IBPC: Poetry and Poets in Rags

3/28/2006

News at Eleven

"[Robert] Bittlestone's insight is brilliant," says Gregory Nagy, director of the Center for Hellenic Studies, in Washington, D.C. "He has done something very important. This is a real breakthrough convergence of oral poetry and geology, and the most plausible explanation I've seen of what Ithaca was in the second millennium B.C. We'll never read the Odyssey in the same way again."

from Smithsonian Magazine: Odyssey's End?: The Search for Ancient Ithaca

[Aliki] Barnstone's introduction opens with a bit of personal history: "It was [Constantine] Cavafy's erotic poems that first captivated me. Now I am astonished by the prophecy of his historical poems." It's a natural division for any critic of Cavafy's oeuvre, even if, as Barnstone notes, Cavafy's erotic and historic poems are "inseparably connected."

from The New York Times: Modern Greek

"He dedicated it to Misha. I think it's one of his best poems," [Viktoria] Schweitzer said. "It's very interesting to see Brodsky using some of Misha's words in there, how it communicates with the book. He used to say he considered Misha to be his best reader and listener."

from The Republican: Man, writer, teacher: Friend recalls Brodsky

The quality of thought is perfectly matched by the language here, elegantly shaped, made to shimmer. There is never the slightest forcing. Every stanza--Wilbur is a master of stanza forms--seems effortlessly to unfold. The early poems could be cut out of the book, framed, hung on the wall.

from The Guardian: The poet as heliotrope

I think the poet's job and the poem's job is to try--to try--to tell the truth about something, and to try to tell it in a fresh, distilled, musical as possible, rhythmical as possible way, and as lucid as possible. I think clarity and accessibility are very important, and I want my poems to be understood.

from Valley Advocate: Easthampton Verse

"There's often the misunderstanding when you're writing in the first person that it's about you," Wright said. "But it's not necessarily. It could be anybody talking. You're trying to write something anybody could identify with and feel they’re the 'I.'"

from MetroWest Daily News: Book of uncommon prayer

One is struck when the simple, heartbreaking image finally comes together and the sentence ends: The speaker, wracked by grief, cradles the telephone's receiver, inconsolable. [Mary] Karr's reader also gets a taste of her patented, acerbic wit ("due to your having died and been incinerated").

from The Austin American-Statesman: Mary Karr's sacred verse

[Henry James] found her "zealotry" to be "unedifying", objecting in particular to the "insistent voice and fixed eye" Barrett Browning brought to bear on social and political issues. They constituted, he felt, a most "unbecoming characteristic".

from The Word: True Daughter of Her Age

[Camille] Paglia's take: As Oscar Wilde said, "To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up." [Rochelle] Kraut's impudent naturalism has a bohemian decadence. As a writer, she spurns bourgeois gentility and academicism; as a woman she trades sheltered innocence for bruising experience, with its loneliness and ennui.

from Toronto Star: What makes a great poem?

'. . . .If she ever gets wind of it, she'll probably hurl it into a corner of the room. I'll send her a copy, but I'll definitely cross out the thing about her breasts being like cobras, because that's totally untrue.' [--Hugo Williams]

from The Observer Magazine: Rhymes of passion

Here, [Alice] Quinn talks with Matt Dellinger about Bishop and her work, and reads selections from the book.

from The New Yorker: Quinn's Bishop

Great Regulars

What a marvelous gift is the imagination, and each of us gets one at birth, free of charge and ready to start up, get on, and ride away. Can there be anything quite so homely and ordinary as a steam radiator? And yet, here, Connie Wanek, of Duluth, Minnesota, nudges one into play.

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 052

The phrase "naked chrome bulldog" is fun to say, but, as the ampersands imply, the poem has no intention of lingering on such moments. Decay, exemplified by the decomposing leaves, will not wait for extended, prosey musings or explanations.

from Robert Pinsky: The Washington Post: Poet's Choice

Beyond him, none. His wide, strange camp at the end of the great high-road. And lots of new little poets camping on Whitman's camping ground now. But none going really beyond. Because Whitman's camp is at the end of the road, and on the edge of a great precipice. [--D.H. Lawrence]

from Frank Wilson: Books Inq.: Remembering Whitman . . .

The Malham Bird by Dannie Abse

from The Guardian: Original poetry: The Malham Bird by Dannie Abse

Still life with snake

By Jesse Nathan

from Lawrence Journal-World: Poet's Showcase

Cyril Ferez: "L’homme assis"
par Franca Maï

from MR Zine: Franca Maï, "Cyril Ferez: 'The Man Who Sat Down'"

"The Man I Killed"
By David Thorburn

from "The Man I Killed" By David Thorburn

Poetic Obituaries

"This sounds like he was a man's man, tough and strong," [Rev. John] Norman said, "but the interesting thing about Greg [sic] is that he had a softer side."

Norman said [Gary] Blackmon made great biscuits and wrote poetry. He was also a close adviser to his students.

from The News & Observer: Four Oaks mourns teacher

[Bridget] Braithwaite was an accomplished real estate lawyer with a tremendous zest for reading and writing. Her personal library included more than 4,000 books, ranging from the classical to modern science fiction. Her writing included short stories and poetry.

from WFAA.com: Bridget Braithwaite

[Ian Hamilton Finlay's] first poem in sandblasted glass was shown at the Cambridge International Exhibition of Concrete Poetry in 1964. Two years later he settled with his wife at Stonypath in the Southern Uplands, near Dunsyre, Lanarkshire, where he set about creating his poetic garden, later named Little Sparta.

from Telegraph: Ian Hamilton Finlay

[Kathleen M.] Hill was described as a poet by her friends. She published nationally in industry journals.

from Naples Daily News: Hospice mourns death of staffer

Kunjunni Mash, 79, the poet who tickled the imagination and thoughts of millions of Keralites with his funny one-liners, died here on Sunday. He was a bachelor.

Kunjunni had been ailing for sometime.

from Newindpress.com: Kunjunni Mash dead

[Stanislaw Lem's] first literary works were poems and short stories.

He emerged as a major science-fiction author in the early 1950's with works that he later disavowed as simplistic, and he sometimes ran afoul of the Communist censors.

from The New York Times: Stanislaw Lem, Author of Science Fiction Classics, Is Dead at 84

But early on, Mr. [Jack] Slater came to a conclusion.

"The answer is there is no answer," he wrote in The Seattle Times. "Just suffering and, if you are lucky, meaningful work, good friends, a few opportunities to love, and time to plant tomatoes."

from The Seattle Times: Jack Slater, 1946-2006: "I don't want to be missed. I'd rather be celebrated"

She played the guitar, wrote music and loved to write poetry, friends said.

When it came to speaking her mind, they added, [Suzanne] Thorne was fearless.

from Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Suzanne Thorne, 15: A gregarious teen who liked music, partying

Richard Usborne, who died yesterday aged 95, was the author of two highly diverting studies of neglected bestsellers, Clubland Heroes (1953) and Wodehouse at Work (1961).

from Telegraph: Richard Usborne

Noted film lyricist and poet Goverdhan Lal Vyas died here today after a prolonged illness.

from New Kerala: Poet and lyricist Goverdhan Lal Vyas passes away

Alastair Warren, who was editor of The Herald from 1965 to 1974, has died after a short illness. He was 83.

from The Herald: Former editor of The Herald dies

3/21/2006

News at Eleven

World Poetry Day
21 March

from UNESCO: World Poetry Day: 21 March

"If you say no to dictatorship and proclaim civil rights freedoms, especially freedom of expression, in an Arabic country," says the Omani poet and playwright Abdullah al Ryami, "you are in constant danger."

from The Guardian: Without rhyme or reason

[Samuel] Menashe's difficulties in his home country probably have a lot to do with the fact that, as an American poet, he appears to have done almost everything wrong. He didn't teach creative writing, didn't ally himself with his more sociable peers, didn't serve on many committees and didn't finagle his way into many anthologies. He appears mostly to have just . . . written poetry.

from The New York Times: A 'Neglected' Master

Indeed, [Charles] Reznikoff's work launched a withering assault on the shibboleths of a proper and conventional, a "literary," poetry.

Reznikoff's writing proved elusive because it refused the assigned system of values of a culture that annihilates that which it does not acknowledge as valuable.

from The Brooklyn Rail: Brooklyn Boy Makes Good: Charles Reznikoff, the Poet of New York

One of his [Nguyen Cong Tru's] famous poems describes the mundane life of a man who lives only for fame, wealth and pleasure who comes to the realisation that he must leave it all behind to live a tranquil life, one in harmony with nature. This is the expected behaviour of a scholar.

from Viet Nam News: Artisan De revives tradition of ca tru

"A page-based poet such as Eliot can sometimes appear to be baffling, and you think 'what the hell does this mean?'," says [Andrew] Motion, "but when you hear him reading, the hairs on the back of your neck stand up and you can feel something extra. There's a sense in which the emotional content of a poem does deliver itself through sound."

from The Scotsman: Well versed in web power

What you did was certainly an example of what John meant when he said, “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.”

But I think you were both wrong. I have the conviction that anything a person says—any sound any sentient being produces—is willy-nilly meaningful. [--Jackson Mac Low]

from The Brooklyn Rail: The King of Boredom

He was killed by some teenagers, some skinheads, nationalists. I was so ashamed. My poem--Death of a Cigar Roller--was published earlier this month in Russia in Novye Izvestiya. I also called a radio station in Moscow and recited this poem to hundreds of thousands of Russians. I hate any kind of aggressive nationalism. [--Yevgeny Yevtushenko]

from Tapei Times: There's danger in love poetry

This force transmits itself, of course, by poetic means: [WB] Yeats's essential gift is his ability to raise a temple in the ear, to make a vaulted space in language through the firmness, in-placeness and undislodgeableness of stanzaic form.

from The Guardian: The defiant self

In sharp contrast, [Luis de] Camoes' lyrics--his sonnets, elegies, songs, rounds, odes and eclogues--are virtually unknown outside Portugal. They exist in English in a milk-and-water selection by Lord Strangford (1803), in the skilful Seventy Sonnets by JJ Aubertin (1881), and in the explorer Richard Burton's eccentric Lyricks of 1884.

from The Guardian: In search of a rhyme

A News Wales reader in Australlia has pointed out that Wales has the answer to a problem that has confounded poets for years--finding a rhyme for the word orange.

from News Wales: Rhyme for orange found in Wales

Great Regulars

The poets among us, though, would notice the shoe and see an opportunity to use it to create a literary image that not only addresses the condition of that particular shoe, but the condition of all such shoes on the streets of our lives.

from Bill Diskin: York Daily Record: Poetryork: Inspired by her 4th-grade teacher

Walt Whitman's poems took in the world through a wide-angle lens, including nearly everything, but most later poets have focused much more narrowly. Here the poet and novelist Jim Harrison nods to Whitman with a sweeping, inclusive poem about the course of life.

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 051

The two are so far apart they are practically two different people in the same body. The result is a kind of madness.

Every inner emotion is contradicted by its outer expression. Inwardly, she grieves, she loves, she raves, but outwardly she appears indifferent, hateful and silent.

from Christopher Nield: The Epoch Times: The Antidote--Classic Poetry for Today

Cafe Oleh invites readers to submit their poetry for publication. Please send a maximum of two poems at a time.

from Cafe Oleh: Jerusalem Post: Readers Verses: Poets Corner:

That this poem has survived so many dawns and outlived not only individuals but also languages and civilizations adds to its emotional force. Sappho's "young students" are now dust, as ancient as the dust of their teacher, but in some other sense every reader of this poem becomes one of Sappho's students.

from Robert Pinsky: The Washington Post: Poet's Choice

Mahatma Gandhi felt that he had to pay immediate attention to this letter because of the unimpeachable source from which it came. But Mahatma Gandhi died soon after and no one has referred to that letter again.

from V Sundaram: News Today: The Congress crucifixion of Mahatma Gandhi

Rumi's major works of mystic poetry like: 'Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi' and 'Mathnawi' (Rhyming couplets) transmute the sorrow of human loss into the joy of union with the divine beloved. When I read the following poem called 'A Garden Beyond Paradise', in his great work 'Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi', I only felt that I was re-reading all the great Upanishads of Vedic India:

from V Sundaram: News Today: The melody of Jalaludin Rumi

Our Old Bed by Abdullah al Ryami

from The Guardian: Original poetry: Our Old Bed by Abdullah al Ryami

Sometimes it's the very contradictions in a poem, the presence of two or more opposing forces pulling at each other, or interacting, that give the poem its power and energy, as if it were driven along by that friction and struggle. This dialogue, or dialectic, is present in much great poetry.

from The Guardian: Poetry Workshop: Jane Duran's workshop

In a Chinese Restaurant

By Michael L. Johnson

from Lawrence Journal-World: Poet's Showcase (March 5)

Stationary Front

By Larry Rochelle

from Lawrence Journal-World: Poet's Showcase (March 12)

March Madness (12 March 2006)
By Priscilla S. McKinney

from Lawrence Journal-World: Poet's Showcase (March 19)

We were inundated with thousands of entries from Daily Mirror readers when we called for examples of your best verse.

We launched our campaign to get the country's creative juices flowing after reports that sales of anthologies have plummeted and only one per cent of Britons who bought a book last year chose verse.

from Mirror.co.uk: Daily Mirror: Rhyming Readers Rise to Our Verse Challenge

This lady, (E.T.S.) sent me several poems, one in particular touched me in a way that words can not describe. I am most honored to feature another of this lady's poems.

from The Monroe Times: Poets Corner

"The Hole"
By Tom Sleigh

from Slate: "The Hole" By Tom Sleigh

Poetic Obituaries

Sowkoor Subrhamanya Adiga (59), a noted poet, died due to heart attack on Friday night.

from Newindpress: Noted poet Sowkoor Adiga passes away

Utah poet laureate Ken Brewer, whose diagnosis of pancreatic cancer last year led him to write poems almost daily about the ravages of disease and his mortality, has died. He was 64.

from KUTV: Embracing His Own Death, Utah's Poet Laureate Dies

They laid stuffed animals and flowers on the median. A candle flickered there as cars passed by.

Devyn [Marie Burke], who dropped out of school when she was 15, liked to sing, write poetry, ride horses and spend time at the beach

from St. Petersburg Times: Teen killed in hit-run 'just loved life'

Police said they don't know why [Jeri] DeFabbia was driving in the wrong direction and it was unclear where she had entered the highway. An investigation is ongoing.

DeFabbia's family said Sunday she was a creative type who took pleasure in drawing, writing poetry and storytelling.

from Poughkeepsie Journal: Woman, 21, killed in collision with bus

K. Leroy Irvis was a modern renaissance man.

The poet, sculptor, activist and politician died Thursday morning at the age of 89. Irvis became the fist black speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, and the first in any state since Reconstruction.

from The Pitt News: Native Pittsburgher dies after life of scholarship

Eminent journalist and poet Yusuf Pasha died in a road accident in the city's Bangla Motor area yesterday.

A passenger bus hit Pasha, assistant editor of the Daily Janakantha, while he was crossing the road at about 6:00pm.

from The Daily Star: Road accident in city kills journalist

Island resident, singer, poet, philosopher and storyteller Lloyd "Woose" Reed died last Sunday, March 12 inside at Arcadia Nursing Home.

Having just turned 98 last September, Reed will be forever remembered on Chincoteague for his remarkable talents and generosity.

from Chincoteague Beacon: Island icon 'Woose' Reed dies

3/14/2006

News at Eleven

Back to 1996, I myself was thrown into solitary confinement in the infamous dog-cell No.2 of Insein Prison. At that time, Dr. Myint Naing (MP) was in the dog cell No.1, Dr. Zaw Myint Maung (MP) in the dog cell No.3, Myo Myint Nyein in No.4 cell, Dr. Khin Zaw Win in No.5, U Naing Naing (MP) in No.7, U Tun Win in No.8 and U Win Tin was in cell No.10.

from Asian Tribune: The Most Distinguished Journalist of Burma has to celebrate his 76th Birthday in Jail

Those graduating from a Soviet school remember Shushanik Kurghinian?s "Laborers" poem that was learned by heart by pupils.

Here we come--
In worn-out jackets, in grease and soot,
With shabby caps and dirty hair . . .

Now there is no Soviet Union, and as it disappeared Kurghinian was also erased from the school curriculum.

from ArmeniaNow.com: Kurghinian?s comeback: 100 years before or later, what difference does it make?

Though he was called to Heaven before completing the project as he had planned it, the message in Mattie [Stepanek]'s essays and correspondence is simple and clear. Listen to his Heartsong that reverberates throughout the pages that follow, learn to hear your own, and you, too, will be emboldened to take up the challenge of the ages: Just Peace. [--Jimmy Carter]

from ABC News: Excerpt: 'Just Peace' by Mattie Stepanek and Jimmy Carter

A prodigy in Westchester County is sparking a war of words over her fiery poetry.

The seven-year-old recited verse comparing Christopher Columbus and Darwin to vampires and pirates--and that just touched off the firestorm.

from 7Online.com: Poetic injustice for local child prodigy?

"My outlook is pessimistic," she [Elizabeth Bishop] wrote in January 1964. "I think we are still barbarians, barbarians who commit a hundred indecencies and cruelties every day of our lives . . . but I think we should be gay in spite of it, sometimes even giddy--to make life endurable and to keep ourselves 'new, tender, quick'."

from The Guardian: Looking-glass world

In "October," she [Louise Glück] writes:

It is true there is not enough beauty in the world.
It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.
Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.

from The New York Times: Art of Darkness

[James Merrill] told J.D. McClatchy in a Paris Review interview: "I believe the secret lies primarily in the nature of poetry--and of science too, for that matter--and that the ability to see both ways at once isn't merely an idiosyncrasy but corresponds to how the world needs to be seen: cheerful and awful, opaque and transparent. The plus and minus of a vast, evolving formula."

from Los Angeles Times: Medium with a message

At USD, she [Gloria Gervitz] said, "During 27 years I was in my poem 'Migraciones,' waiting for it, receiving it in its own time that it imposed on me."

The poem is divided into seven parts, many of which were published previously.

from The Union-Tribune: Mexican poet spent 27 years composing book-length work

From the front window she [Lynette Roberts] sees men arranging sheaves of barley "into a platform of dry trash". This image leads to the poem's extraordinary, defiant ending: "So the rats will come and their omens/But with them with more hop and joy/Fearless birds of splendid plumage."

from The Guardian: Around my cradled self

[Michael and Edna Longley's] partnership is quiet but rigorous, based on deep understanding and honest critique of one another's work.

"The poetry and the criticism exist separately under the one roof and come together at the birth of a poem or an essay," says Michael.

from The Scotsman: Well-versed in marriage

And, though relevance to the experience of middle-school children should probably not be the only possible criterion for choosing material, what does a poem about nostalgia for youth have to say to people who are still embedded in the experience of being young?

How does such remote nostalgia fire them with an interest in poetry and language as a way of illuminating the world they live in?

from San Francisco Chronicle: Leaving creativity behind: Drilling for tests kills curiosity and imagination

Great Regulars

Thousands of Americans fret over the appearance of their lawns, spraying, aerating, grooming, but here Grace Bauer finds good reasons to resist the impulse to tame what's wild: the white of clover blossoms under a streetlight, the possibility of finding the hidden, lucky, four-leafed rarity.

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 050

The book's title sequence presents some of the history in a series of poems in the first person: the voice of a slavery-born Native Guard soldier who recounts, for example, the recorded incident where white Union troops fired on the Native Guard rather than on the white Confederate enemy. (An "unfortunate incident," in a colonel's words as Trethewey reports and annotates them.)

from Robert Pinsky: The Washington Post: Poet's Choice

The exact positioning of the slant rhymes [George] Witte employs here--blind and spine, smashed and cast and glass--not only gives his verse its ever-so-subtle music, but also underpins its equally subtle thought. And Witte's poems are nothing if not thoughtful, whether he is pondering, as in "Thaw," what turns out to be "a mine of gnats englobed in dew," or, as in the title poem, trying to deal with an especially unnerving death:

from Frank Wilson: Philadelphia Inquirer: A poet who makes subtle music with his words

At the Fishhouses by Elizabeth Bishop

from The Guardian: Original poetry: At the Fishhouses by Elizabeth Bishop

There is a lady from the Monroe area [E.T.S.] who has composed some of the finest religious poetry I have ever read and has given me permission to share it with you.

So let's get to it.

from The Monroe Times: Poets Corner

Now this same primary panic that I feel in our rush towards patriotic armaments I feel also in our rush towards future visions of society. The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past.

from Purple Patch: Daily Times: The fear of the past --Gk Chesterton

"Lot's Wife"
By Katha Pollitt

from Slate: "Lot's Wife" By Katha Pollitt

Poetic Obituaries

In the 1960's he [Gordon Parks] began to write memoirs, novels, poems and screenplays, which led him to directing films. In addition to "The Learning Tree," he directed the popular action films "Shaft" and "Shaft's Big Score!" In 1970 he helped found Essence magazine and was its editorial director from 1970 to 1973.

from The New York Times: Gordon Parks, a Master of the Camera, Dies at 93

[Ken Lunt] said [Gordon] Parks told him it was about forgiving the bad times of his youth. Called "Homecoming," the poem was published as a letter to the editor in the Fort Scott Tribune in 2001.

from The Joplin Globe: Fort Scott to be Parks' final resting place

[Arthur] Collins and [Maureen] Stapleton shared a love of poetry and did several poetry readings as fundraisers for local cultural organizations.

"She drank a lot," Collins said, "but she was never drunk on stage. She drifted into this solo existence in the last years."

from Berkshire Eagle: Award-winning actress dies at 80

3/7/2006

News at Eleven

Aunty Delmae [Barton], 62, has sung on stages around the world, performed with ballets and orchestras, even penned poems for prime ministers but, yesterday, with tears running down her cheeks, she recalled the shame of lying in her own vomit, unable to speak or reach out to passers-by.

from The Courier-Mail: Left for dead at bus stop

These troubadours are consumed with anger about the power women have over them; they're frustrated by their lives; and they often address not their mistresses but other men, with whom they share political and poetic commitments.

from The Guardian: Hark how the auzels chirm

I had the letters translated from Polish into English and I took the translations and made couplets out of them. But it really just wasn?t working.

Now, I've always been interested in form and one of the forms that I came across was the acrostic. The acrostic is an ancient form for remembering in which the first letter of each line spells out something--a name, a message--when read in sequence.

from Bookslut: An Interview with Anna Rabinowitz

The signature style he [Paul Muldoon] developed--and it's fair to say that no contemporary English language poet is remotely in his league - consists of dense and richly allusive narrative passages (some critics have called it "cultural mapping") full of dazzling wordplay, startling rhyme schemes, and the witty and virtuosic reclamation of traditional English language verse forms.

from The Buffalo News: Paul Muldoon is about more than his books of poetry

Like Byron later, he [Jonathan Swift] wrote not as an artist but as a gentleman amateur, or so he liked to imply. The poems, technically simple but rhetorically complex, owe much of their effect to the known character of the author and his contemporary celebrity.

from The Guardian: Reveller at life's feast

The recipient of the poem "To Grief" is as much a being as the recipient of "To Paula," "To the Corner of the Eye" as "To the Next Time. [W.S.] Merwin is Ulysses and his departed teeth are those companions who did not survive the Odyssey. He and the few who remain sit beside the hearth. Sitting there he addresses another companion in the poem "To Smoke"

from Bookslut: Present Company by W.S. Merwin

This attention to sheer detail is characteristic of the sensibility behind Clampitt's poetry. Like Marianne Moore, [Amy] Clampitt was an architect of detail; as she remarked to another writer, "Finding a form is, as I see it, the main problem when it comes to writing poetry."

from The Philadelphia Inquirer: Letters of a shy poet who cherished the detail of verse and life

"Poetry," she [Jane Hirshfield] summed up, "is about the precise language to convey the precise thought."

"But the hardest part of a poem," she said, "is finding the subject."

from Santa Cruz Sentinel: Chris Watson, Bookends: Jane Hirshfield talks about the art and science of writing poetry

Arthur Miller: I tell you frankly, sir, I think if you are talking about a poem I would say that a man should have the right to write a poem just about anything.

from The Independent: Arthur Miller on trial

"I knew I had a story to tell, but it took me a long time to write it down; I had to begin by writing the most simple things. The most difficult thing, however, was that nobody wanted to hear this story. People would look at me, smile and walk away. That affected me more than what happened in prison. That is what affects your capacity to write." [--Carlos Reyes-Manzo]

from The Guardian: Word power

Sometimes in her VW beetle, Peggy [Appiah] crisscrossed the Asante region triple checking on information on abramo? (goldweights), adinkra symbols, and proverbs and establishing their accurate meanings and interpretations with chiefs, priests, elders and other informed people.

from Accra Daily Mail: Peggy Appiah Never Dies

Great Regulars

In its composition and representation it is plainly different from Pollock's "Lavender Mist," but, surprisingly, I find them similar in that both the painting and the poem are full of atmosphere and action, control and coincidence--four elements necessary for any artist serious about the relationship between form and content.

from David Biespiel: The Oregonian: Control, creativity meld in poet's mist of artistry

Julie Steeper does not take being a poet lightly. "Poets have always been society's true historians," Steeper says. "We do not simply report--we reflect the impressions of society. We write not just of facts, but of feelings."

from Bill Diskin: York Daily Record: Poetryork: Dover poet inspired by Sylvia Plath

What makes the whole process interesting is when two people climb into the same bed to warm up the covers. This week?s poets explore the happiness that comes from snuggling in with long-term partners to sleep well through long winter nights.

from Elizabeth W. Garber: Village Soup: A Year of Poetry from a Wealth of Maine Poets: Snuggling under the covers on cold winter nights

Just as the things we see and hear and wonder at leave our own field of vision, the flowers, birds, and bees appear and dance a marvelous dance, and then all that is left is "the lonesome field."

from Linda Sue Grimes: BellaOnline: Knowing One?s Own Self

This fine poem by Rodney Torreson, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, looks into the world of boys arriving at the edge of manhood, and compares their natural wildness to that of dogs, with whom they feel a kinship.

from Ted Kooser: American Life in Poetry: Column 049

Cafe Oleh invites readers to submit their poetry for publication. Please send a maximum of two poems at a time.

from Cafe Oleh: Jerusalem Post: Readers Verses: Poets Corner

This is wit on a rampage, dramatizing its own excessive drama, generating a sense of desperation as well as knowledge. This is not quite a mad song, but nearly.

from Robert Pinsky: The Washington Post: Poet's Choice

A Description of the Morning by Jonathan Swift

from The Guardian: Original poetry: A Description of the Morning by Jonathan Swift

I like the unobtrusive form, the short line at the end of each stanza reinforcing the narrator's absence from the world. There are some lovely moments: the idea of eyes unlearning "the habit of seeing me" is original and beautiful, as is the leaving of a dream that won't be remembered.

from The Guardian: Poetry Workshop: Ghosts, written

That technique involves the seizure of power by a small, highly disciplined group of people; the terror and the secret police follow, it would seem, automatically. I do not think any group good enough to have such power. They are men of like passions with ourselves.

from Purple Patch: Daily Times: I am a democrat . . . --Cs Lewis

"The Worker"
By Sharon Olds

from Slate: "The Worker" by Sharon Olds

Poetic Obituaries

"My way of writing poetry was to go to a jazz concert and just let the music come through me and just write nonsense poems, so that one was listening to the noise of the words rather than the meaning." [--Ivor Cutler]

from BBC News: Cult poet Ivor Cutler dies at 83

Tsegaye [Gebremedhin Khewessa] was the author of five plays and half a dozen collections of poetry as well as 30 translations/adaptation of plays by leading European and Russian poets and playwrights.

He won the coveted Haile Selassie I Prize for Amharic (language) Literature in the early 1970s, receiving his award personally from the late emperor.

from IOL: Ethiopian poet laid to rest in Addis Ababa

[John La Rose] was also the editor at New Beacon Books and of their journal, New Beacon Review, and published two volumes of his own poetry, Foundations (1966) and Eyelets of Truth Within Me.

from The Guardian: John La Rose

[Luna Leopold] traveled the globe studying rivers in Europe, the Middle East, India and Russia.

He also built furniture and cabins, hunted and fished, made his own bows and arrows, flew planes, painted landscapes, wrote poetry, composed music, rode horses and acted on stage.

from Tri-Valley Herald: UC Berkeley professor, geomorphology pioneer dies at 90

Phil Nisbet, writer, poet, geologist and frequently insightful critic of uncritical thinking, died suddenly and unexpectedly last night at his home in Moscow. The apparent cause of death was a heart attack.

from New West: New West Contributor, Phil Nisbet, Dies Unexpectedly at his Moscow Home

[Montri Umavijani] sketched it while on the road or sipping coffee, the goal being to search for the ultimate truth and fathom the innermost level of human consciousness through experience.

Montri was by all means Thailand's greatest contemporary poet, well versed in both English and Thai.

from Nation Multimedia: Montri Umavijani, our greatest modern poet: 1941-2006

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