Hadara Bar-Nadav on "Family of Strangers"

. . . the poem holds on at the edge of itself; so as to exist, it ceaselessly calls and hauls itself from its Now-no-more back into its Ever-yet.
      —Paul Celan

“Family of Strangers” documents my attempt to be receptive to ghosts even when this opening hurts, takes me down, grinds its boot heel into my back. Perhaps words themselves are ghosts that keep us company, little rafts in a sea of loss.

I considered the text as well as the white space of the page when writing “Family of Strangers,” which pays special attention to various presences and absences. For me, white space is never empty, a perspective informed by my work as a painter. The text of a poem has objectness, shape, and weight; the negative space of the page also has shape and weight—all of which inform the poem. Sparse couplets on a page have a different visual resonance than a prose poem or sestina. A poem’s shape sends a signal to the reader before a single word is read.

In early drafts of “Family of Strangers,” I inserted horizontal lines between the stanzas in an effort to compartmentalize the sections and physically contain the ghosts and grief, which seemed to want to fly off the page. Lee Sharkey, co-editor of the BPJ, suggested I take out the lines and I did, letting the stanzas (and the ghosts) hum across and among themselves.

I indented the text where the lines had been to suggest absences being created and filled. The unevenness and inherent tension of tercets created a strained asymmetry, as if the stanzas were limping through space. I alternated between tercets and couplets to embody the difficult navigation among speaker and ghosts, idea and language, and creation and destruction. Here lives a vital and visceral ugliness that recalls for me Picasso’s notion of painting as “a horde of destructions.” Loss gathers and ghosts gather whose absence is palpable and sharp.

Poetry teaches me to open my senses to dreams, impulses, currents of wind, light, color, and sound. Poetry is where the senses sing, cry, and take shape through language. Certainly, this kind of openness can be painful, particularly in a poem such as “Family of Strangers,” which virtually forced me to challenge my own resistance to writing and receiving it:

             Ghosts, I adore your absence.

      Ghosts, I cannot lie to you
      who are transparent, I
      who am also transparent.

Here my dead father knocks on a little paper door. Here my family murdered in the Holocaust knocks and waits. Poetry lets them in. And dreams let them in. If my poems seem surreal I suspect it is because dreams have taught me not to look away, but to look and look again, to become porous, permeable. Both poetry and dreams teach me to be receptive to the disorder of the world and to be generative in the midst of joy, destruction, and pain. Grief made into art.

Avery Slater on “Bullet Proof”

This poem began, as perhaps all poems do: as a problem. Rather, as several separate problems entangling themselves at saturation point. Sericulture was the first problem, a practice I’d long been fascinated and horrified by. I’d been haphazardly building a mental compendium of facts about sericulture for years, unsure whether it might produce a poem.

Immediately before writing this poem, two things collided. In my arbitrary attempts to understand various developments in the history of quantum physics. I encountered a description of vacuum energy, via the “Casimir effect,” named after its discoverer. Then, in a moment stemming from the sericulture interest—I discovered the first bulletproof vests were silk. One rather postmodern coherence sutured these two facts, in a coincidental confluence of unrelated readings: namely, that the first name of Revered Zeglen, the bulletproof vest’s inventor, was “Casimir.”

It is said one of the hardest English words to translate is “serendipity.” Apparently, only English expresses this notion in one word. This assertion of relative difficulty is patently unverifiable. Nonetheless, as an alleged fact it has stayed with me, as perhaps a more verifiable one mightn’t have. The idea’s indelibility could be rhetorical: ironic that “serendipity” is the word giving translators headaches. Yet “serendipity defies translation” might be more deeply tautological, a statement tantamount to “winter defies being summer.”

Writing this poem was a lesson for me in serendipity’s inscrutable nature—that which emerges from confluence, not correspondence. If translation makes sense of a thing by way of correspondence (worm = Wurm = verme), then serendipity is sense arising unexpectedly from convergence of the disparate. Thus, what I had in “Casimir” was not just a name, but a conspiracy theory—rather, a “happy conspiracy”: the synonym I will offer for the untranslatable “serendipity” (itself, serendipitously enough, a proper name, given long ago to Sri Lanka by Persian traders.)

Proper names are tacitly untranslatable words. Venezia,Venedig, Venice, yes, but only through error, or, more exactly, through inexactitude. Here I return to the so-called “problem” which is the ungainly clam shell of every poem’s hoped-for Aphrodite: how to make sense imprecisely. Not stupidly, not badly, not imperfectly, but . . . serendipitously? What the proto-poem presented me with was undoubtedly disparate. I first asked, how to treat facts not as facts, but as images?

Images are not identical to facts, nor yet are they supremely different. What difference? The conceptual divergence between particles of 20th century physics versus Democritus’s hypothetically indivisible atoms might demonstrate this difference. Images operate more as particles of modern physics in that they are not inert, exhibiting instead a kind of Brownian motion (seemingly patternless movement). To assert, metaphorically, a Brownian motion for the poetic image, I suggest something psychoanalysts and child-storytellers already know: the image is profoundly unsettled, anxious, hyperactive, mercurial, and never says “exactly” what it means. Better to let it scattershot about, it might lead somewhere—but whether to a poem, or to an island in the Indian Ocean is for the convergence of trade winds to decide.