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NICHOLAS SAMARAS - POETRY - SPRING 2008 FEATURE  

FEATURE
Debra Allbery
"The Third Image": Constellations of Correspondence in Emily Dickinson, Joseph Cornell, and Charles Simic, an essay on ekphrastic poetry and the notion of poetry and painting as "the sister arts."

Debra Allbery
Three ekphrastic poems: "Courbet," "No Tutor but the North," and "How to Explain a Dead Hare."

POETRY
Betty Adcock
Charles Coté
Martyn Crucefix This marks an author's first online publication
Burt Kimmelman
Eric Pankey
Michael Salcman
Nicholas Samaras This marks an author's first online publication
Jim Tilley
Gloria Vando
Eleanor Wilner

Interview
A Note on Fictional Truth, a Conversation with Ed Pavlić, by Andrew John McFadyen-Ketchum.

Book Review
"A Change of Maps" by Carolyne Wright—Book Review, by David Rigsbee.

Nicholas Samaras

This marks an author's first online publication Nicholas Samaras won The Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. He has two new manuscripts of poetry, both seeking a publisher. This poem is from SIMKO, a book of poetry written on the life of the Slovakian poet and translator of German Poetry, Mr. Svetozar Daniel Simko.


The Balthus Poems    


A new lesson: Bring words to this picture.
School out for the day, and Daniel Simko's apartment
became night school. Dinner ordered in from corner
restaurants. Music played low on the stereo. Hours to go.

Each evening, Daniel would introduce me to the works
of East European writers, artists, photographers, dissidents.
And the one book that became ritual: The Balthus Poems
by Stephen Dobyns. Then, I'd never heard of either of them.

But don't we all learn by imitation, first? We spent months
with that book, writing our own versions, our descriptions
of the paintings, the parlours and lives, the education
we received in return. Yes, the picture was a room to die in.

We agreed it was Sunday. The air looked like Sunday.
Anyone in the picture could have been the partisan.
Even the woman who had just left that drawn room,
her fragrance still evoking the night, the fog outside.

The silence in the drawing could have been only
her fragrance, or could have been the enigma code needed
to break the war. The white plate on the table, the open
book. Bring words to this picture. The possibilities endless.

 

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