Poetry Pop Up: Barbara Goldberg

FURLOUGH

I love to see those tall, lean, muscular men

with their clean-shaven heads and digital

watches toss their kids in the air. And I love

to see them drop, not weightless, but light

as grenades. This is how children learn that fear

can be fun.  And fathers, that this too is hand

to hand combat.  To cradle or kill – what story 

do we tell ourselves to justify.  That a dunam

of earth is worth dying for?  That a child opening

his mouth with an o of pleasure overturns

everything?  We grow like onions, our heads

buried in dirt.  And we die like onions, face

down in a pot of boiling water.  Gravity causes

all to fall down, and love, to hold things up.

BARBARA GOLDBERG is the author of five prize-winning books of poetry, including the Felix Pollak Poetry Prize for The Royal Baker’s Daughter. She also translated Scorched by the Sun, poems by Israeli poet Moshe Dor.  Goldberg and Dor translated and published four anthologies of contemporary Israeli poetry.  Goldberg received two fellowships from the NEA as well as awards in translation, fiction and speechwriting.  Goldberg is Series Editor of the Word Works’ International   Editions.  She lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.   www.barbaragoldberg.net

Poetry Pop Up: E. Ethelbert Miller

Pumpsie Green

Years before we decided to change

our names and name ourselves

I held your baseball card in black

hands and wondered who gave you

the name Pumpsie.

How unforgettable, as if Nat

King Cole had decided to sing your

name. You were the first black player

to play for Boston. I wondered about 

the ear's loneliness when you got a

hit or the error someone made when

calling you to bunt and run.

How green was the Fenway field

before your arrival?  Your name

a sign against segregation finally

finding a place in the locker room.

Pumpsie Green.  What Red Sox

fan mistook your last name for 

being Irish after being puzzled by

your first?

E. Ethelbert Miller/photo by Annie Kim

E. Ethelbert Miller is a writer and literary activist. He is the author of several collections of poetry and two memoirs. Miller serves as a board member for The Community Foundation for the National Capital Region. For fourteen years he has been the editor of Poet Lore, the oldest poetry magazine published in the United States. In 1996, Emory and Henry College awarded Miller an honorary degree of Doctor of Literature. He has been a Fulbright Senior Specialist Program Fellow to Israel in 2004 and 2012. Miller has taught at several universities and currently serves on the faculty at the University of Houston/Victoria. His poetry has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, German, Hungarian, Chinese, Farsi, Norwegian, Tamil and Arabic.

Miller is often heard on National Public Radio. He is host of the weekly morning radio show On the Margin which airs on WPFW-FM 89.3. Miller is host and producer of The Scholars on UDC-TV, and his E-Notes has been a popular blog since 2004. On April 19, 2015, Miller was inducted into the Washington DC Hall of Fame. In 2016, Miller received the AWP George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature and the DC Mayor's Arts Award for Distinguished Honor. His latest book of poetry, The Collected Poems of E. Ethelbert Miller, edited by Kirsten Porter and published in 2016 by Willow Books, is a comprehensive collection that represents over 40 years of his career as a poet.

Poetry Pop Up: Nancy Naomi Carlson

LAKE WAUBEEKA

        — A summer community in Connecticut, founded by Jewish firefighters

The lake is not what I most remember, 

     opaque between water lilies whose stems

would tug at the oars my father dipped

     into surface glaze, stirring up algae and flies—

nor the outcrop of rock, my mother standing watch

     as our boat sprang leaks on its way from the shore—

but the mountain itself enclosing the lake,

     a presence, embrace that made our Studebaker’s engine

strain in different keys as gears were changed,

     so even, eyes shut, I could guess how close we were

to the top. While my father hammered his chisel 

     into the same stone on which our summer house was built,

I’d chip away mica found in the woods,

     or strip sassafras bark with my nails, then chew 

its fragrant pulp. I’d pull Queen Anne’s lace

     by the roots, just for its mock-carrot smell, balance

on fallen trees and tunnel through hulls,

     singing, or magnify sun on a single brown leaf.

(First published by The Missouri Review Online)

Nancy Naomi Carlson/Photo by Seth Carlson

Nancy Naomi Carlson has received grants from the NEA, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County, and has authored three books of poetry and four books of translations, including Hammer with No Master (Tupelo Press, 2016), translations of René Char, which was a finalist for the  CLMP Firecracker Poetry Award, and The Nomads, My Brothers, Go Out to Drink from the Big Dipper (Seagull Books, 2015), translations of Djiboutian poet Abdourahman Waberi, which was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award. Her work has appeared in such journals as APR, Boulevard, The Georgia Review, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. Seagull Books will publish her co-translation of The Dancing Other, a novel by Suzanne Dracius, from Martinique, this fall, Naming the Dawn by Abdourahman Waberi next spring, and her second full-length collection of non-translated poems in fall 2018. For more information, please visit www.nancynaomicarlson.com.