January 26th Poetic Ticker Clicking
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The Beacon
seven days a week. "Work in that environment is very intense," he says. "The cold polar environment never goes away. You walk out the door, it's there. You go to the plane, it's there. Everywhere you fly, it's there. Nature dominates. Your first impression is, 'How could anybody survive in a place like this?'"
he [Derek Walcott] says, "is the way poetry has been taught. There is a wilful and perverse obscurity about so much contemporary poetry. I blame those who have been teaching it for making it remote for the public.
is very effective. For a Buddhist, when you are under a pattanikkujjana you are no longer a Buddhist. For the government it is very effective. They are Buddhist--nominally of course--and the pattanikkujjana has a very bad effect on them. As Buddhists, they play the religion card. They assume they are the guardians of the religion. They are the promoters of the religion. They put up big pagodas and give support to the monasteries.
must be deducted from his prison term starting from the date of his arrest. But the court counted his judicial custody starting from the date of trial commencement. So, the previous three months custody means unlawful custody. In this way he is losing his lawful rights. We call for the immediate release of poet Saw Wei," exclaimed AAPP-B Joint-Secretary Bo Kyi.
were left standing out in the cold Tuesday when a mysterious nocturnal visitor didn't keep his standing date to toast the author at his Baltimore burial plot.
and mime, often doing both simultaneously, having reportedly studied with Etienne Decroux in the 60s, who also taught the famous mime Marcel Marceau. "We had a mime company in Boston, The Silent Players . . . we got good reviews," Barnum said. "My mime partner was born here and went to France. He spoke French and English . . . (and) traveled across France in a donkey cart, doing mime and writing poetry. I created a mime, 'Rope and the Flower.' It was sold and went all over the world."
in what water actually is, its substance, its realness. While water in literature is often a metaphor for what cannot be expressed, in life it has a miraculous physicality all its own and Gross inhabits this completely. It makes for a remarkably solid book despite its fluid foundations. In "Pour", the falling water is "this slick and fluted glitter,/slightly/arcing, rebraiding itself as it falls,//as for tangible/seconds it's a thin/taut string of surface tension//that my hand feels, on the handle,/as a pulse, a pull,/a thing//in space, that lives in this world".
delighted and bewildered" to have won. Although he wrote love poems to his wife during her lifetime, they never discussed him writing poems about her after her death, he said, "but I think she knew I was bound to turn to the only thing I could do in life to make sense of it for myself".
how many countries have a national day devoted to the celebration of a poet?
the natural world and the inner world of feeling. He also connected the two indivisibly. We are his heirs, and we see and feel through him. His vision illumined our landscape.
In 1958, he produced Things Fall Apart, one of the great novels of the 20th century. It tells the story of Okonkwo, a brilliant, brutal, fatally proud Igbo warrior who is brought down by his confrontation with white missionaries. The book made Achebe, in Nadine Gordimer's words, the "father of modern African literature".
Lawson Fusao Inada, who served two terms beginning in 2006, is due to step down and nominations are being accepted until Feb. 15.
second creator (God being the first) that creates a second nature (that is, art). And the purpose of that art is to teach and delight and to lift readers into the perfection of the poem's universe. The Philip Sidney bumper sticker for this aesthetic: "Look into thy heart and write."
of craft; not just the craft of poetry, but her love of textiles, dressmaking, and paper. Lorsung's artistic talents are not limited to being a wordsmith; she also used to have her own line of clothing and now creates prints and drawings.
is that he heard his own voice; that he reached the point where he couldn't write without feeling he was repeating himself. That's the worst thing that can happen to a writer. A new reader shouldn't be able to find you in your work, though someone who's read more may begin to." [--E.L. Doctorow]
and painter with an Irish-Catholic background. This poem, taken from her excellent pamphlet The Cast-Iron Shore (erbacce-press, Liverpool) does indeed have a painterly quality to it--the half-open doorways, the empty kitchen with its dripping tap, the crockery, all seem images from a stilllife.
over which to become nostalgic, the collection of images is striking: the listener can see the fire burning, sending up its "blue-black smoke," and hear the crackle as the fire rages, and smell the smoke as it rises to the "sapphire skies," which the listener can also visualize. That image cluster is so strong that the reader/listener is lulled into oblivion regarding the possible damage caused by the fire.
I'm afraid the shadows on the wall will turn into demons," when you turn out the lights, the shadows on the wall will probably turn into demons because that is your preconception. And once preconceptions enter the brain, they're hard to get rid of, kind of like cockroaches:
and National Book Award finalist Rae Armantrout ("Versed") were poetry finalists, along with D.A. Powell's "Chronic," Rachel Zucker's "Museum of Accidents" and Eleanor Ross Taylor's "Captive Voices."
by W. S. Merwin
wrote me a letter in which he listed everything he and my uncle had eaten in the past week. That was the news. I love this poem by Nancyrose Houston of Seattle for the way it plays with the character of those letters from home that many of us have received.
Greek comedies to have survived, and he wrote some blistering satires of the corruption of his day. One of is best and most hilarious works is "Lysistrata," an anti-war satire in which the central character, an Athenian woman, organizes a highly effective protest against the war with Sparta. She and her female allies take over the Parthenon and refuse to have anything to do with men until they bring the war to an end. When the men finally relent, Lysistrata makes this speech near the close of the play:
Body Armor
audience for such things: it has been estimated that at the time of Keats' death, the combined sales of the three books published during his lifetime amounted to 200 copies. By the middle of the 19th century, greatly helped by the example of Tennyson, as well as the advocacy of his friends Arthur Hallam (the subject of In Memoriam) and Richard Monckton Milnes (author of the first biography of Keats, which appeared in 1848), things had changed.
her funeral, and insisted it be a "celebration" rather than an occasion for mourning. Dozens of "E.T." balloons were released into the air, symbolizing "unconditional love." Perhaps we were to picture her bicycling through the sky toward home.
a refreshing dose of reality. A gifted poet as well as a sculptor and painter, he wrote energetically about despair, detailing with relish the unpleasant side of his work on the famous ceiling. The poem, in Italian, is an extended (or "tailed") sonnet, with a coda of six lines appended to the standard 14. The translation I like best is by the American poet Gail Mazur.
of authenticity, it is the sustained energy of the line, the syntax and the argument that prove the impression is rooted in the real thing. There is a personality to Burns's tone, and an energy to the syntax, that seem literally physical. This is not only a matter of diction. The very forms he favoured with the riches of his native language--the song, and the verse-epistle--connect directly to the voice.
of isolation, and the way in which it encourages the inner world to expand until it blocks out "fallow and stepwise" outer experience. Nevertheless, key encounters structure the book.
of [Dag] Hammarskjöld's religious preoccupations until after his death--although, not long after he became Secretary-General, he did say in a radio interview with Edward R. Murrow that "the explanation of how man should live a life of active social service in full harmony with himself as a member of the community of spirit, I found in the writings of those great medieval mystics for whom ‘self-surrender' had been the way to self-realization, and who in ‘singleness of mind' and ‘inwardness' had found strength to say yes to every demand which the needs of their neighbors made them face, and to say yes also to every fate life had in store for them when they followed the call of duty as they understood it."
By Gary Corseri
by John Ash, after Cavafy
from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto I
Ode on Melancholy
Think of what your commodity will be. It could be anything that can be bought and sold: lollipops, farmland, petrol, body parts, microchips, precious metals . . . Make some notes about what your commodity is and what it does.
by Cynthia Cruz
Visiting Paris
)))) Listen
His scenarios are described as if at the very moment they become visible, before any conclusions may be drawn--but the characters within them seem to have been living in this condition for hours, days, or longer. Although the poems' microplots entail social situations, they cancel or disregard the potential for shared values or acts that may be performed together to create a third way.
"Isla en el tacto" (1965), "Canciones para tu historia" (1936-1939) and "Todo el mar en la ola" (1989), as well as essays about Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario and Cuban poets Nicolas Guillen, Jose Maria Heredia and Jose Marti.
in 1968 E.C. and was one of those, who made significant contribution in the struggle to topple the dictatorial Derg regime.
a baseball man, a piano man, a vocalist, a poet, a storyteller supreme, and almost 40 years ago, the kind of fellow who would go out of his way to befriend a young baseball writer for no good reason. Except, that's just [Bobby] Bragan for you.
for Ross County Head Start for 19 years. She enjoyed teaching, reading, writing poetry and drawing and was a member of the National Poet's Society.
Coury's Department Store, Long's Laundry, Peggy's Restaurant and helped run Davidson's 66 Station with her husband. She wrote and published several poems and wrote weekly news columns for the Waynoka Enterprise, Woods County News and Woodward News. She was past worthy matron of the Order of Eastern Star, mother adviser of the Order of Rainbow for Girls and worked on the election board. She was a member of city council, chamber of commerce, Waynoka Saddle Club, Waynoka Super Scribblers Club, Cloverleaf Club, S.E.B. Club and held a lifetime membership in the Ladies Auxiliary of Freedom Cimarron Cowhand Associa-tion.
short stories, poetry," said [Tim] Engelbrech. "He sings, plays the saxophone."