Snigdha Poonam at a 14th-century stepwell behind her 18-story newspaper office in the heart of Delhi. Photo by Ravi Choudhary.
Your name: Snigdha Poonam
Current city: Delhi
How long have you lived here: Nine years
Three words to describe the climate: hot, cold, extreme.
Best time of year to visit: October-March
Join the staff and interns of The Common for a celebration of uncommonly good literature! Come to hear readings from our most recent issue and enjoy wine and cheese in the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College.
Free and open to the public – students, parents, and local lit lovers all welcome!
Amherst College
September 2018 marks one year after Hurricane María devastated the island of Puerto Rico. This event features contemporary Puerto Rican writers of both poetry and prose sharing new creative work and discussing how the ongoing crisis has transformed our styles of survival, our experience of diaspora, and the function of translation. Readings will include a bilingual element to fully represent Puerto Rican linguistic diversity.
This month we welcome back contributor LOREN GOODMAN, the author of Famous Americans, selected by W. S. Merwin for the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets, Suppository Writing, and New Products. He is an associate professor of creative writing and English literature at Yonsei University / Underwood International College in Seoul, South Korea, and serves as the UIC Creative Writing Director.
RAPTURE
The Rabbi’s little son
Decked out in stripes
One leather strap
Over the edge
Of the black
Lacquer box wraps
Graphic novel written by BESSORA and illustrated by BARROUX. Translated from the French by SARAH ARDIZZONE.
Reviewed by JULIA LICHTBLAU
In 1994, the last year my husband and I lived in Paris, a Senegalese woman named Delphine cleaned our apartment, often bringing her baby girl. At some point, she asked us to help her resolve her immigration problems. The baby was a French citizen; Delphine had come to France to work for French expats returning from Dakar and been let go some years ago.
The Common will receive its third grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2018. The Art Works grant of $10,000 will be awarded to The Common to help publish more and diverse writers, expand its readership, and also support The Common in the Classroom initiatives.
“We are thrilled to receive our third NEA grant as The Common heads into its 8th year of publication. The grant will go a long way to increase the diversity of authors and literary works published on our website and in print,” says Founder and Editor in Chief Jennifer Acker. “It will also support teachers and students who use The Common in the Classroom by expanding the library of online tools and resources.”
The Common staff and interns. Left to right, standing Debbie Wen, Flavia Martinez, Managing Editor Emily Everett, Isabel Meyers. Seated Sunna Juhn, Editor in Chief Jennifer Acker, Madeline Ruoff. Not pictured: Julia Pike, Nayereh Doosti.
In The Common office, we’re getting so excited for the work we’ll be publishing, both in print and online, in 2018. But it seems only fitting to give one last nod to the fantastic pieces that we brought out in 2017. Below is a list of our most-read pieces of the year: the poems, essays, interviews, and art that made 2017 our biggest year yet for web traffic from around the world! We hope you’ll have a look, if you haven’t already, and see why this work struck a chord with readers this year.
Three poems by ALBERTO de LACERDA, Transnational Spirit
Translations and introduction by SCOTT LAUGHLIN
“This is what I live for: friendship and the things of the spirit.” Alberto de Lacerda often repeated this refrain to his friends. Friendship meant kinship, connection, and community. The things of the spirit were poetry, literature, art, dance—the myriad expressions of the spiritual and transcendent Alberto sought, and lived by, his whole life.
Such values perhaps couldn’t lead to anything but an intercontinental life.
Buds that flower on the vanilla vines in the morning must be pollinated before dusk by human hands, or they will wilt and die and drop to the rain-mudded ground of this slash in a hillside overlooking the sea. Tobisoa, his small fingers perfect for the task, uses a toothpick to lift the rostellum, then presses the exposed anther against the stigma.
Archeological Museum, Napoli
Beard-barnacled, chokingly-fixed, almost somehow stupid, yes,
almost like will itself pushed to the extreme of its own
absence, almost like presence perpetuated so as to obliterate
personhood’s merest increments—ah, but don’t
listen to even the soundest advice you are given, never, never, no,
Graffito is sure he hears the inert face telling him, yeah,
forget pondering your person in light of pure practicalities,
and fuck letting any of the standard measures of modern
existence—money or fame, say, or so-called community, or (gasp
gasp) success—clutter the local, the cosmic
clatter of the single soul clanging the skin and organs
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