....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}
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
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