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Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Travis Nichols

Nocturne at High Noon. And the National Book Award Goes to . . .

nba092323

From a list of the most interesting list of of finalists ever (so says Ron Silliman), the National Book Award judges picked Keith Waldrop’s Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (UC Press) as this year’s winner.

Waldrop, a fixture of the poetry world of Providence, Rhode Island, has been celebrated as a translator (most recently of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal) and as a publisher, with his wife Rosmarie, of Burning Deck Press.

Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy is made up of three long poem sequences that mix philosophy and poetry in a style familiar to readers of Waldrop’s fourteen other collections.

“These powerful poems,” says his publisher, “at once metaphysical and personal, reconcile Waldrop’s romantic tendencies with formal experimentation, uniting poetry and philosophy and revealing him as a transcendentalist for the new millennium.”

Publisher’s Weekly called the collection “entrancing” and the Providence Sunday Journal said it’s “a complex, absorbing work.”

The National Book Award judges said: “If transcendental immanence were possible, it would be because Keith Waldrop had invented it; he’s the only one who could—and in Transcendental Studies he has. These three linked series achieve a fusion arcing from the Romantic to the Postmodern that demonstrates language’s capacity to go to extremes—and to haul daily lived experience right along with it: life imitates language, and when language becomes these poems, life itself gets more various, more volatile, more vital.”

Pennsound has a large collection of Waldrop recordings up for those who want deep immersion into the transcendental experience.

For anyone else who just wants a taste of the celebration, here’s a short clip from St. Mark’s Poetry Project.

Have the NBAs transcended?  Has this award gone to a notably different poet than it has in the past (2008: Mark Doty; 2007: Robert Hass; 2006: Nathaniel Mackey)?

Abigail Deutsch

dubious poetry: the palin comparison

Palin-Norfest

Many have noted the poetry latent in Sarah Palin’s speech. Now that she’s published a memoir, Going Rogue, many are noting the non-poetry of her non-prose.

But who would have imagined that Palin had a poetic forerunner, a partner in rhyme, a fellow Bard of Bad? Julia A. Moore (1847-1920), popularly called the “Sweet Singer of Michigan,” produced reams of writing that soon became known as the worst of the verse. If Palin wrote a poem, I posit, it would be this definitive work of Moore’s.

Abigail Deutsch

second sex takes second place?

Sappho

I own a pink skirt, a pink dress, a pink scarf, a pink coat, three pink sweaters, and six pink shirts. Each time I shop for clothes, my eyes wander toward another rose tee, and my fingers fondle another salmon sarong, and I ask myself, Why?

But I know why. I love pink because I am Woman.

Obviously.

The more serious implications of being Woman—and Literary Woman in particular—have lately drawn a lot of press. First, as poet Steve Fellner noted in his blog, men beat out women four to one in the prestigious, and historically male-skewed, Whiting Awards for emerging writers. Second, in a move that attracted much more attention than the Whiting wrong, Publishers Weekly compiled a boys-only top 10 books list of the year. The extended list of 100 best books featured 29 female writers.

Abigail Deutsch

Writing on the wall

Berlin

White space criss-crossed yesterday’s New York Times opinion page like mortar. Uneven in length and width, stanzas gave the impression of crumbling brick. Poem titles appeared painted on, recalling graffiti.

In light of the endless debate over Whether Good Political Poetry Exists, the commemoration of the fall of the Berlin Wall with a wall of poetry–a throwback to the days when poems regularly appeared in newspapers–gave me a case of the grins. The poetry wall struck me as an editorial eye-roll, a visually complex, literarily ambitious “duh.” (Just the same, it’s worth bearing that debate in mind while reading these poems, which, like the rough-hewn wall, can feel uneven.)

Abigail Deutsch

And how should I begin?

crumb-genesis-page

In the beginning of Paradise Lost, Milton paints and points and dallies, filling eight lines with sorrow and hope and mountains and fruit, disobeying the strictures of English grammar in favor of the more contorted Latinate, including, even, an “or” in line seven that threatens to undermine his progress, such as it is, until, in the beginning of line nine, he finally delivers the phrase “In the beginning”—the first words of Genesis—and then the sentence continues for several more lines, such that “In the beginning” serves as a sort of hinge, swinging the reader backward into the book’s preliminary lines or forward, if he will, into what follows, itself functioning as a sort of “or,” an opener of possibilities, a poser of questions.

It’s not over yet.

As if in tardy celebration of Milton’s 400th birthday (which, you’ll remember from all the parties, was last year), scholars and graphic novelists and rightist revisionists have been reworking the Bible. Certain conservatives are seeking to reform and void the King James version, which they view as troublingly liberal, while a Dutch scholar investigates Genesis’s first verb. R. Crumb’s Genesis is forthcoming, as is David Rosenberg’s Literary Bible. You’re doubtless wondering, as I am: will any of these make the Good Book an even Better Book?

Abigail Deutsch

Poetry is dead! Long live poetry!

Not crossing the bars.

Writers keep writing about the end of writing.

The English department is declining. Comparative literature has died. Book reviews? Print journalism? Poetry?

There’s just one problem: no one gets into details. I want to know exactly when and why literature, and poetry in particular, will croak.  Will it happen in bed or on the street? Will poetry die in peace, or in the throes of a guilty conscience?

And so, in the style of the solemn journalism covering this crisis, I offer a few speculative reports for a nonexistent newspaper (call it my personal musepaper).

Abigail Deutsch

In memoriam: William Safire, a gem of a wordsmith

ws

Was William Safire a poet?

No.

He was a Nixon speechwriter, a conservative pundit, a four-time novelist, and a funny, fastidious observer of English usage.

But can we detect his influence, however great or small, on such dextrous manipulators of contemporary verse as Matthea Harvey, Heather McHugh, and Paul Muldoon (among others, perhaps including you, dear commenter)?

Yes.

And could anyone encounter a poem about a bartender, say, without recalling Safire’s column on bartenders, barmen, barmaids, barkeeps, innkeepers, and so forth?

I certainly can’t.

Some background:

Abigail Deutsch

“The” “age” “of” “genius”

2005-Kings-County-Fair-Rese

In a recent Slate article, Ron Rosenbaum explores uses and abuses of the word “genius,” suggesting:

Maybe genius has been, if not democratized, more widely and thinly distributed, rather than concentrated in the hands of a precious few…. Maybe we no longer live in the kind of romantic age that created Byron, the template of genius.

Or maybe we do.

Abigail Deutsch

Keats lives! (for a while)

John Keats Bright Star poetry

Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate:—
‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article.

—Lord Byron

Keats didn’t actually die because of a bad review. But if he had, how would he feel now that Bright Star, Jane Campion’s film about him, is garnering so much positive press?

Being dead, he probably wouldn’t feel much of anything. If he weren’t dead, though, his waxen cheeks would flush, his vague eyes focus, his chapped lips tremble. He’d study Entertainment Weekly and Time Out and The San Francisco Chronicle. He’d linger over the blog entries, gasping with pleasure – or horror? “O, for a glass of vintage!” he would whisper, emotions high. It would take him so long to read all the reviews that, unfortunately, he would die before he finished.

And so it is in memoriam to John Keats (1795-2009) that I offer a round-up of numerous, luminous Bright Star reviews. Your blogger found a total of 55, terminating her search only when she could no longer focus her eyes.

Joel Brouwer

Today

I was deep in the heart of the heart of the country on September 11, 2001, and spent much of the day trying and failing to fight off abstraction, to somehow worm my way into the reality.

Poems can sometimes help with that.

The Poetry Foundation has these poems available for your perusal today. No offense, fine poems, but kind of a weird list, isn’t it?

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Anselm Berrigan
Abigail Deutsch
Tonya Foster
Melissa Friedling
John S. O'Connor
Barbara Jane Reyes
Amber Tamblyn
Edwin Torres

STAFF WRITERS

Cathy Halley
Michael Marcinkowski
Travis Nichols
Fred Sasaki
Don Share

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So long and thanks for all the fish + a question... (8)
Vladimir, Ron, and Gregori (4)
dubious poetry: the palin comparison (3)
To Vaya in the Viva of Time (2)
Indie Publishing: Two Questions, Many More... (5)

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