"I do my best to formulate difficult and intriguing questions about texts that readers have deemed the best works produced in these various national traditions. Why has history been kinder to Quevedo than to Góngora? How do their respective writings represent very old breeds of impulse that we're still struggling with? What made Machado return to the fields of Castilla? What did Lorca, Neruda and other poets of the Spanish language learn from Whitman? What makes Neruda so universal and yet innovative? How and why has Borges haunted so many who have come after him? To what degree is the “magical realism” of García Márquez, inaugurated by Alejo Carpentier, actually magical at all? What is most strange, mystical, and/or Mexican about Octavio Paz? Or rather, what is most Pazian about Mexico?
"I intend the format of these seminars to be informative but informal; part lecture, and part discussion where digressions are welcome. We may even laugh quite a bit. At these seminars, you ought to feel among equals or else with some who are just a few steps ahead, beckoning you forward. ¡Que nos veamos pronto!"
More information -- dates, reading topics, and registration information -- can be found at the seminars homepage.
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At his blog for poetry and translation, John Oliver Simon has posted a journalistic profile piece about two Costa Rican poets. About Osvaldo Sauma: "At the closing ceremony of the international poetry festival in Medellín, Colombia, before 5,000 people at the outdoor amphitheatre on the slopes of the Cerro Nutibara, most of the poets read from their published books, but when it was Osvaldo's turn, he pulled a couple of sheets of paper from his back pocket and began reading a typed poem. When he finished the one page, he realized that what was on the other was something completely different, and he broke up. 'I shat with laughter, me cagó de risa, y toda la gente se cagó de risa.' A woman came up to him afterward and said 'Venite, come with me.' 'It was that gesture that captivated her,' says Osvaldo. 'My helplessness.'"
And about Ana Istarú: "'See, it's not as if we created a utopia in Costa Rica on purpose,' Ana Istarú (born 1960) explains to me. 'It happened by default. We're a biological corridor, a land-bridge.' At the weakest extension of Aztec and Inca influences before the Conquest, in colonial times Costa Rica attracted the second sons of second sons, who had to roll up their sleeves and work, since there was no treasure. There were practically no Indians left, no slaves. The Black population on the Atlantic Coast came from Jamaica just a hundred years ago. Nicaragua was much richer, with its factional wars between the Conservatives in Granada and the liberals in León. 'We heard about Independence by mail,' Ana laughs. 'We showed the typical Tico reaction: do nothing, wait and see.'"
Publisher David R. Godine is offering a "summer reading special" -- 25% off the list price of Grady Wayne's anthology of nature writing, "Bright Stars, Dark Trees, Clear Water." The discount is active until August 31st... authors include John James Audubon, Henry Beston, John Burroughs, Gretel Ehrlich, Florence Page Jaques, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Farley Mowat, John Muir, Grey Owl, Roger Tory Peterson, Ernest Thompson Seton, Henry David Thoreau, Catharine Par Traill, and. Walt Whitman.
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Some of you may know that the editors of Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics, are behind the creation of dozens of regional poetry groups on Facebook. Together, these groups form a network bringing together tens of thousands of readers and writers, and are a great place to connect with local literary goings-on everywhere from Cork, Ireland, to Cambridge, UK, to Nigeria, to Naropa, and New York City. (A full listing can be found at http://www.fulcrumpoetry.org/links.) These local groups are a great point of access to various kinds of community and conversation... for example, over at the Poetry South Africa page this week, I was pointed to http://www.klemen.pisk.net/afrika-eng.htm, where recordings are posted in all 11 official South African languages for the poems recited by South African artists and translators during the World Cup.
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Katia Kapovich is one of the founding editors of Fulcrum. In a new interview with her over at Open Letters Monthly, she presents an interesting view on the poetry in this adopted country of hers.
OLM: ‘You've said before that you've felt the goal of many American poets is to find magic in everyday life, whilst Russian poets have this inclination to create poems that transcend, that compress all the magic into one moment. You've called it the “orphic” poem. Could you elaborate on that?'
KK: ‘American poetry strikes me as balanced with occasional sparkles and revelations about everyday magic. My explanation for this is American individualism and its “normal” texture of life. Russian poetry, in comparison, might look somewhat outwardly, manic-depressive and “orphic” — a self-coined term — meaning that it's always “de profundis.” It's about life and death, war and peace, crime and punishment, in other words, about the extremes with which the Russian novel was preoccupied in the nineteenth century.'
Daniel Pritchard responds on his blog: "But it is also impossible to argue that contemporary American poetry is unconcerned with profound concepts. Many if not most poets are engaged with deconstruction and hegemony, whether they are aware of the influence or not. (These postmodern critiques seem to have become the mere techniques of poetic observation.) They do reflect on some of our deepest ethical issues, often focused on socio-economics and language politics. So much of human experience is given short service by these techniques, though. It seems as if the direct confrontation of the 'orphic' in contemporary poetry is considered déclassé, dismissed. Not all and every, but many and most — the plurality of American poets shy away from these Russian Novel Concepts." I.e., the Russian novel concepts explored by Tolstoy et al., not the concepts which appear de nova in Russian literature. Read more from Prichard at http://danpritch.blogspot.com/2010/07/poetry-de-profundis-few-notes.html.
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Ron Silliman seems to be routing similar concerns as he thinks on W. S. Merwin being announced as the new US Poet Laureate. Over at his blog, http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2010/07/i-know-whenever-i-use-phrase-school-of.html, Silliman argues that the poetic tradition he's identified as the "School of Quietude," epitomized by the writing of Merwin, is one of Neophobes: "Surely I could have used some other term, though the only adequately descriptive alternative I can think of is Neophobe. Yes, there is an audience for neophobic literature & always will be. But I would challenge the idea that there is anything “mainstream” about neophobia & I cringe to think of it as “Official Verse Culture.” Even worse, however, is that idea that it should continue to be the Verse That Dare Not Speak Its Name. That, of course, is precisely what is wrong with the neophobic tradition."
As near as I can tell, School of Quietude poets are those Silliman doesn't read or resemble. Renowned curmudgeon and go-it-aloner Bill Knott (whose mixed-bag and frequently marvelous self-published books of poetry show up all over the place) responds at his own blog, http://knottprosepo.blogspot.com/2010/07/silliman-neophobe.html: "the usual guff from the big bad wuffpuff." It is an interesting call and response, though I think its polarity is orthogonal to those Kapovich and Pritchard are mulling over.
In the current print issue of http://www.standpointmag.co.uk, the question is asked -- is Geoffrey Hill our [Britain's] greatest living poet? The poems and interview therein tell the answer. Hint: he quite arguably is.
The Los Angeles Review of Books, according to its organizers, is alive and teeming with book wormholes: "a new, groundbreaking, full-service book review soon to be launched on the web, with a print edition to follow. LARB will take full advantage of the latest technologies to create a forum unlike any other." Good for those who want reviewery, but not at the expense of dead trees. Follow the Review's development at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=325121077032.
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In May, Boston poet Lawrence Kessenich was awarded first prize at Ireland's Strokestown International Poetry Festival for his poem "Angelus." The director of festival, Merrily Harpur, told Kessenich that they would enjoy having more entries from the U.S. (ahem). Submissions for the 2011 prizes are now being accepted at http://www.strokestownpoetry.org. A bit about the circumstances surrounding the poem may be read at http://www.boston.com.
At the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, Don Share has curated an exhibition whose components, he writes, are "characterized by what the Bible calls a 'still, small voice.'" Quiet, but not quietude; call it the puissance of small voices. The compact smallness of Pat Valdata's sonnet "Plans" seems ready to leap up and out: "White men in Waxahachie plain won't / Teach me, nor any men North or South. / Being female, and black, they say, I can't / Learn such things. But my full-lipped mouth / Loves aileron, chandelle, empennage." Examine other works and read Share's exhibition notes at http://www.midatlanticarts.org/maar/exhibitions_poetry.html.
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Over at Slate magazine, "Wissahickon Schist" by Karl Kirchwey is the pleasing Tuesday poem selected by Robert Pinsky. From http://www.slate.com/id/2259548: "You open a book to the stories of changing forms / and see the guts of a mole exploded on the lawn, / a red-tailed hawk balanced, nonchalant, on the railing, / and the day's light cut on such a deep bias, // one February afternoon, with a thousand starlings / aligned in the branches of the silver pendant linden, // that it seems the whole earth will tip into a chasm of dark."
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There is a brief note in the journal Poetics Today about a new book that sounds to me quite enticing, "Poetic Affairs: Celan, Grünbein, Brodsky" by Michael Eskin. Eyal Segal writes: "Here the focus is on three “affairs” that played major roles in the poets' lives, though in one case only indirectly. First is the 'Goll affair,' in which Celan was falsely accused of plagiarizing the works of the poet Yvan Goll by the latter's widow, an accusation that haunted Celan and overshadowed his life from the early 1950s until his suicide in 1970. The second, regarding Grünbein, is the 'Livilla affair,' namely, the banishment of the Stoic philosopher and statesman Seneca from Rome to Corsica in AD 41 on the charge of having committed adultery with Emperor Claudius's niece, Julia Livilla, a charge resulting from a court intrigue initiated by Valeria Messalina, Claudius's first wife. (It is notable that, in Eskin's view, this Roman affair still constitutes a major part of Grünbein's literary biography, since the poet treats this past historical event as central to his own life and poetics.) And third, the 'Brodsky affair' concerns the poet's trial and conviction in 1964 on the trumped-up charge of social parasitism and his subsequent expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1972 as well as his liaison with and betrayal by Mariana Basmanova."
From http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=12384: "Eskin offers unprecedented readings of Celan's, Brodsky's, and Grünbein's lives and works and discloses the ways in which poetry articulates and remains faithful to the manifold truths -- historical, political, poetic, erotic -- determining human existence." Literary history can often nicely complement our reading of the poetry itself, when it avoids the market's inducement to tabloid biography or academia's tendency to turn the lens of history into the mold of experience. I'm intrigued, and wonder if Eskin is up to the same sort of elucidation as Christopher Ricks in his new book, "True Friendship." (A review of this latter appears atThe Quarterly Conversation.)
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Some Boston-area readings of note.
Peter Campion, poet and editor of the journal Literary Imagination, will be reading TONIGHT with Tom Yuill, author of the just-released Medicine Show, at 6 PM at the New England Art Institute directly next to the Brookline Village station on the D-branch of the Green Line.
Diana Der-Hovanessian and XJ Kennedy will be reading in the latest installment of the Poetic Justice reading series, Thursday, July 8th, at 6:30 PM at the Liberty Hotel, 215 Charles Street, Boston, right off the Charles-MGH station on the Red Line. An open mic will follow this free and public reading. Diana Der-Hovanessian, New England-born poet, was twice a Fulbright professor of American Poetry and is the author of more than 23 books of poetry and translations. She is the current president of the New England Poetry Club. X. J. Kennedy is a former poetry editor of The Paris Review, and his poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, The Hudson Review and have been aired on the Today show, Good Morning America, and Garrison Keillor's radio programs. Kennedy has also co-authored several textbooks, including An Introduction to Poetry with Dana Gioia, now in its tenth edition.
Mark Strand will receive the Golden Rose award at the annual NEPC Golden Rose reading. Part of the 2010 Longfellow Summer Reading Series, organized by the New England Poetry Club, founded in 1915 by Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, and Conrad Aiken. Sunday, July 11th, 4 PM at the Longfellow House, 105 Brattle Street in Cambridge. Free and open to the public.
On Thursday, July 20th, Nora Delaney and Michelle Robinson will read at the second session of the U35 series, at the Marliave, 10 Bosworth Street, Boston. More information and recordings of the last installment can be found at http://criticalflame.org/U35.
Ibbetson Street Press is pleased to announce its 4th annual poetry contest for residents of Massachusetts. The winner will receive a $100 cash award, framed certificate, publication in www.ibbetsonpress.com and a poetry feature in the "Lyrical Somerville" column in The Somerville News. The award will be presented at the Somerville News Writers Festival on November 13, 2010. To enter, send 3-5 poems, any genre or length, to the Ibbetson Street Press: 25 School Street, Somerville, Mass. 02143, along with cash or check for the $10 entry fee. Make payable to "Ibbetson Street Press." Postmark deadline for submissions is September 15, 2010.
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Erica Mena and Chad Post have posted a new episode of their Reading the World podcast, a series of lively discussions about the international world of literature. In this fifth outing, they're talking with Bill Johnston, director of the Polish Studies Center at Indiana University, about translations, dialects, and his forthcoming translation “Stone upon Stone” by Wieslaw Mysliwski: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id354090868?i=84508008. An interview with Johnston appears at Cosmopolitan Review.
I learned of the new 'cast via the Three Percent blog, a 'resource for international literature' hosted by the University of Rochester where Post works with Open Letter Books: http://www.rochester.edu/threepercent.
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Over at Three Percent, Post had posted a post about the new issue of Cerise Press, "an international online journal based in the United States and France, [that] builds cross-cultural bridges by featuring artists and writers in English and translations, with an emphasis on French and Francophone works." As Post writes, "Cerise Press is pretty beautiful and admirable." I'd add intelligent and sensitively edited to that appreciation. Many of the new texts are translated from contemporary French originals; one that I particularly enjoyed is titled "Notes from the Ravine": "A buzzard slowly spirals upwards in the harsh pre-spring light. You prune the pomegranate tree, its thorns scratching your hands. In order to counter all kinds of absurdities that would make you collapse on the spot." Read on at http://www.cerisepress.com/02/04/from-notes-from-the-ravine.
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I used to work for Keith Botsford, long-time editor of News from the Republic of Letters, about which literary magazine Botsford's co-editor Saul Bellow wrote, "We are a pair of utopian codgers who feel we have a duty to literature. I hope we are not like those humane do-gooders who, when the horse was vanishing, still donated troughs in City Hall Square for thirsty nags." The magazine still thrives -- http://bu.edu/trl -- and I think Bellow was overstating when he spoke against the threat of obsolescence. My friend the poet Ilya Gutner says, "art always exists by exception." Look at the state of translation; the Three Percent blog takes its title from the statistic that only about three percent of the books published in the US each year are works of translation. (Like those self-studiers who wonder why Adam had a belly button, United Staters are devout navel-gazers; cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_%28book%29, http://www.rochester.edu/threepercent/index.php?s=database.) Three percent is a small number, but we should take heart that we have it in our power, as readers, book-buyers, reviewers, and crowd-source participants, to help increase the audience for all kinds of literature.
Botsford used to circulate a regularly-updated email to those young turks who asked him what they should read. His Guide to Culture included a section on the literature of Poland: "Like Italian and Portuguese, Polish literature is one of our culture's best-kept secrets. Norwid is one of the very greatest nineteenth century poets, as good as Heine, as Keats. Czeslaw Milosz -- as poet, political essayist and memoirist -- is a central figure. He's to be read in fragments, one bite at a time. His collaboration with Alexander Wat, which produced Wat's "My Century" -- a great history of a terrible time - is one of literature's rare saintly acts. The Poland that was and is you will find in J. Iwaskiewicz's wonderful trilogy (having read it in French, I don't know whether it's been englished), but in what other literature would you find the essays and poetry and plays of Kazimierz Brandys and Zbigniew Herbert, or S. Lec? And that's to pass over the wonderful Yiddish literature that developed in Poland: a Singer, a Peretz, a Picard, an Aleichem. You have to seek these out, and keep an open mind."
From Johnston on Mena and Post's podcast, through Three Percent to Botsford on Polish -- this has been something of a ramble. I'll trim the thread with a bit of Yiddish enthusiasm from mutual friend Sean Campbell, who last night pointed out to me that the complete works of Isaak Babel can be had on Amazon for about $15. He's been hauling this massive scarlet hardback around with a great big smile on his face -- the image is distinctly not that of nags lining up at the trough.
