Forrest Gander : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

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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)

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)

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.”
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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)

Forrest Gander

Uruguay: Don’t Look Away

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Melisa Machado
For many of the people reading this website, the three best-known poets from Uruguay might be Comte de Lautréamont (born Isador Lucien Ducasse in Montevideo, 1846), Jules Supervielle (born in Montevideo in 1884), and Kent Johnson (lived in Montevideo 1961-1971 and in 1978), three men who gained renown after leaving Uruguay and writing in languages other than Spanish.
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Kent Johnson as a youth in Montevideo

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11.24.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (20)

Forrest Gander

Hungary: Don’t Look Away

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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)

Forrest Gander

Libya: Don’t Look Away

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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)

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)

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)

Forrest Gander

Before the Elections: The Darkness Surrounds Us

A recent Harriet entry by Olena Kalytiak Davis begins “As Mother Said” and soon enough mentions “driving.” The combination reminds me that I’ve wanted to write something about Robert Creeley’s famous poem, “I Know a Man.” This particular moment in American history makes it all the more timely.
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Robert Creeley in Bolinas, CA