JAN HELLER LEVI [18.744]

JAN HELLER LEVI

Nacida en 1954 en la ciudad de Nueva York. Poeta que enseña en el Programa MFA de CUNY Hunter College en escritura creativa.

Creció en Baltimore, Maryland. Levi fue destinataria del Premio Walt Whitman de la Academia Americana de Poetas por su primer libro, Once I Gazed at You in Wonder. También ha recibido otros dos premios, George Bogin Memorial Award, and the Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award.

Antes de enseñar en el Hunter College, Levi también enseñó en el Sarah Lawrence College y el Centro de Poesía Unterberg de la Calle 92 en la ciudad de Nueva York. Está casada con el novelista y dramaturgo suizo, Christoph Keller, y la pareja divide su tiempo entre Nueva York y San Gallen, Suiza.

Bibliografía

A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, Edited by Jan Heller Levi (WW Norton & Company, Inc., 1995)

Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan, Edited by Jan Heller Levi (Copper Canyon Press, 2005)

Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, Consulting Editor: Jan Heller Levi (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006)

Once I Gazed at You in Wonder: Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 1999)

Skyspeak: Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 2005)

Spanish version by Adalberto García López

Presentamos un texto de Jan Heller Levi, es poeta. Ella da clases en el MFA Program en el Hunter College. En 1998 mereció el premio Walt Whitman por su libro Once I Gazed at You in Wonder. La version al español es de Adalberto García López

 http://circulodepoesia.com/2016/05/american-poetry-jan-heller-levi/

El mundo

(después de Milosz)

Ahí –donde ves una progresiva

declinación, junto a un andrajoso terreno, sucio,

donde edificios departamentales serán construidos-

los niños caminan a su casa de la escuela.

La luz cae desde un preciso cielo sin nubes.

Las chicas sujetan sus libros con sus brazos.

Los chicos caminan arduamente como pequeños hombres,

fingiendo que no tienen preocupaciones.

Cuando el último niño alcanza

la cima de la colina,

una rama baja del arce se balancea.

Uno de los niños, ahora más cerca de casa,

arranca una hoja del árbol

para escuchar el sonido que el mundo hace

cuando interferimos con él.

The World

(after Milosz)

There — where you see a gradual

decline, beside a raggedy field, mostly dirt,

where new apartment houses will soon be built —

children are walking home from school.

Light beats down from a strict, cloudless sky.

The girls cradle their books in their arms.

The boys trudge ahead like little men,

pretending they have no worries.

When the last child reaches

the bottom of the hill,

a low branch of a maple is bobbing.

One of the children, now closer to home,

has torn a leaf from it

to hear the sound the world makes

when we interfere with it.

Why We Don’t Have Solar Energy

found poem from Capital

It was partly

the want of streams

with a good fall on them,

partly

battles

of super-abundance

of water

in other respects

that compelled the Dutch

to resort to wind

as a motive power.

The wind-mill itself

they got from Germany,

where its invention

was the origin

of a petty squabble

between

the nobles,

the priests,

and the Emperor,

as to which

of these three

the wind “belonged.”

first published, in somewhat different form,

in Gobshite Quarterly, issue 8/9

This One’s for You

Even if you didn’t have green eyes (in the bathtub, blue).

Even if you didn’t have a lovely singing voice,

            or care for Alexandrine champagne

            some slow Saturday evenings to sing it through,

it pleases me, your lips close to my ear,

            or when you’re a big girl, and I’m a big girl too.

Five years difference between we two.

Sometimes it hardly matters. I’ve decided to worship you,

            Diana, goddess of the forest—

            or is she the one of the hunt?

            Who cares? You remind me of her

too. Some woman caught me up, breathless, in her strong arms,

            said breathe, darling. Her eyes were green-blue.

Vague resemblances: that’s the daily news.

Meaning: I’m willingly a fool for you

            any hour past midnight,

            and almost anytime in three-quarter view.

            Consider this, too: stumbling back, after a fight,

to someplace we could call home, you and I have been known

            to duet a jubilee so funky it sounds like the blues.

What steady arrows you shoot, Diana, become

a goddess of the hearth: you whisper

            time to put the porchlight on,

            and we do. Who am I talking to?

What is this strange glare, this prescience that you won’t be true?

Sometimes you say something like even so, boo,

and it sounds like breathe, darling. That’s why this one’s for you.

Waiting for This Story to End Before I Begin 

All my stories are about being left,

all yours about leaving. So we should have known.

Should have known to leave well enough alone;

we knew, and we didn’t. You said let’s put

our cards on the table, your card

was your body, the table my bed, where we didn’t

get till 4 am, so tired from wanting

what we shouldn’t that when we finally found our heads,

we’d lost our minds. Love,I wanted to call you

so fast. But so slow you could taste each

letter licked into your particular and rose-like ear.

L, love, for let’s wait. O, for oh no, let’s not. V

for the precious v between your deep breasts

(and the virtue of your fingers

in the voluptuous center of me.)

Okay, E for enough.

Dawn broke, or shattered. Once we’ve made

the promises, it’s hard to add the prefix if. . . .

But not so wrong to try.

That means taking a lot of walks,

which neither of us is good at,

for different reasons, and nights up till 2

arguing whose reasons are better.

Time and numbers count a lot in this. 13

years my marriage. 5 years you my friend.

4th of July weekend when something that begins

in mist, by mistake (whose?), means too much

has to end. I think we need an abacus to get our love

on course, and one of us to oil the shining rods

so we can keep the crazy beads clicking,

clicking. It wasn’t a question

of a perfect fit. Theoretically,

it should be enough to say I left a man

for a woman (90% of the world is content

to leave it at that. Oh, lazy world) and when the woman

lost her nerve, I left

for greater concerns: when words like autonomy

were useful, I used them, I confess. So I get

what I deserve: a studio apartment he paid the rent on;

bookshelves up to the ceiling she drove

the screws for. And a skylight I sleep alone

beneath, and two shiny quarters in my pocket

to call one, then the other, or to call one

twice. Once, twice, I threatened to leave him—

remember? Now that I’ve done it, he says

he doesn’t. I’m in a phonebooth at the corner of Bank

and Greenwich; not a booth, exactly,

but two sheets of glass to shiver between.

This is called being street-smart: dialing

a number that you know won’t be answered,

but the message you leave leaves proof that you tried.

And this, my two dearly beloveds, is this called

hedging your bets? I fish out my other

coin, turn it over in my fingers, press

it into the slot. Hold it there. Let it drop.

NEW POEMS

Every time I pick up the pen, I write myself out of the canon. Who said that? Mina Loy? Maybe it was me.

* * *

This book is wonderful. Why didn’t I read this

before. Before what? Why didn’t

I read everything? Why didn’t

I read everything before? Before 

what? Before I felt like

I should have read some-

thing before. When was

that?

Before

I became the person who needs

to have read it

before. But maybe

if I had read it before,

I wouldn’t be the person

who needs to read it now. I’d

be another person, and I’d need

to read something else I

hadn’t read

before.

* * *

S. says long sections of P.’s novel are stolen. He goes to courthouse records, provincial libraries, he finds transcripts and journals that he drops into his text like stars, like his own stars, when they are really the stars of another. “I’m a thief,” S. says P. told him after too many glasses of wine. P., who is also a novelist, spends half the night getting us to agree (immediately) that this is wrong. 

* * * 

ON METER

Demeter, sister of Zeus, goddess of grain and agriculture. Persephone, her daughter, abducted by Hades. Disguised as an old woman, Demeter goes searching among mortals. She arrives at Eleusis, where she is employed as an attendant of Queen Mateaneira, who recognizes her nobility, bade her sit and eat and drink. She remains standing, apart, until a slave woman called Iambe lifts up her skirt and makes her laugh. 

* * *

MY WHOLE LIFE

He wouldn’t give me cancer’s email because he was afraid I might write something that would hurt its feelings. 

* * *

i want to

interrogate my childhood, drag it

into the station house, taunt

it with cigarettes,

glare the overhead lightbulb

in its eyes and demand

its confession.

whereas, a.m. says, “i can’t get past my unknowing, which, at times, unexpectedly, brings me joy.”

.