Mark Wunderlich
Mark Wunderlich nació en Winona, Minnesota y creció en la ciudad rural de Fountain, Wisconsin. Asistió al Institut für Deutsche Studien del Concordia College y más tarde a la Universidad de Wisconsin, de donde recibió un BA en Literatura Alemana e Inglés. Wunderlich obtuvo una Maestría en Bellas Artes de la Escuela de Artes de la Universidad de Columbia, donde estudió con JD McClatchy, William Matthews y Lucie Brock-Broido, entre otros.
El primer libro de Wunderlich, The Anchorage, fue publicado en 1999 por la University of Massachusetts Press y recibió el Lambda Literary Award. Su segundo libro, Voluntary Servitude, fue publicado por Graywolf Press en 2004. Un tercer volumen de poemas titulado The Earth Avails, fue publicado en 2014 y recibió el Premio Rilke 2015 de la Universidad del Norte de Texas. El libro es actualmente finalista para el Premio Kingsley Tufts. Ha publicado poemas individuales en The Paris Review, Yale Review, Slate, Tin House, Poetry, Ploughshares, Boston Review y otros. Su trabajo ha sido incluido en más de treinta antologías y ha aparecido en NPR's All Things Considered. Su trabajo ha sido traducido al italiano, al búlgaro y al sueco.
Como profesor, Wunderlich ha enseñado en los programas de escritura de posgrado en la Universidad de Columbia, el Sarah Lawrence College, la Universidad de Ohio y la Universidad Estatal de San Francisco. Ha impartido cursos de escritura y literatura en la Universidad de Stanford, Barnard College y Stonehill College. Desde 2003 ha sido miembro de la Facultad de Literatura en el Bennington College en Vermont, donde también sirve como miembro de la facultad central en los Seminarios de Graduación. En 2012 fue nombrado Director de Poesía en Bennington, una serie de lecturas en el campus, conferencias y residencias cortas de prominentes poetas estadounidenses e internacionales. Es miembro de la facultad e invitado regular del programa de escritura de posgrado en la Escuela de la Universidad de Columbia de las Artes, División de Escritura.
Wunderlich es receptor de una beca de Wallace Stegner de la universidad de Stanford donde también sirvió como conferenciante de Jones. Recibió dos becas del Centro de Trabajo de Bellas Artes en Provincetown, así como becas del National Endowment for the Arts, del Massachusetts Cultural Council y del Amy Lowell Trust. También es el ganador del Premio de escritores en el trabajo, el Premio Jack Kerouac y becas de la Conferencia de Escritores de Pan de Pan y la Colonia de MacDowell. En 2012 recibió un Premio Editor de la Missouri Review y también fue seleccionado para una residencia en el Arteles Creativity Center en Hämeenkyrö, Finlandia. En 2014 fue miembro de la Fundación Civitella Ranieri.
Como Administrador de Artes, ha trabajado para la Academia de Poetas Americanos, la Sociedad de Poesía de América, Poetas y Escritores, el Centro de Poesía de la Universidad de Arizona, donde fue Director Interino y la Conferencia de Escritores de Napa Valley. Actualmente preside el Consejo Asesor Artístico de la Colonia Millay para las Artes en Austerlitz, Nueva York. También es miembro de la Junta Asesora de Noemi Press.
Wunderlich vive en el valle de Hudson de Nueva York cerca de la aldea de Catskill.
El Dios de la Nada
Mi padre se cayó del bote.
Su equilibrio había estado fallando por un tiempo.
Había ido en el bote con su perro
cazador de patos a un pantano, cerca de Trempealau, Wisconsin.
No había nadie cerca,
excepto por el nervioso granjero que limpiaba el desagüe en el establo
–sordo de un oído por culpa de años junto a las máquinas–,
y que estaba casi a un kilómetro de distancia.
Mi padre se cayó del bote
y el agua se arremolinó a su alrededor, llenó
sus vadeadores y lo arrastró hasta el fondo.
Descendió en un agua rala como un mal café.
El perro se lanzó al agua,
creyendo quizás que era un juego.
Debo corregirme –los perros no piensan como nosotros–,
ellos reaccionan, y la reacción del perro
fue nadar alrededor de la cabeza de mi padre.
Esta no es una historia tranquilizadora
sobre un perro que ladra para pedir ayuda,
o que chupetea la cara de mi padre para animarlo
a mantenerse a flote. El perro finalmente se cansó y nadó a la orilla
para olfatear entre la hierba, disfrutar su nueva libertad
de los cuidados de su amo,
indiferente a la situación de mi padre.
El agua estaba fría, eso lo sé,
y mi padre siempre había sido friolento.
Que él estaba muy frío es una certeza, aunque
nunca le he preguntado sobre este suceso.
No sé cómo logró salir del agua.
Creo que el granjero salió a buscarlo
después de que mi madre lo llamara apurada y condujera
hasta la granja después de que mi padre no regresara a casa.
Mi madre me contó de este suceso en voz baja,
tapando con su mano el teléfono e intercalando
divertidos non sequiturs para no ser escuchada.
Admitir la enfermedad de mi padre
habría provocado la ira del Dios de la Nada,
que llega corriendo cuando escucha una voz temblorosa
para barrer al débil con su aliento sin amor, helado.
Pero ese dios había sido llamado antes,
durante una época en la cual plantó una semilla en el cerebro de mi padre,
que creció, congeló su lengua,
le robó su equilibrio.
El dios estaba ahí cuando mi padre cayó del bote,
susurrando desde una madriguera en su cerebro,
y fue ahí cuando mi madre, percatándose del momento,
supo que algo estaba mal. Este dios es un dios frío,
un dios hambriento, egoísta y con mala vista.
Este dios tiene la cabeza de un perro.
Presentamos el poema “El Dios de la Nada”, del autor estadounidense Mark Wunderlich (Minnesota, 1968), en versión del escritor costarricense Gustavo Solórzano-Alfaro.
http://circulodepoesia.com/2017/04/poesia-norteamericana-mark-wunder/
The God of Nothingness
My father fell from the boat.
His balance had been poor for some time.
He had gone out in the boat with his dog
hunting ducks in a marsh near Trempealeau, Wisconsin.
No one else was near
save the wiry farmer scraping the gutters in the cow barn
who was deaf in one ear from years of machines—
and he was half a mile away.
My father fell from the boat
and the water pulled up around him, filled
his waders and this drew him down.
He descended into water the color of weak coffee.
The dog went into the water too,
thinking perhaps this was a game.
I must correct myself—dogs do not think as we do—
they react, and the dog reacted by swimming
around my father’s head. This is not a reassuring story
about a dog signaling for help by barking,
or, how by licking my father’s face, encouraged him
to hold on. The dog eventually tired and went ashore
to sniff through the grass, enjoy his new freedom
from the attentions of his master,
indifferent to my father’s plight.
The water was cold, I know that,
and my father has always chilled easily.
That he was cold is a certainty, though
I have never asked him about this event.
I do not know how he got out of the water.
I believe the farmer went looking for him
after my mother called in distress, and then drove
to the farm after my father did not return home.
My mother told me of this event in a hushed voice,
cupping her hand over the phone and interjecting
cheerful non sequiturs so as not to be overheard.
To admit my father’s infirmity
would bring down the wrath of the God of Nothingness
who listens for a tremulous voice and comes rushing in
to sweep away the weak with icy, unloving breath.
But that god was called years before
during which time he planted a kernel in my father’s brain
which grew, freezing his tongue,
robbing him of his equilibrium.
The god was there when he fell from the boat,
whispering from the warren of my father’s brain,
and it was there when my mother, noting the time,
knew that something was amiss. This god is a cold god,
a hungry god, selfish and with poor sight.
This god has the head of a dog.
Mark Wunderlich
Mark Wunderlich was born in Winona, Minnesota and grew up in rural Fountain City, Wisconsin. He attended Concordia College's Institut für Deutsche Studien, and later the University of Wisconsin from which he received a BA in German Literature and English. Wunderlich earned a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University's School of the Arts Writing Division where he studied with JD McClatchy, William Matthews and Lucie Brock-Broido, among others.
Wunderlich's first book, The Anchorage , was published in 1999 by the University of Massachusetts Press, and received the Lambda Literary Award. His second book, V oluntary Servitude , was published by Graywolf Press in 2004. A third volume of poems titled The Earth Avails , was published in 2014 and received the 2015 Rilke Prize from the University of North Texas. The book is currently a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. He has published individual poems in The Paris Review , Yale Review , Slate , Tin House , Poetry , Ploughshares , Boston Review and elsewhere. His work has been included in over thirty anthologies and has been featured on NPR's All Things Considered . His work has been translated into Italian, Bulgarian and Swedish.
As a teacher, Wunderlich has taught in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, Ohio University and San Francisco State University. He has taught undergraduate writing and literature courses at Stanford University, Barnard College and Stonehill College. Since 2003 he has been a member of the Literature Faculty at Bennington College in Vermont where he also serves as a member of the core faculty in the Graduate Writing Seminars. In 2012 he was named the Director of Poetry at Bennington —a series of on-campus readings, lectures and short residencies by prominent American and international poets. He is a regular guest faculty member of the graduate writing program at Columbia University School of the Arts, Writing Division.
Wunderlich is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University where he also served as a Jones Lecturer. He received two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Amy Lowell Trust. He is also the recipient of Writers at Work Award, the Jack Kerouac Prize, and a fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the MacDowell Colony. In 2012 he received an Editor's Prize from the Missouri Review and was also selected for a residency at the Arteles Creativity Center in Hämeenkyrö, Finland. In 2014 he was a fellow at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.
As an Arts Administrator, he has worked for the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Poets & Writers, the University of Arizona Poetry Center where he was Acting Director, and the Napa Valley Writers Conference. He currently chairs the Artistic Advisory Board at the Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, New York. He also serves on the Advisory Board of Noemi Press.
Wunderlich lives in New York's Hudson Valley near the village of Catskill.
Coyote, with Mange
Oh, Unreadable One, why
have you done this to your dumb creature?
Why have you chosen to punish the coyote
rummaging for chicken bones in the dung heap,
shucked the fur from his tail
and fashioned it into a scabby cane?
Why have you denuded his face,
tufted it, so that when he turns he looks
like a slow child unhinging his face in a smile?
The coyote shambles, crow-hops, keeps his head low,
and without fur, his now visible pizzle
is a sad red protuberance,
his hind legs the backward image
of a bandy-legged grandfather, stripped.
Why have you unhoused this wretch
from his one aesthetic virtue,
taken from him that which kept him
from burning in the sun like a man?
Why have you pushed him from his world into mine,
stopped him there and turned his ear
toward my warning shout?
Amaryllis
after Rilke
But of all that will fade; on the table is the amaryllis,
pushing its monstrous body in the air,
requiring no soil to do so, having wound
two seasons' rot into a white and papered bulb,
exacting nutrition from the winter light,
culling from complex chemistry the tints
and fragments that tissue and pause and build
again the pigment and filament.
The flower crescendos, toward the light,
though better to say despite it,
gores through gorse and pebble
to form a throat, so breakable, open
with its tender pistils, damp with rosin,
simple in its simple sex, to burn and siphon
itself in air. Tongue of fire, tongue
of earth, the amaryllis is the rudiment
of form itself, forming its meretricious petals
to trumpet and exclaim.
How you admire it. How you see it vibrate
in the draft, a song it is, a complex wheel
bitten with cogs, swelling and sexual,
though nothing will touch it. You have forced it
to spread itself, to cleave and grasp,
remorseless, open to your assignments—
this is availability, this is tenderness,
this red plane is given to the world.
Sometimes the heart breaks. Sometimes
it is not held hostage. The red world
where cells prepare for the unexpected
splays open at the window's ledge.
Be not human you inhuman thing.
No anxious, no foible, no hesitating hand.
Pry with fiber your course through sand,
point your whole body toward the unknown,
away from the dead.
Be water and light and land,
no contrivance, no gasp, no dream
where there is no head.
The Corn Baby
They brought it. It was brought
from the field, the last sheaf, the last bundle
the latest and most final armful. Up up
over the head, hold it, hold it high it held
the gazer's gaze, it held hope, did hold it.
Through the stubble of September, on shoulders
aloft, hardly anything, it weighed, like a sparrow,
it was said, something winged, hollow, though
pulsing, freed from the field
where it flailed in wind, where it waited, wanted
to be found and bound with cord. It had
limbs, it had legs. And hands. It had fingers.
Fingers and a face peering from the stalks,
shuttered in the grain, closed, though just a kernel
a shut corm. They brought him and autumn
rushed in, tossed its cape of starlings,
tattered the frost-spackled field.
Gebet eines Ehemannes (A Husband's Prayer)
You, author of all wonders,
shown to us by your many prophets
and instruments—our own shoemaker's daughter,
illiterate and bent, who proclaims from her special chair
in the meetinghouse, who reminds us to be humble,
and not aspire above our station,
to find beauty in utility, and to beware idolatry—
you who chose to provide me with a spouse,
and a house, a barn and sheds, gardens,
a small orchard, a field rich with clover,
hives humid and speckled with pollen,
and who finds the greatest satisfaction
when we attend to three responsibilities:
to be a brother to another, to be a good
and kindly neighbor, to move through the world
with a mate; give me strength.
From the coolest and boggiest portion
of my heart, my worries multiply as spores
canker the apple leaf. My mate,
though weak, is there to help me
set aside my burdens, if only I could
describe them into the space between our pillows
at night. When thistles spring up in the field
of our marriage, when the noxious vine
twines onto the maple, let us pull it up
by its roots. When I gaze upon the gothic script
tattooed on the young gardener's brown stomach,
strain to read it as it moves, remind me
my own name is written in the mind of another
however faint.
Let that be enough. Let me not dwell
on our weaknesses, on our smells, our shedding
skin and hair. There is a small chalet
somewhere on the cool green pasture
of an alp where we shelter, our heads
on the striped ticking, our hands
barely touching as we sleep.
A Servant's Prayer
Oh Tenderhearted, O Kindhearted,
you who have spared us from eternal servitude,
by torturing and killing your only child,
we know what you can do.
Only you can spare us
from a world in which the Creature
presses his stinking hoof to our neck,
the tyrant who supervises a petty bureaucracy
rich with oil and other filth, covers his sow-bride's
fat Bahama-tanned paw with a crust of diamonds.
You have chosen to keep me in a state
of service, beholden to a mustachioed czarina
isolated and confused and grandiose,
which is, I confess, a trial.
I beg you, assuage my bitterness.
Help me to know that this is your will,
and help keep me from resenting
those, who despite their meager talents,
their pettiness and appetite for derision,
wield power over me. My service here
though of this world, is not meant for this world
bent of uglification and strife.
Part the curtain and let me glimpse
your gleaming hem.
Remind me that behind this knotted tapestry
of tasks and humiliations
is a shining world that must remain hidden
so it may remain unspoiled. When Misti
severed her thumb and wrapped it
is a swaddle of cloth, afraid to tell management
lest she lose her job, I glimpsed you,
there at the pearly bone flush with crimson,
beautiful and fragile and lit with the pain
of our kind. At the hospital, she was made whole
again, though I'm certain she bears the scar to this day,
though you were secreted, once again,
beneath the surgeon's arrogant work.
I am grateful for the power in my body;
help guard it from poisons, keep my sleeve
far from the spinning shaft, my skin free from
tick bites, stray dogs, the mule's twisting
ivory teeth. Help me keep my strength,
and practice diligence and mercy,
like your son, sawing and swinging his hammer,
walking home on dusty feet
to a meal someone worked all morning
to prepare.
The Earth Avails
"Taken as a whole, The Earth Avails reads as a remarkably cohesive narrative that can be taken as a kind of spiritual biography of a specific time on earth. Making becomes vital to the poems and their meanings, in other words. And the making involves the poet moving out of the way and surrendering to the subject matter, which makes the poem bigger. The “I” is consciousness, or perhaps greater good, more than it is autobiographical impulse."
Michael Klein, The Boston Review
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Voluntary Servitude
"If we seek poems that stun us out of our own miseries, Mark Wunderlich's Voluntary Servitude is a book we should turn to. In his first collection The Anchorage , Wunderlich established himself as a champion of the homoerotic, and the certainly homoerotic servitude and domination are at the core of this second volume as well; however, this book reveals Wunderlich as a poet in command of archetypal themes that are much more widely inclusive, archetypes that slither with sensual innuendo but that struke at the core of any dream-haunted reader."
RG Evans, The Literary Review
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The Anchorage
"Mark Wunderlich's first book, The Anchorage , is a vigorous, necessary attempt to make our words catch up with your changing world: "This is America--beetles clustered with the harvest, dust roads trundling off at perfect angles, and signs proclaiming unbearable roadside attractions." The poems are extravagantly--perhaps I would say fiercely--autobiographical. The self-consciousness with which the poet starts touts the exuberant joys of the promiscuous, almost universal, body and its uncountably possible connections, sometimes violent--"the heaving back, the beard, the teeth at the throat"--and sometimes distanced by being placed in a minority social context, itself set in the geography of the prevailing society..."
FD Reeve, Poetry
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