earl of Surrey, was the Tudor poet who did most to establish that new Italian immigrant, the sonnet, in remarkably comfortable quarters in the English language. This week's poem, Brittle Beauty (also known as The Frailty and Hurtfulness of Beauty), is one of those in which Surrey sets himself the challenge of playing the same duo of rhyme-sounds in each of its three quatrains.
"beautiful," "student" and "teacher" and found the work of the teacher Will Okun, who "won a trip" to accompany the columnist Nicholas Kristof to central Africa in 2007. In this piece, he focuses on his students back in Chicago, and we thought it made a lovely match with Marilyn Taylor's "Subject to Change".
Bright Ladder
Paul Williams ("We've Only Just Begun" and much else), who is president and chairman of the board of the music company ASCAP, what he valued about his friend's lyrics. In an e-mail, Williams nailed it.
I dare not speak my name, it is so long
features Alex Dimitrov.
Our latest installment features a poem by Allen Lowe, updating Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."
Our latest installment features a poem by Amelia Cohen-Levy.
Our latest installment features an excellent poem by Sheera Talpaz.
we must, [Franco] Fortini holds on to a belief in humanity's collective destiny: " . . . the dark water beyond the future . . . of that I knew how to speak". This balance of public and private, [Michael] Hamburger says, can be "hard or impossible to render in another language". The fact that these translations were authorized by Fortini--himself a skilful and prolific translator into Italian of Brecht, Proust and Goethe--suggests that Hamburger's efforts were not in vain.
close as it gets to reality. Most of his poems and paintings are dark and deal with sorrow. Some are about life on the precipice with the shadow of death looming large. 'Blood on the concrete' was the first poem he scribbled on the cover of his Class VIII notebook. 'Death immortal' and 'Lizards don't cry' are some of the other poems that will feature in 'A Bunch of Lies'.
Concord High School principal Gene Connolly called [Cote] Laramie "an amazing young man" who loved poetry, reading, writing, and performing. He participated in the Poetry Out Loud festival and competed nationally, according to the newsletter.
of the beat universe when he became a book clerk in the now world-famous City Lights Bookstore of San Francisco.
which have appeared in The Paris Review and The New York Quarterly and have recently been collected in two volumes, "Chasing Ghosts" and "The Time We Have Misspent," Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday said, "His work is precise, perceptive, and provocative," and Andrew Glaze called him "an intellectual who persists in the love of language, an aging lover who dates Dickinson but marries Millay."
a four-mile march through Chicago's West Side on Monday night called for an end to the U.S. war on drugs. Javier Sicilia, whose 24-year-old son was killed last year by Mexican drug traffickers in Cuernavaca, blames the drug war for tens of thousands of violent deaths in that country.
winner Liu Xiaobo has dismissed rumors that he will receive an early release on medical grounds, his former lawyer said Wednesday.
master of the love poem, which can be a tricky business. But his love poems are always delivered with an honesty, a sincerity. One has the sense that the poet's motives are not false, that he is writing these poems because he needs to.
that "the most highly sexed beings upon the planet are the creators--the poets, sculptors, painters, musicians--and so it has been from the beginning".
complaints against 'infidels', disgust at Afghans earning dollars, descriptions of suffering at the frontlines and the loneliness of widows, orphans and mothers, but without reference to engaging meaningfully with the outside world or even with the government to find a peaceful solution to the future. The solution for most lies in fighting the invaders until they leave. The poem "Slave" satirises the Karzai-Bush alliance, accusing the former: "Karzai! You sold the country for a few dollars."
English Poetry, Sudeep Sen gives you the lay of the land as far as English language poetry in India is concerned: "Only a handful of contemporary English language Indian poets command international and national status. And the others who are visible happen to be known within very tight and narrow confines of the poetry circles, university reading circuits and literary festivals."
who I recently heard speak, and who said something to the effect of "a new music is a new mind," meaning that one knows one is wading into a new book of one's own poems when some new kind of music in the language begins to emerge. I feel very far from a new music right now. [--Craig Morgan Teicher]
The Same Life Twice by Frank Kuppner--are accessible after their own fashions without compromising on the Modernist injunction that poetry should "make it new". The fundamental difference between the books is one that courses through the whole history of poetry: the competing claims of the lyric and the philosophic. They might be united in wonder, but they are profoundly opposed in method.
to lyrics is a natural one. "I've always been interested in writing for music. It started when I was a kid in Armagh. I was at a school where there was a lot of music in the air, literally. There were a couple of people who taught there who taught Irish literature, music, poems and songs, together. It was probably a much more significant component than I ever realised at the time."
a photo in her kitchen, displayed high on the wall. Janet Lewis followed my gaze, and asked, "Do you recognize who that is?" I didn't. "That's Emily Dickinson, grown up." It was a matchless photo, attentive and sensual. She told me it was included in the Richard Sewall biography of the poet, and that she had torn it out from the book and put it on her wall.
in reading contemporary poetry, to discover that the auditory element of a poem has run well ahead of one's own aural conditioning. It takes no more than a poet who is particularly clever in her use of sonics--with "cleverness" narrowly defined, here, as the ability to craft soundscapes grander than those for which our workaday experiences prepare us.
[Will] Gompertz says he does not know what name to give to the last twenty years of art, but, for me it is definitely conceptualism. Or perhaps financialism.
that goes back to the literary magazine's roots 14 years ago, when it was founded in Portland by Win McCormack, who then hired Brooklyn-based Rob Spillman as editor. The bicoastal arrangement worked out fine for all concerned as the magazine flourished and the two locations became cultural centers for everything new and happening now.
escaping domestic punishment to find the indifferent and infrequent comet as the embodiment of his suicidal father--and at the same time, the young poet seeks communion between the architectural shelter of bricks with the elemental sky that is without protection or refuge. To write poetry between those two psychic locales is to fashion an art of poise.
of trees and the light lengthening and turning golden as it shines up from the water in the evening. Days are so much shorter. It's hard to keep fall and winter off our minds even while we're still playing at summer here at the lake, our last family members arriving tomorrow for a week.
£10,000 prize, from Mary Costello's collection of Irish short stories The China Factory, released by small publisher Stinging Fly Press, to Harbach's novel, which follows the story of baseball player Henry Skrimshander and arrives garlanded with praise from Jonathan Franzen and John Irving. For the second year running, Guardian readers nominated a title, this year choosing Sarah Jackson's "assured and mysterious" poetry collection Pelt.
by Jane Shore
our economy will have improved and people who want to work can find good work. Minnie Bruce Pratt, who lives in Syracuse, N.Y., has a new book, mentioned below, in which there are a number of poems about the difficulties of finding work and holding on to it. Here's an example:
Anne Carson and Derek Walcott aren't. In many ways this is a radically democratic anthology--to get in you don't need to be famous, you just need to be good. There's some fun gossipy stuff in here too, like seeing Plath and Hughes go head-to-head again, each represented by poems they published in the magazine in 1963; Plath wins, her "Fever 103˚" positively sizzling next to Hughes's lukewarm "Heatwave."
device of the symbol more effectively than Waterville poet Peter Harris has in "The Net." Peter writes that the poem "comes from a particular event in my childhood, an early encounter with racism and my complicity in it, growing up as I did in an overwhelmingly white community."
or leaning--the face is the same. Queen, saint, or angel--it is the same. The subject of each painting dwindles into insignificance besides the artist's obsession.
my sister's husband's daughter's mancould justifiably make assumptions that his more or less middle-class reader would share his formative literary experiences, and that these would have included bedtime tales by Andersen, probably in the same edition, with the same illustrations. Perhaps in 2020 there will be a wistful poem by a "grown-up" remembering JK Rowling's tales of Harry Potter?
is the central faith of anyone who takes criticism seriously: that it is an art. And, like all arts, it comes with its own aesthetics, its own challenges and considerations, which all of us who write it have to keep in mind. Of these, the most important is that criticism is subjective, that, as in any creative enterprise, we can only write from our perspectives, which we must honor and, as Mendelsohn points out, constantly question, as well.
Just as you are about to grasp it
by Andrew Durbin
of translations of [Subramania] Bharati (Hachette, 2012) allows Indian readers in English the chance to grapple with the challenging ethics and metaphysics and distinctive lyric sensibility of one of modern Tamil literature's greatest poets.
(On exhibition at the Museum of Liverpool, alongside Macca's trousers)
By Artis Ostups, translated from the Latvian by Ieva Lešinska and Tom Pow
We Are So Illegal
Translation by Nahida Exiled Palestinian
by Gerry LaFemina
