IBPC: Poetry and Poets in Rags

3/25/2008

News at Eleven

The most famous Buddhist in the world, he [The Dalai Lama] advises his Western followers not to embrace Buddhism. He seeks out famous scientists with geekish zeal, asserting that certain Buddhist scriptures disproved by modern science should be abandoned.

In his public appearances before English-speaking audiences, he prefers to speak of "global ethics" rather than of the abstruse Buddhist concept of Nirvana.

from The New Yorker: Holy Man

The life of the mind was inseparable from the notions of piety and prayer. It was also tied inextricably to the use of the Latin language, of which tongue Milton was a master. Most of his earliest poems are composed in that language, and he was able to write it as fluently as he wrote English. At the same time he was writing sonnets in Italian, directed principally at his close friend, Charles Diodati, with whom he shared that deep and sexless intimacy that was then so common among males.

from The Times: Peter Ackroyd examines the legacy of Milton

[Brian Hall] ascribes a certain amount of parental guilt to Frost, having him muse at one point: "In this haphazard household of caravaners--meals, if any, at all hours, father to bed at 3:00 a.m., mother up at 6:00--there's no telling who's sleeping where." He regrets that he spends so much time away at readings, even though these appearances are the main source of his income.

from Star Tribune: When bad things happen to good poets

Their first real fight occurred when [Lord] Byron offered to pass along to the meddlesome [R.C.] Dallas the value of one of his copyrights, and [John] Murray balked at paying a third party a sum he had intended for Byron himself. As he grew older, however, Byron took more and more pride in his 'Brain-money', as he called it, the money he had earned professionally: 'I have imbibed such a love for money that I keep some Sequins in a drawer to count, & cry over them once a week.'

from London Review of Books: You Have Never Written Better

The low point, it is clear, came in the 18th, when poets like Dryden and Pope preferred expansive verse essays and satires to closed forms. William Cowper and other poets attempted to keep the fires burning--Cowper's tribute to William Wilberforce proclaims the emancipationist "Friend of the poor, the wrong'd, the fetter-gall'd"--but the sonnet was a diminished thing until the 19th century, when the British Romantic poets and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow--not to mention lesser-known sonneteers, such as Jones Very and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman--revived the form.

from The Wall Street Journal: How It Gives Life to Thee

Yea slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea,

and

My sister and my sister's child,
Myself and children three,
Will fill the chaise, so you must come
On horseback after we.

At secondary school, the anthologies served up plenty of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Hopkins, Hardy and Frost - with Yeats and Eliot giving a foretaste of what might be encountered at university.

from ABC News: Poetry: better than texting!

A Michael Hofmann poem is now a rare, strange, much valued item. Strange because, at first glance, many of the poems seem no more than frayed notes concerning a mood between depression and despair; but then something in that fraying catches at you, either some odd shift in register, or maybe just a sense that as your eyes are blithely passing over the words suddenly a hole has opened up beneath them and you are falling through the language, into a world of cries.

from The Guardian: Said and done

I have experienced the amputation
of my left breast I hate its absence.

"Fidelity," posthumously (odd word, recalling dirt) published, is her [Grace Paley's] fourth collection of poems. Clearly, she had death and its retinue--illness, aging, memory, regret--in mind. Clearly, she was angry at the prospect of death, unready to surrender.

from Los Angeles Times: 'Fidelity: Poems' by Grace Paley

I don't think poets need think about smaller presses as just places to start out. A trade house isn't necessarily the best place to wind up; books can get lost in the shuffle, and frequently do not remain in print. The loyalty and resources of a more specialized literary press often serve our art better than the big houses do--though I have been very fortunate in this regard. [--Mark Doty]

from The Somerville News: Interview with poet Mark Doty: A poet who goes from "Fire to Fire"

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--
I, too, am America.

It stuns me to think that this was written--that [Langston] Hughes faced these issues--just over fifty years ago. Michael S. Harper, currently a professor at Brown university, reminds us in his poem American History how bad it was at the nation's birth and how bad it still can be.

Those four black girls blown up
in that Alabama church

from The Huffington Post: Poems About Racism

More recently, he [Jack AgÃ¼eros] has translated the poetry of JosÃ© MartÃ, the apostle of Cuban independence from Spain.

Since falling ill, he has been helped with the translation by Lidia Torres, herself a young poet. She took part in Tuesdayâ€™s benefit, along with other young poets like Aracelis Girmay and Rich Villar. They were joined by older trailblazers like Sandra Maria Esteves and Julio Marzan.

from The New York Times: A Puerto Rican Poetâ€™s Fight With Alzheimer's

Great Regulars

[Kris] Kristofferson was being lined up to teach literature at West Point, but he left to become a writer of country music. His father understood, but his mother all but disowned him. In Brownsville, he'd grown up amid the sounds of Mexican and country music.

from Bryan Appleyard: The Sunday Times: Kris Kristofferson proves he's still an outlaw with This Old Road

But one of the most thoughtful Mother's Day gifts out there is already available: Helicon Nine Editions' The Movable Nest: A Mother/Daughter Companion.

Nest is an anthology of verse, stories, letters and nonfiction exploring the complex bond between mothers and daughters. Here the reader will rediscover why this relationship is so basic to the human condition; it is at once profound, conflicted, heartbreaking and fulfilling.

from John Mark Eberhart: The Kansas City Star: Helicon Nine anthology features verse and prose on the mother/daughter bond

Hats off to Robert Stewart, editor of New Letters magazine, who's marking the 20th anniversary of his Plumbers poetry collection. To help celebrate, here's a poem from that very fine book.

Pouring Lead
By Robert Stewart

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Anniversary

'On her birthday'

By Anne Mallinson

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Birthday presence

Soup
By Pat Daneman

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Bubble, bubble

WOW
By William Trowbridge

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Too cool for . . .

Ukuleles and color fields
By Maria Vasquez Boyd

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Ukuleles . . .

Please Take Out the Trash

By Larry M. Schilb

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: What? Tuesday again?

The reader can imagine that the speaker has been ridiculed by someone, perhaps as a child by an adult, for "standing and staring" at something that fascinated him. Now, in this poem, he explores the idea of standing and staring, and he wants to know what life is about if standing and staring cannot be tolerated.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Davies' 'Leisure'

The speaker has explored the subtle differences between his muse and his own soul in several earlier sonnets, and he continues a variation on this theme here. It could be argued that a useful overall theme for the entire sonnet sequence includes the classic battle between mind and soul.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 49

There isn't enough time for the nuts and bolts of verifying facts and, in the case of a memoir, doing a background check on the author.

Publishing houses have also cut staffs about 10 percent recently, [Daniel] Menaker said. "This is a business with a very narrow profit margin, so there have been cutbacks. Now, the industry does seem to be asking for more and more work from fewer and fewer people. There's going to be sloppy mistakes."

from Bob Hoover: Post-Gazette: Separating fact from fiction is author's job

The germs in mud that produce green frogs may actually be the frogspawn, but the image that sticks in my mind is the bear cub's mother who "licks into shape in her own image" the bundle of fluff to which she has given birth. It conjures a vivid picture of her huge tongue almost lifting the tiny cub off its rudimentary paws as she cleans it.

from Frieda Hughes: The Times: Monday Poem: The wonder of it all

For a while, [Franz] Wright's phone message was, "At the sound of the gunshot, leave a message," which effectively terrified the casual caller into hanging up.

The poems he wrote then were darkly hilarious in their paranoia.

from Mary Karr: The Washington Post: Poet's Choice: Franz Wright Raised Up

Poem: "Spring and All" by William Carlos Williams, from Collected Poems Vol. 1.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: For the week of March 24, 2008

We greatly appreciate your newspaper's use of this column, and today we want to recognize newspaper employees by including a poem from the inside of a newsroom. David Tucker is deputy managing editor of the New Jersey "Star-Ledger" and has been a reporter and editor at the "Toronto Star" and the "Philadelphia Inquirer." He was on the "Star-Ledger" team that won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. Mr. Tucker was awarded a Witter-Bynner fellowship for poetry in 2007 by former U. S. Poet Laureate, Donald Hall.

Today's News

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 156

The "nightly" return of sky to earth is not a vivid kindling of male and female, but rather a routine of their relationship. Amidst this humdrum scene, however, a larger drama will unfold as snow melts into soil, and a new season is about to begin. The poem answers the titleâ€™s question about the "wife's" patience.

Why She Waits

from Denise Low: Ad Astra Poetry Project: Patricia Traxler (1944 - )

"Whatever movements we plan to make, we must first ask for approval. Only when it's approved by higher-ups can we make a move under surveillance," he said.

Wang said Tsering Woeser, who goes by a single name, had been confined to the couple's Beijing home since March 10, the 49th anniversary of a Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule in 1959.

from Luisetta Mudie: Radio Free Asia: Tibetan Writer Under House Arrest in Beijing

Beginning with a feminine rhyme and ending with a masculine one, the poem traces an arc of yin and yang, grace and power.

Turning her back on society, [Emily] BrontÃ« appears to have chosen obscurity and nothingness. Yet this impression is exploded in the final stanza, where her exile turns out to be nothing less than a transfiguration.

from Christopher Nield: The Epoch Times: The Antidote--Classic Poetry for Modern Life: A Reading of 'Stanzas' by Emily BrontÃ«

The best age to be is...

The age you are because that's the reality check you have to do every day.

from Michael Rosen: The Independent: The 5-minute Interview: Michael Rosen, Poet and author

The poem was sparked by his telling me that he was going to take a road trip to his hometown in Ohio with Clark Mercy.

Bill and Clark Drive to Ohio

from Andrew Varnon: Flash & Yearn: Remembering Minneapolis

Enthusiasm, too, is the very life of gifted spirits. Ponder the lives of the glorious in art or literature through all the ages. What are they but records of toils and sacrifices supported by the earnest hearts of their votaries?

from Daily Times: Purple Patch: A defence of enthusiasm --Henry Theodore Tuckerman

For more than a century science and its occasionally ugly sister technology have been the chief driving forces shaping our world. They decide the kinds of futures that are possible. Human wisdom must decide which are desirable.

from Daily Times: Purple Patch: Presidents, experts and asteroids --Arthur C Clarke

By Barbara Mayer
We watch the procession:

from The Kansas City Star: Between the Lines: 'Winter Geese'

Anonymous Poet
by Stanley Moss

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Anonymous Poet

March
by Louise GlÃ¼ck

from The New Yorker: Poetry: March

-- Edward Hirsch, New York City

The author of "How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry" (1999; Harcourt), Edward Hirsch has written six books of poetry, including the recently released "Special Orders" (Alfred A. Knopf, $25, 80 pages), in which "Branch Library" appears.

from The Oregonian: Poetry

[by Judy Curtis]
The Greatest Truth

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: The Greatest Truth

The whole thing reeks of trying too hard, and it anticipates the fanatical drone of [Ezra Pound's] "Canto XIV," in which Londoners are described as living in a place full of "financiers/lashing them with steel wires" and:

The slough of unamiable liars,
bog of stupidities,
malevolent stupidities, and stupidities,
the soil living pus, full of vermin,
dead maggots begetting live maggots,
slum owners,
usurers squeezing crab-lice...

from Powells: Review-A-Day: Ezra Pound: Poet Volume I: The Young Genius 1885-1920

"Houseflies"
By Kevin Barents

from Slate: "Houseflies" --By Kevin Barents

Poetic Obituaries

[Ishwor Ballav Bhattarai] was one of the founding members, with Bairagi Kainla and Indra Bahadur Rai, of the groundbreaking and hugely influential Tesro Ayamic movement or known also as the Third Dimension, which reshaped Nepali literature.

More than a dozen literary works and hundreds of songs, stories and essays authored by Bhattarai have been published till date. He had also written a literature column for the leading Nepali daily 'Kantipur' for a longtime.

from Kantipur: Poet Ishwor Ballav Bhattarai passes away

Mrs [Angela] Bennett said [of her daughter Samantha Bennett] : "Sam was always a very loving, beautiful daughter and whenever I saw her or spent time with Sam, or picked her up, her last words would always be, 'I love you mum'.

from BBC News: Killed daughter's poem released

Brittany [Cena] was a 10th Grade Student at Toms River High School North. Some of her interests included writing poetry, fashion, the artistry of hair and makeup, music and singing, designing jewelry and making handbags. Brittany was a very creative and inspiring an student.

from Asbury Park Press: Brittany Cena, 15, of Toms River

The author of more than 20 novels, more than 60 plays and several thousand poems, Mr. Claus was best known for his 1983 novel, "The Sorrow of Belgium."

A long, dense, poetic work, the book views the Nazi occupation of Belgium, starting in May 1940, through the eyes of a teenage boy named Louis Seynaeve. It examines the moral contradictions many Belgians faced and the outright collaboration of others, undermining myths of widespread resistance that took hold after the Nazis were defeated.

from The New York Times: Hugo Claus, One of Belgium's Most Renowned Authors, Dies at 78

Sitting on his living room couch in Lexington, Mass. in early 1975, Robert A. Dentler pondered a reporter's question about why US District Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. had tapped him as an expert to help draft Boston's school desegregation plan.

"I don't put much weight on the idea that anyone is expert enough to solve social problems," he said with a smile. "The solutions come out of developing the collective will of the community."

from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Robert A. Dentler, 79, helped draft school desegration plan

[Vivian Lavonne Long] was a member of Zion Lutheran Church of Grand Coulee, serving as secretary to the congregation, also serving as a member of the Board of Education and Board of Stewardship and was an adult Bible study leader for many years. Her hobbies included poetry writing, bowling, camping, fishing, quilting and crafts.

from The Star of Grand Coulee: Vivian Lavonne Long

"Orthodoxy and poetry tend to give each other the jitters," he [Isaac Meyers] wrote in a 2005 review. "If that seems to be overstating things, try praising a poet for being 'Orthodox' or even 'well behaved.' Then try asking a yeshiva bokhur to waste his time phrasing things beautifully. This detente is a shame, since traditional Judaism offers a rich background for poets, even in English--as long as the poets are willing to look slightly eccentric."

from The New York Sun: Isaac Meyers, 28, Ph.D. Candidate in Classics at Harvard

[Jon Oxendale] made his own puppets and his Little Theatre of Fantoccini had more than 70 performing marionettes including kings, queens, historical and fictional characters.

Jon offered a wide variety of shows with a difference. There were poems for children and adults that could be funny, deep and shallow.

from Wigan Evening Post: Tributes after death of poet

3/18/2008

News at Eleven

A reader in love with [C.P.] Cavafy has no choice but to own several, since it often happens that where one translator comes up short, the other does better. Every time I'm struck with admiration for the poetic qualities of Haviaras's translation (he even manages to reproduce the rhymes of some of the early poems), I recall a poem Sachperoglou has done exceedingly well. Such as 'Ithaca':

from London Review of Books: Some Sort of a Solution

The junta increased U Win Tin's sentence by 10 more years. They put him alone in his cell. The cell was 8.5 x 11.5 feet. There was only a bamboo mat on the concrete floor. Sleeping, eating, walking and cleaning the bowels were done in the very same place. He could not see the sun, the moon or the stars. He was intentionally barred from breathing fresh air, tasting nourishing food and drinking a drop of fresh water. The worst thing was throwing the old writer into solitary confinement in such a cage for two decades.

from Asian Tribune: Burma's Longest Serving Prisoner of Conscience Must Be Free

"I can't take it anymore like this, I am leaving finally," Taslima [Nasreen] said. "They did not even allow me to go back to Kolkata to collect my things, you guys are there, take care of those."

They won, secular India lost. Taslima is finally leaving India for Europe, unable to cope up with life in solitary confinement in the dungeons of "safe house"- or should we call it gulags for cultural offences? - that exists in free India. Safe houses are nice places to keep safe from species like a "Muslim woman writer with a big mouth."

from Sify News: Goodbye Taslima, Welcome India without slogans

When he is not at his cottage in Donegal composing poetry or attending literary functions in Dublin, [Cathal] O'Searchaigh spends a good deal of his time in Nepal where he has raised money for charities over the past ten years and adopted a son.

But his preference for sex with younger men has placed him at the centre of a public storm in Ireland, with calls for his poetry to be taken off the syllabus.

from The Guardian: Film sparks storm over Irish poet

But [Dan] Chiasson teases us with his description of the dirtiest poem in the anthology, W.H. Auden's "The Platonic Blow," which Chiasson can only call "is the dirtiest verse written since Rochester--I can't even talk about it here."

So how dirty is it, really?

from New York Magazine: How Dirty Is That Auden Poem That Was Too Dirty for the 'Times Book Review'?

Can it be that William Wadsworth's or Paul Violi's best erotic poems are better than Frank O'Hara's second or 10th or 50th best? I'd like to see someone make that case.

It's good to encourage people who otherwise wouldn't read older poems to take a little Hart Crane with their Mark Doty, but it's odd to leverage a few old names merely to inflate the value of the new ones.

from The New York Times: Hot or Not

The Academy of American Poets has announced the launch of a mobile poetry archive which provides free and direct access to the entire collection of over 2,500 poems on Poets.org, as well as hundreds of biographies and essays, all in the palm of a hand.

from Wireless and Mobile News: 1st Mobile Poetry Archive Launched for National Poetry Month & Beyond

Five years ago, on the same day that British and American troops marched into Iraq, poets convened in St Andrews for the first day of the StAnza Poetry Festival. The invasion formed an uncomfortable backdrop to the festival that year â€“ sitting listening to poetry felt like fiddling while Rome burned.

This year, on the first day of StAnza, an explosion claimed 11 more lives in Baghdad, a reminder that the occupation continues.

from The Scotsman: Chapter and verse

Samuel Johnson gave the poem first place "among the productions of the human mind."

But it is now the quadricentennial of [John] Milton's birth in 1608, and it is startling that this work, once central to the literary and religious experience of the English-speaking world, is so much a curiosity, sentenced to the margins by its preoccupations with biblical interpretation, condemned by the density of its prosody, which does not instantly seduce but, instead, commands the reader to give way before it, persisting until no resistance is possible.

from The New York Rimes: A Giant's Roaring, Faintly Echoed

Our images of Hell, the devil and the fall of man have been irrevocably shaped by [John] Milton's versions of them. His "Areopagitica" remains one of the foundational texts of the argument for freedom of speech.

The closing lines of "Lycidas", his elegy for an acquaintance drowned at sea, have always seemed to me one of the most moving passages in English verse.

For so to interpose a little ease,
[/. . . .]

from Telegraph: English poetry masters: John Milton
also Telegraph: English poetry masters: Percy Bysshe Shelley
also Telegraph: English poetry masters: Christina Rossetti
also Telegraph: English poetry masters: Robert Browning

In this series, the Guardian brings together seven of the greatest poets of the 20th century.

Each booklet includes a generous selection of the poet's best known and most acclaimed work.

from The Guardian: Great Poets of the 20th Century
also The Guardian: A poetry of atonement: Rowan Williams on WH Auden
also The Guardian: The mother of so much: Margaret Drabble on Sylvia Plath
also The Guardian: Foreword: Jeanette Winterson on Ted Hughes
also The Guardian: Playing the common world's melody: John Banville on Seamus Heaney
also The Guardian: Happy warrior, embittered pacifist: William Boyd: Siegrfried Sassoon
but also The Guardian: commentisfree: This great poets list has only one woman. About right, too

Great Regulars

Claire Ridley, the UK marketing manager of the game, showed me, with a noticeable degree of pride, a rather gentle Spore tribe she had created. I asked her what would happen if she just left them alone. "They would die of hunger," she said with a note of real anxiety. "You have to nurture them and look after them."

from Bryan Appleyard: The Times: Bryan Appleyard tries out Spore and creates his own species

Now Powell's has taken another step into the collector market and started a limited-edition, subscription-only book club. It features independent and small-press books in original sets with extra goodies such as CDs or DVDs, cookies or chocolates, and promotional material.

from Jeff Baker: The Oregonian: Bookmarks: Powell's starts limited-edition book club

[Tom Paulin] is wondrously nimble at tracking a pattern of sound through a text, though the process rapidly become repetitive and over-technical: "There are three ih sounds in the next stanza, two in the next stanza, along with two i sounds. Then in the last stanza there are a total of nine ih sounds and three i sounds . . ."

You can, in short, read too closely, just as you can squash your nose up against a canvas until the painting fades to a blur.

from Terry Eagleton: The Times: The Guardian: A puritan at play

Gunter Grass Reads Gabo
By Evan Fleischer

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Don't tell Gunter about this one

Approaching Fifty

By Tina Hacker

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Life begins at . . . ?

I have some great news: Washburn University's Woodley Press soon will release Lindsey Martin-Bowen's first full-length poetry collection, Standing on the Edge of the World. The poet generously agreed to give Parachute a preview:

Everyone Connects Kansas with Oz

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Oz? It's over the rainbow

Iowa Poet Laureate Robert Dana today joins Kansas' Denise Low and Missouri's Walter Bargen on the roster of state poet laureates featured on Parachute.

Blood Harvest
By Robert Dana

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: The Poet Laureate Project, Part 3

The author of today's poem is 12 years old; he lives in Independence, Missouri.

Wood Carving

by Danny Mallinson

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Prodigy

A poem by Linda Rodriguez:

I Could Live in the Library

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: The stacks are nice this time of year

When [Stanford] White was shot dead by Harry K Thaw in 1906 and his mansion was sold off, Hearst and John D Rockefeller "fought like schoolboys" over the stained-glass windows, the weather vanes, the doorways and the ceilings. I was told once of a Rockefeller property where there were two huge Renaissance fireplaces--in the squash court.

from James Fenton: The Guardian: Restoration and removal

The speaker assumes that if is difficult for many citizens to understand the purpose of the death of soldier, so he is going to explain why that difficulty exists: "It is because like men we look too near,/Forgetting that as fitted to the sphere,/Our missiles always make too short an arc."

Many ordinary citizens cannot see the bigger picture in the cosmic scheme of things: they "look too near."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Robert Frost's 'A Soldier'

Carl Sandburg is an excellent poet, who has written many fine poems, but this is not one of them. Nevertheless, because beginning students/readers of poetry need to be able to compare the well-written and the not-so-well-written works, it is important for those students/readers to experience even the uninspired work of the best poets.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Sandburg's 'Young Sea'

That is how I feel about this poem: "Here" is where "the blockage" is; it is also the present moment (and place) in any of our lives. The "ache" appears to be the ache of ageing--even the poet's doctor says "I have that, we all have". "Here" is also wherever the poet is.

from Frieda Hughes: The Times: Monday Poem: Here, by Ken Smith (Shed: Poems 1980-2001, Bloodaxe)

In "Carrion Comfort," [Gerard Manley] Hopkins refuses to feast on the rotten meat of melancholy, though he can barely long for day and stave off suicide. Hopkins's syntax is so mangled, the lines so packed with heavy plodding accents and stilted comma stops, that he speaks as if through a chokehold. Yet somehow the depth of his suffering proves the vigor of his faith.

Carrion Comfort

from Mary Karr: The Washington Post: Poet's Choice: Lenten remorse: Hopkins's dark night of the soul

Poem: "Fishing On The Susquehanna In July" by Billy Collins, from Picnic, Lightning.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: For the week of March 17, 2008

The American poet Elizabeth Bishop often wrote of how places--both familiar and foreign--looked, how they seemed. Here Marianne Boruch of Indiana begins her poem in this way, too, in a space familiar to us all but made new--made strange--by close observation.

Hospital

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 155

For a while it all got pretty nasty; there were even suggestions that [Philip] Larkin's books might be banned from some libraries. But what is his reputation today, 23 years after his death? Even though the heat of debate has died down a bit, he remains a divisive figure.

from Andrew Motion: The Guardian: The quarrel within ourselves

In one scene, I try to hold a fellow student crushed by a tank, and realize his two legs are gone, with only blood gushing from his body. Such scenes are rewound and played again, night after night. No time for healing after such an event.

It has been 18 years since I set foot in my hometown.

from Luisetta Mudie: ClatteryMacHinery on Poetry: Life and Death from Beijing: a Poetry Sequence by Luisetta Mudie and Dreamer Fei

The key is to rethink the traditional roles of art and science, to find a middle ground where we might frame aesthetic solutions to scientific questions, or apply a scientific rigor to the challenges of art.

"[T]he fused method that results," he [David Edwards] argues, "at once aesthetic and scientific--intuitive and deductive, sensual and analytical, comfortable with uncertainty and able to frame a problem, embracing nature in its complexity and able to simplify to nature in its essence--is what I call artscience."

from David L. Ulin: Los Angeles Times: 'Artscience' by David Edwards

In "God Particles," [Thomas] Lux's 11th volume of poetry, readers are confronted by the brutality, banality and violence of the modern world. But they also encounter God particles scattered throughout--an instance of kindness, a reason for joy, an impulse to forgive.

Lux, recipient of the 1995 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for "Split Horizon," is known for his uncompromising and bold poetry.

from David L. Ulin: Los Angeles Times: 'God Particles: Poems' by Thomas Lux

That's a gorgeous image, and exactly right, for this is what we are, brief sparks flashing, momentary bursts of illumination animated by a creative force so indifferent that "it/exaggerates our self-/importance even/to think you would/ignore the prayer."

At the heart of this, of course, is God--or a conception of eternity at any rate. For [Alan] Shapiro, that's less a source of comfort than of silence, a caesura in the face of everything we cannot know.

from David L. Ulin: Los Angeles Times: Songs of experience, of loss and longing

The number one way to combat counterfeiting of U.S. currency, Don Drosehn says, is not through the complicated patterns of engraving, or the red and blue threads in the paper, or even the watermark of a bill.

â€œNothing is as effective as the feel,â€? says Drosehn. He proceeds to take a bill out of his pocket, grasping it in his fingers at the edges and pulling.

from Andrew Varnon: UMass Amherst: The Buck Starts Here

by Jonathan Musgrove

The Day I Saw the Emperor's Clay Soldiers

from The Atlantic Monthly: Poetry: The Day I Saw the Emperor's Clay Soldiers

by Paul Muldoon

The Windshield

from The Atlantic Monthly: Poetry: The Windshield

The Woman who Worries Herself to Death by Kathryn Simmonds

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: The Woman who Worries Herself to Death by Kathryn Simmonds

Sean's suggestions for adding drama to poetry

A fundamental skill is the ability to dramatize a poem, to give it the sense of three-dimensional life, rather than simply let it comment on its subject. Few of us are sufficiently remarkable to have interesting general opinions about life, but if we renew proverbial truths in fresh contexts we may be on to something.

from The Guardian: Poetry Workshop: Sean O'Brien's workshop

Found Myself in Search of Matthias & Paul
by Robert Gibbons

from Guernica: Poetry: Found Myself in Search of Matthias & Paul

By Martin Zehr
She fumbles in her purse for reading glasses

from The Kansas City Star: Between the Lines: Between the Lines: 'Waiting to Read'

For the Prisoners of Guantanamo
by Dennis Brutus

from MR Zine: For the Prisoners of Guantanamo

Midi
by Les Murray

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Midi

On Beauty
by James Longenbach

from The New Yorker: Poetry: On Beauty

Pharaoh's Daughter
By Erika Meitner

from Nextbook: Pharaoh's Daughter
also Nextbook: North Country Canzone

Pancho Savery's poem "Full Moon" is the winner of Hubbub magazine's 2008 Stout Award and will appear in Volume 24 of the magazine, available Monday. Savery teaches English, Humanities and American Studies at Reed College, and his poems have appeared in journals such as Rainy Day and Hanging Loose.

from The Oregonian: Poetry

By Lauren Syphers

The Ginger Jar

from The Philadelphia Inquirer: Your Poem: [by Lauren Syphers]

[by Jane Allen]
Memories

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: Memories

[by B. Kelton]
An Ode to the Overgrown Forest

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: An Ode to the Overgrown Forest

In themselves, the visual components are hardly enough for a poem: but once [Charles] Wright has mediated the landscape--through an aphorism, a few metaphors, some minatory concepts, an evanescent life-cycle, a hope, and a regret--the painting-poem assumes that atmosphere of visual intensity, intellectual spareness, and colloquial interruptions by which we recognize Wright's hand. The poet uses a palette of strictness and grayness and deadness, but at the end creates a change in hue:

from Powells: Review-A-Day: Snatched from the Air

In his new bi-lingual collection Nort Atlantik Drift (Luath, Â£15), Robert Alan Jamieson takes the reader on a journey to the rhythms and voices of Shetland, creating a lyrical blend of mythology, autobiography and culture. He appears at the StAnza poetry festival this weekend.

Laamint fir da tristie

from The Scotsman: Poem of the Week: Robert Alan Jamieson

"planting daffodils"
By Charlotte Boulay

from Slate: "planting daffodils" --By Charlotte Boulay

Poetic Obituaries

A powerful writer known for his uncompromising stand, [Padma] Barkataki's creations encompassed diverse realms from short story and novel to drama and poetry to children's literature and translation works. He was also an acclaimed critic and prose writer. Realism had been Barkataki's forte, and his works touched the deepest chords of the reader.

from The Assam Tribune: Padma Barkataki passes away

With painter Don Kommit, [Angela] Costa founded the Silk City Poets in Paterson, N.J., a poetry performance group in the early 1970s. She received the William Carlos Williams Poetry Award in 1975, and, in New York, studied with Diane Wakowski and Ntozake Shange. Various literary magazines and anthologies (Black Creation, Diversitas and Howling Dog) published her work. She often read on WBAI ("Ghosts in the Machine") and appeared on Manhattan Cable's "Radio Thin Air."

from Downtown Express: Angela Costa, 54, Tribeca musician and writer

[Tanikka] West said her family belongs to Restoration Christian Center and that Sydney [Dailey] participated in volleyball, chorus and dance at school. She enjoyed writing poetry.

"She wrote about her family. She wrote about things she loved, flowers and wanting her family to be happy and being happy herself," she said.

from Tulsa World: Mother: Victim was harassed

"All his students knew his passion for literature, the sharpness of his insights, the breadth of his knowledge, and his certainty that a poem or a novel could make a difference in lives," [Roland] Dille recently wrote [of Clarence Glasrud] in the school's alumni magazine. "And all of them knew that he was always there for them, a man unable to find any question silly, a man whose every response avoided condescension."

from The Forum: Former MSUM professor Clarence 'Soc' Glasrud dies at age 96; called 'a legend in his own time'

In 1983, she [Marcia E. Hensley] began her work as a co-owner with her husband in a newspaper business. During their time in the business, the couple moved back and forth several times between Minnesota and Iowa. Mrs. Hensley retired in 2001, and the couple moved to Luverne in June 2003. She was a member of ARC and enjoyed writing poetry, spectator sports, and working alongside her husband.

from Post-Bulletin: Marcia E. Hensley--Rochester

During World War II, she [Elizabeth L. Hoadley] served with the U.S. Navy as a nurse.

Following her military service, she worked as a nurse in the family nursing home in West Franklin and later at Lakes Region General Hospital in Laconia.

She traveled throughout the United States over the years and enjoyed motorcycles. She also wrote poetry.

from Concord Monitor: Elizabeth L. Hoadley

Janet said that [her daughter] Kayley [Howson], a former pupil of Rosehill Primary School and Gawthorpe School, loved her music, reading and writing poetry.

She said: "Kayley had trouble expressing her feelings to people but somehow she could find the words to write poetry. We didn't realise how much she had written--but we found hundreds of poems. [. . ."]

from Lancashire Telegraph: Pink tribute to tragic girl

[Ryan Kell] was an artist, drawing, painting and writing poetry, and had played bass guitar for several local bands, Paul Kell said.

Ryan worked for a construction business owned by his stepfather, Brad Darrell, and had learned to install tile. Paul Kell said his son learned guitar from Darrell and had picked up his artistic talents from Cynthia.

from Canton Repository: N. Canton man's body found after fall into pit

[Virginia Fedor Poole] was noted there both for her ability to memorize and recite long poems and for her imitation of the child actress of the 1940s, Margaret O'Brien. In high school, Virginia not only performed in school plays, but acquired the "Jini" spelling of her nickname.

from Vineyard Gazette: Virginia F. Poole, 73, Touched Island With Enthusiasm for Life

Months after her initial diagnosis, she [Martha Rapaport] wrote transcendent poems and let herself be photographed bald from chemotherapy, then sent that transformational project, called "In the Spirit of Healing," to health centers to inspire others.

from The Virginian-Pilot: Troupe's founder had creative, healing roles

As a publisher, [Jonathan] Williams produced more than 100 books with some of the 20th century's best poets and photographers.

Among Williams' first titles was Olson's "Maximus Poems," an influential landmark in contemporary poetry.

But Williams saw no barriers between high and low art, writing, by turns, elegant and earthy poems inspired by rusted roadside signs and classical forms.

from Asheville Citizen-Times: Poet, photographer and publisher Jonathan Williams dies at 79

3/11/2008

News at Eleven

Poetry is written out of the true self, in all its complexity, in all its saving incoherence, its authentic internal contradictions, its existential candour, a self utterly remote from the self deduced by the world, the glib caricature we recognise reflected in the eyes of others, "eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase".

from The Guardian: All jokes aside
see The Guardian: Great poets of the 20th century: Eliot
and The Guardian: Great poets of the 20th century

By writing in the English vernacular and moving from alliterative to metrical arrangements of sound, his [Geoffrey Chaucer's] work was the incubator for modern English prosody.

from Telegraph: English poetry masters: Geoffrey Chaucer

"Old Poets", from Elaine Feinstein's aptly titled new volume Talking to the Dead, reflects that "We were so sure/The words of their poems would last,/and that the next generation/would be equally in love with the past". If "love" can encompass every shade of rivalry and argument, she has every right to her confidence. Poetry itself, as the imprisoned Wyatt came to know, can be the most stalwart paramour of all.

The Poem that Changed My Life

Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate

I Look into my Glass, by Thomas Hardy

from The Independent: Why poetry still matters, by Boyd Tonkin

Robert Frost Lecture: No poem is intelligible except in light of all the other poems, and the poems that were ever written, so you better get about them, circulating among them. That's what I say in the spirit of poetry too, and you take as much stock in it as I'm telling you to take...'

from WBUR Newsroom: Robert Frost Unplugged

Such young people have, in effect, no history, and this being so, their own significance is diminished. The problem is not whether Shakespeare or the Bible or TS Eliot is "relevant" to them, but whether they can see themselves as part of a continuum, a community extending across history.

from The Guardian: 'Read poetry: it's quite hard'

T.S. Eliot, who achieved the lofty status of Nobel Prize winner--and, significantly--became one of his generation's most authoritative cultural critics, himself ironically remarked upon his genetic inheritance from "witch-hangers" and the cultural debt he owed to his common heritage with Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Indeed, as even a superficial acquaintance with American literature will reveal, Eliot's sensibilities and literary soul had much in common with Hawthorne's work, and with that other eminent American expatriate, Henry James.

from Salem Gazette: 'Between two waves of the sea' - T.S. Eliot's roots in the North Shore
also Salem Gazette: 'At the source of the longest river'--T.S. Eliot's ties to Salem
also Salem Gazette: T.S. Eliot:: 'The river is within us, the sea is all about us'

"No, not me. I can't go that. I get stage-fright. Wait till Allen comes back--he's great. He loves that."

To what did Kerouac attribute his sudden recognition on the West Coast, after years of the opposite here in the East: "One thing," he said. "Rexroth. A great man. A great critic. Interested in young people, interested in everything."

from Village Voice: Back to the Village

That they have taken note of him, he [Linton Kwesi Johnson] says, "is great. But they recognise me, not the other way round. Some black and Caribbean poets seek a kind of validation from these arbiters of British taste. But they really didn't exist for me. I was coming from a position of cultural autonomy. I did my own thing, built my own audience and established my own base. My audience was ordinary people."

from The Guardian: 'I did my own thing'

The poet wrestles all the way to the last lines between a readiness to make peace with her own passing versus a continued resistance, along with the mourning of friends, family and colleagues. For [Grace] Paley, who passed away before seeing the publication of this book, these last words sustain the truths she was committed to, and bear witness to new wisdom.

from The Brooklyn Rail: Poetry: Peculiar Antennae

Split This Rock calls poets to a greater role in public life and fosters a national network of activist poets. The festival will explore and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for change: reaching across differences, considering personal and social responsibility, asserting the right to free speech, bearing witness to the diversity and complexity of human experience through language, imagining a better world.

from Foreign Policy in Focus: Hear This Hammer Ring

Reporters Without Borders will launch the first International Online Free Expression Day under UNESCO's patronage on 12 March, when it will also organise its second "24-hour online demo against Internet censorship," urging Internet users to come and demonstrate on its website, www.rsf.org.

from Reporters Without Borders: Wednesday 12 March : launch of Online Free Expression Day plus repeat of last year's "24-hour online demo"

Great Regulars

[Alison] Brackenbury is at her best when exploring details from her own life and from her immediate environment, when celebrating the possibilities of the near at hand, and, in the end, it's in these subtle evocations of everyday fragility that Singing in the Dark finds its strength.

from Charles Bainbridge: The Guardian: At home with the horses

[James] Frey has a contract for a novel and has started a blog. The scandal over [Margaret] Seltzer's book will blow over--until next time.

When Primus St. John, an English professor at Portland State, was asked about fake memoirs, his answer was telling.

"Which one?"

from Jeff Baker: The Oregonian: Bookmarks: Memoir Mess

[Richard] Kenney is a muscular poet. Ideas leap toward emotions, images quicken into thoughts, consonants tick into consonants, and vowels elide into vowels. This sort of circular momentum is at the heart of his Italian sonnet, "Millenary," too. It's a wry, Y2K lament cushioned with a concluding punch line of self-deprecation.

Millenary

from David Biespiel: The Oregonian: Poetry

"When you're writing your first novel and you're writing it in free verse, you have to pause every 15 pages and reassure yourself you're not crazy. You come up with a lot of different excuses for why you're not crazy.

"You really aren't expecting anyone to buy it," [Toby] Barlow said recently in a phone interview from San Francisco, where he was promoting the book.

from John Mark Eberhart: The Kansas City Star: Sharp Teeth author couldn't tear himself away from the idea of a werewolf novel

Eastern Washington University Press recently brought back into print "Awake," Dorianne Laux's excellent debut poetry collection from 1990. It's great to have it back. Today, Parachute features the collection's title poem, courtesy of the author.

Awake

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: "Awake"

OK. People are responding by sending poems, so the blog will go on for now. But I STILL NEED MORE poems, screeds about poetry, rants, deep thoughts, considered observations and so on.

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Back from the brink

Back Yard

by Jon Herbert Arkham

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: 'Back Yard'

'The Collection'
By Judith Bader Jones

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: 'The Collection'

So think of this as Poetry Lab # 1. What are your overall impressions? Are there things he could do to make the poem better? If so, what? Hit that ol' comment button. All I ask is that everyone offer respect along with honesty.

Crow

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Poetry Lab One

Here's a wonderfully naked poem by Carrie Allison. I make no apologies for printing it on a Sunday. Enjoy.

Trying

By Carrie Allison

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Procreation

Memory and Migration

By Van K. Brock

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Van's the man

At the Waffle House

By Shawn Pavey

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Waffle stomp

"Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me and I will be whiter than snow." (Psalm 51:7).

When I first read this, I could hardly believe it. "What? Me, clean as snow?" How stunning.

By the time I was 20 years old, I was a sexual mess.

from John Freeman: Philadelphia Daily News: Bible shows the way out of sin and addiction

The poem exemplifies one of his most frivolous attempts to squeeze a poem out the measured encumbrances of faulty modernism. [John] Betjeman identified himself in Who's Who as a "poet and hack."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Betjeman's 'Westgate-On-Sea'

Some tried to invent their own mythology and religion.

Influenced by a widespread failure to understand scientific advancement of their era, many began to think that the human being was a super-animal instead of child of God.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Four Modernist Poets

In the preface, [Malcolm M.] Sedam claims his poetic experience by stating, "Let me speak for my own poetry--that it happened to me--that I lived, enjoyed or suffered every scene and that these poems are the essence of these experiences."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Malcolm M. Sedam

Fine. Then let's define memoir as fiction and forget all this nonsense about the "truth."

According to [Lee] Gutkind, readers don't care anyway.

from Bob Hoover: Post-Gazette: A hoax? Nah, just a memoir

This is such an appropriate poem for March, and David Sutton's reminiscences of being cold in winter need no explanation. His childhood experience is familiar to me, and will be to anyone who has not been "coddled".

from Frieda Hughes: The Times: Monday Poem: Chilling memories

Beyond the laconic remark in the subtitle, it is difficult to say how much, if at all, [Robert] Frost intended his poem to comment on Christian religion. But the editors of the TLS saw fit to publish the poem in the run-up to Easter 1954; and so in 2008 do we.

The Bad Island â€“ Easter
(Perhaps so called because it may have risen once)

from Mick Imlah: The Times Literary Supplement: Poem of the Week: The Bad Island--Easter

The apocryphal story goes that he'd been promised a friend's daughter in marriage, but the friend reneged, allegedly because Archilochos' mother had been a slave. The resulting curse, "Liar," still sprays like seawater on your face.

Liar

from Mary Karr: The Washington Post: Poet's Choice: Poetic Staying Power

Poem: "San Antonio" by Naomi Shihab Nye from Is this Forever, or What? Poems and Paintings from Texas.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: For the week of March 10, 2008

Here, poet Yusef Komunyakaa, who teaches at New York University, shows us a fine portrait of the hard life of a worker in this case, a horse and, through metaphor, the terrible, clumsy beauty of his final moments.

Yellowjackets

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 154

Except that the marriage turned out to be exceptionally happy, and Dorothy [Wordsworth] never did anything but support it and call Mary "dear". Yet in the last part of Dorothy's long life (she stayed under her brother's roof until her death at the age of 84), the strains finally emerged and drove her to the edge of madness.

from Andrew Motion: The Guardian: The agony, the ecstasy and the hot soup

[Rob Wicks] wanted me to go and meet Harry [Patch], who is 109 years old and the last surviving "Tommy" who fought in the trenches during the First World War, share his memories, then come home to London and write something about him.

If things went well, there would be a second meeting, at which I'd read Harry his poem.

from Andrew Motion: Telegraph: Harry Patch: A century's life shaped by four months at war

The Five Acts of Harry Patch
'The Last Fighting Tommy'
by Andrew Motion

from Andrew Motion: Telegraph: The Five Acts of Harry Patch

[Charles] Kingsley repeats the form of this opening stanza as he turns to the rocks and streams. The "rosy rocks" remind us of blood, suggesting the elemental extremes of birth and death beyond the cozy designs of the seaside resort. This coloring may strike us as fanciful, but it faithfully describes the red rock so distinctive of the Devonshire and Cornish landscape.

from Christopher Nield: The Epoch Times: The Antidote--Classic Poetry for Modern Life: A reading of 'Dartside' by Charles Kingsley

But because of labels like "memoir" and "nonfiction," we have to preten? d the spectacle is based in reality. So, perhaps instead of rigorous policing, we need a new name for this hybrid category. We're talking about stories inspired by gritty real life--stories that claim to be outrageously "authentic," like the best reality TV, while also playing up their own tabloid qualities.

from Meghan O'Rourke: Slate: Lies and Consequences

by Susan Zenker

"Against the grain of white headboard you sketched
blue doves with gold open beaks, gold-scalloped wings
that cluttered the doorways--wishes
through which early evenings Diego slipped
out to markets, cantinas, and trysts."

Posted on March 7, 2008

Shrine to Frida Kahlo

from Donna Snyder: Newspaper Tree: Tumblewords Poetry: Poetry: "Shrine to Frida Kahlo"

aura
by Arlo Quint

from The Brooklyn Rail: aura

Big Box
by Ange Mlinko

from The Brooklyn Rail: Big Box

Cuckoo Nun
by Ange Mlinko

from The Brooklyn Rail: Cuckoo Nun

Caption
by Lihn Dinh

from The Brooklyn Rail: Caption

How to Foster
by Linh Dinh

from The Brooklyn Rail: How to Foster

Not Quite Symmetry
by Linh Dinh

from The Brooklyn Rail: Not Quite Symmetry

Typical Umbrella Fiasco
by Miles Champion

from The Brooklyn Rail: Typical Umbrella Fiasco

Fantasy of Gods

By Joseph Bassi

from The Daily Texan: Poetry: Fantasy of Gods

Ladybug

By Benjamin Toscher

from The Daily Texan: Poetry: Ladybug

A Summer Day in Winter

By Benjamin Toscher

from The Daily Texan: Poetry: A Summer Day in Winter

With this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were from the very beginning at stake in the game.

from Daily Times: Purple Patch: Structure, sign and play --Jacques Derrida

Editor's note: This week in Poetry Corner we feature the work of Jonell Esme Jel'enedra, who has lived and worked in the Santa Cruz community since 1980. She is the author of "Stilt Walking at Midnight" (Hummingbird press, 2004), a recipient of a Mary Lonnberg Smith award, and the Quarry West poetry award, First Prize, 1999.

Lullabies for an Insomniac

from Good Times Weekly: Poetry Corner: Poetry by Jonell Esme Jel'enedra

Candle at a Wake by Elena Shvarts, translated by Sasha Dugdale

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: Candle at a Wake by Elena Shvarts, translated by Sasha Dugdale

Patricia Wallace Jones creates a highly resonant and engaging poem from the dawn exercise. As in some of Michael Longley's poems of the natural world, the brevity is extremely well-judged--less is so often more.

from The Guardian: Poetry Workshop: 'Thick with season'
plus T? he Guardian: Poetry Workshop: 'Thick with season' (continued)

'Dreaming of You as a Saint'
By Maril Crabtree

from The Kansas City Star: Between the Lines: 'Dreaming of You as a Saint'

A Clean Slate
by Fred D'Aguiar

from The New Yorker: Poetry: A Clean Slate

Terrible Things Are Happening . . .
by Maureen N. McLane

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Terrible Things Are Happening . . .

By Sydne M. Klein

Inspiration

from The Philadelphia Inquirer: Your Poem: [by Sydne M. Klein]

By Nicole Murray

I am the person who,

from The Philadelphia Inquirer: Your Poem: [by Nicole Murray]

[by E. Bernard Arnold]
A Confused Husband

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: A Confused Husband

[Bradford] Morrow, in his introduction, intimates that this poem may have been the inspiration for Ginsberg's "Howl." In fact, Rexroth was one of the chief influences on the Beat Generation, a connection he later disavowed with the now famous statement, "an entymologist is not a bug."

from Powells: Review-A-Day: Selected Poems

American poet Tess Gallagher is in Scotland for the StAnza poetry festival (see interview, page 20). Her long-awaited eighth collection, Dear Ghosts (Graywolf Press), confronts illness, mortality and the loss of loved ones, including that of her poet and short-story writer husband Raymond Carver.

Little Match Box

from The Scotsman: Poem of the Week

"For D."
By Rosanna Warren

from Slate: "For D." --By Rosanna Warren

Poetic Obituaries

Rodney L. Armstrong, March 6, 1965--December 22, 2005

Rod was a good friend during and following the years we worked together on the poetry board he created, Gandy Creek. He was also a fine poet himself, as this poem (originally published in Avatar Review 3) shows:

"Particles"

from The Compost Heap: In Memoriam

[Padma Barkataki] wrote 38 novels, five collections of short story and ? two collections of poetry as well as three children books. He also translated several classics of different languages into Assamese.

from Calcutta Telegraph: Padma Barkataki dies at 82

[Marilyn Jane Camp] started teaching in rural Madison County in 1949 and retired in 1989 from Muscatine public schools. Following retirement, she moved to Indianola. She enjoyed reading and poetry.

from The Des Moines Register: Marilyn Jane Camp, 77, Indianola

When the Rev. [Howard W.] Creecy [Sr.] took the pulpit, his son said, "He was the master mix of intellect, wisdom and spiritualism. You were going to hear great poetry, great prose and great preaching."

He was known for his prayers, his son said. For years, his sermons were broadcast on AM radio.

from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Howard Creecy Sr., 79, leader in SCLC

[Jeannie H.] Davis was given awards for her work by the Girl Scouts of America, North Philadelphia Community, and the Chapel of Four Chaplains. She enjoyed writing poetry.

from The Philadelphia Inquirer: Jeannie H. Davis: Elementary teacher, 90

"Raven truly was wonderful," he [Raven McConnell's father Tony] said. "She was loved by everybody. She was very interested in photography. She wrote great poems. She loved poetry and art."

from The Columbus Dispatch: Hit-and-run victim gives life to others

3/04/2008

News at Eleven

One initiator and participant will be the general secretary of the Friends of Tibet Organization, poet Mr Tenzin Tsundue.

The walkers will leave India in early March and trek through the Himalayas, reaching Tibet during the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing in August.

from Epoch Times: An Epic Walk Home through Himalayas for Exiled Tibetan Poet

Earth Shattering has poems on destruction to alert and alarm anyone willing to read or listen as well as poems which illuminate the ecological balance of the rapidly vanishing world.

As the world's politicians and corporations orchestrate our headlong rush towards eco-Armageddon, poetry may seem like a hopeless gesture. But if Seferis and Heaney are right, poetry can at the very least be "strong enough to help".

from The Guardian: Something in nothing

[Paul Laurence] Dunbar's rebuttal that night was his own writing and elocution, a performance that was highly praised.

"Part of the remarkable thing about Dunbar's life is how he is able to negotiate what is truly an impossible climate of racial discrimination. This is one of the most horrific periods of racial repression in America," the BGSU professor [Timothy Messer-Kruse] said.

from The Toledo Blade: Toledo helped shine light on gifted black poet

Among the tourists, he [TS Eliot] would have seen some locals fishing from the jetty to supplement their diet with cod or eels, said Mr [David] Seabrook. Eliot may well have noticed others combing the beach for anything left from shipwrecks.

In the middle of November, Eliot left Thanet and went to Lausanne in Switzerland to undergo psychiatric treatment. The Waste Land came out in 1922.

from Kent News: How TS Eliot found inspiration at Margate

As [Robert] Frost says in what may be his best essay, "The Constant Symbol," "every poem is an epitome of the great predicament; a figure of the will braving alien entanglements." The out-setting poet should expect a series of surprises and even some lucky accidents. "It takes a hero to make a poem," Frost said in one of his interviews.

Every good poem involves risk-taking; not least with its eventual reader.

from The Washington Times: What the poet was thinking

The committee looked at nominees' rÃ©sumÃ©s and their poetry, judging on the basis of quality of the work, contributions to the literary community and willingness to serve. The top three names were sent to the governor, and he personally selected Bly.

Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River

By Robert Bly

from Pioneer Press: Robert Bly is state's first poet laureate

"Writing those poems, I came to understand why people write elegies," [Mary Jo] Bang says. "One of their uses seems to be to keep the person alive in the world. I was aware from the beginning that I was keeping a conversation going with someone I was talking with for 37 years. Now, because of that event, I needed all the more to talk with him.

"At the end, you know that you have not kept that person alive. An elegy is a way of distracting yourself from lacerating grief."

from St. Louis Post-Dispatch: At home with Mary Jo Bang

Dorothy [Wordsworth] began writing the Grasmere Journals in 1800 "because I shall give William pleasure by it". William's pleasure included filching from Dorothy's pages to create his poetry. The connections are transparent: "I never saw daffodils so beautiful," wrote Dorothy. "They grew among the mossy stones. . . & the rest tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed . . ."

from The Times: The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth by Frances Wilson

And once she [Daphne du Maurier] found [J. Alex] Symington--by then living a reclusive existence on the outskirts of Leeds, in a house filled with hundreds of boxes and overflowing files of BrontÃ« papers and relics--he gave her a series of enticing clues to follow, suggesting in letters to her that Charlotte's signature had been forged on many of Branwell's youthful manuscripts, and that some of Branwell's most accomplished poems had been wilfully misattributed to Emily, so that they could be sold for a far higher price to collectors who were interested only in the famous sisters rather than their disappointing brother.

from The Times: The Great Bronte Mystery

Eve is compared to a wood-nymph in Diana's service. Raphael arrives in the garden of Eden like the god Mercury, shaking his plumes and giving out "Heavenly fragrance". And the garden itself is compared to:

that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flowers
Her self a fairer flower by gloomy
Dis
Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world . . .

These have always been my favourite lines in Paradise Lost, with their astonishing leap out of the Christian and into a pagan world picture.

from The Guardian: The devil's advocate

In his poem "Buffalo Bill's" for example, [E.E.] Cummings positioned the words on the page to suggest the shape of an arrowhead and the danger of Buffalo Bill's career.

"Cummings captures that dynamism of his life by the way he makes his lines move on the page, so you can see them moving further to the right and then back, and that's all connected with his painting at the time," [Milton] Cohen says.

from National Public Radio (NPR): College Restores Artwork by Poet E.E. Cummings

Great Regulars

Lisa Alvarado
Grieving

from Lisa Alvarado: Grieving

The standard model is a triumph of human thought, a masterpiece. Professor Richard Kenway, who led the QCDOC team, implored me to tell you just how amazing it is. Thanks to the standard model, the human mind has grasped the behaviour of the unimaginably small entities of which the universe consists.

But, like so much else in modern physics, it doesn't quite make sense.

from Bryan Appleyard: The Times: Supercomputer works on cracking the mystery of the universe

[Hadji] Ali used camels on a freight route between Yuma and Tucson, Ariz. Some of them went into the desert and became feral. After his death in 1902, Ali became a legendary Western figure, the subject of a folk song ("The Ballad of Hi Jolly") and a festival (Hi Jolly Daze in Quartzite, Ariz.).

from Jeff Baker: The Oregonian: Common threads in U.S., Mideast

"But in Pakistan, the situation looked quite different," said Fatima [Bhutto] in a speech at the Foreign Correspondents' Club here.

"To say there was rigging in the February 18 elections is an understatement . . . It wasn't just rigging, it was quite open, unapologetic rigging. It was no longer under the table, it was very much on top."

from Fatima Bhutto: The News International Pakistan: Bhutto's niece slams Western media

Why are you crying? my father asked
in my dream, in which we faced each other,
knees touching, seated in a moving train.

I'm Li-Young Lee. I was born in Indonesia. I'm ethnic Chinese. I came to this country about '64. I was born in '57. My mother was the oldest granddaughter of the fifth wife, of the first president of the republic of China.

from Jeffrey Brown: PBS: Newshour: Poetry of Li-Young Lee Is 'Descended from Dreamers'

Admonition: If you are writing more poems than you read, you are writing too many poems (unless you're in one of those monthlong-or-so bubbles involving a manuscript nearing completion or some such; you know what I mean).

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Admonitions

I don't think it's wise to let February pass without a poem from John Donne. So:

Break of Day

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: John Donne

In a mere 64 pages of poems, [Natasha] Trethewey gets to the heart of why this war still troubles us. One could read a couple of shelves full of generic Civil War novels and never scratch so deeply at the issues of race and racism, of neighbor against neighbor, of the only war Americans ever fought against one another.

from John Mark Eberhart: The Kansas City Star: Bibliofiles: On poetry, Civil War and cliches

On the Grasshopper and Cricket

The poetry of earth is never dead:

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: John Keats

By Seymour Glass

John Keats

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: "John Keats" haiku (wink, wink)

A little folk/blues for everyone. This is an excerpt from the lyrics to Roly Salley's "Killing the Blues":

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Killing the Blues

There are many variations--at least several dozen--of what is known as "The Month Poem," a mnemonic device.

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: The Month Poem

The late Stevie Smith's excellent "Thoughts About the Person From Porlock" is something of a meta-poem, reflecting, as it does, on Coleridge's composition of "Kubla Khan." Here is an excerpt.

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Punked by Porlock

[Zadie Smith's] instructions to the contributors were simple: "Make somebody up."

That permission seems to have rubbed off on the work. The Book of Other People is full of writers taking chances.

Some of the characters we meet here talk their way into existence, like Rhoda, the chatterbox grandmother in Jonathan Safran Foer's story.

from John Freeman: The Vancouver Sun: Anthology is full of writers taking chances

In fact, it often makes itself known in the shortest form possible: poetry. Paul Auster, Raymond Carver and Louise Erdrich all made their debuts with small volumes of verse. And 50 years ago, so did a 26-year-old ex-Talk of the Town reporter from The New Yorker named John Updike.

The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures, Updike's debut volume of light verse, was published in March of 1958 and it remains in print today.

from John Freeman: theblogbooks: A lighter shade of Updike

In the second quatrain, the speaker/artist addresses the profane reader who fails to understand the genuineness of this speaker's art, those who think his "jewels trifles are." This speaker is aware that there will always be those who denigrate the genuine and uplift the mediocre. To a dedicated artist, such an attitude is his "greatest grief."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 48

"For me Alice is an attempt to carve out a space in our rather noisy media world for a kind of online reading," [Kate] Pullinger said from her home in London. "It incorporates text, sound and image, but in some ways it bears quite a close relation to reading a book. I'm really interested in creating a story where people will want to do the equivalent of turning the page."

from Katie Haegele: Star Tribune: The way we 'read'

Yet "His eyes are empty as a statue's" which brings me back to thinking that he is one--and his heart is as hard as marble--perhaps because he's carved of marble. Then I read that his muscles are lightly haired and his skin is honey-tanned and think that he might be a figure in a painting--or perhaps a waxwork that shows every human crease and hair in an effort to replicate a human body.

from Frieda Hughes: The Times: Monday Poem: An object of desire

Severe, stony, sometimes ill-humoured, scathing alike of Welsh peasant and English influence, his [R. S. Thomas'] poems are widely taught in schools.

The Country Clergy

from Mick Imlah: The Times Literary Supplement: Poem of the Week: The Country Clergy

In this poem, young [Robert] Hass crosses that campus near where his hero Randall Jarrell had translated his own patriarch, Chekhov. Jarrell--a tennis player famous for charm--captured the misery of housewifery in the effortless '50s. "Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All . . ." He later shocked everyone with his suicide. By cross-dressing in Jarrell's angelic tennis garb, Hass questions the faux ease of academic life and the perils of inherited habits:

Old Dominion

from Mary Karr: The Washington Post: Poet's Choice

Poem: "Moment of Inertia" by Debra Spencer from Pomegranate.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: For the week of March 03, 2008

In this endearing short poem by Californian Trish Dugger, we can imagin? e "what if?" What if we had been given "a baker's dozen of hearts?" I imagine many more and various love poems would be written. Here Ms. Dugger, Poet Laureate of the City of Encinitas, makes fine use of the one patched but good heart she has.

Spare Parts

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 153

E. Ethelbert Miller

Tomorrow

from E. Ethelbert Miller: Beltway Poetry Quarterly

As the New York Philharmonic left North Korea after its historic concert in Pyongyang, many North Korean defectors were left wondering what impact the event would have on the lives of ordinary people.

"The North Korean people have lived under the shadow of dictatorship and oppression for a long time, and most of them have no idea about music," Seoul-based defector Park Kwang Sun told RFA's Korean service.

from Luisetta Mudie: Radio Free Asia: North Korean Defectors Left Skeptical by Concert

Books are about ideas and feelings. We read in order to find out what it would feel like to be in this or that situation. We explore other peopleâ€™s way of thinking and we look and how they and the society changes.

Reading small extracts from books, followed closely by "fact" questions, misses all this.

from Michael Rosen: Socialist Worker: Michael Rosen explains how not to bore the pants off kids

This week's Poetry Corner features the work of Liberty Rose Elgart-Fail, a writer and performance artist living in Santa Cruz. She holds a bachelor of arts degree in expressive arts with concentrations in writing and speech communication from Ithaca College. Her work can be found in magazines, college curriculum and it is also featured in the Library of Congress Sept. 11 online collection.

Unrelated

from Good Times Weekly: Poetry Corner: Liberty Rose Elgart-Fail

by Reginald Shepherd

Experiment V

for Kate Bush

from Guernica: Poetry: Two Poems

History
by Stephen Dunn

from The New Yorker: Poetry: History

Needle's Eye
by Dan Chiasson

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Needle's Eye

[Eavan] Boland was born in Ireland and educated in London, New York and Dublin, and her many books of poetry, prose, criticism and translation include "Against Love Poetry" (W.W. Norton & Co., 2001), "Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time" (W.W. Norton & Co., 1995) and "New Collected Poems" (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008), where "Is It Still the Same" most recently appears.

from The Oregonian: Poetry

By Hediya Sizar

The Ink

from The Philadelphia Inquirer: Your Poem: [by Hediya Sizar]

[by Hugh A. Harter]
Waves

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: Waves

[by Eileen MacDonald]
Poem: There once was a sonnet quite fair

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: There once was a sonnet quite fair

Sarah Maguire's new collection, The Pomegranates of Kandahar (Chatto, Â£9), contains precisely observed and sensual poems that travel the devastated and troubled world we live in. Here she brings us home to her garden, but evokes perfectly the chill in the early spring air. She appears at StAnza poetry festival later this month speaking about poetry and conflict.

Field Capacity

from The Scotsman: Poem of the Week

"Acorns"
By Linda Pastan

from Slate: "Acorns" --By Linda Pastan

Between
Linda Zisquit

from Zeek: Between: Linda Zisquit

Poetic Obituaries

Poetry was another of [Sarah Jeanne] Antrim's gifts, her aunt said. "I have some poetry that would knock your socks off. You'll cry. She was awesome."

Cassandra Kirschbaum, a friend of Antrim's and a freshman at Milford High School, remembers Antrim as a "very loving person."

from Community Press: Investigation into Milford student's death ongoing

In a profile for her [Nancy Hemenway Barton's] "Textures of the Earth" catalogue (1978), Benjamin Forgey, then the art critic for the Washington Star (and later The Post), wrote: "Painstaking observation of specific visual facts; careful nurturing of authentic personal experiences; skilled translation of these visual and emotional impressions into new tactile forms--these are the essential facets of Nancy Hemenway's art-making. It is a skilled, poetic enterprise that produces the evocative resonances we can find in these unusual tapestries."

from The Washington Post: Artist Nancy Hemenway Barton; Known for Tapestries

In 1947, she [Eliana Beam] sold her first poem, "Lament of a Beekeeper's Wife," to a beekeeping journal. Her first check, she remembered vividly, was for $2.50.

Other newspapers and magazines bought her verse, including McCall's, Better Homes and Gardens, The Cleveland Press, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cats magazine and Ohio Farmer. Then, she noted,

By the time I was publishing, safe in my stride,
Traditional poetry sickened and died.

from Star-News: She used her words to deal with what life handed her

[Kenneth G.] Kuchler was involved in transcribing traditional Shoshoni music, including lyrics, Wolf said. "He used to tell me writing out the music was the easier part of it all."

Some of his work is included in Newe Hupai, Shoshoni Poetry Songs, published by Utah State University Press, according to Ralph Kuchler.

from The Salt Lake Tribune: Kuchler, longest tenured member of the Utah Symphony, dies at 85

It was nearly 7:30 p.m., and Peter Osborne sat at his wife's bedside at Westchester Medical Center.

He was reading Walt Whitman to her, an 1865 poem titled, "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" He reached the last stanza:

Till with sound of trumpet,
Far, far off the daybreak call, hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind,
Swift! to the head of the army! swift! spring to your places,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

With those final words, Janis Osborne was gone.

from Times Herald-Record: Port advocate, editor Osborne dead at 64

[Brittany] Romer penned poems and made home videos that spoofed popular movies. She aspired to a career in journalism or photography.

from The Tampa Tribune: Grief Consumes Driver Charged In Friend's Death

[Louis Ross] was in jail when he wrote the poem that ended up at the AA meeting.

"He was a smart guy," says [Carl] Taglianetti. "He was the kind of guy you'd love to have with you when he was straight."

from The Providence Journal: This story lives on in a poem

Along with being [Joyce Carol] Oates' partner as she ascended to the front rank of American writers, Smith also founded and served as editor in chief of Ontario Review, a highly regarded literary magazine whose pages glow with the work of major figures such as Margaret Atwood and Russell Banks, as well as with emerging writers.

from Chicago Tribune: Oates' husband was quiet voice

S. Rangarajan, who wrote under the pen name Sujatha, was known for his versatility in writing. He was the superstar among the world of present writers in Tamil. He had a way with words, whether it meant writing short stories, science fiction, plays, and pieces of writing on history or screenplay for films.

from Oneindia: Writer Sujatha passes away!

Simon "Si" Wakesberg, a veteran journalist and one of the longest-tenured staff members of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc. (ISRI), died in late February at the age of 94.

Wakesberg, an award-winning poet and writer, was born in Poland in 1913 and emigrated to New York City at age 8.

from Recycling Today: In Memoriam: Si Wakesberg

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