March 13th Poetic Ticker Clicking
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a century after his birth, stems from his assertion that modern poetry had failed to respond to the crisis of man in the 20th century. He criticized, as he put it, "The sweatless paganism of Wallace Stevens . . . Eliot's weary Anglicanism. Yeats's fairytale Byzantium . . . Frost's jaunty pastoralism." None of these poets, according to Layton, had dealt with "man, tortured, humiliated and crucified." None had provided a portrait of man "that might have stiffened us for the cruelty, perversion, systematic lying and monstrous hypocrisy of the totalitarian regimes . . . or the no less damnable perversions and hypocrisies of the European bourgeois and imperialist."
of miles are often closer than two people sitting right next to each other on a bus--and [Albert] Goldbarth celebrates these surprising coincidences.
book makes the case that [William Carlos Williams] Williams' poem wasn't just for cold-hearted bastards. It was for everyone. Reading through the book, you can't help but feel that adult literature--and, indeed, our culture as a whole--has lost something through academic poetry's segregation. One William Carlos Williams poem inspired this entire delightful book. How much great art could we have, then, if poetry were allowed to stop gazing into its navel for obscure meaningfulness and were allowed, instead, to speak to its natural audience of malevolent plum-eaters and children of all ages?
are spontaneous, lyrical, physical and immediate. When his grandmother, a farmer, tells him she doesn't understand poems, he explains to her, "A poem is a song. It is in your heart and you can breathe it with your mouth."
with such a fury?" the narrator asks as he begins the tale. "Oh . . . the gods, of course . . . . Um . . . pride, honor, jealousy . . . Aphrodite . . . some game or other, an apple, Helen being more beautiful than somebody--it doesn't matter. The point is, Helen's been stolen, and the Greeks have to get her back."
to performance, Scotland is home to a crop of literary festivals and events, such as the annual garden readings in Callander; the monthly avant-garde brilliance of Michael Pedersen and Kevin Williamson's Neu! Reekie! at the Scottish Book Trust in Edinburgh; and the recent Margins festival in Glasgow.
"Collected Poems" is, however, a revelation, almost certainly among the two or three most important books of poetry that will be published this year. His poetry is helped, not hurt, by this context and relative abundance. Around this book's margins a scruffy and blood-warm autobiography emerges.
the overly-religious moral façade that thousands of poor, hysterical souls have adopted in this our honduras, including some writers and intellectuals, Juan Ramón Molina's "Metempsychosis" can definitely show us that a bard from the 19Th century was ahead of our time.
surely, to be to enrich the culture. Few achieve it. Under Fiona Sampson's dedicated editorship, Poetry Review did just that.
alongside this, that the ideal world is sort of there, if we can only meet it halfway. Poetry is, I think, an attempt to pre-empt the kind of speech that closes down the possibility of such a meeting, an attempt to keep oneself open linguistically and sensually and imaginatively to the world as it is, rather than using it as a movie screen for received ideas and second-rate wishes. Marx said the forest only echoes back what you shout into it--and this is very often true, perhaps more often than not, but I think the poet's task is to suggest that it needn't be.
what Tibetans have wanted to articulate," said the joint letter by Woeser and a senior Tibetan religious figure, Arjia Rinpoche, now living in exile in the United States, and Tibet's Amdo-based poet Gade Tsering.
after his [Frank O'Hara's] 30th birthday and the death of his close friend Bunny Lang, that the "I do this, I do that" pieces started to appear. The surreal devices are toned down and a distinctive intimate voice emerges, delivering the close at hand. As he says in a poem to the painter Robert Rauschenberg: "Yes, it's necessary, I'll do/what you say, put everything/aside but what is here." By 1961, however, these had evolved into a series of charismatic, fragmented poems spinning on colloquial phrases and half-glimpsed details, scattering themselves in pieces across the page.
for his previous collection, Stumbling in the Bloom, a collection exuberantly abuzz with "excesses, complexities, entanglements." Now the prolific West Coast poet is back with Crawlspace, his 16th collection, offering wordplay that's just as lively, but sounding a darker, less ebullient note.
farm in central Wisconsin. He received his MFA in poetry from the University of Alaska-Anchorage. His first collection, Yellowrocket, was a Midwest Booksellers' Choice Awards Honor Book. He'll celebrate the launch of his second book, Pitch, this Wednesday at the Loft Literary Center at 7pm. Here's one of his poems from the new collection.
respond to his poems. "For me writing poetry is an activity of the soul," says Abbott. "It is the way the soul expresses itself in a world that is noisy, busy, and demanding. It is a place where I can express my deepest feelings and thoughts in a way that allows the reader to say, I hope, 'I have felt that too.'"
and the British Council are teaming up to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1962 event, with 50 major international and Scottish authors coming together to debate the relevance of literature today and to attempt to build what organisers said would be "the most complete picture of writing and its relationship to modern life ever attempted". The modern incarnation of the 1962 event, which will take place in August, will be broadcast simultaneously online around the world.
American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War" was the nonfiction winner, and the poetry award went to Laura Kasischke's "Space, in Chains."
the Cincinnati Gardens, Professional Basketball, 1959
and here she writes about the yearning of children to find, amidst the clutter of adult life, places they can call their own.
will be held in the town of York, where Sarton, one of Maine's most important authors, lived in her "house by the sea." The centennial celebration will include music, commentaries, poetry readings and even a clambake. Details are available at the Sarton 100 website, maysarton100.org. In preparation for the festivities, here's a characteristically vivid and witty poem by the poet herself.
Oh, Washington
we spend our lives longing to see: the "smile of love." Yet there is a shadow: the "smile of deceit." Are these opposites or two aspects of the same relationship? Somehow there is a "smile of smiles" that combines the two.
alterations do a fine job of conveying a poem's spirit. Rather than using the literal "shriveled" to describe a sail, he says it's "grey with mildew." Rather than telling us that "dead bodies" are smuggled into "a silent world," he says "the dead" are so transported. In general, while one can quibble about Robertson's book, "The Deleted World" is pleasurable whether or not it's a good translation of [Tomas] Transtromer.
I have performed alternating poetry and music with the Takacz String Quartet, and last year Bruce Springsteen and I did a show where Bruce played behind poems like "Shirt" and "Jersey Rain"--and that actually worked surprisingly well. But the music that seems to most naturally fit is jazz. That's why we call it "POEMJAZZ."
Graham Greene, say, or Muriel Spark, or François Mauriac--have proved so good at limning the inner space of character. They do not see the person as a product of causation, but as one who acts out of deliberate motives, who risks the consequences of transgression, and for whom the search for God is the search for a judge who can free them from their self-condemnation.
Kenya Noon
Self-Portrait as Amnesiac
By Petrarch, translated by Nicholas Kilmer
Calvin Forbes's "Momma Said" with a 2009 article about a mother giving her adult son a lesson on baking Irish soda bread--"Nanny's Recipe, Still in Demand."
For Sale
Between the neighbor's cherry trees
Ode to El Cabrito
"The Fish, the Man, and the Spirit"--I must have been in college--I remember doing a double-take. A poem involving a crabby dialogue between a fish and a man stood out radically from the field of English Romantic poetry I was reading then, wherein a man immersed in a landscape typically falls into a quiet meditation.
saying you forgave me
as a poet as he had already published a few books, like his most famous 'La ragazza Carla', which was released in 1962.
approach to conflicts and his rejection of tyranny--whether that of dictators or revolutionaries--leaves him with many detractors who cannot find satisfaction in his refusal to settle for rigid extremes. He is insistent that the welfare of the individual and the individual's freedom to think, write, and act unhindered takes precedence over any overarching ideological vision, however emancipatory it may perceive itself and actually be.
possible in Turkish due to the narrow sound range of the language, the poet lists the primary recurring word constellations that haunted him in "Gül" as ay (moon, or the expression "ah!"), ayı (the animal bear), aya (to the moon or holy) and ayva (quince); gül, which means both rose and to smile; and kırağı (frost), which can be broken down to a number of meanings, including "meadow," the verb "to break," "poison" and "web."
for quite some time, but as soon as they are written down, the register clears, as it were, and I have to work with what is on the paper. I think of it as being similar to working with metal: as long as the lines are in my head, they are warm and malleable; when they are written down, they are less workable, a little like when worked metal is plunged into a cooling tank. Not much happens on paper, and though I type the poems up later, I would very rarely make changes at that stage.
pressing on [Andrew] Motion's agenda: "The next thing to take over my life in a big way," as he describes it.
masterpiece. But it's redolent of literary history. The young Michael Ondaatje, an aspiring writer new to Canada, went to stay there; [Al] Purdy welcomed him, as he did so many others. His poem "House Guest" describes an earlier, longer visit by the Communist writer Milton Acorn; for two months the pair quarrelled about politics, drank, wrote poems, and listened to "how the new house built with salvaged old lumber/bent a little in the wind and dreamt of the trees it came from."