The Drunken Boat Fall/Winter 2005

The Drunken Boat ISSN: 1530-7646
Fall/Winter 2005 Vol.5, Issue III-IV

This issue is dedicated to Vizma Belševica, Klāvs Elsbergs, and Pēteris Zirnītis
who died serving the Word.

Spring/Summer 2005 … Fall/Winter 2004 … Spring/Summer 2003 … Winter 2003 … Fall 2002 … Summer 2002 … Spring 2002 … Winter 2002 … Fall 2001 … Summer 2001 … Spring 2001 … Winter 2000 … Spring 2000 … Summer 2000 … Fall 2000 … Poetry … Chapbooks … Translations … Columns … Talk … Reviews … Essays … Features … Contributors … Artwork … Links … Index … Masthead … Rimbaud … Submissions … Contact Us …

Latvian Poets

Eduards Aivars
Amanda Aizpuriete
Vizma Belševica
Uldis Bērziņš
Leons Briedis
Ronalds Briedis
Jānis Elsbergs
Klāvs Elsbergs
Inga Gaile
Margita Gailitis
Astrīde Ivaska
Juris Kronbergs
Liāna Langa
Edvīns Raups
Jānis Rokpelnis
Māris Salējs
Knuts Skujenieks
Kārlis Vērdiņš
Māra Zālīte
Inese Zandere
Imants Ziedonis
Pēteris Zirnītis

Latvian Translators

Inara Cedrins
Margita Gailitis
Inguna Jansone
Ieva Lešinska
Ilze Klavina Mueller
Māra Rozītis
J.C. Todd

from Hungary

Sándor Csoóri
translated by Len Roberts, Dr. Anette Márta, Mária Szende, and Lászlo Vertes

from Romania

Ionatan Pirosca
translated by Camelia and Andreea Luncan with Luci Shaw and Jeanne Murray Walker

Teofil Stanciu

from Russia

Inna Lisynanskaya
translated by Karen Blomain and Maya Petrukhina

from Slovenia

Lucija Stupica
translated by Ana Jelnikar, Martha Kosir-Widenbauer, and Janko M. Lozar

from the Ukraine

Alexander Dovzhenko
translated by Dzvinia Orlowsky

from the U.S.

Abayomi Animashaun
Aliki Barnstone
Eve Grubin

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Recent Issues

Spring/Summer 2005

Interview with Mairéad Byrne

And featuring her chapbook length poem THE WEATHER

Interview with Joy Harjo

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Upcoming Issue

Spring 2005 will feature contemporary Chinese poets from Macao, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Mainland China, including a number of Chinese poets living abroad.

Feature of Latvian Poetry

To Be the Roots

“A language dies as one might expect: the weak find they must speak to the strong in the language of the strong. According to linguist Michael Krauss, director of the Alaska Native Language Center, as many as 3,000 languages will go silent in this century. Three thousand languages, comprising half of all the words on earth, will slip from utility into coded secrets and then into disuse. . .But what of “little” languages, like Latvian, perhaps threatened but not on the verge of extinction, languages spoken by millions, rather than hundreds or thousands? What preserves these languages, keeps humans listening, during times of hostile occupation, so they continue, in the words of poet Vizma Belševica, “To be the roots. In subsoil where never a ray/Descends.”
By J.C. Todd

Selection of Contemporary Latvian Poetry
Edited by J. C. Todd and Margita Gailitis

GRATITUDE and Other Poems
by Vizma Belševica

Text As Participation and Other Poems

by Uldis Bērziņš

from Cook Up Something Transitory for Me
by Edvīns Raups

from “Collected Works” Book I
by Knuts Skujenieks

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Featured Presses

&#268ervená Barva Press was founded in April 2005. The press publishes books of poetry, fiction, plays, chapbooks, broadsides, and poetry postcards from writers around the world.
by Gloria Mindock

Cutthroat, a Journal of the Arts is the new literary swimmer spawned in the Four Corners Area. As Poetry Editor, William Pitt Root says, “Among clear-running Western streams still carving their way through the Rockies, ‘Cutthroat’ refers to the beautiful & endangered trout Richard Brautigan described as ‘precious intelligent metal,’ the species technically known as Salmo clarki. . . ”
by Pamela Uschuk, Editor In Chief

Interviews

On The Importance of Whitman,
Responsibilities of Poets, Cultural & Ethical Relativism, And Living As A Poet in Las Vegas:

“It is a huge failure of the imagination and of the human spirit to make war, with the rationale that certain people have to lose for a greater good. Maybe that’s true. Maybe certain people have to suffer for some greater good. Maybe that’s true, I’d like to think that maybe not. Maybe people have to sacrifice for some greater good, but the idea that you have to punish the innocent for some kind of greater good, I think that is a failure of the human imagination and a failure of the human spirit to say that that must happen. . . ”
An interview with Aliki Barnstone .
By Abayomi Animashaun.

And featuring the poems of Eva Victoria Perrera, an imaginary poet created by Aliki Barnstone.

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Recommended Reading

The Imaginary Poets
Edited by Alan Michael Parker
and featuring his
Introduction.

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Essays

In Defense of a Poetics of Witness:

“Greek survivors and their descendants, including members of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki, with whom I’m in personal contact, are engaged in a valiant effort to break this silence about the Holocaust, seek restitution for lost lives and property, and to make the fact internationally known that Jews have a long and illustrious history in Greece. As Cynthia Ozick says, ‘History is the ground of our being, and together with imagination, that is what makes writing.’ I am writing in the voice of a single person, who is Greek and who lives from 1917-2001. I consider it my ethical responsibility to give careful attention to the history and to bring it to the light in the now. ”
An essay by Aliki Barnstone .

How Eva Victoria Perera Learned To Fly with Chagall:

“In my poems, I want to paint a full picture of an annihilated life, people, and city, and such a portrait includes not just the terror and death of the Shoah, but beauty and love. In Chagall’s work I find a way to mourn, witness, and celebrate.”
An essay by Eva Victoria Perera .

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