Your brain is listening to you
Haiku Metaphor
The End of Nature
Purity, Restraint, Stillness
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Best of 2010
I posted this "best of" list at No Tell Hotel's blog. I was thinking minimally at the time. Here are a few more I could have / should have also added to the list:
A Cloud of Witness, by Jason Stumpf
--excellent prose poems with a tight rhythmic backbone
Transcendental Studies, by Keith Waldrop
--the complete trilogy by the master of collage
The Cloud Corporation, by Timothy Donnelly
--this book is super hot shit right now, so my natural inclination is to try to be different & say, nah, it's not all that, but I'm really not different, I'm like everyone else, and man, it is all that
No, No Scary by Zachery Schomburg
--a fantastic follow up to The Man Suit, which was itself scary good
The Waste Land and Other Poems, by John Beer
--anyone crazy enough to use this title must be formidable. These talky, sharp poems take me back to sweet home Chicago
The French Exit, by Elisa Gabbert
--Gabbert's deft two-line stanzas are equal parts charm and dazzle as they swerve through observations, thought patterns, and reflections
Reveilles, by Nathan Hoks
--this guy's kind of narcissistic, but the poems aren't bad
I'm sure there's a lot of other good stuff I should add, but I'm still catching up with the best of 1983, so hey, 11 new titles is pretty good.
A Cloud of Witness, by Jason Stumpf
--excellent prose poems with a tight rhythmic backbone
Transcendental Studies, by Keith Waldrop
--the complete trilogy by the master of collage
The Cloud Corporation, by Timothy Donnelly
--this book is super hot shit right now, so my natural inclination is to try to be different & say, nah, it's not all that, but I'm really not different, I'm like everyone else, and man, it is all that
No, No Scary by Zachery Schomburg
--a fantastic follow up to The Man Suit, which was itself scary good
The Waste Land and Other Poems, by John Beer
--anyone crazy enough to use this title must be formidable. These talky, sharp poems take me back to sweet home Chicago
The French Exit, by Elisa Gabbert
--Gabbert's deft two-line stanzas are equal parts charm and dazzle as they swerve through observations, thought patterns, and reflections
Reveilles, by Nathan Hoks
--this guy's kind of narcissistic, but the poems aren't bad
I'm sure there's a lot of other good stuff I should add, but I'm still catching up with the best of 1983, so hey, 11 new titles is pretty good.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Ashbery and why to read poems
The lovely conclusion from Megan Snyder-Camp's compelling reading of "Paradoxes and Oxymorons":
Ashbery reminds me why I read poems. It’s not to understand a poet’s intentions, or to get to know the poet. It’s to savor the movement of mind that comes from fully engaging with a rich poem, and tracing the edges of structures whose echoes and ghost-images will appear at surprising intersections in the days ahead, working themselves through in my mind. Work, in that context—the work of bridging gaps, navigating a sharp turn, weighing one thing against another—feels like play. I get lost in it, I resurface, I dive back down. I show up muddy to lunch. I’m not trying to get exactly out of the poem what the poet put in; I’m certain that I won’t. What I get, rather, is exactly what I need, which shifts with each reading. I need a structure strong, engaging, and open enough to lead me beyond my own expectations into an exploration of what it truly means for one word, or idea, or person to connect to another—a chain of those connections strong enough, and flexible enough, to swing out over the vastness of possibility.I'm normally not one for reader response, but this seems like the way to go--especially her description of the mind working at the "edges of structures whose echoes and ghost-images will appear at surprising intersections in the days ahead," as if prescribing a kind of prescience to the poem that we meaningfully engage with. The chance play that forms our mental and imaginative destiny!
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Friday, November 5, 2010
Book Launch
I will be giving a reading at Newtonville Books on Dec. 2 With Mark Conway & Jason Stumpf. Come on down.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Reveilles in the blogosphere
Salt has posted a clip of me reading in promotion of the book as part of the blogs launching the Crashaw and Scott Award books.
Reveilles can be purchased here.
Reveilles can be purchased here.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Saturday, August 7, 2010
AN INVITATION
@ http://pippoetry.blogspot.com/
We invite translators to help us in Project for Innovative Poetry gathering major world authors. Please feel free to suggest a poet on whom you're working or have in the past. We need a decent size biography and complete listing of the poet's books of poetry with the titles in the original language, cities of publication, publisher names, and dates and the same for any translations into English. We also need to note the date of birth and death, and would like a picture of the poet if is available.
We also attempt to post English language translations of 3-4 poems, just to characterize the work. These poems may be published elsewhere, and we will list all copyrights and note copyright protections. In any event, if you are working on a translation this site may help to keep other publishers aware of your activities. Please feel free to suggest that they check out our site on a regular basis.
I am open any suggestions, and will attempt to get back to you as quickly as possible. Please send them via email (douglasmesserli@gmail.com).
You might also check our earlier listing of poets listed as we began our site.
Douglas Messerli
Publisher
We invite translators to help us in Project for Innovative Poetry gathering major world authors. Please feel free to suggest a poet on whom you're working or have in the past. We need a decent size biography and complete listing of the poet's books of poetry with the titles in the original language, cities of publication, publisher names, and dates and the same for any translations into English. We also need to note the date of birth and death, and would like a picture of the poet if is available.
We also attempt to post English language translations of 3-4 poems, just to characterize the work. These poems may be published elsewhere, and we will list all copyrights and note copyright protections. In any event, if you are working on a translation this site may help to keep other publishers aware of your activities. Please feel free to suggest that they check out our site on a regular basis.
I am open any suggestions, and will attempt to get back to you as quickly as possible. Please send them via email (douglasmesserli@gmail.com).
You might also check our earlier listing of poets listed as we began our site.
Douglas Messerli
Publisher
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Arctic Poems
Vieve has designed a very cool cover for my translation of Huidobro's Arctic Poems. At least I think so! I love the geometry of it & the minimalist feel.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Monday, July 26, 2010
Reading Moxley's "Fragments of a Broken Poetics"
As Teddy's been napping this morning I luckily stumbled across this lovely, keen, and provocative piece of aphorisms on poetry by Jennifer Moxley, whose work I admire. Here are some of my favorite passages with my own half-baked marginalia interspersed:
1
"The poet's psychology, visible only to the poet's friends, floats lightly over the surface of the poem. It discolors some words temporarily, but never quite settles into them—provided those words belong together. If so, they will eventually cast off this shadow; if not, it will eventually smother them. Thus, it is the poem, not the poet, that we love. Through it the singular becomes shared, the transitory eternal."
-What a superb response to the problematic relationship between poet and poem.
8
"The idea of audience is a nuisance born of the need for spectacle. Poems haunting the precarious dialectic between existence and extinction do not need it. Their magic is dependent on the private experience of separate individuals."
-Yes!
17
"Sleep, to whom Keats partly owes his "worthy rhymes," has long been kin to poetry. Saint-Pol Roux affixing a sign that reads "poet at work" to his bedchamber is the most playful example of this alliance. Both sleep and poetry open a passage to the unconscious, one by nature, the other by artifice. Both create memories of astonishing wakefulness, one through dream, the other through imagination. It is almost impossible to reproduce or transmit such experiences by other means."
-Yes, more or less, but I dislike the overly tidy distinction between nature and artifice... I don't know that either domain (sleep or poetry) rests purely in the realm of these two extremes. Is there not an art to dreaming? A wild, natural poetry?
"It is almost impossible to reproduce or transmit such experiences by other means."
-To my mind, it is impossible. It is where mimesis fails, which is why I find dream and poetry to be the most compelling states we can inhabit.
25
"Sometimes the poem has more friends than the poet."
-We can only hope so!
29
"There is a time in every poet's life when the mention of other writers, even if dead, is intolerable. It is a necessary rejection of the known text in favor of the not-yet-written. If things go as they should, this allergy will be only temporary. The lively mind will eventually find such closed antipathy boring and opt for openness instead."
-Don't I know it. Luckily all my allergies come and go...
28
"Poems demand a concentrated lingering to which we are unaccustomed. This is why they cause discomfort. When we stand still in one place, attempting to document and respect the details, we feel as vulnerable as a small creature in an open field beneath avian predators. Rapid and sequential page turning gives us a sense of progress and accomplishment, relieving us from the double threat of frustration and impatience."
"concentrated lingering"--getting harder and harder to do!
29
"Language has no weather, and therefore is not, strictly speaking, an environment."
-Hmmm. I really want to quarrel with this one. Maybe J.M. and I have different ideas of what weather would mean for language. I tend to equate weather with mood (don't ask why, just a bad pathetic fallacy tendency I suppose--though I don't think of it so literally, i.e. gray sky doesn't equal sadness)--I mean that mood is a kind of psychological weather. And think perhaps the most important aspect of a poem is its mood. So for me poetry can work as a kind of psycholinguistic "weather".
34
"I once wrote, 'those who think poetry is working, are laboring under a misconception.' By which I meant that the mental activity of writing a poem sabotages the mechanized reproduction of culturally programmed cognition: work-a-day thought is put to a stop. "
-Hell yes.
37
"The trick with fashion is to sit it out."
-An excellent reminder!
41
"After a point, even the poem can grow bored with its own devices."
-I hate it when that happens. That's when it's time for a coffee break or a bike ride.
45
"A great deal of overlap notwithstanding, the poem's knowledge is never quite identical to the poet's. Poets understand the intention behind their poems, and may even recognize the outcome, but there is always a remainder they cannot foresee and, indeed, may never detect."
-Couldn't agree more. This is why we need poems--we can get at that remainder no other way.
1
"The poet's psychology, visible only to the poet's friends, floats lightly over the surface of the poem. It discolors some words temporarily, but never quite settles into them—provided those words belong together. If so, they will eventually cast off this shadow; if not, it will eventually smother them. Thus, it is the poem, not the poet, that we love. Through it the singular becomes shared, the transitory eternal."
-What a superb response to the problematic relationship between poet and poem.
8
"The idea of audience is a nuisance born of the need for spectacle. Poems haunting the precarious dialectic between existence and extinction do not need it. Their magic is dependent on the private experience of separate individuals."
-Yes!
17
"Sleep, to whom Keats partly owes his "worthy rhymes," has long been kin to poetry. Saint-Pol Roux affixing a sign that reads "poet at work" to his bedchamber is the most playful example of this alliance. Both sleep and poetry open a passage to the unconscious, one by nature, the other by artifice. Both create memories of astonishing wakefulness, one through dream, the other through imagination. It is almost impossible to reproduce or transmit such experiences by other means."
-Yes, more or less, but I dislike the overly tidy distinction between nature and artifice... I don't know that either domain (sleep or poetry) rests purely in the realm of these two extremes. Is there not an art to dreaming? A wild, natural poetry?
"It is almost impossible to reproduce or transmit such experiences by other means."
-To my mind, it is impossible. It is where mimesis fails, which is why I find dream and poetry to be the most compelling states we can inhabit.
25
"Sometimes the poem has more friends than the poet."
-We can only hope so!
29
"There is a time in every poet's life when the mention of other writers, even if dead, is intolerable. It is a necessary rejection of the known text in favor of the not-yet-written. If things go as they should, this allergy will be only temporary. The lively mind will eventually find such closed antipathy boring and opt for openness instead."
-Don't I know it. Luckily all my allergies come and go...
28
"Poems demand a concentrated lingering to which we are unaccustomed. This is why they cause discomfort. When we stand still in one place, attempting to document and respect the details, we feel as vulnerable as a small creature in an open field beneath avian predators. Rapid and sequential page turning gives us a sense of progress and accomplishment, relieving us from the double threat of frustration and impatience."
"concentrated lingering"--getting harder and harder to do!
29
"Language has no weather, and therefore is not, strictly speaking, an environment."
-Hmmm. I really want to quarrel with this one. Maybe J.M. and I have different ideas of what weather would mean for language. I tend to equate weather with mood (don't ask why, just a bad pathetic fallacy tendency I suppose--though I don't think of it so literally, i.e. gray sky doesn't equal sadness)--I mean that mood is a kind of psychological weather. And think perhaps the most important aspect of a poem is its mood. So for me poetry can work as a kind of psycholinguistic "weather".
34
"I once wrote, 'those who think poetry is working, are laboring under a misconception.' By which I meant that the mental activity of writing a poem sabotages the mechanized reproduction of culturally programmed cognition: work-a-day thought is put to a stop. "
-Hell yes.
37
"The trick with fashion is to sit it out."
-An excellent reminder!
41
"After a point, even the poem can grow bored with its own devices."
-I hate it when that happens. That's when it's time for a coffee break or a bike ride.
45
"A great deal of overlap notwithstanding, the poem's knowledge is never quite identical to the poet's. Poets understand the intention behind their poems, and may even recognize the outcome, but there is always a remainder they cannot foresee and, indeed, may never detect."
-Couldn't agree more. This is why we need poems--we can get at that remainder no other way.
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