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Holly Rice

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Poetry

TIE Poet of the Month: ‘Love Poem to Media Luna,’ by Mộng-Lan

It didn’t take me long to fall for you

what the ethereal eye beholds

in ascension
half moon crescent earth

O media luna
de manteca

my secret sin that i devour whenever

durante las noches sueño de tu cuerpo
tender
feathery body waiting for me

(yet really wanting to forget you)

how easily you break away
into lithe fibers the way i break
away from this life

you melt in my mouth dos ríos
en un desierto


una media luna
crossing une croissante en el cielo

rising when the sun sets

swathed in sublime butter light

delectable crust warm interior fazing into air
del orno

mi boca en tu boca
mis ojos en tus ojos

how easily you give way to your precious inside

how your wings fly
effortlessly

in my favorite café in Buenos Aires you come in threes
cada una delicada como
el rocío de la mañana

each an imperfect half moon

Internationally known multi-artist, poet, writer, painter, photographer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, singer, dancer and teacher of the Argentine tango, Mộng-Lan left her native Vietnam on the last day of the evacuation of Saigon. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, the Juniper Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Awards for Poetry, she is the author of eight books and chapbooks, the most recent of which is One Thousand Minds Brimming. Other books include Song of the Cicadas; Why is the Edge Always Windy?, Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art; Tango, Tangueando: Poemas & Dibujos (the bilingual Spanish-English edition); Love Poem to Tofu & Other Poems (poetry & calligraphic art, chapbook); Love Poem to Ginger & Other Poems: poetry & paintings (chapbook); and Force of the Heart: Tango, Art. Mong-Lan’s poetry has been nationally and internationally anthologized to include being in Best American Poetry; The Pushcart Book of Poetry: Best Poems from 30 Years of the Pushcart Prize; Asian American Poetry: the Next Generation; Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (Norton); and has appeared in leading American literary journals. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Fulbright Scholar in Vietnam, she received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona. Her most recent poetry & jazz piano album, Dreaming Orchid: Poetry & Jazz Piano was just released. Visit: http://www.monglan.com

featured image via Phoenix Wolf-Ray on Flickr.

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Columns

June Market Report, by Stacey Harwood-Lehman

School’s out for summer!  Congratulations to all graduates and to those still in the midst of their studies, for completing another semester. It’s time for swimsuits and sunscreen.

For the second time, I taught “Food Narratives” to New School undergraduates and continuing ed students.  In the past, I had conceived of food narratives in literary genres—poetry, non-fiction, journalism, and fiction.  While such works remain prominent on the syllabus, I have broadened the scope to include food narratives in visual art and music. Finding the right approach was a challenge, but I arrived at a formula that the students seemed to embrace. 

The art critic and award winning biographer Mark Stevens (de Kooning: An American Master, with Analyn Swan, Knopf, 2006) once told me that when you look at paintings of meals and food you can almost always be certain that the food will look great, delicious. This comment stayed with me and when I encountered a

a series of poems by Sandra Gilbert that appeared in The America Scholar I decided that it would be exciting to add a section on visual art to my syllabus. Gilbert’s poems are about paintings of meals by old masters, ranging from the gory (Goya’s Saturn Devouring One of His Children) to the sexy (Manet’s, Déjeuner sur l’herbe).  Here is the opening of Gilbert’s poem about the Goya “First he swallowed the screams. / They were bitter, stringy, hard to chew, but he seasoned them /with the sweet dark curls & managed to get them down / without gagging . . .” The poem stands alone but to appreciate it fully, one must view the painting and be familiar with myth that inspired its brilliant creator. You can find Gilbert’s poems here.

My students embarked on a treasure hunt. I instructed them to visit a museum or gallery, view a painting of food or a meal, and invent a narrative to go with it. Although there is no shortage of material in New York City, I compiled a list of favorites that they could use as a starting point. As luck would have it, the Studio Museum in Harlem had just launched “Palatable: Food and Contemporary Art” an exhibit that considers how contemporary artists of African descent use food to explore politics, memory, heritage, race and culture. (The exhibit is on view through June 26).

It is sometimes said that the artist provides half the work; the reader or viewer supplies the rest. My students proved this assertion with their lively responses to paintings. They wrote poems, short stories, and essays, each quite different from the other even when contemplating the same masterpiece. One student viewed Willem Claesz Heda’s Still Life with Oysters, a Silver Tazza, and Glassware as depicting the prelude to lovemaking, interwoven with a disquisition about the aphrodisiacal power of the oyster; another imagined the violent demise of a relationship. Joachim Beuckelaer’s Fish Market, inspired in one student a light verse with rhymes worthy of Dr. Seuss, and in another a short story about a morning in the life of a Fishmonger’s wife. 

Summer is time for the outdoors, but we will have rainy days along with days of intolerable heat. Find respite in a museum and let a painting transport you to another world, another life.

featured image via the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Poetry

TIE Poet of the Month: ‘Love Poem to Curry,’ by Mộng-Lan

. . . but the promise of a moment

of spices luxurious uncontainable

how will i remember your embrace?
how will i remember your trembling?

how will i remember your presence around me
all-enveloping?

i only need to taste you slowly daily

origins rich as sand

your powers multifaceted gingerly i savor
your ingenuity

what are you?
mysterious complex luscious dark

as if behind velvet curtains closed doors

satiny as the Sahara as your turmeric

breathless as ever you make me

in the spices of your delirium

turmeric coriander fenugreek fennel
ginger cloves garlic curry leaves
peppers chilies mustard

endless varieties of you
seamless steamy concoctions

fragrant



as the years are long
as the years terse


that unfurls centuries thousands of years of knowledge

traditions glowing of temples robes flowing orange

rich dark past love
of desire of uncountable kisses
or kisses missed

Internationally known multi-artist, poet, writer, painter, photographer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, singer, dancer and teacher of the Argentine tango, Mộng-Lan left her native Vietnam on the last day of the evacuation of Saigon. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, the Juniper Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Awards for Poetry, she is the author of eight books and chapbooks, the most recent of which is One Thousand Minds Brimming. Other books include Song of the Cicadas; Why is the Edge Always Windy?, Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art; Tango, Tangueando: Poemas & Dibujos (the bilingual Spanish-English edition); Love Poem to Tofu & Other Poems (poetry & calligraphic art, chapbook); Love Poem to Ginger & Other Poems: poetry & paintings (chapbook); and Force of the Heart: Tango, Art. Mong-Lan’s poetry has been nationally and internationally anthologized to include being in Best American Poetry; The Pushcart Book of Poetry: Best Poems from 30 Years of the Pushcart Prize; Asian American Poetry: the Next Generation; Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (Norton); and has appeared in leading American literary journals. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Fulbright Scholar in Vietnam, she received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona. Her most recent poetry & jazz piano album, Dreaming Orchid: Poetry & Jazz Piano was just released. Visit: http://www.monglan.com

feature image via Cilantro Cooks.

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Poetry

TIE Poet of the Month: ‘Love Poem to Persimmons (Quả Hồng)’ by Mộng-Lan

Smooth skinned orange interior exterior
heart-shaped

your pull more intense than gravity
adamant kiss wet on wet

textures in-between

your sweetness croons
of days
in Việt Nam those simmering Texas days mother’s
varieties of hồng
from her garden crunchy & silken
those Tokyo 東京 days

diligently on branches
during December in Japan you
sway

leisurely turning snow to fire
you turn as the earth’s axis does
imperceptibly
adorning skeletal trees

like a design for a new brimmed hat
mid-winter snow dusts your curves

orange
feverish thoughts

lan headshot nm Internationally known multi-artist, poet, writer, painter, photographer, multi-instrumentalist, composer, singer, dancer and teacher of the Argentine tango, Mộng-Lan left her native Vietnam on the last day of the evacuation of Saigon. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, the Juniper Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Awards for Poetry, she is the author of eight books and chapbooks, the most recent of which is One Thousand Minds Brimming. Other books include Song of the Cicadas; Why is the Edge Always Windy?, Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art; Tango, Tangueando: Poemas & Dibujos (the bilingual Spanish-English edition); Love Poem to Tofu & Other Poems (poetry & calligraphic art, chapbook); Love Poem to Ginger & Other Poems: poetry & paintings (chapbook); and Force of the Heart: Tango, Art. Mong-Lan’s poetry has been nationally and internationally anthologized to include being in Best American Poetry; The Pushcart Book of Poetry: Best Poems from 30 Years of the Pushcart Prize; Asian American Poetry: the Next Generation; Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (Norton); and has appeared in leading American literary journals. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Fulbright Scholar in Vietnam, she received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona. Her most recent poetry & jazz piano album, Dreaming Orchid: Poetry & Jazz Piano was just released. Visit: http://www.monglan.com

feature image via Mộng-Lan.

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Poetry

‘Louisiana’ by Ashawnta Jackson

I remember tearing the fibers from the stalk. Remember the rush of warm sweetness and how it lingered on the tip of my tongue. I let it sit there. Just for a minute. Just long enough to let it cover the inside of my mouth, coat it in memories. Grandfather with thick blade cutting thick stalks to bring to anxious mouths. We. Eagerly sucking the juices until the fibers hung dryly from our mouths. Spit.

Remember the taste of sugar.

Let it run down my chin, dripping in sticky, sweet droplets at my feet. The ground is hard here. Too hard to ease my body into. Too hard to forget grandfather’s hunched back as he worked fields of green cane. And I remember with each bite. Remember each brittle thwack thwack of the knife against the cane. Faster. Thwack. Each bite a reminder. Thwack. How this sweetness turns to nothing but thick ropes against my tongue. Thwack. Faster. Each drop against my chin. Again again. Thwack. My hands a fibrous mass of memory. Faster. Thwack. Faster. Breathe.

The hands that cleaned this, chopped this, they ached with the weight of the knife. Ached with the raw skin burned and peeled, the roughness of the flesh. Over and over again. My father’s body didn’t bend like that. His stood like the tall, stiff stalks. Rooted to something earthen, something dark rich cool. His body was made from the land, but not for the land. I watched him work the knife, too. His hands remembering the rhythm. His body bent in silent tribute. My tiny, brown hands reaching for their own remembrance.

Ashawnta Jackson is a former Managing Editor of 12th Street literary journal, and has written for WNYC’s Soundcheck blog, Feet in 2 Worlds magazine, KMHD Jazz Radio’s blog. She is currently an editor at the Parsons Journal for Information Mapping.

feature image via kccornell on Flickr

 

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