The Best American Poetry

"That grand old Irish/Italian tradition" [by Moira Egan]

One of the great things about being an American poet who happens to live in Rome is the proximity to the American Academy in Rome. In recent years, things have become even better for us poetry-loving Romans, thanks to AAR trustee William B. Hart, who endowed an eponymous Residency for a senior poet to join the community at the Academy. 

Karl Kirchwey, poet, professor, and, for these past three years, Heiskell Arts Director at the AAR, has provided some wonderful programming in conjunction with the poets' visits (a remembrance of Brodsky, readings and seminars on and in translation [Italian/English and Polish/English], and the fascinating facets and various reworkings of the Ovidian oeuvre, for example). 

Poets who have been lured to Rome by this fellowship include Jorie Graham, Derek Walcott, Robert Hass, and, most recently, Seamus Heaney. And you can well imagine the thrill that passed through the DNA of this Irish lass when it was announced that Mr. Heaney would be the Hart Poet in Residence for 2013! 

Mom, Michelangelo and Me [by Moira Egan]

Happy Mother's Day to all of you moms out there!

Like many wandering Americans, I've spent much of my adult life living in places that happen to be far away from my mother, from New York to Dublin, from Thessaloniki to Rome. This, I should say at the outset, has been driven by my desire to wander rather than a desire to be away from my mother, who is a very cool mother and, by the way, also a dear friend.

So this last move, which brought me here to Rome, also began to pose interesting possibilities for spending good mother-daughter time together. A couple of years ago, Mom came up with the good idea of making pilgrimages to see the works by Michelangelo that she hadn't yet seen, and guess who was going to be her daughterly tour guide.

More on Sipping on Sunsets [by Moira Egan]

Don't you love it when the New York Times imitates life? When I saw today's article about sipping on a sunset and thinking about Italy, I couldn't decide if I should laugh or cry. I came back from Sardegna to Rome just in time for the latest heat wave. They've begun naming heat waves here the same way hurricanes are named in the States. Well, sort of the same way: it's not alphabetical and they are named after classical characters, both mythological and historical. The first one I heard about was Charon, then there were Minos, Ulysses, Scipio. Now it seems to be Nero. Insert Rome Burning Joke here. Except there really are fires in Rome, which isn't funny.

But here you see a lovely couple enjoying the sunset over Santa Teresa di Gallura in Sardegna. And here I will confess that I prefer Campari over Aperol, hands down. No, wait, hand holding cold glass beading with condensation--

From the Archives (1/1/11): A Resolution Suggestion (by Moira Egan)

Happy New Year!

I'm just sorry that I couldn't find the scratch-n-sniff version of this image that is intentionally out-of-season for many of us who read this blog. Time passes, seasons change: yep, that's what they do. Hope you're dug out from under that snow!

Just thought I'd pass along the time-altering, season-shifting resolution that I'm really going to try to keep this year. This one is not about going to the gym or eating fewer carbs or being nicer to your neighbors (though those things might just alter time, or create that feeling anyway!)

Here it is: Take ten minutes out of your day, put everything else aside, and read a poem. Just sit with it, see where it takes you, feel what it makes you feel. Read it again, and see what else you see, hear what else you hear in it. Then (maybe this sounds like poetry as yoga, but that's ok!) just sit for a minute and breathe in the air that the poem has made around you, that little poem bubble of altered thoughts and/or feelings. And then go off--or back--to work, or school, or the gym, to the rest of your regular day.

I'm going to be teaching a lot of poetry this semester, and I'm very happy about that. And yes, in those classes, we will do a certain amount of tying the poem to a chair and poking around to figure out which of those rhetorical techniques with strange names in Greek might be at work to create the effect of the poem. But the more important thing I want impart to my students is that the poem is there for the reader to sit with, to enjoy, to learn from, to laugh or cry along with. The poem as a little blip of time out of time.

And to start the New Year off right, how about this little time-stopper of a piece by Miss Emily Dickinson. 

Essential Oils -- are wrung --
The Attar from the Rose
Be not expressed by Suns -- alone --
It is the gift of Screws --

The General Rose -- decay --
But this -- in Lady's Drawer
Make Summer -- When the Lady lie
In Ceaseless Rosemary --

¡1.1.11! A Resolution Suggestion [by Moira Egan]

Happy New Year!

I'm just sorry that I couldn't find the scratch-n-sniff version of this image that is intentionally out-of-season for many of us who read this blog. Time passes, seasons change: yep, that's what they do. Hope you're dug out from under that snow!

Just thought I'd pass along the time-altering, season-shifting resolution that I'm really going to try to keep this year. This one is not about going to the gym or eating fewer carbs or being nicer to your neighbors (though those things might just alter time, or create that feeling anyway!)

Here it is: Take ten minutes out of your day, put everything else aside, and read a poem. Just sit with it, see where it takes you, feel what it makes you feel. Read it again, and see what else you see, hear what else you hear in it. Then (maybe this sounds like poetry as yoga, but that's ok!) just sit for a minute and breathe in the air that the poem has made around you, that little poem bubble of altered thoughts and/or feelings. And then go off--or back--to work, or school, or the gym, to the rest of your regular day.

I'm going to be teaching a lot of poetry this semester, and I'm very happy about that. And yes, in those classes, we will do a certain amount of tying the poem to a chair and poking around to figure out which of those rhetorical techniques with strange names in Greek might be at work to create the effect of the poem. But the more important thing I want impart to my students is that the poem is there for the reader to sit with, to enjoy, to learn from, to laugh or cry along with. The poem as a little blip of time out of time.

And to start the New Year off right, how about this little time-stopper of a piece by Miss Emily Dickinson. 

Essential Oils -- are wrung --
The Attar from the Rose
Be not expressed by Suns -- alone --
It is the gift of Screws --

The General Rose -- decay --
But this -- in Lady's Drawer
Make Summer -- When the Lady lie
In Ceaseless Rosemary --

Bridget Meeds on Jay Leeming's Poetry

From the Ithaca Times (May 10, 2006):

<<
When reading Jay Leeming's first collection of poems, Dynamite on a China Plate, it's hard not to think of fathers. Along with his literal father Joseph (who is honored in the acknowledgments), Leeming's literary fathers - Robert Bly and David Lehman - hover above this collection. A first book is often the melding of influences into something new. That something new made by Jay Leeming is a full-bodied, intelligent and thoroughly satisfying group of poems.

      Like Robert Bly, Leeming takes a craftsman's approach to constructing a well-made poem. We also see his influence in Leeming's deep connection to the "rightness" of image. And there's rarely a spare word in any of these poems. Consider, for instance, "Apple," quoted in full:
      
      "Sometimes when eating an apple
      I bite too far
      and open the little room
      the lovers have prepared,
      and the seeds fall out
      onto the kitchen floor
      and I see
      that they are tear-shaped."

      From the simple and homely image of an apple, we move quickly into the world of sex and knowledge.

      Leeming has a rare talent for image, metaphor and simile. Turns of phrase such as "the cry of the crow is a jack-knife opening" or "in the cricket-heavy darkness" show his deft hand. The early poems in the book, which tend to be a simple and attractive as wood polished to a sheen by use, appear to have been his school in which he refined his careful description.
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Mom, Michelangelo, and Me [by Moira Egan]

Happy Mother's Day to all of you moms out there!

Like many wandering Americans, I've spent much of my adult life living in places that happen to be far away from my mother, from New York to Dublin, from Thessaloniki to Rome. This, I should say at the outset, has been driven by my desire to wander rather than a desire to be away from my mother, who is a very cool mother and, by the way, also a dear friend.

So this last move, which brought me here to Rome, also began to pose interesting possibilities for spending good mother-daughter time together. A couple of years ago, Mom came up with the good idea of making pilgrimages to see the works by Michelangelo that she hadn't yet seen, and guess who was going to be her daughterly tour guide.

Il Premio Napoli a New York [by Moira Egan]

We can't be there, but we hope you can. 

Venerdì Nero (?) [by Moira Egan]

That floating, tooth-shaped thing and the wiggle beneath it are murmurations of starlings. Yes, that really is the collective noun for starlings: nice, isn't it? There was a beautiful photo essay about Rome's starlings in the NYT a couple of years ago that's well worth checking out: go here.

Of course, we don't have "Black Friday" in Rome, since we don't have Thanksgiving, but I thought I'd post some pictures that feature black in honor of the day. I'm not going shopping, no. Are you?

But we did have Thanksgiving dinner. Did you see that New Yorker essay about expat Thanksgivings? (Very funny, all too true, but I think I want to introduce Jane Kramer to our butchers.) One serious advantage to living abroad, though, is that you can decide on Wednesday to have Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday (we just sorta forgot it was coming up, being really busy lately, and not being bombarded by images of turkeys and pilgrims, etc.) but we said, Hey, yeah, let's do it.

[Vegetarians might want to skip the first paragraph after the jump.]

Premio Napoli [by Moira Egan]

[Vesuvius looming over Naples]

Things I remember from the first time I visited Naples: it was mercilessly hot. Our hotel room was tiny, brown, and stifling, and the toilet paper was, well, awful. I couldn't sleep because, out on the streets, they were playing music very loudly, especially, over and over, "Delilah" by Tom Jones: it was the summer when that was a huge and ubiquitous hit, even in Italy.

More recent impressions of Naples have concerned the Camorra, described by Roberto Saviano in his best-selling, terrifying book, Gomorra. The garbage strike, millions of Euros spent putting that trash on trains and chuffing it up to Hamburg, where they could actually dispose of it. The overarching corruption. Etc.

I had the opportunity to update my impressions of this old harbor city when Damiano and I went down there for the Premio Napoli, an annual literary prize that celebrates Italian and foreign writers, and that is doing a great job of causing people to reevaluate what they think about Naples.

The Italian winners this year were Alessandro Leogrande, Luigi Trucillo, and Franco Arminio, while the foreign winners were Avraham Burg, Robert Harrison, and Charles Simic.