GAS Featured Poet: Ma Yongbo

Ma Yongbo was born in 1964,Ph.D,representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry,and a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry.He has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986 included 7 poetry collections.He focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Williams and Ashbery. He recently published a complete translation of Moby Dick, which has sold over half a million copies. He teaches at Nanjing University of Science and Technology. The Collected Poems of Ma Yongbo (four volumes, Eastern Publishing Centre, 2024) comprising 1178 poems, celebrate 40 years of writing poetry.

Line by line retranslation of Ashbery 

Waiting makes time democratic, you just said so

Then a white horse ran by, repeatedly running back and forth

Like a messenger passing straight through various rooms from the front door

Out through the back door, I waited like this for twenty-seven years.

Initially it was the honey of distortion brewed in the rooms distorted in your convex mirror

And that gesture was both an invitation and a refusal

Unfolding for me a moment that fluctuated incessantly

A crack that exists, the circulation of water in the ocean

A ring formed by a self-devouring serpent in motion 

In between is the void filled with power

This mirror of others reflects oneself at the same time

Allows all the images of leaves stacked in the depths of the mirror to remain

Like a demon in a bottle floating on an infinitely transparent surface

Longing for the light of your face, symbolic stones

They only stop temporarily in order to focus

Forming some kind of meaning, then they are quickly swept away

By the randomness of a hasty retrospective flood

This is more like a dream that a person struggles with but still cannot wake from

Maybe he doesn't really want to wake up

Finding himself in an uninhabited street

In the silence just as the last bus leaves

In the steam, the taillights flicker dimly

This is a climate without scenery, it is something nameless

Moving, appearing and disappearing, erasing some, and then adding some from the void

Adding something, originally the messenger and the message were one

How to receive the infinite return of the Möbius strip

What you have experienced, you know nothing about

And poetry is an understanding of this pain, and also a forgetting

Whether the reward is a reed flute, or separation of body and head

It will all enter a distilled space

Like bees living in the nest of the sun

And these, whether they are enough for me

Pretending that nothing happened, continue to sing

This may be the barbarian plundering in Rome

Defined safe zone, several temples scattered on hills

Let us continue with determination

Tell others the symbolism, and show the mystery to ourselves

GAS Featured Poet: Irma Kurti

 

IRMA KURTI is an Albanian poet, writer, lyricist, journalist, and translator and has been writing since she was a child. She is a naturalized Italian and lives in Bergamo, Italy. In 2020, she became the honorary president of WikiPoesia, the encyclopedia of poetry. In 2023 she was awarded a Career Award from the Universum Academy Switzerland. She also won the prestigious 2023 Naji Naaman's literary prize for complete work. Irma Kurti has published 30 books in Albanian, 26 in Italian, 16 in English, and two in French. She has also translated 22 books by different authors. Her books have been translated and published in 17 countries.

The immense summer sky

 

I was waiting for a sweet word that night

that would’ve filled my soul with light

while above us just like a field of fireflies 

expanded the infinite summer sky.

 

I was just waiting for a caress like a soft

wave of the sea two steps away from us,

but you simply spoke and I was surely lost 

in a labyrinth of episodes from your past.

 

Your voice trembled and mingled with

the waves; in fragments it came to me as 

all my illusions vanished. It was enough 

just to live the magic of that moment.

 

 My love prevailed in the atmosphere; it

was filled with scents, manifold sounds,

close and elusive. I felt so happy, drunk,

your words wrapped in light—a distant

lighthouse in a dark and remote harbor.

 

Days have passed, turning into months,

the skies have changed and become

leaden and gray. The clouds announce

the tempests, but I still have above me

that immense summer sky like a field—

boundless and unattainable—of fireflies.

 

 

GAS Featured Poet: Duane Anderson

 

Duane Anderson currently lives in La Vista, NE.  He has had poems published in Fine Lines, Cholla Needles, Tipton Poetry Journal, and several other publications. He is the author of ‘On the Corner of Walk and Don’t Walk,’ ‘The Blood Drives: One Pint Down,’ and ‘Conquer the Mountains,’ and ‘Family Portraits.’

In the Eyes of a Glass

I am one of your companions,
holding what you pour into me,
tasting each treasured fluid 
as it is placed inside of me,

not caring if I am filled with water,
milk out of a gallon jug,
beer out of a bottle
pop out of a can.

Fill me with the drink of your choice,
then drink from me 
what you have trusted me to protect,
whether you sip me, gulp me, chug me,

and what once filled one belly 
disappears into the belly of another.
I am one always patiently waiting
for the next round of liquid refreshments.

A toast to you my friend,
a toast to me.
Let’s celebrate
as our lips touch each other in friendship.

GAS Featured Poet: Michael Lee Johnson

Michael Lee Johnson is a poet of high acclaim, with his work published in 46 countries or republics. He is also a song lyricist with several published poetry books. His talent has been recognized with 7 Pushcart Prize nominations and 7 Best of the Net nominations. He has over 653 published poems. His 330-plus YouTube poetry videos are a testament to his skill and dedication. He is a proud member of the Illinois State Poetry Society: http://www.illinoispoets.org/. His poems have been translated into several foreign languages. Awards/Contests: International Award of Excellence "Citta' Del Galateo-Antonio De Ferrariis" XI Edition 2024 Milan, Italy-Poetry. Poem, Michael Lee Johnson, "If I Were Young Again." 

 

In My Will

 

In my will, there will be a pinball machine.

A renovated jukebox from American Pickers,

a cable TV show. For the taverns, bars, 

and basements of fun seekers for those

who long to be free and ferocious.

I no longer fear death.

Empty vodka bottle by my bed.

A dusty Bible underlined

Jesus’ messages 

in red.

GAS Featured Poet: Ivan Pozzoni

Ivan Pozzoni was born in Monza in 1976. He introduced Law and Literature in Italy and the publication of essays on Italian philosophers and on the ethics and juridical theory of the ancient world; He collaborated with several Italian and international magazines. Between 2007 and 2018, different versions of the books were published: Underground and Riserva Indiana, with A&B Editrice, Versi Introversi, Mostri, Galata morente, Carmina non dant damen, Scarti di magazzino, Here the Austrians are more severe than the Bourbons, Cherchez the troika. et The Invective Disease with Limina Mentis,Lame da rasoi, with Joker, Il Guastatore, with Cleup, Patroclo non deve morire, with deComporre Edizioni. He was the founder and director of the literary magazine Il Guastatore – «neon»-avant-garde notebooks; he was the founder and director of the literary magazine L'Arrivista; he is the editor and chef of the international philosophical magazine Información Filosófica; he is, or has been, creator of the series Esprit (Limina Mentis), Nidaba (Gilgamesh Edizioni) and Fuzzy (deComporre). It contains a fortnight of autogérées socialistes edition houses. He wrote 150 volumes, wrote 1000 essays, founded an avant-garde movement (NéoN-avant-gardisme, approved by Zygmunt Bauman), with a millier of movements, and wrote an Anti-manifesto NéoN-Avant-gardiste. This is mentioned in the main university manuals of literature history, philosophical history and in the main volumes of literary criticism. His book La malattia invettiva wins Raduga, mention of the critique of Montano et Strega. He is included in the Atlas of contemporary Italian poets of the University of Bologne and figures à plusieurs reprized in the great international literature review of Gradiva. His verses are translated into French, English and Spanish. In 2024, after six years of total retrait of academic studies, he return to the Italian artistic world and melts the NSEAE Kolektivne (New socio/ethno/aesthetic anthropology).

 

THE BALLAD OF PEGGY AND PEDRO

The ballad of Peggy and Pedro barked out by the punkbestials 

of the Garibaldi Bridge, with a mixture of hatred and despair, 

teaches us the intimate relationship between geometry and love, 

to love as if we were maths surrounded by stray dogs.

Peggy you were drunk, normal mood, 

in the slums along the bed of the Tiber 

and alcohol, on August evenings, doesn't warm you up, 

clouding every sense in annihilating dreams, 

transforming every chewed-up sentence into a gunfight in the back 

on armour dissolved by the summer heat.

Lying on the edges of the bridge's ledges, 

among the drop-outs of the Rome open city,

you opened your heart to the gratuitous insult of Pedro, 

your lover, and toppled over, falling into the void, 

drawing gravitational trajectories from the sky to the cement.

Pedro wasn't drunk, a day's journey away, 

you weren't drunk, abnormal state of mind, 

in the slums along the bed of the Tiber, 

or in the empty parties of Milan's movida, 

with the intention of explaining to dogs and tramps 

a curious lesson of non-Euclidean geometry.

Mounted on the edge of the bridge, 

in the apathetic indifference of your distracted pupils, 

you jumped, in the same trajectory of love, 

along the same fatal path as your Peggy,

landing on the cement at the same instant.

The punkbestials of the Garibaldi Bridge, cleared by the local authority,

will spread a surreal lesson to every slum in the world 

centred on the astonishing idea 

that love is a matter of non-Euclidean geometry.

GAS Featured Poet: Jason Ryberg

 

Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen books of poetry,

six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders,

notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be

(loosely) construed as a novel, and countless

love letters, never sent. He is currently an artist-in-

residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted

P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community, and is an

editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection

of poems is “Fence Post Blues (River Dog Press, 2023).” 

He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster

named Little Red and a Billy-goat named Giuseppe,

and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the

Gasconade River, where there are also many strange

and wonderful woodland critters. 

 

 

 The Slippery Slope

of Infinite Regression

Those far-off and fleeting buzzards 

of indeterminate feeling,

pyrning and gyring on the horizon,

those flittering moths of thought 

recently seen accumulating, at the oddest times,

on the shimmering quicksilver edge

of your mind’s magnificent fish-eye lens...

they’ve been rapidly devolving

into dubious notions and bizarre insecurities

concerning the teleological motions

of moth’s wings and the polar ice-caps of Mars

(and their collusion and subsequent influence

over your own precarious place

in the grand schemata

of people, places and things)...

And what about that sweet, young thing, there,

givin’ you the cheerleader sneer

from across the bar?

What is that, exactly, that she’s beaming out,

so radiantly? Loathing? Pity?

Some subtle shade of pathos, at best?

Or that grizzled, hoary Ahab

of a character shootin’ you the stink-eye

from the back window of a passing bus ...

Maybe it all adds up to nothing much,

but, something both all-knowing

and faintly unwholesome was

most definitely transmitted in the brief,

teleo-scopic instant of that

thousand-yard stare.

And those little clickity-clicks

and distant kettle whistles

and whispering phantoms of white noise

you’d swear, sometimes, just like

billowing clouds of gnats and other no-see-ems

(hosting the reincarnated souls

of grievous sinners, no doubt)

always mucking up your receptions

and transmissions.

What could their involvement be

in all of this and to what possible purpose

and degree?

Sabotage?

Subterfuge?

Hostile take-over?

Zen masters, fortune cookies

and bar-stool philosophers,

street-sweepers, antique dealers

and the capricious daughters

of Mexican generals, alike,

will tell you, 

it is precisely at these moments 

that one must immediately 

pull the rip-cord and nullify all contracts 

and pre-arrangements 

with the world,

let loose the horses,

release the hounds,

and set free the birds of primeval light

that have languished too long in their cages,

but, most importantly,

one must stalk and chase and feed,

voraciously, upon the hot, dripping, 

still-beating hearts

of wide open spaces.