Charles Adés Fishman



Charles Fishman: Artist’s Résumé

Charles Fishman created the Visiting Writers Program at the State University of New York at Farmingdale in 1979 and served as director until 1997. He also co-founded the Long Island Poetry Collective (1973) and was a founding editor of Xanadu magazine and Pleasure Dome Press (1975). He served as final judge for the 1998 Capricorn Poetry Award; was founder and coordinator of the Paumanok Poetry Award competition (1990-97) and Series Editor for the Water Mark Poets of North America Book Award (1980-83); and served as Poetry Editor of Gaia, Cistercian Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Genocide Studies, as well as Associate Editor of The Drunken Boat (1999-2005). Currently, he is a poetry consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC (1995-), Poetry Editor of New Works Review, and Director of the Distinguished Speakers Program at Farmingdale State.

Fishman’s books include The Firewalkers (Avisson Press, 1996), Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (Texas Tech University Press, 1991), Country of Memory (Uccelli Press, 2004), 5,000 Bells (Cross-Cultural Communications, 2004), and The Death Mazurka (Texas Tech, 1989), which was nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and listed by ALA Choice as one of the outstanding books of the year (1989). His other books include Catlives (1991), a translation of Sarah Kirsch’s Katzenleben, and Mortal Companions (1977), a booklength collection of poetry. His sixth booklength collection, Chopin’s Piano, will be published by Time Being Books in January 2006. He is currently editing the revised second edition of Blood to Remember, which will be released by Time Being Books in 2007.

Fishman's books can be purchased from their respective publishers by clicking the hyperlinks above. Cross-Cultural Communications' mailing address is 239 Wysnum Avenue, Merrick, NY 11566. The contact for Timberline Press, publisher of the original edition of The Death Mazurka and Time Travel Reports, is Clarence Wolfshohl, Timberline Press, 6281 Red Bud, Fulton, MO  65251. Book summaries and ordering information appear at the bottom of this page.

Fishman’s poems, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in more than 300 journals including Abiko Quarterly (Japan), Contemporary Poetics (Korea), Cyphers (Ireland), European Judaism (England), The Georgia Review, Grain (Canada), The Jerusalem Review (Israel), Midstream, New England Review, New Letters, Nimrod, Salmagundi, and Verse—and in such major anthologies as Bittersweet Legacy: Creative Responses to the Holocaust (University Presses of America, 2001), Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust (Northwestern University Press, 1998), Fathers (St. Martin’s Press, 1997), and Carrying the Darkness: The Poetry of the Vietnam War (Avon, 1985). The first full-length critical study of his work appears in Contemporary Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets (Greenwood, 1999). A 52-page retrospective of his work is currently online at www.threecandles.org, as is a 22-poem selection of his poems on the Holocaust at www.thehypertexts.com .

Fishman’s awards include the Long Island School of Poetry Award from the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association (2006), the Eve of St. Agnes Poetry Award from Negative Capability (1999), the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize of the Southern California Anthology (1996), and the Gertrude B. Claytor Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America (1987), and he has been a finalist or prizewinner in numerous other competitions, including the Paterson Poetry Award (2005, for Country of Memory), the Pablo Neruda Poetry Award (Nimrod, 1998), the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award (PSA, 1994), and the New Letters Award for Poetry (1993). He has received NEH fellowships in poetry from Yale University (1982), the University of California at San Diego (1978), and Boston University (1974) and completed a Doctor of Arts (D.A.) in contemporary American poetry and poetry writing at SUNY Albany in 1982. In 1995, he received a fellowship in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Fishman has given more than 350 readings throughout the United States and in Israel and has conducted numerous poetry workshops. He has had poetry residencies at Mishkenot Sha’ananim (Jerusalem), Ucross (Clearmont, WY), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (Sweet Briar, VA), the Millay Colony for the Arts (Austerlitz, NY), and the Jack Kerouac House (Orlando, FL), and he was a featured poet at the 1994 Asheville Poetry Festival (NC).



What People in the Know Have to Say about Charles Fishman

Country of Memory (2004):

“Charles Fishman uses words like a jackhammer, a searchlight, a scalpel, and a lover’s hand.  If you love poetry, you need to read Country of Memory.” —Laurel Johnson, Quill, Summer 2004
 
“Who reads these poems will read a man, a very good man, a man reflecting on his family and his life as a poet, and on the world which he makes more beautiful and more memorable with his words. These poems are a special gift to those who love words and life and poetry.” —S. Friedman (Israel), Amazon.com, June 2005
 
“This country of memory breathes and bleeds.” —Alyssa A. Lappen, Amazon.com, June 2005 
 
The Firewalkers (1996):
 
“Charles Fishman’s poems are deep, sensuous, musical, and fully alive.  Each one rings true.  What more is there to say?  This is, indeed, poetry.” —Denise Levertov
 
”James Wright once remarked that he aspired as a poet to write the poems ‘of a grown man.‘  In The Firewalkers, Charles Fishman has written an entire book of such poems—poems which, in their unflinching gaze at the sorrows and joys of relation (as son, as father, as husband, as friend, as lover) ‘give back gentleness to existence.‘  Like his firewalkers themselves, these poems ‘cross where only faith can navigate,‘ and they do so nobly, passionately, and with great feeling.” —Michael Blumenthal
 
”These poems of recuperative memory and redemption are written out of the wounded landscape of the body and its mortality—blood speaking—the world in its passing.  The elements become figural here: water, air, fire, the earth, in a language of mystery and desire.  The Firewalkers is a work of great poignancy and breadth; the burning ground beneath this poet is time itself.” —Carolyn Forché
 
The Death Mazurka (1987): 
 
"These poems are beyond sadness and beyond anger.  In their single-mindedness, in their sheer accumulation, they are terrifying, and pure.  Fishman has done the unthinkable.  He has written an entire book about the murder of the Jews.  It is a delicate book, and dramatic and exciting.  Most of all, it is brave." —Gerald Stern, University of Iowa
 
"In his powerful and important book of poems, The Death Mazurka, Charles Fishman courageously makes Jewishness universal in these times.  Out of images of common flesh, Fishman molds stunning dark beauty." —Leo Connellan
 
"An outstanding book of poems, The Death Mazurka is entirely focused on the murder of Jews.  Of immediate importance, it offers a difficult but accessible vision of one man dancing against severest oppression.  These poems are courageous, direct, and deeply moving responses to the Holocaust, and their strength is that they are redemptive and not forbidding."  —Choice, April 1988
 
"Charles Fishman's poetry is direct, captivating, philosophical, splendidly evocative of not only the Holocaust but of deep perceptions about life and death, what it is to be mortal. The Death Mazurka is a poet's assessment of the human condition." —Richard Eberhart
 
The poems of The Death Mazurka are responses to the Holocaust, poems of destruction and survival.  They are delicate, fierce, touching, somber, bitter, horrible, dark, heavy.  And yet they are somehow filled with grace.  And, unbelievably, with hope.  Fishman manages in the poems to convey the pain of the Holocaust—pain for all people—while helping us to be healed and look forward. —David Romtvedt

"Charles Fishman's challenges in this tour-de-force collection of poems are manifold.  Although he succeeds in conveying the mixed emotions that arise from the contemplation of lives like Dr. {Janusz} Korczak's, and in resisting powerful temptations to sentimentalize, Mr. Fishman's many successes would be worthless if he had failed at his greatest challenge, to capture our attention. . . .  Mr. Fishman knows this.  He knows that if he is to reach any audience at all, his poetry cannot afford to be anything less than the best, and in this, he does not disappoint." —Jonathan Daunt, Pacific International (premier issue, Spring 1993)

Mortal Companions (1977):
 
"Some of the poems are mysterious novels-in-little; some are a frightening music.  Indeed, they all frighten.  Panic-poems.  They express my spine. . . .  You will make us respond to beauty.  Your language is often and often beautiful, and often and often daring." —Cynthia Ozick
 
“The final effect of Mortal Companions is a curious mix of bone-deep sadness and sustained vitality.  For though the struggle be long and hard and uphill all the way, in the very act of writing these poems, in trying to grapple with and rise above the flawed world and the flawed lives we inhabit, Fishman insists on the validity of human dignity.” —W. D. Ehrhart, WIN, February 1978
 
“[Fishman] emerges as an astonishing craftsman and a human being of unusual sensitivity, empathy, and courage. . . .  These poems show us how to grieve.” —Brown Miller, Small Press Review, May 1978
 
Translation:
 
Catlives (1991):

“The translations are wonderful, as I wouldn’t have believed it possible. . . .  Thank you so much for the work and, also, for refurnishing my little flowers so carefully with their right names.” —Sarah Kirsch
 
“Marina Roscher and Charles Fishman [have] succeeded marvelously in transferring the German into English.  The translations have given us a stylistically accurate and poetically true version of an excellent book.” —Hans Juergensen
 
“Reading this rhythmically faithful and inspired translation of Katzenleben, I kept feeling that I was in the voice-presence of one of the holy mad. . . .  I will not be able to forget this haunted, poignant, fully human book.” —William Heyen

Anthology:

Blood to Remember (1991):
 
"The sacred duty of Holocaust remembrance—commemorating the dead, honoring the living, and posing the pertinent theological, ethical, and political questions generated by the Holocaust—is the substance of Charles Fishman's compelling collection of American Holocaust poetry. . . .  Fishman successfully assembles works that render a historically remote and often painfully resisted subject in a manner that makes the catastrophe real. . . .  one is grateful for the book's sound critical notes, its exploration of the moral implications of the Holocaust and problematics of writing Holocaust poetry, and its witness to the terrifying truths of human history while asserting the indestructibility of the human spirit.  Highly recommended.” —S. L. Kremer, Kansas State University, Choice, Jul/Aug '92
 
“Enter with caution.  Reading Charles Fishman’s Blood to Remember can be a difficult, even wrenching, experience.  The poets collected here face Adorno’s charge—that writing ‘poetry’ after Auschwitz is barbaric, yet these American responses to the Holocaust, far-ranging in their poetic voices and forms, confirm that poetry can dispel the stupor of historical amnesia.  Imagining the unimaginable, uttering the unutterable, they restore faith in memory and reaffirm their role as its powerful guide.  If you doubt poetry’s ability to speak history—read this book.” —Robert Franciosi 
 
"Blood to Remember is not just another anthology; it is a wrenching, powerful experience.  Fishman deserves praise and gratitude for ferreting out these talented soloists and creating a mighty chorus to serve as a worthy memorial to the victims of the Holocaust." —Haim Chertok, Hadassah Magazine, April 1992
 
"Despite its horrific subject matter, Charles Fishman's collection of Holocaust poems finds its way to beauty through the transforming power of art. . . .  Unrelenting in its refusal to compromise with the facts of history, these poems, through their sheer integrity, lend new credence to Keats' old formula, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty.'" —Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 1991
 
"This volume, with its close to 200 works, recalling various phases and aspects of this dread event, is both a lament and historical treatise, a catharsis and accusatory document. . . .  In Professor Fishman's words, this is intended as the 'record of our human refusal to forget what has wounded us beyond repair.'  There is little question that he has succeeded admirably." —Sidney Moskowitz, Rockland Center for Holocaust Studies newsletter, April 1992
 
"This powerful collection speaks directly to our present task in relation to the Holocaust: how to bring that historically distant event into our immediate sense of our own lives.  The rich and varied voices make the past palpable, painful, and real.  This text cuts through the bone and to the heart.  We should all be grateful for it." —Roger S. Gottlieb
 
“I keep mentioning Blood to Remember to people as one of the best books I have seen on poetry.” —Dr. Stephen Feinstein, Director, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota

The work as a whole:

"Charles Fishman has the remarkable power of giving every thought a physical presence on the page." —David Ignatow
 
"Charles Fishman’s poems have a metallic brilliance that is of our age . . . a lyrical pathos and psychological insight that are of any age.  I respect them and recommend them.” —Hayden Carruth
 
"Charles Fishman writes an exceptionally resonant and lyrical poetry of the night and all that we associate with darkness: the human inability to see and understand, especially the great suffering of others. . . .  He reifies and humanizes the darkness of historic tragedy with its cold-blooded statistics.” —Gayl Teller
 
"Charles Fishman, a man devoted to remembering the Holocaust and its victims, is a lyric poet whose poems I identify as Jewish in the most profound sense. . . .  The poet is an elegiac poet and one who is primarily anxious and urgent and angry with history.  For this poet, the family is central, and the cultural standards are prophetic anticipation and a kind of messianic hopeless-ness.  The age, for this poet, is always dark.  And his poems compete with this darkness." —David Shapiro
 
“As I see it, you are the great poet of Judaism today as Nelly Sachs was in her day. Your most passionate poems speak of and from the profound experience of being a Jew in the Twentieth Century.” —Lynn Strongin, July 2005
 
“Charles Fishman is a great poet. In an age of creeping relativism, aesthetic and otherwise, this is probably a suspect, not to mention a politically incorrect, statement. We’ve been conditioned to believe that there are no truly legendary or iconic poets anymore. After all, they all died out, those true literary giants, with the end of Modernism--didn’t they? The Williamses and the Stevenses and the Eliots.  But the fact is that Charles Fishman is a great poet, a contemporary Eliot struggling to make sense out of the Wasteland of our age, which is still, indubitably, the Holocaust. And, frankly, he succeeds.” —Terri Brown-Davidson, Pedestal Magazine, June 2005



Books by Charles Fishman

Booklength Poetry Collections
Mortal Companions (1977)
The Werewolf’s Polonaise (1981)
The Death Mazurka (1987)



The Firewalkers (1996)
Country of Memory (2004) ß Click Here

Chopin’s Piano (2006) ß Click Here

Poetry Chapbooks
Aurora (1974)
Warm-Blooded Animals (1977)
Zoom (1990)

As the Sun Goes Down in Fire (1992)
Nineteenth-Century Rain (1994)
An Aztec Memory (1997)



Time Travel Reports (2002)



5,000 Bells (2004)



E-Books
Booklength Collections:
The Firewalkers (2000)
Mortal Companions (2000)
Chapbooks:
Nineteenth-Century Rain (1996)
In Spanish Light (2000)
A Terrain (2003)

Anthology
Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (1991)

Translation
Catlives (editor, with Marina Roscher, translator, 1991)



Miscellaneous

An Index to Women’s Magazines & Presses (1977)



2006 Readings by Charles Fishman

March 15th: Suffolk County Community College – Selden, Long Island/ Center on Holocaust, Diversity, & Human Understanding – I will probably bring books but not sure yet.  Contact person: Krista Gruber (gruberk@sunysuffolk.edu)

March 17th: The Poetry Barn – Huntington, Long Island.  Contact person: George Wallace (Poetrybay@aol.com)

April 20th: Claremont McKenna College – Claremont, CA.  Organizers: Dr. John K. Roth (john.roth@claremontmckenna.edu) & Ms. Bonnie Snortum (BSnortum@claremontmckenna.edu), Director of the Athenaeum series

April 25th: University of Judaism – Los Angeles, CA,  Organizer, Dr. Michael Berenbaum (michael@berenbaumgroup.com)

September 15th: Walt Whitman Birthplace – Huntington Station, Long Island.  Organizer, Ms. Barbara Bart, Executive Director, Walt Whitman Birthplace Assoc.  (631) 427-5240 (V) or (631) 421-8954 (V)



Poems by Charles Fishman

Army Doctor, Unit 731
From the testimony of Yuasa Ken
 
His father had a practice in Shitamachi,
the old district of Tokyo, and a hunger
to be a doctor grew inside him.  When the war
knocked at his window, he was ready:
you can’t cure the soon-to-be-dead
without doctors.  Dispatched to Shansi
 
province in China, he flew like a night moth
to the hospital, where the bitter cold
did not daunt him: he was a warrior,
a samurai in a fresh white coat.  Still,
he felt his bones go cold and his will waver,
for he knew what manner of death lived there.
 
At the hospital, he stepped into the circle
of his destiny, where others had gathered,
but only to act out their supporting roles:
he was the one who would follow orders
or issue commands.  The smiling Red Cross nurses
had been over this ground before
 
but never with such a good-looking young doctor,
and their cheerful demeanor made him think:
What if this man tries to flee—if he dies
under the knife, without a last meal or a call
to his family, without his Shansi gods clustered
around him?  He thought these things, but they
 
were not his concern.  If he did not practice
on the living, how would he learn?  He would not
lose heart with everyone watching and made the log
lie down: he would not be embarrassed by weakness.
The anesthetic took effect, but the appendix
was hard to locate, and the opening of the pharynx
 
was a puzzle to resolve, like the opening of a gate
in a walled garden.  When this prisoner was neatly
dissected, yet would not die, he, Yuasa Ken, watched
the director of the hospital inject air into his heart.
This was the first time he understood the power
that lived in his uniform, in his surgeon’s tools,
 
in his hands, and each incision he made after this
seemed easier.  He practiced sewing up intestines
that had slipped from living bodies, and he watched
as the dentist excised healthy teeth   as the urologist
 
scalpeled testicles, and he took pride in these things:
he was a loyal servant of the Japanese nation.
 
Gradually, he came to enjoy his accomplishments
and, in town, would swing his shoulders: the girls loved
his swagger, and all the local men deferred to him—
everyone admires an officer!  The city moved
with the merest rise in his voice, with the merest dip.
Sake overflowed his cup.
 
                        *   *   *
 
After the war, he had eleven years to think, but then
he was released from prison, and the nurses
who had served with him took his face in their hands:
their words were softer and more fragrant than cherry
blossoms torn and scattered by the wind.  But an old pain
flooded him, and he asked them to remember:
 
they had been with him at Shansi.  Hadn’t they
held down his victims and complained, Sleep, sleep—
drug give!, in that parody of Chinese?  Didn’t they feel
the same shudder he felt rush through them now,
as if death had brushed their hearts?

From Chopin's Piano, by Charles Fishman. Copyright © 2005 by Time Being Press.


 
Names on a List
January 23, 1995

David Ben-Zino, Adi Rosen, Damian Rosovski—
Who were these soldiers Islamic Jihad killed?
In Tel Aviv I had slept in a young soldier’s room
—my shirts hung for a while in his closet,
my head crushed his pillow, and my feet
drank the chill from his floor.  Was he
among the murdered, this only son of my friends?
 
No, he was not in Netanya in the third week
of January, he was not in Tel Aviv, not
in Israel, not in the Middle East at all. 
Then let us not speak his name, not even
in a whisper: who are we to trust the gods
or the unseen powers?  My friends shall keep
their son, and I will sleep without dreaming. 
 
But who were these young soldiers?  Rafael
Mizrahi, Yehiel Sharvit, Yuval Tuvya—how did
they live and what did they live for?  A month
earlier, in Jerusalem, I saw two soldiers at ease
at the Haas Promenade.  They were there to guard
children and the teachers of these children
and Uzis hung at their backs in stark diagonals.
 
They looked like soldiers, but I could see
they were really older brothers and would-be
boyfriends, and one joked with the teacher
whose clouds of copper hair outshone the midday
sun; the other ate his lunch and half-sprawled
in the scorched grass.  I saw their sisters
and cousins in the Judean Desert, in the spillway
 
of light that opened into dark, conflicted Jericho,
and they were waiting in the alleyways of the Old
City where tribes of tourists materialized from stone
and filled their arms with Yemenite jewelry and Druse
cloth.  I understand, but who was Gilad Gaon? who
Eran Gueta? who was David Hasson? who Eitan Peretz?
I saw them in Abu Ghosh, wolfing down hummus
 
in olive oil, small hills of falafel.  And they
were at the bus terminal in Tel Aviv, hauling
their battered duffels   at the Bahá’í shrine in Haifa
keeping watch in the sacred gardens   and I saw
them anointed with fire in the sunset that blossomed
over Ashkelon.  But you know these words are lies
and your hearts are not fooled by my stories
 
for Yaron Blum is dead   Ilie Dagan is dead  
Amir Hirschenson is dead   Anan Kadur is dead  
Maya Kopstein is dead   Soli Mizrahi is dead
Avi Salto is no longer with us   Daniel Tzikuashvili
is no longer with us     All the bright young flames
of Israel’s sun are dying   and I am here speaking
their names to you.

From Chopin's Piano, by Charles Fishman. Copyright © 2005 by Time Being Press.


 
Praying for My Sister
This earth is but one country and mankind its citizens.
—Bahá’u’lláh

1
I went to Acco and prayed for my sister. 
It was a bleak day in January, the northernmost coast
of the kingdom.  The bus ride from Jerusalem took hours. 
What is a day to the heart that seeks absolution? 
I had taken this duty on myself:  I would stand in the Báb’s garden
where Haganah soldiers had been murdered by the British;
I would speak for her words of hope and comfort.
 
This was the realm of passionate martyrdom,
and I would read from Bahá’í scripture, The Fire Tablet
and The Seven Valleys.  It was late afternoon and the sky
was rapidly darkening—soon there would be rain. 
No one stood with me in this haunted place, but I reached out
to my sister through these words; I reached out to her God
for her, as the cool drops fell . . . and I felt the spirit of my sister
touch my lips, the breath of an old Spirit graze my cheek.
 
2
In Haifa, too, I prayed for her: at the great temple,
under the gold-leafed dome.  Deep in the sacred gardens,
the sea stirred the ramparts; light blossomed
on the ripening fruit.  I took off my shoes and entered. 
The quiet approached me. 
 
I prayed for my sister there.  I asked for Bahá’u’lláh’s blessing
to descend on her like cool rain, to sweeten her days
with the scent of lush blossoms.  In that small chapel,
I could not tell if the Earth had, at last, become one country,
but I knew that my sister should be minister of a world at peace.
 
3
I prayed for my sister in Acco and Haifa, and I prayed
for her again at the Wall, for this was the place
where the power of life fully spoke to me, where history
and heaven seemed entwined.  I prayed for her
in the Judean hills, where the zealots had known God
through the strength of community and isolation;
at Stella Carmel, where Christian missionaries offered Christ
to my wandering heart (and where I said grace for them
in my heart’s best Hebrew).  I spoke to my sister words barely spoken,
until what I murmured to myself felt like the sweetest blessing.

From Chopin's Piano, by Charles Fishman. Copyright © 2005 by Time Being Press.



The Death Mazurka

It was late—late in the silence—
yet a mangled tune still rose
as if from a needle trapped
in a warped and spinning groove:
an inarticulate moan
fragmented out of sense
but insistent it be known.

Footfalls turned me around:
a troupe of dancers spun
and kicked and dipped as one—
three score minus one,
and that one danced alone.
I watched them skip and prance
but followed only her.

And yes, the drum was swift
and kept a lively beat,
and violins sang sweet
then stridently miaoued—
a mocking sliding note.
She alone danced on
uncoupled, incomplete.

But the trumpets shrilled their tongues
and the saxophones crooned deep
and cymbals scoured the night
to a clashing brassy gleam.
How the women's earrings shined!
like sparks from a whirling fire
that never would be ash.

Then the men whisked off their hats
and bowed to the slide trombone
as though it sat enshrined.
But still she danced alone
at the edge of the wheeling ring:
I could feel the horizon tilt
when she veered close to me.

Then she turned   then I   then the night
blew back forty years:
I stood in a desolate place,
a reservoir of death
—I could kneel anywhere and drink!
Yes, here was the shul in its bones
and here Judenrein Square

and here a few scorched teeth
from some martyred, unknown saint.
The sky was a scroll of pain
—each star a sacred name!
I saw through time in that light.
But I turned and blood rained down
and I turned and dipped and drank

and could not take my fill:
I yearned to find her there.
And I turned toward darkness again
where dancers in masks like skulls
twirled in smoke and fire,
whirled in fire and smoke.

Now! screamed the violins.
And she was near as my heart
as we clasped each other and turned.
And Now! they shrieked.  And Now!

From The Death Mazurka (Texas Tech University Press, 1989; first published in a letterpress edition by Timberline Press, 1987)



European Movements

Córdoba to Hamburg   Bordeaux to
Strasbourg   Marseilles to Rome   Bucharest
to Belgrade   Kalisz to Lublin   Vienna to
Kishinev   Cracow to Lvov   Nomads,
why so restless?  Did you hear the voice
of Midsummer lightning?  All that back-
breaking portage: Granada to Corfu   Genoa
to Salonika, tireless!  Always hurrying
from one black patch to another: Cologne
to Bialystok   Prague to Kiev   Lisbon to
Amsterdam   Tallinn to Polotsk: ceaseless
in your translations!  Dear malcontents,
unsettled on dark nights under the moon
of horses: Soncino to Posen   Chernigov
to Frankfurt   Avignon to Tarnopol   Berdichev
to Worms   Exiles! Black Sea transports
Crimea Express   Zhitomir to Copenhagen
Helsinki to Antwerp   Starodub to Brest
whirling lights clustered at Satmar   in
the galaxy of Warsaw   starstreams   time
travelers on the dead continent   wrapped
in languages   in the Law's endless bindings
Why didn't you stay put in the whale's
belly?  Why didn't you pull the white sky
of silence over your heads?  Did the golden
bells of Chelmno charm you? the meadow flowers
of Majdanek bend their fiery cups?  Did you
rise to the black psalteries of Ravensbrück?
Wanderers! such desire for a life of Christian
culture! such anointings with sacred oils,
bathings in blessed waters!

From The Death Mazurka (Texas Tech University Press,1989; first published in a letterpress edition by Timberline Press, 1987)



Landscape after Battle
For Andrzej Wajda

To a nocturne accompaniment —
Chopin—they perform Liberation.
As they starved to Vivaldi.
As they burned to Bach.

You ask us to remember when a corpse
was esteemed 'incompletely processed'
that could not, of itself, rise
above the ashfields . . . and dance.

Andrzej, you understand the silence
of your poets: self-hate and catechetical
obedience; violent, unassimilable grief.

Life should taste sweet, milk warm
from the nipple, but in your language
it is salt and blood.

You give us a victim to remind us why we speak.

Her name is Nina and—offkey—she sings,
and we are moved by her bare legs
and her loose hair, and we are almost
ready to follow . . . Red leaves

build soft mounds under the emptying trees

Poland, here is your Jew!
She will swallow the wafer, translucent
as pale skin, and kiss your numb body
—unkosher meat!

And she will draw you out of your Christ-
blazoned prison, until each bloodied finger
wakens from its dream, until your strangled
voice bears witness:

One life is history enough to mourn.

From The Death Mazurka (Texas Tech University Press, 1989; first published in a letterpress edition by Timberline Press, 1987)



Five Holocaust Memories

I.  A German Witness

She was living with her parents outside of Munich. 
One day, her mother had sent her to obtain some cheese,
and she was heading back along the country road
that was filled to the brim with fleeing civilians and soldiers.
She had been thinking about her father, the industrialist,
and about how their cheese was paid for.
                                                        
Then she rounded a curve in the road and saw the prisoners:
they were guarded by SS men and leaned against a wall. 
She could see that these were, in fact, skeletons, wrapped
in a skin of black-and-white-striped cloth: the cloth was threadbare
and the bones showed through.  She knew they were prisoners
but didn't understand what their crime was . . .

and she thought of the cheese, white and creamy, growing riper
in her rucksack.  She thought of giving the cheese to these shadows,
for their eyes held her, and she opened her sack and reached in.
The cheese emerged in her hand with the power of sunlight.

II.  A Dutch Witness

Her father was a judge and had taught her
the Dutch tradition of offering refuge.  One day,
on her way to school, the sky, which was clear
and blue in Amsterdam, darkened. 

She saw a truck parked near a home for Jewish children,
and there were German men, in uniform, laughing
and joking.  What pleasure it was to be conquerors! 

She saw that these soldiers were lifting the children
by their legs, by their skinny arms, and by their hair,
and throwing them into the truck.  It was a sunny day,
nine o'clock in the morning, a fine hour to walk to school. 

And she saw that, for these men, who harbored no child
in their hearts, murder would be easy.  She would climb
onto the truck.  She would honor her father's words. 
She would rescue children.

III. A Polish Survivor

At Birkenau, he helped push a wagon filled with sand
that was dumped each day on the ashes:
each day, they pushed the sand   yet the ashes
could not be covered.

At Majdanek, there was no water for prisoners
so he never washed.  After 9 weeks, his flesh drank
only darkness: it was as if the sand of Birkenau
had taken the form of a man.

In Auschwitz, he pulled blackened rags
from his emaciated body and let the shower
engulf him, but his pain was unslakable   and Majdanek
clung to him   like burning cloth.    

IV.  A Czech Survivor

Her father's last words to her: If you survive, keep
your principles.  He was killed when they arrived
at Auschwitz, but she would remember his words.

These are her words to us:  Auschwitz . . . there is—
there has not been—there has not been . . .
When the sun came up it was not the sun . . . it was
always red    always black    it never said, never was life. 
It was destruction.

V.  An American Officer

The tanks stumbled on Mauthausen,
and he came in after them. 
This is how he saw the living skeletons,
who had carried heavy rocks to the precipice. 

He counted the steps himself: 186
of them.  He weighed the victims who still lived,
and he held his breath in the barracks. 

It was unbelievable.  The bunks and their stench
—unbelievable.  The quarry and its dead: unbelievable.
And the silence of the nearby town.  Nor could he believe
the responses of his own heart   that ached for a new language
in which to speak.

Published in the Poetry Porch Forgiveness issue (Sections 1,2, & 4). From Chopin's Piano, by Charles Fishman. Copyright © 2005 by Time Being Press.



Eastern Europe after the War

Wisps of memory   ragged dips in the grass

A few years earlier, millions died in sub-zero
temperature     Stripped to their underwear,

they were whipped    beaten with fists
and rifle butts   their infants ripped

from their arms     Their prayers to God
changed nothing     Shot in the neck,

they were kicked   into ditch after ditch    
Those still living clutched at prayer shawls  

or thrice-blessed amulets   but their words  
their tears   called down no power    

Their deaths did not alter the sky, which continues
to shelter their murderers     The earth

that churned for days afterward has yielded nothing  
but fragments     The years swept by, blurring

the landscape   though, on occasion, something
in humanity   twitched     A list of the names

of the missing   slipped from official fingers  
and drifted into history     In Eastern Europe,

not a stitch was mended     The gash
in the abandoned universe   could not be healed  

Published by The Scream Online. From Chopin's Piano, by Charles Fishman. Copyright © 2005 by Time Being Press.



The Children

I thought my poems were finished—
but your tears for the children  
and for the mothers who could not bear  
and for the mothers who had to quiet their young
forever . . . your tears woke the words in me again
where they had slept, where my thoughts
had withdrawn from the pain of so much death.

Dear wife, I have you to blame for this yielding
to memory, this warfare of the spirit.  I have you
to thank: you, and your wise heart that will not retreat
to the safety of ignorance.  You have called me again
to witness and be maimed, to name and remember,
and to not be healed.

Published in Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust  (Northwestern University Press, 1998) and 5,000 Bells (Cross-Cultural Communications, 239 Wysnum Ave., Merrick, NY 11566).



Ghosts

God cannot be directly the cause
of sin, either in Himself or in another . . .
—Aquinas, Summa Theologica

I've heard it said that lives
are valueless as smoke,
that only God survives
the poisoned drink of death.

And yet I count these ghosts
and think of one who died
with a young child at her breast,
unnoticed and unmourned.

The ditch was nearly filled
with people she had loved
and it flared before her eyes
like the lips of a mortar wound.

Only her child seemed to know
how quickly time could run:
he himself was the sun
aflame in his mother's arms.

Only her child seemed to know:
here time would cease forever.
They tore him from her throat,
and then it was her turn.

And then it was her turn— 
she heard the loud report— 
again! again! again!
until her soul went deaf.

All night she lay with the bones— 
here, where the Old World ended:
Aquinas mute as a bug
and God with his left wrist branded.

Published in 5,000 Bells (Cross-Cultural Communications, 239 Wysnum Ave., Merrick, NY 11566).



My Mother's Candlesticks

My mother couldn't read Hebrew
but she knew the value of things
That's why she saved newspapers
until the pages turned brittle
and the newsprint broke into flakes  
and why she kept old friendships burning
long after her friends were dead:
anything worth reading would speak to her
next year   and true friends would never tire
of listening     My mother loved those candlesticks  
and kept them polished faithfully   yet she
did not kindle their fire     Neither silver nor gold,
they had come down to her from her mother's —
from her grandmother's —hands   tarnished  
pitted   the last brassy patina gone     The cups
were akilter   the wobbly bottoms would not align  
but these battered objects could hold two candles    
My mother knew the blessing once   far back  
in her girlhood   but the flames blew out
when her mother died     These flames
that glimmer still   in Malaga   Thessaloniki  
Berlin     These flames that are the ancient news
of our people     These flames that await the match
in my fingers   and the Barukh atah on my lips.

Published in 5,000 Bells (Cross-Cultural Communications, 239 Wysnum Ave., Merrick, NY 11566).




A Dance on the Poems of Rilke

I remember a Czech dancer who danced on the poems of Rilke.
—Stennie Pratomo-Gret

In the particular hell of Ravensbrück
where Gypsy girls were sterilized and babies
were drowned at birth   where dysentery  
lung cancer and typhus   took life after life  
and grotesque experiments in the inducement
of infection and pain were cultivated as a fine art  

where women of every European nation slaved
for Siemens   through endless moonless nights  
and cut trees   dug pits   loaded and unloaded
railway cars and barges   where abortion was
inevitable   and sexual cruelty the rule   and where

a woman could be duly tortured for using rags
as tampons   or merely for adjusting her dress  
a certain Czech woman who knew every word
danced to the poems of Rilke   moving sinuously
to each of his Orphean sonnets   bowing gracefully
with the first notes of each Elegie: she felt the dark music

of Rilke's heart   each soaring leap of the spirit   each lunge
toward grief     Though she is long gone   and we
no longer know her name   she is the one who showed
even a halting step could be a triumph   and a dance
on the poems of a dead poet   might redeem.

Published by The Scream Online. From Chopin's Piano, by Charles Fishman. Copyright © 2005 by Time Being Press.




Adam Remembers

I.  The Garden

1.

In the beginning, a beginning

had been made: water existed

and potential.  Then the god saw

that bi-polarity was needed.  I

don’t know why.  Earth—also pre-

existent—floated on a skyless sea. 

What light there was did not proceed

from the sun or from the uncountable

stars, nor did our moon capture

that first illumination.

                   *        *

That god I knew was multi-gendered

multi-valenced   polymorphic, delighted

in his unknowability.  In this sense only

were we created in his image: androgynous

ambiguous   utterly ironic.

2.

And that god was subject to time: existence

was generated sequentially.

Eden was built for failure and for punishment.

Before we set out to know it, Eden was named.

The god lied to us about the Tree of Knowledge,

for though we tasted of its fruit, we did not die.

3.

I was not wed to Eve, yet we ate the god’s fruit:

clearly, he had placed it in the garden for us,

for it called us to it where it gleamed like a cache

of poorly hidden jewels. 

                   *        *

Why should one place be holy, and why was the tree

off-limits if our hunger required its gifts? if our limbs

had not been similarly restrained?  Surely, the forbidden

thing should not have glowed so brightly—or have sent

into the sweet morning air a deeper sweetness.

                   *        *

We were two notes of a symphony, curiously dis-

harmonious, nor was the serpent our seducer

but only the instrument played by a more supple hand.

And why should we not have relished our nakedness

or the pleasures that blossomed within us—in rolling arpeggios—

when our flesh was strummed?

The god we knew was not omniscient: he did not foresee

our fall.  Or he was impoverished in benevolence

and did nothing to prevent it.  That deity we briefly

lived with could not know our thoughts but raged

when we hid.  Yes, he was vengeful, misogynist, unforgiving,

and could not gauge our strengths: how we would run

from his fatal abandonment or seek to overcome it. 

No, he was not invulnerable to discord, to denial or pain,

and he did fear us, no matter that gorging at the Tree of Life.

II.  In the World of Seeing and Believing

I remember how our first-born was treated, how all

that was dark in him was drawn forth, until Abel lay dead. 

Tell me, why was Cain’s forehead marked by that burning finger?  

Who else was afoot on the wandering planet?

Yes, tell me, where did Cain’s wives come from?

and their children’s wives?  From which unmeasurable distance

did they slither, bringing their heavy breasts and their proclivity

for murder?

After my son’s death, placed forever on the head

of my son, Eve brought me another child, also a boy. 

From him, from Seth, all we have come to know as the future

would follow.

                   *        *

The god we knew was not the only god,

though we were required to believe this.

When was he pleased with who we were:

a parent with his flawed but prodigiously talented

offspring?  Instead, this god threatened to destroy us—

and soon did, obliterating in a breath, in a long monsoon

heartbeat, billions to whom he had given life.  Clearly,

Noah could not have fulfilled the letter of his mandate:

of ‘all that lives,’ many were left behind.  This god loved

covenants that, later, could be broken.

                   *        *

He held life and death in his hands and, for most,

chose death.  What malice did those creatures keep

in their small bodies?  Why did the god forget Noah

and the beings he had saved?  149 days he misremembered.

III.  Apartness

Much else has happened: a next thing and a next.

Through Noah, rules and a rainbow, but also drunkenness

and discord beyond telling: fall within a fall, waterfall

that will not cease tumbling.

And who did Noah learn from? who but he that had severed

the bonds of language?

                   *        *

The god I knew condoned slavery, adultery, capital

punishment, and set a human hand to steer the ship of nature,

so that the stars themselves might eventually be torn

from the ether.  He loved strife, found peace and order a burden

more tedious and boring than grief.  I don’t expect him

to come forth now from his lost lair, from the uncreated place

that cannot be regained.

From Time Travel Reports, Timberline Press

When Night Fell

Florence, 1348

They bathed in urine and shellacked themselves

with shit and locked dead animals in their rooms

at night.  Some bared their backs to leeches,

sensing a link between disease and the fluids

that sluiced through their bodies.  A few drank

molten gold   or powdered emeralds, as if a diet

of precious stones could heal them.  But nothing

worked and, quickly, a dizziness came, a shaking

of bones, a raging fever.  And soon blood seeped

from liver and kidney   from spleen and lungs

and swellings that no priest held sway over

appeared in armpits and groins.  Dried blood

under the skin turned bodies black, and no cure

revealed itself, not the most diligent penitence

nor the most foul and odoriferous salves

nor could physicians, in their neck-to-ankle great-

cloaks   in their beaked and carefully anointed

headdresses, beat back the stench of the dying.

When night fell, almost no one survived.  The few

who did fled to places more remote, where plague

sprang up like fresh shoots of ginger.  There was

nothing to eat but their own virulent blood   nothing

to swallow but their own fatal saliva   and no one

they loved was there to comfort them.  They lay down

without sacrament and were dragged in their shrouds

to a shallow ditch where the treasures of Firenze

were not laid to rest with them.  No, the dead were set

in artful layers over them   and the carriers of the dead—

the beccamorti— soon grew fat   or fell down, quick,

on top of them.  Nor were they mourned, for who was left

to whisper to the earth   or to turn her eyes to heaven?

In this city of funerals, no church could afford more

than a single bier   a bench to lay out the dead had the rarity

of uncut rubies   and wool cloth, a necessity for mourners,

grew more costly than snow-white ermine.  Nor could hymns

be sung in cloisters nor death knells be rung, for the dying

hated reminders.  Those who served the rich filled

their coffers: spice dealers and harlots   wool merchants

and carpenters   friars and priests of the parish.

And the beccamorti grew in numbers as they stumbled

to the grave.  Theirs was a dance of death and a dirge

in homage to darkness   and only death was welcome

in the city, which wore its shroud of fever: processions

of sainted relics swayed through the filthy streets

and those almost-corpses who bore the weight of Santa

Maria Inpruneta swept like wraiths over the bleeding

cobbles, mumbling their prayers and crying out Mercy!

Near the end, those still alive clogged the leaf-strewn

piazzas: they came to bear witness to their hearts,

still beating   to their lungs, still pumping   and they

dined together, as if to eat what others could not

was the ultimate solace.  No bells were rung

when dinner guests were missing, for the living

could not bear it, and fear of the pestilence went on

breathing, so that no poultice could draw the poison.

In Florence, those who sold herbs   nettles   tinctures

of mercury   were like buoy lights blinking on the storm-

blackened Mediterranean.  Each church was a glittering ship

that sailed into darkness.
 

From Time Travel Reports, Timberline Press

Charles Fishman: Curriculum Vitae
Address:       56 Wood Acres Rd – E. Patchogue, NY  11772
Phone/Fax:  (631) 776-2752 (H); (631) 420-2687 (O); (631) 420-2753 (F)
E-mail:           carolus@optonline.net, fishman@farmingdale.edu
Rank:             Distinguished Service Professor – State University of New York
Position:       Director, Distinguished Speakers Program, SUNY Farmingdale (2001-)
                        Director, Visiting Writers Program, SUNY Farmingdale (1979-1997)
                        Director, Program in the Arts, SUNY Farmingdale (1987-1990)
Education:   SUNY Albany: D.A. Creative Writing (1982)
                        Honors: President’s Award for Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation
                        Concentration:  Contemporary American Poetry and Poetry Writing
                        Additional Focus: Holocaust Poetry, Jewish-American Writers, Romantic Poetry
                        SUNY Stony Brook: M.A.-level course work in English & Hebrew (1975-79)
                        Hofstra University: B.A. and M.A. English Literature
                        M.A. Thesis: An Inquiry into Yeats’s Method of Ordering His Poetry
Academic    Applaud an Educator Award, The Harvard Graduate School of Education (2005)
Honors:        Fellowship to study “Ethics after the Holocaust: Key Issues ..."
                       U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, July 2001
                       George M. Estabrook Distinguished Service Award – Hofstra University (2000)
                       Poetry Consultant, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (1995-)
                       New York State/United University Professions Excellence Award (1990)
                       Appointed Distinguished Service Professor, SUNY (1989)
                       NEH reviewer for Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (1985)
                       SUNY Chancellor's Award: Excellence in Teaching (1985)
                       Farmingdale Foundation Award: Excellence in Teaching (1985)
                       NEH Post-doctoral fellowship: Yale University (1982)
                       NEH Fellowships: UCSD (1978), Boston University (1974)
Honors:       Long Island School of Poetry Award –  Walt Whitman Birthplace, 2006
                      “For My Son” nominated by Tryst  for 2005 Pushcart Poetry Prize
                       Finalist, 2005 Paterson Poetry Prize, for Country of Memory
                       “Learning to Swim” nominated by Three Candles for 2002 Pushcart Poetry Prize
                       Finalist, Green Rose Award for Poetry, New Issues Poetry Series (1999)
                       Winner, Eve of St. Agnes Poetry Award, Negative Capability  (1999)
                       Finalist, Pablo Neruda Award, Nimrod, 1998
                      Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, Southern California Anthology  (1996)
                      Fellowship in Poetry, New York Foundation for the Arts (1995)
                      Finalist, Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, Poetry Society of America (1994)
                      Finalist, New Letters Award for Poetry (1993)
                      Finalist, Carnegie Mellon Poetry Award (1991)
                      The Death Mazurka nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry (1990)          
                      Gertrude B. Claytor Memorial Award, Poetry Society of America (1987)
Reference: An Index to Women’s Magazines & Presses (Seagull Publications, 1977)

Appearances in:

The Sorrow Psalms: A Book of Twentieth Century Elegy  (University of Iowa Press, 2006)
The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp  (U. of Wisconsin, 2004)
Kindled Terraces: American Poets in Greece (Truman State University Press, 2004)
Bittersweet Legacy: Creative Responses to the Holocaust  (Univ. Presses of America, 2001)
Poetry Comes Up Where It Can (University of Utah Press, 2000)
New to North America: Writing by U.S. Immigrants, Their Children and Grandchildren (Burning Bush Publications, 1998)
Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust  (Northwestern, 1998)
Fathers (St. Martin’s Press, 1997)
Images from the Holocaust (NTC Publishing Group, 1996)
Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry (Monitor Publishing Co., 1996; also 1981, 1984, 1985, 1987)
Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust  (Texas Tech, 1991)
80 on the 80s: A Decade's History in Verse  (Ashland Poetry Press, 1990)
Ghosts of the Holocaust (Wayne State University, 1989)
Lessons of the Vietnam War (Center for Social Studies Education, 1988)
Carrying the Darkness: The Poetry of the Vietnam War  (Avon, 1985)

Print Journals:

Poems, translations, articles, and reviews in more than 300 periodicals, including Abiko Quarterly (Japan), American Book Review, Atlanta Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Boulevard, College English, Colorado Quarterly, Confrontation, The Contemporary Poetry  (Korea), Cyphers  (Ireland), Dalhousie Review (Canada), European Judaism (England), Film Quarterly, The Genocide Forum, Georgia Review, Grain (Canada), Hawai'i Review, The Hollins Critic, International Quarterly, The Jerusalem Review (Israel), The Jewish Chronicle  (New Zealand), The Literary Review, Malahat Review (Canada), Midstream, Mississippi Review, New England Review, New Letters, New York Quarterly, The New York Times, Nimrod, Poetry Now, Poetry International, Salmagundi, Small Press Review, and Southern Poetry Review.

E-Journals:

Big City Lit, The Drunken Boat, Full Circle, New Works Review, Nidus, The Pedestal Magazine, Poetry Porch, Samsara Quarterly, TheScreamOnline, Sidereality, Switched-on Gutenberg, Three Candles, Tryst, others.

Judge:;

Capricorn Book Award, Writer’s Voice (1998)
Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience (1998)
Coordinator, Paumanok Poetry Award International Competition (1990-1997)
Eckerd College, Student & Alumni Poetry Awards (1991)

Editor:

Poetry Editor, New Works Review  (2003-)
Associate Editor, The Drunken Boat  (1999-2001 & 2002- 2005)
Poetry Editor, The Cistercian Studies  Quarterly  (1998-2000)
Poetry Editor, The Journal of Genocide Research, City College, CUNY (1997-1999)
Poetry Editor, Gaia  (1993-95) and the www version of Gaia & Whistle Press (1996-1999)
Series Editor, Water Mark Poets of North America (1980-83)
Founding Editor, Xanadu  (1975-78)

Festivals & Residencies:

Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence, Orlando, Florida, January-February, 2002
The Millay Colony for the Arts, Austerlitz, New York (December 1999)
Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sweet Briar, Virginia (6/97, 9/03, 12/04)
Ucross Foundation, Clearmont, Wyoming (August 1993 & October 1997)
Poetry Alive!  festival, Asheville, North Carolina (June 1994)
Mishkenot Sha'ananim, Jerusalem (January 1992)

Readings & Lectures:

Bar-Ilan University, Ben-Gurion University, Boston College, Brigham Young University, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Donnell Library Center (Manhattan), Georgia Tech, Haifa University, Hebrew Union College (Jerusalem), Hebrew University (Jerusalem), Hofstra University, Louisiana State University, Mishkenot Sha'ananim (Jerusalem), National Public Radio, New York School for Social Research, PEN American Center, Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (CUNY Graduate School), Rutgers University, Simon Wiesenthal Center, Suffolk Center on the Holocaust, Diversity, & Human Understanding, SUNY Binghamton, Tel Aviv University, University of Georgia, UMass-Amherst, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Vanderbilt University, University of Washington, Wayne State University, Wesleyan University, The Writer’s Voice (Billings, Montana), United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and more than 300 other venues 

Criticism:

Review of Passionate Renewal: Jewish Poetry in Britain Since 1945, in American Book Review , Vol. 23, Issue 2, January/February 2002.

The Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Writing, ed. Hilda Raz, H-Judaic review, September 1999

"Death's Shining Body: A Reconsideration of Kinnell's Book of Nightmares," Asheville Poetry Review, Fall 1994

"Through the Sharpness of Distance: American Poets on the Holocaust," Poetry Pilot, (Academy of American Poets), May 1990
"I Didn't Say Goodbye: Child Survivors of the Holocaust," American Book Review (March/April 1986)

"A. R. Ammons: The One Place to Dwell," The Hollins Critic, 1982

Foreword to books by Michael Blumenthal, R. T. Smith, and Stephen Corey, Water Mark
Poets of North America Book Award , 1980-83
William Pillin: A Certain Music," critical introduction to Pillin's collected poems, To the End of Time (Papa Bach Editions, 1980)

Papers & Talks:

"Raising the Bar in Editing,” AWP Convention Web Fair, New Orleans, March 2002

“Problems in Representing the Holocaust in Poetry,” Univ. of Alabama-Huntsville, 1998

"Some Cautions on the Use of Dramatic Monologue in Poetry on the Holocaust" AWP, 1996

"Poetry as Testimony: Some Key Texts, " Tampa Bay Holocaust Museum, 1996

"Poems of Liberation and Reconciliation, " Brigham Young University, 1995

“The Riddle of Responsibility: Poems on the Murder of Europe’s Jews,” Rider Coll., 1994

"American Poetry and the Holocaust," The Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies,          Graduate School and University Center, CUNY, 1993
 
Perspectives on My Work:

Austin, William James. “Charles Fishman,” in Contemporary Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (Greenwood, 1999)


For Readings, Book Orders, and Adoptions:

To order Chopin's Piano or Blood To Remember from Time Being Press, click here.
 
Title: Country of Memory
Author: Charles Fishman
ISBN: 0-9723231-3-9
Publication Date: April 2004
Price: $14.00
116 pages

Country of Memory is a memoir in poetry that uncovers the confusing, mysterious, and often dangerous paths we travel to make sense of our lives.  The poems center on family, friendship, nature, and foreign lands, on love and loss of love, and reveal how we somehow manage to grow up and survive.  Charles Fishman's fifth booklength collection shines a clear light on the gate of memory, which we must open to understand who we are.

Toll-free number: 1-866-206-2311
Address: Uccelli Press, PO Box 85394, Seattle, WA  98145-1394
Email: pub@uccellipress.com
Fax (secure 24 hour fax): 206-361-5001
Phone: 206-240-0075

Website: www.uccellipress.com (this an online store, but to obtain a discount, call, email, or fax the publisher, Toni La Ree Bennett)

Online order form: http://www.uccellipress.com/READERS/orderformCountry.htm

To order copies:

Books can be purchased via credit card or check but, to ship books, the publisher will need to know your address & the number of copies you desire.
 
Bookstores should send an invoice, indicating the quantity required and the date needed:
 
  1-24 books –  20% discount (11.20 each)
25-49 books –  25% discount (10.50 each)
50-99 books –  30% discount   (9.80 each)
 100+ books –  40% discount   (8.40 each)

 

Title: Time Travel Reports
Author: Charles Fishman
ISBN: 0-944048-24-2
Paperback
Price: $8.00
28 pages/10 poems

The poems in Time Travel Reports explore unusual, almost quirky, incidents in the lives of individual human beings and in the histories of nations and cultures.  Moments of spiritual profundity coexist with episodes of almost incomprehensible personal disaster.  The world created in this collection is bleakly laughable and surreal.