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.”

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?

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.”

Forthcoming from Yale University Press

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).

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.

Kent Johnson as a youth in Montevideo

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.

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

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”)

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).

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.

Robert Creeley in Bolinas, CA

Inseparable by Lewis Warsh, Granary Books, 2008

Despite that Lewis Warsh is most closely associated with the community of writers who met at St. Marks Church on the Bowery from the late 70’s through the 90’s, his influence has been felt nationally and internationally.

Because Sharon Olds has been publishing for forty years and because her work has drawn so much attention, both disparaging and laudatory, most people I know already have decided attitudes towards her work.

No Eyes: Lester Young by David Meltzer, Black Sparrow Books

David Meltzer’s No Eyes: Lester Young
 is one of the most masterful, joyous, life-affirming books of poems on music (and IN music) published in the United States.

The Heaven-Sent Leaf by Katy Lederer, BOA Editions, 2008

Her new book, The Heaven-Sent Leaf
, shows Lederer in her most independent mode.

City of Corners, Wave Books, 2008

Working as a Registered Nurse in an infectious disease clinic in Brooklyn, John Godfrey has steadily published books of poems (and sometimes, as in the case of Push the Mule, prose) characterized by an exuberant attention to language and to the emotional surges & ebbs of urban relationships.

It’s as if people have ceded both their destinies and their imaginations to “a hopeless gray area of defeat and despair,” Anne Waldman comments in the introduction to the anthology Civil Disobedience: Poetics & Politics in Action
 (Coffee House Press, 2004). Few other American writers have responded to that malaise with as much joy, ferocity and irrepressible charge as Anne Waldman.

Order through Small Press Distribution or hambrose13@hotmail.com

If I were a young poet looking to apply to an MFA program, one of the places most attractive to me would be the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana, and not only because Missoula is so convincingly beautiful.

In responsive commentaries on my earlier note memorializing the death of Pablo Neruda, several people mentioned the living Chilean poet Raúl Zurita. During the Pinochet regime, Zurita had the guts to bulldoze a poem into the sand of the Atacama Desert. It read ni pena ni miedo: neither pain nor fear.
 Long ago, it would have been obliterated by rains and wind, but the people in the nearest village still carry shovels into the desert on Sundays and they turn over the sand of the letters to keep it fresh. In 2001, the President of Chile announced on TV something that most people already knew: that the bodies of hundreds of people who disappeared during the Pinochet dictatorship would never be found because they had been thrown out of airplanes into the Pacific Ocean and into the mouths of volcanoes.

Two very different new books, one by Naomi Shihab Nye and one by Kent Johnson, turn epistolary toward remarkably similar and fierce political ends.

Javier Huerta's excellent post on privilege and the bilingual pun (above) prompts me to share this note. On Monday, I received an email from KL, someone I know who teaches at a detention facility in Virginia, asking me to translate something that a girl in her class had written in Spanish. KL teaches high school-age children who are waiting for a court hearing or sentencing; they are usually incarcerated at the facility for just a few days or a few weeks. Obviously, it’s a difficult environment for learning.

Collage/Painting by Lisa Abbott-Canfield

Today is the anniversary of Pablo Neruda’s death in 1973. In homage, I’m posting this poem, “Ode with a Lament.”* Written in the early thirties in Spain, it probably alludes to Neruda’s daughter Malva who was born with hydrocephaly and Down’s syndrome. I find the last stanza particularly moving in its depiction of the emotionally vulnerable girl killing ants and crying, her abecedary on fire because she will never learn to read.

Drawing by Douglas Culhane

Any of us can get into a good fight arguing over singer-songwriters whose poetic lyrics we champion. And some singers, Leonard Cohen or David Berman (of The Silver Jews) for instance, publish books of their own poetry. In the seventies, a number of singer-songwriters made references to poets: Bob Dylan to Dante, Verlaine & Rimbaud, Patti Smith to Rimbaud, Lou Reed to Delmore Schwartz, and, um, Aerosmith quoted from "Hamlet." But who are some of the younger singer-songwriters referencing poems by other poets? (Steve Burt, who will know them all, is limited to two responses).

For two of the best, click continue reading this entry, below.

Palace Music Bonus Disc

The Slovenes are coming! Five of them, anyway: Tone Škrjanec, Tomaž Šalamun, Gregor Podlogar, Ana Pepelnik, and Primož Čučnik. This could be big trouble (see their bio notes). Catch you unprepared? That's just what they want! Better click Continue Reading This Entry below.

Tomaž Šalamun at Brown University, 2007

The best book by our best living literary essayist, An Elemental Thing
 by Eliot Weinberger got scant attention when it was published in 2007. As is sometimes the case with significant American writers, Weinberger’s reputation may be greater abroad

than at home. Certainly his work has been translated into umpteen languages (including Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, and Maori). I recently reread An Elemental Thing
 and was knocked out again and surprised by what I missed the first time.

It is 12:20 in Providence a Friday…
I scroll through the madding blogs and check in
with Harriet
 to see what the poets
in Wales are doing these days…

Zoë Skoulding