poetry

Peace for Ukraine

Today marks exactly three years since Putin launched his most recent war of aggression against Ukraine. The war is senseless – all wars may be said to be senseless, but this one takes the cake. According to the Kyiv Independent, Ukraine has lost roughly 46,000 troops since the invasion began. Russia has lost just shy of 900,000 among those killed and wounded. The number of Ukrainians injured – including civilians – runs into the hundreds of thousands, not to mention the kidnappings, rape and torture victims, and other atrocities perpetrated by the Russians on innocent Ukrainian citizens. May this war end soon, and may it end with justice for Ukraine. Слава Україні! Slava Ukraini!

Below are a few poems I wrote an published during the first months of the war. I repost them here by way of solidarity with Ukraine and its people, as well as those standing with Ukraine on the right side of history.

“On Divination” from Rise Up Review Summer 2022

“Black Ships off Troy” from Kitchen Table Quarterly January 2023

“Reverse Engineering” from Pidgeonholes January 2023

Day Lasts Forever Reviewed in Asymptote

Jason Gordy Walker has written a perceptive and insightful review of Day Lasts Forever for Asymptote. He gives a nice general summation of Dell’Arco’s themes:

Across the collection, many themes abound: the art of laziness, the nature of language, good architecture and the weather, the moon’s propaganda strategy, the heart of the scarecrow or the sunflower or the sundial, Jove and the deadly sins, the importance of life’s simple pleasures, self-isolation and the longing for reconnection, the absurdity of the artist’s life, watermelons and summer nostalgia, the history of Rome, light and darkness, a few unique felines. . . Is there hunting? Yes: some birds get shot. Is there wine? Plenty. 

What’s not to like? Walker concludes with what I take as the highest praise:

As such, this modest, rewarding selection from a vast corpus should be required reading for any serious student of translated poetry, and [Mario dell’Arco]—honorably resolute in the dissemination of his Roman dialect—ought to be placed on the shelf next to Italian legends like Italo Calvino and Eugenio Montale. 

Click on cover to order from World Poetry Books.

I’m not sure if this is a book, a butterfly, or a handful of angels. PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

Day Lasts Forever at the National Library of Rome

On March 12 – Mario dell’Arco‘s 120th birthday – I will take part in a presentation at the National Library of Rome with Marcello Fagiolo dell’Arco, Franco Onorati, Carolina Marconi, Riccardo Duranti & Gemma Costa on the topic of poetic translations from Romanesco. Below is the flyer for the event (in Italian). It is a great honor to be invited to speak about my experience translating the poems of Mario dell’Arco. If you’re in Rome or environs, feel free to drop in!

Starman

One of my favorite photos of him, doing what he loved. Sometime in the 1970s.

Roughly five years ago, then-editor of the journal Verse-Virtual Firestone Feinberg invited me to collect some of the poems I had been writing about my father and add some biographical notes in order to create a ‘portrait’ of him for publication. The ensuing piece, which I called “Starman” after one of the poems I had written (and ripped from the Bowie song of the same title) developed into my first book of poems, Unburial. “Starman” collects poems, biographical sketches and photos of the man who was my father, and whose sudden and premature passing left its mark on me in ways I am – now older than he ever was – perhaps still unable to fully understand.

February 11, 2025 marks thirty-five years without him.

I’ve made an Unburial playlist for anyone who wants to read the book in a different way, in which each poem is paired to a song that is meant to extend it or comment on it. It’s a pretty good playlist, I think!

Of course, my father is very much alive and well in the Romanesco poems of Mario dell’Arco, which I published last November. There are no extant recordings of my father’s voice, and no video footage (that I am aware of), so the poems in Day Lasts Forever serve also as a reimagining of his voice, a way for me to engage in dialogue with him through the medium of translation. You can read a review of the book by Anna Aslanyan in the Times Literary Supplement.

Ti amiamo.

“Light in Late September” at SOFLOPOJO

I have a new poem at SOFLOPOJO – or South Florida Poetry Journal* – called “Light in Late September”. It’s a bit of a companion piece to a poem I wrote a few years ago called “Sestina for the Falling Autumn Light“, a variation on the theme of the changing of the seasons, the waning of the light and the gradual entry into the dark half of the year. My birthday falls in late September, so I guess it’s a time of introspection for me. At that time last year I had just returned from a trip to the United States and was feeling hopful about the future of America and the world. The Harris campaign was in full swing, and it really looked like she had a strong chance at not only winning the election but winning decisively. So it goes.

The poem took its initial inspiration from a walk near my house, in Umbria. The sky was doing its usual late summer light show, full of pinks and deep yellows, streaked with the white of clouds like an artist’s brushstrokes. Swarms of gnats gathered in the dusk. Birds cut across the sky in formation. Later I found that Keats mentioned the gnats in his “Ode to Autumn“, and that image made its way into my poem. (In practice, whatever I’m reading worms its way into whatever I’m writing in one fashion or another.) Fiat lux!

*For future reference, the poem is in the February 2025 Issue, #36, which can be found in their Archives.

Submission Fees and Their Discontents

I have a think-piece – I love that expression – at Mark Danowsky’s newsletter Stay Curious this week. The piece is about submission fees, as the title hints at. I don’t love them, as the title also hints at. Here is a taste:

As a poet with a personal policy of not paying submission fees – except for a good cause or the rare contest fee – the number of journals open to me steadily grows fewer and fewer, not to mention those which have gone defunct. Of course, there are always new journals cropping up to replace them, and while many of them are promising, there is nothing quite like a long-serving journal, one that has survived the storms of time like an old ship, weathered and battle-scarred.

Please read the rest at SC, if you’re interested.

Five Poems at Judith Magazine

We have a convicted criminal in the Oval Office, surrounded by a cabal of oligarchs and sycophants making up a kakistocracy – government by the worst people. Not a day goes by when I don’t ask myself how we got here a second time, and if we will collectively make it to the other side of whatever this is. It’s in such times that the power of art and literature reveals itself more fully, becoming a way to cope with the encroaching darkeness and find a way through the muck.

I have a sheaf of new poems at Judith Magazine, titled “A Failed Synonym for Love”, with a heartfelt introduction by editor Rachel Neve-Midbar, poet and translator of the poems of Vilna ghetto partisan and Israeli poet Abba Kovner. “Happiness”, was written just after the 2024 election. As an added bonus you get to read about how much I love bagels and lox!

No one can predict how bad things will get before they begin to get better again. Everyone must find their own way to resist evil: taking to the streets, calling their congresspeople, practicing everyday human decency – all of these counter the effects of malaise and disempowerment they’d like us to feel. “An artist is an artist”, as the recent song by Skunk Anansie goes, “and they don’t stop being an artist ‘cos of you, you know.” Rise up. Shteyt af!

Day Lasts Forever in the TLS!

Well, it’s been a week with all the mishaguss in the US, the horrible tragedy on the Potomac and so much other madness around the world. I think when something nice happens it’s a good idea to share it. This really surprised me – I wasn’t expecting to Day Lasts Forever to get reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement! The review is quite enthusiastic, almost as if Mario dell’Arco is a super fun poet to discover. (Which he definitely is!) In fact, the reason I committed to translating his poetry was so that other readers could discover him the way I did so many years ago in a secondhand bookshop in Rome. He put a smile on my face, and got me thinking – an irresistible combination in a poet. Here is a taste of the review:

Dell’Arco’s work has been almost unknown to anglophone readers until now. This book-length selection, translated by Marc Alan Di Martino, is a bilingual edition featuring several dozen poems, often just a few lines long, their themes ranging from Rome to love, from solitude to cats. The names of the author and the translator, arranged alongside each other, themselves read like poetry. Di Martino’s imaginative translations refract the light of the originals at unexpected angles, now preserving things (for example, the letters of the alphabet used as hooks in “The Illiterate Fish”), now playing them up, rendering “bruciato” as “burnt to a crisp” or transforming “un peso morto” into “a ball and chain at my feet”.

You can read sample poems from the book here.

“Azulejos” in Pulsebeat 10

Last spring I took a trip to Málaga, Spain with my daughter and some friends to visit a cousin who has lived there for many years. The weather had been beautiful the week before our arrival, but turned cold and rainy and stayed that way the entire week we were there. Consequently, we saw quite a few museums and indoor spaces, including the Picasso Museum, the Museo Carmen Thyssen and the Málaga Museum.

I hadn’t been to Spain for many years, and it was great to be back despite the weather. After the trip I wrote a poem about Spain, attempting to get my art around some of the complexities of the place, its culture and its history. The poem is titled ‘Azulejos’, and takes its name from the brightly colored ceramic tiles one often sees in Spain and Portugal. It was recently published in Pulsebeat, a wonderful online journal from Detroit. Many thanks to editor David Stephenson for curating it. 🐂

(Portrait of a girl in a headscarf, Museo de Málaga)

Click image to go to Pulsebeat.

Still Life with City Turns Three Today! 🎆

January 20, 2025 will be remembered for many reasons, and most of them bad. As we brace for whatever’s coming, I’m celebrating Still Life with City‘s third birthday! In summer 2022, my sister and I organized a book drive to send aid to Ukraine. Somehow we were able to drum up a few hundred dollars with this book, which we sent to beleaguered writers in Odesa. It may not be much, but one does what one can. It’s pretty affordable for a poetry book, so why not take a chance on it? Слава Україні!