2008 November : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Archive for November, 2008

Forrest Gander

What I Learned Blogging for Harriet (after Alan Gilbert)

That in response to postings, a lot of people prefer to send back channel emails than to publish their comments on site.
That one criterion for death is the failure to communicate or respond.
That I generally like poetry ridden hard and put up wet.
That some poets are a lot more interesting in their poetry than they are in their commentaries.
That as usual, Oppen speaks for me when he says “I think of literature not as a part of the entertainment industry, but as a process of thought.”

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11.30.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

Javier Huerta

Verse Charades

I offer you two charades:
1.
My first doth affliction denote,
Which my second is destin’d to feel
And my whole is the best antidote
That affliction to soften and heal.
2.
My first displays the wealth and pomp of kings,
Lords of the earth! their luxury and ease.
Another view of man, my second brings,
Behold him there, the monarch of the seas!
But, ah! united, what reverse we have!
Man’s boasted power and freedom, all are flown;
Lord of the earth and sea, he bends a slave,
And woman, lovely woman, reigns alone.
Thy ready wit the word will soon supply,
May its approval beam in that soft eye!
(I’ll give your ready wits an opportunity to solve the charades. “My first” and “my second” refer to syllables. “My whole” is the word you’re trying to guess. For the answers click on “Continue Reading.”)

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11.30.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Olena Kalytiak Davis

THAT WHICH I SHOULD HAVE DONE I DID NOT DO

“already i missed not working and felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of everyday that is wasted in your life…”

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11.30.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Cathy Park Hong

Revolver

I first came across Robyn Schiff’s poem “Dear Ralph Lauren” at jubilat (where I’m a guest editor) and was floored by the formal and emotional torques of this wonderfully odd poem. Put simply, it’s a poem about Ralph Lauren (real name: Ralph Lifshitz). Put crudely, it’s about the narrator’s obsessive father fixation with Ralph Lauren. But broadly, the poem touches upon the American Dream, capitalist fetishism and Jewish assimilation. It’s a complex poem brocaded with tongue-in-cheek factual details you might find in a Polo catalog (“Might I, if there’s one in stock, be sent the Ralph Lauren Winchester Tote…”) but just as you’re about to be lulled by these details, she dropkicks you with a violent or disturbing anecdote: “Why Dad, do you translate me so tormented, so raving, driving my muddy pony with death spurs and blood on my stick.”

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11.30.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Lavinia Greenlaw

The plain shape of things

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Something stops making sense, won’t stay still, can’t be grasped, and then you come across the plain shape of it – a simple version that says ‘This is what I mean.’
Once when I was broken-hearted, I went to stay in a place where it rained every day. Each morning when I opened my door and set out along the path, I found a heart-shaped puddle. If anyone had been anywhere near, I would have said ‘Look, a heart-shaped puddle,’ and they would have said ‘Yeah right,’ and seen the heart because I had told them it was there.
The heart-shaped puddle meant nothing but I had to stop myself acting upon it and that meant something.

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11.30.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Forrest Gander

What Is Eco-Poetry

Owl Visitation recorded by visionary artist Thomas Ashcraft
(play the brief movie clip at the site below)
Thomas Ashcraft, Heliotown
As globalization draws us together and industrialization and human population pressures take their toll on natural habitats, as species of plants and animals flicker and are snuffed from the earth, it may be worthwhile to ask whether an ethnocentric view of human beings as a species independent from others underpins our exploitation of natural resources and sets into motion dire consequences. What we’ve perpetrated on our environment has certainly affected a poet’s means and material. But can poetry be ecological?

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11.29.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (15)

Javier Huerta

McGonagalls All

Javier Huerta: More and more I am convinced that what we need now is a revival of bad poetry. So I’m working on a book of bad poems.
Friend Unnamed: You mean another one.
JH: Ah, well . . .
FU: Listen, why do you speak of “revival’? Don’t you think bad poetry has been alive and well all these years. In the biggest journals. In the smallest zines. In slams. In MFAs.
JH: I’m not interested in passing judgments. Those poems you consider bad poetry, I’m sure, have their defenders. When I say “bad poetry,” I mean a value neutral category of writing that involves the affected, the hyperconventional, the ornamental, the anticlimactic, the disproportionate.
FU: Neutral, you say.
JH: Well yes, you can have good bad poetry or bad bad poetry. I read somewhere that the International Society for Humor Studies discontinued its annual Julia Moore Good Bad Poetry Competition because the entries failed to ascend (I was going to say descend) to truly memorable badness. Writing good bad poetry is an art. When I say I’m working on a book of bad poems, all I mean to say is I want to engage this art form. Now, if you consider my first book to be bad poetry, I can only say that that badness was not intentional.

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11.29.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Forrest Gander

A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century: Don’t Look Away

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Adina Hoffman, author of the biography of Taha Muhammad Ali:
My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century 
As Adina Hoffman notes in the Prelude to My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, “no one has ever written a biography of a Palestinian writer before, in any language (including Arabic), and that—together with the fact that most Western readers have little if any experience of that culture and literature—brings with it extra responsibility.”
Ali%2C%20Taha%2C%20Happiness.jpg
Forthcoming from Yale University Press

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11.28.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Forrest Gander

Europe: Don’t Look Away, 16 New German Poets  (Burning Deck) & New European Poets  (Graywolf)

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New European Poets , Edited by Wayne Miller & Kevin Prufer (Graywolf, 2008)
There’s a lot to complain about Graywolf’s New European Poets , edited by Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer, but only if you’re a sneering, retromingent malcontent. Otherwise, it’s impossible not to celebrate this book with a big whooping hurrah. It was published in 2008, the same year that Americans were skewered by The Swedish Academy’s permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, for being insular, disinterested in translations, and influenced almost exclusively by our own culture. What Miller and Prufer bring to us is not an assemblage of the usual suspects, those big shot European writers whose names have seeped, against the odds, into our consciousness.
(If you are thinking of stopping here, at least read the poem at the end of this entry; you won’t forget it soon).

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11.26.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Linh Dinh

Clear Cutting

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To do five readings, I went from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Portland, then back to San Francisco. I slept in five homes, two hotels and two trains. I saw old friends, made many new ones. The sweetness and generosity I encountered upset my habitual guardedness. On an Amtrak between Klamath Falls and Eugene, I chatted with Jack D. Fir, not his real name, who worked in a sawmill in Florence, on the Oregon Coast, for 31 years before it went out of business, thanks to the spotted owl brouhaha, he said. “These environmentalists live on the East Coast, never been out here, so they don’t know how much forest we have. Just look for yourself,” he indicated with a nod. “You can cut them responsibly, and they’ll grow back.”
Many old growth trees are already rotted in the center, he explained, his right index finger drilling into a C formed by his left hand, so a storm would knock them all down. Wasted. “Since our logging industry is mostly dead, we have to buy lumber from overseas, from people who really don’t give a hoot about the environment.” With sawmill rotting by the river, Jack got hired by Safeway, but business is down, the town depressed and what’s worse, many people would rather drive 60 miles to shop at a Walmart. The fishing industry is also kaput. Without logging and fishing, the town opened a retirement home, a golf course and a casino, tried to attract tourists, which worked for more than a decade, but thanks to high gas price and the national recession, few people visit anymore. At 60, Jack has two years of mortgage left. “I just hope Safeway doesn’t go bankrupt. At my age, it will be hard to get hired again. I don’t want to move to the city to find another job.”
Sitting in the lounge car, we stared through large windows at the blonde fields, viridian evergreens and another snow-tipped mountain. Canadian geese suddenly infested a small patch of sky. The winding lake seemed short of water. Even at four thousand feet in November, there was no snow, which wasn’t right. “They might just turn me into a wafer, you know, a cracker,” Jack chuckled. “Do you know that Charlton Heston’s film, ‘Soylent Green’?”

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11.25.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Archive for November, 2008

Forrest Gander

What I Learned Blogging for Harriet (after Alan Gilbert)

Javier Huerta

Verse Charades

Olena Kalytiak Davis

THAT WHICH I SHOULD HAVE DONE I DID NOT DO

Cathy Park Hong

Revolver

Lavinia Greenlaw

The plain shape of things

Forrest Gander

What Is Eco-Poetry

Javier Huerta

McGonagalls All

Forrest Gander

A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century: Don’t Look Away

Forrest Gander

Europe: Don’t Look Away, 16 New German Poets  (Burning Deck) & New European Poets  (Graywolf)

Linh Dinh

Clear Cutting

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