JUDITH BAUMEL
Judith Baumel nació el 9 de octubre de 1956 en el Bronx, Nueva York, es una poeta americana.
Creció en la ciudad de Nueva York, asistiendo a la Escuela Secundaria de Ciencias del Bronx. Se graduó en la Universidad de Radcliffe, magna cum laude, estudiando con Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert B. Shaw, James Richardson y Jane Shore. Se graduó en la Johns Hopkins University, donde estudió con Richard Howard, Cynthia Macdonald y David San Juan. Fue profesora en la Universidad de Boston y la Universidad de Harvard.
En 1985, se casó con el poeta y periodista David Ghitelman, editor de la revista temprana AGNI. Se divorciaron en 1999. Su actual pareja es Philip Alcabes, profesor de Salud Pública en el Hunter College, City University de Nueva York, y autor de Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from The Black Death to Avian Flu (Public Affairs 2009).
Fue directora de la Sociedad de Poesía de América 1985-1988.
Su trabajo ha aparecido en The Nation, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Yale Review, AGNI, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.
Vive en la ciudad de Nueva York y enseña en la Universidad Adelphi y el City College de Nueva York. Su blog es http://www.judithbaumel.com
Premios
1987 Premio Walt Whitman
Libros
The Kangaroo Girl . GenPop Books. 2011. ISBN 978-0-9823-5943-3 .
Now: a collection of poems . Miami University Press. 1996. ISBN 978-1-881163-14-5 .
The Weight of Numbers . Wesleyan University Press. 1988. ISBN 978-0-8195-2144-6 .
Periódicos
"Mr. Goldfish and Vicky" . mamazine .
"Vandalism" . The New Criterion . February 1996.
"Our Differences" . AGNI 21 . 1984.
Memorias
Jeffrey Meyers, ed. (1988). "Robert Lowell: El Maestro". Robert Lowell, entrevistas y memorias . University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-10089-7.
Antologías
Nicholas Christopher, ed. (1989). En 35: la nueva generación de poetas americanos . Ancla libro. ISBN 978-0-385-26035-0
William J. Walsh, Jack (INT) Myers, ed. (2006) En el marco de la roca:. Poetas americanos contemporáneos, 1951-1977. Mercer University Press. ISBN 978-0-88146-047-6 .
La traducción al español es de Tania Márquez Aragón.
http://circulodepoesia.com/2016/04/american-poetry-judith-baumel/
Día nevado
¿Qué fue eso que me llevo a insistir en los trineos?
¿A sacar a los niños al parque de juegos a través de colinas empapadas
en lugar de hacer ángeles? Estaba hundida en el hielo y ellos también.
En sus pestañas había hielo inamovible,
se arrastraron y revolcaron en la nieve. El progreso de sus rendidas
extremidades se hizo lento. Seguramente
la memoria del fuerte de nieve atrapa,
la infantil ciudad que descarrila felizmente
sus esperanzas de leche y pan y papel oscuro.
Cuando era joven vine a Boston tarde
tarde tarde una noche de invierno desde Baltimore.
El alba, después de la ventisca del setenta y ocho
resplandecía en la callada ciudad donde
los camiones de basura barrenaban sus cargas de nieve
como a través de una ciudad secreta-
llenando y botando en el puerto
y llenando de nuevo. Acababa de remover
un niño de mi vientre, bueno alguien más lo hizo
y no era un niño sino una pequeña herida
por dentro. No significó nada para mí, ese tritón
ese feto prematuro y nada significó el procedimiento
excepto, quizás, el fin del miedo
y las náuseas. Hoy, cómo resiento
la forma en que la tristeza y pérdida son recuerdos
que estamos forzados a cargar. Escuchen-Feliz
es como me sentí y todavía me siento así,
cuando puedo excavar a través de los eufemismos
de aquellos que hablan por mí. Feliz, más feliz
que por siempre ese grano, ese organismo que
permanece por siempre pequeño e inacabado
en contraste con mi hijo que llegó exactamente
diez años después de ese día,
a una mujer lista para él. He llorado al volver a
mi perdido amor de nuevo,
viendo las calles de Boston siendo limpiadas
clareadas de la nieve invasora
que se adhiere a las arterias y que justamente
sofocó nuestra oportunidad de hacer una vida corriente.
Esa lucha con el destello de la media noche:
el limpio y arreglado gesto de una madre.
Snow day
What was it drove me to insist on sleds,
to pull the children out of the playground
and toward the park’s much steeper hills, instead
of making angels? I was waist deep and bound
by ice, and they were too. In their eyelashes
was unremovable ice. They crawled and flailed
on snow. The progress of their grudging limbs
slow. Surely memory of snow-fort caches,
the childish city happily derailed,
its hopes of milk and bread and papers dim.
When I was young I came to Boston late
late late one winter night from Baltimore.
The pre-dawn, post-blizzard of seventy-eight
glowed in the silent town where dump trucks bore
their loads of snow as through a secret city—
filling and then dumping in the harbor,
filling yet again. I’d just removed
a child from my womb. Well someone else did it
and it was not a child but some small scar
inside. It meant nothing to me, that newt,
that early fetus, and the procedure meant
nothing except perhaps the end of fear
and queasiness. Today how I resent
the way sadness and loss are souvenirs
we’re forced to carry with us. Listen—Happy
is the way I felt, and still I feel,
when I can shovel through the euphemisms
of those who speak for me. More happy. Happy
that forever will that speck, that organism
remain forever small and unfulfilled
in contrast to my son who came exactly
ten years after to the day, and to
a woman ready for him. I had wept
returning to my now-lost lover anew,
seeing the streets of Boston being cleaned,
scraped clear of the invading snow
that clung to arteries, that fairly smothered
our chance to try to make a normal flow
of life. That struggle with the midnight gleam:
the wiping tidying gesture of a mother.
Daphne era bien conocida en estas puertas
y en estas calles. De afable humor y afable sonrisa.
Nos rasgamos las vestiduras y tomamos asiento en la tarima.
Veamos quién puede contar mejor la historia.
Amaryllis
Te adoraré lo mejor que pueda.
Tomando mi turno para alzar a nuestra Daphne
Hacia las estrellas. Daphne debe elevarse entre ellas,
también fui a amada por Daphne.
Lycoris
Amargo café por la mañana cremoso y acompañado de chisme.
Nuestras madres preocupadas aún ofrecen consejos pertinentes.
Debiéramos juntar los trapos viejos
y en la mesa de la cocina tenderlos bien planchados.
Cytheris
Por qué me importa si todavía se veía hermosa
ayer en la última foto. La piel nacarada y el rostro
sutil y frío de Daphne se recuestan entre su hijo e hija.
Entre su casi último y último suspiro.
Delia
Un paseo de otoño en carroza hacia la cosecha del manzanal.
Entrelazamos hombros, bajamos la cabeza al hablar.
Y oímos el llamado, sollozando en la luz que mancha.
Nuestros niños nos estaban buscando tomados de la mano.
Nysa
¿Quién estaba allí cuando las manos de Daphne dejaron de cerrarse?
¿Dónde estaba el destino cuando la lengua de Daphne engruesó
y se asentó en su boca O la brisa dónde estaba cuando los músculos
no movían más los pulmones de Daphne?
Phyllis
Mañanas por el camino verde de paliséid,
el camino un desconcierto de matorral, ramas y vidrio.
Caminamos y hablamos y pensamos, pero falso era,
que mi vida se cerraba y la de ella volvía a destellar.
I Too Was Loved By Daphne
Daphne was known within these doors
And to these streets. Lovely her humor and lovely her smile
We tear our garments and sit on low boxes
Let’s see who can sing the best story.
Amaryllis
I will praise as best I can
Taking my turn to raise our Daphne up
Among the stars, Daphne shall be high
Among the stars; I too was loved by Daphne.
Lycoris
Morning coffee bitter and milky with gossip.
Our mothers still offering worried apposite
Instructions. We’d gather the awful scraps
At the kitchen table and smooth them flat.
Cytheris
Why do I care that she was still beautiful
Yesterday in this last photo—Daphne’s pearly skin
And delicate frozen face tilting up between
Her boy and girl, between her next-to-last and last breath.
Delia
One autumn hayride into the apple picking orchard
We locked shoulders, bowed our heads in talk, then heard
Calling, weeping in the dappling light. Left behind,
Our little boys were searching for us hand in hand.
Nysa
Who was there when Daphne’s hands stopped
Closing? Where was fate when Daphne’s tongue
Thickened and set in her mouth. Or the breezes
When Daphne’s muscles no longer moved her lungs?
Phyllis
Mornings on the Palisade greenway, the path
A jumble of undergrowth and branches and glass,
We walked and talked and thought, but it wasn’t true,
That my life was closing down and hers was blazing anew.
Misericordia
When the Sinatra brothers blew off
a bunch of fingers, two thumbs, and one
eyeball among them one July 3
mishandling fireworks it seemed good—
a finally successful payback (the first try
having been merely burning out the garage
and mother-in-law apartment
of their house on our block) for the two
bicycles, one sled, and one watch they’d taken
from my brother over the years. I don’t
want to talk about revenge or the compact
feeling of goodness that is the consolation
of the meek daily facing small tortures but that
they’d been brought to Misericordia
Hospital where all the Catholics went. The Jews
went to Jacobi or Montefiore, and we lived,
these two threads, amid each other
in a great childish confusion, unable to beat
the weft to the warp. I can imagine the informal
lectures the Catholic kids received, as I recall
mine about heartless popes and the persistent mimicry
of the New Testament. In fact, I’d heard the echoes
of what they heard when Charles Cutaia, who “liked” me,
said he felt sorry for me one lunch period and followed
that with an afternoon in which he pointed, Ruth-like,
to the far wall of the school yard and said “for Judy!”
so that when, at the next pitch, he actually hit
the home run, I had to run home in at least three
states of embarrassment. The Sinatra brothers
went to a hospital I imagined would culture
more misery for them. From the building’s tower the word
hung over the Bronx River Parkway, and driving past
I never hesitated to consider the misery within.
When did the Catholic kids learn the meaning
of the word? During “Released Time,” those leisurely
Wednesday afternoons when they went to catechism
and the Jewish kids wandered the half empty classroom
a little happy, a little lonely?
Did they know that misery develops with one
in need of mercy? Or somehow through
indulgences of food, or a small bench grinning
at your knees with the cynical knowledge of sin
embedded in a gargoyle’s smirk along the pew?
Or that what is at the heart of the word is the heart
and its ability, with its up and down, in and out,
to grant mercy and then remove it, endlessly?
So I later learned reading Benito Pérez Galdós’s Misericordia,
the last of his novelas contemporáneas
where the moral rightness of the Madrid street
embroiders profusions of misericordia,
where the “moor” Almadena/Mordejai teaches the Sh’ma
to the saintly Benina, his Amri, as a magical formula
to achieve the riches neither can extract from their stern
patrons, casual donors and willing victims
who weave pity, compassion, and mercy for these beggars,
these petty thieves, embezzlers, happily optimistic
in their logic as they argue about who has and who doesn’t,
about secret forms of loyalty and faith.
Ah, the bitter loss of the sled. That it was so easy. That
they approached us at the top of the hill, a Snow-Day,
the closed school downhill beyond us. Joey simply said “it’s ours”
and it was. The hospital has shed the vestment
of its old, evocative name, and is now “Our Lady
of Mercy. ” Joey and Bobby and Tony Sinatra
have undoubtedly gone on from the 600 schools,
those garbage containers for the incorrigible
in which they first found themselves judged,
heroes and villains at once, to the sort of ageless
tricks that enlivened Calle Cabeza, to the heroin
that was traded and used far out of my sight,
to the local carting or construction business
where misery is doled out in each paper-less
contract. Every Christmas we watched them set a creche,
some diminished thing along the lines of a presepe
Mrs. Sinatra must have known in her paese.
And though now, certainly, I’m sure that the Mary
they carefully placed inside the straw pitied them, I hated
her face then, hated the license it gave them, the license
it gave us to be squeamish with blood, to shirk
from those images of Mary’s son, his wounds
daily displayed. My self-pity is lately transformed
as I recreate the tableau of all of us complicitous
in that old exchange—
Mrs. Sinatra lamenting her ragazzi, porca miseria,
my father who would not stoop to recover the property,
my brother ever stunned in the release of the property,
and me screaming, screaming my polite curses after
the fact—and for all of us I am now furiously without compassion.
The Influence Of Peers
I don’t want to hear that kind of language in this house
Try shoot shucks sugar
sheleileigh Shalala,
anything but the vowel
which hits the iffy one
and comes too close.
I’m an idiot has taken over,
though not for long.
I’ve ceded ground on butt,
the lost tuchas, tush, tushy
having had the double virtues of ethnic
reminder and gentle enjoyment
of the soft yielding place
from which I wiped with care
that which I wish to hear
called only by cuteness, or evoked.
Well, what could he do,
my muscular ball of opposition,
that whirl of destruction,
wielding Hrunting,
tossing chairs and books
and punching out the wind
behind him screaming
beep you beep you beep you beep.
Blue Vitriol
for Rabbi Manny Viñas
“I am hereby writing this…for the sake of proclaiming the sanctity of the Torah.”
Do not tell me it is written
I have no right of return. It is not.
Not with a virgule
Not by a virago
Not through a viremia
Is it written. It is written
Sometimes with a virgule
Often by a vav-of-reversal
Always through a mordant
Of gall and vitriol: oak apple, flower
Of copper, lamp black, acacia senegal.
You draw from a dampness that consumes
All, where black birch straddles the air
Over long gone nurse logs, where the sign
Of the Name is ever cycling decomposition
Generation to generation, where the new
Wasp leaves the marble pocked and round shelter
To drift on the wind. And you record with a turkey feather
The voice of the unspeakable Name eternal.
The Block
What we could hear through the walls:
What couldn’t we hear through the walls?
What we could hear in the streets:
What couldn’t we hear in the streets?
What we heard in the house,
Friday nights candles low, end stumps of challah
the first to go, the sugar cube between the teeth
accepting and changing its glessele te, forefinger on bottom
thumb on rim, spoon stuck in to relieve and draw the heat.
That one kept gasoline and fireworks in the garage.
That one parked in front of the hydrant and never
got a ticket, and when they rebuilt the street
the hydrant was moved to The Stutterer’s house—
it was una cosa vostra.
That one bought his taxi medallion with his father-in-law’s money.
Those are the refugees whose
son went flying through the windshield, the one born
in America died, the one born in Palestine was driving.
Those were in DP camps and that one gets reparations for her broken back.
That one’s butcher scales are fixed.
The pharmacist’s wife should have told us about the monthlies,
That one was going through her changes and she hit her child.
That one’s insides dropped after her last child and she won’t
Let her husband touch her.
A piece of fruit after dinner, she called the youngest one melon-head because she had one.
Many called her katchkie-duck because once a neighbor saw her
Diaper-bound waddle
But the oldest one, k’aine h’ora, could not be seen
As an infant and wouldn’t be named in the open air.
The evil eye was too subtle.
Idylls
Corydon said, Look neighbor, the cow
from my village gave the sweetest milk.
In April a thin green-white nectar
with the flavor of the smallest new pea.
Even deep in winter her milk’s
aroma constrained the tongue to release
its depth. It’s what I long for, and when
the Dellwood man drops bottles in my tin
box, I sigh for a thicker layer of cream.
Antigenes said, Neighbor, here are my grapes—
trim them and trick them up
around a few sticks, here, and they will be fat
as Elizabeth Taylor’s jewels. Have the Knife
Man give you his horse’s best gifts,
Be patient in picking, be cruel in crushing
and the wine will keep you all year to the next.
Phrasidamus said this cherry tree—this one—
in this strip of concrete patio will flower
and fruit like the Czar’s second-best.
The pink of the blossom will soothe a restless
dream and the fruit’s red will give your mouth
the strongest flesh it’s ever conquered
even as your tongue searches for the hard
pit. Let your daughters harvest what they will.
We did. We climbed the ladder and we picked.
There was no bowl sweet enough
for the cherries and, later, the grapes
So I carved one in the winter and while I did,
I sang, and filled jugs tall as I was
with must and sugar and slop,
filled jars as small as my mother’s hands
with pectin and wax and cotton.
Through the row house sheet rock
came screaming of names and private
grievances, through the night. Worse
than we could say, we heard—strange curses.
And every morning the sun shone
on the garden strips of the lost mother tongues.
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