We at Harriet are deeply saddened to report the loss of poet and translator Stacy Doris, who died on January 31 at the age of 49 after a battle with cancer. We discussed Doris’s book-length poem The Cake Part (Publication Studio, 2011) just recently. This work, which acts as “an eruption of all the repressed joy and terror of [the] 18th century revolution, back into our time, into the 21st century,” was released with a series of video adaptations of the book, in which many of Doris’s poets and friends in the Bay area and beyond enacted their parts or songs with a rather plucky and loving spirit. It’s clear that Doris “begins with complexity and mixture and continues with complexity and mixture.”

In April of last year, Eric Baus pointed us to a recording of Doris reading “Love Letter (Lament),” which appears in her book Paramour. The poem begins with a note to the reader that Baus excerpted from:

“It was written between 1995 and 2000 in the South of France and in North America by a willful female author who, nagged and baffled by questions of poetic form’s future, set out, as if she had all the time in the world on her hands, to catalogue, through strategies of parody and vivisection, an eclectic variety of Western Prosodic models. For subject matter the theme of love, certainly the most prevalent topic of poetic tradition, was readily selected.”

A willful female author, indeed: Her books included Paramour (Krupskaya, 2000) and The Cake Part, as mentioned, as well as Knot (University of Georgia Press, 2006), Cheerleader’s Guide to the World: Council Book (Roof Books, 2006), Conference (Potes & Poets, 2001), Une Année à New York avec Chester (P.O.L., 2000), La vie de Chester Steven Wiener ecrite par sa femme (P.O.L., 1998), and Kildare (Segue Foundation, 1994). Poetry Center Director Steve Dickison tells us that a new book of poetry, Fledge, will be published this Spring by Nightboat Books.

Doris was also a translator, noted for her work with contemporary French poetry: She co-edited two anthologies, Twenty One New (to North America) French Writers (Raddle Moon, 1997) and Violence of the White Page (with Emmanuel Hocquard, Tyuonyi, 1991). She also contributed translations to Aufgabe’s recent vital feature on French poetry and poetics.

Dickison writes that “Stacy moved to San Francisco with her husband Chet Wiener to begin teaching for the Department of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University in the Fall of 2002. An innovative and powerful teacher, she deeply influenced her many students. The Poetry Center is planning events for mid-April in celebration of her life and work, as poet, translator, and teacher.” Watch their website for more information.

Via The Poetry Project, we’ve also heard that poet Laynie Browne is collecting written responses to the life and work of Stacy Doris for The Volta, where Browne is a contributing editor. Those interested in contributing can send submissions to info at poetry project dot org.

Our hearts go out to Doris’s friends and family. A film of her reading in Paris, 2007.

She made it to 101 years old; we are stunned. Gallerist NY tells us that Dorothea Tanning, surrealist painter and poet, has died. “According to her publisher, Graywolf Press, she passed away of natural causes while sleeping.” Graywolf Senior Editor Jeffrey Shotts wrote today:

We are honored to have published her two poetry books, the first of which was published when she was 94 and the second of which was published just last fall when she turned 101. As she herself remarked, with her usual wry self-awareness, she was ‘the oldest emerging poet.’ The fact that she could have such an illustrious career as a visual artist and, so late in that career, then turn to poetry with such forceful craft and signature imagination is a triumph of her unparalleled vision and indomitable spirit. Working with her over two books has been one of the greatest delights of my career as an editor.

Gallerist NY on the evolution of Tanning’s art career:

Ms. Tanning, active as an artist for some eight decades, is perhaps best known for the Surrealist paintings she produced in the 1940s and ’50s. Like Magritte, her work often took the form of realistic depictions of disturbing, surreal situations, as in 1943′s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, in which two apparently entranced young women are confronted by a giant yellow sunflower.

In another iconic work, Birthday (1942), a topless woman in a dress sprouted with dark roots of some sort opens a door that looks out down a hall way filled with a long series of identical doors. A winged beast crouches on the ground beneath her. The work provided the title of her first memoir.

Ms. Tanning was born in 1910, in Galesburg, Ill. (“where nothing happens but the wallpaper,” she once quipped), and by age seven she had decided to become an artist. She studied briefly at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago but abandoned her studies after a matter of weeks, moving to New York in 1935 at the age of 22.

Inspired by the Museum of Modern Art’s Alfred Barr-curated “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” exhibition, she set sail for Paris in 1939, hoping to meet the Surrealists, who had by that point all left the country in the hope of avoiding the war. Returning to New York, she designed imagery for department stores and married Homer Shannon, a relationship that lasted six months.

In 1941, Ms. Tanning joined the Julien Levy gallery, a stronghold of Surrealism at the time, and she fell in with the group, meeting artists like Breton and Tanguy, whose ghostly color palette and amorphous shapes were an influence on some of her work of the time. She also met artist Max Ernst, then married to dealer Peggy Guggenheim, and the two fell in love, moving to Arizona together in the mid 1940s. The pair married in a joint ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet Browne, and moved to France in the 1950s, where they worked until 1976, when Ernst died.

As her career progressed, Ms. Tanning was commissioned to make sets and costumes for the ballets of George Balanchine and other performances and public venues. The Drawing Center presented a retrospective of this body of work in 2010, marking the centennial of her birth.

Later in her career, Ms. Tanning’s work became increasingly abstract, and she experimented with other mediums, like sculpture, printmaking and weaving. By the 1980s, she became increasingly focused on her writing, publishing numerous poems and two memoirs.

We pointed to MoMA’s recent celebration of her life and work just recently; and even picked Tanning’s Coming to That as one of the best poetry books of 2011. Read an excerpt from the book here. Ms. Tanning, you will be greatly missed. Photograph of Dorothea Tanning above by Man Ray, 1948.

The Associated Press and The Polish Cultural Institute have both just reported that poet Wislawa Szymborska died today. More:

Her personal secretary says that Poland’s 1996 Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska has died. She was 88.

Michal Rusinek said Wednesday that Szymborska died “quietly, in her sleep.” She resided in the southern city of Krakow.

The Nobel award committee’s citation called her the “Mozart of poetry,” a woman who mixed the elegance of language with “the fury of Beethoven.”

Szymborska has been called both deeply political and playful, a poet who used humor in unforeseen ways.

The winner of the Goethe Prize in 1991 and, yes, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996 (her Nobel speech can be read here), Szymborska once said, “I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.” Also a translator and essayist, her poetic output was small and careful, with no more than 250 published poems. Poems New and Collected, in English, was published in 2000. Other collections of her poems that have been translated into English include People on a Bridge (1990), View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems (1995), and Monologue of a Dog (2005).

“Hence the indispensable / silver lining,” you can read and listen to her poem “Consolation” here. As well, read “Clouds,” below.

Clouds

I’d have to be really quick
to describe clouds—
a split second’s enough
… for them to start being something else.

Their trademark:
they don’t repeat a single
shape, shade, pose, arrangement.

Unburdened by memory of any kind,
they float easily over the facts.

What on earth could they bear witness to?
They scatter whenever something happens.

Compared to clouds,
life rests on solid ground,
practically permanent, almost eternal.

Next to clouds
even a stone seems like a brother,
someone you can trust,
while they’re just distant, flighty cousins.

Let people exist if they want,
and then die, one after another:
clouds simply don’t care
what they’re up to
down there.

And so their haughty fleet
cruises smoothly over your whole life
and mine, still incomplete.

They aren’t obliged to vanish when we’re gone.
They don’t have to be seen while sailing on.

— Wisława Szymborska

(Translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh)

As you’ve heard by now, playwright, poet, dissident, and former Czech president Vaclav Havel died this weekend at the age of 75. The New Yorker’s David Remnick recommends some of Havel’s favorite writers, including poets Joseph Brodksy and Czeslaw Milosz; and The New York Times excerpts reviews of plays written by Havel, many of which premiered in New York’s Public Theater.

Havel himself had recently lost a friend in Czech poet Ivan Martin Jirous, who died in November. Havel wrote poems too of course, including his famous visual poems (typograms) from the early and mid-1960s. Another beautiful one here.

Another great way to invest time in Havel’s creative work would be to take a listen to the radio play The Memorandum (1966), which is up at UbuWeb. A bit about it:

Source: tape recording of broadcast material.

Satirical Comedy.

The Memorandum (VyrozumenÌ) written 1966, is one of the best known and most popular plays by Czechoslovaki’s (later the Czech Republic’s) best known playwright, Vaclav Havel.

Inspired by the absurdities of life in Eastern Europe under Communism,like much of Havel’s writing, The Memorandum is political, at least implicitly. The play concerns the tribulations of Josef Gross, the managing director of an organization encumbered by a bureaucracy that is out of control. The introduction of an artificial language, Ptydepe, is supposed to streamline office communications, but only makes it worse.

Havel’s satire is full of irony about the kind of jobs created by communism as well as the constant surveillance by office spies. Though Havel’s vision was informed by his observations many critics have noted that the office politics depicted can be found around the world. The importance of conformity to keep one’s job is seen as relatively common.

As Michael Billington of The Guardian wrote,”The play may have grown out of experience of Czech communism; its application, however, is universal.”

The Memorandum opens in the office of Josef Gross, the managing director of an office. He is reading his mail when he comes across an important memorandum written in what seems like an incomprehensible language. His secretary, Hana, informs him that it is written in Ptydepe, a new language that is supposed to be more efficient for communication. Gross learns that his deputy director, Jan Ballas, has ordered its introduction without his knowledge. Gross asks him to cancel its introduction, and while Ballas agrees at first, he later convinces Gross that the use of Ptydepe would be best for everyone. This is endemic of the growing power struggle between Gross and Ballas. While Gross wants to work on a humanist principle, Ballas is ready for a conflict and believes he has everyone in the organization on his side. What follows is ludicrously comic……….

As for Ptydepe, Havel’s orginial artificial language, you can read all about it here. Interestingly: “The vocabulary of Ptydepe uses entropy encoding: shorter words have more common meanings. Therefore, the shortest word in Ptydepe, gh, corresponds to what is so far known to be the most general term in natural language, whatever. (The longest word in Ptydepe, which contains 319 letters, is the word for ‘wombat’.) Theoretically an even shorter word than gh exists in Ptydepe, namely f, but it has no meaning assigned and is held in reserve in case a more general term than ‘whatever’ is discovered.”

Ubu’s also got an essay about Czech concrete poetry and experimentation by Mary Ellen Solt, which puts Havel’s poetic work in context with the likes of Jirous, Jiri Kolar, and Haroldo de Campos.

My own acquaintance and relationship with poetry is bound up with acquisition, memorization, and recital. That is: I realized when I was quite young that I could learn poems “by heart,” as the saying goes. This may have something to do with early experience in compulsory religious and scriptural studies. It was no hardship for me to commit hymns and verses of the Bible (though not so many psalms, oddly enough) to memory. Furthermore, I found that this fairly simple attainment could, as well as give me satisfaction, win me praise. This helped make up for my almost dyslexic inability to read music, or to play a note on any instrument. And, when it came to poetry, I would squirm at the embarrassed clumsiness with which my classmates “read” beautiful lines that they obviously felt were effeminate by definition.

Read the whole thing here.

More than a distributor of books, Mr. Whitman saw himself as patron of a literary haven, above all in the lean years after World War II, and the heir to Sylvia Beach, the founder of the original Shakespeare & Company, the celebrated haunt of Hemingway and James Joyce.

As Mr. Whitman put it, “I wanted a bookstore because the book business is the business of life.”

Whitman’s hospitality was legendary. According to the obituary, a large sign on the wall of the bookstore quoted Yeats: “Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.” Whitman estimated that he offered lodging to over 40,000 young writers and wanderers since he took over the store in 1951. Those lodgers included some of the brightest literary lights of the last sixty years:

Its visitors list reads like a Who’s Who of American, English, French and Latin American literature: Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Samuel Beckett and James Baldwin were frequent callers in the early days; other regulars included Lawrence Durrell and the Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, all of them Mr. Whitman’s friends.

Read the full obituary here and check out Shakespeare & Company’s own remembrance here.

Logue grew up in Portsmouth, Hampshire. After a stint in the military, where he served as a soldier in the Black Watch and spent 16 months in an army prison, he turned to a variety of jobs to support his poetry. His Illiad project unfolded over 45 years, during which time he also wrote screenplays, contributed to Private Eye magazine, translated Brecht, and penned a pornographic novel under the name Count Palmiro Vicarion. But as a recent obituary in The Guardian notes:

It was the radio producer Donald Carne-Ross’s invitation to reimagine The Iliad for BBC radio that set Logue on the journey of creativity that was to be his principal legacy. Carne-Ross dismissed his lack of Greek as no hindrance to the task, and Logue set about using existingtranslations – or “cribs” as he called them – from Alexander Pope, George Chapman and others, as well as literal versions from Carne-Ross himself.

[...]

His achievement was to invigorate the dramatic storytelling voice in the ancient work. This he did in a contemporary style that is at times cinematic. For instance, at one point he shifts scene with a simple line: “Cut to the fleet.”

Modern pop-cultural references pervade it: All Day Permanent Red was a catchline for a lipstick advert. The violence is visceral, almost pornographic, in detail and has all the drama of an eyewitness account true in spirit to Homer’s original:

As he fell back, back arched,
God blew the javelin straight; and thus
Mid-air, the cold bronze apex sank
Between his teeth and tongue, parted his brain,
Pressed on, and stapled him against the upturned hull

Logue was a sort of magpie of poetry – there are sections lifted from Brecht and others, and he rewrote existing reports of violence into his descriptions. “I’m fickle,” he said in an Observer interview in 2006. “Almost everything I do is based on other texts. Without plagiarism, there would be no literature. I’m a rewrite man. A complete rewrite man, like our Willy Shakespeare.”

Poet Louis MacNeice praised Logue’s “re-write,” saying that “never was blood bloodier or fate more fatal.” Read Logue’s entire obituary in The Guardian.

From the New York Times:

A quietly respected poet who wrote in rural solitude, Ms. Stone became something of a public figure when news of her award was announced in November 2002 and press accounts drew attention to her unusual life story of struggle and belated acclaim, dominated by the suicide of her poet husband in 1959.

New readers discovered a poet of varied and uncommon gifts, fierce and funny, by turns elegiac, scathing, lyric and colloquial . . .

She began to gain a wider audience when her collection “Ordinary Words” (1999) won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2000. With the publication of “In the Next Galaxy” by Copper Canyon Press, her ascent to the front rank of American poets was confirmed. In 2007 she was named to a four-year term as Vermont’s state poet.

Inevitably, in her later years, the poetry took on a more somber tone. Age, with its ravages and regrets, became a constant theme. Her husband’s suicide and the long decades of widowhood continued to haunt her verse. In “Getting to Know You,” she wrote:

In my 30 years of knowing you

cell by cell in my widow’s shawl,

We have lived together longer

in the discontinuous films of my sleep

than we did in our warm parasitical bodies.

The mood could shift abruptly, from the cuttingly satirical mode of “Male Gorillas” (“At the doughnut shop/twenty-three silverbacks/are lined up at the bar,/sitting on the stools”) to the comic exuberance of “Relatives,” a rollicking song of praise to grandmothers of every stripe:

It’s grandma you have to contend with.

She’s here — she’s there!

She works in the fast food hangout.

She’s doing school lunches.

She’s the crossing guard at the school corner.

She’s the librarian’s assistant.

She’s part-time in the real estate office.

She’s stuffing envelopes.

Ms. Stone once called poetry “emotional opinion.” It coursed through her life, she said in her acceptance speech at the National Book Awards ceremony, like a constant verbal stream heard above the thrum and buzz of everyday existence. “It just talked to me, and I wrote it down,” she said. “So I can’t even take much credit for it.”

Also, there’s this nice tribute to Stone from the folks at Bloodaxe Books. It features photos, video, interviews and poems.

We learned late last night that Theodore Enslin — “one of our greatest poets working quietly outside the noisy mainstream,” as Matthew Henriksen put it — has left us. Enslin, a prolific poet identified with Cid Corman, Charles Olson, and particularly the Objectivist tradition, was born in Pennsylvania in 1925 and became a resident of Maine in 1960. He was the author of over 60 books of poetry, including Then and Now: Selected Poems 1943-1993 (edited by Mark Nowak in 1999), and the epic, two-volume Ranger (1978 and 1980). Richard Owens of Damn the Caesars wrote, in a 2006 review of One Day And How It Was (Granite Press 2005), of Enslin’s output:

I pity the fool burdened with the task of compiling a comprehensive bibliography of Ted Enslin’s published work. The spontaneous, decentralized nature of small press publishing undoubtedly confounds such a task further. Here one minute, gone the next. Tracking down several dozen small press publications and magazines might be difficult but it is nonetheless possible; tracking down a body of published works comparable to the number pumped out by Enslin would require a Herculean effort.

Owens also looks at such a small volume in relation to Ranger, writing:

Where Enslin’s two volume epic Ranger is long and indeed dense, a philosophically & historically complex work grounded, in part, in the tragic destruction of Mesoamerican culture in the sixteenth century, the short poems included in One Day are seemingly transparent, bound neither spatially nor temporally….Aside from language there is nothing to tie this poem to a particular time or place, no one detail which would lead us to a particular moment or region. Yet there is a conviction, a value revealed. Singing and selling are diametrically opposed, the two advanced as mutually exclusive dualities. This conviction is, to be sure, a foundational theme upon which Enslin’s larger, far more complex works are built. To read such a slim volume as a window into the larger works is thus possible and profitable. To read it for its own sake is, of course, a pleasure all its own.

Michael Kelleher has some lovely remarks on meeting Enslin at the 2004 Poetry of the 40′s Conference in Orono, Maine:

Ted Enslin was one of the featured poets of the conference, being of the generation that began writing in the 40′s and also being a resident of the state of Maine. I recall that on the first night of the conference he participated in a round table discussion about Louis Zukofsky that also featured Robert Creeley, Mark Scroggins, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian and Bob Perelman.

Enslin told of studying music with Nadia Boulanger, who eventually told him to give up music in favor of writing. He complied, eventually seeking out Conrad Aiken as a mentor. Aiken, he said, taught him only how to drink. He then discovered Zukofsky and began sending him his poems, which eventually developed into a kind of correspondence course in poetry. Not a bad way to learn, I suppose.

On the second to last day of the conference, Jonathan Skinner suggested that Matthew Cooperman and I skip out of the conference to go visit Ted at his farm in rural Maine, a suggestion to which we happily agreed. We drove up the coast about an hour and then inland slightly to arrive a ways down a very secluded road at his house, which is about 250 years old, if not older.

Ted came downstairs and welcomed us and we all sat in his living room talking about poetry and so forth. He then took us out for a walk and showed us his property. As we walked toward the woods he pointed to a small house, which he said was his wife’s potting shed. Further on into the woods we came upon a clearing, in which were planted, quite a ways apart from one another, 8-10 different varieties of young trees. He explained that this was a kind of literary arbor he had been cultivating, meaning that each variety of tree was chosen because it had made an appearance in some literary work that was important to him — for example, he had planted a lotus blossom in honor of William Carlos Williams.

Deeper into the woods he brought us to a little A-frame house, which was where he wrote. Inside resembled a loft, with a small kitchen and living room on the first floor and a desk and office in the loft area above. I remember he had a vast collection of classical music CD’s and hundreds of books on the shelves, including, as I recall, the entire set of Samuel Pepys’ diaries. Jonathan was very impressed by this and asked if Ted had read them all. “Oh, yes, of course,” he said.

Up in his loft he showed us where he wrote at a little desk by the window. The loft was crammed with old steamer trunks. We asked what they contained and he told us they were all filled with manuscripts, most of them unpublished. Given how much he has published in his life, which is a lot to say the least, it was astonishing to see physical evidence of at least an equal quantity of writing lying dormant in his home.

Bob Arnold has a partial list of Enslin’s published books on his blog, A Longhouse Birdhouse. Ron Silliman leads us to an excerpt of Ranger and an interview with Enslin about musical structures in poetry. A chapbook from Beard of Bees can be downloaded here. Enslin’s papers are held at NYU’s Fales Library & Special Collections. The collection highlights include letters written by Paul Blackburn, Robert Bly, Carol Berg, Hayden Carruth, Cid Corman, Diane DiPrima, Clayton Eshleman, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Henry Rago and Gary Snyder.

Our hearts go out to Ted Enslin’s family, friends, and all who read and were inspired by his work. From his poem “Times of Day,” published in Poetry in 1966:

Nicht Schleppen

Walking in

lock step

it is hard to imagine

more than one

or that this walk

into the last haze

of twilight

extends

from one to another–

that the air itself

parts

to admit us.

Better known by his nickname “Magor,” which roughly translates as “loony” and derives from “phantasmagoria,” Jirous trained as an art historian, but was banned from doing his work and became a legend of the dissident underground instead. He’s remembered in an obituary from the Associated Press:

Before the collapse of communism in 1989, Jirous spent more than eight years in prisons for anti-communist activities. In prison, he wrote his best poetry, including “Magor’s Swan Songs,” a collection that was awarded the Tom Stoppard Prize — awarded to authors of Czech origin — in 1985.

Born September 23, 1944, in the town of Humpolec, Jirous studied art history before becoming the band’s artistic director in the late 1960s. The brutal communist crackdown on its members in 1976 inspired then dissident playwright Vaclav Havel to draft the Charter 77 human rights manifesto.

Havel on Thursday described the death of his “friend for many years” as a tough blow.

“I’m glad that Magor lived to see the better times. He significantly contributed to make them possible.”

Read the rest of his obituary here and find a good biography of Jirous here.

Renowned Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali died on Sunday at the age of 80, reports Ma’an News Agency. Ali’s poems “followed the experiences of Palestinians living in Israel, and Palestinian refugees around the world. They were translated into several languages, including English and Hebrew. Muhammad Ali grew in international acclaim after an Israeli-American writer Adina Hoffman wrote a biography of his life…” The New Yorker’s Book Bench covered the biography’s release in 2009:

Last night, at the CUNY Graduate Center, Adina Hoffman, the author of “My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness,” a new biography of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, flashed, on the wall, a fading photo of a slope covered with one-story homes, patches of low trees, and curved dirt paths—the Palestinian town of Suffuriya, circa 1931. Hoffman pointed to a house near the left side of the frame. Inside its walls, Taha Muhammad Ali was a week from being born.

Taha Muhammad Ali is now in his late seventies. Photographs of him tile the cover of Hoffman’s book—in most his head is propped up with a hand, as though he is nearly too weak for the task. His face is deeply wrinkled, and his lips flop together. There’s a self-acknowledging humor in the pose, though, and, according to Hoffman, in the man. Other photos, from Muhammad Ali’s souvenir shop—The Prominent Souvenir Center of Nazareth—attest to his playfulness: “Nicer Than You Imagine. Cheaper Than You Expected,” and to his intelligence: “A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever” from Keats’s “Endymion.” An autodidact—he left school at the age of eleven to support his family—Muhammad Ali loves John Steinbeck, or, as he pronounces it, “Shteinbeck.” He identifies strongly with “Cannery Row.”

Later, Hoffman put up a photo of present-day Suffuriya. Barely a structure remains, and the land has become a pine grove. No one lives there; it is preserved through Muhammad Ali’s poetry, and now through Hoffman’s book, a history that reads in some parts like a mystery.

A man in the audience asked whether Muhammad Ali’s family had been forced to leave Suffuriya in 1948, or whether they had fled by choice. “It’s complicated,” Hoffman answered.

An interview with Hoffman about the biography was published online in BOMB in November of last year. Hoffman said:

Rather than a book focused exclusively and probably in more conventional fashion on this one remarkable poet and person, it wound up emerging as something much more expansive. Because it’s not just that Taha himself isn’t especially well known, but that the very culture he comes from, the literature that matters to him, the language he speaks, the history and politics that have shaped him are so basically unknown—or if known, so often misunderstood—in the West. As I entered into Arabic and the multiple human and literary realms that became available to me through the language, the shape of the book opened out and I realized that Taha and his poetry would be the anchor for this more sweeping tale—what I ended up calling in the subtitle A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century.

Poet and SLS founder Mikhail Iossel points us to this video of Muhammad Ali reading poems in Arabic, with English translations from Peter Cole:

Taha Muhammad Ali (with Peter Cole) from Neil Astley on Vimeo.

Taha Muhammad Ali (with Peter Cole) from Neil Astley on Vimeo.

You can also read and listen to Muhammad Ali’s poems here at PBS News Hour. Our sincerest condolences and respect to the poet’s friends and family.

The Guardian and The Telegraph both report that poet and novelist Emanuel Litvinoff passed away on September 24. Litvinoff, born in 1915 in Whitechapel, East London, might be best remembered for a “devastating public attack” on TS Eliot. The Telegraph describes the moment:

During the 1920s, at a time of high literary anti-Semitism, Eliot had written several strongly anti-Semitic poems, including “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” in which “Burbank” is described as a “Chicago Semite Viennese” whose “lustreless protrusive eye, stares from the protozoic slime”. The poem continues: “On the Rialto once./The rats are underneath the piles/The Jew is underneath the lot./Money in furs.” Eliot included the poem in his 1948 Selected Poems, published by Penguin as a first popular edition of his works.

Litvinoff admired Eliot and was inclined to forgive him for his fashionable pre-war anti-Semitism, but was horrified that he was prepared to celebrate such sentiments after the Holocaust. In 1952 Litvinoff wrote a poem entitled “To TS Eliot” in which he angrily proclaimed: “I share the protozoic slime of Shylock”. He was scheduled to read it at the inaugural poetry reading of the Institute of Contemporary Arts; then, just before the start of the event, the ICA’s chairman Sir Herbert Read, thinking that the poem was meant as a tribute to Eliot, informed him that “Tom” had just arrived with an entourage.

Nervous but undaunted, Litvinoff launched into his poem, which at first produced a shocked silence, and then pandemonium. Stephen Spender rose indignantly to declare: “As a poet as Jewish as Litvinoff, I deeply resent this slanderous attack on a great poet and a good friend.”

Herbert Read expressed himself scandalised by Litvinoff’s “bad form” and told him that if he had known in advance what the poem was about, he would not have allowed it to be read. Amid the general denunciation, only one member of the audience seemed to have a good word for Litvinoff: Eliot was overheard to mutter to his friends: “It’s a good poem.” Of all the poems which Litvinoff wrote, “To TS Eliot” was the one which appeared time and time again in anthologies.

It wasn’t all Litvinoff was known for, but the moment was exemplary. Writes The Guardian:

From that moment, through to Emanuel’s major poems, such as “The Dead Sea” (from his 1973 collection Notes for a Survivor), several novels and his memoir, Journey Through a Small Planet (1972), Emanuel’s voice was one raised in protest against the fate of the Jews. His editorship of the monthly newsletter Jews in Eastern Europe, which gave details of the atrocities being perpetuated against the Jews of the Soviet Union, made a serious contribution to the legislation that eventually allowed Jewish people to leave the USSR for Israel.

Livitnoff was on active duty from 1939 until the end of World War I, and wrote his first and second collections while posted in Northern Ireland, North Yorkshire, and, in 1942, Sierra Leone.

He ended the war, after further service in Alexandria, as acting major, and returned to the immediate postwar depression of a damp basement in Fitzjohn’s Avenue, Hampstead, where he struggled to make a living as a writer. He worked with the novelist Louis Golding on a play based on Golding’s bestseller, Magnolia Street – a spectacular flop at the Embassy theatre, in Swiss Cottage. He also worked as a reviewer and commentator for publications including the Guardian, the Listener and the New Statesman. His son, Julian, was born in 1946, by which time [his wife] Irene had become the breadwinner thanks to her modelling career under the name of Cherry Marshall….

Let’s break here to note that, according to the British model’s own obituary, her real name was “Irene Maud Pearson, but she borrowed a surname from the postwar Marshall Plan when she needed a moniker balanced between competence and feminine pertness.”

In 1955 [Livitnoff] masterminded an unlikely fashion show to the USSR for his wife and the glamorous models of her Cherry Marshall Agency, and in doing so he “walked 50 yards into the Jewish problem”. The experience of seeing derelict elderly Jews who had been in Soviet prison camps galvanised him into making the plight of Soviet Jews internationally known. Gradually he became a world expert on the subject, recruiting Bertrand Russell, among others, to the cause, and visiting cities in Europe and the US to lecture and drum up support.

Livinoff went on to write films as well, one of which was to star Dirk Bogarde but was never made (darn it!), and several TV plays. Watch Livinoff read his famous “To TS Eliot” for a BBC documentary on Eliot below. (An explanation of Eliot’s anti-semitism precedes the reading.)

Hart was best known for his 1971 invention of electronic books, or eBooks. He founded Project Gutenberg, which is recognized as one of the earliest and longest-lasting online literary projects. He often told this story of how he had the idea for eBooks. He had been granted access to significant computing power at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. On July 4 1971, after being inspired by a free printed copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, he decided to type the text into a computer, and to transmit it to other users on the computer network. From this beginning, the digitization and distribution of literature was to be Hart’s life’s work, spanning over 40 years.

In July 2011, Michael wrote these words, which summarize his goals and his lasting legacy: “One thing about eBooks that most people haven’t thought much is that eBooks are the very first thing that we’re all able to have as much as we want other than air. Think about that for a moment and you realize we are in the right job.” He had this advice for those seeking to make literature available to all people, especially children: “Learning is its own reward. Nothing I can say is better than that.”

Michael is remembered as a dear friend, who sacrificed personal luxury to fight for literacy, and for preservation of public domain rights and resources, towards the greater good.

His full obituary, granted to the public domain by Dr. Gregory B. Newby, is available here.

I first met Sam when, several years ago, I invited him to give a reading at Harvard.  In the frequent conversations that ensued, Sam – feeling his age – was worried that something might happen to him before he got to do the reading; we joked about it.  When the night of the event arrived at last, Sam seemed vigorous and hale, much to my relief.  But only a few moments into his reading, to everyone’s horror and my complete disbelief – he collapsed.  Fortunately, doctors like to go to Harvard poetry readings, and the police and an ambulance arrived right away.  Sam had only fainted, but of course we were extremely worried about him.  The two doctors and I tried to convince him to go straight to the hospital, but he refused.  He was determined to finish the reading, which he did; and when we feted him nervously at the Faculty Club he glowed with pride.  Yet that is not the most memorable part of the occasion.  Those who saw Sam read will know that he recited his work from memory, that he looked leonine, that he was, both on and off the podium (and this is no euphemism), a perfect gentleman: a mensch.  And so my most cherished memory from the evening consists of a small thing that occurred shortly after the reading resumed.  A very young child was among the listeners, softly chewing a few Cheerios as she sat beside to her poetry-loving parents.  At one point, somebody shifted noisily in a chair to chastise the family with a sharp look.  But Sam demurred from this correction, expressing his keen pleasure in having the child present.  Later, on the flyleaf of her parents’ copy of his selected poems, Sam improvised and inscribed a poem – which he insisted, later, on revising right in the book.

Sam had a remarkable memory for poems, but much else besides.  He often recalled the kinds of compliments and slights a poet is bound to have received over the course of a long life’s work; he had certain reasons for ruefulness, true, but also a magisterial kind of modesty – or better, a keen sense of proportion – that prevented him from truly relishing praise for his accomplishments, which he seemed both to expect and to be surprised by.  In our time of poetry movements, schools, coteries, and communities, Samuel Menashe was singular and self-sufficient.  For over a half-century, he lived alone in a three-room apartment in New York with a 39-dollar rent, having as company poetry – and a grapefruit tree (easier to take care of, he said, than a dog).

Austerity and economy were the hallmark of Sam’s life as well as his poems, which almost always consist of a handful of lines.  When he read them aloud, he would sometimes recite them twice; this was effective because a single poem of his will usually have more impact than a poem by someone else at several times the length.  Like Dickinson’s, Menashe’s poems are brief but very seldom simple, and might take years to unfold fully in the reader’s mind.  In introducing his work, the critic Christopher Ricks said: “His still small voice carries.”  We must now add that his voice, though stilled, still carries.

You can read more about Sam here;  I’ll end with a poem from the April 2004 issue of Poetry by which he wanted to be remembered.

Here

Writer Rip Rense profiled Wannberg for The Times in 1995. “Oh, his words might not be widely published, might not even be noticed much when he recites them aloud, but it doesn’t matter. He is cursed. He sees the rose and the three-legged cat all the time. He must write.” Rense attended Venice High School with Wannberg, who back then was “speaking poetry.” “You couldn’t shut him up. It was a stream-of-consciousness kind of Chick Hearn-meets-Charles Bukowski narrative about friends and current events heavily laced with references to Sam Peckinpah movies and neighborhood dogs. He couldn’t help himself. Somewhere along the line, he damned the stream and started capturing the words on paper, found he couldn’t stop, then enrolled at San Francisco State University and majored in creative writing (translation: poetry). This, I think, was essentially a device to facilitate writing as many poems as possible while earning a diploma.”

Wannberg’s book “Nomads of Oblivion” made the L.A. Times bestseller list in October 2000. His next book will be published by Viggo Mortensen’s Perceval Press, which has posted two of his recent poems on its website.

The full article can be found here. Our condolences to friends (all 4,389 of them!) and family.

From the article:

“He touched so many people,” said friend Jeannie Piekos of Minneapolis. “It’s not just poets or people from Powderhorn; he worked with people that were academics or taxi drivers who liked poetry.”

McBride taught in Minneapolis and St. Paul schools, co-founded Poetry for the People and the Powderhorn Writers Festival, and worked for In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre.

“He was the community’s best-kept secret,” said Janis Lane-Ewart, executive director of KFAI Radio, where McBride was a frequent contributor. “He was a cult figure within the poetry community.”

Earlier this year, filmmaker Mike Hazard of St. Paul released a 30-minute documentary on McBride called “A Poet’s Poet.” It will be shown at the Twin Cities Black Film Festival on Sept. 17.

“He was among our best [writers],” Hazard said. “He’s widely regarded as the old master of spoken word in the community.”

More on McBride’s community impact:

He co-founded Poetry for the People, a group of local poets, and started the Powderhorn Writers Festival with Piekos in 1997 to bring artists together.

“He saw all of us as artists,” said his wife, Lucinda Anderson.

Indicative of his egalitarian views, McBride made sure that everyone who entered the festival’s writing contest won a prize, Piekos said. The event also boosted the image of a neighborhood that was known more for its crime rates.

“It just brought a community together, which is what all Roy’s work did,” she said. “He loved people and he had a great hope in art and poetry healing and bringing people together.”

Amy Ballestad taught with McBride in Minneapolis and St. Paul schools, where she said he could mesmerize unruly sixth-graders with poems.

“Roy saw the beauty in every story,” she said. “Kids, especially, really resonated with that.”

Nine years ago, he moved to Osceola, WI with his family, where he discovered a passion for farming. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s two years ago.

Frances Dietch was born in New York City in 1927, grew up on the Upper West Side and, as she grew older, started spending a lot of time hanging around Greenwich Village where she fell in with the writers and poets who became the Beat Generation. Jack Kerouac was allegedly so enamored with Fran that he serenaded her with the immortal words “Be my girlfriend, I’m so lonely” while his buddy Allen Ginsburg played bongos in the background.

Amazingly, Fran resisted that heartfelt plea and married Jay Landesman, editor of the literary journal Neurotica, reasoning, “He’ll make a good first husband.” The marriage lasted 61 years, until Jay’s death in February. It survived the Beat and hippie generations, epic amounts of drugs (counteracted by equally epic amounts of macrobiotics), two children and bad fashion (chronicled by their humiliated son Cosmo, who “thought of having them committed to the Institute for the Criminally Dressed”), and was the rare instance of a successful open marriage: In the mornings, Jay and Fran and their extramarital partners, plus their two sons Cosmo and Miles, would all have breakfast together.

They later relocated to St. Louis and opened the Crystal Palace nightclub, which saw its fair share of famous guests:

The Landesmans coaxed many of their New York friends out to St. Louis to perform at the Crystal Palace, including Ginsberg, Woody Allen, Miles Davis, Barbra Streisand and Lenny Bruce. (Bruce tried to persuade Fran to leave Jay on grounds that he was inbred: “Let’s you and me go on the road and send him a little money every month.”)

But, this, too had to end:

But after The Nervous Set flopped in New York and the Crystal Palace started booking yogis and strippers, the Landesmans decided it was time to leave St. Louis. Jay wanted to move to a Greek island, Fran wanted to move somewhere where people spoke English, and so they compromised on London, where they stayed for the rest of their lives. Jay ran a publishing company and, according to the New York Times, “managed the career of a kung-fu stripper,” and Fran continued to write poems and songs.

And things didn’t really slow down once they got to London, according to Cosmo, from his memoir Starstruck: Fame, Failure, My Family and Me:

Getting married, having children was their one attempt to live conventionally…it didn’t last. They soon abandoned the straight and narrow for the crooked and the carefree. By the time Flower Power came around, they were in the twilight world of middle-age. Their hair became longer, their dress became wilder, the drugs got stronger and marriage became more experimental. I tried to get them to stay at home more instead of rushing round to pop festivals….and I warned them about the friends they ran around with.

Still, amidst the chaos, they managed a life by their own rules:

Fran somehow found time to produce five books of poetry, published by Jay. In 1994 she teamed up with the composer and pianist Simon Wallace; together they would write more than 300 songs and performed them together in theaters, nightclubs and music festivals all over England. “It was a good life,” she would say later, “but it wasn’t commercial.”

What better way to end than with a snippet from Fran’s own “Life’s a Bitch”?

Life’s full of shit Even when you’re in your prime Though your show’s a hit Reason never seems to rhyme Every joke has a switch Every joker a twitch Every high has a hitch Baby, life is a bitch.

How can we be forbidden to mourn?  The notion seems shocking, yet it is espoused in John Donne’s great poem, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” It might take some acquaintance with Christian theology, the science of alchemy, Donne’s penetrating use of conceits and metaphors, and much else besides to explain this mystery, but one is disinclined to engage in literary criticism when one is grieving.  And it is with sorrow that we’ve learned of the death of Poetry contributor Wilmer Mills, who passed away on July 25, 2011, surrounded by his family.  In a touching online journal kept by family members for those of us who loved and admired him, Wil was felt to have reached a new place toward the end of his struggle with liver cancer.  Wil and his family sang hymns together near the very end, and read from the Bible: Revelation 21, and Psalm 139.  When he left us, his wife Kathryn posted the text of Donne’s immortal poem.

Wil was many things: a carpenter, songwriter, husband and father, poet.  He made things with his hands, and he made a life with his spirit.  I met him because he made poems, and when I saw him last year in Tennessee I took it for granted that I would see him again, and hear his beautiful voice again (click here for a sample) – and that there would be more poems.  We published several, which you can read here – and in retrospect, one of them goes incredibly well with the Donne.  “An Equation for My Children” is hard to read without tearing up just now, but the poem has, in a way, its own strictures against crying:

Donne’s poem, written for his wife Ann More, before travel separated them, begins with a couplet that describes how “virtuous men pass mildly away, / And whisper to their souls to go.”

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers’ love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

When people are separated on earth from each other, as all eventually will be, we are actually given expansion, and are refined, because our souls remain in some way freely conjoined.  This is what love does, and poetry, too.  I’m grateful to have learned these things from John Donne – and from Wil, as well.

*

Addendum: Click here to see a fascinating tribute to Wil from a friend of his, Jeff Hardin, whose crush on Nigella Lawson, it turns out, inspired the poem mentioned above.  “I have to ask this question: have you ever been prayed for by a dying man? Have you ever heard someone, aware of his own dying, ask God to help you accept His providence?”

Poet, translator, and professor Edwin Honig passed away on May 25 at the age of 91, after a battle with Alzheimer’s, as The New York Times writes. Honig was emeritus professor of english and comparative literature at Brown, having taught there for a quarter century before retiring in 1982. NYT notes Honig’s translation work with Fernando Pessoa and Federico García Lorca, of whom he also wrote a critical study. As well:

Professor Honig translated many plays, including those of the 17th-century Spaniard Pedro Calderón de la Barca and those of his 16th-century countryman Miguel de Cervantes.

Published by New American Library in 1964, Professor Honig’s translation of Cervantes’s “Interludes” — short vignettes performed between acts of full-length plays — comprises earthy entertainments like “The Jealous Old Husband,” “The Divorce-Court Judge” and “Trampagos, the Pimp Who Lost His Moll.”

Professor Honig was knighted by the Spanish and Portuguese governments for his service to their national literatures.

As a critic, he was known in particular for “Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory,” published in 1959. . .His own poetry collections include “The Moral Circus,” “The Gazabos,” “Shake a Spear With Me, John Berryman” and “Time and Again: Poems, 1940-1997.”

Ron Silliman points us to eight poems Honig published in Jacket #16 (2002).

Bell, 47, whose performances have been featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, had just closed his business, the Literary Cafe and Poetry Lounge on 933 NE 125th Street, at about 12:40 a.m. and was walking to his car nearby when another car occupied by at least two men pulled up beside him, said Lt. Neal Cuevas of the North Miami Police Department.

A gunman leapt out from the passenger seat and fired multiple times at Bell, who died on the scene, Cuevas said. The men then fled in the car, but did not take any of Bell’s possessions, which included cash and jewelry.

“We don’t have a motive right now,’’ Cuevas said.

Several witnesses, who had been inside The Literary Cafe earlier that night, offered police differing descriptions of the suspects’ car color as light and dark, with a spoiler on the rear.

Bell will be missed in South Florida’s poetry and spoken-word performance scene, where he loomed as a local laureate, having achieved national recognition with performances on Def Poetry Jam and on albums by artists such as Miami’s Pit Bull, and hosting open-mic nights at his Literary Cafe and other venues.

Standing nearly 6-feet-5, Bell cast an imposing presence on stage, where he delivered prose honed from a life of poverty, fatherlessness, crime and prison — before finding redemption through words.

The full article, with links to audio clips of Bell and the Facebook page started in his honor, can be found here.

Gil Scott-Heron, the poet and political activist who helped lay the groundwork for rap and is best known for the song/poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” died on Friday night at the age of 62. Scott-Heron had come back into prominence after being featured on Kanye West’s latest album and releasing new work of his own last year.

Here are links to remembrances on Scott-Heron from BBC, The New York Times and the Washington Post . There’s also a moving tribute from Steve Almond over at The Rumpus:

More than any single issue, Gil’s essential topic was America, how the nation had fallen away from its moral precepts and into ruin, a condition of spiritual malaise that would eventually deliver us the bigotry and psychotic greed of the Bush Era.

If this makes Gil Scott-Heron sound didactic, the fault is mine, for it is the unique talent of the prophet to convert rage into poetry.

In 2010, Chuck D had the following to say about Scott-Heron:

“You can go into Ginsberg and the Beat poets and Dylan, but Gil Scott-Heron is the manifestation of the modern word. He and the Last Poets set the stage for everyone else.”

In addition to the major news outlets, many artists Tweeted in response to Scott-Heron’s passing, including Cee Lo, Sarah Silverman, Usher, Eminem, Michael Moore, Donald Glover, and many, many more. #gilscottheron.

He will most certainly be missed.

]]> http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/05/r-i-p-gil-scott-heron/feed/ 0 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/05/edwin-honig-poet-and-translator-passes-away/ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/05/edwin-honig-poet-and-translator-passes-away/#comments Tue, 31 May 2011 14:11:52 +0000 Harriet Staff http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/?p=28131 Edwin Honig, former Brown Professor and author of numerous collections of poetry, plays, criticism, and translations, namely of Fernando Pessoa, passed away last week after a battle with Alzheimer’s disease. According to this article from The Providence Journal,

Honig once told former Providence Journal columnist Wanda Howard that he was 13 when an alert teacher at the high school he was attending in Brooklyn, N.Y., introduced him to poetry, putting him under the influence of such writers as Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Thanks to his grandmother who spoke Spanish, Arabic and Yiddish but little English, he said, he also developed an intense lifelong interest in Spanish and Portuguese.

All together, he wrote 10 books of poetry, 3 plays, 5 books of criticism and 8 translations, one of the earliest of which was on Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet murdered by Franco’s fascists in Granada. It was published in 1944. Four decades, later he was knighted by the president of Portugal for helping to introduce Fernando Pessoa to the English-speaking world and was similarly honored in 1996 by the king of Spain for his translations of Spanish poets and playwrights.

Honig, who taught at Harvard University before going to Brown, received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mishkenot Sha’Ananim in Jerusalem, the National Endowment of the Arts and the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

He would later compile nearly a half-century of his poems in a volume titled “Time and Again,” and was working on a second volume, “Over Time,” when he became ill.

In “To Restore a Dead Child,” he released decades of sorrow over the death of his 3-year-old brother who was run over by a truck when Honig was just 5.

One of Honig’s collections of Pessoa translations can be found here.

]]> http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/05/edwin-honig-poet-and-translator-passes-away/feed/ 0 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/05/leonora-carrington-1916-2011/ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/05/leonora-carrington-1916-2011/#comments Fri, 27 May 2011 15:00:13 +0000 Harriet Staff http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/?p=28104

We are sad to note that surrealist painter, sculptor, poet, and writer Leonora Carrington has died at the age of 94 in her longtime home of Mexico, as the Washington Post reports.

Once the lover of German artist Max Ernst, Carrington was also part of a famous wave of artistic and political emigres who arrived in Mexico in the 1930s and ‘40s. In the male-dominated realm of surrealism, she was a member of a rare trio of Mexico-based female surrealists along with Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo.

“She was the last great living surrealist,” said longtime friend and poet Homero Aridjis. “She was a living legend.”

Friend and promoter Dr. Isaac Masri said she died Wednesday of old age, after being hospitalized. “She had a great life, and a dignified death, as well, without suffering,” he said.

“She created mythical worlds in which magical beings and animals occupy the main stage, in which cobras merge with goats and blind crows become trees,” the National Arts Council wrote, adding, “These were some of the images that sprang from a mind obsessed with portraying a reality that transcends what can be seen.”

An obituary in The Telegraph today is more anecdotal, to say the least:

Their life was complicated—Ernst was still spending time with his wife—but Leonora plunged recklessly into Surrealist Paris life. At one smart party she arrived wearing only a sheet, which she dropped at an opportune moment; she sat at a restaurant table and covered her feet with mustard, and served cold tapioca dyed with squid ink to guests as caviar. Visitors to the rue Jacob might wake up in the morning to a breakfast of omelette full of their own hair which she had cut while they slept.

She got to know Picasso and Bunuel (“uncouth Spaniards”), Dali, Man Ray, Miro, Breton, Tanguy, Peret, Belmer, Arp and many others. With her wild, dark beauty she looked the perfect submissive “femme enfant”, but she rejected the notion of being anyone’s muse (“all that means is that you’re someone else’s object”) and was quick to snap if anyone took her for granted.

When Joan Miro gave her some money and told her to get him some cigarettes, she told him to “bloody well” get them himself. Dali won her approval by calling her “a most important woman artist”, and her work was shown at exhibitions along with the work of Meret Oppenheim, Remedios Varo, Eileen Agar and other women.

Carrington was also the author of short story collections, novels, and poetry. Cult publisher Exact Change published Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet in 2004. An excerpt is here.

]]> http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/05/leonora-carrington-1916-2011/feed/ 0 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/05/anne-blonstein-1958%e2%80%932011/ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/05/anne-blonstein-1958%e2%80%932011/#comments Thu, 05 May 2011 19:00:29 +0000 Harriet Staff http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/?p=27008 We’d like to note the passing of British poet and translator Anne Blonstein, who wrote from her home in Basel, Switzerland, up until her death in late April. Blonstein was known for work, in books like correspondence with nobody and worked on screen, that made use of the ancient Rabbinical device, the notariqon. As Blonstein said in an interview regarding spiritual elements in her writing and translation: “To the right of my writing desk there is one shelf devoted to books by and about Paul Celan. Above this is a shelf of bibles and related reference works. There are four German translations (from Luther to Buber and Rosenzweig), four English translations (ranging from the King James to the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh), three in French, and the standard Hebrew Masoretic text. No Septuagint (Greek) or Vulgate (Latin)—at least not yet…There is also a Koran.”

As poet Maria Damon wrote of Blonstein’s work in Jacket, “The project is heir to Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the History of Philosophy,’ capturing the courage and intelligence of history’s forgotten ones, rendering them anew, under the aegis of a Jewish woman’s language experiments. This is a fascinating and, for many of us, compelling development in contemporary poetry and deserves far richer exegetical attention…”

Blonstein’s books also included the blue pearl (Salt 2003) and memory’s morning (Shearsman 2008), as well as the butterflies and the burnings, out from Dusie in 2009. Recent poems can also be found at word for word and Cambridge Literary Review, issue 3. Our thoughts go out to her friends and family.

As Anne herself said of her poems: “I don’t know how they will evolve, where they will take me, and as the writing emerges it nearly always also sends me away from my writing table again in directions I never envisaged at the start, following up ideas, clues, persons or whatever, be it in libraries, museums or, for example, thinking of a sequence I wrote last year, rose gardens. I love the surprises of this process. I am reluctant, though, to describe expectations I might have of potential readers. In all honesty, none perhaps. Or: I just hope my books reach the hands, eyes and minds of open and curious individuals.”

]]> http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/05/anne-blonstein-1958%e2%80%932011/feed/ 0 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/obitdidactic/ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/obitdidactic/#comments Wed, 06 Apr 2011 19:00:32 +0000 Ange Mlinko http://tpf_beta.tierradev.com/harriet/?p=24200 It was about a year ago that I read with Paul Violi at Pace University. Today—shocked—I see his black-framed photo on Silliman’s blog. A blogging category I neglected to put on my list: Obituary.

There’s something about breaking bread with a person, especially a person whose poems you’ve read with pleasure, that gives you a feeling of affection for him. That’s where the sense of a “poetry community” comes from, I know—even though I don’t really believe in a poetry community, any more than I believe you can know someone through their poems or blog posts (so much of it given over to social grooming). Yet Violi kept his illness private, justified in what I infer is his belief that poets aren’t family; information doesn’t belong to the internet.

Daisy has said everything I wanted to say about abstract craft talk, but if I had to generalize, Violi’s well-known Counterman offers a pithy preceptorial. It takes the measure of reality as the distance between a deli sandwich and the Cathedral St. Pierre. A deep bow to Paul Violi today.

Pleasures of the Didactic gave me pause. While you make an excellent point, Alicia, about didactic children’s songs—I heart, heart Schoolhouse Rock—I know in my own work I’m under the sway of two well-known aphorisms about poetry: John Keats’s “we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us” and Philip Sidney’s “the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.” Sidney of course didn’t think this was incompatible with poetry having an ethical function—but it is incompatible with the kind of didacticism I associate with overtly political poetry; or even the sort of somber moral force-field I associate with, say, Anthony Hecht or Robert Frost.

Which brings me back to Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. In an extraordinary penultimate chapter, we are privy to Elizabeth at the pearly gates. Yes—it is Judgment Day for Elizabeth Costello, and Coetzee’s stand-in for St. Peter, “a man in shirtsleeves, writing” tells her she must “make a statement” if she is to be admitted to the afterlife. “A statement of what?” she asks. “Belief. What you believe,” he replies. But what if one is not a believer?

“The man shrugs. For the first time he looks directly at her. ‘We all believe. We are not cattle.’ For each of us there is something we believe. Write it down, what you believe. Put it in the statement.”

Elizabeth Costello is stumped: “It is not my profession to believe, just to write. Not my business. I do imitations, as Aristotle would have said.” But the rest of the chapter records her turmoil as she wrestles with the question of what being a writer has to do with beliefs. This goes to show how uncomfortable our most exacting verbal artists are with the didactic, I think. And with its absence.

]]> http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/obitdidactic/feed/ 0 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/the-curious-builder/ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/the-curious-builder/#comments Mon, 04 Apr 2011 18:36:17 +0000 Anselm Berrigan http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/?p=23913 Index Hudney, Sutej IX, X, XI, 7, 9, 25, 58, 60, 61, 64 Plates   5,10, 15 Childhood   70, 71 Education   78, 79, 80 Early relationship with family   84 Enters academy, honors   84 Arrest and bewilderment 85 Formation of spatial theories  90 “Romance of Ardoy, The” 92 Second arrest 93 Early voyages, life in the Pyrenees 95 Marriage 95 Abandons landscape painting 96 Third arrest 97 Weakness of character, inconstancy 101 First signs of illness, advocation of celibacy 110 Collaborations with Fernando Gee 111 Composes lines beginning: “Death, wouldst that I had died / While thou wert still a mystery. 117 Consequences of fame, violent rows, professional disputes 118, 119 Disavows all his work 120 Bigamy, scandals, illness, admittance of being “easily crazed, like snow.” 128 Theories of perspective published 129 Birth of children 129 Analysis of important works: Wine glass with fingerprints Nude on a blue sofa The drunken fox trappers Man wiping tongue with large towel Hay bales stacked in a field Self portrait Self portrait with cat Self portrait with frozen mop Self portrait with belching duck 135 Correspondence with Cecco Angolieri 136 Dispute over attribution of lines: “I have as large supply of evils / as January has not flowerings.” 137 Builds first greenhouse 139 Falling-out with Angolieri 139 Flees famine 144 Paints Starved cat eating snow 145 Arrested for selling sacks of wind to gullible peasants 146 Imprisonment and bewilderment 147 Disavows all his work 158 Invents the collar stay 159 Convalescence with third wife 162 Complains of “a dense and baleful wind blowing the words I write off the page.” 165 Meets with Madam T. 170 Departures, mortal premonitions, “I think I’m about to snow.” 176 Disavows all his work 181 Arrest and pardon 182 Last days 183 Last words 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190 Paul Violi (July 20, 1944 – April 3, 2011) from Splurge (Sun, 1982) ]]> http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/04/the-curious-builder/feed/ 0 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/03/john-haines-1924-2011/ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/03/john-haines-1924-2011/#comments Mon, 07 Mar 2011 15:44:04 +0000 Harriet Staff http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/?p=22891 Alaskan poet John Haines died last week in Fairbanks. Among his many admirers was the late Hayden Carruth, who labeled John Haines “one of our best nature poets, or for that matter one of the best nature writers of any kind.”

From this weekend’s New York Times:

Mr. Haines may have been drawn to the far North in the manner of Robert Service or Jack London, but unlike them he came to stay and carve out a long life. He cleared forest, built cabins, planted gardens, chopped wood, cut trails, traveled by snowshoe and dogsled, trapped lynx and marten, weaved nets for salmon fishing, and had encounters with grizzlies.

He was often alone and sometimes with one of five wives or a girlfriend, most of whom quickly tired of the wilderness — or his famously cantankerous personality.

Mr. Haines used his north-country images to take readers on a profoundly introspective spiritual journey, what Edward Hirsch in The New York Times called “a primitive pantheism that prays outward to the snowy owl and the gods of winter.”

Mr. Kooistra, a former college philosophy professor and commercial fisherman, contended that London and Service “were essentially tourists” compared with Mr. Haines. “This is poetry of a different level,” he said.

Mr. Haines wrote a dozen books of poetry, essays and autobiography; was a writer in residence at a half-dozen colleges; and earned two Guggenheim Fellowships and a $10,000 Lenore Marshall/The Nation Award, among other prizes. In Alaska, he was a source of pride as one of the first truly acclaimed writers the 49th state produced.

Here is his poem, “The Girl Who Buried Snakes in a Jar,” reprinted from The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer his collected poems from Graywolf Press:

She came to see the bones
whiten in a summer,
and one year later a narrow
mummy with a dusty skin
and flaking scales
would break apart in her hand.

She wanted to see if sunlight
still glinted in those eyes,
to know what it lighted
from a window on the mallow roots,
leaf mold and fallen casques.

And to ask if a single tongue,
one forked flicker in the dark,
had found any heat in death:
in the closed space and chill
of that burial, what speech,
what sign would there be.

She who walked in the canyon early,
parted the grass and halted
upon the living snake, coiled
and mottled by a bitter pool,

unearthed her jar in another spring,
to find the snake spirit gone,
only a little green water standing,
some dust, or a smell.

(1974)

]]> http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/03/john-haines-1924-2011/feed/ 0 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/03/the-teachings-of-akilah-oliver-remembered/ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/03/the-teachings-of-akilah-oliver-remembered/#comments Wed, 02 Mar 2011 19:00:52 +0000 In Memoriam http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/?p=22783 When Akilah Oliver passed away last week, memories and tributes to her work and giving spirit as a teacher spread out across the communities she touched, from Coffee House Press to Naropa University to The Poetry Project. Below is a collection of stories and thanks from friends, colleagues, and those she inspired.

From The Poetry Project:

Feliz Molina wrote…

Akilah, what is there to say, but in saying and not saying it. What I learned from you: not to talk when lacking sincerity. What I sometimes was reluctant to say around you, what you taught me without saying. That I understood so much when you didn’t say and that we have so much to say now that we can’t say them. One day or never, these things will be said and until then I’ll think of you, every so often, dreaming of our silly plans for the “Institute For the Hot Mess” and feeling now that what we won’t do sustains us.

Moe Seager wrote…

I so much enjoyed sharing time with Akilah in Paris in 2009, talking and laughing together with trumpeter, Rasul Siddik, while she was here to read, and in New York last spring, a time when she proposed that we do a jazz-poetry live music presentation. Sadly, this will not be. I appreciated Akilah for her poetry. I appreciated her for her critical analysis. I appreciated her world view; a relation to people and circumstances beyond her personal sphere. She and I shared a long walk and talk in Paris, a long walk and talk in Manhattan, memorable. Akilah was a distinguished poet, a caring mother and for me, a welcome presence who was easy to befriend. R.I.P. sister.

Kimberly Castanon wrote…

Akilah,
Four nights ago, I dreamed I was looking up the phrase “taken aback” in the dictionary. As I read these words, God said over my shoulder – “when human life goes beyond it’s context.”

And so Akilah… onward.

From Coffee House Press:

Aimee Herman wrote…

i walked around Brooklyn today, reading some of her poems out loud because she needs to be heard…..remembered…. smeared into the streets of where she stormed.

Peter Bushyeager wrote…

Akilah Oliver will be missed. I was always struck by the subtlety of her work, her remarkable collaborations with musicians, and her quiet, committed, gentle way of moving through the world. Those who took her workshops tell me that she brought all of her gifts to bear and created a very special, supportive atmosphere that truly nutured people.

From Monkey Puzzle Press:

Diane Klammer wrote…

Akilah taught us some powerful lessons about grief in her book, A Toast in the House of Friends. We will have to hold those lessons close to us now. She was a supportive friend and mentor, telling me to put my writing out there and allow it to do what it will. This is a shock and a loss.

Scott Forman wrote…

Akilah always made me look at things from a different perspective, outside of my own limited perceptions and beliefs – coming from such diverse, opposite, and sometimes opposing backgrounds and experiences, it was like we could tell each other to go to hell, feel good about it, and I think each of planned on enjoying the trip. She was never condemning or judgmental, but really made me think about my own judgments and condemnations, my own inner prejudices and even fears, and I am a better person and writer because of her.

Friends of Akilah are collecting funds for her funeral costs and to “support activity to keep the memory of Akilah and her work alive!” More information can be found at Litmus Press.

]]> http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/03/the-teachings-of-akilah-oliver-remembered/feed/ 0 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/02/victor-martinez-i-am-an-american-writer/ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/02/victor-martinez-i-am-an-american-writer/#comments Sat, 26 Feb 2011 15:00:59 +0000 Harriet Staff http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/?p=22693 Mission Loc@l remembers poet and National Book Award-winning novelist Victor Martinez who passed away earlier this week. Born in Fresno, California, Martinez would prove influential and respected enough among his 11 other siblings to secure his own room to write, yet he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1996 that the most his high school guidance counselor had encouraged of him after reviewing his talents and high test scores was a career in welding.

Free from the low expectations of high school, Martinez first went to Cal State Fresno then on to receive the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford before settling in San Francisco where he formed the Humanizarte collective with other Chicano poets (including his friend Francisco X. Alarcon who wrote of his contributions to the Bay Area in The Rumpus) as well as being active in the Chicano/Latino Writers’ Center of San Francisco, the reopening of the Mission Cultural Center, and a frequent contributor to El Tecolote. Despite his involvement in the Mission literary community, his work went largely unnoticed elsewhere until he published Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vida.

In 1996, Victor Martinez, a local poet, reached a personal low when he read his poetry at Intersection for the Arts and exactly six people showed up. Three were friends.

A week later, he discovered that he was nominated for the National Book Award.

Galeria de la Raza threw a send-off party before he flew to New York for the awards ceremony. “We said, ‘You’re going to win!’” recalls writer Alejandro Murguía. “He said. ‘Nah. I’m a Chicano writer. This is a New York award.’”

He won.

The book would end up on high school reading lists everywhere (while being banned by just as many) and send him to read and speak all over the country. Though even then, not everyone got his work. “In other places, recalls Martinez’s wife, Tina Alvarez, he would be introduced only to Latino students. ‘He would refuse to speak unless it was to the entire class,’ she says. ‘He would say, ‘I am an American writer.’”

His style was laborious and minimalist. “He was like a chiseler,” says another friend, the artist Jurgen Trautwein, who spent years getting beers at the Zeitgeist and talking art with Martinez. “Someone who built something up and took it down to the core, the skeleton. He had a lot of love for sculpting. He loved Giacometti. He read his biography over 10 times.“‘Too many words. That’s what he would say. ‘Too many words.’”

“He would tell me, ‘Poetry is the essence of thinking,’” says his brother, Ramiro.

When people asked him what he did for a living, he said he drove a truck.

“So many people have wiped their asses with the word artist,” says Sal Garcia, laughing. “We were of the working class.”

]]> http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/02/victor-martinez-i-am-an-american-writer/feed/ 0 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/02/akilah-oliver/ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/02/akilah-oliver/#comments Thu, 24 Feb 2011 17:21:40 +0000 Harriet Staff http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/?p=22649

Coffee House Press has reported that the poet Akilah Oliver has died. Read her insightful interview with BOMB, “Good Grief,” here. Our thoughts go out to her friends and family.

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