Yesterday was World Poetry Day. In the spirit of the occasion, Katie Couric brings us five of her favorite poems. That's our first link. We also have a companion link to the U.N. News Centre making the announcement. The next two items are poems, one by Kabir, translated into English by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and the other with Beau Blue poetry. But if there is a theme this week, it is the reviews, the works of W.H. Auden, Adrienne Rich, C.D. Wright, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Oakes, and Charles J. Butler. And those are just in our News at Eleven section. We also have a full section of Great Regulars as always, and the Poetic Obituaries.
sinking your teeth into a great poem. They are romantic (Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" gets me every time--seriously, guys, propose to your sweetheart with this one and she'll never turn you down!), provocative ("Richard Cory" by Edwin Arlington Robinson comes to mind), contemplative, comforting, and joyful.
At a time when there is so much turmoil in the world, find a poem you love and dig in, even for a few minutes. If you need some instruction, start with "How to Eat a Poem" by Eve Merriam.
Here are five of my favorites in honor of World Poetry Day.
annotated edition of The Age of Anxiety seeks to repair and renew contemporary readers' relationship with the poem. That it should triumphantly succeed in this task, however, has less to do with unravelling the poem's intricacies than with clearly showing how its many knots are tied. In an expansive preface and through rigorous textual notes, editor and Auden scholar Alan Jacobs outlines the circumstances of the poem's composition, traces the relations between psychology and religious belief as they play out in the text, and firmly situates the work in its historical moment.
with his ambitions and his frustrations, his longings and his fears. He wanted clarity and beauty, earthly satisfaction and divine reward. "The folio is not merely a site for drafting poetry," Barkan writes, "but the ground where he sketches out the contradictions of his life." The artist struggled to understand his creative gifts in relation to his possible salvation. Michelangelo wrote, "Art and death do not go well together: in what, then, should I place my greatest hope?"
from the personal because they don't quite overlap for the poet. And that is generally true of Tonight No Poetry Will Serve. The political poems are brittle and self-righteous precisely because they don't draw on [Adrienne] Rich's best muse: her experience. The personal poems in Tonight No Poetry Will Serve are more supple, especially those on poetry's most traditional, existential subjects--love, loss, and death:
a bourbon-loving, Yeats-quoting, white Catholic mother of seven. In 1969, she left her ironing board and joined six black men on the baking Arkansas blacktop in a civil rights march. It bore contradictory fruit:
V, as [C.D.] Wright calls her, was tossed in jail. Her car was burned up. Her husband, the town's appliance-store proprietor, served her with divorce and custody papers, and went on the radio to disown her. A state trooper drove V across the Arkansas line and put her out in Tennessee.
would enjoy going through the back-and-forth. [Laughs] And it's a good book for academics. They would want to know that kind of stuff, and that's information that really isn't available anywhere--in terms of what they did with putting the poems into the house style and then Bishop's responses to what they end up doing. But that's why it's there, and I only did it for the places where the manuscripts were revised. Some of the other poems don't have it because there's no revising, at least in the manuscripts. . . . They show how interesting the process is--how it was collaborative in some ways, where Bishop was open to what they did, or she didn't care, or sometimes maybe she didn't notice--and that there were many hands involved.
of Mercy [Dudley Woodbridge]'s questioning of Puritan dogma. The most emotionally wrenching of these is "Divorce, Disinheritance, Excommunication." In it she says, "My/father stayed in the room when they voted,/as did my husband. I did not expect that." Later she recalls, "When they excommunicated me, I went into the forest/where God waits for me" ("The Gift of Prophecy.")
The major journey Mercy undertakes is undeniably a spiritual one. And in poem after poem, the spiritual plight of the 17th-century woman surfaces, as in "How God Comes to Me":
can be oblivious to a murder and walk across bloodstains on our big city streets without recognizing them in the book's first poem, "Crimson Stroll." Suddenly while stepping over the red brown stains, the author recognizes it for what it is, seeing a stark vivid beauty of someone's life bled out on the streets.
and literary critic Jarosław Rymkiewicz drew over 200 free speech supporters in a Warsaw courtroom yesterday, during his first appearance in a libel case launched by Agora, publisher of the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper.
"This is a process that will show what freedom of speech looks like in our country, which is supposed to be a free country," Mr Rymkiewicz said earlier.
Agora is demanding an apology and zł.10,000 in compensation for something the poet wrote in conservative paper Gazeta Polska last September.
McKnight Distinguished Artist Award, [Bill] Holm is the author of several books of essays and poetry including, most recently, The Windows of Brimnes. Known both regionally and nationally as a humorist, writer, and prairie radical, Bill Holm passed away on February 26, 2009.
intrepid sass and admirable panache can rescue a handful of half-baked conceptualizations that would have been better served following an extended back-burner simmering. Readers devouring brave new waves of words at a heady pace will resent, if only slightly, the glaringly odd low note failing to adequately justify a sprinkling of jarring anti-social, anti-anti-social and anti-narratological narrators who, apparently, eschew rising to the occasion in favour of stooping to conquer.
Go for a walk and part of whatever you walk through rides back on your socks. Here Peter Everwine, a California poet, tells us about the seeds that stick to us, in all their beauty and variety.
who served 10-year jail terms for subversion, but the authorities are keeping up the pressure on activists after the end of the annual parliamentary session.
Jin Haike, 34, was released from the Beijing No. 2 Prison, while Xu Wei, 37, was released from Yanqing Prison on Saturday.
China said it has shut down more than 130,000 "illegal" Internet cafes, according to a new government report issued this week, and vows to extend the crackdown from urban to rural areas.
Nearly 7,000 of the closures took place in 2010.
The closures took place over the past six years as part of Beijing's long-term strategy to regulate cybercafes, official media reported on Friday.
China has rolled out tough new regulations aimed at monitoring Internet usage across the country in the past year, with many Internet cafes now requiring a swipe of smart ID cards before allowing people online.
where are we going? Even to ourselves, as we sit at home or hurry through the city streets, we remain a bewildering mystery.
Matthew's Arnold's haunting poem, The Buried Life, describes our yearning to know our own heart. In this short extract, not even "the world's most crowded streets" can stifle the "unspeakable desire" to find our most essential self. The word "unspeakable" suggests that such knowledge cannot be put into words--and is somehow deemed obscene by others. The true individual is terrifying to the group.
10:30 a.m.: Prepare to enter my "writing mode." Place one hand on a dictionary originally owned by T.S. Eliot (a fortune at auction, but worth it!). Place the other hand on a bathrobe belonging to Hart Crane. Place my feet in a laundry hamper thought to have been briefly in the possession of James Merrill's dentist. Soak it in.
in both senses of that word. The title sequence of her first book, The Ghetto and Other Poems, takes an energized, head-on look at the old Lower East Side. Ridge sees the Yiddish-speaking tenements and pushcarts directly, from that time (1918) and from inside that place. Ridge's way of making a poem about the ghetto scrubs away any accumulated nostalgia or sentimentality: "Hester street,/Like a forlorn woman over-born/By many babies at her teats,/Turns on her trampled bed to meet the day."
posters discussed the valediction to Venus and, alternatively, the "hello" to Venus, as poetic genres worthy of future exploration. March 21 being the first day of spring, it seems that optimism is called for, so this week's choice is an extract from the celebratory poem The Vigil of Venus (Pervigilium Veneris), translated by Thomas Parnell.
the poem "The Word That Is a Prayer," a photograph, above, from a Times slide show of over 100 images of the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and a March 11 blog post by the Op-Ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof, "Sympathy for Japan, and Admiration."
on amendments to Egypt's constitution, the first surge has faded, and women's rights seem far in the background.
When a committee was assembled to draft the amendments, not a single woman was on the panel. And on March 8, International Women's Day, women took to Tahrir Square again, but this time they were heckled, booed, and threatened. Journalist Ethar El-Katatney wrote on Twitter: "Was just ranted at by a 'sheikh' telling me to go home and raise my kids."
Jewish holiday poetry out there is either about the High Holidays or Passover. The extensive liturgy and introspection in the case of the former and the mythic storytelling cannon of the latter lend themselves to metaphors and color our language with their musicality. Yet, as Kafka has shown, there's nothing quite like the poetry of the lesser known occasion, the undesired calendar date. On that note, I would like to introduce a piece of my own, which addresses Ta'anit Esther--the fast of Esther that preceedes Purim.
and with a few words, one could achieve so much more than with prose". This poem is the embodiment of the above quote. Beisch successfully applies the rigorous philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre to colloquial language in a poem that moves from small-town/big city anxiety to cosmopolitan confidence in 19 lines. The narrator's power to overcome emotional, mental, and philosophical distress in the course of a sit-down dinner is so appetizing that this poem is a dish that begs to be eaten over and over again.
and his shelves contained first editions of Dickens, Byron, Yeats and Joyce alongside the poetry of Ted Hughes and TS Eliot, his favourite poets. An author, his book of poems, Variations of Ambush , was reprinted.
Casting a wry look at life, his last poem, written just a few days before he died, anticipated his death. Describing his ageing body, he wrote: "Perhaps I should abandon it/Quietly slip away/Over the light blue hills at sunrise/Leave the vehicle for others to dispose of. . . ."
An avid reader, he died in his sleep with three books at his bedside.
in letters, the poet and scholar was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1976, shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry in 1981, and won the 2005 Carlo Betocchi International Poetry Prize and the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English-language Literary Arts. His final poetry collection, Looking Into Trees, was published in 2009 by Sybertooth.
books for children that were published and received rave reviews: "The Poetry Troupe," "The Garden Alphabet," "B is for Bethlehem," and "The Baby's Game Book."
She also published assorted poems in various magazines, including The Horn Book, Cricket, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Nation. After she retired, she continued to volunteer in schools to bring poetry to children. She also joined various writers groups, including the Dietrich Theater's Writers Group.
We begin this week with the report of a remarkable translation project that takes us to Hell for poetry, and I don't mean Lofoten. After the link to the article, there is a link to the project's website. In addition to this poetry, scroll to our Great Regulars section, where we have some terrific poems to read as usual. Among them, Kristen Hoggatt offers up some John Ashbery, Garrison Keillor brings us two by Dorianne Laux, one called The Beatles and the other Cher, Ted Kooser looks at a poem called The Word That Is a Prayer, Michael Rosen reads four of his to us, the Arty Semite publishes some Morris Rosenfeld, but Jay Parini notes the ten best ever from America. (Really?)
We have excellent news articles too. Also in Great Regulars, David Ulin gives us 9 ways of looking at earthquakes through literature, René Wadlow marks the anniversary of Ghandi's Salt March, and Tenzin Gyatso officially devolves his formal authority in favor of a democratic process. Oh yes, news galore. And there's more in our News at Eleven section, as always.
For the second week running, the InterBoard Poetry Community (IBPC) issued results from judge Kwame Dawes with his commentary, this time February's. Thanks to him, and congrats to the poets and IBPC boards where the winning poems were workshopped.
were in terrible condition, missing words, lines or stanzas. [Sarah] Moskovitz worked from 80 to 90 reels of microfiche acquired by the Holocaust Museum from the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Her husband, Itzik, scanned each frame to look for poetry, convert it to a digital format and then make it legible, sometimes taking nearly a week to adjust a single frame.
Some, such as Eamon Grennan and Bernard O'Donoghue, have lived outside Ireland for more than 40 years. [Sara] Berkeley, Paul Muldoon, Justin Quinn, Colette Bryce and Greg Delanty have been away for an average of 20 years each. Since 1996 Eavan Boland has been based for much of the year in California, at Stanford. David Wheatley, Conor O'Callaghan, Vona Groarke and John McAuliffe have all left within the past decade. And there are others. Most left to take up teaching posts, a lot of them in creative writing.
A woman kisses her drooping lover on the lips whenever he takes a step. A rhythm that equates steps and kisses. Next to me on the plane a woman pours herself on her seat like a thin light. A crooked nose. She is weeping. I do not dare ask her the reason.
Perhaps her heart, like this era, is full of holes," Adonis writes.
In this last line we see one of Adonis' repeating gestures: a sudden leap from the personal to the universal and back. Just as the poet seems to be equally comfortable with traditional and innovative forms, short poems and poems of epic length, he is equally able to move from minute details to sweeping yet insightful generalizations.
In the foreground a water meadow with some tiny cows, two brushstrokes each, but confidently cows.
In Sha Sha, an early portrait of her friend Charlotte Russell, above the wainscoting panels whose wood grain, complete with mildew, receives special attention, a simple mathematical equation is written on the wall: "1 + 4 = 7." As perhaps a comment on other "inaccuracies" in the picture--the anatomy of the figure, the invisible chair she sits on--it boasts, like them, a pictorial rightness of its own.
and subversive essayist Angela Carter, discovered at her former London home, have revealed a previously unknown passion that casts new light on her development as a novelist.
Carter, who died of lung cancer at the age of 51 in 1992, was one of Britain's most celebrated authors and remains a leading voice in feminist fiction, but her poetry has never been professionally published or widely studied. In the 1970s and 1980s she was at the forefront of fabulist or magical narrative work.
themed collection, he says, it crept up on him. "It did what water does, it seeps its way into every crack. I would think I had been writing about something else and would end up writing about water. I've come to trust to the things you don't know you're doing, the things that creep up on you, more than the ones you intend."
The water in the book is more physical than metaphorical. It flows, trickles, pours into all sorts of subject areas, from the deep past to an imagined future.
is how incredibly musical [Glyn] Maxwell's work is: these poems come alive when they are read aloud. This is largely a matter of poetic form--Maxwell has no time for so-called free verse--though that term is perhaps misleading. By form, I don't mean the particular arrangements of rhymes within a regular stanza structure (though he sometimes uses those, too). A slavish dependence on form in that sense will often kill a poem. No, it is based in rhythm, and especially in the relative weights of words and stresses within the line, and the productive tensions between grammatical or sentence structure and line length
in poetry, which will be given Thursday night, have little in common, except that each employs a distinct tool or perspective that pushes the margins of the genre. The result is like a smorgasbord, with flavors ranging from strong to subtle. Not every offering will appeal, but they all deserve a bite.
leaves little room for figures below the first rank unless they happen to be women (Hemans and Landon) or provide sturdy support for a star performer (Moore and Hunt). So Walter Savage Landor, who qualifies on none of these counts, thereby loses his place in the history of English poetry. Yet Landor was a brilliant epigrammatist, perhaps the finest of the nineteenth century--as the following bears witness:
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife, Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art; I warmed my hands before the fire of life, It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
and other home regions to other areas seeking better opportunity, members of Phyllis Wheatley clubs across the nation recognized the need for women to have safe, supportive living quarters in large, sometimes unfriendly urban environments. Thus were born the Phyllis Wheatley homes, the first being established in Detroit in 1897. Other such ventures sprung up where there were Phyllis Wheatley clubs with one in Nashville, Tenn., evolving to establish a Phyllis Wheatley Room at Mercy Hospital there and eventually, in 1925, a home for aged women.
though the greens are on the ropes. As they slug it out, the language grows ever more vicious and the claims of both sides ever more extreme. To the sceptics the greens are lying, cheating, catastrophe-crazed group thinkers; to the warmists, the sceptics are mad, bad, neo-fascist defenders of Big Oil.
The internet is free, open and neutral. Anybody can use it to go anywhere they like and it is neutral because there is no control over what information flows through its networks.
The internet is, therefore, unique among communication and information systems. Telephony is controlled and access to it is expensive, radio networks are heavily regulated and monopolised by a few players, cinema is the property of the big studios, books and newspapers are also the property of big players, and television is done by a tiny elite. But, out there on the net, you can do and say what you like.
History suggests this brief golden age will soon end.
when describing the sparse Mexican towns near the border with the US, "Land of flies and little lizards, dried bush/And blizzards of sand", and much of the best writing evokes characters, such as "The Worm" or "Lupe", who inhabit this violent world.
This year's sidewalk poetry contest is about to get underway in St. Paul, and the city is looking for haiku, limericks and other short verse to imprint into city sidewalks.
I mean face it, isn't this the kind of publishing a poet really wants? To be virtually written in stone?
during the past few years, when I have thought, "I must go out and get the latest Newsweek," I know I am going to draw a blank. Likewise with Time. But the same is not true of a significant number of American periodicals: in no particular order, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The New York Review of Books--each have run pieces which have indeed "reset the agenda" or entered political consciousness.
Usually these articles are the work of dogged individuals who have pursued some large concealed truth (torture, the financing of the Right, the repossession of homes), or who have taken the time to follow an individual (a general, a politician, a crooked financier) for long enough to gain genuine new insight.
self-deprecatory thoughts, admitting that her floral efforts are surely "overgrown with bitter weeds and rue," but she gladly submits them for him to "weed" as needed. He can correct her clumsiness. She names two of her poems "eglantine" and "ivy" and commands him to "take them," as she used to take his gifts of flowers, and probably gifts of his own poems to her as well.
in short, the assumption of political responsibility by elected leaders for the popular good. In order for our process of democratization to be complete, the time has come for me to devolve my formal authority to such an elected leadership. The general lack of experience and political maturity in our democratic institutions has prevented us from doing this earlier.
Given that the line of Dalai Lamas has provided political leadership for nearly four centuries, it might be difficult for Tibetans generally and especially those in Tibet to envisage and accept a political system that is not led by the Dalai Lama. Therefore, over the past 50 years I have tried in various ways to raise people's political awareness and encourage their participation in our democratic process.
Tibetan is the only language to preserve the entire range of the Buddha's teachings, including the texts on logic and theories of knowledge (epistemology), which we inherited from India's Nalanda University. This is a system of knowledge governed by reason and logic that has the potential to contribute to the peace and happiness of all beings. Therefore, the policy of undermining such a culture, instead of protecting and developing it, will in the long run amount to the destruction of humanity's common heritage.
All the ways we try to describe or interact with our experience of being human are limited because we are limited. But we can do some incredible stuff! Making art is sort of like shaking hands with the infinite, maybe, and making up words is beautiful. Language is a tool we use to help us understand our world and by its nature, it's flexible and creative. It makes me feel excited and warm to think of it.
