Archive for December, 2007
Ange Mlinko
Story
It was Sunday, 40 degrees with a snowstorm on the way. What do people do in the suburbs? I put on some Elliott Smith and went down to the riverfront.
Major Jackson
Book Parties
Is there any moment more fulfilling and celebratory in a writer’s life than the book party? I have hosted one of my own, but have attended nearly a half-dozen and have found all of them superbly festive. I love that moment when a room full of family and friends raises their glasses in officious honor of a dear friend or relative having achieved the ultimate in creation, the birth of a vision into its final form. There is always a toast at a book party, sometimes ill-timed either too early or too late, yet wonderfully obligatory and replete with adoration and awe. It occurs to me that what this forum needs is a definitive list of “Book Party” Do’s & Don’ts.
Ange Mlinko
Some Debts
The January issue of Poetry goes live next week, along with my essay-review of new books by Mary Kinzie and Robert Pinsky. There was a bit that took me too far afield, so I excised it from the final draft. Still, it might hold some interest for someone somewhere! Readers of Pinsky’s Gulf Music know the book meditates at length on the etymology of the word “thing.” He even includes the dictionary definition as a sort of found poem, lingering on the irony that “thing” used to mean something more along the lines of an assembly, an address, and even a “giving voice to,” rather than “a concrete object, a physical or bodily thing.” This movement from thing as process to thing as object fueled the meditations of another poet—thirty years ago.
A.E. Stallings
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers
Many a Christmas carol has been spoiled by slick, oversweetened arrangement, piped into a mall to stimulate more panic buying. Christmas poems, read in a quiet moment to ourselves, are harder (though not impossible of course) to commodify. They are something of an antidote. As a member of Muzak’s marketing department remarked, quoted in a New Yorker article a year or two back, “Our biggest competitor is silence.”
Ange Mlinko
The Flame Hatches
Here in upstate New York near the St. Lawrence River, bordering the expanse of that fabled northern land called Canada, I was awestruck by sunrise, the first sunrise after the solstice!
UTTERANCE
crack the red wax open
read note readdress dispatch
so he enabled the correspondences
of others and to be so occluded
by the flux of words gave pleasure
as crescendo filled the branchings
flickering the quilled exchanges
until one particular melody exhausted
silence and called out spontaneous
response:
abyssal the flame hatches
That’s from the Irish poet Trevor Joyce’s new book What’s in Store—a three-hundred-plus-page veritable bodega. (I discovered it through my favorite blog here, entry for Dec. 13.) There are translations and reworkings of: “Folk Songs from the Finno-Ugric and Turkic Languages,” “Anonymous Love Songs from the Irish,” the Chinese poets Ruan Ji and Lu Zhaolin, as well as maybe half a dozen other sources. There are also short lyrics addressed to friends and loved ones. In light of all the Harriettalk about constraints and sonnets, one of the endnotes provides a tonic to too much purely formal ambition:
A.E. Stallings
Happy Birthday, E.A. Robinson
I actually had a couple of other posts brewing (or gestating, as Annie Finch put it), but the twin prompts of Ange’s Malice of the Sonnet post and a timely reminder via Writer’s Almanac, made me realize a short post on Edwin Arlington Robinson was in order today.
Major Jackson
Right On!
Congratulations to poets Nikki Giovanni, Gregory Pardlo, and Tracy K. Smith. They are finalists for the first annual Essence Literary Award in the category of Poetry. Their books are: Acolytes by Nikki Giovanni; Totem by Gregory Pardlo; and Duende by Tracy K. Smith. All three books are exceptional, and I urge you to read them.
Essence Magazine, founded in the late 1960s, a fashion, lifestyle and entertainment magazine originally geared towards African American women, the first of its kind to do so, has long supported and featured African American writers in its pages and through its annual fiction-writing contest. The Essence Literary Awards comes at an important time, in which, educators, politicians, and parents should stress the importance of literacy, as all indicators and federal reports suggest reading is promptly becoming an obsolete activity of American life.
Stephen Burt
a nocturnal
Either today or tomorrow is the shortest day of the year: before the calendar reforms of the sixteenth century, that day would have been December 13, which is why that day, and not this day, remains Saint Lucy’s Day. While many people of Scandinavian descent have already celebrated St. Lucy herself by letting small children walk around with electric lights on their heads (thus supplanting an older custom that would today be seen as a crazy fire hazard), many others will notice the solstice and look up poems appropriate for the shortest day, of which three below the fold.
Ange Mlinko
The Sonnet’s Malice
I didn’t think I had anything to say about the sonnetfest here on Harriet. But then a friend sent me an article about Edwin Denby: great American ballet critic, friend of Frank O’Hara’s circle, poet who wrote many, many sonnets. I had studied them years ago, and then put the book away (sonnets not being my cup of tea). I opened Collected Poems again this week, and have been unable to put it down since.
THE SUBWAY
The subway flatters like a dope habit,
For a nickel extending peculiar space:
You dive from the street, holing like a rabbit,
Roar up a sewer with a millionaire’s face.
Squatting in the full glare of the locked express
Imprisoned, rocked, like a man by a friend’s death,
O how the immense investment soothes distress,
Credit laps you like a huge religious myth.
It’s a sound effect. The trouble is seeing
(So anaesthetized) a square of bare throat
Or the fold at the crotch of a clothed human being:
You’ll want to nuzzle it, crop at it like a goat.
That’s not in the buy. The company between stops
Offers you security, and free rides to cops.
Christian Bök
Five Avant-Garde Canadians of 2007
—————–
I am embarking upon my vacation for the holidays—but before departing, I am going to propose five of the best books of avant-garde poetry published in Canada during this last year. I recommend them all to any interested readership outside my country:
1. Yesno by Dennis Lee
2. The Alphabet Game by bpNichol
3. Thumbscrews by Natalie Zina Walschots
4. Fake Math by Ryan Fitzpatrick
5. Human Resources by Rachel Zolf
—————–
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Anselm Berrigan
Abigail Deutsch
Tonya Foster
Melissa Friedling
John S. O'Connor
Barbara Jane Reyes
Amber Tamblyn
Edwin Torres
STAFF WRITERS
Cathy Halley
Michael Marcinkowski
Travis Nichols
Fred Sasaki
Don Share
RECENT COMMENTS
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A thoughtful blog. To be honest, however, I've never much been worried by Auden's ... MORE »
Terreson | 11.07.09 -
Interesting post. I need to pick poems for two readings next week and I always ... MORE »
Jessie Carty | 11.07.09 -
"and if the robbers of PZ’s copyright justify their theft by asserting it’s beneficial because ... MORE »
Gary B. Fitzgerald | 11.07.09 -
Nice tune, nice arrangement, nice playing, beautiful voice -- thanks for posting it.
For two semesters ... MORE »
john | 11.06.09 -
Nature is a cannibal. MORE »
Gary B. Fitzgerald | 11.06.09
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