One More Poetry Giveaway!

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!

"Language Is Infinitely Flexible And Powerful"

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"

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

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

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!

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.

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

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?

 

 

Marilyn Hacker On "That Balance Of Foreignness And Familiarity"

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"

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

There Is Your Bending Neck

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.