THE BEST WORDS IN THEIR BEST ORDER

One More Poetry Giveaway!

2008-05-02T16:34:07-04:00

After checking out what a great month the blog has had, in terms of hits and attention, we decided we couldn't end National Poetry Month without one more big THANK YOU to everyone who read.

So we've got ten more CDs to give away, all filled with the best recordings from the FSG poetry blog both from this year and last year. You've got Seamus Heaney (reading Ted Hughes), Maureen McLane, Henri Cole (reading Elizabeth Bishop), C.K. Williams, and Eliza Griswold, and that is just for starters.

So if you would like to be entered to win one of these ten CDs, please leave a comment below with the name of your favorite poem by an FSG poet. We'll pick ten winners at random on May 9th.

And thanks again for reading!

A Fine Rain Falls

2008-04-30T17:36:53-04:00

In a perfect world, we would have been able to post audio of August Kleinzahler's 'Goddess' as the final post for this National Poetry Month, with its fabulous final line, "Unvisited I do not live, I endure."

But you know, in thinking about it, I have to say I've decided it would have been a bit melodramatic and probably something that the poets themselves would have eschewed. So instead we end, rather pleasantly, with Kleinzahler reading his poem 'Noir.' (Which I like to think of as a little love letter to certain nights in San Franciso.)

Thanks so much for reading this month, and I hope to see all of you here again next year!

You can download 'Noir' here, or stream it in the player below.

Wind Makes A Rush At The House

2008-04-30T16:00:00-04:00

I never thought that a single word could break my heart, but here we are: Kleinzahler has done it in this deceptively simple poem. This poem, Portrait of My Mother in January, is also from his new collection, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City.

You can download the audio here, or listen to it in the player below.

Chaste In Its Geometry

2008-04-30T14:51:09-04:00

I thought it would be perfect to close out the month with the voice of August Kleinzahler, who has a new collection out from FSG this month, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City. Maureen McLane wrote a fabulous three-piece consideration of the book earlier this month, that is an excellent introduction to the sounds of Kleinzahler's poetry, but honestly, there's nothing as good as listening to him read it aloud.

This first poem, Almost Nothing, has a epigraph: "In memoriam: Gordon Ashworth, architect." I'm afraid I couldn't find any info for you via my good friend Google, but perhaps someone has more information to post in the comments? Regardless, I feel confident ending the month with such strong verse (and we'll have two more from August later today). You can download the poem here, or listen in the player below.

Why Blame The Fire For Its Damage?

2008-04-29T12:07:46-04:00

By now, you are all probably well familiar with Maureen McLane's 'After Sappho IV,' which has been printed out since early April and hanging on your office wall. (Right? You all printed it out, right?)

And now here is McLane reading two poems from that cycle, 'After Sappho IV' and 'After Sappho V,' which McLane describes as "emerging out of a year of reading translations of Sapphic fragments."

As a reminder, both of these poems will appear in McLane's debut collection of poetry, Same Life, which will be published by FSG in the fall.

"Language Is Infinitely Flexible And Powerful"

2008-04-28T17:00:00-04:00

And here is part two of Helen Frost's post for us (you can find part one here). Her most recent collection of poetry is Diamond Willow, a book of poems shaped in patterns much like the distinctive wood grain.

"In writing The Braid I invented/discovered a book-length formal structure, an elaborate design based on Celtic knots, involving syllable counts and braided words at the beginning and ends of lines. Once I’d found the form and the characters’ voices, working so intensely within that form--9 months or so of 8-hour days, completely immersed in the work—led me to the exhilarating discovery that language is infinitely (or very nearly so) flexible and powerful.

I’ve come to see my books not so much as 'novels-in-poems' as, in each case, a whole and distinct 'novel-as-poem.' Now I enter into each novel very much as I enter into a single poem, but I have the scope (and the editorial support—thanks, Frances!) to delve deeply into the narratives and personas, and follow the images and music towards a central poetic pivot point. My most recently published book, Diamond Willow, is a book-length narrative based on a formal structure that can be found in the natural world. Combining my love of children, poetry, and Alaska with such a deep meditation on the diamond willow form was pure delight."

--Helen Frost

Helen Frost On "Freedom In Form"

2008-04-28T15:17:14-04:00

And now for something new to the blog: a post written by one of our children's authors, poet Helen Frost (who is published by FSG's books for young readers).

Frost began her poetry career with a book of poems for adults, but her more recent collections are all for young readers: Keesha's House, The Braid, and her new book, Diamond Willow. She excels at writing novels in verse, and I thought it might be interesting to hear how she interacts with this form, one that recalls the days of epic poetry.

Here is the first part of her post. Keesha's House, which she refers to here, was a 2004 Printz Honor winner.

"I’ve always found freedom in form—my first book, for adults, includes a sestina, a villanelle, a crown of sonnets—so it was natural for me to work in form when I started writing poetry for young readers. Keesha’s House began as a series of sestinas in the voices of teenagers, and developed into a novel in a very architectural way. The sestina form was perfectly appropriate for teen voices, the sonnet form better suited for adult voices; then as I 'built the rooms' of the novel, I saw how these two forms supported each other in intriguing ways."

--Helen Frost

Strange Rangers

2008-04-27T14:00:00-04:00

Let me draw your attention to the fabulous and descriptive review of August Kleinzahler's new collection, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City:

Mr. Kleinzahler is an American eccentric, a hard man to pin down. Born in New Jersey, he writes poems that have a pushy exuberance and an expert recall of that state’s tougher schoolyards — of bullies with names like Stinky Phil and of “fire trucks and galoshes,/the taste of pencils and Louis Bocca’s ear.” And he writes with elegiac insight about life’s losers, the people he calls “strange rangers,” the addicted, insane or destitute.

We'll have two recorded poems from him to close out the month.

Light Older Than Wine

2008-04-26T20:45:00-04:00

Derek Walcott wasn't able to get into the studio this year to record any new poems--although if you haven't heard the ones posted last year, stop what you're doing and go listen now--but last week The New Yorker picked up the slack for us and ran a new poem of Walcott's titled 'In Italy.'

You can read the whole poem online here.

More Whitman!

2008-04-26T11:30:00-04:00

I'm not sure if this is intended to be a nod to National Poetry Month or not, but this weekend NPR is rerunning its hour-long tribute about "America's most radical poet," Walt Whitman. Be sure to listen especially for FSG writer Michel Cunningham, who included Whitman in his most recent novel Specimen Days.

And just in case you aren't spending your weekend around a computer, the whole show can be listened to online here.

Moon Has Never Understood Wine

2008-04-25T17:00:00-04:00

Here we have more of David Hinton's thoughts on the process of translating classical Chinese poetry for his upcoming anthology from FSG, Classical Chinese Poetry.

In this recording Hinton reads poems from two of the poets included in his anthology: Li Po and Tu Mu. The two poets seem to have an intertwined life story, with Li Po--once nicknamed "the Poet-God"--falling from grace because of an assumed slight against the emperor and his eunuchs and befriending the aspiring poet Tu Mu.

Here are Hinton's thoughts on the two poets for download, or you can stream it live below.

David Hinton On "The Native Cosmology Of Classical Chinese Poetry"

2008-04-25T15:08:56-04:00

David Hinton is both a poet and a translator. He is the editor and translator of FSG's upcoming collection of classical Chinese poetry. His comments on translation--particularly on translating ancient Chinese verse--were incredibly enlightening to me. I've never considered that translation can be this sort of a vessel. Check out what Hinton had to say:

"Every poetry gets its deep form from its native cosmology. The native cosmology of classical Chinese poetry is a system we might now describe as deep ecology, in which humans are an organic part of the earth—a very contemporary insight, and altogether different from the Judeo-Christian worldview that has shaped Western poetry until very recent times, a worldview in which we are spirits visiting this merely material earth almost like aliens. The ecological implications of these two worldviews are obvious, and I’ve found that translating classical Chinese poetry is a way for me to make contemporary poetry that operates outside of the Western cosmological or mythological system, even so far as to register a very different sense of what the self is."

How interesting is that? The idea that one can find a truer self through the words of the past than the current climes of today. I'm going to hazard a guess here--one that might be way off--but it sounds like Hinton's experience of translating poetry is far different than Marilyn Hacker's experience, which she calls "the angel-wrestling with language."

Are there any translators out there who would care to offer their thoughts? Are these two sides of a coin, or are they vastly different approaches?

Love's Bow Has Smashed Against The Daily Grind

2008-04-24T17:00:00-04:00

The Mayakovsky poem 'Past One O'Clock' is where Michael Almereyda, editor of Night Wraps the Sky, found the title for the book. He reads it for all of us below, and I want to quote from his introduction to Night Wraps the Sky as a way of setting up the poem:

"Even at this distance--more than seventy-five years after his death and nearly twenty-five years after the collapse of the government he fervently promoted--it remains difficult to account for the phenomenal nature, the sheer outlandishness, of Vladimir Mayakovsky. As unofficial poet laureate of the Russian Revolution--"my revolution," he called it--Mayakovsky had unrivaled authority and glamour, taking on multiple responsibilities and roles--orator, playwright, magazine editor, stage and film actor, poster maker, jingle writer--with a singular mix of self-mockery and martyrdom.

Photographs of the poet--particularly the glowering shaved-head portraits taken by Aleksandr Rodchenko in 1924, when Mayakovsky was thirty-one [ed. note: as you can see on the book's cover to the left]--display a kind of proto-punk ferocity, a still-burning aura of tough-guy tenderness, soulful defiance."

This poem, I think, is an interesting read when paired with that photo, and with the wikipedia summary of his life. Almereyda reads it well, breathing life into a character who has become larger than life.

All Of Us Are Horses, Sort Of

2008-04-24T14:43:15-04:00

Here I have two recordings for you of Mayakovsky's poem "Getting Along with Horses," read in both English and in Russian by translator Val Vinokur. Vinokur is one of several translators who worked on FSG's collection Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky.

I'm not positive, but I like to think that perhaps Vinkour chose to read this particular poem because it does a lovely job of highlighting the work that a translator does in retaining the rhythms of a poem in translation. If you listen to the English version first, you'll hear a lot of noise words representing sounds, like 'clip clop' and 'jingle jangle.' In listening to the Russian version I didn't hear those exact words--the rhythm was there, but the words were slightly different.

Again, I have to say that I don't speak Russian, but I find it fascinating that words I take to be simply onomatopoeic are also subject to mutability of language (David Sedaris also talks about this, albeit it a humorous way, here).

Here are the pieces for downloading, or you can stream them below--and if there are any Russian speakers reading, I would love to know what the Russian equivalent of 'jingle jangle' is...

English:

Russian:

Hey Professor! Get That Bicycle Off Your Nose!

2008-04-23T23:00:00-04:00

Should you, for some reason, still be laboring under the illusion that famed Russian poet and radical Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was in any way a traditional person, allow me to present what are (in my opinion) the most unusual/interesting facts from his Wikipedia page:

Mayakovsky was imprisoned on three occasions for subversive political activities, but being underage, he avoided transportation.
In the summer of 1915, Mayakovsky fell in love with a married woman, Lilya Brik, and it is to her that the poem "The Backbone Flute" (1916) was dedicated; unfortunately for Mayakovsky, she was the wife of his publisher, Osip Brik.
He started reciting poems such as "Left March! For the Red Marines: 1918" at naval theatres, with sailors as an audience.
Following Stalin's death, rumors arose that Mayakovsky did not commit suicide but was in fact murdered at the behest of Stalin, however, there is no evidence that he was murdered.

Good lord. We are going to have a fabulous time with this guy for the next day and a half. As a way of dipping a toe in, so to speak, here is an audio recording from a March 24th event at the Bowery Poetry Club featuring so many fabulous readers that it would be too much to expect me to list them all.

It's a bit long, and the sound quality is not the best ever, so if you don't have time immediately to listen to all of it, can I just point you to the first poem, read and interpreted by Ron Padgett? It's where the title line for this post came from, and wow: I assure you it is unlike anything else you will hear today.

A Tip Of The Hat

2008-04-23T13:25:55-04:00

No week spent focusing on the work of translators would be complete without bringing up the work that Michael Orthofer does on his blog, The Literary Saloon, and website, The Complete Review. The site compiles online reviews of books into one convenient place, while also taking care to offer color commentary when appropriate.

Special attention is given, especially on the blog, to works of literature in translation. (I should say here that this is my interpretation of the focus--I suspect Mr Orthorfer might say that he's just giving literature in translation it's due, and fair enough.)

If you're new to the site, as amazingly loads of people are, and are a translation geek, be sure to check out their reviews of books that have not yet been translated into English. (Don't worry: the reviews are in English.)

Marilyn Hacker On "That Balance Of Foreignness And Familiarity"

2008-04-22T16:00:00-04:00

And now, we have another guest post from poet and translator Marilyn Hacker. Her translation of Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen was the first winner of the Robert Fagles Translation Prize earlier this year, and it will be published by FSG in the fall. Marie Etienne is a French poet who has published eight volumes of poetry, five novels, and two books on the theater.

Here is Marilyn Hacker speaking about what drew her to Etienne's poems (if you have not read Hacker's earlier comments on translation, you might want to read this post first):

"In the case of Marie étienne’s poems, I am attracted by a considerable otherness: the absence of a unified lyric « I »; a lifelong familiarity with and reference to landscapes, languages and cultures I have not experienced. But there is, too, a comity of interests including an intense focus on form and its inflections of content; on the disjunctive ways the poet can utilize and subvert narrative. King of a Hundred Horsemen’s sequences derive from both the sonnet and the prose-poem. They are oneiric and ekphrastic, and delight in blurring limits between the two as they (also) swiftly shift landscapes. As poets, we share pleasure, in very different registers, in integrating correspondence and dialogue, sometimes at its most demotic, into a poem. This not unrelated to the insistence on irony and humor as possibilities for poetry, noting the way irony can metamorphose to tragedy, to political statement, or both.

It is perhaps just that balance of foreignness and familiarity which draws the bilingual or polyglot poet-reader to the exercise, the art, of translation, and the maintenance of that balance in the translated poem which may most intrigue and delight its reader."

--Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker On "The Most Engaged Form Of Reading"

2008-04-22T14:44:48-04:00

Poetry-in-translation week continues, readers! And today we have our first guest post on the subject.

I was especially excited when Marilyn Hacker agreed to to write about her experiences translating because she a long history as a poet and writer herself. In addition to her award-winning translations, Hacker is the author of eleven collections of poems and seven published books of translations from the French. Information about her original books of poetry can be found here, and her most recent translation, of Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen, will be published by FSG this Fall.

You'll find more information about her translation of King of a Hundred Horsemen in the post later today. Below is what I think of as a perfect introduction to the art of translating from someone who connects with poems in much the same way as I do. Here is the first word from Marilyn Hacker:

"For the poet who is also a translator, the great pleasure of translation – of poetry – is, shall we say, the continuation of the struggle by other means. The struggle in question is the angel-wrestling with language of which poetry largely consists, and here, the participant in the « Mental Fight » (Blake, of course) is handicapped by the removal of ego, and, indeed, of the resources of anecdotal memory, from the translator-poet’s corner. What can happen at best is the transformation of a struggle to a dance, performed by two resonating but never-exactly-mirroring constructs of language. Capoeira, anyone?

More concretely: I have translated a dozen or so (almost all contemporary) French or Francophone poets, and I’d be hard put to explain my choices except for that chemistry poems exercise on their destined readers. Translation is at once the most engaged form of reading and (as above) an earthy, hands-on engagement with language. The translator must be faithful to the text’s linguistic valence, its connotations, to its music as well as its meaning; yet a translation succeeds when it exists independently as a poem in the receptor language. Poet-mathematician Jacques Roubaud’s theory of translation leads us to deduce that there are an infinite number of possible valid translations of a poem (Baudelaire’s sonnets as prose poems! Baudelaire’s prose poems as sonnets!), thus an infinite number of independent poems one poem might generate. But dizzying oneself staring in a kaleidoscope distracts from the work."

--Marilyn Hacker

This Week We Translate

2008-04-21T17:03:54-04:00

We're stepping into uncharted waters here, folks. Welcome to the FSG poetry blog's first official poetry-in-translation week.

Full disclosure: I am possibly the worst person ever to host this. Seriously bad. I don't actually speak any other languages. I choose to do my study abroad in Australia.

Somehow despite this--because of this?--I am fascinated by translating poetry. It almost seems willfully complicated, like the literary version of those terrible Strongest Man in the World competitions that you always see on cable. Except, instead of pulling an airplane with her teeth, the translator will remain faithful to the meaning of the original poem while putting her own flourish on the language within! (Audience cheers wildly.)

But I digress.

Luckily we will have some experts to lead us through this wilderness. We have a range of poets and translators who are guest blogging to discuss the subject, including the fabulous Marilyn Hacker, Clare Cavanagh, David Hinton, and several of folks who worked on recent translations of Mayakovsky.

To get yourself psyched up, you can find Yves Bonnefoy audio from last year here and here. Bonnefoy introduces the poems in English and then reads them in French. It's gorgeous.

Sleeping It Off In Rapid City (Part 3)

2008-04-21T09:00:00-04:00

And here, for your Monday morning, is the last section Maureen McLane's essay on August Kleinzahler's new selected poetry collection, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City. (You can find more information about Maureen McLane here--her poetry collection Same Life will be released by FSG in September.) Part 1 can be found here, and part 2 here.

I am going to want to sit with his stunning title poem for a long while. I don’t think I’ve read a more vertiginous, powerful take on US myth-history in a long while. “Sleeping It Off in Rapid City”: this is some world-historical hangover! AK plunks us down in “the exact dead center of America,” and diagnoses (or gives an autopsy of) the current condition of “the dead solid center of the universe/At the heart of the heart of America.” Even to put it this way abuses the poem, since AK doesn’t write poems announcing their “about-ness” (“here is my poem about the state of the nation; here is my poem about X, about Y): but with its layering of and cutting between geologic time, Oglala myth, General Custer’s writings, Mt Rushmore, Kevin Costner, historical monuments, stripmall culture, the “heritage” industry, and the question of what might be “sanctified ground/Here, yes, here,” this poem sounds out a ramifying homage to and critique of what he satirically, but not only satirically (as I hear it), calls “this great land.” “God bless America/We’re right on top of it, baby…on a great slab of Mesozoic rock.”

I could go on and on, but one art these poems embody is the art of knowing when to stop.

--Maureen McLane

Sleeping It Off In Rapid City (Part 2)

2008-04-20T22:19:49-04:00

And now, part two of Maureen McLane's post about August Kleinzahler's new book of selected poems, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (part 1 can be found here and the final section will arrive later today):

Precisely naming. A “sense of where you are” is what Bill Bradley had on the basketball court, according to John McPhee, and that’s what these poems paradoxically offer—paradoxically, because many of these poems seem to distill themselves out of apparent dislocation, a condition which seems to be one true “home” for the Kleinzahlerian adventurer. He puts us in transit—on airplanes; in Vancouver, the Coney Island boardwalk, Cork (Ireland), and what seems to be Amsterdam; cinematically zooming down on couples in a plaza in one city, a hotel in another; elsewhere taking us through the postmodern “no-places” that seem to constitute the spaces and strange hours of certain western travelers.

--Maureen McLane

Sleeping It Off In Rapid City (Part 1)

2008-04-20T17:08:00-04:00

Dear God, do I love the poetry of August Kleinzahler. So I was thrilled when Maureen McLane (author of the upcoming FSG collection Same Life) offered to write a post about his new book of selected poems, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City. I've separated it into three chunks for you, so be sure to come back for all of them. Here's the first:

Funky tunings! Lots of gongs! Thanks to iTunes and August Kleinzahler, I am sitting here listening to ethnomusicologist Colin McPhee’s transcriptions for two pianos of the Balinese Gamelan, played by McPhee and Benjamin Britten. Here are some of the first auditory-consumer fruits of reading August’s “Sleeping It Off in Rapid City,” one of whose poems. “A History of ~~Western~~ Music: Chapter 49,” draws on excerpts from McPhee’s memoir, “A House in Bali.”

AK has “big ears” and there’s enormous sonic vroom but also delicacy here—“Chopin floats; Schubert, as well./What is it exactly?” The nervy, fascinatingly inventive music of the new poems in this new-and-selected volume take off from some previously established motifs: the “History of ~~Western~~ Music” series, installments of which appeared in his last book, “The Strange Hours Travelers Keep,” are wonderfully, episodically continued here (and torqued to non-Western musics in the case of the gamelan). There’s a lot of talk out there, for those who like poetry-talk, about poetry and/or information, and what’s amazing to me is how this poet processes the most apparently diverse data-bits into propelled, simultaneously attitudinal and elegant poems. AK’s poems land somewhere between a blow and a caress. It’s been argued that when you read a poem you meet a person, and not in some dopey “confessional poetry” way; whatever is going into these poems, the peculiar, distinctive neurological dance we might call “voice” is always signaling here a governing, wily, sensitive intelligence. I don’t know how AK manages to get a “9-cyclohetadecenone-addled marionette/Mewing” in a poem “(Secondary Sexual Characteristics”), but he does. Nothing—and certainly no register of style or diction—is alien to him. Let’s pivot from “Kill me, fuck me, write me bad checks” to “Hold on, the jacaranda’s gone missing” to “Downstairs, Sol, of Sol’s Paradise Club,/mixes a fizz drink for a mummy blonde./--Thanks, Sol.” And on to “You’d figure the hawk for an isolate thing,/commanding the empyrean.” There’s a lot of rain in this book, as well as clouds, airplanes, music, drinks, love, wiseguys, motorcycles, birds, jets, and precisely named chemicals and geologic strata.

--Maureen McLane

I Belong To The School That Is Against Schools

2008-04-19T22:33:00-04:00

Those of you who were reading the blog last year will remember that we had a wealth of audio from Pulitzer Prize winning poet Paul Muldoon. There was our first poetry ringtone, a meditation on poems by Rilke and James Wright, an enthusiastic reading of John Berryman, and a rendition of 'The Sightseers' from his book Horse Latitudes, all well worth a listen if you didn't catch them the first time around.

So I've been feeling a bit bereft this year without his pleasant demeanor around the place. To remedy the situation slightly, here is a great interview conducted with Paul Muldoon shortly after he was appointed poetry editor for The New Yorker. Matt Dellinger interviews him for the magazine (and cracks a pretty good joke about Paul's rock band Rackett).

The interview is wonderfully wide reaching, touching on good, weird stuff like geodesic domes, hip hop, and the pleasing variety found in the work of younger poets today. Here's a snippet:

Q: I'm sure readers are wondering what you might have in store for New Yorker poetry, and whether you feel you have any particular mission?

A: The answer is that there is no mission, I have no mission except, except, except...to be open to the possibility of offering a wide range of poems. I tend to go in fear of schools of any kind, I tend to go in fear of those who would insist that poetry must take any particular shape or form in the world, or indeed perhaps any lack of shape or form. So I belong to the school, one would say, that is against schools. So I am open to anything.

I Am Sorry To Tell You

2008-04-19T18:03:14-04:00

Imagine my surprise this morning, laying in bed this morning, wondering if I had the desire to get up and make coffee before noon (I didn't) and listening to This American Life, when I heard a completely unique take on that old chestnut 'This Is Just To Say' by William Carlos Williams.

I don't want to ruin the surprise for you, but I feel that I can say that there are several responses to the poem, written by TAL's contributors, and David Rakoff's is a wonderfully nasty little gem of a poem.

Well worth a listen if your Sunday plans include a relaxing morning with the paper. You can find a listing of their air times here.

Oops: We Totally Missed Poem In Your Pocket Day

2008-04-18T20:38:00-04:00

Poem in you pocket day was Thursday! We totally missed it. I feel terrible about this! Did anyone carry a poem around in his or her pocket? Share in the comments.

Be sure to also check out New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, who wrote an original verse (meant to be taken completely seriously, I am certain) for New York's poem in your pocket day. The gauntlet has been thrown down, Los Angeles.

Here Is A Person

2008-04-18T13:47:11-04:00

Okay, I lied a little bit yesterday. I wasn't going to post any fiction readings from the Grace Paley tribute at Poets House, because to be honest, I didn't know how I could justify their being posted on a blog about poetry. But I found myself thinking about this Amy Hempel reading after I'd listened to it, thinking about the beautiful simplicity and finality of that line: 'then she died.'

And then there was also this appreciation by A.M. Homes, who said:

"I think of Grace and I think about how when I first read her stories I really couldn't understand them. They were lost on me and I didn't know why. And then I borrowed a record from the library--it was a recording of Grace reading 'Goodbye and Good Luck' and 'A Conversation with My Father' and suddenly listening to the sound of the reader's voice reading her own work, her intonation like an incantation made it all perfectly clear."

Which is a huge part of what this blog is about--the way that writing when read aloud takes on a new shape and new form, and it makes you view the written word differently. If you like these stories, please do check out Grace Paley's Collected Stories, which is well worth a read especially if you primarily have appreciated Grace's poetry.

Unfortunately, we don't have Grace Paley reading her own work. But I hope that the intonation and incantation of Amy Hempel reading her short short story 'Mother' will suffice. I'm also including the whole of A.M. Homes' words, because I love the way they set up the reading.

You can download the Hempel here and the Homes here, or listen to them in the players below.

A.M. Homes:

Amy Hempel:

Definitely Not A National Poetry Month Event

2008-04-17T17:39:33-04:00

In case any of you are looking for someplace to spend happy hour tonight, friend of the blog Levi Asher will be hosting a poetry reading--just a normal one, NOT for national poetry month, I've been assured--at the Bowery Poetry Club tonight. Rumor has it that a future FSG author will be appearing alongside Levi, as will Tao Lin, so you probably don't want to miss it.

Details: Tonight, April 17th, from 6:30-7:30 PM.
The Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery Street
(Between Houston and Bleecker)
F train to 2nd Ave, 6 to Bleecker

Also, Levi has promised (threatened?) bongo drums. My representation of what that will probably look like after the jump.

Before I Was Nobody I Was Me

2008-04-17T13:39:47-04:00

Here is the last of the poetry that I will post from Grace Paley's tribute by Poets House. This reader is one of my favorite poets, Galway Kinnell. He reads selections from Fidelity, Grace's posthumously published book, and her Collected Poems, mentioning in this introduction the reasoning behind his selections,

"These poems are a kind of history of her life just before she died,"

which is quite a wonderful way to describe going into the next world--still writing, still observing, still striving to make sense of your experiences.

I especially like listening to his take on the poem 'Here,' the last poem read in Kinnell's recording, particularly because it seems to come directly from the reader's own heart. Kinnell mentions that for the past year he has opened all of his readings with this poem, and you can hear in his voice the hours devoted to reading it aloud.

You can download the poems by clicking this, or stream them in the player below.

Often The Only Thing That Comes With Publication Is Silence

2008-04-16T17:55:37-04:00

Here's another, untitled poem by Grace Paley, read by author Wesley Brown at her Poets House tribute last year. He describes Grace's impetus to write as such:

"…the validation of her work was not in its critical reception, but in the effort she made to give voice to what Jane Cooper called ‘the crooning and combative language of the street.’ These voices spoke loud and clear in Grace’s poetry and stories, or when she joined a public chorus creating a ruckus around some injustice that many would have preferred to keep quiet.

But wherever Grace’s voice made its presence felt, she never ceased to take delight in a world that also made her furious."

You can listen to the audio here, or stream it live below.

An Evening Of Affection And Respect

2008-04-16T16:04:41-04:00

I can't take credit for that title--those are the words that Poets House executive director Lee Briccetti used to introduce their tribute to Grace Paley, held in late 2007. Poets House was kind enough to share their audio with us, and I'll be posting selections from it all day today.

Here, poet Jean Valentine introduces and reads 'In the Bus,' including a funny story about visiting Grace in jail in Washington DC.

And here is poet Naomi Replansky reading several poems (including 'The Poet's Occasional Alternative,' which I adore) and speaking about the way New York City influenced Grace, and the ways Grace influenced the city.

"She would take realistic talk, intonations from the Bronx, or Lower East Side, or Greenwich Village, and heighten it until it became almost surreal."

There Is Your Bending Neck

2008-04-15T17:13:47-04:00

A little homework for all of you.

With the release of Same Life, coming out this September, Maureen McLane will be the newest poet to enter FSG’s roster. (Maureen, please keep an eye out for your jersey, which should be in the mail.) And I think it’s time you all get to know her a bit better.

So today for you I have a downloadable broadsheet, a preview of the poem After Sappho IV from Same Life. You can set it as your computer’s wallpaper, or print it out and hang it on the actual wall—I’m not picky about the way you appreciate our poetic broadsheets, and I suspect Maureen is fairly loose about it as well.

Please also read Maureen's fabulous, and hilarious, article from The Boston Review about teaching some rather reluctant children—are there any other kind?—at the East Harlem poetry project.

“We faced, of course, some problems of definition. With kids, unlike undergraduates or grumpy academics or bickering coterie poets, one need never enter into metaphysical, formal, or historical debates revolving around the question, ‘What is a poem?’ Anything you said was a poem. A prose poem, a poem in stanzas, a poem in free-verse lines: all were poems. No problem: who cares? It became clear that our tacit definition of ‘poem’ was, ‘a short piece of writing, in lines, more or less.’”

I’ll also have some audio and maybe even a guest blog from her in the coming weeks, so be ready.

Wanted: National Poet

2008-04-15T12:02:53-04:00

Another set your Tivo alert--PBS aired an hour-long special on Walt Whitman last night, and it looks crazy good. Be sure to keep an eye out for the interview with one of FSG's own, Yusef Komunyakaa.

One of my favorite things about Whitman is the way he seems uniquely American, so this quotation from Allan Gurganus really caught my eye:

"I think Walt Whitman went to the help wanted section and found a squib that said Wanted: National Poet. And he was innocent enough to believe there really was such a job. And he was innocent enough to believe that if he could just write a poem that incorporated everything he felt and suspected and hoped for from America, that he would have the position. And you know, by God, he did it."

They've also got a great interactive map of Whitman's New York up at their website, which you know I am all about. And if you're not so hot with programming a Tivo, you can also stream the whole program from the site.

Guess Who Hates National Poetry Month?

2008-04-14T14:04:00-04:00

Well, it’s probably not much of a guessing situation, since I think most of you already knew anyway. But regardless, here you go: Bloggers hate National Poetry Month. Poets hate National Poetry Month. I’m even going to go out on a limb and suggest that there are probably some Joyce Kilmer-reading 6^th graders who are hating on National Poetry Month right this very minute.

I read so much commentary about what a bad thing NPM is that I sort of felt like I needed to bring up the fact that I have, actually, listened to and considered these arguments against it. I suspect that most people who have read Charles Bernstein’s essay agree with it at least in part—he’s a funny and wise writer, and his argument probably makes a lot of sense if you’re living in a major city, especially one that offers poetry readings most nights of the week. From Bernstein's essay:

As part of the spring ritual of National Poetry Month, poets are symbolically dragged into the public square in order to be humiliated with the claim that their product has not achieved sufficient market penetration and must be revived by the Artificial Resuscitation Foundation (ARF) lest the art form collapse from its own incompetence, irrelevance, and as a result of the general disinterest among the broad masses of the American People.

The motto of ARF's National Poetry Month is: ‘Poetry's not so bad, really.’

I don’t mean to say that you have to live in a big city to be able to turn your nose up at the idea of a month devoted to poetry. I am pretty sure that if you’re a person who spends a lot of time writing poetry, or reading poetry, or hanging out with poets, then the idea of National Poetry Month sounds stupid, whether you live in Terra Haute or San Francisco. But let’s be honest: to takes a lot more effort to be a full-time poetry fan if you are also a full-time resident of a city lacking a significant university population or growth industry.

And this is why I am a fan of National Poetry Month.

When I was in high school in Saginaw, MI--which, for the record, was one of those cities lacking in the significant university population and growth industries--I considered myself a die-hard poetry fan. I went to an extremely nerdy high school, where we did things like “journal” for an hour each day and get bused hours to tiny art museums to sit within an installation of knitted trees and write poems about it. (I swear I am not making this up. I also once went to a summer camp where we had to do the Macarena like the wetlands. This is what passes for arts education in the Midwest.) Sure, I think everyone in the class knew what we were doing was ridiculous. And yet at the same time, we all appreciated the effort—I mean, I wrote poems about those trees. I’d bet money those journals are still sitting at my parents' house somewhere.

So after all that energy expended toward “everyday” poetry, it was pretty exciting to have Cornelius Eady come to speak at the local community college one April. It was so easy—just sit and listen! I still remember it pretty well. He wore red Converse with his suit—pretty much the height of fashion to us high school poets—and I still have my signed copy of You Don’t Miss Your Water.

Which makes me think. If NPM did that for me, I bet there are more people benefiting from it, at least in tiny way. Just think about it. There’s got to be some long-suffering arts reporter sitting at a newspaper desk in Oklahoma and thanking his lucky stars for National Poetry Month, because it means he has an excuse to run an AP feature on a poet.

And I like to picture to look of glee on librarians' faces when they realize that there’s extra money in April for all the new poetry books they’ve been dying to read.

So there. Poetry month: pretty freaking great. I appreciate that there are multiple points of view on the subject—actually, I’m thrilled that there are, and not just because I get an extra post out of it—and I’m even sympathetic to the arguments against. But you can stop telling me about Bernstein: I’m here staking my position as firmly PRO. To summarize another poetry blogger (who I can’t link to here directly because of his habit of posting unseemly videos), even if you live and breathe poetry, April just means more readings and discounts on poetry collections. And who can hate on that?

Poet's House Showcase (Part 4)

2008-04-13T13:04:58-04:00

Finally, the last words from the catalog:

"We look forward to seeing you next year, when we mount the Poets House Showcase for the first time in our new and permanent home in Battery Park City."

This exhibit will be open from April 12-19 at @ NYPL Jefferson Market Branch
425 Sixth Avenue (at West 10th Street)
For library hours, call (212) 243-4334
Admission free

Poet's House Showcase (Part 3)

2008-04-13T10:00:00-04:00

Don't tell anyone at FSG, but this chapbook really charmed me with the cover.