http://www.signandsight.com/features/1749.html -- signandsight -- Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan
Printable View
http://www.signandsight.com/features/1749.html -- signandsight -- Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan
from Collected Poems 1920-1954
from The Occasions 1928-1939
[to I.B.]
from Part I
GERTI'S CARNIVAL
If your wheel gets snared in tangled
shooting stars and the stallion
rears in the crowd, if a long
shiver of pale confetti falls like snow
on your hair and hands, or children raise
their plaintive ocarinas* to salute
your passing, and faint echoes
float down from the bridge onto the river;
if the street empties, leading you
to a world blown inside a trembling bubble
of air and light where the sun salutes your grace--
it may be you've found the way,
the route a piece of melted lead
suggested for a moment on that midnight
when a calm year ended without gunfire.
{excerpt}
{from the Rivised and Bilingual Edition,
translated and annotated by Jonathan Galassi} [*ocarinas...n. A small terra-cotta or plastic wind instrument with finger holes, a mouthpiece, and an elongated ovoid shape.
[Italian, from dialectal ucarenna, diminutive of Italian oca, goose (from the fact that its mouthpiece is shaped like a goose's beak), from Vulgar Latin *auca, from *avica, from Latin avis, bird; see awi- in Indo-European roots.]
Book of Isaiah
by Anne Carson
I.
Isaiah awoke angry.
Lapping at Isaiah’s ears black birdsong no it was anger.
God had filled Isaiah’s ears with stingers.
Once God and Isaiah were friends.
God and Isaiah used to converse nightly, Isaiah would rush into the garden.
....
{from one of four parts}
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/bo...html?ref=books -- Donald Finkel, 79, Poet of Free-Ranging Styles,
Is Dead
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: November 20, 2008
Donald Finkel, a noted American poet whose work teemed with curious juxtapositions, which in their unorthodoxy helped
illuminate the function of poetry itself, died on Nov. 15 at his home in St. Louis. He was 79....{cont.}
from Poetry magazine, December 2008
PRAIRIE OCTOPUS, AWAKE
..................
Owls swallow vowels in stilled trees. It's not
sleeplessness, it's fear of what the dark will
do if don't keep a close eye on it.
Blue minutes leak from the pricked stars' prisms,
seep into the earth unchecked. Just as well--
I've hardly enough arms to gather them.
{second of two stanzas}
Close your eyes
Unwinding the bitter onion–
Its layers of uncertainty are limited,
Under brown paper its sealed heart sings
To the tune of a hundred lemons. ... {one of two stanzas of CHOPPING}
From Five Songs For Relinquishing the Earth by Jan Zwicky
The rock weeps into its own whiteness.
Sunny meadow slopes, the gentians,
far above.
The sun, too, tumbles down. A symphony
of spruce boughs sinks into the fiery moss.
Jewel-music, the amber roar of the falls.
No one thinks of home.
Waiting in the cool shadows,
we are dappled with hope.
The fascination of water
is the laughter of geometry.
Wind plunges down the hillside:
a longing to embrace.
The mountain drifts in twilight.
When we draw the blinds at dusk
is the moment we most want to open
them again.
JBI:
Would you be so good to provide the current pronunciation of Jan Zwicky?
Chasestalling
I don't know - I just call her Zwicky, rhyming with picky. and the Z pronounced as in Zebra.
From Brahms' Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, Op. 115 by Jan Zwicky
That we shall not forget to honour
brown, its reedy clarities.
...
That the mind's light could be filtered
as: a porch, late afternoon,
a trellised rose,
which is to say
a truth in nostalgia:
if we steel ourselves against regret
we will not grow more graceful,
but less
...
History
**********after Haydn, Op. 64, No. 2, Adagio
It is quiet now.
The nameless officers for State Security
shrug on their overcoats
and head home through pre-dawn streets.
Oiled locks
turn, then turn again.
The general snores.
You will think it cold,
the way it fingers
open eyes, the darkened cheekbones,
the blood between the legs. ...
{excerpt}
Jan Zwicky
Pasted from <http://www.cstone.net/~poems/histozwi.htm>
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
{excerpt from AUBADE, last stanza of this poem}
...Yet her poetry from beginning to end is concerned with prisons,
vaults, cages, bars, curbs, bits, bolts, fetters,
locked windows, narrow frames, aching walls.
“Why all the fuss?” asks one critic.
“She wanted liberty. Well didn’t she have it?
A reasonably satisfactory homelife,
a most satisfactory dreamlife—why all this beating of wings?
What was this cage, invisible to us,
which she felt herself to be confined in?”
Well there are many ways of being held prisoner,
I am thinking as I stride over the moor.
As a rule after lunch mother has a nap
and I go out to walk.
The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April
carve into me with knives of light.
Something inside it reminds me of childhood—
it is the light of the stalled time after lunch
when clocks tick
and hearts shut
and fathers leave to go back to work
and mothers stand at the kitchen sink pondering
something they never tell.
You remember too much, ... {excerpt from long poem, THE GLASS ESSAY}
TALKING TO THE MOON
A defeated politician is in circulation
again, as we say of coins,
and his mouth is full of words.
His words have all been handled smooth.
They'd shrink, like lozenges, except
some sweat from everyone who's had them
is on them. He could be you,
why don't you support him?
But some people hoard words.
"The year the lake froze all the way
across . . . ," a sentence might begin
and then nod, sleepy in a hot kitchen.
The words are a spell to make the lake
freeze again. The sentence never ends. ... {excerpt}
THE DEFINITION OF GARDENING
....."Horticulture is a groping in the dark
into the obscure and unfamiliar,
kneeling before a disinterested secret,
slapping it, punching it like a Chinese puzzle,
birdbrained, babbling gibberish, dig and
destroy, pull out and apply salt,
hoe and spray, before it spreads, burn roots,
where not desired, with gloved hands, poisonous,
the self-sacrifice of it, the self-love,
into the interior, thunderclap, excruciating,
through the nose, the earsplitting necrology
of it, the withering, shriveling,
the handy hose holder and Persian insect powder
and smut fungi, the enemies of the iris,
wireworms are worse than their parents,
there is no way out, flowers as big as heads,
pock-marked, disfigured, blinking insolently
at me, the me who so loves to garden
because it prevents the heaving of the ground
and the untimely death of porch furniture,
and dark, murky days in a large city
and the dream home under a permanent storm
is also a factor to keep in mind."
{excerpt}
Outer Space
If you could turn the moon
on a lathe, you would
because you are curious.
And that would explain
why the moon slivers,
but explain it stupidly
by not taking care
to ask how the moon rounds.
And so we go, stupid ideas
for feet. The better to wander
with, retort the feet,
and what can you say,
you who shaved those taut
spirals from the moon,
kinks of tightening light
that fell away from your attention
to your work growing smaller
the better you did it?
{excerpt}
****FROG!...
***** *****
Abstract in nature, yet so very important to it. He is the warning sign,
the innervision to peace or self-destruction. Calmly and confidently in
eyes wide open he watches and protects the inner being of innocence
and the beauty of nature inspires him to love and give. He is not ugly!
And the prince is not a prince. But he can be crazy like a poet
clinging to the words of Gods and Demons and the drama of your
sneers and snickers of him. This is love for all of you stuck in
boredom and the intense madness of our darkside. In the danger of
the Forest he does not seperate his emotions. ...
{excerpt}
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/bo...r=1&ref=review --- ‘Poetry’s Shadow’
By KARL KIRCHWEY
Published: December 19, 2008 --- Here is a first book written from a very high floor of the Tower of Babel, and
the view is exhilarating. --- a review of AN AQUARIUM
Poems
By Jeffrey Yang
63 pp. Graywolf Press. Paper, $15
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/ma..._r=1&ref=books --- The Lure of Death
By MELANIE THERNSTROM
Published: December 24, 2008 --- Death is the ultimate subject for a poet. It’s the ultimate subject for all of
us, of course — the self impossibly contemplating its impossible absence — but for a poet whose work is to express
the inexpressible, it is a particular opportunity. “I had often wished for some dread disease . . . /Overwhelmed by
some unspecific disappointment or frustration, or joy, I longed for the “clarity” an illness might bring./It’s
beautiful to have enemies you can see!” Jason Shinder wrote in a journal he called “Cancer Book.”...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/bo..._r=1&ref=books --- --- The Bard of Despond
By DAVID BARBER
Published: December 25, 2008
"In spite of being considered armed and dangerous in so many precincts of American poetry that his mug shot ought to
be stapled up in the post office, there’s still as of this writing no price on William Logan’s head. But you wouldn’t
have much trouble rounding up plaintiffs for a class-action suit: arguably the most industrious and notorious poet-
critic to brandish that hyphen like a knife between his teeth since his acknowledged master Randall Jarrell was on
the prowl, Logan has perfected the gentle art of raising hackles by practicing poetry criticism as a blood sport
rather than a parlor game. Any old reviewer can ruffle feathers. Logan collects scalps." --- Review of STRANGE FLESH
By William Logan
93 pp. Penguin Poets. Paper, $18
From Poetry, January 2009
IDIOT PSALMS
I. a psalm of Isaak, accompanied by Jew's harp.
O God Beloved if obliquely so,
dimly apprehended in the midst
of this, the fraught obscuring fog
of my insufficiently capacious ken,
Ostensible Lover of our kind-- while
apparently aloof-- allow
that I might glimpse once more
Your shadow in the land, avail
for me, a second time, the sense
of dire Presence in the pulsing
hollow near the heart.
Once more, O lord, from Your enormity incline
your Face to shine upon Your servant, shy
of immolation, if You will.
{first of four parts}
II
The day’s at end and there’s nowhere to go,
Draw to the fire, even this fire is dying;
Get up and once again politely lying
Invite the ladies toward the mistletoe
With greedy eyes that stare like an old crow.
How pleasantly the holly wreaths did hang
And how stuffed Santa did his reindeer clang
Above the golden oaken mantel, years ago!
Then hang this picture for a calendar,
As sheep for goat, and pray most fixedly
For the cold martial progress of your star,
With thoughts of commerce and society,
Well-milked Chinese, Negroes who cannot sing,
The Huns gelded and feeding in a ring.
III
Give me this day a faith not personal
As follows: The American people fully armed
With assurance policies, righteous and harmed,
Battle the world of which they’re not at all.
That lying boy of ten who stood in the hall,
His hat in hand (thus by his father charmed:
“You may be President”), was not alarmed
Nor even left uneasy by his fall.
{excerpt from four part poem: MORE SONNETS FOR CHRISTMAS}
Little Low Heavens
A talented verse mechanic cracks open the hood to illuminate the structure and ignition points that make a poem rev up and roar forever.
by Clive James
Any poem that does not just slide past us like all those thousands of others usually has an ignition point for our attention. To take the most startling possible example, think of “Spring,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Everyone knows the first line because everyone knows the poem. “Nothing is so beautiful as Spring” is a line that hundreds of poets could have written, and was probably designed to sound that way: designed, that is, to be merely unexceptionable, or even flat. Only two lines further on, however, we get “Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens” and we are electrified. I can confidently say “we” because nobody capable of reading poetry at all could read those few words and not feel the wattage. Eventually we see that the complete poem is fitting, in its every part, for its task of living up to the standards of thought and perception set by that single flash of illumination.
But we wouldn’t even be checking up if we had not been put on the alert by a lightning strike of an idea that goes beyond thought and perception and into the area of metaphorical transformation that a poem demands. A poem can do without satisfying that demand, but it had better have plenty of other qualities to make up for the omission, even if the omission is deliberate, and really I wonder if there can be any successful poem, even the one disguised as an unadorned prose argument, which is not dependent on this ability to project you into a reality so drastically rearranged that it makes your hair fizz even when it looks exactly like itself. {from an article published in Poetry Magazine -- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/jour...html?id=182120 }
....Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
from Phillip Larkin's 'Here'
"Adrian Mitchell is to feature in the February 2009 UK domain issue. As a tribute following his recent death, we have published his poet page in advance, along with archive audio recordings of him performing at the Poetry International Festival. Further poems will be published on 1 February 2009."
Read his biography and listen to the audio recordings at http://international.poetryinternati...p?obj_id=13553.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/12/bo...n.html?_r=1&em --- Inger Christensen, Scandinavian Poet, Is
Dead at 73
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: January 12, 2009
Inger Christensen, a distinguished Danish poet whose work — lyrical, philosophical, self-referential and exquisitely
mathematical — was a cornerstone of modern Scandinavian poetry, died on Jan. 2 in Copenhagen. She was 73 and lived in
Copenhagen.
She died after a short illness, said Susanna Nied, the American translator of her poetry.
WAIT
Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax—
not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely,
time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail,
one part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore,
another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was
for whom everything always was going too slowly, too slowly.
It was me then who chopped, slashed, through you, across you,
relished you, gorged on you, slugged your invisible liquor down raw.
Now you're polluted; pulse, clock, calendar taint you, befoul you,
you suck at me, pull at me, barbed wire knots of memory tear me,
my heart hangs, inert, a tag-end of tissue, firing, misfiring,
trying to heave itself back to its other way with you. {two of four stanzas}
from Poetry Magazine, February 2009
VIRGIL
Aeneid, II, 692-end
As he spoke we could hear, ever more loudly, the noise
Of the burning fires; the flood of flames was coming
Nearer and nearer. "My father, let me take you
Upon my shoulders and carry you with me.
The burden will be easy. Whatever happens,
You and I will experience it together,
Peril or safety, whichever it will be.
Little Iulus will come along beside me.
My wife will follow behind us. And you, my servants,
Listen to what say: just as you leave
The limits of the city there is a mound,
And the vestiges of a deserted temple of Ceres,
And a cypress tree that has been preserved alive
For many years by the piety of our fathers.
We will all meet there, though perhaps by different ways
And, Father, you must carry in your arms
The holy images of our household gods;
I, coming so late from the fighting and the carnage
Cannot presume to touch them until I have washed
Myself in running water." Thus I spoke.
{excerpt, translated from the Latin}
Quote:
Originally Posted by quasimodo1
I don't think that translation works particularly well - it may be accurate, but I don't think it is quite beautiful, it terms of language.
I thought it unremarkable as well but posted it anyway. The fact that the bar is set low is an unfortunate statement. What I notice in this particular publication is that while submissions are greater than ever ...good or great poetry is no guaranteed result. Ferry has done better.
Poetry Foundation
Year in Review
January 2009
The Poetry Foundation, like many, will remember 2008 as the year of the great financial crisis. From poets and their publishers, to schools and literary organizations, this year's economic collapse has afflicted everyone in the poetry community in ways that are both far-reaching and painfully individual. The Foundation's own challenge was to protect the value of its endowment and continue its work to support poetry and poets.
The U.S. stock market finished 2008 down 34% for the year. Losses on other types of investments, including real estate, private equity, and international, were similar. Thanks to the cadre of prudent fund managers who are responsible for investing the Foundation's endowment, our resources were not directly affected by defaults in the mortgage market, the failures of Wall Street firms and custodial banks, or the more recent losses of charitable foundations that were invested with Bernard Madoff. Although the value of the Foundation's portfolio has declined in line with the markets in which it is invested, there were no write-offs or permanent losses, and the endowment is positioned to participate fully in the eventual market recovery.
As a matter of prudent management the Foundation has adopted a budget for 2009 that will not exceed 5% of the value of the endowment, a common policy in the foundation world and one that the Poetry Foundation has heeded in its five years of operations. At the same time, we are doing everything possible to maintain our work on behalf of the field and to preserve our direct payments to poets and writers, publishers, and prizewinners.
The lean economic times notwithstanding, the Foundation continues to develop a broader and more engaged audience for poetry. All of the Foundation's programs, including its new initiatives, enter 2009 intact. The site for building the Foundation's permanent home in Chicago has been purchased and prepared, and a beautiful design by John Ronan Architects awaits the groundbreaking. When market conditions turn more favorable, we look forward to the sale of a bond issue and the start of construction. And the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, a think tank dedicated exclusively to issues of intellectual and practical importance to poetry, will see 2009 as its first formal year. Katharine Coles, poet laureate of Utah, former head of the creative writing program at the University of Utah, and founding director of the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature, is already at work as the Institute's inaugural director. She has selected as a first field of study for the Institute "Poetry and the New Media."
While tending to its responsibilities on the business side of the house — the necessary left-brain activity of an arts organization — the Foundation continued its mission to discover the best poetry and to celebrate it through publication, prizes, and criticism. This year the Foundation increased its number of Lilly Fellowships, our annual awards for emerging poets, from two to five. Providing $15,000 to each of five fellows, the fellowships provide no-strings-attached assistance to young poets at a formative time in their careers.
Poetry, for its part, published many first-time contributors (over two hundred of them in the past five years). To quote just one of the spirited and articulate poems from these newcomers, Sarah Lindsay's "Zucchini Shofar" begins:
No animals were harmed in the making of this joyful noise:
A thick, twisted stem from the garden
is the wedding couple's ceremonial ram's horn.
Its substance will not survive one thousand years,
nor will the garden, which is today their temple,
nor will their names, nor their union now announced
with ritual blasts upon the zucchini shofar.
Shall we measure blessings by their duration?
And it ends:
This moment's chord of earthly commotion
will never be struck exactly so again —
though love does love to repeat its favorite lines.
So let the shofar splutter its slow notes and quick notes,
let the nieces and nephews practice their flutes and trombones,
let the living room pianos invite unwashed hands,
let glasses of different fullness be tapped for their different notes,
let everyone learn how to whistle,
let the girl dawdling home from her trumpet lesson
pause at the half-built house on the corner,
where the newly installed maze of plumbing comes down
to one little pipe whose open end she can reach,
so she takes a deep breath
and makes the whole house sound.
Discovery and celebration: they are apparent in each new issue of Poetry, and they are a legacy going back to the magazine's very beginnings. Harriet Monroe and Ezra Pound, her "foreign correspondent," chose the poets they published with a combination of personal enthusiasm, neighborhood familiarity, and a perfect willingness to go against the grain. Publishing the new talents of their day — Eliot, Stevens, Moore, and Williams, among many — they tapped into a reservoir of underground energy that came to be known as Modernism. The rest, as they say, is history.
Speaking of underground energy, the Foundation tapped into a load of that this year through our blog, Harriet, and through the Printers' Ball. Inspired by Harriet Monroe's "Open Door" policy*, the blog has become an agora where, with suitable noise and excitement, aesthetically diverse poets come to debate the art form. The Printers' Ball, in a parallel way, showcases Chicago's independent publishing scene. One might think of the Printers' Ball and Harriet together as a kind of Salon des Refusés, that historic exhibition where the Impressionists found their identity in opposition to the French Academy. Whether any poet-descendants of Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, or Ginsberg were present at the recent Printers' Ball, I don't know, but the fact that the police showed up at the prior year's ball is a positive sign. It seems more than merely appropriate that the Foundation remain open in every way possible to the emergent talents and the underground energies of the moment.
Across our programs we continue to cultivate new poetry readers among the youngest members of our culture. This year Poetry Out Loud, the national recitation contest, reached more than 250,000 high school students across the country. The Foundation appointed the second Children's Poet Laureate, the renowned and delightful Mary Ann Hoberman. Our growing collection of successful audio programs, available on poetryfoundation.org, includes the popular monthly podcast featuring the editors of Poetry. In 2008 listeners downloaded our audio content more than five million times. The multifaceted Poetry Everywhere project received a Parents' Choice Award for its online educational curriculum. Classical Baby (I'm Grown Up Now): The Poetry Show — our collaboration with HBO and a kind of poetry primer for young children and their parents — premiered on television in April and received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Program.
Looking around at the widespread effects of the financial crisis, it seems that the old models, both business and social, are broken. At such moments in history, when there is no going back, poetry can intuit the future. As Yeats wrote after the failed Easter Rising of 1916:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
A few years later the Republic of Ireland was formally established.
Sincerely,
John Barr
* The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine. . . . To this end the editors hope to keep free of entangling alliances with any single class or school. They desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written.
MEN AT MY FATHER'S FUNERAL
The ones his age who shook my hand
on their way out sent fear along
my arm like heroin. These weren’t
men mute about their feelings,
or what’s a body language for?
And I, the glib one, who’d stood
with my back to my father’s body
and praised the heart that attacked him?
I’d made my stab at elegy,
the flesh made word: the very spit
in my mouth was sour with ruth
and eloquence. What could be worse?
{excerpt}
LIVES OF THE SAINTS
I began as a darkness and remained so. My life was lit by occasional flares toward which I groped unevenly. I had no mother and no father to speak of. Then you came and it was a big midnight into which the empty stars had been sucked. All that was left were the curved streaks of their paths sliding through space as we turned on our axis and turned around our sun, and turned around our galaxy and turned once more. There was no turning point. All was in flux. All was darkness.
*
I was a schemer. I lit lamps in unlikely places to attract night's insects. I knew nothing of the day. Words sunk in me like ships crushed in an ice floe. I nursed hiddenness. Took on meaning. Imbibed the sound of thunder. I waited for things to come by and trapped them. My father told me that wild things will not suffer containment. I learned by entrapment. I learned by the sound of my knees sliding through fall leaves. I entered and left by the smallest of holes, like a bat. I peeked when I was supposed to cover my eyes. I saw things I was not intended to see. I told. I didn't tell. I said. I didn't say. I hid in the least spaces.
*
I was most ordinary and began as a thing. You didn't know me. We missed each other by minutes—my coming, your going. I made up words to explain it. They never did. At 12, I found something that was like you but was not you. I began to follow it. It led me everywhere. I fed it from a saucer on the chipped linoleum floor. I kept it lit.
*
I was a great liar and told many tales that were true. I kept things in pockets that no one knew about. I had suitcases ready at all times. And nobody could discover what it meant. I followed anacondas and slipstreams. I wanted a vegetable but all we had were flowers. Sometimes I took them down. I tried to remake the noise. I sat for examination. I was full of puncture holes. Marks appeared on my body overnight, as if from dreaming. I climbed the ladder from Hell and crossed. My robe trailed behind me and caught in the slats because I was already not tall enough for it. You believe me, don't you?
* {prose poem of ten parts}
When I returned from what I might characterise
as a last nervous piss, she said, turning the
ignition on, 'Do you mind?'
'You're in the box seat,' I said.
'The boot is on the other foot, now,' she said,
leaning determinedly on the accelerator.
'Then let it be on your head,' I said, as we
slithered heatedly across the street slap-bang
into the expensive plate-glass purple
sign-painted EXCELSIOR PET EMPORIUM ....
(excerpt)
"STILL, however blurry “greatness” may be, it’s clear that segments of the poetry world have been fretting over its
potential loss since at least 1983. That’s the year in which an essay by Donald Hall, the United States poet laureate
from 2006 to 2007, appeared in The Kenyon Review bearing the title “Poetry and Ambition.” Hall got right to the
point: “It seems to me that contemporary American po*etry is afflicted by modesty of ambition — a modesty, alas,
genuine . . . if sometimes accompanied by vast pretense.” What poets should be trying to do, according to Hall, was
“to make words that live forever” and “to be as good as Dante.” They probably would fail, of course, but even so,
“the only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.” Pretty strong stuff — and one
wonders how many plays Shakespeare would have managed to write had he subjected every line to the merciless scrutiny
Hall recommends." {excerpt from "The Great(ness) Game" article by David Orr, 2/19/09 --
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/bo.../Orr-t.html?em
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/bo...r=1&ref=review --- TIME AND THE TILTING EARTH
Poems
By Miller Williams
51 pp. Louisiana State University Press. Cloth, $45. Paper, $16.95 --- ---
"But Williams isn’t finished making *poems, and that’s a fact for which we should be thankful. His latest collection,
“Time and the Tilting Earth,” offers many pleasures. Chief among these are Williams’s way of entwining the pure
earthiness of language as it’s spoken with rigorous metrical precision, and, analogously, his affection for the
quotidian, with an insistence on confronting unanswerable but unavoidable existential problems." {excerpt from
review}
16.95 seems a little much for a 51 pager.
Fragments 5 and 6
8 Fragments For Kurt Cobain
by Jim Carroll
5/
Then I translated your muttered lyrics
And the phrases were curious:
Like "incognito libido"
And "Chalk Skin Bending"
The words kept getting smaller and smaller
Until
Separated from their music
Each letter spilled out into a cartridge
Which fit only in the barrel of a gun
6/
And you shoved the barrel in as far as possible
Because that's where the pain came from
That's where the demons were digging
The world outside was blank
Its every cause was just a continuation
Of another unsolved effect