IBPC: Poetry and Poets in Rags

11/25/2008

News at Eleven

A source at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said: "The time has come to start a debate on who the next poet laureate should be, how the post should develop and the entire direction of poetry in this country."

Ministers freely admit to being impressed by the way popular TV programmes such as Pop Idol manage to galvanise huge audiences into backing their favourites.

They add, however, that they will not ape "exact voting processes" which pick a winner after candidates are eliminated one by one in a series of telephone votes.

from Telegraph: Public to be given say in selection of poet laureate
also Telegraph: Poet laureate options
also The Times: Who will be the new Poet Laureate?

New England College is about to lose its status as the one school in the country with a poetry-only master's degree program. And administrators blame the program's former director, who they say stole NEC' s faculty and students and re-created its program at Drew University in New Jersey.

So far, six faculty from NEC's small master's program have left Henniker for Drew University, according to a lawsuit NEC has brought against its former director, poet Anne Marie Macari, and Drew University.

from Concord Monitor: Poetry program heads to court

[Joy] Harjo said she could not continue to work in a program "that has been so deeply compromised" and that she didn't trust the University to uphold the rights of its students and faculty.

"The Chavez-and-students sex-site debacle was mishandled," Harjo said. "Because of this, the creative writing program lost face and credibility locally and nationally. Those of us--a majority of the creative writing program--who pushed for a proper ethics investigation based on policies already in place were retaliated against for speaking up. This whole situation could have been handled in a way that was respectful to all parties. As it is, only the rights of one person was considered."

from Daily Lobo: English professor resigns over administration's actions

[Brenda] Wineapple sees [Thomas Wentworth] Higginson and [Emily] Dickinson as flip sides of a coin: "The fantasy of isolation, the fantasy of intervention: they create recluses and activists, sometimes both, in us all." By mapping these contradictions so scrupulously, Wineapple allows Dickinson and Higginson their full measure of humanity.

Covering some of the same ground, Christopher Benfey's A Summer of Hummingbirds isn't, properly speaking, a biography. It is an account of a cultural moment, the summer of 1882, when the literati were breaking sexual taboos and finding a metaphor for this liberation in hummingbirds, which had been popularized by early-nineteenth-century naturalists.

from The Nation: Her Nature Was Future: Emily Dickinson's White Heat

"When you have a limited vocabulary and limited space, you explore all the areas, all the little corners that you think that something might go into. Every day I learn new words, and discover them like new land.

"My mother tongue is so inside. It would be painful for me to try to distance myself from my mother tongue. It is too comfortable. The question I ask is, 'In which language do you sigh?' The language that you do that in is your mother tongue. I sigh in Persian, but I think in English. That's a very significant factor in mastering a language. And the next level is, you dream in that language." [--Maryam Ala Amjadi]

from Pavland News: Iranian poet Maryam Ala Amjadi embraces the adve nture of writing in English

No one more than Cavafy, who studied history not only avidly but with a scholar's respect for detail and meticulous attention to nuance, would have recognized the dangers of abstracting people from their historical surroundings; and nowhere is this more true than in the case of Cavafy himself. To be sure, his work—the best of it, at any rate, which is as good as great poetry gets—is indeed timeless in the way we like to think that great literature can be, alchemizing the particulars of the poet's life, times, and obsessions into something relevant to a wide public over years and even centuries. But the tendency to see him as one of us, as someone of our own moment, speaking to us in a voice that is transparently, recognizably our own about things whose meaning is self-evident, threatens to take a crucial specificity away from him—one that, if we restore it to him, makes him seem only greater, more a poet of the future (as he once described himself).

from The New York Review of Books: 'As Good as Great Poetry Gets'

[Pier Paolo] Pasolini's seventeen-year-old assassin came from one of these borgate--Tiburtino III. Built in 1935 on marshland, Tiburtino III is still periodically flooded by the Aniene, a tributary of the Tiber, its Fascist-era tenement blocks now blanched ochre, with peeling green shutters. The tenements are not the "human habitations" promised by Fascism, "but coves of disease, of violence, malavita and prostitution", in the words of Pasolini. Yet the outskirts, strewn with broken washbasins, chicken coops, prams, shoes and old tyres sprouting poppies, present a characteristically Pasolinian pasticcio of the poetic and the squalid.

from The Times Literary Supplement: Pasolini's Roman poetry

Speaking after his confrontation with Christian Voice in Cardiff, he [Patrick Jones] said: "I was hoping that maybe they would come out and have a debate.

"That's within my rights to do that.

"My book didn't set out to be provocative at all."

Reverend Geoff Waggett, of Ebbw Vale, said he was dismayed that the Llanhilleth reading was going ahead.

He said: "Freedom of speech is important and people are certainly entitled to express themselves in poetry.

"But when that poetry is both blasphemous and obscene and when one of our public buildings is used for the proclamation of such material, I then need to question the moral values of those who have responsibility for those buildings."

from Gwent Gazette: Controversial reading by poet Patrick Jones goes ahead despite protests

[Ted Hughes] also offered increasingly penetrating analyses of the creative process, as shaped by his own engagement with--and artistic avoidance of--his psychic dramas. In another letter to [Moelwyn] Merchant, he confesses a belief that "whatever we work at, in the way of imaginative creation, operates as a conjuration, a ritual summoning of all energies associated with the subject matter--from levels that our normal activities can rarely tap. And those energies are good or bad for us--helpful or destructive--almost in the style of demonic entities--according to our subject matter, & the moral-imaginative interpretation we make of it."

from Truthdig: Regina Marler on Ted Hughes' Letters

The calm, even tone of [Colette] Bryce's poetry is similar to that of her slightly older contemporary Lavinia Greenlaw, but possesses less of that quality once memorably described by Andrew Motion as combining "an excited way of seeing with a calm way of thinking". Where Greenlaw's work possesses the unmistakable erotic charge of strong poetry, Bryce's is for the most part flatter, on occasion almost affectless.

Or perhaps it is more correct to say that Bryce's work yields its significance a little less readily.

from The Guardian: The spider in the glass

=0 ATo start the writing process, she [Gayle Danley] tells the 11-year-olds, "I want you to close your eyes [and picture] when something changed in your life and how you felt that day." After a minute or two, she asks, "Anyone saw something when you closed your eyes and it kind of made you sad? Or real happy?"

A few students nod. Danley calls on those with raised hands with, "Yes, princess," "Go ahead, gorgeous," and "Talk to me, handsome."

A girl in a polka-dot shirt tells the class about the day her dad took her shopping and told her to buy whatever she wanted. Then he bought her lunch, she says, and announced that he was leaving town. "I never saw him again," the girl tells the class, through tears. "I really miss him." Gayle gives her a tissue, holds her hand.

from The Washington Post: The Poetry of Pain

Great Regulars

"Allen and I came from the far ends of the nation," Snyder writes in an introduction to "The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder" (Counterpoint, $28, 321 pages). "I was from German and Scandinavian working farmer/logger/fisherman world of pre-WWII Puget Sound, Allen from the New York City Immigrant Left. We met in a backyard in Berkeley, and again in Kenneth Rexroth's wood-floored apartment in the foggy Avenues zone of San Francisco. . . . We argued a lot and were not easy on each other. I made h im walk more, and he made me talk more. It was good for both of us."

from Jeff Baker: The Oregonian: Bookmarks: Beat poets: 40 years of letters

In the poem "Expecting Songbirds," a father relinquishes a small corner of his control, opening up his son to risk, so that he can experience the beauty of the world.

Danger and beauty coexist, they are partners in this dance. The father learns that to protect his son too much is to exclude important truths about the world -- that sometimes beauty can assuage loss.

[by Joe Benevento]

Expecting Songbirds

We stopped feeding the birds

from Walter Bargen: The Post-Dispatch: Missouri Poets: Joe Benevento

Santana Shorty: To carry myself with respect.

I've kind of lost my language, and yet I write these poems to bring back my language, and so I put it into the poem, and so then I'm using my language again. So in a way it's kind of like a little push to, like, you know, don't lose it, bring it back, or work for it.

Heilery Yuselew: And once you start using it, you just keep grabbing more and more and more. All of a sudden, you have all these words in your head. So they're there and you can't forget . Like our poems, we can't forget them no matter how hard we try.

from Jeffrey Brown: PBS: Newshour: N.M. Spoken World Club Explores Indian Identity, History

So: As William Faulkner once said, "Read, read, read. Read everything." But remember that the good stuff is the most rewarding.

Our 10 highlights

•The Underneath, by Kathi Appelt with illustrations by David Small

•Flight: New and Selected Poems, by Linda Bierds

from John Mark Eberhart: The Kansas City Star: Notables from the noteworthy Books of the Year

By John Mark Eberhart

God sits upon a throne

of diatomic hydrogen, the smallest

from John Mark Eberhart: Parchute: Universe

The third stanza reveals the speaker's best mood, one that he no doubt wishes he could retain throughout the day. He declares that it is very "sweet" "to sit alone with the class"; he can perceive that his teaching is reaching them like a "stream of awakening." A transference of knowledge passes from the teacher to the students, "whose brightening souls it laves/For this little hour."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Lawrence's "Best of School"

The teacher/speaker metaphorically compares his recalcitrant students to "hounds" that pull on the leash trying to free themselves from his instruction. They do not want to learn, and he does not want to teach. They are dogs who "hate to hunt" the knowledge to which the teacher is trying to lead them.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Lawrence's Last Lesson of the Afternoon

Here is the truth: "suddenly, the wind lashing my chest,/the infinitely dense night dropped into my bedroom." Now the reader understands that the speaker in not in fact languishing in this surreal nightmare but has simply had a "dense night dropped into his bedroom."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Neruda's "Ars Poetica"

The "rising/empty planet" brings joy. Then the speaker appends the following phrase that hangs unconnected: "great stars clear as vodka,/so uninhabited and so transparent." There is great adventure in visualizing a star that is as clear as a Russian beverage. The speaker is suggesting the joy that would be attainable once he and his companion "arrive there with the first telephone."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Neruda's The Future is Space

The speaker then avers that he can find no reason to reprimand the Muse, who knows no "hatred." With human beings, the speaker can read changes of mood in their physical face with its "frowns, and wrinkles." The human will display "moods" easily read by those who take note, but the Muse, being ethereal, can steal away as surreptitiously as she steals in.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 93

Daniel Pink argues in his book, A Whole New Mind, that right-brained, creative people are critical for future business. According to him, the MFA is the new MBA, so perhaps after the buffer of student loans and cheap student health insurance dissipates, your child will sell out and pursue something with a more tangible return. But do not be mistaken, she is not wasting her time. And I assure you, her creative work has met enough opposition that she can't possibly be deluding herself.

from Kristen Hoggart: The Smart Set: Ask a Poet: Fatherly Advice

In his introduction, [Jay] Parini explains his plan:

"By books that 'changed America,' I mean works that helped to create the intellectual and emotional contours of this country. Each played a pivotal=2 0role in developing a complex value system that flourishes to this day."

My chief complaint with Parini, then, is his word choice, not his title choice. Helping to create "intellectual and emotional contours" is not "change," but influence.

from Bob Hoover: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: 'Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America' by Jay Parini

For five months, we had lived our lives to accommodate George and his nightly return to our kitchen, and now, as if he knew the cage was for him, he'd decided that it was time to go. I was both vastly relieved--and bereft. Never again would he bury unmentionable objects beneath the sofa cushions in the kitchen, or slot Schmackos dog chews into the toaster.

from Frieda Hughes: The Times: Monday Poem: A dream come true: After four years, Frieda Hughes has finally built her garden paradise

[Barack] Obama also starred in the acceptance speeches of the nonfiction winner, Annette Gordon-Reed (for "The Hemingses of Monticello"), and poetry winner Mark Doty ("`Fire to Fire"), who cited the election and his recent marriage to his male partner: "We are on a path to equality for all Americans and nothing is going to turn us back."

from Hillel Italie: Associated Press: Mail Tribune: Matthiessen wins National Book Award fiction prize

For [Adam] Zagajewski, historical carnage is endured by loving those close to us ("when we were together/in a white room"). The poem moves from large to small to large again. By contrast, in "If I May," Mississippi poet Brooks Haxton drolly springs from the worldly occasion of receiving a poetry prize to a God whose existence is--though scientifically dubious--praiseworthy:

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

After Our Daughter's Wedding
by Ellen Bass

While the remnants of cake

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: After Our Daughter's Wedding by Ellen Bass

A Deer in the Target
by Robert Fanning

I only got a ten-second shot,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: A Deer in the Target by Robert Fanning

The O's
by Baron Wormser

My grandfather is lying in the hospital bed

from Garrison Keillor: The Wri ter's Almanac: The O's by Baron Wormser

Runways Café II
by Marilyn Hacker

For once, I hardly noticed what I ate

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Runways Café II by Marilyn Hacker

Snow
by George Bilgere

A heavy snow, and men my age

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Snow by George Bilgere

The Story of My Life
by Jennifer Michael Hecht

Each day goes down in history, wets its feet

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: The Story of My Life by Jennifer Michael Hecht

Translation of My Life
by Elizabeth Spires

I remember the past.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Translation of My Life by Elizabeth Spires

Most of us love to find things, and to discover a quarter on the sidewalk can make a whole day seem brighter. In this poem, Robert Wrigley, who lives in Idaho, finds what's left of a Bible, and describes it so well that we can almost feel it in our hands.

Finding a Bible in an Abandoned Cabin

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 191

In the second stanza, he digs more deeply into the experience. As the hunter seeks to take another being's life, he also confronts his own mortality, his own "uncertain ghost." He confronts a memory "so deep," which is the underlying nature of humankind: We are predators, and this poem does not make apologies for this survival skill.

Hunting Again

for Pete

Things are different out here,

from Denise Low: Ad Astra Poetry Project: Michael L. Johnson (1941--)

Do not wear yourself out. Keep enough time for your own writing. That is not just a question of getting up an hour earlier; it means the more difficult task of preserving staring-off time, thinking time. The laureateship takes over your life. An American publication described it as "a double-edged chalice". A ridiculous mixed metaphor, but true enough.

from Andrew Motion: The Guardian: Between the lines: Andrew Motion's advice to the next poet laureate

So oneness is almost attained--but not quite. "Limb" and "hair" have utterly different functions and textures, almost as different as those of the oak dresser and the fragile, cro oked-legged insect. And only one of the couple is peacefully asleep. The other is awake, and observing--eternally vigilant, as the writer has to be, looking in, looking out, trying to name the world and make sense without loss of mystery. The unnameable is present in the poem, too.

[by Naomi Foyle]

Your Summer Arm

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Books blog: Poem of the week: Your Summer Arm

All the protest that we were just talking about fits into the book because a big part of the struggle with me in writing this book was that, after September 11th, after Katrina--and I live in New Orleans now--after terrible things happen: what good is a writer, a poet? Poetry seems kind of trivial. Some people will argue, I have friends who are poets and they'll argue that, well, "It's still a refuse, it's still a place you can go for hope and things like that": poetry, you can still get that out of it. And I suppose that's true. But I always felt that certain things in the news, non-fiction, or real experiences were always stronger than poems themselves to a certain degree. So in the book there's a lot of struggle with being a poet in a time when things are supercharged politically and there's lots of terrible things going on in the world.

from Belinda Subraman=2 0Presents: Mark Yakich and The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine

Shayna Nestor (CAS'08)

"Poem Written at Morning" by Wallace Stevens

"I chose to read this poem because it looks at how we experience the world around us, through aesthetics and multiple sensory intake."

from BU Today: The Favorite Poem Project: Poem Written at Morning

Adam Sweeting, an associate professor of humanities in the College of General Studies, reads an untitled 1877 poem by Emily Dickinson.

"Although she doesn't use the term 'Indian summer,' Dickinson allowed the season to seem like this jarring interlude that suddenly interrupted the normal flow of temperatures and time," says Sweeting, whose book Beneath the Second Sun: a Cultural History of Indian Summer was published in 2003. Sweeting's research focuses on the interplay between cultural and natural forces in 19th-century America.

from BU Today: The Favorite Poem Project: Summer Has Two Beginnings

By Oscar Solis

Hemingway's Ghost

Spent the better part of an afternoon

from Express-News: Poetry: 'Hemingway's Ghost'

These are poems from Craig Arnold. Ausable Press recently=2 0published his second book, "Made Flesh." He is currently a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence in Bogotá, Colombia. When not globetrotting, he teaches at the University of Wyoming .

Uncouplings

from Good Times Weekly: Poetry Corner: Poems by Craig Arnold

The Happy Prince by Janet Frame

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: The Happy Prince by Janet Frame

[Caroline Lynch] takes a considerable chance with her choric word manic because the insistence on condition could become melodramatic and oppressive, but it's a proper risk, a poet's risk. In any case her strengths are clear from the first three lines where scale and voice are established. [--George Szirtes]

from The Guardian: Poetry Workshop: Writ small

Peace

by Stanley Moss

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Peace

Signing Ceremony

by Clive James

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Signing Ceremony

[by Charlie Rachel Sirmaian, Age 10]

Portsmouth< br>
The smells, the sounds, the ocean and the fun

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: Portsmouth

"The White Skunk"
By David Ferry

from Slate: "The White Skunk" --By David Ferry

by Judith Baumel

Atonement There Is Betwixt Light and Darkness

To be a we, we must include

from Zeek: Three Poems

Poetic Obituaries

[Derek] Brewer was the foremost Chaucerian scholar of his time. He was always ready to make Chaucer and his contemporaries accessible to readers who were not medievalists: Chaucer; An Introduction to Chaucer, Chaucer in His Time, and Chaucer and His World are among his titles. His publications were not only in scholarly prose. He wrote verse, too, and was proud that his poetry received the Seatonian Prize of the university 11 times.

from The Times: Professor Derek Brewer: Scholar and Master of Emmanuel College

[Roger E.] Egan was active in Reading is Fundamental program, and he wrote various guidelines for the treatment of minorities and women in textbooks. He was the author of "Poppies and Other Poems" and a screenplay, "In His Way."

A former adjunct professor at the College of St. Elizabeth, Convent Station, and chairman of the Department of English, St. Francis Preparatory School, Brooklyn, N.Y., Mr. Egan served as a lay advisor to the Council of American Bishops and as educational director of the Assumption parish council in Morristown.

from Daily Record: Roger E. Egan: 87, publisher and educator

[Donald] Finkel's work could be mordantly comic and was often of epic length; a single poem could fill an entire volume. There was little high-flown abstraction in his poetry, and little lofty diction. Writing in colloquial free verse and butting normally disparate subjects against each other, he deliberately blurred the boundaries between the animate and inanimate, the mythic and the mundane, the sacred and the profane.

The title poem of "Not So the Chairs" opens this way:

The tables slept on their feet

like horses

from The New York Times: Donald Finkel, 79, Poet of Free-Ranging Styles, Is Dead

Retired professor, former city councilman and noted poet Dr. Peter Hilty, 87, died Thursday at Southeast Missouri Hospital.

Hilty taught English at Southeast Missouri State University from 1962 to 1991, where he established the poetry journal The Cape Rock.

Mary Miller, a form er student who also attended the same church as Hilty, said he "instilled in his students a love of words."

from Southeast Missourian: Retired professor Dr. Peter Hilty dies at age 87

[Richard E. Jones] enjoyed playing the piano, writing poems and short stories, and painting.

He spent the first 87 years of his life in Western New York. He moved to Windsor in 2001 and then to Florida in 2004.

from Windsor Beacon: Richard E. Jones (1913-2008)

A brilliant translator, mostly from Japanese into English, she [Eileen Kato] also translated Japanese waka, a traditional Japanese poetic form that preceded haiku , into Irish, and old and modern Irish poetry into English.

Her translations are included in several seminal collections, including Twenty Plays of the Noh Theatre , Twelve Plays of the Noh and Kyogen and Traditional Japanese Theatre: an Anthology of Plays.

She also published many scholarly articles on Irish and Japanese literature in such journals as Monumenta Nipponica and the Journal of Irish Studies.

Her true love was poetry and she had a particular devotion to WB Yeats.

from The Irish Times: Mayo woman who became a member of the Emperor's staff
also The Japan Times: Eileen Kato, special adviser to Emperor, 'waka' translator, dies at 76

[Aleh Loyka] wrote a series of novels dedicated to Yanka Kupala and Francisak Skaryna, research works focusing on modern poetry, a textbook about the history of Belarusian literature, books for Belarusian children, and translated a number of works by French, German, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish poets into the Belarusian language.

Shortly before his death, he sent to a publishing house his 101st book, reminiscences about renowned Belarusian author Uladzimir Karatkevich.

His poetry is distinguished by romantic notes, soft humor and folklore allusions.

from Belarus News: Poet Aleh Loyka dies at age of 77

Marianne [Sokoloski] was proud of her Native American "Osage" heritage. She enjoyed beading and made jewelry and other designs. Marianne was a wonderful cook and had a great sense of humor. She wrote poetry; liked fishing; loved animals and flowers; and collected antique bottles. She was in touch with nature and preferred to be out of doors.

from The Coloradoan: Marianne Sokoloski

Clara [Sorenson] loved being outdoors, caring for her flowers and garden. She bottl ed peaches until her 100th birthday. A talented seamstress, she was always sewing clothes for her family. She also made many beautiful quilts, upholstered furniture and wrote beautiful poetry.

from The Spectrum: Clara Sorenson

The service featured songs and poems Kelly [Tracy] had written, lauding her faith and underscoring her strong desire to help anyone in need.

Her mother, Cindy Tracy, tearfully read a prayer Kelly had written in January. At the time, Kelly felt helpless and lost while trying to aid a friend with his troubles.

from The Arizona Republic: Gilbert teen killed in crash remembered Friday

[Lawrence] Wheatley, who often invited musicians to his home after the jam sessions, was known to play for hours on end.

"You almost couldn't pull him away from the piano," Ross said.

The only known recordings of his music are private tapes from concerts, which Lorenz Wheatley hopes to release on compact disc.

Mr. Wheatley wrote poetry, studied dictionaries and word origins and taught himself Latin, Arabic, Spanish and German. He was an excellent cook and chess player and could often be found at the chess tables in Dupont Circle.

from The Washington Post: Jazz Pianist, Mentor Lawrence Wheatley

"Linda Wiggin had a fiery spirit and great sense of play," said friend and former colleague Candyce Rusk, of Austin, Texas, and Provincetown. Rusk described her as "a deeply talented intuitive, poet and teacher," who "had much compassion for those involved in domestic violence disputes" when she served as a police dispatcher. "She was one of the first of a series of magical people I met in Provincetown in the early 1990s. Linda was a force to be reckoned with, purposefully striding down Commercial Street in a crushed velvet cape, flowing red-blonde hair."

from The Provincetown Banner: Former Provincetown psychic murdered

11/18/2008

War is perhaps the great subject for poetry, and love is its nearly equal partner. Pulitzer winner Yusef Komunyakaa has written devastatingly about both, and he opens his 13th collection of poems with a sequence of sonnets called "Love in the Time of War." Despite the promising subject, the poems do not quite work.

It's not for lack of good ideas.

from San Francisco Chronicle: 'Warhorses,' by Yusef Komunyakaa

Besides, although she [Sharon Olds] sometimes reads new poems in public and submits them to magazines, readers will have to wait years to encounter [Carl] Wallman in her work. Living in a new place while finishing old poems, she is something like the graylag goose, which lingers as long as possible before lighting out for new territory.

Yet already she speaks of her old work in the past tense. "My landscape was more the interior of a house," she said. Now the woods in spring green, summer glory, autumn splendor20and winter white tint her consciousness.

from Concord Monitor: A poet's new place

Its intention is to create an "intellectual biography . . . gathering what we can from his plays and his poems", but its ambition is larger than that. To investigate Shakespeare's "cultural DNA", [Jonathan] Bate oscillates between two established parameters: the social, cultural, and physical conditions that Shakespeare inhabited, and the work that he produced in those conditions. He extracts the composite parts of the soul and atomises them, and, in bouncing between the two reflective surfaces of the work and the life, creates a sort of hologram of Shakespeare.

from The Guardian: The seven ages of Shakespeare

[Carol Muske-Dukes'] list of awards and accomplishments includes a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, the Ingram-Merrill Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Award from the Library of Congress, the Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, five pushcart prizes and the WriteGirl Bold Ink Award.

"I am truly honored to be named California's poet laureate and I look forward to serving the people of California and poetry which reaches the hearts and imagination of young and old in both urban and remote areas of this diverse and dynamic state." said Muske-Dukes.

from The Salinas Californian: New poet laureate of California announced
also Los Angeles Times' Jacket Copy: On tour: With Carol Muske-Dukes

My favourite [Zbigniew] Herbert poem, "Photograph", strategically deploys the Biblical myth of Abraham and Isaac to illuminate the communist idea that the end justifies the means, that the immediate sacrifice is justified by the millennial outcome:

my little boy my Isaac bend your head
just a moment of pain and then you will be
anything you like - a swallow a lily of the valley.

Abraham thinks he is preserving Isaac's innocence and rewarding him with freedom.

from Telegraph: Zbigniew Herbert: The Collected Poems--review: Lies have to be beautiful

An astonishing collection of poems written by a doomed Great War soldier has survived to become a Newbury family's treasured heirloom.

In 1917, Lance-Corporal George Cox of Bucklebury had survived 13 major battles, including the killing fields of Mons, Ypres and the Somme and he was no stranger to the bloody horrors of the First World War.

And yet, amidst the slaughter, he found time to fill a pocket notebo ok with page after page of hauntingly beautiful war poetry.

from Newbury Weekly News: Family unveils treasured war poems more than 90 years after they were written in the trenches during World War One

Reporters Without Borders and the Burma Media Association are appalled to learn that detained poet Aung Than, a member of the opposition National League for Democracy, was probably infected with the HIV virus when he was forcibly injected in Insein prison hospital two years ago. Several people, including his mother, have told the two organisations that he is now in a critical condition.

from Reporters Without Borders: Jailed poet gets HIV virus from forcible injection in Insein prison
also, from June 21, 2006 Southeast Asian Press Alliance: Four dissidents sentenced up to 19 years in prison for anti-government poems

Though [Edna St. Vincent] Millay married a man, Eugen Boissevain, she was intimate with women and openly acknowledged her bisexuality in her work and personal life. Still, Millay struggled with her role and identity within both heterosexual and lesbian relationships, a challenge she often tried to work out in her poetry.

The following sonnet is from her collection Fatal Interview, which was published in 1931:

Night is my si ster, and how deep in love,

from AfterEllen: Lesbian Poetry Retrospective Part II

Consequently, "Wichita Vortex Sutra" reads like a prophetic and final antiwar poem, an elegy for the power of language in an age of competing information.

Four decades later, a vivid realization of [Allen] Ginsberg's prophecy would appear to be Poets Against the War, an anthology, edited by Sam Hamill, which was assembled in response to Laura Bush's apolitical White House symposium on American poetry shortly before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. At best, the poems in this antiwar tome share Ginsberg's poignant awareness of poetry's political limitations; at worst, the poems are just as paranoid, hyperbolic, and self-righteous as the neoconservative justifications that led to the war.

from Believer: The Last Antiwar Poem

Whenever the question comes up--and it does nearly every term--of whether or not rock lyrics qualify as poetry, I offer my students a simple but heartless test. Ask all the musicians to please leave the stage and take their instruments with them--yes, that goes for the backup singers in the tight satin dresses, and the drummer--and then have the lead singer stand alone by the microphone and read the lyrics from that piece of paper he is holding in his hand. What you will hear can leave=2 0only one impression: the lyrics in almost every case are not poetry, they are lyrics. [--Billy Collins]

from The Times: Bob Dylan: the beatnik bard

Great Regulars

The short answer--and the one on which all are agreed--is: use it or lose it. The plasticity of the brain means that it is able, in the face of injury or decay, to find ways of adapting itself to preserve strong patterns of activity. So, if you play chess all the time, you probably will be almost as good at 80 as you were at 40. You would probably also be almost as good at Dr Kawashima's Brain Training games. But so what? Read books, good books--nothing works better.

from Bryan Appleyard: The Sunday Times: Can everyone be an Einstein?

[Gary] Snyder was right, and thanks to a Portland photographer who made a copy of Tape 1 and kept it for more than 20 years, another important literary find has been uncovered and preserved. The new tape is the first recording of Snyder reading his poems. It contains the earliest known working version of his long poem "Myths & Texts," numerous other poems that later appeared in his books "Riprap," "The Back Country," and "Left Out in the Rain," and unpublished poems.

from Jeff Baker: The Oregonian: Recording discovered: famed poet live at Reed College

In her new volume, "Blood Dazzler," a finalist for the National Book Award for poetry, Patricia Smith brings an incantatory brilliance to the horror of that hurricane and our nation's shameful response to it.

This is an awesomely alliterative book. Smith, who is a slam poet champion, makes her lines seethe and bulge like high-pressure fronts. For her, the storm is elementally female.

from John Freeman: Star Tribune: Awful beauty

The lesson of [John] Leonard's writing is that how you say a thing matters. Independence, in his mind, was a given. If you didn't have it in one publication, work for the next guy. More importantly, however, if you weren't up to the task of embracing a book's challenge, of taking on its most serious concerns in language as carefully tuned as that which you purported to critique, then you might not bother writing at all.

from John Freeman: The Guardian: Books blog: John Leonard's critical example

According to the Harvard Crimson, in 1982, while [Derek] Walcott was teaching as visiting professor in English at the college, a freshman=2 0student accused the Nobel laureate of sexual harassment. She reported that during a private discussion session about her poetry, Walcott suddenly announced that he did not want to talk about poetry anymore, and then he asked her, "Would you make love with me?"

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Derek Walcott

The speaker then addresses the church bells telling them that when they ring for the couple's wedding, they will "come to church in time." He is implying that until then they will prefer to spend their time together enjoying on the company of each other, while they happily listen to the bells from afar.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Housman's "Bredon Hill"

The speaker begins his prayer asking for forgiveness for a sin--the original sin of being born of man and woman. Although he knows he does not remember choosing to be born, he knows that the fact that he is incarnated indicates that he is not soul-perfected: he has karma to burn, he must reap what he has sown. The speaker's sin-consciousness demonstrates that he has made significant progress as a devotee from the days when he was using his wit and charm to seduce a virgin.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101. com: John Donne's "Hymn to God the Father"

The music helps her remember her first night in the institution when "It was the strangled cold of November;/even the stars were strapped in the sky/and that moon too bright/forking through the bars to stick me/with a singing in the head." She fought incarceration at first and had to be "strapped" down; she remembers seeing the moon shining through the bars on the windows.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: November Poet – Anne Sexton

The speaker then avers that each personality is attracted to its own particular "pleasure" from which it may take "joy." But for the speaker, none of those mentioned pleases him, and his choice surpasses all the others, even though it is only one simple entity.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 91

The speaker then acknowledges that still he is as yet only a human being who cannot aver that he "fears no blot." And he offers a rather agnostic nod to his beloved soul suspecting that he might be wrong in his estimate, but if he is, he cannot realize his error.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 92

Paramahansa Yogananda's "Thy Divine Gypsy" from Songs of the Soul features a speaker who dramatizes the spiritual journey of an ardent worshiper of the Divine who sees the Creator everywhere.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Yogananda's "Thy Divine Gypsy"

Taking into account the inspiring courage being shown by people all over Tibet this year, the current world situation, and the present intransigent stance of the government of the PRC, all the participants, as Tibetan citizens should discuss in a spirit of equality, cooperation and collective responsibility the best possible future course of action to advance the Tibetan cause. This meeting should take place in an atmosphere of openness, putting aside partisan debate. Rather, it should focus on the aspirations and views of the Tibetan people. I appeal to everyone concerned to work together to contribute as best as they can.

This Special Meeting is being convened with the express purpose of providing a forum to understand the real opinions and views of the Tibetan people through free and frank discussions. It must be clear to all that this special meeting does not have any agenda for reaching a particular predetermined outcome.

from Tenzin Gyatso: The Office of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama: Special Message of HH The Dalai Lama for Tibetans In and20Outside Tibet

'Do you know a man with a digger?' I asked them. And that's how we came to meet Ray Philips.

Ray dug me a 40ft wide doughnut of a hole marked by the outline I'd sprayed in the grass. He left an island in the middle. Lining the pond with Butyl took four of us. Then I had to cut out a hole for the island. To finish, Ray laid a chunk of slate that I'd bought from Clive Richards at Mid-Wales Stone, as a bridge to the island. The pond, now completed, took a whole week to fill.

from Frieda Hughes: Daily Mail: Rocky days, stormy nights: How Frieda Hughes transformed a desolate one-acre field into the garden of her dreams

I donned multiple layers of clothing beneath waterproofs, used a pickaxe and was never without my heavy-duty rubber gloves, which saved my hands from the skin-splitting effects of putting them in potting mix - or wet mortar as I sponged the joints in my stone walling. I must have gone through 30 pairs. Only the snow brought me to a halt, because I couldn't see where I was digging.

from Frieda Hughes: Daily Mail: The magpie who came to stay: Artist Frieda Hughes has an unexpected house=2 0guest to her dream garden

Poetry's roots in sacred song are undeniable. Native American hunters around a fire praised the Great Spirit for sending buffalo. In other cultures, tillers of the soil begged a cloudless sky to split open and loose down rain. I would rank Robert Bly's translations of Kabir--a 15th-century Indian ecstatic poet raised Muslim and infused with wisdom from both the Sufis and Hindus--up there with the Hebrew Psalms and the Song of Solomon. In this poem, Kabir refers to the soul as "my inner lover":

I talk to my inner lover, and I say, why such

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

The Fields
by W. S. Merwin

Saturday on Seventh Street

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: The Fields by W. S. Merwin

The League of Minor Characters
by Kathleen Flenniken

The main character sits on his childhood bed

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: The League of Minor Characters by Kathleen Flenniken

Shame
by C. K. Williams

A girl who, in 1971, when I was living by myself, painfully lonely, bereft, depressed,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Shame by C. K. Williams

Sometimes
by David Budbill

Sometimes when day after day we have cloudless blue skies,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Sometimes by David Budbill

They eat out
by Margaret Atwood

In restaurants we argue

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: They eat out by Margaret Atwood

Waste Management
by Maurya Simon

Every night a bear comes round our house to scare up

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Waste Management by Maurya Simon

The Wedding Vow
by Sharon Olds

I did not stand at the altar, I stood

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: The Wedding Vow by Sharon Olds

Occupational hazards, well, you have to find yourself in the occupation to know about those. Here Minnie Bruce Pratt of Alabama gives us an inside look at a kind of work we all have benefited from but may never have though t much about.

Cutting Hair

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 190

One of my inspirations for this exercise was the work of D.G. Rossetti (1828-1882), the Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter. Rossetti wrote poems about his paintings or, conversely, did paintings about his poems, as was the case with "The Blessed Damozel." He called this process "the double image." Here are the two opening stanzas from "The Blessed Damozel":

The blessed damozel leaned out

from Anthony Maulucci: Norwich Bulletin: Poets have long explored their work through painting

"When gossip grows old," the Polish writer Stanislaw Lec said, "it becomes myth." In the case of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, the myth made by gossip has long obscured the art made by a couple of poets. That's a pity. It's a pity not only because many people might enjoy the poetry if they were to read it on its own merits, rather than for the customary vicarious frisson, but also because many people might not enjoy it.

from David Orr: The New York Times: Love, Your Ted

Why should being working class affect how do you do at school?

Qu ite rightly, some people have answered this in terms of the kind of squeeze that affects all working class children – lack of money, time and living space.

But there's something else. It's to do with the nature of what we might call "school knowledge". This is based on what used to be called "book learning", it favours the written word over the spoken, the theoretical and abstract over the practical.

from Michael Rosen: Socialist Worker: Class selects the educational elite
also Michael Rosen in: The Sunday Times: A novel approach to the classroom

Pleasure costs: it must be torn from "the iron gates of life", an image that obviously has little to do with jokes about virginity and much more to do with the life-threatening, as well as life-giving, realities of labour and birth. And that darker understanding is also what makes this a great poem. Its wit is underpinned by an almost-Darwinian awareness of the struggle for survival, and its tenuousness and brevity when achieved.

[by Andrew Marvell]

To His Coy Mistress

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Books blog: Poem of the week

Here, in just a few lines, we get from the "Keystone Reptil e Club" to ancient Greek pithoi--large pots often used to bury the dead. The quick movement of thought and sound brings the past into the realm of the contemporary, making immediate a world that arrives not from idea, or knowledge, but through the improvisation of song.

*

Like [John] Taggart, Roger Snell investigates the sonic possibilities of the poem in his first book-length collection--The Morning. Snell also continues a conversation with modernism, nodding in his work to Pound, Williams, Olson, and the Objectivists. It's curious to watch someone's affinities so nakedly distributed throughout a book--but a relief too.

from Dale Smith: Bookslut: Marsupial Inquirer: "Victory of the Song": John Taggart and Roger Snell

dog days
© 2008 Mónica Gómez

1
my nickname was mut

from Donna Snyder: Newspaper Tree: Tumblewords Poetry: Dog Days

Mirza Hoseyn Ali Nuri, who would later be known as Bahá'u'lláh or "The Splendor of God," was born on November 12, 1817, in Tehran, Iran. Bahá'u'lláh’s father, Mirza Abbas Nuri, was a powerful government dignitary who served as a governor until 1834 when the new Shah purged the old government. Bahá'u'lláh’s family was left with their family estate, where Bahá'u'lláh had a co mfortable childhood. As the son of nobility, traditions of the time prevented Bahá'u'lláh from receiving a formal education, but he studied calligraphy, poetry, horsemanship and swordsmanship on his own, and soon gained a reputation for his knowledge and insight.

from findingDulcinea: Happy Birthday: Bahá'u'lláh, Founder of the Bahá’í Religion

William Schwenck Gilbert, one half of the successful Gilbert and Sullivan duo, had a knack for satire and an eye for staging, producing comic operettas beloved to this day, including "The Pirates of Penzance" and "The Mikado." Gilbert coped with a difficult childhood with disagreeable parents and surmounted a period of indecision before launching himself into a renowned career writing for theater.

from findingDulcinea: Happy Birthday: W.S. Gilbert, Operetta Librettist for "The Pirates of Penzance"

Although weak in health himself, Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson will always be associated with vigorous adventure, thanks to such thrilling tales as "Kidnapped" and "Treasure Island." He also achieved international fame for his chilling (and subsequently oft-imitated) Victorian horror story, "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

from findingDulcinea: Happy Birthday: Robert Louis Stevenson, Author of 'Treasure Island'

Under the Jacarandas by Clive James

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: Under the Jacarandas by Clive James

Ode to Nitrous Oxide

by Sharon Dolin

Coleridge said that nitrous oxide--laughing gas--
provided "the most unmingled pleasure" he ever knew.
--Edward Rothstein, The New York Times

Is it only the memory of being

from Guernica: Poetry: Ode to Nitrous Oxide

By Larry Racunas

Those were days

from The Kansas City Star: Between the Lines: ‘Clotheslines,’ by Larry Racunas

The Bridgetower

by Rita Dove

from The New Yorker: Poetry: The Bridgetower

Master of Disguises

by Charles Simic

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Master of Disguises

[by Jack Nyhan]

Warmth and love
With her incandescent glow
from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: Warmth and love

There are 46 days left until the end of 2008. The nights are drawing in and the temperature is dropping. In Goose Music (Salt, £12.99), edited by Andy Brown and John Burnside, this poem captures the sombre beauty of the changing seasons.

XI The Afterlife from Eleven Gift Songs

Sooner or later, you wake in a different season,

from The Scotsman: Poem of the Week: Andy Brown and John Burnside

"Omaha Beach"
By Piotr Florczyk

from Slate: "Omaha Beach" --By Piotr Florczyk

Two Poems by Celia Dropkin

Translated from the Yiddish by Kathryn Hellerstein

A Summer Sonata

I bathed in fresh, clear waters,

from Zeek: Two Poems by Celia Dropkin

Poetic Obituaries

Motl [Brody], the third-eldest of seven siblings, had spoken of becoming a rabbi like his father, Eluzer Brody, and often wrote Hebrew poems that he sang at family functions in his soprano voice.

from The Washington Post : N.Y. Boy On Life Support in D.C. Dies

[Donald] Finkel was poet-in-residence at Washington U., where he taught from 1960 until 1991. He wrote 14 books of poetry, with long narrative and frequently humorous free verse. Admirers described it as a new form, a fusion of text and poetry.

His writing won prestigious awards. But his friends remember him best for his generous help to students, his enduring love for his late wife and writing partner, Constance Urdang, and his zeal for exploring everything around him.

from St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Donald Finkel, celebrated St. Louis poet

[Jean Ann Gilligan] worked for Munsingwear for 15 years where she was a advertising and production manager. Then she worked as office manager for a small publishing company and later worked in direct marketing for a printing company. Recent years found her in declining health.

Music and writing were always part of her life. She wrote many songs, poems and short stories.

from Belmond Independent: Jean Gilligan

Lorraine [Gertrude Hando] loved crossword puzzles, writing poetry, dancing, Friday fish fry's and trips to the casino. Her children will remember her for devotion to her20family and her Irish sense of humor. She was a wonderful cook and Saturday morning donut frying always drew a crowd.

from Appleton Post-Crescent: Hando, Lorraine Gertrude

[Joseph B.] Harlan was an avid reader who especially loved biographies. He loved to write and often wrote humorous poems to commemorate birthdays and weddings of friends and family members.

In the 1990s, he began a startup health care company. In 2001, he joined the law firm DLA Piper.

from Baltimore Sun: Joseph B. Harlan

Grace Hartigan, one of the New York painters associated with poets John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O'Hara in the 1950s during the early days of their careers, died last Saturday, November 15, at the age of 86. Hartigan's closest connection to the New York School of poets materialized in her personal relationship with Frank O'Hara throughout the ‘50s and the collaborative poem-posters they created, particularly a series of one dozen Hartigan artworks concerning text by O'Hara and with the words incorporated into the paintings.

from One Poet's Notes: Grace Hartigan and Frank O'Hara

During his life he penned five books of poe try and founded the performance poetry group Al Hellus and the Plastic Haiku Band.

He also was the founder of the Saginaw Drainage Basin Artists Alliance, which in the mid-1990s began sponsoring poetry slam competitions at the Red Eye Coffee House, 205 N. Hamilton, and an annual Rouse for Roethke, a one-day marathon reading of all of native son Theodore Roethke's poems.

from The Saginaw News: Poet's words, actions moving

[Madeline Krause] participated in the Monroe County Civic Theater and the Bloomington Playwrights Project.

Breshaun Joyner, education director for the BPP, said Krause had been involved in its plays since she was 14 years old.

Krause participated in the BPP "mini play" program where youths wrote and performed plays, Joyner said. She also took a poetry class the BPP offered.

A poem she wrote took her to a statewide poetry competition.

from Indiana Daily Student: IU student remembered for her love of acting

Most will remember Teresa "Teri" Layton as a restaurateur following in her mother's footsteps.

But what many didn't know was that she was a writer. A poet, really.

Whether it was stringing together prose about the birth of her three children, or journaling about her battle with ovarian=2 0cancer, Teri was the creative one in the family.

from Naples Daily News: Spotlight: Teresa "Teri" Layton

This poem reflects the plight of the poet who lent a rare depth and richness to Gujarati and Urdu literature. [Farid 'Adil'] Mansuri has several published collections of poetry and drama to his credit.

from The Times of India: City poet's tryst with citizenship

Mrs. [Ruth] Mushock loved to sing and was a soloist at St. Lawrence Catholic Church. She wrote poetry and was a gifted seamstress who started a custom drapery business after retiring a few years ago from Kilpatrick Stockton, where she was a legal secretary.

from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Ruth Mushock, 66, sunny in face of cancer

Re-elected to the Lok Sabha for the sixth consecutive time in 1999, [Ajit] Panja was Minister of State for External Affairs in the NDA Government headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

A man of varied talents, Panja was a keen stage actor and had won great appreciation for his portrayal of Ramakrishna Paramhans in the Bengali play 'Noti Binodini'. He was also interested in Rabindra Sangeet and writing poe ms and dramas.

from Chennaionline: Panja was a lawyer, a former minister and a stage actor

A poet and essayist, [Bohn] Stone was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2007.

According to a University press release, Stone said that he believed his duty as a writer was to prepare for "a good death."

He was a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine. His first book of poems, The Smell of Matches, was published by Rutgers University Press in 1972.

from The Emory Wheel: Stone, 72, Remembered As Doctor and Poet

Born at Sujangarh on Sept 11,1919, [Kanhaiya Lal] Sethia wrote in Rajasthani, Hindi, English and Urdu. His Poems 'Dharti Dhoran Ri', 'Pathal Aur Peethal' and 'Kun Zameen Ro Dhani' have attained the status of folk songs.

He published 18 books in Hindi and 14 books in Rajasthani.

from Times Now: Poet Kanhaiya Lal Sethia dies
also Wikipedia: Kanhaiyalal Sethia

11/11/2008

News at Eleven

Reporters Without Borders and the Burma Media Association are appalled by the combined sentence of 20 years and six months in prison that a special court in Insein prison passed today on a young blogger, Nay Phone Latt. A poet, Saw Wai, was sentenced to two years in prison for a poem containing a coded criticism of Gen. Than She, the head of the military junta.

from Reporters Without Borders: Prison court sentences blogger to 20 years, poet to two years
also The Times: Burma activists sentenced to 65 years each in draconian crackdown

[It's a Queer Time]

It's hard to know if you're alive or dead When steel and fire go roaring through your head.
One moment you'll be crouching at your gun Traversing, mowing heaps down half in fun:
The next, you choke and clutch at your right breast-- No time to think--leave all--and off you go . . .
To Treasure Island where the Spice winds blow, To lovely groves of mango, quince and lime-- Breathe no good-bye, but ho, for the Red West!
It's a queer time.

You're charging madly at them yelling "Fag!"
When somehow something gives and your feet drag.
You fall and strike your head; yet feel no pain And find . . . you're digging tunnels through the hay In the Big Barn, 'cause it's a rainy day.
Oh, springy hay, and lovely beams to climb!
You're back in the old sailor suit again.
It's a queer time.

Or you'll be dozing safe in your dug-out-- A great roar--the trench shakes and falls about You're struggling, gasping, struggling, then . . . hullo!
Elsie comes tripping gaily down the trench, Hanky to nose--that lyddite makes a stench-- Getting her pinafore all over grime.
Funny! because she died ten years ago!
It's a queer time.

The trouble is, things happen much too quick; Up jump the Boches, rifles thump and click, You stagger, and the whole scene fades away:
Even good Christians don't like passing straight From Tipperary or their Hymn of Hate To Alleluiah-chanting, and the chime Of golden harps . . . and . . . I'm not well today . . .
It's a queer time.

• Robert Graves: The Centenary Selected Poems (Carcanet Press)

from The Guardian: First World War: Robert Graves' It's a Queer Time
also The Guardian: First World War: Richard Aldington's Bombardment
also The Guardian: First World War: Madeline Ida Bedford's Munition wages
also The Guardian: First World War: Ivor Gurney's On Somme
also The Guardian: First World War: John McCrae's In Flanders Fields
also The Guardian: First World War: Wilfred Owen's Dulce Et Decorum Est
also The Guardian: First World War: Siegfried Sassoon's Suicide in the Trenches
also The Guardian: First World War: Siegfried Sassoon's Memorial Tablet

No through-line. No story arc. Just months of boredom punctuated by fantastic and horrible moments that didn't seem to connect to one another.

Poetry offered a nearly perfect vehicle to explore those moments. Two months after [Brian] Turner returned home, he finished the award-winning "Here, Bullet." A second volume will be published this spring, and he is working on a third. (Watch Turner recite "Here, Bullet" below)

Poetry has long been the soldier's art, and on Veterans Day, it is worth remembering that leaders, and all of us, have a responsibility to listen.

from The Oregonian: Why poetry is the soldier's art

Within the walls of the old prison, [Josiah Wistar] Worthington was charged with preparing the facilities for the arrival of the many exhausted and wounded troops that would inevitably be arriving from the besieged island of Corregidor, just off the tip of Bataan.

"From then on," [his daughter Frances Worthington] Lipe said, "he was a prisoner in 12 different locations. They were sent to Formosa for a period of two and a half years and then they were sent on to Manchuria--over close to the Gobi Desert. That's where he finally was liberated."

Throughout the years of captivity, Worthington's poem grew ever longer.

"A flowing beard
Makes halter shank
That's commandeered
To pull and yank,
And lead a frail
Yank 'round the trail.
Your manicure
Commands contempt.
You never know
Just what was meant,
But one swift blow
And down you go."

It was in this way the war veteran recorded tortures and privations endured under a Japanese regime not signator to the Geneva Contentions.

from The Boerne Star: Daughter makes life's work of prisoner's epic poem

Infantrymen sleep when and where they can. There's no such thing as a full night's sleep, [Suzanne] Steele found. Hers was interrupted every time a tentmate went out or came back from patrol. Once at 1 a.m., she was awakened and told "Get dressed. Sergeant wants to see you." She then spent 90 minutes in a LAV turret learning what night watch involves.

Steele is thought to be the first poet accepted in the artists program, whose roots reach back to the First World War.

from Times Colonist: Dust to verse

[Private Thomas Brandon's] time in the trenches were tough as he
described: "Not only was it living death but also living hell".

His last verse reads: "And when the war is over and your children ask for stories. Just tell them of the hardships in the Battle of Mons.

"And should they ask for more, to keep the peace in bonds. Just tell how well the British fought on the battlefield at Mons."

Margaret [Martin], who discovered her great uncle's journey said she cried when she read the poem.

from Lancashire Telegraph: Waterfoot woman discovers Hyndburn soldier's war poem

If you want a [Roberto] Bolaño book that's not going to tip your car over, or you need to know how to say menacing poetic things in Spanish (las tierras regadas con sangre me la pelan: "the soils watered with blood can suck my dick"), The Romantic Dogs will cover you on both counts.

Here's one of our favorites--the story of a mother and her young son poignantly caught up in a mysterious apocalypse.

Godzilla in Mexico

Listen carefully, my son: bombs were falling

from New York: Read an Excerpt From Roberto Bolaño's New Poetry Collection

You end up dropping back through your own trapdoors, with a kind of "they-can't-take-this-away-from-me" feeling. There's a paradox, of course, since the poems that provide the recompense are the very ones that turn your private possessions into images that are--as Yeats once said--"all on show". Yet a poem saves as well as shows. [--Seamus Heaney]

from The Guardian: 'To set the darkness echoing'

[Rachel] Zucker is right there with us. "Wane, wax, wobble/My mind is a map of hunger," she writes. "They say Abulafia could stop his heart/with one letter. Alef/lodged in his semi-lunar valve./Small e after breath/is what I do to keep living." Indeed, there is a wonderfully rendered aridity in Zucker's work, as if she is in a desert, and thirsty:

They say God's voice in the city
sounds like a man but in the desert
sounds like a woman. His voice, the spine of nighttime, sounds like water . . .
. . . One word against my sternum and
I unzip.

from The Jewish Daily Forward: Poets of the Desert and the Sea

A pothole for a grave

Antonio Batista's poem Parked Cars and Potholes in the City of Mississauga was one of the verses that led to his being convicted of threatening death against Mississauga city councillor Pat Saito.
Yesterday the Ontario Court of Appeal heard arguments on whether Mr.
Batista should have been offered the protection of freedom of speech.

Some excerpts:

Pat pot, patch pot

from Globe and Mail: Testing the limits of poetic licence

Great Regulars

"Alluding both to the assurance in the New Testament that God notes even the fall of a single sparrow and to the quotation from Hamlet assuring us that 'there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,' this poem speculates about the divine benevolence that we sometimes feel we are promised and those provisions we, by instinct or 'prescience,' make for ourselves. The poem consists, then, of 'notes'
on the swiftness of fate and the presence of grace."

[by Marjorie Stelmach]

Grace Notes

If a sparrow dies in flight, the sky

from Walter Bargen: The Post-Dispatch: Missouri Poets:
Marjorie Stelmach

J.D. McClatchy:

Election Day

The older couples had voted just after dawn,

from Jeffrey Brown: PBS: Newshour: The Electorate Process Inspires 'Election Day' Poem

Carl [Beauchamp] recently turned 70. He lives in East Greenwich and is a husband, a father, a grandfather and now, rather suddenly, a poet--some 45 years after "Grim Reaper," his first and final published poem, was written.

Grim Reaper

It's only natural

from Tom Chandler: The Providence Journal: Poem motivated by prediction of suicide

In the more intimate settings that make up the bulk of this collection, [Maura] Dooley's fascination with what lies beneath shows itself more subtly as a bent for self-interrogation, a tendency that reaches its climax in "Stent!", in which the speaker talks directly to her own heart (" 'felt, 'rending, 'broken,/it's what I knew you by").
In general, though, the "you" to whom her poems are addressed is either unaware of the attention (as in the sweetly tender "Midsummer Lullaby", in which a child, "reaching out/for a lamp to scratch the dark" is "small enough still, to make do instead/with any little light my hand might shed") or a figure who exists in memory only: it's the speaker's relationship with her loved ones, rather than the loved ones themselves, that's being examined.

from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: Ebb and flow

The desire to be alone for a time, to recharge and replenish the soul, is not neurotic. It is, indeed, healthy.

According to Psychology Today, "Loneliness is marked by a sense of isolation. Solitude, on the other hand, is a state of being alone without being lonely and can lead to self-awareness."

That's fairly well-put. Better still this quote from Henry David Thoreau's Walden: "I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."

from John Mark Eberhart: The Kansas City Star: The very hours when solitude grows

He is happy to be going home for Christmas to his family, which he calls "Old folks" in the refrain of each stanza. The trail he usually takes to reach home he has named "the Christmas trail," because it is a special ride heralding a happy reunion.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Badger Clark's "The Christmas Trail"

He continues his modern convenience bashing by telling the promising poet to avoid "screens." In addition to television screens, these "screens" would include computer screens, one would suppose. But then he says, "Stay away from anything/that obscures the place it is in."
He seems to suggest that even decorative screens, such as room dividers, are to be avoided also.

He then remarks, "There are no unsacred places;/there are only sacred places/and desecrated places."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Berry's "How To Be a Poet"

After hearing the price, "A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars," the speaker lets the reader know that at the point he knew he never meant to sell them. The city merchant then drops out of the dialogue, leaving it a mystery exactly how the speaker said no and what the man's response might have been. The speaker does say what he believed about haggling over price: "Never show surprise!"

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Frost's "Christmas Trees"

When the Muse forsakes him, as she often does, he promises that he will not continue to call her "sweet beloved name." He will allow her to vanish, in case he "should do it wrong." If the resulting sonnet becomes "too much profane," he does not want his Muse to suffer the blame, for he knows that he alone is responsible for the errors, while the Muse is solely responsible for the motivation and inspiration.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 89

The speaker then commands the Muse not to return again to cause him grief, for he knows and avers that he will be able to soldier on; he will escape the "sorrow." But he knows how love-turned-to-hate wants to add insult to injury. He commands his fickle Muse, "Give not a windy night a rainy morrow,/To linger out a purpos'd overthrow."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 90

The speaker begins by celebrating the function of the physical parts of the rose that keeps its physical body alive and growing: "They did their best/And they are blest--/The sap, the shoots,/The little leaves and roots." The speaker/writer changes the term "blessed" to "blest,"
thereby doubling the rime from a mere sound rime to include a sight rime. The double rime strengthens the emphasis of the idea of the Divine working through these vital parts of the plant.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Yogananda's "Undying Beauty"

"Talking Turkeys" consists of five stanzas. It is a cross between a rap song and a versanelle, with a reggae flavor. It scintillates with rime but does not display a consistent rime scheme. While the poem's delivery appears to emphasize the fun in its subject, its deeper message is quite serious: Benjamin Zephaniah is an activist vegan-vegetarian.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Zephaniah's "Talking Turkeys"

If this new sense of urgency doesn't help you, my advice is this:
Drink some Chianti, take a nap, dream yourself doing impossible acrobatics, then rise with a new clarity. Take it one step at a time.
If you haven't found a solution in a couple of years, you need to shake up your brain some more. Read poems that are so incomprehensible that they leave you flabbergasted, like poems in an unknown foreign language or maybe some by John Ashbery, and you will be hungrier than ever to return to Fermat's theorem.

from Kristen Hoggart: The Smart Set: Ask a Poet: Wedding Bells?

I had been digging holes in which to upend the rocks; only when they were in position could I dig flowerbeds, as a digger was needed to move them around, and flowerbeds would get in the way. I was sleepless with excitement the night before the stones arrived--34 tons of them.
Life is about finding purpose and I had found mine; I would spend days landscaping the garden and evenings painting and writing poetry.

from Frieda Hughes: Daily Mail: The art of gardening: How Frieda Hughes turned 34 tons of rock and a huge hole into a garden to rival her abstract paintings

[John Ashbery] says a turning point came with his collection, "Rivers and Mountains," published in 1966. For years, he had been pulling apart the art of verse, now he would stitch it back. The evolution continued with "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror." He usually works quickly and rarely revises, accumulating words in his mind so they stream onto the page. But for "Self-Portrait," he found himself struggling, having to set work aside and then come back to it.

"I had very low expectations," he says. "The poems cost me much more effort than anything I had written before."

from Hillel Italie: Associated Press: Foster's Daily
Democrat: John Ashbery--movie fan and canonical poet

In his seminal essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T.S. Eliot argues that only a poet's grounding in history sustains the work after the tidal upsurge of adolescent passion has receded. Jack Gilbert draws from history when he goes from a warrior's fevered heroics to the average wife's daily fidelity in "The Abnormal Is Not Courage":

The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German

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

3
by John Berryman

Sole watchman of the flying stars, guard me

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: 3 by John Berryman

Amphibious
by Erin Murphy

My daughter wants to take

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Amphibious by Erin Murphy

Following the Road
by Larry Smith

I have left my wife at the airport,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Following the Road by Larry Smith

How To Be a Poet
by Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: How To Be a Poet by Wendell Berry

Lucky
by Tony Hoagland

If you are lucky in this life,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Lucky by Tony Hoagland

Middle-Aged Men, Leaning
by Bruce Taylor

four movements

~
They lean on rakes.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Middle-Aged Men, Leaning by Bruce Taylor

On The Days I Am Not My Father
by Scott Owens

I don't yell. I don't hold inside

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: On The Days I Am Not My Father by Scott Owens

In celebration of Veteran's Day, here is a telling poem by Gary Dop, a Minnesota poet. The veterans of World War II, now old, are dying by the thousands. Here's one still with us, standing at Normandy, remembering.

On Swearing

In Normandy, at Point Du Hoc,

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 189

[James] McCrary's writings are like gesture drawings of artists, where ink outlines horizons and encloses balloons of space. The first line of this poem sets up the philosophical framework, questions about "out there." Then the words suggest the very basics of thunderclouds
gathering: clouds, movement, "electric," "a bit of wet," and then more movement. Then the narrator compares weather to thought, which is "there" and "here" at once or "t(here)".

7/25/91

Thinking about out there

from Denise Low: Ad Astra Poetry Project: James O. McCrary (1941--)

Breakfast

eggs or breasts?

from E. Ethelbert Miller: E-Notes: Breakfast

The Odyssey of O

Origins omen oracle obvious odd odd-ball odds one

from E. Ethelbert Miller: E-Notes: The Odyssey of O

I'd written my graduate thesis and then a book on Edward Thomas, who was killed at Arras in 1917. I'd visited the battlefields of that region several times - once with my father, on the 60th anniversary of the D-day landings. I'd edited an anthology of first-world-war poetry.
Meeting Harry, I thought, would connect the writing to its circumstances in a uniquely powerful way.

And so it did. After a train-ride to Bristol, then a drive along the misty switch-back to Wells, I found Harry's nursing home among the suburbs. The staff told me how to get the best from him: he might be amazingly robust for someone 110 years old, but 110 was 110. I should speak up, talk slowly, repeat myself if necessary.

from Andrew Motion: The Guardian: Meeting Harry

A typical [Kay] Ryan poem begins with a proposition--"Everything contains some/silence" or "It's what we can't/know that interests/us."
She explores old bromides, wondering what the fabric of life is like
("stretchy") or what it might be like to live on an island where silence is revered. Here's "Green Hills," from The Niagara River, her sixth (and most recent) book:

Their green flanks

from Meghan O'Rourke: phillyBurbs.com: The outsider artist

As in dreams or some forms of mental illness, the systematic becomes a form of derangement. Here, the zany yet orderly movement from thing to thing also feels fateful and pointed. Even the sudden introduction of the first person--" 'Twas like a lion at my door"--feels inevitable and foredoomed as well as crazy and unanticipated. The doubleness of deed, the doubleness of linked repetitions, the doubleness of couplet
rhyme: How can these dual processes resolve themselves? With the disruptive, emphatic, and triple repetition in the final line.

There was a man of double deed,

from Robert Pinsky: Slate: "There Was a Man of Double Deed": The unhinged reason of an anonymous classic

When I buy a poppy, I listen across the years to someone else's painful memories (my grandmother's) of someone who was killed 23 years before I was born (her young brother). What we remember after so many years depends increasingly on the power of words and images--which are themselves formed of memories. In a week when we also remember the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, Isaac Rosenberg's words, tougher than poppies, ask to be worn close to the heart, and closer still to the brain.

In the Trenches

I snatched two poppies

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: theblogbooks: Poem of the week

by Nancy Lorenza Green

The tall
Black man
steps
into
the light

from Donna Snyder: Newspaper Tree: Tumblewords Poetry: A Moment in History

I still am a huge animal rights advocate. When I put out And We the Creatures, I was really focussed again on animal rights. That was just shortly after my first book. And I felt that there were really no good poems on animal rights. There were a lot of people trying. Myself included. I tried a lot and failed. But I think I managed to get one or two decent ones out. And I managed to find a few others.

from Belinda Subraman Presents: C. J. Sage: Poet and Editor

Bicycle Day

by Mel Nichols

and then rode down into the rock-filled cave

from The Brooklyn Rail: Poetry: Bicycle Day

Blaise Memories 1-4

by Vincent Katz

OSRAM Bellalux

from The Brooklyn Rail: Poetry: Blaise Memories 1-4

Homage a Ponge

by Charles North

1
Some of the things it is best known for: Movies rarely do justice!

from The Brooklyn Rail: Poetry: Homage a Ponge

'People I wish I'd Known'

by David Novros

Tarkowsky

from The Brooklyn Rail: Poetry: 'People I wish I'd Known'

Cold Mountain wrote his poems on the rocks, tree, and temple walls of China's Tientai Mountains. He earned a place as an influential figure in the history of Chinese literature through his rigorous honesty and insight on the human condition.

Red Pine is one of the world's foremost translators of Chinese literary and religious texts. He began translating Chinese poetry while living in a monastery in Taiwan, and visited Cold Mountain's remote caves in preparation for these translations.

180
I reached Cold Mountain and all cares stopped

from Good Times Weekly: Poetry Corner: Chinese Stone Poems

Tara Boulevard by Derek Mahon

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: Tara Boulevard by Derek Mahon

By Maryfrances Wagner

After the neighbor sprays,

from The Kansas City Star: Between the Lines: Three haiku by Maryfrances Wagner

The Coffin Store

by C. K. Williams

from The New Yorker: Poetry: The Coffin Store

Exxon

by Robert Wrigley

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Exxon

[by Judy Curtis]

Do Remember

Do remember when childhood dreams

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: Do Remember

[Kevin Young's] poems play on the deep links between food and identity, not only culturally but on the individual level: Each person's maque choux, brisket or gumbo is an expression of his own individuality and so entirely different from another's:

From "Elegy for Maque Choux":
I sure
couldn't make maque choux.
Still, no one can do

from Powells: Review-A-Day: Dear Darkness Poems

The Hike

by Genie Zeiger

November is the hardest month,

from The Sun Magazine: Poetry: The Hike

Poetic Obituaries

In his later years [Baldev Raj (B.R.)] Chopra turned to television, serializing Hindu epic poem "Mahabharat," which aired on pubcaster Doordarshan beginning in 1988-89. With its 98% world viewership the serial has entered the Guinness Book of Records.

from Variety: Bollywood vet B.R. Chopra dies

A poet, Brigitte [Dunn] once, years before 9/11, wrote of the World Trade Center crumbling in an earthquake, John Dunn said.

from The Gazette: Man faces a long, lonely road trip home

[Rick Edwards] was the consummate lifelong learner voraciously reading books of all kinds as if he could consume the knowledge of the ages through treasuring the written word. He engaged his talents as a writer as well. He wrote clearly and beautifully, writing everything from newsletters for his team to poetry for those he especially cared about.

from Lane 9 News: Michigan's Rick Edwards, 58

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor killed more than 2,400 people and led to America's entry into World War II.

[Richard] Ferguson, years after the attack, wrote "Look Back Once More," a collection of poems and prose describing his Pearl Harbor experiences.

from The Joplin Globe: Pearl Harbor attack survivor dead at 88

Krystal Griffin, a massage therapist student at Otero Junior College in La Junta, had her first poem published when she was 11. It was a short poem published in the 2001 edition of "Anthology of Poetry by Young Americans." The accomplishment fueled her hope of publishing her own poetry book someday.

from KMGH Denver: 2 Sisters, Grandmother Killed In Train Crash

Nancy [M. Kelling] enjoyed music and self taught herself to play keyboard and the trombone. She also enjoyed writing poetry, and participated in various plays in the Chilton area.

from Sheboygan Press: Nancy M. Kelling

Aside from serving as editor of the New York Times Book Review (back when it actually meant something) during its glory years between 1971 and 1975, [John] Leonard contributed a monthly books column for Harper's and served as television critic for New York Magazine.

from Edward Champion's Reluctant Habits: RIP John Leonard

Born in Dublin in 1934, [James] Liddy is perhaps best known for his early collections, In A Blue Smoke (1964) and Blue Mountain (1968).
The first volume of his memoir, The Doctor's House: An Autobiography , was published in 2004.

The director of the Arts Council, Mary Cloake, said Liddy was one of the most independent, engaging and original poets of his time. "His poetry, which revealed a consistent intellectual and emotional curiosity, was widely read in Ireland and abroad," she said.

from The Irish Times: Tributes paid after death of poet James Liddy, aged 73

Mrs.[Zoila] Melendez was a dedicated Yankees fan and avid reader who enjoyed writing poetry.

She was a warm person, and cooked many Honduran specialties and took great pleasure in gathering family and friends in her home and entertaining.

from Staten Island News: Zoila Menendez, 88

A soldier shot dead by a Taliban gunman wrote a poignant eulogy which he asked to be read at his funeral.

In his moving piece, Private Jason Rawstron said that he realised the 'reality and true meaning of life' while he was fighting in Helmand province in Afghanistan.

from Lancashire Telegraph: Remembrance Sunday: Shot Clayton-le-Moors soldier wrote eulogy for funeral

A nod to [Jean] Snyder's sense of humour and flair for the dramatic, she also kept a shiny disco ball that hung above the room spinning throughout the service.

[Pat] Pickett decided to speak, with a promise from her daughters to back her up if she fell to pieces--which she didn't.

She described a mother who was a storyteller, an artist and poet, a fashion plate and a caretaker who, later in life, became a fan of Jimmy Buffett and margaritas.

from The Canadian Press: Daughter gives mother a dignified send-off with meagre resources

The last of his five books of poetry was titled "Music From Apartment 8," a reference to his mother's home in Decatur. Dr. [John] Stone also wrote an essay, that ran in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution four years ago, about shielding his mother from reports of terrorism and war. She was 96 at the time and died last year, just shy of her 99th birthday.

Dr. Stone's anthology of literature and medicine, "On Doctoring:
Stories, Poems, Essays," co-edited with Richard Reynolds, has been issued to first-year medical students for the past 17 years, according to the Emory spokeswoman.

from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: John Stone, 72, doctor with poetic talents

[Benjamin E.] Strohmeier, who also enjoyed writing poetry and short stories, had been working at Miguel's Pizza at the gorge.

Crews returned to the area where Strohmeier and [Laura] Fletcher died Wednesday morning, inspecting equipment they hadn't seen on the rock the day before, said John May, a member of Wolfe County Search and Rescue.

There was webbing, a type of strap climbers use, on an anchor bolt, and the webbing "essentially tore in half, and as a result the climbers fell," May said.

from Lexington Herald-Leader: Officials: Frayed strap caused 2 climbers' fatal fall

[Geneva Edith 'Mausey' Hudson Talburt] contributed many articles and letters to her hometown newspaper the Batesville Guard over the years.
She also wrote poetry all of her life and amassed volumes of personal work.

from The Baxter Bulletin: Geneva Edith 'Mausey' Hudson Talburt, 97

11/04/2008

News at Eleven

These poets, in short, inspired each other. [Robert] Lowell always seems to be stuffing her newest poem into his billfold, so he can take it out later like a hundred-dollar bill. [Elizabeth] Bishop saw immediately how strange and even shocking "Life Studies" (1959) was (its confessional style caused as violent an earthquake in American poetry as "The Waste Land"); but he noticed something more subtle, that she rarely repeated herself. Each time she wrote, it was as if she were reinventing what she did with words, while he tended to repeat his forms until he had driven them into the ground, or driven everyone crazy with them.

from The New York Times: 'I Write Entirely for You' also The Village Voice: A Great Poetic Twosome: The Elizabeth Bishop-Robert Lowell Letters

To be sure, his [Constantine Cavafy's] work--the best of it, at any rate, which is as good as great poetry gets--is indeed timeless in the way we like to think that great literature can be, alchemizing the particulars of the poet's life, times, and obsessions into something relevant to a wide public over years and even centuries. But the tendency to see him as one of us, as someone of our own moment, speaking to us in a voice that is transparently, recognizably our own about things whose meaning is self-evident, threatens to take a crucial specificity away from him--one that, if we restore it to him, makes him seem only greater, more a poet of the future (as he once described himself).

from The New York Review of Books: 'As Good as Great Poetry Gets'

Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace, Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace-- Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath, And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs, deliver Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before death Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God.

On the surface, such a swirl of language might resemble logorrhea, yet Hopkins is always striving to be precise, to arrive at what he called the haecceitas, or thisness, the fundamental individuality of an idea or thing. Even now the poetry that resulted seems astonishingly modern. Imagine how rebarbative, how transgressive it must have sounded in the age of Tennyson.

from The Washington Post: Michael Dirda on 'Gerard Manley Hopkins'

"Elegy Against the Massacre at the Amish School in West Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, Autumn 2006" uses language as stark and plain as hymns.
This tragedy might hold a particular poignancy for [Susan] Stewart.
Now an English professor at Princeton and an important theorist of poetry and aesthetics (in books such as The Open Studio and Poetry and the Fate of the Senses), she was once a child of the southern Pennsylvania countryside. She grew up observing the Amish; her love of the soft landscape they cohabited has become fused, in her poetry, with the tradition of the English pastoral lyric.

from The Nation: Lullaby: Susan Stewart's Red Rover

Then W. S. Merwin proceeds with a group of personal poems that recall childhood moments ("my mother told me/that I was not afraid of the dark/and when I looked it was true"), the death of a father, the inheritance of a Webster's dictionary that became a well-worn poet's tool.

The second section of the book deals with darkness and mourning, centered on a stunning rendition of "Little Soul," a poem attributed to the Emperor Hadrian. Here is Merwin's version:

Little soul little stray

from The Seattle Times: Poet ponders life's contrasts in "The Shadow of Sirius"

"He writes in every poetry form known to man," says local poet Spiel, one of [Jim] Hall's friends.

Proclaims Hall, in a voice deep, resonant and wise: "You should never be afraid of trying something new."

That may as well be Hall's daily mantra. He writes. He rewrites. He learns. He experiments. And he writes some more.

"I write at least one poem every day," says Hall. "In fact, I have a
motto: A writer is someone who wrote something today."

from The Pueblo Chieftain: Poet's passion

[Matthew] Zapruder seems to imagine the poet's role to be a kind of cultural medium. In the interview with Rob McLennan linked above, Zapruder says he prefers to write in the presence of ambient sounds, and it's plausible to hear them registered in the poes. In "Andale Mono," for example, he imagines poetry, first as a light inside a closet, then as a kind of ventriloquism, and finally simply as
tautology:

In the poem we want to try to set off a light each time

from Bookslut: The Pajamaist by Matthew Zapruder

In What's Right About What's Wrong, [Donna] Trussell's verse thrives on ultimate terms: the tension and polarity between living and dying.
Her finest poems could have been written only by someone who has come face to face with such terms.

from The Kansas City Star: Donna Trussell turns survival and loss into powerful poetry

[Wilfred] Owen was shot dead on 4 November 1918, just a week before the armistice, but his death seemed no more or less significant than any other soldier's.

Other than colleagues and family, only a few dedicated followers of English letters would have known the young man's name: he had published only five poems before he was killed.

from BBC News: Myth and magic of Wilfred Owen

Thus we have here Ruskin [Bond]'s volume of poetry, old-fashionedly lyrical and versatile, written with a feel for the short English line and poetic form acquired from decades of dealing in the language, shot through with nostalgia for a vanished Anglo-Indian way of life and love of Mussorie, the hill station within whose piney heights Rusty-Ruskin has sequestered himself these last few decades.

Secondhand Shop in Hill Station

from The Daily Star: On Ruskin Bond's poetry

Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes

from WorldChanging: A Poem for Election Day

Great Regulars

What if [John Crowe] Ransom had used saddened instead? How flat, how empty of the truth of the moment! He wanted that touch of anger, of distress that the world can take away such liveliness. The power of a good poem is that its short lines, its choice of line breaks, calls our attention to the words. We become skilled at listening harder, and that makes us less vulnerable to manipulation.

Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter

from Fleda Brown: Traverse City Record-Eagle: On Poetry: Word power makes us listen

By John Mark Eberhart

(this is for Philip Miller and Sherri Eberhart)

The god of molecules sweats the small stuff.

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: 'The God of Molecules'

Like the typical abusive husband who promises to change and never do those bad things again, "Impeccable he spoke. His smile was glowing."
But she had been through enough. Living with a man who embodied all of the "seven deadly sins" had convinced her that the best path to take from thence on was to "beat it to St. Anne's where she took the veil."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Gwynn's "Snow White and the Seven Deadly Sins"

Unfortunately, this poem reveals that Keats' grasp of history is tenuous, further emphasizing the fact that readers cannot trust poets with historical accuracy. Some critics have argued that the use of the name "Cortez" fits the rhythm of the line better and are willing to sacrifice historical accuracy for aesthetics--an unfortunate and even dangerous stance.

It is doubtful that Keats meant any perfidy with his error and probably believed he was being accurate in crediting Cortez with the discovery.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Keats' "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"

The speaker begins his seduction play by pointing out that the two people involved are mortal and therefore should not delay physical gratification. It they had all the time in the world, they could pass it any number of ways, including the close cogitation about "which way/To walk." She could amble along the Ganges River in India looking for precious gemstones, while he would go crumbling to himself, waiting for her by the Humber River in England.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress"

The speaker/poet knows his own value and position, including his own weaknesses. Thus, in his art he believes he is wont to display, from time to time, remnants of those weaknesses. Even when his "story"
tries to cover his flaws, he knows that they will show through the work, for he also knows his unique talent is employed for truth-telling.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 88

Like a "schoolmaster," the kiss would teach them both the pleasures of "take and give." The yielding of each partner would offer a "friendly fray." But the "blow" each receives would "both wound and heal." And the feigned death would only allow each to live more fully in the other.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Sir Philip Sidney's "Sonnet 79"

But even though he had committed this regrettable act, he "dared to rob it of its smell!" He brought the rose to his nostrils and deeply inhaled its delightful perfume, and then he immediately felt another pang of remorse for having delighted his own senses at the rose's expense

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Yogananda's "Blood of the Rose"

If the Tibetan national identity is sustained well, its value systems--based as they are on the Buddhist tenets of loving kindness and compassion--have an innate quality of being beneficial for the whole of the world. Therefore, our struggle for truth is not only related to the benefit of the six million Tibetans, it is also closely related to our ability to provide a certain amount of benefit to the entire world. Our struggle for truth, thus, has reason behind it. If in the future the Tibetan struggle for truth is amicably and properly resolved, it will certainly help millions of people, including those in China, to discover new prospects for leading a healthier, more meaningful life, securing both mental and physical happiness.

On the other hand, if Tibet were to become a society that pursues only material benefit--as a result of China's complete obliteration of Tibetan religion and culture, the very basis of which is compassion--this will, instead of benefiting the Chinese people, lead to their loss in the future.

from Tenzin Gyatso: The Office of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama: Clarifications on H.H. the Dalai Lama's Remarks

With "Partita for Sparrows," she [Brenda Hillman" makes the poignant act of burying dead sparrows in Europe embody the persistence in that continent--scarred by tyranny--of dangerous class hierarchies that foment unrest. Presume that her choices aren't haphazard and try to unpack each detail. You'll enter a mythic landscape fresh with
meaning:

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

A day in bed with Aunt Maud
by Elizabeth Smither

My dear high-foreheaded aunt, good

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: A day in bed with Aunt Maud by Elizabeth Smither

I'll Be Seeing You
by Jo McDougall

World War II is slipping away, I can feel it.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: I'll Be Seeing You by Jo McDougall

Lessons
by Pat Schneider

I have learned

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Lessons by Pat Schneider

On Catalpa Street
by Jo McDougall

At dusk, when kitchen-window light

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: On Catalpa Street by Jo McDougall

#67: Success is counted sweetest
by Emily Dickinson

Success is counted sweetest

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: #67: Success is counted sweetest by Emily Dickinson

To a Leaf Falling in Winter
by W. S. Merwin

At sundown when a day's words

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: To a Leaf Falling in Winter by W. S. Merwin

Walking the Dog on the Night before He Is to Be Fixed by John Stone

As far as I can tell, old chum, neuter

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Walking the Dog on the Night before He Is to Be Fixed by John Stone

I really like this poem by Dick Allen, partially for the way he so easily draws us in, with his easygoing, conversational style, but also for noticing what he has noticed, the overlooked accompanist there on the stage, in the shadow of the singer.

The Accompanist

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 188

This process can work in reverse, meaning a poet can better understand what he is attempting to express in a poem if he transforms it into a drawing or painting. It is not a big leap from words to a picture since most good poetry contains visual imagery.

Perhaps the most extreme example of this is Japanese haiku, which is primarily composed of essential images.

from Anthony Maulucci: Norwich Bulletin: Poetry, art have symbiotic relationship

Walter White's Night Train

On the train back north

from E. Ethelbert Miller: Foreign Policy in Focus: E-Notes: Walter White's Night Train

Human rights, the rule of law, and even the country's status as a republic are in grave danger in China, according to a former top Communist Party aide.

In an essay lauding the European Parliament's decision to award the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought to jailed AIDS activist Hu Jia, former high-ranking cadre Bao Tong said the fight to defend human rights and the rule of law had now entered the lives of ordinary Chinese people at every social level.

from Luisetta Mudie: Radio Free Asia: China's Rights Struggle 'Urgent'

Walt Whitman's poem celebrating Election Day calls our "quadrennial choosing" a more spectacular and powerful show than national scenic marvels such as Yosemite, Niagara Falls or the "spasmic geyserloops"
of Yellowstone.

The poem is not wet or glibly sunny. Whitman chooses to speak of voting day not as beautiful or sacred but as "powerful." He compares it not to forest glades or meadows but to the fluid, dynamic energy of rivers, geysers and waterfalls and to the immense scale of mountains and prairies.

from Robert Pinsky: The Boston Globe: A poem for Election Day

Psychologically, the poem is a piercing portrait of the human "soul", with its rational fear of death and its irrational dream of a future "Good morning", if not "in some brighter clime", at least amid the whirling atoms.

[by Anna Laetitia Barbauld]

Life

(Animula, vagula, blandula)

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: theblogbooks: Poem of the week

Romantic preoccupations with self, childhood, and nature give this poem its untimely wonder. It asks questions that return again and again to challenge us with temptations to form answers. And yet, [Roger] Snell allows the poem to stand as its own response to the impossibility of life. It is the artifact of his witness and recollection in words.

from Dale Smith: Bookslut: Marsupial Inquirer: "Victory of the Song": John Taggart and Roger Snell

There is a basic crux that follows through in my work from the get-go and that is I always try to paint a picture in the reader's head. And I think the thing that's really changed the most is I pay attention to sound a lot more than I did before.

from Belinda Subraman Presents: J.P. Dancing Bear: Poet, Editor of APJ and Dream Horse Press

China, for its economic modernization, needs creativity and individuals who are willing to do things in new ways. But it is difficult to limit the creative individual only to selling goods in new ways. The creative individual also thinks about the way power is exercised, the way work is organized, the way that corruption wins out over competence and professionalism.

More and more creative people are banding together, some into legally recognized Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), many others into informal networks.

from René Wadlow: Tibetan Review: The sunshine and shadows of life in fast-changing China

Out of Season

Ros Barber

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: Out of Season

The Body or its Not

by Keetje Kuipers

I have plans to kill a creature. The best

from Guernica: Poetry: The Body or its Not

By Greg Field

All the children in my art room

from The Kansas City Star: Between the Lines: 'Possession Is Nine Tenths of the Law'

From This to That

by Eamon Grennan

from The New Yorker: Poetry: From This to That

Prayers

by Rae Armantrout

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Prayers

Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina

by Jack Gilbert

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina

[by Joan Rochette]

Autumn Ballet

There is the cold, and the smell of skunk

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem from the Portsmouth Poetry Hoot

[by Meredith Maloney, age 10]

Once I fell asleep and found

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: Once I fell asleep and found that I was in outer space

Theories and Apparitions (Cape, £9) is Mark Doty's new collection.
Visions and beauty abound, uniting in this wishful sighting of John Berryman (1914-1972) tucking into lunch on the corner of 21st Street.

Apparition

Chilly noon on Seventh,

from The Scotsman: Poem of the Week: Mark Doty, Apparition

"Upon Hearing a 2-Year-Old's First Attempts at an Elvis Impression, I Recall the Difficulties of Her Birth"
By John Hodgen

from Slate: "Upon Hearing a 2-Year-Old's First Attempts at an Elvis Impression, I Recall the Difficulties of Her Birth" --By John Hodgen

Poetic Obituaries

[Caren Acker] started her artistic career as a modern dancer with the Carol Conway Dance Company in Manhattan. Later, she worked with Richard Lewis, the author and early childhood educator, teaching dance, movement, puppetry and poetry in elementary school workshops throughout the New York area.

from Post-Bulletin: Caren Acker--Rochester

[Charlene O. Alexander] was an organist, pianist, Sunday school teacher, junior choir director, church board member and a Women's Fellowship member. Charlene's church family was very important to her.
She was a 4-H leader for over 30 years, wrote poetry and children's music and was an active reader.

from Palladium-Item: Charlene O. Alexander

A published poet, he [John Burchenal 'Burch' Ault] once said that "by writing about one's own life, one begins to wonder about the general condition of human life."

Ault remained committed to the education of youth for his entire life, once saying, "I know of no other college or university that does all this as well as St. John's. For 25 years, I have been a student, enthralled and deeply grateful."

from The New Mexican: John Burchenal 'Burch' Ault, 1926-2008: St. John's official loved learning, education

"There are very few people in life that can do that. Most people can do it with one or two or three or four people in their lives. Sherri did it with a number of people."

Even her [Sherri Eberhart's] husband of 19 years, John Mark Eberhart (The Star's book review editor), felt that she was never his alone: "I loved her very much, but I also knew that, for Sherri, community was the thing."

from The Kansas City Star: Tribute: Sherri Eberhart was a friend to the community

[Marilyn Ferguson] also wrote short stories and poems that were published in women's magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Mademoiselle.

After moving to Los Angeles in 1968, she began studying psychology and collecting the information that formed the basis of her next book, "The Brain Revolution" (1973), which explored new research on such topics as hypnosis, meditation, extrasensory perception, memory and genetics.

from Los Angeles Times: Marilyn Ferguson, 70, dies; writer's 'The Aquarian Conspiracy' was pivotal in New Age movement

Angeline Gain battled with the addiction for five years and, tragically, had finally managed to beat the bottle when she died from complications arising from liver disease in March this year.

Now the 35-year-old's family has released a poignant poem to the Evening Telegraph to warn others about the dangers of turning to drink.

from Evening Telegraph: Poem reveals secret pain of daughter who battled against drink addiction also Evening Telegraph: Angie's Poem

News at Eleven

These poets, in short, inspired each other. [Robert] Lowell always seems to be stuffing her newest poem into his billfold, so he can take it out later like a hundred-dollar bill. [Elizabeth] Bishop saw immediately how strange and even shocking "Life Studies" (1959) was (its confessional style caused as violent an earthquake in American poetry as "The Waste Land"); but he noticed something more subtle, that she rarely repeated herself. Each time she wrote, it was as if she were reinventing what she did with words, while he tended to repeat his forms until he had driven them into the ground, or driven everyone crazy with them.

from The New York Times: 'I Write Entirely for You' also The Village Voice: A Great Poetic Twosome: The Elizabeth Bishop-Robert Lowell Letters

Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes

from WorldChanging: A Poem for Election Day

By John Mark Eberhart

(this is for Philip Miller and Sherri Eberhart)

The god of molecules sweats the small stuff.

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: 'The God of Molecules'

A day in bed with Aunt Maud
by Elizabeth Smither

My dear high-foreheaded aunt, good

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: A day in bed with Aunt Maud by Elizabeth Smither

I'll Be Seeing You
by Jo McDougall

World War II is slipping away, I can feel it.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: I'll Be Seeing You by Jo McDougall

Lessons
by Pat Schneider

I have learned

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Lessons by Pat Schneider

On Catalpa Street
by Jo McDougall

At dusk, when kitchen-window light

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: On Catalpa Street by Jo McDougall

#67: Success is counted sweetest
by Emily Dickinson

Success is counted sweetest

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: #67: Success is counted sweetest by Emily Dickinson

To a Leaf Falling in Winter
by W. S. Merwin

At sundown when a day's words

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: To a Leaf Falling in Winter by W. S. Merwin

Walter White's Night Train

On the train back north

from E. Ethelbert Miller: Foreign Policy in Focus: E-Notes: Walter White's Night Train

Out of Season

Ros Barber

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: Out of Season

The Body or its Not

by Keetje Kuipers

I have plans to kill a creature. The best

from Guernica: Poetry: The Body or its Not

By Greg Field

All the children in my art room

from The Kansas City Star: Between the Lines: 'Possession Is Nine Tenths of the Law'

From This to That

by Eamon Grennan

from The New Yorker: Poetry: From This to That

Prayers

by Rae Armantrout

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Prayers

Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina

by Jack Gilbert

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina

[by Joan Rochette]

Autumn Ballet

There is the cold, and the smell of skunk

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem from the Portsmouth Poetry Hoot

[by Meredith Maloney, age 10]

Once I fell asleep and found

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: Once I fell asleep and found that I was in outer space

Angeline Gain battled with the addiction for five years and, tragically, had finally managed to beat the bottle when she died from complications arising from liver disease in March this year.

Now the 35-year-old's family has released a poignant poem to the Evening Telegraph to warn others about the dangers of turning to drink.

from Evening Telegraph: Poem reveals secret pain of daughter who battled against drink addiction also Evening Telegraph: Angie's Poem

~~~~~~~~~~

Mr [Mohammed] Hussain was a self-described poet who was detained on Nauru by Australian authorities under the Howard government's so called "Pacific solution". But his claims for asylum were rejected by immigration officials and he was sent back to Afghanistan.

Mr Glendenning met Mr Hussain in January in Kabul, where the Australian was filming a documentary, A Well-Founded Fear, about asylum seekers rejected during the Howard years.

Mr Hussain told Mr Glendenning he could not live in Afghanistan because of the Taliban and other factional enemies, and now lived in a place where there was a coal mine, "a mountain and no one else".

from The Sydney Morning Herald: Beheaded after trying for asylum in Australia

"He was a conscientious objector in World War II," Arthur Larrabee said [of his father Kent Larrabee]. "He went to jail" in New York State, but for less than a year because the war ended.

In the early 1980s, Mr. Larrabee was distributing his antiwar poetry in Moscow when the authorities took a very close interest.

"After he got arrested, the police went through his knapsack, wondering who was this guy," his son said. "After they read all his stuff, they decided he was a good guy and gave him a tour of Moscow - in a police car - so to honor him."

from The Philadelphia Inquirer: Activist sacrificed pay for peace

A Malayalam teacher with 34 years of his service in various NSS colleges in the state, Gopinathan Nair was also renowned as a poet and author of many books as well as a regular contributor to various journals.

His close association with M P Manmathan, who remained in the vanguard of the Sarvodya Mandalam and Prohibition Movement, became a turning point in the life of Gopinathan Nair.

from Express Buzz: Trikkodithanam Gopinathan Nair passes away

The coursework emphasized classic literature, language study, current events and the arts. The Orrs initiated a music program that brought to the school jazz and folk artists, including Duke Ellington and Jean Ritchie.

Mrs. [Eleanor] Orr worked with U.S. poet laureate Richard Eberhart, whose son was a student at the school, to create a poet-in-residence workshop. There was also a course on opera.

from The Washington Post: Eleanor W. Orr, 81; Co-Founded District's Hawthorne School

Mr [Jacob] Rosenberg's poetry and prose have been published in Australia and overseas, with a number of poems translated into Hebrew and Russian.

His most recent work, the paradoxically titled Sunrise West the follow-up to East of Time was honoured at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards earlier this year.

from The Australian Jewish News: Acclaimed author Jacob Rosenberg dies at 86

Mak Sooi Joo, former principal of St. Nicholas Convent secondary school, was among those Millicent [Sibert] saw grow from a child to a teacher and later principal of the school.

Mak said she was able to work very well with Millicent, who taught music, english and poetry.

from The New Straits Times: Former St Nicholas Convent principal Millicent Sibert passes away

A hip-hop fan, [Jacob] Toves wrote poetry and performed it for his friend over beats that he produced on his computer. Toves cracked jokes and laughed often, Padilla said.

from Los Angeles Times: Marine Lance Cpl. Jacob Toves, 27, Grover Beach; among 3 killed in Afghanistan

Bill [Wright] had many talents and interests (architecture and design, magic, travel, poetry, genealogy, writing, solar cooking, hymnody, Bible study, evangelism and Christian outreach, etc.), which, by God's grace, he continued to pursue and develop throughout his retirement years.

from Barron News Shield: William Robert Wright

Mr [Mohammed] Hussain was a self-described poet who was detained on Nauru by Australian authorities under the Howard government's so called "Pacific solution". But his claims for asylum were rejected by immigration officials and he was sent back to Afghanistan.

Mr Glendenning met Mr Hussain in January in Kabul, where the Australian was filming a documentary, A Well-Founded Fear, about asylum seekers rejected during the Howard years.

Mr Hussain told Mr Glendenning he could not live in Afghanistan because of the Taliban and other factional enemies, and now lived in a place where there was a coal mine, "a mountain and no one else".

from The Sydney Morning Herald: Beheaded after trying for asylum in Australia

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