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Translation and its discontents, part quatre

“When I was reading an anthology of contemporary European poetry, I was struck by how much its poems tended to sound alike: in most cases, I couldn’t really tell what country or language a poetry had come from until I checked.”

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02.27.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (27)

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I’ve decided to draw poems…

Jason Guriel recently took a keen-eyed look at the visual poetry we presented in the November 2008 issue of Poetry. One of our readers, Jerry Payne, in Clearwater, Florida, wrote in to say:
“Look, let’s call “visual poetry” what it really is—visual art. Some of us are in love with language and the way in which words—just words—can be put together in relationships that say something. Let’s not continue to water down the concept of poetry any more than it already has been.”
Well, I guess we’ve upped the ante in the February 2009 issue.

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02.02.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (45)

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The things people write in books!

I mean literally, the things people scrawl on the flyleaves and in the margins of books. My mother taught me not to deface books, not even to dog-ear them, but tell it to a poet! There’s real treasure in literary marginalia: notes, scribbles, and assorted editorial comments added to books. Take Blake’s famous comment on Francis Bacon – “Philosophy has Destroyd all art & Science.” Blake really had it in for the artist Sir Joshua Reynolds, on whose death he scrawled, “Funeral granted to Sir Joshua for having destroyd Art . . . .” Unlike many a lesser poet, though, Blake ordinarily attacked ideas not people, and tried to delete that comment. Coleridge is the most copious of literary marginalia-writers; he even invented the word “marginalia.” Anybody who let him borrow a book would later find reams of cramped, scribbled commentary it it; his essay-like annotations have been collected in a set of six volumes (so far) that contain some eight thousand notes. (Alas, the best-known marginal note isn’t by a poet: Fermat’s “last theorem,” which didn’t even fit in the margins of the book he was defacing; Wikipedia says it’s the most famous solved problem in the history of mathematics.) Other stuff written inside books include doodles, reader’s marks like stars, asterisks, crosses… but also actual poems! So guess what we recently found! Read on after the jump…

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01.07.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

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The fist of survival: On childhood and poetry

I wanted to leave everywhere from about the age of nine. This involved delinquency at school and withdrawal from the home scene. I didn’t like grown-ups with the exception of my father and felt uncomfortable with what was given to me as a birthright and what later came to be understood (by me and my culture) as meaning: White.

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12.05.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

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Information, Thy Nemesis is Reverie

Quoth Ange Mlinko -
Just three years ago I was sitting in a room of a Madison Avenue office tower, listening to my boss make a pitch to his boss, a hedge fund manager. Normally, during my spotty career as “content specialist” in various capacities, meetings were an opportunity to get hopped up on coffee and doodle. This was not to happen in front of a man whose day was micro-scheduled in fifteen-minute increments. Instead I listened dutifully to a plan to build a mirror site for the hedge fund’s server “outside the blast zone,” in the blueberry fields of New Jersey. At least the information would survive, even if we didn’t.
Information, thy nemesis is reverie. The reverie I used to fall into, for instance, when I didn’t care to listen in meetings. The reverie of great poetry, for another instance. But when I reflect that the most contemporary-sounding poems sound the least lonely, I wonder where reverie, as a mode of poetic thinking, is going. I also wonder if the store of knowledge unique to the poetic tradition of reverie will survive—or if it will morph into something at all recognizable to, say, Sappho…

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11.25.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

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Deciphering the “mi’kmaq book of the dead”

Although it’s not essential to this visual poem or an appreciation of it, mIEKAL aND has produced a translation of what you see above; it begins like this…

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11.11.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (11)

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Editing yourself out… and in.

We open on a tiny flat in Dublin. A young poet sits by a window, writing. But something is wrong. The poem—eloquent, sonorous, carefully crafted—feels off. Studying the page, she suddenly realizes why, and the reason hurts harder for having been so easy to miss: she edited herself out.

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11.10.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

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Of course we did!

“There is simply too much to think about. It is hopeless — too many kinds of special preparation are required. In electronics, in economics, in social analysis, in history, in psychology, in international politics, most of us are, given the oceanic proliferating complexity of things, paralyzed by the very suggestion that we assume responsibility for so much. This is what makes packaged opinion so attractive.” So said Saul Bellow – to which political speechwriter Barton Swaim recently added: Another name for “packaged opinion” is “politics.” Even if you’re a poet, and ostensibly resist prepackaging… people can probably guess who you voted for. Uh oh!

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11.04.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

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Will there be time for eggnogs and eclogues in the place where we’re going?

The title of this post is from my fave Halloween-season poem, “What the Spider Heard,” by Weldon Kees. And just in time for your tricks and treats, a change in seasons, the onset of “standard” time, and the big election – we’re pleased to announce…

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11.03.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

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The hybrid-way or the highway

The Oxford English Dictionary says that the word “hybrid” comes from the Latin hibrida – the offspring of a tame sow and wild boar. There are lots of citations of Darwin, but we won’t go there; now, I’m not the guy who just finished reading the entire OED, but it looks to me as though the word has fewer citations from poets than almost any other I can find. It’s quite curious, then, to find Cole Swensen disputing the notion of a fundamental division in American poetry, and proposing that “the model of binary opposition is no longer the most accurate one and that, while extremes remain, and everywhere we find complex aesthetic and ideological differences, the contemporary moment is dominated by rich writings that cannot be categorized, and that hybridize core attributes of previous ‘camps’ in diverse and unprecedented ways.”