<<<
Lizzie [Hardwick]: "Well, it's curtains for him, or, as my students would say, drapes."
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from entry for 11/ 2 / 79 NYC
Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals & Notebooks, 1964-1980
(NY: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2012)
« September 2012 | Main | November 2012 »
<<<
Lizzie [Hardwick]: "Well, it's curtains for him, or, as my students would say, drapes."
>>>
from entry for 11/ 2 / 79 NYC
Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals & Notebooks, 1964-1980
(NY: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2012)
Posted by The Best American Poetry on October 16, 2012 at 01:50 PM in Spontaneous Aphorisms | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Last night, in the Corner Room of the New York Public Library's Mid-Manhattan Branch (40th Street and Fifth Avenue), an attentive audience was wowed by poems from Russia (with translations read by John Narins) and the United States. From left to right below: David Lehman (moderator), Russian poets Alla Gorbunova, Dina Gatina, Lev Oborin, American poets Heather Christle, Tina Chang, Matthew Yeager.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on October 16, 2012 at 12:43 PM in Poetry Readings | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Yesterday I wrote about the confluence of kismet in poetry, exploring how interviews, letters, poems, poets and seemingly random turns of events are able to stop us, resonate, to say, yes, here, this.
But in my discussion so far, I have not mentioned how so much of this is in flux. How are those unexpected moments being enhanced or irrevocably altered due to our increased involvement with technology and the digital world?
There are countless observations about the losses we have experienced and are experiencing in our digital conversion. In talking about compiling Lucille Clifton’s Collected Poems, for example, Kevin Young discusses how Clifton’s journals, thick, heavy, weighed with ubiquitous notes and scraps of paper became thinner and thinner as Clifton relied more on the computer.* Undoubtedly there is much to consider here. E-mails do not have the same feel and temperament as letters; they are often lost, deleted or simply not saved, vanished in the ether. Gone will be entire swaths of understanding about the creative/writing process, about the influences between writers, specifics in terms of times and dates, etc. Granted, I am only scratching the surface here; the impacts of loss are only beginning to be understood.
But, despite this, consider the potential for technology. How is this leviathan of social media inspiring new work, setting up alternate ways of understanding, reading, experiencing art, that have not previously been part of our experience?
As an illustration: consider your first reading of The Waste Land. Now consider if your first exposure to that poem had been on an iPad, through The Waste Land app for iTunes, complete with links to Eliot’s handwritten notes, comments left by Pound, audio recordings, and links to explain references and allusions in the poem. How would this have caused you to experience the poem differently? How can we even begin to ponder the contrast?
But let’s back up a bit. What happens, is happening, when poetry begins to use or relies on references to technology? Entire poems (and often a series of poems or perhaps a full collection) can hinge on technological language, structure, reference, or suggestion. How does the mention of, say, an iPhone or an iPad alter or enhance our experience of the poem itself?
Take Terese Svoboda’s poem, “Neighborhood Watch” from the September 10, 2012 New Yorker.** The poem ends:
…You hobble off,First, just the mention of technology (iPad) requires our exposure to and awareness of the device. Then we have technological language. Svoboda encourages us to question the way we use our terminology and the layers of meaning that this particular language provides. Though the word “interface” has been around for well over a century, it is one we now associate with the digital world. And, as it includes the word face, so the body becomes aligned with the digital. Too, we wonder about components of the language, thanks to the pairing of interface/face. Inter. Inner. Enter. And of course, there is the reference to the screen, staring “at its black” and the multiple suggestions this offers, not only of a blank or “off” screen, but also a suggestion of “fade to black,” an ending. And then there is last line--boot it up—taken from the early days of computerspeak-- meaning to start something. Of course this also brings to mind other phrases involving “boot,” as in to give someone the boot, which is, interestingly the opposite of starting but rather the finish. In just three lines, it is clear that this poem would not turn as it does without the hinge of technology. How compelling too that Svoboda ends the poem directly with tech language, especially given that the poem seems to begin so rooted in the human, and arguably, the intimate: “A weather of sweaters mostly moth-woven.”
Jan Clausen also uses technology references in her poem “Veiled Spill #1” from Poets For Living Waters:
“…This is the world. Where you can do anything. Synthesize a garden or tweet about Art. Pour concrete and sprinkle designer compost and sow exotic grasses. Draft an ars poetica on your mobile. Stock the second freezer with mice to feed the python. Where everything is superfluous like our bodies, but only an ant is more or less foolproof. I can’t get them out of my kitchen. This is the weird. Where nothing helps anything….” ***
Notice the language here. We don’t “plant” a garden, we “synthesize” it. We tweet about art; we draft an ars poetica on a mobile. All are observations rooted in the temporal and transitory, possibly suggesting the later “superfluous” nature of our bodies, perhaps even our ways of relating to language, or by extension, to technology.
Posted by Julie E. Bloemeke on October 16, 2012 at 09:15 AM in Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Here Here - and also on the sidebar to the right - is a little orange picture, with people excitedly scrambing over an enormous open book. This is your portal to entering the UK's National Poetry Competition - in reality, an international poetry competition - possibly the most important competition for an unpublished poem in the UK.
A competition has a life beyond the words first, second, third. This year, to celebrate the life and afterlife of the poems that win, or are commended - and the journeys poets find themselves on, sometimes merely as a result of deciding to enter - we're taking some of the most interesting poets in the UK on a 'blog tour' to talk about their own poems and experiences.
'Best American Poetry' is kindly hosting us for this week; we'll be posting up at least one post a day. So read what the poets have to say, find your best poem, click the picture, enter the competition - you never know where you're going.
To begin, here's a piece that appears in the current issue of Poetry News, our members' newsletter:
The kids are back at school and the nights are drawing in – it’s that time of year again. That’s right: the “season of mist and mellow fruitfulness”, when poems from up and down the country, and around the world, make their way to the Poetry Society for the UK’s most important poem competition. The holiday season is over and it’s time to get the pick of your poems ready for their big day out.
For 34 years, the National Poetry Competition has been making a difference: both to well-known poets and to the new names the competition has brought to the fore, whether as winners, as ‘commendeds’ or ‘placed’. Every year the judges, and the staff in the office, feel a palpable excitement; last year saw over 11,000 poems submitted and the winners and commendations reflected the thrill of new discoveries.
New discoveries included last year’s third prizewinner, Zaffar Kunial for ‘Hill Speak’, who had never sent a poem anywhere before (though he had been writing for years). In 2010, Paul Adrian’s first-prize-winning poem ‘Robin in Flight’ was also his first published poem.
How do you help your poem put its best foot forward in such company? Even after he won, Paul Adrian said, “the calibre of the past winners is truly intimidating”. But your poem is not up against past winners: it’s up against the other poems sent in for this competition, and they are all judged anonymously. Paul added, “The NPC is wonderful in its democracy: open to all, professionals and amateurs alike, and judged anonymously, it focuses solely on the strength of the poetry.”
Ian Duhig has sat on both sides of the fence, as both a competition winner and (in 2001) a competition judge (with Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Michele Roberts, and Michael Donaghy). Here’s what he says about that process:
“All the good poems somehow created space around them as you read through the pile. I think it was Eliot who said that poets aren’t really in competition because they are doing such different things, and there are so many varieties of poetry around to be enjoyed at present that his remark is even more true now. However, within their styles some have more intensity than others: they command their space and ‘stand well’, so you want to keep looking at them. When I found a poem I liked I read it aloud several times as well as rereading it mentally many more times. I suspect most judges do this, so entrants may well want to bear this in mind and do the same with their poems before sending them off.”
So read your poem aloud – to yourself, to someone else. Show it to a friend. Give it a week, check it again, look out for spelling and punctuation errors (everyone is susceptible). Once you’ve scrubbed it up nicely, you have until 31 October to give it a kiss, tuck in its scarf, and send it off for its big day out.
Posted by Katy Evans-Bush on October 16, 2012 at 08:04 AM in England | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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My first impressions on approaching the New Jersey
Performing Arts Center were of contrasts. 4,000 high school students attended
the festival’s events on Friday, and most of them were piling into their buses
out front, a few speaking excitedly about the day’s session on “Poetry and
Survival,” another bemoaning having to miss Jane Hirshfield. The first festival
goers I met were comparing this year’s to the previous four they had attended, one
speaking wistfully of Waterloo Village, while another praised the City of
Newark for partnering in making this one happen. A white exhibition tent in
front of Prudential Hall was filled with table after table of poetry books,
arranged alphabetically by author, at which people stood quietly reading,
turning pages, almost to the one silent, next to tables laden with festival
logo-emblazoned tee shirts and coffee mugs, water bottles and posters, around
which there was chatter, laughter, and quick swapping of opinions on size,
color, and number. Between events, people compared sessions they had attended
earlier in the day, distances driven to get to the festival, books recently
read, poems used in teaching, and conversations with Natasha Trethewey and
Amiri Baraka.
I chose two sequences of events – one conversation and one performance -- and in the first, Eavan Boland and Henri Cole. The large performance hall was comfortably full and the discourse instantly different from what we had left outside. Eavan Boland pointed the audience to Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” and the moment of realization that the speaker was the ringmaster. Henri Cole read in almost one breath Sylvia Plath’s “Balloons,” saying after how from beginning to end, he had the sense of holding a bare live wire. These were responses to a request from the audience that the poets share an exemplary simile or metaphor that worked profoundly for them. Revision and rereading, difficult versus obscure poems, love poems and politics surfaced in other questions.
Later, the performance started with jazz and continued with Terrance Hayes, Fanny Howe, Thomas Lux, and more. Terrance Hayes read new poems, including “Barber-ism”, with haircuts, men, and mind static; his introductions offered stories that ran beneath and gave rise to verse. Fanny Howe, praising Hayes’s work and almost apologizing that hers would be “more delicate,” read lines of shimmering beauty, poetry performed center stage. Thomas Lux caught the audience laughing and understanding and disturbed, often at once, playing mind games that refused to remain just that.
On the train back into the city, the difference of the day’s discourse stayed with me as I read poems of the poets I had heard speak and read. Among them were words about words and more.
“Howyoubeens”
Mostly people talk to people, standing
Round to jibber-jabber in the blue hours
Of weekdays. You see them meandering
Words while the calendar tilts and pours
Its steady juice of minutes…
Everything ignored in the name of Weather,
Of somebody’s business & “Howyoubeens.”
I too am guilty. Chattling after strangers.
Wasting it. Dumb. Bitching about the wind.
-- Terrance Hayes
“Gravity and Center”
I don’t want words to sever me from reality.
I don’t want to need them. I want nothing
to reveal feeling but feeling – as in freedom,
or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond,
or the sound of water poured in a bowl.
-- Henri Cole
Madge McKeithen teaches writing at the New School, is at work on her second book, and writes online at www.madgemckeithen.com
Posted by The Best American Poetry on October 15, 2012 at 08:00 AM in Current Affairs, Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Posted by The Best American Poetry on October 15, 2012 at 06:00 AM in Nin Andrews Comics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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TED JONATHAN is a poet and short story writer. Born and raised in the Bronx, he now lives in New Jersey. Bones & Jokes, his most recent full-length collection of poems and short stories, was published by NYQ Books (2009). His first collection Spiked Libido
was published by Neukeia Press. Ted's work has appeared in New York
Quarterly, Web Del Sol Review, Pedestal, Hiram Poetry Review, and many
other magazines. Translations of his poetry have appeared in multiple
Russian magazines.
Posted by jdeming on October 15, 2012 at 05:00 AM in KGB Reading Series | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Once, in conversation over a drink or two, a fellow poet asked when I began writing. The words were out of my mouth before I had a chance to catch them. “Before I was born,” I had said. I was perplexed by the speed and intensity of my response, and even more so by the seeming contradiction. What had I meant by this? Why had I responded in that way?
I have turned over those questions in my mind for years, have, in fact, been quite haunted by them. If I were to tell you that my unexpected response had something to do with coincidence would that seem like a lie? If I were to tell you that it had to do with something deeply visceral yet apparently random would that make any sense at all?
Let me begin before poetry, with how I experienced this feeling in my body even before I could write words to paper. I would try to tell you that it felt something like this: an emphatic yes! that was somehow connected to a spiritual knowing, a heady energy cocktail of mental and physical, an intersection of kismet—of the seemingly random being not at all random—as an absolute type of truth. It was a force that lit me up, sustained me, beyond what we walk through in the every day.
Eavan Boland--in her "Letter To a Young Woman Poet"—might have called it an eroticism of personal history or past, but to me it was more of a merging of notes, all to one vibration: at first through symbol and then later into language.
Connecting this feeling to words—and more specifically to the creating of story--I began to realize it was the beginnings of poetry before I could articulate what poetry was. My earliest poem drafts began around age 10. And even though I called what I was writing poetry—it did have a loose verse form—I did not align what I was doing with “poetry” at all. The poems that I encountered in elementary school—I vaguely recall snippets of Ogden Nash and Shel Silverstein—seemed to be from an entirely different planet than what I was putting to paper.
What I knew: I wrote because—and as I later learned Rilke would say—I had to. I felt called, compelled, unable to not write. And, when I look back at what I was up to, even that young, I find I was doing something that would be a tangible reminder of this confluence that I am trying to describe even now.
By the time I was in my early teens, I had filled a three-ringed notebook—I remember, it was the largest I could find at the time—with poems written in longhand. Not 20 or 30, but 100 or more. Meticulously organized. Most of them are signed and dated with a final note: “inspired” to indicate when I had first drafted the poem, and/or “revised” for when I considered the poem complete. Eerily enough—especially given my discussion here--some of the poems even have drawings or newspaper articles clipped to them. Most are written on notebook paper, but some are on receipts, hotel stationery, suggesting even then the power of that impulse to write.
Testament? Talisman? I could hardly say. But what I knew was that it was evidence of my experience of confluence, words that somehow arrived through me in my attempt to create, understand, perhaps re-create the energy that got me to the paper in the first place.
It sounds staggering, but it was not until my mid-twenties
that I made the connection between my impetus for writing as a child and the
world of poetry. So, when I began to
realize that poets talked about the idea of confluence, that they too
experienced it, longed for it, thrilled to it the same way I did, I was
stunned.
Sitting in workshop with James Dickey at the University of South Carolina in 1995, I found myself struck again and again by what he said about “supposed” coincidence—“Nothing is coincidence!” he would often tell us emphatically—those moments of intersection that cross our lives in exactly that time, for exactly that way. When he talked about this in terms of poetry or of being a poet—he often called poets “masters of the superior secret”—I, and my younger self who could not put that confluence experience to words, were hooked.
When Dickey talked of books, he talked of books “choosing,” their readers. As he writes in Sorties (collected excerpts from his journals): “Isn’t it a marvelous thing, this having a house full of books. Something crosses the mind—a flash of light, some connection, some recognition—and one simply rises from one’s chair and goes, as if by predestination, to that book, to that poem.” I can hardly get over the word predestination. That feeling of being led. Of being called.
Later, in Sorties, he marvels at the “odyssey” of books, how “things once written down, long ago, by people long since dead, find their way” into a reader’s hands at just a specific time.
My delight in these discoveries only continued. Imagine connecting these impassioned moments from Dickey’s workshop with other tangible circumstances and examples. I think immediately of the poems that arise from these random—or seemingly random—confluences—the way that the unexpected suddenly crashes in and becomes something new. Though there are countless examples, Marianne Moore’s “Four Quartz Crystal Clocks” remains one of my favorites.
In 1939, Moore received a Bell phone bill in the mail that included a flyer titled “The World’s Most Accurate ‘Clocks.’” I think of the piles of unwanted junk mail that we receive and rarely even acknowledge today, but in 1939, this insert must have been a bit of a surprise. Taken by the moment and the information, Moore was compelled to write a poem based on what she learned about the clocks from the flyer. (She even wrote letters to a Bell representative, Paul B. Findlay, to confirm her accuracy.)
It causes one to wonder, what if that insert had not been
mailed? What if it had not captivated
Moore as it did? And, by what act of
grace was this story--and the insert itself--saved? The original flyer, published in a Fall 1981
edition of the Marianne Moore Newsletter,
shows us not only the text and drawings that Moore herself saw, but contains
Moore’s notes, presumably toward the poem itself.
But Moore’s example is only one. Anne Sexton, in a 1968 Paris Review interview with Barbara Kevles, gives us two incredible instances of how confluence resonated with her. First, through her interaction with Saul Bellow, and second, in her unexpected encounter with Rimbaud’s words that eventually inspired her to write the poem “Flee on Your Donkey,”:
First, Bellow:
(Previously in the interview Sexton talks about how she writes an apparently feverish fan letter to Saul Bellow about Henderson the Rain King. In the morning, she regrets her perceived exuberance and mails him an apology. She says:)
“Saul Bellow wrote me back on the back of a manuscript. He said to me, “Luckily, I have a message to you from the book I am writing [which was Herzog]. I have both your letters—the good one which was written that night at 3 A.M. and then the contrite one the next day. One’s best things are always followed by apoplectic, apologetic seizure...” The message that he had encircled went this way, “With one long breath caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don’t cry you idiot, live or die, but don’t poison everything.” And in circling that and sending it to me, Saul Bellow had given me a message about my whole life. That I did not want to poison the world, that I didn’t want to be the killer; I wanted to be the one that gave birth, who encouraged things to grow and to flower, not the poisoner. So I stuck that message up over my desk and it was a kind of hidden message. You don’t know what these messages mean to you, yet you stick them up over your desk or remember them or write them down and put them in your wallet.”
One can hardly even begin to consider all of the intersections that had to happen for this message to arrive to Sexton. What if Bellow had not made the connection between her letters to him and that part of his manuscript just then? What if he only saw Sexton’s first letter—or felt compelled to respond-- because of her apologetic second one? What if he had circled a different passage, no passage at all, or picked plain stationery? I love that Bellow uses the word “Luckily.” It is suggestive of the confluence--that at just that moment, at just that crossroads in time--Anne’s letter arrived. How fascinating that it took Sexton writing to Bellow and Bellow circling his own words for Sexton to see what would later become a type of life message to her, and one could argue, a message of some reassurance to her. (Though one admittedly has to take into consideration the multiple poisons of Sexton’s life and tragic end.) And how powerful and profound this must have been that Sexton put this message over her desk, memorized it, used it as the title for her Pulitzer-Prize winning Live or Die, and then called it to mind a few years later in this interview? And, in discussing this passage of confluence, she is opening it up to be repeatedly rediscovered, even by us, in this exact moment.
Yet Sexton’s discussion of confluence does not end there. Instead she continues to discuss the pull of words, of taking a conscious action even when the subconscious intention is not yet—or may never be—known. And she gives us another example:
“One day I was reading a quote from Rimbaud that said, “Anne, Anne, flee on your donkey,” and I typed it out because it had my name in it and because I wanted to flee. I put it in my wallet, went to see my doctor and at that point was committed to a hospital for about the seventh or eighth time. In the hospital I started to write the poem, ‘Flee on Your Donkey,’ as though the message had come to me at just the right moment. Well, this was true with Bellow’s quote from his book. I kept it over my desk, and when I went to Europe, I pasted it in the front of my manuscript. I kept it there as a quotation with which to preface my book…. [in my book] You say there’s a tension there and a structure, but it was an unconscious tension and an unconscious structure that I did not know was going on when I did it.”
Posted by Julie E. Bloemeke on October 15, 2012 at 12:08 AM in Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
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Julie E.
Bloemeke is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. An Edmund A. Ramsaur fellow, she studied with
James Dickey while completing her masters degree at the University of South
Carolina. She is a winner in the 2012 Artists
Embassy International Dancing Poetry contest for which she read her work as part of the
annual September performance in San Francisco.
Her poems have most recently appeared in A&U: America’s AIDS Magazine, Qarrtsiluni and in the
collaborative chapbook Jasper Reads:
Download. In spring, 2012, her
series of poetry and photography on abandoned spaces was featured in Deep South Magazine. Her poetry and
non-fiction are forthcoming in a number of anthologies including The Southern Poetry Anthology Volume V:
Georgia. She recently received a fellowship from Virginia Center for the
Creative Arts (VCCA) and is working on her second poetry
manuscript. Follow her on twitter
@jebloemeke.
Welcome, Julie.
Like us on Facebook!
-- sdh
Posted by The Best American Poetry on October 14, 2012 at 09:19 PM in Announcements, England, Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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As everyone has heard by now, this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Chinese novelist Mo Yan. Nearly any selection would create controversy—from sour grapes to complaints about literary quality to accusations of political maneuvering on the part of the Nobel committee. This year, what strikes me is the substantial difference between what is being said in the US about the choice, and what is being said in China.
Outside of Chinese literature specialists, the major reaction in the US seems to be: “Huh?” Few have heard of, let alone read, Mo Yan’s work, even though six of his novels have been translated into English, with two more forthcoming. For a Chinese writer, that is a remarkably high rate of translation. And therein lies part of the trouble.
In China, Mo Yan is a prominent literary figure, largely because of Zhang Yimou’s adaptation of his novel Red Sorghum Clan into a movie (renamed Red Sorghum), but partly because he is so widely translated. Access to the rest of the world, and in particular, the English-speaking world, means potential fame and money and a shot at international prizes like the Nobel. That alone can lead to bitterness among other authors whose work has not received the same attention from the West. Mo Yan is also well known for his ability to toe the official line, and this creates resentment in a political climate that necessitates a delicate balancing act between expression and self-censorship. Mo Yan is a member of the official Writer’s Association, from which he draws a salary. For Chinese writers, and for China specialists in the West, ‘official’ is a fraught term. It smacks of obeisance to the Communist regime, and a kowtowing to government strictures on what is allowed and what is not. For those who risk everything to speak out against the political system—writers like Liu Xiaobo, Ma Jian, and Liao Yiwu, or the artist Ai Weiwei—this shows a lack of moral courage. Since the awarding of the Nobel, the Chinese internet has exploded with complaints of this type. Mo Yan the stooge, Mo Yan the coward, Mo Yan the inferior self-limited writer.
Yet the Chinese press as well as many critics and readers are behind him. And Mo Yan does address a range of controversial issues. His novels are by no means simple peons to the greatness of the Communist party, or, like the worst of ‘official’ literature, Brave-Communist-Party-Member-Saves-Village tales. What tends to protect Mo Yan from Party censure (although his work at various times has, in fact, been censored or criticized by the government) is that he sets his work in the past—i.e., he says nothing about the current political regime—and he uses a style of ‘hallucinatory realism’ to address issues that if tackled head-on might lead to Party condemnation. Having a tadpole as a narrator provides a certain amount of protection. The Communist Party will often ignore allegory and extended metaphor, so long as it doesn’t cross a certain, constantly changing, line. Liu Xiaobo, the other recent Chinese Nobel laureate (the one never mentioned in the Chinese press), wasn’t jailed for his potentially incendiary poetry; the government just cared about his directly political writings.
And now the Chinese government has a laureate it can promote. But with such recognition comes a degree of dangerous power. Mo Yan has just said at a news conference that he hopes Liu Xiaobo will win his freedom soon (although he also said he ‘doesn’t understand’ Liu’s political essays), which is an embarrassment for a government greatly concerned with keeping face. Perhaps Mo Yan will continue to make cautious political statements, perhaps not. Either way, he is now, whether he likes it or not, a political figure, in China even more than in the West.
----Eleanor Goodman 顾爱玲
(Ed note: Eleanor Goodman is a Research Associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, where she is working on a book-length translation project. Eleanor writes fiction, poetry, and essays, and translates contemporary Chinese literature. Her work has appeared widely in publications such as PN Review, Fiction, Pathlight, The Guardian, Pleiades, Acumen, Perihelion, New Delta Review, The Los Angeles Review, and on this blog. Find out more about Eleanor Goodman here.)
Posted by Eleanor Goodman on October 13, 2012 at 07:08 PM in China, Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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NA: Copper Canyon Press is such a
successful independent poetry press. I simply love the fact that Copper
Canyon is for poets only. But how do you do it? What makes this
press so unique and successful?
KF: Thank you for your kind words about Copper Canyon. I think success in the poetry world is largely defined by having a community who supports your efforts, and Copper Canyon has a terrific community of readers, authors, benefactors, volunteers, board members and staff members. We are lucky to have talented and creative folks working at Copper Canyon who are not only passionate about poetry, but dedicated to getting it into the hands of readers.
I also think Copper Canyon--and this is something I noticed when I first began working here--is in a constant state of learning. We are continuously educating and reeducating ourselves on the changing ways of the industry as well as seeking out new authors, translators and diversifying our book lists. We are turning 40 years old this year—it’s definitely been a communal effort with lots of branches, stems, leaves and roots.
NA: Who came up with the name, Copper Canyon?
KF: Our founders decided on the name “Copper Canyon.” It refers a large, open pit copper mine in the western mountains of Utah (as the story goes, it was a sacred spot for some jewelry-making Utes).
NA: What are some of the struggles and the rewards of working with an independent poetry press?
KF: I see the struggles of working with an independent poetry press as part of the rewards. Though I cannot speak for everyone, I think the majority of people working in the poetry publishing industry are aware of the financial challenges of nonprofits and understand that trends in sales are going to be strikingly different than, say, the launch of the iPhone 5.
However, I get to work with some of the nation’s most talented, fiery, intelligent writers. I’m able to interact with poetry on a level that continues to push my intellectual boundaries. Working for an independent press has had dynamic effects on my own poetry--my job has profoundly effected my personal life in a positive and intensely productive way.
I feel a potent, aggressive and ardent sense of gratitude for what I do. When I was studying in Chicago, my MFA thesis instructor Jaswinder Bolina called my attention to how lucky we are, as Americans, to be able to study the art of poetry. Many other countries have economic or socio-economic issues that prevent people from even attending college, let alone attending college to study poetry. I’ve never forgotten this and feel the sentiment carries over into my work with Copper Canyon. It’s not so much that the rewards surpass the struggles, but that the struggles enrich—and in some cases create—the rewards.
NA: Whenever I hear the name Copper Canyon, I think of Pulitzers and National Book Awards. Maybe you could say a few words about your recent prize-winning collections. (Feel free to include links to the books, reviews, etc.)KF: One of our most recent prize-winning collections is Laura Kasischke’s Space, in Chains, winner of the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. Space, in Chains is one of those collections that captures contemporary domesticity with such sharpness and, as Stephen Burt writes in his NBCC review, “At times the poems are undoubtedly ‘confessional,’ derived from traumatic moments in the poet’s own life. And yet the same poems that look to Kasischke’s experience ask us briskly to look to our own...”. It’s a startling, graceful collection.
C.D. Wright’s One with Others won the 2010 Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award that year. Wright did an interview for the National Book Foundation where she says, “Every poet I know is trying to write their way through the vortex of discourses, and moreover, to write against a massive sense of helplessness.” It’s hard not to be profoundly effected by that statement, or by the investigation being done in One with Others.
NA: I am always looking for poetry books in translation. Copper Canyon Press has a nice selection. Is it a challenge to market translations? If so, what do you do to overcome that challenge? Do you have any new books in translation coming out? If so, could you post a short excerpt? And maybe provide a link?
KF: Ah, happy to hear you’re interested in translations! W.S. Merwin’s Selected Translations is forthcoming very soon (you can read a review of it at Publishers Weekly), along with Sun at Midnight, translations of Muso Soseki’s work (2013). Much further down the line in the spring of 2013 is New Poems: Rilke, translated by Joseph Cadora. I don’t feel that it’s “challenging” to market translations, though it’s certainly different than working with English-only poetry collections. I think there’s a huge opportunity to find new readership when you publish (or publicize) translations. It allows Copper Canyon to navigate the landscapes of other countries: our translators help us better understand who the readers of poetry are in China, Japan, and so on. It’s invaluable, really, to have that kind of knowledge, and I think we are all grateful for the trans-cultural insights we get each time a translation gets sent down the rail.
NA: Do you also publish books on craft?
KF: We have in the past, Theodore Roethke’s On Poetry & Craft is one example. In the words of our Executive Editor Michael Wiegers, they are more “the exception, not the rule.” The Press’s mission, first and foremost, is to put poetry into the hands of people. So when it comes to considering new manuscripts, Michael is focused on primarily poetry collections—however, if the right book on craft came along, it would certainly be taken into consideration. A PC answer, I know, but true.
NA: Your book covers are really beautiful. Who designs them?
KF: We have two designers, Valerie Brewster and Phil Kovacevich who regularly work on the cover designs of our titles. In addition to these two graphic designers, Michael and Tonaya Thompson, our Managing Editor, focus lots of time and energy on book design...not to mention the author themselves, who have a hand in selecting artwork and providing feedback on the covers of their collections. For example, the cover of Dean Young’s newest collection Bender: New & Selected is a painting by Young: you can see it here; and Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was an Aztec cover features a photograph of her actual brother.
NA: How does one become a Copper Canyon poet?
KF: Well...I’m going to go (indirectly) with John Keats on this one. It’s like his theory, a “Mansion of Many Apartments.” Essentially, Copper Canyon is a house with many rooms, and each room represents a different aesthetic, poetic concern, theme, topic, etc. Just as each room in a house has a different key or “way to get in,” so does Copper Canyon. There is no one way to become a Copper Canyon poet. I’m not an authority on the editorial aspect of book selection, but I know Michael Wiegers is a firm believer in brilliance; i.e. brilliant writing that reaches the public both emotionally and intellectually. We occasionally find poets through recommendations, we occasionally solicit specific poets, and we read every submission that come into our mailbox.
NA: I am such a fan of one of your new
poets, Natalie Diaz. Her collection, When
My Brother Was an Aztec, is stunning. On the one hand, her
poetry speaks of her Native American childhood, and on the other, it is
surreal, melodic, and darkly visionary. I would love you to talk a little
bit about her work.
KF: I agree, it’s “darkly visionary” and stunning. I think Natalie Diaz’s poetry speaks to a community of voices that have been historically underrepresented. What’s so fascinating about her writing is how rich in emotion it is while still tackling politically and socially relevant subjects. When My Brother Was an Aztec is not just gently approaching “identity” or “culture,” it’s full-on embracing the collision of language and society, language and love, language and community, and so on. The poems move tactfully between tenderness and brutality so the reader gains quite a realistic picture of her personal life in addition to a more global insight on Native American society.
NA: Could you mention some other new and forthcoming titles? Maybe provide links to interviews, reviews, etc.
KF: Absolutely—we have a great upcoming Spring / Summer 2013 season with collections by Bob Hicok (Elegy Owed, forthcoming in March), W.S. Merwin (Collected Haiku of Buson), former Yale Younger Poet and doctor Fady Joudah (Alight), Kwame Dawes (Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected), Lisa Olstein (poems from her collection Little Stranger will be featured in an album by the band Cold Satellite), Ed Skoog (Rough Day), Tishani Doshi (Everything Begins Elsewhere) and Jane Miller (Thunderbird).
There is also Brenda Shaughnessy’s newest collection Our Andromeda (she has a recent review in The New Yorker where the poems are referred to as “vulnerable, heartbroken, mean, vengeful, and thrilling.”). New York Times bestselling memoirist Stephen Kuusisto has a new collection of poetry due out soon called Letters to Borges, along with Mark Twain Award winner Dan Gerber with Sailing Through Cassiopeia, Tung-Hui Hu (Greenhouses, Lighthouses), and Tom Hennen (Darkness Sticks to Everything: New & Collected).
Dean Young’s Bender: New and Selected has just hit the ground running. We also have some exciting books by debut poets like James Arthur (Charms Against Lightning) and the APR / Honickman Prize Winner Tomas Q. Morin (A Larger Country) that are absolutely polished and beautiful works.
NA: I would like to close the interview with a poem from a Copper Canyon poet.
KF: While I don’t have one favorite CCP poem, I heard Matthew Zapruder read this poem at the Denver AWP in 2010 (before I began working at Copper Canyon) and it struck me as the kind of poem that can make you laugh, but also intensely consider your entire life’s work and commitment to poetry—yes, I wish I was being hyperbolic. It’s from his collection, Come on All You Ghosts (2011) and you can also find it online at The Poetry Foundation website.
The Prelude
Oh this Diet Coke is really
good,
though come to think of it it
tastes
like nothing plus the idea of
chocolate,
or an acquaintance of
chocolate
speaking fondly of certain
times
it and chocolate had spoken
of nothing,
or nothing remembering a
field
in which it once ate the most
wondrous
sandwich of ham and rustic
chambered cheese
yet still wished for a piece
of chocolate
before the lone walk back
through
the corn then the darkening
forest
to the disappointing village
and its super
creepy bed and breakfast.
With secret despair
I returned to the city.
Something
seemed to be waiting for me.
Maybe the “chosen guide”
Wordsworth
wrote he would even were it
“nothing
better than a wandering
cloud”
have followed which of course
to me
and everyone sounds amazing.
All I follow is my own
desire,
sometimes to feel, sometimes
to be
at least a little more than
intermittently
at ease with being loved. I
am never
at ease. Not with hours I can
read or walk
and look at the brightly
colored
houses filled with lives, not
with night
when I lie on my back and
listen,
not with the hallway,
definitely
not with baseball, definitely
not with time. Poor
Coleridge, son
of a Vicar and a lake, he
could not feel
the energy. No present joy,
no cheerful
confidence, just love of
friends and the wind
taking his arrow away. Come
to the edge
the edge beckoned softly.
Take
this cup full of darkness and
stay as long
as you want and maybe a
little longer.
Kelly Forsythe is the publicist for Copper Canyon Press. She has poems forthcoming or published in Black Warrior Review, Columbia Poetry Review and The Minnesota Review. In 2011, she was featured in American Poet as an Academy of American Poets “Emerging Poet.”
Nin Andrews received her BA from Hamilton College and her MFA from Vermont College. The recipient of two Ohio Arts Council grants, she is the author of several books including The Book of Orgasms, Spontaneous Breasts, Why They Grow Wings, Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane, Sleeping with Houdini, and Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum. She also edited Someone Wants to Steal My Name, a book of translations of the French poet, Henri Michaux. Her book, Southern Comfort was published by CavanKerry Press in 2010. Follow Nin's blog here.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on October 13, 2012 at 08:00 AM in Meet the Press, Nin Andrews | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Let me propose an additional instrument to the array we poets already enjoy at our disposal when we put our poems together. I call it “elastic rhyme,” and I’ve been using it here and there for years. Simply put, elastic rhyme, which is especially suited for prose-leaning styles that characterize much current poetry, supplies a flexible order for the writing of verse; while rhyme occurs systematically, the point at which it actually occurs varies – thus, the term, elastic rhyme.
Rhyme can be magic – frequently, subtle magic – that beguiles readers and listeners even today and seduced their forebears from the time poetry enticed early devotees and an audience around a fire to be word-comforted. So, I’d certainly not suggest a terminal scuttling of rhyme, but I would espouse an emendation to soften overtness of hard rhyme – mitigating, if not removing, monotonous,singsongy instances that can repel poets and readers or listeners alike.
Rhyme in elastic rhyme will normally strike, but not always, between alternate lines. One can choose from a vast assemblage of applications – use of measured feet (i.e., pentameter, trimeter, etc.), blank verse, free verse – in combination with elastic rhyme. For example, a poet may assign a certain number of words per line – with variation, if preferred, per line throughout the poem even to that number – depending on the tautness desired, and then select any one of the first few words in every other line to rhyme with any one of the last few words in each succeeding line. The approach could be modified to substitute a syllabic scheme for the word system, just described.
At present, some verse continues to rely on rhyming techniques at the end of lines, utilizing sonnet, sestina, terza rima, or other style arrangements. Elastic rhyme can break the line ending adherence and foster more diversity in rhyme composition. In much earlier verse, poets often found the use of shorter lines more effective, but, over time, extended lines were enlisted; elastic rhyme builds on this liberalization without rejecting order or rhyme altogether. Steadfast fidelity to tight and repetitive elements in poetic form is a scary regimen for most of us – we’ve learned to be dutifully chary of devotion to such methods, for they become more than a bit boring to the poet, and, even more to the point, they contribute to disinterest, if not to downright agitation, by the audience in the midst of oppressive monotony.
For generations, poets supported, by their practice, the thesis that lines of verse are joined, solidified or emphasized at the moment rhyme is finalized. In responding to one of my longer poems, which employs elastic rhyme, the poet, Molly Peacock, made a separate and quite discriminating observation when she concluded that elastic rhyme can actually serve the purpose of “stretching and contracting language.” She thus underscores the benefit that by adjusting rhyme completion away from traditional placement, the poet can, through elastic rhyme, actually stretch and contract signal moments of verse.
Posted by J. Chester Johnson on October 12, 2012 at 06:00 AM in Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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We should not suppose this return connotes a literary topography akin to PARADISE LOST, BHAGAVAD GITA of the MAHABHARATA, or THE ILIAD. Of course, we don’t think of ourselves as poets engaged in preserving, in verse, traditional epic contests with warrior battles, supernal interventions, or topical armageddon between conspicuous forces of good and evil. Rather, a more modern epic form of poetic relevance establishes a consequential context for the events explored and also reflects the values of the particular time and place.
There are recent longer poems or collected series of poems that capture the values of an age, which values often oppose each other within the poem, and do so through an unusual telling of remarkable, singular events. Examples that immediately come to mind are C. D. Wright’s ONE WITH OTHERS and Cornelius Eady’s BRUTAL IMAGINATION. Wright wrote this book-length poem about the way a mentor and others conducted themselves in the midst of civil rights events, more particularly, the 1969 March Against Fear (from West Memphis, AR to Little Rock, AR). In the work, we learn much about complicity without redemption and courage with redemption. Previously in ONE BIG SELF, Wright relied on a similar approach (accompanied by photographs – applied, in an adjacent style, by James Agee and Walker Evans for LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN) to communicate life in the Louisiana prison system. With a different structure, Eady employed a long cycle of related poems that discover and explain the environment in which a white mind invokes an imagined black man to cover up a murder; the cycle conveys, among other things, the perspective as shown through the eyes of that fictitious black man whom Susan Smith tried to blame for the killing of her two sons in South Carolina. Both of these longer works qualify as epic pieces, not simply for the length of each, but also for the considerable examination into the complex and extensive worlds that produced the events on which these poets relied.
It would be incorrect, however, to surmise that Eady and Wright are working alone in this new epic verse mode. Several other American poets have claimed it in their own discrete styles. Kindred examples include: Nicole Cooley in BREACH, which examines in a cycle of numerous poems the immediate effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans (Cooley’s hometown) and the concomitant aftermath; and Van Brock’s UNSPEAKABLE STRANGERS, a book-length set of poems “about and related to the Holocaust, its causes, and the persistence of its causes and effects” – in the words of Brock.
Some poets, on the other hand, alter the epic mode through intriguing and surprising methods to produce a unique slant. Kimiko Hahn in TOXIC FLORA probes science (actually, articles on science that appeared in THE NEW YORK TIMES) as the underlying universe for a long set of inter-connected poems. At the same time, Davis McCombs chooses in ULTIMA THULE the interiors of a network of caves, located in south central Kentucky, to extrapolate into epic dimensions an almost endless context of history, vistas, conflicts and death.
So, who says that Homer and Virgil do not live? Undoubtedly, they do; it’s just they now choose another means of travel. While I’ve tried my own hand at various applications of the latest use of the epic verse form, it’s best and most prudent for this poet to let the pieces cited in this article stand for the conclusion that long sets of linked poems or single, expansive poems, composed in the new epic verse mode, embolden and enrich the current American poetry world in ways that are both original and convincing.
# # #
Posted by J. Chester Johnson on October 11, 2012 at 06:00 AM in Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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When: Monday, October 15, 2012 at 7pm
Where: New York Public Library, Mid-Manhattan Branch, The Corner Room, 40th St. & 5th Avenue, (diagonally across from the main building) NYC
Cost: Free
Description: Carrying forward Russia’s rich poetic tradition, acclaimed rising poets read from their work, discuss the variety and richness of contemporary Russian verse, and consider their art and its role in the context of Russia’s volatile political and social reality. Reading alongside them will be key US poets whose work, in breadth of vision and acclaim, both relates to and differs from that of the Russian poets in interesting ways. To be moderated by David Lehman, one of the foremost editors, literary critics, poets, and anthologists of contemporary American literature. This event is for the general English-speaking public, readings will be done in both English and Russian.
Featuring:
Tina Chang, born in 1969 in Oklahoma, was raised in New York and teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. She was elected as Poet Laureate of Brooklyn in 2010 and has received awards from Academy of American Poets, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and Poets & Writers.
Heather Christle was born in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, in 1980. She is the author of three poetry collections: What Is Amazing, The Difficult Farm, and The Trees The Trees, which won the 2012 Believer Poetry Award. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, serves as Web Editor for jubilat, and coordinates lectures for the Royal Society of Hadley for Improving Natural Knowledge at Flying Object, in western Massachusetts, where she lives.
Dina Gatina was born in 1981 in the town of Engels in the Russian provinces. She completed her degree at the Saratov Arts School and then graduated from the Moscow Institute of Contemporary Art. She lives in St, Petersburg and works as an artist, illustrator and poet. In 2001 she was shortlisted for the Debut Prize with her poetry and in 2002 she won the prize in the “short prose” category.
Alla Gorbunova was born in 1985 on Vasilievsky Island in St. Petersburg; she graduated from the Philosophy Department of St. Petersburg University in 2008, majoring in social philosophy and the philosophy of history. Gorbunova now works as a translator, reviewer, and journalist, and teaches philosophy at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic University. She won the Debut Prize for her poetry in 2005, and has since published two collections of poetry, the latest of which was short-listed in 2011 for the Andrei Belyi Prize.
Lev Oborin is a highly influential young poet and critic. Born in 1987 in Moscow, he graduated from the Russian State University for the Humanities with a degree in philology. He is currently a graduate student there, studying Russian-British cultural ties. He is one of the creators of a web site dedicated to experimental poetry and a guitarist in an indie rock band.
Matthew Yeager's poems have appeared in NANOfiction, Sixthfinch, Bat City Review, Supermachine, Gulf Coast, and others, as well as Best American Poetry 2005 and Best American Poetry 2010. His short film "A Big Ball of Foil in a Small NY Apartment" was an official selection at thirteen film festivals in 2009-2010, picking up three awards. Other distinctions include the 2009 Barthelme Prize in Short Prose and two MacDowell fellowships. He’s been working the last two years on developing and writing a serial television drama tentatively called Savages of the Ohio, a true historical drama about Philadelphia merchant adventurers in the 1760s. His work is widely taught. The son of a coalminer’s daughter, he graduated high school in Cincinnati, OH in 1998 and has lived in New York City since 2002.
Moderator:
David Lehman will moderate the evening. One of the foremost editors, literary critics, and anthologists of contemporary American literature, David Lehman is also one of its most accomplished poets. Born in New York City in 1948, Lehman earned a PhD from Columbia University and attended the University of Cambridge as a Kellett Fellow. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry and creator of The Best American Poetry series in 1988 and the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. Lehman’s numerous honors and awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award. On faculty at both the New School and New York University, he lives in New York City.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on October 10, 2012 at 03:31 PM in Announcements | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Effort is its own reward. We are here to do, and through doing to learn; and through learning to know; and through knowing to experience wonder; and through wonder to attain wisdom; and through wisdom to find simplicity; and through simplicity to give attention; and through attention to see what needs to be done.
Pirkei Avot V:27
-- sdh
Posted by The Best American Poetry on October 10, 2012 at 12:46 PM in Spontaneous Aphorisms | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Is there reason to be especially concerned should, for economic or other reasons, the number of available teaching jobs in creative writing be increasingly inadequate to accommodate new MFA graduates with a concentration in poetry? Let me suggest this outcome will not be an entirely dire circumstance for the future state of poetry or for the poetic future of those most affected, when we take a retrospective look at the output and careers of poets who have lived the double life – that is, those who wrote verse at the same time they held down non-poetry occupations. The double life has served many poets quite well.
Emily Dickinson helped maintain the Dickinson household in Amherst and did the baking for the family. Walt Whitman wrote copy and editorial commentary for newspapers; he and C. P. Cavafy worked as government employees. There was William Carlos Williams, who practiced medicine, and, for eight years, T. S. Eliot chose to be a banker. Marianne Moore and Edna St. Vincent Millay were employed in various, unrelated positions while still writing. Pablo Neruda, a diplomat and politician; Robert Frost and Wendell Berry, farmers.
I’m judging that young poets do not need to get hung up on teaching as the narrow means open to them for a successful poetry career. Indeed, Wallace Stevens felt strongly the lessons he learned in business – he ran the surety claims department for the Hartford Insurance Company – improved his verse. When offered a poetry chair at Harvard, he turned it down in favor of the double life.
Is the Wallace Stevens precedent counterintuitive? I think not, and not because he didn’t care deeply about the part of his life that dealt with poetry. No, there is a more subtle reason. Most serious poets write poems for those surprises through which verse should always lead. Why would it therefore be confusing that someone who constantly traveled someplace unusual through the venue of his verse could also behold the other side of his double life being both surprising and inviting as well? After all, we do not merely leave who we are on the page; rather, we bring who we are to the page.
It’s often not a freedom of choice to adopt a double life, for many poets must accept that path before a career break or an accumulation of breaks occurs. Today, there are known poets who have, along the way, been an accountant, a biologist, an administrator, a musician; in fact, there are still others, including this author, who permanently choose a double life.
If this course seems necessary or opportune, I offer a few guidelines. First, let your poetic side help you select a non-poetic job. You can’t go home at night with verse on the agenda and be befuddled or burdened by an unhealthy and severe day at work. Second, pick a job that will not wear you out physically. Have energy remaining to respond affirmatively to the siren call of your verse. Third, make sure your daily job is not jejune or vapid, for that will surely convey itself into your writing. Finally, give yourself moments of recovery during each work day to jot down a thought or two or three related to your verse – for, believe me, the thoughts will come.
Once developed with flexibility, practicality, and a little elan vital, the double life can become a durable answer to the many questions hovering around a commitment to the writing of verse.
Posted by J. Chester Johnson on October 10, 2012 at 06:00 AM in Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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<<<
All political language is alienated. Political language as such is the enemy. (Joseph [Brodsky's] posiiton).
>>>
-- Susan Sontag, entry for 12/ 6 / 77, in As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals & Notebooks 1964-1980 (ed. David Rieff, FSG, 2012)
Sontag's journals are extraordinary. It is irresistible to quote from them. as I plan to do in the weeks to come. She had a fabulous mind and was as brave in her self-encounters as she was voracious in approaching a world of intellectual stimulation. Thank you, David Rieff, for this significant accomplishment. -- DL
Posted by The Best American Poetry on October 09, 2012 at 01:35 PM in Spontaneous Aphorisms | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.
-- by Charles Bukowski
Read more about Charles Bukowski here.
Posted by The Best American Poetry on October 09, 2012 at 01:10 PM in Poems | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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On the afternoon of September 10th, 2011, seven poets participated in a reading, held for the 10th commemoration of 9/11 and sponsored by Poets House, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Trinity Wall Street. The reading, convened in the cavernous sanctuary of Trinity Church at Wall and Broadway, two blocks south of Ground Zero, attracted approximately 300 persons. Poems of grief, remembrance and reconciliation were presented by the poets.
During their readings that day, both Cornelius Eady and Mark Doty referred to difficulties they each had faced in writing about the 9/11 experience. I believe the obstacles they confronted in writing about the event spoke for many poets, who had dealt with similar demons in the aftermath of 9/11.
The impediments are patent. Instinctively, we know words cannot and do not supplant reality; words, even if crafted well, can only make damnable reality more understandable. Subtlety is, as a matter of course, the mother’s milk of a poet’s craft; and those immediate and uncorrectable 9/11 experiences of inescapability, unconditioned desperation, palpable incomprehension, and uncompromising exposure, whether one were actually present that day in downtown New York City or not, simply countervail and explode a poet’s natural field of responsive behavior. The veins and nerves are torn. One cannot be subtle in the face of impossible violence and destruction, which immediately rip away at words attempting to make meaning out of meaninglessness. The events were too much with and part of us – words could not compete with the visions and imaginings we all had of both Ground Zero and those whose partial remains created the indescribable personality of the Pit, the Pile.
The most notable verse to surface on the subject of 9/11 came from the marvelous poet, Galway Kinnell, whose poem, “When The Towers Fell,” was published in September, 2002 by THE NEW YORKER. The verse put the events elegantly, evocatively and soberly in a context of something larger than the moment and its specific characteristics; rather, the poem put 9/11 seriatim in a long line of indiscriminate horror and violence that have too often proven to be humanity’s bedfellows over millennia. We seven poets ended the program with a reciting of the poem – each of us taking a part of “When The Towers Fell.” Reading this work alone or together with other poets, I could not help but recall Yevtushenko’s “Babi Yar” and Whitman’s Civil War poetry.
My own poetic attempts fell principally to a piece, albeit an important piece, of the 9/11 story. St. Paul’s Chapel, located within yards of the North Tower site, served as the 24/7 relief center – a respite of peace and refuge – for the recovery workers, who toiled in the savage Pit during the nine-month, clean-up phase. I volunteered part-time there, sometimes during a day, but mostly overnight on a weekend. This experience translated into a poem I wrote, “St. Paul’s Chapel,” which has been, for the last ten years, the memento card for the approximately 30,000 visitors who come weekly to the Chapel. Though a mere few yards away from the unspeakable, there was in the Chapel at least air to breathe, a place to think, and enough people to hug – not an unfair amount of essence for verse.
Posted by J. Chester Johnson on October 09, 2012 at 06:00 AM in Guest Bloggers | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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See this show of Italian language books and magazines from James J. Periconi's private collection, a lifetime labor of love, at the Grolier Club, 47 East 60 Street. It's open Monday to Saturday, 10 AM to 5 PM. For more info, and admission is free. Click here or just take my word for it. -- DL
Posted by The Best American Poetry on October 08, 2012 at 03:43 PM in Announcements | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman