Showing posts with label Nancy Agabian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nancy Agabian. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 01, 2022

Rescheduled: Book launch and reading


 

Book Release and Poetry Reading with book signing and reception in-person 

for History of Forgetfulness by Shahé Mankerian

(Fly on the Wall Press, 2021)


Thursday, March 10th, 2022 at 7:00pm ET

Guild Hall | Armenian Diocese

630 2nd Ave, New York, NY



PLEASE NOTE: All attendees must provide proof of COVID vaccination

Readings by the author and NY area writers and scholars:
Nancy Agabian, Christopher Atamian,
Alina Gregorian, Alan Semerdjian,
Alina Gharabegian & Lola Koundakjian

Shahé Mankerian releases his critically-acclaimed debut collection, taking readers back to 1975 Beirut, where an un-civil war is brewing. 
Mankerian asks, “Who said war didn’t love / the children?” setting the tone for a darkly humorous collection in which memories of love, religion and childhood are entangled amongst street snipers and the confusion of misguided bombings.



For more information contact Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center
Diocese of the Armenian Church of America (Eastern)
630 2nd Avenue | New York, NY 10016-4885
zohrabcenter@armeniandiocese.org
www.zohrabcenter.org

Wednesday, December 01, 2021

Shahé Mankerian’s debut poetry collection History of Forgetfulness book launch [postponed]

DUE TO CIRCUMSTANCES BEYOND OUR CONTROL, the event is postponed. WE WILL KEEP YOU POSTED.

Please join us for the Book Release & Poetry Reading of Shahé Mankerian’s debut poetry collection History of Forgetfulness with readings by NY area writers/intellectuals Nancy Agabian, Christopher Atamian, Alina Gregorian, Alan Semerdjian, Alina Gharabegian, & Lola Koundakjian

The Zohrab Center was established through the generous gift of Mrs. Dolores Zohrab Liebmann in memory of her parents, and dedicated on November 8, 1987 in the presence of His Holiness Vasken I (†1994), Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians;  and His Eminence Archbishop Torkom Manoogian (†2012), Primate of the Eastern Diocese of the Armenian Church of America. Liebmann’s father, Krikor Zohrab 1861-1915), was a renowned author, jurist, humanitarian and community activist in Constantinople, who was among the first Armenian intellectuals killed in the 1915 Genocide.



December 2, 2021  7:00pm ET 

at Zohrab Center

630 Second Avenue

New York, NY 10016-4885




Monday, June 15, 2020

Nancy Agabian's contribution to our Call for Poems on the topic of epidemics, illness, medicine, death and healing

Nancy Agabian of East Walpole, MA, USA has shared her original poem. APP thanks her.

Into the Needle


If the virus doesn't ever go away
            or worse, worsens, what will I do?
            I don't let my mind go there. I stay close
            to the day, the hour, the minute,
            the present, I sew a mask, stitch
            by stitch, the prick of the needle,
            a small dash of thread, one moment
            into another, a thought leading
            to the next--

Sometimes I let myself imagine a
            new year, a new home, a new
            line of work. Surroundings change
            and I'm the same, my body superimposed
            on a background like Colorforms,
            a toy from childhood. The real magic:
            the way two surfaces stick together
            without glue, an object peeled and fixed
            onto a picture, belonging, temporarily.

I know life's not this smooth,
            like glass, like the surface of a still pond.
            It's rough and ragged, jagged
            as a mountain no one has ever
            seen before. I must train to
            scale this passage, but perhaps I am
            building new muscles, however
            slight: a shift of the eye, a snip of thread

            cut square, a breath in, and out, of care.

Thursday, April 11, 2019

April 24th 2019 reading in New York City (streamed event)



The event was streamed:

https://www.facebook.com/AsianAmericanWritersWorkshop/videos/2117403338561093/

Sunday, March 17, 2019

Reading in Portland Oregon





BEYOND THE G-WORD: ARMENIAN AMERICAN 
WRITERS IN HYBRID 

THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019 7:00 – 8:00 PM 
ANOTHER READ THROUGH BOOKSTORE 
3932 N MISSISSIPPI AVE, PORTLAND, OR 

Armenian-American writers have long written about trauma as a means of social justice. Their resistance to oppression, including that of the current political moment, also expresses liberation. Through intersectional lenses of gender, sexual orientation, class, and race, Armenian-American poets/writers read work that addresses immigration, diaspora, exile, and war. This event centers Armenians' liminal position between East and West, and poc and white, challenging the “single story” of the Armenian genocide of 1915. With roots in Lebanon, Armenia, and Syria, these writers share works of hybridity that reflect and celebrate their diverse, multi-faceted lives.

Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Arminé Iknadossian immigrated to the United States in 1974 to escape the civil war. She earned her MFA from Antioch University. Iknadossian is the author of the chapbook United States of Love & Other Poems (2015) and All That Wasted Fruit (Main Street Rag). She teaches and writes in Long Beach, California ✸Nancy Agabian is the author of Princess Freak, a poetry/performance collection, and Me as her again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter, a memoir. Her novel, The Fear of Large and Small Nations, was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially-Engaged Fiction. She teaches writing at NYU ✸Lory Bedikian’s The Book of Lamenting won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. She has an MFA from the University of Oregon. Her work was a finalist for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry and for the AROHO’s Orlando Prize. She received a grant from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial fund ✸Shahé Mankerian's poetry collection, History of Forgetfulness, has been a finalist for the Bibby First Book Award, the Crab Orchard Series, the Quercus Award, and the White Pine Press Competition. He is the co-director of the L.A. Writing Project and the principal of St. Gregory Hovsepian School ✸Lola Koundakjian has authored two poetry books and read in four international poetry festivals in Quebec, Peru, Colombia and West Bank. She co-curates the Zohrab Center's poetry reading series in midtown Manhattan, and runs the Armenian Poetry Project in multiple languages and audio ✸Verónica Pamoukaghlián is a Uruguayan film producer at her company Nektar Films and a nonfiction editor for Washington´s Sutton Hart Press. Her writing has appeared in THE ARMENIAN POETRY PROJECT,  THE ACENTOS REVIEW, THE SOUTHERN PACIFIC REVIEW, PRISM, NAKED PUNCH, SENTINEL LITERARY QUARTERLY, AND THE ARMENIAN WEEKLY

Friday, May 08, 2015

Live from Holy Cross: Nancy Agabian reading Zabel Essayan



Nancy Agabian- photo by Khatchik Turabian

In the Ruins (excerpt)

Two children had gone off by themselves and were talking.
"Do you have a father?"
"No."
"A mother?"
"No."
"I don't have a mother or father, either."
"Did they kill them?"
"Yes."
"They killed mine, too."
A long, grief-stricken silence reigned, and then:
"Do you want us to be brothers?"
And they adopted each other.

That was the general tenor of the conversations of hundreds of children between five and ten. Sometimes, too, brothers and sisters found each other again and rediscovered, in one another's eyes, the hours of terror they had spent together and did not dare come closer, as if held apart by the awful memory of the corpse of a butchered mother or father. For, almost without exception, driven by an instinctive passion for life, they wanted to forget, wanted desperately, frantically to forget; thus they saw an enemy in anyone who tried to expose the passions of their bleeding hearts, or simply stirred up the memory of that hour by his or her presence.


One evening I expressed a desire to visit the children after they had gone to bed, and was ushered to their dormitory. A terrible, unforgettable sight met my eyes. In that spacious hall, on mats arranged in rows on the floor, was a welter of young, half-naked limbs. . . . Because there wasn't enough room for all of them, the children seemed to be piled up on each other. What with their breathing and all their other exhalations, the air was stifling and unbreathable. Something unnameable, something nightmarish and unsettling drifted through the semi-obscurity. The children's bodies were indistinguishable from the blackness of the sheetless beds; only the outlines of their limbs could be made out here and there, an arm, a leg. . . . Those rooms seemed as sad to me as desecrated, devastated graveyards.

Sometimes one of the children, prompted by a bad dream, would raise his head and look right and left, shuddering. One cry of his would be enough to throw all those shapeless, almost undifferentiated piles into agitated motion and, sometimes, uneasy heads would be lifted here and there. In the first few days, it sometimes happened that the ravings of one of the children rattled all the others sleeping in the same room; Still hall asleep, not knowing where they were, they would all jump to their feet screaming, in the belief that they were reliving the hours of the massacre.

Although I had resolved to maintain my sangfroid, I was deeply shaken by that throng of children, deprived of affection and a mother's love and care. ... I decided to leave so that we wouldn't disturb their sleep with our presence. Some were sighing, and all had woken up and were casting uneasy glances our way....

We were getting ready to leave when I noticed a little slip of a girl almost directly at my feet. Two bright, unblinking eyes were looking at me. Her blond hair was strewn over the pillow, and her emaciated neck and emaciated arms and legs spoke of such severe mental and physical suffering that I lost control of myself, and started to cry. And, although I managed to stifle my sobs, the children heard me and woke up. For an instant, a strange stillness prevailed: they were all holding their breaths; then heads were raised, and a child started to cry. At that, as if on a signal, all at once, hundreds of children overcome by a terrifying attack of nerves suddenly began sobbing, screaming, and weeping, twisting and turning their frail, strengthless limbs on their shabby straw mats and calling out to the parents they had lost...
It took us a long time to calm them down. When their tired heads at last came to rest on their pillows, the little girl's two bright eyes were still looking at me. Before leaving, when I stepped closer to see why she hadn't gone back to sleep, she stretched out a pair of arms toward my neck and held me close for a long time.... Before I left, I looked at all the children again. The room was quiet and peaceful. I was assured that now they would sleep soundly till morning. It seemed to me, however, that those children would dream unceasingly, with relentless insistence, of the days of horror they had lived
through, and that the nightmare would hover constantly over then dark-haired heads.

(excerpt)

Translated by G.M. Goshgarian

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Inside Out: Armenian Perspectives in Poetry and Prose

GARTAL 
the Armenian Poetry Project 


present 


Inside Out: Armenian Perspectives in Poetry and Prose 

Nancy Agabian

Michael Akillian 

and Lola Koundakjian 



Thursday, October 28, 2010 
6:00 PM 

Gallery Z 
259 Atwells Ave 
Providence, RI 02903 
401-454-8844 
www.galleryzprov.com

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Live from the Bowery Poetry Club: Nancy Agabian

Gartal and the Armenian Poetry Project are proud to release this audio clip recorded live at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City on April 2, 2010. Click to hear Nancy Agabian’s reading of her poem Why I Suspect New York.



      1.     My first city is Boston.  A four year old squiggling at Fenway Park, I got a free tiny t-shirt, a red sock on my chest over the skin of my heart: allegiance beyond reason though I do not care for baseball.
2.     I lived in Los Angeles for nine years and I liked it.  It was a kind place to become a young artist; it gave me forward rushing in the car at night with the radio on: a communal privacy, creative down time.  New York artists do not understand this.
3.     I am critical of capitalism especially the kind that makes it perfectly reasonable that all the shrinks leave in August.
4.     The people who consider themselves New Yorkers and love the city are in the minority.  There are far more people who live here and hate it. But no one ever thinks about
a.  all the immigrants making money to send home but long for their culture
b. all the creative misfits whose day jobs don't give them time to make art
c. all the mothers staying home who imagine their children swallowed up by the

World Trade Center Bound E train the automated lady announced, as if it still exists.  She says world like whorl, emphasis between the O and the R, a verbal thumbprint.
The subway is the place I go to the most, other than my home or my job.
All this time I have been bound for a place that no longer exists, narrated by nothing. 
Living in the negative space, where history has already been lived, we are complicit in a name that we don't want to die, to save a place that hurt us.

There is excitement in suspicion, a pain in not knowing the truth.  
I will always belong and not belong, as everyone.  

Friday, March 26, 2010

Nancy Agabian: The Modern Goddess Myth about Microwaves


Turn on the microwave move the dials it
heats it heats it makes it hot but nobody
knows how she turned on the microwave
whenever she was depressed, even if there
was nothing inside she turned it on and
watched the carousel turning
around and around and around.
Pretty soon a frozen pizza appeared. She
turned it off (beep beep) and released
the vault handle and lifted the pizza
out.  It was heavy and cold hard; she couldn't
eat it but flung it out the window
instead.  It hit her husband as he was
coming home from work, the alcoholic
husband who beat her then apologized.
It hit him on the head and he was dead.
He died right there; she took his pulse.
He wasn't pulsing; she cried hot tears
(microwave-able).  She had the funeral
a few days later and started going to
therapy and turned her life around.  She
got happy and when the microwave broke
she sold it at her neighbor's yard sale.
Her name was Loretta, the Goddess Loretta
and the Microwave: it is a myth, remember
it and refer to it in academic papers
5000 years from now.


Friday, February 05, 2010

Monday, October 22, 2007

Nancy Agabian: Soup

The girls at the university
told me that if you eat the salty cake,
you will marry the person in your dream
who brings you a glass of water.
But what if someone you despise brings you the water?
What if a girl brings it to you?
What if your mother father brother sister
(or other assorted relative) brings it? they giggled and
I asked, what if you wake up and get the glass of water yourself?

But now I wonder what would happen if you dream of a different
person every year or a whole mob delivers the water or what if
you're already married/don't believe in marriage/wished marriage never existed?
What if you tell a Jungian psychologist about your dream and
he replies that you are incredibly boring?
What if the person fetching you the water represents some aspect of yourself, the part of you that actually loves the 90% of yourself that is composed water?
What if your lover like lightning regularly appears with sweet juice mixed
with water the way you like it
when you wake in the night,
mouth dry, half sighing?
What if on February 3rd you refuse the salty cake the mother of your betrothed has baked but she
feeds you peanuts and popcorn instead and you dream of tornadoes whipping through Manhattan,
two of the twisters combining and you cannot think of a place to hide so instead you must watch the destruction from across the wide East
River in Brooklyn,
your home.

Copyright Nancy Agabian



Nancy Agapian : panade

Les filles à l’université
M’ont dit que si tu manges un cake salé,
Tu vas épouser la personne qui dans ton rêve
T’apporte un verre d’eau.
Mais si quelqu’un que tu méprises t’apporte l’eau ?
Et si c’est une fille qui te l’apporte ?
Et si c’est ta mère, ton père, ton frère, ta sœur
(ou une autre de ta famille) qui te l’apporte ? Elles rigolèrent et
j’ai demandé : et si tu te réveilles et vas chercher toi-même ton verre d’eau ?
Mais maintenant je me demande ce qui arriverait si tu rêves
Chaque année d’une personne différente, ou si toute une foule t’apportait l’eau,
Ou si tu étais déjà mariée/ si tu ne croyais pas au mariage /
Si tu souhaitais que le mariage n’ait jamais existé ?
Et si tu racontais ton rêve à un psychanaliste freudien,
Et qu’il te réponde que tu es incroyablement embêtante ?
Et si la personne qui va te chercher l’eau représente quelque aspect de toi-même,
La part que tu aimes réellement, les 90 % qui sont composés d’eau ?
Et si ton amoureux te rend régulièrement une visite éclair avec un jus de fruit
Dans un verre d’eau exactement comme tu l’aimes
Quand tu te réveilles la nuit,
La bouche sèche, soupirant à demi ?
E si le 3 février tu refuses le cake salé que la mère de ton fiancé a fait cuire au four
Et qu’elle le remplace par du peanut et du popcorn, et que tu rêves de tornades
Tourbillonnant à travers Manhattan,
Et que les deux cyclones se combinent, et que tu n’arrives pas à trouver un endroit
Où te cacher, alors tu observes la destruction
A travers le grand East River,
Dans Brooklyn,
De chez toi.

Lundi 22 octobre 2007


Traduction Louise Kiffer