2008 October : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Archive for October, 2008

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The changes in the weather here have become less gradual, more brutal. Hailstones fall out of a blue sky. There is snow in October and then there isn’t.
It is four years since the sudden death of Michael Donaghy, at the age of 50. Donaghy was an American of Irish descent, who went to the University of Chicago, where he edited The Chicago Review, before settling in London in the 1980s. His poetry was the subject of this year’s T.S. Eliot lecture, given by Sean O’Brien, which focuses on Donaghy’s “Black Ice and Rain” in which a man at a party follows a woman into her bedroom and tells her how he met a woman at a party… O’Brien concludes:

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10.31.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Javier Huerta

Ghosts in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets

I am haunted by the ghost in the footnote to the first sonnet. Footnotes in Charlotte Smith do much more than cite sources, and this first footnote interacts with the rhyme of the final couplet to emphasize the word ghost.
Ah! then, how dear the Muse’s favours cost,
If those paint sorrow best—who feel it most!*
* “The well-sung woes shall soothe my pensive ghost;
He best can paint them who shall feel them most.” Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard,” 366th line.
The end words cost/most produce an off-rhyme, but the asterisk sends the reader to the footnote in order to encounter the true rhyme. Since the sonnet’s couplet keeps the same rhyme sound as the Pope couplet, ghost is both present and absent from the sonnet. A ghost, not unlike an echo, can be a present absence or an absent presence. In Pope’s poem, Eloisa and Abelard are not the ones singing “the well-sung woes”; they are calling on a future bard to sing the woes for them. In addition to having to witness “every pang” and “every sigh” of the living, the speaker of the Elegiac Sonnets is haunted by the ghosts of Eloisa and Abelard. Elegies confront loss, but, more accurately, they must confront the trace of what was lost. In Poetics of Sensibility, Jerome McGann claims that the “peculiar force” of Smith’s sonnets “comes from the fact that they are not elegies for some particular person or persons” (157). These elegiac sonnets depict a dreary vision because the presence of those who are supposed to be absent haunts the poet/speaker out of all possible resort.

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10.31.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Forrest Gander

A Halloween Poem: Strange Are The Products

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George Oppen, New Collected Poems 
A poem written on Halloween in 1976. The poet was living in San Francisco on Polk Street where, four years later, I would be working in a methadone clinic. He is one of my favorite poets. This poem comes from his last book of new poems, Primitive . It is included in the just-released New Collected Poems of George Oppen . There is a gorgeously attentive introduction written by Michael Davidson and, in this new edition, a sweet, almost intimate preface by Eliot Weinberger. Best of all– because I have never heard anyone read poetry in a way that moves me as Oppen’s voice moves me– the book includes a CD of Oppen reading his work. Here is the Halloween poem, below. (I send it out to the young poet Patrick Morrissey, whose impressive work is marked by Oppen, and to Henry Israeli, the editor of Saturnalia Press, for reasons that the poem will make obvious).

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10.30.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Daisy Fried

Phillies! Phillies! Phillies!

9:58 pm South Philly—
Whooos, horns honking, somebody hitting what sounds like a cowbell…
we don’t have a TV and didn’t get around to see if it was streaming on-line, but we can always tell what’s happening in a ball game that really matters by the noise in the street. As the New York Times live blogger says “And after 98 seasons of failure in the four major sports, Philadelphia has a championship.”
(Jim reading little bits and pieces of Silliman’s The Alphabet out loud: “Nowhere are the yellow ribbons of the Gulf War larger or more plastic than at the gas station.”)
I had this idea all day that if the Phillies didn’t win the World Series, Obama wouldn’t win the election. Now I feel better.
Girls screaming, guys bellowing tenor phillllllllllllliiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesssss
like Marlon Brando moaning Stellllllllllllaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa in Streetcar.
Whoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
(the firecrackers, fireworks, and the first sirens, begin…)
Silliman: “P=H=I=L=A=D=E=L=P=H=I=A” !!!!!!!!!
There go some (cop? news?) helicopters overhead.
phillies%20logo.jpg

10.29.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Lavinia Greenlaw

Yet share the same house

from Self-misunderstood
by Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac ‘Gaariye’
I can’t understand you, curious self,
nor grasp how you’re both life and death, 
grabbed land and peaceful settlement, 
grudging milker that makes me full, 
sun set at evening whilst casting 
noon’s shortest shadow: how can you be 
two who can’t marry 
yet share the same house?  
How can I set this riddle and 
give away its answer if 
I fail to understand your secret 
or even what you mean by it?  
Are you something separate, 
a stand-alone that leans 
upon no man’s shoulder, 
or such a part of the people
 that you can’t be parted from them?  
And are you that which is Gaarriye
 or two opposing halves 
he cannot fit together? 
I call you, crooked creation: 
bear witness to your character. 
Gaariye’s poetry was translated by W.N. Herbert in collaboration with Martin Orwin, as part of the Poetry Translation Centre’s second World Poets Tour, which recently brought to the UK leading writers from Kurdistan, Cape Verde, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Somaliland and Sudan. Almost a year earlier, each was matched with a translator and a British poet, who worked together on producing English versions of their work.
W.N. Herbert had this to say about it all on the tour blog:

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10.28.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Travis Nichols

“Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing.”

Fernando Perez, Tampa Bay Rays outfielder and Columbia University grad, tells the the St. Petersburg Times what’s on his World Series night stand:
“Are you staying away from heavy plots during the playoffs?
Actually, what helps me a great deal right now is poetry, like Robert Creeley and John Ashbery. ”
This isn’t the first time the “baseball beatnik” has stepped up to the plate for poetry.
Perez was the subject of a New York Times profile earlier in the post-season, and there he expressed admiration for Herman Hesse, Annie Dillard, and Howard Zinn. In a Columbia alumni magazine article from 2007, Perez extolled the virtues of Lyn Hejinian’s “My Life.”
Perez is the first Columbia grad to play in the majors since Lou Gehrig and is primarily a speed and defensive replacement (though with Joe Maddon’s Rays, you never know what might happen). In the minor leagues, Perez kept an online journal.
Here’s a taste:
“In this way I see baseball as an ‘anti-modernity.’ It feels as though the men who play and stay in the game indulge in a counter culture, the lifestyle in which all you have to do each day is play. It’s rustic. These are reasons why I’m here.”
All of which serves as a reminder of “Sports,” Kenneth Goldsmith’s verbatim transcript of a 2006 Red Sox-Yankees radio broadcast, “Yo-Yo’s with Money,” Ted Berrigan and Harris Schiff’s UA book of drugged out play-by-play, and, of course, Marianne Moore.
UPDATE: A visit to Open Books reminds me (how could I forget?) that Kansas City Royals sidearm slinger Dan Quisenberry wrote poetry, and that Dock Ellis (not Bill Lee. Thanks, Ryan.) threw a no-hitter while on acid, which is sorta like writing poetry. Also: “The Crowd at the Ball Game” from Williams’ Spring and All.

10.28.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

Milan Gagnon

Poetry primer for the polls

As the election season enters its last days, the Poetry Foundation asked poets what guidance through verse they might offer to the candidates—and, perhaps more importantly, to the voters. The first responses came from Matthea Harvey, most recently the author of Modern Life, and Charles Bernstein, director of Buffalo’s Electronic Poetry Center.

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10.27.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (14)

Javier Huerta

Poetas en Nueva Yol

(with apologies to Forrest Gander)
A brown poet does not automatically know the work of other brown poets. It is an education, one that usually does not happen in the classroom. Anthologies, the generous ones, include a brown poet or two, probably Gary Soto, probably Martin Espada. Both are great poets, but come on. It is an education that happens in the main stacks of the UH Anderson Library where instead of studying for classes I was enrolled in I read all the Chicano poets I could get my dirty paws on. My education of brown poets from New York didn’t begin in earnest until earlier this year when I went to NYC for a couple of ACENTOS readings (Big Ups to Rich Villar and his crew) and a Con Tinta reunion (Saludos a El Pasoan Rich Yañez, who more than anyone else has convinced me that ours has to be a retrospective age). The following is a list of 6 Poetas I was fortunate enough to see perform during my stay.

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10.27.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

Olena Kalytiak Davis

FRANKENSTEIN’S GRANDMOTHER

um, that IS right side up. It’s from a pretty amazing installation by someone named Matthew Buckingham that I was fortunate enough to stumble upon (and into) at the Henry in Seattle a few months ago.

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10.26.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Javier Huerta

Bite on my Belly

I.
I never refuse seconds. You can tell this by looking at me. Since I don’t make a habit of stepping on the scale, I really can’t say in precise numbers how overweight I am, but I can say that the label gordo would not be inappropriate. I often joke that my favorite mispronunciation of my name is heavier because it describes me so well. Other ways of joking around about my weight: “I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones” (Whitman), “The girls, the girls, they love me because I’m the overweight lover Ja-a-vi” (Heavy D), and “Un kilo de papada no es papada!” (Paco Stanley). Do I have a weight problem? No, because Maria, my partner, the woman I love, does not seem to mind. She actually likes that she has difficulty wrapping her arms all the way around me. She even likes to pull up my shirt and bite on my belly. I don’t get it either. But if it works for her, it works for me. All of this is just to say that I would make an awful hunger artist.

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10.23.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (11)

Archive for October, 2008

Lavinia Greenlaw

Black ice and rain

Javier Huerta

Ghosts in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets

Forrest Gander

A Halloween Poem: Strange Are The Products

Daisy Fried

Phillies! Phillies! Phillies!

Lavinia Greenlaw

Yet share the same house

Travis Nichols

“Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing.”

Milan Gagnon

Poetry primer for the polls

Javier Huerta

Poetas en Nueva Yol

Olena Kalytiak Davis

FRANKENSTEIN’S GRANDMOTHER

Javier Huerta

Bite on my Belly

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