Poem of the Week, by Reiner Kunze
Friends, if you’re interested in taking a one-day creative writing workshop with me, I’m teaching two of them in Minneapolis next month. May 5: The Freedom of Form. May 6: Writing through Pivotal Points. Click this link for more information and to register. I’d love to see you there!
Long ago I wanted to write a book with an underlying theme of superheroes, but I was stuck. So I asked my son, then a teenager, this question: “What, in your opinion, is the most essential trait of a superhero?” His answer was immediate and clear: “A super villain.”
Forces that oppose each other hold great power in their opposition. Think of our current political nightmare, which pits one force against the other as if those who don’t think like you must be your enemy. But opposition doesn’t have to mean conflict and scorn and hatred. Most oppositional forces in the world, at core, work together to create something bigger than themselves. My grandmother was an incredible cook; my grandfather was an incredible washer of dishes. My friend is a wonderful driver; her wife is a wonderful navigator. My dog needed a long walk every afternoon; I needed to get out of the house. And on and on and it goes. Poem of the Week, by Reiner Kunze.
Two Rowing, by Reiner Kunze, translated by Birgitt Kollmann
Two rowing
a boat
One
knowledgeable about the stars
the other
knowledgeable about the storms.
One
will lead through the stars
the other
will lead through the storms
And at the end
at the very end
the sea will be blue in memory.
For more information on Reiner Kunze, please click here.
For more information on renowned translator Birgitt Kollmann, please read this lovely post about her by one of her English “translatees”.
Five years ago this week my older daughter and I were sitting on the porch of a cafe in Istanbul, smoking a hookah and eating mezes and pita bread. Later, we walked the streets of our neighborhood, which was on the Bosphorus. At one point the muezzins began their call to prayer, the sound of their voices wafting over the stone walls and cobblestones of that vast and sprawling city. The sun was falling below the horizon and my daughter was walking ahead of me, her tumble of dark curls falling over her navy jacket, and my heart seized up in a familiar way, the way it has seized up my entire life, when the world is too beautiful and you want to stop and freeze it but the minutes are passing and passing and passing regardless.
It’s been almost a week now. I washed your blankets and hung them on the line. The mats and small rugs we scattered around on the wood floors to help you with traction are stored away. The Painter put your bed in the storage room and washed your food and water bowls. Neither of us can talk about you in public, so we don’t.
Once, a long time ago, I went to a jumprope exhibition in the gym of a middle school. There were teams of tandem jumpers, rope dancers, and synchronized twirling. The students had practiced for many weeks prior to the exhibition. This was back in the days of big VHS camcorders, and I had one on my shoulder so I could record the coolest moments. At the very end of the competition, the gym floor cleared and a single jump roper entered the room from a side door. One of his legs was twisted up behind his head –it looked effortless, he was that flexible and agile–and he did so many tricks so fast and so well, jump-roping the whole time, that I kept the camcorder trained on him. The crowd burst into a roar. 
What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, by Lesley Nneka Arimah. Holy crud, but this woman can write! I don’t often read short story collections, mostly because a short story sucks me in so completely and then poof, it’s over, and I have to gather up emotional energy to read the next one. But these stories flow one into another in an almost novelistic way, even though each features different characters. Set in Nigeria, the U.S. and elsewhere, this book is about the ties –of family, of love, of misery, of geography– that bind us. Astonishingly good.
A child I didn’t have has been with me throughout my adult life. He has grown up without me in a shadow world that exists within this world: invisible but close by. In dreams he stands in the doorway of a room I’m writing in, his feet on the doorsill, never stepping into the room itself. He’s tall now, and lean, and always smiling. The fact that he never existed makes him no less real to me. Every one of Ross Gay’s poems goes straight to my heart, but none quite like this. 
names and roles taken directly from a seriously cheesy VHS TV series called Ewoks (which I probably found for a quarter at a garage sale). What I remember most is my daughter’s bright eyes as she tromped around the house after her older brother, who was always kind to her.
We used to call them the funnies, and I have a memory of sitting on my dad’s big lap while he folded the newspaper in half, then quarters, so he could read them to me. This would have been on a Sunday, because I remember the strips as being full-color. I still read the daily comics, even though most of them are terrible – tired, unfunny, boring, and retreading the same exact ground for decades on end. Once in a while a strip comes along that’s electrifyingly good –Calvin & Hobbes, Boondocks, Cul de Sac–but they don’t last long, usually because their creators have the courage to cancel them when they’ve run out of steam. So I read out of habit, with no expectation of transcendence. But every once in a while one of them pierces my heart, like today’s Pearls Before Swine, by Stephan Pastis.
Alison McGhee 