Marilyn Hacker visits Profs. Moira Egan and Damiano Abeni's classes

On Wednesday, June 1, Poet-in-Residence Marilyn Hacker visited with students from the Poetry Workshop and The Art of Literary Translation class. In a lively conversation, she discussed poetic form and various aspects of translation. She also delighted students with stories of her own experiences with studying Arabic, translating back and forth between Arabic and French in her lessons, as well as the myriad beauties of poetry in Arabic.

John Cabot University’s Institute for Creative Writing and Literary Translation was proud to welcome 2011 Poet in Residence, Marilyn Hacker, to two separate events at JCU: a reading and a conversation with the poet led by Professor Moira Egan.

• On 1 June, Poet in Residence Hacker visited Professor Egan’s Summer Session I poetry class: CW 354 Creative Writing Workshop: Poetry

Moira Egan, Joseph Harrison & Damiano Abeni after Mr. Harrison's Reading

Harrison was born in Richmond, Virginia, grew up in Virginia and Alabama, and studied at Yale and Johns Hopkins. His book Someone Else’s Name (Waywiser, 2003) was named as one of five poetry books of the year by the Washington Post. His second book of poems, Identity Theft, was published by Waywiser in 2008. His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1998, 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, The Library of America’s Anthology of American Religious Poems, the Penguin Pocket Anthology of Poetry, the Penguin Pocket Anthology of Literature, The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, and many journals. In 2005 he was the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2009 he received a Fellowship in Poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives in Baltimore.

Please join us for the following outstanding events:

• Monday, June 20th:  Readings by Heather McGowan and Jay Hopler, American Academy in Rome, Rome Prize Winners
  
• Tuesday, June 21st:  Readings by Rick Kenney and Kevin Craft, University of Washington
  
• Wednesday, June 22nd:  Institute Student & Faculty Reading
• Tuesday, May 24th:  Reading by Joseph Harrison
• Monday, May 30th:  Reading by Marilyn Hacker, Poet in Residence
• Wednesday, June 1st:  A Conversation with Marilyn Hacker
• Tuesday, June 7th:  Reading by Phillip Lopate
• Monday, June 13th:   Reading by Dorothy Allison, Novelist in Residence
• Wednesday, June 15th:  A Conversation with Dorothy Allison

Unless otherwise noted, all Institute events are held in the Aula Magna Regina on the Guarini Campus of John Cabot University, Via della Lungara 233, Trastevere, Rome.  Photo ID required to enter JCU. The event will begin at the indicated time and guests will not be allowed to enter after the event has begun.

We hope you enjoy the latest installment of original short stories and micro-fiction pieces written by John Cabot students Anisha Fabien, Andrew Nelson, Danielle Rovet, Kira Boswell, Colin Boyd, Melissa Jenkins, Taylor Sanit, and Nancy Hoffman.

At last we arrive at the age of retrospect, when ancient stones overturn to unveil their own ancestors. A revelation of carved stones, fluting and acanthus leaves, flows forth into the present day. They stood for ages supported by other rubble, and now gentle hands sweep dust from monumental letters. How much lies buried still, inaccessible under new old palaces, further treasures, winding their own passages and stairways atop the elder brother! Gaia stretches aged tufa fingers from one foundation to another. Years don’t weaken her mortar in the least. She sighs and columns sway, not fall; they were artifice when they rose, but with interregnum’s settling she reclaimed them. The city rose higher. A shame, we cry, as we lay down new paths and raise up capitols of our own. The barbarians will come and we will fall. Once more Gaia will swallow the highest peaks of state.

During this age, the sunlight drifts dusty upon reconstituted temple corners and fallen lintels and global people winding through the ruins. They point and glance and linger til the sun drives them inward, toward a cool and dusky lunch. Each feels so exposed in this old place, where the ghosts of senators and slaves–friends with all this time–sit atop the columns, laughing. They knew their own grandiosity, and they laugh to see it dwarf our age of quarter-mile Babels. We sweat among their time-washed temples and stretch to reach the Art, the History. Right there, is that the remnant of a gaudy coat of paint? Oh, dust. Imagined-past swims before our eyes, darting left to right, here a white majesty of marble, there a stinking, painted alley. Julio-Claudians wrapped in gilt overrun merchant streets, and the ghosts of the populus laugh.

—written by Nancy Hoffman in CW 350 Fiction Workshop, Fall 2010

I: Auguries, Matthew Campbell, 1946

Seven birds swoop and swoon from the crane-arms of a delicate mobile. Even my slow approach and my cautious gaze send tiny gusts, giving them the ruffled sway of life. A bench, a scarred slab of oak, among the birds. They gather in groups, fleeting around a still life collection: a coffee, a bowl of summer borscht, a half-eaten slice of bread, and a cappuccino. The crane’s arms swing with time and the birds chitter and swirl at the fringes of the meal’s array.

The sculpture begs my fingers to curl around its coffee cup, begs me to sit on its bench and to contemplate, and when I glance around for a seat, there is none. A guard in the doorway discourages temptation. I circle, too, concentric with the lesser arm.

It was a quiet lunch, and I hadn’t seen him in a couple of months. The soup was mine, he had eaten already, and as I sipped he retold the scandals that had happened at work after I left. I was warming, newly, in this shady cafe without the pressure of a joint nine-to-five, when another customer opened the door and a flurry of birds burst in to spoil whatever they could. We jumped up from the meal to marvel at the interruption. These birds hopped foot to foot and I puzzled. To stay? To leave? Even here these messengers harangued me as I sipped my coffee. The baristas rushed around to shoo the flock outside. I watched his face for clues. To order another? The barista decided for me. She snuck two fresh coffees into the place of the soiled ones.

Had the birds flown in from the door to the right, I would have risen and suggested a vague next meeting, and gathered myself and left. But they came from the left door, and so I committed myself to at least a month of absurdity before he grew disgusted and stopped calling. I reviewed my volume on occultism and sign interpretation.

These birds flee at the slightest of currents, their substance is no substance, but there they are, tethered. Would Campbell have let them float free, had he the means?

II: The Three Graces, Anonymous Pre-Raphaelite, 1854

They’re familiar, the Graces, they captivate perhaps too much art. But these three twisted femmes are clearly harpies, agents of divine vengeance, justice, wrath. They are punishers of the perverse and the shamed. Fleet, they fly through the brightest, highest air to bring pain. Their skin, a sickly pale, lets light through to bones and purple veins–though their lifeblood is ash and flame. Each beckons the others to speed, and the face of each shows glee toward her task. The sole delight, for these mockeries of virtue, rests in visiting strife upon strife’s human agents.

A Grace is divine elegance embodied. Her world is silk and incense and it is muffled from the troubles ravaging the world. But we live in an age of abandonment by the gods, and so did Anonymous in 1854. Whatever forces remain mock us and when we plead for a cushion, they send us only more ugliness.

The ugliness is autonomous. It stands dormant, colossal, and when it stirs it bursts into our lives to bring us falsehoods. The brute. In their early days, their youth, the harpies were airy sisters. Passing ages warped their luminescent faces into death-masks. They suffered for civilization’s guilts, the airy ones, the careless ones, and now they punish us for our crimes against ourselves. Nature wreaks its revenge on us, who have forgotten how to live within it, but have yet to learn how to live without. There might exist airy beings, careless, buoyed up on towers of warm air, but we can’t stand them. None should have a life of grand surveys when we labor.

Once to shake free for a few hours I drove far north. As I reached lonely Vermont a sense of owning crept around my heart, and if another car dared tarnish my windy road, I sprinted beyond it. And I kept this up for hours even when the highway became only snaky paths clinging to ravines and bursting rivers. I sped to pass a Lexus (whose driver should have taken better advantage of his car) and the cracked and beaten road slipped away beneath me. My tires jumped, my car slammed into a ditch. Thank god it wasn’t the ravine, they told me. What they meant was “City boy,” with a sigh.

When we seek escape from the troubles we’ve created, the world punishes us. It lures us into placidity, into possessiveness, and then it springs its trap. The harpies got me all the way up in Vermont.

There is only punishment for us now, no grace. Having walked so far in the path of Progress and Enlightenment, our solace lies only in their fruits. Don’t reclaim Nature, don’t paint or write or sing in its glory; Wordsworth was a fat fool, in late life commenting eternally on his own poetry. He realized, much too late, that there was nothing there. There is nothing in landscape if we don’t make of it a civilization, a vocabulary, there is no sense in a pure dandelion or mountain.

III: The Three Graces, Adam Holbern (Student of Rubens), 1623

Marisa jokes all the time about a man for both of us to share. Holbern gives us the prototype in these three Graces. A man and a woman drape their arms around a central man. They are golden–men muscled, figured as Apollo; woman soft, coy, Aphrodisiac. Their hair falls soft upon their shoulders. They drink up all the light around them in the pastoral scene. They drink up the light reflected off my watch, my glasses.

Here stand the capricious, glancing original loves. The woman ties them to the earth, and they let her in on their masculine designs. They dance, they hang garlands over each other and sigh. Later they will slip into some sweet-water pool where the nymphs will coo at the sight of them. On some nearby mountainside Orpheus strums his lyre and praises their beauty. He wrote the song himself and he sings it to the nymphs and the animals in these still-divine lands. Somehow another bard will pick up those strains and echo them out across the hills. Orpheus was a weaver of nature, but in the end it tore him up. It couldn’t stand the mirror.

But once all the other singers took up his thread, one after another like the sown men of Thebes, and the earth with all its multitudes of messengers couldn’t cut them all down. They blanketed the hills with their praises and the grasses had to learn to drink the song like sun. Two of those older maiden Graces left, and a pair of youths took their places.

Marisa shops all her men by me just in case. But I could never split someone like that, not unless I knew for sure we would all soar together.

IV: La Bocca di Leone, Matteo Parisi, 1958

Parisi, a master of reproduction, sets forth a lion skin. Within its gaping mouth spans a shop-lined street in miniature. Christmas lights hang from the lion’s fangs and tiny passersby wave at each other on their strolls into his maw. The lion’s heavy claws reach toward me where I lie, head on my folded hands, peering into his mouth. At any moment he could snap those jaws shut on all the shops, all the little people. He could roll them all back into his gut with one flick of his giant tongue.

He lets them be. He can’t swallow them, because they’ve already skinned him. He has no stomach, no viscera, no need of prey. Animals don’t take revenge. Even with those claws, this king of beasts unleashes them less as threat and more as supplication. Now that I have descended to his world he challenges and begs me to see him. He has ranged far across the world, a snarling wanderer, a master of legions, one feared. After a few decades spread out on the birch floors of this museum, he looks to me as liberator.

“When you leave,” he asks, “burn the fur and leather your kind wear on their backs. Bomb the home of the rancher, send your armies after poachers. Offer up fine ivories as penitence. Toss shells into the sea. Then, when you have done all this, come back. Tie me around your shoulders and we will destroy the centers of commerce. When they have nothing left but their homes, burn me at a sacrificial altar.”

I could write a letter to Parisi telling him I’m not a rebel or a radical, and that sometimes there is chicken on my salad. I restock the shelves of my closet whenever I can afford to, and I’m not sure my tea is free-trade, or shade-grown, or whatever tea is supposed to be.

Or I could ride into town on the back of a lion and waving my arms to tell everyone that I am the voice of the next age, and that they were wrong when they supposed it was enough to repent in mind. I would wear a disguise and never reveal my name, because the next age demands humility. We would all ride in carts driven by leopards and wreathe ourselves in laurels still living. We would live under the canopies of trees.

V: Dormition & Ascension, Luc Thibeau, 1925

Lit by a churning cauldron, a sorceress gazes heavenward. Her eyes look back, her lips part in ecstasy, she burns with wild purples and greens and yellows.  She is a sorceress rapt, her body flows into the cauldron and the flames flow into the cauldron. This sorceress streams up with those flames and settles in a divine realm, and here all the gods are green and purple like she is. I lay my pinkish hand along my pinkish cheek and take a step back. Circe with her hands spread wing-like in revelation, she beckons me. She has a point, like they always do, and sometimes I submit.

The giving in is terrible every time, as the pill, whatever it was, latches onto every cell of me. It tears my body away from me, it banishes my body so I become a spirit for the night. When the lights become intermittent, when my eyes meet no familiar eyes, I am outside with the other spirits. Always Marisa coerces me, and she always watches out while I spin. She guides me into the best crowds and dances with me. She brings the water and she hails the taxi home.

I have tasted the fiery dissolution of these maddened sorceries. They strongarm me and blindfold me and carry me away. Maybe I should fight, but there’s always Marisa to look on and bribe these spell-casters to keep me safe. And in the morning, that is when we wake in the afternoon, she lets herself into my apartment and brings me a bottle of water and a barely-sweetened coffee, and we lay on the couch and worry whether the ceiling will stop spinning.

Thibeau’s opium addiction took him out through the slums. Only after his death were his paintings recovered and spotted in a Parisian pawn shop by an art collector, who passed the canvases around to his friends and upon group consensus, began shopping them around.

When my great-grandfather, then in his thirties and a successful entrepreneur, heard about this he made some inquiries and purchased a few of the Thibeaus, because Thibeau was his father.  Dormition & Ascension is a part of our private family collection, and I have puzzled over it daily. Once Marisa let herself in, though, I understood. She told me that her closest friend had moved and she was no good at keeping up with people, and I was going to take his place, so we went to coffee and then went to drinks. In a moment I saw that fervent upturned gaze, no matter where she was looking. Everything she touched came into its own fluttering life.

She loafs on my sofa, head lolling off the edge, and tears up petals from flowers in a vase on my coffee table. The petals fall onto her stomach, and every time I get up to fill a glass of water or observe my window or consider a bottle of ibuprofen she says, “Wordcount?”

So I fiddle with the edges of the books whose color plates I rely on. The earth kindles the sorceress’s flame, and she rides that flame higher and higher. If she grabbed my hand, she could bring me with her to see the distant topographies. I am the luckiest man when she grabs my hand to dash through the flames and climb them. We fly apart from the rest, Marisa holding my hand tight in her small one, and lie around on clouds. Our tangerine and plum and lemon selves mix with the cumulus. With them we roll over and through everything, apart.

Once in a while another man will push me aside for Marisa, and she gives me a nod to her right shoulder so I go get myself a G&T. Colors never overtake me while I lean away from the crowd, myself alone with my G&T, whether I think of the fires or not. I move in closer to the crowd, but my body never snags on its bright, fauvist ripples without her. I could never throw a punch unless she left me alone to drag some other up there, knowing as she does how I covet the purple and green winds whipping around my body.

— Parts 1-5 of 24 written by Nancy Hoffman in CW 350 Fiction Workshop, Fall 2010

Two—Her skin slides back and forth between day and dusk—allowing the blonde hair to settle his eyes.  The feeling of distance forces him to close his eyes and push his lips against her and slide them back and forth—slower, faster, and then slower again.  No words exchanged.  No terms of endearment.  Only the silent appreciation of how she felt to him.

Three—She cuts into the thin, fuzzy skin with ease, and glides through the inside until she hits a wall.  She tries sliding the knife around the seed unsuccessfully.  The orbit was far from perfect.  She squeezes just slightly on both sides, careful not to bruise the fruit.  The peach falls apart, revealing the red flower that had grown tightly around the seed.  She was surprised by how easily the fruit separated.  With only one, whole seed, there was no need to dig at the pieces that lay in front of her.  The dark red quickly faded into a comforting peach color. She stares at a wedge and releases it into her mouth with a heavy breath.

—written by Kira Boswell in CW 350 Fiction Workshop, Fall 2010

My mug sits alone on the black stone kitchen counter. It’s in isolation from the friendly set of silverware and the communal large pot.  There is an old chamomile teabag, dried out and stuck on the inside of it, from last night’s evening tea. The teabag is tied around the handle as I always do.  The cup has a faint smell of last night’s tea, and the permanent odor of soiled coffee. The inside of the cup has irremovable stains from coffee and tea. They form rings at different levels from top to bottom. The stains are the stratigraphy of a year in Italy, the mornings and evenings spent with the cup and the comforting hot drink inside, mementos of long nights of research and writing, of early morning classes, and homesickness.

The cup is white on the inside and black on the outside. There are words written on the outside of the cup in white marker: Carpe diem, Live Italian, Love forever mom, Time to go all in, The universe is perfect. Each word is written in the signature handwriting of one of my family members. The words are fading, as though I have spent too much time away from home.

The bottom of the inside of cup has a marble design of dark yellow veins left from the chamomile. I untie the teabag and peal the old teabag out of the inside of the cup and gently wash last night’s stains off. A new day.

—written by Andrew Nelson in CW 350 Fiction Workshop, Fall 2010

Emma holds pom poms in one hand, and my sweaty hand in the other.  I remember all of the times she has stood by my side underneath the glare of the stadium lights at football games.  I remember all of the times she has stayed by my side in the dim hallways and cold classrooms in spite of my lies—the lies she never believed, was never tricked by like the other girls I drove away.

Emma doesn’t let go of my hand until the game is over and parents and friends pour onto the muddy field.  When she does, I run up to Jared.  Someone tells her that we have been dating since Tuesday.  She has been expecting this since Saturday when I called and asked for his number for an English project, but she knew we didn’t have English together.  A part of her refuses to believe I would do this to her, and she knows she has let me.  She would like to believe she is more hurt by her own ignorance than my betrayal.

She doesn’t call me a bitch and pull my hair like any other girl would if she learned her friend was suddenly dating the boy she had been in love with for years.  Instead, she gets in her car and drives and cries for hours.  She cries for Jared; she thinks that he has broken her heart.  When he cheats on me with her six months from now, Emma will understand that she has been missing me all of this time.  She will think of the time she held my hand on a cold Friday night in November and will feel the sting of my betrayal deep in her chest.

—written by Melissa Jenkins in CW 350 Fiction Workshop, Fall 2010