Archive for March, 2008
Ada Limón
Thursday Shout Out
I have had the great pleasure of introducing Jennifer L. Knox in a few different writing courses. The first thing that happens is a dilation of pupils, as if an art history teacher suddenly flipped the next slide to reveal the students’ own family photographs. There amongst the van Gogh’s and the Gauguin’s is a picture of their sister wearing only her underwear and carrying a 40 full of gas near the aqueduct. The picture stands up to the others, but it’s wildly close to home. Colors rich and unflinching. This is to say, there is an immediate recognition of language and landscape. With her second book, Drunk By Noon (Bloof Books 2007) Knox continues to simultaneously pierce and please the reader.
Linh Dinh
Tran Da Tu
American readers are familiar with the Vietnam War poetry of Bruce Weigl and Yusef Komunyakaa, etc., some may even have read former NVA Bao Ninh’s novel, The Sorrows of War, but almost no one has read the war poetry of the South Vietnamese, on whose land much of the fighting took place, but that’s not so unusual, is it? How many know what Iraqi and Afghan poets are writing? Among the best South Vietnamese poets of his generation is Tran Da Tu. He was born in Hai Duong, northern Vietnam in 1940. In 1954, during the partition of the country, he went to Saigon, where he became a journalist and prominent poet. During 1963, he was jailed by the Ngo Dinh Diem government for his dissident views, then imprisoned for 12 years by the Communists from 1976-1988, after the collapse of South Vietnam. His wife, the famous novelist and poet Nha Ca, the only South Vietnamese female writer among 10 black-listed as “cultural guerrillas” by the Communist regime, was also imprisoned from 1976-1977. In 1989, a year after Tran Da Tu was released from prison, the couple and their children received political asylum from the Swedish government, but later moved to the US and now live in Southern California. His war poetry reads as if it were written, well, right now. I translate four:
Major Jackson
Poem: House in the World
House In the World
I’m looking for a house
In the world
Where the white shadows
Will not fall.
There is no such house,
Dark brothers,
No such house
At all.
Reginald Shepherd
Read This and Tell Me What It Says
Once again illness has kept me away from blogging for a bit. I had surgery on Friday on the tumors on my liver, which the surgeon believes he has gotten (yay!), but I had to go the emergency room on Saturday in intense pain that turned out to be caused by pneumonia in my right lung. As Frank Sinatra sang, everything happens to me. Yeesh.
I’m sure that every writer remembers his or her first review. I’m even more sure that every writer remembers his or her first bad review. To be honest, I don’t remember the first review of my first book, where it appeared or who wrote it, what it said or where I was when I first read it. But I remember exactly where I was when I saw my first bad review, of my second book, Angel, Interrupted. I was at Borders in Chicago, in my old hipster/gayboy/yuppie neighborhood of Lakeview. I haven’t been to that Borders in many years, but ten years ago they had an excellent selection of literary journals. I picked up a copy of Chelsea, in which my work had appeared several times, and there it was.
Daisy Fried
4000/1,191,216
4000 U.S. military dead in Iraq.
1,191,216 Iraqi deaths (www.antiwar.com).
My prime of youth is but a froste of cares:
My feaste of joy, is but a dishe of payne:
My cropp of corne, is but a field of tares:
And all my good is but vaine hope of gaine:
The daye is gone, and yet I sawe no sonn:
And nowe I live, and nowe my life is donn
The springe is paste, and yet it hath not sprong
The frute is deade, and yet the leaves are greene
My youth is gone, and yet I am but yonge
I sawe the woorld, and yet I was not seene
My threed is cutt, and yet it was not sponn
And nowe I lyve, and nowe my life is donn.
I saught my death, and founde it in my wombe
I lookte for life, and sawe it was a shade.
I trode the earth and knewe it was my Tombe
And nowe I die, and nowe I am but made
The glasse is full, and nowe the glass is rune
And nowe I live, and nowe my life is donn
–Chidiock Tichborne, 1586
Linh Dinh
Small and Smallest
Flying from San Francisco to London over the weekend, I found myself sitting next to a woman whose accent sounded more British than American, so I assumed she was a Brit going home, but no, Randi Cathinka Neverdal was a Norwegian doing her doctorate thesis on small press literary publishing in the U.S. What serendipity! “I’m a poet,” I admitted to Cathinka without shame. We talked.
Daisy Fried
Self-Suspicion
I recently read the journalist Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. The much bruited hook is how did two American Jewish lesbians survive in Vichy France during WWII. The answer is that they were protected by the collaborator Bernard Fay, about whom they may not have known much in terms of his responsibility for the suffering and deaths of a number of people—but people choose not to know what they don’t want to know. There’s also a bit on Stein’s and Toklas’ possibly S&M-ish sexual relationship which doesn’t turn out to be very interesting (as sex lives of other people generally, and disappointingly, do not.) I think Malcolm tries to dislike Stein and to like Toklas, and fails on both counts.
A few years ago I read Malcolm’s The Silent Woman, a book about books on Sylvia Plath. In both books, the Plath and the Stein, there is more interest in Malcolm’s journey in trying to understand her subject than there is in what she finds out. Both are popularized metabiography, both are good smart easy reads. Those concerned about “I” in poems might be interested in Malcolm.
Daisy Fried
Truth and Clarity
So, following Ange Mlinko’s suggestion in the comments section of my last post, here’s all I’m talking about regarding the difference between Truth and Clarity. (They sound like allergy medicines, don’t they?) Truth (to me) might go something like “Socialist democracy is the best form of government.” And I’m always delighted to read good poems by people who hold that opinion (Anne Winters?) but most poems that merely want to tell me that Truth aren’t usually good poems. There are much better ways than poems to make arguments or deliver messages.
Clarity, meanwhile, is more like caffeine. Or a pair of glasses. (I rely on both.) See better, see with more energy, become awake. What does Truth have to do with a poem like (to pick one everybody knows) “The Red Wheelbarrow”? What do we talk about when we talk about this poem?
Ada Limón
Taking Risks: Thursday Shout Out
It is the first day of spring. Renew. Read. Rev up.
In attempting to carry on some of Rigoberto’s wonderful work introducing new books and old favorites from his collection, I thought I’d start a Thursday shout out series. (Unlike Rigo, I may not be able to do it every Thursday, but I will do my honest best.)
Often, the poems that thrill me the most, the ones that make me ignore all the clutter on the table and commit myself to reading them, often memorizing them, are poems that take a stand, that have a strong sense of risk and urgency (I said NOW!). Add that to an individual voice that won’t quit and language that sandblasts the paint off all those ordinary houses we drive by, and you’ve got Alex Lemon.
Poetry Foundation
The Facts of Late Winter
The new feature on the site, “Diversity Then!,” by the novelist Paul La Farge, looks at the sensational faits divers penned by Félix Fénéon in the early 20th century. La Farge mentions that such swift, lurid accounts—poems in small—inspired everyone from Stendhal to Duras to the Surrealists, but modestly leaves out his own book, The Facts of Winter (2005).
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