Wherefore art thou Rosenberg?

The idea that many people coming in from Europe in the early 20th century changed their names at Ellis Island -- or had their names changed for them by immigration — is a persistent one. Immigrants’ names were supposedly switched out for names that could be more easily spelled by Americans or that obscured their ethnicity (or Jewishness). 

Yet there is counter evidence, says Sara Lipton. "A fine scholarly book [A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: a history of Jewish name changing in America by Kirsten Fermaglich] … definitively proved that no names were changed at Ellis; they were changed by legal petition [by the immigrants themselves] between 1920 and 1960.” Nevertheless, Lipton also notes, “many [contemporary Jews] indignantly insist[] that their own family names were indeed changed at Ellis Island.”

“My own father openly told his children that he changed his name because of anti-Semitism,” says Lipton, clearly skeptical of those claiming the changes were imposed. “I doubt he was alone in being so forthright.” Those who changed names, then, wanted to be less a target for the haters. But wouldn’t it be particularly humiliating to change your name for this reason? Where’s your pride in your heritage? Would it make a difference if you felt little connection to the name you were leaving behind? That would make abandoning it easier, wouldn’t it?

“[I]t is worth noting that the names Jews surrendered … were of relatively recent origin. Eastern and Central European Jews only assumed surnames in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Austrian, Prussian, and Russian laws required them to do so. … [N]ames like Rosenberg, Greenberg, and Lefkowitz were surely not essential links to [honored forefathers]. Isn’t it possible that Jews fleeing persecution and pogroms might have felt little attachment to names imposed by the very governments that had persecuted them, derived from towns and landscapes from which they fled? That they might bear the name Rose no less proudly than Rosenberg?”

By the way, in reference to the Shakespeare-derived title of this post, “wherefore” doesn’t mean “where” but rather “why.” Thus the title post could be rewritten, “Why are you called Rosenberg?”

source: 

“The Jewish Authenticity Trap” by Sara Lipton

The New York Review of Books, November 24, 2022, v.LXIX n.18

Jesus, failed writer

I wasn’t sure what to make of Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure. Much of the essay is stories of writers down on their luck, the implication being that’s the standard situation. He stretches that to include famous and bestselling writers by suggesting they, too, often feel undervalued and ill-done-by. Marche digs back into history for the misfortunes of Herman Melville and Jane Austen, then much farther back to ancient China when Tu Fu and Li Po (or Du Fu and Li Bai, as Marche’s choice of transliteration spells them) wandered the nation trying to put together a living, or even back to Confucius who, it seems, couldn’t find a new patron and, one gets the sense, starved to death. The essay culminates with a paragraph on the Son of God:

Jesus Christ may be the most failed writer. He preached love as clearly and as evocatively as possible. In return, his friends betrayed him, his people turned against him, the authorities crucified him. After his death, his disciples gathered a bunch of his speeches into a handful of potted biographies that contradict one another and their world took to massacring his own people on the basis of what they thought he meant. Two thousand years later, Jesus has over a billion devoted fans. They get together, sometimes once a week or more, to read his stuff out loud* to each other. A career could not have gone much worse or better.

Well, that takes your thesis to the apex, Mr Marche. After reading the above I was even less sure what I was to take away. I don’t aspire to Jesus-level consequences for my work. I don’t even dream of paying the bills with my writing. I do suffer. Yeah. There’s that.

source:

On Writing and Failure

or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer

by Stephen Marche

2023. Biblioasis, Windsor ONT Canada

*update 10/10/23: David in a comment notes that I posted this as "out lout" -- perhaps Jesus fans were trying to out lout each other? It was merely I typo so I am correcting it. Funny tho.

“the closest thing … to love”

There aren’t a lot of records of true gay love stories, the farther back you go, the fewer. And far back includes living memory. While browsing the stacks of the Doe Library at UC Berkeley, I came across A Union Like Ours, Scott Bane’s new biography of two men and their marriage-in-all-but-name. F. O. Matthiessen sounded vaguely familiar. He was famous in mid-century, a well-known and somewhat radical academic. He seems to be credited with the founding of American Studies, American history and literature as a worthy discipline, a change from the up-to-then taken for granted Europeward raptured gaze. The other man in A Union Like Ours is Russell Cheney, a painter who achieved his greatest recognition as a regional painter, of Maine mainly.

Frank (the F. of F. O.) and Russell met on a transAtlantic crossing, and quickly fell in love. They built a life together, which lasted twenty years. When Russell died of a heart attack in the house they shared, Frank was stricken. Says author Bane about Frank’s decision to remain:

Matthiessen acknowledged that being in the house was painful, but he opted to stay there instead of going away because, as he described to a friend, his pain was the closest thing he had to love.

Pain is a powerful sensation. I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer numbness, but philosophically I get it. 

source: 

A Union Like Ours: the love story of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney

by Scott Bane

2022. Bright Leaf / University of Massachusetts Press, Boston MA

Oz and vampires

In an interview Charlaine Harris (author of the vampire mystery books filmed for HBO as True Blood) says a major influence was the Oz books:

“Frank Baum’s Oz books fed my imagination in a good way,” she says. “I read them over and over. I am still trying to find a way to work Princess Langwidere into a book.”

When I read that to long-time Oz Club friend Peter Hanff, Peter pointed out that I pronounced “Langwidere” to rhyme with “here.” Rhyme it with “there,” and you get a woman with a “languid air,” Peter said. 

Langwidere (who appeared in the book Ozma of Oz) wore a different head for every occasion. This was played for laughs in the book, but the makers of the Disney movie, Return to Oz, didn’t have to take the concept and character far for horror to manifest. I imagine Charlaine Harris would accentuate the fearful prospect of collecting undead heads, but I don’t know, I haven’t read any of her books. True Blood was fun.   

source:

Publishers Weekly

May 8, 2023

“a seemingly endless procession of …”

I grew up with the Soviet Union as the great antithesis of the US. Often a literalist I was confused by the conflation of the USSR and Russia. Were they one and the same or two entities? Within the USSR’s sphere of influence were other nations with their own names, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and so on. But the USSR itself was usually just called “Russia” despite there being entities within the USSR (regions or republics) that had different names — Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc. I couldn’t have named them all. I remember analogizing them to the states of the US. Texas was big like Russia was big, and Rhode Island was tiny like Estonia, but the USA was a single unit, America, the individual states no less America, and far from being independent nations. Of course, I grew up a century after the US Civil War when the South tried to remove itself from that America, and thought surely such ancient history did not impinge on the present. The Soviet Union’s formative struggles were rather more recent, but seemed to me equally settled. 

In the 1980s there were various movements to cool the antagonism between the USA and the USSR, from the Nuclear Freeze to the building of sister city connections. My own small Northern California town of Sebastopol developed a sister city connection with Cherkasy in the Ukraine. I attended an event or two to see photographs of Cherkasy and talk to people from Sebastopol who went there. Everybody with any authority always used “Russia” as shorthand for “USSR,” so I let my thinking subsume the other republics under that name. Sebastopol had a sister city in Russia, I said to myself. 

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and, soon thereafter, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the non-Russian Soviet Socialist Republics began to reassert individual identities. The Baltic States were the noisiest about it, as I recall. Suddenly I knew the names Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as something other than words on a map.

Ukraine’s independence, however, looked unlikely. Wasn’t it virtually Russia? Ukraine’s first years of independence did appear to be in name only, Russia seemingly dictating the nation’s politics and policies. I noticed the Orange Revolution and the subsequent Maidan, and I rooted for positive change, but it really wasn’t until Russia invaded Ukraine that I had a clear idea of Ukraine being Not Russia. I have followed the prosecution of the war, and it’s clear how horrendous the Russian army is being and the lies Russian leader Vladimir Putin has spewed to justify the attack. But what exactly was Ukraine? Wasn’t it “The Ukraine”? (The definite article is not an official part of the country’s name but an artifact of translation.)

I have finally read a history of Ukraine, Anna Reid’s Borderland. The Ukrainian language is different from Russian, though closely related. Most Ukrainians are bilingual in Ukrainian and Russian — although the very large Russian ethnic minority in the country tends to be monolingual in Russian. Language is an indicator of identity. If your community speaks one language and the community across the way speaks another, the two communities are a long way toward being ethnically distinct. 

I knew something of the horrors of the 20th century in the USSR — the famines caused by agricultural collectivization, the gulag, the two invasions of the Germans. But in reading Borderland (a translation of the word “Ukraine”) I could see these horrors being visited specifically on Ukraine, not just Russia. It was worse in Ukraine than in Russia — one reason being that Russia considered Ukrainians to be lesser than themselves. Genocidal policies were imposed on Ukraine by the Russian regime partly to prevent Ukraine from being anything other than a sidecar of Russia. I got the feeling that Russians were afraid Ukrainians could assert themselves as Not Russia, while at the same time Russia tried to claim no belief in Ukraine at all.

I am not going to try to recapitulate Ukraine’s history here. I have to admit I am still disambiguating the two countries. But having now read something of the history I am clear that the people of Ukraine deserve a future uncoupled from Russia. 

Here’s a passage from Borderland describing the early days of the Maidan protests, which led to the ouster of President Yanukovych, and inaugurated a new era for Ukraine. As Ukraine was turning toward the West, Russia gobbled up the Crimean Peninsula, and occupied a band of territory in Ukraine’s East (2015). Ukraine has essentially been at war with Russia in the years since. In February 2022 Russia, however, majorly escalated, seeking to swallow everything it hadn’t yet taken.But the nastiness was in the future when the Maidan protests against Yanukovych began. (A maidan is a city square, and Kyiv’s main square was the gathering place.) 

Bounded by barricades, the protests initially had a music festival air. On the Maidan itself, green canvas tents filled the area round the fountains where in normal times elderly men gather to play chess. Facing the Stalinist Ukraine Hotel, a covered sound stage hosted an almost round-the-clock stream of speakers and performers. Ruslana, winner of the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest, appeared night after night, leading the crowds in the national anthem. So did rock bands, folk singers, children’s choirs, Cossack drummers and a seemingly endless procession of poets.

“A seemingly endless procession of poets.” Yes! Suddenly Ukraine felt real to me. 

source: 

Borderland: a journey through the history of Ukraine

Anna Reid 

1997, 2015. Basic Books / Perseus, New York

“substitute meat”

As the Save the Whales campaigns gradually reduced the number of nations committed to continued whaling, those that refused to sign on became more and more noticeable — and obviously intransigent. The standouts seemed to be the Soviet Union, Norway, and Japan. Although Russia remains pro-whaling, it has not returned to the hunt after the Soviet Union mothballed its whaling fleet in the late 80s. Whaling was not economic. The Soviet Union could subsidize money-sucks, until it couldn’t. Japan still can. Whaling does not pay its way in Japan; there is not much of an internal market and there is no international market. According to Rebecca Griggs in her book Fathoms: the world in the whale, great quantities of surplus whale meat is sitting in gigantic freezers in Japan. Yet every year Japan sends its whaling fleet to drag more bodies out of the drink. 

I was always curious about what made Japan so adamant about continuing to hunt whales. I remember some sort of vague story about how whaling was traditional in Japan and the Japanese were not about to let outsiders dictate what traditions they could maintain. Griggs visits an expert on Japan who tells the author the “tradition” doesn’t really go back very far:

Toward the tail end of World War II and into the 1960s, Japan experienced a food crisis born of the wartime decimation of supply chains and the Japanese agricultural sector. … US overseer general Douglas MacArthur urged recommencing Antarctic whaling, not only for nutritional reasons but also to retrofit and repurpose Japanese naval vessels, decommissioned as per terms of surrender. The Japanese people were starving and crippled by vitamin deficiencies, whale meat served in elementary and middle schools helped bring young people back to health. Though, in time, the Japanese turned away from this substitute meat, its association with the ideals of self-reliance, and restored pride, have never entirely been dropped.

Whale meat may still bring a warm feeling to those born in the middle of the 20th century — “Why, I remember when I was fed whale meat in my school lunch; boy, did that keep me from starving!” — but few people actually buy it when it shows up in the market. 

Norway’s whaling “traditions” may go back to the Vikings, but so what? All sorts of bad things can be justified by saying we’ve been doing them for a long time. Is the whaling industry paying for itself? Considering that whale meat is increasingly contaminated with heavy metals and other poisons, human made pollution which accumulates in the animals at the top of the food chain, fewer and fewer people want to risk eating it. For some reason ending the hunt is politically toxic in Norway. So it likely doesn’t matter whether there’s a market. 

source:

Fathoms: the world in the whale

by Rebecca Giggs

2020. Simon & Schuster, New York

word of the day: swink

word of the day: swink

context:

Swink how we may, evenings or early morn, 

Our garden crops bring only a bare return.

— lines from a poem by Fan Ch’eng-ta, translated by Gerald Bullett

definition (Collins): labor; toil

While one unfamiliar with the word can figure out a working definition from the context, I do wonder about translators who use such unfamiliar terms in the destination language. 

source:

Anthology of Chinese Literature: from early times to the fourteenth century

edited by Cyril Birch

1965. Grove Press, New York

word of the day: floccinaucinihilipilification

word of the day: floccinaucinihilipilification

context: 

Ferdinand and Isabela [ruled that Columbus] could not be allowed to retain the monopoly of transatlantic navigation. Apparently, though not explicitly in any surviving document, they decided that he had broken his contract by failing to deliver his promises. They added a dextrous piece of floccinaucinihilipilification. Columbus had forfeited his right of monopoly on the coast discovered on his third voyage because ill health had prevented him from landing and taking possession in person.

definition (Cambridge Dictionary): the act of considering something to be not at all important or useful. It's an 18th-century coinage that combines four Latin prefixes meaning "nothing."

While it’s a fun word — one I’ve never seen used before — I don’t quite see how its meaning is appropriate in the context of the quote. It seems to me the Spanish crown decided Columbus failed to do something important. Presumably the crown was looking for an excuse to undo Columbus’ rights-by-discovery, and they found one. Perhaps it is Felipe Fernandez-Armesto  (the author I’m quoting) who considers the technicality to be elevated from its prior floccinaucinihilipilification. 

source: Amerigo: the man who gave his name to America

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

2007. Random House, New York

Reading Dorothy in Tehran

“How did it start, this relationship with America?” Azar Nefisi asks herself in an essay in The New Yorker.  “When I was a young girl, in Tehran, my English tutor told me the story of the Wizard of Oz. It was the first time I had heard of America, of Kansas, and of cyclones.” 

Nefisi doesn’t say whether she read The Wizard of Oz later on her own, or if she at some point saw the MGM movie. But, of course, The Wizard of Oz is only one of the American books that moved her — and we’re talking rather literally here. Nefisi left Iran for the United States.

“America somehow encourages [the] vagabond self,” the author reflects, “and that is why so many people who migrate feel at home here: they can be outsiders yet still belong. Years before I became an American, I had already made my home in the imaginary America. …”

Unlike Dorothy in Wizard Nefisi’s journey was intentionally chosen. Dorothy came around on that front, though. In The Road to Oz, for instance, Dorothy finds herself standing at a crossroads, paths branching off in several directions. She thought she knew the way, but now finds herself confronting choices she hadn’t imagined. But she doesn't panic. This isn’t her first time wandering lost through a strange and magical countryside. Dorothy accepts that she has a ways to go before she finds home again; she chooses a path and moves on. 

Nefisi says she has given other answers when people have asked her why she decided to become a citizen. But this one could be true, too.“Could I have said I became a citizen,” Nefisi wonders, “because of Dorothy and Oz?”

Azar Nefisi is best known for Reading Lolita in Tehran. 

source: “Vagabond Nation” by Azar Nafisi

The New Yorker, April 18, 2011, v. LXXXVII n.9

when you go looking for a happy story

In 2015 the son of an Ivory Coast celebrity got legally married to another man in the United States. I am sure there were Ivorians who quietly congratulated the happy couple, but, you know how it is in this homophobic world, the voices the media found to comment said mean things. 

Roger Fulgence Kassy was “a television personality credited with launching the careers of a number of famous Ivorian performers,” according to Robbie Corey-Boulet. Thierry Kassy was the son. I googled him to see if I could find any positive coverage, maybe a wedding announcement naming his husband. 

Unfortunately what I found was an article reporting Thierry Kassy’s death. According to Presse Cote d’Ivoire, “Thierry Kassy, the only son of the famous Ivorian TV host the late Roger Fulgence Kassy died in the United States of America as a result of Covid 19. The information was made public on Saturday, April 11 [2020] by reggae artist Serge Kassy on his Facebook profile.” (Thanks, Google Translate)

My condolences to Thierry Kassy's husband, family and friends. 

source:

Love Falls on Us: a story of American ideas and African LGBT lives

by Robbie Corey-Boulet

2019. Zed Books, London UK

“human beings who can do what they like”

As I said in my Feb 16 post, LGBT news out of Africa is usually bad. The author Robbie Corey-Boulet offers a quote from a Ugandan politician that manages to be both bad news and good news. 

In 2011 the Obama administration made supporting LGBT rights a priority worldwide. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton said gay rights are human rights. 

John Nagenda, who Robbie Corey-Boulet identifies as “a senior adviser to President Yoweri Museveni,” was quoted in the international press calling “homosexuality … taboo, it’s something anathema to Africans.”

I remember hearing something like this. Nagenda even calls the Obama/Clinton position “abhorrent.”

Along with the murder of gay activist David Kato that same year, Nagenda’s unequivocal denunciation of justice for gay people makes Uganda seem a hellhole for sexual minorities. 

But Robbie Corey-Boulet says Nagenda’s full statement, not disseminated as widely, sounds more hopeful:

A very, very slowly increasing number of Ugandans, and I am one of them, see homosexuals as full human beings who can do what they like in private, between consenting adults. But people look at me like I am a very funny fish when I say these things, even in my own household.

The path to the revocation of legal sanctions against LGBT people was a long and slow process, even where our rights are fully recognized. The US, sadly, has not yet gotten all the way to full recognition. But we’ve come a long way. As for Africa, it is a big place, a land of many cultures and nations. There will be change for the better in some places, for the worse in others. But I do hope “very, very slowly” can speed up. 

source:

Love Falls on Us: a story of American ideas and African LGBT lives

by Robbie Corey-Boulet

2019. Zed Books, London UK

Notes toward an autobiography by others

“I am still someone who absent-mindedly reads aloud from any sign I see, as if it is some way of learning where I am.” 

I sometimes read aloud random words we pass as we’re driving along. I rarely do it when I’m driving, I note, but when I am in the passenger seat, my attention is a little loose and catches on things. Kent will say, “What?” And I will say, “Oh. Sorry. I was just reading a random sign.”

Alexander Chee in the quote above says, “it is some way of learning where I am.” For me I think it’s just reading, which I do a lot. There I am going over the landscape, reading it, and sometimes the landscape features words; the words go into my eyes and fall out of my mouth. It’s not really talking to myself. It’s more reflexive than that, like saying Mm when you run your fingers over a silky surface.

source:

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: essays

by Alexander Chee

Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York

Tecumsay Roberts, pop star, martyr?

The LGBT news out of Africa is typically bad. Homophobes, hate crimes, terrible laws. How bad it really is there is hard to gauge from outside. Africa is a big place. There are a lot of people in it, a lot of very different cultures/languages/ethnic groups in quite a range of environments. One can’t really say something about “Africa” and be right. European colonialism left many legacies, anti-gay laws, especially in former British territories, being one of the bad. 

In his book on three African countries, Liberia, Cameroon, and Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivoire), Robbie Corey-Boulet tries to give his readers some perspective. These countries are on the continent’s western coast. Liberia and Ivory Coast share a border, Cameroon roughly a two day drive from Ivory Coast. Not that far, considering African distances — and roads. 

Tecumsay Roberts was a Liberian pop star. His “hits would be familiar to anyone who so much as set foot in a nightclub in Monrovia [Liberia’s capital] in the 1980s,” says Corey-Boulet. The author compares Roberts to Michael Jackson. “The cover photo for his single ‘Comin’ Home’ is a mirror image of Jackson’s iconic ‘Thriller’ album cover. It shows Roberts in a white blazer, lying diagonally across the frame, staring into the camera, his face less severe than Jackson’s but similarly captivating.”

Roberts “was trailed by whisperings that he was gay.” So was Jackson, of course. But the rumors derailed neither career. 

Sadly, Liberia was plunged into civil war in 1989. Queer people are often scapegoats in times of trouble. One of the rebel armies “arrested Roberts … in 1990. [Roberts and his brother] had gone out looking for food when they were stopped … After complimenting Tecumsay on his music, [the rebel military leader] told him to get in the car and go with the convoy to a rebel base to sing for his fighters.”

Testimony to the post-war truth and reconciliation commission revealed that Tecumsay Roberts was suspected of being gay by this leader, so was murdered. His body was never recovered. 

Anti-gay rhetoric has continued to this day. Robbie Corey-Boulet doesn’t quite call Tecumsay Roberts a martyr to the LGBT cause, but that’s not hard to figure. 

Liberia was founded as an African American African colony, and the people there still look across the Atlantic as to a motherland, Corey-Boulet says. The changes in the status of gay people in the US has not gone unnoticed. Just as here, change has been difficult. Many in the gay community have not welcomed public discussion — and exposure, even when (as with human rights groups and, at times, the US State Department) the attention has been benevolent. When no one really notices you’re there, no one attacks you. At least, not as a group. But change has come, some of it good. In Liberia, as in most of Africa, the laws remain hostile, but Corey-Boulet sees signs of hope. Explicitly anti-gay political campaigns seem to sputter out. Although gay sex remains illegal, proposed additional penalties have failed to be enacted. 

source:

Love Falls on Us: a story of American ideas and African LGBT lives

by Robbie Corey-Boulet

2019. Zed Books, London UK

Bad Weather

In an essay exploring possible turning points in the life of philosopher William James, Louis Menand defines Depression the way I do:

Commentators prefer to assume that [William] James was despondent in the years after his graduation from medical school because of some problem — a family problem, a sexual problem, a career problem, an identity problem, a philosophical problem. But depression is not a problem; it’s a weather pattern. Under its cloud, everything else is a problem. When the weather changes, these problems disappear or become ‘opportunities’ or ‘challenges’ — until dark skies return.

Depression can certainly be triggered by events in one’s life. You may be able to pinpoint the thing that “made” you sad. But if you can’t, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. There might not be a concrete causal factor. Even if you find something you think must have brought it on, addressing it directly often does not blow the Depression away. Sometimes all you can do is endure until the bad weather passes. 

source:

American Studies

by Louis Menand

2002. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York

Think how?

Alexander Chee took a writing class at Wesleyan from Annie Dillard. In an essay describing his experience Chee lays out a lot of Dillard’s precepts on how to write well. 

In this passage Dillard is pushing her students to go back over their writing with one particular feature in mind:

Have you used the right verbs? Is that the precise verb for that precise thing? Remember that adverbs are a sign that you’ve used the wrong verb. Verbs control when something is happening in the mind of the reader. Think carefully.

Wait. What just happened? 

The last two words in the original text are a bit hidden. The whole written out goes: “Think carefully — when did this happen in relation to that? And is that how you’ve described it?”

You’d think, if the adverb was meant as a joke, it would stand on its own, not be tidied behind two concluding questions. But, hey, I laughed.

source:

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: essays

by Alexander Chee

2018. Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York

Best Poems of 2022

Sherwin Bitsui   …..   “Coyote howls canyons into windows …”

Sherwin Bitsui   …..   “The vowels of the starved”

Yosu Buson   …..   three haiku

Kaga no Chiyo (Chiyo-ni)   …..   three haiku

Lydia Davis   …..   Bloomington

Kobayashi Issa   …..   five haiku

Kajetan Kovic   …..   Black Prayer

Jeanne Lupton   …..   four tanka

Jeanne Lupton   …..   four tanka from Numbered Breaths

Jeanne Lupton   …..   three more tanka

Michael Martin   …..   My  Bobcat Skid-Steer Loader Is My Therapy

Meeraji   …..   Call of the Sea

Brane Mozetic   …..   “I fell into a depressing reverie …”

Sheila E. Murphy   …..   “Least amount of air along the walk”

Sheila E. Murphy   …..   “I’m writing this to fathom pleasure”

Milorad Pavic   …..   Seventh Song from Holy Mass for Relja Krilatica

Susan Polizotto   …..   haiku: “She isn’t seeking”

Sandi Pray   …..   haiku: “River clean-up”

Hattori Ransetsu   …..   haiku: “one blossom of plum”

Minal Sarosh   …..   haiku: “Frying kebabs”

Antoinette Scudder   …..   Tea Making

Senryu by anonymous poets   …..   eight sentry

Kelly Shaw   …..   haiku: “Trickling roof leak”

Shiki   …..   three haiku

Masaoka Shiki   ….. haiku: “poppies bloom”

Kim Shuck   …..   The Overseers of Complexity

Dubravko Skurla   …..   Two Shores

Milivoj Slavicek   …..   Once More We Talked a Long Time I and the River

Clark Strand   …..   haiku: “The bathtub spider”

Dietmer Tauchner   …..   haiku: “thaw”

Peter Tchouhov   …..   haiku: “candlelit church”

Paul Violi   …..   Melodrama

Yokoi Yayu   …..   two haiku

*****

I started my own personal anthology of other people’s poems back in 1989. I wanted a source of poems I really loved. When I come across a poem that strikes me just right I tuck a placemark in next to it. I go back to that poem and reread it and reread it. Usually I’ve read a poem five or more times before I decide I can’t leave it behind and have to go to the hassle of copying it out by hand. 

On the first day of the year I read aloud all the poems I collected in the previous year. Yes, I read them aloud to myself. 

If you are curious about previous years, follow the “Best Poems of the Year” link.