THE BEST WORDS IN THEIR BEST ORDER

The Saddest Thing About National Poetry Month

Is that it's only 30 days long. Sigh. Since this is the last day of April, and therefore the last day of National Poetry Month 2007, it's sadly time to change the ringtone on your cell phone, return to downloading podcasts of This American Life to listen to on the way to work, and figure out what you're going to do every morning without FSG's roster of poets to ease you into the day.

But no, this blog will not go gentle into that good night! OK, yes, www.fsgpoetry.com will stop being a blog in the traditional sense, where groups of words are posted a few times a day. But please, keep us in your RSS feeds, or sign up for email updates (which will be the same thing that appears on the blog, only in convenient letter form), because once you teach a girl to blog, it's hard to convince her to stop entirely. I'll continue to post original content at least once a month, and I can only assume it will continue to be amazing.

And last, but certainly not least, I really appreciate everyone who read the blog all month, and commented, and listened to our audio or downloaded our screensavers. As a thank you, I've saved one of the best recordings for last. Here's C. K. Williams reading Robert Lowell's poem 'For the Union Dead' or as Williams describes it in his introduction: "one of the greatest poems by one of the great poets of the last century." Enjoy!

"'I'm Not A Nice Person,' He Chanted"

C. K. Williams won the Pulitzer in 2000 for his collection, Repair, and the National Book Award in 2003 for his collection The Singing. The interview below, with The Newshour on PBS, was conducted in 2003, right after Williams received the NBA, and I think it set up this recording of Williams reading 'The Singing' rather nicely:

JEFFREY BROWN: And what starts a poem for you? What concerns do you have that make you sit down and start to write?

C. K. WILLIAMS: That varies wildly. It can be some little scene that I see in the street. It can be a little piece of language that comes to me. The most interesting thing about a poem is that it doesn't exist until it has its music. Every poem has a music. And until it has that, it's not a poem. It's just information or data that's floating around in your head or on your desk.

JB: And what does "a music" mean?

CW: Well, it's the way the poem identifies itself musically in language. Poems have a different music from ordinary language and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come. Sometimes you have a poem that you really want to write and it never happens. The music never comes and then the poem never happens.

JB: But sometimes it comes and you know it when you hear it?

CW: Yes, when you hear it. Sometimes you hear it before you know it. Sometimes you hear a music and you don't know what the poem is going to be about. You only have that little piece of music, and you think... then you look around the world and you say, "what is this music going to be useful for in dealing with the world?"

On that note, here is C. K. Williams reading 'The Singing':

"The Golden Hair Of Daylight Along Her Shoulders"

It's almost becoming route for me to say, when posting these poems from James Wright, that there's a fantastic last line--but I really think this one, from 'The Journey' may take the cake:

"...The secret / Of this journey is to let the wind / Blow its dust all over your body, / To let it go on blowing, to step lightly, lightly / All the way through your ruins, and not to lose / Any sleep over the dead, who surely / Will bury their own, don't worry."

Wow.

Here's the whole of Wright's poem 'The Journey,' read by Charles Wright back in 1996. (We'll have more of Charles Wright reading his own poems later today.)

"Their Sons Grow Suicidally Beautiful"

As I said before, if you were investing in poets, I'd heartily recommend James Wright.

The second of our three poets this month to buy Wright stock, as it were, is August Kleinzahler, who breaks the fourth wall slightly in his intro by mentioning that he's pleased to be reading Wright's 'Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio' in the fall. (Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!)

But hey--in New York City, at least, it's cold enough to be autumn. And I'm certain Kalamazoo, MI, where I'm headed for the weekend, is going to be at least as cold. So we'll call it square, and everyone can enjoy the poem in the perfect temperature, if not the perfect month.

"I Salute That Various Field"

And, the finish off this Friday, one more poem, this one read by Lawrence Joseph (who we also heard from yesterday). It's a James Schuyler poem titled 'Salute,' and I hope I don't offend anyone here by saying that I always think of Schuyler as a real poets' poet. By which I mean NOT that he's a writer who can only be appreciated by other writers--there's a simple narrative happening in this poem, the story of the difference between what we plan to accomplish and what we actually get accomplished--but more that his work can be appreciated on several different levels.

And those levels are exactly what Joseph describes in his introduction below. The poem is short, only fifteen lines, but that's because Schuyler has managed to boil down the language so incredibly that each word seems to do the work of fifty. I think it's best to listen to Joseph read this poem more than once for maximum impact. Download it and play it on your iPod when you're running late for a meeting. Or, even better, when you're out gloriously wasting a spring day.

"I Am The Snouted Creature"

Finally! The moment we've all been waiting for (and by 'we,' I of course mean 'me'): August Kleinzahler reading Thom Gunn's 'Moly.'

You'll be able to find text for this one again over at Counterbalance, who is making me blush with all the nice things she has to say about the blog, and who is not such a slump in the poetry-enjoying department herself.

Those unfamiliar with Gunn might want to check out these two posts from earlier in the month. The recordings I have are of Gunn reading at FSG's 50th Anniversary celebration in 1996, a few years before he passed away, and my biggest disappointment (in ALL of poetry month) is that I couldn't include on this blog a fourth poem he read that night, which contained some rather delightful--to put it mildly--off-color language and adult situations.

Regardless, I can't think of a better way to get a sense what kind of a person Gunn was than to listen to (or download) this introduction by Kleinzahler. I think we all hope someone will say such nice things about us after our leaving. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that FSG has just re-released Gunn's collection The Man with the Night Sweats with a new introduction by Kleinzahler. (You can buy it online.)

"Whole Day Gone To Hell"

Much digital ink has been spilled on this blog on the subject of how awesome August Kleinzahler is, so I'm very happy to put up the first of his readings, a poem called 'Green Sees Things In Waves.'

Now, as you probably know, one of the main ideas behind this poetry month blog and all the audio I've been posting is that, as James McMichael said, "poetry is an aural medium," one that benefits from a good listen. But poetry is also something of a visual art--there's a beauty to the way it is laid on the page (more on this later today) and something soothing about reading a poem in your favoite book, even if you've read it a thousand times before.

And because of that, I'm teaming up today with Callie's poetry month initative over at her blog, Counterbalance. She's been posting favorite poems all month, some her own and some suggested by readers. I was happy to suggest this one, and for the text of this poem, I hope you'll visit her site here.

As Kleinzahler explains in his introduction to 'Green Sees Things in Waves,' the subject of this poem comes from his time spent working with homeless veterans, and I delight a bit in the idea of how stunned these guys must have been when, instead of getting a tightly laced poetry teacher in a suit and tie, they got a teacher who looked like he knew his way around the parts of San Francisco they'd been hanging out in and didn't even mind some swearing in their poetry.

(This poem is from a book of the same name, which you can buy online.)

"I Know Of No Defense Against Those Addicted To Death"

I find it very interesting that Lawrence Joseph chose to introduce his poem 'Unyieldingly Present' by paraphrasing a quote from Wallace Stevens and describing his work as "a poem that presses back against the violence from without."

Not just because of the quote, which quite accurately sums up the poem, but because both Joseph and Stevens are poets as well as being lawyers--Stevens practiced insurance law in Connecticut and Joseph now teaches law in New York City. Another cool fact about Lawrence Joseph is the screenplay being based on his novel, Lawyerland, and, slightly less cool to anyone who didn't grow up in the midwest, he and I are both from the Detroit area.

Here's Joseph reading 'Unyieldingly Present' from his latest book, Into It, which you can buy online.

"It's Been Almost Sultry Here In The Haight. Eat Your Heart Out."

Some more insider gossip, this from Associate Publicist Audrey Harris, who got to actually spend time with August Kleinzahler (who will read for us TOMORROW) in his stomping grounds of San Francisco:

"August Kleinzahler, in addition to being a poet, is the author of Cutty One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained, a series of autobiographical essays. A huge fan of these pieces, particularly 'The Bus,' a bitingly funny and self-deprecating narrative of a bus ride along a seedy stretch of San Diego highway, I was thrilled when I was assigned to work with August last year. Through our ensuing correspondence, we learned that he lives roughly three blocks from my parents' house in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. What's more, he moved there from New York in 1981, the year I was born. During a visit home last summer I arranged to meet August on a Saturday morning at the Reverie café in Cole Valley, haunt of local writers and bloggers.

I recognized August the moment he walked in the door, not just from his author photo, but from an air of scrappy, bemused outsiderhood unmistakable from his writing. In oversized Gucci sunglasses and a large dark trenchcoat, he looked like he could have walked straight off the set of a hardboiled 1940's detective film. We sat by the window with our coffees, and I broached the ostensible subject of our meeting: publicity for his book, his next project, and his busy reading and lecture schedule. He had just finished a teaching stint at the University of Texas's Michener Center, and seemed glad to escape the heat. With a lingering sense of awe at his good fortune, August recounted his first meeting with Jonathan Galassi, who had learned of his poetry from a friend by chance. He also described a trip he was planning to take to Rapid City and the 'Badlands' of South Dakota. He was writing the titular poem of his forthcoming collection, Sleeping It Off In Rapid City, but had never actually been there. I'm not sure which came first: the poem or the idea for the trip, but I think it was the poem. After a little less than an hour of this, August excused himself: he was driving to Sacramento (a three-hour car ride, factoring in East Bay traffic) to visit 'an old dame' whose birthday it was, and whom he visits every year on her birthday. As a parting gift, he recommended his favorite walk for my next visit to San Francisco: a meandering climb through the eucalyptus-covered hills of Twin Peaks. To this day, whenever I see a new note in my inbox from August, I think of him roaming up there, phrases aligning themselves in his brain.

I received my latest message from August on a recent cold March morning. After asking me to send his author photo to the director of a Polish book festival, he concluded in typical fashion: 'It's been almost sultry here in the Haight. Eat your heart out.'"

The Icing On The Cake

Frankly, after all the awesomeness that has been put forth on this day (Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Adam Zagajewski, Les Murray, Cara Spitalewiz), I can't believe I'm sharing anything else.

But it's Wednesday, and it's raining in NYC, and there's so long until the weekend, which is why I have two poems for you, from John Ashbery, both recorded back in 1996 at FSG's 50th Anniversary party--here's Ashbery reading James Schuyler's '3-25-66' and his own 'Chapter 2, Book 35.' Enjoy!

"Tonight This Small Room Seems Too Huge To Cross"

Following our two recordings yesterday by Gjertrud Schnackenberg, I've got some more downloads for you to use to make your computer, car dashboard, office wall, or locker door look a little more classy.

If you click here you'll find a printable broadsheet poster, screensaver, and a desktop created out of Schnackenberg's poem, 'Snow Melting.' (And while you're there, please be sure to take a look at the downloads available from debut FSG poet Eliza Griswold.)

Poems The Size Of Photographs

Continuing FSG Insiders Week, Cara Spitalewitz has written a great post about what it's like to work with Australian poet Les Murray (for more Les, check here for a link to Adam Zagajewski reading Murray's 'The International Poetry Festival Thing'):

"I’ve always hated my last name. It’s long and hard to pronounce and since starting at FSG, I’ve begun to suspect that I don’t enunciate it properly. Why else would I get so much mail addressed to Caris Pitalewitz? Why else would I get so many compliments on my interesting first name, which rhymes with Paris?

Imagine my surprise when I received a handwritten note from Les Murray, famed Australian poet, complimenting me on my 'splendid name.' The fact that the note was handwritten wasn’t the surprising part. Les doesn’t have access to e-mail. He may as well not have a phone either, since the time difference between New York and Australia is 14 hours. He does have a fax machine, but it only works on occasion.

I learned from the note that Les Murray’s paternal ancestors came from a farm in the Scottish Borders called Spital Tower, which used to be a leprosium run by monks. As a result, my last name has a 'warm resonance' for him.

At the bottom of the page is a black scribble, followed by a parenthetical: (excuse this blot!)

I’ve been here for seven months now, and the only decoration in my office is Les Murray’s note, scotch-taped next to my computer. I’ve excused the blot."

FSG Insider Week, Part 2

More from Associate Publisher Linda Rosenberg, this time with commentary about August Kleinzahler new introduction to Thom Gunn's The Man With The Night Sweats (and, as a reminder, we had two recordings by Thom Gunn posted on the blog earlier this month, and stay tuned, because August Kleinzahler will be coming on later this week to regale us with his tales of hanging out with Thom Gunn in San Francisco):

"August Kleinzahler's long friendship with Thom Gunn, perhaps made easier by each man’s adoption of San Francisco as his home city, surely enhanced his understanding and respect for the rigor and integrity of Gunn’s best work.  In his introduction to The Man With Night Sweats, Kleinzahler considers both the poet and the man—as well as the 1980s, the terrible decade of which Gunn wrote.  In Kleinzahler’s words:

“[A] central component of his mature poetry is its voice, which is highly unusual for a poet writing in the second half of the twentieth century. Gunn early on came under the influence of the Elizabethan poets Shakespeare, Donne, and Jonson, in which there’s no identifiable personality to the ‘I,’ the voice in the poetry.  Even in the most intimate poems, the voice is detached, impersonal. On top of this, Gunn favors what is called the plain style, a taste he picked up from one of his mentors, Yvor Winters. One its chief exemplars is Ben Jonson, a poet Gunn valued very highly and, to an extent, modeled his own work on. The plain style is just that: clear in diction and movement, devoid of rhetoric and poetic figures, inclining toward the way people speak without sounding colloquial. Gunn’s fascination with the city as a backdrop for character and event, along with his anachronistically distanced, rather neutral voice, turned out to be the perfect mix for his poetic witnessing of the plague he was soon to find himself in the midst of.”

Like the FSG poetry blog itself, the aim of our reissue program is to provide an easy entryway into this special world inhabited by some of the most extraordinary poets of the last 60 years…. From John Berryman to James Schuyler, from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and beyond, it's our hope that our volumes—most with new introductions by poets of today—will make it easier for new readers and old to find their way into these extraordinary books. Due to the unique power of the form, most of these works seem to acquire an even greater resonance as time passes. It may just be that the impact of deeply felt, finely wrought language is even more intense in a less literate age."

"A Red Wing Rose In The Darkness"

Two more poems, both beautifully set up by Gjertrud Schnackenberg. In these, she tackles the topic of Czeslaw Milosz and two of his poems--'If There Is No God' and 'Encounter.'

Here is a passage from her introduction to 'If There Is No God' that I find quite striking:

"When I first read this poem, 'If There Is No God,' which Czeslaw Milosz wrote when he was in his early 90s, I was reminded of Michaelangelo's old age, when a witness to his work said that sparks flew from under his chisel. And especially I was reminded of that last vanishing in stone, Pieta, which Michaelangelo was overheard to be hammering and chiseling in his apartment in Rome until a week before his death at the age of 89."

There's more here and here, or in the audio below.

"The Seeds Gathering On His Trouser Legs"

Gjertrud Schnackenberg has a very cool knack in this introduction--she sheds light on much of what rests behind the surface of her poem. She's fit an enormous range of references in here--Charles Darwin's autobiography, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Shakespeare's Prospero, which all dovetail together quite nicely when Schnackenberg gets done explaining it.

I'm a big fan of this idea, that there is a tremendous amount of outside information behind what ultimately goes into the distilled words of a poem. The idea of a poet as a voracious reader and constant student. 

Here's Gjertrud Schnackenberg reading--and giving some excellent food for thought about--her own poem 'Darwin in 1881' from Supernatural Love, which you can buy online.

FSG Insiders Week

I've been promising this from the beginning of this blog journey, and finally it's here: FSG insiders week! I've been saving up these posts penned by editors, designers, publicists, and assistants about what their role is in creating a book of poetry.

I thought we'd start with Associate Publisher and Vice President Linda Rosenberg's post on new introductions to reissued works of poetry:

One of the true pleasures for me, as the series editor of the FSG Classics program, has been to commission new introductions to reissues of classic volumes from FSG's great poetry backlist … John Ashbery on James Schuyler's Selected Poems, W. S. Merwin on John Berryman’s Dream Songs, August Kleinzahler on Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats, just for a start. 

There is no analysis of a poem—of its structure, its flow, its magical conjunction of  essence and form—like one undertaken by another poet. This is even more true if that poet has also been a good friend, one with a unique understanding of the evolution of the writer and the writing. I feel privileged to have been able to gain not just a larger understanding but also a more intimate sense of  these writers and their poems through my work on the introductions to these volumes.

For example, when I spoke with W. S. Merwin about his introduction to John Berryman's Dream Songs, he remembered occasions on which, as Berryman's student, he was present for Berryman's readings of his poems that were so riveting that they were electric… These recollections ultimately took form in his introduction, in which Merwin wrote:

"John had always read in the way he did most things, with a heated passion, and his memory for poetry and for details of the lives of poets were compendious and clear.   It all seemed  to be present and immediate to him, and endowed with a final authority. Once, in his thirties, after a bookstore reading of poems by other poets whom he loved—in this case, Hardy and Yeats—someone had been so foolish as to ask him whether he did not, perhaps, take these things too seriously, and he had answered, 'They’re a matter of life and death.'"

You can buy the new edition of John Berryman's Dream Songs, with the introduction by W. S. Merwin, here, here, or here. We'll have more from Linda Rosenberg later today.

Robert Pinsky = Good Times

Further confirmation of my theory that Robert Pinsky is a poet you'd want to invite to all your cocktails parties can be found here, where he judges a "Meta-Free-Phor All" between Stephen Colbert and Sean Penn from last Thursday's Colbert Report. (And in case any alert readers are wondering, Pinsky's Wikipedia page has already been changed to reflect the appearance.)

And if that's not enough Pinsky for your Monday, here's a link to several poems recorded in 1996, and here's a link to NBA nominee James McMichael reading Pinsky's 'City Elegies.' Or, as Colbert mentioned, you can see him this Saturday, April 28th, at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in DC. 

More Weekend Excitement

I'm willing to take corrections (poetry at fsgbooks.com) on this, but I am pretty sure that Cross-Cultural Poetics is the hardest-working poetry radio show around these parts.

That link will take you to a list of all of the shows Leonard Schwartz has conducted since 1993--and it's an impressive list. In addition to FSG greats Frank Bidart and Lydia Davis, I'd recommend the interviews with Rick Simonson, Chris Abani (whose novel Virgin of Flames I devoured in one sitting last week and heartily recommend), and W. S. Merwin, although it's definitely worth your time to look through all the interviews to find one your favorite poet.

If you're anything like me, that ought to hold you through your cleaning, coffee drinking, cat training, reading-filled Saturday.

"Even The Letters Grew Drowsy, Their Heads Drooping On The Page"

As I mentioned earlier, several factors conspired to keep Adam Zagajewski out of the recording studio in Boston (weirdly, though it was mostly the recording studio's fault), so the preview he had planned of his new poems (due out in a collection next April) is just not going to happen.

I suspect this will whet your appetite for Zagajewski just as well, though--SIX, count 'em SIX, poems recorded back in 1996, and most found in his 2003 selection collection, Without End.

Since there are so many, I'll just post the majority as downloads here:

'Mysticism for Beginners'

'My Self-Portrait'

'The Blackened River'

'In the Beauty Created By Others'

And here, for your streaming pleasure, is Zagajewski reading 'On Swimming' and 'She Wrote in Darkness':

"The International Poetry Festival Thing"

The bad news: Adam Zagajewski wasn't able to record any new poems for us, because the recording studios we were working with in Boston were being difficult. Very, very difficult. And Adam Zagajewski was due to head back to Paris very soon, and the studio couldn't accomodate him and were very inflexible in their timing, and, so much the sadder for all, Adam had been planning to record some John Berryman for us in Boston. (Insert collective sigh of despair here.)

But trust me, I would never leave you with such a downer of a post on a beautiful Friday afternoon! I do have some really bangup recordings of Adam Zagajewski in 1996. Here he is reading another one of FSG's poets, Les Murray, who has a new book coming out next month, The Biplane Houses. This poem is fabulously titled 'The International Poetry Festival Thing.'

"They Had Become Friends"

I really enjoyed the short time I spent in the studio with James McMichael. We hadn't recorded any long poems at that point, and I dug the way he just charged into two longer pieces. This poem, 'The British Countryside In Pictures,' works well when heard aloud, even though it is long, I think because of the narrative that runs throughout.

Perhaps proving what McMichael mentioned to me on his way out of the studio--'Poetry is an aural medium. It gets treated as if it's visual, but it's for the ear.'

"Where Is My Garland Of Lights?"

James McMichael, nominated last year for a National Book Award for his stunning collection Capacity, has a perfect explaination for why he is reading this poem by Robert Pinsky:

"It's a poem I relive each time I read it, with an intensity that comes for me only with the classics."

It can be pretty difficult, getting poets to agree to one set of rules. And I'm quite grateful for that, because it means I get to hear poems like this:

"Gossiping Over Tea And Noodles On Their Break"

Robert Pinsky wasn't able to record any of his poems for us at this point, but I do have two recordings of poems from FSG's 50th anniversary party in 1996, 'The Want Bone' and 'Shirt.'

And if you're enjoy these poems, but sure to check in tomorrow, where we'll have a new recording, but not from who you'd expect...

"One Seal In Particular I Have Seen Here Evening After Evening"

It's just occured to me to wonder if Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate of the United States, Pulitzer Prize nominee, author of 19 books, is frustrated that his Wikipedia entry begins with an almost-immediate reference to his appearance on The Simpsons? (I suspect, though, from my very limited interactions with him, that he would take it completely in stride.)

Here's a poem of Elizabeth Bishop's that Pinsky recorded for us in Boston. It's called 'At the Fishhouses,' and contains an image I love, one of Bishop singing Baptist hymns to a curious seal.

You can download it by clicking here, or listen to the audio below.

Roundup

I just wanted to point you all to a few great roundups of our event--with Knopf, WQXR, and The Strand, on Monday--at Cruelest Month, Lit Kicks, and Galleycat.

And a reminder that Eliza Griswold and Paul Muldoon appeared on the blog earlier this month, and you can listen to and download their poetry from earlier posts.

"I Thought 'I Know That He Will Return It'"

This audio has Frank Bidart introducing his poem 'The Second Hour of the Night' as "newly completed." Since this recording was made in 1996, Bidart has completed one more poem in this series, titled 'The Third Hour of the Night.'

Bookslut conducted a detailed interview with Bidart in June 2005 about this series of poems, which I will quote here:

BS: So far you’ve published "The First Hour of the Night," "The Second Hour of the Night," and "The Third Hour of the Night" -- what is the inspiration for this project? That is, what made you want to do this? Where is it going? Does the project have a name?

FB: The myth behind the series of poems is the Egyptian “Book of Gates,” which is inscribed on the sarcophagus of Seti I. Each night during the twelve hours of the night the sun must pass through twelve territories of the underworld before it can rise again at dawn. Each hour is marked by a new gate, the threshold to a new territory. Each poem in the series is an hour we must pass through before the sun can rise again. I don’t know what will make moral and intellectual clarity and coherence rise again: I could never write twelve “hours.” But were the sun to rise again, it would have to pass through something like these territories. I’ve only written three “hours” over something like seventeen years. I’m sixty-six: I’ll be lucky if I can write one more. I like the idea that I’m involved in a project that can’t be completed: the project corresponds to how things are.

All three of the poems can be found in Bidart's recent books--Stardust, Desire, and In the Western Night. Click here or listen below for a recording of Part II from 'The Second Hour of the Night.'

"These Are The Tranquilized Fifties, And I Am Forty"

Michael over at The Cruelest Month just reminded me of something Paul Muldoon said last night at our event--'sometimes it's fun to have fun with poetry.'

This poem by Robert Lowell called Memories of West Street and Lepke, read by Frank Bidart in 1996, shows that he might have agreed with Muldoon. Just the mouthfeel of the poem when pronounced by Bidart is enough to make you want to read it aloud--words like 'bookworming,' 'beachwagon,' and 'flame flamingo' abound. Download it here, or give a listen below.

And while we're on the subject of Lowell, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Henri Cole's recording of a Lowell poem from last week. Cole reads tonight at Housing Works (which is really in Soho) with Carl Dennis.

Stranded

It was lovely to see so many of you out last night at our literary battle of the heavyweights! The Quickmuse event was a lot of fun--thanks to everyone who braved the rain to see Eliza Griswold, Paul Muldoon, and Brad Leithauser.

But if you weren't able to make it out to The Strand, Quickmuse has you covered. For the competition, both Paul and Brad were asked to write a poem in response to this piece by Alicia Ostriker:

The Blessing of the Dog

to be blessed
said the dog
is to have a pinch
of God
inside you
and all the other dogs
can smell it

You can play Paul's piece here--just click on the 'Play Back the Piece' function, and you'll be able to watch the poem appear as Paul wrote it (be sure to keep an eye on the first letter of each line). The same goes for Brad--his poem is here.

Ultimately, the audience decided that it was just too hard to crown one winner, but what do you think? You can comment on the blog below, or discuss the poems at the Quickmuse site.

Tonight! A Literary Steel Cage Match

Just a reminder about our event tonight!

7 PM, The Strand Bookstore (828 Broadway @ 12th street)

FSG's Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon faces off against Knopf's Brad Leithauser in a Quickmuse event to see who can create the best poem in front of an audience in only ten minutes. Bring your own brass knuckles, in case things get a little crazy. (You know how these poetry events can turn in a second!)

Debut poet Eliza Griswold opens the event with a reading from her upcoming book, Wideawake Field. Wine and cheese served.

And just to get you even more excited, here's a little preview of what Paul Muldoon has in store for you, thanks to YouTube:

"Whiskey Blind And Swaggering Home At Five"

Here's one last poem by Henri Cole (unless you go to his event Tuesday), again with the kind of intro that makes you want to corner him at cocktail parties and ask him all about your favorite poets. Here he is reading and introducing Robert Lowell's 'To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,' and I think you'll find all he mentions in the introduction well worth an extra Google. A short list: Delmore Schwartz; Schopenhauer; 'the absence of pain'; formal metrics; and Cole describing the narrator of Lowell's poem--"a monologue by the wife of a lecherous, hopped-up drunk."

Appropriate for listening to over the weekend, I think:

"Made Her Look Exactly Like A Chickadee"

I don't mean to overstate things, but Henri Cole really revolutionized the way I looked at the words of Elizabeth Bishop with this reading and introduction to her poem, 'The Shampoo.'

Cole says in his introduction, "It's surface subject are the bright streaks of gray in Lotta's hair, but it's real subject is about time, is thinking about making a truce with the passage of time, and what we get is a kind of timeless act of one woman washing another woman's hair..."

Also, if you are enjoying these recordings of Henri Cole, it will certainly be worth your while to go see him read next Tuesday at Housing Works in Soho, 7 PM start. He'll be appearing with the poet Carl Dennis, who also has a new collection out.

"The Mind Is The Most Interesting Thing To Me"

Earlier this month, I mentioned the joys of looking for connections in the set of poems selected by our poets. I think, for the careful listener, connections are there to be found in this set of readings by Henri Cole, who was, believe it or not, the poet I was most nervous about meeting in the studio. Mostly because I'm from the Midwest and am a bit nervous about my pronounciation of 'Henri,' but also because I was such a huge fan of his last book, Middle Earth, and I sometimes have a hard time keeping from gushing.

Cole has a new collection out this month, Blackbird and Wolf, and the first poem I have for you, called 'Twilight,' is from its first section. Cole is a marvelous reader, and it seems to me that he has become very comfortable speaking the words in his poems, so I don't know whether my favorite part is intentional or not--but if you listen, there is a line ("or like us at the pier") where the poem turns from focusing on the outside world to focusing on problems closer to the narrator, and Cole gives a half sigh, infusing his words to come even more fully with a sense of frustration. It's perfect. Download it here, or listen below.

Verse vs. Verse

Since we had so much Muldoon yesterday, I wanted to remind you all about Monday's literary battle of the heavyweights:

On April 16th at The Strand Bookstore, FSG's Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon will face off against Knopf's Brad Leithauser in a Quickmuse event to see who can create the best poem in front of an audience in only ten minutes.

After being given a theme, Muldoon and Leithauser will begin to compose, and their ensuing rough drafts will be projected--in real time!--onto screens for the audience to view while mingling and making use of the complimentary wine. When ten minutes have passed, both poets will read their final works to the audience and a winner will be declared.

WQXR's Jeff Spurgeon will host the event, and poet Eliza Griswold will open the event with a reading from her debut collection, Wideawake Field.

7 PM, Monday, April 16th, at The Strand Bookstore (828 Broadway @ 12th Street). BE THERE!

"Friends, Life Is Boring"

Just because this was too good for me to pass up, here's an old recording by Paul Muldoon in 1996.

There's two John Berryman sonnets, which can both be found in FSG's new edition of The Dream Songs, released next week, and the poem 'Burma,' a Muldoon original, which was published just last year in The Horse Latitudes.

I'll have more on Berryman next week, to commemorate the re-release of The Dream Songs. In the meantime, enjoy!

"I Have Wasted My Life"

If you could buy stock in poets, I would recommend investing heavily in James Wright. We have three different poets reading his work this month, and all of the poems are off the charts in terms of clarity of vision and that last line that's so good, it's like a punch to the guts. (For example see: the title of this post.)

Here I've got Paul Muldoon reading both Ranier Maria Rilke's 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' and Wright's 'Lying in a Hammock on William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota' and discussing the connections between the two poems--the 'fierce pulse' that underlies inanimate objects in each.

Personally, though, I can't get past the beautiful symmetry of those two last lines--Rilke's 'you must change your life' and Wright's 'I have wasted my life'--quite suitable for a grey, rainy day in New York City.

"The B Specials Had Stopped Him One Night"

Part of the joy of Paul Muldoon is that I've rarely seen him without a swirl of activity surrounding him. When he recorded these poems for the blog, we were in the thrall of publicity for Horse Latitudes and The End of the Poem, and the recording studio was absolutely packed. We had a sound guy, Paul's son, me, and then Robert Mackey, who was filming the session for posting on The New York Times website in conjunction with Charles McGrath's NYT Magazine article on Paul.

And yet, we still got a great recording from Paul of his poem, 'The Sightseers.' For this post, we've got the audio below, AND I'm linking here to Mackey's video of Muldoon's band Rackett, and if that doesn't convince you that the best place for you to be at 7 PM on Monday is the Strand Bookstore, for Muldoon's Quickmuse competition, then your cold, black heart is probably not susceptible to reason, so I won't worry any more about it.

"The Shark's Teeth Look Like A Row of Sharks"

This poem, 'The Milkfish Gatherers,' read by the author James Fenton at FSG's 50th anniversary party in 1996, always gives me a bit of the chills up the back of my neck. I think it's a combination of the rhyme at the end of second and fourth line of each stanza, which always fills me with a delicious sense of foreboding (all my embarrassing childhood indulgences in Edgar Allen Poe, no doubt), and then the repetition of the lines "But the spine lives when the brain dies/In a convulsive misery."

An interesting teaser appears in the Author's Note of Fenton's Selected Poems--his collection Out of Danger, where 'The Milkfish Gatherers' originally appeared, was set to music by the composer Dominic Muldowney in the song sequence 'Out of the East.' No word as to what type of music it was, although Fenton's reimagining of Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories as an opera may give a clue (you can listen to an interview with Fenton about the opera here), as do his articles on the Metropolitan Opera and on the preferred way of setting poetry to music.

The link to download the audio of 'The Milkfish Gatherers' is here, or you can buy Fenton's Selected Poems if you prefer reading to listening.

"Oh I Am Not Afraid Of You"

James Fenton proves my personal theory that poets are far more interesting than the average person. For proof, let me refer you to the column he writes for The Guardian titled 'Things That Have Interested Me, which touches on all manner of things, including (but not limited to) prision tattoos, polenta, washing corpses, and Madame Butterfly.

Fenton's poem 'Jerusalem,' which he recorded at FSG's 50th anniversary party in 1996, is far more interesting than the average poem as well. I'd really recommend reading the text along with this audio--there's a facinating rhyme scheme at work in the poem, which is so well folded into the poem that I had to listen to the reading a couple times to pick up on it. It's not one I'm familiar with--does anyone have a name for a rhyme scheme that goes (to me): a a b c c b d d?

Listen to the audio below, or you can download the poem here.

"The Otherness Of The Translator"

Here is Yves Bonnefoy reading a second poem in French, 'La Maison Natale.'

I wasn't able to come up with a good title for this poem, and many of the French speakers in the FSG offices were reluctant to translate the title without the body of the poem also translated--further proof that this poetry in translation thing is tricky, very tricky!

So I'll present here 'La Maison Natale' as Bonnefoy read it in the original French, and if you can suggest a title in English, please mention it in the comments below. I'll give a copy of Bonnefoy's The Curved Planks to the title I like the best. (Click here to download the audio directly.)

"I Am Visting These Words More Than Reading Them"

Poetry in translation is its own animal. The level of balance that must be involved, keeping the desires of the poet intact and, at the same time, making the poem, with all its quirks of language, readable to a whole new set of readers.

One method NOT recommended, which I learned immediately upon receiving this recording of poems by Yves Bonnefoy is the Babelfish program available to translate languages instantly online. From that program, I learned that Bonnefoy's poem 'Les Planches Courbes' equates roughly to 'curved boards,' and 'La Maison Natale' is most likely 'the native house.' Even my three years of high school French--which consisted mostly of watching Muzzy educational videos--could tell there was something slightly off there.

So dear reader, here is Bonnefoy's introduction to his poems, where he speaks about reading his own poetry in translation (and where the title of this post comes from), and his poem 'Les Planches Courbes' (which translates best to English as 'The Curved Planks). You can listen to the audio below, or download these directly by clicking here or here. More Bonnefoy in French later today!
 

"The Ancients Said That Poetry Is a Stairway To God"

Here's more Eliza Griswold, this time reading a poem by Eugenio Montale, 'Syria,' translated by FSG's own Jonathan Galassi.

I know it seems like I'm writing this blog on cruise control by referring you to the introductory comments made by our poets, but Eliza introduces this so well, I could add nothing of value:

"The poem takes seriously the idea that a poetry creates ceremonial space to reach God--or can do so--which is something I find really compelling, and is an old idea."

There's much, much more, so give it a listen, and then mark her event on your calendar.

Download the audio by clicking here.

"There Are Tigers Above And Below"

Eliza Griswold's Wideawake Field is the first debut collection of poetry to be published by FSG in eight years. So you know it's gotta be real big. It will be released next month, and Eliza was kind enough to give all of you a preview by joining in our big event at The Strand next week.

What I found especially cool about Eliza is that she's also a noted journalist--FSG will be publishing a nonfiction book from her in 2008, called The Tenth Parallel, about the warfare that occurs all around the world on that line. And not that any of you would expect any less of an FSG poet, but she's the real deal--be sure to check out some of the stories I've linked to here, as I think it adds another layer of insight into Eliza's poems just knowing where she's been (everywhere) and what she's seen (I'll refer you again to the poems).

Here's Eliza reading her poem 'Tigers,' which was made available last Friday for download in several forms.

As always, you can download the audio by clicking here.

Derek Walcott's Selected Poems

I've been trying to post all of our recordings on weekdays, so you all can start off your days listening to poetry on your iPods on the way to work, but seeing how Derek Walcott's latest book, Selected Poems, will be reviewed today in both The Seattle Times and The New York Times Book Review it seemed like occasion enough to put the audio up.

This is Derek Walcott reading sections from his poem The Bounty, which is excerpted in Selected Poems, and two poems by Joseph Brodsky--'Lullaby' and 'Love Song'--all recorded at FSG's 50th anniversary party in 1996.

Derek Walcott on NPR

If you're anything like me and my roommates, Saturday mornings are spent almost entirely lazing about and making excuses to stay in the apartment drinking coffee for as long as possible. Cleaning the bathroom, vacuuming the couch, trying to teach the cat to fetch: all totally valid reasons for brewing some more java. Also good? Getting so involved in NPR that you couldn't possibly leave the house.

So to help you in your Saturday relaxing, here's a link to an NPR interview with Derek Walcott, conducted just last month by Jacki Lyden. And we'll have more Derek Walcott for you tomorrow, when he reads a bit of his latest book, Selected Poems.

Tigers

Let me tell you: I used to have an office. For about two months. And it was the most fantastic experience of my life. I think about it still--the bookshelves, the door, the chairs for guests. Of course, it's lovely in different ways where I sit now--I have a window, and my coworkers are fantastic. I don't mean to complain, more to describe how much I absolutely loved that office.

And yet it all pales when I consider how infinitely more amazing that office would have been if I had been able to DOWNLOAD a broadsheet poster of Eliza Griswold's poem 'Tigers,' print it out, and hang it on the wall. Or even, better, use it as the wallpaper or as a screensaver on my computer.

Yes, folks, I am about to totally revolutionize your office experience, if you just click here.

(Eliza Griswold's debut poetry collection, Wideawake Field, will be published by FSG next month. She'll also be reading at our event on April 16th, with more readings to come in NYC and Boston. More poems from her on Monday, including a reading of the poem 'Tigers.')

"And The Mind, Without Having It All Wondered If It Could"

Carl Phillips is a remarkably prolific poet, with something like nine books of poetry under his belt in the past fifteen years (you can find one of his earlier poems, 'Leda, After the Swan,' here), which is made even more interesting to me by the fact that he's only been publishing since his 30s. FSG will be releasing Quiver of Arrows, a collection of selected poems, next month.

Here is Carl Phillips reading 'Island' from his most recent collection, Riding Westward. Listen to the intro on this one as well--Phillips ties it together beautifully with the Bogan poem from earlier in the day.

Also, if you prefer to receive these poems all compiled together, you can click here to subscribe to our podcast (or use the box to the right). They'll appear for you every morning, complied and ready to kickoff your day.

You can also download the audio by clicking here.

The Poet Is 71. He Loves Fred Astaire.

A profile by Hillel Italie at the AP proves that Frederick Seidel is pretty much as great as I originally thought:

"It is late morning, dark and cozy in the Carlyle's Gallery lounge. The Twin Towers have fallen. George W. Bush is president. Robert Kennedy is dead. Ezra Pound is a modernist. Seidel rides a motorcycle."

"More Things Move Than Blood In The Heart"

Carl Phillips describes 'Night' by Louise Bogan so beautifully, I'd hestitate to add much:

"[Night] seems to be meditating on the relative insignificance of human endeavors and efforts in the context of the larger, natural world that will outlive us. The poem seems to do that by its camerawork--sweeping from the islands to the estuaries to the life inside the water, then sweeping up to the night sky, the context it gives to the stars and to the land beneath it. Then, suddenly, there's this interruption of intimacy towards an interior 'you' at the end. It also works by each of the first three stanzas springing from an unresolved clause starting with the word 'where.' It's as if the irresolvability of it is the catalyst for the final stanza, where there's this sudden interruption and reminder to the self."

To that I would only add that if you are unfamiliar with Bogan's poems, this definitely deserves a listen. She's a bit of a mixed pleasure for some people, as she had the cojones to call out many of the confessional poets working at the time (including two of my favorites, Lowell and Berryman), but she has the solid, impressive body of work to back it up. I'll post Carl's own poem later today.

(You can also download the poem by clicking here.)

If You're Going To See Only One Poetry Reading This Year

That was a trick title. If you only have time for one poetry reading this year, it should definitely be our event with Quickmuse.com and Knopf on April 16th at The Strand.

But if you have time in your schedule for two, I suppose this would be the other one you should consider: the British and US Poets Laureate will be reading together in Chicago, DC, and London. I think this part is especially cool:

"Both poets will read their own work as well as important works by their contemporaries. The talks will focus largely on each laureate's understanding of his country's most significant poetic voices -- both established and emerging -- that may be unfamiliar to readers overseas."

I'm usually pretty skittish of the word 'important,' but I have to admit a real interest in seeing who the poets pick, especially Andrew Motion's emerging UK writers. Who do you think Donald Hall will pick as an emerging US poet? (I'm sure Dan over at Emerging Writers Network has some suggestions!)

"Fast Asleep at Dawn in Paris"

Lorin Stein, an Editor at FSG gives us an inside track to the cover of Frederick Seidel's latest book Ooga-Booga:

"These photos and the photo on the cover of Ooga-Booga were taken one evening in the summer of 2003 in the photo booth of the Lakeside Lounge, on Avenue B in Manhattan. The woman is my sister, Anna Stein. The bunny ears are me." --LS

And here's another poem from Ooga-Booga, 'The Owl You Heard.' (You can download it by clicking here.)