A Fine Rain Falls

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

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

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?

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.

Moon Has Never Understood Wine

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.
 

Love's Bow Has Smashed Against The Daily Grind

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

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!

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.

Here Is A Person

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:

Before I Was Nobody I Was Me

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.