Divine Disgrace
by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) (translated by A. Poulin, J. R. — Rilke, Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets)

Too unfaithful mouth, my blunt will
shall never speak through you again;
I tried you out, but your breath scrambles
my diction with all the hazards of the heart.

---

Read rest of poem + an intro by Frieda Hughes @ The Times. 5/12/08

I just found out from my fav. show on NPR that the character of Dracula was based on Walt Whitman.


Walt Whitman
Early cover picture of Dracula

Dead
Sarah Harwell

The way my daughter sleeps it's as if she's talking
to the dead. Now she is one. I watch her eyes roll
backwards in her head, her senses fold
one by one, and then her breathing quiets to a beat.

---

Read rest of poem + an intro by Mary Karr @ The Washington Post.

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Hear Harwell read "Dead" @ The Poetry Foundation.

Vendler’s Yeats DAVID ORR New York Times May 11, 2008

"The critic is the only artist who depends entirely upon another art form, which means that part of his job is to determine the nature of that relationship. Should he be an advocate? A policeman? A curator? A hanging judge? A mostly loyal but occasionally snippy personal assistant? The decision is an unconscious one, perhaps, but once it’s made, the critic’s writing will be colored by his chosen role in the same way that our voices carry the accents of our birthplaces.

"Helen Vendler is one of the most powerful poetry critics of our time, and her relationship with her art is as simple as it is peculiar: she’s a steward...."

Review of Vendler's Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form

All the Difference JONATHAN MILES New York Times May 11, 2008

Review of Brian Hall's Fall of Frost, "the first fictional rendering of Frost’s life."

2 good quotes by Joseph Brodsky found in the article:

"Here’s how Joseph Brodsky once summed him up: 'Robert Frost was born in 1874 and died in 1963, at the age of 88. One marriage, six children; fairly strapped when young; farming, and, later, teaching jobs in various schools. Not much traveling until late in his life; he mostly resided on the East Coast, in New England. If biography accounts for poetry, this one should have resulted in none.'”

and

“Would you like to meet Mr. Frost? Then read his poems, nothing else.”

Plathophilia: Rereading Sylvia Bookslut May 2008 - Elizabeth Bachner

"Plath was a confessional person, but not a confessional poet. Of course her famous mental illness and her famous husband and his famous affair and her famous suicide are part of why she’s claimed so much obsessive attention over the years. But imagine this. Imagine that all of the elements of Plath’s life were the same -- not only the cloying mother, the black periods, the jealousy, the early death, but also the letters, the diaries, the paperdolls, the childhood drawings, the essays and even her 'potboiler' (as she herself characterized The Bell Jar). Imagine that all of these elements were the same, but she’d left us the work of Amy Clampitt. My point is that no matter what storms around in the worlds of Plath scholarship and biography, it really is all about the poems. Isn’t that what groupies are always saying? That it’s about the music. Rock stars are rock stars because they make music like that and for a moment or two, it doesn’t kill them, like a firewalker who refuses to get burnt. A great poet, a great rock star, a great artist is a psychopomp, an intermediary between worlds. Whoever they are, as mortals, is of great fascination to their fans and detractors. They are capable of producing bad, hack work, just like mediocre poets, rock stars and artists. The difference is that sometimes they break through, and let us see the underworld or the otherworld without dying ourselves."

Phillip Whalen, 1973
By Richard Wirick, Bookslut May 2008

"My roommate had gotten us tickets to a reading at the College of Marin: Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, clearly a super-group of Beat show musicians. The campus had a small chapel in a pine grove off Highway 101, deep in the foothills of Mount Tamalpais. The air in the sanctuary was damp and salty for a place so far inland; it reminded me of the 'chilly Buddha halls' and Yukon River roadhouses Snyder had celebrated in his newly released Regarding Wave. Though I’d carried the brick-like, unwieldy On Bear’s Head around in my backpack, Whalen’s was the work I knew least. And there he was in front of me, staring at some point in the chapel’s rear where the whale-ribbed nave rose up and left dangling above us all kinds of strange detritus: white paper lanterns and bones of mountain rams, dried rattling kelp, glass balls from Asian fishing nets that cornered the knotted hemp and kept it afloat."

When poetry was king The Prague Post May 7, 2008 Darrell Jónsson

"In 1965, when American beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg was crowned King of May and paraded through the streets, it was clear to the Czechoslovak secret police that the celebration had drifted way off-message and far out of state control.Yet, for a generation of Czechs who took inspiration from the beats, including Václav Klaus and Václav Havel, the day became a key link in the chain of events leading to the Velvet Revolution."

 
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

I have always enjoyed poems that celebrate the small pleasures of life. Here Max Mendelsohn, age 12, of Weston, Massachusetts, tells us of the joy he finds in playing with marbles.

Ode to Marbles

I love the sound of marbles
scattered on the worn wooden floor,
like children running away in a game of hide-and-seek.
I love the sight of white marbles,
blue marbles,
green marbles, black,
new marbles, old marbles,
iridescent marbles,
with glass-ribboned swirls,
dancing round and round.
I love the feel of marbles,
cool, smooth,
rolling freely in my palm,
like smooth-sided stars
that light up the worn world.

Photo by Fay Godwin

"Many of us hate looking at photographs of ourselves, but Philip Larkin seems to have particularly disliked the process. He variously described portraits of himself as looking like 'the late Stan Laurel',

'CS Lewis on a drugs charge',

or displaying 'as much expression as a lump of sugar'.


On other occasions he complained he looked like 'a cross between an egg and a bloodhound' and 'an egg sculpted in lard, with goggles on'".

Photographer's papers reveal image-conscious Larkin Mark Brown Guardian May 7, 2008

"Music is part of the meaning of a lyric. Music can take a set of words that could never communicate as much without it, and turn those lyrics into something more powerful. . . . Songs and poems have a deep family connection, but they have become separate art forms . . . What 'Poetry Out Loud' and songs have in common is that they are both performed. Nobody tells me they love Bob Dylan because they read the sheet music."

-Dana Gioia, qtd in: NEA Chief Offers His Perspective May 5, 2008

"Often in schools, students are turned off by poetry because they're taught to 'get it,' " said assistant professor Gerry LaFemina, director of the Frostburg Center for Creative Writing at Frostburg State University.

"So they read Frost's 'Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening' and the teacher asks what the poem's about and a kid says: 'It's about being tired and coming home and just enjoying a pause in the quiet beauty of nature' or something like that. And the teacher says, 'No, it's about death.' Now, the word 'death' doesn't appear in the poem. So students think that poetry has to be cryptic, confusing, a puzzle. And they learn to fear it."

Reviving the Vanished Voice of Poetry By Valerie Strauss Washington Post May 5, 2008

Memory
Yoruba song, translated by Ulli Beier

Whatever I am taught,
let me remember it.
When the big fish comes out of the water
we can see the bottom of the pond.

---

Read rest of poem and commentary by Mary Karr @ The Washington Post. 5/4/08

A Man and a Woman, a City
by Joan Margarit, translated by Anna Crowe
(Tugs in the Fog, Bloodaxe)

The train stops, wrapped
in the leaden mist that deadens
the noise of the streets, the iron hooters,
the discord of a bad music.

---

Read rest of poem + an intro by Frida Hughes @ The Times. 5/5/08

2 Quotes from Robert Pinsky on "the differences and the similarities between poetry and jazz:"

"They're both arts that feed other arts. That is, jazz music has had a tremendous influence on American popular music, on show music, on rock 'n' roll, and on American classical music. It's like a laboratory where ideas are discovered and things go out into other forms. Poetry, too. They both get adapted or diluted or incorporated into something else. I can't imagine [Quentin] Tarantino making 'Pulp Fiction' if there was no poetry."

and

"...Another thing the two arts have in common is to happen in time: It starts and it ends. A poem, each time any one person reads it aloud, it's a different poem. Each time you hear it, it's different."

A kaleidoscope of poetry and jazz Boston Globe Kevin Lowenthal - May 2, 2008

2 Quotes from Robert Pinsky on "the differences and the similarities between poetry and jazz:"

"They're both arts that feed other arts. That is, jazz music has had a tremendous influence on American popular music, on show music, on rock 'n' roll, and on American classical music. It's like a laboratory where ideas are discovered and things go out into other forms. Poetry, too. They both get adapted or diluted or incorporated into something else. I can't imagine [Quentin] Tarantino making 'Pulp Fiction' if there was no poetry."

and

"...Another thing the two arts have in common is to happen in time: It starts and it ends. A poem, each time any one person reads it aloud, it's a different poem. Each time you hear it, it's different."

A kaleidoscope of poetry and jazz Boston Globe Kevin Lowenthal - May 2, 2008

"In Ireland, or the us or the uk, the tilt is towards the poet who can navigate the worlds of the university, the institution, the community, the reading series, the community workshop, the literary festival. There has been a gradual, perhaps calcifying professionalism which requires of a poet a standard of behavior and communality which poets were once exempted from. I was never uncritical of that exemption. But now, somehow, I wish I saw more of it."

Islands Apart: A Notebook
by Eavan Boland Poetry

"Years later I will be struck by Robert Frost's remark that he first heard the 'speaking voice' in poetry by reading, of all things, Virgil's Eclogues. I will find this extraordinary and comforting in equal measure. Extraordinary in that Frost detected a 'speaking' voice in an antique language, at the remove of two millennia, and through pastoral, always deemed the most artificial of poetic genres because of its conventions. (Dr. Johnson on Milton's Lycidas: 'Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting.') But comforting because my experience in school absolutely duplicated Frost's. Not the pastoral Eclogues but the epic Aeneid: no matter."

Unforced Marches: A Virgilian Memoir
The Aeneid, translated by Robert Fagles.
by Willard Spiegelman
from Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Volume 30, No. 1 & No. 2
Reprinted at Poetry Daily

 
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Though at the time it may not occur to us to call it "mentoring," there's likely to be a good deal of that sort of thing going on, wanted or unwanted, whenever a young person works for someone older. Richard Hoffman of Massachusetts does a good job of portraying one of those teaching moments in this poem.

Summer Job

"The trouble with intellectuals," Manny, my boss,
once told me, "is that they don't know nothing
till they can explain it to themselves. A guy like that,"
he said, "he gets to middle age—and by the way,
he gets there late; he's trying to be a boy until
he's forty, forty-five, and then you give him five
more years until that craziness peters out, and now
he's almost fifty—a guy like that at last explains
to himself that life is made of time, that time
is what it's all about. Aha! he says. And then
he either blows his brains out, gets religion,
or settles down to some major-league depression.
Make yourself useful. Hand me that three-eights
torque wrench—no, you moron, the other one."

Good NPR story on "Poetry Out Loud," containing clips of the contestants reading + brief interviews:

Students Compete in Poetry Recitation Contest Elizabeth Blair 4/29/08

and here's the winning contestant:

'Poetry Out Loud' Winner Reads 'Frederick Douglass'

“I used to keep notes of my altered states of mind under the influence of drink in the hope that they would offer startling new images for poems. They didn’t. It was impossible to decipher my handwriting, and I kept throwing up. Another poetic myth bites the dust.”

-Gwyneth Lewis, qtd in Quieting the Demons and Giving Art a Voice ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D. New York Times 4/29/08

Boo. Hiss.

M.T.A. Derails Poetry By ROBIN POGREBIN New York Times April 30, 2008

"Those poems on the subways are going the way of the No. 9 line — that is, coming to an end after 15 years. Poems may still be posted now and then, but mostly the quotations seen on subways and buses will pertain to a number of different subjects, including history, philosophy, literature and science."

GARY SNYDER WINS 2008 RUTH LILLY POETRY PRIZE Poetry Foundation
April 29, 2008

"Poet Gary Snyder is the winner of the 2008 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Established in 1986 and presented annually by the Poetry Foundation, the award is one of the most prestigious given to American poets, and at $100,000 it is one of the nation’s largest literary awards."

Four Poems for Robin

by Gary Snyder

Siwashing it out once in Siuslaw Forest

I slept under rhododendron

All night blossoms fell

Shivering on a sheet of cardboard

Feet stuck in my pack

---

Read rest of poems @ The Poetry Foundation.

High School Student Shawntay Henry Wins $20,000 First Prize
in National Poetry Competition Poetry Foundation 4/30/08

"With a fan club including her family, friends, English teacher, poetry coach, and members of the Virgin Islands Council on the Arts, 16-year-old Shawntay Henry of the United States Virgin Islands captured the audience with her poetry recitations and was named the 2008 Poetry Out Loud National Champion."

"If one were forced to select a single word to exemplify [Elizabeth] Bishop's peculiar charm and power, it might well be 'No,' which keeps resurfacing at key moments. This was hardly a cry against life's challenges and opportunities. Rather it was a self-reprimand, or a self-exhortation: an internal urging to cast off first impressions, to look deeper and see things afresh. Time and again, an initial image gives way to a truer image: 'Are they birds? / They flash again. No. They are vibrations of the tuning fork you hold and strike.' Or: 'The city grows down into his open eyes / inverted and distorted. No. I mean / distorted and revealed.' Or: 'It is of wood / built somewhat like a box. No. Built / like several boxes in descending sizes.'"

The Poet as Survivor BRAD LEITHAUSER April 26, 2008 Wall Street Journal

"[Mark]Doty believes that poetry is not only a surviving art form, but a thriving one, especially among young people. He says that 10 or 15 years ago when he would visit a high school classroom to talk about poetry, students would groan and roll their eyes. That's not true anymore, and in his experience students are embracing poetry.

"'I think that this is a time when we're very hungry for the flavor of individuality,' he says. 'We have such a global mass-market culture. That tends to homogenize people and products, and we don't have much experience anymore of things that are made by one person at a time. And a poem is never made by a focus group, a corporation, a foreign factory. A poem can only be made by one person, making her mark/his mark in the world, giving shape to experience. And I think that we respond to that gratefully.'"

In 'Fire to Fire,' Doty gathers poems that reflect recurring themes Cape Cod Times LAURIE HIGGINS April 27, 2008

---

Theory of Incompletion
Mark Doty

I'm painting the apartment, elaborate project,
edging doorways and bookcases,

two coats at least, and on the radio
—the cable opera station—something
I don't know, Handel's Semele,

---

Read rest of poem, + two others from Fire to Fire at Poetry Daily.

"While it's probably too early to tell, Poetry Out Loud may eventually do for poetry what Oprah's Book Club did for fiction."

Students' national contest could revive poetry-reading tradition USA Today Greg Toppo 4/29/08

Bullies, Addicts and Losers: A Poet Loves Them All DWIGHT GARNER New York Times April 24, 2008 (Review of August Kleinzahler's new book Sleeping it Off in Rapid City)

---

SLEEPING IT OFF IN RAPID CITY
August Kleinzahler

On a 700 foot thick shelf of Cretaceous pink sandstone
Nel mezzo . . .
Sixth floor, turn right at the elevator
"The hotel of the century"
Elegant dining, dancing, solarium
Around the block from the Black Hills School of Beauty
And campaign headquarters of one Jack Billion
("Together we can move forward")

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Read rest of poem @ The New York Times.

(From the man notorious for his negative review of Garrison Keillor's Good Poems in Poetry Magazine: No Antonin Artaud with the Flapjacks, Please April 2004)

You're an author? Me Too! By RACHEL DONADIO April 27, 2008 New York Times

“'As publishing has become less expensive, the urge to write my own self has become the opportunity to publish my own self,' said Gabriel Zaid, a Mexican critic and the author of 'So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance,' a meditation on literary life in an over-booked world. Today, he added, 'Everyone now can afford to preach in the desert.'”

The Washington Post has a brief article w/links to poetry videos found on YouTube: Poetry in Motion, Thanks to YouTube Christopher Healy 4/27/08.

Here's some zombie haiku:

The Times keeps messing up the Frieda Hughes Monday poems--leaving the titles and sometimes the entire poems off of the on-line columns...(I hope they do better in the hard copies!) I just looked up today's poem in the orginal book: it's called "Autopsy," from Brian Turner's Here Bullet. The third and the last three lines are supposed to be in italix.

Autopsy

Brian Turner
Camp Wolverine, Kuwait

Staff Sergeant Garza, the mortuary affairs specialist
from Missouri, switches on the music to hear
there's a long black cloud hanging in the sky, honey,
as she slices out a Y-incision with a scalpel

---

Read rest of poem + Frieda Hughes' intro @ The Times.

Mary Karr excerpts lines from Derek Walcott poems at The Washington Post: Poet's Choice 4/27/08. I don't like how she's excerpting poems and breaking them up w/her own text instead of giving us the full pieces (see last week's for another example) --as I assume she gets permission to print from the authors and doesn't have to cut them for copyright purposes as I have to do for Choriamb...but it's still nice to see poetry in a major newspaper like the Post.

Two of the ones she excerpts here are too long for a newspaper column anyway, though "Sea Grapes" would have worked fine. Here's where readers can find longer versions of two:

"I'm just a red nigger who love the sea" is from The Schooner Flight.

"That sail which leans on light," is from Sea Grapes

The last piece Karr excerpts is from a book-length poem. Another bit of it can be read at Minstrels. The Prodigal, 3:II 

Order your "Support Poetry" Car Ribbon at Redactions. I wish it wasn't in mourning-black, but it's still a cool idea!

Man Writes Poem
Jay Leeming

This just in a man has begun writing a poem
in a small room in Brooklyn. His curtains
are apparently blowing in the breeze. We go now
to our man Harry on the scene, what's

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Read rest of poem @ The Writers Almanac. (Thursday 4/24/08)

Bookstore and poet in war of words over reading
April 22, 2008 By Bob Hoover, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Joseph-Beth Booksellers on the South Side welcomes a steady flow of authors to its store, from porno-film actors such as Ron Jeremy to prize-winning novelists such as Michael Chabon, but it imposed a different set of rules for Pittsburgh poet Jan Beatty."

Adam Kirsch likes to open his poetry reviews w/controversial leads that catch the reader's attention, even if they don't have much to do w/the actual books he's concentrating on. Here's how he starts his latest review of Eternal Enemies and Azores:

"April is National Poetry Month, the poetry world's annual effort to soothe its bad conscience about practicing a minority art in a democratic culture. Institutional attempts to make more people read poetry always have something forlorn about them, because they are based on a basic error in economics: They try to address a shortage in demand by creating a glut in supply. But if no one likes to read poetry — or so it can often seem to the discouraged poet — then putting poems in hotel nightstands or on subway cars only multiplies the public's opportunities to ignore them. "

David Yezzi and Adam Zagajewski: Songs of Innocence and Experience ADAM KIRSCH 4/23/08 New York Sun

 
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

I may be a little sappy, but I think that almost everyone is doing the best he or she can, despite all sorts of obstacles. This poem by Jonathan Holden introduces us to a young car salesman, who is trying hard, perhaps too hard. Holden is the past poet laureate of Kansas and poet in residence at Kansas State University in Manhattan.

Car Showroom

Day after day, along with his placid
automobiles, that well-groomed
sallow young man had been waiting for
me, as in the cheerful, unchanging
weather of a billboard--pacing
the tiles, patting his tie, knotting, un-
knotting the facade of his smile
while staring out the window.
He was so bad at the job
he reminded me of myself
the summer I failed
at selling Time and Life in New Jersey.
Even though I was a boy
I could feel someone else's voice
crawl out of my mouth,
spoiling every word,
like this cowed, polite kid in his tie
and badge that said Greg,
saying Ma'am to my wife, calling
me Sir, retailing the air with such piety
I had to find anything out the window.
Maybe the rain. It was gray
and as honestly wet as ever. Something
we could both believe.

Jabberwocky
Lewis Carroll

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

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Read rest of poem @ Jabberwocky.com