I can compose calmly and directly now instead of having my brain expand and pulsate in asymmetrical ways. And composition is craftsmanlike and pleasant. As it gets sharper, I can feel the synapses click and the blood run through the capillaries in my temples. I have more wind in my chest, and more space in … More Shahrazad I
By Karen Polster, via Zuky: The poems at Angel Island are among the most dramatic finds in American literature. The crumbling buildings of the former immigration station in San Francisco were scheduled to be demolished, when bits and pieces of Chinese writing were glimpsed behind the peeling paint. These characters turned out to be poetry, … More Poems at Angel Island
Arte de Amar Se queres sentir a felicidade de amar, esquece a tua alma. A alma é que estraga o amor. Só em Deus ela pode encontrar satisfação. Não noutra alma. Só em Deus — ou fora do mundo. As almas são incomunicáveis. Deixa o teu corpo entender-se com outro corpo. Porque os corpos se … More Manuel Bandeira
Regin Dahl (Tórshavn 1918-København 2007) will be buried in Tórshavn on the summer solstice. He was a piano player and composer with a strong tenor/baritone voice we can hear on the MySpace page someone has set up for him and us. He worked as an editor and proofreader, but is best known as a poet. … More Regin Dahl
Here is a new, self-tagging meme to entertain those of us who may be in Grading Jail. What college majors, other than the one(s) you actually declared, have you seriously considered or repeatedly fantasized about declaring? These are mine: Creative Writing Economics Environmental Studies Law Near Eastern Studies Studio Art / Ceramics. Also for Grading … More Other Majors, Other Worlds
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
