Opposite of the divinities we are the mortals that call out to them in vain to pull from their distractions while the film strip runs out on the marble canvas of our future grave. IV On the Weltanschauung of the starry heavens there is the treasure hunt, hide: a starlet of silent film. There's one who expects some explanations from non-being or from nearly nothing. The philosopher rummages in his pockets, fishes out a noumena which the other hand sticks in the "Mouth of Truth," formerly choked with sewage; will it be the fount of truth, this disk of the Ocean? the sky waffles. The metaphysics of cinema unveils the mystery of Samsara for us or cycle of rebirths of the film starlets and stars what to imaginary characters lend their beautiful resemblances; you finish reprise them in a film they come immediately you call for a new filmic karma. And if on a whim they throw a fit, ripping up the contracts sacred to the star system, they risk finishing their careers in Nirvana like all us mortals. V Birds of an imperfect paradise comparable to boozers cry out terrestrial blasphemies in their aerial obscenities, even though Celtic priests would have tracked down in those obscene yelling the unusual frequencies of a subhuman idiom casually impressed in the dissimilar vocal mould. The aristocratic series of the royal seagull circle above the Philharmonic in the hunt for lyric writings, once elect protagonists of Contrappunto Bestiale alla Mente per un giovedi grasso di Carnevale, by Adriano Banchieri, 1568-1634. Lecturers in comparative languages, ornithologists, phonologists, arrange the phonics with their giraffes in the corners of the terraces. Seagulls coarse as Stukas plummet in a nosedive releasing bombs of guano on the earthly festivities, swapping them for a movie set to make the Hitchcock effect real.

Youth Hostel

I Like vast votive bonfires summer days burned away. The jukebox took the place of the master of ceremonies and from under the castle "Forever, love me forever" blasted at top volume; it was a goodbye tossed off by girls who were heading out. One of them, a stranger, left me an apple as a souvenir; straddling the west bastion I meditated on the halves of said apple, cut open oxidized brown in a flash, and in the meantime I thought about graveyards of ships not far from La Grazie, those iron mastodons corroding away from acidic agents. A merchant ship caught me off-guard, as it traversed the watercolor and cleaved the marine canvas; the airy wrinkles played at tacking things together and a precise glance sewed up the sea again after the boat's passing. II At the season's turn, an autumnal specter would reemerge from its tomb and sit astride a tornado, sometimes a waterspout that disturbed the coastline. If I'd been a poet then and not known how to be one, I would have recited verses to placate Shelley's spirit. Where it had been drowned, the phantasm circled around anchored, in infinite punishment. Whenever I return to Lerici I bring with me a new poem but then always it ends up that I read him The Drunken Boat again, and in that instant he calms down, Arthur Rimbaud pleasing him greatly. According to the aesthetic meter of Napoleon the hydrographer, interested in the seabed, the gulf of La Spezia was "the most beautiful port in the universe." Since he was young he'd spun around his rotund frame and every other work of art or landscape painting, in his paragon he seemed to us anticipated by a comparable creation. If the port is to be expanded we will have to move elsewhere with our spirits, ask for asylum, to be submerged in the marine cemetery at Sete, where Romantic spirits are burlesqued by angels.

the woman-career

if these fortresses are all masculine where if I storm them I am a prisoner I was told by one going into a career from my body I'll make the body fallen and be the sponge or else the zipper where my boss breaches the codes to stash me away in what he imposed so I will being my own worst rival be rehired in servitude near medieval liberated at long last from liberty
Valentino Zeichen (born c. 1938), is an Italian poet and writer. He began to write poems at the age of 18, influenced by surrealist authors like Breton and Prévert. His first work was published in 1969 in the literary review Nuova Corrente. Zeichen's first novel, Tana per tutti, was released in 1983. Zeichen's poetry has been praised for its wit and subtle humor. He is considered among the finest poets today in Europe. An annual literary award in Rome, the Premio Zeichen, bears his name.

Douglas Basford's poetry, translations, and critical prose can be found in Poetry, Subtropics, Narrative, Zymbol, Ambit (UK), H_NGM_N, Diagram, The Tampa Review, Two Lines, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. He has been awarded fellowships, prizes, and honors by the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers' conferences, New England Poetry Club, Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Foundation, Southwest Review, Smartish Pace, Paumanok Poetry Awards, Robert Frost Foundation, and other journals and organizations. He teaches at the University at Buffalo, co-edits the online journal Unsplendid, and is Italian language editor of the new translation venture Coeur Publishing.