Wake: Up to Poetry Reading and Celebration

If you weren't able to make it to our Wake: Up to Poetry reading and celebration last month, you're in luck. Thanks to The Wake Forest Interdisciplinary Performance and Liberal Arts Center (iPLACe) and the Wake Forest Documentary Film Program, we now have this lovely video of highlights from the event. We hope you enjoy these excerpts from the readings along with interviews from the contest winners and our Press Director, Candide Jones. Once again, we extend a big thank you to iPLACe and the Wake Forest Documentary Program for making this evening and video possible.

Poem of the Week

Do you have a memory of a childhood trip? "Going Places" by John McAuliffe from the upcoming Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry Volume III, is a tribute to such journeys. As we get older, it is sometimes comforting to remember the times when we got to sit in the backseat and imagine "giant invisible horses", instead of focusing on the reality of adulthood in which one must sit in the front seat and drive the car.

Going Places

It doesn't happen often. Stuck in my room, say,
Looking at rain or for a book, seeing that the floor may
Need hoovering, hungover possibly,
Re-arranging the postcards on the wall:
                                                          At times like this
I begin to remember childhood afternoons,
Sitting in the backseats of cars, going places,
Telephone wires on either side, like fences
For giant invisible horses.





Posted by Sophie

"Legend of the Walled-up Wife" featured in "The Antioch Review"

The spring 2013 issue of The Antioch Review takes a thoughtful look at our recent volume, Legend of the Walled-up Wife, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's translations of Ileana Mălăncioiu's poetry.  Written under the Ceaușescu regime, the book has dark, chilling imagery throughout and critic Benjamin S. Grossberg writes: "Mălăncioiu often blurs the line between life and death, creating the sense of haunted dislocation one finds in Dickinson." He adds that Ní Chuilleanáin;s translation, despite its colloquial tone, "gives the poems a shapeliness, a formality that complements their understated horror."  Mălăncioiu's work is described as "a reminder of just how viscerally... art can speak, even through a censor."

                                                 © Cover Art by David Battle

A Reading by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Our very own Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin reads “The Polio Epidemic” from The Sun-fish.

              Video courtesy of The Gallery Press

Visit our website and order your copy of The Sun-fish today! 

Poem of the Week

 

Welcome to "The Realm of Nothing Whatever".

We have unusual hours. It is only when you are groggy and not quite awake that you can quietly enter this dreamlike space and see striking simliarities between unalike things.  Before you can articulate what you have seen, the time of day is gone.

You are awake.

Careful with the door on the way out.



The Realm of Nothing Whatever

The difference between things
that are really the same is called
Three in the Morning.

The pigeon's bath and the tiger's regard,
the dawn air and the night air,
bird-stretchings and bear-hangings
and pillowed corpse on corpse.

The broken tile sunk
in the wide house
with the desolate side windows
that zero summer,

the pearl forever irritating the oyster
with inexorable tenderness,

the small earth cannot just file past
the bracing flood-breath of another planet
as if nothing has happened.

You do well to fade away
as if at a border crossing,
fashioning your vanishing
to end without force
in a minimum, rocking note.

-From Medbh McGuckian's My Love has Fared Inland .