Just Some Poems: Du Fu in Translation

In translation, even Du Fu’s name is not a constant.  At the time Kenneth Rexroth translated him, the name in English of this Tang Dynasty poet was “Tu Fu.”  Or, as poet Charles Simic put it, “Du Fu, eh?  I knew him when he was Tu Fu.  A swell guy!”

Listening to Penelope

Penelope "may be the best thing to happen to Homer since Joyce."
—George Wallace

It moves like a live thing in his hands
The story, his story
Bloody and sacred, truth and lie
—Ellen McLaughlin

A few years ago, a series of little novels started to appear, preceded by a book of introduction called A Short History of Myth.  The first novel in the series was The Penelopiad, by Margaret Atwood.  Atwood’s premise, “to give the telling of the story to Penelope and to the twelve hanged maids,” was promising.

Sailing Alone From Song to Song

I was going wherever I happened to go,
giving myself over to whatever I met,
-Su Tung-P'o

How easy he has made it for me to enter here,
to sit down in a corner;
cross my legs like his, and listen.
-Billy Collins

One evening, in the manner of Su Tung-P'o, I followed the path of composer Missy Mazzoli to New Amsterdam Records, where a new CD of her music was on offer.  From there I spotted a trio called janus, with a first CD just out.  The trio intrigued me because of its instrumentation:  flute, viola, and harp.

In Search of a Silent Night

© Sans façon.  By kind permission of Sans façon.

The holiday season is upon us, in case the endless Jingle Bell Rock loop at Starbucks hasn’t given it away.

-Jon Stewart

A few chocolates, a glass of mulled wine and a CD by the The Sixteen playing quietly.  Sublime.

-Friko

Here today we are doing something special, we are stopping and appreciating the space between things, the unintentional sounds that make up our world.

-Dave Hilliard, Cage Against the Machine

Last year, in her post “Do You Hear What I Hear?”, Wide Open Spaces remarked on the auditory invasion of Christmas music at this time of year:

It’s not that I don’t enjoy Christmas music; I do have a nice collection of CDs that I bring up from storage this time of year.  I just don’t understand the need to have it invade all my listening hours.  Last year one radio station started playing Christmas music on November 1st –in effect, they devoted 17% of their annual product to these tunes. (And need I mention that these tunes are associated with a religious holiday that not all people celebrate?)

As she noted, while there is some decent holiday music out there, “not everything is listenable.  For every Bing Crosby or “O Holy Night”, there is Alvin and the Chipmunks or “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.”  Blech.”

Listening to Wales: Arvo Pärt and the Vale of Glamorgan Festival

Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer, turns seventy-five this September, and he’ll be celebrating part of his birthday week in Wales.  From September 5th through 11th, his glorious music will form the centerpiece of the Vale of Glamorgan Festival, and Pärt will be in attendance September 8th and 9th.

Listening to Ulysses

Before he was anybody special (well, at least before he had his own show), Stephen Colbert stood on the stage at Symphony Space in New York City and flexed his arms in preparation.  He was about to read two chapters from James Joyce’s Ulysses, Calypso and the Lotus Eaters.

Anne Carson's Nox

Anne Carson has credentials when it comes to fragments.  She’s a professor of classics and translator of ancient Greeks who says, of using brackets when translating Sappho, “Brackets are exciting.”

Hope Is The Thing With Feathers

From the vantage point of Royal Street on a beautiful spring day, the resurgence of New Orleans was abundantly on display.  Choosing from the delectable fare at the New Orleans Roadfood Festival was nigh impossible:  roasted oysters, crawfish enchiladas, roast beef Po Boys, Texas barbecue, dark chocolate turtles, pecan pie, and more.

I Am Not Me, The Nose Is Not Mine

In the teeming collage of text that forms a backdrop for the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of The Nose are the words “spine," smashed,” and “beautiful, pitiful age.”  While in the thrall of the opera’s swirl of sound and image, I held tight to those words in hope of discovering where they came from and what they meant.

$1.00: A Poem by Elaine Sexton

$1.00

for five fresh eggs in winter,
one of them “wrinkled”
the farmer says, but still good.

The Beauty of the Object: Megan Barron’s wrack line

The grains shall be collected
from the thousand shores
to which they found their way

--Kay Ryan, from “All Shall Be Restored”

Sometime in her early twenties, Megan Barron took some slides, one of which “was intriguing but sadly underexposed.”

It occurred to me to remedy the mistake by trying to make a painting of the image, which I did by peering through the slide held between my fingers.  . . . While I probably gave myself a headache, I was surprised at its turning out well & thought, “Maybe I can do this—paint.”

In her current project, wrack line:  one year of beach finds, illustrated, Barron demonstrates her considerable artistic talent every single day.  The wrack line project, as described by Barron, is “a daily visual journal of what washes ashore.  Every day for a year I will post a new painting or drawing of treasures found during beach walks.”

Photographing Birds in Winter

The winter season calls for modifications to how you dress, how you handle your equipment and how you approach the picture-making process itself.  -Tim Fitzharris, National Audubon Society Guide to Nature Photography

In winter, even birds that don’t migrate can be hard to find.  On these cold and snowy days, we see little on our walks:  a junco pecking at frozen ground, a crow settled on a high tree limb.  We thrill to spot what turns out to be a mockingbird, hunkered down in branches to escape the wind.

Why Less is Sometimes Waaaaaay Too Much, or This is Just to Say

For a long time I’ve been interested in setting William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” alongside Eliot’s “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” to raise questions about not only these two writers’ poetics but poetics in general. Chief among these questions is, How does one arrive at X poetics at the expense of Y poetics? The essay I’ve been writing on literary influence (nearly finished, I hope) and these two entries here have given me a chance to work out some of my thoughts.

For He Was Welsh, You Know: Reading Shakespeare's Henry the Fifth

Fluellen:  And I do believe your majesty takes

no scorn to wear the leek upon Saint Tavy’s day.

King Henry:  I wear it for a memorable honour,

For I am Welsh, you know, good countryman.

As I listened to John Metcalf’s Mapping Wales, I conjured a sky thick with Welsh archers’ arrows.  The arrows weren’t the stuff of my imagination, but a scene from Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V.  As one thing so often leads to another, I thought it time to give the film another look.

The Virtues of Difficulty

I had intended this, my first post here, to address the literary economy in some way. As co-director of the Pages & Places Book Festival in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and as we’re deep into the planning for the 2010 festival, our second, I'm now contending with all the expected difficulties regards, for example, convincing government officials and even grant-giving foundations to support a celebration of books. So I have plenty of opportunity, let’s call it, to realize to what degree lovers of books and reading are but a tiny minority.

A World of White and Snowy Scents

Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.
-Wallace Stevens

Right now, I can’t imagine beyond snow.  It’s been falling all day again, though this time, not to much effect.  Deer tracks run everywhere:  they veer toward the hemlock, then, foiled by the fencing, veer back to open ground.  The paths break into ragged patches where deer scraped through to get at grass.

Things As They Are

"Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar."

-Wallace Stevens

I’ve been troubled by computer problems and an inconstant internet these past few days.  I had to remind myself there was a time when such things were not only unnecessary, but not even available.  I had to think:  what, then, were the things I used to use?

I no longer own a typewriter, so I looked around for a notebook and a pen.  I found them foreign objects, and inefficient.  I looked for a dictionary, but had only a small paperback that didn’t contain what I required.  I wanted confirmation of something I’d been told:  that the etymological root of the word “poet” was “maker.”  Without my usual tools to search, I was thrown back on my own experience for proof.

Anne Carson's Red Monster

Now and then, as a vestige of my egghead education, I’m compelled to attempt a hard book.  So when I was shown The Power of the Center:  A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts, I thought, why not?  At page 44, I set it down by Finnegans Wake, vowing, MacArthur-like, to return to each.

The Problem with Wallace Stevens

Our poet-friend came visiting, The New York Review of Books in hand, with Dan Chiasson’s review of the new Selected Poems by Wallace Stevens.  We pored over the review, trying to find in poems the things Chiasson said were there to see.  I felt I had tiptoed up behind a group of elders, Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom chief among them, peaking over their shoulders for a glimpse of Susanna.