Spring/Summer 2012

The Drunken Boat ISSN: 1530-7646
Spring/Summer 2012 Vol. 10 Issues I-II

i.

A body and its shadow shared a world
The shadow’s shadow spread over the body
This world was the fusion of possible shadows
And the shadow of each part of this world was itself a fusion of
this world, and only of this world
Shadow, the fusion of shadows make for a living world
When shadow and shadow of shadow no longer merge into one
world that world is dead

ii.

It will be objected that possibly there is nothing rather than
something
And that, if a world is the maximal fusion of all the shadows it contains, there is possibly, through invisible reflection as well as
involution, a world that is absolutely empty
But a world is not a bottle from which light escapes like smoke
A world is a necessary truth, not an explanation
There is no empty world, a world is not even empty when re-
duced to a point that is indescribable

—The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis, by Jacques Roubaud, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop

Fall/Winter 2011 …Translation Issue 2011 … Cave Canem 2008 … Fall/Winter 2007 … Fall/Winter 2006 … Spring/Summer 2006 … Fall/Winter 2005 … 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 … Contributors … Chapbooks … Translation Feature … Reviews … Essays … Artwork … Masthead … Rimbaud … Contact …

GUEST EDITOR’S NOTE

The theme for this Spring/Summer 2012 issue of The Drunken Boat was sourced from Rosemarie Waldrop’s translation of Jacques Roubaud’s The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis. Waldrop’s translation of Roubaud’s book, a follow-up to his Some Thing Black, has fascinated and engaged me for over ten years. Both books are concerned with many things—philosophy, science, being, self/other, death, light—as well as the author’s loss of his young wife, who died at age 31 of a pulmonary embolism. I took a breath of Roubaud’s text and sent it to many poets of various styles, locales, aesthetics, narratives and voices. I wished to see what would arrive and unravel with this bit of language under the tongue, from other poets. This type of project is certainly not new, but it does create its own world or worlds. What is collected here is not empty, but reflective and shadowed and myriad.

–Melissa Buckheit

IN THIS ISSUE:

Samuel Ace
Maya Asher
Naomi Benaron
Debby Jo Blank
Amaranth Borsuk
Marguerite Guzman Bouvard
Lisa Bowden
Paul Braffort
Melissa Buckheit
Simmons B. Buntin
Wendy Burk
D. Phillip Clifford
Lisa M. Cole
Leopoldine Core
Nicholas A DeBoer
Jennifer K. Dick
Michelle Elvy
Julie R. Enszer
Carrie Etter
Kit Fryatt
Janice Gould
Annie Guthrie
Justin Hardecker
Mark Haunschild
HR Hegnauer
Jen Hofer
Gabriela Jauregui
Emma Jones
Karen Klein
Drew Krewer
Sueyeun Juliette Lee
Mark Lee
Rachel Lehrman
Eric Magrane
Kristi Maxwell
Jeevan Narney
Kristen E. Nelson
Sarah Rose Nordgren
Maria Pinto
Sam Rasnake
Eléna Rivera
Yael Shinar
Jennifer Stella
Todd Swift
Shelly Taylor
Scott Thurston
M.E.Wakamatsu
Joni Wallace
Orlando White
Eleanor Wilner

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Features in Previous Issues

Fall/Winter 2011: Interview and selection of poems with Gregory Orr, chapbooks by Melanie Braverman and Abayomi Animashaun, translation feature from the Polish of Mieczysław Jastrun by Dzvinia Orlowsky and Jeff Friedman.

Spring/Summer 2011:
Translation Issue, including new translations of Tedi López Mills, Kiki Dimoula, Sabina Naef, Nathalie Quintane,Yankev Glatshteyn (Jacob Glatstein), Ioulita Iliopoulou, Lêdo Ivo, Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtė, Else Lasker-Schüler. David Leo García, and Sam Hamill.

Spring/Summer 2008:
A feature of Cave Canem poets and faculty, guest-edited by Niki Herd

Fall/Winter 2007 Contemporary Poetry and Translation from Malta. Interviews with Eleni Sikelianos and Cynthia Hogue. Feature of H.D.’s novel The Sword Went Out to Sea, new work by Sikelianos and Hogue, new translations of Roubaud, and more.

Featured Interviews

Emma Jones

“ And then you have these other inbetween – the imagined underwater society, that alternative commonwealth, and the imagined, projected history of the parrot Narcissus, and the shipwreck, and these things are liminal or hybrid or compensatory and mostly sad. Narratives are where we keep our ancestors. Libraries are where we keep our ancestors. Languages contain them, and all these things are zoos…”

Interviewed by Melissa Buckheit

Selection of poems by Emma Jones

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Orlando White

“Coming back to Edmond Jabès, he mentions something to the effect that the moment someone writes on paper, she or he reveals an injury, that somehow ink is a type of bandage and the page is a wound. I understand this as a writer’s process of creating letters, words, sentences, and as this happens with the action of writing, a writer removes layers of her or his external self, too. Ink (rather than as bandage) is skin/flesh and vice versa, and the page is the skeleton… ”

Interviewed by Melissa Buckheit

Poetry by Orlando White

Bone Light

Reviewed by Melissa Buckheit

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Translations

My Hypertropes: Poetry, Translation, and Transversion

Paul Braffort

translated by Amaranth Borsuk and Gabriela Jauregui

Adaptations

by Kit Fryatt

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Featured Chapbooks

WHAT ONE WANTS AND WHAT WILL BE PRESCRIBED WITHOUT ONE SINGLE CENTER FOREVER

photo by Nicholas DeBoer

by Sueyeun Juliette Lee and Nicholas DeBoer

Choir of the Gone

by Lisa Bowden

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Transmedia/Multi-media

One Week of Poems from Front Page News

by Jen Hofer

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thicket with swan and blue fist:

Video Poem

by Joni Wallace

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Disability, Poetry, ASL, and Me

by Maya Asher

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Documentary Poetics

excerpt from AWAKE, ALERT, ORIENTED