Showing posts with label Peter Balakian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peter Balakian. Show all posts

Monday, September 19, 2022

POETRY INTERNATIONAL - 25th Anniversary Edition



We are thrilled to share that the issue is out, containing a portfolio of contemporary Armenian poets from around the world.

We would love to encourage PI by asking that you purchase copies of this 25th anniversary issue for yourself and your family/Friends, the link is:
https://www.poetryinternationalonline.com/25th-anniversary-issue-table-of-contents/?fbclid=IwAR1thUOYvb0IZopy2Xzu0i5RDgHlBT-6pU4dfAhRBBvhkW80oXbLNOSLac8


Contemporary Poets of the Armenian Diaspora,
edited by ARTHUR KAYZAKIAN & LOLA KOUNDAKJIAN

VAHÉ GODEL, The Law of Numbers/La Loi Des Nombres
SONA VAN, Before the Magi Had Even Reached Bethlehem/ԵՐԲ ՄՈԳԵՐԸ ԴԵՌ ՉԷԻՆ ՀԱՍԵԼ ԲԵԹՂԵՀԵՄ
ANA ARZOUMANIAN, No Lyricism/Nada de Lirismo
ARAM SAROYAN, Saroyan & Minasian
GREGORY DJANIKIAN, Even for the Briefest Moment
ARMEN DAVOUDIAN, Exodus
NORA BAROUDJIAN, On Stage/ԲԵՄԻ ՎՐԱՅ
PETER BALAKIAN, What’s Up
NORA NADJARIAN, Carousel


Many thanks, 

Lola and Arthur (guest editors)

Tuesday, June 01, 2021

Peter Balakian: Near the Border

Gyumri, Armenia, 12/18/10


1.

Over brandy at breakfast we were talking about the Hellenic temple
at the edge of the canyon and the sun gods

who were worshipped there before the time of borders and decrees.
And then the priest came and we were off in a white van

that slid into the sky that was washed into gullies
slate-gray-tarnished-silver, then smooth as tarmac just poured, the way

12/7/88 poured on the screen with numbers when I was teaching in London
and walking Kings Road every day into early dark.

It wasn’t until we got to Gyumri and you put it casually over pizza: you
were in shop class shaving a hammer in a drill press and the floor began to slide.


2.

The neon lights glared over our faces as the amped-up
Russian waitress with green hair spilled Coke on the table.

I remember 12/7/88—the Albert Bridge lit up and the Thames smooth black—
as I watched walls come down on the screen;

a man carried a child through a gouged-out apartment,
three women passed with sacks into the stone-dust and became damask.

----

The neon lights in the pizza place on the square flashed on the window
as you pointed out the rebuilt school and hotel and the polished tufa stone

of fault-line resistance. Outside we picked up the teenage boy,
who settled into the front seat with the priest; a medley of punk

was a soft buzz off the rattling speakers, and the priest began talking to the boy 

    in medias res
about how the body and soul must find a balance with each other,

if we’re to make our own destiny, God couldn’t do it all for you.

----

It came back to you in spurts—
how the floor dished you into the hall, the hammer shaving your hand as

a wall seemed to throw you into the street
where mattresses and chairs were sandwiched in crushed cars.


3.

I was chewing a pizza crust as we walked through abandoned fields of Stalin-
    barracks.
Under the Soviet eagles and busted windows along the tracks where Near East 
    Relief

trains once arrived with powdered milk and clothes for the orphans in the ’20s—
we kicked some rusted cans. Armenian soldiers went back and forth

at the checkpoints of a new history; three women with bags disappeared
into the fog along a chain-link fence.


4.

Memory is like the hammer you used to make coffins
all week with your uncle. When you found your cousins under

rubble they were speaking clearly through the dark—but that was early in the day.
On the BBC some faces moved along the street, the sun lit up punched-out 
    windows

of Brezhnev buildings; in the morning I went to Heathrow to help load planes 
    with clothes and food; 
in evening at a pub off Cheyne Walk, the TV flashed casualty numbers on the 
    telex

news band and the voice of Roy Orbison, who was dead at 50, stayed in my head 
    all day.


5.

I was blind-sided by the sign—30 kilometers ANI
where the border slid into Turkey and the open plain was bleached—

a few boulders, some cattle and beyond the tenth-century city of Ani
was a mislabeled ruin cordoned off by barbed wire, a river, and some Turkish 
    guards.

6.

Between Armenia and Turkey, on the shrinking blue horizon, I saw,

but what does it mean to say “I saw”? just the mind leveraging
a way out of confinement of a cigarette smoke-filling van?

I saw pillars dissolving under the dome of a basilica,
some women disappearing into the abyss of Saint Gregory

as we moved through gullies and blanched grass,

7.

and the van swerved to miss some cows on the road, grazed a fence.
The priest was going on about the soul made flesh—I almost

interrupted him to ask: "the soul not the word? "The boy nodded as he kept beat
to The Clash that was wavering from the dashboard—London was a buzz-saw drone,

hard sexual fetish, world-warning; the horizon was white-air gaps now,
a flaking Virgin on a conical roof floated in the sky, and then the winds changed—


8.


The priest said to the boy that Ani was the Florence of Armenia—“lost”—he said 
    it again, “lost”— and the 
boy asked, really rifled back, as he lit another cigarette, why Armenia

didn’t have a covenant with God like the Jews did. The priest was upset—visibly, 
    in the face, like cold 
wind hit through the window—and he answered in Armenian—

(my voice stalled and I didn’t ask,“what are you saying?”)


9.

The Sex Pistols chanted off-key like urban monks in leather,

the van jolting over ruts,

the gray light giving way to fine snow coming west from Kars


10.

“Byron thought the Garden of Eden circled Ani and on south”—I interrupted 
the priest—
“Yes, yes, Byron learned our language”— he shot back

“Just a romantic orientalist,” I croaked—

“What?”— the priest turned and stared at me over the headrest

“You think anything’s left there? After 1915?” The CD player skipped on a scratch as


11.

the boy popped a can of Diet Sprite, and said something back to the priest in 
    Armenian,

before we stalled in a gulley and the van doors slid open and the cold rushed

us as we spilled outside with flashlights; the opaque white light blew back at me,


12.

the priest pulled his black hood up which flashed against the white outcroppings 
    on the plain that could’ve been sheep carcasses or something else—

The banging gonzo drums of time kept playing off the dashboard—
snow came like crazed moths.



From Ozone Journal, The University of Chicago Press, 2015

Thursday, February 18, 2021

Robert Lowell Memorial Poetry Reading today with Peter Balakian and Susan Barba

Robert Lowell Memorial Poetry Readings

Spring 2021 virtual reading:

Award-Winning Poet Peter Balakian with BU Alumna Susan Barba
The Robert Lowell Memorial Lecture Series
Thursday, February 18, 7:00pm EST

Click here to join us on Zoom!


Photo by Mark DiOrio

Peter Balakian is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Ozone Journal, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, as well as Ziggurat (2010) and June-tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000 (2001). His newest book of poems, No Sign, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press this year.

Balakian’s prose includes The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (2004) and his memoir, Black Dog of Fate. He is co-translator of Girgoris Balakian’s Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide 1915-1918, (Knopf, 2009). He is also the author of a book on the American poet Theodore Roethke and the co-translator of the Armenian poet Siamanto’s Bloody News from My Friend. Between 1976-1996 he edited with Bruce Smith the poetry journal Graham House Review. His prose and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, TheChronicle of Higher Education, Salon, The Daily Beast, Tikkun, The Guardian, LA Times, Art in America, and others.

He is the recipient of many awards and prizes including the Presidential Medal and the Moves Khoranatsi Medal from the Republic of Armenia, The Spendlove Prize for Social Justice, Tolerance, and Diplomacy (recipients include President Carter), a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Emily Clark Balch Prize for poetry from the Virginia Quarterly Review. He has appeared widely on national television and radio (60 Minutes, ABC World News Tonight, PBS, Charlie Rose, Fresh Air, etc), and his work has appeared in a many languages including Armenian, Bulgarian, French, Dutch, Greek, German, Hebrew, Russian, and Turkish. He is a Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities, Professor of English, and Director of Creative Writing at Colgate University.




Photo by Sharona Jacobs

Susan Barba is the author of geode (2020), which was a finalist for the New England Book Awards, and Fair Sun (2017), which was awarded the Anahid Literary Prize from Columbia University. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, Raritan, and elsewhere, and her poetry has been translated into German, Armenian, and Romanian. She earned her doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard University, and she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. She works as a senior editor for the New York Review Books.

Wednesday, October 07, 2020

Don't Look Away: A Literary Series for Artsakh




Dear friends and colleagues,

On September 27th, Azerbaijan, directly aided by Turkey, launched a massive assault on Nagorno Karabakh, an ethnically Armenian territory known to Armenians as Artsakh. Since then, both Artsakh and the Republic of Armenia have been under attack. Artsakh’s capital, Stepanakert, has been relentlessly bombarded by drones, missile strikes and military aircraft. Azerbaijan is targeting not only military forces but also the civilian population and vital infrastructure like hospitals and schools, and evidence shows they have used lethal cluster munitions, which can wreak havoc for decades. In July, Erdogan promised ‘to fulfill the mission our grandfathers have carried out for centuries in the Caucasus,’ a statement with clear echoes of the Armenian Genocide. Armenians fear this assault is an attack on our existence as a people, and we need your help.

On behalf of the International Armenian Literary Alliance, I invite you to the first reading in our series, Don't Look Away, which will raise funds and awareness for Artsakh. The reading will provide context on the conflict and feature award-winning authors Peter Balakian, Carolyn Forché, Nancy Kricorian, Anna Turcotte and Lory Bedikian.


When: Saturday, October 10th at 3 pm Eastern
Click here to join us on Zoom (Password: IALA2020)


Click here to donate to the cause.


Thank you for your support.--

Olivia Katrandjian
www.oliviakatrandjian.com

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

PETER BALAKIAN: Here and Now


The day comes in strips of yellow glass over trees.

When I tell you the day is a poem
I’m only talking to you and only the sky is listening.

The sky is listening; the sky is as hopeful
as I am walking into the pomegranate seeds
of the wind that whips up the seawall.

If you want the poem to take on everything,
walk into a hackberry tree,
then walk out beyond the seawall.

I’m not far from a room where Van Gogh
was a patient—his head on a pillow hearing
the mistral careen off the seawall,

hearing the fauvist leaves pelt
the sarcophagi. Here and now

the air of the tepidarium kissed my jaw
and pigeons ghosting in the blue loved me

for a second, before the wind
broke branches and guttered into the river.

What questions can I ask you?
How will the sky answer the wind?

The dawn isn’t heartbreaking.
The world isn’t full of love.

Peter Balakian, "Here and Now" from Ozone Journal. Copyright © 2015 by The University of Chicago. Reprinted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
Source: Ozone Journal (The University of Chicago Press, 2015)


Saturday, September 03, 2016

PETER BALAKIAN: Head of Anahit/British Museum

For Michael Coyle and Donna Frieze

1


You said anyone could walk in
with a pack of explosives as we passed through
the crowds of tourists and school kids — 

under the glass-grid ceiling lit with sun.

I was saying: She’s our earth, our body, our sex,
as we drifted down the halls of statues and colonnades
and hunks of facades of Greek temples until we found

room 22, “The Hellenistic World,” where a bronze face
in a glass box on the wall stared back at us.

Head from a bronze cult statue
of Anahita, a local goddess
in the guise of Aphrodite (200–100 BC)


the text hung there in space — 

Found in Satala in NE Asia Minor
(Armenia Minor)


a left hand holding drapery was found with the head  //
and out of some bad Comedy Central joke,
my iPhone buzzed with a flash news update
about ISIS or ISIL, or whatever they called themselves that week — 

Temple of Baalshamin at Palmyra — blown up — 
the phrase re-circled — blown up — 


2

and my head was back in the white van with the TV crew in ’09
winding through the buttes and roadside gullies of the Syrian desert,
to the Armenian memorial in Der Zor,

before we went to Palmyra where I sat under
50-foot Corinthian columns — 
the corners chipped by wind and sand

in late May when it hit 110 at noon
and the sun melted the plastic rim of my cell phone — 
as our driver appeared out of nowhere with stacks

of zaatar bread and Diet Cokes — 
we found some shade under a portico
as the visionary pillars disappeared into blue sky.



3

Outside students were buzzing through the gates
of UCL and the brown brick of Bloomsbury was lit up
with sun after rain — 

inside the wunderkammer of Hans Sloane
and the collectors who hauled their stuff from the Middle East — 

(What is the Middle East? my Turkish publisher
asked an audience at NYU — 
Istanbul, Jerusalem, Mumbai, Srinagar?)

you kept asking: What is year zero to us?
Didn’t our war destroy some temples and museums?

I called the curator on the phone at the info desk
to leave my complaint on the message machine
about the signage:

“Satala wasn’t Armenia Minor/NE Asia Minor — 
it was central Armenia /Anatolia — make correction.”



4

What questions were we asking
staring at the misinformation on the wall
and the beautiful Armenian head of Anahit?

Why was I back in Der Zor at the chapel
digging Armenian bones out of the baked ground — 
scratching the marrow and dried mildew?


5


In the age of throat-slitting on Twitter
the imperial shock and awe of burning Tigris — 
the lynching of Saddam on the internet,
vanishing tomb of Jonah — 

which fetishized objects ... whose museum?



6

I’m gazing at the head of Anahit — Armenian
goddess of fertility and love — 
(no more local than the Brooklyn Bridge)

staring at the green and red paint still speckled on her bronze head.
I love her serpentine upper lip, her eyes of black space — 
I stare into the screw hole in her neck
the two curlicues of hair on her forehead
her august throat; her dense acanthine hair.



This poem appeared in Poetry magazine's September 2016 issue.

Monday, June 20, 2016

Honoring Peter Balakian, 2016 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Poetry



Join us to honor

PETER BALAKIAN

June 27, 2016 at 7PM
John Pashalian Hall
Saint Illuminator Cathedral
221 East 27th Street, New York, NY

Book Presentation and Reception


Professor Balakian’s work will be presented by Professor Khachig Tololyan
Reception to follow
Signed copies of “Ozone Journal” will be available.

Monday, December 01, 2014

Peter Balakian: Rock ’n’ Roll


The groove in black vinyl got deeper

What was that light? A migrant
I slid into a scat,

and in the purple silk
and the Canoe

there was sleekness and a rear-view mirror.

And the Angels flew out of the cloisonne vase
They were the rachitic forks hanging in the midnight kitchen.
And so I called you after the house was still.
My turquoise Zenith melting

And you asked: what was that light?
I was spinning. I was the trees shivering,
and the snake of coiled light on the ceiling
was moonglow.

I wasn’t a fool in a satin tux.
I was Persian gold and blue chenille
I was the son of the Black Dog of Fate.

I said: I saw a rainbow of glass
above the Oritani Theater.

Lord, lead me from Hackensack New Jersey
into the white streak of exhaust.

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Quote for the month of November 2014

Now I undo the loops
of yarn I rested my head on.
Under each flower
a tufted pile loosens.

I feel the wool give way
as if six centuries of feet
had worn it back to the hard

earth floor it was made to cover.

Peter Balakian

Saturday, November 29, 2014

Peter Balakian: Mandelstam in Armenia, 1930


Between arid houses and crooked streets
a shadow could be your wife or a corpse
and a mule’s hooves sounded like Stalin’s
fat fingers drumming a table.

In the Caucasus eagles and hawks
hung in the blue’s basilica.
A swallow flew off a socle
into the wing of an echo–

history’s caw and chirp and bird shit
on the tombs in the high grass.
Oh hairy serrated stems
poppies flagged like tongues.

Petals of flat paper
lined your thumbed-out pockets.
Anther seeds burned your pen. 


From a cloud of broom a red bee stumbled,
to your fish-globe brain.
a casket of light kissed the eyebrows of a tree.
 
Lake Sevan’s rippling blue skirt
lapped you. Slime tongues got your eyes.
A half-dead perch slithered your ear.
When the evening air settled
on the creatures of the mountain
the sun was the Virgin’s head.

Here, where the bush grew with fresh blood
and ancient thorns, you picked the rose
without scissors. Became an omen.

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Peter Balakian: In the Caucasus

Into a basalt cavern
I wandered, where the moon 
slid like a water snake
in white skin 
through the gullies
to the blonde and furry wheat.

A grubby man,
I dug toward the damp smell 
of a water channel–
a nation's basement,
a root cellar,

and found a shard 
of khachkar
its intricate lacework 
a whole system of streams 
wound into stone–


grapes and pomegranates 
pomegranates and grapes
pulpy in my hands.

Palmettos leaves fanned
my palms; a rising moon 
in the moss-grown stone 
mirrored the light
where the winged griffins --
those talismen of blood
flew into the arms of the cross.

Down a gulley,
like a volute,
I found a way 
to the dry clay 
of a border between two worlds --

Pegasus flew out
of the tufa walls
into the white shroud of Ararat

and the ringing bells 
slid into the scree.


Raft, Volume 4, 1990.



Sunday, December 11, 2011

Peter Balakian: Photosynthesis

The slips of the day-
lilies come off.

The wind blows
in from Vermont,
blows the silk kimonos

off the delphiniums,
blows the satin cowls
off the jack-in-the-pulpits.

Let it blow
the detonated-pollen
green, acid-rubbed,

plumed and rotting day--
blow into the leaves

their silver undersides
wet you at night.

Slide your tongue
into the green dark

so you can see the ultra-
violet scars on the goldfields
where the bees come in the day.

The night air rises
like steam
from a mud-pot,

and you see nothing.
Hear no voice.
See no light.

Just yourself
staring back at you
in middle age,

as if the novocain
of the sea urchin
froze your lids.

You see the window
you built

where you placed your hands
and broke your turquoise jars
and saw the stones

of scalding yellow
where the steam had burned
things back to where your private lust

and your longing for history
were colorless, and the blood
of the dianthus was gone.

You see your life rise
and slide away like steam,

feel a goat-tongue
lost in a mountain
wet you down.


This poem appeared in Balakian's June-Tree: New and Selected Poems, Harper Collins 2001, and in To Stanley Kunitz, with love from poet friends, for his 96th birthday. Publisher: Riverdale-on-Hudson, N.Y. : Sheep Meadow Press ; [Hanover, NH] : Distributed by the University Press of New England, ©2002

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Peter Balakian interview at Cornell University

Earlier this year, Balakian visited the Cornell English Department's Writers At Cornell reading series. 


Click this link to view the page and access the archived interview.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Peter Balakian at Hunter College, CUNY

Balakian to read at Hunter College Distinguished Writer Series,Wednesday, March 16, 7:30 pm

At Hunter College on March 16, 7:30 PM Balakian will read from his new book of poems Zigguratand the latest edition of his memoir Black Dog of  Fate at Hunter College. 

Location: Faculty Dining Room, Hunter College, West Building, 8th floor.*RSVP: to spevents@hunter.cuny.edu or 212-772-4007. Reading is free and open to the public, but RSVPs are required. Following both readings there will be a Q and A and book signing.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Peter Balakian: Watching the Towers Go Down

Click to hear Peter Balakian reading his poem.






-- from "A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy"


Who is the other who
floats between what you see


and what is there:
think of the other going silent,


screen fuzz smoke,
hours away on TV.


Came as dumb smoke


into my house.
The jade plant leaves,


tongue of the cat,
pan on the stove,


the cardamom and clove
moved in their currents.


Outside the sky was searing blue
honeysuckle wafting through.


There was nowhere to go.
Sat down. Got up.


Stared at the iBook.
Walked around.


No phone service.
The cell's dead too.







Peter Balakian is the author of many books, including a new volume of poems, "Ziggurat," just published by University of Chicago Press, and "June-tree: New and Selected Poems, 1974-2000." His memoir, "Black Dog of Fate," won the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for the Art of the Memoir. Balakian's "The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response" won the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book and a New York Times Best Seller. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship and is a professor of the humanities at Colgate.

Tuesday, September 07, 2010

New poetry collection by Peter Balakian



Ziggurat, published by the University of Chicago Press on September 11, 2010.
 
 
“With characteristic originality, Balakian finds his echoing motif in the construction of the first great skyscraper, the Ziggurat at Ur, and this gives his epic poem ‘A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy,’ a historical depth I have found nowhere else in American poetry in recent years. What Balakian has achieved here is a brilliant assimilation of the historical, philosophical, political, and psychological.”
                                                                        —Carolyn Forche
 
“Peter Balakian’s new book Ziggurat ingests calamity and dissolves it into an exhilarating rhythm and image, pushing the language until it feels like it’s breaking into something new. This is how idioms change, advance. The harrowing long poem “A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy” jostles a range of perspectives and narratives. It is a panorama of contemporary witness, but a syncopation of the same. Balakian renders scenes and at the same time enacts the sensibility being breached and affected—9/11 is just short-hand for our new magnitudes of violence and dissociation.
                                                                        —Sven Birkerts




SCHEDULE OF READINGS and interviews:

Tuesday , September 7PBS NewsHour, poem of the week, (end of the show/and then on-line)

Saturday, September 11: Interview with Scott Simon, Weekend Edition.

NEW YORK CITY            Friday, September 3, 3 - 5 pm. Seminar at Center for the Study of Terrorism, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 899 10th Ave (between 58th and 59th), Room 630-- with Chuck Strozier, Andrea Le Blanc

Thursday, September 16,  7 pm. Gallery 25CPW (62nd Street and Central Park West) - with Bob andLee Woodruff and works by photojournalist Ed Kashi  

SYRACUSE, NYFriday, October 1, 7 pmDowntown Syracuse Y, 340 Montgomery Street

NEW YORK CITYWednesday, October 13, 7 pm. The National September 11 Memorial and Museum, Liberty Streetand Broadway

Thursday, October 14, details TBA, Columbia University

CAMBRIDGE, MAMonday, October 18, 8 pmBlacksmith House Poetry Series, 56 Brattle Street

HAMILTON, NYThursday, October 21,  4:30 pm. Living Writers Series, Colgate University, Persson Auditorium

MENLO PARK, CAThursday, November 18, 7:30 pmKepler’s Books, 1010 El Camino Real

SAN FRANCISCO, CASaturday, November 20, 7:30 pm. The Booksmith, 1644 Haight Street

BERKELEY, CASunday, November 21,  4:00 pm. Mrs. Dalloway’s, 2904 College Avenue

LOS ANGELES, CAMonday, November 22, details TBA. ALOUD Reading Series, Library Foundation of Los Angeles, 630 West Fifth Street

For further information visit www.PeterBalakian.com

Thursday, October 01, 2009

Peter Balakian: Post-Traumatic Shock, Newark, New Jersey, 1942

Shirts hang in the glass showcase
behind the gold French Cleaners,


when I open the door,
naphthalene rises
into the no-legs.


Delphiniums are blue like
the decanters of cologne from Paris.
That’s my brother’s house.


God’s face on a wooden belfry.
God’s lips. God’s nose.
God’s innocent little prick.


At the butcher’s those are cow’s eyes
with the visionary gleam of things
in the dead sand.


I’m the star of a Jew
rising from the beery foam
of Chaplin’s moustache.


It was a dirt road
like the head of an elk
or these hanging ribs.


Figs at Delaney’s all
the way from Smyrna
like shit in cellophane.


On the road. We were going there,
and then Hawaii turned into white light
on the screen of the Philco.


Kamikaze metal.
A runway of gin and broken glass.
Naphthalene of the Red Cross nurses.


Yes, yes, the child’s mine.
No Armenians left?


Jimmy Stewart you bastard
I’m here with some shopping bags.


Peter Balakian, “Post-Traumatic Shock, Newark, New Jersey, 1942” from June-Tree: New and Selected Poems 1974-2000. Copyright © 2001 by Peter Balakian. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Peter Balakian: August Diary

Click here to hear the audio clip August Diary read by Lola Koundakjian.






8/1

From here groomed fields and clumps of trees,
a silo of corrugated tin and a white barn blur.

Unseasonable cool days,
high, blue, a few clouds like ripped pillows
as if this were a lip of the North Sea

and I could look out and imagine Denmark.
But I’m in my office three floors up.


8/3

In Armenian there’s a word—garod—rhymes with “maud.”

The beautiful ones are not faithful
and the faithful ones are not beautiful—

a student said that about some Pavese translations,
here in my office.

Should I tell you what garod means?


8/5

What’s happening in Spitak and Sarajevo and the West Bank
is splayed like the cortex of a silicon chip in the fuzzy air.

Maria, the physician from Armenia, was 25 & had one plastic arm
and one real arm. I met her in East Hampton on the deck of a house on the dunes.
After the earthquake she had no husband,
no parents, and only one child.

“I’m in a good mood today,” she said, “let’s talk about
something else.” I poured her an Amstel Light.


8/10

The coolness intrudes—
month of wind-sprints and retching for the coach.
It comes back like nerve ends after surgery.

Along a country road cicadas rattling.
Chicory and sweet pea intruding on the ripe barley.

I picked up some seed packs from a junk shop on Rt. 20,
a tomato blazed in red ink/ 1926, Fredonia, N.Y.


8/11

What’s between us? The red ink of the tomato?

How does an image stay? Or is it always aftermath?
The way deep black reflected the most light in Talbot’s first calotypes.

But garod: tongue of a snake,
meaning exile, longing for home.

Thomas Wedgwood got images by getting sunlight
to pass through things onto paper brushed with silver nitrate:

wings of a dragonfly, the spine of an oak leaf—
fugitive photograms. But he couldn’t stop the sun
until it turned the paper black.

Stop the light before it goes too far?

Or is desire what garod means?
Longing for a native place.


8/17

Maria said she was learning how to connect nerve endings
in the hand so hands and arms would work again.
There were so many in Armenia without working hands and arms.

At the end of each dendrite is a blurred line
like the horizon I’m squinting.

Image of the other:
light-arrested; not the image of ourselves.


8/21

After digging scallions one day Dickinson defined freedom:
Captivity’s consciousness, so’s liberty.

Maybe garod is about the longing for the native place
between two selves.


8/22

I love the brute force of silence in Roger Fenton’s
Sebastopol from Cathcart’s Hill, 1855. The Crimean inner war.

The artlessness of silver is like my tongue in your wet space,
or like the news photos that bring us the pressure of disaster.

Beloved topography,
garod then must mean yearning.

Is that how we loved under the rattling Nippon porcelain,
in the light calotyped by the fire escape?


8/25

garod: the grain chute that spills
into a dark barn which is endless,

like the self when it’s out of reach.

Are we so lonely that a constellation
could blacken and fill up that same barn,

and that be me or you?

But still we’re piss and oats and stock in there.
We’re like civet, who wouldn’t love it.


8/31

the new glass-plate pictures:
transparent as air, Szarkowski wrote

like windows

the fragmentary, scruffy, particularity
of real living behind them—

Originally published in Dyer's Thistle (1996).

Peter Balakian, “August Diary” from June-Tree: New and Selected Poems 1974-2000. Copyright © 2001 by Peter Balakian. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Saturday, September 29, 2007

Peter Balakian: Parts of Peonies

Click here to hear Peter Balakian's Parts of Peonies read by Lola Koundakjian.

It rained so much in June
some grew to look like stuffed cabbage
or the small heads of lambs.

Even the stigmas were buried
under dense white and red.

All day I tried to put
my hands into their swollen insides.
I thought my touch would reawaken...

In the slightest breeze
they swooned
and things fell into them

(as if their nectar glands
were a substance in my mind
like the seed an ovule becomes):

the spongy sac inside a goat,
almond-shaped eyes
quills of porcupine
fragments of eucalyptus
on the Armenian steppe --

and here in my small upstate garden
a man's pancreas and a nest
are the same --

if they are butchered out
a bird can only drop
her eggs into empty space.

When I close my eyes
in the harsh light
I see only black spots...

the peonies go on and on


This poem has appeared in the volume "Reply from Wilderness Island", Sheep Meadow Press, 1988, and is used here by kind permission.