Poets and poetry – Page 73

April 3, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Night Mail: Selected Poems by Novica Tadić

It ends before it ends, “neither in the title nor in the poem,” and I feel sorry for flames that started out as feathers. A sparrow darts into the cedar tree and doesn’t come out — I’m watching — and the tree twitches all over like someone with a bad case of scruples. Novica Tadić looks a Trojan horse in the mouth and finds a comb.

There are many ways to descend and this poet knows all of them. He goes down to the salt cellar and finds the unknown soldier’s unknown uniform, maybe. And he would try it on, and listen to the martial music, and pledge fidelity with the tip of someone else’s tongue. Yesterday, my mother watched a large, dark milk snake mating with two small garter snakes, and refused for a while to believe in what she had seen: out of such refusals is this kind of poetry made.

The cast of characters includes something monstrous on every other page — most often a chicken, or “the life-giving zero.” Musical accompaniment is provided by “a drum full of mice” and “a giggle made up of the screams of the dying” — that kind of thing. The poet disappears into the set.

At this point in my reading (p. 51, “Nightingale”), a log cock alights on the side of a nearby birch, crest bright as a stop light, and starts whaling away with his deconstructionist’s hammer and nail. Someone opens the night curtains and discovers that the streets are filled with marchers: all the city’s cats have gone on strike. “Our Jesus” is “a pincushion,” a hairdresser campaigns for God’s empty seat, and an anti-psalmist prays for the ridicule of his enemies. Against the white of the page I can make out the blur of a hair on the end of my nose, that almost-invisible flesh-colored companion of all my reading.

It’s Holy Saturday, which means (among other things) that we have silence from the quarry over the hill. The poet says “now” and it sounds like an imperative to me, he says to bring a chair outside and I get the feeling I’m being watched, which of course I am: everything watches everything else, as Tadić says on a page I’ve already lost track of. “From the penetentiary quarry/ the song of songs reaches us,” he writes. (Or Charles Simic does, at any rate.) It’s all there in black and white — the magpie, I mean. Page 90. You can’t miss it.

(Click on the thumbnail to go to the book’s page in Open Library.)

April 2, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Notes from the Red Zone, by Christina Pacosz

It’s been “re-bound,” the first in a series of chapbook reprints from Seven Kitchens Press: saddle-stitched with red thread and knotted in the middle. Notes from the Red Zone, say the red letters, but in the cover photo, the air around the cooling tower is green, and I can’t help translating into the lingo of the aughts: Notes from the Green Zone, with depleted uranium the link between the Hanford nuclear plant in Pacosz’ long poem, set in the early 80s, and our invasion and occupation of Iraq. We were searching, we said, for weapons of mass destruction, as if there were any other kind, as if we were not the chief authors and publishers of that story, tying the red knot at the center ourselves: the dust of vaporized DU shells that will be causing birth defects in Iraqi children for generations.

Why reprint such a book in 2009? Because the Cold War didn’t really end; we are merely in its half-life. “Slogans come easily,/ Life through death/ and they find comfort/ in the promise/ of resurrection,/ rapture in a pure land/ beyond this one.” The poet is a nomad and an interrogator, wondering “where the edge is/ and why there needs to be/ a form, something contained,” wondering about the word enemy. What is the link between domestic violence and war-making (“the woman/ short indian/ wrinkled face/ purpled with bruises/ not sure she can continue/ paying the price”), between alienation from the natural world and hostility toward the other (“blue whale, Polish Jew, tiger, witch”)?

“How long have you lived here?” she asks the women, but the answer, “all our lives,” rings hollow. No man goes down to the river without a fishing pole, knife, hatchet or chainsaw, and no woman goes there alone at all — except the poet, wearing her alertness to the omnipresence of death like a red wool coat. “The conversation turns abruptly/ to the quality of roads/ leading out of town.” The one thing we all have in common is our desire to escape.

How should we think of a president who works actively to reduce nuclear stockpiles at the same time that he advocates a dramatic increase in nuclear power — and expresses skepticism at an enemy’s ability to make the same distinction between weapon and deadly tool? Who in Washington really speaks for nature now? While I am pondering this, the news comes in that the Environmental Protection Agency has at long last “clarified” the guidelines for coal mining to outlaw most forms of mountaintop removal in the Appalachians. Ah, clarity! That thing we read poetry for.

This is a short book, dangerous as a shiv between the ribs, requiring — in my case, at least — three tries to reach the heart: red zone. Maybe it’s time the poet faced some questions herself. I call her up and she answers on the second ring.

(Click on the thumbnail to go to the book’s page in Open Library. My conversation with Christina Pacosz will be featured on the Woodrat Podcast next week.)

UPDATE: Listen to the podcast.

April 1, 2010 by Dave Bonta

These Happy Eyes, by Liz Rosenberg

More light comes, she says, through horizonal windows: this is why her poems are in prose, and I suppose it’s also why the book is square, opening into double panes the color of thick cream. In the oddly blurry author photo on the back cover, she rests one, over-exposed hand on the branch of a Japanese maple in its autumn glory, but inside, the world is sharply focused, and more often than not it’s winter or early spring. She has numbers for the mailman — 1, 2 and 3 — rather than letters. Whatever she sees she becomes, or wants to, until it threatens to crush her in thirteen chapters. I don’t know that I have ever read a poet so attentive to the breathing of other people. She notices the spaces filled by flying snow, shadows, and the smoke from her neighbor’s chimney: “Nothing so small it does not drag an immense tail along behind it.” She listens to children. “What exactly did Kryptonite do to Superman? Krypton: his birthplace. Did it make him homesick?” The publisher’s logo, a woolly mammoth drawn in too-great detail, appears twice, the first time on the half-title page, a sombre, hairy contradiction to the words above it, These Happy Eyes. As I read, slumped in a plastic stack chair on my porch on the morning of April 1, three deer walk by in their ragged molting pelts, ears backlit and veined like autumn leaves that forgot to stop clinging. Woodpeckers drum, and some of the birds whose names this poet doesn’t appear to know become almost anonymous again, the familiar turning unknown — just the opposite of what she quotes Hölderlin as saying. I find an old index card with the draft of a poem scribbled on it and tear it into little bookmarks. Soon the book is bristling with these fragments, which are the same cream color as the pages. “I am,” she says, “not made the way I was taught to be.” My furnace rumbles to a halt and I catch my breath, read the last two poems in a new-found silence.

(Click on the thumbnail to go to the book’s page in Open Library.)

March 31, 2010 by Dave Bonta

The plan

An exercise in close reading: that’s what I’m planning this year. I’m going to try reading a book of poetry a day, first thing in the morning after I come in off the porch, instead of just the usual half-dozen poems. And then I want to try writing about it: about the book, about the reading experience, or about whatever thoughts or memories it might shake loose. And because I do believe in the value of what John Miedema calls slow reading, these books will probably tend to be pretty short, though I have found that with the right level of concentration, it’s possible to read fifty or more lyric poems in one hour.

Why am I doing it? Three reasons, I guess. First, I love poetry books, and I feel I haven’t devoted nearly enough space to celebrating them here. I’ve been trapped in pre-conceived and rather boring notions of how to write about books, I think, and I’m hoping to break out of that.

Second, I’m curious about what a month-long immersion in poetry reading will do to me. Will it be mind-altering? Almost certainly. Will it change the way I read poetry? Maybe. Will it prove to be an overdose, and send me rushing naked and screaming into the streets? Well, let’s hope not.

Third, I do want to be part of the whole poetry month thing, and share a bit of fellowship with other poetry bloggers. But I’ve always had a hard time joining group activities, so if everyone else is writing poetry every day, I have to be reading it. I do hope to make time for reading the new poems that will be appearing on other people’s blogs, too, though. And maybe even writing a few of my own.

March 29, 2010March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Woodrat Podcast 12: Steven Sherrill, Renaissance man and recovering redneck

Steve Sherrill with his painting "Dear Abby VIII"

Steven Sherrill stopped by the house last week to read some poems and a section of his latest novel, play a little ukulele, and talk about how he went from being a redneck hellraiser and welder-in-training to a published novelist, poet, painter, and aspiring musician.

Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes

March 22, 2010March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Woodrat Podcast 11: Ai and the art of monologue

No guest this week, just a monologue in honor of the poet Ai, who died on Saturday. I chant Noh and read poems by Ai (obviously), Richard Shelton, and the O’odham of southern Arizona.

Links:

Ai (1947 – 2010), the Poetry Foundation page
Remembering Ai: Tucson, 1970, blue satin dress (Mark Doty)
In Memoriam to Ai (1947 – 2010) by Jerry Williams
Richard Shelton’s website
Thanking Ai: A Remembrance by Rigoberto González

(Update)

Obituary from Oklahoma State University [PDF]

(Update #2, 3/27)

A remembrance from Alfred Corn

(Update #3, 3/28)

New York Times obituary

Japanese temple bell audio is from Daniele Salvati on freesound.org and is licenced under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 licence.

Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes

March 10, 2010September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote…

Direct link to video.

April is the coolest month, y’all. (T.S. who?)

***

Suddenly I am a little ashamed of my ladybug poem. I just read someone else’s poems about the same, invasive species, and they are so, so moving. They came at the end of one of the more gripping books of poetry I’ve ever read — I mean, I couldn’t put it down — and now I see these utterly familiar insects in a new light. But this is what poetry does, isn’t it?

I bought the book this morning at Webster’s Bookstore Café in State College, Pennsylvania (which incidentally now stocks Odes to Tools) and it’s one of 30 poetry books I’ll be blogging about here next month, one a day, for (Inter-)National Poetry Month. Originally I thought I’d focus on chapbooks, but I’ve decided to broaden it to any poetry book, including a few that I’ve read at least once before. But probably no Collected Works, because each book will still need to be short enough to read (or re-read) in an hour or two and then review or write a creative response to.

NaPoWriMo — National Poetry Writing Month — has really caught on among online poets, and that’s great, but I’m already writing at least one poem a day, if you count my brief Morning Porch entries as poems (they’re usually pretty close). What I don’t do enough of is blog about the poetry books I read, so for me it’s going to be NaPoReMo. I’m going to try to keep the selection as varied as possible to increase the chances of including something that will appeal to almost everyone who reads here, not just fellow hardcore poetry fans. I even picked up a book of baseball poetry today.

So I’ve just finished all the book-buying I intend to do in preparation, but I do want to repeat the offer I made a few days ago on Facebook: if you’re the author of a book of poetry and you’d like me to consider it for inclusion as one of the 30, feel free to mail me a review copy. I’ll probably send a copy of Odes to Tools in exchange, so you’ll get something out of it one way or the other.

One other thing I’ll be doing for National Poetry Month is a reading and multimedia presentation in support of Odes to Tools. I’ll have more information about that in another post, but please mark your calendars: it’ll be at 3:30 pm on Saturday, April 10, at the aforementioned Webster’s Bookstore Cafe in downtown State College. Come for the books, stay for the great coffee. I like to think of it as a pilgrimage.

March 8, 2010March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Woodrat Podcast 9: Ren Powell, A Poet’s Way in Norway

Ren (Katherine) Powell talks about how living in Norway and translating Norwegian poets, and also a Yemeni poet, have shaped her own growth as a writer

Ren Powell

Included in the conversation are readings of four poems by Odveig Klyve, two by Mansur Rajih, and three of Ren’s own poems, “It Wasn’t the Flu,” “Spring Heralds,” and “Losing My Religion.” See Ren’s website for links to more of her poems online, and Anima Poetics for her Flash animations.

Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence).

Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes

March 5, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Next Life

Every day it softens and settles; every night it sets. At a certain point in late morning, it no longer holds you up. In one week since this photo was taken, we have gone from late winter to early spring. Yesterday a bluebird began singing, and this morning at dawn the call of the Cooper’s hawk was echoing off the snowpack — as if such a skilled ventriloquist needs one more way to throw his voice.

I was out early enough to hear him only because a sea urchin woke me, spines poking my flesh as I wandered through a dream forest of kelp. For the past week I have been dithering over a poem about sea urchins, trying to capture that extreme otherness in words, and now this visit. I leaf through Rae Armantrout’s Next Life, which I am trying hard to like, and happen on a poem about those who believe they have been abducted by tentacled aliens, which she compares to Doubting Thomas and his probing of the wounds in the risen Christ. “It is from this wound/ that humans first emerged,” she says — the only lines in the poem that speak to me.

The blurb on the back from Publisher’s Weekly says, “this could be the year when more readers discover Armantrout.” Hmm. Well, readers who happen to be steeped in the self-reflexive thinking of American graduate-school programs in English, perhaps. For who else would relish poems about metaphor:

Metaphor

shifts a small weight
there and back.

My self-relection shames God
into watching

(“Remote”), sentences about sentences:

A man and a woman
finish sentences
and laugh.

Each sentence is both
an acquiescence
and a dismissal.

(“The Ether”), the use of quotation marks to signal irony:

It’s after us
and before us—always

trying to get “in.”

(“Continuity”) or a discourse on irony itself (“Empty”)? The book description informs us that “these poems push against the limit of knowledge, that event-horizon, and into the echoes and phantasms beyond, calling us to look toward the ‘next life’ and find it where we can.” No, they don’t. They merely bore me. The radical questioning of meaning is hardly new, and Armantrout’s poems show little evidence of familiarity with the significant philosophical works of the last hundred years.

I mean, there’s literally a poem here about — no, make that “about” — trying to write a poem, “Make It New.” Infinite recursion does not equal apophatic insight. “You’re left out,” concludes a poem called “Framing.” That’s fair to say.

I walk up into the woods to see if I can spot the Cooper’s hawk, but my eyes are drawn, as usual, to the ground. It’s still below freezing, and my boots barely crunch into the surface, but I stop to admire spiny oak leaves that have melted their way down into shallow graves. Again I think of sea urchins, painstakingly excavating nests in the seafloor’s solid rock: eyes in search of sockets. And that’s not just a metaphor. It turns out that the appendages between their spines are covered with light-sensitive molecules, and the spines help them focus on the same principle as squinting eyelids. They have no brains because they are all brain. They have no eyes because the entire surface of their body is wired for vision.

Listen, you can look forward to the next life if you want, or try to throw your voice beyond the event horizon of a black hole, but I’m telling you: there’s no way another life can be more marvellous than this one.

March 3, 2010 by Dave Bonta

Top Poets

My videopoetry site Moving Poems has only been around since last June, doesn’t have very many incoming links, and averages around 200 page views a day, so probably the following data don’t mean too much. I introduced poets’ names into post titles two months ago in an attempt to get more traffic from people who were typing, e.g., “Emily Dickinson poem” or “Blake Tyger video” into Google. As expected, traffic jumped. What I didn’t expect was who the most popular poets would turn out to be, based on page views of individual posts.

Moving Poems post title	page views
A Julia de Burgos (To Julia de Burgos)	552
Arte Poética by Vicente Huidobro	214
Todesfuge by Paul Celan	208
Der Erlkönig (The Erlking) by Goethe	190
Umeed-e-Sahar (Hope of the Dawn) by Faiz Ahmed Faiz	170
Paris at Night by Jacques Prévert	154
The Tyger by William Blake	138
Ay, Ay, Ay de la Grifa Negra by Julia de Burgos	138
I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died by Emily Dickinson	137
African-American folk poetry: gandy dancers	123
Manhatta (from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman)	109

Because I use the very minimal stats plugin from WordPress.com, I don’t have information on any of the archive pages, and so I have no idea how many people might be visiting, for example, the Emily Dickinson archive page. Dickinson might well be more popular than the great Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos.

Still, I think these results do give some indication of the relative popularity of certain kinds of poetry on the web. Of the 260 posts I’ve published there so far, 128 feature poets from the U.S., and England is the second best-represented country with 34 posts. No other country even breaks ten. This reflects, I think, where the best English-language (or English-subtitled) videos are being made. But clearly it’s not Anglo-American poetry that people are looking for.

I kind of wish I had a more sophisticated stats system now, because I would love to know how many of the people looking for videos of Dickinson and Whitman are from the U.S.; both poets have huge global followings. One way or the other, it’s good to be reminded from time to time just how popular poetry still is beyond the borders of the United States.*
__________

*Yes, I know that Puerto Rico is part of the U.S. But Julia de Burgos is popular throughout Latin America, which is I imagine what accounts for her ranking here.