Category: Smorgasblog

Favorite posts from the blogosphere.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

George Szirtes on disaster poetry and Twitter

“Singular – a poem and comments“:

Natural disasters (and I don’t discount the possibility that human actions in terms of climate change might have been a contributing factor) are different from war. In war there are sides. There are no sides in natural disasters. We are all on the same side. It is not this or that human action we are looking to enter, but the great familiar yet unknown: our sense of being in a world that is not comprehensible to our consciousness.

[…]

The question of evanescence. Why bother with a medium [Twitter] that eats itself as soon as arrived. Why insert these texts (poems, anecdotes, enigmas, proverbs, incidents) into the fabric of general conversation? This perhaps is the most pertinent question in respect of literature. I would argue that evanescence is our human lot and that even literature takes its place among the other activities of life. I can save the texts of course, but their very nature is to be born out of immediate obsolescence. It is not so much a question of what it is like to be within that immediate obsolescence but what it is to have been within it then moved out. I don’t really know the answer to that.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Poetry collaboration, multimedia, and the remix culture

Rachel Barenblat has a great piece about poetry collaboration and remix up at The Best American Poetry blog. Although I also have some quotes in the post (thanks, Rachel!) I particularly liked this quote from Nic S.:

There is so much that technology has brought to the poetry equation – not just by connecting people & poetry and poets & artists who weren’t connected to each other before, but by changing both the face and the delivery of poetry itself. Poems locked up in hard-copy print editions only available for sale are struggling in new and more serious ways, while poems delivered in multiple creative ways online have new leases on life and are reaching an ever-widening audience.

“Locked up” indeed. We shouldn’t ignore traditional media altogether, of course. Appearances in newspapers and general-interest magazines, on television, and on the radio can also reach new audiences. But it’s largely thanks to online culture that artistic collaborations are beginning to take center stage. As Rachel puts it,

Something interesting happens when we see ourselves and our work as part of an interconnected matrix of creativity. Instead of “The Poet” on her pedestal and the adoring readers clustered at her feet (ha!), the new paradigm — it’s a bit web 2.0, or a bit fannish, honestly; everyone is a creator, not just a consumer — gives us the possibility of one person making art, and another person responding in kind.

Read the rest.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

On the value of misreading

Sarah J. Sloat in Passages North:

“Every surprise changes the world,” wrote the aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. In the case of misreadings, the surprise opens the possibility of an alternative world, one in which a clutch of attorneys might “spend the afternoon stargazing in the library,” rather than strategizing, as attorneys in our world are wont to do.

Positive or negative, there is something refreshingly jarring about the unexpected. Good writers do it by thwarting reader expectations. But in the case of misreadings, not the writer but the reader delivers the surprise. The reader’s mind switches out the details. It lapses. It sees what it wants to see. Not only does it overlook, it compensates and embellishes. The misled mind is creative. It doesn’t take words at face value but gets involved, creating a personal subtext.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The weight of inequality

Parmanu:

In the days that followed, I found myself thinking often of the common man on the street and the gap between us. I imagined people – the elevator boy, the waiter in a restaurant, the pizza delivery guy – looking at me, sizing up my net value, and comparing it to their own. On streets I often hid my camera. I sensed a strange notion of guilt, for things I possessed and they did not. I found this condition disturbing, and I wondered how others like me coped. I spoke with some friends.

“We know inequality as an abstraction, and we think we understand it. But putting a number to it, not statistically but in the context of an everyday situation, is something else.”

I was with an ex-colleague who now divided his time between the corporate and social sector.

I continued: “This is what happened when I gave that figure to the barber – I put down a number that made the gap between us explicit. Before this incident I ignored these people, now I think of them everyday.”

“I see what you mean,” he said.

“You live here – how do you cope with this on a daily basis?”

“I deal with it by contributing to social causes. And I tell myself that to do this, I need to keep a certain level of prosperity – good clothes, a car, an apartment, and so on. I need to keep myself satisfied, so that I can have an impact on others.”

“Hmmm.”

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Vulture

mole:

As we watched, a turkey vulture came slowly, slowly down, in great circles, till he was skimming the little beach and practically brushing the rock walls with his huge wings. Eventually he settled on the gull’s rock, a little farther back, and observed the crows at their work. He was remarkably small, with his wings folded: not really much bigger than the gull. We expected him to drive off the crows, but he just watched, for a long time. Eventually he stepped down, going carefully behind the gull, and sidled up to the grey lump, whatever it was, that occupied the crows. He never pecked at it, or interfered with the crows: all three of the bird-kinds resolutely ignored each other. He just looked it over, a long, patient contemplation, while the crows darted in and out. He did not seem to like the surf much, and retreated from it a couple of times. And then he took to the air, unfolding again into a huge, magnificent bird, and rose in circles, as slow as he’d come down.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Fortune-telling with foxes

Under the Banyan:

In the wilderness beyond Sangha stood a trio of elders who provide people with advice about problems or changes in their lives. To do this they seek the help of a sacred desert creature — the pale fox (Vulpes pallida). First the men use a stick to scribble symbols in the sand to represent a client’s questions and possible answers. Then they scatter peanuts over the marks they have left and go home for the night. After the sun sets, there is a good chance that a fox will come to eat the nuts. The next morning, the elders check which answers the fox has left its footprints on — and that is the advice they give.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

A fish named Unknown

Languagehat:

I thought “sheefish” might be a typo (the New Yorker not being what it used to be), but no, there it was in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary: “sheefish [shee (prob. native name in Alaska or northwest Canada) + fish]: inconnu.” The vague etymology was frustrating (it’s not in the AHD, which would have had a better one, and the OED won’t get around to redoing the S’s for years), but “inconnu” took me aback—that’s the name of a fish? Sure enough, the OED has “A game fish, Stenodus leucichthys, belonging to the family Salmonidæ and found in Alaska and north-west Canada,” with citations going back two centuries. And the etymology? “French, unknown.” Which is baffling at first glance, but of course what they mean is that inconnu is a French word meaning ‘unknown.’ And why is a fish called “unknown”? Apparently it’s unknown.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Fun with Han Shan

The Myriad Things:

I’ve been entertaining myself over the last few days translating some poems by Han Shan; and just for the hell of it, I thought I’d post one translation here. I don’t write much poetry of my own (although I used to), so I’m enjoying the experience of taking a break from writing prose, and tinkering with translations.

[…]

Between my feet
      the green grass sprouts,

above my head
      the red dust falls,

and seeing me there,
      the common folk

surround my bed
      with funeral wine and flowers.