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Author<\/h2>\nHelene Pilibosian<\/p>\n
Helene Pilibosian was born in Boston to Armenian parents who survived the Armenian Genocide. Graduating from Harvard University with an ADA in humanities in 1960, she married, traveled and became the first woman editor of The Armenian Mirror-Spectator.<\/p>\n
Her poetry has appeared in such magazines as The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Louisiana Literature, The Hollins Critic, North American Review, Seattle Review, Ellipsis, Weber: The Contemporary West, Poetry Salzburg Review, Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies as well as many anthologies. Some of her poems were finalists in literary competitions of journals such as NEW LETTERS, others won prizes and one recently placed first in the Lucidity Clarity Contest.<\/p>\n
She published the books Carvings from an Heirloom: Oral History Poems, the Writer’s Digest award-winning At Quarter Past Reality: New and Selected Poems, History\u2019s Twists: The Armenians (honorable mention), and A New Orchid Myth from CreateSpace (honorable mention from Writer\u2019s Digest). Her early work has been cited in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature. She holds a degree in humanities from Harvard University.<\/p>\n
They Called Me Mustafa: Memoir of an Immigrant, which she co-wrote with her father, was honored at a Massachusetts State House commemoration and licensed by Alexander Street Press for a database on immigration. She has recently published My Literary Profile: A Memoir, which won an honorable mention from the New England Book Festival 2012. Ohan Press at http:\/\/home.comcast.net\/~hsarkiss has published 12 books, some in English and some in Armenian.<\/p>\n
A New Orchid Myth, considers the immigration of a married couple to Earth from the planet Tome. They are Mr. and Mrs. Everydream and are confused by the different kind of civilization on Earth. They have much to do to get used to ways of life in New York City, where they have settled. However, extensive travel within the states gives them and the reader a broader landscape.<\/p>\n
Trying to find the basis of fascination with myth in outer space, the chosen characters study these elements on their own and collect some answers. However, as immigrants to New York City, they possess a great curiosity about Earth ways they might be able to use. As they travel extensively, they pick up some ideas along the way.<\/p>\n
Sunflowers and orchids are important in this fantasy-narrative. The sunflower seeds provide great nourishment here and in their home planet. Orchids also exist there but are wilted and becoming sterile as are the people. What is needed there is optimism.<\/p>\n
For these flowers form part of a fantasy life on the planet Tome and also have great value on Earth. The red on orchids seems to symbolize optimism, missing on Tome but very much alive on Earth. They have a plan to save their daughter from potential kidnappers by using orchids sent through the stratosphere. They have a bigger plan to save Tome by setting up a sunflower-seed distribution company there.<\/p>\n
The worry is that people from the home planet will kidnap their daughter Taralee to try to revitalize their own system. Eventually the Everydreams develop a plan to send orchids to the planet, thus saving it and themselves. Then forgiveness rules.<\/p>\n
Poems describe the best attributes of many of the states, which they visit. For comic relief, the characters Plastic and Polyester appear occasionally and either comment or run around New York City. Manhattan and California win for description of American places. And there are a few Armenian characters in the background \u2013 Mr. and Mrs. Garmirian and Maral Laramian among them.<\/p>\n
The happy ending of optimism given and restored boosts the morale of the people in the book and the people who read the book. The work has the most appeal to parents, grandparents, adolescents, art lovers and residents of the many states described. It indirectly sends the messages of coexistence and understanding, which anyone can use. For author and reader, it provides an exploration of imagery and imagination and is the type of poetry that doesn\u2019t intimidate.<\/p>\n
Poet Alan Semerdjian wrote of her work, “Marianne Moore is a good starting place for entering Pilibosian’s work.Their writings share the same natural kind of prosaic structure, attention to sibilance and syntax, and transformative quality. Pilibosian, now at a different point in her life, places herself as a successor of modernist ideals
\nand attentiveness to image.”<\/p>\n
Richard R. Blake, official reviewer for Amazon.com wrote, ” The beauty of her choice of words brings to mind delicacies, rich, delicious tidbits of many flavors. Contemporary themes bring to light the tenor of the times, the pressures brought about by the turmoil and uncertainties of today.”<\/p>\n
Helene Pilibosian’s poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies. Some of her poems were finalists in literary competitions or won first prizes and honorable mentions. She has published the books Carvings from an Heirloom: Oral History Poems, the Writer’s Digest award-winning At Quarter Past Reality: New and Selected Poems, and History\u2019s Twists: The Armenians. Her early work has been cited in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature. She holds a degree in humanities from Harvard University.<\/p>\n
Formerly a writer\/editor of The Armenian Mirror-Spectator, she now heads Ohan Press (http:\/\/home.comcast.net\/~hsarkiss), a private bilingual micropress which has published 12 books of both prose and poetry, including her story My Literary Profile: A Memoir, awarded honorable mention by the New England Book Festival.<\/p>\n
TWO GIFTS OF LUCK
\nTwo tears spilled
\nupon the stones of Tome,
\nthose still configurations
\nof form that wore rain
\nand wind and sun for clothing.
\nTwo tears fell upon a ceremony
\nlike two chimes upon a room.
\nTwo clergy sprinkled
\nholy water upon their Tomian names,
\nAmeth and Gran.
\nBlue silk announced her metamorphosis
\nfrom girl to wife,
\nwhile black silk formality
\ndressed the groom.
\nThe chants of the ceremony
\nencircled their rings
\nand tied them with invisible strings.
\nThe stars of Tome shone
\nwith the songs of ancestry.
\nThe horizon accompanied
\non the pipe organ of the family.
\nSome ice dropped
\ninto the glass of rituals
\nfrom the mountain summit,
\nwhere mirth responded
\nto the temperature.
\nCould another life
\non Earth drink dry water
\nin a rocky riverbed?
\nParents then paced
\na floor of cold shale
\nwhile the couple cut
\nthe sunflower cake.
\nThen two lamps looked out
\nof the night like eyes
\nprobing the stratosphere
\nfor chance hiding there.
\nThe two gifts
\nof olive and its branch
\nglowed like phosphorus
\nthrough the ifs and whens
\nand wherefores to be,
\nlighting their way through
\nthe space of where.
\nTwo ceremonies set their watches,
\none for their rings,
\nanother for their travel-codes.
\nWHERE WAS EVERYWHERE?
\nTwo parachutes floated down
\nas one upon their silver color.
\nThe Earth was land and landed
\na couple to plant their guilt
\nor lack of it. Their
\nchoice was clothing made
\nfrom the rags or the rage
\nof their circumstance.
\nThey spread greetings
\na bit lavishly along the
\navenues of the strange.
\nWhy and where gave them
\njokes, suits and dresses,
\nemployment of the employable.
\nThey met office partitions
\nand talked to the machines
\nafter being dubbed Mr. and Mrs.
\nby the bus on the corner.
\nThe New York space recreated them.
\nThe buildings there with trains
\nas their servants
\nliked Mr. and Mrs. Everydream
\nwho conducted the music of the videos
\nwith a spoon. They were living out
\na teenage they never lived.
\nThey swore allegiance to symphony
\nto prove their patriotism
\nand tried to fathom the cymbal clash.
\nWhere was everywhere,
\neveryone? No harm was done
\nwith that experiment of jeans and rock.
\nThe future willed its flurry.
\nThey made it servant
\nand served it tea.
\nThey caught the weather
\nand tried to teach it equality,
\nfor it had convictions,
\ntoo many, yet too few.
\nTheir teenage crawled out
\nof the tunnel of its past
\nlike a flare burned out
\nof the fireworks of their revolt.
\nHousing calmed them
\nto an apartment with a table
\nset with the grapes of awareness.
\nIt defied antiquity of any kind,
\nand they inspected mind, idea by idea.
\nDREAMS FLYING BY
\nWas it a dream flying by
\nor a proverb
\ndressed in feathers,
\na parrot, a cardinal, a bronzed idea
\nof a feathered persona?
\nThe birds paraded above,
\nflapping wings for attitude
\nin their aviary club,
\ntheir facts rustling in the air
\nwith a tint of blue so strong
\nit steered peacocks aground.
\nDown Flamingo Lane
\norange-pink was the ink
\nof a neat nape.
\nThen there was glamour.
\nPossibilities of the fur
\nshe declined to wear:
\nlemur, mink, alpaca,
\ntheir eyes a reminder.
\nThe giraffe\u2019s neck hid the tree,
\nbit an apple for a snack
\nwhile imposing the top of the tree
\nupon curiosity.
\nA leopard cub purred
\nlike a feline find, then napped
\nas a sibling substituted.
\nA child shrieked\u2014
\nbut there were so many\u2014
\nat the elephant\u2019s tusk
\nor trunk or charisma
\nwhile the parents dabbled
\nin this Noah\u2019s Ark
\nthat needed them for company.
\nThey fed the animals kernels
\nof their cast-off childhoods,
\na handful at a nibbling,
\nall for a dime.
\nMICROPHONE TONE
\nThe timer ticked
\nlike a metronome
\nmeasuring her speech
\nprompted by patterns in the floor tiles
\nand spoken through steam.
\nStyle waited for afternoon
\nin a suburban store.
\nOf medium height
\nwith a delicate weight
\nminus self-deception,
\nshe profiled like a portrait
\nby John Singer Sargent.
\nThe salesperson wrapped
\na gray suit with pin stripe reasoning
\nand a scarce red scarf
\nwhile a machine chewed her charge card
\nand returned it like a tip.
\nShe wrapped her words
\naround the microphone,
\nturning stage fright into words.
\nShe told of the lipstick
\nconfused with a creamed brie,
\nof the triangular weave of a rug,
\nof heavy air carrying dust,
\nof owners on bicycles
\nand in used automobiles
\nmaking the broth for charity
\nwith home-grown herbs\u2014
\nall on her home planet.
\nShe told of family
\nwithout the telephone\u2019s ring
\nor an advanced system of wiring,
\nof the custom of stories
\ndeliberating what had been
\nwithout spying on the future,
\nof laws worn as old railroad ties,
\nof no new appointments
\nfor the leadership clan,
\nof verbs that crawled
\ntoo slowly around nouns
\nrather than cultivating them.
\nComplaints sometimes husked wheat,
\ndropped seed that unwrapped
\nand grew new plants out of old situations.
\nThe timer didn\u2019t complain.
\nVOCATIONAL JADE
\nThe yellowed soil filtered
\nclay but not by pain,
\nfor, nerveless, it felt no more
\nthan Earth turned by the worm.
\nThe appellation Gran,
\nstanding next to his woman
\nin a thinking stride,
\nscribbled thoughts on his pottery.
\nThis mass anticipates a pear, he wrote,
\nan Anjou with a stem,
\nbig at the bottom so it will stand
\nfor a hundred hours on end
\nas a clay lamp clamps time.
\nDone, it should be glazed
\nwith an ample greenish jade
\nbearing spots of imperfection,
\nfor the perfect pear appears
\nindelible to reason.
\nNext, a red apple should hold
\nthe tree to its example,
\npromising a crunch to teeth
\nof bovine rectitude,
\nthe human angle superimposed
\nfor nutritional accounting.
\nThe red should look peerless
\nas on Snow White’s cheek
\nbefore she met the witch,
\nthen dulled with ripeness, shining only
\nfrom the bulb attached to its base,
\nbase only to degenerates.
\nAnd what of grapes, the globules
\nthat grant turgidity to color
\nas a shower of shapes?
\nAnd what of other fruit,
\neach a round little mass
\nto hold water’s concentration
\nand that of the human eye
\nfrom its birth to its death?
\nLimits to potter’s clay and wheel
\nspun like the planet
\nin faster revolutions.
\nMillions of likenesses of motion,
\neven the same devotion or more
\ncould not attain a score
\nlike that of the roundness
\nof the endless surface here,
\nso difficult to repay.<\/p>\n
http:\/\/home.comcast.net\/~hsarkiss<\/p>\n