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AJB: How do you manage to balance your creative life with your professional life as an editor of e Massachusetts Review as well as a board member of AJB? WATSON: Of course things are lost—but if the translation is focused not only on the minutiae of language but also on the essence (heart and sinews) of the piece, then nothing intrinsic need go missing. WATSON: Yes. Words on the brain. WATSON: 18 months living in Brazil! (from Dogged Hearts, forthcoming from Tupleo Press, 2010)
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from the cooperative board (continuted)11
AJB: Do you ever feel that something intrinsic is lost in the translation of poetry? If so, how do you reconcile that?
WATSON: Of course things are lost—but if the translation is focused not only on the minutiae of language but also on the essence (heart and sinews) of the piece, then nothing intrinsic need go missing.
AJB: How did you come to be so profi cient in Brazilian Portuguese?
WATSON: 18 months living in Brazil!
AJB: As the Director of � e Poetry Center at Smith College, you must work with many young poets. What kind of advice and mentorship do you try and provide?
WATSON: Write and write and read and write and read and read and write and read and rewrite.
AJB: I understand you also have a background in theater. When you read your poetry, do you approach it as you would in theater? How has theater informed your poetry?
WATSON: One reason I gave up acting is that my body was never as fl exible and expressive as my voice, so while I don’t think the theater background informs my writing, I do love reading (my work or others’) out loud, performing the poem. And the theater stuff comes back when doing translation, which I think of as a performance of the original text.
AJB: How do you manage to balance your creative life with your professional life as an editor of � e Massachusetts Review as well as a board member of AJB?
WATSON: I don’t. I love the editorial work, just as I do translating and teaching at Smith and at Drew and the Colrain Manuscript Conference, but balance?! No such thing. � e only way I managed to fi nish Dogged Hearts (due from Tupelo this summer) was a semester off from Smith. I’m trying to learn how to build in more sustained time for writing. And sending out—that always falls to the end of the list.
AJB: What is your favorite part of the writing process?
WATSON: I love when there’s a draft, or the whiff of a draft, to push around the page. All the diff erent shapes it could take, highways or dirt paths it could go down, ways it could fl y. Even the head-banging and arm-wrestling of it, then the quiet listening and reimagining. � e whole prolonged state of excited possibility!
AJB: Are you a writer fi rst, above anything else?
WATSON: Yes. Words on the brain.
About Ellen:
Ellen Doré Watson directs the Poetry Center at Smith College and serves as poetry editor for The Massachusetts Review. She is the author of four books of poems, including two from Alice James Books, We Live in Bodies and Ladder Music, winner of the 2000 New England/New York Award. Her most recent collection, � is Sharpening, was published by Tupelo Press. Individual poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including The American Poetry Review, Tin House and The New Yorker. She was named by Library Journal as one of “24 Poets for the 21st Century.” Among her other honors are a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant, a Rona Jaff e Writers Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. She has translated a dozen books from Portuguese, including The Alphabet in the Park, the selected poems of Brazilian Adélia Prado (Wesleyan University Press).
E. ZABALA, AGE 55, MULTIPLE FRACTURES, LOC
Perhaps he is Basque though he doesn’t speak it now.He’s dreaming snow in skeins as they slide him clothedinto the scanner, ice chilly and bright. Outside he knowsnight air weighs warm on skin. Thrown from a horse orfallen from a ladder—how can he not care which? Your name is Edur, you will remember yourself in time.He’s thinking he’s on vacation from Captain Left Brain with his pocket watch and brass words. This is like birds loosened, he’s fording a ragged river, then he’s simply shelling peas on a stoop. He’s absorbing the gardenia.When they reply, no, he is father to no one, he doesn’t hide his heavy cloak of grief. It becomes an apricot tree.In his left hand, he fi nds a nettle; in his right hand, a hand. There is some kissing left in his mouth.
(from Dogged Hearts, forthcoming from Tupleo Press, 2010)
A poem from Ellen Doré Watson
our interns 12
Elizabeth Kelleyis a senior in her last semester at UMF. Once a BFA major, she has opted out in favor of the individualized genre of education, which includes a mishmash of creative writing, gender studies and human ecology. She has a lot of plans for after graduation, all variations on the same theme of adventure and self-discovery (whatever that means). Her only regret about this soon-to-be vagabond lifestyle, is the inability to work up a really good garden plan.
A native of Los Angeles, Kate Chianesemoved to Farmington, Maine, to study creative writing and experience what life is like with weather. Next year she plans to move back to the city to work towards her MFA, but until then she is determined to see a moose. Kate appreciates Tchaikovsky, rats, the smell of plums, and the way people talk.
Emily Palmerapparently hates writing about herself as she has about 20 drafts of bios behind her. She applied to UMF to be a creative writing major, only to decide mere moments later that she was really more of a fan of books and poems than a writer of them. She purposefully does not go to bookstores because she knows that she will buy herself into poverty. She can’t wait until she graduates so that she can take up a hobby; perhaps a strange instrument, or puppet making.
