An Archeology of the Future by Emma Catherine Hoff. Cover art by Rebecca Wu, 9. A note from Emma Wood Hello, Stone Soup readers & writers, Earlier this month, we announced that Archeology of the Future by Emma Catherine Hoff, the poetry winner of Stone Soup’s 2022 Book Contest, was released and is available for purchase! Please support Stone Soup and Emma by buying her book today. If you have participated in one of our writing workshops recently, you have likely met Emma! Likewise, if you have been reading Stone Soup for the past couple of years, you will have encountered many of her poems (and maybe one of her photographs!) on our pages. I wish Stone Soup could take credit for making Emma into the poet she is today—and surely we have played some small role—but she came to our classes and our submission pool already a very mature poet with a strong voice and sense of style. I remember being astonished when I first encountered “The Ambassador” in our submission pool—it was dark, surreal, moving, strange. (To me, “strange” is the highest compliment any poem can receive—denoting both originality but also complexity and mystery; a “strange” poem always demands rereading.) Emma was eight years old when she wrote it, and it was the first poem of hers that we published. We are so proud, three years later, to be publishing her collection of poems, which has garnered the advance praise it deserves. Read on for a taste of what others are saying about her collection and further, to read a poem from the collection. Like the Surrealists before her, Hoff can see into the emotional lives of the things we use every day, things we toss around carelessly… If one of my friends had written this beautifully when I was starting out, I would have probably quit, and doffed my cap to her and said “you go on ahead” or more likely, “you’re already there.” — Matthew Rohrer, author of The Others Emma Hoff is a rare poet. And one of my favorites.I am tempted to use the words visionary, otherworldly, untimely, genius. I am tempted to say she flies above the earth. When I read Emma Hoff for the first time years ago, I thought: She’s not from this planet. I thought: She does not remind me of other poets; she makes me forget them. — Conner Bassett, author of Gad’s Book This collection is a garden of eurekas, a cavalcade of astonishments as, stanza by stanza, Hoff delivers the musings of a subtle intellect fed by a deep and abiding empathy for this world. The deftness of the prosody is only matched by its variety. Open it, and read for yourself. — Carlos Hernandez, NY Times bestselling author of Sal and Gabi Break the Universe The delights to be uncovered in An Archeology of the Future strike me with awe, urgency, solace, and compassion. How daring, how beautiful, how extraordinary it is, in this moment of the world when our world feels so broken, that Mt. Parnassas is still at work, and Hoff is a voice so richly sowed. — Jenny Boully, author of Betwixt and Between: Essays on the Writing Life From An Archeology of the Future The Lamp by Emma Catherine Hoff, 1o The light shines innocently, but it blinds me, my eyes become red. I shy from it and still it follows me with its intense gaze boring into me as I walk around the room. I feel the hot bulb, sense the lamp melting and perspiring under its own fever, its own light. The business is done, I think, but my dreams that night are of that still figure creeping up on me, and the next day, I find the lamp standing again. It glares at me and whispers in my ear, burning it, telling me that the sun’s light is not enough. I ask it how it knows, but the sun dies and the lamp is still glowing and I am grateful for it now. We make our way through the darkness until it parts with me, saying it must go, its filament cannot take the strain anymore and that the darkness isn’t as bad as people think. Click here to purchase An Archeology of the Future. Stone Soup is published by Children’s Art Foundation-Stone Soup Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit organization registered in the United States of America, EIN: 23-7317498.
poetry
Poetry Soup – Ep. 13: “There Was Earth Inside Them” by Paul Celan
Poetry Soup – Ep. 13: “There Was Earth Inside Them” by Paul Celan Transcript: Hello, and welcome to Poetry Soup! I’m your host, Emma Catherine Hoff. Today, I’ll be reading the poem, “There was Earth Inside Them,” by Paul Celan. Paul Celan was born on November 23, 1920, in what was formerly Cernăuți, Kingdom of Romania, and is now Chernivtsi, Ukraine, into a Jewish family. Despite being born in Romania, Celan mainly spoke German. His father was adamant about Celan’s education in Hebrew and about Judaism in general. Around the time Celan graduated from preparatory school, he began writing poetry. Celan went to France in order to study medicine, but he went back home a year later to study language and literature. During World War II, while Celan was away from home, his parents were sent to a concentration camp, where they both died. This is the reason why so much of Celan’s poetry is about the Holocaust. In 1952, Celan married Gisèle Lestrange, who was a French graphic artist. Paul Celan drowned himself on April 20, 1970. Much of his work was later translated by Michael Hamburger, who translated the poem I will be reading today. There Was Earth Inside Them, and they dug. They dug and they dug, so their day went by for them, their night. And they did not praise God, who, so they heard, wanted all this, who, so they heard, knew all this. They dug and heard nothing more; they did not grow wise, invented no song, thought up for themselves no language. They dug. There came a stillness, and there came a storm, and all the oceans came. I dig, you dig, and the worm digs too, and that singing out there says: They dig. O one, o none, o no one, o you: Where did the way lead when it led nowhere? O you dig and I dig and I dig towards you, and on our finger the ring awakes. “They Had Earth Inside Them” is one of my favorite poems, and Paul Celan one of my favorite poets – all of his poetry has beautiful rhythm and metaphor. This poem is an extended metaphor, filled with beautiful language that paints images in the minds of the readers – such as a ring “awakening,” or shining on a finger. The poem is about trying to find meaning in existence. In the poem, a group of people referred to simply as “they,” dig to discover this meaning. As “they” dig, time passes by, and they invent no “song” or “language.” In this way, the first part of the poem seems to show the search for meaning as negative. The lines, “And they did not praise God,/ who, so they heard, wanted all this,/ who, so they heard, knew all this,” suggest that religion is a sort of search for meaning as well, God being a stand-in for the meaning of life. After the line, “there came a stillness and there came a storm,” everything changes. This line is the turn of the poem. All of a sudden, Celan breaks the parallelism, making it so not only “they” are digging, but also “I,” “you,” and, of course, the “worm,” a symbol of death, showing that life is short and that we are all trapped in the search for meaning. In the end of the poem, the ring “awakens” on a finger, almost as if it has been shined by the digging and scraping of the hands in the dirt. This line disperses all the negativity at the end of the poem – the ring symbolizes the little things that we live for, it symbolizes finding the “earth inside of them,” or the meaning that is in them, perched on their finger. The image of the poem does remain mixed, however – the ring shines, but it could also be covered in dirt from the repeated digging. Celan managed to create this beautiful poem in just four stanzas – the power of a short poem. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Poetry Soup, and I’ll see you soon with the next one!
Poetry Soup Ep. 12 – “An Ox Looks at Man” by Carlos Drummond de Andrade
Poetry Soup – Ep. 12: “An Ox Looks at Man” by Carlos Drummond de Andrade Transcript: Hello, and welcome to Poetry Soup! I’m your host, Emma Catherine Hoff. Today I’ll be talking about the poem, “An Ox Looks at Man,” by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, which inspired my own poem. Carlos Drummond de Andrade was born on October 31, 1902 in Itabira, Minas Gerais, Brazil. He went to a school of pharmacy, but did not enjoy it. Rather than a pharmacist, de Andrade was a civil servant. As well as writing poetry, de Andrade became director of history for the National Historical and Artistic Heritage Service of Brazil and, later, during World War II, started editing the official newspaper of the Brazilian Communist Party, Tribuna Popular, for a short while. The famous poet Mark Strand (who is one of my favorite poets!), translated a lot of de Andrade’s poetry, and his first English language translator was Elizabeth Bishop, whose villanelle, “One Art,” is featured in Poetry Soup. De Andrade wrote poems on many subjects, but every one of his poems exudes the same gracefulness and beauty. They are more delicate even than shrubs and they run and run from one side to the other, always forgetting something. Surely they lack I don’t know what basic ingredient, though they present themselves as noble or serious, at times. Oh, terribly serious, even tragic. Poor things, one would say that they hear neither the song of the air nor the secrets of hay; likewise they seem not to see what is visible and common to each of us, in space. And they are sad, and in the wake of sadness they come to cruelty. All their expression lives in their eyes–and loses itself to a simple lowering of lids, to a shadow. And since there is little of the mountain about them – nothing in the hair or in the terribly fragile limbs but coldness and secrecy — it is impossible for them to settle themselves into forms that are calm, lasting and necessary. They have, perhaps, a kind of melancholy grace (one minute) and with this they allow themselves to forget the problems and translucent inner emptiness that make them so poor and so lacking when it comes to uttering silly and painful sounds: desire, love, jealousy (what do we know?) – sounds that scatter and fall in the field like troubled stones and burn the herbs and the water, and after this it is hard to keep chewing away at our truth. Rather than writing a poem from the point of view of a human being, Carlos Drummond de Andrade instead writes his from the point of view of an ox looking at humans (referred to as “man” in the title of the poem). The ox seems to feel pity for the humans because they feel so much (“desire, love, jealousy”), and therefore suffer so much. Though the ox can somehow name these feelings, it does not truly know them – “(what do we know?)” The ox thinks humans are fragile and pathetic, that they are lacking in something because they are not strong, because they don’t always get along, because they have feelings that are depressing. But the ox does not know of bravery or friendship, other traits among humans. It only sees sadness, because it cannot really imagine happiness. It has never been happy, trapped in the same daily routine. And so it sees humans as a way of showing itself that its life is not so bad. This is the result of a life without true meaning. The ox does not only comment on itself, however, as de Andrade’s main point is to critique humans. Man to man, there are things we do not see – no matter what things we do, we still think of ourselves as the superior race. But we can counter these feelings in the way de Andrade does – through the eyes of a different animal, such as an ox. The ox says, for example, that “little of the mountain is about them,” showing that humans are somewhat abstracted from their environment. While other animals live in peace with nature, we sometimes even destroy it. This poem shows us that because humanity is so complex, looking at it almost disturbs the ox’s calm demeanor. The ox is not used to this level of intricacy. I wrote my own poem based on “An Ox Looks at Man,” from the point of view of a horse. It goes like this: What the Horse Saw They lack hooves, and they have straw falling from their heads. They have cast a spell to make it soft, like my mane, but not as elegant. I gallop gracefully, and they crouch down, panting, calling me. The beauty of my ballet is countered only by the humor of their jig, which they dance so insistently. They stand there only to make me laugh. I respond to no name. Not the name of the horse, not the name of the animal. They tried to give me a name, and they called me by it, but it was all a part of their play, where they doubled over, running off their grassy stage after me. They made my escape more pleasurable than I thought it would be. Now I have only bushes to talk to, and they make bad companions. They think my eyes are small, that because I do not recognize red, I do not recognize them. My laughs stay secret and joyous, like my leap from the stable to the world. The flies stayed inside, and I became free. They called my name. I respond to no name. Maybe if they named me for my beauty, if they named me for my laughter. If they named me for my feelings or for my color, I might yield. But they gave me someone else’s name. I know the horse they called Onyx, a blank canvas, but black,
