Tuesday, July 31, 2007

July 31st Poetic Ticker Clicking

News Article Tape:
Blog Entry Tape:

July 31st forum announcement

Dear Poetry Aficionados,

Poetry & Poets in Rags

I love it when News at Eleven has a good amount of poetry, and this week it does. We also deal quite a bit with ghosts, believe it or not, and mummies. In Great Regulars, black birds and crows are there. Be sure to check out Katie Haegele's column, as the concrete has begun to move. Linda Sue Grimes deals with eternal life. And Frieda Hughes deals with those shock waves at death that go beyond God. There are many Poetic Obituaries this week as well. Check them out too.

Yours,
Rus

Our links:

IBPC: Poetry & Poets in Rags

Poetry & Poets in Rags blog

IBPC Home

IBPC Newswire

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News at Eleven: There were some people

in those workshops who clearly thought they already knew what good writing was. So they tended to criticize from a particular position they had already taken. That seems a shame. Because there are an assortment of people in a program--both faculty and peers--who can really help you shake up all your perceptions about writing. And that would seem to me to be the best part about being there. If you're really looking to be a better writer, why not be open to every suggestion and see what happens?

from Atlantic Unbound: Writers in Training

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News at Eleven: For [Moica Arac de] Nyeko,

Femrite helped bridge the gap and brought in women writers to the literary landscape through seminars and workshops. The organisation had a room christened 'The Den of Wisdom' furnished with a computer, mattress and blanket only.

"We would go in there and literally close the world out, just thinking about the stories we were working on," she recalls.

from The Standard: It was a long wait for Caine Prize winner

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News at Eleven: Some major media attention

came my way afterward. I was featured in a segment on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" and in an article in Time magazine. I should have been thrilled by all the notice. But I've been saddened by it instead.

Even though all three poems I recited had something important to say, the media reduced me from the complex person I am to a one-dimensional figure by repeatedly discussing my reading of just one--the poem about race.

from The Washington Post: I Am More Than Just a Black Woman

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News at Eleven: --"Always on the Train,"

by Ruth Stone.

from Times Argus: Poet laureate finds rhyme and reason in ordinary life

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News at Eleven: Inverse

By Alan Franks

from The Times: Inverse
also The Times: The Stowaway
also The Times: Lock-In
also The Times: The Poetry of Alan Franks

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News at Eleven: The markets speak for themselves.

From sweet Lancaster corn to zucchini blossoms to Fairy Tale eggplant, seasonal treats abound on farm stand tables throughout the city. If only we could "carry within us an orchard" writes Li-Young Lee in this moving and vivid poem. Enjoy the summer's bounty--the "nectar at the roadside"--before this fleeting season passes.

From Blossoms
By Li-Young Lee

from The Evening Bulletin: Savor Summer's Bounty

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News at Eleven: City Visible attempts to gather

in its arms poets in "dialogue” with one another, "poets who more or less care about the same things and whose work has influenced each others'." As an underlying ideology for the art makers in any region of the world, this seems the freshest and most embracing view of how we interact with stimuli.

from Bookslut: The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century edited by William Allegrezza and Raymond Bianchi

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News at Eleven: The land that gave the world

Robert Burns also has the dubious honor of producing the "world's worst poet." Now fans of the hapless William McGonagall are campaigning to put him in the pantheon of Scottish literary greats.

from International Herald-Tribune: Love him or loathe him, William McGonagall is a Scottish literary legend

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News at Eleven: [Natascha Kampusch] ran down the street

and appealed for help to the first woman she met, but the woman didn't understand her: how would the dead speak? Natascha spoke like a radio announcer, imitating the only female voice she had heard in eight years. She was a waif, weighing less than six and a half stone; the policewoman who was the first official to see her described her as "white as cheese", an unpoetic but no doubt perfectly exact expression of the effects of the underworld.

from The Guardian: Ghost writing

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News at Eleven: Another mummy was found buried

with a love poem written by his bereaved wife.

Dating to around the time Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, the verse bears striking similarities to the famous tragedy.

It reads, in part:

You always said [. . .]

from National Geographic: Korean Mummies Reveal Medical Clues, Love Poems

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News at Eleven (Back Page): A poem emerges.

In some sort of subtle, magical way, says [James] Brandenburg, poetry--both writing it and reading it--allows participants to circumvent the rational, logical part of the brain and go deep. Metaphor, imagery and symbolism combine to unlock the mind's secrets.

from San Antonio Express-News: Adviser believes in healing power of words

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Great Regulars: For example, the line

"But syns that I so kyndely ame served" will probably be read as irony by us ("kyndely" been taken to mean unkindly); however, it may actually have meant something like "But since she has treated me in accordance with her nature (kind)". I think that this relates to some of the issues of tradition and the new raised on the Vintage Twins blog."

They fle from me that sometyme did me seke by Sir Thomas Wyatt

from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: Poem of the week

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Great Regulars: Of course, youth itself

will not have aged, and it makes sense that his poems will not age. They will sit eternally on the page ever speaking in the speaker's voice.

However, if he finds that his poems are aging with "time's furrows," he shall expect his own life will atone for his own death.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 22

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Great Regulars: [Edward] Picot said that "many of the ideas

of concrete poetry"--in which the shape of the typography on the printed page is an element of the poem--"have been picked up by hyperliterature. Instead of having a poem about a bird which is shaped like a bird, you can have a poem about a bird which is shaped like a bird and moves across the page like a bird."

from Katie Haegele: The Philadelphia Inquirer: Still looking at blackbirds

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Great Regulars: Perhaps when the diameter

of the bomb in the poem reaches beyond the seat of God, and He appears unmoved and ineffective, it is because God knows it isn't His fault. He blames us.

from Frieda Hughes: The Times: Shock waves

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Great Regulars: Poem: "Tell Me"

by Anne Pierson Wiese, from Floating City: Poems.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: For the week of July 30, 2007

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Great Regulars: The chances are very good

that you are within a thousand yards of a man with a comb-over, and he may even be somewhere in your house. Here's Maine poet, Wesley McNair, with his commentary on these valorous attempts to disguise hair loss.

Hymn to the Comb-Over

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 122

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Great Regulars: Even as Professor Lazenby strode

about, his students were discovering, through instant messages on their laptops and text messages on their cellphones, that there had been a shooting in one of the dorms that morning and that more shots were being fired in an engineering building nearby. The lecture quickly became an exercise in practicing journalism.

from Charles McGrath: The New York Times: Tales of Two Tragedies

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Great Regulars: In other words, the flocks plunge

him [Mark Cocker] deeply into himself while seeming marvellously other than himself, compelling him to ask questions about how language can contain a sight so amazing, and also to wonder how the birds articulate elements in his deep un- or sub-conscious.

from Andrew Motion: The Guardian: As the crow flies

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Great Regulars: We are told that Mr. Cogito

can "no longer/stand the colloquial turns" (in context, [Zbigniew] Herbert clearly means "commonplace," not "colloquial"), that a prosecutor has a "yellow indicator finger" ("index finger"?), and that you can hear "the tolling of scattered walls" ("collapsing walls"?).

Still, Herbert wrote many poems; mistakes are to be expected.

from David Orr: The New York Times: Translating Zbigniew Herbert

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Great Regulars: Whether the man-eating creature,

said to resemble a giant sloth, exists or not, it reveals something about the human need to imagine a being profoundly other than ourselves that yet somehow reflects (or consumes) US. Here is a poem by Wislawa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh:

Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition

from Robert Pinsky: The Washington Post: Poet's Choice

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Great Regulars: In poetry we are continually being reborn

into new fairylands. The poet in the child is a traveller into fairyland, and if at a later stage he returns to reality, he must bring back with him fire from that heaven if he is to remain a poet. He can not be a poet of experience unless he has first been a poet of innocence.

from V Sundaram: News Today: My favourite poems and poets--I

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Probably the best known of all [Sir Henry] Newbolt's poems and the one for which he is now chiefly remembered is Vitaï Lampada. It refers to how a future soldier learns stoicism in cricket matches in the famous Close at Clifton College:

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night
Ten to make and the match to win
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play, and the last man in.

from V Sundaram: News Today: My favourite poems and poets--II

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Love is the supreme good; it is the overflowing life, the giving and surrender of ourselves to noble ends and lofty causes. It is the valley of humility and the Everest of Himalayan ecstasy. I can go on joyously this way, endlessly forever and ever. Yet at the same time, finally we can never ignore what Shakespeare (1554--1616) said in conclusion: "Love reasons without reason".

These emotions and feelings surged up in my mind and heart again when I re-read the following poem of Allgernon Charles Swinburne (1837- 1909) called 'A Match'

from V Sundaram: News Today: My favourite poems and poets--III

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In poetry, the symbolist procedure--as typified by Verlaine--was to use subtle suggestion instead of precise statement (rhetoric was banned) and to evoke moods and feelings through the magic of words and repeated sounds and the cadence of verse (musicality) and metrical innovation

Rain

from V Sundaram: News Today: My favourite poems and poets--IV

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Great Regulars: [Bert Glick] is a peripatetic poet

who was recently on Pacific Avenue in downtown Santa Cruz, toting a copy of his book: "I Used To Be Me." If spotted, approach with caution. He may attempt to read you a poem.

She said
I had a cookie aura

from Good Times Weekly: Bert Glick

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Great Regulars: Prayer

by Alice Oswald

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: Prayer by Alice Oswald

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Great Regulars: 'Willow'

Stephen H. Benedict

from The Kansas City Star: Poet's Corner: 'Willow'

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Great Regulars: Later in Life

by Jorie Graham

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Later in Life




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There Is No Time, She Writes
by D. Nurske

from The New Yorker: Poetry: There Is No Time, She Writes




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Great Regulars: Here, there's a great urge to run [. . .]

[by Sid Miller]

from The Oregonian: Poetry

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Great Regulars: By Danielle Esplin

My Ode

from The Philadelphia Inquirer: Your Poem: [by Danielle Esplin]

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Great Regulars: I Am Different

[by C Fletcher]

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: I Am Different

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Great Regulars: Microscope

by Miroslav Holub translated by Ian Milner

Most of the poems in Signs and Humours: The Poetry of Medicine (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2007, £8.50) are about our bodies, but Miroslav Holub, the Czech poet and immunologist, takes a closer look at the struggles going on in deeper levels of life.

from The Scotsman: Poem of the Week

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Great Regulars: "War Work (Brooklyn, 1944-45)"

By Barry Goldensohn

from Slate: "War Work (Brooklyn, 1944-45)" --By Barry Goldensohn

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Great Regulars: Application for a Grant

by Anthony Hecht

from The Times Literary Supplement: Poem of the Week

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Poetic Obituaries: [The Rev. Ralph Allen Banning's] love

for Forge Mountain grew as the years passed. During his retirement, he served as interim pastor to many churches. He also taught Bible studies, wrote poetry, grew a garden most years and regularly visited shut-ins.

from Times-News: Ralph A. Banning, 96

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Poetic Obituaries: [Gordon] Bishop's political activism

dated back to anti-Vietnam war protests and poetry readings in the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s. His photo appeared on the front page of The New York Times in January 1967 after he was arrested along with other anti-war protesters during a sit-in in St. Patrick's Cathedral. He was active in "Angry Arts against the War," crisscrossing New York City on the back of a flat-bed truck, reading his poetry and holding up photos of napalm-affected Vietnamese children.

from The Jakarta Post: Gordon Bishop: A dedicated friend of Indonesia

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Poetic Obituaries: [Jurgis Blekaitis] joined Voice of America

in 1952, when it was based in New York, and followed it to Washington when its headquarters moved in 1954.

He published two books of poetry in the United States and a memoir in Lithuania. He also translated poetry by such esteemed European writers as Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky and Ivar Ivask.

from The Washington Post: Jurgis Blekaitis; Theater Producer, Poet Was Editor of Voice of America

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Poetic Obituaries: Friends and family members said

they remember [Kikhiesha] Brooks, a cheerleader and member of the Afro-Haitian dance program during her years at Berkeley High, as a loving, outgoing and especially generous person who was passionate about poetry, music and dance.

from The Daily Californian: Young Mother Dead After Oakland Shooting

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Poetic Obituaries: Lars Forssell, the longest serving

member of the Swedish Academy that awards the Nobel Literature Prize, died Thursday, aged 79.

Forssell, a poet and writer was born 14 January 1928 in Stockholm, and was elected as member to the 18-seat academy in March 1971 and admitted in December the same year.

from Monsters and Critics: Swedish Academy member Lars Forssell dies at 79

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Poetic Obituaries: The author [Victor Frunza] was forced to leave

Romania in 1980 after writing a letter critical of the communist regime led by dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The letter was published internationally, and Frunza was interrogated by the dreaded secret police.

from News 92.3 KTAR: Romanian Anti-Communist Dissident Dies

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Poetic Obituaries: Vic [Goertzen] penned 30 columns

for highwaySTAR under the banner, A Twist of Freight, beginning in May 2004. In his words, you could read his love for the road, his unending curiosity with life, an unrepentant challenge of convention, and utter devotion to his sons.

He was difficult to edit at times, but always a pleasure to read because you never knew what was coming next. There were many stories in him yet to be told, and he often told me that his dream was to publish a volume of poetry.

from Today's Trucking: highwaySTAR columnist dies in truck crash

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Poetic Obituaries: A man convicted of raping and beating

an 86-year-old woman to death in 1980 and who became a published poet in jail was executed late Thursday in Alabama, prison officials said.

Darrell Grayson, 46, was declared dead from the lethal injection at 2316 GMT, a prison official at Holman, Alabama, said.

from Khaleej Times: US convicted murderer executed in Alabama

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Poetic Obituaries: The following poem that she [Gwendolyn Lacy] wrote

for her cousin Sue described her own attitude toward life, her daughter said.

She'd Wish Us to Dance

from Redlands Daily Facts: Gwendolyn Lacy, 78

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Poetic Obituaries: [Bianca] Reid says it wasn't unusual

to find [Robert] Lynch sitting in the back of their ROTC class, writing songs and poems in his notebook. Despite his love for the arts, it was his talent as a leader that stuck out to those who knew him best--the 2005 Seneca High School Junior ROTC students.

from WAVE3: Friends say slain Marine had big plans, big heart

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Poetic Obituaries: Jeevan Mykoo had many sides.

As a policy analyst with Environment Canada, the bright Ottawa man was recognized for his work on the Clean Air Act.

Friends could rely on him for advice, a well-crafted poem, a joke, or a profound thought about an issue.

from Ottawa Citizen: Ottawa man drowns on trip to New York

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Poetic Obituaries: Betty [Jeanne Nirella] continued to teach art

at Rustic Canyon Park, the Palisades-Malibu YMCA, and privately on her deck at her Santa Monica home as well as on several international tours that she led. She moved to Mount San Antonio Gardens in Pomona in 1989, where she continued to teach art and enjoy other creative pursuits, including her active participation with the Live Poet Society.

from Palisadian-Post: Betty Jeanne Nirella, 85; Local Art Teacher

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Poetic Obituaries: [Clarice "Bobbie" Richard] also recited

poetry, one of her favorite pastimes. In her final days, she remembered a poem about a butterfly flying into a church.

In addition to poetry, Clarice Richard enjoyed gardening and a good story. She told fictional stories about a woman who lived in a vinegar bottle and factual stories about dodging bullets from a German plane during the peak of World War II.

from The Huntsville Times: She always made others feel important

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Poetic Obituaries: Loved ones said [Christopher] Scherer joined

the Marines right out of Northport High School, and his parents, Janet and Tim, read a poem their son wrote for the family.

"When Chris was getting ready to be deployed he was very short on words," Janet said.

from NY Daily News: L.I. pastor remembers 'solid' Marine as family says final goodbye

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Tuesday, July 24, 2007

July 24th Poetic Ticker Clicking

News Article Tape:
Blog Entry Tape:

July 24th forum announcement

Dear Poetry Aficionados,

Poetry & Poets in Rags


Tomorrow makes 4 years of Poetry & Poets in Rags. I started this by searching through the news, seeing what was out there one week, seeing if it made sense to use a search engine to come up with informative results. It worked. I posted links to the articles on both Melic's RoundTable and the Atlantic Monthly's Writers' Workshop, both great and former IBPC forums, and both now defunct. After a few weeks, Gina Bryson, the managing editor of the InterBoard Poetry Community, asked if she could publish the column in the Newswire section of the IBPC web pages at Web Del Sol. I hesitated on the commitment, got a similar offer from CE Chaffin of The Melic Review, and said "yes" to Gina.

This week, we begin with a superb Bill Moyers interview with Martín Espada, both the video and script. Then comes an article reporting that 100 Gabriela Mistral poems have been found. This is followed by the report of a lawsuit about Dorothy Parkers' 120 poems that were found. Then a lost poet is passed by everyday in Central Park.

But in News at Eleven, don't miss the Back Page. Meghan O'Rourke just got married. (Congratulations and best wishes!)

The InterBoard Poetry Community is still awaiting results from Maurya Simon for July's poems. I do not know if this has to do again with an e-mail issue on our part; a purposeful delay because of last month's delay; if Maurya simply is taking her time (which is fine); or something else or some combination.

Word is getting around, that a highly-esteemed poet has said "yes", that she will judge for the IBPC some time next year. It is her choice when. She may take a quarter stint, or she may decide to judge the POTY. So, if you get an e-mail about this great news, it is true (if not altered by the mill). Pass it on. I sent word to only one poetry confidante who posts at the forums, and said if she wanted to, she could tell one other, and so forth. As I said in that e-mail: pretty cool, pret-ty cool.

Okay, so just in case it does not come around to you, here's something else I said in that e-mail: "She was in Mark Doty's acknowledgements in Dog Years, and recently reviewed David Kirby's latest collection. So it seemed like a great circle is there that she was already in." This clue narrows it to one poet. If you know who it is, please, tell only one other, who may tell only one other--unless you receive an e-mail with the news, then you may tell another, as the e-mail states.

Yours,
Rus

Our links:

IBPC: Poetry & Poets in Rags

Poetry & Poets in Rags blog

IBPC Home

IBPC Newswire

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News at Eleven: Martín Espada: Yes, that's obviously an expression

that's been beaten into the ground. For me, all justice is poetic.

Bill Moyers: How so?

Martín Espada: Well, first of all, because it is so beautiful. To see justice done, there--there's--there's something about that I can--I can't even put into words. And when you see it happen in a courtroom and, you know, there's someone there, again ordinarily silenced and--and suppressed by that system who has an opportunity to speak or to speak through you. And someone that person is vindicated and justice is done. To me, there's no feeling like that.

from Bill Moyers Journal: Bill Moyers talks with poet, Martín Espada

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News at Eleven: About 100 unpublished poems

along with photographs and other belongings of Nobel prize-winning Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral have been found in the United States, a Santiago newspaper said today.

from Herald Sun: Poems by Nobel laureate Mistral found

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News at Eleven: According to his lawsuit,

while researching a book on the 1920s literary group known as the Algonquin Round Table, of which [Dorothy] Parker was a member, Mr [Stuart] Silverstein discovered more than 120 poems which she had never deemed worthy of publication.

He edited them and offered the collection as a book to Penguin in 1994.

from Telegraph: Penguin in battle over Parker poems

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News at Eleven: "Would you like some information

about Fitz-Greene Halleck?" asked Kenan Minkoff of each passerby on the afternoon of July 8, the birthday (in 1790) of the man once dubbed "the American Byron."

"No."

"No, thanks."

from The Citizen: Memo to politicians and poets: Fame is fleeting

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