July 15th Guernica Poem
section ten of "Mutable and Immutable" by Maya Bejerano translated from the Hebrew by Tsipi Keller
Teaser: "let me go don’t be a dog / my very dear cage / haven’t we agreed"
section ten of "Mutable and Immutable" by Maya Bejerano translated from the Hebrew by Tsipi Keller
Teaser: "let me go don’t be a dog / my very dear cage / haven’t we agreed"
Read Tess Taylor's poem "At World's End: North of San Fransisco" HERE.
Teaser: "Here at the continent’s end, fortifications / linger for the end of the world. They greet // each California morning, these barracks in the fog. / Below, the lagoon is gunmetal, or mercury poured."
Simon Rich should be in every issue of The New Yorker: "Animal Tales"
To be honest, I didn't know the New York Sun covered poetry until I stumbled upon this reconsideration of Robert Lowell's Life Studies by Adam Kirsch. For some time, Life Studies was my favorite collection of poetry. I like the term "favorite" because it means I can change my mind periodically like any good flirt. "Best" or "greatest" are much harder. Nonetheless, Life Studies was also on my list of 15 Greatest American Poetry Collections of the 20th Century, a homework assignment from my then-teacher Liam Rector.
Kirsch's smart piece absolves Lowell of creating confessional poetry: "It would be unfair, however, to lay the blame for so much bad writing at Lowell's door. Just as Marx was not a Marxist, so Lowell was not really a confessional poet." Kirsch understands the bad reputation that the term has gained in the past couple of decades. But why? All movements spawn poor imitations. Why has confessionalism become the whipping boy? There are still many fine poets writing in the personal style, revealing what is necessary in deference to the poem: Adrienne Rich, Marie Howe, Mark Doty, et al.
This problem has been more on my mind than usual because I am about to begin teaching creative writing to high school students, a fun job I've been lucky enough to have for the past couple of summers. The biggest challenge I face with these students is getting them to rethink their position that abstract is better. "If I'm too specific," they argue, "my reader won't be able to relate." One bright girl explained to me last July, "I want it to be vague; I want it to be any beach." It's difficult to explain how in the specific lies the universal. And so I use examples. "Skunk Hour," perhaps, to show how no one's mind is right, though Lowell means it literally when he writes,
One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Light turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town....
My mind's not right.
Guernica has just published two poems by Gabrielle Althen, translated by Marilyn Hacker. You can read them HERE.
Teaser from "The Unassailable": "Nearby harvesters bent in the vineyards / Mindful of patient provisions in the grapes’ blood / To each one his wine-press and his wine / As for me, I unleashed my dogs"
Jay Parini teaches Robert Frost to wayward youth.
This editorial from The New York Times ends with a provocative, perhaps even snotty, quotation from Frost's essay "Education by Poetry" : “Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.”
Two poems by Israeli poet Hamutal Bar-Yosef translated by Rachel Tzvia Back, HERE
Teaser from "The Well": "I am a poisoned well, / I told the ram / as he flared his nostrils. / Everything in me is poisoned. / Venom flows in my stones."
When I first saw The Gap ad in the New Yorker, I thought the artists (some of whom I quite like such as Kiki Smith) had designed t-shirts for various charities. But after closer inspection of the ads and a visit to the website to confirm my suspicions, it seems these artists have designed t-shirts solely for their own and The Gap's profits. SEE PRODUCTS HERE.
I expressed my dismay to a friend who all but yawned. Apparently (I hadn't heard!), that's what artists do these days. And, really, why am I happy for an artist selling her paintings, but irritated at her for selling t-shirts? Or (a better comparison) posters? This is an easy way for the artists to promote themselves. Shoppers who would have otherwise never heard of these artists may seek out their other work.
Side note: Are fashion designers angry that sculptors, et al. are essentially claiming this fashion stuff is easy? Like when rock stars pen books of poems.
I do enjoy the irony of Rirkrit Tiravanija's t-shirt, which reads, "The days of this society is numbered." I wonder how quickly this one is flying off the shelves at small-town malls. And maybe I'm just jealous that poets can't sell out (or at least not as easily), although I'm already forming a list of poets who would make great Gap ad models. Frederick Seidel's t-shirt could read "I spend most of my time not dying," accompanied by that cover portrait on Ooga-Booga.
