{"id":4262,"date":"2019-12-03T10:12:30","date_gmt":"2019-12-03T07:12:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.lnb.lt\/lituanistika\/?p=4262"},"modified":"2019-12-03T10:12:30","modified_gmt":"2019-12-03T07:12:30","slug":"lithuanian-american-poet-and-zen-practitioner-al-zolynas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lnb.lt\/lituanistika\/2019\/12\/03\/lithuanian-american-poet-and-zen-practitioner-al-zolynas\/","title":{"rendered":"Lithuanian-American Poet and  Zen Practitioner AL ZOLYNAS"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>By <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/alliant.academia.edu\/DavidBainbridge\">David A. Bainbridge<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\" \/>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Al Zolynas and Federico Moramarco Poetry Reading\" width=\"840\" height=\"630\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/GiG_DnXax78?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>I would like to introduce you to my favorite poet, Algirdas Zolynas. His most recent book was his just released, <strong>Near and Far<\/strong>, Garden Oak Press, December, 2019,141 pages. $11.69 at B&amp;N.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Al\u2019s poems are personal, rich in\nemotion, and often leavened with humor. Many capture the beauty and mystery of\nevery day life. Some of my favorites include: Bread, In Gratitude; Near\nSunskai, Lithuania; Watching a Day; the Western Felt Works,&nbsp;Leaving Kaunas,\n1944,&nbsp;and Sideways Down Rapids. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Also worth a look in earlier books:\nLove in the Classroom, The Zen of Housework, Nothing to do\u2014Nowhere to go, The\nWay He\u2019d Like it, Running down Summit Avenue in Saint Paul in a Heavy Snowfall,\nand Living with Others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Al was born in Austria of Lithuanian\nparents in 1945. They had fled the Soviet advance and survived bombing raids in\nBerlin. His parents became part of the wave of 11 million displaced people (DP)\nafter the war. His father had been an attorney and one of his grandfathers\nsigned the Lithuanian Declaration of Independence in 1918. As refugees they\nwere refused entry to the US, where you had to have a sponsor, a place to live,\nand a guarantee that you would not displace American workers or, better yet, a\nrelated American citizen.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p>In 1949 the Zolynas family was\naccepted under Australia\u2019s Displaced Persons Program and was able to leave\nGermany. Australia ultimately accepted 10,000 Lithuanian DPs from 1947-1952.\nMost of the DPs were \u201cindentured\u201d manual laborers for two years on government\nprojects\u2014regardless of past experience or education. His father worked for the\ncentral railway station in Sydney cleaning and preparing train cars. In the boy\nscouts Al learned the plants and animals of Lithuania while camping in the\noutback. Eventually his family was allowed into the US and moved to Chicago\nwhere many of the Lithuanian immigrants to America had settled. The refugee\nexperience helped shape his approach to poetry and his interest in Zen\nteachings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He earned his PhD at the University of\nUtah and lived and taught in Utah and Minnesota before settling in California.\nHe taught writing and literature at Alliant International University, San Diego\nfor more than 30 years. Al has been a poetry editor, resident poet in the\nschools, Minnesota Out Loud Traveling Poet, volunteer for the Hunger Project,\nand Fulbright-Hays Fellow to India.&nbsp; He lives, writes, and leads a Zen\nworkshop in Escondido, California.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>His poems have been widely published\nin journals, anthologies, and many are accessible on the web. Many have been\ntranslated into Lithuanian, Spanish, and Polish. His books include 4 Petunia\nAvenue, Quatch Press, 1987; The New Physics, Wesleyan University Press, 1979;\nUnder Ideal Conditions, Laterthanever Press, 1994 (San Diego Book Award, Best\nPoetry, 1994); The Same Air, Intercultural Studies Forum, 1997; and Near and\nFar 2019. With Fred Moramarco, he was co-editor of Men of Our Time:&nbsp; An\nAnthology of Male Poetry in Contemporary America, University of Georgia Press, May\n1992 and The Poetry of Men\u2019s Lives: An International Anthology, University of\nGeorgia Press, 2004 (San Diego Book Award for Best Poetry Anthology in 2005).\nHe also translated Silvija Lomsargyt\u0117-Pukien\u0117&#8217;s memoir, The Parallels of Dita:\nSurviving Nazism and Communism in Lithuania.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p><em>As a long-time practitioner of Zen, I\u2019ve been trained to pay attention to \u201cwhat is,\u201d what\u2019s \u201cjust so\u201d in this moment&#8211;our perceptions, our emotional states, our thoughts, our resistance, the ceaseless change occurring around us. In so doing, over a very long period of time, we come closer to simply appreciating the mystery that we dwell in and that we are. As a poet, I want to \u201crecord\u201d some of that appreciation in language that is alive, interesting, and accessible. Doesn\u2019t the best poetry point us in the direction of that mystery? And doesn\u2019t great poetry help us to actually experience it?<\/em><\/p><cite>AZ <\/cite><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By David A. Bainbridge I would like to introduce you to my favorite poet, Algirdas Zolynas. His most recent book was his just released, Near and Far, Garden Oak Press, December, 2019,141 pages. $11.69 at B&amp;N. Al\u2019s poems are personal, rich in emotion, and often leavened with humor. Many capture the beauty and mystery of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.lnb.lt\/lituanistika\/2019\/12\/03\/lithuanian-american-poet-and-zen-practitioner-al-zolynas\/\" class=\"more-link\">Toliau skaityti<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8222;Lithuanian-American Poet and  Zen Practitioner AL ZOLYNAS&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1581,1555],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-books","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lnb.lt\/lituanistika\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lnb.lt\/lituanistika\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lnb.lt\/lituanistika\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lnb.lt\/lituanistika\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lnb.lt\/lituanistika\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4262"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lnb.lt\/lituanistika\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4262\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lnb.lt\/lituanistika\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lnb.lt\/lituanistika\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lnb.lt\/lituanistika\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}