Guest Edited and Introduced by Bronwyn Mills
Poet Leonard Schwartz was long encouraged and promoted by mutual friend, Ed Foster of Talisman and Talisman Press, though shortly after I first met Leonard (always virtually) he went on to teach at Evergreen State College in Washington state. We also connected through my late mentor and dissertation director, Kamau Brathwaite, of my PhD days and Schwartz’ poetry work. Sadly, Ed died in February of this year and neither Talisman nor the press continues; Brathwaite, too has passed. Happily, however, Leonard is very much with us, teaching at Evergreen, hosting literary events, and producing his own work. I am aware ofhis work on Flaco (Flacofolio) the beloved owl who esaped from the Central Park Zoo. I was able to work with him and his translator on an essay, “The Intimacy of Listening” about the process of translating his prose poem, “Exchange,” into Turkish. Most recently, he caught my attention with a group email listing of the stops on his Sabbatical tour: Liege, Denmark, Croatia, Madrid, Estonia, also Portugal and Paris, then ending in a Norway residency, the result of a recommendation by Norwegian poet Jon Ritland.
What is key about his current work is his full-on experimentation with prose poetry. Thus, we present the result of that Norway residency, the prose poem series the Blonde Raven. In it he deliberately blurs the boundaries between so-called “reality” and “fiction”—or, at the least, the rigidity which we sometimes regard the two. To quote an announcement of his abovementioned tour, “His stories, fragments, and impulses are composted and transformed.” The Raven eries features an ambiguous figure which the poet introduces as “an actual being in my life. I saw her on a regular basis for two years, and see her intermittently, as in a dream, right up to this day. It is all so real that there is no sense in which it can’t be.” Gender—female; species—avian? human? a blonde bird, not black??? albino? When the reference is to ‘animal’ the Blonde Raven is another species or, oddly separate from the animal kingdom by being human. Indeed, ambiguity is key; and, as Schwartz himself puts it, “…both banter and solemnity.” Without further ado, I encourage readers to take the plunge…
— Bronwyn Mills
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Leonard Schwartz is a poet and writer and the author of numerous books of poetry, including, most recently, Flacofolio (with artist Heide Hatry), Actualities I: Transparent, to the Stone, Actualities II and III: Two Burned Hotels, andActualities IV/V Comic Earth (2021, 2022, 2023, Goats & Compasses). Heavy Sublimation (Talisman House, 2018), If (Talisman House 2012) and Salamander: A Bestiary (Chax Press, 2017), with painter Simon Carr, are also out and about. His work in poetics The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises (University of Arkansas Press, 2016), is inclusive of poetry, essays, and interviews. Other titles include At Element (2011), which explore the idea of an eco-poetics, as well as The Library of Seven Readings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008). He edited and co-translated Benjamin Fondane’s Cine-Poems and Other, for New York Review Books. From 2003 to 2018 he produced and hosted the radio program Cross Cultural Poetics. Schwartz splits his time between New York City and the Pacific Northwest.
