July 23rd forum announcement

Dear Poetry Aficionados,

Poetry & Poets in Rags blog

This is the final installment of Poetry & Poets in Rags, completing 10 years, and well over 500 issues. It started as a weekly Saturday forum post at two now-defunct poetry boards, Melic Review and The Atlantic Monthly. It was picked up shortly thereafter by IBPC, which has carried it for nearly its entire 10 years. Early on, it went from coming out on Saturdays to Tuesdays. The popular companion blog began in 2006. My initial motivation was that if I were passing important information on to just one person, then it would be worth the effort. And it has grown to much more than that.

Thanks to all who have clicked in, and if you're reading this, you must be one. Thank you.

Yours,
Rus

Our links:

IBPC: Poetry & Poets in Rags

Poetry & Poets in Rags blog

IBPC Home

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News at Eleven: Approximately 300 of Miram Baheer's members

live in the outlying provinces--Khost, Paktia, Maidan Wardak, Kunduz, Kandahar, Herat, and Farah--where the group functions in secret. Many who cannot safely travel to meet together listen to radio programs broadcast by Mirman Baheer and the Afghan Women's Writing Project.

"We recruit only through word-of-mouth and delete any content that might be used to identify our writers," says Richelle McClain, director of the Afghan Women's Writing Project.

from The Christian Science Monitor: Afghan women write powerful poetry--even amid war

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News at Eleven: [Edvin] Sugarev was admitted to Alexandrovska hospital's

intensive care unit earlier on Wednesday. The 59-year-old poet has been on a hunger strike for 22 days now.

"I was the one who forced him to enter the hospital and put an end to the hunger strike. He vehemently opposed at the beginning, he wanted to persevere. We spoke all night, he was throwing up all night and in the morning his condition became so poor, he was rushed into the hospital," his wife shared on Wednesday.

from Sofia News Agency: Famous Bulgarian Poet Forced to End Hunger Strike by Family, Poor Health

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News at Eleven: Turkish Publishers Association released its report

"Freedom to Publish Turkey" including right violations between June 2012 and 2013. "At least 27 authors, poets, translators, publishers are imprisoned in Turkey," the report cited.

The report included the following chapters: "Lawsuits and Investigations against Books, Books Pulled Off the Shelf", "Other Court Cases Against Writers", "Lawsuits Against Comics", "Censorship, Bans and Investigations Regarding Publications", "Books as Crime Evidence",  "Pressures on Press", "Pressures on Internet Publishing",  "Amendments to Law",  "European Court of Human Rights Rulings" and "Reports of International Organizations".

from Bianet: "At Least 27 Authors, Poets, Translators, Publishers in Prison"
then Bianet: Turkish Publishers Association Report on Freedom to Publish Turkey (June 2012-2013)(pdf)

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News at Eleven: [Ingrid] Jonker had started writing a new collection

of poems just before her death. A selection of these poems was published posthumously in the collection Kantelson ("Toppling Sun"). She then witnesses a shattering event: a Black baby was shot in his mother' arms. She underlined from Dylan Thomas: "after the first death, there is no other". And she wrote: "Die kind (wat doodgeskiet is deur soldate by Nyanga)", "The child (who was shot dead by soldiers at Nyanga").

During the night of 19 July 1965, Jonker went to the beach at Three Anchor Bay in Cape Town where she walked into the sea and committed suicide by drowning. On hearing of Jonker's death, her father reportedly said: "They can throw her back in the sea for all I care."

from The Patriotic Vanguard: Poetry: The Child Who Was Shot Dead By Soldiers in Nyanga

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News at Eleven: There is something about the experience of war,

[Jane] Varley said, that draws people to art.

"Art is an endeavor to try to make sense of chaos," she said, "and in the case of Hugh Martin, to make poetry is not a reaction to war but a present-tense, proactive, ongoing effort to find what is beneath the surface of our lives."

In the forward of The Stick Soldiers, Cornelius Eady wrote: "Here's eleven months worth of sawdust, sweat, dear reader. Somehow, Hugh Martin has wrung poetry from a scab, and now, the full shock and beauty and mystery of the things of war that won't let go will stick to you."

from Akron Beacon Journal: Iraq veteran Hugh Martin of Macedonia is nationally recognized poet

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News at Eleven: [Mark] Edmundson dismisses Anne Carson, too,

as "opaque" and "inscrutable"--the same Anne Carson who became a hit when her compulsively readable, gay coming-of-age "novel in verse" Autobiography of Red was name-dropped on Sex and the City. When Edmundson asserts that "no well-known poet" writes about big subjects like sex, he ignores the entirety of Carson's work. Take just one example from her collection Plainwater: "Men know almost nothing about desire/they think it has to do with sexual activity/or can be discharged that way./But sex is a substitute, like money or language."

As a woman, though, does Carson count?

from The Atlantic Monthly: Literature Is Dead (According to Straight, White Guys, At Least)

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News at Eleven: I find they are often texting, clogging their ears

with multi-colored plugs,  and answering the siren call of cell phones. I always tell my students--for the most part 18 to 20 year olds, that they have to unplug to be open to their senses: sight, smell, sound, taste, etc. I tell them they need to observe--not have their head buried over the sacred cell to see what the latest LOL or whatnot is about.  But of course I always have my cell in the deep pockets of my carpenter pants, and my laptop is at my beck and call. . .and yes, I still write poetry.

from The Somerville News: Doug Holder: The State of Poetry

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News at Eleven: [Harry] Eyres could never understand

the disconnect between the rigorous approach to learning the classics, and the often lascivious or emotional subject matter of the poetry. He singles out A.E. Housman--a "famously dry professor"--as a man who typified the uptight attitude that Eyres hated. But Housman, Eyres points out, could also display a fine sensibility. After a long lecture, Housman read Horace's "Diffugere nives" ("The snows are fled away") aloud: as he left the room, his students saw that his eyes were filled with tears.

from The Telegraph: Horace and Me by Harry Eyres, review

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News at Eleven: [Clive] James is unable or unwilling to pull off,

or replicate, Dante's trick of ending each book with the word "stelle"--stars--but then if he'd done so he would have lost the impressive couplet with which he closes the whole poem, and, as he says, there aren't that many rhymes in English for "stars": ". . . the deepest wish that I could feel/And all my will, were turning with the love/That moves the sun and all the stars above."

It's slightly tautologous, in that there are no stars below, and if you can't end with the word "stars" you might have ended it with "love", as that's what the whole poem is about; both the love of God for all creation and, in lesser fashion, Dante's love for Beatrice.

from The Guardian: The Divine Comedy by Dante, translated by Clive James--review

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News at Eleven: Unfortunately I could only keep drawing or

attempt to transcribe, so I stuck to image making. [Les] Murray has a distinctive reading style, breathless and wheezy, rat-a-tat with emphases on rhymes if any and often finishing on a fade. His laugh is equally Murrayesque--a grunt-chortle as a punctuation, or a explosive laugh pitched at the ceiling.

Anna Heyward, maintaining superb sangfroid, inquired if Les was still writing on his typewriter rather than a word processor. Les replied that You want a messy page with corrections--so you can make it better.

from Crikey: The Pre-Nobel Poet: drawing Les Murray reading

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News at Eleven (Back Page): A look at reoccurring themes and stylistic techniques

may reveal affected writers share a commonality in their writings.  An exploration of the works may help find a way for society to better understand individuals suffering from mental disease, and discover those not yet diagnosed with manic-depression.

Throughout history there have been writers and poets that suffer from manic depression.  If we take a close look at the writings of these renowned writers we find a link to mental illness and the English language.

from PsychCentral: The Groundbreaking Link Between Mental Illness And Literature, Part I
then PsychCentral: The Groundbreaking Link Between Mental Illness And Literature, Part II

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Great Regulars: What these former scions of American literary innovation

fail to see is that the time for merely edifying America as to the realities of language is over; the time for speaking primarily in the language of realities is beginning. Hypotactic verse simply has different aims from paratactic verse, and until those well-versed in the latter become well-versed in the former it will indeed appear as though metamodernism is merely a topical or thematic phenomenon--as though investigation of the nature of reality is somehow less rigorous and exacting than investigation of the written mark (or that these two investigations are not, finally, but two sides of the same coin).

from Seth Abramson: The Huffington Post: On Literary Metamodernism

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Great Regulars: Unpicking the mind of this high-­functioning psychopath

will take some care, but, before delving into Dex's ­disturbingly interesting soul, we should look at the big picture. Everybody knows--or should know--that American long-form TV is one of the great art forms of our time. The Wire, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Shield and, I will insist, Dexter represent a revolution in narrative art comparable to the creative apotheosis of the novel in the 19th century. Less often noticed is the central theme that connects all of these shows: the cult of the antihero.

from Bryan Appleyard: from The Sunday Times: Dexter: The Dandy Psychopath

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Great Regulars: Another Beer

by William Matthews

The first one was for the clock

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

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Dirge Without Music
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Dirge Without Music by Edna St. Vincent Millay

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Mediterranean
by Rosanna Warren

--when she disappeared on the path ahead of me

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Mediterranean by Rosanna Warren

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The Shout
by Simon Armitage

We went out

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: The Shout by Simon Armitage

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The Swan at Edgewater Park
by Ruth L. Schwartz

Isn't one of your prissy rich peoples' swans

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: The Swan at Edgewater Park by Ruth L. Schwartz

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That Reminds Me
by Ogden Nash

Just imagine yourself seated on a shadowy terrace,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: That Reminds Me by Ogden Nash

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Great Regulars: For one thing, by conceiving of religion as an elite

training regimen, [Peter] Sloterdijk implies that a religion is justified only by its saints. Anyone who is not a saint is insignificant, and so the average person's experience of religious meanings--whether metaphysical doctrine or spiritual consolation or tradition or identity or communion--is dismissed out of hand. This is false to the lived reality of religion for most people, and shows how tendentious Sloterdijk's equation of religion with "practice" really is.

Then there is the question-begging insistence that metabiotics, Sloterdijk's discomfitingly biological philosophy, will do in the absence of metaphysics.

from Adam Kirsch: New Republic: Against Cynicism: A philosopher's brilliant reasons for living

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The problem of the workmen in the Holy of Holies is also considered as a case of "deriving benefit" from something prohibited--in this case, the benefit of getting to look at the holiest spot in the world, ordinarily prohibited to everyone but the high priest. Indeed, the rabbis wonder whether it might not be a kind of sin to derive any kind of pleasure from the Temple, even by looking at its decorations, listening to the music played there, or smelling the incense. This seems strange: Surely these things were designed specifically for the pleasure and awe of the Jews who worshipped in the Temple? Why build a beautiful structure and fill it with music and perfume if people are not allowed to enjoy it?

from Adam Kirsch: Tablet: In the Shadow of the Divine, Reaping Unintended Benefits at the Edges of the Law

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Great Regulars: Perhaps there's a kind of afterlife

that is made up of our memories of a departed person, especially as these cling to that person's belongings. Bruce Snider, who lives and teaches in California, suggests that here.

Afterlife

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 435

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Great Regulars: At the Birdfeeder

By Richard Foerster

My neighbor's cat, all nimble

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

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The Longing of the Feet
by Wesley McNair

At first the crawling

from Wesley McNair via Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: The Longing of the Feet

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Great Regulars: One world event to pay close attention to

is the visit of Pope Francis to Brazil this week. Will the focus now turn to poverty and social justice? Is liberation theology returning with a little less Marx?
Shall we dream of Bishop Oscar Romero and count our mornings?

I Am the Land: A Poem in Memory of Oscar Romero

from E. Ethelbert Miller: E-notes: I Am the Land: A Poem in Memory of Oscar Romero

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Great Regulars: In discovering his own, isolated male nakedness,

Actaeon breaks another taboo. He has no alternative, as before, and no further story, except, perhaps, that he will be forced (by loneliness or ill-health) to get to know this nakedness more intimately. His body may be a Newfoundland, but it's one which can be greeted only with irony. He's not even a stag any more.

[by George Szirtes]

Actaeon

O, my America, my Newfoundland
John Donne, "Elegy 20"

O, my America, discovered by slim chance,

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Poem of the week: Poem of the week: Actaeon by George Szirtes

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