I don’t like Big Beach Novels for the summer, as novels invariably wind up boring me, but I do enjoy having a Big Booke of something-or-other to schlepp around from airport lounge to train station to rental car office — & to whatever home or motel or inn I’ll rest my bones reading, reading, reading. Happy to report that I most likely have found that book for this summer: Kenneth Warren’s … Read more Captain Poetry’s Sucker Punch
Edited by Ilya Kaminsky and G.C.Waldrep “If there is a country named Celania—as Julia Kristeva once proposed—its holy texts are filled with doubt, and they overcome this doubt almost successfully, with words of wrenching, uncompromised beauty…The book in your hands is not intended to become one of those heavy scholarly tomes that serve as a “proof” of one’s position in the literary/academic hierarchy. Rather, this is a collection of various … Read more Homage to Paul Celan
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born today 300 years ago. May be the occasion to spend a few hours reading into what is one of the greatest, if not the greatest (sorry, Augustine…) autobiographies, his Confessions. And then you can also check him out from here, & read on… Or, if more theoretically inclined, reread part II of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology. One can only love (or, perhaps, hate) the breath-taking brashness of the … Read more Happy B-Day, Jean-Jacques
I have been reading — & rereading — Clayton Eshleman’s An Anatomy of Night (published — details here — by Blaze Vox [Books] in 2011) with great, & indeed, increasing pleasure over some weeks now. It is vintage Eshleman, that is, the strength & power of image-making, always his forte, & the muscular & nervous dynamic that organizes & drives these knotted metaphorics forward, have in no way diminished with time … Read more Clayton Eshleman’s Anatomy of the Night
My conversation from earlier this year with Leonard Schwartz on translating Paul Celan’s Meridian first heard on his Cross Cultural Poetics radio program is now available via PennSound here as Episode #253: “Celan/Bronk,” 2012: Joris discusses his translation strategy in Paul Celan’s The Meridian: Final Version — Drafts — Materials (Stanford University Press) (30:09)
This just in via the Electronic Intifada: JTA and Haaretz distort Alice Walker’s position on boycott of Israeli publisher Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Tue, 06/19/2012 – 11:31 Alice Walker speaks in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah. (Lazar Simeonov / TEDxRamallah) A JTA (Jewish Telegraphic Agency) report that was carried by Haaretz, accuses Pulitzer prize-winning author Alice Walker of refusing to allow her iconic book The Color Purpleto be translated into Hebrew: Alice Walker, author of “The Color … Read more Alice Walker’s position on Israeli Boycott
Off for a week’s teaching at Naropa, so there will be few posts until I return, meanwhile check out this little interview I gave Maryam Monalisa Gharavi for The New Inquiry: Five Questions with Pierre Joris By MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI Five Questions with __________ is an experiment with flash interviews. The series on poets continues with poet, essayist, anthologist, and translator Pierre Joris. Years ago, after the sudden death of a poet I admired … Read more 5 Questions with_________
Lovely review by Peter Riley of an excellent English poetry press in the Fortnightly Review. Opening paras below, read the whole thing here: Peter Hughes and Oystercatcher Press. By Peter Riley. Peter Hughes. THE LATEST ISSUES from Oystercatcher Press1 have arrived. They are Cloud Breaking Sun by John James and When blue light falls 32 by Carol Watts. Oystercatcher is a small press run by the poet Peter Hughes, and his particular way of finding … Read more Peter Riley on Oystercatchers
Espied at tailend of this morning’s walk, returning through the Narrows Botanical Gardens. A yellow rose, beautiful but scentless. The narrose.
Lovely lazy Sunday morning, warm, slightly humid & possibly the first one of the summer will need the hum of the a.c. Meanwhile thinking about poetry & poetics — & by chance (though that’s the wrong word) come across this little poem by Robert Kelly, from his book The Time of Voice: THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY It should be formal as water is, obedient to every contour of what is yet … Read more The Elements of Poetry