Archive for January, 2008
Stephen Burt
all-name team
Poetry is a kind of naming– the Rilke of the Duino Elegies certainly thought so, and Wallace Stevens, in the wonderful late poem “Local Objects,” said that he wanted to give the things in his poetry fresh names, “to keep them from perishing.”
Naming is a kind of poetry too: or so the news around these parts suggests… examples, elaborations, partial dissents, a journey to A’Quonesia, and some rock music await below the fold.
Daisy Fried
“What Abstract Art Means To Me”
Here’s something I have tacked above my desk to which the question of language’s inadequacy is irrelevant. This is Willem DeKooning, from a talk he gave called “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” at a symposium organized by the Museum of Modern Art in 1950 on the occasion of the show “Abstract Art in America.”
About twenty-four years ago, I knew a man in Hoboken, a German who used to visit us in the Dutch Seaman’s Home. As far as he could remember, he was always hungry in Europe. He found a place in Hoboken where bread was sold a few days old—all kinds of bread: French bread, German bread, Italian bread, Dutch bread, Greek bread, American bread and particularly Russian black bread. He bought big stacks of it for very little money, and let it get good and hard and then he crumpled it and spread it on the floor in his flat and walked on it as on a soft carpet. I lost sight of him, but found out many years later that one of the other fellows met him again around 86th street. He had become some kind of Jugend Bund leader and took boys and girls to Bear Mountain on Sundays. He is still alive but quite old and is now a Communist. I could never figure him out, but now when I think of him, all that I can remember is that he had a very abstract look on his face.
Poetry Foundation
“Battlefield” unearthed…and more on Frank Stanford
I’d love to hear comments from our Harriet bloggers and readers on Ben Ehrenreich’s “The Long Goodbye,” his epic, beautifully written piece on the work and life of the late Frank Stanford, up now on the Foundation site.
Major Jackson
Celebrity Poetry
What is it about celebrity poets that rile “serious” writers of poetry? With each new collection of poems by an actor or music recording star, envy mounts as does the high levels of indifference by poets and critics, alike. Such books of poetry are roundly dismissed and ignored by the literati, yet inevitably become bestsellers owing to the legions of adoring fans that seem to have an interminable appetite for mediocre verse. Rest assured, such books do not attract prize committees and are rarely reviewed outside of Publishers Weekly or Booklist. One would think, also, given the stratospheric mega-sales, these books would appear on the poetryfoundations.org bestseller lists. Alas, there too, ignored.
A.E. Stallings
Translation: Rhyme & Reason
Some of the lack of boldness in translation in the past fifty years or so has been a lack of technical boldness, of even attempting to get across the meter, rhyme sounds, puns, etc., of the original. After all, free verse represents a rather slim subset of poetry over the millennia. Can all poets of all times and languages really have sounded like mid-American, mid-century free verse poets in the plain-speaking tradition?
Often the translator(s) will state in an introduction that to have even attempted to convey the rhyme scheme or demonstrate a metrical pattern would have meant to sacrifice the “true” essence of the poem (the old Puritan notion that artifice and authenticity are at odds). Would it? It starts to sound to me like a cop-out. Can it simply not be done? Whose fault is that? As Daisy said, “Try harder, then.”
Reginald Shepherd
Listmania
At the end of my previous post, in which I listed and briefly discussed some of my favorite books of poetry published in 2007, I promised or threatened that there were more lists to come. I truly do love lists, and once I started making them I found it hard to stop. So here are a couple of other lists pertaining to books of poetry published in 2007, this time sans commentary, for reasons that will become obvious if you look beneath the fold.
Christian Bök
Random Poetry 03
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“I have seen old men who, for long periods of time, would hide in the latrines with some metal disks in a forbidden dice cup and feebly mimic the divine disorder.”
[A sentence quoted from an English version of "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges.]
“T TTTT HTTH TTT THH TTH HTH HHHT TTHHTTT TH HHTH TTHTH THHT HT THT THHTHTHT HTHT HTTH HHHHH HHHTH HT T THHTHTTHT THTH HTT TTH HHHTHT HTHHT TTH HTHHHH HHTTHHHT”
[A series of heads (H) and tails (T), showing a coin-toss for each letter in the above quote.]
“• •••• -••- ••• •– ••- -•- —• ••–••• •- –•- ••-•- •–• -• •-• •–•-•-• -•-• -••- —– —•- -• • •–•-••-• •-•- -•• ••- —•-• -•–• ••- -•—- –••—•”
[A conversion of the random series, above, into a sequence of dits (T = •) and dahs (H = -).]
“E H X S W U K Ö ?E A Q UA P N R &N C X 0 ÖT N E &R Ä D U ÖN Ĥ U YM ,N”
[A translation of the dits and dahs, above, from Morse Code into a series of English symbols.]
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Stephen Burt
more scots, less porn
We knew that the continuing malaise among independent bookstores (despite success stories in North Carolina, in Minnesota, and elsewhere) has long spelled trouble for literary fiction, which relies on in-store events, loyal customers, and local buzz to move the books that never become bestsellers. Now comes word via an expert in the field that the decline of the independent bookstore evens spells trouble for well-written porn.
Fiction of all kinds– even the kinds you might think have a built-in, durable market– is on its way, I suspect, to the status that American poetry already occupies: you can devote your life and your spare time to it, you can find steady work and even a rewarding career track by doing something connected to it, but almost nobody will make a living through being paid, directly, to write books of it. Some consequences– and some news from Scotland (the kind that stays news) below.
Major Jackson
Add to Cart
While Professor Stanley Fish argues the lack of relative worth of the Humanities over at the NYTIMES, I thought I would visit a few of my local, online rare books websites to gauge the fair market value of Poetry (Ruth Lilly, notwithstanding), that is, how much hard cash do works of poetry command in the dangerous, clandestine world of literary intrigue, secular humanism, and covert antiquarian operations.
Wallace Stevens’s art collection and furniture has the distinction of being the most expensive purchase at abebooks.com at a whopping $1.7 million dollars, which itself is followed by Petrarch’s 15th century opera at $400K.
While the below represents a personal wish list, if anyone wants to send me an early birthday gift . . . .
Rigoberto González
Wednesday Shout Out
When I came across this book of poems, I was struck by its use of the surreal: “The password is still bird, folded wings unfurling against the damp sides of your mouth.” Jenny Browne crafts her language into imagery that gestures toward optical illusion, where the vehicle and the tenor can switch places without warning. Look closely and it’s exactly what it seems, and what it doesn’t seem. And in this book of curious metaphors, everything is subject to transformation: a troubled marriage, a bout of insomnia, the man who gives bad directions in downtown San Antonio.
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Thom Donovan
Bhanu Kapil
Fred Moten
Craig Santos Perez
Sina Queyras
Sotère Torregian
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RECENT COMMENTS
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Michael R. wrote:
>If you’d been reading, you’d realize that the point of that passage is ... MORE »
Kent Johnson | 03.21.10 -
Very cool. I had not heard of Piet Hein, and will look him up. A ... MORE »
LH | 03.21.10 -
Definitely very cool, Craig. Very much liked kari edwards' book and will put this on ... MORE »
Sina Queyras | 03.21.10 -
Yay, Janet! MORE »
Mary Meriam | 03.20.10 -
@Sina:
I have not heard of an opera singing poet,
... MORE »
Colin Ward | 03.20.10
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IN THIS ISSUE: March 2010
A selection of new work from Dorothea Grossman; new poems by Lavinia Greenlaw, David Yezzi, A.E. Stallings, Gerald Stern, and Dan Gerber; translations of Carlo Betocchi, and Mahmoud Darwish; an Editorial on Ruth Lilly; an exchange between Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch; an essay by Chen Li; and a review by Daisy Fried.
CHICAGO EVENTS
Poetry Off the Shelf: David Baker
Fri, March 26th, 6:00 PM
Open Books
213 West Institute Place
Free admission
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