September 27th Poetic Ticker Clicking
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Congratulation are in order! Tyehimba Jess' August IBPC results are up. And here are the winning poems:
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."
my silver fork paused in midair.
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.
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.
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."
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.
world if it doesn't include Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Tolstoy" and, of course "the Bible?" he asks.
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.
"Glasgow is the great bisexual capital of Europe," because he was picking up married men in places like the Horse Shoe bar.'
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.
the bestselling novel of all time, with an estimated 200m copies sold. He is certainly the most quoted of writers.
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."
By Steve McOrmond
the Goethe prize earlier this year, Syrian poet Adonis has emerged as the frontrunner to be crowned Nobel literature laureate next month.
"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.
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.
by William Butler Yeats
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.
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.
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.
That Chance Meeting was A Fated Snowslide for Me
in terms of getting it right for our kids in schools where literacy is concerned.
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?
Sara Teasdale's "Debt" with a recent Vows column about the wedding of Sarah Silverman and Jeffrey Blaugrund.
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.
I had wondered about the signs of burning
(translated by Dun Gifford Jr.)]
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.
the Bible, but loved to teach as well. Among her many interests were gardening, writing (especially poetry), and travel.
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."
and children's stories. He enjoyed fishing, shrimping and cooking.
films Just Friends and Tideland and on the TV shows Corner Gas and Little Mosque on the Prairie.
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.
and poems, music, and spending time with her beloved family. She was an avid seamstress and chef.
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.
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.
and they should be free.
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.
ACC sports fan and a supporter of the Baltimore Orioles. He held a lifelong interest in poetry and authored many unpublished poems.
and poems, inventing medical devices and spending time with his grandchildren.
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.
(including an unfinished historical novel about a lost mine in Oregon, limericks and poetry), and was an accomplished fly fisherman.