Daniela Naomi Molnar : part one

Daniela Naomi Molnar’s work asks how to live in the ecotone of now/here, on the brink of socioecological collapse/rebirth. She works across forms, melding painting, poetry, writing, curation, editing, site-specific intervention, activism, and teaching. Her mediums, therefore, are paint, paper, water, varied types of language, and varied forms of community engagement. Place is always one of her mediums. She uses these mediums to try to shape and nurture generative new ideas, ethics, and cultural change. Her work for the past several years has been focused on the complex, intersectional sociopolitical-cultural issues of climate justice and climate grief.

Daniela is the founding Department Head of the Art + Ecology program and a full-time Associate Professor at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, where she has been teaching undergraduate and graduate students since 2007. She is a founding member of the Board of Directors, a backcountry guide, and an all-around integral part of  Signal Fire, providing opportunities for artists to learn about environmental justice by engaging with public wild lands. She is founding Co-Editor of Leaf Litter, Signal Fire’s art and literary journal and Art Editor at The Bear Deluxe Magazine.

She is an MFA candidate in Poetry at Warren Wilson College and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Fugue, Tripwire: A Journal of Poetics, Bomb Cyclone, petrichor, LEON, Discursive Impulse, GAZE, Archivaria, and Submit.

She is a member of the third generation of the Holocaust and a daughter of immigrants. She grew up in and around New York City and lives in Portland, Oregon, in the Cascadian bioregion on the unceded land of the Clackamas, Cowlitz, Chinook, Multnomah, and other Indigenous peoples.

How did you first engage with poetry?

I grew up inside a braided river of languages: Hungarian, Romanian, Hebrew, Yiddish, a bit of Spanish, English, and, predominantly, Huroheyisen (a ragged agglutination of all of the above). My parents are immigrants and I spent a lot of time with my grandparents in their immigrant community in Queens. I recall walking down the bustling street with them, my small arm raised to hold my grandmother’s soft hand, feeling sensorily immersed in a ragged river of heterogenous colors, sounds, scents — and languages — trilled, shouted, sang…

Because I didn’t know any of these languages fluently other than English, their sounds were allowed to just be sounds. And this attunement to sonic sense over rhetorical sense is, I believe, one of the fundamental orientations of poetry.

Poetry also found me in the songs and prayers of my childhood, which included a lot of time spent in Jewish synagogues with my parents and grandparents. Most of the prayers and songs were in Hebrew or Aramaic and often heavily relied on rhyme and repetition. I learned sound sense in these ways, too, while also learning what it sounds like to pray to a broken god: poetry.

Lannie Stabile : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

Because I’m a perfectionist, because I’m ever improving, because I’m often a murderer of good things, I don’t know if a poem is ever finished. But, at some point, I just have to let go.

Sheldon Lee Compton : part five

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

Here is where I return to Ondaatje. His novel Coming Through Slaughter was given to me while I was busy feeling inadequate in graduate school. I wasn’t reading much at all during that time so I was slow to start the book. But then I opened it and saw those three sonographs of dolphin sounds and my reading and writing life was completely changed. There are paragraphs and sentences and phrases in that book I can return to in any mood and become instantly recharged. Ondaatje is in a tower all his own.

And recharge is what I want to do when I get inside my own head or let somebody else work their way in. Anything that distracts from my writing. The writing is what matters; it matters more than publishing, more than praise, more than awards, it even matters more than respect. If you write, don’t let anything come before it other than family. It’s the only way to make sure you express what’s in your heart. And expressing what’s in your heart is the only reason to do anything, ever.

Madeleine Stratford : part five

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

My current pet project is Mestizo Skies, an English translation of Ciels métissés, by Quebecois writer Louise Desjardins (Écrits des Forges, 2014). A few of my translations came out in TransLit, a journal of the Association of Translators and Interpreters of Alberta and in carte blanche, literary e-journal of the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Some new excerpts are upcoming in Inventory, translation journal based in Princeton University’s Department of Comparative Literature.

One thing that makes Ciels métissés particularly interesting to me is that many poems contain English and Spanish words, as well as Quebec French, a language close to my heart that is quite difficult to transpose into English. The poems speak about the endless, lonely, wintry landscape of Northern Quebec, where Louise is from, but they also speak of her travels to Europe and to Latin America, where I too have travelled countless times.

Something in Louise’s work speaks to me on an intimate level. It’s as though she were writing things that I already had in my head or in my heart. It’s like an intense déjà-vu feeling that makes you wonder if you haven’t already written this poem yourself. Because as you translate it, it still belongs to the author, but it feels like it could have been your own. This kind of communion with the authors I choose to translate (whatever the genre) is important to my creative process, but it is essential when I translate poetry.

Eleanor Boudreau : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

Clancy McGilligan, a friend of mine and a fiction writer, was asked a version of this question recently (minus the word “poetry”). He answered, “The uncertainty.” I’m going to agree with that.

It’s definitely the uncertainty.

J.R. Solonche : part one

J.R. Solonche has published poetry in more than 300 magazines, journals, and anthologies since the early 70s. He is the author of Beautiful Day (Deerbrook Editions), Won’t Be Long (Deerbrook Editions),  Heart’s Content (Five Oaks Press), Invisible (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by Five Oaks Press), The Black Birch (Kelsay Books), I, Emily Dickinson & Other Found Poems (Deerbrook Editions), In Short Order (Kelsay Books), Tomorrow, Today and Yesterday (Deerbrook Editions), True Enough (Dos Madres Press), The Jewish Dancing Master (Ravenna Press), If You Should See Me Walking on the Road (Kelsay Books), In a Public Place (Dos Madres Press), To Say the Least (Dos Madres Press), For All I Know (Kelsay Books), The Time of Your Life (Adelaide Books), The Porch Poems (Deerbrook Editions), Enjoy Yourself (Serving House Books), and coauthor of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). He lives in the Hudson Valley.

Photo Credit: Emily Solonche

What are you working on?

A book of poems.

Ilona Martonfi : part five

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

I host Rue Towers Writers in my loft. I read the poems aloud. Receiving generous feedback from our eight members.

Founder and Artistic Director of The Yellow Door and Visual Arts Centre Reading Series, curator of Argo Bookshop Reading Series. I share the stage with wonderful writers and musicians.

Invitations to read at other Montreal literary offerings, open mic at Argo Bookshop. Concordia University readings. And several other fine café gatherings.