Barbara Trachtenberg

Interview with Richard Brown Lethem

2011-04-05T11:21:00.000-07:00

This interview with Richard Brown Lethem was conducted in February, 2005 and published in Words and Images.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sE05CfMBiftEAmLmqSJzhOt2JLFi6zjU32ljXRI69zo/edit?hl=en

2011-03-30T14:13:00.000-07:00

Interview with Doug Holder, poet and poetry mover and shaker, was fun. He's a trove in himself---a life history I'd never have guessed at. Shared stories, different details. Thanks Doug and hoping to share more poetry with you.

Newton Open Studios 2011 will interfere with the Mass Poetry Festival but I am running a Common Threads poetry discussion group at the JP Library, Thursday, April 28, at 6:30 PM, coming right up! I'm posting it now.

View and listen to the three-part INTERVIEW with Doug Holder and Barbara Trachtenberg on this blog!

Doug Holder Interviews Barbara Trachtenberg: Part II of III

2011-03-30T10:10:00.001-07:00

Doug Holder Interviews Barbara Trachtenberg: Part III of III

2011-03-30T10:04:00.001-07:00

Doug Holder Interviews Barbara Trachtenberg: Part I of III

2011-03-30T09:17:00.000-07:00

Visual Art—Photography

2011-03-07T19:26:00.001-08:00

What's Left Behind

2010-11-29T13:47:00.000-08:00

What’s Left Behind

One mid-September afternoon

I peddle past a chipmunk, leveled

and then a garden glove, its fingers

splayed intact. The chipmunk’s form,

his nut-brown stripes of perfect fur are

one dimension of who he was.

Home by dark, I lay my bike

by plants and grasses, things that bloom

by plan and cluster in my flower bed.

A raccoon’s planted by the berry bush!

I stop my eyes to take him in.

He lies in swoon face down and never

moves at my approach not to

bother a soul. I slide my shovel

beneath his weight, surprised he is

so light and lay him in the barrow,

his fine long fingers draped beyond

the edge.

We barrel along the winding

drive and the moon lays bare his fight—

the scat, the tufts of bloodied fur.

We cross Fray’s Road, his nails shine sharp

beneath the moon, and he and I

agree to slide him deep

within the anonymous trees.

Back home the ground is writhing.

In that soft and pungent place

the maggots already thriving

on what he's left behind.

—Barbara Trachtenberg

Exhibit, September, 2010: Impressions of Boston

2010-11-29T13:39:00.000-08:00

Weather Patterns

For JoAnn

The mailman couldn’t come today—

my walkway’s still encased in ice.

I walked around the mounds of snow

and traveled to the old PO.

I reached across the countertop

and grasped the rubber-banded pile

and figured I would trash it all

until I saw the card from you

dated just a year from now.

The cancers come to lie like thieves.

Beneath the snow they leave their paths.

I pulled my spade out of the snow

and dug it deep to the length of the blade

a spade’s an inverted heart-shaped thing.

For forty years I’ve saved your words

our children children when we met.

Your letters came like sweets to read—

mine sent like secrets to be found.

The mourning dove just pecks the ground

digging at shrouds of ice on ice.

A comfort’s mounding all around.

Please coat the earth, protect its skin.

Beware, lay bare a slice a time.

Just let us write our lives and bind

them for our children’s eyes.

It snows again the snow on snow

the white on white the storm on storm

beneath the blankets of our lives.

Now lay a pillow on our earth

and snuff the breath of hows and whys

we used to figure out our lives

so soon we’ll shovel layers to level

the petrified remains.

—Barbara Trachtenberg

Children's Fiction

2009-10-15T12:29:00.000-07:00

2009, The Monkey Painters: a children’s story for four- to eight-year-olds, to be illustrated.

2008, This Way and That Way, a children’s book for ages 1-5, to be illustrated.

2007, Up and Down Days, a children’s book for ages 1-5, to be illustrated.

Articles on Culture

2009-03-11T13:28:00.000-07:00

Coming! Growing Up on the Lower East Side in the Twenties; fictionalized oral history

June, 1995: “Using Oral Histories to Elicit Reflective Writings: The Experience of Being an Immigrant Adolescent in the Urban U.S., MultiCultural Review, Vol. 4, 2, http://www.petrolinas.biz/MCR2001-03/toc1995.htm

March, 1977: “Shoplifting in New England: Any number can play," The New Englander, Vol. 23, 11, p. 40.

Academic Writing

2009-03-11T13:27:00.000-07:00

1995: “Emotional Lives of Refugee and Immigrant Mothers in the Urban U.S.: Strategies for Acculturation,” in Selected Papers on Refugee Issues IV, Ann M. Rynearson and James Phillips, Editors, CORI (Committee on Refugees and Immigrants) Publications of the American Anthropological Association; Part II: Starting Life in a New Land: Communities and Individuals;
http://www.aaanet.org/gad/coripub.htm#3

Poetry

2009-03-11T13:02:00.000-07:00

Best Poem: http://bestpoem.wordpress.com/2009/01/

A Poetry Journal
Barbara Trachtenberg January 31, 2009
Early May

The dogwood blossoms seem best when I’m alone.
The white one’s brown, mottled kisses
like smudged lipstick on each petal.

I love the blossoms’ four prone petals
thrown back shallow cups of sun
iridescent in the gathering afternoon storm.

Their dancers’ arms interrupt each other,
children, calling, “Me, me! Oh, see my spring.”

Cut now in a glass pitcher
they’re as vulnerable in their perfect beauty
as our most private moments together.

Boston City Hall Poetry Exhibit

"Raymond and Thelma in Boston"

Barbara Trachtenberg

Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking. Walt Whitman

We are seventeen and twenty-five
as your hand pulls me with you away
from Boston, your feet planted, mine barely
defined, as though unsure of my step
in the coming night
of this chill June day in Boston
the sky pushing blue,
some fire forcing us on.

“Thelma, here are the chickens of my grandparents’ farm.
and there the tomatoes and a prairie dog.
We ate squirrels, you know.”
“Not koshered,” I say.
“Not in Boston,” you say.
“A mockingbird, Thelma!” your head bobbing,
your hand still grabbing at mine, “Let’s find it.”

Could we have met in Missouri?
In the 30s or 40s? Talked to each other?
A Yiddle in Middle America, my great-grandfather
a Russian, peddling rags to that Scottish farmer
Of the Methodist persuasion?
They lived like cousins, in city and country,
depended on each other somehow
in a time Civil, in a state in the middle
of middle America, later come to Boston.

In this other June night warmed by
quilts and our bodies, we remember them
lying near each other in their cemeteries now,
lying, like us, in the beds of
recycled cloth and earth we come from,
meeting each other in our bedtime talk
in Boston, as we recall
seventeen and twenty-five,
the farms, the rags.

Reviews

2009-03-11T12:03:00.001-07:00

Theatre

November, 2004: Theater Review of Permanent Collection, in ArtsEditor, “Permanent Collection at the New Repertory Theatre”
http://www.artseditor.com/html/opinions/1104_permanent.shtml

Books

Winter, 1991: Book review of Hopeful Openings: A Study of Five Women's Development Organizations in Latin American and the Caribbean, by Yudelman, Sally; (The women in international development (WID) movement)
www.anthrosource.net/doi/ pdfplus/10.1525/jlat.1991.3.2.72 OR http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1525/jlca.1991.3.2.72?cookieSet=1&journalCode=jlca.3 (Latin American Anthropology Review)

Short Stories

2009-03-11T11:26:00.000-07:00

I am completing a series of linked short stories that comprise a collection that present varied facets of the character of Julia as she responds to and interacts with the stories of other characters. As a teacher, researcher and mother, Julia finds her personal life spinning an internal thread through her work and connection with young people, immigrant women and elderly people.

"The Right Documents"

Each week, after taping immigrant Central American mothers, Julia, an ethnographer, wrote fieldnotes in her car by the overhead light, the neighbors probably wondering. Having achieved a motherhood she had never been able to garner for herself, the women and their lives stayed with Julia in the years ahead. This story captures her conversations with the women, represented by one character—an immigrant mother in an imaginary relationship with Julia. The story brings to light an ethnographic process of reaching deeper into oneself by reaching out to those who so generously share their lives with the anthropologist.

A fifteen-minute segment of this story was read at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology (Sfaa) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, March, 2009. This reading can be heard on iTunes between the 16:40 and 30:00 mark on the link below:

http://sfaapodcasts.net/2009/04/30/without-footnotes-writing-creative-ethnography/