2008 January : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Archive for January, 2008

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My first book of prose, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry, is just out in the University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry series, and I have to share the news. This is a project on which I’ve been working for several years, and I’m incredibly excited that it’s finally come to fruition. I got my advance copies about a week ago and have been cradling the book in my arms as if it were my baby. Which it is.
Noted poet and critic James Longenbach generously writes on the back of the book that “Orpheus in the Bronx not only extols the freedom language affords us; it embodies that freedom, enacting poetry’s greatest gift—the power to recognize ourselves as something other than what we are. These bracing arguments were written by a poet who sings.”? I’m grateful to him for the wonderful endorsement.

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01.25.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Christian Bök

Random Poetry 05

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“thus can books that come I judge come infinite”
(By coincidence, the first nine words drawn at random, in this order, from the jumbled lexicon of all words in an English translation of “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges)
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01.24.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Rigoberto González

AWP Countdown

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Say what you will about this conference, it’s the one I look forward to every year. And I hope to see you there. I’m on two panels this time around, and I’ll spare you the details. I’d rather promote other happenings, like the annual Con Tinta Pachanga, one of the many off-site events made possible because the Chicano/Latino writers wanted to have a community space of their own during this reunion-at-large of writers. All are welcome.

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01.24.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (8)

Rigoberto González

Wednesday Shout Out

Winner of the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, Gregory Pardlo’s Totem, is (as its title declares) a literary version of an emblem representing, in this case, the ancestry that inspires the poet’s verse. But the ancestry in question extends beyond the homes of the poet’s childhood and moves into the intellectual and spiritual communities of his adult education and curiosity. Reflection and observation merge frequently, set in motion by the most incidental of activities that become significant suddenly.

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01.23.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Daisy Fried

On Lying

I just read a poem in some journal, I forget where, in which there was a plumber who wasn’t just a plumber, he was also a dreamer, or something. Well, he certainly wasn’t fixing pipes. Plumbers in poems never have their hands in a toilet, have you noticed?
Toilets show up in poems often enough. Frank O’Hara’s poem “Memorial Day 1950”:
…I hear the sewage singing
underneath my bright white toilet seat and know
that somewhere sometime it will reach the sea…
Lines which—and I mean this—this is a perfectly sincere moment in this blog entry—thrill me.

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01.23.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (10)

Reginald Shepherd

Howard Nemerov on the Difficulty of Difficult Poetry

Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) is almost forgotten today, but he was an excellent poet (in the post World War II formalist mode so scorned today, especially by those who know nothing about it) and a brilliant thinker about poetry. (He was also photographer Diane Arbus’s older brother.) His witty and formally exquisite poetry deserves to be better known.
The question of difficulty in poetry, what it is and why it is, is one that quite occupies me. From what I can tell, I’m not alone in this preoccupation. These excerpts from Nemerov’s essay “The Difficulty of Difficult Poetry”? (included in his long-out-of-print collection Reflexions on Poetry & Poetics, published by Rutgers University Press in 1972) eloquently and insightfully address that question.

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01.23.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Emily Warn

Hellos and Goodbyes

Our planned cycling of Harriet impersonators is causing some pangs. One regular reader Mary Meriam writes: “I understand Alicia’s [A.E. Stallings] days are numbered with you, Harriet. What a pity!” We couldn’t agree more.
Though we fashioned Harriet to change personalities every three to four months, facing the switchover is difficult. How will we distract ourselves from family or work without….

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01.22.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Christian Bök

Random Poetry 04

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“Contemplate hexagonal air normal closets each
the is railing endlessly say
great of dictum
Centre hexagons and not capital exists
librarian elegant the seated
up says
books remote each and that have established”
(An acrostic text, generated by taking two short aphorisms about chance by Jean Baudrillard and using them to “read through” a translation of “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges)
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01.22.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Rigoberto González

Poeta en Nueva York

There’s been plenty of talk and balk on Harriet regarding translations, and as a translator and teacher of literary translation, as someone who’s first language is not English, I’ve decided to finally speak up but through the introduction of one of the best translation projects I have come across to date: Pablo Medina and Mark Statman’s collaborative English version of Federico García Lorca’s conflicted love letter to our beloved New York City.

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01.22.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

A.E. Stallings

Happy Birthday, George Gordon, Lord Byron

I live in a town where Byron is Big. There is a beautiful statue of him being embraced by Ellas (Greece) on the corner of a main thoroughfare. There is a street named after him in the center, on which he also has an eponymous hotel. Heck, there is a whole neighborhood named after him. There are even people named after him–Byron has become a Greek given name (Vyronas).
The only place where Byron is Bigger is possibly Missolonghi (a helluva a backwater to die in), where any establishment not named Liberty is probably named Byron.