Obituaries : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

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“The only thing I’d really like to be.”

Comin thro’ the rye, poor body,
Comin thro’ the rye,
She draigl’t a’ her petticoatie
Comin thro’ the rye.

Oh Jenny ’s a’ weet poor body
Jenny ’s seldom dry,
She draigl’t a’ her petticoatie
Comin thro’ the rye.

Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro’ the rye,
Gin a body kiss a body —
Need a body cry.

Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro’ the glen;
Gin a body kiss a body —
Need the warld ken!

“Comin Thro’ The Rye” by Robert Burns

One thing that happened the other day was the memorial, at which one found the issue in which one’s article on the other one recently passed was printed. Agh! I was blogging around trying to nosedive into ashes

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11.15.09 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Abigail Deutsch

Poetry is dead! Long live poetry!

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).

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10.09.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Abigail Deutsch

In memoriam: William Safire, a gem of a wordsmith

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:

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09.29.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (12)

Eileen Myles

Jim Carroll (1949-2009)

I toured with Jim Carroll in 1990. It was sort of an honor.

He was the exact same age as me but when I came to town in the poetry world he already had everything – a book from a big press with a Larry Rivers cover called Living at the Movies and parts of his Basketball Diaries had been published in Paris Review while he was still a teenager. He came to the Poetry Project when he was in high school to meet the older poets – Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman who themselves were in their 20s then. It was unimaginable to me, Jim’s kind of youth. And that he was famous from then on.

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09.16.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Travis Nichols

Jim Carroll, R.I.P.

Jim Carroll—poet, novelist, musician, diarist, impresario—died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60 years old.

The tributes and reminisces have come in from various sources–from English footballers to New York musicians to everyday readers–all noting what a tremendous presence Carroll was both onstage and off.

The New York Times:

“’I met him in 1970, and already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation,’ the singer Patti Smith said in a telephone interview on Sunday. ‘The work was sophisticated and elegant. He had beauty.’

Tom Clark:

“Jim had by that time already begun haunting the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s in the Bowery Church. He loved the poetry of Frank O’Hara, and writing under a rush of Frank’s influence, at seventeen produced his own first slim chapbook, Organic Trains. Ted Berrigan had taken Jim under his wing. Poetry not basketball was where Jim wanted to go in his life.”

Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney on NPR:

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09.15.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Barbara Jane Reyes

San Francisco Poet Al Robles (1930-2009)

Hello all, this is my first post to the Harriet blog, so let me very briefly introduce myself. I’m Barbara Jane Reyes, and I blog regularly at Poeta y Diwata. I am also a contributing blogger for Hyphen magazine, where I feature Asian/Pacific Islander American authors published by small presses. I’m an Oakland-based poet, and a long time San Francisco Bay Area resident.

As a poet, I was mentored by writers in Kearny Street Workshop, the original hub of the San Francisco Filipino American and Asian American literary scene. One such literary figure in this scene was the much venerated poet Al Robles, a denizen of the pre-gentrified SoMa (South of Market), Chinatown, and Fillmore District. He was a true San Francisco citizen, a collector of folks’ stories, and an elder storyteller around whom communities gathered.

Photo by Jeremy Villaluz

Al Robles was an activist, at the forefront of the movement to stop the demolition of the I-Hotel, which housed elderly and low income tenants, many of whom we’ve come to know as the “Manongs,” elder Filipino Americans, or Pinoys, who spent their youths as migrant labor in West Coast agriculture and canneries, and as US veterans who fought in WWII. He brought young activists and artists to Agbayani Village in Delano, a rural settlement of these Manongs, and to the WWII Japanese American internment camps at Tule Lake and Manzanar. He believed it was important for young activists and artists to see these places with their own eyes, to hear the stories of these places firsthand. Robles’s activism was closely tied to his poetic work; in fact, his activism and poetry were one and the same. He believed poets should bring themselves into the world.

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08.16.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

Joel Brouwer

Hayden Carruth (1921-2008)

carruthhayden

Last summer, I was asked to write something about Hayden Carruth, and I did, but the folks who had asked me to write the piece never published it. Carruth died in September of last year. He had been an idiosyncratic but pervasive force in American poetry — both as a writer of poems and a critic of poetry — for more than fifty years. Here is a link to his obituary in the New York Times. And below is the appreciation I wrote last summer. It’s lazy of me, recycling old material here, but I’m grateful to have the opportunity to offer this piece for your consideration. Hopefully it will both garner Carruth some new fans and spark good memories for old ones.

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07.17.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (255)

D.A. Powell

In Memoriam: David Bromige

“Poetry is the theory of heartbreak” — David Bromige (October 22, 1933 to June 3, 2009)
Photo by James Garrahan

Endowed with remarkable wit and a prodigious memory, David Bromige was a paragon of poetic virtues. Not only was he a master of both traditional and innovative forms, but, as a teacher, he exhibited enormous erudition and generosity.

David’s output included dozens of books of his own poems, as well as broadsides and chapbooks, collaborations, fiction, essays, plays. He co-wrote songs with Barry Gifford. And he brought to his public readings a true gift for performance and improvisation. His honors included the Western States Book Award, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and two awards from the Poetry Foundation.

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06.10.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

Linh Dinh

Shove It!

On December 3, 1937, Attila József, age 32, scissored his right sleeve, lay down, draped his arm across a rail and stared at the train arriving on time to kill him. It was his second attempt, the first pointless and disappointing because someone else had been wheeled over up the tracks. József knew his train schedule. He also wrote:

To shove this chair away from here,
to sit down in front of a train,
to climb a mountain with great care,
to shake my bag into the valley,
to feed a bee to my old spider,
to caress an old, old woman,
to sip a delicious bean soup,
to walk on tiptoes in the mud,
to place my hat on railroad tracks,
to stroll around the banks of a lake,
to sit all dressed up on the bottom,

[from "To Sit, to Stand, to Kill, to Die," translated by John Batki]

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09.14.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Archive for the ‘Obituaries’ Category

Travis Nichols

“The only thing I’d really like to be.”

Anselm Berrigan

Controllable Git

Abigail Deutsch

Poetry is dead! Long live poetry!

Abigail Deutsch

In memoriam: William Safire, a gem of a wordsmith

Eileen Myles

Jim Carroll (1949-2009)

Travis Nichols

Jim Carroll, R.I.P.

Barbara Jane Reyes

San Francisco Poet Al Robles (1930-2009)

Joel Brouwer

Hayden Carruth (1921-2008)

D.A. Powell

In Memoriam: David Bromige

Linh Dinh

Shove It!

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