Hoda Fakhari – Hussain, Your Name Will Always Rest Upon our Lips
TQ3 Editor’s Forward
by Jessamyn Smyth
There is a lovely synchronicity that happens in submissions sometimes, and we are always building in response to the work we receive: this time, the poems, stories, paintings, and photographs spoke – directly or obliquely – to the tensions and harmonies of this embodied condition. Here you’ll find work speaking to and from our physical and spiritual selves and structures, our beloved ghosts and demons, our vulnerabilities and limits, our dazzling strength and will. Read More »
Pairings
by Cassandra Cleghorn
I first proposed this collaborative corner of TQ with an appreciative glance at Robert Creeley’s work with visual artists. Poet John Yau writes that for Creeley what mattered most in collaboration was “the kind of integration that can be made to take place.” That integration was intimate, visceral, intellectual: the work emerging simultaneously from conversation, from the materials at hand, from the physical situation of the making, and from the drive toward that particular brand of strenuous abstraction that Creeley spent his life practicing…Read More »
The River Road
by Bronwyn Mills
I live surrounded by a language which is not my mother tongue. It has its own rhythm, its own music and gurgle and bubbling laughter, its own icy formalities, its own intonation and pitch. Replete with false cognates, it is sometimes duplicitous, sometimes uproarious. It has its own history and archaeology of archaic usage. Despite having read many in translation, I am just beginning to read some of that language’s contemporary writers in their original language—slowly—and I am delighting in their pyrotechnics. These tales sparkle; they are fire and glitter…Read More »
Direct Transmission of the Oblique
by Eric Darton
Being citizens of the Extreme West, where nature is said to abhor a vacuum, the emptiness of the World Trade Center “bathtub,” the gigantic, subsurface foundation structure of the twin towers complex, began to drive us crazy. Yet a host of tendencies, both manifest and unconscious, made filling the hole, for an excruciating half dozen years, nigh-on impossible. However badly the collective psyche yearned, or thought it yearned, to see a herm rise out of the omphalos, more powerful countervailing forces disposed the hollow place to remain empty. All the while, the ever-shifting tidal flows of sea and estuary made clear their intention to fill this bathtub, which, without heroic efforts made to keep it dry, would one day become a lake of living water, drawing everything built near its perimeter into its depths…Read More »
Amiri Baraka at the International Pavilions at Miami Book Fair International: November 10, 2007. (Photo courtesy of Miami Dade College)
Out of the Dead Land
by Andrea Applebee
by Andrea Applebee
On January 9th of this year the poet and activist Imamu Amiri Baraka (previously LeRoy Jones) died. It would be impossible to describe his works and their importance here—not just because of their quantity but also because of their incredible range. In early life a beatnik, in middle life a black nationalist, and in later life a marxist—Baraka/Jones was a dominant force in the Black Arts Movement who never stopped demanding a politics and language that would act on his world. His work elicited passionate reactions, as many hateful as honoring. Listening to him read his poems now I am struck first by the vigorous momentum of his voice and then by the themes of music and speech rising from decaying and dying lands and bodies…Read More »
Story, Community, Survival
and Living Pedogogies: an Invitation to Send Creative Nonfiction
by Jessamyn Smyth
I’m in British Columbia, teaching a class in contemporary ethics through Classical texts. Immersed in what I’ve come to think of as my “Iliad in the Wilderness” period, I’m asked to give a visiting faculty lecture on my areas of specialization. My job is to convey to an audience crammed into every available couch-nook, chair, and patch of floor – in twenty five minutes, after which tea and cookies will be served – that it is through story that survival is achieved.