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WHY I WRITE – by Linda Nemec Foster

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Linda Nemec Foster’s essay is featured on the website, Write Across Chicago, which is sponsored by the Illinois Writing Project based at Northeastern Illinois University. A member of the Society of Midland Authors, Linda is the only non-Illinois resident featured on the website.

To read the full article, please click here!

WHY I WRITE – by Linda Nemec Foster

 

ON WRITING

By Linda Nemec Foster

I write because I want to connect with others. I’m primarily a poet and I love poetry for the powerful way it uses language and the blankness around line breaks and stanzas to reflect metaphor, imagery, tone, rhythm, and pacing. Poetry is the only kind of writing where what you don’t say (think of all that white space on the page that surrounds a poem) is as important as what you do say (the language that encompasses each line). And when a poem is read out loud–connecting it to that ancient oral tradition that was the precursor to all written literature–the process is complete.

I also write flash fiction and prose poems that balance the tone between narrative and lyric voices. I like to work with this dichotomy: it’s an ambitious exercise but when the piece can achieve that balance between a narrative arc and strong lyricism, it’s nothing short of magic.

When I’m starting a new poem, I’ll write the first drafts in longhand on a yellow legal pad or a standard notebook. On average, this process of early drafting can result in five to ten rough drafts; that is, every poem I create begins in drafts of at least five to ten versions. After I determine that the piece has achieved a decent structure of form and content, I take the most recent draft and type it on the computer. The revision process continues as I see how the structure evolves as a typed piece. This is particularly essential for poetry as line breaks, stanzas, and section breaks are readily formatted on the computer screen. Currently, a lot of poets and writers prefer to compose directly on the computer but I’m “old school.” I love to feel the paper, to hold the pen, to cross out words and add lines. It’s a tactile and visceral experience for me and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I know the computer is essential for final revisions but that initial creative spark–the first drafts–are always handwritten.

My work of being a poet, a writer, and now (after eleven published poetry collections) an author has enriched my life in ways that are inestimable. True, there is no money in poetry. But the intangible rewards are gratifying and humbling. The most amazing situation I experienced as a writer was when I received an email from a person I never met. This woman had purchased one of my poetry books–a collection of haiku and visual art–that was a quiet meditation on nature and our place in the natural world. Every day she would read excerpts from the book to her friend who was in the advanced stages of terminal cancer. The poetry gave both of them a sense of peace and serenity as one life ended and one life carried on. No award or recognition could match the significance of those words from that stranger.

Linda Nemec Foster is a poet, writer, literary presenter, and founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College. She is the author of eleven collections of poetry including The Lake Michigan Mermaid (with Anne-Marie Oomen), Talking Diamonds, Amber Necklace from Gdańsk, Listen to the Landscape, and Living in the Fire Nest.

Book review of Ten Songs from Bulgaria by Romanian poet, scholar and translator Monica Manolachi.

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(Cervena Barva Press, W. Somerville, MA, 2008)

Linda Nemec Foster is an American poet of Polish ancestry, who has published nine collections of poetry and lives in Michigan. Ten Songs From Bulgaria (2008) is her eighth collection, a chapbook with poems inspired by Bulgarian artist Jacko Vassilev’s black and white photography from the (post-)communist epoch(s) and which inspired Hungarian folk musician Laszlo Slomovits to compose a CD, Cry of Freedom.

Each of the ten ekphrastic poems included in the collection has ten lines and each line has about ten syllables. In them, the poet makes use of the power of the enjambment, moderate repetition and sometimes counterpoint, with the purpose of presenting a reality from elsewhere and the play between past and present, imagination and reality. Several names (Vladimir, Cristo, Stoian and Zlatio Zlatev), the symbol of the dancing bear, the reference to the Balkans and Eastern Europe highlight a geo-cultural framework specific to Bulgaria.

As well as Jacko Vassilev’s dramatic photos, Linda Nemec Foster’s poems depict people “banished from the Garden of Eden”, who find other types of Eden in surreal artistic faith and unusual music and dance. In line with Vassilev’s photos, which illustrate the life of the poor during communism and immediately after, the poems too echo aspects related to the lives of the unfortunate. Inspired by the photographer’s compassion, the poet weaves multivalent stories around moving static pictures and, in contrast with the pictorial project, she sometimes makes the personages speak their own minds. The characters of these poems vary from “he” or “she” to “they”, which conveys a sense of detachment and contemplation, or they are written in the first person singular and sometimes the “I” is combined with “they”, “you” or “she”, which transmits empathy and involvement with a “world as tangible as fog”.

One of the most powerful texts in the book is “The Dancing Bear”, written as a persona poem in which the first person singular is the chained bear, a symbol of tamed nature that breaks its chains of speechlessness by starting to address the onlookers:

Once upon a time, I did not exist

in this frozen pose. Only danced

in your dreams like a myth:

bear of elegant waltz and measured

fox-trot; bear of passionate tango

and manic jitterbug. Now look at me.

Reduced to a muzzle and chain, serenaded

by a fool with a clumsy violin. I refuse

to dance, cannot remember the basic steps.

Music of the forest stuck in my throat.

The poem starts as a fairytale – and there are many of them with and about bears in the world – but ends as a story closer to contemporary man’s attitude to otherness, be it human, animal, natural, cultural etc.  The point of dramatic change placed in the middle, “Now look at me”, signifies a boundary between myth and reality, a door between expectations and fact, between a certain cultural label and truth. It questions the artist’s gaze in a world in which we all watch and are watched and in which those portrayed can more easily talk back. The initial contrast – “I did not exist” / “Only danced” – alludes to the Western imagination of the Orient and is reinterpreted in the second part of the poem as absence, whose phenomenology is subtly instrumented with the verb “to refuse”,  the negation “cannot remember” and the adjective “stuck”. “I refuse / to dance” may stand for a response against stereotypes. Dance does not mean only waltz, fox-trot, tango or jitterbug, all of them related to the urban European and American cultures. The title of the poem reminds us of rural areas and crossroads. Moreover, dancing as a form of body art is indirectly contrasted with the art of writing as opposed to singing or speaking.

The poem is interesting from a gender perspective too. Hunting in general and hunting bears in particular have traditionally been associated with men and their relationship to nature. What Linda Nemec Foster proposes here is a feminine or queer perspective on the same relationship, given that a persona poem implies a mask. Although there is no word in the text which might suggest the bear is anything other than masculine, the fact that the poem was written by a woman casts an intriguing light. What if the dancing bear is a she-bear? Does it make any difference? Of course it does. If chaining and muzzling a she-bear means there will be no more baby bears, then the poem offers a distinct feminine or queer view on understanding and performing wilderness. The empathetic personification suits the object and subject play, in the sense that it projects a dialogic attitude to otherness. Moreover, the underlying meaning of the word “bear” as a verb and its idiomatic expressions suggest a whole complex universe in itself.

The poem also speaks about America and its wilderness, by alluding to the mythical bear portrayed by William Faulkner. It represents a return to nature, as both environmental and human, and a possible internalization of the old Ben (from The Bear, a short story included in the collection Go Down Moses) as a cultural symbol of freedom and untamed nature, here transposed in an Eastern European geographical location. Giving voice to a bear also hints at the contemporary futility of giving voice to others, when, in fact, they came equipped with a voice, but the inability of others to hear them often translates as deliberate silencing. In the bear’s refusal to dance or to sing, the poet represents a reality waiting to be discovered.

*****

Monica Manolachi is a lecturer at the University of Bucharest, where she teaches English in the Department of Modern Languages and where she completed her doctoral thesis, Performative Identities in Contemporary Caribbean British Poetry, in 2011. Her research interests are American, British and Caribbean literature and culture, postcolonial studies and contemporary Romanian and Eastern European literature in translation. As a poet, she has published two collections in Romanian and was awarded a prize for poetic eloquence by the American Cultural Center in April 2005. She is also a translator and editor, contributing to the multilingual literary magazine Contemporary Literary Horizon.

Originally Published by Galatea Resurrection 25, click here to view article.

Linda Nemec Foster Interviewed on Michigan Public Radio

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Bulgarian photography and Michigan poetry inspire an album

“Cry of Freedom” is an album by Ann Arbor musician Laszlo Slomovits, but it’s not your ordinary record.

The album is actually a collection of poems by Grand Rapids poet and writer Linda Nemec Foster that has been set to music.

Foster’s poetry that is featured on “Cry of Freedom” is from her book Ten Songs from Bulgaria. The poetry is inspired by photographs taken by Jacko Vassilev.

Linda Nemec Foster and Laszlo Slomovitz will perform excerpts from the work at 7 pm tonight at Nicola’s Bookstore in Ann Arbor.

Originally Published by Michigan Radio, Listen to the full story>

Mark Lamoureux on four Cervena Barva Press Chapbooks

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I first became acquainted with Cervena Barva Press through Kevin Gallagher, an author from my own press, who sent me a copy of his Cervena Barva chapbook Isolate Flecks. One of the great things about being an editor of a small press without an editorial hierarchy is that one is the sole arbiter of what gets published, allowing for a very personal array of material. If the author is dead in the 21st century, the editor most certainly is not, with present home-printing and POD technology making it easier than ever before to run a small press out of one’s very own garret, attic, coldwater flat, trailer or apartment. Consequently, small publishing ventures allow us to look into the singular tastes of their respective editors.

Some choose to hone a very specific editorial aesthetic, publishing works that highlight a particular facet of the art, whereas other editors operate primarily by whimsy, publishing whatever disparate works catch their eye and appeal to them. It is the former editorial program I most enjoy, and the one from which I approach my own endeavors at Cy Gist press. Likewise, this seems to be the operating principle of Gloria Mindock, editor of Cervena Barva Press, at least among the chapbooks I have had the opportunity to read: Ten Songs from Bulgaria by Linda Nemec Foster, Isolate Flecks by Kevin Gallagher, The News Today by George Held and A Cure for Suicide by Larissa Shmailo. The presentation of these books is utilitarian and no-nonsense; they are half-letter fold, saddle-stapled chaps with various photographs and/or paintings for cover art. The general aesthetic of the poems is likewise straight-ahead—with the authors employing parse-able syntax and generally left-justified lines. Within this general framework, however, there is considerable diversity amongst these various authors.

Ten Songs from Bulgaria is a series of ten-line ekphrastic poems based on the photographs of Bulgarian photographer Jacko Vassilev. An initial reading without having seen the photographs offered a sometimes lyric, sometimes narrative, always “realistic” glimpse of a continuum filled with history, abstraction and melancholy—the mood I often receive from black and white photographs from Eastern Europe. Within each ten lines an explicit story is told—of dancing bears, the patron saint of pilots, and young shepherds in front of old churches. “Pure art beyond your imagination,” as Foster says in “Cry of Freedom.” Ekphrasic work is best experience alongside its visual counterpart, so I looked up the photographs, which, luckily, all seemed to come from a 2005 Harpers’ Magazine feature. Looked at alongside the photographs, the poems provided a melancholy soundtrack to Vassilev’s sad, expressionistic images. Human eyes stare out at the viewer in many of the photographs, and the poems seem likewise sentient and inhabited. As with all good ekphrastic work, these poems and photographs illuminate each other—like the moon is lit by the sun. It is unfortunate that the small press form and intellectual property laws prohibit the presentation of ekphrastic work alongside its “source” material, since this is the best way to experience such work, and this chapbook is no exception. However, the poems also succeed admirably on their own, and call forth a gloaming mood similar to that of the dimly lit photographs, assisted also by the grey paper stock upon which the chapbook is printed.

Isolate Flecks showcases Gallagher’s compelling narrativity that never uses its transparency as a crutch. A poet of considerable range, he is always satisfying—be it in straightforward, almost nostalgic reminiscences of childhood as in “Luis Tiant Fan Club Album” and “The Kid’s Economy,” or in more abstract moments like “No Parade”: “Under confetti / Of paper records // Stacked mattresses / A mess of peas.” Gallagher’s narrative poems are true songs of New England, which seem to enigmatically capture the essence of the region and its ghosts such as Gloucester’s whose “Gill nets hover the ocean floor / like long volleyball nets.” Likewise, Gallagher casts his nets wide and turns up a menagerie of compelling stories and images at once easily recognizable and mysterious.

At 46 pages, Larissa Shmailo’s A Cure for Suicide pushes the limits of the chapbook size; Shmailo pushes a number of other limits while she’s at it. Seemingly like its author, the small book is a handful. These poems cut a singular figure, obsessed with and at the same time afraid of intimacy. At times brief and breathless and at others expansive and frenetic, Shmailo seems to be in constant motion, “I stutter like an old gun: / Take me / Know / The fast love of my hair.” While at times these poems’ excesses can be cloying, they seem to accomplish their intended effect of leaving the reader bewildered and somewhat breathless. A Cure for Suicide gets considerable mileage out of the lyric ‘I,’ but could have benefited from some slight editing or more frequent variation of pace or pronoun for the sake of counterpoint, such as some of the book’s more atypical, but most satisfying—the sparsely-verbed “Harlem Line” and “Exorcism (Found Poem)”’s quasi-religious litanies, and a few fewer femme-fatale relationship autopsies of the order of “Personal” and “Abortion Hallucination.” Overall, however, the book’s compelling moments outnumber its overly familiar ones.

George Held’s book of ripped-from-the-headlines poems, The News Today does what you expect it to. Held is irate about the things that we educated liberals have been irate about since the 1970’s, with the requisite amount of world weary Baby-Boomer self-consciousness (“We showed up again, our hope as threadbare / As the clothes of the oldest Lefties on parade.”) woven in to assure the reader that the author is not being, like, utopian or something. The News Today is most satisfying in its least-expected and most empathic moments—offering human kindness to the erstwhile astronaut in “Nowacked” or cutting Britney Spears some slack in “O Britney.” It is least satisfying at those times where it offers odes to what seems to be a freshman composition textbook with “big” talking points such as GLOBAL WARMING (“The Glacier and the Canary”) VIOLENCE IN SCHOOLS (“Home Made”) and PATRIOTISM (“Patriotism”). Held is an author content to wear his heart and his politics on his sleeve, but the book’s strongest moments are its most ambiguous—such as the weirdly could-be-perturbed-could-be-into-it rhymed couplets of “Be My Pet” (“Wear a collar, like a collie / Be my lap dog and my dolly”) or the aforementioned “O Britney.”

There should be enough for any reader to laud or lambaste as I have here amongst Cervena Barva’s formidable catalog. Mindock’s editorial eye seems to have something for everyone and the press is inspirational in its apparent doggedness in tough times. Amidst a climate of general nebulousness, any one of these scrappy little (mostly) straight-forward books offers a bit of contrapuntal saltiness to the sweet or a porthole in the general opacity and are certainly worth taking a look at no matter what one’s aesthetic allegiances are.

Originally Published by Gently Read Literature, click here to view article.

Polish-American Writers Reading at the Polish Museum of America

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On February 12, 2009, The Polish Museum of America hosted a reading by five Polish American writers: Anthony Bukoski, Linda Nemec Foster, John Minczeski, Leslie Pietrzyk, and me.

The event was a powerful emotional experience for all of us. Speaking for myself, I know that it’s not often that I have the opportunity to read to an audience of people who share my Polish heritage, and when I do such readings, I always feel a strong connection that is hard to explain. It’s a connection that goes beyond words (whether Polish or English), beyond present circumstances, and beyond borders.

Shortly after the reading, Maria Ciesla, the President of The Polish Museum of America, sent me a note that conveys what, I believe, both the readers and the audience felt that night:

Thank you so much for your successful efforts, and please convey my sincere thanks to Linda, Leslie, John, and Anthony. Guests present are still commenting to me about the uniqueness and artistic fullness of the evening. This was a new and magical event for the PMA, and I can assure you it will not be the last. Despite my being transfixed, I glanced around the Hall and observed the same.

To me personally, your writings parallel so much of my own experience, even though our family did not remain in Chicago’s Polonia. Driving home, I blessed and thanked my parents even more than in the past!

_______________________________

To find out more about the readers who read at the Polish Museum, please double click on their names:

Anthony Bukoski has published five story collections, four with Southern Methodist University Press, including North of the Port and Time Between Trains. Holy Cow! Press recently reissued his first book, Twelve Below Zero, in a new and expanded edition. A Christopher Isherwood Foundation fellowship winner, Bukoski teaches English at the University of Wisconsin-Superior.

Linda Nemec Foster is the author of eight collections of poetry including Amber Necklace from Gdansk (LSU Press), Listen to the Landscape (Eerdmans Publishing), Ten Songs from Bulgaria (Cervena Barva Press). She has received honors from the Academy of American Poets, the National Writer’s Voice, and the Polish American Historical Association. She is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College and currently is a member of the Series’ programming committee.

John Guzlowski writes poems about his family’s experiences in the Nazi concentration camps. His most recent books are Lightning and Ashes and the Pulitzer-nominated Third Winter of War: Buchenwald. His unpublished novel about German soldiers on the Eastern Front has recently been short-listed for the Bakeless Literary Award.

John Minczeski’s books of poetry include Letter to Serafin (Akron University Press), November (Finishing Line Press), Circle Routes (Akron University Press), Gravity (Texas Tech). He’s the winner of the Akron Poetry Prize, a Bush Fellowship, and an NEA fellowship among other prizes. He freelances as a poet in the schools and does occasional adjunct work.

Leslie Pietrzyk is the author of two novels: Pears on a Willow Tree (Avon Books) and A Year and a Day (William Morrow). She teaches at Johns Hopkins and has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf and the Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. She is currently writing a novel about Polish immigrants in Chicago.

 

Originally Published by Writing Polish Diaspora, click here to view article.