http://www.theaustralian.com.au/high...-1225900776230
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A VILLAGE LIFE
By Louise Glück
72 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $23
"Poets, being creatures of routine, tend to settle into a style sometime in their 30s and plow those acres as if they’d been cleared by their fathers’ fathers’ fathers. Read a poet’s second or third book and you will see the style of his dotage. Poets restless in their forms, unwilling to take yesterday’s truth as gospel, are as rare as a blue rose; and rarer still are poets like Eliot, Lowell and Geoffrey Hill, who have convincingly changed their styles midcareer." ...from the review. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/bo...w/Logan-t.html ---
The Drowned Children
You see, they have no judgment.
So it is natural that they should drown,
first the ice taking them in
and then, all winter, their wool scarves
floating behind them as they sink
until at last they are quiet.
And the pond lifts them in its manifold dark arms.
But death must come to them differently,
so close to the beginning.
As though they had always been
blind and weightless. Therefore
the rest is dreamed, the lamp,
the good white cloth that covered the table,
their bodies.
And yet they hear the names they used
like lures slipping over the pond: ...{excerpt}
"It’s surely time to give up the Heaney/Muldoon analogizing. These are men whose poems — in terms of texture and structure, tactics and tone — could not be more dissimilar. But here they are, each with new books, issued within a two-week span by the same publisher. What’s a wide-awake couch potato to do but read them side by jowl? If there’s a better way to spend $50 in a bookstore this weekend, I don't know what it is." ...from the review. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/17/bo..._r=1&ref=books --- HUMAN CHAIN
By Seamus Heaney
85 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24. {another review... http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/bo...ooksupdateema3 }
.MAGGOT
By Paul Muldoon
134 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...082704859.html --- By Courtney Cook
Saturday, August 28, 2010
PHANTOM NOISE
By Brian Turner
Alice James.
93 pp. $16.95
Deluge by Tamás Emod
translated from the Hungarian by Thomas Ország-Land (October 2010)
Tamás Emod 1888-1938: Hungarian poet, playwright and theatre director.
I. MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE
Beneath a rig of groans, in a tempest of tears,
engulfed by fear as an awesome deluge recurs,
on board a lost and battered, rudderless galley
afloat on the blood of this dreadful time of folly --
like sailors who trust their news to a bottle in the current,
I thrust these final verses into the torrent
so that, beyond death and terror and darkness, you
may still receive them one day in a better future,
you, in whom we have placed our faith and hopes
in vain, for we shall never reach your shores:
free shores, our home ever since the centaurs’ idylls,
cultured Europe, our ancient, classical cradle.
***
We signal our final farewells before the night covers us,
our helpless pleas of distress flashed over the flood,
and still salute the offspring of tomorrow,
we the galley slaves of the present, the ship and the oars
whose festive garlands have been torn away,
we sad and sensitive souls of this brutal age
who have foretold the worst and seen it all
who had screamed out in fear before we fell,
the children lusting for wisdom, humour and trust
before the depth of hell roared over us:
before our plight sinks into blind oblivion,
I send you these lines, the final news of our lives. ...
{excerpt}
Tribute and Farewell (a review)
By Abigail Deutsch
NOX By Anne Carson
New Directions, 2010
--- { http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/nox-carson/ }
Poetry Festival, Newark, NJ -- Urban Beat for Poetry Festival By FELICIA R. LEE
Published: October 5, 2010 -- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/bo..._r=1&ref=books -- "The truth of that statement will be put to the test by an expected audience of about 20,000 poetry lovers at the festival, which is held every two years. They will interact with dozens of the most celebrated poets in the world, appearing in a lineup that this year includes Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Kay Ryan, Mark Strand, Mr. Baraka, Martin Espada, Sharon Olds and Galway Kinnell." Felicia R. Lee, NYT
THE SMALL ROOM
The men with the same face are talking all at once,
One is a theorist, another is a theorist,
The rest are all theorists.
Behind the unsealed door a masked man listens –
The sophist with club in hand,
He too is a theorist. And somewhat drunk.
What name shall I give the deaf man
Who closes his eyes and places
His fingers in his ears –
Neither wise nor foolish,
Perhaps intelligent.
He faces the outward view of the same
Street which the blind man, beneath
The balcony, has discovered and rediscovered
Over the years with his hand over his mouth.
And eyes bursting open.
{Togara Muzanenhamo, from Spirit Brides}
National Poetry Day: unlock the mathematical secrets of verse --- By Steve Jones
Published: 12:00PM BST 05 Oct 2010 --- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/s...-of-verse.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/a...reading/65215/ Article ...one of five installments by Adam Roberts from The Atlantic
THE NERVE FIBERS
The nerve fibers, a veil on red music clanging,
cannoned from columns. An anthem bubbling.
Scientifically stretching over the cheeks
at the edge of one moment. The grey suit passed,
the overcoat, impressions everywhere.
Watching a negligible dog fetch as if it were human—
his hind legs so honest, so independent—
she stood in a doorway, not beautiful, never
specially clever, remote from herself. Over and over—
twist, turn, wake up, set going. Doomed to sinking—
decorate the dungeon, be decent.
The edge of her mind turning meaning for hours
at a time. Hours and days. A sound like a sickle.
Her head a bunch of heather. Then over.
The matted and tangled message, a red square.
The thinking nerves. The door of the room.
Dante : the Inferno. The English : London.
A piston thumping mechanically behind the screen. ...{excerpt}
from the collection "Sleek for the Long Flight" AN EGG IN THE CORNER OF ONE EYE --- I can only guess what it contains. I lean to the mirror like a teen-ager checking his complexion. Maybe it is sleep. Or a dream in which, like a bee or nursing mother or a radish, you eat to feed others. Or maybe it is a shard of light in the shape of an island from which dogs are leaping into the water, swimming toward a barking that only death can hear. On the eye's other shore life is upside-down. The dogs have swum for days to clamber up and, like an eye in its deathbed, shake out rays of light. Or maybe the light implodes. Or sinks into itself like a turned-off TV, the optic nerve subsiding like a snapped kitestring. I don't know. To open a tear is to kill whatever it was growing. I can't tell the difference between grief and joy. I tell myself that a tear is my dath, leaking. In this way weeping resemmbles menstruation. The egg that will be fertilized never sees the light of day.
NZ Poet Michael Harlow reciting his poem 'I am a Tyger':
http://www.ch9.co.nz/content/michael-harlow-0
from the collection "Sleek for the Long Flight" ... SCORPIO
You are unpredictable, obsessed by sex and death, eager to assert your individuality. You
can be devious, but charming. You will not be invited to the party. You carry your young
on your back, because your tail cannot reach there and, instictively, they know that. You
wish they would get off. If you were born today, you would have been a great basketball
player except for the accident. Today's Scorpio daughter will be beautiful and intense:
when her wishes are granted, she's in trouble. When two of you are gathered in my name,
your tails will snarl in the air like incestuous lariats. You should take care of that
pressing financial obligation today. You have forgotten something. What do you think it
is? You are a spine whose legs have failed to evolve into ribs. Your conversation is
only about you: you never mention me. I am the one who made you what you are. It is my
fault. Tonight should be devoted to romantic pursuits. Whom shall we chase? We will not
be invited to the party. You ought to forget about me. You tend to be careless of others.
You are the only one I have ever loved.
THE ASIANS DYING
When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains
The ash the great walker follows the possessors
Forever
Nothing they will come to is real
Nor for long
Over the watercourses
Like ducks in the time of the ducks
The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky
Making a new twilight
Rain falls into the open eyes of the dead
Again again with its pointless sound
When the moon finds them they are the color of everything
{excerpt}
THE WAY TO THE RIVER
The way to the river leads past the names of
Ash the sleeves the wreaths of hinges
Through the song of the bandage vendor
I lay your name by my voice
As I go
The way to the river leads past the late
Doors and the games of the children born looking backwards
They play that they are broken glass
The numbers wait in the halls and the clouds
Call
From windows
They play that they are old they are putting the horizon
Into baskets they are escaping they are
Hiding
I step over the sleepers the fires the calendars
My voice turns to you
I go past the juggler’s condemned building the hollow
Windows gallery
Of invisible presidents the same motion in them all
In a parked cab by the sealed wall the hats are playing
Sort of poker with somebody’s
Old snapshots game I don’t understand they lose
The rivers one
After the other I begin to know where I am
I am home
Be here the flies from the house of the mapmaker
Walk on our letters I can tell
And the days hang medals between us
I have lit our room with a glove of yours be
Here I turn
To your name and the hour remembers
Its one word
Now
Be here what can we
Do for the dead the footsteps full of money
I offer you what I have my
Poverty ...{excerpt}
ONE OF THE LIVES
If I had not met the red-haired boy whose father
had broken a leg parachuting into Provence
to join the resistance in the final stage of the war
and so had been killed there as the Germans were moving north
out of Italy and if the friend who was with him
as he was dying had not had an elder brother
who also died young quite differently in peacetime
leaving two children one of them with bad health
who had been kept out of school for a whole year by an illness
and if I had written anything else at the top
of the examination form where it said college
of your choice or if the questions that day had been
put differently and if a young woman in Kittanning
had not taught my father to drive at the age of twenty
so that he got the job with the pastor of the big church
in Pittsburgh where my mother was working and if
my mother had not lost both parents when she was a child
so that she had to go to her grandmother’s in Pittsburgh
I would not have found myself on an iron cot
with my head by the fireplace of a stone farmhouse
{excerpt} {an article about Merwin... http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs...n/pdmerwin.htm }
Lines of Refusal
Nothing here, just the sound of the heat, the sound of the cars,
nothing, nothing
Sweet unrest
To the oldest son a scythe, to the second a ****, to the third a cat
Must avoid rivers, strivers, and voyeurs
Not gather, not tether, not tie
The young brother came to a town that was completely hung
with black crepe
Wrote his autobiography in exactly thirty-seven words
Crawled into a crawlspace and pulled shut the door
No friend, no grammar, no end
Later, he too will become an imposing statue
No wish, no fission, no sign
Then hurrying across the avenue
Snow and so on
A young red fox and so on
Face and hair and hands and so on
Each with the incomparable taste of its own life in its mouth
=really good collection of heart touching poetry .
THE WAY TO THE RIVER
The way to the river leads past the names of
Ash the sleeves the wreaths of hinges
Through the song of the bandage vendor
I lay your name by my voice
As I go
The way to the river leads past the late
Doors and the games of the children born looking backwards
They play that they are broken glass
The numbers wait in the halls and the clouds
Call
From windows
They play that they are old they are putting the horizon
Into baskets they are escaping they are
Hiding
I step over the sleepers the fires the calendars
My voice turns to you
I go past the juggler’s condemned building the hollow
Windows gallery
Of invisible presidents the same motion in them all
In a parked cab by the sealed wall the hats are playing
Sort of poker with somebody’s
Old snapshots game I don’t understand they lose
The rivers one
After the other I begin to know where I am
I am home
Be here the flies from the house of the mapmaker
Walk on our letters I can tell
And the days hang medals between us
I have lit our room with a glove of yours be
Here I turn
To your name and the hour remembers
Its one word
Now ...{excerpt}
Rebecca Gould interviews the descendants of Titsian Tabidze, August 2010 --- http://www.guernicamag.com/interview...abidze_8_1_10/
FOR THE ANNIVERSARY OF MY DEATH
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star
Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
...{excerpt}
TERM
At the last minute a word is waiting
not heard that way before and not to be
repeated or ever be remembered
one that always had been a household word
used in speaking of the ordinary
everyday recurrences of living
not newly chosen or long considered
or a matter for comment afterward
who would ever have thought it was the one
saying itself from the beginning through
all its uses and circumstances to
utter at last that meaning of its own
for which it had long been the only word
though it seems now that any word would do
ONLINE SOURCE: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/p...erwin/term.htm
RAIN LIGHT All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning
ONLINE SOURCE:http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06...anscript1.html
The Lovers
The lovers say nothing.
Love is the finest of the silences,
the one that trembles most and is hardest to bear.
The lovers are looking for something.
The lovers are the ones who abandon,
the ones who change, who forget.
Their hearts tell them that they will never find.
They don't find, they're looking.
The lovers wander around like crazy people
because they're alone, alone,
surrendering, giving themselves to each moment,
crying because they don't save love.
They worry about love. The lovers
live for the day, it's the best they can do, it's all they know.
They're going away all the time,
all the time, going somewhere else.
They hope,
not for anything in particular, they just hope.
They know that whatever it is they will not find it.
Love is the perpetual deferment,
always the next step, the other, the other.
The lovers are the insatiable ones,
the ones who must always, fortunately, be alone.
The lovers are the serpent in the story.
They have snakes instead of arms.
The veins in their necks swell
like snakes too, suffocating them.
The lovers can't sleep
because if they do the worms ear them.
They open their eyes in the dark
and terror falls into them.
They find scorpions under the sheet
and their bed floats as though on a lake.
The lovers are crazy, only crazy
with no God and no devil.
The lovers come out of their caves
trembling, starving,
chasing phantoms.
They laugh at those who know all about it,
who love forever, truly,
at those who believe in love as an inexhaustible lamp.
The lovers play at picking up water,
tattooing smoke, at staying where they are.
They play the long sad game of love.
None of them will give up.
The lovers are ashamed to reach any agreement. ...{excerpt}
(translated by W. S. Merwin)
from GREGORY COWLES" review... "Hayes’s work is terrific, and characteristic of a certain strain in contemporary poetry: it’s grounded in narrative even as it’s linguistically dense and playful, with allusions to formal verse traditions and to pop culture new and old."
--- November 18, 2010, 3:15 pm ‘Lighthead,’ by Terrance Hayes: A.D.D. Poet Wins N.B.A. Poetry Award
By GREGORY COWLES --- http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2...rd/?ref=review
TOUCH ME Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
WHEN SHE WOULDN'T
When her recorded voice on the phone
said who she was again and again to the piles
of newspapers and magazines and the clothes
in the chairs and the bags of unopened mail
and garbage and piles of unwashed dishes.
When she could no longer walk
through the stench of it, in her don’t-need-nobody-
to-help-me way of walking, with her head
bent down to her knees as if she were searching
for a dime that had rolled into a crack
on the floor, though it was impossible to see
the floor. When the pain in her foot she disclosed
to no one was so bad she could not stand
at her refrigerator packed with food and sniff
to find what was edible. When she could hardly
even sit as she loved to sit, all night
on the toilet, with the old rinsed diapers
hanging nearby on the curtainless bar
of the shower stall, and the shoes lined up
in the tub, falling asleep and waking up
while she cut out newspaper clippings
and listened to the late-night talk
on her crackling radio about alien landings
and why the government had denied them.
When she drew the soapy rag across the agonizing
ache of her foot trying over and over to wash
the black from her big toe and could not
because it was gangrene.
When at last they came to carry my mother
out of the wilderness of that house ...{excerpt}
Resurrection by Michael Mckimm
As the cod that's cooked in a mountain
of salt comes out delicate as butter, a fur
of disappearances, unrecognisable,
so have I buried the book of our lives
in the salt mines of Cheshire, twenty
miles of white tunnels, two hundred feet deep. (excerpt)
from http://www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/
Thanks q1 for introducing me to Terrance Hayes. I followed the link to another link and then heard him reading his poems. :)
Waipounamu (Wall Poem)
Hoisting history on his back like a sugar-sack,
the swagger strides along greenstone trails.
All night the crib creeks are humming home,
and drowned towns float in their canvas shrouds.
They are just the ghosts of their original selves,
an emotional investment looted by snow-melt for
schemes to answer the Question of Illumination.
To tap this yearning for a golden age,
singing shepherds held wisps of tussock
which curled like lighted Chinese joss-sticks
on the fan-tan tables of sly-grog dens,
frozen in that glacier known as the past.
In the forgotten graveyards, hair grows into grass,
while wind sifts the sweet vernal over and over,
like diggers letting gold dust pour through their fingers.
The Kingston Flyer is chuffing
on the Great Northern Railway to Wakatipu.
John Turnbull Thompson cut the runholders loose
with a panoramic survey and the confidence of a faithhealer
in the middle of Queen Victoria's Royal Century,
when the boom-time harvest of Celtic place-names
seeded Central like a nouveau-Hibernian dialect
from Balclutha to Gimmerburn to Glendhu Bay.
Winter arrives on time in a glitzblitz of powdery snow.
The hoar-frost is a Quarztopolis of ice crystals,
turning weeping willows into frozen chandeliers. ...{excerpt}
TERM
At the last minute a word is waiting
not heard that way before and not to be
repeated or ever be remembered
one that always had been a household word
used in speaking of the ordinary
everyday recurrences of living
not newly chosen or long considered
or a matter for comment afterward
who would ever have thought it was the one
saying itself from the beginning through ...{excerpt} --- Online Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/p...erwin/term.htm
Bella Akhmadulina, Bold Voice in Russian Poetry, Dies at 73 By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: November 29, 2010 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/wo..._r=1&ref=books
THE GREAT LAMENT OF MY OBSCURITY THREE
where we live the flowers of the clocks catch fire and the plumes encircle the brightness in the distant sulphur morning the cows lick the salt lilies
my son
my son
let us always shuffle through the colour of the world
which looks bluer than the subway and astronomy
we are too thin
we have no mouth
our legs are stiff and knock together
our faces are formeless like the stars
crystal points without strength burned basilica ...{excerpt}
PERISHABLE, IT SAID
Perishable, it said on the plastic container,
and below, in different ink,
the date to be used by, the last teaspoon consumed.
I found myself looking:
now at the back of each hand,
now inside the knees,
now turning over each foot to look at the sole.
Then at the leaves of the young tomato plants,
then at the arguing jays.
Under the wooden table and lifted stones, looking.
Coffee cups, olives, cheeses,
hunger, sorrow, fears— ...{excerpt}
MATHEMATICS
I have envied those
who make something
useful, sturdy—
a chair, a pair of boots.
Even a soup,
rich with potatoes and cream.
Or those who fix, perhaps,
a leaking window:
strip out the old cracked putty,
lay down cleanly the line of the new.
You could learn,
the mirror tells me, late at night,
but lacks conviction.
One reflected eyebrow quivers a little.
I look at this
borrowed apartment—
everywhere I question it,
the wallpaper’s pattern matches.
Yesterday a woman
showed me
a building shaped
like the overturned hull of a ship,
its roof trusses, under the plaster,
lashed with soaked rawhide,
the columns’ marble
painted to seem like wood.
Though possibly it was the other way around?
I look at my unhandy hand,
innocent,
shaped as the hands of others are shaped.
Even the pen it holds is a mystery, really. ...{excerpt}
ANOTHER RIVER
The friends have gone home far up the valley
of that river into whose estuary
the man from England sailed in his own age
in time to catch sight of the late forests
furring in black the remotest edges
of the majestic water always it
appeared to me that he arrived just as
an evening was beginning and toward the end
of summer when the converging surface
lay as a single vast mirror gazing
upward into the pearl light that was
already stained with the first saffron
of sunset on which the high wavering trails
of migrant birds flowed southward as though there were
no end to them the wind had dropped and the tide
and the current for a moment seemed to hang
still in balance and the creaking and knocking
of wood stopped all at once ...{excerpt}
A Conversation With W.S. Merwin
Often a poet's contribution to his national literature is measured by awards, fellowships, and grants. W.S. Merwin's importance in the world of literature runs deeper and broader than acclaim and recognition. Merwin, as a historic figure, serves as a link from Pound and Auden (Auden selected Merwin's first book, A Mask for Janus, for the 1952 Yale Younger Poet Series) to the contemporary scene. However, it would be a mistake to view Merwin's growth as a mere rejection of contemporary neoclassicism for the pursuit of "daring experiments in metrical irregularity and thematic disorganization" of the sixties. His concern for discipline remains paramount. What makes his poetry attractive is more than an intangible charm. In Merwin, there is something to be learned.
Merwin has published nine books of poetry, including The Carrier of Ladders for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Moreover, he has written plays, essays, and radio scripts. Merwin has made a large part of his living by translating French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin. His Selected Translations 1948-1968 won the P.E.N. Translation Prize for 1968. Merwin's latest work is Unframed originals (Athenaeum, 1982), his third book of prose. -Jim Brock
{interview -- http://www3.wooster.edu/artfuldodge/...ews/merwin.htm }
BREAD {for Wendell Berry}Each face in the street is a slice of bread
wandering on
searching
somewhere in the light the true hunger
appears to be passing them by
they clutch
have they forgotten the pale caves
they dreamed of hiding in
their own caves
full of the waiting of their footprints
hung with the hollow marks of their groping
full of their sleep and their hiding
have they forgotten the ragged tunnels
they dreamed of following in out of the light
to hear step after step ...{excerpt}