2008 November : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Archive for November, 2008

Poet and memoirist Mark Doty’s new and selected poems Fire to Fire was awarded the National Book Award last night at the NBF’s annual gala event in New York City.
You can listen to Doty read a few poems here, read an excerpt from Fire to Fire here, and listen to Julie Bernstein chat with Doty here.

11.20.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Forrest Gander

Hungary: Don’t Look Away

Radnoti%2C%20Miklos.jpg
In November of 1944, a Jewish Hungarian poet known for mixing innovative and classical styles, was shot into a mass grave with his notebook of last poems in his coat pocket. One of 3,200 Hungarian Jews forced by fascist militia to march hundreds of miles in retreat from Tito’s advancing armies, Miklós Radnóti remained under that mound for eighteen months before he was unearthed and later identified by his wife. What she found in that notebook damp with his body fluids were his last poems, including love poems scribbled to her, Fanni, known to her friends as Fifi. In August 2008, I flew to Budapest, Hungary, to meet with the 96-year old widow of the poet Miklós Radnóti.

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11.20.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Travis Nichols

Charlie Kaufman, Literalist of the Imagination

Riding the bus down to the Hotel Monaco to meet Charlie Kaufman, I suddenly have a terrible piercing pain in my right eye. Every time I blink, it’s like a bit of glass under my eyelid rolls along the surface of my eye. I yelp and frantically try to drag the thing out, but I only seem to make it worse.
I stumble off the bus, finger to eye, thinking, yes, this is the perfect way to meet the writer and director of “Synecdoche, New York,” a movie as much about pain and decay as about creativity and inspiration.
In the hotel lobby, I sit blinking and Kaufman–short, wiry haired, in a leather jacket– walks up and points at me. “You here for Kaufman?” he asks.

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11.19.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (13)

Javier Huerta

Sidewalk Cleaning: Alfred’s Plaque

Here is Alfred, proud and excited, enjoying the honor of having his poem “Corrido Blanco” included in the Berkeley Poetry Walk. I have borrowed the photograph from Lorna Dee Cervantes’s blog. Lorna was there sharing in Alfred’s excitement. Last month as a way to memorialize him, three of Alfred’s students–Robert Reyes, Harold Terezón, and Yo–got together to brighten up his plaque. Here are some photographs from our sidewalk cleaning/reading in memory of Alfred Arteaga.

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11.19.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Forrest Gander

Libya: Don’t Look Away

Medusa Head
On the north African coast where the Wadi Lebda meets the sea, just east of what is now called Tripoli, Libya, the Phoenicians built a trading post more than 3000 years ago. During the Roman Empire, and particularly during the rule of Septimus Severus, it blossomed into Leptis Magna, a magnificent city rivaling Carthage.
Medusa Head

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11.18.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Lavinia Greenlaw

Further “poetic”s

viva%20anarchia%202.jpg
Now that there is renewed hope that action can bring about change, are we going to see a return to explicitly political art?
I went to see the dance company DV8’s latest production, To Be Straight With You, which is described on their website as ‘a poetic but unflinching exploration of tolerance, intolerance, religion and sexuality.’
If someone described a poem that way, I would expect the worst:

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11.18.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (8)

Javier Huerta

Sidewalk Cleaning: Berkeley Poetry Walk

It must be quite an honor to have one of your poems selected for a poetry plaque on the Berkeley Poetry Walk. Ron Silliman said somewhere that it (his inclusion on the walk) is one of the most memorable and satisfying honors he has received. One problem that arises, however, is keeping these tributes clean and unobstructed. Since I am a Berkeley graduate student with little money, I would like to offer my cleaning services for a small fee to be discussed at a later date. If you are either a poet on this Poetry Walk or the follower of such a poet (For a list of all the poets, please consult the Addison St. Anthology), you may be interested in the following services.

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11.17.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Cathy Park Hong

It’s the economy, stupid

I will have to agree with Olena that now that Sarah is back in Alaska, I can now stop tourettically clicking the refresh button and begin to think about poetry.
To assess the last three months? It’s been an obsessive relationship I have had with the Internet. Occasionally I managed to extricate myself from the cold glow of my computer and transform obsession to action: a stint to Philly, for instance, where I canvassed for Obama in immigrant neighborhoods. While Obama’s Ivy-League education was a handicap to working-class white Americans, all I had to do when speaking to Korean immigrants was mention “Harvard” and “Obama” and they clapped their hands and demanded an extra Hope button for their minister.
But other than those rare occasions, I basically had an intravenous tube running from my veins to dailykos, FiveThirtyEight, talkingpoints, andrewsullivan, huffingtonpost (even a gander at the National Review to see who else might be defecting from the Right) and all online newspapers. I’ve had conversations with poets who moaned about procrastinating due to their helpless addiction to the Internet. Perhaps Nate Silver (he of FiveThirtyEight) should do a graph on the productivity level of writers from the month of September – November. Can you imagine the sharp downward slant marking everyday you wasted hours monitoring polls from Zogby to Gallup? Am I just speaking for myself?

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11.16.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Forrest Gander

Australia: Don’t Look Away

From the deck of Robert Adamson’s house
Hot damn, here I am, I was thinking as I looked out from the porch across the Hawkesbury River to the wild preserve on the other side. I’m right where Duncan and Creeley stood, and like them, I’m about to go out at night on the river with that famous Australian poet, fisherman, birder, scrapper, lover, “etc. etc.” as Creeley would say, Robert Adamson.
the river was never the same
that night Duncan gathered the southern stars
into his being the black water plopping with fat mullet
(from “Black Water”)

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11.16.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Cathy Park Hong

DURA

Big Presses allow titles to gently fade out. Small presses go belly up (which brings me to another question—will the recession affect poetry? Perhaps this will be a boon—no longer able to afford the luxuries of hardcover fiction or spend triple digits at the hippest tapas restaurant, stressed out Americans will turn to economically undemanding poetry collections for solace after the glazed remains of their Spam dinner– but I will save this for another post). So with these two factors, thousands of remarkable titles are lost in the ether—if it’s not for the library, one must troll the used bins or cough up an eye-popping amount for a collector’s item on Amazon (currently, I covet Jed Rasula’s Imagining Languages which is going for $125.00). Stephen Sohn had similar thoughts about Myung Mi Kim’s Dura:

Imagine my surprise when I started my internet search and discovered not only that the collection was already out of print, but that the only used copies I could find were priced well over seventy five dollars. Dura had become a “collector’s item.” And while the price might have seemed high at the time, when I think about the incredibly rich critical terrain that has already emerged in relation to Kim’s oeuvre and even more specifically, Dura, I am not surprised that what used copies were left so difficult to obtain.

Well, the fabulous press Nightboat Books has just reissued Dura.

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11.15.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (10)

Archive for November, 2008

Travis Nichols

Doty Hits a Dinger!

Forrest Gander

Hungary: Don’t Look Away

Travis Nichols

Charlie Kaufman, Literalist of the Imagination

Javier Huerta

Sidewalk Cleaning: Alfred’s Plaque

Forrest Gander

Libya: Don’t Look Away

Lavinia Greenlaw

Further “poetic”s

Javier Huerta

Sidewalk Cleaning: Berkeley Poetry Walk

Cathy Park Hong

It’s the economy, stupid

Forrest Gander

Australia: Don’t Look Away

Cathy Park Hong

DURA

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