The Best American Poetry

How Peeps Helped Me Develop an Inner Life (by Leslie McGrath)

At this point in life, I’d have to call myself a Gestural Christian. I celebrate only the major holy days, and do this in the most non-religious of ways. Church is not involved. Jesus Christ is a generalized figure of respect, much like Gandhi and, yes, Oprah Winfrey. (I’m willing to bet that Oprah will be widely venerated a hundred years from now—the first postmodern American icon.)

Each holiday at my house is built on a thin armature of Christian narrative, lovingly coated with a robust amalgam of special food, dishware and libation. The earliest preparation takes place approximately a month before Easter, as soon as Peeps, those sugar-crusted marshmallow critters, appear on the shelves. Packages must be bought, their cellophane repeatedly pierced, then hidden (from myself) for proper aging. A well-aged Peep is a thing of chewy beauty.

This is something I’ve been doing—like watching 60 Minutes every Sunday night-- since childhood, when it occurred to me that Peeps were both sweet and bitter. The combination, probably an unintended result of the food coloring to make the candy neon yellow (back then, Peeps were only yellow, only chicks) was one of my first epiphanies about the complicated nature of pleasure. The bitter tinge made the sweet seem sweeter, just as salt enhances the flavor of most food, including sweet things.

I have a terrible memory, say my daughters, who’ve more than once tearfully screamed at me that their infancies and childhoods weren’t important enough for me to keep in my mind’s memory box. There are reasons both genetic and experiential for my memory’s weakness, and I hope as they become mothers, they’ll understand that I didn’t choose to lose those things precious to them.

What I do remember I also have no choice over. Hence my very clear memory, the Easter before I turned thirteen, of biting into a stale Peep and realizing that the complicated taste I enjoyed so much was present in other forms and in other aspects of life: dinner before dessert, the school week before the weekend, on and on. I’d begun to extrapolate, which gave form to my experience, which included a home life ruled by a violent alcoholic stepfather. From this, metaphor and an interior life richly capillaried with fantasy. I could do nothing about the yelling, namecalling and hitting at home, but once I developed the ability to generate and regenerate from within, I could live with the disparity—the sweet and the bitter.

This morning I stood at the window in my home office, looking out at the robins running over the field and eating my Peeps. I thought about the thousands and thousands of ways we find meaning in our lives, and how a little marshmallow candy became so important to me. This may not be religion, it may not be worship, but it’s my gesture toward the hardiness of the spirit and its capacity for pleasure in small things.

 

Bits and bobs: April 24 - 30

Leslie McGrath, whose posts were so popular last January  has agreed to return.  Welcome back Leslie and thanks!

And by the way, you can listen to Leslie read her poem "The Mouth of the Mind" on Slate, here.  It's a knockout!

Kingston University, London launches its groundbreaking Writing School, a course of study that will offer the UK's first MFAs in Creative Writing and Journalism together with postgraduate courses in Journalism, Publishing, Creative Writing, and English Literature.  Find out more about this exciting program here and about Kington University here.

Catch up with Tattosday's Tattooed Poets project here.

Post your memories of Paul Violi, who died on April 2, here.  

"A Half-Hour for Paul Violi, Saturday, April 30, Orkney, UK.  Details here.

Follow us on Twitter!

-- sdh

"As tensions -- and lobsters -- boil over": Last night's premiere of 24-Hour Restaurant Battle (by Stacey Harwood)

So last night was the season premiere of the Food Networks 24 Hour Restaurant Battle and our great friend Gabriella Gershenson (above, right, with host Scott Conant) is one of the judges.  To mark the occasion, Belinda Chang, wine director at The Modern, and John Winterman, Maitre D' Hotel at Daniel, hosted a party in Gabi's honor.  I could probably stop right there and tell you that however you might imagine the gathering to have been, you would fall short.  We stepped off the elevator and all we had to do was follow the sounds of a great party in progress:  talking and laughter punctuated by the regular "pop" of a champagne cork. The buffet  was set with platters of smoked fish, cured meats, terrines, and generous slices of foie gras, my favorite food in the world.  Belinda and John kept glasses filled and circulated with tubs of caviar that they invited us to eat in the manner of the pros:  with one fist slightly closed, put a half ounce on the soft skin between the first knuckle of your forefinger and the first knuckle of your thumb. Then slurp it up. More, please.

A highlight was catching up with photographer Noah Fecks, who with partner Paul Wagtouicz maintains the stunning and highly entertaining The Way We Ate.  More on Noah and his various interests and enterprises to come.  And we met Christine Deussen with whom David traded fond recollections of Kenneth Koch, their former Columbia professor. (Deussen Global represents France's Alsace region, home of the Strasbourg Cathedral, dry Riesling, and tarte flambe.)

But the main event was 24 Hour Restaurant Battle so at the appointed time, we gathered around the TV to watch the premiere.  The competition follows two teams of aspiring restaurateurs as they conceive, plan and open their own restaurants, all within 24 hours.  Gabi, whose experience as a journalist and editor covering the New York City food scene for Time Out New York and who is now a senior editor at Saveur magazine, weighs in on the likelihood that a contestant's restaurant would make it in the bare-knuckle restaurant world. The premiere episode features teams of ex-lovers who try to put aside their differences so they can make their culinary dreams come true. ( From the teaser:  "as tensions -- and lobsters -- boil over, one team discovers their flame hasn't quite been extinguished.")

No spoilers here.  You can watch a rerun of this first episode on Saturday at 4:00 pm and future episodes on Thursdays at 10:00. 

Three Extracts by Mark Ford

(Ed. note:  We're lucky to have Mark Ford with us this week writing about the exprience of translating Raymond Roussel's Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique.  You can read yesterday's post here.  Find Ford's new translation here. )

The first two extracts are footnotes from Canto IV. There are 98 lines of the main text in this canto, and 134 in footnotes! The first footnote is on the general theme of ambition, and the second on pride, and the fact that animals and birds (apart from the peacock) don’t have it, despite their various accomplishments. The third extract is from the enormous list in Canto II in which Roussel presents 207 examples of things that are visually similar but of different sizes.

1

There is no one who does not cherish an ambitious dream; 
The worker believes he will see himself dictating, at the time of a strike
(These days people use their reason, and each, with their eye on the goal
((We all have one: as long as the nape of his neck,
Laid bare for the blade of the guillotine,
Remains for a quarter of an hour longer connected to his spine,
Thinking: “Letting one's prey slip occurs — often — even
To someone who holds it most securely” (((and indeed, the imbecile
Escapes from his padded cell, the prisoner in solitary confinement from his jail,
The cheese from the beak of the duped crow;
— On some occasions keeping silent is the best option;))),
The murderer has only one aim: escape;)),
Whatever his or her ideal is: to earn a large salary,
To give birth to children, to see the threshing floor overflowing with his grain
Or to make his pulse rate slow and settle down,
Feel that, to succeed, it is better to think and act
Than to make — jobbing worker, infertile wife,
Harvester or invalid — a wish in the moment
That a shooting star leaves its shining trail;),
Tired of giving his sweat to the bourgeoisie to drink
(It is often for Peter that Paul suffers and works;
Vespucci exploited Columbus’s discovery;
And it is to furnish a pearl for some finger or waistcoat
That an oyster spends its life labouring;), laws to his boss;
The slut in her attic dreams of living in style;
And to see his hands adorned with amethysts and holding a crozier
Is a fantasy dear to each fledgeling priest.

2

If human excellence drives out modesty
As much as Monday does the ardour of workers
(One gets used to leisure; the soul and the heart elsewhere,
The lycée pupil is sombre when he returns in October;),
And insanity, in the case of a criminal, the shame of his crime,
And an unsnowy winter high prices for road salt,
Yet pride is not a universal vice;
Leaving aside the peacock, it steers clear of beasts:
The swallow, despite its ability to predict tempests;
The ram, although it is the emblem of the order of the Grand Cross
(Everyone is familiar with the Golden Fleece); the cat,
Although it can work out its bearings at midnight without a candle,
Although it knows how to predict — just like the swallow,
But not so accurately or publicly —
By the static its fur gives off
The anger lurking in a sky that feigns calm,
Although it allows spinsters to enjoy a sweet old age
And can walk in silence even when not on a carpet;
The wolf, although a she-wolf had famous dugs;
The he-goat, although his skin furnishes humans with water-bottles;
Despite the high price currently demanded for his skin, the otter;
Although his name designates a fabric, the alpaca.

3

              the candle end of a miser,
For a flat-headed drawing pin on its own
With its point in the air; — in Switzerland, at the bazaar, for an eyelash,
Curved escapee from a soft eye, the black horn
Of a chamois; — a warming pan after it’s been hung on its nail,
For a motionless pendulum, called back to life;
— In a rickshaw just as it's being readied,
The puller’s degrading harness, for a pair of braces;
— At a lewd woman's house, a pleasant lace-fringed pillow,
For an unused pincushion with a merry flounce;
— A mask put aside by a tired fencer,
For an eye protector to be placed over the glasses
Of a stonebreaker; — the clearly wrinkled temple
Of an old man, for the upper part of the underside of a fist;
— For the hair-touselling black cloth of a photographer,
That with which, generating a breeze, four people cover
A coffin; — an album of portraits, if, to open it,
You have to overcome one or two fasteners, for a parish register;
— For a lowly button hook, the hook, almost a part of his body,
Whose noble fate is to stand in for the five fingers of an armless man;
— An arm sling, for the scarf in which a much enlarged
Cheek is hidden on a day when it's inflamed;
— When he's making iron hot enough to be bent,
For a pair of hearth bellows, the bellows used in a forge;
— For that which someone with a cough shows to a throat-doctor,
An arched cavern, reddened by the setting sun,
With a solitary stalactite; — a lake of blood that appears
In a dangerous district, for the treacherous spittle
Of a consumptive; — at a saddler’s, the tether
From which an empty stirrup gleams, for the broken fastener
Of a yellow umbrella; — for the perfidious, sworn-at bit of shot
That an eater of game spits aside, cursing it to the devil,
A cannonball cleaving the air…

The Star in the Forehead by Mark Ford

(Ed. note:  We're lucky to have Mark Ford with us this week writing about the exprience of translating Raymond Roussel's Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique.  You can read yesterday's post here.  Find Ford's new translation here. )

Towards the end of Canto IV of Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique, Roussel includes in a list of fires that go out, that of ‘le saint feu du génie’, the holy fire of genius, which is extinguished when age renders its possessor gaga. A five-bracketed disruption on the holy fire of genius adds that it often makes the elect possessor of it ‘so vain / That he finds the real stars in the sky pitiful / In comparison with the new star that shines on his forehead…’ From the moment when he was seized by a conviction of his own genius and the glory for which he was destined while at work on his first long poem, La Doublure, when he was only nineteen, Roussel was sure that he would himself be recognized as one of those who carried the blazing evidence of his genius on his brow. This is how he described his sense of his own literary greatness to the psychologist Pierre Janet, who wrote up Roussel’s case in De l’angoisse à l’extase (1926):

I shall reach immense heights, and am destined for blazing glory… This glory will be evident in every one of my works, and will reflect on all the acts of my life; people will research the way I played prisoners’ base. No author has been,or ever can be greater than I, although no one is aware of this yet today. Well, what can you expect – there are some shells which explode with great difficulty, but when they do     explode!... Whatever you may think, there are some who are predestined!

Whatever I wrote was surrounded by rays of light; I used to close the curtains, for I was afraid that the shining rays emanating from my pen might escape into the outside world through even the smallest chink; I wanted suddenly to throw back the screen and light up the world. To leave these papers lying about would have sent out rays of light as far as China, and the desperate crowd would have flung themselves upon my house. But it was in vain I took such precautions, for rays of light were streaming from me and through the walls, I was carrying the sun within myself and could do nothing to impede the tremendous light I was radiating. Each line was repeated in thousands of copies, and I wrote with a thousand flaming pen-nibs. Without a doubt, when the volume appeared, this blinding furnace would be revealed and would illuminate the entire universe, but what no one would believe was that I was carrying it all along within myself.

He even told Janet he felt he was the ‘equal of Shakespeare and Dante’. Needless to say, Roussel was not mobbed on the street on the day of the publication of La Doublure, which attracted almost no attention. Instead, he ‘plummeted to earth from the prodigious heights of glory’, and the depression this caused led him – or, more likely, his mother – to seek Janet’s help.

One of the mysteries of Roussel’s career is his steady belief that his books were likely to become as popular as those of his two great heroes, Jules Verne and Pierre Loti. Even Nouvelles Impressions, a poem unlikely to figure in any bestseller lists, was launched with a well-funded publicity campaign. The Surrealists thought it was great – Dalì called it the ‘most ungraspably poetic’ work of the era, but commercial sales were not strong. Robert Desnos, one of Roussel’s most ardent champions, warned him that these poems ‘sont faits pour l’éternité plus que pour la popularité’. Certainly the demands they make on the reader are considerable, but I can confidently assert that they really do offer a challenge and an experience unique in literature. Although only 59 pages long, they seem to compress an entire lifetime’s involvement in the bizarre and banal ways of the world, and a vast selection of the things, natural and artificial, that make it up, and the different media through which they impinge on us, into an all-accommodating, yet rigorously conceived and executed poetic symphony. They are beautiful, weird, and hilarious, at once a vast casse-tête, or brain-teaser, and an epic journey into the heart of a land where logic and illogic are indistinguishable. One feels, on completing them, rather as one does on completing A la recherche du temps perdu: life is simply not quite the same.

The Great Zo by Mark Ford

(Ed. note: We're lucky to have Mark Ford with us this week writing about the exprience of translating Raymond Roussel's Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique. You can read yesterday's post here. Find Ford's new translation here.)

Raymond Roussel began work on Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique in 1915, that is a year into World War I. He was at the time serving near the front in the Vincennes artillery regiment, and would regularly dispatch copies of work-in-progress back to his business manager, Eugène Leiris (father or Michel), for safekeeping. Did the war play a part in the disruptive poetics of parentheses that he evolved for Nouvelles Impressions? Michel Leiris has described the poem’s use of brackets ‘as a means of making language disintegrate,’ which perhaps encourages us to view it as an experiment comparable to that of, say, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; that is as reflecting the break up of long-held certainties under the onslaught of the savageries of modernity, and in particular modern warfare. There are even a couple of references to scenes of war – two to a blindfolded army emissary, and one to a machine gun, whose bullets a horse will nobly brave, while a donkey is wounded merely by its packsaddle.

Seventeen years were to elapse, however, between these first drafts of Canto I sent back to Eugène Leiris and the book’s publication in 1932, the year before Roussel died of a drug overdose in a hotel in Palermo at the age of 56. And yet at the end of these seventeen years of steady industry, Nouvelles Impressions ran to only 59 pages, and was therefore less than one eighth the length of its predecessor, in name at least, Impressions d’Afrique, published in 1910 (a new version of which, translated by Mark Polizzotti, is promised from Dalkey Archive later this year).

Roussel, therefore, came up with three ways of fattening up this book, the last he would personally see through the press:

1) He decided to print as a kind of coda a poem he had published in Le Gaulois in 1897, called ‘Mon Ame’ (My Soul). ‘Mon Ame’ is basically about what a great poet Roussel is going to be, and how his work will inspire fanatical devotion from an enormous throng of followers – his Roussellâtres – who will thing of him as like a god. These predictions had, however, proved spectacularly and consistently misguided, for none of  Roussel’s books had had anything like the impact or success for which he’d hoped. So he decided to reprint this poem as ‘L’Ame de Victor Hugo’, and claimed in a prefatory note that he’d had a dream in which he saw Victor Hugo writing at his desk, and then read over his shoulder the poem in question. Traces of the original poem, however, remained: he couldn’t bring himself to change a reference to his roussellâtres to hugoâtres, leaving instead a blank followed by lâtres, (‘Sans souci de ces       lâtres / Qui me mettent au rang des dieux’); and the poem’s penultimate verse claims:

A cette explosion voisine
De mon génie universel
Je vois le monde qui s’incline
Devant ce nom: Victor Hugo.

At the explosion deriving
From my universal genius
I see the world bow
Before this name: Victor Hugo.

Does Victor Hugo rhyme with universel? No, but it’s not hard to think of a name that does.

2) He decided to leave every verso in the book blank!

3) He commissioned a hack artist called Henri Achille Zo to furnish him with 59 illustrations, one for each page of Nouvelles Impressions. Each of these illustrations relates to a line from the preceding page of poetry, although Zo wasn’t to know this, or even – though he had fulfilled a commission for Roussel before – the name of his employer. Instead he received, via a detective agency called Agence Goron, a set of 59 ‘indications’ or instructions for 59 drawings. These instructions are not to be thought of as captions, for they were not included in the original Lemerre edition, and only came to light after Roussel’s death.

When Zo eventually found out the name of his employer, he at once fired off a letter of remonstrance:

Please allow me to tell you that I bitterly regret the fact you wanted this collaboration to be shrouded in such an impenetrable mystery. These are not the pictures I would have made if I had known I was illustrating Raymond Roussel!

In this letter he also complains that the precision of the instructions he received meant his drawings ‘manquent de liberté, de fantasie’, and he goes on to wish that Roussel had agreed to engage with him in a genuine collaboration: ‘my illustrations... would have been more in harmony with your work if I’d been able to read the text, or had the honour of knowing the personality of the poet.’

Clearly it was the prospect of just this sort of collaboration that Roussel went to such lengths to avoid!

Such Also Wonder by Mark Ford

(Ed. note: We're lucky to have Mark Ford with us this week writing about the exprience of translating Raymond Roussel's Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique. You can read yesterday's post here.  Find Ford's new translation here.)

Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique is largely made up of lists. Most of Canto II, for instance, is taken up by a list of 207 examples of things of things that might be mistaken for smaller things with which they have a visual similarity. The first of these is a lightning conductor, which is (much) bigger than, but looks like, a grey thread being passed through the eye of a needle; the last is a spider in a fisherman’s net, which looks like, but is (a bit) bigger than a louse in a hairnet. Some of Roussel’s examples in this list amply demonstrate why his writing was so popular with the Surrealists – though the compliment wasn’t returned; he said he found their work ‘un pur obscur’.            

                   — for a single fried egg, on its own,
         With a vigorously salted yolk, the skull, bent in prayer,
         Of an old priest with jaundice;

 

         — For that which someone with a cough shows to a throat doctor, [ie. an
inflamed uvula]
         An arched cavern, reddened by the setting sun,
         With a solitary stalactite;

All of these lists are introduced by a sort of ‘hook’. The ‘hook’ introducing this particular one is an eavesdropper overhearing a conversation about himself; our vanity is such, Roussel goes on to note, that even when we hear our large faults enumerated, it’s as if we fall under a spell that that makes us likely to mistake big things for little things: a porthole for a monocle; a guillotine for a cigar-cutter; an alligator by a sun-umbrella for a lizard by a mushroom. And so on. And so on.

There is no real reason why any of these lists should ever end. In Canto I the dominant list is introduced by someone having his photo taken, who wonders if, even if he keeps as still as he can, he will end up coming out blurred. At this Roussel breaks in:  ‘((((Tels se demandent: - / ((((Such also wonder: -’, and we get 54 instances of people – and things – in comparable states of wondering; a lamppost if the three-headed dog Cerberus would sniff it with all three of its noses before urinating on it; a wall being battered by a loose shutter during a storm, what it is being punished for; an animal-tamer being eaten by a wild beast if his mourning widow will still be strictly in black (sans gris ni mauve) a year on; hot milk that has been left in the pot, if it will be poured with or without its skin.

It occurred to me that that Roussel’s lists, though undoubtedly the product of a very singular imagination, could actually also be the basis for quite useful and interesting writing school exercises. Just as Joe Brainard’s ‘I Remember’ format is widely employed to stimulate autobiographical prose pieces, wouldn’t the ‘Such Also Wonder’, say, work as an inspiring format? Such also wonder:

         the bic pen-cap, how often it will be used
         to clean the writer’s ear; the child’s tooth
         under the pillow, if fairies really exist…

Like ‘le très special procédé  (the very special method) that he used to write his novels and plays and posthumously explained in the essay ‘Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres’ (see the note on p. 233 of this edition of Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique), the special methods Roussel developed in this, his final poem, might also, or so it seems to me, prove useful for later writers.

"Old Ladies Carrying Yoga Mats" (by Mitch Sisskind)

 

 

 

Old ladies carrying yoga mats
Chain their bicycles to the
Parking meters on Larchmont,
Then head to the yoga room or
Whatever it’s called above
The newsstand. I salute them.

I applaud these women,
I admire them, I mentally compare
Them to Bess Turk, who, holed up
In the Shoreham Hotel and sleeping
On a Murphy bed for thirty years,
Developed dowager’s hump.

Yet – and I say this as an old man
Myself -- my gorge also rises and
Acid reflux pains my sense
At the sight of the yoga crones.
With incorporeal ear I hear not
The Little Old Lady From Pasadena,

Nor does Jan and Dean’s joyful chorus
‘Go granny go granny go granny go’
Echo in my teeming brain. I hear instead
The ominously salacious closing words
Of Die Verwandlung: ‘Die Tochter sich
‘Erhob und ihren jungen Korper dehnte.’

Yes, it is the daughter who stretches
Her young body, not some grandmother
And still less a dithering old grandpappy.
This is simply the natural order of things.
Although W.B. Yeats had monkey balls
Implanted in his scrotum, he knew this

And wrote, ‘That is no country for old men’
Apropos of which Mosemolleus Tronsork
Notes how country in a literary context
Always means cunt. Thus, Hamlet to
Ophelia (III:ii), with his head in her lap,
‘Did you think I meant country matters?’

Thus also in Dustin Hoffman’s revolutionary
Portrayal of Willy Loman, Biff is horrified
Not that Willy is tired, defeated, limp,
Flaccid, drooping, detumescent, suffering
From erectile dysfunction, and old,
But that he still wants to do it, whereupon

Biff discovers Willy with a whore.
That is Georges Bataille’s definition
Of obscenity: ‘Showing what should
Be hidden.’ Take it to heart, seniors.
Were I to write a poem about getting
A room with a hot twenty year old

UCSB anthropology major with a tattoo
Of the Greek letter omega above her ass
Would you or anyone want to read it?
I don’t think so, and I don’t blame you.
Twenty years old? Smokin’ hot? Feh!
Omega tattoo above her ass? Feh! Feh!

-- Mitch Sisskind

Translating Roussel: How It Can Damage Your Health by Mark Ford

A few years ago I signed up to do a translation of Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique by Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) for Princeton University Press. I’d never done a translation before, but, well, I’d written a biography of Roussel so knew his oeuvre pretty thoroughly, and had read Nouvelles Impressions a number of times … How hard could it be?

To the translator the poem presents certain obvious difficulties. The least of these is in fact the most obvious: the poem is written in a very peculiar way, for it makes extensive, very extensive, use of brackets and footnotes. The main text of each of its four cantos is conceived as one gigantic sentence, with a single main verb. The opening lines of these cantos look innocent enough: in each case they set about describing some site in Egypt, but before long Roussel has interrupted this description with a parenthetical thought, and this parenthetical thought is itself then interrupted by another, and then comes a footnote, which will have its own sets of parentheses… Therefore, to figure out its opening syntactic unit you have to turn forward to the lines that succeed the canto’s final closing bracket, that is to the canto’s closing lines, then do the same for the lines introduced by the first bracket and that are picked up between its second last and last bracket, and so on, flipping backwards and forwards, gradually working your way into its middle.

It’s a weird way of constructing a poem, and means it certainly doesn’t look like any other poem ever written on the page. By line 21 of Canto I, for instance, one is up to 5 brackets and the first footnote:

 

                                    (((((parfois une étincelle,
L’entourant de pompiers qui grimpent à l’échelle,
Fait d’un paisible immeuble un cratère qui bout¹))))),

                                    (((((sometimes a spark,
Causing firemen, climbing ladders, to surround it,
Makes of a peaceful block of flats a boiling crater¹))))),

 

The footnote then tells us that what we really need when a fire breaks out is a giant like Gulliver, who puts out a fire in the Royal Apartments in Lilliput by peeing on them.

But these brackets and footnotes don’t in themselves present a particular problem to the translator. You’ll have noticed from the extract from the French above that the poem rhymes étincelle and échelle, and, being the methodical man he was, the bout after which we get the footnote Roussel then rhymes with the first line of that footnote. Like most of his earlier long poems, Nouvelles Impressions is written in rhyming alexandrines that alternate masculine and feminine rhymes (ie. rhymes ending in a mute e). But I very quickly decided I wouldn’t be emulating these rhymes. Two earlier distinguished translators, Kenneth Koch (whose version of Canto III was published in 1964) and Ian Monk (whose version in pentameter couplets of the whole thing was published in 2004) had amply demonstrated what really extreme feats of ingenuity and invention use of corresponding rhymes could result in, but my primary aim was to make the French comprehensible.

I started off trying to do it all as literally as possible. I’ve just been reading the great translations of Rilke made by Ruth Speirs in Cairo in the 1940s; in a Note she writes: ‘What I have aimed to do is give as exact a translation of Rilke as is humanly possible.’ I suppose that’s what every translator wants, though no doubt their own personality creeps in insidiously.

As a neophyte to the translating business, what most amazed me was how much it resembled, emotionally, what I imagined it felt like to be chained to a corpse! Not that I didn’t enjoy it, in a peculiar sort of way, but I found the lack of freedom translating entails quite mind-bending. You have to turn into English what he or she has written in French, German, Serbo-Croat, Japanese, whatever. How different this was from fooling around creating ‘versions’, as Pound had done with Fenollosa’s notes for his Cathay poems, as I’d done myself with bits of Apuleius and Ronsard and Boethius and Tacitus and Lucretius and Pliny. Here you had to get it right.

It’s made me feel enormous but unenvying admiration for translators, and led me to abandon earlier plans to translate more Roussel, namely his Textes-genèse (one of which, ‘Parmi les noirs’, has been brilliantly Englished by Ron Padgett), and his fragmentary L’Allée aux lucioles. As I neared the end of Canto IV, sleep deserted me night after night. I found it hard to think of anything else; to breathe; translator’s claustrophobia – is there such a condition?

Now I hold the finished book in my hand, it all of course seems ‘worth it’, though that ‘it’ still lurks in a secret strata of my consciousness, warning me not, at least in the foreseeable future, to try ‘it’ again.

Monday @ KGB: Saskia Hamilton + Karl Kirchwey

Monday Night Poetry at KGB Bar is proud to present Saskia Hamilton + Karl Kirchwey!

Monday, April 18
Hosted by Laura Cronk, Megin Jimenez and Michael Quattrone
Reading starts at 7:30pm
Admission is FREE

www.KgbBar.com <http://www.kgbbar.com/> 

85 East 4th Street * New York, NY 10003 * Phone: 212-505-3360 <tel:212-505-3360>   

Saskia Hamilton is the author of As for Dream (2001) and Divide These (2005), the editor of The Letters of Robert Lowell (2005), and the co-editor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (2008). Her most recent work is in Joining Music with Reason: 34 Poets, British and American, Oxford 2004-2009 (2010). She teaches at Barnard College.

Karl Kirchwey is the author of five books of poems: A Wandering Island (Princeton University Press, 1990), Those I Guard (Harcourt Brace, 1993), The Engrafted Word (Henry Holt, 1998; a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”), At the Palace of Jove (Putnam, 2002) and The Happiness of This World: Poetry and Prose (2007). His poems have appeared in many periodicals including Grand Street, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, New Criterion, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Parnassus, Partisan Review, Slate and Tin House. Kirchwey has been the recipient of grants from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation as well as from the National Endowment for the Arts, and also received a Rome Prize in Literature in 1994-95. From 1987 to 2000, he was Director of the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center in New York City. He is currently on leave from Bryn Mawr College where he serves as the Director of the Creative Writing Program. 


Upcoming, Spring 2011...

May 2          Dorothea Lasky, Star Black + David Yezzi 
May 9          TK + Mitch Sisskind
May 16        Dan Chiasson + Deborah Landau

Interview: Douglas Piccinnini (by Rob Crawford)

In this third and final installment of poets/reading series interviews, I speak with Douglas Piccinnini (photo, right, by Stephanie Thompson), founder of the CROWD reading series. Topics include starting a reading series to bring poets to you, Douglas's secret past life as a jock, and how readings are different than rock concerts.

 

A secret life as a writer and musician

The Prison Industrial Complex: A Panel

American Exile: The Prison Industry

When: Saturday, April 30

Where: The Cooper Union, Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, 41 Cooper Sq., New York City 

What time: 2–3:30 p.m.

With Michelle Alexander, John Lonergan, Susan Rosenberg, and Shahrnuch Parsipur; moderated by Jackson Taylor

The prison industry has become a profitable social solution. It hides and silences whole segments of our population: political resisters, radicals, as well as a disproportionate number of poor men and women of color. For more info

Tickets: $15/$10 PEN Members, students with valid ID. Call (866) 811-4111 or visit ovationtix.com

 Check out our complete schedule of events

Mark Ford, Guest Blogger April 18 - 22

This week we welcome Mark Ford as our guest blogger.  Mark teaches in the English Department at University College London. He has recently published a new translation of Raymond Roussel's New Impressions of Africa  (Princeton University Press).  He is the author of Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams and the poetry collections Landlocked, Soft Sift, and Six Children. He has also published two volumes of essays, A Driftwood Altar and Mr and Mrs Stevens and Other Essays. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.

Here is John Ashbery on Ford's translation of Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique:   "That anyone could translate Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique at all is unlikely, but that it could be done with such sparkle and brio seems downright mysterious. This version rescues Roussel's bizarre masterpiece from its status as an intriguing rumor and turns it into a valuable resource for contemporary English-speaking readers. Poets especially will be in Mark Ford's debt." 

We were lucky to spend a few hours with Mark during our visit to London in March.  He is pictured above with David Lehman.  

Welcome, Mark.

We've created a tribute blog where you can post your thoughts and memories of Paul Violi, who died on April 2.  Please visit Remembering Paul Violi.

-- sdh

Tom Blood and Marriage Publishing House(by Rob Crawford)

  "I write every day, on a good day, for more than ten hours. I have always had low-impact, get-by jobs and relish unemployment and am comfortable in poverty. I remember near the end of the sky position I had crazy twitches and cramps in my hand, and then I knew I was finally getting somewhere as a writer." —Tom Blood
Pre-trimmed cover of The Raccoon, which functions as both a table of contents and as a poem

Tom Blood reading last week in Portland, backed by heckling and haunting strings

 

Interview: Chris Hosea (by Rob Crawford)

In the second installment of our poets/reading series interviews is Chris Hosea. He and Cecily Iddings are married poets who publish the poetry newsletter The Blue Letter, which has recently been expanded into a reading series as well.

We discuss the early impact of e.e. cummings' capitalization as well as an eccentric performance reading at Ugly Duckling. ("So I was removing all these different articles of clothing that were brands, I was naming those.")

"This doesn't rhyme, it doesn't have capitalization, what's going on here?"

Interview: Steven Karl (by Rob Crawford)

On a busy, damp evening this week I interviewed by phone or in person three prominent younger New York poets who also run poetry reading series—Steven Karl, Douglas Piccinnini, and Chris Hosea. Enjoy the interviews, and it's been a pleasure blogging with you all this week.

Steven Karl co-leads the Stain of Poetry reading series and is the author of the three chapbooks . Among other things, in this interview you will learn of his change of heart for Emily Dickinson, as well as elusive mysteries about grapefruit.

"There's really no money in poetry."

Charles Simic to Get Frost Medal

Charles Simic will receive the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America at their awards ceremony on Tuesday, April 19 (at PSA headquarters in the National Arts Club at 7 PM). Previous Frost medalists include Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Marianne Moore, and Lucille Clifton, who was the 2010 Centennial recipient. Congratulations to Mr. Simic and to winners of all the various prizes that will be presented that evening. The photo on the right is from October 1992; Under the auspices of the Academy of American Poets, Simic -- as guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1992 -- and David Lehman hosted a reading featuring four contributors to that volume. If memory serves, the four readers that evening were Jonathan Aaron, Billy Collins, Lynda Hull, and Rosanna Warren, and it took place at the Alliance Francaiseon East 60th Street. -- DL

Musings (by Rob Crawford)

 

 

Mystery Authors Who Write Fast (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

In her posthumously published autobiography, Agatha Christie revealed that she wrote The Mysterious Affair at Styles, her first detective novel, in two weeks. Ed McBain wrote his early 87th precinct novels in about a month each. Christie and McBain were in the company of the titans of what are known as "industry writers," people who can turn out one extraordinary book after another, people who vie for the title "Fastest Typewriter in the West," or anywhere else. Erle Stanley Gardner wrote mysteries for half a century and delivered more than a thousand books. In 1939 alone Gardner published four novels, eighteen novelettes, two short stories, and five articles. John Creasey wrote more than five hundred novels between 1932 and 1979. In 1939, Creasey published thirty-eight novels.

There were many other mystery writers who wrote quickly. Between 1906 and 1932 Edgar Wallace wrote more than one hundred and seventy books. Phillips Oppenheim wrote more than one hundred and fifty novels and short story collections between 1887 and 1944. In the eleven months between May 1932 and April 1933 Georges Simenon wrote ten novels. His goal was to write a novel in eleven days. He wrote two hundred and twenty novels in his career.

Sometimes genre writers are accused of being able to write quickly because the novels are generally briefer and supposedly have less psychological depth, thematic complexity, and linguistic density than "real" literature. Such an assertion ignores literary writers. John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath between June and October in 1928. Herman Melville took just six months to write Moby-Dick. (I think it took me six months to read it.) Noel Coward wrote Blithe Spirit in six days. There are claims Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment very fast to pay off gambling debts. And Robert Louis Stevenson's stepson wrote that the famous author composed Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in three days. These feats are not just true of literature. Handel wrote the "Hallelujah Chorus" in three days and the whole of The Messiah in three weeks.

Mystery writers who write quickly are not necessarily shortchanging literature. Certainly mystery authors writing a series book start off with an advantage. The setting is usually familiar as is the protagonist and the protagonist's surrounding entourage. But the plots have to be worked out and the language has to be enticing.

Mystery writers sometimes work rapidly for the same reason as other artists do. Tlhey are inspired. Or the writing is a powerful and constantly needed release from anxiety. Or the tension is only relieved when the book is completed so there is great incentive to finish it quickly.

But I think the crime novel uniquely benefits from being quickly written. Authors can keep the entire story in their minds. Writing a mystery requires a specific mental framework in which characters, plots, motives, clues, red herrings, setting, literary devices, and other matters all must be in perfect harmony and perspective. There are more novelistic aspects in a mystery than in a "regular" novel. Time dissipates the mind's ability to hold all these in a pattern. Writing quickly enhances the virtues of the tightly-woven mystery tale. Mystery authors should be celebrated and recognized because theirs is a complex intellectual task that, when done well, is compelling to readers' minds and hearts. 

Improved by the Ashbery-Tinsley "Improvement": Poems & Cocktails at Back Forty [by Stacey Harwood]

L to R: Chef Pacifico, Peter Hoffman, and Bob Holman

The idea was genius, cooked up by Tree Swenson of the Academy of American Poets and poetry-loving restaurateur Peter Hoffman (Back Forty, Savoy): Take eight of the city's most creative mixologists and challenge them to invent a drink inspired by a favorite poem. To the drinks add poem-inspired hors d'oeuvres prepared by chef Shanna Pacifico and dramatic readings of the featured poems by the Bowery Poetry Club's charismatic Bob Holman.  Serve it all up in the acclaimed restaurant Back Forty in the East Village, with chef/owner Hoffman as host, and you've got my kind of National Poetry Month celebration. . 

I was there on Tuesday night with camera and notebook but I must confess that after chasing mixologist Anna Dunn's "Tender Buttons" (LIV Vodka, Zaya rum, Berkshire gin, Chinaco tequila and tarragon and lemon syrups) with Pacifico's "Green Eggs and Ham" (deviled eggs with crispy pork) my notes are barely legible.

But I did capture Back Forty's own Russ Tinsley making "The Improvement," inspired by John Ashbery's poem of the same title. The poem has stayed with Tinsley since college and came to mind when he took up the cocktail challenge. He aimed for a spring-like and refreshing drink -- hence the gin -- in which all of the ingredients would be recognizable, like the "inside out," of the poem.With his combination of ginger infused gin, mint, lemon, lime, honey, and splash of ginger beer, I can affirm that he succeeded beautifully. When asked if he would like John Ashbery to sample his creation, Tinsley replied, "that's the dream." John? Are you game? 

I'm hoping that if enough people request "The Improvement" it will become a permanent part of the menu.