The poem is set in Klaipėda, Lithuania, the city of Venclova’s birth. It was formerly part of Prussia, and known to German speakers as Memel. Venclova only lived there for the first two years of his life (1937-39), so has noted that the poem is an imaginary reconstruction of those times. The “shadow on the balcony” refers to Hitler, who gave a speech on the main city square. Marinescu was an ethnic Moldovan Soviet submarine captain who sank a ship of German refugees. The Vistula Veneti were an ancient Baltic tribe, as were the ancient Prussians, for that matter.
Rimas Uzgiris on "Prehistory" |
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Joshua Gutterman Tranen Reviews Pig by Sam Sax
"By treating queer pig culture as worthy of serious attention, Sax successfully articulates contradictions of desire, examines what living with inherited trauma means, and does so with understanding, not judgment, for the queer men who find pleasure and even healing in the violence of pig sex. But whereas Sax treats queer pig sex with nuance and specificity, they opt for an idealized version of Jewish history that doesn’t account for our political reality."
via POETRY PROJECT |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Nica Giromini on Language as Form
"What drew me to terza rima in particular is the tension, or rather disagreement, manufactured by its braided structure of rhymes. Because each stanza is interconnected with both the following and the former, the borders of the unit of the stanza start to fray. And a productive tension—one parallel to that of the competing units of sense of the line and the sentence—emerges between the units of sense of the stanza and of the poem (across stanzas)." |
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