November 24th Poetic Ticker Clicking
| News Article Tape: |
| Blog Entry Tape: |
Best viewed using the Firefox or SeaMonkey browsers or IE9, but no less than IE9.
As with so many blogspot.com blogs now, using IE8 or below yields an "Out of Memory" message--or loading problems freeze your computer.


wrote Philip Larkin. "They may not mean to, but they do."
portrays the poet as a dashing, flame-haired womaniser, mixing high philosophy with simple lust, and dramatises his feverish search for recognition and success as an author.
of each other was close because they were both poets: reading these letters, one senses that Eliot finds it hard to let himself be open with anyone who doesn't have the skill to do what he does. With a fellow poet, he can discuss what is really important to him in language he knows will be understood.
considers an array of infinitely complex concepts--beauty and truth, "creation and consciousness," time and chance, pain and forgiveness, the mind-body problem and the work ethic--in beautifully distilled and perfectly metered lines. Clever, riddling and covertly intense, these are epigrammatic poems to read and read again.
ran a kiosk from his family home. He built a small but bustling business, with an eye turned towards his fiancee, Amira, betrothed to him since birth, "whose trickling laughter and graceful gait," [Adina] Hoffman writes, "had entered his bloodstream so profoundly that she almost seemed to be part of him . . ."
convicted of disseminating terrorist propaganda because of the lyrics to a song or poem they wrote or recited passed through Diyarbakır Prison, now infamous for the torture inflicted upon its inmates. Following their time there, they were forced by varying circumstances to flee the country. Among them are writers, politicians, intellectuals and artists, names such as Kemal Burkay, Yılmaz Çamlıbel, Günay Aslan, Şükrü Gülmüş, Vildan Tanrı Kulu, Garip Dost and Şivan Perver--and most of them are still waiting for the right time to return to their country.
and Greek.
of the great bird poets. This is an orgiastic firework display of common hens calling to the dawn, as seen from the height of the hill.
in the collection is a signed draft version of [Stanley] Kunitz's poem "My Mother's Pears," which Kunitz dedicated to the Stockmals, according to the university. The pear tree that he and his mother planted when he lived in the house remains to this day. The Stockmals would send a box of fresh pears to Kunitz and his wife each year.
you can almost hear [Robert] Burn's mother, Agnes, gently singing one traditional Scots song after another to her eldest boy, and her cousin, Betty Davidson, holding Burns spellbound with tales of ghosts and witches.
things like repetitions and contrasts of themes and meanings. The poets, however, paid attention to repetitions and contrasts of vowels and consonants, rhythmic patterns, and all kinds of features of the sound of the poems. To be sure, there was a certain amount of overlap, but nevertheless, the poets and the critics were reading poems quite differently.
and books do make great gifts when thought is given to making the right choice. In difficult economic times, spending $40 or more on a coffee-table book feels like an extravagance to many shoppers. Cheaper alternatives abound, however. Here's a list of books worth giving, all of high quality and none more than $30:
to read at your Thanksgiving dinner. It worked for me.
weren't consulted and so naturally aren't thrilled: 'While the BFI applauds and welcomes recent work to improve the tunnels leading from Waterloo to the IMAX cinema, we are disappointed that the poem originally commissioned for the space has been erased. It was a much loved piece of inspiring poetry which helped to transform the space and we would very much like to see the poem reinstated by Network Rail who are responsible for that area.'
of a cliff, last in line behind father, mother and brother, until I declared that I wanted to be the leader. Soon after taking up this position, I turned back to find them all gone; then, I looked down to a bus zooming along the highway at the base of the cliff, my mother's arm waving goodbye out the window. It's a remarkable little sexist fable, crystallizing all that I had absorbed about a girl's proper place. [--Susan Holbrook]
it is really true that he would miss her if she died.
of football, and of leaf-peeping is about to give way to the interminable holidays, but readers of young adult books can hold onto autumn a little longer. The ever-growing genre continues to turn out interesting books, and this season gives us tons of new titles to be excited about: nonfiction on surprising topics, and novels nuanced enough to appeal to readers of any age. Here are just a few.
"The First Tycoon," was the nonfiction winner. Keith Waldrop's "Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy" won for poetry. The young people's literature award went to Phillip Hoose's "Claudette Colvin," based on the true story of an early civil rights heroine, who was shaken with emotion as she joined Hoose on the stage.
"What if the solution to all of your problems is spiritual? You've been in therapy for 15 years, you've done self-examination, you've read all this philosophy. What if by spiritual practice, [your depression] can be solved, not just incrementally but completely?"
by Sharon Olds
a brief narration of some event, and what can make them rise above anecdote is when they manage to convey significance, often as the poem closes. Here is an example of one like that, by Marie Sheppard Williams, who lives in Minneapolis.
They are such delicate things, and getting them right is an art. It is all too easy to wobble.
that safe-as-houses mediaeval form, the sestina, and from the intricate pantoum: its accumulative structure also suggests folk-tales such as The House That Jack Built. The invented form is solidly put together, with its dense packing of repeated lines and end-words. But, as the poem literally builds itself, adding an extra line stanza by stanza, it lures the reader constantly to the invisible and illusory.
the world this time featuring Jim Clark, Dee Sunshine, Tom Bradley, Tree Riesener, David Seddon, City of Statues, Linda Benninghoff, Swapan Basu, Shanti Perez and Casey Mensing.
"not only that our ephemeral nature has to be accepted, but that it is a guarantee of human meaning," she [Eva Hoffman] cites his meeting with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, "who experienced a terror of mortality and who disconsolately felt that the transience of all things human meant that, ultimately, they had no value; they didn't count."
We lie here silent in the dark,
from The Shadow of Sirius, by W.S. Merwin
by Philip Schultz
University and has served as co-editor of Burning Deck Press with his wife, poet Rosmarie Waldrop, since 1968. The two poems he reads below are from "Transcendental Studies."
with what might seem a proper conclusion: "so we were turned into Americans / to learn something about loneliness," critiquing and mourning the cataclysm of American complacency. His poems are concerned with America's history, the way that we are drowning and yet still refuse to reform--to "take it personal" as he calls for in one poem.
A new poem by Seamus Heaney
notebook with me, and while we were walking on one recent visit, I wrote down the opening sentence of what became this poem. The rest of the poem came about quickly, as a fairly straight report of that visit and my attempt to think along with it while my kids and I wandered the halls. We were there on a day they were cleaning out one of the rooms near the main lobby. It was summer, and there was watermelon.
who was best known for her books for children and as the editor of the legendary children's book series "Cebelica" (Honey Bee), died in Ljubljana on Friday aged 98.
Kiantone Congregational Church, where she served as Sunday school superintendent and president of the Ladies Aide. At the church, Bessie was known for her cheerful outlook and spur of the moment poetry.
played in the jazz-and-poetry group New Departures, containing the poets Michael Horovitz and Pete Brown, the tenor saxophonist Bobby Wellins and the pianist-composer Stan Tracey. From this came Tracey's own quartet, which in 1965 recorded his suite, Under Milk Wood.
as an energetic young woman who moved to the island at age 13 and was well known through her teens for her creativity and spirit. In recent years, she had emerged as a talented artist tackling everything from sculpture to performance, most notably spoken poetry and music.
from Carlsbad High School, he studied literature and creative writing, and graduated this year from the University of California, Santa Cruz, they said. He wrote poetry and was a published poet.
to his wife in many ways such as writing poetry "Jeanie My Garage Door Opener" and bringing her home crazy daisies for special occasions. He was a wonderful provider retiring from General Motors as a tool and die maker after 41 years.
in the church, reading his Bible and teaching salvation to those he met. He was a devoted husband, father, grandfather and brother who enjoyed hunting, fishing, writing poetry and painting.
to [Dr. Michael] Sarche and often took his doctors out to lunch on the anniversary of the operation.
"In Vain I Tried to Tell You: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics" and "Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach."
for being feisty and sensitive, wrote about the high and lows of her hectic life on the international modelling world, her feelings and her life off the catwalk in her blog at http://iliketoforkmyself.blogspot.com/.
activities with his family and friends, including hiking, skiing and rafting. He was also an avid traveler who visited numerous destinations throughout the world. He loved both reading and writing poetry and dedicated many hours to the craft.
translator and sculptor painted and wrote poems too. He worked for 8 years at the Keyhan newspaper and later continued his commentating on Payyam Emruz, writing a column called 'An Outsider's Look'.
Prof. [Mukunda Madhava] Sharma made wide-ranging contributions to Sanskrit literature, especially in the realms of poetry and poetics, history and epigraphy. A prolific writer and an accomplished critic, he authored 43 books besides over 260 research papers and articles in Sanskrit, English, Assamese, Bengali and Hindi. During his two-year stay in Indonesia from 1983 to 1985 as Visiting Professor in Udayana University, Bali, he mastered Bahasa and wrote a book in that language.