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    artist ALVARO CARDONA-HINE & poet GEORGE KALAMARAS
 

top: 2008, Emanations 1, 2, 3. Acrylic on paper. 23" by 30" each
bottom: 2008, Sonata in Three Movements for an Unknown Instrument, First Movement, Fast. Acrylic on canvas. 10" by 120"
pedestal: animal skull
 

 

  Hypnosis of Breathing

   It looks, once again, like copper in the throat.
   The tea kettle. Guttered leaves. Stillness of a holiday.

   Three a.m. seems a long life away.
   The sky of Japanese scrolls uncreases a dog.

   Several shapes fly through one another.
   We think we're sleeping, believe the hypnosis of breathing.

   Honestly. Of course. What could be done? And would?
   Too many birds do not comprehend the language of snails.

   And so, copper. And so, it appeared in the gutters of the throat.
   One moment we think we're alive. Then we are music.

   It is true only the fingers grow after we smile?
   Sometimes we show our teeth-bones to the surliest dog.

George Kalamaras is Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including five chapbooks. His titles include Gold Carp Jack Fruit Mirrors (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2008), Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair (Quale Press, 2004), Borders My Bent Toward (Pavement Saw Press, 2003), and The Theory and Function of Mangoes (Four Way Books, 2000), which won the Four Way Books Intro Series. His co-authored book (with Alvaro Cardona-Hine), The Recumbent Galaxy, won the C&R Press Open Competition and will appear later this year.

His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada, Greece, India, Japan, Mexico, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, including The Best American Poetry 2008 and 1997, The Bitter Oleander, Hambone, New American Writing, New Letters, Sulfur, Talisman, TriQuarterly, and others. He is the recipient of Creative Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1993) and the Indiana Arts Commission (2001), and first prize in the 1998 Abiko Quarterly International Poetry Prize (Japan).

A long-time practitioner of yogic meditation, he is also the author of a 1994 scholarly book on Hindu mysticism and Western language theory from State University of New York Press, Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension: Symbolic Form in the Rhetoric of Silence. During 1994, he spent several months in India on an Indo-U.S. Advanced Research Fellowship from the Fulbright Foundation and the Indo-U.S. Subcommission on Education and Culture.

After living many years with their beagle, Barney, George and his wife, writer Mary Ann Cain, have welcomed a new beagle pup, Bootsie, into their home.
Alvaro Cardona-Hine is a poet, painter, composer, and translator. Born in 1926 in Costa Rica, he came to the United States in 1939. Since 1945, when he began writing poetry, he has written seventeen books, most recently a memoir, Thirteen Tangos for Stravinsky (Sherman Asher Publishing, 1999). Other books include The Gathering Wave (Scribner, 1969) and Four Poems About Sparrows (Eyelight Press, 1994). A History of Light (Sherman Asher Publishing, 1998) was named a Small Press Book Award Finalist for 1998.

His plays, music, text for music, and paintings have been viewed and heard by people all over the globe. He has had one-man and group shows of his art in California, Connecticut, Florida, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas, including his 1986 major one-man show, The Mythic Paintings, at the MacAllen International Museum in MacAllen, Texas. His work is in private collections around the world.

He has also received grants for his writing, including a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1978, a Bush Foundation Fellowship in 1978, and a Minnesota State Arts Board Individual Artist Grant in 1982.

Cardona-Hine’s work has been published in numerous anthologies, including Sur, Joven Literatura Norteamericana (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1970), The Contemporary World Poets (Harcourt, Brace, Javanovitch, 1967), The Other Side of a Poem (Harper & Row, 1977), and The Pushcart Prize IV: Best of the Small Presses, 1979, and in major magazines such as The Nation, Kayak, Prairie Schooner, Crazy Horse, and others.