More poetically than I, Anne Waldman asks whether it is illuminating to think of poetry as a career, or in relation to careers. The connection to institutions. To commerce. The origin of the word career in chariot races. I would rather think of trajectories than races. Freeing the work from both competition and from establishmentarian … More Career Poets
These are some earlier notes on Anne Waldman’s Outrider and a few of my reasons for reading it. Continuing, I will excerpt from the second and third pieces in the book, and bold the phrases which most strike me. This reading is turning me slightly Buddhist. The term “OUTRIDER,” says Waldman, was adopted in part … More Anne Waldman
We lived, I and Lucie, in a devastated world; and because we did not know how to commiserate with the devastated things, we turned away from them and so injured them, and ourselves as well. (313) “If the mountains were paper and the oceans ink, / If the stars were scribes, and all the world … More Milan Kundera III
Here are some fragments from the first section of Anne Waldman‘s Outrider (Albuquerque: La Alameda Press, 2006). I love poetic manifestos, and I have just discovered an entire web archive of them. And someone at Western Michigan has excerpted portions of Olson’s 1950 manifesto Projective Verse for the sake of contemplation. I am engaged in … More Outrider
Walter Benjamin says that ‘translatability’ is one indicator of a work’s quality, that neither the work nor its translation was created for the reader, and that translation is a ‘mode’. From his famous essay: 1. Translation is so far removed from being the sterile equation of two dead languages that of all literary forms it … More The Task of the Translator
As it is April, and as I am dreaming of ancient languages and points north, we will read in Middle English of sweet showers, and listen to the original sounds while reading a modern translation of Chaucer right here. I do not read Middle English well, but I am hoping to read Faroese at least … More Here bygynneth the Book of the tales of Caunterbury
This evening as I attempted to track down certain modern Faroese poems, I discovered that the language of the Shetland Islands was called Norn, and that it greatly resembled Faroese. I came upon this English-Norn vocabulary list, gathered from informants in 1774: Foula,… … Fugla or Uttrie An Island,… … Hion. Bread,… … Coust. Oat … More Norn
Here is Alice Fulton’s essay Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions (Thumbscrew 12 [Winter 1998-99]: 53-66). In the preamble to her Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry (St. Paul: Graywolf, 1999), Fulton suggests that poetic speech is uheimlich in the sense of the undomesticated and ex-centric. It takes place in an … More Alice Fulton
It is windy here, so we will read an autumnal poem. Animistic, I like personified seasons, and I have bolded the lines which brought this poem to mind. To Autumn (1819) Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines … More John Keats
Nothing about pain Except that it is cloistered like a madonna in heat and at the finest impulse grasps and embraces me The little dog that looks from behind a nearby tree Nothing cleans the scab of a healed scar It sleeps warm and comfortable intertwining legs Its desolate silence freezes my strength It casts … More Nada sobre el dolor
coldhearted scientist وداد 