Benjamin Niespodziany : short takes on the prose poem

 folio : short takes on the prose poem

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] A prose poem is a globe thrown into a square. A pair of misfits sitting willingly at the kids' table. A prose poem is an unstable quartet of professionals pretending like they know what they’re doing. A novel within a toggling box. A god lost at sea. A prose poem is an unknown inside of an unknown. It is where we box ourselves in and thin the outsides. Where we hide from the world, whirligigging as if it this oxymoron was meant to be, as if throwing prose and poetry into the same bowl is normal, standard, average. After all, it crafts a solid concoction. I guess what I'm trying to say is: the prose poem is a delectable soup. My spoon is never satisfied. My spoon can't get enough.

[2] The prose poem does not demand an ending. It does not demand an explanation. It does not need a resolution. It contains none of these things and all of these things. Anything can happen inside of such a boxed-in paragraph. A pair of wings catches fire and turns into a frog. I fell in love with the prose poem because it felt like a contained commercial break, a parable in interlude form. Enough to chew on while eating lunch, while walking around the neighborhood. A world within a wink.

[3] I think the prose poem is a brain, waiting for a paper weight to crush it into ooze.

[4] Or maybe the prose poem is an aquarium full of skulls and glow-in-the-dark coral.

[5] In all seriousness, folks, the prose poem is a tattered coat I wear to my own daily funeral. I'm thankful.

 

 

 

 

The Shopping Plaza

My mother's car is full of leaf beetles. For each beetle that flies out of my mother’s car, two new beetles fly in. My mother does not acknowledge the leaf beetles. She is late to meet my sister at the shopping plaza. My sister is waiting at the shopping plaza. The shopping plaza is supposed to have silver spatulas and discounted songbirds. My mother drives fast. The leaf beetles line her wig. She has no leaves to give them. My mother's car offers plenty – maple wood baskets, napkins, Spanish ham - but it holds no trees. The leaf beetles ignore everything but my mother's wig. They only want the wig. It's a very expensive wig. It's the only wig she has.

(originally appeared in FENCE)

 

 

Origins of Borscht, or: A Liter of Tree for Dr. Sky
inspired by the Bulgarian folk figure Hitar Petar

Dr. Sky walks to buy soup. He has no money to buy soup. He approaches the soup. He takes the last scrap of paper from his pocket and holds it over the soup. The steam will be well-flavored, he says. Flavored like well. Flavored like soup. The paper will relay the bread, the steam will be a shadow's taste. A shadow of a lasting dream. No steam, the soup man sings. Cold soup. Everyone in town laughs as if it's required by law.

 

 

The Devil Suggests

The devil is wearing a scarf and we do not know why. The final island is not the final island. The shoeboxes are full of old dolls. I have kept this rug in my car for years. I named her after kerosine drying on a wall. I'm writing a final thesis on puzzle pieces. The sea urchins earning room in my foot. Hollow trees, we apologize for our pouring of sand. The end of the world is a camera capturing the silence. Every time my knee clicks, I know I'll live forever.

(originally appeared in Mercurius Magazine)

 

 

 

 

Benjamin Niespodziany’s work has appeared in Fence, Fairy Tale Review, Sporklet, Maudlin House, and others. Along with being featured in the Wigleaf Top 50, his writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. His debut chapbook, The Northerners, was released at the end of 2021.

 

Amanda Earl : what poems do in a few above/ground press 2021 chapbooks

 

 

 

 

1. evoke dreams

The Northerners by Benjamin Niespodziany is “an ekphrastic sequence written while  watching the Dutch film De Noorderlingen (1992)  directed  by  Alex  van  Warmerdam.” I haven’t seen the film, but I enjoyed this sequence very much. I did the same sort of thing while watching Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet and it’s published in Kiki, my poetry book with Chaudiere Books (now with Invisible Publishing). I love the minimalism of this sequence, the fragments, and the fact that some of the poems “appeared as daydreams written on post-it notes.” There’s a fairy tale quality to the sequence. There are evocative lines, such as “He houses the dark” when writing about someone called “the forester” from the film I would think. You know how your dreams seem completely logical while you’re dreaming? I felt that here. Like I was dreaming too.

2. mesmerize through accumulatory sentences

In Yesterday’s Tigers by Mayan Godmaire, the sentences start out small and build into complex images and structures. I delighted in these poems, some were haibun, I believe. I loved the call to the senses. I don’t know about you but since the pandemic, my world has been increasingly reduced to screens, so I welcome any opportunity to engage with the senses. I enjoyed the way occasional sentences in French appeared. Switching languages in a poem changes its rhythm and pace. I love the way Persephone is linked throughout and to the land. The lines in italics come from Jim Morrison songs and Proust’s Du Côté de Chez Swann and work well with the text. I’d like to read more of Godmaire’s writing.

3. play with geometry

Andrew Brenza Geometric Mantra is intriguing. Brenza works with and against the grid  in these digital visual poems. Some of the words are readable and some are not. He begins with a maze at the start of a sentence, followed by mirages and mirror images. The work shifts into distortions and breakages as the mirror breaks into shards of reflections becoming kaleidoscopic and fading. There is an error to remember, darkness and snow, letters that meander and link or bunch together like magnetic fuzzy iron filings in a magnetic field experiment. There is a sad sea. I can read each one of these poems and my mind begins to wander too, taking me all over the place from Eurydice’s broken mirror (once more a Cocteau reference) to the suicide by drowning of Virginia Woolf, to this odd little toy I had as a child that used a magnet to collect filings beneath a plastic sheet…None of this was the author’s intent, but as a writer, I always want my work to lead outward and inward. So it’s a compliment. I know these were probably great fun to make.

Katie O’Brien’s Micro Moonlights plays with musical notation in a similar way. Some of the titles come from or were inspired by Beethoven. This work also plays with the grid, here the sheet of music, sometimes horizontal or vertical or at a slant, and the notes, sometimes repeated, sometimes dancing off the sheet, sometimes layered into a tower of song, to reference Leonard Cohen for my own entertainment, or a big tangled up pile of cacophony. I would like to hear these played on a piano.  

4. make me ache with envy

In Less Dream N.W. Lea makes poems that ripple across my lake of loneliness, as his work always does for me. They quietly sing flaw. Everything at Once is a mantra that I’ll keep on my wall. There’s something so humble about this work, yet it also astonishes with these unique lines that feel like truths for me. “the blackbirds in the bare maple/are little adorable portals/into Void. [from Void].

Jason Christie’s Bridges and burn is a thoughtful, humorous and sometimes wry sequence that plays with the contradictions between the natural world and the human world as we try to survive  late capitalism. It’s been the subject of much of Christie’s work especially his most recent and brilliant collection, Cursed Objects (Coach House Books, 2019. “In the meantime, the tree grows like a graphic expression of a kind of rough music performed by the ants.” Hell yeah.

THE OCEANDWELLER by Saeed Tavanaee Marvi and translated by Khashayar Mohammadi is a gorgeous work. “bitter nights had sedimented underneath our nails”

There is acacia entering a kitchen window, white like a bride. There is a downpour, two telephone conversations mingled. There is pain: “its strange / how pain resembles words / if inspected from close range / its as if words are constructed by pain” – “hide your wings”

I love that above/ground press publishes translations, not something I’ve seen too often in the micropress universe. I appreciated being introduced to Saeed Tavanaee Marvi’s work, which I would likely never have read because I don’t speak Farsi.

5. have me leaping around

JoAnna Novak’s Knife with Oral Greed opens with an epigraph from Anne Sexton’s poem, Hansel and Gretel from Sexton’s Transformations, which I hadn’t heard about before and will now read.

Knife with Oral Greed is a great title, by the way, and perhaps refers to an ancient Finnish tale, Kullervo, based on a very shallow Google search. Makes me think of Freudian analysis – orality.

This is a minimal sequence, spare of colour (white, red, silver), with unusual words like “tessarae,”: tessarae are small, cut stones used in mosaics as early as the third or fourth century. A “cuchillo” is a Spanish word for knife. I do not know what a “peach leo” is but I like it.

I am enamored by all the textures in this sequence: wax, silk, silver, oil, foam, white flowers, cake, snakes, wine, flypaper…

There’s a small American perfumery called “For Strange Women,” I have only learned about this month. The descriptions of the perfumes were so enticing, I had to purchase a solid perfume called Fireside Story. This work is well-written and strange, and that is a compliment. It feels like a dream. There are some reversals where objects perform actions that I’ve seen in some Canadian contemporary surrealist-ish poetry.

Looking at Novak’s site, I notice Noirmania, a poetry collection that is described by Johannes Göransson, author of The Sugar Book describes as “part hellish fashion shoot, part necroglamorous memoir, part grotesque diorama.” I’m intrigued. I feel like this intensity that is described is restrained in Knife with Oral Greed, but it’s there, beneath the skin, in the veins…

And of course, I have to look up Göransson, who is a poet, translator, professor and editor. I immediately follow him on Twitter. I liked his use of “necroglamorous.” This leads me to this fantastic poem published on Poetry Daily, “Summer (excerpt) which blends English with another language that I don’t know so I can’t name it and is heavy with texture and intense too. Then I go to his site and read a bit from an interview he did where he’s quoted as saying he wants to drown in poetry. I adore this. That’s what I’m here for.

 

 

 

 

 

Amanda Earl (she/her) is a polyamorous pansexual feminist cis-gendered poetesse, the fallen angel of AngelHousePress and the managing editor of Bywords.ca, and that’s all she wants to mention in her bio right now. More info: AmandEarl.com; Adoring fans: https://linktr.ee/amandaearl.

 

 

Benjamin Niespodziany : on The Northerners

 

 

 

The Northerners is a chapbook-length poetry sequence written while watching the 1992 Dutch film De Noorderlingen (The Northerners). The movie takes place on one solitary street and in one secluded forest. Together, the film feels like a series of Russel Edson poems. Absurdist vignettes. Folkloric strange happenings. I had already watched the movie a handful of times and decided to watch it on mute while freewriting. Done over three sessions in 2019 and 2020, I then trimmed the writing down – from nearly 2,000 words to 800 – and turned it into a micro poetry sequence. I highly recommend you watch this film by Alex van Warmerdam, as well as his more recent (and more surreal) Borgman.

Along with The Northerners (which was the first of this ongoing series), I have written another 50+ pieces while watching various movies on mute. One during the French film Mood Indigo (2013) that was published in Heavy Feather Review (and nominated for the Best of the Net). One during the Swedish film You, the Living (2009) which is forthcoming from Mercurius Magazine. One during the Greek film Birds (Or How to Be One) which is forthcoming from HAD. All of these are part of a manuscript-in-progress with a working title of Ekphrastic Jazz. Some of the other movies I've watched for this series include Borgman (mentioned above), El Topo, Holy Motors, Pity, Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium, and more. Even Looney Tunes makes an appearance.

 

 

 

Benjamin Niespodziany's writing has appeared in the Wigleaf Top 50, Fence, Salt Hill Journal, Fairy Tale Review, and various others. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. A former Peace Corps Volunteer in Ecuador, he currently works nights in a library in Chicago and runs the multimedia art blog [neonpajamas].