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News Articles, with Rus Bowden

11/25/2003


Of the estimated 15,000 children who were imprisoned in Terezin, only 100 are known to have survived. As Oratorio Terezin makes clear, the tragedy inspired an eloquent response from some of the inmates. As one of them wrote:

The heaviest wheel rolls across our foreheads
To bury itself deep somewhere inside our memories.
We've suffered here more than enough,
Here in this clot of grief and shame,
Wanting a badge of blindness
A fourth year of waiting, like standing above a swamp
From which any moment might gush forth a spring.
Meanwhile the rivers flow another way,
Another way,
Not letting you die, not letting you live.
And the cannons don't scream and the guns don't bark
And you don't see blood here.
Nothing, only silent hunger.
Children steal the bread here and ask and ask and ask
And all would wish to sleep, keep silent
And just to go to sleep again.

from CanadianChristianity.com: A Canadian tribute to Holocaust children



On the second floor is a study furnished with portraits given to him by well-known artists, including an amateurish rendering of Matilde by the Mexican Diego Rivera. Next to it is the bedroom he and Matilde shared. Her colorful high-heel shoes are still in the closet. On the third floor, with a large portrait of Walt Whitman along one wall and a shelf of books along another, is another study, where Neruda wrote. And on the top floor, like a captain's deck, is a sitting room with a clear view of Bellavista and other spots in Santiago.

from Washington Post: Chile: Author, Author: A Literary Tour Of Santiago



Note the abab rhyme scheme and rather rigid meter, both so determinedly old-fashioned. This is the sort of thing that gets most would-be poets in deep trouble, trapping them in stilted anachronisms of phrasing and form. At this late date, few poets can write in such a style and display keenness. Hecht is one of the few.Hecht's mastery also derives from his ease at blending erudition with accessibility.

from The Kansas City Star: Hecht's Later Poems a brilliant gathering



'. . . .The extant verses are often derivative (thus his The Harp of India' mourns the fact of a subjugated India in strains very similar to Moore's 'The Harp of Erin') . . . but we glimpse through his poems a lively and sensitive mind.' [S. Kripalani]

The Harp of India

Why hang'st thou lonely on yon withered bough?
Unstrung for ever, must thou there remain;
Thy music once was sweet--who hears it now?
Why doth the breeze sigh over thee in vain?
Silence hath bound thee with her fatal chain;
Neglected, mute, and desolate art thou,
Like ruined monument on desert plain;
O! many a hand more worthy than mine
Once thy harmonious chords to sweetness gave,
And many a wreath for them did Fame entwine
Of flowers still blooming on the minstrel's grave;
Those hands are cold--but if thy notes divine
May be by mortal weakened once again,
Harp of my country, let me strike the strain!

from The Daily Star: Indian Poetry in English: Henry Louis Vivian Derozio



"Good writers write; failed writers teach" is one of those ego-supporting statements that ignore Milton's homemade classroom (with enlightened syllabus and afternoon walks) or Ted Hughes helping set up the Arvon Foundation. What really fine writers like Pauline Stainer do is both write and educate, and they do so first and foremost within their poems. Her poetry teaches by example - Stainer's polyvalent curriculum embraces ancient history, mythology, metaphysics, the visual arts and music, geography, natural philosophy and physics.

from The Guardian: A spring in her heels: David Morley hails the playful intelligence of Pauline Stainer's The Lady and the Hare



A poet trains for his craft the way a boxer trains for his fight, [Roberto] Sosa said. But the creative act can't be "revealed" or "patented."

A poet aspires to write a transcendent text, he said. It's a text that "reaches another dimension," [Jo Anne] Engelbert said.

Translating a poem, "pressing the language" for art and accuracy takes immense energy, Engelbert said.

from The St. Augustine Record: Jo Anne Engelbert gets award for the translations of works by Honduran poet Roberto Sosa



In 1964, after seeing an exhibition that included Andy Warhol's ''Brillo Box," an enlarged plywood reproduction of a Brillo box, [Arthur] Danto had a revelation. He recognized that: 1) By no existing conception of art could ''Brillo Box" qualify as a work of art. 2) Nevertheless, ''Brillo Box" was undeniably a work of art. 3) Therefore, the history and philosophy of art would have to be reconceived.

from The Boston Globe: Art, beauty, and other obsolete ideas



Sometimes he doesn't want to go to school. "Why, my love, if school is so important?" I ask him. "What is important is my dad, and I do not like the school anymore."

The problem is that Gabriel's father, my husband, Manuel Vázquez Portal, is one of those being persecuted by this "revolutionary justice."

According to official propaganda, Gabriel is the son of a counterrevolutionary.

from FrontPage Magazine: Drawing Strength From Gabriel



Hugh Kenner, the critic, author and professor of literature regarded as America's foremost commentator on literary modernism, especially the work of Ezra Pound and James Joyce, died yesterday at his home in Athens, Ga. He was 80.

from New York Times: Hugh Kenner, Commentator on Literary Modernism, Dies at 80



In the spirit of Thanksgiving, here is an excerpt of a poem by Max Coots, along with some tasty information about the produce items that he mentions. What could be better for a nutritionist than a poem that compares friends to fruits and vegetables!

from Billings Gazette: Hayes: Tasty Thanksgiving ideas come from poetry



Special Section: Iraq, USA, the Occupation of Poetry

In this talk, [Tariq] Ali explains the reasons that poetry is so central to his latest book, Bush in Babylon. He reads a number of poems in their entirety, and explains the political context and importance of them. The question and answer section is every bit as interesting, in particular his discussion of the history of the Inquisition, the expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula or forced conversion of Muslims and Jews in the 15th century, and the creation of the modern European identity.

from Dissident Voice: Poetry in Turbulent Times: The Role of Poetry in Political Struggles in the Muslim World



June Jordan: Correct me if I'm wrong, but this killer crusade, this conversion of a stranger’s land into a killing field, this reduction of a people to a video display. This homicidal rhetoric that history does not support, that our common destiny is certain to condemn. This war has not saved one human being. This war has not saved a single American life. This war has not saved a single Israeli life. This a war has not saved a single Iraqi life. This war has not rescued the lives of Kuwait.

from Democracy Now: From the Persian Gulf to the Invasion – Poet, Activist, Essayist and Teacher June Jordan Speaks About the U.S. and Iraq in 1991



That is not to say we are the only ones who only talk, loving the sound of our own familiar voices and ideologies, neglecting to open our ears to a different tune. I was struck, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, by the degree to which the attacks on the World Trade Center were seen as an assault on a symbol, made in total ignorance of the reality of the concrete lives unfolding within the towers.

To the extent that people within existed at all for the attackers, it was in abstract terms, as "infidels."

from The Baltimore Sun's SunSpot.net: Words Without Borders - making the U.S. cosmopolitan: National myopia about other cultures' literature damages this country



Howard Zinn and Thom Yorke have never done lunch, waved to each other along the red carpet, or even had a conversation. But what if they did?

We took the recent release of Howard Zinn's new book, Artists in Times of War (Seven Stories Press/ Open Media Series) as an opportunity to find out what would happen if these two very different people were to sound off on the role of artists in politics. After all, who better for this dialogue than Radiohead's Thom Yorke?

from Independent Media Institute's AlterNet.org: Truth in the Hands of Artists



Like many dictators, Saddam Hussein loved art, and especially adored poetry. He patronized the arts like an Ottoman caliph, lavishing riches on artists and poets who pleased him. He commissioned hundreds of sculptures, paintings and monuments. And he poured millions into a film industry he called the "cinema of the state."

Poets who wrote paeans to Hussein's greatness earned medals. Often, the government appointed them editors of news papers. "It was the dream of everyone to write a poem that caught his eye, because they would get money, power, a title," says Faris Harram, a bearded young poet who works as a low-paid clerk. "It was possible to make a lot of money working for the government. If I had, I would be rich!"

from The Christian Science Monitor: In chaotic new era, Iraqi artists seek aid


11/18/2003


The heightened awareness he experiences while looking out onto the Italian landscape is intensified because of the connection [Dave] Smith is able to make with the remembered rain, especially how it sizzled "onto/ the petals of her prized hydrangeas."

In this way, the memory of those flowers and their "blue surprise" provides the emotional context for Smith's more immediate experience: "The way it is tonight, rain shaking Bellagio's hydrangeas."

from The Baltimore Sun's SunSpot.net: Italian landscape calls forth emotional memories: Vivid description, quiet drama mark Dave Smith's work



Qu Yuan (340-278 BC), the famous poet who committed suicide because he was unhappy with the dark reality of life, was among the first to write poetry about the chrysanthemum. He wrote in his poem "Li Sao": "Drink dew from the magnolia in the morning and take autumn chrysanthemum's falling petals as food in the evening."

Another famous poet, Tao Yuanming (365-427), is also recognized as a poet who had a deep affection for the flower. His most famous poem is about the chrysanthemum: "Pick a chrysanthemum near a fence and enjoy the mountain in the south at your leisure."

from Xinhua News Agency's Xinhuanet.com: Chrysanthemum - flower of honour



And changes in the temporal lobes can produce hypergraphia. One example of these changes is temporal-lobe epilepsy. Some people with epilepsy stemming from temporal-lobe damage have hypergraphia so strong that they will write on toilet paper or use their own blood for ink if nothing else is at hand. Their hypergraphia is usually linked to other personality traits, including unstable mood and motivation, and a tendency to ruminate on the philosophical or religious Big Questions. Similar traits are often seen in people with manic-depression during their manic periods.

from The Chronicle Review: Writing Like Crazy: a Word on the Brain



They had been working to "build democracy and the rule of law," a goal proclaimed in the Summit's final declaration.

Among them was the journalist and poet Raúl Rivero, who was arrested on 20 March this year and sentenced on 7 April to 20 years in prison after a sham trial at which defence rights were not respected. He was accused of "undermining the country's independence and territorial integrity." He defended himself by saying : "I don't plot, I write."

from Reporters Without Borders: Open letter to the heads of state about the human rights situation in Cuba



The poem is reprinted on this page with the addition of a left-side tally of lines, so readers can refer to what Sofield has to say. Casual readers, be warned: We're going under the hood.

From its start, the poem moves, like the Earth around the sun, without pausing, until its lone period at the end. Sofield says he wanted a single sentence and he wanted short lines.

from Daily Hampshire Gazette: Between the lines, with poet David Sofield



It is acknowledged that the foundation of Hausa literature is now isolated or even pushed out of the literary activity. This may often be attributed to the high level of talent and the linguistic prowess required in writing a poem especially in Hausa.

Poetry in Hausa is and has been at a standstill for so long. The prevalence of a culture that tilts more to the screen than the text, thus Hausa poetry becomes more endangered

from allAfrica.com: Is Hausa Poetry in Decline?



Helen Friedman Blackshear, whose lifetime of writing brought her numerous honors, including four years as Alabama's poet laureate, has died at 92.

from Times Daily: Teacher, poet laureate Helen Friedman Blackshear dies at 92



He [Charles Causley] wrote a letter to me last year, one of many wonderful, rich, funny and revealing letters, in which he talked about Hughes, his greatest friend, about how he had loved him, how he missed him.

"I used to see them often, when he was with Sylvia. Lovely girl. And Frieda and Nicholas. I used to look at them in their cots and think, 'and all I've got to show for it are a few old poems'."

from The Guardian: Joking apart: Susan Hill celebrates the poetry of Charles Causley - Cornishman and friend - who died this month



Could it then be that the satire in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales on such "crooked church officials" as the Pardoner and the Summoner provoked the wrath of Archbishop Arundel?

And could the posthumous Ellesmere Manuscript of Chaucer's poem have been censored on political grounds? According to [Terry] Jones, Chaucer's knight is represented in the text as a democratic sort of chap, wearing a "fustian jupon" (the medieval equivalent of a donkey jacket), whereas in the Ellesmere illustration he has a high-fashion "liripipe" (a dandyish sort of scarlet cravate).

from telegraph.co.uk: Monty Python's death of Chaucer



Generally speaking, [Francine] Prose is right: Musedom is essentially women's work. Women writers have lacked the economic and cultural capital that would enable them to attract men and render them into passive objects of the female gaze. In the rare instances where women writers have turned men into muses, the transformation has been accomplished without male consent.

from Boston Globe: The power of the 'negative muse'


11/16/2003


Special Sunday Edition:
Fresh articles about poetry from About.com


"Don't be like Piñero! If you aspire to be a writer/activist, you must first of all plan to live. You must escape the hedonism of this society and live a humble life of discipline and service. You must find true values, life-affirming values to serve as the foundation of your art." [Dahveed Ben Israel]

from Piñero & the Poet's Life: Michael Salinger interviews Dahveed Ben Israel



As the world moves ever closer to war... in the face of what feels inevitable... even after the bombs begin to fall... we must do what we can here... gather the voices of poets in a great chorus for peace.

from Poems For Peace: As war commences again...



In many ways, Marcellus is the most experimentally progressive spoken word artist in Tokyo. He is the only poet I know of who can improvise lines of poesie to the accompaniment of live musical riffs. With the Modern Soothsayers, the jazz funk band, he bellows his soulful timbre in intensely expansive, expressive ways. For a sound clip from this venture, check out the “Sounds� page at Light-Walker.com, where you can also hear another of his collaborations, with electronica artist Nakamura Tatsuya.

from Poetry Currents: Japan: Marcellus Nealy: Light Walker



I'm not a poet, but I do appreciate fine writing, albeit, books, short stories, fiction, whatever. Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most interesting and macabre of them all.

from Edgar Allan Poe: Although not born in Baltimore, he called it his home.



1967 Gwendolyn Brooks attends Fisk University's Second Black Writers' Conference and begins to rediscover her blackness. After the conference, Brooks decides to become more involved in the Black Arts movement. Her poems become angrier in tone and she begins to market her work through black publishers. Gwendolyn Brooks becomes a black poet (instead of a poet who just happens to be black).

from Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000): African American Poet; Illinois Poet Laureate; Pulitzer Prize Winner



Then there's The Courtship of Myles Standish (1923), a silent film based on the Longfellow poem about the Myles Standish/John Alden/Priscilla Mullins love triangle, which I have to admit I have not seen.

from Thanksgiving in the Movies: Myth vs. Reality



One of the more poignant events in this autobiography is the description the trauma Maya suffered at the age of eight. She was raped by one of her mother's friends during one of her visits to St. Louis. A few days after telling her brother about the attack, she overheard news that her attacker had suffered a violent death. It was then that Maya stopped speaking for five years because she thought that her words killed her attacker. Even at this young age she was convinced that words could be powerful. It was with poetry that she finally found her voice again.

from Maya Angelou: Extraordinary Human Being



Poetry

Just Give me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Diiie 1971
Oh I Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well 1975
And Still I Rise 1978
Now Sheba Sings the Song 1987
I Shall Not Be Moved 1990
On the Pulse of Morning 1993
The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou 1994
Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems for Women 1995
A Brave and Startling Truth 1995

from Maya Angelou: Her Works



Victorian misconceptions of the 18th century fashioned the charm of the Christmas holiday... but, it was the serendipitous collaboration of a painter, a writer, a professor's poem and a political illustrator that produced today's Christmas greeting card.

from The Illustrators of Christmas: Victorian Realizations of Christmas



In the mid-1800s, the Victorians were eager to share their holiday greetings. They had the mode: the postal service. But, they didn't have the method: Christmas cards.

Enter Sir Henry Cole... soon to become the first director of England's South Kensington Museum (renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899)... and British illustrator John Calcott Horsley!

from The Illustrators of Christmas: The Birth of the Modern Christmas Card



In 1862, [Thomas] Nast became smitten with Dr. Clement Clarke Moore's poem 'Twas the Night Before Christmas.2 Nast, now an illustrator for Harper's Weekly, couldn't resist the opportunity to visually depict Moore's Christmas fantasies. He created a sleigh and reindeer and a Santa Claus. Harper's Weekly published his drawings... our modern Santa had come to town!

from The Illustrators of Christmas: America's Modern Christmas Card


11/11/2003


"[Dylan] Thomas was an elemental poet, pared down to the essence without trappings," [Bob] Kingdom continues. "He talks about human experience that has meaning for any generation.

"Of course, there is much in Thomas that may seem dated," Kingdom adds. "In the '40s and beyond, many people truly believed that heavy boozing was part of talent, as opposed to the destruction of talent. And when someone said [as Thomas did] that he didn't want to live past 40, it was assumed in some quarters that he must be a genius."

from Backstage.com: Bob Kingdom: Embodying Dylan Thomas



In 1927 when Dylan was a schoolboy living in Uplands, Swansea, he submitted the ode, which he discovered in a November 1923 edition of the Boy's Own, to The Western Mail claiming it was his work.

Editorial staff were so impressed he was given a 10 shilling note and Dylan's proud father framed it at their home and showed it off to visitors.

from icWales: Dylan Thomas tricks BBC from the grave



He argues that many of the best gay American writers — from Henry David Thoreau to Gertrude Stein — had this sensibility because they lived when it was more difficult to be openly gay. Living in an oppressive time and being different in an intolerant culture helped them as writers, [Rick] Whitaker says.

from The Washington Blade: Gay between the lines: Rick Whitaker’s entertaining book of literary criticism looks at the impact of gay authors writing from the closet.



"I think poetry is created at the crossroads of differences between cultures," said the Spanish poet Jenaro Talens, who divides his time between Madrid and Geneva. "The future of poetry lies in this diversity, a kind of Tower of Babel, which economic globalization wants to eliminate but in which I feel very content. I don't think language needs to be transparent. It needs to make people think."

from The Jerusalem Post: A sort of rapture



The signatories to the brief included this year's Nobel Laureate, South African novelist J.M. Coetzee, and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon.

Poetry, "is an artistic medium particularly well-suited for the examination of one's own potential for depravity," they wrote the court. "The developing genre of 'dark poetry,' as practiced by Julius, is merely a continuation of this literary tradition."

from The Mercury News: Literary luminaries write court on behalf of teen poet



Irrational thoughts pulsed through my head the entire way. If The Washington Post decided to run my poem, would it then be okay for me to wear one of those great hats that said SCOOP across the top? Would I be considered a child prodigy?

When I reached home my mother was standing in the door with the phone in her hand and tears in her eyes. Mr. Shearer had just called and told her that I was, in fact, going to be published . . . in the Catholic Standard.

"The Catholic Standard?" I cried. "Who the heck reads that?"

from The Washington Post: Ode, the Agony! A Poet, Her Work Are Parted



Dichterliebe (A Poet's Love) ranks among the greatest examples of a song cycle - a group of songs that form a cohesive musical and literary structure. The 16 songs in this cycle reflect on lost love, a favorite theme of 19th-century poetry.

Heine's emotional verses, which reflect the very essence of Romanticism, become extraordinarily vivid through Schumann's melodic lines and, just as significantly, the piano accompaniment.

from The Baltimore Sun's Sunspot.net: Lieder: So easy to love



Outside of Al-Azhar, scholars have praised the book for its affinity with Islamic mysticism known as Sufism, which regards the love of women as a means of loving God.

But last Saturday, a 28-member committee of Al-Azhar's Islamic Research Academy issued a fatwa, or religious edict, saying the book should not be circulated or republished, and claimed that the book was an open invitation to obscenity in suggesting that women should surrender themselves without shame to passion, and parade naked before their lovers.

from allAfrica.com: Islamic Clerics Ban Poetry for Women



Though popular - no other living British poet of his distinction commanded so diverse a readership - he was resolutely untrendy. He belonged to a conservative countertradition that stressed the national character of its poetry and the vital inspiration of popular forms such as folk songs, hymns and, especially, ballads - he was, in his day, probably the finest writer of ballads in English.

from telegraph.co.uk: Charles Causley



Influential political figures in various eras in Arab and Islamic history were referred to as “people of the tongue� or “people of the pen.� Ahmed Ibn al-Hussein, being so talented as a writer, and as well obsessed with the question of political power, actually claimed to be a prophet, that his words were of divine origin. He was put in jail for such a claim ­ but he did not fully give up.

from The Daily Star: The power and beauty of Al-Mutanabbi: Writer’s theme was nexus between poetry, politics



Special Veterans & Remembrance Day Section:

A large shell exploded near his head weeks later, throwing him into the air, and another, ghoulishly, exhumed a comrade, depositing his corpse nearby. Owen was haunted by blood-soaked dreams and, after a diagnosis of shell shock, he was committed to a war hospital. He befriended a fellow patient, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, and embarked on his most prolific period of writing. For Owen, the romance of war was by now long gone. He wrote of one wounded soldier, "heavy like meat/And none of us could kick him to his feet."

from The New York Times: What World War I's Greatest Poet Would Say About Hiding Our War Dead



The visual element in "Dead Man's Dump" is not only pronounced, it is also unmistakably Rosenberg's in its odd, changing angle of vision. The reader views the scene first through the eyes of "someone carrying wire up the line on limbers and running over dead bodies", Rosenberg told Marsh, but then through the upturned, haunted eyes of a dying man waiting for rescue and finally from the limber-driver's perspective again.

from The Guardian: Visions from the trenches



But it's a stanza from an unheralded McCrae verse, Disarmament, that the Guelph donors have asked to have engraved on the wall of the new gallery: "Let us cease/From darkening with strife the fair world's light/We who are great in war be great in peace./No longer let us plead the cause by might."

from Montreal Gazette: New museum to immortalize poet: Couple's gift to new institution allowed them to name special gallery after McCrae



Oppen fought in the second world war, surviving (as a number of subsequent poems recall) by leaping into a foxhole to escape enemy fire. This national service notwithstanding, in the early 1950s it became clear that his Communist background would sooner or later bring him to the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

from The Guardian: By catboat to New York: George Oppen's commitment to linguistic truth was impressive, says David Herd, after reading his New Collected Poems



"I'm Gertrude Stein," she said.

Barringer said he knew of Stein as a poet and writer, but he felt more interested in securing the village than stopping to talk.

Only later, when the story of Stein's liberation - and her big poodle - hit the pages of Yank and Life magazines, did Barringer realize just how famous she was.

from McAlester News Capital & Democrat: Veteran recalls WWII feats


11/4/2003


So it is both important for our view of Dickens at the outset of his writing career, and immensely entertaining, to find on the front page of the True Sun for March 13 1832, a poem called "The Turtle Dove" (the stanza copied by Collier appears at the end):

As lonely I sat on a calm summer's morning,
To breathe the soft incense that flow'd on the wind;
I mus'd on my boots in their bright beauty dawning,
By Warren's Jet Blacking - the pride of mankind.

from The Guardian: A twist in the tale: The trauma of his boyhood experiences in a blacking factory has long been seen as crucial to Charles Dickens's career, but newly discovered early work challenges the legend



Bilingualism is [Gali-Dana] Singer's crusade. In her opinion, the 1970s approach gave too much credit to geography and language. On the contrary, she believes, the place where she lives and the language she speaks don't rule who she really is and what she writes. Instead, they just increase the possibilities for expression.

"I write in Russian and in Hebrew independently of what I want to say," Singer explained. "It's not a conscious thing. A poem begins with a word of some sort. If that word happens to be in Russian, then that means that the poem will be in Russian. If the poem turns out to be in Hebrew, then that means that the poem will be in Hebrew."

from The Moscow Times Metropolis: Russian Poets in Israel Learn to Speak in Tongues



[Carol] Muske-Dukes said that she remembers her mother pushing her on a swing and reciting Robert Louis Stevenson's poem "The Swing".

"How would you like to go up in a swing, up in the air so blue? Oh, do I think it the pleasant thing...'"

Muske-Dukes said that the words of the poem would pull her out on one line and swing her back on another.

from Daily Trojan: Literary masters among us



For [Ted] Hughes, poems tended to turn into sequences: the poem, singular, begins to look a bit neglected, a foot soldier in an imperial project conducted at a growing distance from the real hand-to-hand action.

from The Guardian: Essential but unlovely: The publication of Ted Hughes's Collected Poems shows both his genius and his failings, says Sean O'Brien



Crying for Hussein is said to cleanse the soul. The sheikh would emphasize parts of great sorrow, like when Hussein’s brother and flag holder, Abbas, saw children dying of thirst and swore to bring them water. The Umayyads waited until he was holding the water in his hands, then cut them off.

from The Daily Star: Al-Husseiniyya: performance and poets: Story of the death of Hussein has many tellers



[Rasul] Gamzatov wrote with affection and drama of Dagestan's landscapes of soaring mountains and long Caspian Sea shoreline and his love poems combined puckish humor with passion, as in the closing couplet of A Hundred Women I Adore:

"I love a hundred girls, it's true/But every one of them is you."

from CJAD 800: Well-loved Russian poet Rasul Gamzatov dies at 80 in Moscow hospital



In poems about "Julie (encephalitis)" or "Alison (head injury)" she [UA Fanthorpe] made her first attempts to capture the voices of people who could not speak for themselves, in acts of literary ventriloquism that were to become something of a trademark.

In addition to a whole new palate of human pain, she discovered another new world, one of bureaucracy, hierarchy and the petty machinations of office power. "One of my advantages was the fact that I wasn't used to being treated as if I was dirt," Fanthorpe explains with a smile.

from Independent.co.uk: UA Fanthorpe: Life of the English poet



Pound will always be significant, in the sense that in order to understand the history of 20th-century poetry one will need to know who he was and what he did. But whether poets will feel ignorant for not having yet read "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" I simply cannot tell. It was never my favourite poem.

from The Guardian: Something beautiful I once knew: James Fenton defends the reputation of Ezra Pound



"One shouldn't move away from poetry - for much of our aesthetics come from poetry; religion started with poetry, thought started with poetry; the epics Ramayana, Mahabharata, Iliad. If you believe in the occult, when the Devi descends, she descends on the shaman (who) has also been reciting slokas. I have written essays on science and poetry and religion and poetry. There must have been a time when science or knowledge was all combined in one man or one lady. Poetry is literally god- given. It can't be put aside because people have taken to the TV or computer or magazines." [Keki Daruwalla]

from The Daily Star: Indian Poetry in English: Daruwalla



Nursery rhymes helped comfort the kindergartners. Poems seemed to help older students, but they couldn't take away the anger and confusion for Jerabek Elementary students who returned to school for the first time since wildfires swept through their neighborhoods.

from The Casper Star-Tribune: Anger, sadness fill campus as students return to school after deadly California wildfires


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