OFFICE HOURS: PETER BALAKIAN COLGATE PROFESSOR PUBLISHER NEW COLLECTION OF POEMS
By Nate Lynch
Colgate Maroon News
Oct 28 2010
NY
Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor in Humanities and Professor
of English and Director of Creative Writing Peter Balakian recently
published Ziggurat, a book of poetry dealing with a number of topics
from Balakian’s life including the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Ziggurat was published by the University of Chicago press on the
ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and is available at
the Colgate University Bookstore.
After the September 11 attacks, Balakian became preoccupied with the
idea of the towers and their absence. Balakian had been a mail-runner
in Lower Manhattan and was delivering mail when the first 49 floors
of the World Trade Towers opened in 1970.
“After 9/11 I got interested in the absence of the World Trade Towers
and the Big Hole in Manhattan that was left from the attacks. I was
haunted by what their beauty was and by their absence.”
Balakian began work on his new book in 2003. His engagement with 9/11
culminates in a 43-section poem titled “A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy”
and a shorter series called “The World Trade Center/Mail Runner”
poems. The sequential poem was a departure from his previous works.
“In ‘A-Train/Ziggurat/Elegy’ I tried to explore the life of a character
in a poem that deals with Manhattan from the late ’60s through 2006,
in which among other things, the building and description of the
World Trade Towers are central images,” Balakian said. “I think one
of the challenges in this new book is working with this new form
of a sequential poem; 43 sections that work in a fragmental and
lyrical way.”
The book also engages with a variety of other scenes and concepts
important to Balakian, including Andy Warhol, Emily Dickinson
and the ruins of the Bosnian National Library (destroyed during the
Bosnian War of 1992-1995).
“I have continued to be engaged with the aftermath of historical
violence (genocides, terrorist attacks),” Balakian said. “Among other
things, these are the zones that matter to my writing both as a poet
and prose writer.”
The title “Ziggurat” unifies many of these ideas and provides a way
of thinking about them, as the poems contain many allusions to the
ancient Sumerian civilization and its great temples, called Ziggurats.
“[The Ziggurat at Ur, in southern Iraq today], is often called the
first great skyscraper in Middle Eastern and Western history; it was
built by the Sumerians around five thousand years ago,” Balakian said.
“It means ‘great building’ in Aramaic. I found it a rich trope for
thinking about great monuments of architecture and great monuments
of civilization. It became a trope for thinking, in certain oblique
ways, about the loss and recovery of human achievements.”
Ziggurat was praised highly by critics, who applauded both its poetic
construction and synthesis of historical and personal approaches
to the poems. Essayist and literary critic Sven Birkerts commended
Balakian’s form and effect.
“Peter Balakian’s new book Ziggurat ingests calamity and dissolves
it into an exhilarating rhythm and image, pushing the language until
it feels like it’s breaking into something new,” Birkerts said. “It
is a panorama of contemporary witness, but a syncopation of the same.
Balakian renders scenes and at the same time enacts the sensibility
being breached and affected – 9/11 is just short-hand for our new
magnitudes of violence and dissociation … the work aims to reveal
the human capacity to integrate and, after hard passage, transcend.”
Sadiq Akoriji, who reviewed Ziggurat for Library Journal, admired
Balakian’s command of language, calling the book, “Aesthetically
rich and engaging; recommended for all serious poetry readers.”
“Balakian … here portrays a panoramic world that throbs radiantly
with history, politics, art, myth, and music, even as it conveys the
contours of day-to-day life,” Akoriji said in his review. “Throughout,
he uses concrete detail and historical fact without succumbing to
dogma … Balakian’s poems create a world sustained by the power
of associations, in which borders get thinned out and lives that
seem unconnected flow on each other. Even as he focuses on his
relationship with the world, he avoids indulging in monologue,
instead using reportorial diction to sketch flashes of scenes that
seem as if they are taken by cameras with cracked lenses.”
Balakian has been a prolific writer since he first began teaching
at Colgate University in 1980. His previous works include the
award-winning memoir: Black Dog of Fate (1997), the New York Times
Bestselling historical work: The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide
and America’s Response and the critically acclaimed book of poems:
June-Tree: New and Selected Poems.
Balakian is currently working on a new book of poems and a book
of essays.
From: A. Papazian
http://www.maroon-news.com/news/office-hours-peter-balakian-1.1733661