Polish poet and translator Boris Gerus, who wrote this poem in Hebrew. Friends and fans are Gerus are working to raise funds for Gerus, who suffers from the rare Takayasu's Disease.
the "The Sacrifice of Abraham," a series of re-tellings of the biblical story of Isaac and Abraham. In each section, a group of rabbis gathers to re-tell and offer commentary on the story, and with each re-telling transforms it into a broader and broader vision encompassing Greek gods, revolutionaries, insurgents, love affairs, and photographic details from current events. The artwork featured here is part of the cycle "Suspension of ThisBelief" from Arielle Tonkin's recent installation "Archaeology of a Collapsed Page," mixed media, 2012, and was selected by the writer and photographed by Laurie Trok.
enjoyed reading and writing poetry, composing several pieces for a girl he was seeing then, Callicum said.
Roslyn Heights, would want to be remembered as a poet and humanitarian, said Florence Wohl, his wife of 50 years.
This week, we begin with a poem, an excellent poem and a timely one for review, as it has meaning for many readers in relation to the death of Sylvia Plath 50 years ago. The drafts of "Sheep in Fog" are up for auction with her notes, which is giving journalists reason to take another look, to see if the changes she made days before her death to the final stanza foreboded suicide. This lead story has several links to it, including two to Bonhams, which will take you to a video and an early draft of the poem. The artdaily.org link will give you what appears to be the final process of revision, striking out the old ending and title Fog Sheep, and writing in the new. Just for the sake of how a timeless poet crafts over time, these links are important any time. Go into our Great Regulars section, where there is an Olivia Cole link. She gives us Sheep in Fog's setting and has more to say on the matter. Frankly, as I read the poem, if we are to take these revisions and the poem somehow literally, which we should not be doing, it looks like she is expressing a threat to her life, not that she is threatening suicide. This leads me back to looking at the craft and how this confessional poet would weave ideas into a poem.
Our next link is somewhat related, in the sense that it has great import to women poets in their societies. It has to do with woman poets in Ghana, and refers to the Poetry Foundation of Ghana celebrating the women poets of Africa. This is followed by our next story, an interview with American poet Eileen Myles, who among others, answers the question, "In other words, if we’re so post-feminist, why do there still need to be his and hers anthologies?" For another related link, scroll down to Great Regulars, past the individuals, to the periodicals. Caravan brings us seven poems from the book Wild Girls Wicked Words, and discusses the situation of female Tamil poets saying, "As the writer and translator Lakshmi Holmström observes, 'For these past years, Tamil women poets have been categorized into "Bad Girls" who write "body poetry" and "Good Girls" who refrain from doing so.'"
We have dozens more items in a huge week for poetry in the news, from all over the world as you can tell already, and on many different topics. Let me note here, that on our Back Page, the eleventh story in News at Eleven you will find a gathering of articles with poems. Thanks for clicking in.
show the poet's increasing fragility as she approached the date she took her own life, aged 30.
a baby hears. She sings the baby lullabies and tells tales. She sings folklores and recites appellations. The woman is the first poet every child in Africa knows but we grow and the situation changes. What killed that genuine appetite for creativity in our mothers? Was it that they were not given enough space or the more laborious works denied them of much fruitful exploration of the art they already created and knew?
I think while female writers and editors are observing exactly what you are observing--that the proportions are bad--I don't think anyone's truly interested in waiting for the world to get it right in male editors' eyes. I myself would always rather do a female majority publication so that men can be included in a female literary vista, and feel that, and we can have that option of looking to see which men are saying something that resonates with the work that needs to be put out publicly by us.
tread lightly on this earth of Europe/lest my people's bones protest."
a five-year jail sentence, [Cuban poet Angel] Santiesteban-Prats was placed in an isolation cell, without water or light, when he went on hunger strike following his transfer to Prison 1850.
he [Les Murray] said. 'Holodomor was one I wanted to get in there. It's a Ukrainian word. It means the 7 million Ukrainians who were starved to death by Stalin. It's a word that ought to be as well-known as holocaust. Sometimes they name these dreadful genocides and sometimes they don't. It seemed a matter of justice that it got in.'
and introduced suddenly and completely, and consequently are often recognized immediately as novel and revolutionary. Thus William Carlos Williams reflected that T.S. Eliot's Waste Land "wiped out our world as if an atomic bomb had been dropped on it," and the critic A. Alvarez recalled that when Sylvia Plath first read "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" to him, he was shocked: "at first hearing, the things seemed to be not so much poetry as assault and battery." In contrast, experimental innovations generally lack drama, and appear quietly and gradually.
Of poetry. I've read all of Yeats 1,400 times. "The Winding Stair" confronts the desire to destroy the noble or excellent, and it tells us to "cast out remorse," tells us how necessary that is:
from Sinai and the Negev turns this perception on its head and shows that survival is not only economic but also social, spiritual, psychological and aesthetic. Poetry was for the Bedouin a counter to the stark harshness of the desert: it served as an expression of emotion as well as a practical way of passing a message, easier to remember since it was in rhyme. It was also a vehicle for celebrating traditional Bedouin traits--extreme generosity, hospitality, bravery and honour.
to Violet Trefusis]
to remember past the first stanza of even the short "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," I feel a little better. When I can't remember the title of the book I'm currently reading, oh, thank goodness, Billy Collins--or the speaker in his poem, who is so close to being "him" I suspect he is--can't either.
in the essay is the canon and the way it's taught is part of the problem. So you're proposing, in a sense, a new canon?
of a poem. The setting is a dawn ride over Dartmoor, where until the breakdown of their marriage Plath, Hughes and their two small children had been living. Ariel was her horse (named grandly after Shakespeare's flying invisible spirit), and it's from him that she surveys the frozen landscape: "The hills step off into whiteness./People or stars/Regard me sadly, I disappoint them//The train leaves a line of breath. O slow..."
work in Minnesota, but they often feel that no one knows about it.
"Sales" by W. S. Di Piero with the article "Indo-Caribbean Content, Victorian Style" by Vera Haller.
by Carol Ann Duffy
for eroding educational standards and "dumbing down" teaching. But now the 100 academics who wrote an open letter in March criticising the education secretary's revised national curriculum have had their own accuracy questioned. Their letter has been dubbed "simply illiterate" by the judges of the inaugural Bad Grammar awards.
by Paul Zimmer
grab and eat, grab and drink, because this world from which we depart is like a wedding celebration." That is because, as the Schottenstein edition glosses it, "it begins and ends within a short period of time."
one's self back into childhood. Maybe we can get the physical details right, but it's very hard to recapture the innocence and wonder. Maureen Ash, who lives in Wisconsin, gets it right in this poem.
a sort of police procedural in quatrains, facts and linguistic flights become disturbingly indistinguishable:
personal wishes and longings? In today's poem, Mariana Tupper of Yarmouth explains.
Advice for Poets
of Xinjiang have begun keeping registers of religious believers, in a fresh move that appears targeted at the region's population of 9 milllion mostly Muslim Uyghurs, many of whom chafe under Chinese rule.
tie me to the tracks, I tell 'em.
"Relational Epistemology" harmonises its many flavours. And those philosophical raisins not only stimulate the reader's grey cells, but leave an added lexical fragrance on the palate.
by Cliff Fyman
Heavy Sublimation
Three
Two
poets in Tamil has been one of the most charged spaces in the literature of that language in the last two decades. But these poets are often judged not by the quality of their language and imagery, or the density and detail with which they pursue their themes, but by the prevailing conventions of the world they live in--even the more liberal sections of that world. As the writer and translator Lakshmi Holmström observes, "For these past years, Tamil women poets have been categorized into 'Bad Girls' who write 'body poetry' and 'Good Girls' who refrain from doing so."
by Mark A. Murphy
By Andrew Seguin
Wish
last years saw her, for the first time, confronted by personal pain that lay beyond the pale of her idealistic, late-Romantic view of the world. Her greatest poetry--Poem of the End, After Russia--had been inspired by a sense of affront and injustice. But it is one thing to be abject, another to be insignificant, as Tsvetaeva now was, in terms of the self-styled luminaries of Soviet literature. From mythic confessionalism she retreated into dispatches as cryptic as the Morse code tapped out between prison cells: "My loneliness. Dishwater and tears. The underside of everything is terror".
The God of Numbers
elegiac best. The reference to wild swans may be a nod to Yeats's affection for Coole Park and the Usk may remind us of Henry Vaughan's deep love for his native Welsh mountains. But the weakening "A" rhyme of the ABAB stanzas gradually loosens the attachment to place. These are others' homes and, as [Paul] Potts reminds us, Barker was a vagrant: "the only place where he is a fixture is in the poetry of this language".
best for her community involvement and achievements, notably as the force behind the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program. Hill started the program in 1997 with the help of volunteers--people she never failed to mention. She was a co-chairwoman with Paula Rais for 10 years before choosing to hand the position over to [Leslie] Kimball.
and countless poems, but was famously known for Jacbur, a never before seen form of poetry, a consolidation of unrelated words, yet in a sarcastic way made sense which has subtle political import and messages. It was the first time someone dare challenge the sacred form of the thousands year old form of Somali poetry. Intentionally he poked fun of the old form of poetry; it was brilliant and a comedy at its best. It made people laugh when Dhoodaan brought together allegories of diametrically opposed things such as a goat and a hyena dinning together or grilling a watermelon and sweetening it with hot oil. Something only the brilliance of Dhoodaan can pull off; he became the new standard of Somali poetry and a yardstick for all the other poets to be measured against.
