2008 July : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Archive for July, 2008

Philadelphia resident Ish Klein is not only a fine poet whose work dances on the border between mawkish sentimentality and lyrical poignancy, she’s also an excellent–if extremely bizarre–filmmaker.
Here’s a taste:

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

07.24.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Lucia Perillo

More Patchen

Since there have been a few posts about the political poetry of Kenneth Patchen, I thought I would post a few of what he called his picture poems. These are from a book I own called Wonderings, published in l971, shortly before Patchen’s death.

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

07.23.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (9)

Ange Mlinko

Two Chapbooks

Harriet writers have an open invitation to post even after their contract expires, but not many of us do so. The intensity of professional blogging for three to six months is exhausting, and the exposure may leave one feeling, months later, unnerved. Nevertheless, there is always news. Why not share it here? I am thinking of two recent chapbooks, both by young women, both enamored of language like summer foliage, dense and floral, practically Shakespearean — one is, after all, called Sonnets, and the other is called Comedies. Warning: Some of the language herein may not be suitable for …

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

07.22.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (10)

Reginald Shepherd

On Alvin Feinman’s “True Night”

While I am recovering from surgery that will hopefully put at end to my cycle of illness, I am having Robert post another tribute to my mentor Alvin Feinman.
So it is midnight, and all
The angels of ordinary day gone,
The abiding absence between day and day
Come like true and only rain
Comes instant, eternal, again:
As though an air had opened without sound
In which all things are sanctified,
In which they are at prayer—
The drunken man in his stupor,
The madman’s lucid shrinking circle;
As though all things shone perfectly,
Perfected in self-discrepancy:
The widow wedded to her grief,
The hangman haloed in remorse—
I should not rearrange a leaf,
No more than wish to lighten stones
Or still the sea where it still roars—
Here every grief requires its grief,
Here every longing thing is lit
Like darkness at an altar.
As long as truest night is long,
Let no discordant wing
Corrupt these sorrows into song.

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

07.22.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Alan Gilbert

Taking the bait

The question Mark Nowak has raised a couple times concerning the devaluing of politically progressive poetry in comparison with work that appears less socially engaged would take a book, not a blog entry, to fully answer. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that the frame of the discussion keeps slipping within and between Mark’s two posts and the numerous reader responses to them. His sets of examples are dissimilar; so, too, are the cultural historians he cites. For instance, in his June 29 post on Linton Kwesi Johnson he wonders whether Johnson’s work might “speak differently and perhaps more powerfully than a poem by, say, [Tom] Raworth or [Bernadette] Mayer or W. S. Merwin.” In his July 15 post, he asks why a poem such as Kenneth Patchen’s “Southern Organizer” has completely disappeared—to the point that even Patchen’s biographer wasn’t aware of it—while James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio” is widely anthologized.

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

07.21.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (10)

Mark Nowak

Samadoon

the ratatat and bomb booming …..calls for the lost
compliantly igniting troubles and provocation
my bull elephant
people sheltering …..engaged ever betrothed
to mucus and weakness …..of all diseases
malaria tuberculosis
they’re led astray by killing’s admirers son of Barre and his lot
in ignorance following …..the mistaken animal haired humans
for my people … ..with wickedness poured into them
i pass you this message …..alliterating in ‘d’
Who was it that said “poetry is news that stays news”? [Rhetorical question alert.] Reading today’s NYTimes article “Somali Killings of Aid Workers Imperil Relief” I remembered Cabdulqaadir Xaaji Cali Axmed’s gabay, “Samadoon”, published several years ago in Modern Poetry in Translation.

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

07.20.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Alan Gilbert

This is what democracy looks like

It’s interesting that the posts which have generated the most discussion during the past couple months—Lucia Perillo’s “Why are poets aligned with the left?” from June 23 and Mark Nowak’s “Cannon fodder” from a few days ago—both deal with the relationship between poetry and politics. I can’t tell if this is the result of people being deeply engaged by the topic (certainly, that’s part of it), or if a rhetorically charged statement—regarding poetry and war, or the racism and sexism of a particular poem—is what in fact springs the dialogical trap in these kinds of forums. I’m guessing it may be more the latter.

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

07.19.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (15)

Mark Nowak

Chimurenga

Very few literary magazines get me excited when they arrive in the mail. As has probably become more than evident to those reading my blog posts the past six weeks, I’m seeking something decidedly different than many USAmerican poetry journals regularly provide when I crack the spine of that pefect-bound or saddle-stitched or stapled paper object that is newly disembarking from its postal envelope.
Enter Chimurenga, whose new double-issue (no 12/13) arrived in my mailbox from Cape Town, South Africa, a few days ago. Transnationally poetic? Check. Innovatively interdisciplinary? Check. Designed by the gods? Check. Unafraid to simultaneously articulate the aesthetic, the political, the cultural, and the economic? Check(mate).

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

07.19.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Linh Dinh

Furthest from Me

by David Horvitz

| CONTINUE READING THIS ENTRY »

07.18.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Lucia Perillo

It’s scary to think about what your body is going to look like in forty years

dsc00085.jpg.jpg
At the swimming pool, I am an honorary old person—I get to swim with the senior citizens, who play volleyball in the shallow end and use the deep end for water exercise. Only a few people do the exercises, and they move over to let me swim, and I also try to do some of the exercises, though when I go underwater to check out what my legs are doing, I find they’re merely dangling like the cartoon swimmerets of a brine shrimp.
What does this have to do with poetry? The other day…