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News Articles, with Rus Bowden

1/27/2009


News at Eleven

John Updike, the kaleidoscopically gifted writer whose quartet of Rabbit Angstrom novels highlighted so vast and protean a body of fiction, verse, essays and criticism as to place him in the first rank of among American men of letters, died on Tuesday. He was 76 and lived in Beverly Farms, Mass.

from The New York Times: John Updike, a Lyrical Writer of the Ordinary, Is Dead at 76
also The Boston Globe: Acclaimed writer John Updike dies at 76
also Telegraph: John Updike: a life in quotes
also NPR: Updike's 'This I Believe' Essay
also Scientific American: The Dance of the Solids



This is, of course, Americana; most of us can find ourselves somewhere in those words.

Early on, the poem acts as a quiet metaphor for the coming of Barack Obama. "All about us is noise," [Elizabeth] Alexander writes seemingly as a set-up. This is followed by several scenarios about the daily struggle: "Someone is stitching a hem," "A farmer considers the changing sky," "A teacher says 'Take out your pencils. Begin.'" and the best one of all--"Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice."

from EbonyJet: Praise Song: The Morning After
also Yale Daily News: Inaugural poem garners praise
also The Weekly Standard: A Distinctly American Poem
also Home-Schooled By a Cackling Jackal: I planned to stay quiet on the inaugural poem and . . .
also Comedy Central: The Colbert Report: Elizabeth Alexander



A torchlit procession led by a giant illuminated sculpture of Tam O'Shanter marched from Robert Burns' birthplace in Alloway to the auld Brig O'Doon on Saturday night (24th January) as part of the celebrations for the poet's 250th anniversary.

Having watched scenes of the poet's birth through the windows of the old cottage, the procession, led by pipers and drummers, paused under a series of arches en route which lit up as the procession arrived.

from Scotland on TV: Robert Burns: Burns fireworks light up old Brig O'Doon
also Scotland on TV: Robert Burns
also Scotland on TV: Burns Supper
also Scotland on TV: Homecoming 2009



1. Sorley Maclean, Hallaig

This is a dark, difficult painful poem, appropriately enough since it is about the Clearances in the Highlands.

. . . I will go down to Hallaig,
to the sabbath of the dead,

from The Times: The Top 10 'other' Scottish Poems



Self-Portrait with Fire Ants

To visit you Father, I wear a mask of fire ants.

from OhmyNews International: Pascale Petit: A Poet With a Mission: An alchemist of the question and the answer



[by Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury]

One by one, the marks join up:
easing their way through the broken soil,

from The Guardian: Arabic Class in the Refugee Camp



Poetry is the richest history we have of our inner life. But the history of the present is still being written, and the excitement of the new can be bewildering: every poem about using a microwave starts to look sexier than Shakespeare's sonnets. Eliot's "sense of fulfilment" is less easily had. Ezra Pound, his severer friend, used to lament that "the thought of what America would be like if the classics had a wide circulation troubles my sleep".

from Telegraph: The meaning of modern poetry



But despite these antagonisms and differences, academia is vital to poetry. The very traditions and canons that many poets draw on for inspiration and legitimacy were formed by university syllabuses and scholarly editions; the rescue of forgotten figures, and the gradual downgrading of once major poets, combine to alter the contemporary landscape as well as that of the past. And graduate readers still make up an influential segment of the audience for literary work.

from The Guardian: Books Blog: Why poetry needs a professor
also The Guardian: Oxford hunts for new professor of poetry



Past efforts to draw in co-sponsors for an event so deeply affiliated with Dodge were unsuccessful, he said: "People think we have plenty of money. But if other New Jersey institutions wanted to join us, we would welcome that."

That makes sense, too. Drew University is already partnering with the foundation to digitize the old tapes of poets reading their work at the festival.

We hope that when the economy rebounds others will step up, including corporations and individuals in the private sector, to support what has surely become a state treasure.

from The Star-Ledger: Losing Dodge Poetry Festival is a loss for words



What lies behind the continuing popularity of Robert Burns? Why do people in far-flung countries celebrate his birthday each year with set-piece Burns suppers, culminating in solemn toasts to the Immortal Memory? No other poet – with the exception of Shakespeare – appears to generate such long-lived, heartfelt affection; no other poet’s words are sung by vast crowds in a thousand distant cities each New Year when Auld Lang Syne is given voice. Burns is simply universal.

from Telegraph: The Bard: a Biography by Robert Crawford--review



I polled Scottish foodie friends who told me a) I just didn't get it (but then I was English so I wasn't meant to) b) what was all this once a year nonsense? And c) if an Englishman ever wrote about it he'd get lynched.

from The Guardian: The haggis challenge
also The Guardian: How to make your own haggis (21 pictures)
also The Guardian: Burns is alive and kicking, 250 years after his birth
also The Guardian: Robert Burns



Great Regulars

Contemporary art has the useful ability to claim both spirituality and secularity. It's new, it's not religious, but it's not shopping--well, it is for Saatchi, but you get my meaning. The new art boom in Arab countries is said to be clear evidence of a new secularisation that may help to loosen the grip not just of the shoppers but also of the theocrats and the jihadists. It's a lot to ask of art, but on the other hand, the art may just be a symptom of wider social change.

from Bryan Appleyard: The Sunday Times: Islam stripped bare



Fast-moving, conversational, acerbic, heavily influenced by the New York poets of the 50s, [Robert] Rehder's writing darts across the page in restless couplets weaving the anecdotal and the aphoristic with self-parodying immediacy--"I like movies where guys triumph/Against the odds.//And I'll probably be watching one/When I die."

from Charles Bainbridge: The Guardian: Please sir, send me a Nobel Prize



These are, necessarily, poems of deep introspection, in which manic episodes, escape attempts and the baffling helplessness of incarceration are examined with agonised honesty.

The risk with a collection such as this [by Sarah Wardle] is that the subject matter will smother the verse.

from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: Poetry borne out of stress



The pithiness, click of rhyme and smoothly insistent rhythm show why [Wendy] Cope is, as the cover has it, "one of Britain's best-loved poets". This is likeable verse: witty, memorable, immediately relevant.

For all that, it's difficult to see why, exactly, Faber has chosen this moment to produce Cope's Selected.

from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: Two Cures for Love: Selected Poems



[Mark] Doty's best work makes us highly aware of bodies in space, dignifies what Andrei Codrescu once roughly called the "wind-borne meat comet" with all its gestural mystery, whether it is the figure of a homeless man or the dying body of a lover.

"I swear sometimes/when I put my head to his chest/I can hear the virus humming/like a refrigerator," Doty writes in "Atlantis," a long poem that manages to be about the specter of AIDS without assuming a reader's pity.

from John Freeman: Poet Mark Doty makes the familiar exotic in 'Fire to Fire,' his collection that won the National Book Award



The speaker asserts that Pop thinks his grandson is just a "green young man/Who fails to consider the/Flim and flam of the world."

Pop advises his grandson that his sheltered existence is responsible for the young man’s ignorance of the "flim-flam" world. The speaker just stares at the old man, who seems to exhibit a facial tick, with his eyes darting off "in different directions/And his slow, unwelcome twitches."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Obama's "Pop"



The speaker then produces once more a reason that the young man should marry, "So that eternal love in love’s fresh case/Weighs not the dust and injury of age." Also, by producing heirs who will continue the beauty and love of the two generations, the young father abolishes the curse of father time’s imposition of "necessary wrinkles."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 108



He demands that she not visit his resting place but instead merely "let the wind sweep" in place of her skirts swishing around his grave. And because she would not cry for him, he demands she not appear but let the "plover cry." He welcomes a crying bird and imagines its plaint more appropriate than the "foolish tears" of his faithless former love.

Thus, he demands that she "go by."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Tennyson's "Come Not, When I am Dead"



The human individual is capable of speaking "loud and clear" and "with meaning new." While all other divinely-inspired, natural creatures may partially express the spirit of the Supreme Intelligence, the human individual may "fully declare/Of One that’s everywhere."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Yogananda's "One That's Everywhere"



The 21st century is regarded as a century of information revolution. And yet some countries of the world, which includes China, impose restrictions on the free flow of information. Such actions are anachronistic and hence there is no way that these can be sustained in the long run. Therefore, I believe that China too will soon become more liberal in terms of disseminating and sharing information.

Last year, many Chinese intellectuals came out with a number of articles and other campaign activities, calling for freedom, democracy, justice, equality and human rights in China. Particularly in a recent development, we saw an increasing number of people from all walks of life signing up to an important document called the Charter '08. This is indicative of the fact that the Chinese people, including the intellectuals, are beginning to demonstrate their deep yearnings for more openness and freedom in their country.

from Tenzin Gyatso: The Office of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama: H.H. the 14th Dalai Lama's Message to the Chinese People



There's been grumbling in the po-biz division of the lit world about Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem, "Praise Song for the Day." Part of it stems from the dreaded "instant analysis" nature created by the demands of the media.

David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times, for example, was expressing his unhappiness less than 24 hours after hearing it while the bloggers were busily pounding away at the keyboard before the applause died and Alexander sat down.

from Bob Hoover: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Inaugural images drown poem



[John Updike's] fiction first appeared in the New Yorker magazine in the 1950s after he dropped plans to be a painter and became a full-time writer. He also wrote prolifically about novels, writers and art in numerous essays collected in a half dozen books as well as three autobiographical works. He started his career as a poet, releasing nine poetry collections.

from Bob Hoover: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Novelist John Updike dies at 76



Many of [John] Updike's reviews and short stories were published in The New Yorker, often edited by White's stepson, Roger Angell.

By the end of the 1950s, Updike had published a story collection, a book of poetry and his first novel, "The Poorhouse Fair," soon followed by the first of the Rabbit books, "Rabbit, Run." Praise came so early and so often that New York Times critic Arthur Mizener worried that Updike's "natural talent" was exposing him "from an early age to a great deal of head-turning praise."

Updike learned to write about everyday life by, in part, living it. In 1957, he left New York, with its "cultural hassle" and melting pot of "agents and wisenheimers," and settled with his first wife and four kids in Ipswich, Mass, a "rather out-of-the-way town" about 30 miles north of Boston.

from Hillel Italie: KTAR: John Updike, prize-winning writer, dead at age 76



Poetry nominees were August Kleinzahler's "Sleeping It Off in Rapid City," Juan Felipe Herrera's "Half the World in Light," Devin Johnston's "Sources," Pierre Martory's "The Landscapist" and Brenda Shaughnessy's "Human Dark with Sugar."

For criticism, finalists included Richard Brody's "Everything Is Cinema," Vivian Gornick's "The Men in My Life," Joel L. Kraemer's "Maimonides," Reginald Shepherd's "Orpheus in the Bronx" and Seth Lerer's "Children's Literature."

from Hillel Italie: Associated Press: Marilynne Robinson finalist for critics award



Following the world's most awaited oration--President Barack Obama's inaugural speech--poet Elizabeth Alexander echoed the new leader's tribute to daily labor, his call for responsibility and his reminder of the sacrifices that made his election possible.

"Say it plain: that many have died for this day," Alexander, 46, said Tuesday during her brief reading, in which she also spoke out to the world about "love that casts a widening pool of light, love with no need to pre-empt grievance."

from Hillel Italie: Associated Press: Poet offers `praise song' for Inauguration Day



This winter I heard Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney recite to a packed crowd an early poem that's among his most celebrated. "Digging" starts off tracing the poet's break from his sod-cutting father in Northern Ireland. The pen he holds as a gun in the opening lines suggests Heaney is a kind of stickup man at first, taking aim at his father for doing undignified work, which Heaney must "look down" on. And though digging makes "a clean rasping sound," the old man is a comic, almost feminized figure, "his straining rump among the flowerbeds."

Digging

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



The Crocodile
by Lewis Carroll

How doth the little crocodile

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: The Crocodile by Lewis Carroll



Fishing
by Kate Scott

Sam was a galunky kind of guy,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Fishing by Kate Scott



On the Assembly Line
by Virgil Suarez

Cousin Irene worked in the cold of a warehouse

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: On the Assembly Line by Virgil Suarez



Personals
by Robert Phillips

I'm honest, discreet, and no way a lech.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Personals by Robert Phillips



A Red, Red Rose
by Robert Burns

Oh my luve is like a red, red rose,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns



Snow
by Debra Nystrom

--for Brad

Fifteen below and wind at sixty,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Snow by Debra Nystrom



Snowfall In The Afternoon
by Robert Bly

I
The grass is half-covered with snow.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Snowfall In The Afternoon by Robert Bly



Over the next days, [Allen] Ginsberg personally bathed the man in the Ganges; tended to his ear, which was infested with maggots; fed him, took him to a doctor, showed him how to take penicillin. When the man started to recover, Ginsberg and Orlovsky took him to a hospital, where his family finally reclaimed him.

"Anyway, that’s my soap opera for the month," Ginsberg wrote self-deprecatingly. But there is no mistaking the genuine compassion and selflessness of his actions.

from Adam Kirsch: Nextbook: The Reader: Dear America



Here's a fine poem by Chris Forhan of Indiana, about surviving the loss of a parent, and which celebrates the lives that survive it, that go on. I especially like the parachute floating up and away, just as the lost father has gone up and away.

What My Father Left Behind

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 200



With nightfall, aging begins, and also a process of confusion. [Kevin] Young uses vivid comparisons to explain this mystery: strips of bark on the ground are a coded text. Darkness is like dangerous depths of water. In the last two lines is another shift, as mosquitoes bite: "Wish /them well. Wave." The poem tells us to embrace the dark.

Childhood

from Denise Low: Ad Astra Poetry Project: Kevin Young (1970-)



Although it is still an affirmation of an important kind for poets in general, I consider it strange that none of these presidents called upon the U.S. poet laureate to pen their praises.

This may be because of the continuing disconnect between government and the arts, especially poetry, in this country. Whereas in many other countries, not only are poets given an equal place with presidents and prime ministers, they actually become presidents or senators themselves (e.g., Vaclev Havel in Czechoslovakia and Pablo Neruda in Chile).

from Anthony Maulucci: Norwich Bulletin: Poets face difficult task when writing for new president



Elegance, grace, style have returned to the White House. What we are looking at are people in love and loving on the world stage. Much has been written about the marriage between Barack and Michelle Obama. I still tell everyone that I feel good every time I see them holding hands, husband and wife as true partners. But what does the Obama family reflect when it comes to the family image?

from E. Ethelbert Miller: NPR: Weekend Edition Sunday: An Image Of Obama Family



I found [Elizabeth] Alexander doing what Obama did in his address. Alexander stands in front of us as mother and comforter. An ordinary woman in extraordinary times? This complements the humility expressed by Obama. For a moment Elizabeth Alexander is not a Yale professor she is a woman going about her daily work. She hears the music created by the people. If her words seem more prose than poetry, it's because she is saying it plain. This is a praise song in which the words of remembrance do the heavy lifting.

from E. Ethelbert Miller: E-Notes: The Poem



The Institute for Policy Studies recently launched a petition calling for 1 percent of the stimulus package to be spent on the arts. This arts stimulus initiative wouldn't just boost funding for public programs. The money could create workplace arts and reading programs, increase fellowship and scholarship support for artists, foster cultural exchange programs with other nations and support artist- and writer-in-residence programs in schools and public libraries, and more. Proponents also are calling for the establishment of a cabinet-level post for culture and the arts in the Obama administration and beyond.

from E. Ethelbert Miller: Institute for Policy Studies: Unleash the Arts: 1 percent of the Stimulus Package



What I prized most about [John] Updike, though, was his marvellous ear for a sentence. In the stories especially, he caught the shimmer of light on the grass, for example, with uncanny skill. He could describe a twitching face, a wrinkled elderly hand, a fond gesture of affection, with shocking ease. I doubt I shall ever forget the painful stories about a family coming apart in Problems (1979); 'Separating' is one story I've read again and again through the years, with increasing admiration.

My guess is that he will long be remembered as a master of the short story, the American equivalent of Maupassant.

from Jay Parini: The Guardian: American splendor



For poet Elizabeth Alexander, Barack Obama's inaugural speech must have felt like a hard act to follow. I'm a great admirer of Alexander's work--she has a delicate touch, and her poems cut deep. In the circumstances, I think she did a fine job. Yet it was Obama's speech that rang in the world's ear, as only the purest poetry can.

But could it truly be termed "poetry"?

from Jay Parini: The Guardian: Could Obama's speech be called poetry? Yes, it could



"I tie my Hat--I crease my Shawl" presents those ordinary, domestic, and personal actions of the body as a dutiful surface overlaying a mystery: a time, "some way back," when life delivered an unspecified blow so severe that existence stopped.

That great loss has left a great, invisible hollow. Despite the absolute emptiness--or because of it, she says--daily actions are performed "precisely" and with "scrupulous exactness" by one who keeps on living after life actually has closed. (Dickinson's poem No. 1732 begins "My life closed twice before its close.")

from Robert Pinsky: Slate: The mystery of the unspoken in Emily Dickinson's "I tie my Hat--I crease my Shawl"



To use this ancient form was an idea with exciting potential, but, as it turned out, the title of Elizabeth Alexander's inauguration poem was more inspired than the poem itself.

"Each day we go about our business,/walking past each other, catching each others'/eyes or not, about to speak or speaking," Alexander begins: not a riveting start. "All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din . . ." The "thorn" image is picked up later: "words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,/words to consider, reconsider". In a poem concerned with language and human encounter, brambles may not be the sharpest metaphorical image for the curse of Babel.

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Books blog: Elizabeth Alexander's praise poem was way too prosy



The Movement of Bodies [by Sheenagh Pugh] is not a description of the painting. However, [Joseph] Wright is known to have based his Philosopher on Godfrey Kneller's portrait of Sir Isaac Newton, and the way Newton gazes at the figure to his right in the picture might just suggest the way he stares at "the young mathematician" in the poem, dreamily distracted from his rational preoccupations, suspended in that state of blind attraction and gravitational upset which is said to make the world go round.

The Movement of Bodies

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



The answer is outside our window.
Astronomers look
for the beginning
and find there is no end.

[--Belinda Subraman in Approaching The Veil, Scientifically]

from Belinda Subraman Presents: Blue Rooms, Black Holes, White Lights



The image the sentence should bring to mind is that of a salmon struggling against the current of the stream on its way to spawn. The point is that, so long as we live, we are surrounded, like a fish in water, by a medium of being that is pressing always against us, and that to cease struggling against that pressure means to die.

This quote, in fact, is irreducible. Like a poem, it means only what it says precisely as it says it. It cannot be translated into a platitude.

from Frank Wilson: When Falls the Coliseum: That's What He Said: Life against the current



Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

I simply do not find this coherent. Are we meant to contrast the second and third examples, who live by "do no harm" or "take no more than you need" with those who live by "love thy neighbor" or are they all meant to be contrasted with "the love beyond" that follows? And what exactly is that love, if it isn't "love thy neighbor as thyself" (which, by the way, is only half of the admonition).

from Frank Wilson: Books, Inq.--The Epilogue: The inaugural poem (cont'd.) . . .



With precious few exceptions, all the books on style in English are by writers quite unable to write. The subject, indeed, seems to exercise a special dreadful fascination over schoolma’ms, bucolic college professors, and other such pseudo-literates. One never hears of treatises on it by George Moore or James Branch Cabell, but the pedagogues, male and female, are at it all the time.

from Daily Times: Purple Patch: Literature, style and ideas --H.L. Mencken



[Charles L.] Dodgson, throughout his life, loved children. Some theorize that it’s because he grew up entertaining his younger siblings, or because he had a stammer and was shy with adults. At Oxford, he became friends with the children of his college dean, Henry Liddell. Dodgson would tell the girls, Alice, Edith and Lorina, all sorts of stories, and sometimes the girls were characters in those tales. In 1862, Alice asked him to write one of the stories down, so he did.

from findingDulcinea: Happy Birthday: Lewis Carroll, Author of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”



For this workshop, I'd like you to write an elegy. The following are a few notes which may be helpful but are certainly not binding: you should write what you like!

Formally, though, an elegy is a poem written in elegiac couplets; a line of hexameter followed by a line of pentameter. That definition, however, pays no regard to the poem's particular subject or tone: more generally, an elegy is a poem of lament (in any form), perhaps on the death of a beloved person, or on any such grievous loss.

from The Guardian: Poetry Workshop: David Constantine's workshop



Army Cats
by Tom Sleigh

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Army Cats



True Love
by Barry Gifford

from The New Yorker: Poetry: True Love



Writer Brian Gard participated in Word & Hand 1and 2, and his work has appeared in Open Spaces. This sonnet is from a book manuscript that is nearly complete. Gard received a master's of arts in literature from the University of the Pacific, and he occasionally is a guest lecturer on the history and structure of the sonnet for Portland State University. President of Gard Communications, he serves on the Board of Trustees of Willamette University and is a recent past chair of the boards of Literary Arts and Oregon Business Association.

from The Oregonian: Poetry: #48



by Robert Burns

Is there for honest Poverty

from PBS: Newshour: Weekly Poem: 'A Man's A Man for A' That'



[by M.K. Lisi]

Through A Glass Darkly

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: Through A Glass Darkly



By Valerie Gillies

Tomorrow we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, and here we have some words from his mother, touchingly imagined by Valerie Gillies in The Spring Teller (Luath, £12.99).

Ah'm gaun tae the well

from The Scotsman: Poem of the Week: Robert Burns's Mither at the Well Grant's Braes, East Lothian



[by Peter Cole]

The Ghazal of What Hurt

Pain froze you, for years-and fear-leaving scars.

from Zeek: Four Poems by Peter Cole



Poetic Obituaries

Ms. [Paulette] Attie graduated UCLA cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. She was the recipient of a National Poetry Award in 1998, five ASCAPlus Awards for songwriting, from 2000 to 2004. She was the first woman performer elected into the Friars Club in 1988. Her book, The Seven Keys to Live a Masterful Life, which incorporates her life philosophy, is about to be published.

from Back Stage: Paulette Attie, Singer, Actress, and Author, Dies



[Timothy Bolton] was a graduate of Chelmsford High School with the class of 2005. Tim attended the Grace Community Church of Chelmsford, MA, and the First Baptist Church in Reading, MA. He loved animals and enjoyed music, writing poetry and camping.

from The Lowell Sun: Timothy Bolton



[Theresa Boyd] was a 1966 graduate of West Muskingum High School and was formerly employed by The Zanesville Times Recorder and Putnam Transfer. She was a member of The Market Street Baptist Church in Zanesville and The First Baptist Church in Coshocton. She enjoyed writing poetry, singing, gospel music and church activities.

from Zanesville Times Recorder: Theresa Michelle 'Terry' Boyd, 62



Dave [Haddock] said: "She was extremely eccentric and, for the last 20 years of her life, lived in her own world of poems and Gracie Fields.

"All she wanted to do was write poems. She wrote a whole life story of Gracie Fields in verse and had letters from the Queen, Charlie Chaplin, Margaret Thatcher and others thanking her for her poems."

Many of Beryl [Down]'s poems recall staff and life at Rossiter's, particularly members of the Rossiter family.

from Herald Express: Open invite to poet's funeral



A man of equability, handsomeness and charm, John [Fairfax] avoided the poetry scene, quietly producing his own work--including Adrift on the Star-brow of Taliesin (1974) and Bone Harvest Done (1980), and co-authoring with [John] Moat several guides to writing. His anthology of space poetry, Frontier of Going (1969), included Norman Nicholson and Edwin Morgan as "dreamers of the world, rhymers of moon and dune", while as editor of the Phoenix Press he gave a platform to younger poets, including his partner from the mid-1980s to the mid-90s, Sue Stewart.

from The Guardian: John Fairfax



[Mick Leigh] began writing poetry as therapy for the pressures of work, and eventually began to perform it publicly--a move that ultimately led him back to England, initially to Westbury, where he had a sister-in-law.

He wrote two poetry books for children, The Big Book of Bonza Poems, and for adults, Soul of the South.

from Wiltshire Times: Aussie poet Mick Leigh dies





[Liang Yusheng's] writing career started at Sin Wan Bao, which asked him to pen a kung fu series in 1954, capitalizing on a martial arts fever in Hong Kong sparked by a public duel between two rival fighting styles. Liang went on to write 36 novels over a three-decade career before retiring in Sydney.

Liang's work reflected his knowledge of Chinese literature and history. He often opened his novels with a poem and included characters interested in literature.

from PR-inside.com: Chinese martial arts novelist Liang dies



[James McNeal] started his teaching career as a 7th- and 8th-grade science teacher at Strawberry Mansion Junior High School. He later taught biology and chemistry at South Philadelphia High School, after which he moved on to Parkway Delta.

One of his books, "Thoughts in the Black Experience," could be found in the New York Public Library and its Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, his family said. He also wrote a manuscript, "Life in a Plain Brown Bag," and a number of poems.

from Philadelphia Daily News: James McNeal, 66, innovative teacher



[William J. Pomeroy] continued to pour out a torrent of books and articles: "Apartheid, Imperialism, and African Freedom"; "Apartheid Axis: United States and South Africa"; "American Neo-Colonialism: Its Emergence in the Philippines and Asia"; "Guerrilla Warfare and Marxism"; a volume of poetry, "Beyond Barriers"; and a collection of short stories, "Trail of Blame."

Among his most touching books, is "Sonnets for Celia," a slim volume of love poems he composed for his wife while they were in prison.

from People's Weekly World: William J. Pomeroy, Philippine freedom fighter, dies



[Evelyn Thompson] had a special gift for writing poetry for everyone, on every occasion. Her Christian faith and her family were important to her.

from Hillsboro Argus: Evelyn Thompson, 92, service Saturday





[John] Updike said that his aim was to "give the mundane its beautiful due", and he had an uncanny ability to find the right words to conjure up scene and character. His description of "the physical fact of a horse--the pungent, assaultive hugeness of the animal and the sense of a tiny spark, a gleam of skittish and limited intelligence, within its monstrous long skull"--is immediately evocative. Likewise his "clean, sad scent of linoleum", or the "hoarse olfactory shout" of a football stadium. Adam Mars Jones declared that, if he should ever go blind, tapes of Updike's novels would be his best reminder of the visual world.

from Telegraph: John Updike
also The Guardian: John Updike, chronicler of American loves and losses, dies at 76


1/20/2009


News at Eleven

Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

from About.com: Mark's Contemporary Literature Blog: Elizabeth Alexander's Inaugural Poem
also Houstron Chronicle: Capturing a moment not soon forgotten
also The New York Times: Seeking Words to Move by Trusting Her Voice
also National Post: Elizabeth Alexander and the language of history




The poet originally from Cardiff but now living in Ceredigion explained: "A few days after his election I was performing in front of 2,000 schoolchildren in Birmingham.

"Academi's message that they wanted me to write a poem for Obama came through and I was introduced by the chief examiner as the National Poet of Wales who will write a poem for Obama.

[by Gillian Clarke]

New Year, 2009

Venus in the arc of the young moon

from BBC News: Poem sent for Obama inauguration



[by Fady Joudah]

The rice field birds are too clever for scarecrows,

from Foreign Policy In Focus: Fiesta!: Poem: 'Scarecrow'



[by Kathy Engel]

This is the time

from Foreign Policy In Focus: Fiesta!: Poem: 'Inaugural'



Since [Edgar Allen] Poe made his literacy bones in Philly, isn't it only right they be returned there?

"What gets me is, Poe is treated like the son of Baltimore, but Baltimore wanted no part of Poe when he died," Pettit says. "There were three people at his funeral, no tomb."

With a pen mightier than Ben Franklin's and and an underdog story worthy of Rocky Balboa, Poe would be a perfect fit for Philadelphia, the former magazine capital of the U.S.

from Courier-Post: Cities gear up for celebrations of Poe
also South Coast Today: Even at 200, Poe endures in pop culture



[Robert Burns] knew that he was, for some of his supporters, an exotic specimen to be exhibited, proof that a “mute inglorious Milton” really could be found behind a plough. In fact, he exploited this image, aware of its currency and marketability; it was, as he put it, “part of the machinery of his poetical character” to pass for “an illiterate ploughman who wrote from pure inspiration” on occasion. But this acquiescence in the role scripted for him by the culture was almost invariably accompanied by subversive elements.

from The Times Literary Supplement: The defence for Robert Burns



The performances of LKJ's poems are accompanied by reggae rhythms, but according to the poet himself these rhythms are inherent in the meter of the verse, indeed, LKJ continues to see his texts as poems and not songs, insisting that his poems must work as poems.

To describe this type of demotic hammered poetry LKJ coined the term ‘dub poetry' in reference to the technique of dubbing or mixing the instrumental track of a recording with voice. In reggae terms dub, strips away many of the melodic tracks leaving only the rhythm section with the other instruments reduced to an echo. These instrumental recordings allow DJs to toast or chat over the top of the music and this is where LKJ finds the space to perform his poetry.

from PopMatters: Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Eloquence of Rioters



They tell him, "Benjamin, when you have a mortgage and children, you'll know what it feels like." But of course he [Benjamin Zephaniah] never will have a mortgage and children, he never will mellow. "Because I've got to tell you really honestly, if you look at a lot of my work in the early days, there was stuff I was really angry about, and deep down I still am angry about it. OK, I'm not getting arrested by police in the way that I used to, but there's lots of things in the world that I'm still angry about. I just think: why can't people see the bigger picture and not just think about themselves?"

from The Guardian: The interview: Benjamin Zephaniah



In 1969 [Ciaran] Carson missed dying by an inch or so when a bullet tore through a taxi he was sitting in on the Falls Road and over the next two decades he was stopped repeatedly by soldiers. "When somebody comes to you and says 'OK, mate, over here, against the wall'," he says in exaggerated Cockney, "and you're asked who you are, where you're from, and you say: 'I'm from here.' When you hear it, in your home . . ." Did it ever make him feel like joining in?

from The Guardian: A life in poetry: Ciaran Carson



[George] Szirtes knows that to write a sonnet places him in a distinct tradition; but the liberties he takes with the form, and his use of the sonnet sequence, allow him to question and enrich that tradition. With their almost-refrains and near-repeated lines, Szirtes’s haunting sequences allow him to explore the shifts and faults in the cultural connections that he makes.

Cultural displacement can be fruitful for a poet; linguistic displacement is more difficult to manage.

from The Times: George Szirtes, New and Collected Poems and Reading George Szirtes, by John Sears



Slammed by the economic downturn, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation has canceled its signature poetry festival for 2010 and implied the event may not return in its nationally recognized form.

David Grant, president and CEO of the Morristown foundation, said the poetry program--until now--had been spared the kind of cuts that have affected other foundation grant areas every year since 2002.

"Poetry was the last thing where we had to pull back and try to do more with less or try to do different things," Grant said.

In a letter to its poetry constituents, Grant said the foundation's assets have dropped 30 percent.

from The Star-Ledger: N.J. poetry festival organizers cancel 2010 event, future uncertain



Great Regulars

The main stylistic influence on the New Zealand poet CK Stead is probably Ezra Pound, from whom he has inherited a delight in iconoclastic adaptations of classical poets. Here's his take on Catullus--"Death, you clever bugger/who would have credited you/with such finesse!" And the sequence "Walking Westward" (1979) is full of the colloquial rumbustiousness and jarring disjunctions of the middle Cantos.

from Charles Bainbridge: The Guardian: Collected Poems 1951-2006 by CK Stead



[Derek] Walcott's lyricism is on full show, from the piercing insights of "Elsewhere" to the sense of wonder and craftsmanship to be found in "The Bounty"--"Never get used to this; the feathery swaying casuarinas,/the morning silent light on shafts of bright grass". But his greatest achievement lies in his ability to combine this lyricism with broad narrative structures.

from Charles Bainbridge: The Guardian: Selected Poems by Derek Walcott



Carnal desire, the poet [W.H. Auden] reflects, allows no lasting fulfillment and is childish, one that draws out the pure beauty of an even thoughtful and discriminating individual to its grave, thereby proving the ephemeral nature of such love. The 'child' in him is yet to learn how not to make mistakes in stupidity.

Every single beauty of the world is subject to mortality owing to some "guilty" defect in wholeness.

from Bhaskar Banerjee: Merinews: Transcendent love through a lullaby



On the other hand, a deft political poem, a poem that inserts itself into civic discourse with one eye on time and another eye on lyrical imperatives is a rare and necessary piece of art. Richard Hugo's "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg," Carolyn Kizer's "The Erotic Philosophers," Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead," C.D. Wright's "King's Daughters, Home for Unwed Mothers, 1948" and Adrienne Rich's "What Kind of Times Are These" are a half-dozen examples of fine and important American political poems of the past 50 years.

But for now, this week, poetry and politics meet in a place where Langston Hughes can come out of the kitchen.

I, Too, Sing America

from David Biespiel: The Oregonian: Boomarks: Poetry: Langston Hughes' words are in sync with new political era



Elizabeth Alexander: What I want to do in the composition of the poem is to be very quiet and very humble before the forces that make me able to write poems.

It's a very, very big challenge. It's a very extraordinary moment. And I think the fact that Barack Obama has decided that he wants to have a poem as part of the inaugural is tremendously significant, to say that here is a time when we can listen to language that shifts us a little bit, that allows us to pause for a moment and contemplate what's ahead of us, to think about how we can contribute to the challenges ahead of us, all of those things can be possible in the moment of pause and shift that--that a poem makes possible.

from Jeffrey Brown: PBS: Newshour: Poet Elizabeth Alexander Reflects on Inaugural Reading
also Jeffrey Brown: PBS: Newshour: Poet Profile: Elizabeth Alexander



The poems in Heart's Needle--the first of more than 30 volumes of poetry and translations published by Snodgrass in his lifetime--grew out of the poet's pain at losing custody of his young daughter, Cynthia, in the wake of a bitter divorce from his first wife. The lengthy title poem was addressed directly to Cynthia; the unadorned simplicity of stanzas such as "Winter again and it is snowing;/Although you are still three,/You are already growing/Strange to me" led to startled praise from a reading public raised on the anti-biographical doctrines of New Criticism.

from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: 'Father of confessional poetry' WD Snodgrass dies, aged 83



Heath in Key West

By John Mark Eberhart

Duval Street in five a.m. darkness:

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Snuff the roosters



But instead of sinking into melancholy with the news that sense experience is delusion, the speaker helps his listeners understand that "Sorrows bulge with joy./Failures are potent with determination for success,/Cruelties urge the instinct to be kind." The bad is not meant to cause harm but to encourage good.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: January Poet--Paramahansa Yogananda



Soothsayers reporting future calamities often exhibit behavior that limits their credibility. Many of those "world dreaming" folks like to pretend to be prophets, even though they spout "incertainties." Their portentousness becomes a blemish, when their many claims are rendered false by time.

During times of supposed "peace," citizens fail to remember that there has never really been a time of peace on earth.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 107



The speaker contradicts his beloved's claim of mortality. He reports what he said to her after she protested his attempt to immortalize her name in sand. He argues that "baser things" may "die in dust," but he has determined that she is too "glorious" to die and then offers his verse as the means for her gaining immortality.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: The Spenserian Sonnet



Liz B., try to remember that nothing is really "lost" (I know, easy for me to say, right?). All the poems you wrote served to develop your skill, to bolster and train the voice that is now more than ever before ready to write poems. The old poems that you remember will be rewritten. Parts from the poems that you've forgotten will make their way into new and better poems. Isn't it kind of liberating that all your poems burned?

from Kristen Hoggart: The Smart Set: Ask a Poet: Weighty Topics



W.D. Snodgrass, a Beaver Falls native, burst upon the American poetry scene like a comet in 1960 when his collection, "Heart's Needle," won the Pulitzer Prize and created a large following for his work.

"Nothing he published later equaled the readership of that book," said fellow poet Ed Ochester. "It was so sensational--poems that were both readable and formalist at the same time. It remains one of the finest books of 20th-century American poetry."

from Bob Hoover: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: W.D. Snodgrass /Native of Beaver Falls who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry



Most strikingly, however, [John] Buchan was happily married, from the age of thirty two, to Susan Grosvenor, with whom he had four children; Leithen, like many of his "pals", remained a bachelor. On the third page of the first novel, Leithen mentions the wife of a dodgy clubmate as the "only person (person?) to have captured my stony heart"; by The Dancing Floor, this has been purified to the claim that "I had never been in love in my life". The girls in this omnibus are of the regular Buchan type: "slender", vivacious, respectably unconventional, "like an adorable boy" or "like a wild boy".

from Mick Imlah: The Times Literary Supplement: Then and Now



[Hortense] Calisher, the author of more than 20 books, was a three-time nominee for the National Book Award and a four-time winner of the O. Henry Prize for the short story. Several works, notably "In Greenwich . . . ," have been anthologized.

Like Marcel Proust and Henry James, the writers to whom she was most often compared, Calisher composed in the thick, quantum rhythms of the mind. Her sentences were long, her language complex and her story lines often elusive.

"I do know that in the novel, I feel free to digress," Calisher told the Associated Press in 1998.

from Hillel Italie: Associated Press: Prize-winning writer Hortense Calisher dies at 97



As we welcome Obama into the White House, I choose to celebrate with Yusef Komunyakaa's "Ode to a Drum," in which an African hunter addresses the gazelle he uses to feed his family and to make a drum. Assembling the instrument, the speaker recreates a living body to carry the song of lost ghosts (perhaps stolen by slave ships). But the drum's transforming power also binds its listeners in a powerful circle. It beats trouble from the land. By poem's end, it's a triumphant panther.

Gazelle, I killed you

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



But what readers really want is the same as what Shakespeare's audience wanted--dastardly deeds by dark, despicable men and/or some generous blood-spattering and/or saucy wenches with pert breasts cinched up to be displayed like fresh fruit on a platter. It isn't rocket science, people.

"Read my book," the novelist said. "Are there breasts in it?" asked Brad. "Oh, just grow up," the man sneered. He didn't notice Brad's left hand reaching under the workbench for the .357 Magnum he kept taped there for just this eventuality. "I'm a serious novelist," the man said quietly, "and I've won many awards." But those awards weren't going to save his skin from some serious perforation now. No, sir. BLAM BLAM BLAM.

from Garrison Keillor: Chicago Tribune: She saw her pale reflection in the window. A.k.a. torture



Ars Poetica #100: I Believe
by Elizabeth Alexander

Poetry, I tell my students,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Ars Poetica #100: I Believe by Elizabeth Alexander



Everyone is Afraid of Something
by Dannye Romine Powell

Once I was afraid of ghosts, of the dark,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Everyone is Afraid of Something by Dannye Romine Powell



First Cutting
by Susie Patlove

What is the hayfield in late afternoon

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: First Cutting by Susie Patlove



Having Confessed by Patrick Kavanagh

Having confessed he feels

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Having Confessed by Patrick Kavanagh



Middle-Age
by Pat Schneider

The child you think you don't want

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Middle-Age by Pat Schneider



Peaches or Plums
by Alan Michael Parker

Oh, how I hate my mind,

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Peaches or Plums by Alan Michael Parker



Winter Afternoon
by Grace Paley

Old men and women walk by my window

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Winter Afternoon by Grace Paley



The last part of Warhorses is a long poem ingeniously titled "Autobiography of My Alter Ego," crafted out of matching half-lines like a call-and-response. The life described is both the poet's and not the poet's. A grandfather tells the poem's speaker, "Boy, you/were born one hundred steps/ahead of many. You/inherited the benefit of a doubt." As a poet of supreme sensitivity--that vibrating membrane--it has been [Yusef] Komunyakaa's fate to experience the extreme violence of race, of war, and of love, and to survive them all, heavy with the measure of those who are dead, making songs that are potent and comprehensive.

from Karl Kirchwey: The Philadelphia Inquirer: Poems vibrating with war, love



The poem's argument was as hard to remember as its language; it dissolved at once into the circumambient solemnity. [Elizabeth] Alexander has reminded us of what Angelou's, Williams's, and even Robert Frost's inauguration poems already proved: that the poet's place is not on the platform but in the crowd, that she should speak not for the people but to them.

from Adam Kirsch: The New Republic: The Plank: Adam Kirsch on Elizabeth Alexander's Bureaucratic Verse



I'd guess that most of us carry in our memories landscapes that, far behind us, hold significant meanings for us. For me, it's a Mississippi River scenic overlook south of Guttenberg, Iowa. And for you? Here's just such a memoryscape, in this brief poem by New Yorker Anne Pierson Wiese.

Inscrutable Twist

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 199



Standing in the Great Hall and gazing upward is like finding yourself inside a Fabergé egg. If great thoughts--not just the idle reflections of the moment, but the really big ideas--could take physical shape, this is probably what they would look like. The sensation you feel is one of mental levitation--like wisdom, only more exciting.

from Charles McGrath: The New York Times: The Great Library Jefferson Began, and How It Grew



Let us do more than have an inaugural poem or try to get a job in the new NEA. Let every office of everything have a poet in residence. Let poets work on policy language. Let poetry guide us into a world driven by empathy, and yes, generosity; a lyrical, toughly truthful, multilingual world in which we can hear the clams, the porcupines, the worker who hasn't had a break since he or she can remember, and the children who've been told to keep quiet. [--Kathy Engel]

from E. Ethelbert Miller: Foreign Policy in Focus: Fiesta!: Interview with Kathy Engel



But until the appearance of The Lost Leader, no one could know the scale of the project he [Mick Imlah] had undertaken. The book turned out to be nothing less than an account of the matter of Scotland, from pre-literate beginnings to recent times--including, towards the end, some very beautiful poems about his partner and young family. Its ambition is completely matched by its technical skill--everything from blank verse to hexameters. Its reinvention of 19th-century forms and tones is compelling. Its ironies are engrossing.

from Andrew Motion: The Guardian: The week in books



Political obsessions marked Byron's last years as he moved from Ravenna to Pisa to Genoa, often followed by the countess. His death came, famously, on a self-financed military expedition in support of Greek independence from the Ottoman empire. He died in mid-flight, as it were, a legendary figure whom [Edna] O'Brien describes as "the embodiment of Everyman, human, ambitious, erratic, generous, destructive, dazzling, dark and dissonant". But in what sense do these adjectives embody Everyman?

from Jay Parini: The Guardian: The rake's progress



But the poem of his [W.D. Snodgrass's] that has stayed with me for decades, and sounds in my head at least once a week, is "April Inventory". It's spoken by a college teacher who sees his life passing before his eyes, looking wistfully at his circumstances:

Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,
We shall afford our costly seasons;
There is a gentleness survives
That will outspeak and has its reasons.
There is a loveliness exists,
Preserves us, not for specialists.

The tone here is so idiosyncratic and yet so perfectly in touch with its moment, with its linguistic environment, that one reads and recites, again and again, satisfied and thrilled.

from Jay Parini: The Guardian: W.D. Snodgrass's last walk through the universe



Last Robot Song

by Robert Pinsky

from Robert Pinsky: The New Yorker: Last Robot Song



[by Michael Rosen]

In Gaza, children,
you learn that the sky kills

from Michael Rosen: Foreign Policy in Focus: Fiesta!: Poem: 'In Gaza'



The eye itself is one of her [Martha Kapos'] archetypes, and its strange appearances and movements have a surreal, Picasso-esque effect. In "Portrait from Memory", "You sit in what remains/of an eye"; and in "The Concise History of Art", an eye, presumably the artist's, "goes barefoot". The most astonishing "eye" is the one that "goes about fast and far-flung" in "Lost in South Devon": "Shining black from last night's rain/your eye walks out abundantly in leaf/along a branch, dwindles/to a narrow stem then disappears/into any tight slit of sky/the green shade lets you through."

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: The fast and far-flung eye



Though the diction is informal and modern, the rhyme, rhythm and refrain underpinning it seem to me a little like those ancient stones that have endured so long, and may still make strong and beautiful 21st-century walls.

"The Unaccommodated" is from Anne Stevenson's Poems, 1955-2005 (Bloodaxe Books). She has also published with Bloodaxe a critical book, Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop. Her most recent poetry collection is Stone Milk. Grateful thanks to the publishers and to Anne Stevenson for permission to reproduce "The Unaccommodated".

The Unaccommodated

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



For all its pomp and circumstance, the first writer's inaugural didn't exactly set the world of words on fire. First, there was the address by President Obama, which, while refreshingly tough-minded, lacked the soaring rhetoric for which he is known.

Then, there was "Praise Song for the Day," a poem commissioned for the inauguration and written and delivered by Elizabeth Alexander, a Yale professor and author of five collections of poetry, including the 2006 Pulitzer Prize finalist, "American Sublime."

from David L. Ulin: Los Angeles Times: Inaugural poem is less than praiseworthy



In a recent essay in the Nation, William Deresiewicz argued that the NEA has played into the tendency of so-called literary mandarins--the critics and scholars--to see themselves as "the Last of the Readers," an embattled cultural elite. His response to the 2002 survey's finding that "only" 96 million American adults engaged in literary reading? "Ninety-six million American adults engage in literary reading!"

In other words, there's a whole lotta reading going on.

from David L. Ulin: Los Angeles Times: The NEA's take on reading



If there's a problem with a book like this, it's how one thing can lead to another. And another. A blurb on the back cover asks, "Who wished he had invented blue jeans." I didn't know, so I looked it up (under blue in the index). I'm not going give away who it was, but he also said something much more mysterious: "I don't really like knees."

from Frank Wilson: When Falls the Coliseum: That's What He Said: You can quote it



by James Brandenburg

In the valley of the sun

from Express-News: Poetry: 'Voices de la Luna'



While working as an editorial assistant at Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in 1839, he [Edgar Allan Poe,] wrote and sold "The Fall of the House of Usher" to the magazine. He then published a two-volume collection of stories, "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque," but received none of the profits.

from findingDulcinea: Happy Birthday: Edgar Allan Poe, Poet and Master of the Gothic, Mystery and Horror Genres



Peter Mark Roget had far-ranging passions and hobbies. He was a philologist, a doctor, a teacher, an inventor and a chess aficionado. Roget improved on the kaleidoscope and made important contributions to the science of cinema. He helped found the University of London and the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge, but arguably his most memorable contribution is his thesaurus.

from findingDulcinea: Happy Birthday: Peter Mark Roget, Compiler of Roget's Thesaurus



Donald Marlowe Lobner is a local resident and self-proclaimed "simple farm boy" began his serious obsession with writing poetry in July 2000 when he wrote his first poem to his sweetheart, Miss P. He continues to write and to be obsessed.

Flannel and Silk

from Good Times Weekly: Poetry Corner: All the Lobners



Until recently, Roz Spafford taught writing at UC Santa Cruz. She also wrote book reviews as well as a column, called Mediations, for local and regional newspapers. She now lives and writes in Canada. Her first book, 'Requiem' received the 2008 Gell Poetry Prize. The following poems are from The Gospel According to Mary, the center section of 'Requiem,' published by Big Pencil Press (the publishing imprint of Writers & Books) in 2008.

Mother of the Disappeared

from Good Times Weekly: Poetry Corner: Excerpts from Roz Spafford's 'Requiem'



No snow fell on Eden
by Jen Hadfield, winner of the TS Eliot prize 2008, announced this week

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: No snow fell on Eden by Jen Hadfield
also The Guardian: Jen Hadfield: An ode to the fish factory



Earring

by Ales Steger translated by Brian Henry

The whole time he tells you what to do.

from Guernica: Poetry: Earring



[by Marie Asner]

the trail was known only to us

from The Kansas City Star: Between the Lines: 'By the Kaw' poem by Marie Asner of Overland Park



First Idyll
by Susan Stewart

from The New Yorker: Poetry: First Idyll



It Must Have Been the Spirits
by C.P. Cavafy

from The New Yorker: Poetry: It Must Have Been the Spirits



[by Joel Glassman]

Encounter on a summer Saturday at noon

Aggressively mowing scrub grasses on churned-up soil,

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: Encounter on a summer Saturday at noon



The title of Larissa Miller's bilingual collection, Guests of Eternity (translated by Richard McKane, Arc, £12.99), suggests the Russian poet's view of humanity, its transience and its obligations, especially its duty to nourish the soul. Her poem typically moves from the domestic to the transcendent.

Guests of Eternity

from The Scotsman: Poem of the Week: Larissa Miller



"Inauguration Day"

By Frank Bidart

from Slate: "Inauguration Day" --By Frank Bidart



Poetic Obituaries

Then on November 21 2007, Mr [Majid] Ali got up and left the house for work as normal, his father told the hearing.

However, he was found later that day hanged in Lomeshaye Park. Police found notes, poetry, his bail conditions and letters about "forever love" in his pockets, the court heard.

from Lancashire Telegraph: Nelson man, 21, killed himself after being accused of stalking



[Leonard E.B. Andrews] formed Andrews Publications, and eventually was publishing 23 bimonthly reports concerning litigation proceedings. In 1987, Mr. Andrews sold Andrews Publications and a second company, Andrews Communications, which published trade magazines.

In the 1960s and '70s, he wrote a column of meditative poems published in the New York Daily News and in the Philadelphia Inquirer and reprinted in Reader's Digest and religious publications.

from The Philadelphia Inquirer: Leonard E.B. Andrews, 83, publisher, patron of arts



The family said it all. [Courtney] Brooks' sister, Kelly Tucker, could barely get out a handful of words--"It's been hard," she sobbed--forcing Shaffer, the prosecutor, to take over and read her lengthy statement.

In it, Tucker had written about the man she knew as "Spankey," about how he helped her with his children, was always there for late night phone calls: "He was the person I called when I need to laugh," she said. Brooks wrote private poems for his family and took the family photographs.

from The Baltmore Sun: Death of Courtney Brooks



[Maurice Chappaz] was famous for his polemics with those he believed were selling out his homeland.

He was also known as a poet, traveller and translator.

His breakthrough as a writer came in 1965, with the publication of "Le Chant de la Grande-Dixence" (The Song of the Grand Dixence) and "Portrait des Valaisans" (Portrait of People of Valais). His last book appeared in 2008.

from swissinfo: Author Maurice Chappaz dies



At life's end Robert Dunn, the much-loved Portsmouth poet, set about putting his things in order and writing his final goals. His last and most fervent wish was to live long enough to vote in his final presidential election and help usher Barack Obama into the White House.

Dunn, a former city poet laureate, died Aug. 31, 2008 without voting. Nor was he able to achieve his dream of meeting with then-candidate Obama. But on Sept. 3, just days after his death, a letter arrived from the man who will take office on Tuesday.

from Portsmouth Herald News: Obama letter arrived days after Portsmouth poet Robert Dunn died



Donna [K. Foster] was a member of the First Christian Church in Pittsfield., the Women of the Moose, she did volunteer work at the Pittsfield American Legion Post #152, she was a published poet and attended a poetry convention in New York City.

from Pike Press: Foster, Donna K.



In the cafes, where he appeared nearly every evening, he rubbed elbows with future celebrities. He was also a regular at the Neptune Diner on 1st Avenue and St. Mark's Bookshop.

In his later years, [Richard] Leck restyled himself a poet, and unlike many of us lesser scribblers, he actually was good enough to find a publisher in Karen Lillis, who runs Words Like Kudzu Press in Pittsburgh.

from The Village Voice: Richard Leck, 1933-2008



[Louise Melder] was a dental assistant with the US Army Air Corps during World War II and lived in Oklahoma, California, Texas, Indiana and many other states in her lifetime.

Mrs. Melder lived in Calcasieu for many years and was a member of Peniel Baptist Church. She was a homemaker who wrote poetry.

from The Town Talk: Louise Melder



[Carmella M. "Millie" Messina] and her husband also owned a butcher shop in Mizpah. Although Millie and Carlo had no children of their own, they were always surrounded by their many nieces and nephews. Millie liked to write poetry and incorporated her poems into her holiday cards she mailed to her family.

from The Daily Journal: Carmella M. 'Millie' Messina, 89



Sir John Mortimer, who has died aged 85, became a lawyer at his father's behest and a writer by his own preference; through rare gifts of energy, confidence, intelligence and wit he succeeded brilliantly in both careers.

His experiences at the Bar afforded the material for the creation of Horace Rumpole, the shambling but stylish barrister whose quirky devotion to apparently hopeless causes made him one of the most compelling characters on British television.

from Telegraph: Sir John Mortimer



When interviewed by the Alpena News on the event of his 90th birthday, he [Sidney Nadolsky] was asked to reveal his secret to longevity and vitality. He quipped, "Pick your parents right."

Always an independent thinker with a profound commitment to social justice, he wrote a weekly topical poem (calling it "doggerel") for the Presque Isle County Advance and contributed generously to various social causes that champion the poor and the disenfranchised.

from The Holland Sentinel: Sidney Nadolsky, 95



[Leslie "Les" Phillabaum] enjoyed the opera and gardening and had a great interest in poetry, she said.

Two of the 200 books of poetry he helped publish won Pulitzer Prizes. In honor of Phillabaum, LSU Press created the L.E. Phillabaum Poetry Award in 2005.

from The Advocate: Retired LSU Press director dies at 72



[Robert Lael Pillman] fished many boats, and finally bought his own boat, the Luna, when he was 66 and the boat was 75. He fished, clean and sober almost 19 years, to the end. Winters he could be found in San Carlos, Mexico, after he single-handed his 27 foot yawl, the Seabird, from Newport to the Sea of Cortez. He read voraciously, wrote poetry, and could make a boats diesel engine sing.

from South Lincoln County News: Robert Lael Pillman



For 40 years he chronicled the insights and observations of Hampstead's literary scene, but never allowed a soul to see his records.

Now the death of the Belsize Park recluse John Rhodes has stirred some of the area's best-known writers and poets to save the enormous, mysterious archive he left behind.

The poet Alan Brownjohn and the best-selling author Deborah Moggach have called on Camden Council to "preserve, preserve, preserve" the thousands of diary entries stored in Mr Rhodes's tiny bedsit flat in Lambolle Road.

from Camden News Journal: Writers call for recluse's work to be preserved



[Milan] Rúfus was generally considered to be a cultural and moral authority because he kept raising questions of truth and beauty, the Sme daily wrote. Rúfus wrote about love in both its worldly and divine senses and he was always searching for humanity and truth. Despite their deep philosophical messages, his poems are simple and comprehensible. They reflect his faith in God, in humility and love of life.

from The Slovak Spectator: Goodbye to the great poet



[Stephanie Elizabeth Searles-Gonzalez] was a teacher's aide for the Vineland Board of Education until her health failed. Stephanie enjoyed writing poems, spending time with her family, dancing, and she was an all around loving, sweet spirited, giving person.

from The Daily Journal: Stephanie Elizabeth Searles-Gonzalez, 42



"She was always willing to teach anyone all that she knows," said [Ana] Sisnett's daughter, Meredith Sisnett. "She was an international teacher of love."

Sisnett enjoyed writing poetry, but she wrote less in recent years because she didn't want to write about her illness. Instead, Byrd said, Sisnett preferred creating visual art.

from The Austin American-Statesman: Ana Sisnett, 1952-2009: Celebrated author, artist and activist Sisnett dies after battle with cancer



Mr. [W.D.] Snodgrass was the author of more than 30 books of poetry and translations. His 1995 collection, The Führer Bunker: The Complete Cycle, was a controversial evocation of the last days of Nazism. One of his most celebrated teaching books is De/Compositions (2001), in which he analyzed more than 100 poems to show how poetry works.

from The Philadelphia Inquirer: W.D. Snodgrass, 83, Pulitzer-winning poet



Beulah [Springstead] had many interests; gardening, sewing, quilt making, and needlework, bird watching and identification, reading, writing poetry as well as study materials for youth (some of which were published), DVBS and Christmas programs, teaching Sunday School classes, playing the piano, exploring family history, letter writing, camping and picking huckleberries with family, and photography--but her greatest loves were her family and the Lord.

from Pinedale Roundup: Beulah Mildred Springstead



[Danai] Stratigopoulou, who was born in Athens in 1913 and raised in France, was also a noted translator, namely, of Greek demotic songs into Spanish and poems by Pablo Nerouda into Greek

from ATE: Noted songwriter, performer Danai Stratigopoulou dies



When [James] Thorpe arrived at the Huntington in 1966, the San Marino institution was a quiet and insular research library and museum. During his 17-year tenure, scholarship--which the Huntington calls the heart of its mission--was bolstered by an increase in research fellowships, renovations to the research facility and acquisitions including the archive of the great 20th century American poet Wallace Stevens and the papers of astronomer Edwin Hubble.

The Huntington's education program also flourished under Thorpe.

from The Los Angeles Times: James Thorpe dies at 93; former director of the Huntington Library put it on the map



Significant works by Val Vallis include, Dark Wind Blowing, Songs from the East Coast and The Queensland Centenary Anthology (as editor).

"On World Poetry Day in 2002, the Honourable Matt Foley, former Minister for Employment, Training and Youth and Minister for the Arts announced the naming of a major poetry award, the first Arts Queensland Val Vallis Award for Unpublished Poetry to commemorate Val's contribution to poetry in Queensland.

"Val's work captured the landscape of the east coast and our hearts. He will be deeply missed."

from Westender: Vale Val Vallis 1916 - 2009



In the Soviet era, when Russian was the official language and the use of Romanian was strongly discouraged in Moldova, [Grigore] Vieru fought for the cultural reunification of Moldova and Romania. In the 1970s, he wrote "The Little Bee," Moldova's first Romanian-language school manual for young children.

"He lived for the Romanian people and for our unity. The way a mother loves a child, that is the way he loved Romania," Razvan Theodorescu, a former Romanian culture minister, said Sunday.

from The Associated Press: Moldovan poet Grigore Vieru dies in car crash



Always active in the communities where he served, Donald [E. Warth] enjoyed working with Habitat for Humanity, serving with the Stephen Ministry and being a part of church handbell choirs. His hobbies included writing poetry, painting and working with art glass.

from Zanesville Times Recorder:



[Yvonne Alice Warren] attended the Chapel of the Lake at Johnson Lake and enjoyed living at Johnson Lake, spending time with family and writing poetry.

from Lexington Clipper-Herald: Yvonne Alice Warren


1/13/2009


News at Eleven

Railway Children by Mick Imlah

from The Guardian: TS Eliot Prize for Poetry: Railway Children by Mick Imlah
also The Guardian: TS Eliot Prize for Poetry: Ladies and Gentleman This Is a Horse as Magritte Might Paint Him by Jen Hadfield
also The Guardian: TS Eliot Prize for Poetry: Post-Traumatic by Moniza Alvi
also The Guardian: TS Eliot Prize for Poetry: Dulwich Picture Gallery Through a Veil of Tears by Maura Dooley
also The Guardian: TS Eliot Prize for Poetry: Apparition by Mark Doty
also The Guardian: TS Eliot Prize for Poetry: Second Time Around by Ciaran Carson
also The Guardian: TS Eliot Prize for Poetry: Full Volume by Robert Crawford
also The Guardian: TS Eliot Prize for Poetry: Lit Windows by Glyn Maxwell
also The Guardian: TS Eliot Prize for Poetry: Recognition by Stephen Romer
also The Guardian: TS Eliot Prize for Poetry: Snow in Northumberland: An Effusion by Peter Bennet
also The Guardian: TS Eliot Prize for Poetry: TS Eliot prize for poetry



Even the "gut-worms" she had to pluck from their stomach cavities make an appearance in print.

Poetry is a most unreliable occupation, and [Jen] Hadfield admits that "the financial thing is terrifying - I'm a bit of a control person and I don't like uncertainty". But now the T.S. Eliot prize has given her, as she says, "plenty of writing time" to come.

Glid

I turn the camera on my dissolving self,

from The Times: Jen Hadfield: a jaunty voice from the isles
also The Independent: Poetry enters remarkable new territory



[Michael Massey Robinson] wrote poetic quips, one of which was a disproved murder charge against a London alderman. He attempted to extort money by threatening to publish. Robinson was sentenced to death but reprieved and transported. In NSW this wily bard wrangled himself a pardon and was appointed poet laureate.

So, did dodgy Robinson really ruin it for generations of budding Australian poet laureates?

from The Courier Mail: Australia needs a poet laureate



[Arthur] Rimbaud was an impossible guest. He took to nude sunbathing just outside the house. He turned his room into a squalid den. He mutilated an heirloom crucifix. He was proud of the lice infesting his long mane and even pretended he was encouraging the vermin to jump on to passers-by. [Paul] Verlaine was delighted with Rimbaud's antisocial antics, which recalled to him his own younger excesses before his marriage.

from The Guardian: Teenage dirtbag



Harold Pinter had a very public cancer.

He wrote about it, talked about it, made it a metaphor--and yesterday, three months later, he died of it.

In 2002 he turned a nurse's remark about "cells which have forgotten how to die" into a poem.

I need to see my tumour dead
A tumour which forgets to die
But plans to murder me instead.

from The Times Literary Supplement: Harold Pinter: Exit a master



Of the three, two fared well commercially--The Cocktail Party won the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play on Broadway and The Confidential Clerk ran for almost a year in the West End. Only The Elder Statesman flopped, and yet, in the years since his death, in 1965, [TS] Eliot's dramatic oeuvre subsequent to Murder in the Cathedral has been tarred with the brush of failure.

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats may have inadvertently given the world one of its most successful musicals (Cats), but otherwise Eliot is the forgotten man of British theatre.

from Telegraph: TS Eliot festival at Donmar Warehouse brings back poet from the waste land



The first time I remember seeing Robert Pottie was in the dead of an epic Ottawa winter. He was perched on the sidewalk near the corner of Metcalfe and Slater scribbling into his tattered notebook as swarms of pedestrian traffic hurried by to make it to work before 9 a.m. Hardly taking a moment's notice to check the progress of his hat or plead for spare change, Pottie seemed more interested in writing and smoking his cigarette, which he sucked on vigorously. I was alarmed that somebody would have the gall to challenge the zeal of minus-25 temperatures by writing outside with a bare hand.

from The Charlatan: The street poet's healing words



The rash of kidnappings in the Niger Delta has entered into the new year with two prominent indigenes of the region--Dr. Elechi Amadi and Chief Nelson Efiong--being the latest victims.

Amadi, a renowned author, academic and Chairman of the Rivers State Scholarship Board, was seized from his Mbodo Aluu residence on Monday night by heavily armed gunmen.

from The Punch: Renowned author, Elechi Amadi, abducted, freed



As much as they dreamed of peace, both [Mahmoud] Darwish and [Yehuda] Amichai rejected the sterile language of the peace treaty, playing with the paper-white terms of conventions and constitutions, converting them into something touchable and everyday. In Wildpeace, Amichai's vision of peace is not the technical "peace of a cease-fire", but a living thing:

"Let it come
like wildflowers
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace."

from The Guardian: Amichai to Darwish: Palestinian and Israeli writers on conflict



Last semester, Elizabeth Alexander '84 introduced the presidential race into the curriculum for her African American Studies course "Freedom and Identity in Black Cultures." She added President-elect Barack Obama's book, "Dreams from My Father," to her syllabus and invited guest lecturers to speak about the significance of race.

And then Obama won.

"It was really a terrific convergence," Alexander said. "To have the big moment itself and then to have a class the next day."

from Yale Daily News: Professor to write Obama's inaugural poem



[Jennifer] Aniston joins a proud tradition of celebrities whose romantic verse has been accidentally leaked--or in her case, probably released--to the media. Last New Year's, an entrepreneurial diner picked up a scrap of paper Kate Moss left on the floor of a restaurant bathroom that turned out to be a poem from her drug-addled boyfriend Pete Doherty. Doherty had written the poem on the back of a menu.

from The Huffington Post: Really Bad Love Poems Of The Stars



Great Regulars

[Pamela] McClure acknowledges the strong bond between the human and animal world.

How beautifully she conveys this friendship, this love: "Skin on skin," "my flesh on her flesh," "mane frothing up between my hands."

Life is an open invitation: "climb on" for the ride; "come in" and submerge yourself in all that is offered.

Swimming the Mare

from Walter Bargen: The Post-Dispatch: Missouri poets: Pamela McClure



And while [Greta] Stoddart is quite capable of parsing the possibilities inherent in anything from time's passage to a plastic bag ("up in the attic/with your sad hoard/of baby clothes and love letters"; "deep in a hole/at the end of the garden/wrapped round a house sparrow"), she is drawn most strongly to relationships, with their endless ambiguities, their flaws and shadows and faultlines. Childhood, and our responses to it, exert a particularly magnetic pull.

from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: A cow in the lavender bush



[Eiléan] Ní Chuilleanáin's talent lies in her descriptions. Images flex and crack with revelatory energy; crucially, however, they retain their translucence, electrifying without drawing attention to themselves.

from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: Imagining Odysseus resting on his oar



Born in 1956 and raised near Glasgow, [Mick] Imlah combined a highly successful, if spare, poetic output with a parallel career in literary journalism. He was editor of the prestigious Poetry Review from 1983 until 1986, and worked at the Times Literary Supplement from 1992, where he was poetry editor. In 2000, he edited the New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse with fellow poet Robert Crawford.

from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: Poet Mick Imlah dies, aged 52



[Mark] Doty is terrifically precise as he inspects time's wreckage. The right words, these poems assert, have the power to resurrect the past and give it meaning. Like C.P. Cavafy and James Schuyler, two poets whose work looms large here, Doty is a sensualist with a deceptively casual register.

from John Freeman: The Plain Dealer: Mark Doty makes the familiar exotic in 'Fire to Fire' poems



The attempt to unify her narrative is not effective however. The possible reminder of a Greek tragedy leaves the poem unwieldy yet shallow with its lack of a tragic character. Her attempt to assign herself in that role looks pathetic, as it becomes clear that she is merely blaming a created entity she calls "Death & Co." for her own doubts and fears.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Plath's "Death & Co."



In the first quatrain, the speaker had begun by even averring that when all is said and done those poets actually wasted their time in composing such vulgar descriptions. He now clips their flights of fancy by stating that their attempt to express beauty exists in "a blazon." Although they tried to accomplish greatness, they remained immature and obvious in their attempts.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 106



Fourteen months after the National Endowment for the Arts announced the death of reading in America, it now claims books are back in style and credits itself for the success.

The NEA yesterday said data from its latest polling, "2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts," showed that "the overall rate at which adults read literature [novels and short stories, plays or poems] rose by seven percent" since it started the survey in 1982.

from Bob Hoover: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: The plot thickens: NEA reports reading is now on upswing



"Reading on the rise" declares a new government study, which reports a surprising and welcome increase in the number of adults who recently read a novel, short story, play or other work of literature.

But the study also suggests that not every person who reads necessarily wants to.

from Hillel Italie: Associated Press: Nashville Area News: NEA reports rise in reading, not all voluntary



[Pamela Greenberg] favors things over ideas, beauty before theology. She even enlivens the traditional address: "My Lord" becomes "God, Our Upholder." Greenberg explains that "the word Adonai comes from a root meaning support for a pole of the tabernacle, so I often translate it as Foundation or Upholder." Here's her version of Psalm 8:

For the Conductor of the Eternal Symphony

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



Asking for Directions
by Linda Gregg

We could have been mistaken for a married couple

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Asking for Directions by Linda Gregg



Fair Warning
by Alden Nowlan

I keep a lunatic chained

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Fair Warning by Alden Nowlan



In the South, In the North
by Peg Lauber

The grass here is strange paradise to northern feet.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: In the South, In the North by Peg Lauber




My Son, Under the Waterfall
by Alan Michael Parker

The weight of what falls surprises, the solidity of

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: My Son, Under the Waterfall by Alan Michael Parker



Recollection of Tranquility
by Idris Anderson

The first time we ever quarreled

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Recollection of Tranquility by Idris Anderson



Unfortunate Location
by Louis Jenkins

In the front yard there are three big white pines, older

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Unfortunate Location by Louis Jenkins



VII
by Wendell Berry

I would not have been a poet

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: VII by Wendell Berry



This column has had the privilege of publishing a number of poems by young people, but this is the first we've published by a young person who is also a political refugee. The poet, Zozan Hawez, is from Iraq, and goes to Foster High School in Tukwila, Washington. Seattle Arts & Lectures sponsors a Writers in the Schools program, and Zozan's poem was encouraged by that initiative.

Self-Portrait

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 198



So much for our impression of the Middle Ages as a time of strict self-denial. Well, perhaps it was for many, but the Goliards knew how to run amok. So much so that they make the American beat poets of the 1950s seem like Boy Scouts by comparison. For example, in some districts in France, they held a celebration in which a donkey dressed in a costume was led to the chancel.

from Anthony Maulucci: Norwich Bulletin: Medieval monks' poetry celebrated living a full life



What will be the fate of the arts during this recession? Some states have cut funding for their arts commissions. Many schools have cut or abandoned arts and music programs in the past decade because of budget crunches and pressure from No Child Left Behind, which requires schools to regularly test math, English, and science,--but doesn't address arts expertise, foreign languages, or other important subjects.

from E. Ethelbert Miller and Melissa Tuckey: E-Notes: Unleash the Arts: One Percent for Arts Petition
also iPetitions.com: Arts Stimulus Plan



[Robert] Crawford has righted old wrongs--scraping layers of yellowing varnish from received impressions of [Robert] Burns--and he has also made some vital new connections between Burns's independent-minded politics and the nationalism of contemporary Scotland. The effect is not to produce an expediently up-to-date version of the national poet (there's enough plain-speaking about Burns's laddishness, his support for the slave trade, his snobbishness and his hypocrisy to prevent that happening). Rather, we get a portrait of a man with astonishing natural gifts, living in toughly actual times.

from Andrew Motion: The Guardian: 'Humming the air with the verses I have framed'



It's worth pondering, however, on why the "freight," the precious cargo, is "undeveloped." Perhaps there is no singular, final truth and all human life rests on nothing more than confusion? The "weight" would therefore refer to our knowledge of an essential lack at the heart of life--a reality that snuffs out our transcendent aspirations. Perhaps, on the other hand, if the universe is protean, this frees us to imagine new possibilities, new selves.

from Christopher Nield: The Epoch Times: The Antidote--Classic Poetry for Modern Life: A Reading of 'Could mortal lip divine' by Emily Dickinson



Of course, a feminist reading of such poems might see them as patronising, and their idealisation of women as self-servingly limited and stereotypical.

The version below has modernised spelling and is taken from a 1975 edition of Palgrave, omitting several stanzas present in [Richard] Crashaw's original text. The shortened version was published during the poet's lifetime, so quite possibly had his approval, and I think the tactful editing allows the shape of the poem to emerge with greater effect. However, if you prefer, the full text is available online.

Wishes
To his (Supposed) Mistress

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Books blog: Poem of the week: Wishes to his (Suposed) Mistress



The Church of England's website has a new section called Matter of Life and Debt, and has also just published a group of prayers for people afflicted by the current financial crisis.

While this "pastoral initiative" to comfort the credit-squeezed is well intentioned, the prayers, set out as flaccid scraps of free verse, actually create a sense of impoverishment--the impoverishment of the English language.

from Carol Rumens: The Guardian: Books blog: Redundant prayers



Mick Imlah, who has died at the age of 52, was one of those rare figures in British poetry: a truly literary protagonist. Part of a generation for whom it became fashionable to disavow literary seriousness--in CVs which instead drew attention to any other feature of the poet's life--Imlah, while popular and gregarious, committed his working life to very best practice. With his death we've lost not only a major poet but a major editor, too.

from Fiona Sampson: The Guardian: Books blog: Mick Imlah's death is a multiple loss to poetry



After all, we humans seem to have a craving for certainty, often in direct proportion to its unattainability. How else explain our preoccupation with the future, something we can guess at all we want but cannot actually know at all? As Niels Bohr put it, "Predicting is difficult. Especially the future."

Yet we do it all the time.

from Frank Wilson: When Falls the Coliseum: That's What He Said: The world abounds in Tom Macaulays



Beverly Monestier, both Cypriot and American, runs the Synergy Foundation for peace through literary arts and education. She is a published poet who teaches poetry and runs workshops in schools and the poetry organizations. This poem won third place in the Poetry Society of Texas' Ahmad Shamloo Contest.

from Express-News: Poetry: 'Beverly Monestier'



[Elizabeth] Alexander told the Washington Post on the day of her selection that she was "honored and thrilled." She explained, "This incoming president of ours has shown in every act that words matter, that words carry meaning, that words carry power."

To prepare for the challenge of writing a poem specifically to the occasion, Alexander has focused on the work of W.H. Auden and Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African-American poet to win the Pulitzer Prize.

from findingDulcinea: Happy Birthday: Elizabeth Alexander, President-elect Obama's Inaugural Poet



The stolen heart by Arthur Rimbaud

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: The stolen heart by Arthur Rimbaud



This exercise produced a very entertaining menagerie - and, not surprisingly, an equally intriguing cast of human observers going about the double work of description, both evoking what they're looking at and revealing something about human lives in the process. In CJ Allen's sly and evocative parrot poem, we meet a sharply-etched, gnarled old bird, and in the process encounter the couple who care for this memorable creature.

The Parrot by CJ Allen

They were not married, exactly,

from The Guardian: Poetry Workshop: Poetry Workshop: a creature feature



By Philip Miller

Life before death

from The Kansas City Star: Between the Lines: 'Life Before Death' poem by Philip Miller



Eh?
by Nathalie Anderson

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Eh?



Learning to Read
by Franz Wright

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Learning to Read



By Sean Norton

)))) Listen

Due to the late

from PBS Newshour: Weekly Poem: 'Rose Hips'



[by Courtney Gallant, Age 10]

A Secret

I have a secret, I never told you

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: A Secret



In her debut collection, Quarry (Templar Poetry, £9.99), Dawn Wood chooses some surprising subjects and makes wonderful connections. Her poems have a compact energy, and their subjects are freshly observed, as here, where painted cattle with their flowery names are taken into the living context of affection and cost.

On Visiting the Aberdeen-Angus Society

from The Scotsman: Poem of the Week: Dawn Wood



"Morning of the Monsoon"
By Diane Mehta

from Slate: "Morning of the Monsoon" By Diane Mehta



Poetic Obituaries

Ms. [Carol] Adair was the life partner of Kay Ryan, to whom she was married twice--once at San Francisco City Hall in 2004, the second time at the Marin Civic Center in 2008, on the same day Ryan learned she had been named U.S. poet laureate. They were together for 30 years.

"Carol always wondered what she was made of," Ryan said. "In December she wrote that 'what's at the bottom of me is optimism and will.'

from Marin Independent Journal: Carol Adair, College of Marin instructor, dies at 66



[Cophene R. Anthony] loved music, particularly, Lawrence Welk, loved to play the piano, sing, write poetry and read numerous books up until a short time prior to her death.

from The Star Press: Cophene R. Anthony, 102



Mr. [James Ira] Brooks was a true renaissance man. He was an artist, poet, musician and tinkerer. He enjoyed living on the river in Cotter, possessed a wonderful sense of humor and was a shameless flirt.

from The Baxter Bulletin: James Ira Brooks, 78



Through the 1970s, he worked at Harper & Row, Doubleday and E. P. Dutton, where he served as Editor-in- Chief.

While at Doubleday, [Thomas] Congdon's first significant success came in the form of Peter Benchley's 1974 hit novel "Jaws." A shark sighting Congdon once had along the coast at Squam catalyzed his early enthusiasm for the book.

At Dutton in 1978, Congdon edited A. Scott Berg's "Maxwell Perkins: Editor of Genius," which won a National Book Award in 1980.

from The Nantucket Independent: "Jaws" editor Thomas Congdon dead at 77



[Tyrone Counts] became interested in writing poetry and drawing from an early age, and always carried around a black and white composition notebook to write down his poems, said his other sister, Desiree Counts.

"As children we sat together and read the dictionary--he had me write down words and the definitions," said Desiree, an optician who lives in Atlanta. "He taught me basically what I know."

from The Jersey Journal: Sisters mourn slain brother as gentle poet who loved all



[Rose Esslinger] was a former member of Christian Women, the Arch Confraternity of Christian Women, and was recording secretary of Christian Women. She was a member of the Catholic Order of Foresters and the Queen of Peace Rosary Makers. Rose loved making rosaries for mission, family, and friends. She enjoyed music, poetry, writing her own poems, crossword puzzles, cryptograms, and math logic puzzles.

from Oshkosh Northwestern: Rose Esslinger



"She was a very mild-mannered woman who had a keen sense of humor," said one of her [Virginia Evrard's] daughters, Mary Alice Grothe of Long Beach. "She was very intellectual, witty." She wrote poetry and from the age of 21 did challenging crossword puzzles, she said.

from Newsday: Virginia Evrard, devoted her life to church, has died



Afterwards [John] Fenton doffed his hat and proceeded to the terraces.

During his last years he continued to write and review, and to accept a large number of invitations to lecture and preach all over the country.

John Fenton married first Mary Ingoldby, with whom he had two sons (one of them James Fenton, the poet and writer) and two daughters.

from Telegraph: Canon John Fenton



Joanna Guze, one of the most prominent translators of French literature into Polish, has died at the age of 92.

She is particularly well known for her translations of works by Alexandre Dumas and Albert Camus. Her translation of the latter's La peste is considered to be a supreme achievement.

from Polskie Radio: Joanna Guze dies



[Epeli Hau'ofa's] publications include the most recent "We are the Ocean: Selected Works by Epeli Hauofa a collection of his essays, fiction, and poetry published in January 2008. The University of Hawai'i Press noted, "His writing over the past three decades has consistently challenged prevailing notions about Oceania and prescriptions for its development. He highlights major problems confronted by the region and suggests alternative perspectives and ways in which its people might reorganize to relate effectively to the changing world.

from Matangi Tonga: Writer Epeli Hau'ofa dies in Suva



Mick Imlah was one of the outstanding poets of his generation. Using his postmodernist Oxford background as a springboard, he vigorously reinvented himself as an ironical Scottish writer of unique humour and insight.

Michael Ogilvie Imlah was born (with his twin Fiona) in Aberdeen in 1956, and brought up in Milngavie, near Glasgow.

from The Times: Mick Imlah: poet, critic and founding editor of Oxford Poetry



During her life, Lauren [Johnson]'s appetite for music, prose and poetry was voracious, and she surrounded herself with friends measured by depth who honored her intensity and extraordinary sense of humor. Her formative years were enriched in part by her work at Kate Marie's Coffee Shop, the Li'l Flower Shop and Highland Meadows Golf Course during her years in Windsor.

from Windsor Beacon: Lauren Moilien Johnson (1985-2008)



Gary [Jones] had formerly worked at 3M Company and was a freelance artist and writer from 1968 to 1988 working on commercial art, cartoonist, poetry, ads and design.

from The Star Press: Gary G. Jones



Joe [Krall] will be remembered as having a great sense of humor and his favorite trick of weaving a tale, which the listener would believe, until, with a twinkle in his eye, they knew they had been had. His family, friends and caregivers will miss his stories, poems and sharing his knowledge of nature.

from Great Falls Tribune: Joseph W. Krall



A very talented poet, he [Jack McCabe] wrote many poems for special occasions, special friends, and pets in his life. He loved walking the beaches of Gulf Shores, Alabama collecting shells with his golf ball retriever. He loved his Cubbies, Hawkeyes, and Dodgers.

from Fort Dodge Messenger: Jack (John) McCabe




After painting landscapes for the last 10 years, three years ago Mr. [Robert] Muller showed his work at a two-person exhibit at the Lambertville public library.

"He decided he was interested in poetry," his son said. When he had written enough, in 2006 "he was pleased with his work and self-published a book of it. . . . In his later years, he blossomed."

from The Philadelphia Inquirer: R. Muller, insurance agent



A renowned lover of poetry, Mr. [Michael B.] O'Donoghue often favored his companions and guests with expressive recitations of English, Gaelic, and American pieces. His repertoire of hundreds included famous as well as obscure pieces, ranging from Yeats and Wordsworth to "Casey at the Bat." He visited schools from Buffalo to Randolph to share his love of poetry with school children of all ages.

from The Post-Journal: Michael B. O'Donoghue



Ms [Eluned] Phillips published her memoirs in 2007 after her family persuaded her to share her memories of some of the world's most famous writers and artists.

In her book--The Reluctant Redhead--she revealed that, although she shared a love of writing and poetry with Thomas, she did never really got on with him.

She told the BBC News website, shortly before her 93rd birthday: "Either he was too drunk to talk or in a world of his own."

from BBC News: Writer who mixed with icons dies



After his ordination in 1951, he ministered in churches in Ohio and established a church in a rural area near Toledo. Under his leadership, the mission church of 20 families grew into one of the strongest parishes in the diocese, his son said.

After retiring in 1988, Mr. [Thomas] Pickering pursued his longtime study of the poet Robert Browning. He was treasurer of the Browning Society in New York until recently.

from The Philadelphia Inquirer: Rev. Timothy Pickering, 85



[Mansour] Rahbani was the brother of Assi Rahbani, who was married to Lebanese singing diva Fairuz, for whom the two men composed many poems and songs.

The pair, who became known as the Rahbani Brothers, also wrote several widely-acclaimed musicals including "Petra" and "Biyaa el Khawatem" (The Ring Seller), which was adapted on screen by Egyptian film director Youssef Chahine.

from France 24: Lebanese composer Mansour Rahbani dies aged 83



[David] Richie was an avid fisherman and basketball player. He worked in university and community theater as an actor, playwright, director and stagehand. He wrote poetry and performed stand-up comedy.

"He told me he used to go out to fields back in Fairfield . . . and tell jokes to cows," said his wife, Mickey. "He figured if you could make a cow laugh, you must be pretty funny."

from Sacramento Bee: Longtime community reporter David Richie dies



A journalist, storyteller, poet, dramatist and essayist, Rodriguez Velez in his long career was the head of many printed communications media.

From 1932 to 1989 he was a correspondent, editor, columnist, editorial writer, chief editor, assistant director and director of the weekly Mundo Grafico, the dailies La Hora, Prensa Libre, El Dia, El Panama America, Prensa, Matutino and La Republica, as well as of the local magazines Preludios, Urraca, Siete, Educacion, Loteria, Mas and Semana.

from Latin American Herald Tribune: Panama Writer Mario Augusto Rodriguez Dies



[Milan] Rufus is one of the most outstanding personalities of Slovak poetry in the modern history of Slovakia.

For decades he had been dealing with the questions of truth and beauty, he wrote about worldly and divine love--inexhaustibly seeking humanity and truth. Rufus' poems are simple and intelligible verses, full of belief in God, humility, modesty and love of life and humanity. For Slovaks, Rufus represented a unique moral authority. His poetic works and essays, as well as his creations for children, are universally read in Slovakia.

from TASR: Poet Milan Rufus Dies in Bratislava



We've received sad news: Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.D. Snodgrass died this morning at the Madison County home he shared with wife Kathleen, after a four-month battle with inoperable lung cancer.

from The Post-Standard: In Memoriam



A member of Our Savior's Lutheran Church, she [Patricia M. Stern] enjoyed knitting, crocheting, drawing, reading, gardening and writing poetry.

from The Post-Bulletin: Patricia M. Stern--Austin



"Quietly, she thought deeply about big things," says Martha's daughter, Polly Stewart.

As time went on, she became weary. Her poems wavered from Shel Silverstein wry to glum. "In her 90s, my mom did not know why she was still living," says Polly. She would occasionally send a "Thanks," now and again, a "To Whom it May Concern" skyward.

Nonegenarian, crabbed and drear

What are you still doing here?

from The Salt Lake Tribune: Brilliant and controversial, Utah poet Martha Stewart leaves a rich legacy



E. Donald Two-Rivers, an Ojibwa Indian who left Canada at 16 and settled in Chicago's then rough-and-tumble Uptown neighborhood, took up writing while behind bars for robbery.

He went on to win a national award for short stories, start a Native American theater group, write plays, a newspaper column and poems that he read in dramatic fashion at poetry slams in Chicago and across the country.

Mr. Two-Rivers, 63, whose given name was Edmund D. Broeffle, died of complications from lung cancer Sunday, Dec. 28, at his home in Green Bay, said his daughter Vanessa Broeffle. He left Chicago for Green Bay in 2002.

from Chicago Tribune: E. Donald Two-Rivers 1945-2008: Ojibwa poet, playwright



[Edith Louise Zimmerly] took many trips to England and the Middle East. She was active in Wolverine Dog Club and trained cocker spaniels for many years. In 2003, she published her own book of poems and short stories.

from Livingston Daily: Edith Louise Zimmerly


1/06/2009


News at Eleven

For this first Sunday of the year, a time for resolutions and the contemplations that go with them, we have asked some of the area's leading poets what they find close to home that inspires poetry and what their poems can tell us about where we live.

from New York Times: Region's Poets Convey a Sense of Place
also New York Times: Selected Works by Connecticut Poets
also New York Times: Selected Works by Long Island Poets
also New York Times: Selected Works by New Jersey Poets
also New York Times: Selected Works by Westchester Poets



Finding a dead end

It is said that it is enough for a poet to be the guilty conscience of his times. [Mahmoud] Darwish could see that both Palestinians and Israelis were trapped in a hole and one of his last poems spoke of the dead end in which they found themselves:

He said: Will you bargain with me now?

from The Hindu: Mahmoud Darwish: Romantic Exile



It is fairly safe to say that this kind of English poetry, with its unique diction and ebb-tide, will never be written again by Indian men. Or women, for that matter.

Below are reprinted some poems.

What Is A Year?
Mukul Sharma

from The Daily Star: Indian Poetry of the Seventies



Li Bai (701-762), one of the "Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup," supposedly died drunk, trying to embrace the moon from his little boat on the Yangtze. I've read other translations of his poem "Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon." Compared to [David] Lunde's, they seem stodgy and affected and "poetic" in a bad way. Lunde's version is a mellow nighttime ballad, sweetly timeless, that captures that feeling of setting off on a road trip with no destination. There's also a poignant humor to it that's missing in other versions, but feels so authentic that I'm just sure it's the poet's voice, and sure I would've really liked him, if I'd ever come across him singing and dancing under some fat spring moon, hanging out with his shadow.

I offer a cup to the moon.

from Bookslut: Breaking the Willow: Poems of Parting, Exile, Separation and Reunion edited and translated by David Lunde



For [Sylvia Townsend] Warner, the collection was clearly a creative act; it seems to have signalled both a release of the self and a commitment to communality, a ghost at home on the earth at last:

Greet finally the earth, greet leaf and root and stock.
Stand in your last hour poised, like the dandelion clock--
Frail ghost of the gaudy raggle-taggle that you were--
Stand up, O homing phantom, stand up intact and declare
The goodness of earth the greatest good you found,
Ere the wind jolts you, and you vanish like the foam.
("Go the long way, the long way home")

[Frances] Bingham claims that "to read the collection in its entirety now is valuable not only for period context, but because it reveals correspondences in the two poets' work".

from The Times Literary Supplement: Sylvia Townsend Warner, ghost writer



Poet Naz?m Hikmet’s citizenship is restored 58 years after it was revoked and 46 years after he died. Considered one of Turkey's first modern poets, Hikmet's patriotism and rich use of free verse earned him the esteem of artists, intellectuals and champions of freedom of expression.

Born during the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey’s most renowned poet spent many of the first years of the Turkish Republic resisting against the state. For much of that time, as his poems gained international acclaim, the outspoken communist languished behind bars.

from Hurriyet Daily News: Poems of freedom from behind iron bars, exile



But the revered Scots poet Robert Burns was openly discussing republican sentiments in the last months of his life, risking punitive action for challenging the authority of the king, an expert in Scottish literature has found.

In a biography to mark the 250th anniversary of Burns's birth, Prof Robert Crawford of St Andrews University has unearthed new evidence which he believes is conclusive proof that Burns was a democrat who sympathised with the French revolution.

from The Guardian: Burns was a republican fan of French revolution, says expert



[Brenda] Wineapple's subtle strategy is not to explain [Emily] Dickinson, but to remind us that she "sang to relieve a palsy". Dickinson did not specify the locus of her palsy, but Wineapple hints that it was her very selfhood--consciousness itself--that hurt. And though grateful to be "one's self & not somebody else", Dickinson could not and would not endure the keen ache of being her fathomless self alone.

from The Times Literary Supplement: Emily Dickinson and other hummingbirds



After reading the poem, I agreed with this assessment until I read the opinions of Thomas Jefferson, who thought she was "below the dignity of criticism," Amiri Baraka, who found her "ludicrous," and Seymour Gross, who thought she was a female "Uncle Tom."

"That's harsh," I thought. "Did any of her critics even consider the possibility that this young slave might have been writing from behind the walls of irony? What would the poem look like if I became her third-person narrator with limited omniscience?"

from OfficialWire: Letter From SC: Reading Between Poet Phillis Wheatley's Lines



But now such literary greats as Coleridge, Shelley and Browning have disappeared from school exams to be replaced by more modern writers like Hornby (Nick) and Palin (Michael).

Dead poets and authors who are central figures in the canon of English literature are no longer being featured in GCSE papers, according to new research by Cambridge Assessment, the school examinations arm of Cambridge University.

And as they lose their place in exam syllabuses to more contemporary text, their study is dying out in schools.

from Telegraph: Michael Palin replaces Alexander Pope in English lessons



"We called our experiments 'Psychicbread'--a conspiracy to fuse poetry, film and music. For us the name meant food for the soul, food for the head. It was the stuff that kept us up 'til dawn talking like there was no tomorrow and stalking the streets absorbing the atmospheres and secret life of the city at night.

"Our work was an attempt to distil our wonderings and visions: the hints and whispers that something more was happening just below the surface. The poems and films Plasticman, It's Only Water, Alien Love, Possession, Alien Rave! and most recently The Message are all experiments in tragic-comedy, magic-realism and, most of all, our collective stupidity." [--Mark Gwynne Jones]

from The Guardian: Interview: Mark Gwynne Jones



Great Regulars

As the critic Harold Bloom succinctly puts it, "Keats wants to be as steadfast as the star, but not in the sense of the solitude of the star's steadfastness". Lines 2-8 describe the star's steadfastness, which is, above all, one of solitude as hinted by its hanging in "lone splendour", and the poet calls the Star an "Eremite," or hermit. Keats says that it rests "aloft the night," meaning both in the night sky and above the night sky.

from Bhaskar Banerjee: Merinews: Keat's monument of the soul's magnificence



She dreams that her parents are seated on two chairs against a table. Since in dreams no doubts can exist, she sees them as real-life figures, faintly aware also at the back of her consciousness that they are not, as suggested by the word 'again' alive for her. To her, the faces long since lost, appear so immensely adorable with the light of living that even as the time is one of progressive falling of darkness, with the setting sun at dusk, they glow; and the radiance that shone with brightness on their countenance, she imagines, were fit for a painting by Rembrandt.

from Bhaskar Banerjee: Merinews: A dream reality . . . !



It is seeking what's between words, what's not public. It's seeking what sometimes can't even be pinned down as a definite emotion.

Elizabeth Alexander, the poet commissioned to write the inaugural poem for Obama, said, "the pressure--the challenge--is to write a poem that can serve . . . all of those expectant, gathered millions and to let the poem be what calms my nerves when I am up there." My good wishes are with her in this daunting task.

from Fleda Brown: Traverse City Record-Eagle: On Poetry: Inaugural poems



Drawing on the sensibilities of the European poets--Goethe, Michaux, Hölderlin--whose work he knows so intimately, [David] Constantine's humane and serious volume weighs the life of the individual against the crash and tumble of the wider world and finds in favour of the subtler forces and complexities of the former.

from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: Treats in store for 2009



"I don't know what I'd do with my mornings if I didn't write in them," [John] Updike says in a telephone interview from his home in Beverly, Mass. "There are pleasures to writing--you kind of get out a lot of your bad secretions. You can purge yourself of them through writing. And there's still some market for what I have to say.

from John Mark Eberhart: The Kansas City Star: Writing too enjoyable for John Updike to consider retirement



A serene death, "an undustful death" is also suitable. Such a death would leave a body without bullet holes "in our shirts" and "no evidence in our ribs." The body would be whole and untouched, not maimed and battered as those who invite such atrocities in the name of their cause.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Barghouti's It's also Fine



The speaker repeats his trinity, "Fair, kind, and true," a third time, as he remarks that ordinary use of these terms defines them separately, but in his cosmogony they create a new reality that until he had thought them into being has never combined to craft the one that he now sustains.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 105



He then dramatically proclaims that after they vanish, they exist only "behind the cosmic screen." They do not cease to exist, however; they merely change "their displayed coats."

Instead of the physical world mayic drama of sight and sound, these once worldly presences become "quiet" for they are "concealed." But the important, uplifting thought that accompanies the spiritual reality of all phenomena is that they do not truly vanish; they "remain."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Yogananda's "Vanishing Bubbles"



Your mission, Linwood, if you choose to accept it, is to write an apocalyptic poem about the space debris problem that is so powerful it begins a change. It has to be so good that it inundates the mainstream, warrants translation into all the world languages, and terrifies the globe. All international leaders need to be compelled to work together, with a team of scientists, and solve this problem, and it's your job to make this problem a priority.

from Kristen Hoggart: The Smart Set: Ask a Poet: Space Invaders



[Toi Derricotte] believes that [Elizabeth] Alexander "is the right kind of poet for Barack Obama. She's very clear and intellectual in her poems, not abstract, but she makes you think about complex subjects." Derricotte added:

"Reading one of her poems is a lot like reading the newspaper. They have that sense of immediacy about them."

Reached later, Michael S. Harper, one of the nation's most esteemed poets and teachers and a 2005 Pulitzer judge, said he had put a lot of Alexander's work into anthologies he has edited and added, "She's splendid."

from Bob Hoover: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Obama's inaugural poet called 'splendid'



Pretty much any spiritual practice, whether religious in the formal sense (Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, etc.) or purely secular (counting breaths, a centering prayer), finds divinity in contemplation. To become fully alive, we must still our chaotic desires. The poems of Greek-born poet Tryfon Tolides work almost like mini-meditations, bringing us to a sweet, nameless emptiness.

Calling

Come to the point where, finally, you are lost,

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



Denmark, Kangaroo, Orange
by Kevin Griffith

Pick a number from one to ten. Okay, now multiply that number

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Denmark, Kangaroo, Orange by Kevin Griffith



Illustrated Guide to Familiar American Trees
by Charlie Smith

I don't get it about the natural world.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Illustrated Guide to Familiar American Trees by Charlie Smith



In the Produce Aisle
by Kirsten Dierking

In the vivid red

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: In the Produce Aisle by Kirsten Dierking



Night Flight
by George Bilgere

Quietly
by Kenneth Rexroth

Night Flight

I am doing laps at night, alone

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Night Flight by George Bilgere Quietly by Kenneth Rexroth



The Palomino Stallion
by Alden Nowlan

Though the barn is so warm

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: The Palomino Stallion by Alden Nowlan



Sunday Morning
by Tom Sexton

Come down and do your crossword. I worry

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: Sunday Morning by Tom Sexton



What To Do the First Morning the Sun Comes Back
by Roseann Lloyd

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: What To Do the First Morning the Sun Comes Back by Roseann Lloyd



As she [Hannah Arendt] wrote in 1941, "One truth that is unfamiliar to the Jewish people, though they are beginning to learn it, is that you can only defend yourself as the person you are attacked as. A person attacked as a Jew cannot defend himself as an Englishman or Frenchman. The world would only conclude that he is simply not defending himself." That was why Arendt strongly urged the creation of a Jewish army, which would enable the Jews to hold up their heads as equals among the Allied powers.

from Adam Kirsch: The New Yorker: Beware of Pity



I suspect that one thing some people have against reading poems is that they are so often so serious, so devoid of joy, as if we poets spend all our time brooding about mutability and death and never having any fun. Here Cornelius Eady, who lives and teaches in Indiana, offers us a poem of pure pleasure.

A Small Moment

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 197



Tracy Smith and Linda Pastan poetry reading at the Folger next week. I've almost finished my introductions. I was reading Pastan's An Early Afterlife and came across her poem "Baseball." It captures some of the things I try to say in my memoir The 5th Inning, which will be released in March.

Baseball

When you tried to tell me

from E. Ethelbert Miller: E-Notes: Tracy Smith and Linda Pastan poetry reading . . .



The effect is not to produce an expediently up-to-date version of the national poet (there's enough plain-speaking about [Robert] Burns's laddishness, his support for the slave trade, his snobbishness and his hypocrisy to prevent that happening). Rather, we get a portrait of a man with astonishing natural gifts, living in toughly actual times. The poetry is allowed to breathe an air of genius, but is always connected to the spirit of its places.

from Andrew Motion: The Guardian: 'Humming the air with the verses I have framed'



This is, I believe, a metaphysical poem. It wears its metaphysics lightly--but it is still concerned with ultimate values and the flawed intersection of worldly and unworldly things. The ebb and flow of its rhythms at times suggests the music of a contemporary psalm.

[by Kevin Brophy]

Painters

It is as if each one had been sent to colour in the world,

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



The poet's effort, moreover, according to [Jack] Spicer, involved keeping a "public mask." Such distances between the private and public invited a creative spirit or otherness that allowed language to lift above the petty values of the tribe in order to restore communal knowledge. (The mask also protected the poet's privacy, saving him from the painful projections of others.) In order to expand the capacities of the tribe, the mask the poet wore represented that motivating otherness in poetry.

from Dale Smith: Bookslut: Marsupial Inquirer: Spicer's "Golem"



It's not so much that we've lost them. The amazing thing is that we've had the privilege of their company. What follows is a look at some of the people in entertainment and the arts who died in 2008.

from John Timpane: Philadelpia Inquirer: In Appreciation, 2008



[by Frank Wilson]

Grand sparrow chorus

from Frank Wilson: Books, Inq.--The Epilogue: Haiku . . .



It is, of course, common for people to think of faith in terms of belief, that is, in terms of a proposition or set of propositions to which one either assents or does not. Actually, though, the two words are quite different in both meaning and origin. The word faith can be traced to the Latin word fidere, meaning to trust. Belief comes from an Old English word referring to whatever or whomever one holds dear.

from Frank Wilson: When Falls the Coliseum: Proportioning your beliefs to your faith



by Andrea Cohen

In a Haystack

A needle must feel

from The Atlantic Monthly: Poetry: In a Haystack



And while such an one is ploughing distressfully up the road, it is not hard to understand his resentment, when he perceives cool persons in the meadows by the wayside, lying with a handkerchief over their ears and a glass at their elbow. Alexander is touched in a very delicate place by the disregard to Diogenes.

from Daily Times: Purple Patch: An apology for idlers --Robert Louis Stevenson



The most fatal disease of friendship is gradual decay, or dislike hourly increased by causes too slender for complaint, and too numerous for removal. Those who are angry may be reconciled; those who have been injured may receive a recompense: but when the desire of pleasing and willingness to be pleased is silently diminished, the renovation of friendship is hopeless; as, when the vital powers sink into languor, there is no longer any use of the physician.

from Daily Times: Purple Patch: The decay of friendship --Samuel Johnson



by Robert M. Barry

They were all singing, "School's Out!"

from Express-News: Poetry: 'Neighbor Man'



As for [Carl] Sandburg, he seemed not to care, once writing, "There is a formal poetry only in form, all dressed up and nowhere to go. The number of syllables, the designated and required stresses of accent, the rhymes if wanted—they all come off with the skill of a solved crossword puzzle."

from findingDulcinea: Happy Birthday: Happy Birthday, Carl Sandburg, American Poet



Joseph Stroud is the author of five books of poetry; the most recent is "Of This World: New and Selected Poems," from Copper Canyon Press. His work has earned a Pushcart Prize and has been featured in the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. In 2006, he was selected by the Poet Laureate of the United States for a Witter Bynner Fellowship in poetry from the Library of Congress. He divides his time between his home in Santa Cruz and a cabin in the Sierra Nevada.

Feral

The plaza of the Gypsies.

from Good Times Weekly: Poetry Corner: This Murmuring, by Joseph Stroud



Entropy by Robert Rehder

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: Entropy by Robert Rehder



Katyusha, Katyusha by Sean O'Brien

from The Guardian: Original writing: Katyusha, Katyusha by Sean O'Brien
also The Guardian: Award-winning poet Sean O'Brien writes Gaza poem



by Umberto Saba, translated by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan

Winter

It's night, a bitter winter. You raise

from Guernica: Poetry: Two Poems



To Exist Is to Resist

by Remi Kanazi

In my mind

from MR Zine: To Exist Is to Resist



Alien vs. Predator

by Michael Robbins

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Alien vs. Predator



At the River

by Louise Glück

from The New Yorker: Poetry: At the River



Hamish Whyte's collection, A Bird in the Hand (Shoestring Press, £8.95), makes the most of small, revealing moments in family and everyday life, attends to the pleasures of what's past and passing. Here, an exchange overheard becomes emblematic of longer journeys we're making, from the old year to the new.

The Great Journey

The old couple

from The Scotsman: Poem of the Week



"The Unwritten History of Prose"
By T.R. Hummer

from Slate: "The Unwritten History of Prose" --By T.R. Hummer



Poetic Obituaries

Mention 'Adeboye Babalola', for instance, and the minds of many (former) students of African Literature will race to the poem, When a Strainer Takes in Water, a Yoruba incantation he translated into a beautiful poem. So fluid and meaningful is the piece published in A Selection of African Poetry edited by Theo Vincent and K. Senanu that it is easy for many students to commit it to memory. He said of his own works, "The oral poetry I used to hear recited by farmers . . . they are in the same cycle of oral poetry called Ijala in Yoruba and deal with certain aspects of country life of farmers and hunters,"

The main area where Babalola worked extensively is in Ijala, the hunter's poetry which he first documented in Orin Ode fun Aseye, a collection of numerous Ijala chants first published by Macmillan in 1973.

from The Punch: As the strainer takes in water



[James Ira Brooks] was a member of Cotter Planning Commission, Cotter Chamber of Commerce and Tennessee Long Hunters. Mr. Brooks was a true renaissance man. He was an artist, poet, musician and tinkerer. He enjoyed living on the river in Cotter, possessed a wonderful sense of humor and was a shameless flirt.

from Baxter Bulletin: James Ira Brooks, 78



Works that stand out in her [Inger Christensen's] production include the large collection of poems called It (Det) from 1969, where she explored both social and political issues as well as contrasting love and hate.

The rules of language and mathematics as well as musical composition also inspired her.

"Numerical ratios exist in nature: the way a leek wraps around itself from the inside," she said of Alphabet from 1981 where she used the alphabet and the Fibonacci mathematical sequence.

from Gulf Times: Danish poet Inger Christensen dead at 73
also ErasmusPC: CityPoem 70--Copenhagen



[Eileen B. Deno] taught for 15 years as a Kindergarten Teacher at Mishicot and Stockbridge Elementary Schools. After she was preceded in death by her first husband, Sherman Nofke, she was united in marriage to Denis F. Deno on December 6, 1980, at St. John's Ev. Lutheran Church in Woodville, and the union was blessed with two children. She was a member of St. John's Ev. Lutheran Church and enjoyed writing poems, gardening, singing, playing cards, and crafts.

from The Post-Crescent: Deno, Eileen B.



Jacquelyn [Elliott] was a member of Trinity Lutheran church in St. Peter and enjoyed walking, helping at the church office, hand sewing frogs and snowmen, writing birthday poems, crossword puzzles and lottery scratch-off tickets that she called her "Chances."

from Mankato Free Press: Jacquelyn Elliott



For several years, Mrs. [Wanda Joyce] Fitzpatrick worked for the Purple Sage Ranch and as a receptionist at the Frontier Times Museum. A talented western artist, as well as a gifted poet and writer, Mrs. Fitzpatrick was also a certified member of the Cherokee Nation.

from Bandera County Courier: Wanda Joyce Fitzpatrick



[Antonio Fontana] was known for his ability to fix anything that was broken, and he loved to sing, play ukulele and write poems.

He was a member of the South Beach Senior Center, where he enjoyed line dancing and singing in the chorus.

from Staten Island News: Antonio Fontana, 86



Sue [Ellen Fulkerson] had been a poet since childhood with numerous awards including citations from Who's Who. Several of her poems have been published over the past 30 years including a book published in 1999 entitled, "Poems For Life's Seasons" which include sketches by local artist and friend, Vici Taylor.

from Zanesville Times Recorder: Sue Ellen Fulkerson, 65



[Ronald] Harnish's friends drove on for a few blocks, then flagged down a police officer for help. They were only able to describe the assailants as Latino.

Harnish, of Lakewood, Calif., was a decorated high school football player and wrestler who also wrote poetry.

On Saturday, Harnish's friends and family will hold a candlelight vigil at the scene of the crime, at 30th Street and C Street.

from Union-Tribune: Reward for information on 2006 murder of sailor increased



Neighbour Rose Huggins said [of Kim Hibberd]: "Kim was a talented musician and photographer.

"We will miss his friendship and his singing and poetry recitals as he walked home past our bedroom window.

"May he rest in peace. Love Rose and John."

from thisisgloucestershire.co.uk: Murder inquiry launched after city death



Those who did not know her have enjoyed--or should take the time to enjoy--the many things around town that she has played a hand in: the Canebrake Theater, the Demopolis Public Library and several other educational and enriching ventures.

An award-winning poet and author, [Patty] Horton was active in the First Presbyterian Church and was involved in many other civic functions, especially those involving education and the arts.

from Demopolis Times: Patty Horton will be remembered



[Edith 'Pegge' Kristof] also was a member of the Democratic Society, the precursor to the Democratic Club, and volunteered at the county elections department.

"She loved literature and art. She painted and wrote short stories and poems," said her daughter Linda O'Neill of Santa Rosa.

from Santa Rosa Press Democrat: Edith 'Pegge' Kristof



The cheerleading squad will wear ribbons for the rest of the season in memory of [Brooke] Lambert.

"Brooke to me was just a friendly wonderful student who was kind to others. I think that stands out more than anything," says [Principal Shelia] Smith.

Lambert's family found a poem she wrote in school. "Love is when you care a lot for someone or something, you would do anything, give anything, even your life."

from WYMT TV Mountain News: Middlesboro Crash Victim Remembered



Lucille [Treybig Langford] worked as a micro-paleontologist; raised Alan, Brian and Lauren; and even taught Spanish-English bilingual education--all well before women's liberation.

She traveled around the world, played the pipe organ and wrote prose and poetry.

from Bandera County Courier: Treybig Langford Ph.D.



Laura and Michael [Murphy] traveled the world and wrote investigative freelance journalism. Laura was a very talented poet. She enjoyed reading, visiting with friends, and loved to sing in harmony with her husband Michael.

from Valley Courier: Laura Darnell Murphy, 80



[Vincent J. Nowak] taught Math and Science in Wrenshall, Minn. and Spooner, Wis. He was involved in youth sports for many years, and was instrumental in the construction of the 19th. Ave. baseball field. He coached many youth football and baseball teams. He loved poetry and won awards for his work.

from Duluth News Tribune: Vincent J. Nowak



[James A. O'Keefe] continued to agitate against the war and imperialism and for civil rights while an undergraduate at UC Berkeley and graduate student at San Francisco State. James was a remarkable poet and novelist, though his publications were few since he showed far less interest in publishing his work than in writing it.

from San Francisco Chronicle: O'Keefe, James A.



In 1985, on a PEN tour of Turkey with Arthur Miller, he [Harold Pinter] erupted furiously at a journalist during dinner at the US Embassy. They were subsequently barred from the country, but were proud at having drawn attention to the torture of political prisoners. The experience also prompted Mountain Language (1988), a play about the suppression of minority cultures. Right wing critics regularly point to Pinter's ability to criticize the British government openly as "the most powerful rebuttal" of his politics, in Tory MP Michael Gove's words. Works like Mountain Language have, in fact, shown a remarkable astuteness. Kurdish actors in London rehearsing a revival of the play in 1996 were arrested by armed police for carrying prop weapons, and were forbidden from speaking their own language. This is the theme of the play.

from World Socialist Web Site: Harold Pinter: Independent and critical to the last
also Telegraph: Harold Pinter's funeral held in accordance with his precise plans
also Telegraph: Harold Pinter directs his own funeral
also Telegraph: Harold Pinter faces opposition to memorial in Poets' Corner



[Lauren Richmond's] second wish was to write and publish a book of poetry. Her book, "Black & Brown Markers," was published in July 2007 and is available at www.PeoplesEducation.com.

The book was distributed at a Marty Lyons Foundation fundraiser, where several of the attendees were well-connected with White House staff. Lauren met Jenna Bush, who was so taken with her story, she invited her to the White House for a poetry reading.

Both Laura and Jenna Bush read selections from the book. Lauren then got to meet with President George W. Bush.

from Scarlet Scuttlebutt: Bridgewater teen's dying wish to help others becoming a reality



We received this note from our friend Anne MacNaughton on Christmas Eve morning, and must pass it on:

"Sad news.
Nanao Sakaki passed away in Japan on Monday.

from About Poetry: Farewell to Nanao Sakaki
also About Poetry: Nanao Sakaki
also Allen Ginsberg Project: Nanao Sakaki passes on



After two years she [Frances Lederle Schulte] became a teacher for the Scottville School District (now Mason County Central), where she taught high school English for over 25 years. Many students recited their first poem, learned to appreciate America's great novelists, got hooked on Shakespeare and learned to use proper punctuation and grammar under Mrs. Schultes tutelage.

from Ludington Daily News: Frances Lederle Schulte



At a point in life when most people slow down, Verna Mae Slone found her voice.

She was a quilter, a dollmaker and the mother of five sons. But after Slone found her voice, she also became the author of six books, the best known of which was her first, What My Heart Wants to Tell.

In simple language, Slone wrote about life and the importance of family, community and the fast-disappearing culture of her beloved Eastern Kentucky mountains.

from Lexington Herald-Leader: 'Grandma Moses of the mountains' dies



Mr. [Martin] Snipper was an artist and traveler with a storied past: He put himself through art school to become a painter with the Works Progress Administration, taught painting to Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and kept traveling through his retirement, celebrating his 89th birthday in Cuba with his second wife, Betty. At first a painter, he later worked mostly in sculpting, said son Rossi Snipper of Minneapolis.

from San Francisco Chronicle: Martin Snipper, S.F. backer of public art, dies



Terry [Whitright] dedicated his professional career to community improvement through Indian education at the reservation public schools, as a college professor and as president of Blackfeet Community College. He also was a writer and poet, writing a two-volume epic novel and a fine collection of poems.

from Great Falls Tribune: Terrance Edward Whitright



"She was a homebody, she spent a lot of time at home with children," said her daughter, Joan Mularz.

Mrs. [Rita] Wright enjoyed doing crossword puzzles and writing poetry, and had three of her poems published.

She relaxed by working in her garden and by decorating for the holidays.

from Staten Island Advance: Rita Wright, 88


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