SILVIA PIO Born by the sea, she lived in a fisherman’s shack with her parents and a number of brothers and sisters, and by the sea she remained. During the day, she went down to the beach and sat with…
Clio's Kingdom, Fiction
Flying in the Water
The Staff of Orpheus, Contemporary Classical Music
What was it again that made you beautiful?”
Still Beauty, the second single of our former collaborators, She Owl, i.e. Jolanda and Demian, is out now. Already performed in their most recent concerts, this is a studio version, mixed by Sam Beste (The Vernon Spring, Hejira). The accompanying…
The suitcase of Hermes, The Showcase of Margutte, Poetry
Prayer, prophecy and poetry: Richard Berengarten’s Changing
SILVIA PIO The I Ching (Yijing) or Book of Changes is the oldest of the Chinese classics and was originally conceived and compiled as a divination manual, a handbook for fortune tellers. It is believed to be one of the world’s oldest books…
Calliope's Voice, Poetry
Resolutions
SILVIA PIO Get ready to start again, or better, to be reborn. Sharpen your sword and wait, alert and aware, the coming of new challenges. But treat the enemy kindly, be they outside or inside you. Dare to open new…
Clio's Kingdom, Fiction
Frozen Ground
SILVIA PIO The morning they buried her husband, four men had to come and dig because the earth was hard as marble. It had been two days since he died. The sutrau, the sexton, had wanted to wait a bit…
Clio's Kingdom, Fiction
StonyMoon or HoneyMoon?
SILVANO GREGOLI I recently witnessed two unusual events. Unusual in themselves, first; then doubly unusual because, although random in nature, they were mysteriously connected. The first event took place in the waiting room of a barbershop in Italy. As I…
Calliope's Voice, Poetry
Two poems from The Wine Cup: Twenty-Four Drinking Songs for Tao Yuanming
RICHARD BERENGARTEN The evening star Hey, we’ve got a guitar. So let’s have a song. Once we’re sozzled we can totter off home. You sang old songs. I strummed on a guitar. We reminisced. We mixed up fact and fable.…
Calliope's Voice, Poetry
Poetry without Borders
Poems by Rose Ausländer, Gioconda Belli, Mario Benedetti, Francisco Brines, Paul Celan, Kim Chi-ha, Cho Byung-Hwa, Kamala Das, Miguel Hernández, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Erich Fried, Ernst Jandl, Sarah Kirsch, Xavier Villaurrutia, Ida Vitale, Adam Zagajewski but also important modern…
The Showcase of Margutte, Poetry
Sound, music, mystery
Michael (Dickel) Dekel, a poet and an artist SILVIA PIO (edited by) *** At the Cemetery The distraught woman bends over the disturbed ground, screaming at the man just interred there— cries of good-bye and how-could-you, pulled from deep inside,…
Platonic Diversions
Greetings from Mondovì: A Hole in the Heart
LESLIE MCBRIDE WILE There’s a hole in the heart of Piazza. Our farmacia storica has closed its door under the portici, the metal gates pulled tight. The hand-painted sign remains above, as if some other pharmacy might come along to…
The suitcase of Hermes
In Memory of A Banyan Tree: Poems of the Outside World: 1985 – 2022
MICHAEL ROTHENBERG When I was 17 years old living in Miami Beach reading Michael McClure’s Meat Science Essays, I never in my wildest imagination thought that some day I would be running a bromeliad and orchid nursery in California and…
Calliope's Voice, Poetry
Viv Longley’s Tally Sheet
VIV LONGLEY Scar Tissue Mum told me I fell off my trike charging down the orchard, pretending I was a horse. I failed to gallop round the fence, and landed in the nettle patch. My skin remembers. I still reach…
Clio's Kingdom, The Showcase of Margutte
The Child
SILVIA PIO Once, a man lived in this town with his wife and three children. She was always in and out of the mental asylum. He was on his boat day in and day out and, when he got home…
Calliope's Voice, Poetry
A poem for Ukraine in multiple translations
RICHARD BERENGARTEN I wrote this poem in 2020, immediately after hearing Olesya Zdorovetska’s extraordinary and beautiful renderings of poems by ten Ukrainian poets: Iryna Starovoyt, Olech Lysheha, Yury Izdryk, Marianna Kijanowska, Kateryna Babkina, Lyuba Yakimchuk, Yurii Andrukhovych, Halyna Kruk, and Serhiy…
The suitcase of Hermes, The Showcase of Margutte, Essays
“The 23 Days of the City of Alba”, between History and Literature
“Two thousand Italian partisans took the city of Alba on October 10, 1944, and two hundred lost it to the Fascists on November 2.” Beppe Fenoglio was among them, but he wrote this book in a scandalous (for the times)…