“Heart with Park and Children”

Posted on October 1, 2013 • Words by Eunice Odio & Keith Ekiss • Art by Jennifer Moses

Collaborators’ Q&A: Translator Keith Ekiss: Maybe I’m romanticizing the original Spanish, but Odio’s poem seems more mysterious, more secretive than my translation. This is a shy poem. Artist Jennifer Moses: I think trying to approximate a sensation or image in relation to language is similar to a translation.

Poet Eunice Odio (1919-1974) is considered the leading Costa Rican poet of the twentieth century. Translator Keith Ekiss is the author of Pima Road Notebook (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2010) and the translator of The Fire’s Journey (Tavern Books, 2013) by Eunice Odio.  Artist Jennifer Moses is a painter living in Boston.

Tagged: Childhood / Youth, Painting: Acrylic, Romance / Anti-Romance, Spanish (language), Translation

“Extirpation”

Posted on September 1, 2010 • Words by Keith Ekiss • Art by Douglas Culhane

Collaborators’ Q&A: Poet Keith Ekiss: …Something’s missing in this landscape, which for many years has been the home of the Pima, that would still be there, if it weren’t for the damming and diverting of the Gila River in Arizona. Artist Douglas Culhane: …I decided to focus on expressing what was lost (specific bird, specific natural landscape). I had decided to leave out the hard geometric lines which the poem describes—but there they are visually in the poem—the underlying grid of printed text.

Poet Keith Ekiss is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University and the past recipient of scholarships and residencies from the Bread Loaf and Squaw Valley Writers’ Conferences, Santa Fe Art Institute, Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Petrified Forest National Park. Artist Douglas Culhane works in sculpture and drawing. He has exhibited in New York and New England.

Tagged: Animals, Ecopoetry, LGBTIQ+ Artist, Migration, Ocean / Water, Painting: Watercolor, Rural