Finding the Angel Within: An Interview with Ken Ronkowitz

I was interviewed for the National Poetry Month episode of the podcast L-Town Radio. The host, Joe O'Brien, is a multi-hyphenate librarian-poet-musicmaker at the Livingston Public Library in New Jersey, which is the town where I spent several decades as an English teacher. 

We had a long conversation, and I talked about my experiences as an English teacher, teaching poetry and writing poetry. We got into my invented form, the "Ronka," and how writing a poem is like "finding the angel within." 

The interview is broken into parts and mixed with library staff reading favorite poems, and news of the library. 

If you are curious to hear the voice of and know a bit more about the person behind Poets Online, you can listen on their website  or on Apple Podcasts, or on Spotify 

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Writing the Day Podcast

In April 2021, I started doing podcasts of some of the poems that I have been writing and posting on another personal site called Writing the Day  That site began in 2014 when I decided to try a daily poetry writing practice. I wrote 365 poems that year in my invented form. I have continued the practice though now on more of a weekly basis.

The website has followers and gets regular visitors and I assume some of the podcast followers are those same people - though perhaps the podcast has a different audience. It's hard to know about who is connecting to these virtual forms of poetry. 

It doesn't have a large audience but, for now, I enjoy writing the poems and doing the podcasts. There are now more than 800 poems on the website, so there is much that could be recorded. The poems are brief and so are the readings. Some have additional information about the poem but most of them clock in at just a few minutes.  

I record the poems using Anchor and you can listen to them at Anchor, but right now most visitors are listening at Spotify - which isn't surprising since it is a very popular app, though probably more associated with music. The podcast is also available on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, RadioPublic and Breaker.  They are all free, as are the apps to listen.

Any thoughts? Have you listened? Leave a comment. 

Ken

Prompt: Translation

Translations are an important part of the poetry world.  Even translating the deceptively-simple haiku is difficult and worthy of argument. We use the phrase "lost in translation" more often in situations that don't have to do with going from one language to another.

You probably have tried one of the translation tools online, such as Google Translate, and very likely found the results to be so literal that something was lost in the process. This is more likely when translating poetry and literature and language that is more figurative.

The poem "On Translation" by Mónica de la Torre suggests that the translator's job is:

"Not to search for meaning, but to reedify a gesture, an intent.
As a translator, one grows attached to originals. Seldom are choices
   so purposeful."

Translations can be far-reaching, such as those done for politicians in places like the United Nations.

Our prompt this month deals with translation in poetry, but not necessarily of poetry.




One poem in Charles Baudelaire's collection Fleurs du mal  (a title that easily translate to Flowers of Evil) is "Harmonie du soir."  Just looking at the first stanza of that poem in several translations shows us the "problem" with translations.

Baudelaire wrote:

Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige
Chaque fleur s'évapore ainsi qu'un encensoir;
Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!

That stanza was translated by William Aggeler as:

The season is at hand when swaying on its stem
Every flower exhales perfume like a censer;
Sounds and perfumes turn in the evening air;
Melancholy waltz and languid vertigo!

But in the translation by Roy Campbell, the stanza becomes:

Now comes the eve, when on its stem vibrates
Each flower, evaporating like a censer;
When sounds and scents in the dark air grow denser;
Drowsed swoon through which a mournful waltz pulsates!

Cyril Scott translated that stanza in this way:

The hour approacheth, when, as their stems incline,
The flowers evaporate like an incense urn,
And sounds and scents in the vesper breezes turn;
A melancholy waltz — and a drowsiness divine.

And the version translated by Lewis Piaget Shanks looks like this:

the hours approach when vibrant in the breeze,
a censer swoons to every swaying flower;
blown tunes and scents in turn enchant the bower;
languorous waltz of swirling fancies these!

Which translation is the right one, or the best one, or the closest to what Baudelaire would have wanted to say in English?

I can't ask you this month to do translations of poems since many of us don't have multiple languages to use. Let us think about other instances of translation in our lives.

In "Elegy in Translation" by Meg Day, she notes something we have all done - hearing a song lyric incorrectly:
"I saw Joni live and still thought a gay pair of guys put up a parking lot." 

Even after hearing the song sung live - like hearing a poet at a reading - she didn't hear the correct Joni Mitchell lyric ("They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.") though she may have known that was the actual line.

In the haiku-like "Elvis in Translation" by Elaine Equi, she writes about one of the other kinds of translations we do in our lives.

"Sometimes the blue in Blue Hawaii
gets lost. But Elvis’s eyes speak
pure Esperanto."

My own thought is that we are all translators, whether it be in our everyday lives or in the ways that we take experiences and translate them into poems for others to read and experience.

For this month's prompt, I ask you to focus on the act of translation in any form - actually translating from one language to another, interpreting and translating a conversation in our own language or a gesture or a facial reaction, a baby's cry, a pet's attitude, the meaning of clouds moving towards you - the possibilities are wide open and many. Is that translation accurate, successful, or is something lost or mistranslated?

I offer up my own take on translation as this month's model poem.

Translation

My grandparents would speak Slovak
with my father, the aunts and the uncles
at the Sunday dinners at their home in Newark
when they didn’t want us to know.
In those days, the priests spoke Latin.
That was the mystery of the faith.
The boys on the #42 bus spoke Spanish
as I rode to my afterschool job
and when they laughed, looking in my direction.
Too fast for my B+  Spanish III  understanding
but enough that it hurt.
The waiter at the Chinese restaurant
changes my order into words
that I want to understand, 
but will  never know.
Translation.
This is the poet’s job, 
and the job of the reader too.
We have been in training
all our lives.

by Kenneth Ronkowitz

Deadline for submissions is November 30, 2018

Translation

When the U.N. General Assembly listens to a speaker, how much is lost in the translations?

"As you know, translation is really a problem-solving task. Every once in a while you see the original and something comes into your head that is also a formal solution to the problem of getting it into lively English, and you feel like you've written a poem. But that's pretty rare. I wouldn't exactly say it's more like doing crossword puzzles than it is like writing poetry, but it's a mix of the two. "                    

- Robert Hass, "Interview: A Common Language"

Ask Google Translate to do its work on "poets online" and you will get in Italian "poeti in linea" and in French "poètes en ligne" and though I can't read Japanese, I'm sure that  詩人オンライン is also a "poet on a line" of some type. Something is certainly "lost in translation."

Translation is difficult. Edward Hirsch says that "Strictly speaking, total translation is impossible, since languages differ and each language carries its own complex of linguistic resources, historical and social values. This is especially true in poetry, the maximal of language."

The translation of poetry needs something more than simply translating words and getting the same general meaning. In defining "translation" for his Poets Glossary, Edward Hirsch notes:

That’s why its untranslatability has been one of the defining features of poetry. Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the word untranslatableness. Robert Frost famously said, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” An Italian pun captures the idea: traduttore/traditore, translator/traitor.

You can find advice about translating poetry, but I am interested here more in using poetry to talk about translation.

We sometimes say, "Let me translate that for you" meaning that we will rephrase something complex into a more understandable form.  We use the expression "in simple English"  in this way.

Richard Blanco's poem"Translation for Mamá" begins:

What I’ve written for you, I have always written
in English, my language of silent vowel endings
never translated into your language of silent h’s.
               Lo que he escrito para ti, siempre lo he escrito
               en inglés, en mi lengua llena de vocales mudas
               nunca traducidas a tu idioma de haches mudas.

He writes his poems and also translates it into his mother's Spanish.

But "How do I say it?” is what Joy Harjo is really concerned with in her poem “Deer Dancer..”  Though she can be referring to the language of her own Mvskoke/Creek Nation, she is also talking about the inadequacies of all languages. 

How do I say it?  In this language there are no words for how the real world
collapses.  I could say it in my own and the sacred mounds would come into
focus, but I couldn’t take it in this dingy envelope.  So I look at the stars in
this strange city, frozen to the back of the sky, the only promises that ever
make sense.

Harjo is trying to tell a story about an incident in a bar, but language can't quite convey all that happened there that night.

Nearly everyone had left that bar in the middle of winter except the
hardcore.  It was the coldest night of the year, every place shut down, but
not us.  Of course we noticed when she came in.  We were Indian ruins.  She
was the end of beauty.  No one knew her, the stranger whose tribe we
recognized, her family related to deer, if that’s who she was, a people
accustomed to hearing songs in pine trees, and making them hearts.

The word "translation" derives from the Latin translatio, which in turn comes from trans- and fero, meaning “to carry across” or “to bring across.” It usually mean the transfer of meaning from one language to another, but it also is what we do in interpreting the world around us every day.

One of my poems is about this everyday translating we do - from other languages, in interpreting the world and certainly in writing and reading poetry.

Translation

My grandparents would speak Slovak
with my father, the aunts and the uncles
at the Sunday dinners at their home in Newark
when they didn’t want us to know.
In those days, the priests spoke Latin.
That was the mystery of the faith.
The boys on the #42 bus spoke Spanish
as I rode to my afterschool job
and when they laughed, looking in my direction.
Too fast for my B+  Spanish III  understanding
but enough that it hurt.
The waiter at the Chinese restaurant
changes my order into words
that I want to understand,
but will  never know.
Translation.
This is the poet’s job,
and the job of the reader too.
We have been in training
all our lives.

- Kenneth Ronkowitz

Our writing prompt for November is a poem about translation in any of those three ways: from other languages, in interpreting the world, or in writing and reading poetry.

Prompt: Terrance Hayes and the Golden Shovel

Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes invented a poetry form he calls the Golden Shovel. You take a line (or lines) from a poem you admire, and use each word in the line (or lines) as an end word in your poem while maintaining the order. So, if you choose a line with six words, your poem would be six lines long.

This borrowing method is not without precedent in poetry. One similar form is quite ancient: the cento, in which you make a poem entirely from other poets' lines. Another form makes a new poem by removing lines from an existing poem - that is known as an erasure.

For my own first Golden Shovel attempt, I wrote a poem for my daily writing practice last year. I chose a poem by Gary Snyder called "Changing Diapers" and used his line "you and me and Geronimo." I wrote it in the ronka form that all my daily poems for 2014 used.

Geronimo [after Gary Snyder]

After the reading, talking briefly to you
and recalling another time – when I, Steve and
you shared coffee conversation – you remembered me.
A wonderful lie. We are men, and
we jump like paratroopers and shout Geronimo.

My poem came out of a brief encounter with Snyder recently when he read at the Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey. It also recalls a longer conversation we had at another Dodge Festival more than 20 years ago.

In what I believe must be the first Golden Shovel poem, Terrance Hayes used a Gwendolyn Brooks poem. He started with Brooks' often-anthologized poem, "We Real Cool." His poem is called "The Golden Shovel.".

"The rules" for this new form are:

• Take a line(s) from a favorite poem
• Use each word in the line (or lines) as an end word in your poem and
• Keep the end words in the order they appeared originally. That means that you could read the stanza at the right edge like an acrostic.
• Give credit to the original poet (it can be in the title, an epigram or within the poem) and for our prompt also include a note a reference to the poem, though it doesn't have to be part of the poem itself. It would be great if you could include a link to the original poem online so that readers could see your inspiration.
• The new poem does not have to be about the same subject as the original poem, but it can be related.

We know how poets love to play by the rules. Mr. Hayes pushes a bit on his own rules by using more than a line and and using every word from the Brooks poem. Twice. Setting the bar high. In his collection, Lighthead, he also has a poem using Elizabeth Alexander's poem, “Ladders” (for his "Last Train to Africa") and borrows lyrics from songs by Marvin Gaye and Louis Armstrong for others.

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Terrance Hayes' poem “The Golden Shovel” is from Lighthead (2010, Penguin) which won the National Book Award.




Extra Credit: Think you know why Hayes called his poem and form "The Golden Shovel?"   Tell us your answer in a comment on this post.

Writing the Days, One Ronka at a Time

I wrote a guest post for Adele Kenny's poetry blog, The Music In It, about my daily writing practice this year and the ronka poems I have been writing and posting online.

It is a good exercise to get "meta" about your writing once in awhile and think about what you write and why. Treat yourself as an assignment from that poetry class and look at the themes that run through your poems, the language etc. (I didn't realize how many birds were flying into my daily poems.)

Here is what I wrote for Adele.

This year I wanted to take on a daily writing practice with my poetry.  It's not an original New Year's resolution. William Stafford is the poet who inspired me the most. he wrote every day of his life from 1950 to 1993. Not everything he wrote was a poem. His 20,000 pages of daily writings include early morning meditations, poems, dream records, aphorisms, and other “visits to the unconscious.”

I do write every day, but not always poetry, so the resolution was to do a daily poem. Stafford did go through a period when that was also his goal. When he was asked how he was able to produce a poem every morning, he replied, “I lower my standards.” I like that answer, but, while the phrase has a negative connotation, Stafford meant that he allowed himself some bad poems knowing that with daily writing there will be eventually be some good work.

I wanted to impose some form on myself each day and I thought using a short form might make the project more likely to succeed. I love haiku, tanka and other short forms, but I ended up creating my own form for this project.

Finding a photo of her

from that summer when we were fifteen
that hot day behind the beach house
her bare shoulders, back, arms and legs -
when I suddenly realized she’s a woman
and it startled me.  It startled me.

I call my form the ronka – obviously a somewhat egotistical play on the tanka form.

The term waka originally encompassed a number of differing forms including the tanka (“short poem”) and chōka (“long poem”), sedōka (“memorized poem”?) and katauta (“poem fragment”). Of those, only the tanka has really survived.

If you look at those forms, you notice that the numbers 5 and 7 are the heart of all of them.  The katauta is  5-7-7  and the chōka counts out  at 5-7-5-7-5-7…5-7-7 and the sedōka at 5-7-7-5-7-7 is composed of two sets of 5-7-7.

The tanka form consists of five units (often treated as separate lines when romanized or translated) usually with the following pattern of 5-7-5-7-7. Even in that short form, the tanka has two parts. The 5-7-5 is called the kami-no-ku (“upper phrase”) and the 7-7 is called the shimo-no-ku (“lower phrase”).

For my invented form, a ronka contains 5 lines, each having 7 words without concern for syllables. Westerners consider haiku to be 5, 7, and 5 lines counted by syallables, but, since Chinese and Japanese have no syllables, that has always been a Western convention.

Letters Loved

Old letters from lovers, not love letters,
but timelines of relationships like plot diagrams -
conflicts, turning points, resolutions, conclusions, mostly tragedies.
Why do I save them? No sequels.
Dangerous tinder to have around. Best burned.

As with traditional tanka, I decided to have no rhyme. (Even accidental rhymes were considered faults in a tanka.). I also decided to use the haiku principle of show rather than tell. For example, to indicate spring by mentioning cherry blossoms rather than stating the season. I started the year trying not to include myself or people as frequently as we do in Western poetry, those have crept into the poems.

I have even added a few footnotes and links to poems.

Fathers and Sons

Sons grow up and leave their fathers
to become fathers and perhaps have sons.
Child is the father of the man,
said another poet, his heart leaping up.
Five days of rain, then, a rainbow.

We are just past mid-year and I have maintained by daily poem practice without great difficulty. I post them online at Writing the Day and each observation of the day is categorized as being from the outside world or inside the world of dwellings or the mind.

I write at all times of the day, but most poems seem to come at the end of the day. (I also set a daily 10 pm reminder on my phone about posting a poem.)

A non-poet might think that writing 35 words a day is not much of a challenge, but poets will understand that I frequently don't write much faster than a word-per-minute. I also post an image (my own or borrowed) with each poem.

Some poems are ars poetica or poems about poetry or writing.

Firefly Revision

Basho considered a Kikaku haiku as cruel:
A red firefly / tear off its wings -
a pepper.  A pepper / give it wings –
a red firefly, was Basho’s simple change.
Revision as a Buddhist act of kindness.

Carving

No, writing poetry is more like carving
wood and taking away, finding the heart
hidden inside, paring, using point and blade.
The danger comes from the dull knife.
The soft inside will be thrown away.

Some are observations on a particular day, such as this one from the Friday the 13th in June:

A thirteenth day that is a Friday.

A Full Moon to complete a triad

of  strange correlation without any real causation.

We look carefully for signs and connections -

find clockwork regularity; serendipity in the moments.

The blog I post to has a "tag cloud" feature and I tag each ronka with a few keywords that describe the poem. It is interesting to me to see what words occur most frequently: birds, time, the Moon and tea have all been things that I seem to return to this year.

Titles have become another way of adding a line to the poem, though I still limit myself to seven words there too.

I’m Not An Actor in Hollywood But

I want a body and stunt double.

I want better lighting. No high definition.

More scenes and lines, 20 against 20,

gross points on profits, hand and footprints,

a star on the Walk of Fame.

There are lots of books and websites to find poetic inspiration through writing prompts. I have been doing a monthly one at Poets Online since 1998.  Adele has provided almost 200 well-defined prompts here already. My fellow New Jersey poets, Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Diane Lockward have excellent craft books with prompts - Writing Poetry To Save Your Life and The Crafty Poet, respectively. William Stafford and Stephen Dunning's Getting the Knack is a book I bought when I started teaching and I still dip into for inspiration.

Daily practices have a long history as paths of transformation spiritually, physically and for learning a craft. Perhaps, meditation and prayer will be your spiritual practice. Perhaps, yoga, tai chi or running is your physical practice. You might even combine them - kinhin is walking meditation. Consider a daily writing practice, whether it be poetry, a field guide from nature, a garden journal, one page of that long-intended novel. Disciplines of the mind are a good way to a healthy brain!

Adele is a poet and offers regular writing prompts online that are very well explained and illustrated. She is a fine poet herself - check out her collection What Matters - and she has written many books on a variety of topics.

A former professor of creative writing in the College of New Rochelle's Graduate School, Adele Kenny is founding director of the Carriage House Poetry Series (NJ), which is where I first met her. She is one of those many people across the country whose local efforts keep poetry alive. The readings have featured New Jersey poets and nationally-known poets, including Mark Doty, Jim Haba, Stephen Dunn, BJ Ward, Renee Ashley, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Laura Boss, Marie-Elizabeth Mali, Diane Lockward, Alicia Ostriker and Patricia Smith.

Adele is also the poetry editor of Tiferet Journal. She has read in the US, England, Ireland, and France, and has been a featured reader at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.

Ken Ronkowitz Reading at Carriage House October 16

The Carriage House Poetry Series was established by Adele Kenny in 1998 and is held in the Kuran Arts Center, a 19th carriage house, in Fanwood, New Jersey.

The Carriage House Series has featured a wide range of both nationally-known and local poets including Gerald Stern, Renee Ashley, Stephen Dunn, Alicia Ostriker, Patricia Smith, Taylor Mali, and Maria Gillan.

Ken Ronkowitz will be the featured reader on October 16. Ken is a lifelong NJ resident and educator. After many years teaching in public schools, he moved to the NJ Institute of Technology. Ken has been the editor since 1998 of PoetsOnline.org, a monthly online poetry magazine and web site for poetic inspiration. His poems have been published in magazines such as English Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Paterson Literary Review, Roadmap, Prague and the anthology, The Paradelle. He has worked with the Geraldine Dodge Foundation on poetry projects in NJ and is the recipient of a two Dodge Foundation Writing Grants. He is a member of the Advisory Board for the Passaic County Cultural & Heritage Council. He has been a volunteer educator for the past 30 years in the NJ Non-Game and Endangered Species Program. Since 2008, he has been the Director of Writing at Passaic County Community College and is an adjunct professor at both PCCC and NJIT.

Readings are held at 8 pm on the third Tuesday of each month from February - June and from September - December. All readings are free and open to the public. Most readings include an open mic after the feature, and audience members are invited to share their poems.

The remaining readings for 2012 will be Nancy Scott and Dave Worrell (November 20) and a 14th Anniversary Celebration on December 11 featuring James Arthur with a book launch, reading and signing for Charms Against Lightning (Copper Canyon Press)

Autumn Haiku Workshop (NJ)

We will be offering a another free haiku workshop next month in New Jersey. Our last workshop celebrated the start of summer and this next one will focus on autumn.

The autumn haiku workshop with Ken Ronkowitz is on both reading and writing haiku, that best known (and misunderstood?) form of Japanese verse. It will be held Saturday, October 8, 2011.

Though many Westerners associate haiku with early lessons on writing poetry as a child, the form dates back more than 300 years and is considered very serious poetry in the East.

Haiku consists of non-rhyming verses that frequently use nature and seasonal themes that aim to evoke vivid mental pictures and stir strong emotions in readers.

It is a form that has connections to other mediums of expression, aesthetics and Zen culture.

In the workshop, we will read and discuss the history of haiku, how it is composed in English and then compose and share our own haiku.


Our host location for this workshop is the Ringwood Public Library (New Jersey).

• The Essential Haiku
• The Sound of Water: Haiku by Basho, Buson, Issa, and Other Poets
• Writing and Enjoying Haiku: A Hands-on Guide
• The Haiku Handbook - How to Write, Teach, and Appreciate Haiku

Haiku Workshop in NJ June 25

Poets Online is sponsoring a free haiku workshop this Saturday, June 25, 2011 at 7:00pm in North Plainfield, New Jersey. This free workshop will be conducted by Ken Ronkowitz.

Though many Westerners associate haiku with early lessons on writing poetry as a child, the form dates back more than 300 years and is considered very serious poetry in the East. Haiku consists of non-rhyming verses that frequently use nature themes and aim to evoke vivid mental pictures and stir strong emotions in readers.

We will discuss what is haiku and how it is composed in English, look at related forms, and examine the connections to other mediums of expression, aesthetics and Zen culture.

The host, Organigaya Cafe, will serve organic Japanese fare prior to the workshop, so arrive early and enjoy a great meal before the workshop begins. Free cup of  House Green Tea to all attendees.

Organigaya Cafe, 478 Somerset Street, North Plainfield, New Jersey - organigaya.com 

Suggested Haiku Reading

• The Essential Haiku
• The Sound of Water: Haiku by Basho, Buson, Issa, and Other Poets
• Writing and Enjoying Haiku: A Hands-on Guide
• The Haiku Handbook -25th Anniversary Edition: How to Write, Teach, and Appreciate HaikuThe Haiku Handbook - How to Write, Teach, and Appreciate Haiku

Poets Online Haiku Workshop June 25

Poets Online will sponsor a Haiku Workshop on Saturday, June 25, at 7:00pm in North Plainfield, New Jersey.

This is a free workshop with Ken Ronkowitz on both reading and writing haiku, a form of Japanese verse.

Though many Westerners associate haiku with early lessons on writing poetry as a child, the form dates back more than 300 years and is considered very serious poetry in the East. Haiku consists of non-rhyming verses that frequently use nature themes and aim to evoke vivid mental pictures and stir strong emotions in readers.

We will discuss what is haiku and how it is composed in English, look at related forms, and examine the connections to other mediums of expression, aesthetics and Zen culture.


The host, Organigaya Cafe, will serve organic Japanese fare prior to the workshop, so arrive early and enjoy a great meal before the workshop begins. Free cup of House Green Tea to all attendees.

Organigaya Cafe

478 Somerset St

North Plainfield, New Jersey

information at http://organigaya.com

The event is also on Facebook.



The Essential Haiku


The Sound of Water: Haiku by Basho, Buson, Issa, and Other Poets


Writing and Enjoying Haiku: A Hands-on Guide