Poetry & Poets in Rags

Dear Poetry Aficionados,

Poetry & Poets in Rags blog

We begin with Liao Yiwu, who is back in the news as he stops at Harvard on his tour. We have two articles on him that do a great job giving his background. This is followed in News at Eleven by a remarkable little autobiography by poet Pam Ayres. We go from there to Yiddish poet Naftali Herts Kon. And we're off around the world and into history as we go each week, including a visit through the infinite monkey theorum, onto our Back Page , where some virtual monkeys randomly typed Shakespeare's "A Lover's Complaint." You'll also find some good poetry and other items in our Great Regulars section, which comes before the third section, the Poetic Obituaries.

Congratulation are in order! Tyehimba Jess' August IBPC results are up. And here are the winning poems:

1st place: Section 8 by Opie DeLetta of Wild Poetry Forum

2nd place: Solstice by Allen M. Weber of Desert Moon Review

3rd place: Ode to What Settles by Toni Clark of The Waters Poetry Workshop

Thanks for clicking in.

Yours,
Rus

Our links:

IBPC: Poetry & Poets in Rags

Poetry & Poets in Rags blog

IBPC Home

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Rus Bowden · at 1:04 PM

in the middle of our phone conversation," said moderator Rowena X. He of the department of East Asian Studies, describing communications with the poet earlier this year that culminated in yesterday's dialogue. "He was told that there was no way he would be able to speak at Harvard."

Liao [Yiwu] made his precipitous escape to the West within the last few months and began a tour promoting his book "God is Red," which tells the stories of persecuted Chinese Christians.

from The Harvard Crimson: Chinese Poet Liao Yiwu Shares Experience as Captive
then Chicago Sun-Times: Liao Yiwu writes about what China doesn't want you to hear

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Rus Bowden · at 1:03 PM

my silver fork paused in midair.

'Yes, in a place called Buckland,' he went on pleasantly. At this point, his expression clouded with perplexity and thoughtfulness as small, remembered fragments began to come together. His face clearing, he asked excitedly: 'What did you say your surname was again?'

I could see the way this was going and didn't like it. 'Ayres,' I mumbled as incoherently as possible.

'Ayres?' he almost shouted in disbelief. 'Did you say your name was Ayres?' I put down the silver fork and waited as if for a blow. 'Didn't your mother use to be a cleaner?' he asked. 'No,' I said. 'No, that wasn't my mother. It's a very common name. It must have been someone else.'

from Daily Mail: Much-loved poet Pam Ayres reveals how her verse helped her escape a life of rural poverty

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Rus Bowden · at 1:03 PM

wife Lisa and daughter Vita left well before that, emigrating to Israel in 1964. He died there seven years later, never having recovered from the loss of his writings.

Today, Lancman--who defected to the U.S. in 1966--says she is "disillusioned and indignant" as she and her sister hit a wall trying to regain their father's works.

"The return of these documents would be a modicum of justice, of the justice that was never granted to my father," Lancman, 69, said.

from Associated Press: Stalemate in Poland over work of a Yiddish author

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Rus Bowden · at 1:02 PM

How do you explain the phenomenon of the young Hitler saving his money all week in order to attend one of Mahler's new symphonies, possible passing Rilke or Franz Kafka on the street? But enough of that. I love the concreteness of the language, its hold on something primeval in the speech of human beings, its phonetic logic somehow connected with the eerie literalness that can still provide glimpses of the awe in which this force that caused a second world to be, an invisible world superimposed on the world of appearance, the means the metaphor by which this two-fold increase in the infinite seemed to occur.

from The Huffington Post: Exclusive Interview With Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet Franz Wright

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Rus Bowden · at 12:40 PM

is like a room with no door, where everything that will ever be is already present: "The same war story told a hundred times/the same brand of cigarettes distributed by friendly hands/and those same eyes hovering, dark and lazy./Only that."In an essay reprinted here, Lleshanaku records that following a stay in the US she discarded most of the poems she had written while there, because "I felt as if I was following the wrong star . . . It was too easy to embrace the philosophy of a culture immersed in a long tradition of individualism . . . It is a philosophy completely alien to my culture."

from The Guardian: Haywire: New and Selected Poems by Luljeta Lleshanaku--review

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Rus Bowden · at 12:39 PM

a spiritual and geographical road trip with both Saul Bellow and John Berryman as back-seat drivers. In Li'l Bastard we journey with [David] McGimpsey from "the unreachable squalor of (his) home" in Montreal to Texas, television (in the 1970s detective serial Barnaby Jones), Illionois, Nashville, L.A. and back to Montreal, stopping at taco stands, local watering holes, palaces, airports, and MFA classrooms along the way. The rapaciousness of the book's affairs engenders the "bastard" of the title: The poems are unfranchised amalgams that are no less natural for their illegitimacy.

from National Post: David McGimpsey sings of the world as it actually is

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Rus Bowden · at 12:38 PM

world if it doesn't include Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Tolstoy" and, of course "the Bible?" he asks.

"These are the constituents of our mind and spirit."

His book, "The Shadow of a Great Rock," tries to show the permanent aesthetic import and value of the King James Bible and how the text informs the entire tradition of literature in England and America.

from Deseret News: Patriarchs among the poets: Harold Bloom's case for the Bible as high literature

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Rus Bowden · at 12:38 PM

I first admired the Canadian poet Anne Carson as a Greek scholar, when I, too, was earning my living in that trade. I found in her poetry the same inspiring passion for words and ideas. In 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, I wrote about a poem of hers in which a daughter breakfasts with an irritating mother before visiting her father, an Alzheimer's patient. You wouldn't think anyone could make a poignant lyric out of that: she does.

from The Guardian: The artists' artist: Poets

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Rus Bowden · at 12:37 PM

"Glasgow is the great bisexual capital of Europe," because he was picking up married men in places like the Horse Shoe bar.'

Morgan was discreet, but it is possible to read between the lines of his poetry and see the real story. Thomson refers to the graphic descriptions in 'Glasgow Green', a poem written in the 1960s about what could be a male rape. 'He describes this liaison with this male thug, which sounds as if it is either very dark, dangerous and exciting or extremely violent,' he says. 'When you read it from an LGBT perspective, the references are sharp, barbed, biting and sometimes painful.'

from The List: Liz Lochhead discusses her new play, Edwin Morgan's Dreams--and Other Nightmares

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Rus Bowden · at 12:37 PM

for a tepid sort of vegetable life, an almost quietist routine that might appeal to a sexagenarian but hardly at all to a 20-year-old. Certainly, his conviction that one should "live unknown" is fundamentally at odds with the entire Renaissance, the motto of which might be, as art historian Michael Levey once remarked, "Every man his own Tamburlaine." Despite the impulse to flee the madding crowd, a pastoral ideal that runs throughout history, from Theocritus to Thoreau, shouldn't a fully human life actually embrace a whole lot of interesting trouble? We strive, struggle and suffer because we are engaged, or ought to be engaged, with enterprises that demand our all. Humankind's great heroes are overreachers, not retirees.

from The Washington Post: Stephen Greenblatt's "The Swerve," reviewed

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Rus Bowden · at 12:36 PM

that a computerized simulation of the theoretical simian typing pool has completed "A Lover's Complaint," a narrative poem that appeared in a book of The Bard's sonnets.

"This is the first time a work of Shakespeare has actually been randomly reproduced," Anderson wrote.

from CNN: Digital monkeys with typewriters recreate Shakespeare
then Jesse Anderson: A Few Million Monkeys Randomly Recreate Shakespeare

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Rus Bowden · at 12:04 PM

the bestselling novel of all time, with an estimated 200m copies sold. He is certainly the most quoted of writers.

"He is far more deeply ingrained in the culture than any other writer," says Florian Schweizer, director of the Charles Dickens Museum in London. "Journalists refer to him in the sports pages and even the business pages. People just get it. They know who Micawber is, and football matches between Madrid and Barcelona are referred to as a 'tale of two cities'." Schweizer adds that it is hard to find a contemporary novel that does not, in some way, refer to Dickens. Yet, as little as 40 years ago, the claim that he was second only to Shakespeare would have seemed absurd, even deranged.

from Bryan Appleyard: from The Sunday Times: 1)Shakespeare 2)Dickens. . . . ?

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Lap dancers earn 30% more when they are ovulating. You are safer in a plane when the pilot hands over to the copilot. Men inadvertently touch women with their left hand . . . well, perhaps not all men. The one who tells us all this, Robert Trivers, does--but he's not exactly normal.

In fact, he may be the most abnormal man I have ever interviewed. He is a petty thief with a high sex drive and an inordinate love of Jamaican women, a sucker for con artists and, according to one friend, completely "cuckoo". On the other hand, the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker says he is "one of the great thinkers in the history of western thought", and Richard Dawkins calls him "a uniquely brilliant scientist".

from Bryan Appleyard: from The Sunday Times: Robert Trivers on Deceit

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Rus Bowden · at 12:01 PM

you want to examine what moves you, what frightens you, what is most perplexing to you. I'm most attracted to a subject when I feel there's a disconnect between how the subject--whether it was the earthquake in Pakistan in 2005, the war in Lebanon in 2006, or violence in Pakistan--is reported and how it is lived."

from Fatima Bhutto: Deccan Chronicle: I started writing poetry when there was fear, says Fatima Bhutto

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Rus Bowden · at 12:01 PM

by the name of John Hartley is an oak sapling on Peckham Rye, planted this weekend in honour of William Blake, who claimed to have seen an oak "filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars" when he visited the place at the age of nine.

from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: Blake's vision tree returns to Peckham Rye
then ambivalency.net: Replanting the Angel Oak

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It's boomtime for the Booker. This year's shortlist, announced on 6 September, is already the most popular ever. The six books have sold, collectively, 37,500 copies since the announcement, an increase of 127% year-on-year, and up 105% on the previous record-holding year, 2009. And there's still another three weeks to go until the winner's announced.

from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: The Booker shortlist's sales are nothing to glory in

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Rus Bowden · at 12:00 PM

By Steve McOrmond

After consulting the astronomers,

from Judith Fitzgerald: The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: If it's Thursday, it's IOW Verse Day III

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The United States Postal Service recently unveiled 10 new first-class postage stamps with a poetry theme for its 2012 "Forever" series, this time focussing on notable American poets of the twentieth century including Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), Robert Hayden (1913-1980), Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), Denise Levertov (1923-1997), E. E. Cummings (1894-1962) and Theodore Roethke (1908-1963).

from Judith Fitzgerald: The Globe and Mail: In Other Words: MuseSplashes

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Rus Bowden · at 12:00 PM

the Goethe prize earlier this year, Syrian poet Adonis has emerged as the frontrunner to be crowned Nobel literature laureate next month.

Ladbrokes has made the 81-year-old, described as "the most important Arab poet of our time" by the Goethe jury, its 4/1 favourite to win this year's Nobel prize for literature, ahead of another octogenarian poet, the 80-year-old Swede Tomas Tranströmer, at 9/2.

from Alison Flood: Adonis declared Nobel prize for literature favourite

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Accusations of "dumbing down" were levelled at this year's Man Booker shortlist when the judges aimed for "readability" above all, but it turns out readability was exactly what the public were looking for after the six novels competing for this year's prize became the most popular Booker line-up since records began.

from Alison Flood: The Guardian: Booker prize shortlist breaks sales records

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Rus Bowden · at 11:59 AM

"Like Some Old fashioned Miracle" recreates the wistful yet strong feelings that rage in the heart of one who loves the summer season above all others. She feels such agony that the season is ending, yet she finds it miraculous that the world continues with such beauty and abundance. The "old fashioned miracle" is the only way she can describe the conflict that rages in her heart; it is as if love and despair had struggled for supremacy, and love wins against great odds.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Emily Dickinson's Like Some Old fashioned Miracle

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Rus Bowden · at 11:58 AM

is a phenomenon which should take place either through the voluntary choice of the concerned person or at least on the strength of his or her karma, merit and prayers. Therefore, the person who reincarnates has sole legitimate authority over where and how he or she takes rebirth and how that reincarnation is to be recognized. It is a reality that no one else can force the person concerned, or manipulate him or her. It is particularly inappropriate for Chinese communists, who explicitly reject even the idea of past and future lives, let alone the concept of reincarnate Tulkus, to meddle in the system of reincarnation and especially the reincarnations of the Dalai Lamas and Panchen Lamas. Such brazen meddling contradicts their own political ideology and reveals their double standards. Should this situation continue in the future, it will be impossible for Tibetans and those who follow the Tibetan Buddhist tradition to acknowledge or accept it.

from Tenzin Gyatso: The Office of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama: Statement of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, on the Issue of His Reincarnation

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Rus Bowden · at 11:58 AM

by William Butler Yeats

I whispered, 'I am too young,'

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Brown Penny by William Butler Yeats

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Magnificat
by Mary Ruefle

O Lord, I did walk upon the earth

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Magnificat by Mary Ruefle

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Promiscuous
by William Matthews

"Mixes easily," dictionaries

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Promiscuous by William Matthews

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September Visitors
by David Budbill

I'm glad to see our friends come:

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: September Visitors by David Budbill

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Three-Legged Blues
by Jane Hirshfield

Always you were given

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Three-Legged Blues by Jane Hirshfield

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Tomorrow, Today, and Yesterday
by Jane Piirto

the 3-year-old, wanting to know what day

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Tomorrow, Today, and Yesterday by Jane Piirto

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Unveiling
by Linda Pastan

In the cemetery

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Unveiling by Linda Pastan

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Rus Bowden · at 11:57 AM

or identity that cuts across national boundaries, it is defined largely by storytelling. Just as many Jews now consider scripture to be what Wallace Stevens called a "supreme fiction," so fiction has become our contemporary scripture--a body of texts that creates Jewishness in a post-religious age. When we read the major Jewish writers of the last 60 years, we inevitably think about what they have in common and what we have in common with them, as Jews and interpreters of Jewish experience.

from Adam Kirsch: Tablet: Pilgrim's Progress

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Rus Bowden · at 11:57 AM

and several years ago I co-edited an anthology of bird poems called The Poets Guide to the Birds. I wish Judith Harris had written this lovely description of a mockingbird in time for us to include it, but it's brand new. Harris lives in Washington, D.C.

Mockingbird

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 340

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Rus Bowden · at 11:56 AM

was adept at poetry in forms as well as free verse. In this week's poem, using a three-beat line and haunting rhymes, she links the annual departure of geese to the losses and sorrows of women.

from Wesley McNair: The Portland Press Herald: Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry

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Rus Bowden · at 11:56 AM

That Chance Meeting was A Fated Snowslide for Me

That chance meeting was a fated snowslide for me,

from E. Ethelbert Miller: E-Notes: That Chance Meeting was A Fated Snowslide for Me

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Rus Bowden · at 11:55 AM

Lobsang Kalsang and Lobsang Konchog, left the monastery after morning prayers on Monday, said Kanyag Tsering, a monk living at the Kirti branch monastery in exile in Dharamsala, India, citing sources in the Ngaba area.

The monks arrived at around 10:30 a.m. at a major intersection in Ngaba township, the same spot where Phuntsog had set fire to himself in March.

from Luisetta Mudie: Radio Free Asia: Two More Monks Self-Immolate

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Rus Bowden · at 11:55 AM

in terms of getting it right for our kids in schools where literacy is concerned.

If we are serious about engaging children in education we must put in the spirit of investigating and discovering--not dictating to the children and teachers.

The most important way that's been proven to further a child's chances in education is to give them LOADS of books.

from Michael Rosen: The Sun: A passion for the printed word (scroll down)

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Rus Bowden · at 11:54 AM

anything goes as long as "it keeps the economy flowing". The only hope is that people, confused or confident, rich or poor, recognise and resist any authority that tries, whether through tyranny or cosseting, to suppress their independent-mindedness. It's a timely warning, and always has been. Perhaps we should at least be glad that, during an economic crisis, there's little hope of excessive comfort--except for the excessively comfortable. Anyone for revolution?

[by Shanta Acharya]

Beware

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Poem of the week: Beware by Shanta Acharya

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Rus Bowden · at 11:53 AM

Sara Teasdale's "Debt" with a recent Vows column about the wedding of Sarah Silverman and Jeffrey Blaugrund.

from Katherine Schulten: The New York Times: Poetry Pairing: 'Loved Me Deep and Long'

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Rus Bowden · at 11:52 AM

telling of a true story, one with much at stake for all of us. And the further you read, the more astonishing it becomes. It's a chapter in how we became what we are, how we arrived at the worldview of the present. No one can tell the whole story, but Greenblatt seizes on a crucial pivot, a moment of recovery, of transmission, as amazing as anything in fiction.

What's recovered, crazily enough, is a tattered copy of an epic philosophical poem written two millennia ago (at least 55 B.C.) by the Roman poet Lucretius (full name, Titus Lucretius Caro). Its traditional name is De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), and it's one of the wonders of world poetry.

from John Timpane: The Philadelphia Inquirer: New book "The Swerve," a gripping tale of an ancient poem that conveys the cosmos

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There are rules.

If you share your deepest personal secrets with thousands of strangers on the Web, you can't talk. You can smile, wave, play background music. You can even make a two-handed "heart" sign.

But talk? No.

If you're making a "secrets video" for posting on YouTube or Tumblr--as hundreds of young people, predominantly women, are doing--you must write your secrets out in flash-card fashion.

from John Timpane: The Philadelphia Inquirer: A very public space for sharing very private secrets

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Rus Bowden · at 11:51 AM

by Joan Kresich

Haiti, keep your name

from CounterPunch: Poets' Basement

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Rus Bowden · at 11:51 AM

poetry legends. He pioneered the performance poetry scene a few decades ago, opened and is still running his world-renowned Bowery Poetry Club, is a professor, publisher, lecturer and much more.

Today, in the spirit of the upcoming holidays, The Arty Semite is featuring Holman's 1994 poem "A Jew in New York."

from Forward: The Arty Semite: Bob Holman's Poem for Rosh Hashanah

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Rus Bowden · at 11:50 AM

I had wondered about the signs of burning

from Granta: I had wondered about the signs of burning

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Rus Bowden · at 11:50 AM

By Alan Brownjohn

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: His Morning--II

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Rus Bowden · at 11:47 AM

renew our perception of something familiar, that say something inimical about it, or something close to the bone. Don't let your language be too loose. Wrap it carefully around the theme so that there's nothing there that hasn't merited its place. I'd be delighted to read poems with a structure that says as much as the words themselves--a sonnet perhaps, for its tendency to negotiate limit and liberty--for skin itself gives structure and limit. A tasteful re-telling or adaptation of Greek myth, or a love poem, wouldn't go amiss either.

from The Guardian: Rachael Boast's poetry workshop

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Rus Bowden · at 11:47 AM

When you see an old man in shorts

from Morning Star: Well Versed: Ding Dong

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Rus Bowden · at 11:46 AM

(translated by Dun Gifford Jr.)]

Fishing in Autumn

The fall pond cheerless, the water clear,

from The Oregonian: Poetry: Fishing in Autumn

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Rus Bowden · at 11:46 AM

The sky has a blackbird.

from PBS: Newshour: Weekly Poem: 'The Field Has a Girl'

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Rus Bowden · at 11:45 AM

You've got your downtown frown

from Portsmouth Herald News: Random Acts of Poetry: Jumpin' Joy

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Rus Bowden · at 11:45 AM

in Writing Ground, a pamphlet put together by four women writers for the Dumfries and Galloway Wildlife festival earlier this year, exploring places which have a lot of meaning for them.

This is about Crichope Linn, where the intrusion of litter into the natural scene seems all the more shameful because of the powerlessness of the lovely nymph, the mythical guardian of the waterfall, to protect her environment.

from The Scotsman: Poetry review: Writing Ground

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Rus Bowden · at 11:43 AM

By Edward Hirsch

from Slate: "The Lottery" By Edward Hirsch

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Rus Bowden · at 11:38 AM

the Bible, but loved to teach as well. Among her many interests were gardening, writing (especially poetry), and travel.

from Kitsap Sun: Dora Jean 'Dodee' Adams, 98

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Rus Bowden · at 11:38 AM

used to write poems over his relationship with the girl, who is yet to be identified," he added[, speaking of Mahtab Ahmed].

When contacted, Inspector Rajesh Kumar, who is investigating the case, said: "We are probing the case from all the angles. Love affair is also one of them."

from Daijiworld: IIT Kanpur Student Commits Suicide

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Rus Bowden · at 11:37 AM

the library at the new Southern Local High School in 1963. She was a member of the Ohio State Teachers Honorary. She will be remembered for her vibrant spirit, her love of teaching and poetry, and for her beautiful flower pictures.

from Salem News: Hazel Marie (Copeland) Baker

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Rus Bowden · at 11:37 AM

published in an unusual variety of religious magazines. He also was an award-winning poet with hundreds of poems "drifting out there" as he would say. He never suffered the dreaded "writer's block" because he said writing was like being a farmer: "One's chores were never done."

from The Holland Sentinel: Connon Barclay, 72

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Rus Bowden · at 11:36 AM

and children's stories. He enjoyed fishing, shrimping and cooking.

from Journal and Courier: Larry Coleman, 62

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Rus Bowden · at 11:36 AM

films Just Friends and Tideland and on the TV shows Corner Gas and Little Mosque on the Prairie.

Crooks also turned her hand to writing her memoirs and poetry.

In 2007, she was honoured by the Saskatchewan Writers' Guild with the John V. Hicks Manuscript Award for About Jim and Me: A Love Story.

from CBC News: Teacher, writer, broadcaster Sally Crooks dies at 84

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Rus Bowden · at 11:35 AM

who has died aged 83, will always be better known as Ted Hughes's co-translator of another 20th-century Hungarian poet, János Pilinszky. In this, he is reminiscent of Edward Fitzgerald, a poet whose own verse is largely forgotten, but who lives in literary memory as the ingenious translator of Omar Khayyám's Rubáiyát.

from The Guardian: János Csokits obituary

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Rus Bowden · at 11:35 AM

and poems, music, and spending time with her beloved family. She was an avid seamstress and chef.

from The Coloradoan: Margaret L. Donahue

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Rus Bowden · at 11:34 AM

guitar, billiards, poetry, song writing and was an accomplished water color artist. She also enjoyed bowling, golf, swimming, pinochle and playing many types of board games with her grandchildren.

from phillyBurbs.com: Esther Geremia

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Rus Bowden · at 11:34 AM

from UCLA but her true education was in traveling extensively through Latin America, meeting the artists and furiously debating the creation and influences on their art. She made lifelong friends with her probing intellect and what can be called brutal honesty.

from KCET: RIP: Shifra Goldman, 85, Longtime Champion of Chicano, Latin American Art

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Rus Bowden · at 11:33 AM

the Appleton Improvement Committee, served as a library volunteer, taught art at the Appleton Elementary School, and was a member of the Rag Baggers rug club and a local antiques club. She enjoyed being creative, writing multiple books full of poetry, creating art and painting, hooking and braiding rugs, knitting and crocheting, and also reading.

from Republican Journal: Pauline Gurney

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Rus Bowden · at 11:32 AM

and they should be free.

He [Michael Hart] came to apply that principle to books, too. Everyone should have access to the great works of the world, whether heavy (Shakespeare, "Moby-Dick", pi to 1m places), or light (Peter Pan, Sherlock Holmes, the "Kama Sutra"). Everyone should have a free library of their own, the whole Library of Congress if they wanted, or some esoteric little subset; he liked Romanian poetry himself, and Herman Hesse's "Siddhartha". The joy of e-books, which he invented, was that anyone could read those books anywhere, free, on any device, and every text could be replicated millions of times over.

from The Economist: Michael Hart

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Rus Bowden · at 11:32 AM

known for award-winning fiction and nonfiction about people affected by World War II, died after collapsing at her home in a Tokyo's suburb, her relatives said Thursday.

from The Japan Times: War fiction author Henmi dies at 72

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Rus Bowden · at 11:31 AM

ACC sports fan and a supporter of the Baltimore Orioles. He held a lifelong interest in poetry and authored many unpublished poems.

from Suffolk News-Herald: Clarence W. "Red" Jones

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Rus Bowden · at 11:31 AM

and poems, inventing medical devices and spending time with his grandchildren.

from Journal and Courier: R. Robert Lamb, 62

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Rus Bowden · at 11:30 AM

and novelist Emanuel Litvinoff, who has died aged 96, appeared at the first poetry platform at the ICA, in London. He castigated TS Eliot--whom he admired and was present at the event--for reprinting, after the Holocaust, a 1920 poem featuring the lines: "The rats are underneath the piles/The Jew is underneath the lot." From that moment, through to Emanuel's major poems, such as The Dead Sea (from his 1973 collection Notes for a Survivor), several novels and his memoir, Journey Through a Small Planet (1972), Emanuel's voice was one raised in protest against the fate of the Jews. His editorship of the monthly newsletter Jews in Eastern Europe, which gave details of the atrocities being perpetuated against the Jews of the Soviet Union, made a serious contribution to the legislation that eventually allowed Jewish people to leave the USSR for Israel.

from The Guardian: Emanuel Litvinoff obituary

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Rus Bowden · at 11:30 AM

poetry books as well as being a charter member of the Fairfield Ruritan Club, where he served as the president, vice president and secretary in years past.

from Salem News: Eber S. Martin

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Rus Bowden · at 11:29 AM

(including an unfinished historical novel about a lost mine in Oregon, limericks and poetry), and was an accomplished fly fisherman.

from The Siuslaw News: Norman Lee "Norm" Mayberry

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Tuesday, September 27, 2011