STEVE POLESKIE, ART FLYER

Poleskie and his Pitts Special biplane, Ithaca NY, 1977

DURING THE 1970s AND 80s ARTIST STEPHEN (STEVE) POLESKIE, created numerous temporary artworks in the sky by flying an aerobatic biplane trailing smoke through a series of intricate maneuvers. He called these ephemeral events, which were sometimes accompanied by musicians and dancers on the ground, and parachutists in the air, Aerial Theater. Over the years he did performances above many cities in the USA including: New York, Boston, San Francisco, Washington DC, Richmond, and Toledo. In 1978 Poleskie disassembled his Pitts Special biplane, which he had rebuilt and specially painted and reassembled it in an art gallery in New York City to accompany a show of his drawings. You can see this on his web site link below. Poleskie's Aerial Theater was very popular in Europe, especially Italy, were his events in the sky were considered as the logical extension of the work of the Futurist artist Fedele Azari. Poleskie also was able to do performances in Germany, Switzerland, and the UK using borrowed or rented airplanes.

We have recently uncovered a 1984 film of Poleskie explaining what his Aerial Theater is about and showing some drawings of projects that he is working on before taking up his biplane and and flying through a piece. You can view this ten minute film by clicking on the "Art Flyer" link below. Poleskie also talks about his art, and flies a performance, with views from the cockpit, on the Channel 9 interview, which is the  third link below.

Steve Poleskie, Art Flyer
Stephen Poleskie web site
Poleskie Interview on NYC Channel 9

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Ithaca NY, a Writer's Town and Our Hometown

ONAGER EDITIONS IS LOCATED IN ITHACA, NY, a town that is presently the home to many well-known writers. There have also been a considerable number of famous writers who lived there in the past. A recent article in Ploughshares magazine web site by Sarah Catteral gives an idea of what it is like to live in Ithaca today. We have posted the beginning of the article. You can read the rest by going to the link below.

ITHACA IS A SMALL CITY in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. It sits at the southern end of Cayuga Lake, surrounded by state parks, smaller towns, farms, and wineries. Like most other college towns it’s a little island of economic stability with liberal politics, an active cultural scene, and bartenders with PhDs. A single storm can drop three feet of snow in January or April, and that scares some people away, but outside of the mud seasons in late fall and early spring, it is beautiful here.

Ithacans love books. Used book stores proliferate, and on a weekday morning at the public library there’s often a line at the circulation desk. When our independent bookstore announced it would have to close in February 2011, over 600 individuals bought shares to resurrect it as a successful community-owned cooperative.

Throngs of writers live in and around Ithaca, and two of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2011 were by current residents Eleanor Henderson and Téa Obreht.

Resident literary writers (a very incomplete list):

Diane Ackerman, Rebecca Barry, Peggy Billings, Paul Cody, Leslie Daniels, Amy Dickinson, Rachel Dickinson, Alice Fulton, Laura Glenn, Brian Hall, Paul Hamill, Eleanor Henderson, Katherine Howe, Edward Hower, Phyllis Janowitz, Sorayya Khan, Jay Leeming, J. Robert Lennon, Alison Lurie, Katharyn Howd Machan, Jeanne Mackin, Anne Mazer, Dan McCall, Ken McClane, James McConkey, Maureen McCoy, Paul McEuen, Fred Muratori, Robert Morgan, Téa Obreht, Stephen Poleskie, Ernesto Quiñonez, Nick Sagan, Beth Saulnier, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Stephanie Vaughn, Helena Maria Viramontes, Paul West, Alexi Zentner.

Literary references:

Ithaca and its campuses appear in many works by writers listed and not listed above. Their characters drink in our bars, renovate houses, have affairs with graduate students, and fall to their deaths in the gorges. Diane Ackerman’s recent Cultivating Delight provides a literary naturalist’s view of her Ithaca garden through the seasons. Vladimir Nabokov taught literature at Cornell for fourteen years and lived in ten different homes around town. Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire are all partially set here.

Ploughshares Ithaca Article

Stephen Poleskie reading stories at the Lost Dog

nothing uglier than the truth

nothing uglier than the truth


they were talking crime and true crime, making monsters out of men and men out of monsters. anthropomorphic. siobhan pointed to the serial killer case unfolding in new orleans. baxter couldn’t make his dinosaurs believable enough for the drunk writers to take seriously. photographs of the women who were raped, freed, raped again, freed again, and finally killed, convinced them all there’s enough cruelty in the world to fill the half-empty glasses of a million sick men. horace said there’s nothing uglier than the truth. siobhan wrote that down and took it as her own.

Mike Foldes

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Author of Sleeping Dogs, A true story of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping
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ACORN'S CARD, a novella and two stories

Stephen Poleskie, Acorn’s Card. Ithaca, NY: Onager Editions, 2011. 116 pp. $12.00 Paper. ISBN 978-1-60047-558-0

The blurb on the back of Stephen Poleskie’s Acorn’s Card declares the collection, a novella and two short stories, “out of the ordinary tales of living in America.” Yet after reading Poleskie’s work, “out of the ordinary” seems less than apt. Rather, Poleskie presents the incredibly ordinary – a reclusive man struggling to accomplish the tasks associated with everyday life, a Polish immigrant working to support his family, a suburban couple suffering from the flu and innocuous household worries. With sharp images and frank, direct prose, Poleskie transforms this “ordinary” material into captivating stories that draw readers into the characters’ worlds and leave them there to contemplate their own lives long after the tales have come to a close.

Acorn’s Card, the novella for which the collection is named, hinges upon extraordinary circumstances – John Acorn, a young man who enlists in Vietnam and then goes AWOL after his helicopter crashes during training drills, emerges from his mother’s attic after thirty years of hiding. In a close third-person narration, the novella follows John’s return to a changed world and his struggle to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder, the loss of his mother and perhaps most strikingly, the challenges and freedoms of living out of the attic and in the everyday world. The story begins with John warring against his fears as he contemplates taking his first steps out of his mother’s house in order to retrieve the mail from across the street. Poleskie describes the challenge in painstaking detail: “He had been studying the street from the security of the house for most of the day, considering if and when he could safely cross – a decision not yet fully resolved in his mind when he stepped out onto the porch at dusk, reconciled to his fate” (3). John’s trip to the mailbox consumes the first nine pages of the eighty-eight page novella, yet at no point does the narration grow tiresome. Rather, Poleskie’s careful combination of sentiment, imagery, and flashback makes this ordinary task of fetching the mail seem like a feat of great import: “Suddenly, with a scream bursting from his throat, he ran down the rest of the steps and bolted across the asphalt. Eager, ignorant, and rasping with desire, John reached the mailbox. He hung onto it as if it were about to go somewhere” (6). From his first errand to the mailbox, to his calculated trips to the grocery store, John’s attendance to everyday chores reveals his pain and alienation and ultimately, highlights him as a man grappling with life as much as death.

“A Loaf of Bread,” the next story in the collection, details the plight of Polish immigrant, Jan Lesnachevski, who came to America to escape persecution for his role in organizing the Solidarity shipyard strikes. As in Acorn’s Card, the story focuses on Jan’s life long after this major turning point has passed. Now in the New World, Jan works long nights as a plumber, watching his children become more Americanized as he and his wife lose touch with their Polish roots yet fall short of becoming “true Americans”: “And while they worked hard to improve their knowledge of their adopted country, its history and its culture, they were forever circling outside, making the rounds, jostled and shoved, polite novelties, in demand until Poland’s plight had faded from the headlines” (91). “A Loaf of Bread” follows Jan on his way to work one night, after he buys a loaf of pasty white bread for his family’s breakfast and then proceeds to get lost on the wrong side of town. The loaf of bread, mass-produced and tasteless, becomes the emblem of the real American dream – for Jan and his family, it is undesirable but better than their other options.

The final story in the collection, “Flyer Bag,” truly highlights Poleskie’s ability to bring characters to life by immersing them in ordinary details. This short tale is set in the manicured backyard of a couple’s suburban home. Suffering, albeit mildly, from a late spring flu, they are revealed as quintessentially middle-class Americans, sitting “on a bench in their garden enjoying the sun with a resigned calmness – the way older people often do” and fretting over trivialities – their housecats, germs on shopping carts, and a plastic bag carried off by the wind. But once again, this story of the mundane is anything but dull, as Poleskie brings the scene to life with frank insights into the characters’ minds – “Realizing that their afternoon was already almost gone, wasted John supposed, they stood there breathlessly waiting for the white plastic bag to descend by itself” (113). Ultimately, the story becomes a commentary on middle-class, modern American life, where responsible citizens function as stewards of their own plot of land, chasing “the dozens of other bags, foam containers, pizza boxes, and soda cans” out of their front yards (112), but at the same time are immersed in privilege, revealed through their concerns with grocery store germs and a single, plastic bag caught up by a breeze.

Delving deeply into the lives of each of his characters, Poleskie presents three fast reads that satisfy on the page as much as they do hours later when the strikingly real images return to the mind to reveal their depth of meaning. Through these tales of the ordinary, Acorn’s Card reminds us that truly good fiction resides in the craft, not in extraordinary feats of plot.

~from Editions Bibliotekos, Spring 2012

- Jill M. Neziri, Fordham University.  

Jill M. Neziri, Ph.D. is a teaching fellow at Fordham University. She has published book reviews with Jacket. She is co-editor of the anthology, From the Heart of Brooklyn, and her poems appear there as well as in several literary magazines.
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When Walt Whitman Played for the Philadelphia Eagles

A Excerpt from SCONTO WALAA, a novel by Stephen Poleskie, published in November 2012

THE NEXT YEAR the Eagles' number one receiver had demanded too much money when his contract was up for renewal so was sent packing. Whitman was moved up to the regular squad. He rode the bench and covered kickoffs, until the third game, when the former number two receiver, now number one, broke his ankle. Given his chance Walt made the most of it, even making a spectacular catch in the last seconds of the home game against the Eagles hated rivals the New York Giants. He hadn’t scored the game winning touchdown, but Walt Whitman’s grab had set up the three yard run that did.

About midseason some local sports pundit, remembering a famous writer with the same name who had lived just across the river in Camden, New Jersey had given our Walt Whitman the tag “The Poet.” Sconto now got to fume at headlines that read: The Poet snags six balls as Eagles trounce Skins. Wala did get to shout at his television set, and cheer, even spilling his beer, when The Poet had his bell rung and was driven off the field on a golf cart in the final game of the season. The Eagles made the playoffs as a Wild Card. The Poet, however, was suffering from a concussion and did not play. The Eagles were blown away in the first game, and the TV announcers kept speculating how much the offense missed Walt Whitman, with the camera frequently panning to him standing next to the player’s bench wearing mufti, his face a blank expression, as if he was attending a séance or some such thing.

Maybe it was the crack on the head, but Walt Whitman now believed he was a poet, or perhaps it was the tidy advance a “book producer” agent had garnered for him from a big-name publisher. Walter, who had to repeat the Freshman Writing Seminar at Wilbender College twice, sat down at this computer, which he had previously used mainly for viewing porn and playing video games, and, pecking away with two fingers and the help of a ghostwriter, shortly came away with a collection of poems he called Eagle Claws. This could kindly be described as free-verse doggerel about the joys of playing wide receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles football team.

Greased by large sums of publisher’s money, distinguished literary critics for major newspapers and magazines, who normally ignored first books of poetry, indeed any book of poetry, spit all over themselves slathering Eagle Claws with praise. Walt Whitman appeared on all the talk shows, including Oprah, and for nine weeks the book hovered near the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

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STEPHEN (STEVE) POLESKIE is an artist and writer. His artwork is in the collections of numerous museums including the Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York: and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Tate Gallery in London, and the Museum Sztuki in Lodz. His writing, fiction and art criticism, has appeared in many journals both here and abroad. Among these are American Writing, Leonardo, Lightworks, Many Mountains Moving, Satire, SN Review, and Sulphur River Literary Review in the USA; D'Ars, and Spazio Umano, in Italy, Himmelschrieber in Germany, and Imago in Australia. He also has a story in the anthology The Book of Love, from W. W. Norton, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Poleskie has published five novels and has taught, or been a visiting professor at twenty-seven colleges and art schools throughout the world, including: MIT, Rhode Island School of Design, the School of Visual Art in New York and the University of California, Berkeley. He has also been a resident at the American Academy in Rome. Poleskie is currently a professor emeritus at Cornell University. He lives in Ithaca, NY with his wife, the novelist, Jeanne Mackin. Additional information can be found on his web site: www.StephenPoleskie.com/



BEING HUMAN

an anthology

Twelve authors and fifteen stories on the nature of being human and the human character in both the natural environment and human-made world constitute this stimulating book. The stories are engaging, memorable, contemplative, and even humorous. While we have constructed, over thousands of years, a vast cathedral of scintillating, rational humanity, we can be primal and shadowy with visceral emotions – and so this collection admirably demonstrates. There are many difficult questions posed in the book. Why do we kill certain creatures while nurturing others? When do we draw the line between protecting our property and letting other creatures live and thrive? What drives people to kill others to protect their land? Many of these stories explore the lines cast under the surface of creation, characters looking for a nibble of understanding to make better sense of their place in an evolving world.

CONTRIBUTORS: Stephen Poleskie, Arthur Powers, Lisa M. Sita, Andrea Vojtko, Jeff Vande Zande, James K. Zimmerman, Anne Whitehouse, Janyce Stefan-Cole, Patty Somlo, Rivka Keren, Kelly Wantuch, Larry Eby

FOREWORD: Ian S. Maloney, Ph.D.

Published by: Editions Bibliotekos
http://www.ebibliotekos.com/

publisher@ebibliotekos.com

Available at bookstores or online

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WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

Wisława Szymborska died on 1 February 2012 in Poland. She was one of Poland's greatest poets and won the Nobel Prize for Poetry in 1996. Showing great strength in times of trouble, she survived the Nazis and the Communists and lived to tell about it with clarity, honesty, humor, and charm. She will be remembered.

Here is one of her poems as a tribute.

ON DEATH, WITHOUT EXAGGERATION

It can't take a joke,
find a star, make a bridge.
It knows nothing about weaving, mining, farming,
building ships, or baking cakes.

In our planning for tomorrow,
it has the final word,
which is always beside the point.

It can't even get the things done
that are part of its trade:
dig a grave,
make a coffin,
clean up after itself.

Preoccupied with killing,
it does the job awkwardly,
without system or skill.
As though each of us were its first kill.

Oh, it has its triumphs,
but look at its countless defeats,
missed blows,
and repeat attempts!

Sometimes it isn't strong enough
to swat a fly from the air.
Many are the caterpillars
that have outcrawled it.

All those bulbs, pods,
tentacles, fins, tracheae,
nuptial plumage, and winter fur
show that it has fallen behind
with its halfhearted work.

Ill will won't help
and even our lending a hand with wars and coups d'etat
is so far not enough.

Hearts beat inside eggs.
Babies' skeletons grow.
Seeds, hard at work, sprout their first tiny pair of leaves
and sometimes even tall trees fall away.

Whoever claims that it's omnipotent
is himself living proof
that it's not.

There's no life
that couldn't be immortal
if only for a moment.

Death
always arrives by that very moment too late.

In vain it tugs at the knob
of the invisible door.
As far as you've come
can't be undone.

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Below is a link to an interview conducted by John Guzlowski with Michal Rusinek, a poet and translator, who served as Ms. Szymborska's secretary. Although it only speaks briefly about Ms. Szymborska the interview offers insight in to her personality.

http://writingpolishdiaspora.blogspot.com/2012/02/interview-with-michal-rusinek-wislawa.html

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