News at Eleven

A reader in love with [C.P.] Cavafy has no choice but to own several, since it often happens that where one translator comes up short, the other does better. Every time I'm struck with admiration for the poetic qualities of Haviaras's translation (he even manages to reproduce the rhymes of some of the early poems), I recall a poem Sachperoglou has done exceedingly well. Such as 'Ithaca':

from London Review of Books: Some Sort of a Solution

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The junta increased U Win Tin's sentence by 10 more years. They put him alone in his cell. The cell was 8.5 x 11.5 feet. There was only a bamboo mat on the concrete floor. Sleeping, eating, walking and cleaning the bowels were done in the very same place. He could not see the sun, the moon or the stars. He was intentionally barred from breathing fresh air, tasting nourishing food and drinking a drop of fresh water. The worst thing was throwing the old writer into solitary confinement in such a cage for two decades.

from Asian Tribune: Burma's Longest Serving Prisoner of Conscience Must Be Free

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"I can't take it anymore like this, I am leaving finally," Taslima [Nasreen] said. "They did not even allow me to go back to Kolkata to collect my things, you guys are there, take care of those."

They won, secular India lost. Taslima is finally leaving India for Europe, unable to cope up with life in solitary confinement in the dungeons of "safe house"- or should we call it gulags for cultural offences? - that exists in free India. Safe houses are nice places to keep safe from species like a "Muslim woman writer with a big mouth."

from Sify News: Goodbye Taslima, Welcome India without slogans

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When he is not at his cottage in Donegal composing poetry or attending literary functions in Dublin, [Cathal] O'Searchaigh spends a good deal of his time in Nepal where he has raised money for charities over the past ten years and adopted a son.

But his preference for sex with younger men has placed him at the centre of a public storm in Ireland, with calls for his poetry to be taken off the syllabus.

from The Guardian: Film sparks storm over Irish poet

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But [Dan] Chiasson teases us with his description of the dirtiest poem in the anthology, W.H. Auden's "The Platonic Blow," which Chiasson can only call "is the dirtiest verse written since Rochester--I can't even talk about it here."

So how dirty is it, really?

from New York Magazine: How Dirty Is That Auden Poem That Was Too Dirty for the 'Times Book Review'?

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Can it be that William Wadsworth's or Paul Violi's best erotic poems are better than Frank O'Hara's second or 10th or 50th best? I'd like to see someone make that case.

It's good to encourage people who otherwise wouldn't read older poems to take a little Hart Crane with their Mark Doty, but it's odd to leverage a few old names merely to inflate the value of the new ones.

from The New York Times: Hot or Not

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The Academy of American Poets has announced the launch of a mobile poetry archive which provides free and direct access to the entire collection of over 2,500 poems on Poets.org, as well as hundreds of biographies and essays, all in the palm of a hand.

from Wireless and Mobile News: 1st Mobile Poetry Archive Launched for National Poetry Month & Beyond

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Five years ago, on the same day that British and American troops marched into Iraq, poets convened in St Andrews for the first day of the StAnza Poetry Festival. The invasion formed an uncomfortable backdrop to the festival that year – sitting listening to poetry felt like fiddling while Rome burned.

This year, on the first day of StAnza, an explosion claimed 11 more lives in Baghdad, a reminder that the occupation continues.

from The Scotsman: Chapter and verse

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Samuel Johnson gave the poem first place "among the productions of the human mind."

But it is now the quadricentennial of [John] Milton's birth in 1608, and it is startling that this work, once central to the literary and religious experience of the English-speaking world, is so much a curiosity, sentenced to the margins by its preoccupations with biblical interpretation, condemned by the density of its prosody, which does not instantly seduce but, instead, commands the reader to give way before it, persisting until no resistance is possible.

from The New York Rimes: A Giant's Roaring, Faintly Echoed

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Our images of Hell, the devil and the fall of man have been irrevocably shaped by [John] Milton's versions of them. His "Areopagitica" remains one of the foundational texts of the argument for freedom of speech.

The closing lines of "Lycidas", his elegy for an acquaintance drowned at sea, have always seemed to me one of the most moving passages in English verse.

For so to interpose a little ease,
[/. . . .]

from Telegraph: English poetry masters: John Milton
also Telegraph: English poetry masters: Percy Bysshe Shelley
also Telegraph: English poetry masters: Christina Rossetti
also Telegraph: English poetry masters: Robert Browning

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In this series, the Guardian brings together seven of the greatest poets of the 20th century.

Each booklet includes a generous selection of the poet's best known and most acclaimed work.

from The Guardian: Great Poets of the 20th Century
also The Guardian: A poetry of atonement: Rowan Williams on WH Auden
also The Guardian: The mother of so much: Margaret Drabble on Sylvia Plath
also The Guardian: Foreword: Jeanette Winterson on Ted Hughes
also The Guardian: Playing the common world's melody: John Banville on Seamus Heaney
also The Guardian: Happy warrior, embittered pacifist: William Boyd: Siegrfried Sassoon
but also The Guardian: commentisfree: This great poets list has only one woman. About right, too

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Great Regulars

Claire Ridley, the UK marketing manager of the game, showed me, with a noticeable degree of pride, a rather gentle Spore tribe she had created. I asked her what would happen if she just left them alone. "They would die of hunger," she said with a note of real anxiety. "You have to nurture them and look after them."

from Bryan Appleyard: The Times: Bryan Appleyard tries out Spore and creates his own species

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Now Powell's has taken another step into the collector market and started a limited-edition, subscription-only book club. It features independent and small-press books in original sets with extra goodies such as CDs or DVDs, cookies or chocolates, and promotional material.

from Jeff Baker: The Oregonian: Bookmarks: Powell's starts limited-edition book club

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[Tom Paulin] is wondrously nimble at tracking a pattern of sound through a text, though the process rapidly become repetitive and over-technical: "There are three ih sounds in the next stanza, two in the next stanza, along with two i sounds. Then in the last stanza there are a total of nine ih sounds and three i sounds . . ."

You can, in short, read too closely, just as you can squash your nose up against a canvas until the painting fades to a blur.

from Terry Eagleton: The Times: The Guardian: A puritan at play

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Gunter Grass Reads Gabo
By Evan Fleischer

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Don't tell Gunter about this one

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Approaching Fifty

By Tina Hacker

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Life begins at . . . ?

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I have some great news: Washburn University's Woodley Press soon will release Lindsey Martin-Bowen's first full-length poetry collection, Standing on the Edge of the World. The poet generously agreed to give Parachute a preview:

Everyone Connects Kansas with Oz

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Oz? It's over the rainbow

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Iowa Poet Laureate Robert Dana today joins Kansas' Denise Low and Missouri's Walter Bargen on the roster of state poet laureates featured on Parachute.

Blood Harvest
By Robert Dana

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: The Poet Laureate Project, Part 3

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The author of today's poem is 12 years old; he lives in Independence, Missouri.

Wood Carving

by Danny Mallinson

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Prodigy

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A poem by Linda Rodriguez:

I Could Live in the Library

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: The stacks are nice this time of year

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When [Stanford] White was shot dead by Harry K Thaw in 1906 and his mansion was sold off, Hearst and John D Rockefeller "fought like schoolboys" over the stained-glass windows, the weather vanes, the doorways and the ceilings. I was told once of a Rockefeller property where there were two huge Renaissance fireplaces--in the squash court.

from James Fenton: The Guardian: Restoration and removal

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The speaker assumes that if is difficult for many citizens to understand the purpose of the death of soldier, so he is going to explain why that difficulty exists: "It is because like men we look too near,/Forgetting that as fitted to the sphere,/Our missiles always make too short an arc."

Many ordinary citizens cannot see the bigger picture in the cosmic scheme of things: they "look too near."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Robert Frost's 'A Soldier'

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Carl Sandburg is an excellent poet, who has written many fine poems, but this is not one of them. Nevertheless, because beginning students/readers of poetry need to be able to compare the well-written and the not-so-well-written works, it is important for those students/readers to experience even the uninspired work of the best poets.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Sandburg's 'Young Sea'

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That is how I feel about this poem: "Here" is where "the blockage" is; it is also the present moment (and place) in any of our lives. The "ache" appears to be the ache of ageing--even the poet's doctor says "I have that, we all have". "Here" is also wherever the poet is.

from Frieda Hughes: The Times: Monday Poem: Here, by Ken Smith (Shed: Poems 1980-2001, Bloodaxe)

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In "Carrion Comfort," [Gerard Manley] Hopkins refuses to feast on the rotten meat of melancholy, though he can barely long for day and stave off suicide. Hopkins's syntax is so mangled, the lines so packed with heavy plodding accents and stilted comma stops, that he speaks as if through a chokehold. Yet somehow the depth of his suffering proves the vigor of his faith.

Carrion Comfort

from Mary Karr: The Washington Post: Poet's Choice: Lenten remorse: Hopkins's dark night of the soul

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Poem: "Fishing On The Susquehanna In July" by Billy Collins, from Picnic, Lightning.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: For the week of March 17, 2008

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The American poet Elizabeth Bishop often wrote of how places--both familiar and foreign--looked, how they seemed. Here Marianne Boruch of Indiana begins her poem in this way, too, in a space familiar to us all but made new--made strange--by close observation.

Hospital

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 155

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For a while it all got pretty nasty; there were even suggestions that [Philip] Larkin's books might be banned from some libraries. But what is his reputation today, 23 years after his death? Even though the heat of debate has died down a bit, he remains a divisive figure.

from Andrew Motion: The Guardian: The quarrel within ourselves

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In one scene, I try to hold a fellow student crushed by a tank, and realize his two legs are gone, with only blood gushing from his body. Such scenes are rewound and played again, night after night. No time for healing after such an event.

It has been 18 years since I set foot in my hometown.

from Luisetta Mudie: ClatteryMacHinery on Poetry: Life and Death from Beijing: a Poetry Sequence by Luisetta Mudie and Dreamer Fei

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The key is to rethink the traditional roles of art and science, to find a middle ground where we might frame aesthetic solutions to scientific questions, or apply a scientific rigor to the challenges of art.

"[T]he fused method that results," he [David Edwards] argues, "at once aesthetic and scientific--intuitive and deductive, sensual and analytical, comfortable with uncertainty and able to frame a problem, embracing nature in its complexity and able to simplify to nature in its essence--is what I call artscience."

from David L. Ulin: Los Angeles Times: 'Artscience' by David Edwards

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In "God Particles," [Thomas] Lux's 11th volume of poetry, readers are confronted by the brutality, banality and violence of the modern world. But they also encounter God particles scattered throughout--an instance of kindness, a reason for joy, an impulse to forgive.

Lux, recipient of the 1995 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for "Split Horizon," is known for his uncompromising and bold poetry.

from David L. Ulin: Los Angeles Times: 'God Particles: Poems' by Thomas Lux

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That's a gorgeous image, and exactly right, for this is what we are, brief sparks flashing, momentary bursts of illumination animated by a creative force so indifferent that "it/exaggerates our self-/importance even/to think you would/ignore the prayer."

At the heart of this, of course, is God--or a conception of eternity at any rate. For [Alan] Shapiro, that's less a source of comfort than of silence, a caesura in the face of everything we cannot know.

from David L. Ulin: Los Angeles Times: Songs of experience, of loss and longing

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The number one way to combat counterfeiting of U.S. currency, Don Drosehn says, is not through the complicated patterns of engraving, or the red and blue threads in the paper, or even the watermark of a bill.

“Nothing is as effective as the feel,� says Drosehn. He proceeds to take a bill out of his pocket, grasping it in his fingers at the edges and pulling.

from Andrew Varnon: UMass Amherst: The Buck Starts Here

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by Jonathan Musgrove

The Day I Saw the Emperor's Clay Soldiers

from The Atlantic Monthly: Poetry: The Day I Saw the Emperor's Clay Soldiers

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by Paul Muldoon

The Windshield

from The Atlantic Monthly: Poetry: The Windshield

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The Woman who Worries Herself to Death by Kathryn Simmonds

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: The Woman who Worries Herself to Death by Kathryn Simmonds

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Sean's suggestions for adding drama to poetry

A fundamental skill is the ability to dramatize a poem, to give it the sense of three-dimensional life, rather than simply let it comment on its subject. Few of us are sufficiently remarkable to have interesting general opinions about life, but if we renew proverbial truths in fresh contexts we may be on to something.

from The Guardian: Poetry Workshop: Sean O'Brien's workshop

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Found Myself in Search of Matthias & Paul
by Robert Gibbons

from Guernica: Poetry: Found Myself in Search of Matthias & Paul

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By Martin Zehr
She fumbles in her purse for reading glasses

from The Kansas City Star: Between the Lines: Between the Lines: 'Waiting to Read'

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For the Prisoners of Guantanamo
by Dennis Brutus

from MR Zine: For the Prisoners of Guantanamo

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Midi
by Les Murray

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Midi

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On Beauty
by James Longenbach

from The New Yorker: Poetry: On Beauty

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Pharaoh's Daughter
By Erika Meitner

from Nextbook: Pharaoh's Daughter
also Nextbook: North Country Canzone

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Pancho Savery's poem "Full Moon" is the winner of Hubbub magazine's 2008 Stout Award and will appear in Volume 24 of the magazine, available Monday. Savery teaches English, Humanities and American Studies at Reed College, and his poems have appeared in journals such as Rainy Day and Hanging Loose.

from The Oregonian: Poetry

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By Lauren Syphers

The Ginger Jar

from The Philadelphia Inquirer: Your Poem: [by Lauren Syphers]

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[by Jane Allen]
Memories

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: Memories

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[by B. Kelton]
An Ode to the Overgrown Forest

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: An Ode to the Overgrown Forest

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In themselves, the visual components are hardly enough for a poem: but once [Charles] Wright has mediated the landscape--through an aphorism, a few metaphors, some minatory concepts, an evanescent life-cycle, a hope, and a regret--the painting-poem assumes that atmosphere of visual intensity, intellectual spareness, and colloquial interruptions by which we recognize Wright's hand. The poet uses a palette of strictness and grayness and deadness, but at the end creates a change in hue:

from Powells: Review-A-Day: Snatched from the Air

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In his new bi-lingual collection Nort Atlantik Drift (Luath, £15), Robert Alan Jamieson takes the reader on a journey to the rhythms and voices of Shetland, creating a lyrical blend of mythology, autobiography and culture. He appears at the StAnza poetry festival this weekend.

Laamint fir da tristie

from The Scotsman: Poem of the Week: Robert Alan Jamieson

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"planting daffodils"
By Charlotte Boulay

from Slate: "planting daffodils" --By Charlotte Boulay

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Poetic Obituaries

A powerful writer known for his uncompromising stand, [Padma] Barkataki's creations encompassed diverse realms from short story and novel to drama and poetry to children's literature and translation works. He was also an acclaimed critic and prose writer. Realism had been Barkataki's forte, and his works touched the deepest chords of the reader.

from The Assam Tribune: Padma Barkataki passes away

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With painter Don Kommit, [Angela] Costa founded the Silk City Poets in Paterson, N.J., a poetry performance group in the early 1970s. She received the William Carlos Williams Poetry Award in 1975, and, in New York, studied with Diane Wakowski and Ntozake Shange. Various literary magazines and anthologies (Black Creation, Diversitas and Howling Dog) published her work. She often read on WBAI ("Ghosts in the Machine") and appeared on Manhattan Cable's "Radio Thin Air."

from Downtown Express: Angela Costa, 54, Tribeca musician and writer

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[Tanikka] West said her family belongs to Restoration Christian Center and that Sydney [Dailey] participated in volleyball, chorus and dance at school. She enjoyed writing poetry.

"She wrote about her family. She wrote about things she loved, flowers and wanting her family to be happy and being happy herself," she said.

from Tulsa World: Mother: Victim was harassed

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"All his students knew his passion for literature, the sharpness of his insights, the breadth of his knowledge, and his certainty that a poem or a novel could make a difference in lives," [Roland] Dille recently wrote [of Clarence Glasrud] in the school's alumni magazine. "And all of them knew that he was always there for them, a man unable to find any question silly, a man whose every response avoided condescension."

from The Forum: Former MSUM professor Clarence 'Soc' Glasrud dies at age 96; called 'a legend in his own time'

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In 1983, she [Marcia E. Hensley] began her work as a co-owner with her husband in a newspaper business. During their time in the business, the couple moved back and forth several times between Minnesota and Iowa. Mrs. Hensley retired in 2001, and the couple moved to Luverne in June 2003. She was a member of ARC and enjoyed writing poetry, spectator sports, and working alongside her husband.

from Post-Bulletin: Marcia E. Hensley--Rochester

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During World War II, she [Elizabeth L. Hoadley] served with the U.S. Navy as a nurse.

Following her military service, she worked as a nurse in the family nursing home in West Franklin and later at Lakes Region General Hospital in Laconia.

She traveled throughout the United States over the years and enjoyed motorcycles. She also wrote poetry.

from Concord Monitor: Elizabeth L. Hoadley

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Janet said that [her daughter] Kayley [Howson], a former pupil of Rosehill Primary School and Gawthorpe School, loved her music, reading and writing poetry.

She said: "Kayley had trouble expressing her feelings to people but somehow she could find the words to write poetry. We didn't realise how much she had written--but we found hundreds of poems. [. . ."]

from Lancashire Telegraph: Pink tribute to tragic girl

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[Ryan Kell] was an artist, drawing, painting and writing poetry, and had played bass guitar for several local bands, Paul Kell said.

Ryan worked for a construction business owned by his stepfather, Brad Darrell, and had learned to install tile. Paul Kell said his son learned guitar from Darrell and had picked up his artistic talents from Cynthia.

from Canton Repository: N. Canton man's body found after fall into pit

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[Virginia Fedor Poole] was noted there both for her ability to memorize and recite long poems and for her imitation of the child actress of the 1940s, Margaret O'Brien. In high school, Virginia not only performed in school plays, but acquired the "Jini" spelling of her nickname.

from Vineyard Gazette: Virginia F. Poole, 73, Touched Island With Enthusiasm for Life

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Months after her initial diagnosis, she [Martha Rapaport] wrote transcendent poems and let herself be photographed bald from chemotherapy, then sent that transformational project, called "In the Spirit of Healing," to health centers to inspire others.

from The Virginian-Pilot: Troupe's founder had creative, healing roles

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As a publisher, [Jonathan] Williams produced more than 100 books with some of the 20th century's best poets and photographers.

Among Williams' first titles was Olson's "Maximus Poems," an influential landmark in contemporary poetry.

But Williams saw no barriers between high and low art, writing, by turns, elegant and earthy poems inspired by rusted roadside signs and classical forms.

from Asheville Citizen-Times: Poet, photographer and publisher Jonathan Williams dies at 79

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News at Eleven

Poetry is written out of the true self, in all its complexity, in all its saving incoherence, its authentic internal contradictions, its existential candour, a self utterly remote from the self deduced by the world, the glib caricature we recognise reflected in the eyes of others, "eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase".

from The Guardian: All jokes aside
see The Guardian: Great poets of the 20th century: Eliot
and The Guardian: Great poets of the 20th century

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By writing in the English vernacular and moving from alliterative to metrical arrangements of sound, his [Geoffrey Chaucer's] work was the incubator for modern English prosody.

from Telegraph: English poetry masters: Geoffrey Chaucer

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"Old Poets", from Elaine Feinstein's aptly titled new volume Talking to the Dead, reflects that "We were so sure/The words of their poems would last,/and that the next generation/would be equally in love with the past". If "love" can encompass every shade of rivalry and argument, she has every right to her confidence. Poetry itself, as the imprisoned Wyatt came to know, can be the most stalwart paramour of all.

The Poem that Changed My Life

Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate

I Look into my Glass, by Thomas Hardy

from The Independent: Why poetry still matters, by Boyd Tonkin

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Robert Frost Lecture: No poem is intelligible except in light of all the other poems, and the poems that were ever written, so you better get about them, circulating among them. That's what I say in the spirit of poetry too, and you take as much stock in it as I'm telling you to take...'

from WBUR Newsroom: Robert Frost Unplugged

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Such young people have, in effect, no history, and this being so, their own significance is diminished. The problem is not whether Shakespeare or the Bible or TS Eliot is "relevant" to them, but whether they can see themselves as part of a continuum, a community extending across history.

from The Guardian: 'Read poetry: it's quite hard'

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T.S. Eliot, who achieved the lofty status of Nobel Prize winner--and, significantly--became one of his generation's most authoritative cultural critics, himself ironically remarked upon his genetic inheritance from "witch-hangers" and the cultural debt he owed to his common heritage with Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Indeed, as even a superficial acquaintance with American literature will reveal, Eliot's sensibilities and literary soul had much in common with Hawthorne's work, and with that other eminent American expatriate, Henry James.

from Salem Gazette: 'Between two waves of the sea' - T.S. Eliot's roots in the North Shore
also Salem Gazette: 'At the source of the longest river'--T.S. Eliot's ties to Salem
also Salem Gazette: T.S. Eliot:: 'The river is within us, the sea is all about us'

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"No, not me. I can't go that. I get stage-fright. Wait till Allen comes back--he's great. He loves that."

To what did Kerouac attribute his sudden recognition on the West Coast, after years of the opposite here in the East: "One thing," he said. "Rexroth. A great man. A great critic. Interested in young people, interested in everything."

from Village Voice: Back to the Village

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That they have taken note of him, he [Linton Kwesi Johnson] says, "is great. But they recognise me, not the other way round. Some black and Caribbean poets seek a kind of validation from these arbiters of British taste. But they really didn't exist for me. I was coming from a position of cultural autonomy. I did my own thing, built my own audience and established my own base. My audience was ordinary people."

from The Guardian: 'I did my own thing'

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The poet wrestles all the way to the last lines between a readiness to make peace with her own passing versus a continued resistance, along with the mourning of friends, family and colleagues. For [Grace] Paley, who passed away before seeing the publication of this book, these last words sustain the truths she was committed to, and bear witness to new wisdom.

from The Brooklyn Rail: Poetry: Peculiar Antennae

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Split This Rock calls poets to a greater role in public life and fosters a national network of activist poets. The festival will explore and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for change: reaching across differences, considering personal and social responsibility, asserting the right to free speech, bearing witness to the diversity and complexity of human experience through language, imagining a better world.

from Foreign Policy in Focus: Hear This Hammer Ring

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Reporters Without Borders will launch the first International Online Free Expression Day under UNESCO's patronage on 12 March, when it will also organise its second "24-hour online demo against Internet censorship," urging Internet users to come and demonstrate on its website, www.rsf.org.

from Reporters Without Borders: Wednesday 12 March : launch of Online Free Expression Day plus repeat of last year's "24-hour online demo"

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Great Regulars

[Alison] Brackenbury is at her best when exploring details from her own life and from her immediate environment, when celebrating the possibilities of the near at hand, and, in the end, it's in these subtle evocations of everyday fragility that Singing in the Dark finds its strength.

from Charles Bainbridge: The Guardian: At home with the horses

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[James] Frey has a contract for a novel and has started a blog. The scandal over [Margaret] Seltzer's book will blow over--until next time.

When Primus St. John, an English professor at Portland State, was asked about fake memoirs, his answer was telling.

"Which one?"

from Jeff Baker: The Oregonian: Bookmarks: Memoir Mess

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[Richard] Kenney is a muscular poet. Ideas leap toward emotions, images quicken into thoughts, consonants tick into consonants, and vowels elide into vowels. This sort of circular momentum is at the heart of his Italian sonnet, "Millenary," too. It's a wry, Y2K lament cushioned with a concluding punch line of self-deprecation.

Millenary

from David Biespiel: The Oregonian: Poetry

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"When you're writing your first novel and you're writing it in free verse, you have to pause every 15 pages and reassure yourself you're not crazy. You come up with a lot of different excuses for why you're not crazy.

"You really aren't expecting anyone to buy it," [Toby] Barlow said recently in a phone interview from San Francisco, where he was promoting the book.

from John Mark Eberhart: The Kansas City Star: Sharp Teeth author couldn't tear himself away from the idea of a werewolf novel

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Eastern Washington University Press recently brought back into print "Awake," Dorianne Laux's excellent debut poetry collection from 1990. It's great to have it back. Today, Parachute features the collection's title poem, courtesy of the author.

Awake

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: "Awake"

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OK. People are responding by sending poems, so the blog will go on for now. But I STILL NEED MORE poems, screeds about poetry, rants, deep thoughts, considered observations and so on.

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Back from the brink

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Back Yard

by Jon Herbert Arkham

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: 'Back Yard'

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'The Collection'
By Judith Bader Jones

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: 'The Collection'

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So think of this as Poetry Lab # 1. What are your overall impressions? Are there things he could do to make the poem better? If so, what? Hit that ol' comment button. All I ask is that everyone offer respect along with honesty.

Crow

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Poetry Lab One

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Here's a wonderfully naked poem by Carrie Allison. I make no apologies for printing it on a Sunday. Enjoy.

Trying

By Carrie Allison

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Procreation

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Memory and Migration

By Van K. Brock

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Van's the man

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At the Waffle House

By Shawn Pavey

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Waffle stomp

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"Purify me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me and I will be whiter than snow." (Psalm 51:7).

When I first read this, I could hardly believe it. "What? Me, clean as snow?" How stunning.

By the time I was 20 years old, I was a sexual mess.

from John Freeman: Philadelphia Daily News: Bible shows the way out of sin and addiction

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The poem exemplifies one of his most frivolous attempts to squeeze a poem out the measured encumbrances of faulty modernism. [John] Betjeman identified himself in Who's Who as a "poet and hack."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Betjeman's 'Westgate-On-Sea'

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Some tried to invent their own mythology and religion.

Influenced by a widespread failure to understand scientific advancement of their era, many began to think that the human being was a super-animal instead of child of God.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Four Modernist Poets

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In the preface, [Malcolm M.] Sedam claims his poetic experience by stating, "Let me speak for my own poetry--that it happened to me--that I lived, enjoyed or suffered every scene and that these poems are the essence of these experiences."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Malcolm M. Sedam

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Fine. Then let's define memoir as fiction and forget all this nonsense about the "truth."

According to [Lee] Gutkind, readers don't care anyway.

from Bob Hoover: Post-Gazette: A hoax? Nah, just a memoir

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This is such an appropriate poem for March, and David Sutton's reminiscences of being cold in winter need no explanation. His childhood experience is familiar to me, and will be to anyone who has not been "coddled".

from Frieda Hughes: The Times: Monday Poem: Chilling memories

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Beyond the laconic remark in the subtitle, it is difficult to say how much, if at all, [Robert] Frost intended his poem to comment on Christian religion. But the editors of the TLS saw fit to publish the poem in the run-up to Easter 1954; and so in 2008 do we.

The Bad Island – Easter
(Perhaps so called because it may have risen once)

from Mick Imlah: The Times Literary Supplement: Poem of the Week: The Bad Island--Easter

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The apocryphal story goes that he'd been promised a friend's daughter in marriage, but the friend reneged, allegedly because Archilochos' mother had been a slave. The resulting curse, "Liar," still sprays like seawater on your face.

Liar

from Mary Karr: The Washington Post: Poet's Choice: Poetic Staying Power

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Poem: "San Antonio" by Naomi Shihab Nye from Is this Forever, or What? Poems and Paintings from Texas.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: For the week of March 10, 2008

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Here, poet Yusef Komunyakaa, who teaches at New York University, shows us a fine portrait of the hard life of a worker in this case, a horse and, through metaphor, the terrible, clumsy beauty of his final moments.

Yellowjackets

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 154

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Except that the marriage turned out to be exceptionally happy, and Dorothy [Wordsworth] never did anything but support it and call Mary "dear". Yet in the last part of Dorothy's long life (she stayed under her brother's roof until her death at the age of 84), the strains finally emerged and drove her to the edge of madness.

from Andrew Motion: The Guardian: The agony, the ecstasy and the hot soup

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[Rob Wicks] wanted me to go and meet Harry [Patch], who is 109 years old and the last surviving "Tommy" who fought in the trenches during the First World War, share his memories, then come home to London and write something about him.

If things went well, there would be a second meeting, at which I'd read Harry his poem.

from Andrew Motion: Telegraph: Harry Patch: A century's life shaped by four months at war

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The Five Acts of Harry Patch
'The Last Fighting Tommy'
by Andrew Motion

from Andrew Motion: Telegraph: The Five Acts of Harry Patch

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[Charles] Kingsley repeats the form of this opening stanza as he turns to the rocks and streams. The "rosy rocks" remind us of blood, suggesting the elemental extremes of birth and death beyond the cozy designs of the seaside resort. This coloring may strike us as fanciful, but it faithfully describes the red rock so distinctive of the Devonshire and Cornish landscape.

from Christopher Nield: The Epoch Times: The Antidote--Classic Poetry for Modern Life: A reading of 'Dartside' by Charles Kingsley

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But because of labels like "memoir" and "nonfiction," we have to preten? d the spectacle is based in reality. So, perhaps instead of rigorous policing, we need a new name for this hybrid category. We're talking about stories inspired by gritty real life--stories that claim to be outrageously "authentic," like the best reality TV, while also playing up their own tabloid qualities.

from Meghan O'Rourke: Slate: Lies and Consequences

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by Susan Zenker

"Against the grain of white headboard you sketched
blue doves with gold open beaks, gold-scalloped wings
that cluttered the doorways--wishes
through which early evenings Diego slipped
out to markets, cantinas, and trysts."

Posted on March 7, 2008

Shrine to Frida Kahlo

from Donna Snyder: Newspaper Tree: Tumblewords Poetry: Poetry: "Shrine to Frida Kahlo"

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aura
by Arlo Quint

from The Brooklyn Rail: aura

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Big Box
by Ange Mlinko

from The Brooklyn Rail: Big Box

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Cuckoo Nun
by Ange Mlinko

from The Brooklyn Rail: Cuckoo Nun

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Caption
by Lihn Dinh

from The Brooklyn Rail: Caption

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How to Foster
by Linh Dinh

from The Brooklyn Rail: How to Foster

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Not Quite Symmetry
by Linh Dinh

from The Brooklyn Rail: Not Quite Symmetry

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Typical Umbrella Fiasco
by Miles Champion

from The Brooklyn Rail: Typical Umbrella Fiasco

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Fantasy of Gods

By Joseph Bassi

from The Daily Texan: Poetry: Fantasy of Gods

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Ladybug

By Benjamin Toscher

from The Daily Texan: Poetry: Ladybug

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A Summer Day in Winter

By Benjamin Toscher

from The Daily Texan: Poetry: A Summer Day in Winter

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With this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were from the very beginning at stake in the game.

from Daily Times: Purple Patch: Structure, sign and play --Jacques Derrida

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Editor's note: This week in Poetry Corner we feature the work of Jonell Esme Jel'enedra, who has lived and worked in the Santa Cruz community since 1980. She is the author of "Stilt Walking at Midnight" (Hummingbird press, 2004), a recipient of a Mary Lonnberg Smith award, and the Quarry West poetry award, First Prize, 1999.

Lullabies for an Insomniac

from Good Times Weekly: Poetry Corner: Poetry by Jonell Esme Jel'enedra

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Candle at a Wake by Elena Shvarts, translated by Sasha Dugdale

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: Candle at a Wake by Elena Shvarts, translated by Sasha Dugdale

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Patricia Wallace Jones creates a highly resonant and engaging poem from the dawn exercise. As in some of Michael Longley's poems of the natural world, the brevity is extremely well-judged--less is so often more.

from The Guardian: Poetry Workshop: 'Thick with season'
plus T? he Guardian: Poetry Workshop: 'Thick with season' (continued)

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'Dreaming of You as a Saint'
By Maril Crabtree

from The Kansas City Star: Between the Lines: 'Dreaming of You as a Saint'

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A Clean Slate
by Fred D'Aguiar

from The New Yorker: Poetry: A Clean Slate

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Terrible Things Are Happening . . .
by Maureen N. McLane

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Terrible Things Are Happening . . .

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By Sydne M. Klein

Inspiration

from The Philadelphia Inquirer: Your Poem: [by Sydne M. Klein]

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By Nicole Murray

I am the person who,

from The Philadelphia Inquirer: Your Poem: [by Nicole Murray]

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[by E. Bernard Arnold]
A Confused Husband

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: A Confused Husband

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[Bradford] Morrow, in his introduction, intimates that this poem may have been the inspiration for Ginsberg's "Howl." In fact, Rexroth was one of the chief influences on the Beat Generation, a connection he later disavowed with the now famous statement, "an entymologist is not a bug."

from Powells: Review-A-Day: Selected Poems

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American poet Tess Gallagher is in Scotland for the StAnza poetry festival (see interview, page 20). Her long-awaited eighth collection, Dear Ghosts (Graywolf Press), confronts illness, mortality and the loss of loved ones, including that of her poet and short-story writer husband Raymond Carver.

Little Match Box

from The Scotsman: Poem of the Week

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"For D."
By Rosanna Warren

from Slate: "For D." --By Rosanna Warren

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Poetic Obituaries

Rodney L. Armstrong, March 6, 1965--December 22, 2005

Rod was a good friend during and following the years we worked together on the poetry board he created, Gandy Creek. He was also a fine poet himself, as this poem (originally published in Avatar Review 3) shows:

"Particles"

from The Compost Heap: In Memoriam

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[Padma Barkataki] wrote 38 novels, five collections of short story and ? two collections of poetry as well as three children books. He also translated several classics of different languages into Assamese.

from Calcutta Telegraph: Padma Barkataki dies at 82

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[Marilyn Jane Camp] started teaching in rural Madison County in 1949 and retired in 1989 from Muscatine public schools. Following retirement, she moved to Indianola. She enjoyed reading and poetry.

from The Des Moines Register: Marilyn Jane Camp, 77, Indianola

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When the Rev. [Howard W.] Creecy [Sr.] took the pulpit, his son said, "He was the master mix of intellect, wisdom and spiritualism. You were going to hear great poetry, great prose and great preaching."

He was known for his prayers, his son said. For years, his sermons were broadcast on AM radio.

from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Howard Creecy Sr., 79, leader in SCLC

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[Jeannie H.] Davis was given awards for her work by the Girl Scouts of America, North Philadelphia Community, and the Chapel of Four Chaplains. She enjoyed writing poetry.

from The Philadelphia Inquirer: Jeannie H. Davis: Elementary teacher, 90

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"Raven truly was wonderful," he [Raven McConnell's father Tony] said. "She was loved by everybody. She was very interested in photography. She wrote great poems. She loved poetry and art."

from The Columbus Dispatch: Hit-and-run victim gives life to others

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News at Eleven

One initiator and participant will be the general secretary of the Friends of Tibet Organization, poet Mr Tenzin Tsundue.

The walkers will leave India in early March and trek through the Himalayas, reaching Tibet during the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing in August.

from Epoch Times: An Epic Walk Home through Himalayas for Exiled Tibetan Poet

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Earth Shattering has poems on destruction to alert and alarm anyone willing to read or listen as well as poems which illuminate the ecological balance of the rapidly vanishing world.

As the world's politicians and corporations orchestrate our headlong rush towards eco-Armageddon, poetry may seem like a hopeless gesture. But if Seferis and Heaney are right, poetry can at the very least be "strong enough to help".

from The Guardian: Something in nothing

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[Paul Laurence] Dunbar's rebuttal that night was his own writing and elocution, a performance that was highly praised.

"Part of the remarkable thing about Dunbar's life is how he is able to negotiate what is truly an impossible climate of racial discrimination. This is one of the most horrific periods of racial repression in America," the BGSU professor [Timothy Messer-Kruse] said.

from The Toledo Blade: Toledo helped shine light on gifted black poet

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Among the tourists, he [TS Eliot] would have seen some locals fishing from the jetty to supplement their diet with cod or eels, said Mr [David] Seabrook. Eliot may well have noticed others combing the beach for anything left from shipwrecks.

In the middle of November, Eliot left Thanet and went to Lausanne in Switzerland to undergo psychiatric treatment. The Waste Land came out in 1922.

from Kent News: How TS Eliot found inspiration at Margate

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As [Robert] Frost says in what may be his best essay, "The Constant Symbol," "every poem is an epitome of the great predicament; a figure of the will braving alien entanglements." The out-setting poet should expect a series of surprises and even some lucky accidents. "It takes a hero to make a poem," Frost said in one of his interviews.

Every good poem involves risk-taking; not least with its eventual reader.

from The Washington Times: What the poet was thinking

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The committee looked at nominees' résumés and their poetry, judging on the basis of quality of the work, contributions to the literary community and willingness to serve. The top three names were sent to the governor, and he personally selected Bly.

Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River

By Robert Bly

from Pioneer Press: Robert Bly is state's first poet laureate

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"Writing those poems, I came to understand why people write elegies," [Mary Jo] Bang says. "One of their uses seems to be to keep the person alive in the world. I was aware from the beginning that I was keeping a conversation going with someone I was talking with for 37 years. Now, because of that event, I needed all the more to talk with him.

"At the end, you know that you have not kept that person alive. An elegy is a way of distracting yourself from lacerating grief."

from St. Louis Post-Dispatch: At home with Mary Jo Bang

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Dorothy [Wordsworth] began writing the Grasmere Journals in 1800 "because I shall give William pleasure by it". William's pleasure included filching from Dorothy's pages to create his poetry. The connections are transparent: "I never saw daffodils so beautiful," wrote Dorothy. "They grew among the mossy stones. . . & the rest tossed & reeled & danced & seemed as if they verily laughed . . ."

from The Times: The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth by Frances Wilson

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And once she [Daphne du Maurier] found [J. Alex] Symington--by then living a reclusive existence on the outskirts of Leeds, in a house filled with hundreds of boxes and overflowing files of Brontë papers and relics--he gave her a series of enticing clues to follow, suggesting in letters to her that Charlotte's signature had been forged on many of Branwell's youthful manuscripts, and that some of Branwell's most accomplished poems had been wilfully misattributed to Emily, so that they could be sold for a far higher price to collectors who were interested only in the famous sisters rather than their disappointing brother.

from The Times: The Great Bronte Mystery

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Eve is compared to a wood-nymph in Diana's service. Raphael arrives in the garden of Eden like the god Mercury, shaking his plumes and giving out "Heavenly fragrance". And the garden itself is compared to:

that fair field
Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flowers
Her self a fairer flower by gloomy
Dis
Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world . . .

These have always been my favourite lines in Paradise Lost, with their astonishing leap out of the Christian and into a pagan world picture.

from The Guardian: The devil's advocate

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In his poem "Buffalo Bill's" for example, [E.E.] Cummings positioned the words on the page to suggest the shape of an arrowhead and the danger of Buffalo Bill's career.

"Cummings captures that dynamism of his life by the way he makes his lines move on the page, so you can see them moving further to the right and then back, and that's all connected with his painting at the time," [Milton] Cohen says.

from National Public Radio (NPR): College Restores Artwork by Poet E.E. Cummings

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Great Regulars

Lisa Alvarado
Grieving

from Lisa Alvarado: Grieving

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The standard model is a triumph of human thought, a masterpiece. Professor Richard Kenway, who led the QCDOC team, implored me to tell you just how amazing it is. Thanks to the standard model, the human mind has grasped the behaviour of the unimaginably small entities of which the universe consists.

But, like so much else in modern physics, it doesn't quite make sense.

from Bryan Appleyard: The Times: Supercomputer works on cracking the mystery of the universe

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[Hadji] Ali used camels on a freight route between Yuma and Tucson, Ariz. Some of them went into the desert and became feral. After his death in 1902, Ali became a legendary Western figure, the subject of a folk song ("The Ballad of Hi Jolly") and a festival (Hi Jolly Daze in Quartzite, Ariz.).

from Jeff Baker: The Oregonian: Common threads in U.S., Mideast

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"But in Pakistan, the situation looked quite different," said Fatima [Bhutto] in a speech at the Foreign Correspondents' Club here.

"To say there was rigging in the February 18 elections is an understatement . . . It wasn't just rigging, it was quite open, unapologetic rigging. It was no longer under the table, it was very much on top."

from Fatima Bhutto: The News International Pakistan: Bhutto's niece slams Western media

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Why are you crying? my father asked
in my dream, in which we faced each other,
knees touching, seated in a moving train.

I'm Li-Young Lee. I was born in Indonesia. I'm ethnic Chinese. I came to this country about '64. I was born in '57. My mother was the oldest granddaughter of the fifth wife, of the first president of the republic of China.

from Jeffrey Brown: PBS: Newshour: Poetry of Li-Young Lee Is 'Descended from Dreamers'

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Admonition: If you are writing more poems than you read, you are writing too many poems (unless you're in one of those monthlong-or-so bubbles involving a manuscript nearing completion or some such; you know what I mean).

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Admonitions

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I don't think it's wise to let February pass without a poem from John Donne. So:

Break of Day

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: John Donne

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In a mere 64 pages of poems, [Natasha] Trethewey gets to the heart of why this war still troubles us. One could read a couple of shelves full of generic Civil War novels and never scratch so deeply at the issues of race and racism, of neighbor against neighbor, of the only war Americans ever fought against one another.

from John Mark Eberhart: The Kansas City Star: Bibliofiles: On poetry, Civil War and cliches

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On the Grasshopper and Cricket

The poetry of earth is never dead:

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: John Keats

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By Seymour Glass

John Keats

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: "John Keats" haiku (wink, wink)

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A little folk/blues for everyone. This is an excerpt from the lyrics to Roly Salley's "Killing the Blues":

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Killing the Blues

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There are many variations--at least several dozen--of what is known as "The Month Poem," a mnemonic device.

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: The Month Poem

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The late Stevie Smith's excellent "Thoughts About the Person From Porlock" is something of a meta-poem, reflecting, as it does, on Coleridge's composition of "Kubla Khan." Here is an excerpt.

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Punked by Porlock

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[Zadie Smith's] instructions to the contributors were simple: "Make somebody up."

That permission seems to have rubbed off on the work. The Book of Other People is full of writers taking chances.

Some of the characters we meet here talk their way into existence, like Rhoda, the chatterbox grandmother in Jonathan Safran Foer's story.

from John Freeman: The Vancouver Sun: Anthology is full of writers taking chances

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In fact, it often makes itself known in the shortest form possible: poetry. Paul Auster, Raymond Carver and Louise Erdrich all made their debuts with small volumes of verse. And 50 years ago, so did a 26-year-old ex-Talk of the Town reporter from The New Yorker named John Updike.

The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures, Updike's debut volume of light verse, was published in March of 1958 and it remains in print today.

from John Freeman: theblogbooks: A lighter shade of Updike

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In the second quatrain, the speaker/artist addresses the profane reader who fails to understand the genuineness of this speaker's art, those who think his "jewels trifles are." This speaker is aware that there will always be those who denigrate the genuine and uplift the mediocre. To a dedicated artist, such an attitude is his "greatest grief."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 48

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"For me Alice is an attempt to carve out a space in our rather noisy media world for a kind of online reading," [Kate] Pullinger said from her home in London. "It incorporates text, sound and image, but in some ways it bears quite a close relation to reading a book. I'm really interested in creating a story where people will want to do the equivalent of turning the page."

from Katie Haegele: Star Tribune: The way we 'read'

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Yet "His eyes are empty as a statue's" which brings me back to thinking that he is one--and his heart is as hard as marble--perhaps because he's carved of marble. Then I read that his muscles are lightly haired and his skin is honey-tanned and think that he might be a figure in a painting--or perhaps a waxwork that shows every human crease and hair in an effort to replicate a human body.

from Frieda Hughes: The Times: Monday Poem: An object of desire

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Severe, stony, sometimes ill-humoured, scathing alike of Welsh peasant and English influence, his [R. S. Thomas'] poems are widely taught in schools.

The Country Clergy

from Mick Imlah: The Times Literary Supplement: Poem of the Week: The Country Clergy

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In this poem, young [Robert] Hass crosses that campus near where his hero Randall Jarrell had translated his own patriarch, Chekhov. Jarrell--a tennis player famous for charm--captured the misery of housewifery in the effortless '50s. "Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All . . ." He later shocked everyone with his suicide. By cross-dressing in Jarrell's angelic tennis garb, Hass questions the faux ease of academic life and the perils of inherited habits:

Old Dominion

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

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Poem: "Moment of Inertia" by Debra Spencer from Pomegranate.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: For the week of March 03, 2008

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In this endearing short poem by Californian Trish Dugger, we can imagin? e "what if?" What if we had been given "a baker's dozen of hearts?" I imagine many more and various love poems would be written. Here Ms. Dugger, Poet Laureate of the City of Encinitas, makes fine use of the one patched but good heart she has.

Spare Parts

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 153

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E. Ethelbert Miller

Tomorrow

from E. Ethelbert Miller: Beltway Poetry Quarterly

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As the New York Philharmonic left North Korea after its historic concert in Pyongyang, many North Korean defectors were left wondering what impact the event would have on the lives of ordinary people.

"The North Korean people have lived under the shadow of dictatorship and oppression for a long time, and most of them have no idea about music," Seoul-based defector Park Kwang Sun told RFA's Korean service.

from Luisetta Mudie: Radio Free Asia: North Korean Defectors Left Skeptical by Concert

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Books are about ideas and feelings. We read in order to find out what it would feel like to be in this or that situation. We explore other people’s way of thinking and we look and how they and the society changes.

Reading small extracts from books, followed closely by "fact" questions, misses all this.

from Michael Rosen: Socialist Worker: Michael Rosen explains how not to bore the pants off kids

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This week's Poetry Corner features the work of Liberty Rose Elgart-Fail, a writer and performance artist living in Santa Cruz. She holds a bachelor of arts degree in expressive arts with concentrations in writing and speech communication from Ithaca College. Her work can be found in magazines, college curriculum and it is also featured in the Library of Congress Sept. 11 online collection.

Unrelated

from Good Times Weekly: Poetry Corner: Liberty Rose Elgart-Fail

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At le Café de la Gare by Neil Curry

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: At le Café de la Gare by Neil Curry

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by Reginald Shepherd

Experiment V

for Kate Bush

from Guernica: Poetry: Two Poems

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History
by Stephen Dunn

from The New Yorker: Poetry: History

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Needle's Eye
by Dan Chiasson

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Needle's Eye

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[Eavan] Boland was born in Ireland and educated in London, New York and Dublin, and her many books of poetry, prose, criticism and translation include "Against Love Poetry" (W.W. Norton & Co., 2001), "Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time" (W.W. Norton & Co., 1995) and "New Collected Poems" (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008), where "Is It Still the Same" most recently appears.

from The Oregonian: Poetry

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By Hediya Sizar

The Ink

from The Philadelphia Inquirer: Your Poem: [by Hediya Sizar]

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[by Hugh A. Harter]
Waves

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: Waves

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[by Eileen MacDonald]
Poem: There once was a sonnet quite fair

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: There once was a sonnet quite fair

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Sarah Maguire's new collection, The Pomegranates of Kandahar (Chatto, £9), contains precisely observed and sensual poems that travel the devastated and troubled world we live in. Here she brings us home to her garden, but evokes perfectly the chill in the early spring air. She appears at StAnza poetry festival later this month speaking about poetry and conflict.

Field Capacity

from The Scotsman: Poem of the Week

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"Acorns"
By Linda Pastan

from Slate: "Acorns" --By Linda Pastan

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Between
Linda Zisquit

from Zeek: Between: Linda Zisquit

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Poetic Obituaries

Poetry was another of [Sarah Jeanne] Antrim's gifts, her aunt said. "I have some poetry that would knock your socks off. You'll cry. She was awesome."

Cassandra Kirschbaum, a friend of Antrim's and a freshman at Milford High School, remembers Antrim as a "very loving person."

from Community Press: Investigation into Milford student's death ongoing

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In a profile for her [Nancy Hemenway Barton's] "Textures of the Earth" catalogue (1978), Benjamin Forgey, then the art critic for the Washington Star (and later The Post), wrote: "Painstaking observation of specific visual facts; careful nurturing of authentic personal experiences; skilled translation of these visual and emotional impressions into new tactile forms--these are the essential facets of Nancy Hemenway's art-making. It is a skilled, poetic enterprise that produces the evocative resonances we can find in these unusual tapestries."

from The Washington Post: Artist Nancy Hemenway Barton; Known for Tapestries

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In 1947, she [Eliana Beam] sold her first poem, "Lament of a Beekeeper's Wife," to a beekeeping journal. Her first check, she remembered vividly, was for $2.50.

Other newspapers and magazines bought her verse, including McCall's, Better Homes and Gardens, The Cleveland Press, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cats magazine and Ohio Farmer. Then, she noted,

By the time I was publishing, safe in my stride,
Traditional poetry sickened and died.

from Star-News: She used her words to deal with what life handed her

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[Kenneth G.] Kuchler was involved in transcribing traditional Shoshoni music, including lyrics, Wolf said. "He used to tell me writing out the music was the easier part of it all."

Some of his work is included in Newe Hupai, Shoshoni Poetry Songs, published by Utah State University Press, according to Ralph Kuchler.

from The Salt Lake Tribune: Kuchler, longest tenured member of the Utah Symphony, dies at 85

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It was nearly 7:30 p.m., and Peter Osborne sat at his wife's bedside at Westchester Medical Center.

He was reading Walt Whitman to her, an 1865 poem titled, "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" He reached the last stanza:

Till with sound of trumpet,
Far, far off the daybreak call, hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind,
Swift! to the head of the army! swift! spring to your places,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

With those final words, Janis Osborne was gone.

from Times Herald-Record: Port advocate, editor Osborne dead at 64

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[Brittany] Romer penned poems and made home videos that spoofed popular movies. She aspired to a career in journalism or photography.

from The Tampa Tribune: Grief Consumes Driver Charged In Friend's Death

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[Louis Ross] was in jail when he wrote the poem that ended up at the AA meeting.

"He was a smart guy," says [Carl] Taglianetti. "He was the kind of guy you'd love to have with you when he was straight."

from The Providence Journal: This story lives on in a poem

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Along with being [Joyce Carol] Oates' partner as she ascended to the front rank of American writers, Smith also founded and served as editor in chief of Ontario Review, a highly regarded literary magazine whose pages glow with the work of major figures such as Margaret Atwood and Russell Banks, as well as with emerging writers.

from Chicago Tribune: Oates' husband was quiet voice

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S. Rangarajan, who wrote under the pen name Sujatha, was known for his versatility in writing. He was the superstar among the world of present writers in Tamil. He had a way with words, whether it meant writing short stories, science fiction, plays, and pieces of writing on history or screenplay for films.

from Oneindia: Writer Sujatha passes away!

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Simon "Si" Wakesberg, a veteran journalist and one of the longest-tenured staff members of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc. (ISRI), died in late February at the age of 94.

Wakesberg, an award-winning poet and writer, was born in Poland in 1913 and emigrated to New York City at age 8.

from Recycling Today: In Memoriam: Si Wakesberg

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News at Eleven

There is a cliché about music writing, sometimes attributed to Thelonious Monk, among others: "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." If so, Nathaniel Mackey is compelled, rather than deterred, by the multiform madness of the enterprise. He is the Balanchine of the architecture dance.

from The New York Times: Jazz Man

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Guernica: Was it useful for you to know Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler—other young poets, I mean.

John Ashbery: Oh yes. When we were young, we were our only audience. We would write poems and read them to each other, and in fact, for quite a few years, I didn't really think that anybody else was going to be interested. My first book was not at all successful. I'm talking about the Yale University one, which I think they printed 800 copies of, and it took eight years to run out.

from Guernica: Houses at Night

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"Three dangerous moments will come to you," he [Vyasa] says. "The first will be at the time of your wedding: at that time, hold back your question. The second will be when your husbands are at the height of their power: at that time, hold back your laughter. The third will be when you're shamed as you'd never imagined possible: at that time, hold back your curse."

Panchaali, of course, does none of these and thus launches the conflicts and problems that are the stuff of all storytelling.

from Los Angeles Times: 'The Palace of Illusions' by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

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[by Susan Tichy]

1.

Three men who look like Bedouin, but are not, pause with their camels in the snow--

from Foreign Policy in Focus: Fiesta!: American Ghazals

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" . . . Australia will notice a New Zealand writer if someone in New York or London says they are interesting and New Zealand will notice Australian writers (in the same way). Everything has to go back to the old centres that we thought we had freed ourselves from."

The answer, he [Bill Manhire] thinks, would be to encourage much more trans-Tasman travel by publishers and editors of books pages, especially to events such as writers' festivals. But with the internet changing the way readers can access books, he says, maybe these old distribution networks will eventually lose their power, anyway.

from The Age: The accidental poet

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The poem ends: 'This is an illusion: perspective is everything./Wherever I may stand/the vanishing point is my eye,/the beholden.' To write poems about seeing, you have to disappear; it is essential to relinquish your so-called perspective. The beholden, with its suggestion of gratitude, is for Maguire a self-cure for narrow-mindedness. Egotism dissolves in perception.

from The Guardian: Precise visions and visceral wit

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One often feels while reading his work that if there is any misstep, any syllable or stress put wrong, not only the poem but its maker will either go up in flames or disappear down a black crevasse. This is the drama of [Robert] Creeley's defining work, and that drama never feels calculated or inauthentic.

from The New York Times: What Is Left Out

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"It's like Frost unplugged," said Peter Campion, editor of the journal. "Previously unpublished lectures would drive scholars crazy in and of themselves, but in addition to that, we're getting him in discussion. He's sitting down with a bunch of 20-year-olds and trying to teach them. That involves anecdotes, stories, jokes, funny little disses on his contemporaries."

from GazetteXtra: Poet Robert Frost illuminated by previously unpublished transcript of 1947 Dartmouth lecture

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It is widely expected among education circles, however, that the Irish syllabus committee of the NCCA will withdraw his poetry from the list of prescribed poets.

The move is the latest in a protracted saga surrounding [Cathal] O'Searcaigh's sexual relations with young men in Nepal, which was brought to light by Gortahork-based film-maker Neasa NiChianáin in her upcoming documentary 'Fairytale of Kathmandu'.

from The Donegal News: Poet to be taken off Leaving Cert?

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Of Thomas Gray: "as if turning your poetry into published work were mortifying". Of the Alice books: they took "their life from a special relationship with children. They hardly belonged to the realm of commercial authorship". Of Sir Walter Scott: "his anonymity was a way of turning his personal experience into impersonal fiction".

from Times Literary Supplement: Hiding behind the pen

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[Xhevdet Bajraj] said it was months before he could sleep without worrying that someone would break into the house to kill them. (Last week Kosovo formally declared its independence from Serbia, prompting protests in Belgrade.)

For weeks after Bajraj arrived in Mexico City, he sat at his computer, unable to write. Eventually the words came. His first book containing poems written in Mexico, The Liberty of Horror, won Kosovo's top literary prize.

from USA Today: Mex. refuge for world's persecuted writers

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Great Regulars

"I don't quite understand about understanding poetry. I experience poems with pleasure: whether I understand them or not I'm not quite sure. I don't want to read something I already know or which is going to slide down easily: there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience. It's certainly not meant not to be read. But I enjoy only works of art with an element of surprise in them. It's probably an essential feature of any work of art." [--John Ashbery]

from Bryan Appleyard: Carcanet: Interview with John Ashbery

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The readers that write in to me are critical and aware, they're sharp and impassioned and I'd like to thank everyone of them who has written in with a question or a comment--you've helped me learn so much on this journey of ours.

However, and there is always a however, I do get my fair share bizzarro mail.

from Fatima Bhutto: The News International Pakistan: Frequently asked questions

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Anna Beer talks to Sarah Crown about her new biography of poet John Milton published 400 years after his birth

from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: Books: Anna Beer on her new biography of poet John Milton

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In the opening section he describes the death of his father in piercing detail, anchoring the exigent crisis with strands of earlier memories ("Appearing in his car on Sunday mornings/Impatient for the whole world to wake up,/He'd arrive for lunch before breakfast") that lend individual texture to this most commonplace of tragedies.

from Sarah Crown: The Guardian: On your marks

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Clutter
By Alarie Tennille

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: 'Clutter'

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Another Spring
By Greg Field

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Field trip

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Dawn Harris Rainey reminds us today of the wisdom of the late Wystan Hugh Auden:

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: A Nod to Auden

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One Below
by Jon Herbert Arkham

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: 'One Below'

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Through My Window

By Ryan P. Silva

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Student Poem # 3

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Jonesburg, GA
By Shane P. Stricker
University of Missouri-Kansas City

from John Mark Eberhart: Parachute: Student Poem # 4

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Ever since I found the mass-market paperback of a novel by William T Vollmann at a small drugstore in Paris, I thought: retailers can do better.

Coffee shops seem the ideal place to start. Half the people who go to a coffee shop are there to chat. The other half go to read. Why can't Starbucks or Costa give the readers more?

from John Freeman: The Guardian: theblogbooks: Books with everything

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She has enjoyed him carnally: his nipples are like ripe berries in her hand. He tastes "like grainmeal mingled with beer" and "[l]ike wine to the palate when taken with white bread." "White bread" used to a delicacy only the rich could afford.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Ancient Egyptian Poem

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The speaker likens them to Christ who shed his blood for mankind. As the divinity of Christ portended a "better way" of life for those who understood His courage and followed in His brave footsteps, those who understand and follow the courageous path of these brave black soldiers will also find "a better way."

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Jamison's 'The Negro Soldiers'

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She will be grateful when her sister's soul has departed, and the dying one no longer has to suffer the sorrowful and painful transition she is now undergoing.

The speaker attempts to report as calmly and objectively as possible as she, at the same time, dramatizes the event that is so crucial, so vitally important.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: 'On the Death of Anne Brontë'

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His creations remain with him, and even if his muse roves far from him, his inspirational urges cannot range farther than his thoughts. And through his poems, "I am still with them and they with thee." He is, therefore, never without his love, his muse, his inspiration.

from Linda Sue Grimes: Suite101.com: Shakespeare Sonnet 47

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His mention of metal combs recalls the days when remedies for head lice were combed through the hair with just such combs; there is a punitive and controlling aspect to the use of these. And when he complains that he is sick of his annuals, I imagine that it is because his brain has developed beyond them, even while being artificially constrained by his medication.

from Frieda Hughes: The Times: Monday Poem: A suspicious degeneration

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Poem: "Water" by Robert Lowell from Selected Poems.

from Garrison Keillor: The Writer's Almanac: For the week of February 25, 2008

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America's answer to Amy Winehouse may just be a former wedding singer whose résumé includes a lengthy stint as a prison guard. Atlanta-born Sharon Jones is a decade or two older than Winehouse, but the big-voiced African-American singer is doing her part to revive old-school soul music--and she's doing it without emulating Winehouse's tabloid-magnet antics.

from David Kirby: The Christian Science Monitor: Why Sharon Jones is the new face of old soul music

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A child with a sense of the dramatic, well, many of us have been that child. Here's Carrie Shipers of Missouri reminiscing about how she once wished for a dramatic rescue by screaming ambulance, only to find she was really longing for the comfort of her mother's hands.

Medical History

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 152

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In the next section, the poet [Albert Goldbarth] does look at the desiccated animal remains, but without poetic metaphor. He accepts "hard summer; the land enameled." He accepts life disintegrating into dust. Then he finds solace in prayer and love.

Wings

from Denise Low: Ad Astra Poetry Project: Albert Goldbarth (1948 - )

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With the exception of Martin Luther King's, most political oratory is decidedly un-poetic and political poetry should not emulate a stump speech. You can write about the topics of war, poverty, racism, sexual abuse or other social problems, and perhaps you can move people to alter their way of thinking. If you want to motivate people to take some sort of action to make our country (and our world) a better place to live, then you must first move them.

from Anthony Maulucci: Norwich Bulletin: Political poetry must first move the reader with an idea

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"The situation is quite serious," Sandra Boss, interim chairwoman of the Mount's board, said in a telephone interview from London, where she works. "On the one hand, the Mount [Edith Wharton's estate in Lenox, Mass.] is winning awards for preservation and is internationally renowned as an institution. And it's well run from an efficiency perspective. We've made great progress by cutting costs and raising revenues. On the other hand, our current debt levels are unserviceable and unsustainable. We're not in control of our own destiny unless we can mount a restructuring of our debt."

from Charles McGrath: The New York Times: Landmark Massachusetts Building Where Wharton Wrote Faces Foreclosure

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Nothing changes the pain of suffering, the humiliations of aging, our inability to change the past, guess the future, or capture the elusive present. We are thrown into the world and have barely a minute to make sense of it before we vanish.

It is the "moving finger" of the artist, poet, or otherwise, that helps us see through what is mere convention and face whatever lies outside—chaos or higher vision.

from Christopher Nield: The Epoch Times: The Antidote--Classic Poetry for Modern Life: A Reading of The Moving Finger by Omar Khayyam

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For this, my farewell "Poet's Choice" column, here are two poems related by a form: the sonnet.

from Robert Pinsky: The Washington Post: Poet's Choice

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[Brigit Pegeen Kelly] moves straight on, into the mystery of metamorphosis. This dead creature "[ . . . ] tricked//our vision: at a distance she was/for a moment no deer/at all//but two swans: we saw two swans" and "this is the soul: like it or not". It is transformation which animates, often beautifully, even in death.

Yet, ambitious as this might seem set against our own poetic norms, it is not enough for Kelly.

from Fiona Sampson: The Guardian: The transforming soul

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by Annette Marie Hyder

Your teeth flash halos of hate
as you try to turn my wine into water
lessen the loaves
subtract the leaven of pleasure
from this experience
leaving it flat like matzo bread.

Posted on February 21, 2008

Your company, a crown of thorns

from Donna Snyder: Newspaper Tree: Poetry: "Your company, a crown of thorns"

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In 1924, [A A] Milne published a book of children's poems entitled 'When We Were Very Young', with drawings by Punch illustrator, Ernest Shepard. This book includes a poem about a Teddy Bear who 'however hard he tries grows tubby without exercise'. This was Pooh's first unofficial appearance in A A Milne's writing.

from V Sundaram: News Today: Inventing Wonderland --Fantasies of A A Milne

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Dr. [Elisabeth] Kubler-Ross was greatly influenced by the poems of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) in his famous work 'Gitanjali' and other works. Almost every chapter in her famous maiden book called "On Death and Dying" carried a quotation from the writings of Tagore. She was very fond of the following lines of Tagore in his "Stray Birds":

'Death belongs to life as birth does The walk is in the raising of the foot as in the laying of it down'

from V Sundaram: News Today: Philosopher of death and dying

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There are relatively few new outbreaks of violence. The current violence over Gaza has been with us at least since 1948, as has the division of Kashmir between India and Pakistan or the discontent of ethnic minorities in Burma. The violence in Sudan began on the eve of independence in 1956 and has been with us, in one form or another, since.

As governments are largely unwilling to admit that they are unable to cope with a new downward spiral of tensions and violence, it is up to non-governmental organizations to sound the warning bell.

from René Wadlow: media for freedom: Acting in Time

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[Glenn] Reynolds, who knows his away around the First Amendment, thinks that "the press establishment's general lack of enthusiasm for free speech for others (as evidenced by its support for campaign finance 'reform') suggests that it'll be happy to see alternative media muzzled. "

"You want to keep this media revolution going?" he asks. "Be ready to fight for it. "

from Frank Wilson: Books, Inq.: The Epilogue: Her wish . . .

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Consider just one aspect: the slave who stood behind the general in the triumphal chariot and held above the honorand's head a golden crown while whispering, "Look behind you. Remember you are a man." Beard, who holds a chair in classics at Cambridge University, points out that this "has become one of the emblematic trademarks of the triumph," even figuring, in slightly different wording, in the closing sequence of the film Patton.

from Frank Wilson: Philadelphia Inquirer: A tradition not so well understood after all

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Count ten by Arnold Wesker

from The Guardian: The Saturday poem: Count ten by Arnold Wesker

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Near Field
by W. S. Merwin

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Near Field

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Rain Light
by W. S. Merwin

from The New Yorker: Poetry: Rain Light

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A Single Autumn
by W. S. Merwin

from The New Yorker: Poetry: A Single Autumn

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--Vi Gale (1917-2007)

Born in Sweden and raised in Clatskanie, writer and publisher Vi Gale lived in Portland for 67 years. She began writing short stories and poetry in the 1950s, and her early books of poetry--including "Love, Always," in which "In a Loud Whisper" appears--were published by Alan Swallow in Denver. In 1974 she founded Prescott Street Press, publishing original work by some of Oregon's best-known poets, as well as translations.

from The Oregonian: Poetry

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By Nicole Naticchia

Wind

from The Philadelphia Inquirer: Your Poem: [by Nicole Naticchia ]

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[by John J. Witherspoon]
Winter

from Portsmouth Herald News: Poem: Winter

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Toby Barlow's first book, Sharp Teeth, is a verse novel about werewolves. This makes it not only a decisive answer (nay!) to the age-old question "Is long-form monster poetry dead?" but also a perfect marriage of form and subject: Both the werewolf and the verse novel (which lopes across the centuries from Pushkin to Browning to Vikram Seth) are shaggy hybrids that appear once in a blue moon and terrify everyone in sight.

from Powells: Review-A-Day: Sharp Teeth

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Gerry Cambridge opens a window on American poetry for UK readers, and in the 21st issue of The Dark Horse offers stimulating criticism alongside poems from both sides of the Atlantic.

He includes this touching and many-layered meditation on time and memory from the distinguished American poet Rachel Hadas.

Quickening

from The Scotsman: Poem of the Week

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"The Room"
By Michael Chitwood

from Slate: "The Room" --By Michael Chitwood

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Poetic Obituaries

Mrs. [Mavis] Biesanz authored "The Costa Ricans," published in 1988 and "The Ticos: Culture and Social Change in Costa Rica" published in 1998, both with her son Richard and his wife, Karen Zubris Biesanz.

from A.M. Costa Rica: Prolific author and observer of Tico life, Mavis Biesanz, dies at 88

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[Brian Hill] also wrote poetry and short stories, Rees said.

A graceful writer, Mr. Hill began his blog in December 2003 as physicians were diagnosing why "my left arm and leg are . . . acting funny. Lazy. Tingly. I have noticed myself stuttering, using the wrong word sometimes (broccoli instead of ravioli), slurring words, and 'mix-mashing' syllables . . . or just not remembering the word I need. I counted this up to getting older and having two small children."

from San Francisco Chronicle: Brian Hill dies--he blogged about his illness

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Moving from Canton, Zaughn [Jones] was a homemaker. She was an active member at Howland Community Church where she attended. Zaughn was an avid golfer, enjoyed swimming, reading and poetry. She was very talented as an artist.

from Tribune Chronicle: Zaughn Jones 1920-2008

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[Arun Kale's] first poem collection "Rock Garden" was published in 1993, following which his other collections including the popular 'City of Siren' went on to recieve accolades.

He was elected as a President of the proposed Akshar Manav Sahitya Sammelan to be held on Feb 26-27 at Bhosi in Chandrapur district.

from The Hindu: Poet Arun Kale passes away

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[Amelia R. Lockhart-Battenhausen] was smart, funny and artistic, with a flair for writing poetry and loved the outdoors. Her adoration for children was well known, as was her uncanny ability to find the humor in every situation.

from Parkersburg News and Sentinel: Amelia R. Lockhart-Battenhausen

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Mrs [Kim] Roye described her son [Jerome Roye] as "a very artistic boy", who loved to draw, paint, write poems and write his own music.

He also worked for a company called Hatlow Entertainment designing t-shirts and clothing.

He had recently been commissioned to paint graffiti in a pub opposite Herne Hill station.

from Croydon Guardian: Mum's tribute to son killed in Streatham crash

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The community was saddened by the death of Omena native and long-time resident Barbara Foltz Schneidewind. Barbara was a talented writer of poetry and children's books.

from Leelanau Enterprise: Omena news

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M. Shivanna (72), a Non-Resident Indian, who participated in the poetry reading session of 9th Kannada Sahitya Sammelana, died here on Friday following cardiac arrest.

from The Hindu: NRI poet dies after recital

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Jonathan Tyler, 18, was a gifted poet who moved to Gilead this winter to work as a lift attendant at Sunday River Ski Resort in Newry.

The three inseparable friends went to nearby Gorham, N.H., on Saturday night to fuel up Tyler's 1994 Mitsubishi Eclipse and to buy cigarettes after a day's work.

from Sun Journal: 'Good boys' Community mourns teens killed in crash

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[Tara Lynn] Woodman was wearing a 2004 "Just Move It" T-shirt when found and had participated in an event in Chinle where she received one of the shirts, Lewis later learned.

Her uncle, Mark Forster, spokesman for the family, said Friday, "She was a very fine poet and a very good athlete. She ran track and participated several times in the 'Just Move It' events."

from Gallup Independent: Navajo woman's body is identified

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News at Eleven

Poems such as "Floodtide: For the black tenant farmers of the south" by Aksia Muhammad Toure or June Jordan's "In Memorium: Martin Luther King, Jr.", Julia Field's "Poems: Birmingham 1962-64", and the many poems of Ishmael Reed, Richard Wright, Conrad Kent Rivers, Keorapetse W. Kgositsile., and a hundred more. Here are just a few.

Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song: A Poem to American Poets

from