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The Plant Ladies

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  View this email in your browser Sandra Alcosser The Plant Ladies I was sent to my room to think things over So I sat with white dog On a ledge Twenty stories high in golden haze Concrete belfry Breathing black oxides from the East River Drive Watching the turd-eating seagulls dive. Periodically a maroon Cadillac passed Under my window and tooted It’s Now or Never into the wind. Friend Dorothy on the eleventh floor Had all the best shrinks Gurus Five brilliant husbands And a C-R group But she never got solved either. Stacked together in a dead-faced totem we Stared west at the Statue of Liberty. There was no choice. But Burpee Seeds saved us. Nursery stock Like broken nerve endings Bugged Rotted. We pick pick pick, deadhead Loosen the earth, massage the roots Whisper Play Bach flute sonatas and They survive. We become the plant ladies. Our souls spore-borne Heart-shaped gametophytes Descend Lie like liverworts On sweet sour soil. Bodies left behind in a room of wallflowers and Ba...
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Pont Mirabeau

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  Pont Mirabeau Le voyageur A Fernand Fleuret. Ouvrez-moi cette porte où je frappe en pleurant La vie est variable aussi bien que l'Euripe Tu regardais un banc de nuages descendre Avec le paquebot orphelin vers les fièvres futures Et de tous ces regrets de tous ces repentirs         Te souviens-tu Vagues poissons arqués fleurs surmarines Une nuit c'était la mer Et les fleuves s'y répandaient Je m'en souviens je m'en souviens encore Un soir je descendis dans une auberge triste Auprès de Luxembourg Dans le fond de la salle il s'envolait un Christ Quelqu'un avait un furet Un autre un hérisson L'on jouait aux cartes Et toi tu m'avais oublié   VOYAGER to Fernand Fleuret Open up can't you hear me crying at your door Life rises and runs away like the tides of Euripe You watched the clouds roll in Aboard the orphan steamer with fevers off the bow With all of your regrets and your if onlys         Do you remember Waves flying ...
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Michael Hofmann, The Art of Translation No. 6

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  The Paris Review Subscribe Michael Hofmann , The Art of Translation No. 6 Interviewed by Robyn Creswell Issue 230, Fall 2019 Photo courtesy of Barbara Hoffmeister It’s a little strange to encounter Michael Hofmann in Gainesville. He has taught creative writing for over twenty years at the University of Florida, whose sprawling campus is dominated on its northern edge by a football stadium, the Swamp, where orange-and-blue Gators chomp their unlucky opponents. A short drive from there, you can pick your way past dozens of real gators, dusky green and preternaturally still, in the Paynes Prairie Preserve, which is also home to herds of wild horses and bison. How the bison got to Florida, and why they stayed, must be an interesting story. In one of Hofmann’s few Gainesville poems, “Freebird,” written after his first visit in 1990, he quotes D. H. Lawrence: “One forms not the faintest inward attachment, especially here in America.” Hofmann’s native ground, in his translations as well...
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