submissions (updated,

periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics is open to submissions of previously unpublished poetry-related reviews, interviews and essays. Please send submissions as .doc with author biography to periodicityjournal@gmail.com

Submissions of previously unpublished poetry remain solicitation-only, with the exception of translated works (which you should very much send along).

also seeking essay submissions in our "Reconsiderations" and "#FirstRealPoets" series. Originally prompted by Canadian poet Ken Norris, "Reconsiderations" is a series of essays by poets on older poetry titles they consider important. The "#FirstRealPoets" series was originally prompted by Canadian poet Zane Koss, who posed the questions: Who was the first poet you interacted with? While some of the responses have leaned into first discovering the work of a particular poet, the original question wished more to ask about interactions in-person. Was there a poet who read in your high school? Someone you caught early on at a reading? Was there a particular poet who first made you feel welcome in the community?

All rights revert to the author(s) upon publication.

Noah Sparrow : Two poems

 

 

Meditations During my Hair Emergency
 

Every Wednesday
an hour of my day
is filled
like the bucket
right by my socks 

The soap gradually
climbs further
into nailbeds,
the floor
washed in
a weekly
showering 

And to make it
all better,
I’m wearing
a hair-mask from
Sephora, from
a kind of
buy-something
get-something-else
sort of deal, 

And now this room
is stripped of bad air,
refilled from
all kinds of soap of
floor beneath me
Stripped of a dusting
to make room
as I prepare
to my sanity to roll out
like an overly commanding
carpet, waiting to
be stepped on
and kind of wanting it
to be that way 

This kind of removal of
dust and crumbs
would be borderline
excessive anywhere else
but here 

And an hour ago
I saw a man
unhoused,
washing somebody
else's car 

A car holds
little-to-no
boundaries on where
it can move and
if you don’t believe
me, just look at
the commercials,
Look at the men
rolling through forestry,
framed by the evergreens,
the occasional bear 

If I tried to clean off
that mans floors,
it would take a
million hours and a
million buckets and all
the borders
would collapse behind us 

If you look behind
the car,
you’ll hear
more and more honking
until the driver
speeds through,
until the bubbles of soap
forfeit clinging onto wrists,
until seasons change
and the floor
turns into ice 

 

 

ME IN THE MEDIA (IN FOUR PROSE-POEMS)

1.     Stand Up Routine 

I’ve often been told that I should write about my mother. She used to write about me. I found her stand-up comedy scripts when I was ten and I’m not sure if I was a bad reader or if she was a bad writer. Hindsight can’t reheat memories burnt into indifference. She had a set where she relished having “mediocre children”, because having a Jesus-like baby would be too hard. Didn’t want the pressure. There was more content about my brother, like how he quit hockey because he didn’t like to sweat. A few years later he ran home crying because a lady tried to grab him into her car in the McDonalds parking lot. He got three blocks away then hid in a bush. He was eleven. That was possible back then. Afterwards he went back to McDonalds and got his fries. Lips salt-rimmed, cheeks swollen. I laughed at the fact he went back. My mother got mad at me and she gave me homework: I needed to work on my sense of humour.

 

2.     On Reddit

When I was sixteen I got involved in some protests. I went semi-viral. I’d look up my own name every night. My favourite thing written about me was a Reddit thread concerned about my width. A man with “gun” in his username wrote no way a biological woman has shoulders that broad. He had a theory about my mother putting silicone in my arms. Then I moved provinces. Then I got recognized from those protests, but only once. By a bar. I said she was wrong, she’s thinking of the wrong guy, that was actually my twin brother who killed himself. I started to believe it. I decided we died in mid-April. I decided it was a pilled-affair. I decided he was real because I said so and that was enough for me. Isn’t that what writing is? He jumps off the balcony when it rains. He says we're going to do a do-over. He’s always trying for a do-over. He’s me but chubbier, more dramatic. I never gave him a name but when I hear my own it sounds like liar liar liar. This is adult make-believe.

 

3.     As It Happens (CBC) 

When I was seventeen my mother made her CBC debut. She wrote an op-ed; it impressed. I came along because I’ve always been an off-screen-star. We dressed ourselves up, did our own hair. Taming unbuckles in the face of rain, wind licks curls back into strings. They asked her standard questions and she provided standard answers. Answers orbiting me. She told the camera how after I transitioned she would cry in the shower, so I wouldn’t be afraid of her grief. She thought I’d be harder to love now. On my ninteenth birthday I fucked a man on a Tim Horton’s blanket and decided I would become so loveable it would scare people. I don’t know how to write about sex but I can tell you that the blanket was ugly, the man was mediocre, and somewhere it will always be raining. Man-made or not.

 

4.     On Cable

At nineteen I went out on a date with X. He was from here, knew more than me. We were walking by a climate-change protest and made eye contact with a guy from cable news. He said we had “a look” and interviewed us about the provincial election. X gave responses that sounded correct-enough. I didn’t know any of the political party names so I made things up about the guys from the blue party. They didn’t air much of me, but there’s a clip of us together: him looking at me. He was only looking at me. The start of me being loved was always supposed to be public.

 

 

 

Noah Sparrow is a Montreal-Tiohtià:ke based writer. His chapbook SPECTACLE/SPECTATOR is forthcoming soon with above/ground press, and a second, Here I am Dying at an Average Pace, is forthcoming with Cactus Press in 2026. He won the Gabriel Safdie Poetry Award, was a finalist for the 2024 Montreal International Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2025 International Metatron Poetry Prize. Check out his work in The Fiddlehead, Scrivener Creative Review, or find more at noahsparrow.com

Sonja Greckol : How I came to translation

Generating Dark Matter -- Diverted and Dark Matter based on Rocío Cerón's Materia Oscura

 

 

 

In 2019, I watched Rocío Cerón perform Materia Oscura in Guanajuato, Mexico visiting my friend, the poet and editor, Lee Gould, who had recently established and published the bilingual journal La Presa as her contribution to a Spanish English dialogue while resident in Mexico. I was swept completely into Cerón's powerful performance and felt compelled to penetrate her words. At the time, I had begun to study Spanish in Toronto and Guanajuato: I could order a meal but had little more competence.

Having grown up in a bilingual Alberta household with a unilingual Ukrainian grandmother, I had a mother tongue child tongue competence in Ukrainian. My mother, however, frequently spoke Romanian with her family so I'd heard it spoke regularly; I have never been an adept language-learner.  Such is the power of patrilineal endogamy. The block settlements of the late 19th and early 20th century produced contiguous Ukrainian and Romanian settlements.

Since my family was loosely constructed across those two communities which were linguistically distinct culturally, I had a sonic sense of Romanian but no words.  While doing a Transtranslation workshop with Mark Goldstein in which we read theories of translation, I elected to begin a sonic translation from the work of the Romanian poet, Nora Iuga, in which I had the sounds but not the sense.

My previous work, Skein of Days (Pedlar Press, 2015) a survey work had specifically focussed on the language available to shared understandings based through a fractured examination of mid to late C20th largely Canadian newspaper headlines and Magazine tables of Contents. I became interested in Natural Language Processing and Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet One but failed to execute any Kurzweil imitations on my Skein database.  I was primed to 'mess' with language. 

Dark Matter -- Diverted is the product of just such 'messing' driven by wanting to understand more of Cerón's work, to examine early Google Translate, more of the cognate and lexical structure of both Indo-European and Uralic languages and by my own poetic that seemed compatible with Cerón's as far as I could grasp it at the time.  Following the morph and flow through successive translations, both from Spanish to a single language to English or through multiple languages and back to English generated results that varied dramatically and syntactically. As with Skein of Days, the resulting texts were my compositions; they were assembled by my sensibility out of the array of words and structures provided by the various translations.

As I developed more comfort with Spanish on the page, Dark Matter took shape in a multilingual translation workshop with Erin Moure.  Under her watchful eye and polyglot guidance, poets translate from Ukrainian, French and Spanish into English. I continue to translate more of Cerón's work. Her exquisite sensibility and exuberant poetic continuesto intrigue me. While none in the workshop are fluent in all languages, the accumulation of linguistic and poetic expertise generates exciting work in multiple languages. I am grateful to Erin Moure, Jaclyn Piudik and Roman Ivashkiv for their ongoing work.

 

 

 

 

Sonja Greckol (Tkaronto/Toronto Canada) books include No Hay Linea En EL Tiempo/No Line In Time (manofalsa editore, 2025) translated by Eduardo Padilla, Monitoring Station (University of Alberta Press – Robert Kroetsch Series, 2023), No Line In Time (Tightrope, 2018), Skein of Days (Pedlar Press, 2014), and Gravity Matters (Inanna Press, 2008). 

Her long poem ‘No Line In Time’ won the 2017 Briar Patch Poetry Contest and No Line In Time was listed for the League of Canadian Poets Raymond P Souster Award in 2019. Monitoring Station (UAlta Press) was listed for the Alberta Book Publishers Award in 2024.

La Presa (Spring 2017)Asymptote (Jan 2025) published an excerpt of her translation of Rocío Cerón’s 'Trances' and her e-transtranslation ‘Dark Matter - Diverted’ of Rocío Cerón’s ‘Materia Oscura’ appeared in La Presa (Spring 2017). Greckol edits poetry for Women and Environments International. Greckol is a member of the League of Canadian Poets Feminist Caucus.

 

Laura Kerr in Conversation with James Knight

Introduction

James Knight’s visual poetry occupies a restless territory where language refuses to behave as text alone. Drawing on Surrealist traditions of rupture, assemblage, and metamorphosis, his work treats words as physical matter, cut, scattered, reconstituted and capable of producing bodily and psychological effects rather than stable meaning. These poems do not depict dreams so much as enact convulsions: of syntax, of image, of voice. What emerges is a practice grounded less in reverie than in disturbance.

Across Knight’s work, figures appear as unfinished anatomies, while language behaves like tissue that can be split, stitched, or bled into form. Text and image are not hierarchically arranged but entangled, each exerting pressure on the other. This Surrealism is not nostalgic or illustrative. It is procedural, material, and often violent in its refusals, insisting on poetry as an embodied event rather than a readable surface.

Singing the Monsters, Knight’s current book-length visual poetry manuscript, extends this practice into sustained engagement with Beowulf. Rather than treating the epic as source material to be illustrated or modernized, the manuscript approaches it as unstable matter, an inherited text reopened through fragmentation, digital distortion, and formal risk. Monsters re-enter not as symbols but as mutable presences, shaped by the same Surrealist logic that animates Knight’s wider body of work.

Interview

Laura Kerr: 

The mask reveals. The mouth was never enough.

When you enter the beak, what speaks?

There is a long history of poets who do not speak “as themselves,” but through the animal, the daemon, the altered body—as if the poem requires a different vessel.

When you become the bird, do you join a lineage or begin one?

James Knight:

One of the epigraphs to my book Cosmic Horror is Igor Stravinsky’s comment on the composition of his most famous work: “I was the conduit through which The Rite of Spring passed.” I see my work in the same way, in that it does not come from or belong to me; instead it uses me, just as DNA uses a living organism to survive and replicate.

The Bird King (the thing that writes and the masked performer) is a theatrical expression of something alien that speaks through me. I’m more ventriloquist’s puppet than poet. I think I can trace this back to my discovery of T. S. Eliot when I was 16; The Waste Land is the supreme act of ventriloquism, in which the poet himself is obscured by heterogeneous voices. (I’m aware that the opposite argument holds too: Eliot’s masterpiece is imbued with his personality.)

Laura Kerr:

CHIMERA 52 and the fleshy structure

The body appears in your work as unfinished, a site of becoming rather than belonging. Here, the body is spliced from cut text, stitched from memory, pigment, and wound.

Is this metamorphosis forward, or is it return?

James Knight:

It is a return to our raw, vulnerable animal state. Before I am a thinking, rational being, I am an animal. Eating, sleeping, defecating, etc., are infinitely more important activities than the making of poetry.

Almost all of my work has a somatic quality, embodying the physical reality of who we are and what it is to be a temporary, kinetic collage of skin, bone, blood, organs. Moreau’s Doctored Bodies and Beowulf express this physiological reality through the arrangement of signifiers in anatomical configurations, suggestive of animal life, reproduction, the hardness of bone and the slop of entrails.

Laura Kerr:

Your Surrealism is not the dreamscape. It refuses escape.
It is the convulsion of language as body. 

What must Surrealism become to stay alive?

James Knight:

Surrealism must abandon the word Surrealism and its connotations. The minute a writer or artist thinks of themselves as a Surrealist, bad old habits dominate the creative process. A good example was the Chicago Surrealist group in the latter part of the twentieth century. Their figurehead, Franklin Rosemont, wrote poems that amounted to no more than an insipid pastiche of something André Breton, Benjamin Péret, and others had done much better decades before.

The spirit of Surrealism is one of revolt; ultimately it must revolt against its own mind-forg’d manacles and deadening conventions.

Laura Kerr:

The poem in your work is not written—it is assembled, sutured, unearthed.

Is the text trying to break through the image, or is the image trying to grow a voice?

James Knight:

I see no distinction between the act of placing letters and words into a sequence and that of marking a surface with colours and shapes, materially or virtually. The first book I remember is Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, a narrative in which the poetic text and enchanting pictures are dependent on one another to shape the story and affect the reader.

When an idea occurs to me, it’s always a body with a voice, a visual aesthetic, and an aural presence; most of the time, that aural presence is expressed visually, in the form of little black squiggles that form sounds in the mind of the reader.

Laura Kerr:

One of the strengths of Singing the Monsters lies in how it opens visual poetry outward, treating digital tools not as specialist equipment but as materials that can be taken up anywhere. When you write, “A visual poem can be made on a phone while sitting on the loo!”, extending Ducasse’s claim that poetry should be made by all, you frame digital practice as a widening of participation.

At the same time, this Beowulf is clearly the result of sustained craft, extensive photography, multiple apps, custom glitch filters, and careful orchestration over time.

When we celebrate accessibility in visual poetry, how do we make space for expertise without reinstating hierarchy? Is the democracy you’re pointing toward one of access to tools or access to the discernment that allows certain configurations to carry the intensity found here?

James Knight:

The hierarchies that exist in the world of art and poetry are established by powerful people who assert the superiority of one artist over another. Those powerful people are publishers, critics, social media commentators, and, to a lesser extent, readers. Unfortunately, I don’t see how we will ever reach a point where hierarchies disappear.

Access to tools widens participation in creative processes, which can only be a good thing, and I think a consequence of that participation will be, for some, a discovery of innovative methods and approaches.

Laura Kerr:

Your reimagining of Grendel’s mother as earth goddess rather than aberration is one of the most compelling achievements of the project, undoing the Anglo-Saxon moral frame and granting these figures genuine vitality.

Yet the visual language through which this occurs, glitching, liquefaction, fragmentation, explosive text, draws on aesthetics associated with breakdown and system failure. 

Do you see glitch as a means of freeing these monsters from their original moral coding, or as translating their otherness into a contemporary register shaped by digital decay? What does it mean, for you, to “give new life” through instability rather than restoration?

James Knight:

It is never my intention to make work that is “relevant” or of my time, simply because I make it for myself and have no interest in fashionable themes. But the glitch has long bewitched me, and it felt perfectly natural to use it, with all its connotations of our fractured digital culture, when telling my version of Beowulf.

If I’m giving new life to Grendel and his nameless mother, that new life has to be unstable, dynamic, impossible to fix into a definitive image. I should add, though, that none of the monsters in the story (Grendel, his mother, and the dragon) are glitched. Grendel and his mother were made with acrylic paint and careful digital manipulation, while the dragon is a collage of photographed war machinery from World War I.

The environments in which they convulse and roar and seethe are glitchy, however. They inhabit a broiling world that collapses from one scene to another.

Laura Kerr:

The aleatory behaviour of your “Blood” filter—its capacity to bloom, contract, and rupture beyond your control—feels crucial to the work’s vitality, recalling oral tradition’s improvisation, where stories lived through variation rather than fixity.

At the same time, this unpredictability is mediated by proprietary software systems designed by others.

When you describe this process as play and discovery, how conscious are you of working within those systems? Does authorship shift when chance is technologically mediated or is the real measure simply whether the monsters are allowed to sing?

James Knight:

I’m very conscious that I’m using tools someone else invented, as we all do, all or most of the time, whether those tools are paint brushes or Microsoft Word. If there is any individuality in the way I use those tools, it’s in the way they seem to direct me to use them in unusual combinations. It’s never something that is planned.

Some words that have popped into my head look a certain way to me, and an app that might realise the aesthetic I have in mind presents itself.

As for authorship, I think we accord that notion far too much importance. I am not important: the work is.

Singing the Monsters 

 

 

This interview forms part of my ongoing exploration of Experimental Poetry Criticism, attending to how visual poetry thinks: through process, through material choices, through the aesthetics of digital composition, and through questions of access and authorship in contemporary making.

You can find more of James Knight’s Poetry/Art on these links below: 

www.thebirdking.com 

Instagram- @jkbirdking

@badbadpoet.bsky.social

 

 

 

 

Laura Kerr is an award-winning Canadian visual artist and poet. In 2012, she was honoured with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for her contributions to the arts and her long-standing commitment to art education.

She recently sold her art school to devote herself fully to her writing and art practice. Laura currently serves as Vice-President on the executive board of Plug In ICA, a leading contemporary art centre located on Treaty 1 territory in Manitoba, Canada.

For over 30 years, she co-owned and taught at Paradise Art School, specializing in classical and contemporary art education. Throughout her career, she has explored the intersections of traditional mediums and digital technology, increasingly blending painting, drawing, and photography with generative processes.

Her current focus is visual poetry—experimental, image-based works that merge poetic ambiguity with technological play. By using digital tools in process-driven ways, she ensures the artist’s hand remains central—even in collaboration with machines.

She is also developing a body of experimental poetry criticism, written in collaboration with AI trained on her own work. These pieces challenge conventional interpretation and embrace uncertainty, forming a self-reflective loop between maker, machine, and meaning.

Stan Rogal : REPORT FROM THE DEAD POETS’ SOCIETY: Bachmann

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) in conversation with Stan Rogal

 

Harder days are coming.
The time of debt delayed, revocable,
becoming visible on the horizon.
Soon you will have to buckle your shoes
and drive the dogs back to the bog farms.
             — from: The Time of Debt Delayed

 

It was a lovely warm spring day, June, early afternoon. I was in the Annex, having just finished a tasty ramen lunch at Kenzo’s, now set to jaywalk the busy street toward BMV, when I spotted a telephone kiosk on the corner of Major and Bloor. I couldn’t recall seeing a kiosk there any time previous and approached it with some no small measure of curiosity and intrigue. As I neared, the telephone rang. The event seemed well-beyond the merely coincidental and so I naturally assumed the call must be for me (beyond coincidental being an understatement since the kiosk looked to have been vandalized, the phone book lying shredded on the ground, the machine itself torn from its housing and tilted to one side, hanging by a screw, the black connecting cable ripped free exposing the bare coloured wires inside. It couldn’t possibly have rang, yet, it had). I reached for the receiver and noticed that it, too, was disconnected from the body of the machine, the cord dangling. I said hello and was answered by a voice that sounded mechanical, though it could have been a person speaking robotically and covering the mouthpiece with a handkerchief, as a rough-and-tumble ruse. Fine. I listened.

Good day, Stan. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, involves an interview with one Ingeborg Bachmann. She is — as is always the case — a formerly well-known, well-respected poet, now deceased. We have arranged the interview for four o’clock this afternoon at the Sol Melia Hotel in Little Italy. You will meet with her to ascertain the reason or reasons for her abrupt appearance from the beyond. As always, should you be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow all knowledge of your actions. This message will self-destruct in five seconds.

As I listened, it occurred to me that even the powers-that-be must get bored from time to time and have need to invent ways to entertain themselves, but I thought that lifting a trope from Mission Impossible was maybe sinking a bit low. I asked: who is this? even knowing I wouldn’t get an answer. All I heard was someone’s muffled laughter before the line went dead. Fine. It was just past one. I had time to browse BMV, ascertain the exact address of the hotel, and walk down to College street, near Christie. Ingeborg Bachmann? Interesting. I was somewhat familiar with her and her work, having bumped into her on-and-off over the years, especially an article in Sulfur magazine, accompanied by the usual Google search. As an Austrian having spent most of her relatively short life in metropolitan Europe, I wasn’t sure how well-known she was to most Canadians other than myself and I wondered what the circumstances might be surrounding her recent incarnation in Toronto.

I reached my destination at the appointed hour, checked in with the hotel clerk, ascended a flight of stairs and knocked on the door, which was ajar. A voice said come in. I entered the room and closed the door behind me. A woman sat up in bed wearing a hotel-issued white bathrobe and fuzzy white slippers. She held a cigarette in one hand, a water glass of red wine in the other and an ashtray in her lap. I surveyed the room, recalling a quote I’d read written by a friend of Ingeborg’s: “I was deeply shocked by the magnitude of her tablet collection. It must have been 100 per day, the bin was full of empty boxes. She looked bad, she was wax-like and pale and her whole body was covered in bruises. I wondered what could have caused them. Then, when I saw how she dropped the Gauloise that she smoked and let it burn off on her arm, I realized: the bruises were burns caused by falling cigarettes. The numerous tablets had made her body insensible to pain.”

 I couldn’t help but notice the empty pill and alcohol bottles and the full ashtrays scattered about — though the woman herself appeared well-kept, attractive, her dirty-blonde hair nicely combed, wearing a modicum amount of make-up, her skin unblemished — and I wondered if much of the hotel room mess had been staged for her arrival to make it appear familiar and comfortable. The same with locating her in Little Italy, since, while she’d been born in Austria, she’d died in Rome, where she had taken up residence for several years. It made some sense given she was prone to depression, anxiety and mood swings. Best to help her acclimatize slowly and gently before introducing her to the reality of the situation — that is, dragged back from the dead, different time, different place — and the reason for her being here.

She smiled pleasantly, flashing two rows of sturdy squares of white teeth, and gestured with a hand toward a chair near the bed. I walked over, sat down, and placed my recorder on the night table. She pointed out an open wine bottle and a glass alongside my recorder. I poured myself a generous shot.

 

Ingeborg Bachmann: I understand that I am to be interviewed by you, is that correct?

Stan Rogal: Yes, if you’d do me the honour.

IB: Of course! After all, we’ve both been summoned, yes? To play our parts in the unfolding drama? (She took a drag from her cigarette, tilted back her head, and blew smoke toward the ceiling.)

SR: Uh-huh. And…are you comfortable?

IB: Comfortable? What an odd question. How do you mean?

SR: I noticed several signs posted on walls on my way up warning there was no smoking anywhere in the building.

IB: Ah, I see. Well, I haven’t been outside my room since I arrived, so… (She shrugged.) Besides, the various materials (she indicated packs of cigarettes, matches, ashtrays) were already provided, so, I assumed…

SR: Right. And no one mentioned any other concerns around smoking? The possible dangers, and so on.

IB: Oh, you mean, like, in bed? (She waved her cigaretted hand around her head.) In my information package it was noted that my robe, as well as the bedding, had been treated with some sort of fire retardant. As a precaution. Not that I feel in the mood at the moment to set myself on fire again, whether accidentally or deliberately. (She grinned and widened her eyes.)

SR: And which was it, if you don’t mind me asking?

IB: To be honest, I’m not sure. I’d been taking a lot of medications at the time and wasn’t quite in my right mind. In fact, as I recall, I died more from drug withdrawal in the hospital rather than due to my burns. (She tugged her sleeves and checked out her arms.) Which have healed nicely, it seems.

SR: As a point of interest, you may have been brought back at a prior age to the fire. It happens.

IB: How curious! And how exciting! (She took a large swig of wine. I followed suit.)

SR: You mentioned an information package? Did it explain why you’re here?

IB: It did. It seems that the local Austrian Cultural Society is celebrating the one-hundredth year of my birth, Jun 25, 1926, by presenting a retrospective of my work over the weekend beginning tonight, including a staged reading of my play, The Good God of Manhattan, as well as more recent films based on my relationships with Paul Celan and Max Frisch. Apparently there’s a cinema nearby where the festivities will take place.

SR: The Royal, yes, almost next door. And happy birthday, by the way, I hadn’t made the connection. (I raised my glass and we toasted.) I realize that you wrote radio plays, stage plays, librettos, short stories, essays, a novel, and also did translations, but you began — and this is my special interest and that of my readers — as a poet. And quite successfully, too.

IB: Yes. (She rocked her head and smoked, shyly flattered, I thought.) I suppose that’s true. 

SR: Your poetry has been described as being feminist in the confessional or autotheory style, sombre, surreal writing that often dealt with women in failed love relationships, the tentative connection between art and humanity, and the inadequacy of language. Is that an accurate assessment?

IB: Ha! As far as it goes, given “the inadequacy of language,” which every serious writer has to constantly struggle with. (She topped up our glasses.)

SR: That struggle seems very clear in your poem, “In the Storm of Roses,” where you wrote: “Wherever we turn in the storm of roses, / the night is lit up by thorns, and the thunder / of leaves, once so quiet within the bushes, / rumbling at our heels.” Even the traditionally beautiful image of the rose is not enough to calm the storm. In fact, it becomes part of the storm and used to terrorize. It’s a very different outlook from those poets who regard nature as a symbol of serene beauty.

IB: Raleigh said: “No use going to the country, it will bring us no peace.” Big dog eats little dog. One thing eats another, no? It’s the same everywhere.

SR: Do you think growing up during the war maybe tainted your outlook toward the world in some large respect? In your poem, “Every Day,” you said: “War is no longer declared, / just continued. The unheard-of / has become commonplace.”

IB: I wouldn’t doubt it. I grew up surrounded by war. Between the Nazi bombs falling and the Allied bombs falling, there was no escape. That, plus the fact my father was a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi who sexually abused me as a child. Him along with a friend of his. As for my mother, she sided with my father. More from fear, I think, than loyalty.

SR: I’m sorry.

IB: Yeah, me too. (She butted her cigarette in the ashtray and lit another.) And tell me, has anything changed, or is the world still committing the same atrocities, the same abominations, over and over, one against the other?

SR: The same, I’m afraid. (We sat for a moment, silent, sipped our wine. I let out a sigh.) Anyway, on a brighter note. You published your first volume of poetry, Mortgaged Time, in 1953, which won you the coveted literary prize of the Group 47 and with it, instant fame. You were even the subject of a cover story in the mass-circulation Der Spiegel magazine in 1954.

IB: The cover story turned out to be somewhat of a two-edged sword, I’m afraid. There was the so-called fame, yes, but at a price. I was young, you understand, twenty-eight, energetic, vivacious even, with cropped hair and bold lipstick, the very image of a young iconoclast. The magazine article played more heavily on these features — packaged and sold me as a commodity in order to sell more magazines — and I could never rid myself of the image of being a beautiful blonde who had somehow become, of all things, a writer — sensuous yet intellectual, a cosmopolite from a provincial town in Austria, strangely succeeding in a world traditionally dominated by men. How could this be? Well, I might just as well have gained such notoriety for having two heads.

SR: I see the point you’re making, and while I’m sure you’d have preferred more focus by the magazine on your writing than your looks, the recognition did open a number of doors for you, isn’t that right? Opportunities that were more concerned with you as a poet.

IB: Yes, though I’m not sure the two facets were easily separated by this point.

SR: In the film noir, Farewell My Lovely, Claire Trevor said to Dick Powell, “Mmm, you’ve got a nice build for a private detective.” Dick answered…

IB: “It gets me around.” Ha! You’re saying accept the good with the bad.

SR: I’m saying you don’t have much choice in the matter. You need a container, might as well be an attractive one.

IB: Is that a compliment?

SR: It’s an observation. (I poured us more wine.) You had a love affair with famed poet Paul Celan for several years, who championed you as a writer. You were invited to the United States in 1955 by Harvard University where Henry Kissinger had organized a seminar for talented European writers and intellectuals. The two of you became lovers.

IB: (She threw her head back, laughed, took a quick puff on her cigarette.) You’re saying, perhaps, that the lady doth protest too much.

SR: Maybe a little. (I lifted my hand and formed a small space between my thumb and index finger.) A soupçon.  

IB: Fine, yes, Henry and I had an affair. It was exciting, though a bit of a disaster. What else is new? After all, he was married with two children. The relationship couldn’t go anywhere. He wanted some excitement in his life. Called me his “bizarre poetess.” (She shook her head madly, bugged her eyes, stuck out her tongue and made a guttural noise.) Poor Henry. He was heartbroken when I ended the affair. But it wasn’t just the family, you see. For all the talk about his involvement in world peace talks, his hands were as bloody as the rest of them. We were at odds politically, since I was strictly anti-war, anti-killing.

SR: Uh-huh. In 1956 you published your second book of poems, Invocation to the Great Bear, which won even more critical acclaim, and in 1959 you became the first holder of the newly created chair in Poetics at the University of Frankfurt. More honours included membership in the West Berlin Academy of Arts, an Austrian National Medal, and a Georg Büchner Prize from the Academy for Language and Literature. Regarded as one of the major voices of German-language literature in the 20^th century, in 1963 you were nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by German philologist Harald Patzer. Whew! Pretty impressive.   

IB: Yes. I suppose I could be accused of having amassed ‘an embarrassment of riches,’ as they say in the vernacular.

SR: And yet, for all of your success, you were unhappy, depressed, even, clinically, for which you were prescribed medications.

IB: You sound surprised, why? You think everyone who is successful is happy? There’s a long history of so-called successful people who have suffered from what we call in German, weltschmerz, or world-weariness. Existential angst. Ennui. Poe’s Conqueror Worm. The list goes on. Many try to cope through drugs or alcohol. Many commit suicide. It’s my understanding that a majority of comedians and clowns are clinically depressed, and who attempt to hide behind a mask of laughter. I was simply one of many functional depressives.

SR: Yes, in one poem you wrote: “The sick know / that a colour, a breath of air, / a hard step, indeed / a whimper of grass in the world / turns the heart inside / the body, causing them to hope / for peace the more they sense / war, as the war goes on.” You blame your condition on what happened to you as a child during the war?

IB: In part, though not totally.

SR: Then what?

IB: (She laughed, knocked back the remains of her wine and poured us more.) That shit-heel Ludwig Wittgenstein.

SR: Really? (I grinned.) I thought you were a fan of his ideas. A devout adherent, in fact.

IB: That’s true, I was. Am. But he was a blessing and a curse. I mean, how can I be a writer when he states: “All I know is what I have words for.” And: “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” As a writer, my only tools are my words. How can I go on when I know that my words lack any real power to either communicate any true meaning or make any real change? How can I go on when I know that I’m limited by the very tools I depend upon?

SR: Right. Tough love. Didn’t he also say: “Only describe, don’t explain.”

IB: That’s right. Not enough to rip out my tongue, he wants to cut me off at the knees as well; render me completely powerless. I might as well be a monkey banging away at the typewriter keys hoping to produce something of value by complete accident.

SR: Still, you continued writing, why?

IB: Because…as much as I might’ve agreed with him, I was determined to try to work around my — and language’s — limitations. I was a writer, after all, what else was I good for?

SR: You did, of course, stop writing poetry after your second book, despite the accolades. Why was that?

IB: I felt that I’d said what I needed to say with poetry; used what I needed to use. I didn’t want to be one of those poets who repeats themselves book after book, poem after poem: the same images, the same themes, the same words until they became cliches. Do you understand?

SR: Oh, yeah. In fact, more of today’s poets could take a lesson. I think you even said to detractors: “Quitting involves strength, not weakness.” I may be paraphrasing.

IB: Yes. (She leaned toward me slightly and whispered past an upraised hand.) Though between you, me, and the bedpost, I did continue to write poetry, I just never put together and submitted another collection. It became one of those guilty pleasures. (She crushed her cigarette and lit another.) You know, not only was Wittgenstein a philosopher and linguist, he also had a talent for plumbing and carpentry. In fact, his neighbours only knew him in those capacities and would call on him to fix things for them when they were in need, and he obliged, never feeling unrecognized or belittled on any level. Incredible, yes? Anyway, he used these skills as an analogy to writing, saying that language, words, should be thought of as tools in a tool-box: “there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, nails and screws. The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.” I decided to write fiction because I thought it would give me more tools to play with and experiment with. Besides, I wasn’t about to allow a man to tell me that my chosen vocation and skills were limited, no matter how damn smart or clever he was. (There was a knock on the door and a voice called out from the hallway: Ms Bachmann, we’re ready for you.) It’s my entourage. I’m to have the full celebrity treatment: hair, make-up, nails, eyebrows, jewelry, a new frock, a spray of perfume, a puff of powder, and so on, the corpse to be made presentable for general public viewing. (She rolled a sleeve and pressed the lit end of her cigarette on her arm, producing a round burn mark, followed by a second burn a few inches higher. She didn’t flinch, simply smiled, sighed, and slit her eyes.) Ahh, that’s better. As I’m sure you’re aware, habits are the hardest things to break. Also, when I looked into the mirror earlier, I barely recognized myself. Gone were the distinguishing scars, the horse hair shirt, the barbed wire panties. It frightened me. (She took a deep drag, exhaled, grabbed the empty wine bottle and gave it a shake.) Now, if you wouldn’t mind, be a love and bring me another one of these. There’s a case sitting on the floor beside the dresser. You can let them in as you leave. (She fluttered her fingers toward the door.) Thank you. It was lovely speaking with you, really.

SR: Of course. (I did as I was asked, gathered my belongings, and made way for the others to enter and perform their appointed tasks.)   

 

I checked the various media the next couple of days to see if there was any coverage of the event. As I more or less expected, there was nothing. Wittgenstein said: “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” In the case of Ingeborg Bachmann, I felt there was much to speak of, both in terms of her literary legacy and her life as the ‘bizarre poetess.’ A love affair with Henry Kissinger? It boggles the mind. Of course, that’s just my opinion. Unfortunately, there’s little interest in poets or poetry these days either within the media or the public at large. Perhaps if she’d gone up in flames in her hotel room, someone may have taken notice. Though even then, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Bachmann herself was well aware when she said: “Poetry like bread? That bread would have to grind between the teeth and reawaken the hunger before it stills it. And this poetry will have to be sharp with insight and bitter with longing in order to be able to stir the sleep of people. For we are asleep, are sleepers, from fear of having to look at ourselves and our world.”

          Well said, Ingeborg. Well spoken. One can only hope that on your next hundredth-year birthday, the world treats you better; will be — at the very least — open and more welcoming, crazy as it sounds.

 

       

 

 

 

Stan Rogal lives and writes in Toronto along with his artist partner Jacquie Jacobs. His work has appeared almost magically in numerous magazines and anthologies. The author of several books, plus a handful of chapbooks, a 13th poetry collection was published in March 2025 with ecw press. Co-founder of Bald Ego Theatre and former coordinator of the popular Idler Pub Reading Series.