Welcome to Witty 13
Spring, 2021
Esteemed Readers,
Dare we wish you a salubrious April Fool’s Day? This writer once lived up on the frozen tundra of Michigan—its beautiful but frigid Upper Peninsula, on the shores of Lake Superior—where one of my colleagues remarked upon the Chaucerian dictum, “April is the cruelest month.” There, yes, indeed it was: tantalizing signs of spring, then—blam! several feet of snow, with Arctic temperatures to match. Wherever you are located, we here offer you some writing and images for your pleasure and consideration. And, no fooling, we begin with Lisa Hase-Jackson’s wistfully mid-Western spring poem, “Maple.” We then offer a pocketful of poetry, Cliff and Selhan Endres' translations of the eminent Turkish poet, Enis Batur. These will ultimately be part of a book-length collection, to be published by Talisman House Press. And turning to a different vocabulary, dancer and dance journalist, Karen Greenspan, has given us a remarkable Performance essay on the monk dancers of Bhutan, with spectacular photos of same. |
In February, The Guardian announced the rediscovery and March republication of Proust’s "The Seventy-Five Pages," containing, “germinal versions of episodes developed in In Search of Lost Time” and which opens “the primitive Proustian crypt.” Missing documents and absent or hard to find letters pertinent to Proust’s various works and experiences are not new; and we at Witty Partition, with the kind permission of Karl Orend of Alyscamps Press in Paris, are pleased to include a brief excerpt from Edouard Roditi’s “The Quest for the Lost Proust,” published in very limited edition in 2019. The loss of Proust’s personal letters, the search for missing ones, and, fortuitously, the discovery of some in possession of the owner of a Turkish Bathhouse in Paris background the selection we offer, "Jupien's Bath."
Roditi, himself, suffered the same obscurity as certain aspects of Proust’s life and work. We thus include a translation, from the Romanian, of a poem by Celan—jointly done by Roditi and frequent contributor, Contributing Editor-at-Large, Chris Sawyer-Lauçanno, along with the latter’s brief recollection of Roditi himself. Sawyer-Lauçanno also continues in another section with his memoirs, now Chapters 21 – 23.
Two works of fiction grace our pages, Alexander Shalom Joseph's "I Met Myself" and Susan Tepper's "Distance;" and with Emily Conklin’s essay “The Feeling of Lineage,” we introduce Urban Legends, a new series that considers the always-evolving urban dynamic. In our Remarkable Reads section, Consulting Poetry Editor Dana Delibovi’s “Squaring Accounts,” reviews the posthumous collection, The Historians, by Irish poet Eavan Boland. We also introduce and celebrate our new Consulting Prose Editor Jan Schmidt as she brings us her insights into American Histories: Short Stories by John Edgar Wideman.
Our Portfolio this month is a stunning Ekphrasis by Melinda Brown.
Of course there are more visual treats: our InSight photos, our Colophon.
Our ¡VIVA! contains multiple short remembrances of the several elders who have left us recently. We have, however, reserved commemorations of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died at the age of 101, in lieu of inviting all those of you who were able to attend the commemorative reading this past March 24. Chris Lauçanno Sawyer knew Ferlinghetti and has written a personal remembrance to be published in our next issue, Issue #14, along with a link to a recording of that reading.
Last but not least, I would like to give three cheers for my two co-editors: I encourage you to visit/subscribe to the only literary magazine dedicated solely to novel excerpts, Novel Slices, founded by Witty co-editor Hardy Griffin. Not to be outdone, Witty co-editor Eric Darton’s novel, Free City, is the source text for a series of prize-winning short films by Bill Hayward.
For details and links regarding the above, see NEWS.
I also wish to thank Consulting Poetry Editor, Dana Delibovi, for her invaluable assistance in converting the somewhat inscrutable hand-typed version of Roditi's "Quest" materials to text as well as her further insights into mounting them.
- Bronwyn Mills
Roditi, himself, suffered the same obscurity as certain aspects of Proust’s life and work. We thus include a translation, from the Romanian, of a poem by Celan—jointly done by Roditi and frequent contributor, Contributing Editor-at-Large, Chris Sawyer-Lauçanno, along with the latter’s brief recollection of Roditi himself. Sawyer-Lauçanno also continues in another section with his memoirs, now Chapters 21 – 23.
Two works of fiction grace our pages, Alexander Shalom Joseph's "I Met Myself" and Susan Tepper's "Distance;" and with Emily Conklin’s essay “The Feeling of Lineage,” we introduce Urban Legends, a new series that considers the always-evolving urban dynamic. In our Remarkable Reads section, Consulting Poetry Editor Dana Delibovi’s “Squaring Accounts,” reviews the posthumous collection, The Historians, by Irish poet Eavan Boland. We also introduce and celebrate our new Consulting Prose Editor Jan Schmidt as she brings us her insights into American Histories: Short Stories by John Edgar Wideman.
Our Portfolio this month is a stunning Ekphrasis by Melinda Brown.
Of course there are more visual treats: our InSight photos, our Colophon.
Our ¡VIVA! contains multiple short remembrances of the several elders who have left us recently. We have, however, reserved commemorations of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died at the age of 101, in lieu of inviting all those of you who were able to attend the commemorative reading this past March 24. Chris Lauçanno Sawyer knew Ferlinghetti and has written a personal remembrance to be published in our next issue, Issue #14, along with a link to a recording of that reading.
Last but not least, I would like to give three cheers for my two co-editors: I encourage you to visit/subscribe to the only literary magazine dedicated solely to novel excerpts, Novel Slices, founded by Witty co-editor Hardy Griffin. Not to be outdone, Witty co-editor Eric Darton’s novel, Free City, is the source text for a series of prize-winning short films by Bill Hayward.
For details and links regarding the above, see NEWS.
I also wish to thank Consulting Poetry Editor, Dana Delibovi, for her invaluable assistance in converting the somewhat inscrutable hand-typed version of Roditi's "Quest" materials to text as well as her further insights into mounting them.
- Bronwyn Mills