2007 September : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Archive for September, 2007

Rafter of Satan

You gotta love those poetry explication exams in undergraduate English classes.

I really enjoyed reading Steve’s post about translation. A lot of my writing time is spent not working on my own things, but translating. Translation is a great boon to a poet. You never have to face the white page alone if you don’t want to. I think of translation as a special kind of deep reading. It lets you try on other voices, and other genres (epic, didactic!). But it can be a heart-breaking business—there’s no such thing as a perfect translation, and every success is paid for by a failure. So since you are going to fail, why be dull?—be bold! Fail big! A couple of fun totally quirky (and distracting) translations:

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09.20.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

Stephen Burt

and the pleiades

I’ve been looking again at Sherod Santos’ slightly controversial volume Greek Lyric Poetry: A New Translation. A few of you might remember Garry Wills’ broadside against it, and Rosanna Warren’s response. Wills thought it inaccurate, not really a translation, and hence a betrayal: Warren and others thought the poems, often enough, worked in English, and thought them better than the more literal versions that don’t feel like poems.

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09.19.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Rigoberto González

Wednesday Shout Out

Watershed moments happen unexpectedly and they sometimes come in the most surprising of shapes. In the following poem by Scott Hightower, a youth with an entire life yet to live comes across a life already lived via a memoir, and the Ethel Waters story becomes a paradigm for hard living (is there any other kind?) that resonates throughout this young person’s adulthood:
The Autobiography of Ethel Waters

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09.19.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Ange Mlinko

Nowhere’s Vernacular

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I [heart] A.E. Stallings’s post on the vernacular:

Do I think the “plain-spoken” impetus in poetry has gone to far? Yes. “Plain-spoken” often just means dull and listless and unimaginative writing. Real plain-spoken people are more imaginative than that. “Idiomatic” after all, is Greek for “individual,” for “peculiar.”

There are poets who do plainspoken masterfully, and then there are the imitators. It’s a paradox that beginning students are always struck by: poetry is made up of the language we all use, but not everyone can just toss off poems. Even the plainspoken is a style, wrested through hard-won technique. (I think of James Schuyler, who was W.H. Auden’s personal secretary in Ischia; he once said of Auden’s work, If that’s poetry, I guess I’ll never be a poet. The irony is that one could say the same thing of Schuyler’s work. It’s that peculiar.)
Stallings’s post touched off another set of associations on a parallel track. I, too, was an ex-pat for a while—just a short year—in Ifrane, Morocco, in 1999. It wasn’t long enough to miss the American vernacular, but I became keenly aware for the first time of the jeers aimed at my native tongue. “Ah, American,” a librarian told my husband, wagging her head. “The Berber English!” Berber, of course, is one of the indigenous languages of Morocco, but you know—a redneck dialect. The Queen’s English was like to Classical Arabic. That was just the Moroccan view—you don’t want to know what the British academics thought of us!

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09.18.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Emily Warn

To Our Readers

Where is Kwame Dawes? Did we muzzle Kenneth Goldsmith after his Madonna/Koons post? Why have Patricia Smith’s musings and shout outs slowed down? And who are all these newcomers prattling and jabbing away on Harriet?

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09.18.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

A.E. Stallings

Texture

During Greece’s long hottest-on-record summer, and while Arcadia was, literally, burning, and while I was without babysitting and left with the lioness’s share of child care (we have a three-year old, Jason), I took up . . . knitting.

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09.18.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Stephen Burt

a world of words to the end of it

We don’t want our toddler to watch much TV, but we do let him watch some things, and we watch them with him: Meerkat Manor, for example, and WNBA basketball (congratulations to the Mercury!), and, now, a new show called Word World, an animated series designed to teach reading, in which all the characters and most of the sets (a DOG, a SHEEP, a BARN, etc.) are physically made of the letters in their names (so that the dog, for example, has a D for a head, and a tail growing out of his G).
It’s one of many ways in which interactions with a young child starting to learn to read can put you in touch with what poetry critics these day are pleased to call “the materiality of language”– in this case parodically, in the case of Fox in Socks more truly: is there a book of poetry for adults that does more to privilege the signifier– as we say now– or to focus on the sounds of words? (How would you stage, or recite, the Fox in Socks Hamlet?)
And yet, of course, there are ways in which we as readers of poetry feel that we might be made out of words, ways that seem not quite appropriate to toddlers, or not quite susceptible of depiction in art aimed at them– ways in which lyric poems written for adults reveal their authors, if not their readers, as shot through with concepts, animated by abstractions.

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09.17.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Rigoberto González

The Quetzal Quill (and the Henny Penny Syndrome)

I attend at least two poetry readings a month in New York City. A few venues I check on periodically like The Bowery Poetry Club and Cornelia Street Café—both are fabulous spaces that lend themselves to the intimacy between a reader and an audience. So when the time came that I decided to curate my own series, I turned to Angelo Verga, poet and best friend of the NYC poetry scene.

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09.16.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Ange Mlinko

Champagne

These Jeanne Moreau-ish Bourgeois eyeballs (cast upward as, we are told, is proper to champagne sipping) led me to the entrance of the Williams College Museum of Art in a faint drizzle. Autumn has a light touch here: a burgundy fringe on the roadside, gold and blush in haptic patches on the tree crowns, like the burnish on a pear.
Inside, Modernism Concentrate: a Larry Rivers, a Diebenkorn, a deKooning, a Cornell—bang bang bang. Upstairs, a perfect Pisarro. A perfect Piero della Francesca. I wandered through the exhibition on Gerald and Sara Murphy, pausing at video of a Stravinsky ballet that made the hackles on my neck rise as I recalled the quote from Edith Sitwell’s A Poet’s Notebook that I had just been reading that morning in a coffeeshop:

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09.16.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (8)

Archive for September, 2007

Rigoberto González

Rafter of Satan

A.E. Stallings

Miss her, Catullus?

Stephen Burt

and the pleiades

Rigoberto González

Wednesday Shout Out

Ange Mlinko

Nowhere’s Vernacular

Emily Warn

To Our Readers

A.E. Stallings

Texture

Stephen Burt

a world of words to the end of it

Rigoberto González

The Quetzal Quill (and the Henny Penny Syndrome)

Ange Mlinko

Champagne

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