Types of Closure in Poetry, Part 2: Ending a Poem with a Resonant Image

For me, one of the most effective ways to achieve closure in a poem is to end with a resonant image.

The temptation when you are ending a poem is to try to tie up every loose end. You want to tell the reader exactly what it is that you’re trying to say, what you’ve been building up to for the entire poem. That strategy is very likely to put the reader off. Why? Because no one likes being lectured to. Least of all, fans of poetry. The chances are, if you’ve written the entire poem with a particular emotion or idea in mind, the reader has gotten the message by the time the poem is almost done.

So, don’t end a poem by hitting the reader over the head. Instead, expand the horizons the poem has explored. Finish with an image that lingers in the reader’s thoughts and echoes other elements in the poem. Ending with a particularly vivid and haunting image changes the tone so that the poem has closure at the end.

The best way to explain this is to give an example. The classic instance of this is John Keats’s sonnet, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”:

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Basically, the speaker of this poem is saying that he’s read a lot about Homer’s Greece, but he never really got it till he read George Chapman’s translation of The Odyssey. Now he understands the beauty and majesty of Homer’s poetry and the world he describes.

John Keats

But instead of saying that flat out, in the poem’s sestet, or final six lines, Keats gives us two seemingly unrelated images. The first is an astronomer discovering a new planet when it “swims” into view (you gotta love that verb, “swim”!). The second is the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés, leading an exploratory party to a cliff in Panama, where for the first time, Europeans gazed on the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific, from the Americas.

More than any didactic conclusion, these two images give a sense of the incredible wonder that Keats felt when he read Chapman’s translation of Homer. That last image, of the ocean that was undreamed of by Cortés and his men, just rolls on and on in the mind, like a long chord, as vast and inspiring as the Pacific.

What provides the closure here is that we have switched from Homer to another realm, but one that vibrates with Keats’ feelings about discovering Chapman’s version of The Odyssey. The poem has shifted, but is still in the mode of awe, in fact, deeper in that mode because of the resonant image. The image Keats chooses is so much more expansive than someone sitting in a library reading a translation from ancient Greek. The image also reflects on how amazing a reading experience can actually be.

One contemporary poet who has mastered the art of ending on a resonant image is Joseph Millar. Millar has a way of finding a final image that engages the reader, brings together threads in the poem, but opens the door to deeper emotion or contemplation. 

Joseph Millar

In his poem “Labor Day,” for instance, Millar describes all the ways that labor is not being done on that holiday. The speaker is celebrating all those who have earned a day off because of their hard work. Instead of winding up with this theme, though, he ends with a cinematic image that encapsulates and expands the poem’s ideas and emotions:

the tuna boats rest on their tie-up lines

turning a little, this way and that.

This last image is a symbol of Labor Day itself, with the boats docked and not in use (and you know tuna boats see some serious fishing!). But that image also lets in another range of ideas and emotions, because of the restlessness of the boats in the water. This motion might suggest that Labor Day may be a time of repose, but it also highlights unresolved issues about those who work with their hands, and those who manage or profit from their labor.

Types of Closure in Poetry, Part 1, Part 3, Part 4

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Types of Closure in Poetry, Part 1: Introduction

When I was starting out as a young poet, I kept hearing other writers talk about “closure.” I couldn’t image what this odd word meant. It sounded like getting your hand caught in a door. A poem ends when it ends, right? Why does there even need to be a name or a word for that?

The more I’ve written and the more I’ve read, the more I realize that closure is a crucial part of a poem.

Elizabethan poet Sir Thomas Wyatt was one of the first to use rhymed couplets to close a sonnet

But what is closure? Here are a few possible definitions:

• Closure is the way that a poem completes itself.
• Closure is the way a poem fills out its own shape.
• Closure is the way that the poet and reader both understand that the poem is winding down, or reaching back into the world.

There are three main types of closure in poetry, and I’ll discuss each one in this series of blogs. The three main techniques that poets use to end poems:

1) A resonant image
2) Repetition or a rhythmic change
3) The killer last line

Of course, very few endings are purely one or the other type. There are many variations and combinations of these types.

I think all these ways of ending a poem have one thing in common: at the conclusion of a poem, something changes from the way the poem has progressed prior to the finale. Every poem creates a kind of pattern for the reader. At the close of a poem, that pattern usually changes. The change can be in the structure of the poem, the mood, the awareness of the speaker and/or reader, the imagery, the subject matter, the sounds of the language, the emotion, or the point of view. In other words, almost any aspect of the poem or combination of facets can create closure, providing that the poem changes in some significant and palpable way toward the end, breaking the poem’s pattern.

Here are the sections of this blog that deal with the different types of closure:

Resonant image
Repetition or rhythmic change
The killer ending

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Movies about Writers—For the Oscars

On first thought it seems that movies about writers are a contradiction in terms. Writing is an introspective art that relies on intangible thoughts and feelings. The process of writing mainly involves sitting still for long periods of time. Movies, on the other hand, are all about action and motion. Films look at human behavior entirely from the outside, with the exception of a voiceover narration.

Jessica Brown Findlay in This Beautiful Fantastic

But in fact there have been quite a number of terrific films where the character of a writer plays an important part. I asked friends on Facebook to nominate movies they like about writers, and to my shock, twenty titles appeared within a day, an incredible variety from film noir to fantasy to contemporary realism. Thank you so much to for all the suggestions—I’m sorry I couldn’t include all of them in this blog. Here are the nominees for best films about writers:

The accomplished translator of Persian literature and opera libretto author Niloufar Talebi suggested a movie I’d never heard of, much less seen, This Beautiful Fantastic. When I watched it, I was entranced by the excellent performances of Jessica Brown Findlay, Tom Wilkinson, Andrew Scott, and Jeremy Irvine. It’s a fairy tale about a very OCD writer in the U.K. who is forced out of her interior world into a reality that can be harsh but is ultimately blessed. Niloufar also picked The Lives of Others, about writers in East Germany during the Cold War era, a deeply felt and brilliant movie.

Russian translator and publisher Jim Kates nominated Julia, which must be Jane Fonda’s best movie, and maybe Vanessa Redgrave’s as well. A story of Lillian Hellman’s childhood friend who ends up in the resistance against fascism right before World War II, Julia is taken from Hellman’s own writing in her wonderful memoir, Pentimento.

Jane Fonda as Lillian Hellman in Julia

Documentary filmmaker Andrea Simon, the painter Jessica Dunne, and poet George Higgins all picked a movie I greatly admire, Bright Star, about the romance of poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, an elegant and intelligent period flick.

The writers Ernestine Hayes and Lisa Stice both selected Stranger Than Fiction, a moving comedy where Emma Thompson plays a frazzled novelist who begins to tamper with reality when she steps into her own literary world. Great cast, fun plot!

Poet and naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield nominated I Am Not Your Negro, a fascinating documentary that matches images to James Baldwin’s final, unpublished manuscript, a provocative mediation on race, the U.S.A., and the soul of a country.

Poet Vivian Faith Prescott picked The Business of Fancydancing, Sherman Alexie’s powerful film about identity, love, and the literary profession.

Historian Miranda Sachs voted for Shakespeare in Love, a captivating story based on the bard’s writing and bits of fact that the screenwriter extrapolated to create a fine plot with wonderful acting.

Creative nonfiction writer David Stevenson told me about Genius, a strong film on the unlikely subject of a literary editor, Maxwell Perkins. The movie depicts the relationship between Perkins, who edited such authors as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway at Scribner’s, and the novelist Thomas Wolfe. Excellent performances by Colin Firth, Jude Law, and Nicole Kidman.

I have a weakness for film noir, so I have to mention In A Lonely Place, a Nicholas Ray flick starring Humphrey Bogart as a Hollywood writer who has 24 hours to solve a murder and exonerate himself.

Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place

I also love Judy Davis’s intelligent and emotional portrayal of George Sand in Impromptu and her performance in My Brilliant Career, based on the novel by the Australian writer Miles Franklin.

And a recent addition: Their Finest, a 2016 sleeper about screenwriters working on propaganda films in the UK during World War II.  Bill Nighy has a wonderful supporting role as a washed-up actor recruited for a hokey picture, and Helen McCrory is marvelous as his Polish agent. Stay with this movie—it starts out corny but that’s just the set-up for a strong ending.

Speaking of Helen McCrory, she has a great cameo as the novelist Ann Radcliffe in Becoming Jane, a film about Jane Austen's early years. As overloaded as I feel by the Jane Austen craze, this film is a delight to watch, with a wonderful cast of Anne Hathaway, Maggie Smith, Ian Richardson, and Julie Walters.

Here’s another: Mistress America, starring the multitalented Greta Gerwig, who collaborated on the screenplay with director Noah Baumbach. The film follows an awkward and lovable college student trying to gain acceptance as a fledgling writer at Barnard College. The stepsister-to-be of the young writer, Gerwig plays a goofy and hilarious character who isn’t much good at anything but is all the more charismatic because of that.

More still: in 2018, the movie Mary Shelley took the life of the author of Frankenstein and turned it into a compelling story of a brilliant young woman succeeding in the man’s world of the English romantic writers. Terrific cast, excellent screenplay, fine direction by Saudi Arabia’s first woman filmmaker, Haifaa Al-Mansour.

The 2019 film Little Women, written and directed by Greta Gerwig, is also a terrific story about a struggling young woman writer, based on the book by Louisa May Alcott.

My Dog Stupid (Mon Chien Stupide) is a recent French movie based on a short story by U.S. author John Fante. Great performances by screenplay writer Yvan Attal and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who are also a couple in real life. 

Mothering Sunday is an unlikely title for a movie about an orphaned young maid whose path leads her to become a writer. It’s a worthwhile film, with a great supporting performance by Colin Firth as a man too preoccupied with his own family’s troubles to notice much else, but with good instincts. 

The list goes on!

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Translating George Sand

I’ve always admired the French writer and activist George Sand (1804–1876). She was a prolific author and a dedicated advocate for social change who fought for the rights of women and workers. 

George Sand

Currently Sand is far better known in the English-speaking world for her audacious life than for her writing. Sand had many lovers, both men and women, including the composer Frédéric Chopin; bad-boy poet and playwright Alfred de Musset; and Prosper Mérimée, author of Carmen. George Sand was notorious for cross-dressing as a man in order to attend the Paris theaters that were only open to males.

George Sand:  Prolific Author

Sand (whose real name was the Baroness Amantine Lucile Aurore Dudevant) was a workhorse as an author. Also highly social, she entertained guests during the afternoon and evening, then wrote most of the night. There is a story about George Sand, perhaps apocryphal, that she finished writing one novel halfway through the night, and not willing to lose valuable time, she started another one without a pause. Whether this anecdote is true or not, it says a lot about her reputation as a hardworking author.

George Sand painted by her friend Eugène Delacroix

Finding the Right Work to Translate

I was, to be frank, more than a little in love with George Sand. Not owning a time machine, I decided the best way to get close to her was to translate one of her works. But which to pick of her 100 novels, plays, and memoirs? I couldn’t read them all. Most of her plays were untranslated, so I started there. But I soon realized that the theater in nineteenth century Paris was a lot like network television was before streaming. It was a popular form of entertainment where the standards were fairly low, and not much revision or planning went into the throwaway scripts.

Many of George Sand’s most renowned novels had already been translated either during the first wave of interest in her work in the nineteenth century, or during the recent feminist revival. The majority of her prose works felt dated to me, sentimental portraits of virtuous peasants. The fact that she was renowned in France as a great stylist, the mentor of Gustave Flaubert, a writer’s writer, was not coming across to me. I started to wonder if there was a translation project involving George Sand that would make sense for me.  

Searching for Clues When Looking for a Work to Translate

I was combing through various biographies of Sand, looking for a glimmer of a translation project. I came across a reference to an obscure novel of hers titled Horace. The biography mentioned that Sand’s publisher had absolutely refused to accept the manuscript when she presented it to him in the early 1840s, despite the fact that Sand was then a best-selling author. That sparked my curiosity.

I did some more digging and found another interesting clue. The French publisher Éditions de l’Aurore, which was undertaking a major project to reprint most of Sand’s works, chose Horace as the second book in their series, ahead of almost all of her most famous novels. I immediately ordered the French edition of the book.

When I read George Sand’s Horace, I found it charming, witty, and amazingly farsighted politically. It reflected the real world that Sand lived in: the banter in aristocratic Paris boudoirs, and the arguments in gritty Left Bank student garrets about overthrowing the corrupt monarchy. I knew I had the book I wanted to translate, and even better—it had gone untranslated into English since Sand had essentially self-published the book 150 years before.

Finding a Voice That Sounds Right for a Nineteenth-Century Novel

I immediately went on a sort of literary diet in order to get into my mind the voice of a nineteenth century woman novelist. For two years, while I was creating the first draft of the translation of George Sand’s Horace, I read only novels by English women writers. It was a delicious bubble bath of books, including Persuasion by Jane Austen, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, and Mary Barton by Edith Gaskell. Reading all of those books helped me to get the right diction, tone, and viewpoint for the translation. Somehow, though, none of those novelists quite reminded me of George Sand’s sardonic Paris salon humor. It wasn’t until I read William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair that I found a voice in English that matched Sand’s urbane and urban voice in Horace.

I created a first draft of the translation in a style that was as close as I could get to the diction of a nineteenth century novel. I sent the book to someone I trusted, Tom Christensen, then editor in chief at Mercury House, a fine literary publisher near where I lived in San Francisco. Tom accepted the book, but he asked to meet with me about the translation.

“The translation is fine as far as it goes,” Tom said, “but it’s stilted, it’s stiff. You can’t write this as if you lived in the nineteenth century.” I realized Tom was right. I had fossilized George Sand’s language in diction that wasn’t natural to me, an idiom that didn’t exist any longer.

I completely rewrote the translation, using phrasing that was much closer to contemporary English. When I was reading the nineteenth century novels, I had compiled a list of contractions that were actually in use during that time, such as can’t and don’t. In the new version of the translation, I used those contractions every chance I could, both for the narrator’s voice and for dialogue. Proudly I brought my revision to Tom Christensen.

His reaction wasn’t what I was hoping for. “It sounds too contemporary,” he said. “You need a voice that seems like the nineteenth century, but actually uses some modern phrases. There has to be a balance.”

My third draft was somewhere in the middle—neither purely contemporary nor completely archaic. I only used contractions for the dialogue and very sparingly in the narration. That middle version satisfied Tom.

How the Translation of Horace Was Received

I was fortunate that my translation of George Sand’s Horace was the first to appear in English after the release of the popular movie Impromptu, a George Sand biopic starring Judy Davis. Horace got written up twice in ten days in the New York Times, and the first printing sold out in eight weeks, almost unheard of for a translation of an unknown nineteenth century novel. The English translation of Horace remains in print more than thirty years later.

A Favorite Passage from Horace

Here’s a favorite passage from the novel, where George Sand talks about students and how they become less radical as they grow older and more cautious:

“…we regard as youthful foolishness those courageous theories that we once loved and professed; we blush at the thought of having been a Fourierist, a Saint-Simonian, or a revolutionary of any stripe; we hardly dare recount what audacious motions we put forward or supported in political groups; and finally, we are astonished that we ever hoped for equality with all its consequences, that we loved the people fearlessly, that we voted for the law of brotherhood with no amendments. And after a few years—that is, when we’re well or poorly established—whether we be right smack in the middle, royalist, or republican, of the shade of opinion of the Débats, the Gazette, or the National, we inscribe over our doorway, or on our diploma, or on our license, that we never, in all our life, intended to commit any offense against sacrosanct Property.”

_________________________________

Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Homage to Chana Bloch

The world lost a wonderful member of the literary community in 2017—Chana Bloch, poet, translator, and teacher of generations of creative writers and students of literature. I attended her memorial on October 8, 2017, at Mills College, where Chana taught for more than thirty years. It was moving to see women who had studied with Chana decades ago returning to campus to recount how Chana had changed their lives, including professionals who did not end up as writers but were still profoundly shaped by the experience of working with her.

Chana Bloch

Chana had a fantastic sense of humor, and she was a modest person, free of pretention, despite her numerous accomplishments. She collaborated on some of the best contemporary translations of Hebrew poetry. The English version of Yehuda Amichai’s collection Open Closed Open that she created with Chana Kronfeld is to me one of the finest literary translations of contemporary poetry into English. A friend told a story at Chana’s memorial about this book: Amichai was terminally ill while the two Chanas were working on the translation. The poet was pressuring them to finish so he could see his best collection in English before he died. According to the speaker at the memorial, Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld resisted the demands of the great Hebrew poet, knowing they would probably only have one chance to get the translation right, since books of poetry in translation rarely go into multiple editions. As it turned out, the Chanas finished their work to their satisfaction, and Amichai lived to see the book in print.

Chana Bloch’s translation in collaboration with Ariel Bloch of The Song of Songs is one of the most beautiful renditions of a biblical text into English. Their version brings out the freshness of the language and the imagery, and returns the romance and the raunch to The Song of Songs:

Let me lie among vine blossoms,

in a bed of apricots!

I am in the fever of love.           

This book of the Hebrew Bible is often bowdlerized in translation till the sensuality becomes only symbolic or veiled. Chana was determined to create a nakedly beautiful Song of Songs, and she succeeded. 

Chana Bloch’s own poetry is full of tantalizing complexity. The poet Judy Halebsky spoke at the memorial, recalling that she had asked Chana when she was a student at Mills College about an emotion that she was trying to express in a poem, which had not yet come across as she’d intended. Chana told her, “Every emotion is actually two conflicting emotions.” That’s not only true in life, it’s true in Chana’s poetry as well.

In Chana’s poem “The Joins,” included in her collection Blood Honey, she refers to the Japanese art of kintsugi, a method of repairing broken pottery where the seams are sprinkled with gold dust to create a gorgeous pattern out of the breaks. From the first line of the poem, Chana makes clear that she is speaking in metaphor:

What’s between us

often seems flexible as the webbing

between forefinger and thumb.

Seems flexible, but it’s not;

what’s between us

is made of clay

Human relationships are almost always Chana’s subject. Even though she’s talking about a technique in pottery, the poem is clearly about breakage—emotional, psychic, global:

We glue the wounded edges

with tentative fingers.

Scar tissue is visible history

In Chana Bloch’s poetry, she begins with the assumption that we are all wounded. But by recognizing those injuries, by learning from the pain, we can reach a state that might even be better than innocence:

Sometimes the joins

are so exquisite

they say the potter

may have broken the cup

just so he could mend it.

A couple of times Chana visited a class I taught regularly on contemporary world poetry at a college in San Francisco, where she spoke about the writing of Yehuda Amichai and Dahlia Ravikovitch that she had cotranslated. I have to confess I was a little jealous of how instantaneously my students bonded with Chana, a stronger connection than I’d been able to weave during an entire semester. I think that ability to win the trust of students came from Chana’s piercing intellect, her genuine warmth, and her disarmingly frank comments, delivered in her Bronx accent. It just wasn’t in Chana’s constitution to be anything less than completely honest, as a professor, a poet, and a friend. I miss her. 

Other posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Reflections on the First Asian Literature Festival, Gwangju, South Korea, November 2017

I had the good fortune to be invited to speak at the First Asian Literature Festival, held in Gwangju, South Korea, from November 1 to 4, 2017. Convened by the conference organizer, the distinguished Korean poet Ko Un, the festival brought together topnotch writers from several Asian countries, including South Korea, China, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, and Mongolia. The festival also included authors such as France’s Claude Mouchard and Spain’s Antonio Colinas, writers who have a deep and enduring interest in Asian literature. 

Writers and festival staff at Mudeung-San, a mountain near Gwangju, South Korea

Nobel Prize-winner Wole Soyinka from Nigeria gave the keynote address. He has a resounding basso voice, and a virtuoso ability with language that commands attention, not to mention a lofty physique surmounted by a white afro, which Ko Un described as “a cloud of hair.” Soyinka underlined two major problems for the world literary community: the one-sided view of culture by many in the West who see no reason to go beyond the walls of their own circles, and the threat to the freedom of imagination and speech from totalitarian forces, both religious and political power-hungry fanatics whom Soyinka called “anti-minds.”

“I know you, but do you know us?” Soyinka said, challenging the exclusiveness of the Western canon. “That is, I know Dante, I know Homer, I know the Symbolists, the Imagists, the Romantics. I know your Shakespeare, I know Baudelaire, I know Racine, I know T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gogol, Mangakis, and I know Proust…but do you know us? That is, do you know Sundiata? Gilgamesh? Mahabharata? Do you know Kahlil Gibran? Do you know the writings of Tierno Bokar, the Sage of Bandiagara? Do you know the Ozidi Epic? Do you even know the Legend of Chaka the Zulu or indeed the narratives of Fagunwa?”

One magical part of this conference was Ko Un's role as organizer and host. He not only created intellectual and artistic sparks throughout the festival, he gave the invited writers a personal tour of his Korea. Ko Un showed us a South Korea that has bled to achieve democracy, a country with great natural and cultural treasures.

We began the conference with a visit to the May 18^th National Cemetery, where the fallen of the 1980 rebellion are buried. That uprising resulted in a brief and free commune in the city of Gwangju, violently repressed by the military government’s forces after ten days.

The cemetery for the victims of that suppression is deeply stirring, with photos by the grave of each victim of the dictatorship’s repression in Gwangju, many of them not even old enough to attend high school or college when they were murdered. 

Ko Un at the grave of his friend who took part in the Gwangju uprising in 1980

It was moving to follow Ko Un through the burial ground as he stopped at the grave of each friend who had fallen or been imprisoned, giving details of their lives: Tae-il Jo, whom Ko Un characterized as a heavy drinker who took part in the protests on the streets of Gwangju; and Han-Bong Yun, a poet whom Ko Un knew in jail as such a principled purist that he cleaned his cell three times a day. Ko Un slapped the latter’s gravestone and said, “Take care.”

You might think that keeping up with an eighty-four-year-old poet wouldn’t be that difficult, but you’d be wrong in the case of Ko Un. Two days later he led us on an amazing odyssey around the countryside near Gwangju, not one of us able to keep pace with him on the hikes. We visited Mudeung-san, a mountain known for its columns of granite, the tawny-tufted reeds that grow in its meadows, a candlelight procession against military rule that switchbacked up the slopes, and a down-to-earth monk who used to prowl its peaks centuries ago.

Nearby we stopped at Wonhyo Temple, the Zen monastery where Ko Un had been a monk in his youth. We sampled buckwheat tea, lotus flower tea, sugared ginger, and tangerine gelatin shaped in tiny flower molds, while we looked out over the mountains with the head monk. At that moment, stress seemed not to exist.

On that excursion Ko Un also took us through a bamboo forest in Damyang and recounted how an egalitarian circle of Chinese poets used to gather in a bamboo grove to read in the third century C.E.

Poet Cecilia Son recited a poem in the bamboo grove with the wind rushing through the leaves overhead, a wonderful accompaniment to the writing.

Ko Un’s nighttime reading in one of the four beautiful theaters in the new Asia Culture Center in Gwangju was one of the most energetic and engaging I can remember. That poet can scoop up an audience’s attention like no other, dominating a large stage and space.

In talking to many of the writers at the conference or reading their biographies, I was struck by how many of them had experienced either imprisonment, censorship, blacklisting, and/or exile by governments trying to silence them. Even torture, in the case of Ko Un. Getting to know these writers personally was eye-opening. I hear regularly about authors being deprived of the freedom to write, but to meet these wonderful people, and to know that they endured these terrible violations of their rights, reminded me keenly that we can never stop our vigilance in supporting freedom of speech wherever it is threatened.

The Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, site of the conference, was a fabulous venue for this event, which will continue on a biannual basis. Completed in 2015 and headed by its President Bang Sun-gyu, the center is a magnificent complex of theaters, art galleries, conference rooms, libraries, gardens, and offices, devoted to enhancing the knowledge of Asian arts. Designed by Kyu Sung Woo Architects, the center is located at the site of the final massacre of the 1980 democracy protestors. It is a moving memorial to those demonstrators, and a lasting embodiment of the free exchange of ideas that they fought for. As Wole Soyinka said in his keynote address, “When we set out into the realms of the imagination, we experience liberation at its most unsullied.…We are not only free, we see humanity as the very repository of Freedom.”

With Uriankhai Damdinsuren, poet from Mongolia

Writers at the 2017 Asian Literature Festival included:

Antonio Colinas (Spain)

Duo Duo (China)

Ko Un (South Korea, Chair of Organizing Committee)
Shams Langeroodi (Iran)

Claude Mouchard (France)

Zack Rogow (USA)
Sagawa Aki (Japan)

Wole Soyinka (Nigeria)

Uriankhai Damdinsuren (Mongolia, recipient of first Asian Literature Award)

Ayu Utami (Indonesia)

___________________________________________________________________________

Zack’s memoir about his writer dad, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry