The Stone of Language

By Anya Achtenberg

ANYA ACHTENBERG is an award-winning author of the novel Blue Earth, and novella, The Stories of Devil-Girl (both with Modern History Press); and poetry books,  The Stone of Language (West End Press); and I Know What the Small Girl Knew(Holy Cow! Press). Her fiction has received awards from Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story, New Letters, the Asheville Fiction Workshop, the Raymond Carver Story Contest, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and more; andpoetry awards include first prizes from Southern Poetry Reviewand Another Chicago Magazine.Individual works of fiction and poetry have also been published in Harvard Review; Malpaís Review; Gargoyle; Tupelo Quarterly; The Mas Tequila Review; Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion; Hinchas de poesía; Poet Lore; Taos International Journal; Paterson Review; and numerous others. Prior to the 2004 publication of The Stone of Language, various versions of this manuscript won recognition as a finalist in five competitions: the Philip Levine Poetry Contest, the Hayden Carruth Award from Copper Canyon Press, the May Swenson Award from Utah State University Press, Cleveland State University’s Poetry Center Prize, and the Alice James Books Awards.
"Achtenberg is a poet of lyrical intensity... interested in detail for the wealth of revelation and music it will yield up"
-- Luis H. Francia, The Village Voice
"Anya Achtenberg's visionary workshops on writing for social change have received national acclaim. With this book of poetry, she practices what she preaches--redreaming a just world--in a way that is simply breathtaking."
-- Demetria Martinez, author of Mother Tongue
"Stunning and original! Powerful 'make it new' language"
-- Stratis Haviaras, founder and editor of Harvard Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Modern History Press
• Release date: May 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781615995028

Anya Achtenberg

Anya Achtenberg is an award-winning fiction writer and poet. Her publications include the novel "Blue Earth", and autobiographical novella "The Stories of Devil-Girl", both with Modern History Press; and poetry books, "The Stone of Language", published by West End Press after being finalist in five poetry competitions; and "I Know What the Small Girl Knew" (Holy Cow! Press). Her short fiction has received awards from Coppola's Zoetrope: All-Story, New Letters, the Raymond Carver Story Contest, and others. She is at work on History Artist, a novel centering in a Cambodian woman born of an African American father and Cambodian mother at the moment the U.S. bombing of Cambodia began. This work received a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. She is also writing a book of poetry and short prose, The Matadors at the Crossing. Anya teaches creative writing workshops and classes around the country and online with growing international participation, and offers manuscript consultations and coaching for fiction writers, memoirists, and poets. She also organizes groups of writers, artists, filmmakers and educators to travel to Cuba. Along with her numerous fiction and memoir workshops, she developed and teaches a series of multi-genre workshops on Writing for Social Change (Re-Dream a Just World; Place and Exile/ Borders and Crossings; and Yearning and Justice: Writing the Unlived Life), which she has started writing into a movable workshop. Visit Anya at www.AnyaAchtenberg.com

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Preface to the Revised Edition

Much time had passed since the original 2004 publication by West End Press (Albuquerque, New Mexico) of The Stone of Language, when publisher Victor Volkman of Modern History Press offered to bring this volume of poetry to more audiences through an e-book. (The Modern History Press imprint had published my novel Blue Earth and my novella, The Stories of Devil-Girl.) While I love physical books, I have accepted electronic forms in order to take many books with me everywhere, so I was thrilled to accept Modern History’s offer, and West End agreed.

West End Press was founded in 1975 in New York City by multicultural and class-conscious publisher John Crawford, purportedly at the West End Bar near Columbia University. After decades of work, John passed away in 2019. Among many very gifted writers published by West End, was dear friend and mentor Meridel Le Sueur, a prescient midwestern radical, a brilliant writer in prose and poetry, a class-conscious feminist who understood and communicated the history, oppression and strengths of women. Meridel was one of the first people to read in total the poems which would be collected in my first book of poetry, I Know What the Small Girl Knew, published by Holy Cow! Press. Her understanding and embrace of those poems shocked me, and opened a door for me into a dimension of enduring belief in my work. Meridel was born in 1900, and we lost her in November of 1997, but I periodically reread the typewritten and handwritten notes and postcards she sent me, and each time become more certain that what she knew of women’s consciousness is crucial knowledge.

Then the task, to update this book for electronic publication. When I looked back at the collection, after years of seeing it in print, two of the poems presented themselves as the whisperings of a difficult-to-decipher subtext, whisperings about why I belonged to poetry, while story, to which I have since delivered myself, must stolidly refuse me. Both poems referred to the constant slipping away of image, name, language, from the ability to hold onto coherent identity and coherent story; image, name and language, as inadequate instruments to bring forth my history, that which lives in my bones. These poems especially brought forward the impossibility of my having an in-category identity and sense of place. They held something of the consequences of my inherited sense of being refugee—a child of many silenced languages and many successive displacements, who had a terribly hard time reaching clear names for that fragmented state of being groundless and in motion. In a way, I saw my task in revision to bring these two longer poems a bit closer to clarity about the impossibility of arriving at clarity regarding identity and place.

I’ve needed language more than any other tool, not only a language which counted me as a member of the generation of first native speakers in the family, but a poetic language of which I was the first speaker…Long before these poems took their first shape in the open air, I spent a long time just trying to speak—chiseling away at, puzzling through—to break open that stone of language after long ages to relieve my silence and give me entry into the larger language. Now, here, is what that stone—in some moment of compassion, some breach in its unyielding husk—has given me lately…and, now, from my position as writer of stories as well as of poems, I hope that this stone of language offers a bit more clarity.

To me, the nature of story seems so profoundly kaleidoscopic; its causality, so clearly complex; its form organic to a voice fleeing, wandering, in flight; its knots, unable to be calmly disentangled on a pre-scheduled page. Stories often require a poetic vision, and poems often ache for story.

I had no easy solution for the two poems in this collection most difficult to write. The first, These Snapshots I Have Lost, was written after the many rolls of film I brought back from the Soviet Union, then in the process of perestroika or restructuring, were burnt black because of some defect in my new, untested camera. And the title poem, The Stone of Language, which continues to whisper to me that in the multiple origins and pathways of language; in the successive displacements of one language by another; in the multiple losses of languages; in the congealing of language by the harshness of life, labor, and violence, as by trauma, displacement and flight, and by the often grievous unfulfillment of our gifts—is hidden the key, not to going home—which may not be possible anymore—but to understanding what home might be.

The stone of language, I’ve been asked, what could that mean? Many survivors and descendants of current, historical and intergenerational trauma know that silent stone in a family that does not or cannot speak of their own history, in a country—in a world—that constantly erases it by means of historical amnesia, climate catastrophe, gentrification, ethnic cleansing, all manner of wars of ferocity and traumas of violence, loss, and violation; and even through continuing systems of classification that obscure, distort, erase us and our stories. The language left is one of bombed and bulldozed rubble, and the elaborate overlay of lies. Those who would cover it all up often prefer stories clipped to fit within the outlines of a single body on the pavement; stories of simple causality that highlight the most recent crime and a single befuddled or demonic perpetrator, rather than the embedded grand masters of crime. So, stories recede, and language congeals.

Stone.

It is, especially,