Contributor Spotlight: Chris Tamigi

I’m excited about seeing “Impure Acts” (my translation of Mauro Covacich’s short story “Atti Impuri” ) in print in the HFR.  The idea of an English translation of a contemporary Italian story set in postwar Poland intrigues me in that it interposes several layers of mediation between the reader and the narrator.  You have Covacich who conjured up this scene in the mountains outside postwar Krakow and described it in Italian, and then you have the translator (me) importing the story from Italian into English. 

Thus “Impure Acts” delivers Krakow by way of Rome.  I haven’t asked Covacich how much he researched the setting, but I’m sure he worked in part under the assumption that a young priest leading a group of high-school students on a daytrip into the mountains could unfold in much the same way then and there as it would in Italy (if not in today’s Italy, Italy a couple of generations ago).  Indeed “Impure Acts” is not so far removed from the Italian experience as it is for the American reader.  Besides Catholicism’s central role, we also see an alpine shelter (I had no idea what these were the I first time I encountered one in an Italian novel, but maybe I just haven’t spent enough time in the mountains) and a dance organized by the “rail workers club” (Covacich uses the word dopolavoro which literally means “after work” and refers to the state-sanctioned recreational clubs set up for workers under the Fascist regime). 

I enjoyed learning about the diverse writers and cultural artifacts referred to in the story.  There was a quote from philosopher Simone Weil, for which I first consulted an English translation and the original French before writing my own version—finagling the wording to best fit the narrator’s intended meaning.  There’s also a synopsis of the short film, Falling Leaves, by silent movie director Alice Guy-Blaché.  At some point, I decided I absolutely needed to watch the movie on YouTube in order to clear up some minor uncertainty.

Then there were the two quotes from the New Testament.  The one from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is one of my all-time favorites given the Gnostic/Manichean subtext one can read into his assertion that our battle is against the spiritual forces of evil.  For quotations from the Gospel, I try to borrow from the King James or Standard Version for my translations, but—alas—here the passage alluded to in Mark didn’t really serve the purpose of defining the Greek term kairos (a new concept for me) so I ended up just translating Covacich’s version into English.  And, finally, there are the hymns the students sing.  I had no luck finding English versions of these; Covacich told me they were written in antiquated Italian which encouraged me to use words like “Thou Seraph.”

One last anecdote: when I first showed my draft of “Impure Acts” to fellow translators, they pointed out how—given the “touchy” subject matter—I had to be sure and steer clear of unintentional doubles entendres.  This was made all the more challenging by the presence of hard sausage (dried sausage? salami?) in the story.  Once you start thinking along these lines, even commonplace idioms like “on the other hand” can start to make you giggle. 

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Chris Tamigi was awarded a 2014 ALTA fellowship for emerging translators.  He is a student in the University of Arkansas’s MFA program in literary translation and is currently translating Mauro Covacich’s novel In Your Name (A Nome Tuo).  His translation of Covacich's "Impure Acts," appeared in Issue 55 of Hayden's Ferry Review.

Contributor Spotlight: Sarah Pemberton Strong

My poem “Mobile” was inspired by a baby gift for my newborn daughter—a mechanical crib mobile sent by a well-meaning relative I’d never met. This mobile, with its toxic-smelling plastic ponies and its beepy, teeth-grinding rendition of a piece of music I was fond of, struck me at first as the very nadir of technological achievement. As the poem says, whenever I looked at it—and smelled the chemicals coming off the plastic—it made me think of  “asthma attacks and Chinese factory workers.” In an earlier draft, the poem went on to ask, “Why would anyone give a naked infant / such a complicated dance of suffering?” Although those lines didn’t make it into the final version, once I had posed that question, I wanted to try to answer it, or at least investigate it. That investigation comprises a large part of the pleasure poetry gives me—the experience of embarking on a quest I hadn’t intended to sign up for.

As my mind jumped around trying to answer the question I’d posed myself, I discovered the discursive narrative that is the poem’s form. I wanted “Mobile” to read the way people actually think, leaping from one idea to the next with lightning speed. As I worked on the piece, however, a tension developed between the heap of details I was accumulating and my desire to make a poem that, despite its content, still had a clear formal shape. To create that shape, I had to search out connections between the different images and discard those that didn’t serve the emerging structure. The Blue Danube Waltz led me to the real Danube river, down through a good deal of European history, and then back out to a performance I once attended, where there was

a man sitting alone on the edge

of the stage that was the twentieth century,

plucking the notes of the waltz on a classical guitar

with such exquisite tension between

the sweeping music of the river

and the tiny punctuated pattern of human feet

that the people in the sparse and hurried

lunch-hour audience put down their cell phones and wept.

The memory of how deeply affected I’d been by the music, which up until then I’d associated with ice-skating rinks and Bugs Bunny cartoons, gave me a response to my original question: Why would anyone give a defenseless infant such a mobile? Why would anyone want to buy it? Why ponies? Why the Blue Danube? Perhaps a powerful wish for something genuinely nourishing—a beautiful piece of music, or the sight of horses running—was buried inside this flimsy piece of mass-produced junk, still alive in there and straining to be heard.

When I began “Mobile” in the autumn of 2013, I had no idea how it might relate to other poems I was writing. Now, a year and a half later, I see that this poem’s concerns are connected to a larger work, and that a good deal of what I’ve been writing this last year keeps returning to the same themes: the effect of our human habits of consumption, the relationship between what we crave and what we aspire to, and the tension between our fantasies of returning to some sort of utopian, Edenic state and the likelihood that, if granted one, we might destroy it through our own transient cravings as we “rise up from the earth’s breast / and crane our necks over the grasses, distracted / by a glimpse of shiny things.”

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Strong's poem, "Mobile," appeared in Issue 55 of Hayden's Ferry Review.

Contributor Spotlight: Ben Purkert

When our bodies are most intimate with one another, where do our minds go? Maybe they abandon us for a few moments. Maybe they reach “up & up for the ceiling / where hot air lightly / presses its face.”

I wrote my two poems in HFR after reading Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet. I found myself thinking a lot about Carson’s claim that desire depends on three things: the lover, the beloved, and whatever comes between them. What if there is no obstacle keeping us apart? Is embrace the antithesis of eros? And once we split up, does eros increase proportionally across time and space? Or do we eventually drift out of range, the signal thinning out?

I’m fortunate to have a good relationship with my ex. And yet there’s inevitably a strange mix of emotions that accompanies any chance encounter. The exchange feels natural but surreal, friendly but somewhat fatalistic.

Let’s fly says the tree

Into what says the cloud

The common metaphor, I think, is distance: we describe a couple as having separated. But we’re not marble pieces dragged across a chessboard. We morph over time. And the spaces between us are not nothing. The gaps in our lives fill with new devotions, new loves, new poems. 

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Ben Purkert's poem, "In Hotels, Sex Flings Itself Open," appeared in Issue 55 of Hayden's Ferry Review.

Contributor Spotlight: Patrick Milian

The first poem I wrote was a libretto, a byzantine elaboration of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” My roommate asked me if I’d try writing the text for an opera he was hoping to write, so I tried. I tried writing the only way I knew how—which meant meter, rhyme, form, and capitalizing the first letter of every line. It took about a year to finish the libretto and, reading it now, it seems like a record of an idiosyncratic education in which arias turn into sonnets, duets are sung is terza rima, and Longfellow makes more than one appearance. These were the best methods I knew of making a poem sound like music.

Ironically, that opera is being held in pre-production limbo just across campus from the HFR office at the Lyric Opera Theatre.

 “Libretto” was drafted over the course of ten days in the San Juan Islands and was the only piece of writing I worked on while there. It was an exercise in focus, in leaving out all distractions to see what would happen. I only read one book: Peter Porter’s collection of the poems Benjamin Britten had set to music. I also went the ten days without my headphones, a typically integral part of my process. One afternoon, I was sitting outside, reading some Auden sonnets that Britten had set, and suddenly someone was in the building behind me, plinking out a few notes on a piano. It wasn’t quite a song, but the sound immediately announced itself as music. That was the moment I knew what this poem was going to be.

Britten and Auden, though frequent collaborators, only wrote one full opera together: Paul Bunyan—one of the worst English operas ever made. Suffice to say that, under pressure from the producers to include more female voices in a story about lumberjacks, Britten and Auden added the roles of a singing dog and two cats: Fido, Moppet, and Poppet.

“Libretto” reconceptualizes that collaboration, imagines the process of composition, cut through with the dangers of erotic tension and creative differences, and ultimately ends on a stale and, perhaps, underwhelming image. The goal, however, was to do more than retell Britten and Auden’s collaboration, but to become something like that piano cutting through the silence, to make language that announces itself as a potentiality for music. Auden wrote that “the job of the librettist is to furnish the composer with plot, characters, and words; of these, words are the least important.”

I say the first poem I wrote was a libretto because I’ve stopped seeing a difference between the two. We speak of the “musicality” of language, but music is not and cannot be language, nor can language be music. What language can be, however, and what I think we mean when we call it musical, is an imaginative pivot point from meaning-making into music-making. “Libretto” is a furnishing, a jumping-off place, a constellation of sounds and rhythms that can, if you would like, set off music. Dana Gioia in his essay “Sotto Voce: The Libretto as Literary Form” points out that the libretto is not written for the audience, but for the singer and the composer. It is an inspiration for the music. The title of this poem is “Libretto” not because it is meant to be sung, but because it is meant to set off music in the reader, to make the reader a composer.

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Patrick Milian's poem, "Libretto," appeared in Issue 55 of Hayden's Ferry Review.

Contributor Spotlight: Michael Meyerhofer

The Gender Revolution, Televised began as a layman’s rumination on gender identity—what it means, what it does, how it starts. I suppose it was also fueled by my pessimistic view that whenever society has an opportunity to learn some great lesson, it typically squanders it, focusing instead on rants and curiosities. That’s certainly been true for pretty much any racial, religious, or gender-based scandal in recent history.

That being said, the closet optimist in me still believes that lost opportunities can be—and often are—internalized in our collective self, the way a fledging student might seem to ignore a teacher’s advice, only to employ it later without even realizing it. There’s some precedent for this. For instance, the Dred Scott case, the Scopes Trial, and Plessy v. Ferguson all initially reached shameful conclusions, though their legacy sparked a positive reversal.

Obviously, the poem’s title is a nod to Gil Scott-Heron’s socially scathing, pulse-quickening piece, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, first recorded in 1970, which itself begins with an acknowledgment of that frustrated, counter-culture anthem coined by Tim Leary a few years earlier: Turn on, tune in, drop out.

I love addressing social issues in poems, but nobody really wants to hear a bunch of dry, imageless pontifications, whether they agree with them or not. So especially when it comes to modern poetry, I think it’s a matter of retraining the pipe-smoking, analytical brain to do what children do with ease—that is, be visual. Seize and keep hold of the primal thread afforded by imagery and scene, regardless of whatever else wanders in. While this particular poem began as a rumination, I didn’t even realize at first what I was ruminating on; I just had the silly image of bowties on an ultrasound, and the question of how society might respond to such a thing.

Smarter minds than mine have scratched themselves raw, trying to decide whether gender identity is a wholly social construct or is, on some level, as immutable as race. I don’t claim to be an expert on much of anything, but I do think that complex issues and disquieting social hypocrisies (and apathies) can often be understood simply by replacing certain variables with absurd exaggerations, similar to how satire works. Thus, in certain settings, even something as innocuous as a bowtie could ignite the same aggression, anxiety, and short-sightedness as a foreskin. But great or small, it’s also true that instinctual, misguided rushes to judgment can still be a catalyst for change, given time.

Also, I hate bowties. But hey, other people love them, so I must be missing something.

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Michael Meyerhofer's poem, "The Gender Revolution, Televised," appeared in Issue 55 of Hayden's Ferry Review.

Contributor Spotlight: Matthew Baker

“HTML”: THE ORIGIN STORY 

 It’s strange to mourn someone you’ve never met. The story isn’t about him, but the story exists because of him, because he died, because the circumstances of his death were so preposterous, and so in that sense you could say that “html” is an elegy for Aaron Swartz. I’d been planning to write an English/HTML hybrid for years, but the project kept getting postponed in favor of other stories, it was always next up, it was never the priority. And then Aaron died. I honestly don’t know how to describe the effect his death had on me. I’d never met him, not in reality, but in the age of the internet, when so much of a person is accessible online, his thoughts and his memories and his feelings and his jokes, do you even have to? I identified with him, I’d learned from him, and none of what had happened—the arrest, the prosecution, the suicide—had made any sense at all. His death hit me hard. It upended my priorities. Suddenly writing that English/HTML hybrid felt urgent, I needed to write the story and needed write the story now, and so I put aside everything I’d been working on, and I did, that’s why I finally wrote “html.” I was living in Ireland, renting a studio in a townhouse that was so drafty the wind would audibly whistle through. I had to wear a wool hat and fingerless gloves indoors. The story took me a month to complete. I wrote full-time, overtime technically, eleven hours a day, seven days a week. At night, I’d stand in the shower until the hot water went cold. I didn’t do anything else that month and didn’t want to. I left my studio exactly once, to buy more food. At the grocery store, nobody bumped into me, nobody even brushed up against me in passing, and I didn’t speak to the cashier. I walked back to my studio with a sack of groceries and didn’t leave again. I went a month without being touched by or talking to another human, and if you have read the story and are curious about the story, that’s really what I’m trying to capture for you, is what being in my head that month was like. Luckily, replicating that actually will be pretty easy. Play the six videos below simultaneously. Simultaneously, that’s important. Aside from Aaron, here’s everything that was in my head back then, here’s what being conscious was like for me:
   
 I had a certain vision for the story. I was trying to articulate something about myself, capture something specific through the narrative, some unnameable, unseeable thing, the type that only a story could have given form to. And ultimately, I failed. I caught glimpses, but the thing never took form. I revised the story a number of times over the following year, I struggled with it, I brooded over it, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t figure it out. To this day, even now that it’s published, I consider the story a failure. I am glad I wrote it, though. Roger Ebert remarked once about the director Werner Herzog: “He has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made for pragmatic reasons or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular.” That’s my hope for this story. That, even if it’s a failure, Aaron might have considered it spectacular somehow. To be honest, I don’t care what the rest of you think about it. This one was for him. 

Contributor Spotlight: Blair Hurley

I’ve always had an abiding interest in religion, and in Buddhism specifically, thanks to early exposure from a family friend who told me about her conversion. We’d sit at the kitchen table playing gin rummy and she would try to tell me about her experience. She said it was like her head was splitting open and the universe was pouring in. I often wondered what it felt like and whether I’d ever have that sort of experience. I wondered whether I wanted it, or whether I was afraid of the loss of control such ecstasy might feel like.

I’ve written a handful of stories about female Buddhists and the uneasy place women must make for themselves in the world of religion if they wish to lead spiritually-informed lives. Women still aren’t given much space for spiritual excellence. The female monastic tradition is almost non-existent in historically Buddhist countries such as Japan. But still, women find a way to practice, and they find each other. Living in New York and Boston, I’ve seen women, both local and far from home, struggling to have some spiritual element in their lives. And when they talk about it, their stories are often followed by a self-deprecating laugh; it’s considered so trivial, so spirituality-lite, to explore Buddhism. I wanted to capture those many voices that populate the odd space of a meditation class, how they come together and separate again. I think finding your community is an essential part of belonging to a religion and making that religion part of your identity.

I think I switched the perspective of this story about five times while I was writing the first draft of this story. I’d write a scene in my notebook in the first person, then continue on my computer in the third person, then go back and switch it all to third or back to first. I couldn’t seem to get a sense of who was telling the story. But when I finally switched to the second person “you”, things started to come together. I realized I wanted my narrator to speak to the reader. She was like my old friend again, urgently trying to tell me what her life was like then and why it mattered. The second person places the reader in among the women’s community, rather than looking mockingly down on them. Then their failures and triumphs are the reader’s too.

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Blair Hurley has been writing from a young age and has short stories published or forthcoming in Descant, Narrative Northeast, The Red Rock Review, Quality Women's Fiction, The Allegheny Review, The Armchair Aesthete, and the book The Best Young Artists and Writers in America.  A graduate of Princeton University, with her MFA in Fiction from NYU, she is currently completing a novel. Her piece, "That Thing You're Thinking," appeared in issue 55 of Hayden's Ferry Review.

Contributor Spotlight: Mel Bosworth

I enjoy a brisk hike from time to time, a hike that’ll have me sitting in a cozy diner a few hours later with an awesome grilled cheese sandwich in my hands and a plate of greasy French Fries before me. Maybe a strong coffee. Food and drink to replenish my weary body. I don’t know that I’ll ever take a hike tantamount to the one that brings the characters of “This Place of Great Peril” to the summit of the 84^th highest mountain in the world. That’s pretty severe. That’s some hiking! An adventure like that requires certain equipment and knowhow. A steely resolve. Perhaps a dash of earthly desperation. The 84^th highest mountain in the world, or, to be more accurate, the 84^th most prominent peak in the world, is China’s Xuelian Feng, aka Snow Lotus Peak, which is in the neighborhood of twenty-two thousand feet. It’s up there. My brave yet foolish hikers are two lovers I left androgynous because I never could quite see their faces, and given the second person narration it made sense to leave this particular aspect open. All but stripped of their faculties by the time they arrive at the summit, they are lost to the wilderness of high altitude. And from there things tip into another territory. It’s a story of love and loyalty, and about being in a position where you see someone struggling but are unable to help them. It’s about controlling what you can control and leaving the rest to the gods. Lessons such as these are best taught from high peaks, though there is much to learn at sea level, too. All levels, really. I suppose any person who sits long enough in the booth of a diner can eventually know the secrets of the universe, or be reacquainted with them. Which reminds me, could you please pass me that ketchup?

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Mel Bosworth is the author of the novel Freight and the poetry chapbook Every Laundromat in the World. He lives in Western Massachusetts. His short story, "This Place of Great Peril" appeared in issue 55 of Hayden's Ferry Review.

Behind the Masthead: HFR Editors' Winter Fashions

Winter is our favorite season in the Sonoran Desert. Get inspired by our editors' super trendy winter fashions. What are your favorite Arizona winter trends?

Class in the front, breeze in the back. Hospital gowns are the desert way to go. - Kyle B., Poetry Editor

"Shoes: Brown boots. Good for scorpion-stomping. Coat: Faux-fur coat borrowed from friend two Halloweens ago. Originally intended for a Mrs. Peacock outfit. Never returned. Hat: UV rays are the enemy." -Dana D., Editor

"I like to think of this coat as my Kate Hudson in Almost Famous coat.  Hardly ever get to wear it here so I've got to improvise." -Chelsea H., Editor

"Florida Chic." -Allegra H., Fiction Editor

"Though many young writers are burdened by obligatory self-discovery, through the act of writing, I find myself most productive when when wearing my replica 'Young William Gass' costume. Sure, the material's itchy, and some might consider the two hours I spend every morning applying makeup a waste of valuable writing time, but when it comes to imitating the greats, there is no substitute for dermal transmutations. Additionally, Gass's chilly demeanor really helps keep me cool in the desert!" -Alex M., International Editor