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Text of the page (random words):
ght now the speaker is at home in the labor of the fields longer than a man s life i want to be at home that way i want to wait with berry here in the fields to see how well the rain brings on the grass berry gazes quietly his jeffersonian face resting on his hands that cap his hoe and i hop up and down beside him tugging on a turned up cuff berry s poetic voice is deep and resonant like the voices that read lincoln s words in the documentaries berry s poetry is also deceptively simple like lincoln s best lines part of berry s resonance comes from his decision to live his lines in the early 1960 s berry gave up his teaching position at new york university to farm and teach in henry county kentucky where his family had farmed for over 150 years his discussion of environmental issues in robert bly i recently got my hands on ten poems of francis ponge translated by robert bly u0026amp ten poems of robert bly inspired by the poems of francis ponge owl s head press published it in 1990 on acid free paper bly is my current poet man and i was happy to see this volume after reading a piece on another ponge volume at via negativa not too long ago bly says that he began translating ponge s poetry twenty years before the volume s publication ponge then was also an inspiration for bly s larger books of prose poems the morning glory and this body is made of camphor and gopherwood both published in the 1970 s one can see ponge s influence more clearly in the poems of the morning glory which like ponge s poems in ten poems are principally object poems the prose poems of both of these poets where successful permit the reader to see their objects in a light not exactly revealed by the poems words bly strives to get across some quality in an object or animal that he feels words cannot reach bly finds that this ineffable quality of things resonates in the subconscious he is not of course the only t s eliot i love east coker i do last night i patched up my thirty year old copy of eliot s four quartets with clear packaging tape when i was in college one of my friends paid twenty dollars to rebind my twenty five dollar leather bound king james bible for my birthday but by last night no one had offered to rebind my 1 65 harvest book paperback edition of four quartets maybe i m supposed to have internalized all the words i need by now the paper is thick and the pages haven t yellowed at all the top edges of the pages have inexplicable rusty freckles like the ones on my arms i m also in the middle way in fact i m as old as eliot was when he wrote east coker since when is fifty the middle way by the way was eliot flattering himself my life divides neatly into smaller decade long lives as if i were leading six different lives and my fifties life makes me feel old a lot like my thirties life did my thirties were a little hard i was out of shape and had lots of aches and pains some clock went off in my head at age thirty i m not married what juan r jimenez at the base of the approach of training poets to consider their poems from a reader s standpoint is the notion that the writer s problems are literary in truth the writer s problems are usually psychological like everyone else s from the introduction to the triggering town by richard hugo to write differently you have to change your life robert bly a good poet may or may not write poetry but a consistent poet would never write poetry so writes nobel prize winning poet juan ramón jiménez in his 1941 essay poetry and literature in reality the poet when mute or when writing is an abstract dancer and if he writes it is out of an everyday weakness for to be truly consistent he ought not to write he who ought to write is the literary man unlike poetry literature is an imitative art tied chiefly to the sense of sight and linked in jiménez s mind to painting and sculpture as an imitative art literature is full of contrivances and may attain a kind of perfection indeed it becomes more perfect the more artificial and contrived it is poetry though is a creative art grounded in garrison keillor we got off the mountain today and spent a couple hours at the local barnes and noble we re more profligate on vacation so we each got a couple of books i bought good poems garrison keillor s first anthology of the poems he has read on the writer s almanac over several years of weekday mornings i ve wanted to write fewer poems that are as keillor in his introduction describes his own early poetry lacerating opaque complexly layered unreadable who better to turn to than keillor because he s on the radio he picks poems that make a strong first impression and sound good he s also a snob snob for instance keillor s introduction lacerates a couple of my heroes including t s eliot gosh garrison who is more delicious to the ear than eliot but i ll absorb the blow i m in no position to use eliot as a direct model for my own writing after dinner i propose a poetry reading michael t s and b are good sports and i assign each of them a couple of poems from good poems t has spent most of the last three months training a dog she does this in her spare time when she s not czeslaw milosz czeslaw milosz was mixed up in a lot of twentieth century history but he managed to be one of the century s greatest poets anyway he died this past summer at age 93 two years after publishing new and collected poems 1931 2001 from which the poems quoted in this article are drawn milosz s poems rarely address directly the terror he witnessed under stalin s and hitler s régimes milosz apparently agreed with polish novelist eliza orzeszkowa who he said certainly knew much about the dark side of human existence but she preferred for reasons she considered superior not to divulge that knowledge the superior reason for milosz may be his curious form of optimism that bends in the face of hell but does not break in this respect milosz s optimism resembles that of dostoevsky whom milosz lectured on during milosz s many years as a professor at berkeley milosz was catholic but unlike dostoevsky he had his doubts about his christian faith milosz preferred a philosophical faith i e a belief in transcendence as a measure of humanity he believed in objective truth and reason which he considered a gift of god what i learned from jeanne hersch milosz had faith also in tom montag the cover is nice but i prefer to judge tom montag s the big book of ben zen by its paper the book is mostly paper and the words seem comfortable with that they aren t saddled with the entire book s weight they are free to range and return home i am moved to say some of the book is ink but most of the book is paper but ben is up ahead of me not all of the notes just the right ones and the silence ben zen s silence and the space that suggests silence remind one of zen poetry as lucien stryk says in the preface to zen poems of china and japan his joint translation with takashi ikemoto silence carries its weight in a zen poem zen paintingu0026 8217 s brush strokes however few serve to make the mind aware of the space suggested not so much by the absence of objects but by the manner in which the objects are absorbed and in poetry perhaps the most important things are to be found in the silence following the words for it is then that the reader or listener becomes conscious of the calm within ben isn t trying to be anything mind you nic sebastian nothing s as dull as another s dream all that disassociated description nic sebastian s poems in her debut poetry book forever will end on thursday are dreams i think but dreams stripped down to personal myth sound and a few sunken words convey the ineluctable feeling that description carries for the dreamer alone place and syntax are only hinted at in nic s poems and both place and action are primal words don t build here they point and they double up or break into phonemes or both they don t create meaning they surrender to it oboe you are the beauty of bound reed or better numen s breath passing through reed into african blackwood or better shaman s fingers on silver keys you are oboe nic s poems move like dreams dreams undigested and finally flying on their own terms these poems carry the universal without the local the world without the grain of sand even the black paperback covers curl away from the book like raven s wings most lyric poems are to me a vivid daydream or a cheap vacation but nic s don t meet me at the runway they re in mid flight when i turn a page to them how do i board i repeat gary soto i first discovered gary soto this past school year in the glossary of our fat ninth grade english textbook the glossary references his poem oranges as a study in connotation a concept i was about to teach after teaching the poem to four different classes i was ready for more soto so i bought soto s new and selected poems now ten years old soto is a study in connotation in getting a lot out of a little his poems especially his early ones glint with the scraps of language that get brushed off of many poets workbenches consider copper in which leonard and the poet are walking dirt alleys after mass collecting copper in the first stanza copper scraps are a means to a meager income in the second and last stanza copper becomes a guiding light its soft glow contrasting with the white glow of leonard s and his bloated bodies before a snowy tv on a snowy day collecting copper becomes an ironic means for leonard and the poet to recover their dignity using sparse images soto moves deftly from connotation to theme in almost no time soto s early poems often sketch his poor childhood in a family lisa russ sparr there is little proof that emily dickinson and gerard manley hopkins contemporaries who led single and relatively reclusive lives writing poetry on opposite sides of the atlantic met and wedded and produced children in fact the only proof i ve found to support this absurd claim is the poetry of lisa russ sparr which seems to descend from both poets work sparr shares dickinson s cool ironic personification that becomes story just in time to end there s something like ice cream in dickinson s and sparr s essences of abstractions like soul and death and worship they are scooped more than they are sculpted but sparr also inherits hopkins s diction chosen both for the heat and force of sound and both poets sound makes meaning as well as for the subconscious associations carried by the perfect unfitly spoken word for sparr maybe apples of dusk in pictures of cobalt sparr dwells on sky she draws from blue and the stars and the hot afternoon she ll seemingly choose any subject or feeling or poetic form under the sky so long as her soul can live under that sky and in sight of it for me lisa russ sparr s poetry shakes with the pervasion charles wright what gets me about gerard manley hopkins right now and the reason i read his bio and reread some of his poems this month isn t hopkins but what charles wright can do with him as far as i can see wright loves hopkins s repetition and his invented compound nouns and adjectives but he achieves something different with them the poet richard watson dixon wrote hopkins that he agreed with robert bridges s assessment hopkins s poems more carried him out of himself than those of any one i feel the same way about hopkins s poems there s something pure and other about them that allows me to connect with him but wright takes me not out of myself but into a space within a void a sometimes scary one a void that feels like contemplation is coming for me then wright is pure mirror all knowing unknowable discoverable only as i slowly discover myself so he s kind of like the therapist i had years ago soft spoken but professional the tribe s shaman who always pointed me to an abyss i started reading wright s black zodiac a couple of months ago because i thought he could help me with my writing i loved how books on poets gerard manley hopkins during his three years in a poor but beautiful part of wales where he would learn the welsh language as perhaps the single thing he had time to enjoy outside of his theological studies he was assigned to undertake as part of his training to become a jesuit priest gerard manley hopkins began writing poetry again he had burnt all of his poetry seven years earlier when he had joined the jesuits hopkins s rector at st beuno s in wales father jones who had a better feel for hopkins s true gifting than any of his superiors to date jesuit superiors as well as his superiors at oxford where he had converted to catholicism around age twenty saw how moved hopkins had become reading in the times about the foundering of the north german steamer deutschland off the english coast and suggested that someone at the theologate write an ode celebrating the lives of the five catholic nuns who drowned in the disaster hopkins volunteered the papers were still adding to the public s knowledge of what happened when hopkins began writing his ode hopkins sent the wreck of the deutschland to the month a jesuit magazine which took a few months robert lax thoughts while reading merton u0026amp friends a joint biography of thomas merton robert lax and edward rice by james harford i feel a tension between my devotional life and my love of writing i have recognized this tension also in the writings of trappist monk thomas merton a modern day contemplative and a gifted writer i bought echoing silence thomas merton and the vocation of writing a 2007 compilation of merton s writings on writing to see how merton lived with a calling to both writing and devotion i ve always found merton s distinction in new seeds of contemplation between a poet and a contemplative both true and tough the poet enters into himself in order to create the contemplative enters into god in order to be created i found language in echoing silence from the 1958 essay poetry and contemplation a reappraisal that expands on the new seeds aphorism now it is precisely here a novice contemplative s tentative experiences of grace which reflection threatens to spoil that the aesthetic instinct changes its colors and from being a precious gift becomes a real danger if the intuition of the poet naturally leads him into the inner sanctuary of his soul it is for william shakespeare a year in the life of william shakespeare 1599 by james shapiro a new kind of history year book has become somewhat popular over the past twenty years or so we have fairly popular books dedicated to and named for 1066 1688 and 1857 books published last year covered 1776 and 1599 the latter being james shapiro s a year in the life of william shakespeare 1599 the subject of this review i wonder if anyone has calculated what year we will have a history book about each year of recorded history at this slow but accelerating rate what accounts for the popularity of this recent genre of history book it certainly interests us to see a significant historical phenomenon or issue played out in the ...
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