Eleonore Schönmaier : Three poems

 

 

 

Enter

 

In the early hours of
the morning thousands
of large vehicles enter
the city blowing sirens

and horns. We're all
suddenly wide awake. Most
of us are always home, day and
night (by choice

of course). Our
meals are delivered
to our doors. Many, many years ago
the frail and elderly confined to

their homes had a meals-on-wheels
program or so I'm told.
The drivers of the heavy tractors
head into the city center. These farmers,

many of them older, are among
the few of us who still venture
outdoors. They want to remind us where
our food comes from

though most of our fruits and
vegetables, like us, are now
grown indoors in vertical
gardens.

 

 

Floats

 

I found the coast
storm-strewn
with French books

fallen overboard,
when I walked
the shore

years ago,
pages open
to the breeze.

Ragged, worn
and wet, I took
a book home

and I still enjoy
the essence
of those pages

where we share
the best and
embrace

the worst, but
where the best floats
to the surface.

 

 

 

Ancestors

 

A day after heavy rain
I stand at just the right
angle and find a forest

mirror—this physics of light
where the sky-blue, leaf
green, and limbs of the trees

reflect from the pool
of water in the hollow
stump of an ancestor.

 

 

 

 

Eleonore Schönmaier’s latest collection is Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021). Wavelengths of Your Song (MQUP) was published in German translation as Wellenlängen deines Liedes (parasitenpresse, 2020). Dust Blown Side of the Journey (MQUP) was a finalist for the Eyelands Book Awards 2020 (Greece). 

Her poetry has been set to music by Greek, Dutch, Scottish, American and Canadian composers including Michalis Paraskakis, Panos Gklistis and Carmen Braden. She’s won the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, the Earle Birney Prize, the National Broadsheet Contest, and was one of the winners in the Poem in Your Pocket Day contest 2023. Her poetry has been widely anthologized in the United States and Canada including in Best Canadian Poetry.  http://eleonoreschonmaier.com

Noah Eli Gordon, Arielle Greenberg, Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Fiona Tinwei Lam + Eleonore Schönmaier : virtual reading series #11

a series of video recordings of contemporary poets reading from their work, prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellations, shut-downs and isolations; a reading series you can enjoy in the safety of your own protected space,

Noah Eli Gordon : “Social Distancing”

Noah Eli Gordon is the author of a dozen books, including the recent collection Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Hoses Down?, which the New York Times called “absurdist flash fiction, disrupting reality through juxtaposition.” Find Gordon’s poem and a process note here: https://www.inknode.com/noaheligordon/social-distancing-2

Arielle Greenberg : “‘Made by Maid’ is My Favorite Song by Laura Marling and I Want to Crawl Inside It and You, Too.”

Arielle Greenberg’s previous poetry collections are Slice, My Kafka Century and Given. She’s also the writer of the creative nonfiction book Locally Made Panties, the transgenre chapbooks Shake Her and Fa(r)ther Down, and co-author, with Rachel Zucker, of Home/Birth: A Poemic. She has co-edited three anthologies, including Gurlesque, forthcoming in an expanded digital edition co-edited with Becca Klaver. Arielle’s poems and essays have been featured in Best American Poetry, Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers and The Racial Imaginary, among other anthologies. She wrote a column on contemporary poetics for the American Poetry Review, and edited a series of essays called (K)ink: Writing While Deviant for The Rumpus. A former tenured professor in poetry at Columbia College Chicago, she lives with her family in Maine, where she writes, edits, teaches and works for a creative services agency.

Jean Marc Ah-Sen : “Ah-Sen and I”

Jean Marc Ah-Sen is the Toronto-based author of In the Beggarly Style of Imitation and Grand Menteur. The National Post has called his work “an inventive escape from the conventional.” He lives with his wife and two sons.

Fiona Tinwei Lam : “Ode to Chopsticks”

Fiona Tinwei Lam is the author of Intimate Distances (finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Prize), Enter the Chrysanthemum, and a new poetry collection, Odes & Laments (Caitlin Press, fall 2019).  She also authored the illustrated children’s book, The Rainbow Rocket. Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction have been published in over thirty anthologies (Canada, Hong Kong, and the US), including The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry in English (Tenth Anniversary Edition).  Her poems have been featured  twice on local transit as part of B.C.’s Poetry in Transit.  She is a co-editor of and contributor to the creative nonfiction anthology, Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, and also the editor of The Bright Well, a collection of contemporary Canadian poetry about facing cancer.   She and Jane Silcott have co-edited the creative nonfiction and poetry anthology, Love Me True: Writers Reflect on the Ins, Outs, Ups & Downs of Marriage. Her poetry videos have been screened at festivals locally and internationally. She teaches at Simon Fraser University (Continuing Studies).

Eleonore Schönmaier : “Let Us Be,” “Weightless” (from Wavelengths of Your Song) and “What Gets Blown In” (from Wavelengths of Your Song)

Eleonore Schönmaier’s collection Wavelengths of Your Song (McGill-Queen's University Press) will be published in German translation in September 2020 in time for the Frankfurt Book Fair (with Canada as the guest country). She is also the author of Dust Blown Side of the Journey (MQUP) and Treading Fast Rivers (MQUP).  Canadian, Dutch, Scottish, American and Greek composers have set her poems to music including Emily Doolittle and Michalis Paraskakis. She has won the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, the Earle Birney Prize, and the 2019 National Broadsheet contest, among others. Her poetry has been included in the League of Canadian Poets and the Academy of American Poets Poem in Your Pocket Day Brochure, and has been widely anthologized including in Best Canadian Poetry. eleonoreschonmaier.com