tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-123453392024-03-17T22:03:08.625-05:00A Burning Patience"And, in the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid cities."
-- Arthur RimbaudLyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.comBlogger185125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-7610587080150026362016-05-17T17:01:00.000-05:002016-05-17T17:01:02.227-05:00I'm still here<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Just posting here to let anyone know (whoever is still dropping by from time to time) that I still haven't disappeared, I've just been spending time away from the computer and the internet for a while.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I plan to be back, possibly fairly soon. We'll see how life goes.</span>Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-61583045809254279912015-04-05T10:35:00.001-05:002015-04-05T10:35:49.597-05:00AWP in Minneapolis, and recommended reading<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Again I've been away from this blog longer than I'd intended. Much busy with writing, and reading, and life in general.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I'll be attending the annual AWP conference this year, this coming week here in Minneapolis.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Some general information for anyone not familiar with Minneapolis: most of the conference events will be at the Minneapolis convention center, at the southern edge of downtown. The weather here this time of year can be highly variable. The forecasts I've seen are saying high temps in the 50's, and lows in the 30's. Either rain or snow are possible this time of year. (This past week it got warm, up to 83 degrees one day, though that's not in the forecast for this coming week.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Most of the buildings in downtown Minneapolis are connected by enclosed overhead walkways (known locally as "skyways") at the second floor level of the buildings, which can be a big help if the weather turns nasty. The skyways are mostly open from early morning through early evening, though it varies somewhat. If you Google "minneapolis skyway" that should give a bunch of links to maps of the skyway system. The convention center is also connected to the skyways. A lot of the (relatively) cheaper places to eat are in the skyway/second floor level of the office buildings.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">You can get from the airport to downtown Minneapolis by the light rail train. Train fair is $2.25 during morning and evening rush hours, and $1.75 during non-rush hour times and all day on weekends. There are ticket machines on the station platforms. (At the airport, last I knew, the ticket machines are at the top of the escalator before you go down to the train station.) * If you're staying at any of the "official" AWP hotels downtown, or any other hotels nearby, you'll probably want to get off at the Nicollet Mall station downtown, and walk south.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">*</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Some of the AWP events I plan to check out are include:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">On Thursday, a 10:30 panel on "Robert Bly and the Minnesota Writers Publishing House," and a Tribute event (at 3:00) for poets Joy Harjo and Linda Hogan (both Harjo and Hogan are listed among the panel members); also, an offsite event, a Red Dragonfly Press Social and Reading, at 6:00 p.m. at the Gamut Gallery, 1006 Marquette Avenue (across the street from the Hilton hotel);</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">On Friday, a panel on "James Wright in Minneapolis", at 1:30;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">On Saturday, "Writing into the World: Memoir, History and Private Life," a panel at 12:00 featuring poet Carolyn Forche among others; "Tribute to Tom McGrath," at 1:30, with panelists Mike Hazard, John Bradley, Michael Dennis Browne, and Ray Gonzales; a Robert Bly tribute event at 3:00; an at 8:00 p.m. a reading and conversation with Carolyn Forche and Kevin Young.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The above are the highest-priority events for me; there are others I may also try to get to if I have the stamina and concentration. Plus there's the bookfair...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">*</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">There are several poets and books of poems I've been trying to get to, to write about here. I've been slow and delinquent in this. Two I want to mention in particular that I highly hope to get to, and that I highly recommend:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Lavando la Dirty Laundry</em> by Natalia Trevino (should be a tilde over the <em>n</em> in her last name), published 2014 by <a href="http://mongrelempire.org/catalog/poetry/lavandodirtylaundry.html">Mongrel Empire Press</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">And <em>Continuous Performance</em> by Maggie Jaffe, a selected poems from her body of work, published 2014 by <a href="http://www.reddragonflypress.org/books.html#!/CONTINUOUS-PERFORMANCE-by-Maggie-Jaffe/p/41735315">Red Dragonfly Press</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">*</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Anyway I'm still here. Hoping to get back here shortly and say some more.</span>Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-10545933866627495172014-12-27T21:18:00.002-06:002014-12-27T21:18:38.929-06:00Petrified Time<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This past fall I read <em>Petrified Time</em> by <strong>Yannis Ritsos</strong>, translated by Martin McKinsey and Scott King, published in 2014 by <a href="http://www.reddragonflypress.org/books.html#!/PETRIFIED-TIME-by-Yannis-Ritsos/p/39545220/category=10396222">Red Dragonfly Press</a>. This is one of the strongest translations of Ritsos that I've read, and one of the books of poems published this past year that spoke to me most powerfully. (The book includes the original Greek along with the English translations.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Yannis Ritsos spent periods of his life on various prison islands in Greece for his left-wing political activites, imprisoned for left-wing political activities along with many other members of the left-wing resistance. The poems in <em>Petrified Time</em> come from a period of roughly four years of imprisonment in the late 1940's and early 1950's, including a year in the particularly brutal prison on Makronisos. The poems evoke a deeply rooted endurance, a love and embrace of the hearts and lives of the vast majority of the people of the world, in quiet stubborn defiance of all efforts to crush the fires of life.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">From the poem "Things We Know":</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">A sun of stone went with us</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">scorching the desert wind and thorns.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The afternoon hung from the sea's selvage</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">like a bare yellow bulb in some deep forest of memory.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">We had no time for such things -- but even so</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">now and then we'd look up, and there on our blankets</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">with the dirt, the oil stains and the olive pits</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">a few willow leaves, a few pine needles remained. [...]</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">[...] Yet we knew that off at the great crossroads</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">was a city lit by a thousand colored lights</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">where people greet you with the simple nod of the forehead --</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">we recognize them by their hands</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">by the way they cut their bread</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">by the shadows they cast on the dinner table</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">as every voice grows sleepy in their eyes</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and a lonely star makes a cross on their pillow.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">We know them by the strife that furrows their brow</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">but more than that -- when the night sky deepens overhead</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">we know them by their poised, conspiratorial manner</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">as they slip their heart like an illegal leaflet</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">under the world's closed door.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Much of the poetry of Yannis Ritsos has been translated into English during the past half century; too often, translators blur or miss entirely the political weight his poems carry. (I've written about Ritsos previously in this blog, <a href="http://aburningpatience.blogspot.com/2005/05/translating-yannis-ritsos.html">here</a>.) Ritsos was a Communist, and remained one to the end of his life; he remained fully committed to the promise (not yet realized) of remaking the world in the name and interests of the billions of us who daily make and build the world with our hands and feet and minds and voices and hearts. One of the things I especially like about McKinsey and King's translation of <em>Petrified Time</em> is that the political intent of the poems if not obscured overlooked.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Comrades, they forced us to remain silent.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">We had no chance to give voice to our song.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">As usual, the afternoon fills with dust,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">dust from the traffic of mothers in black dresses</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">returning from Averoff Prison or Hadzikosta Hospital</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">or the Department of Transfers,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">grieving mothers in black dresses,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">with their hearts wrapped in handkerchiefs</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">like crusts of dry bread, bread so hard Death can't chew it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Comrades, they are forcing us to remain silent.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">They are forcing away our sun.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">They don't want us to give voice to our song --</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">the one that begins simply, with strength and bitterness:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Workers of the world, unite!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">At night, when an illicit moon rises above the horizon without a word,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The shadow from a gigantic crutch is etched onto the rocks of Makronisos.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"We could make this crutch into a ladder,"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Vangelis suggests, leaning toward Petros' ear,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">as if giving voice to the first line of our future song.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Comrades, it's getting late. It's very late.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">We must give voice to our song.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">(From the poem "Duty".)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In the daily struggle of living in the world, hope and fatigue come and go. Some days it's a little easier to face the first morning light than other days; some evenings the gathering dark weighs heavier than other nights. In his poems Ritsos and the others imprisoned with him persist and endure, but at no time is he fully outside of the experience. During the days and nights on an island of rock and wind and relentless sun, amid tents sloping toward the sea, surrounded by arms soldiers and barbwire, at no time does he in any way soften or romanticize what is hard and difficult and oppressive.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">A crumb of death in our pockets -- we go unshaven.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Where is there a stalk of wheat to bend on its knees to heaven?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Night is slow to fall. The shadows can't hide the hardness of the rock.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The dead man's canteen is swallowed up in the sand.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The moon anchored on another shore,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">rocked to and fro by the calm's little finger.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">But what shore? and what calm?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Our thirst was great</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">as we sweated all day at the stone.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Beneath our thirst</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">lay the roots of the world.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">(From the poem "The Roots of the World".)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">This is a book of poems about remaining alive and thriving in spite of crushing work and crushing monotony. This is a book of poems about continuing to seek possibilities when none offer themselves, or when possibility itself seems to be held incommunicado behind arms guard and barbwire. Yannis Ritsos published over a hundred books during his lifetime -- poetry, essays, drama, autobiography, translations of other poets into Greek. Certain images recur throughout the whole body of his work, in perpetual variation -- sun and sea and stone and wind, moon and movements in the night, long days and nights of watching and waiting and making ready. Behind the ever-present imagery are the years on the prison isles, the sea viewed through barbwire, the sun on the bare backs of forced labor, a group of prisoners taken away to be shot.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">One month, two months... then many more.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">We measured them by hauling both stones and fears on our shoulders,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">by tapping a hooked finger along the side of the clay pitcher</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">to hear the sound of water</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">just as we listen for the voice of our wife behind a door,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">just as our wife listens for the voices of even the smallest of stars,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">just as the stars listen for the bleating of flocks at dusk. [...]</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">[...] If only we were less thirsty, it wouldn't occupy our minds,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">if only there was one tree on the hillside or at the top of the island,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">if only there was a handful of shade, and less bitterness, and less injustice.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">We've forgotten the shape of a tree -- is it, perhaps,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">like a large banner of water?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">or like a "Thank you" that someone said to you in the past?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">or like a lover's hand searching for your hand?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">In the future, we'll plant thousands of trees.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">(From the poem "Noon".)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In the aftermath of the Second World War, a civil war ensued in Greece, between the populist and labor-oriented political movements of the political left and the right-wing political movements of corporate capitalism and the military; Greece wasn't the only place in the world where this was going on during those years. The business class and military prevailed, in part due to economic and military backing they received from the U.S. government and allies of the U.S. This is some of the wider background to how Yannis Ritsos and thousands of others were sent to prison on islands of rock hammered daily by the sun.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">*</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I hadn't intended to let six months pass since my last post in this blog. To any of may have come by looking for anything new during this time, my thanks -- I haven't gone away, just had a few months submerged in the various things of life. I'm still here and will keep posting things in this blog as I'm able to. I don't plan to let six months go again until the next blogpost.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Winter solstice in the northern hemisphere; here in Minneapolis, it's dark when I leave for work in the morning, and dark when I get home in the evening. By the end of January the daylight will have advanced enough so that there will be at least a glow of light in the west, on clear evenings anyway, as I'm getting home in the evening.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Poetry is everywhere. There is nowhere on earth that it doesn't belong.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I'll finish with a few more lines by Yannis Ritsos from <em>Petrified Time</em>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The days come and go. The rock never changes.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Sometimes a ship sails past, or a cloud --</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">leaving behind it a scrap of shade, a little window</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">onto a memory of trees.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Nothing ever changes.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Neither heart nor rock changes. [...]</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">[...] Evening folds up its red banner.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Once again we will sleep with a stone between our teeth,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">with the sea's breathing at the back of our ears.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Brothers, whatever comes now</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">will find us with our bundles slung over our shoulders,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and in those bundles, all of our hearts</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">turning our pledge to Democracy over in our minds</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">the way we twist our finger in the buttonhold of a friend's jacket</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">not because we have nothing to say</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">but because of all the love we feel for him -- and so it is:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">when we love we cannot speak,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">we toy with a branch of wild olive,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">scratch a name in the dirt,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and it's always the same, and we'll always be ready,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and it's always the name of Freedom.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">(From the poem "Ready".)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span>Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-59713574216750266712014-07-01T23:08:00.000-05:002014-07-01T23:08:00.855-05:00Savage Coast<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've been away from this blog longer than I'd intended to be -- I've been caught up in daily life stuff again, and doing much reading in "spare time." One of the books I read this past spring, and really liked, is <em>Savage Coast</em> by <strong>Muriel Rukeyser</strong> (2013, <a href="http://www.feministpress.org/books/muriel-rukeyser/savage-coast">The Feminist Press at the City University of New York</a>).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Savage Coast</em> is a novel based on Rukeyser's experiences in northeastern Spain (Barcelona and the Catalonia region in general) for a few days at the time of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July, 1936. The Spanish Civil War is a large subject; during the years the war took place, roughly July 1936 through early 1939, it became a gravity point for the international political Left, as volunteers from many countries joined the International Brigades and travelled to Spain, and entered full and brutal military war against Fascist armies (led by upper-ranking officers of Spain's military) who were trying to overthrow the elected government.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Rukeyser's novel gives a deeply close-up and personal account, full of remarkable detail, sometimes almost random, sometimes carefully observed and chosen. The overall arc of the story moves from chaos and isolation and vague gestures to sharp vision and collective movement and clarity of purpose. It is a radically political novel, clearly and intentionally, both in the intimately personal-is-political sense and in the public activist communal sense.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Rukeyser travelled to Spain in July 1936 to write and report about an alternative People's Olympics that had been organized in Spain, as a protest and defiance against the "official" summer Olympics that were taking place that year in Germany (and were being used as a propaganda device by the Nazi government there). The lead character in the novel, named Helen, is loosely based on Rukeyser herself, and a number of the other major characters are based on real people who also were there, though Rukeyser says in a short note at the front of the book, "None of the persons are imaginary, but none are represented at all photographically; for any scenes or words in the least part identifiable, innumerable liberties and distortions may be traced."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In the first half of the book the story action takes place mostly on a train after it has entered northeastern Spain; much of the time is spent at a small village where the train has halted because war has broken out further south, and because of a general labor strike in much of the country as a protest against the attempted Fascist counter-revolution. The people do what people do: the passengers on the train try to find information, food, places to sleep, in the village and in whatever small supplies they have with them on the train; the people in the town cope with the sudden influx of visitors as best they're able. Here's a brief passage from early in the book, to give a little flavor of Rukeyser's writing:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">All the passengers in third were filling the aisle now, crowding out the open windows, talking to the groups whose heads could be seen, banked thick against the sides of the train, standing on both sides of the station platform. Helen pushed back through the swarming cars, through the holiday knots, laughter, gossip. An arm reached out and seized her wrist. Igt was the tight-skinned Hungarian, the manager.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"Have you heard the rumors?" he shouted, over the laughter and talk. "All sorts of rumors, already. The English are saying that the Communists have bombed the tracks and that we can't go farther; and I heard the Frenchman say that the engineer has gone on strike, and won't move the train until he gets some kind of extravagant promise." He fanned himself with the straw hat. "But come in and meet our team anyway." The Hungarians were standing, politeness and warmth ran around the compartment. The fine-faced printer was introduced. "It looks like something real," he said. "But obviously nobody knows that. You probably ought to find the other Americans."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"I know one of them," said Helen. "I wish you'd go down and reassure her. She's on her way to the bullfights, and she turned into jelly when they searched the train."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"They were absolute correct to search the train," the printer answered. They destroyed some snapshots we were taking, too. Last spring, they said, the Fascists caught a lot of photographs of armed civilians, and anyone whose face was clear got his. They're not taking any chances."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"But if you've been talking with them --" Helen cried, her face darkening with excitement. "What do they say is happening?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"They only said that," the printer told her. He was a young student, from his look, his earnest clear glance, but the marks about his mouth and his darkened, blunt fingers showed how long he had spent at work; he looked straightforward at Helen now, obviously telling all he knew. "They were ordered to go through the train; for all they knew, the girl said, it's just an examination, and we'll go right on through to Barcelona."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">As I read the book, I kept thinking of the word "cinematic" to describe the shifts in scene, the dialogue that often seems carefully written and offhand at the same time, the changes in view from long shot to close-up to angular glance to clear simple frame, again both carefully set up and almost randomly occurring.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Muriel Rukeyser was in Spain for a few days. During that time, she met a man from Germany, Otto Boch, a runner who had come to Spain for the Olympics. They became lovers. Boch stayed, and joined the anti-Fascist International Brigades, and was killed in the civil war. One of the characters in <em>Savage Coast</em> is a German runner based on Boch, and in novel he and Rukeyser's character Helen become lovers. Some years later, in the late 1940's after the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, Rukeyser dedicated her poem cycle <em>Elegies</em> to Otto Boch.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In the second half of the novel, Helen and her several traveling companions find a way to Barcelona, a city bright and joyous with popular insurgence; the city shows marks of recent fighting, and there is still danger from Fascist snipers and abductors. The days become filled with large public gatherings, official ceremonies, following rumors and threads of news reports, as the weight of the mounting events of the larger world grows ever greater. And mingled with this, the realization by the many visitors that they'll need to decide, and soon, whether to leave for home or to stay and join the coming storm.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Here's another passage from the book; the scene takes place on the first morning after Helen and others from the train have arrived in Barcelona:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Helen went immediate to the window, hauled up the venetian blind, and stood in the broad panel of sunlight the struck across the room. The gunfire continued. Facing her, a curved wall of arches surprised her, thrown block-long and receding; it took her a second to recognize the tiers and galleries of the arena, the slim pillars which were so perfect for snipers. Her eye ran over the shaded colonnade with animal speed: she had become vigilant, it gave her a tremendous sense of health and freshness to wake without fear and speculate on concealed rifles.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The angle of the Olympic cut down across her view to the right, and she could see nothing but a boarded up café, a filling station, and the radiator and front wheels of the overturned car. But to the left lay the new city, ruled square, block after block of new apartment houses patched white with flags of truce. Behind them stood the high fortress on its strip of cliff, cutting the mountain range abruptly to an end.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Olive and Peter were lying awake in bed.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"That was the seven o'clock bell, wasn't it?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"That was the beginning of the shooting," laughed Olive. Correct response, thought Helen. She came over to the window in Helen's room. "They said something about leaving the blinds drawn."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"I don't know," Helen said slowly. "I don't mind an open window on a street, so much, today."</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"I think I'm finished with all that too. Peter and I were walking to dinner when we missed you; Peter had just said something about the truck-ride and fear when a car came up. The driver asked us to get in, and we didn't think anything of it. There was a guard with a submachine gun; everything seemed proper until they started driving and took us miles through the country, or park -- darkness, anyway. They didn't say a word to us. Then we began to remember things -- we hadn't noticed the initials on the car, fascists can drive cars too, we didn't speak Catalan, the car had only one door -- all of those things."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"It's a big park," Helen said.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"A goddamned big park. But it may have cured me."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">They hung out the window. At the filling station, cars and trucks were already lined up, C.N.T and U.G.T cars for the most part, and the proprietor and two assistants were supplying them, lifting the dripping nozzle out of one tank and dropping it into the next without bothering to check the stream of gas.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"They're going to run short of cars," Helen remarked under the grinding of gears as they rushed down the street."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"The state's requisitioning cars from dealers," said Peter, from bed.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"There was a Ford sign on the road."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Helen knew she would always have this first morning of complete confidence. Peter and Olive had it too, she saw, reading their faces. One more lie to hold against the books! she reflected; the foolish irrelevant stories of people's characters changing like wind which shifts.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">She had wanted a life for herself, and found she was unequipped; and adjusting her wants, cared to be a person prepared for that life. I want greatness, she thought, the rich faces of the living. All the tenseness stood in the way, and see how it removes! One morning, and the fear of death is replaced.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Rukeyser wrote <em>Savage Coast </em>immediately after her return from Spain in 1936. Early reactions from at least one reader of the manuscript, and one potential publisher, were strongly negative -- likely reacting against the left-leaning politics of the novel, as much as against the courage and joy and audacity of a woman making a strong clear statement -- and she put the novel away among her papers, and it remained mostly unknown, and unpublished, during her lifetime and for several decades after that.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The edition published by The Feminist Press has been edited with skill and sensitivity by Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, and includes an Introduction by Kennedy-Epstein and useful endnotes. Over the years Rukeyser wrote several journalistic articles about her days in Spain in 1936, and the Feminist Press edition includes one of these at the end of the book, "We Came for the Games: A Memoir of the People's Olympics, Barcelona, 1936," originally published in <em>Esquire</em> magazine in October 1974.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The Feminist Press has also published a booklet of several other short pieces by Muriel Rukeyser, <em><a href="http://centerforthehumanities.org/lost-and-found/barcelona-1936-selections-muriel-rukeyser%E2%80%99s-spanish-civil-war-archive">"Barcelona, 1936" and Selections from the Spanish Civil War Archive</a></em>, Series 2, Number 6, published in the Lost and Found series of the CUNY Center for the Humanties, Spring 2011. Both articles help highlight how closely Rukeyser held to the essential facts of the events that occurred during her days in Spain, including many critical details of dialogue, descriptions of buildings and people and public places, and so on. The "Barcelona, 1936" pamplet includes, among other things, an image of a hand-drawn map of the small town where the train waited for a few days.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I'll finish here with one further passage from near the end of the novel; the scene is a large public gathering in Barcelona, in which speakers recount the difficult previous days and the hard time of struggle that waits ahead. This section of the novel includes interspersed lists of names of people in Spain who had died during the previous days of fighting.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">They could not be seen, they could not yet be heard; it was the cry advancing with them, its front advancing as their front rank came up, that made them known: a great female animal cry, victorious wail of spectators, the city acclaim of those on the edge and sympathetic, who still have throats to cheer, while those silent fighters pass between their lines.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And now the "Internationale" sprang up, strange, in foreign inflections, as the Norwegians began to sing, changing the wordfall, the sound, almost the song itself.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The Dutch, and the Hungarians; picked it up, unfamiliar, only the form carrying it through, the marching tune.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The French were missing.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">But it reached the crowd of Belgians, the song came nearer, the great crying welcome to the army came, mixing, until the chorus became a crying greet:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<em><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"C'est la lutte finale,</span></em><br />
<em><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"Groupon-nous, et demain,"</span></em><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">...El directive de la C.N.T. Francisco Acaso, Eduardo Gorgot, José Biota, Javier Noguera, Alejandro Prodonis y Fuentes, Concepción Canet y Alcaráz, Vicente Vásquez, Salvador Guerrero, José González y Valencia, Enrique Arnau y Erude, Julián Gil y González...</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"L'Internationale..."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Here! The first line of set faces, brackets of arms set in perpetual fist, red bands about the head, straight stony foreheads dark.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<em><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"Sera le genre humain..."</span></em><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">In a high sung note, praising, crying, speeding an army of unarmed men, who walked rope-soled, blankets slung at the shoulder, their women with them, a few, among them, a few, running beside in the blaze, past the shining confiscated roadsters, the homemade armored cars, the lines of spectators, and the Olympic lines who backed them, singing the unique song, finally arriving to the double English version, the English and Americans singing, welcoming, as the army passed; an army, not in the pathetic small battalions of the night before, but rounded up, strong in numbers, unshakeable, but barely clothed, barely helmeted, barely armed.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">They passed for minutes, the lines of soldiers, passing to a new phase of war. The city was strong now in its own defense; in a day, eferything would be running once more, the city would be held; but these were going to be the outer front. Almost exhausted by the internal battle, with the strenuous look of purity on their faces, they must be renewed to the next front.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">They must be renewed. They must be enough.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">*</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I've written about Muriel Rukeyser previously in this blog, <a href="http://aburningpatience.blogspot.com/2007/01/all-shimmering-names.html">here</a>, and <a href="http://aburningpatience.blogspot.com/2014/03/muriel-rukeysers-elegies.html">here</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">There's a great deal of information and general background on the internet about the Spanish Civil War, with varying reliability. A good place to start is the website of the <strong>Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive</strong>, <a href="http://www.alba-valb.org/index.html">here</a>. The Lincoln Brigade was the name taken by many of the volunteers from the United States who went to Spain to join the international struggle against the Fascist military invasion. The Lincoln Brigade website includes history, educational materials, current upcoming events related to study of the Spanish Civil War, links to other online sources, and other material.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span>Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-91351907681102063702014-04-15T21:03:00.001-05:002014-04-15T21:03:19.840-05:00A few paragraphs from John Berger<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Here are a few paragraphs from the British Marxist art critic <strong>John Berger</strong>, from his essay "A Professional Secret," in his <em>Selected Essays</em> published 2001 by Vintage Books. Berger talks here primarily about some of his encounters with paintings, visual art; his comments surely are relevant to poetry writing and other creative work as well.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I've read much of John Berger's writing over the years, mostly his art criticism and other essays, also his novel <em>From A to X</em>, which I loved. I often go to his writing when I need to clear my mind, sharpen my critical thought, step back and get some perspective on things. I've learned a great deal from Berger's work, about looking at art and looking at the world.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In his essay "A Professional Secret," originally published in 1987, Berger begins by talking about a painting by Hans Holbein he wants to go and see in Switzerland (he's lived for many years in the foothills of the French Alps). He arrives in Berne, discovers the Holbein painting is in a different city in Switzerland, so he and his companion go and visit an art museum in Berne.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">He talks a little about painted Christian images of violence and brutality (depictions of Christian martyrs, the crucifixion, etc.) -- the contradictory nature of such images, such subject matter painted so beautifully -- and then he asks: "how can the brutal be made visibly acceptable?"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Berger continues:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The question begins with the Renaissance. In medieval art the suffering of the body was subservient to the live of the soul. And this was an article of faith which the spectator brought with him to the image; the life of the soul did not have to be demonstrated in the image itself. A lot of medieval art is grotesque -- that is to say a reminder of the worthlessness of everything physical. Renaissance art idealizes the body and reduces the body to gesture. (A similar reduction occurs in Westerns: see John Wayne or Gary Cooper.) [...]</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">At the beginning of the nineteenth century Goya, because of his unflinching approach to horror and brutality, was the first modern artist. Yes those who look at his etchings would never choose to look at the mutilated corpses they depict with such fidelity. So we are forced back to the same question, which one might formulate differently: how does catharsis work in visual art, if it does?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Berger then says, in effect, that catharsis doesn't work in art: "Paintings don't offer catharsis. They offer something similar, but different."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Berger mentions several paintings in the museum, from the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century: Courbet, Monet, Braque, Klee, Rothko.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Quoting Berger again:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">How much courage and energy were necessary to struggle for the right to paint in different ways! And today these canvases, outcome of that struggle, hang peacefully beside the most conservative pictures: all united within the agreeable aroma of coffee, wafted from the cafeteria next to the bookshop.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The battles were fought over what? At its simplest -- over the language of painting. No painting is possible without a pictorial language, yet with the birth of modernism and after the French Revolution, the use of any language was controversial. The battles were between custodians and innovators. The custodians belonged to institutions that had behind them a ruling class or an élite who needed appearances to be rendered in a way which sustained the ideological basis of their power.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The innovators were rebels. Two axioms to bear in mind here: sedition is, by definition, ungrammatical; the artist is the first to recognize when a language is lying.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I read this passage, and I think immediately of those poets and writers I've known over the years who have survived (and occasionally prospered) by getting one foundation grant after another, eventually settling into teaching jobs somewhere; poets and writers who have spent much of their lives and efforts in service of the custodians Berger talks about here: adept at (and comfortable with) rendering appearances in a way which sustains the ideological basis of the power of their custodians.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">And again from Berger's essay:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Image-making begins with interrogating appearances and making marks. Every artist discovers that drawing -- when it is an urgent activity -- is a two-way process. to draw is not only to measure and put down, it is also to receive. When the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one, through the appearance of whatever one is scrutinizing. Giacometti's life's work is a demonstration of this.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The encounter of these two energies, their dialogue, does not have the form of question and answer. It is a ferocious and inarticulated dialogue. To sustain it requires faith. It is a burrowing in the dark, a burrowing under the apparent. The great images occur when the two tunnels meet and join perfectly. Sometimes when the dialogue is swift, almost instantaneous, it is like something thrown and caught.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I offer no explanation for this experience. I simply believe very few artists will deny it. It's a professional secret. [...]</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">*</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">There's much more in Berger's essay, and much more in his other writings. If you're not familiar with John Berger's art criticism, a good place to start might be his book <em>Ways of Seeing</em>, published in the 1960's, based on a BBC T.V. series of the same name that he was involved with. I found the book especially useful because of the many pictures it includes to illustrate the art and art criticism concepts he talks about.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I've written about John Berger's novel <em>From A to X</em> previously in this blog, <a href="http://aburningpatience.blogspot.com/2009/08/from-to-x.html">here</a>. I highly recommend it also.</span>Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-10001120739377834402014-03-26T20:41:00.000-05:002014-03-26T20:41:58.694-05:00Muriel Rukeyser's Elegies<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Among the various things I've been reading lately is <em>Elegies</em> by <strong>Muriel Rukeyser</strong> (a new edition published 2013 by <a href="http://ndbooks.com/book/elegies">New Directions</a>; originally published by New Directions in 1949). The book is a gathering of 10 poems, each several pages in length, that Rukeyser wrote over a period of years in the 1930's and 1940's. I love Rukeyser's poetry, and it's a joy and a wonder to read this sequence of poems in its full concentration and power.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The events of the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930's were among the original sources of impulse for the poems; also, in a different way, Rilke's <em>Duino Elegies</em>. Rukeyser dedicated the <em>Elegies</em> to Otto Boch, a German man she met on her way to Spain at the outbreak of the civil war. Boch became Rukeyser's lover, and later he died while fighting against the Fascist invasion of Spain.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The poems form a remarkable and varied river of moods and tones and textures, sometimes flowing and lyrical, sometimes keenly philosophical, sometimes fervent and urging, sometimes verging on prophetic ecstasy. Here are some lines from the second elegy, which is titled "Age of Magicians":</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Does this life permit its living to wear strength?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Who gives it, protects it. It is food.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Who refuses it, it eats in time as food.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">It is the world and it eats the world.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Who knows this, knows. This has been said.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">This is the vision of the age of magicians :</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">it stands at immense barriers, before mountains :</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">'I came to you in the form of a line of men,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and when you threw down the paper, and when you sat at the play,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and when you killed the spider, and when you saw the shadow</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">of the fast plane skim fast over your lover's face.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And when you saw the table of diplomats,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">the newsreel of ministers, the paycut slip,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">the crushed child's head, clean steel, factories,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">the chessmen on the marble of the floor,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">each flag a country, each chessman a live man,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">one side advancing southward to the pit,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">one side advancing northward to the lake,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and when you saw the tree, half bright half burning.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">You never enquired into these meanings.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">If you had done this, you would have been restored.'</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I read these lines, and others of a similar surge in the book, and I think of the news events of our time, of this year, the rattlling of heavy guns along borders, the proud strutting of members of Congress accompanied by lobbyists from Exxon Mobil or JPMorgan Chase or Comcast... I think of the young men and woman who lured into joining the militaries of the world out of some notion of serving a "country" or because the available choices for any kind of livable future are shinking in the shadow of the ravenous mega-economies of corporate empire.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">And here are some lines from the seventh elegy, titled "Dream-Singing Elegy," which evokes a world of a greatness and beauty and possibility that touches the sleeping and waking dreams of all of us, all of us who have not given up, who have not forsaken life or succumbed to the feeding frenzies of the commodity world:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">When we began to fight, we sang hatred and death.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The new songs say, "Soon all people on earth</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">will live together." We resist and bless</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and we begin to travel from defeat.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Now, as you sing your dream, you ask the dancers,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">in the night, in the still night, in the night,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"Do you believe what I say?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And all the dancers answer "Yes."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">To the farthest west, the sea and the striped country</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and deep in the camps among the wounded cities</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">half-world over, the waking dreams of night,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">outrange the horrors. Past fierce and tossing skies</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">the rare desires shine in constellation.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I hear your cries, you little voices of children</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">swaying wild, nightlost, in black fields calling.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I hear you as the seething dreams arrive</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">over the sea and past the flaming mountains.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Now the great human dream as great as birth or death,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">only that we are not given to remember birth,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">only that we are not given to hand down death,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">this we hand down and remember.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Brothers in dream, naked-standing friend,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">rising over the night, crying aloud,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">beaten and beaten and rising from defeat,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">crying as we cry : We are the world together.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Here is the place in hope, on time's hillside,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">where hope, in one's images, wavers for the last time</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and moves out of one's body up the slope.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">That place in love, where one's self, as the body of love,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">moves out of the old lifetime towards the beloved.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Singing.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I've been reading and rereading <em>Elegies</em>. I find new roads and depths in each reading.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The new edition includes a perceptive Introduction by Jan Heller Levi and Christoph Keller, written in ten brief sections, which provides useful background on the poems, and on Muriel Rukeyser's life during the years when she was writing them.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I've written about Muriel Rukeyser's poetry previously in this blog, <a href="http://aburningpatience.blogspot.com/2007/01/all-shimmering-names.html">here</a>.</span>Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-45297909347929922612014-03-14T22:41:00.001-05:002014-03-14T22:41:24.733-05:00Poet Bill Knott<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Poet <strong>Bill Knott</strong> died this past Wednesday March 12 at age 74, following complications from surgery. I first read a few of Bill Knott's poems in a paper handout in a poetry writing class I was in during my last year of high school (1971-72); the poems in the handout were given without the poets' names, so it was a few years later when I found his first book, <em>The Naomi Poems, Book One: Corpse and Beans,</em> that I found his poems again and attached his name to them</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I've always loved many of the poems in <em>The Naomi Poems</em>, the deep blue sensuality and delicacy of his love poems, the sharp acrimony of his politically explicit poems. In Knott's later books, he experimented in other directions with his poems, and I didn't always feel drawn to his later work.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I didn't know much about Knott's life, and more or less lost touch with his work for a number of years. Over time he apparently came to feel cynicism and rancor about the inward-looking office politics of the literary publishing world in the United States, and in recent years he stopped searching for publishers for his books of poems, in some cases refused offers to bring earlier books of his back into print, and at one point he started publishing his poem old and new on an online blog and making his work available for free.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In one interview, Knott discussed in detail his reasons for considering himself to have failed as a poet, or at any rate to have failed at a career in the the world of literary awards and contests and other sorts of literary competition. He did in fact receive several major literary awards and grants over the years, and he taught for more than 25 years at Emerson College. There were many other poets and professors his age and younger, of weaker ability as poets, who received greater literary and career acclaim much earlier in their lives.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">A good interview with Bill Knott, from sometime around 2004, is in the online literary magazine <em>Memorious</em>, <a href="http://www.memorious.org/?id=140">here</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">An insightful article by John Cotter on Bill Knott's poetry is in the website of the Poetry Foundation (affiliated with Poetry magazine in Chicago), <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/247222">here</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">A obituary for Bill Knott, along with four of his poems, is in the online magazine <em>Open Letters Monthly</em>, <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/bill-knott-1940-2014/">here</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thanks to poet blogger Elisa Gabbert, in whose blog <a href="http://thefrenchexit.blogspot.com/">The French Exit</a> I found each of the above weblinks.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">* *</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Here are four short poems by Bill Knott that I've always liked, from <em>The Naomi Poems, Book One: Corpse and Beans</em>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">*</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Goodbye</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">If you are still alive when you read this,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">close your eyes. I am</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">under their lids, growing black.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">*</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Death</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">They will place my hands like this.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">It will look as though I am flying into myself.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">*</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Retort to Pasternak</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The centuries like barges have floated</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">out of the darkness, to communism: not to be judged,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">but to be unloaded.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">*</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Poem</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Let the dead bury the dead:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">it is said. But I say it is we living</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">who have been shoved underground, who must now rise up</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">to bury the dead, the Johnsons, Francos, Fords and McNamaras.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span>Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-6504913225159054922014-03-11T20:32:00.001-05:002014-03-11T20:32:21.644-05:00Writing Process Blog Tour<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Last month I got an e-mail from poet friend <a href="http://californiawriter.blogspot.com/">Julia Stein</a>, who was taking part in a kind of chain blogpost passing from one person to another. The idea is for each writer who's taking part to write a blogpost answering four questions.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The four questions are: <em>What am I working on?</em> <em>How does my work differ from others of its genre?</em> <em>Why do I write what I do?</em> <em>How does your writing process work?</em></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">My first impulse was not to attempt answering the questions, because these are pretty broad questions, and they touch on stuff that writers and artists and philosphers and workers of all kinds have been tangling with for, what, thousands (or, possibly, hundreds of thousands) of years. I had no notion how I might answer most of the questions.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But after talking with Julia about it a little more, I decided to attempt this. This will likely be kind of muddled.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em><strong>What am I working on?</strong></em></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I write mostly poetry. I've been writing for 45 years. I write somewhat sporadically, some days I find it relatively easy to write, the poems come out without great effort, other days I have to push with a real act of will, dig for the next line, I'll find maybe a line or two for something I'm writing and that's it for the day. Some days nothing comes out. I try to spend at least a little while every day sitting with my notebook open in front of me or near me, waiting to see if something will bite. (I write by hand with a pen in a paper notebook.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">(I just paused here for a minute, went and looked out the window at the sun setting in a chilly northern March sky, long swashes of flaming pink and pale rose and lilac clouds ranged across a faint blue evening sky, the sky near the horizon so pale it's almost white, above the intricately tangled tree branches in the old cemetery across the street.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I always try to sit with the notebook open at least for a little while each day, whether or not I'm able to write anything.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">At any time I'm usually working on several poems in progress, and at any time the poems I'm writing are gradually gathering together into three or four poetry book manuscripts in progress. (I also have, right now four or five completed poetry book manuscripts that are, theoretically, looking for homes, though I'm not highly vigorous in searching for publishers.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Right now the two manuscripts I seem to be paying the most attention to are one titled, probably, <em>Road Song and Annunciation</em>, which may be completed or nearly completed, and one titled, maybe, <em>Twentieth Century Modern</em>, which probably isn't completed yet.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><strong><em>How does my work differ from others of its genre?</em></strong></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Each time I think about this question, I'm put off by how arrogant and smug it sounds. I don't know whether my work differs from any other work. Much more interesting to me what one person's poetry may have in common with another person's poetry. Written poetry has existed in the world for several thousand years, and oral poetry (and its ancestor, chant and song and solemn ritual and ecstatic dance) has likely existed for several tens of thousand years at least. (Poet Gary Snyder, among others, has written much on this -- the enduring practices of literature, i.e. oral literature, that begin long before the practices of writing.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I tend toward poetry that tries to have some perceptible connection between a person's interior world and the exterior world around us. Poetry that is relevant to the billion daily events of our individual lives and our collective lives, our individual and collective histories. Political, would be one word to describe what I intend when I write poems, at least much of the time. All human activity is political; all human activity takes place in the context of all other human activity, in the past and the present and moving into the future. Poetry is a part of this collective act, just a much as any other human action is.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em><strong>Why do I write what I do?</strong></em></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I maybe have partly answered this in my answer to the previous question. In the more basic sense, why I write poetry, why anyone does, or paints paintings or makes music or dance, these things are, at least in part, rooted in the most basic questions that face all of us. Questions about why we exist, what it means to exist, what it means to think these things, to be conscious of our own existence and thought and longing.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Poetry is one way for the mysterious inner life of one person to meet and speak with the mysterious inner life of another person, through the medium of the common world and life we share, which is, among other things, political. Long-time poet friend Roy McBride said, "You don't make poetry out of nothing, you make poetry out of everything."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em><strong>How does your writing process work?</strong></em></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Of the four questions here, this is maybe the most difficult to answer. I sit with my notebook open, feel or "listen" in myself, around myself, for anything that might want to come out. Writing seems to come and go in cycles for me; I have periods of active almost constant writing, for days and (now and then) weeks, and then periods of little or nothing, "dry" periods, or days or (sometimes) weeks. One of the difficult and necessary disciplines I've needed to learn has been how to wait out the dry times when I'm not writing, or not writing much, or grind out just a line or two every few days.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In a certain sense -- in the sense of sitting with the notebook and waiting and listening -- I'm always writing, though not always literally writing something down on the page.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Sometimes after a dry few days or week or two, I'll start feeling a kind of vague irritableness, something grumbling and rumbling just below the surface of clear articulation. By now, after many years, I've found that this often means a poem or two are taking shape (but, sometimes, not yet ready to come out).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">A poem often comes to me (whatever "comes to me" means exactly) as a kind of three-dimensional geometric shape (or, maybe, four-dimensional, though I'm not entirely sure what a four-dimensional shape looks like). I'll get a kind of quick glimpse of what the poem might be, how long it might be, where it slows and quickens, how wide-reaching it is, how many parts of the universe it pulls into itself, how close-up-detailed it is, things like that. Little by little, I start attaching words to the points and pieces of the geometric shape, the flicker of universe that's emerging from whatever place it is that poems emerge from. I'll write the first line.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I don't have a very clear notion of where it is that poems "come from," or what it exactly means when a poems comes or comes out. It might be possible to describe writing a poem as being in a state of dreaming and waking at the same time, maybe not literally so, but at least some state of mind resembling that. I do know that some of the techniques I've found effective at remembering dreams when I've waken up remembering only a brief scene or moment or fragment, also seem to be useful in finding a full poem when all I have are one or two lines. At least in a sense, poems often seem to me to begin in the silence and space before words.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I don't write multiple drafts of poems. Typically I start with the first line, and I cross out and rewrite, as needed, as I work line by line through the poem. So, most of the time, the first draft is in effect also the final draft. Sometimes I get stuck, not sure what comes next in a poem, and then there's nothing to do by sit and wait for it. Sometimes I've waited a day or several days or a few weeks, then more of the poem starts coming out again. Sometimes I've waited years. I have at least a couple of poems that sat half-finished in my notebook for more than ten years before I figured out how to finish them. Usually it doesn't take that long...</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">For many years the whole preliminary incubation of the poem was entirely interior for me, I just sat and waited for it. In recent years I've sometimes started writing a few notes for a poem as it starts taking shape. Once it's at the very brink of forming and coming out, it can happen very quickly, and sometimes I can lose the thread of it. I've found that writing down the bits and pieces of lines as they took shape has been helpful in not losing track of a poem once I start writing it. It took a long time before I felt sure enough of what I was doing, before I started writing down notes for a poem before I actually wrote it. And even now I don't do that all the time. Sometimes it just seems to work best to let the poem come out as it comes. Most of this is a more or less mysterious thing to me.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">At some point when I'm working on a poem, it's done, or as done as I'm going to get it. Learning when to leave off, when to stop working and working the poem and let it be done. A poem that is worked too much, that is too oversmoothed, may loose some of the power it had when it first emerged into articulation, it may start to become a little too mass-produced. (This may be a way to start to approach questions about the differences between art and craft, though that's maybe another discussion.) It took me a while to learn the discipline of letting the poem be done, to understand that there will be more poems.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">*</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">That's what I've got right now on the four questoins Julia Stein passed along to me. Thanks for the nudge, Julia.</span><br />
Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-38263959825929154162014-03-03T20:35:00.000-06:002014-03-03T20:35:14.179-06:00AWP in Seattle 2014<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I went to the annual AWP conference in Seattle this past week. The conference took place from Thursday Feb. 27 through Saturday Mar. 1; I flew out on Wednesday the 26th and flew back to Minneapolis on Sunday the 2nd. Here's a brief rundown of the events I attended and other miscellaneous stuff about the conference. I didn't take notes much during any of the conference days, so this will be a little disorganized.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><strong>*</strong></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The conference event I liked best was a panel and reading in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of poet <strong>William Stafford</strong>. I've always liked Stafford's poetry -- his quiet plain-speaking manner, his poems that often seem simple and innocent, or just odd, at first reading, and that seep more deeply into bedrock after sitting with them a little. Panelists were writer Kim Stafford (William Stafford's son), and poets Brian Turner, Toi Derricotte, and Coleman Barks; the panel moderator was Jeff Schotts of Graywolf Press (Graywolf has published several of Stafford's books). The panel members recalled their encounters with William Stafford, and read poems of his, with much warm humor and quiet reflection. * If you're not familiar with Stafford's poetry, a useful recent collection is <em>Ask Me: 100 essential poems</em>, edited by Kim Stafford, published in 2014 by Graywolf Press.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Another good one was a panel exploring the poetry and life work of <strong>Hayden Carruth</strong>. Carruth is a poet whose poems I've only read a little over the years; I've known him mainly through the anthology he edited in the 1970's, The Voice That Is Great Within Us, which has been widely used by poetry teachers over the years since. Panel members were Malena Mörling, Lee Briccetti, Douglas Unger, Sam Hamill (who, when he was publisher of Copper Canyon Press, published several of Carruth's books), and moderator Shaun Griffin. The panel began with an audio recording of Carruth, in his sonorous baritone voice reading his poem "The Impossible Indispensability of the <em>Ars Poetica</em>." Each of the panelists in turn then talked a little about the importance of Hayden Carruth's poetry, his long difficult life (especially his struggles to make enough of a living to survive from week to week, and his struggle to publish and to keep his books in print in the face of academic and critical indifference); each of the panelists read a few of Carruth's poems.I found myself following along with the poems sometimes in a copy of Carruth's book <em>Toward the Distant Islands</em> (see the list of books at the bottom of this article); I don't usually do that during poetry readings, though I found it useful in keeping pace with Carruth's sometimes tangled and insistent poems of philosophical argument. One of the things I like to do at writing events (such as AWP) is to seek out the work of writers I'm not deeply familiar with, to try to see what I may have missed; I'm glad I went to the panel on Hayden Carruth's work.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The panel <strong>Hyphenated Poets: Ethnic American Writing Against Type</strong> featured electrifying readings by poets Barbara Jane Reyes, Cathy Park Hong, and Solmaz Sharif. (A fourth scheduled panelist, Farid Matuk, wasn't able to attend; the panel moderator was Kaveh Bassiri.) While I found some of the poetry difficult at first (sometimes made of broken sentences, sometimes code-switching rapidly from one way of speaking to another), I didn't find the occasional difficulty or unfamiliarity alienating; I generally found that the poems spoke to me through the initial difficulty I found in them; I was usually able to reach past my own unfamiliarity with what the poems were doing. For some time I've been reading poet <a href="http://www.barbarajanereyes.com/blog/">Barbara Jane Reyes's blog</a>, and was pleased that we were able to meet face to face at the event.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Other AWP events I attended and enjoyed were the panel "Writing Inside Out: Authors' Day Jobs;" the panel "Native American Poetics: The Fourth Wave" which featured poet friends <a href="http://aburningpatience.blogspot.com/2007/11/like-water-traveling-home.html">Erika Wurth</a> and <a href="http://aburningpatience.blogspot.com/2011/07/remain-here-to-imagine.html">Marianne Broyles</a>;and a reading by several poets to celebrate the 25th year of the magazine <em>Image</em>, which included poet friend <a href="http://aburningpatience.blogspot.com/2005/12/rivers-of-song.html">Gina Franco</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">There were a couple of other events I had hoped to get to, and as usual at these things, my energies started to fade toward late afternoon, and my concentration started to wander, and I had to retreat and rest.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">*</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">When I wasn't at readings and panel events, I spent quite a bit of time wandering the giant bookfair, which filled a couple of huge exhibit halls and a connecting space between them. I had a chance to chat with <strong>John Crawford</strong>, publisher of <a href="http://www.westendpress.org/store/">West End Press</a>; also with poet friend <strong>Jeanetta Calhoun Mish</strong>, publisher of <a href="http://www.mongrelempire.org/Mongrel_Empire_Press/Welcome.html">Mongrel Empire Press</a>; <strong>Bryce Milligan</strong>, publisher of <a href="http://www.wingspress.com/wingspress.cfm">Wings Press</a>; <strong>Gary Willkie</strong> of <a href="http://www.acequiabooksellers.com/shop/acequia/index.html">Anthology Books</a> in Portland, Oregon, who was filling in briefly at a bookfair table for someone else; I also had the pleasure of meeting again poet <strong>Pamela Uschuk</strong>, and poet <strong>Natalia Treviño</strong> (her book is listed in the book list below). * (<em>Note regarding the above link to Anthology Books:</em> although the web address says "acequiabooks" -- the previous name of the bookstore when they were in Albuquerque -- the webpage itself now shows their new name Anthology Books.) Also talked a bit with M. Scott Douglass, editor and publisher of <a href="http://www.mainstreetrag.com/">Main Street Rag</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Most of the AWP events, and the bookfair, were at the Washington State Convention Center in downtown Seattle. I found the maps of the convention center fairly confusing, with floors layered one atop another at apparently impossible angles to each other. I found it a little easier to find my way around just searching on foot, though still almost became lost once or twice. The building seemed to have been designed randomly, with escalators to some floors but not others. In one instance, an escalator from the 4th floor went up one level to the 6th floor, with no mention of a 5th floor. There were a couple of sets of rooms with identical room numbers in different parts of the convention center; some were being used and some weren't, and to find the ones that were being used it was necessary to follow a twisting passage to another wing of the building with its own set of conflicting escalators. There was yet another set of event rooms, and the only way I found to get there was to go down an escalator that could be reached only by making your way through the entire bookfair to an access doorway at the back of the largest exhibit hall. One runs into such things sometimes in cities that are built on hills.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">There were also some AWP events that took place in meeting rooms at the Seattle Sheraton a block from the convention center. Occasionally I saw people running madly up or down multiple escalators, trying desperately to get from one event to another during the 15 minute interval between events. Reminded me of trying to get to class on time in high school...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">There were plenty of places to just sit between events, which I appreciated, especially as the days eased toward late afternoon. The weather in Seattle was beautifully mild; high temps around 60 degrees the first couple of days with plenty of sun, then a little cooler after than with grayer skies (though the highs were still in the low 50's or early 40's). It rained a little on Saturday. Here in Minneapolis the temperature was something like minus 10 the day I flew to Seattle, and was around 10 above zero when I got back on Sunday; the Seattle weather felt like spring. Here and there, if I looked in the right direction, a glimpse of mountains or water; seagulls floating above the downtown Seattle roofs.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><strong>*</strong></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">As I've done each of the previous years I've been to the AWP conference, I brought home too many books from the bookfair. Here's a list of the items I found, all of which I recommend:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Life's Good, Brother</em> by <strong>Nazim Hikmet</strong>, a novel (published originally in 1962) by the great Communist poet of Turkey, translated by Mutlu Konuk Blasing (Persea Books, 2013).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Sueño</em> by <strong>Lorna Dee Cervantes</strong>, her most recent books of poems (Wings Press, 2013).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Toward the Distant Islands: New and Selected Poems</em> by <strong>Hayden Carruth</strong> (Copper Canyon Press, 2006).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Lavando the Dirty Laundry</em>, poems by <strong>Natalia Treviño</strong> (Mongrel Empire Press, 2014).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>The Mountain Poems of Meng Hao-jan</em>, poems by a poet of China from the T'ang Dynasty period, translated by David Hinton (Archipelago Books, 2004).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Woman on the Terrace</em> by <strong>Moon Chung-hee</strong>, poems by a present-day poet of South Korea, translated by Seong-kon Kim and Alec Gordon (White Pine Press, 2007).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>4-Headed Woman</em>, poems by <strong>Opal Palmer Adisa</strong> (Tía Chucha Press, 2013).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Engine Empire</em>, poems by <strong>Cathy Park Hong</strong> (W. W. Norton, 2012).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Eye of Wate</em>r, poems by <strong>Amber Flora Thomas</strong> (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005); I found this one on the Cave Canem table at the bookfair.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Poems of Love and Madness: Selected Translations</em> by <strong>Carlos Reyes</strong>, a gathering of translations of various poets; includes the English translations and the Spanish originals (Lynx House Press, 2013).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">M. Scott Douglass, published of <strong>Main Street Rag</strong>, also kindly gave me a copy of the Winter 2014 issue, after I realized that my subscription had lapsed. * Thanks, Scott -- I'll be sending a renewal shortly.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"> ** I haven't inserted weblinks for the items in the book list here. All of the publishers have websites -- I encourage you to go and find them online.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">*</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Next year the AWP conference will be here in Minneapolis the second week of April. Weather can be variable here that time of year. Bring a winter coat and shorts.</span>Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-1908846123109177352013-12-20T19:25:00.002-06:002014-01-04T19:56:32.255-06:00Review of my book online<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Poet friend Julia Stein has written a review of my recent book <em>All Through the Night: New and Selected Poems</em>. The review, which is generally enthusiastic, is published in the online literary magazine <em>5_trope</em>, </span><a href="http://5trope.com/newissue/julia-stein-on-lyle-daggetts-all-through-the-night/"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A poem of mine is published in the same issue of <em>5_trope</em>, </span><a href="http://5trope.com/newissue/lyle-daggett-period-rooms/"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The 5_trope issue has a lot of other great writing and reading in it too. The Contents page for the current issue is </span><a href="http://5trope.com/newissue/contents/"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">here</span></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> -- go check it out.</span>Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-45824878773104116682013-12-13T19:45:00.001-06:002013-12-13T19:45:20.971-06:00Secret Traffic<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em>Secret Traffic: Selected Poems</em> by <strong>Roy McBride</strong> has been published this year by Nodin Press in Minneapolis. (The book is distributed by Itasca Books -- their webpage for the book is <a href="http://www.itascabooks.com/secret-traffic.html">here</a>.) Roy McBride was a poet friend since we first met in Minneapolis in the 1970's; I've written about him previously in this blog, <a href="http://aburningpatience.blogspot.com/2011/08/poet-roy-mcbride.html">here</a>. Roy died in 2011 at the age of 67. During his life he published a couple of small books of poems, and had some poems in magazines and anthologies over the years, though he was best known for the electrically exciting poetry readings he did all over Minneapolis and St. Paul and here and there elsewhere. The new collection is edited by Lucinda Anderson (Roy's wife), Gayla Ellis, and Margaret Hasse, and is a fuller length gathering of his poems from over the course of his life.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Secret Traffic</em> gives a good sense of the range of Roy's work, his deep compassion at the daily suffering of the people of this world, his audacious sense of humor, his somewhat incredulous outrage at the ignorance and corruption of those who perpetrate hurt on other people and at those who act in complicity, the open wound of his own and others' sorrow and loneliness. Another poet here in Minneapolis, Ivory Giles, said that Roy told him once, "You don't make poetry out of nothing. You make poetry out of everything."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">At various times over the years, I took part in poetry writing and performing groups Roy had organized or helped organize. Many of his poems in <em>Secret Traffic</em> are familiar to me from hearing him read them at one time or another. Here's a little of a longer poem called "Scraping, Pushing and Pulling," about a job he had in a restaurant kitchen. (All of the poems quoted here are from the book <em>Secret Traffic</em>.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">His first day on the job the new manager:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">caught the head line-cook in the pantry</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">with a seventeen-year-old waitress,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">caught the pantryman loading a side of beef</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">in the trunk of his car,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">caught a busboy polishing off a fifth of scotch,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">fired him and had to catch him again when he took</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">his clothes off and was terrorizing customers</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">in the parking lot;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">then caught a party of six trying to slip out</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">on a two-hundred-and-forty dollar check,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">caught the cook's helper blowing his nose</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">in a batch of clam chowder,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">caught the dishwashers sending silverware out</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">without sending it through the sterilizer,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">caught the maintenance man and a waitress</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">smoking a joint in the storage room,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">caught a hostess with a purse-full</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">of little creamers,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">caught hell from the owners for upsetting all the help</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and was fired.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Scraping, pushing and pulling at La Cafe de Costra Nostra.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Roy McBride was constantly observing the world, feeling the world through his own skin and through the lives of friends and family and strangers. He evokes people in his poems that I'll never forget. In the poem "Watergate," he tells about his grandmother Lurene, who "reads her Watchtower/ in the corner/ behind her bed" and who "forgets her cane/ ten times a day":</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">In her room</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">we sit and watch</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">images of America</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">in black and white.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">THE CBS EVENING NEWS:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">with Walter Cronkite in New York</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and Robert Bell in Washington</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and Marvin Kalb in Paris</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and my grandmother in America.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">One hundred thousand dollars</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">moves through Minnesota</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">moves across America</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">moves into Mexico</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">moves into Washington.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><em>I wish I could just see</em></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><em>a hundred thousand dollars,</em></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">my grandmother of nobility</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">welfare, old age pension,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">food stamps and poverty says.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><em>I wish I had</em></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><em>a hundred thousand dollars,</em></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">my grandmother says</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">in America.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Roy wrote love poems that ached with yearning and loneliness, and, sometimes, that opened blossoming worlds of spring and sunlight. His poems move with a widely varying music. Sometimes the tone changes in great sudden leaps through the poem. Other times the tone and song flow with more subtle and gentle modulations. Here are lines from the poem "You Are Near":</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">You are near.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I can hear your breath (quick intake --</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">sigh through the leaves of my soul).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I am the gentle monster inside this dragon.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Ride this flesh.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Scratch behind my ears.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I will catch your tears in my fiery throat.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Holding you near.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Calling you dear.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">My hear is red and blooming.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Listen to the church bells in my chest.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Roy McBride was African-American, and lived his early years in the segregated South. In his poems he touches often on the many large and essential questions about what it is and was to be African-American in the United States. Sometimes this comes up in his poems almost offhand, part of the background of a common day. Sometimes it comes forward into large clear view, central to the great wide world we all live in.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">From the first section of the poem "Traffic," a poem Roy read often to audiences, frequently improvising, dancing with the words, pulling in events of the day and the hour:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I meet a woman walking</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">over on Third Avenue</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">by Fair Oaks Park.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">It's around ten o'clock / dark</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and she is so frightened it frightens me.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Should I stop / run away / say</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I'm harmless, though big, black;</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">full of the same fantasies that</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">fuel the fire, fear, the tear.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">She jogs away.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I slow down.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I want to crawl under the ground.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">It's a pleasure to get back to my cell.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Away from this traffic traffic traffic traffic.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">We have needed this book of poems for a long time. We have needed, and need, the poems of Roy McBride. Amid the hundred academic debates worming along from one year to the next in the drowsy catacombs of one English department or another, the poems of Roy McBride offer examples of the greatest possibilities we're capable of. I love this book.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The book <em>Secret Traffic</em> includes a DVD about Roy McBride, "A Poet Poets," produced in 2011 by Mike Hazard of the <a href="http://www.thecie.org/">Center for International Education</a> in St. Paul. I'm delighted that the publishers included the DVD -- I think it's necessary to get at least a little sample of Roy reading his poems out loud, in order to get a full sense of who he was and is as a poet.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I'll finish here with an excerpt from the poem "Soul Food," which recounts a visit Roy and his family made to relatives in the South in the 1950's, sometime not long after the racist murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi. (Some basic information on the murder of Emmett Till is in the PBS American Experience website, <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/">here</a>. There are also other online sources if you go and search.) "Soul Food" is one of the poems in the book that moved me most deeply.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">That afternoon</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">we went to the store,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">my father, mother, aunt and me.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">My parents were nervous.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">All the grownups</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">black and white</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">were nervous...</span><br />
<em><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Let's get our groceries</span></em><br />
<em><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and get back home!</span></em><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Mama asked my aunt</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">if we needed some meal.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">My aunt said, <em>Yes!</em></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I said, <em>I know where it is!</em></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and started running back</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">down the aisle</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">turning the corner</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">smashing into a display</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">of canned goods</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">spilling them</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">all over the floor.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">A white man came up,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I think he was the manager,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">he shouted at me and raised up his arm,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">but before he could hit me</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Daddy grabbed his arm,</span><br />
<em><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Go get in the car, boy!</span></em><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">is all I hear him say.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I went to the car.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">They came out without the groceries.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">We drove back to the quarters and went to the house.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><em>It wasn't his fault,</em> Mama said.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Daddy said, <em>He shouldn't have been running</em></span><br />
<em><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">in that store!</span></em><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><em>Boy, you have done it this time,</em> my aunt added in.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Grandfather cleaned his rifles,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">his shot-gun and loaded them</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">stuck them behind the front and back doors.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">After supper</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">all the kids</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">had to go to bed early.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I couldn't sleep</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">hearing their voices</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">talking low on the porch...</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">woke with a start</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">in the brightness of morning</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Daddy already</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">packing the car...</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And right after breakfast</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">with lots of hugs</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and lots of tears</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">we started the long drive</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">with a shoebox full of cake</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">never discussing what happened</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">never discussing how it made us feel.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
*<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Thank you, Roy.</span><br />
Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-22909350882071153502013-08-24T20:34:00.003-05:002013-08-24T20:34:50.578-05:00Poems in Blue Lyra Review<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A couple of poems of mine have been published in the online magazine <em>Blue Lyra Review</em>, <a href="http://bluelyrareview.com/lyle-daggett/">here</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The above link is to the page with my poems. To check out the other fine poetry in the current issue, go to the table of contents page for the issue (August 2013), <a href="http://bluelyrareview.com/issue-2-3-poetry/">here</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The main page for <em>Blue Lyra Review</em> magazine is <a href="http://bluelyrareview.com/">here</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">My thanks to poet friend <a href="http://www.lenoreweiss.com/">Lenore Weiss</a>, who guest edited the issue.</span><br />
Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-2335214790055405022013-07-16T23:09:00.001-05:002013-07-16T23:18:47.928-05:00I'm still here -- and reading Vladimir Mayakovsky<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For those of you who come by here from time to time, I haven't disappeared, just laying back a little during the summer. I'll be back soon.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span> <br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">One of the things I'm currently reading, and that I recommend, is <em>Selected Poems</em> by <strong>Vladimir Mayakovsky</strong>, translated from Russian by James H. McGavran III, published 2013 by <a href="http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/Title/tabid/68/ISBN/978-0-8101-2907-8/Default.aspx">Northwestern University Press</a> in their Northwestern World Classics series. (The book has the English translations only, not the original Russian.) The translations, although not everything I might hope for, have vigor and muscle, and McGavran uses some imagination in catching a little of the feel of Mayakovsky's wild play with word sounds and invention of words.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span> <br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This is the first large selection of Mayakovsky's poem available in English for many years, and it includes a good sampling of his work covering several decades up until his death in 1930. Translator and editor McGavran doesn't give any hint of having left-leaning politics, though neither does he shy away from translating Mayakovsky's politics in the poems he's chosen for the selection. The book includes several of Mayakovsky's longer poems (including a couple I haven't seen translated before), as well as shorter poems, and also a prose autobiographical sketch by Mayakovsky that covers his life up through about 1928.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span> <br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Mayakovsky's poetry is a large subject, and I'm hoping to write more about it after I've had more time with the book. For now, passing along my recommendation.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span> <br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Northwestern University Press has also published <em>Mayakovsky: Plays</em> translated by Guy Daniels (2013; this appears to be a new edition of a collection originally published ca. 1995), I haven't seen this book up close, just saw it listed in the Northwestern U. Press website. The publisher's webpage for this book is <a href="http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/Title/tabid/68/ISBN/978-0-8101-1339-8/Default.aspx">here</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">A good website devoted to Russian poetry is hosted by the Northwestern University Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, <a href="http://max.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/index.html">here</a>. The website includes text of Russian poems and English translations; online audio, in a variety of formats, of Russian poetry read aloud (in some cases, apparently read by the poets themselves); and other material.</span>Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-33683365707990806732013-05-17T21:25:00.003-05:002013-05-17T21:25:57.914-05:00Darkness Sticks to Everything<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">During the past month I read <em>Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems</em> by <strong>Tom Hennen</strong> (published 2013 by <a href="https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/pages/browse/book.asp?bg={CAB804E4-560B-4D2A-B7C5-0C08B963FDDD}">Copper Canyon Press</a>). I very much like the book. I took my time reading it, a few poems at a time, going through at a quiet pace, letting the poems speak to me in their own time.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I first read poems by Tom Hennen in his first book, <em>The Heron With No Business Sense</em>, which was published in 1974 by Minnesota Writers' Publishing House (and is included in <em>Darkness Sticks to Everything</em>). Hennen lived for many years in the area of Morris, Minnesota, and has written many poems growing out of his living and working on farms and in nature areas. Poems of quiet observation of the details of nature, rabbit tracks, grass touched by breeze, mouse burrows, the way leaves cling to tree branches and then fall, the way ice forms and thaws on a stream, the change in the light as the seasons move. The earth is always a living presence in Tom Hennen's poems.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">From the poem "Minneapolis" (all quoted passages here are taken from <em>Darkness Sticks to Everything</em>):</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The swamp has become a supermarket overnight.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">A heron with no business sense</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Vanishes.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The hungry man from the woods</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Feeds on loose change</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Like a parking meter.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">At night</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The smokestacks sink into the ground.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Underground the soot changes hands.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The night shift moves slowly</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Emitting a dim light from their mole eyes.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Many of Hennen's poems are brief, almost tiny, quick glimpses of a scene or a moment. And always with a tactile, kinetic quality, catching image and motion at once.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Cold water</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Soaks the fur of wild things.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">A smell of wet lumber is everywhere.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The night sways slightly</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Tied to the dock.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">(From the poem "Night near the Lake.")</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">"The night sways slightly / Tied to the dock." How many times I've stood by a lake at night and felt that same kind of movement. Remarkable.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Tom Hennen has a patient and gentle humor that surfaces from time to time in his poems, the way a friend will make an offhand amusing comment in a conversation. On the prairie, much of the life goes on beneath the ground, or in the area just a few inches above the ground. From the poem "Independent Existence":</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">A willow leaf</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Drops on the water</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And is immediately still.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Autumn air penetrates the ground.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Wind hums endlessly</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">To the tangled grass.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">When things happen here</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">There is no urge to put them on TV.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Amid the daily storm and clatter of corporate news media panic, the constant wolf-crying of CNN "breaking news," Tom Hennen's poems are a warm remedy.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In his poems Tom Hennen is always sooner or later acting with the natural world, always approaching closer, one way or another seeking a meeting place of human beings and the earth we live on, listening for the uncounted languages that move constantly around us and through us.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">A lone goose call drifted down</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Lightly as a feather falling.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I jumped the fence</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">To fetch the cows for evening milking.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">On the hill above the still pond I sang,</span><br />
<em><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Ka Bas, Ka Bas.</span></em><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The only Latin my father taught me</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">As I learned the dreamy habits of animals.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">They came, as always, past the pond</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">As if truly happy to hear my voice.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The bristly hair on their backs</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Lit golden by the sun</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Just when dark mist began to rise</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Around their cold hooves.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">(From the poem "Country Latin.")</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em></em></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Darkness Sticks to Everything</em> includes poems from perhaps forty years or more of Tom Hennen's life. The more recent sections of the book include many prose poems, with the looser longer-moving rhythms that prose poems can allow, though still with the careful patient detailed observation that infuses his earlier poems. Sometimes I'm just astonished at the things he sees. From the prose poem "Outdoor Photos":</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Find a quiet rain. Then a green spruce tree. You will notice that nearly every needle has been decorated with a tiny raindrop ornament. Look closely inside the drop and there you are. In color. Upside down. The raindrop has no instructions to flup us right-side up. People, dogs, muskrats, woods, and hill, whatever fits, heads down like quail from a hunter's belt. Raindrops have been collecting snapshots since objects and people were placed, to their surprise, here and there on earth.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The book includes an enthusiastic Introduction by poet Jim Harrison, and an insightful Afterword by poet Thomas R. Smith which gives more information about Hennen's life and how his poems have come into the world. I also love the the cover art, a painting by Susan Bennerstrom of grain silos in a green field under dark turbulent clouds. The weather is a constant companion and force of life with anyone who lives in the vast land of plains that reaches across the inland of North America.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">During July on the prairie</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The pine tree stands alone on the main street</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Of a disintegrating country town.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Its needles pump all day,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Still it cannot turn all the passing carbon monoxide</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Into anything useful. [...]</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">[...] The island in the lake drifts even farther from shore.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Heat increases.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The afternoon begins its insect hum.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">We can tell a storm is coming</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">By looking into each other's lies.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">(From the poem "Clouds Rise Like Fish.")</span><br />
Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-44342926086957115862013-05-10T22:24:00.002-05:002013-05-10T22:24:57.957-05:00In the name of humanity<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Linking here to an article I liked by Keston Sutherland in the Tumblr blog A Flying Fiery Roule, titled "Theses on Antisubjectivist Dogma."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The article is an effective and articulate critique of reactionary attempts by "Language" poets, writers of "conceptual" poetry, and related sorts to deny the existence and possibility of an identifiable viewpoint or perspective in poetry.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The article further outlines some of the ways in which the denial of a subjective point of view in poetry essentially echoes attempts by capitalist institutions to silence and invalidate the rights and identity of workers. As much "conceptual" poetry and its relatives attempt to turn poems into mere objects empty of existence, capitalism similarly attempt to turn workers into interchangeable objects to be used.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">A little of the above is my own take on some of what Sutherland says on the topic. <strong>Sutherland's article</strong> is <a href="http://afieryflyingroule.tumblr.com/post/49378474736/keston-sutherland-theses-on-antisubjectivist-dogma">here</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thanks also to poet blogger Joseph Hutchison, in whose blog <a href="http://perpetualbird.blogspot.com/">The Perpetual Bird</a> I found a link to Sutherland's article.</span>Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-80984642978587995552013-04-14T18:25:00.001-05:002013-04-14T18:38:19.162-05:00A book of the living<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've just read <em>The Mississippi Book of the Dead</em> by poet friend <strong>Timothy Young</strong>, a book consisting of one long poem, published 2013 by <a href="http://parallelpress.library.wisc.edu/poetry/titles/author.shtml?TYoung">Parallel Press</a>.Like much of Tim Young's poetry that I've read over the years, it has a gritty sinewy quality, an organic feel of work done by hand.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The <em>Mississippi Book of the Dead</em>, written in 78 five-line stanzas, is a kind of series of snapshots and inner narrative of the poet traveling by land along the length of the Mississippi River, seeking a connection (or reconnection) with the earth and an opening (or reopening) of spirit. The journey begins in northern Minnesota at the source of the river, and ends in the Louisiana delta and islands sometime after hurricane Katrina had come through.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">A couple of stanzas from early in the poem, numbered, as all the stanzas are:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">2.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">For months I've been rutabaga broth,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">stewing in retirement's kettle.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I'll drive the Great River Road,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">which snakes beside the Mississippi,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">through swamps and drizzle and red pines.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">3.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">When I trekked Nepal in '81,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">after visiting Katmandu temples,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I met a man who walked all India</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">from the tip to the Chinese border.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">He carried but a bedroll and a book.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Through the journey of the poem, Young comes to grips with much pain and loss, the accounting of choices, the texture of a life. These are not journal entries, but the raw stuff of observation, seeing through the poet's eye.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">10.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The ground is trembling from nighttime explosions</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">at Fort Ripley's artillery range.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I never went to Nam, but Roger,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Steve and Dennis came back,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and blew themselves away, one way or another.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">11.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Pig's Eye is a riverside waste plant.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Prisons hunker up and down this River.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I'm not really a pilgrim</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">like Parsifal or Quixote,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">but a rosary of sorrow twists in my head.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">How different the view of a place, close up and at ground level. How different from the floodlit gloss of CNN babble and budget "debates" in Washington. A stroke of a pen, a backroom deal, a few votes here and there, can land with iron weight on the lives of untold numbers of people in the heartland of a nation.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">29.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The Gateway Arch is a man-made rainbow.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">My half-breed ancestor passed through Missouri</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">as a wagon train scout with Forty-Niners.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">My great-great-gramps never found his pot-o-gold.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">His petty wife abandoned him and her children.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">30.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">It could say "Pompeii," but it's Herculaneum,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">a Civil War city with lead smelters.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Even today the green leaves are heavy.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Every empire feeds on poison and lead,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">civil wars bullets and death.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">31.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Razorwire cuddles the Menard Prison</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">near the coffin carrier's town of Chester.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I watch the sun die on Missouri flats,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">where a pioneer town drowned in the river.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">An otter sprawls dead-ahead on the road.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The poem approaches a kind of climax, or pivotal turn, as Young relates staying with a friend in New Orleans, Dr. Robert Roberts; in a note at the front of the book, Young tells how Roberts has worked to hellp prison inmates in Louisiana make their way back into life outside of prison. Tim Young himself worked for many years in Minnesota as an educator in a juvenile prison.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">At one point in the poem, Young describes accompanying Roberts on some of the work Roberts does in the community:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">62.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Robert buys an extra lunch to deliver</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">to the homeless in the French Quarter.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"Look at their shoes. You can tell who's hungry."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">They are sandstorms and snowdrifts banking,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">against doorways or trash piles in the alleys.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">63.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">A backstreet trinity sits on a stoop,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">sharing silence and a liter of beer.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">One looks beaten, but his cheeks are tattooed</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">like an insane clown in a hip-hop posse.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"Is that the One where Spirit hides? Let's do it."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">64.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">With the meal from Picadilly's</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I ask the clown, "Sir, could you use a meal?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">"Yes, thank you." "And could you use some cash?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">His voice becomes real, "God Bless You."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Robert tells me, "The changing voice proves his spirit."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In the long winter of corporate media silliness and academic murk, in the blizzard of military strutting and the slashing of budgets for food stamps and public housing, amid the stock market feeding frenzies and home foreclosures gift card points and software upgrades, Tim Young's book <em>The Mississippi Book of the Dead</em> offers a real voice, a presences of spirit, the touch of the earth. We need this book.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">74.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The sky's red over Marion, and the moon's out,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and I watch the first bright dawn in weeks.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Parked in Love's Gas Station,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I watch thousands upon thousands,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">of snow geese fly into the sunrise.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-662171565178231902013-03-24T19:38:00.001-05:002013-03-24T19:38:56.996-05:00Review of All Through the Night<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The online poetry magazine <em>Pemmican</em> has published a review, by poet John Bradley, of my book <em>All Through the Night: New and Selected Poems</em>. The review is <a href="http://www.pemmicanpress.com/reviews/daggett-bradley-mar13.htm">here</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">My thanks to John Bradley for the review, and to Bob Edwards, editor of <em>Pemmican</em>, for publishing it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>All Through the Night</em> is available from the publisher Red Dragonfly Press. The publisher's ordering page for the book is <a href="http://www.reddragonflypress.com/all-through-the-night-by-lyle-daggett/">here</a>.</span>Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-22875538245131359532013-03-13T21:28:00.003-05:002013-03-13T21:28:43.120-05:00AWP in Boston<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I went to the annual AWP conference last week, which was in Boston this year, March 6 through March 9. Here's more or less what's floated to the surface a few days afterwards. I didn't take detailed notes while I was there, so most of what I'll tell here is from memory, and is as accurate as I can make it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The best event I went to was a panel celebrating the life and work of poet <strong>Muriel Ruykeyser</strong>. The panelists who were able to attend were poet Olga Broumas, poet Sharon Olds, and the moderator Jan Freeman (publisher of Paris Press, which has reissued several of Rukeyser's works in recent years). Poets Galway Kinnell and Michael S. Harper were also scheduled to be on the panel, but were unable to make it there because of a two-day-long snowstorm in New England on Thursday and Friday during the conference.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The Rukeyser panel was beautiful, transcendent, one of the greatest things I've ever been to. Jan Freeman read from Rukeyser's great prose book <em>The Life of Poetry</em>, a wide-ranging exploration of the social and psychological forces that shape and affect poetry, and the importance and uses of poetry in the world. Broumas talked about her encounters with Rukeyser's poetry, the importances of Rukeyser's work in her own poetry, and she then read Galway Kinnell's poem "Jubilate" which (among other things) describes a poetry reading Rukeyser did in the last years of her life, during which Rukeyser suffered a stroke but insisted on finishing the reading.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Sharon Olds gave a deeply personal moving account of having been in a class Rukeyser taught in New York, a "poetry appreciation" class (rather than a writing workshop, though I have no doubt some people in the class wrote poems). She talked about Rukeyser's warm open welcoming presence, her deep understanding of what might be possible, her bearing and posture when she stood in the room, her strong speaking and reading voice.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Someplace in there Jan Freeman read notes Michael Harper had sent, that he had intended to use during the panel.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Toward the end of the event, a couple of the panelists commented that the discussion during the panel kept tending toward a recognition of the erotically alive qualities of Rukeyser's poetry and other writing -- this in particular, of the many facets her writing exhibits, political consciousness, compassion, scientific acumen, a strong democratic and communial oppenness to possibilities.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The panel took place in a large room, filled end to end with rapt listeners. I'm not sure if I would quite describe the mood in the room as ecstatic, but it was at least elated. People applauded continuously. William Rukeyser, Muriel Rukeyer's son, was in the room, and at one point he stood briefly as Jan Freeman introduced him.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I attended two other really good panels.One was about Nazim Hikmet, the great 20th century Communist poet of Turkey.Panelists included Sidney Wade, Dorianne Laux, David Wojahn, his longtime translators Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk, and two other people whose names aren't listed in the AWP website and I unfortunately didn't note down. The panelists talked mostly about how and when they first encountered Hikmet's poetry, and its importance to them in their own work. The panelist were warm and enthusiastic in their comments -- nobody, as far as I can recall, sat and read a paper out loud. A couple of people did read one or two of Hikmet's poems. The event was hugely attended, the small meeting room was packed, standing room only -- I did in fact stand by the wall through the whole event -- people sitting in the aisles, spilling out into the halls.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">And, a good panel on the life and work of poet Adrienne Rich. Panelists were Alicia Ostriker, Jenny Johnson, and Beatrix Gates. I particularly liked Ostriker's strong clear comments about Rich's poetry, her capacity to bring together in her poems the pieces of a fragmented world. Ostriker talked specifically, in this regard, about Rich's poem "An Atlas of the Difficult World" (from Rich's book of the same name).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I also went to panels titled "Teaching Creative Writing to Teens Outside of the Classroom," "Poetry for the People" (at which the panelist were current and former poets laureate of Northhampton, Massachusetts), and "Masters of Noise: Surviving and Thriving without an MFA," all of which I enjoyed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I especially liked the energetic discussion and comments from the audiences at all of the events i attended this year. People weren't just passively listening. At one of the panels I attended, one of the panelists got up and went to the podium mike, said "I want to stand up so I can see you," and then she proceeded to read a paper, barely looking up from it the whole time. This, however, was the only instance of the paper-reading syndrome I encountered at the events I went to.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Aside from the panel events, I spent a lot of time during the days wandering the gigantic bookfair, on the off-chance I might find something to read.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">It snowed here in Minneapolis early last week, and I was a little worried about getting out of town for the conference, though the snow finally let up and moved on about a day before I flew to Boston. The weather in Boston was seasonably gray and chilly and damp on <br />Wednesday when I flew there, then on Thursday and Friday there were two days of non-stop sideways-blowing snow, with stiff east wind off the Atlantic. (My hotel room was on the 27th floor, and on clear days I had a good view of the Charles River a few blocks to the north; on the blizzard days, the river and the buildings on the far side disappeared in snow and fog.) The temperature stayed at or a little above freezing during the days, and although the weather made the streets messy and sloppy and played havoc with traffic, from what I could tell a lot of the snow melted right away. By Saturday morning the snow had stopped.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The hotel and the convention center were in a block of adjoining buildings, and it was possible to go from one to the other without going outside, and I was greatful for this during the lively weather days. (In downtown Minneapolis, most of the buildings are connected by enclosed overhead walkways, which is likewise a big help getting around during the long winters here.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">It was my first time in Boston, and I didn't get a chance to see much of the city outside the immediate area of the convention center, though I did get a good look at the riverfront on the way two and from the airport. I definitely want to go back to Boston sometime and just spend some time there, without anything specific to get done.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">One of the enjoyable things about these conference events is meeting and seeing people you don't see often. I had a chance to talk a couple of times with poet friend Jeanetta Calhoun Mish (publisher of Mongrel Empire Press); John Crawford (publisher of West End Press); Gary Willkie (owner of Acequia Books in Albuquerque) and Marilyn Stablein; M. Scott Douglass (publisher of Main Street Rag magazine and books); and poet blogger Mary Biddinger. I also enjoyed meeting for the first time Gary Metras, publisher of Adastra Press; Adastra publishes beautifully made letterpress books, as well as modern-style offset print editions.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">As I have at these things in past years, toward late afternoon I tended to get a little wiped out, and retreated to the hotel room and holed up for the evening, though I did wander out briefly a couple of times. Here and there I managed to write a little, when I coiuld get my mind focused enough.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">As I have each of the previous years, this year I brought back too many books, and am enjoying them. Here's the list of what I found and brought home:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Before There Is Nowhere To Stand: Palestine/Israel Poets Respond to the Struggle</em> edited by Joan Dobbie and Grace Beeler with Edward Morin, published 2012 by <a href="http://www.losthorsepress.org/catalog/before-there-is-nowhere-to-stand-palestine-israel-poets-respond-to-the-struggle/">Lost Horse Press</a>. Contributors include Ruth Fogelman, Samuel Hazo, Nizar Qabbani, Alicia Ostriker, Adonis (Ali Ahmed Said Esber), Rachel Barenblat, Tawfiq Zayyad, Mahmoud Darwish, Sam Hamod, Doreen Stock, Fadwa Tuqan, Judy Kronenfeld, Khaled Abdallah, Naomi Shihab Nye, Philip Metres, Sharon Doubiago, Rachel Corrie, Lahab Assef Al-Jundi...these among many others. A truly powerful collection, just excellent.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>The Orgy</em>, a novel by Muriel Rukeyser, a somewhat fictionalized account by Rukeyser of traveling to Ireland for the last surviving pagan goat festival. Originally published in 1965; reissued 1997 by <a href="http://www.parispress.org/books/orgy.shtml">Paris Press</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Marginalia Poems from the Old Irish</em>, translated by Louis McKee, published 2008 by Adastra Press. This is one of those beautiful rarities you never find anywhere. A beautifully made letterpress book, nineteen poems, the medieval Irish originals and modern English translations. I've probably spent more time this with this book than any of the others I found at the bookfair this year. (Adastra Press does not have a website. The publisher can be reached by paper mail at: Adastra Press, 16 Reservation Road, Easthampton, MA 01027. The book is cover priced at $18.00. He asks $3.00 for shipping and handling in the U.S. His brochure also says you can order his books online through the Small Press Distribution website, <a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/">www.spdbooks.org</a>.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em>Check Points</em>, poems by Michael Casey, drawn very much from his experience as a soldier in the U.S. war against Vietnam. Published 2011 by Adastra Press.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Something More Than Force: Poems for Guatemala 1971-82</em> by Zoe Anglesey, published 1982 by Adastra Press. I love book. Zoe was a longtime friend; she died in 2003. For many years I've had the original letterpress edition Adastra published of her book. The copy I found at their table at AWP this year is the second edition, published by offset print, also very nicely made. I wanted another copy, to give to someone at some point.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Shortly Thereafter</em>, poems by Colin D. Halloran, published 2012 by <a href="http://www.mainstreetrag.com/CHalloran.html">Main Street Rag Publishing Company</a>. Poems made mostly from Halloran's experience as a soldier in the U.S. war against Afghanistan.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>From the Fishouse</em>, edited by Camille T. Dungy, Matt O'Donnell, and Jeffrey Thompson, published 2009 by <a href="http://www.perseabooks.com/detail.php?bookID=47">Persea Books</a>. An anthology of poems drawn from the <a href="http://www.fishousepoems.org/">website</a> of the same name.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Capital of Pain</em> by Paul Eluard, poems translated by Mary Ann Caws, Patricia Terry, and Nancy Kline, published 2006 by <a href="http://www.blackwidowpress.com/">Black Widow Press</a>. Bilingual edition.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Poetics of Dislocation</em> by Meena Alexander, published 2009 by <a href="http://www.press.umich.edu/1139954/poetics_of_dislocation">University of Michigan Press</a>. Collection of essays and other prose writing; one of the "Poets on Poetry" series published by the press.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative</em>, Series 3, Spring 2012. This is a bundle of eight pamphlets, reissued publications (or, in some cases, first publication) of various historic works by poets, often obscure and "lost" (or buried in an archive somewhere) for many years. The bunch I found this year (at the Small Press Distribution table at the bookfair, if I remember right) includes writings from the 1930's on the Spanish Civil War by Langston Hughes, Nancy Cunard, and Louise Thompson; "Homemade Poems" by Lorine Niedecker, published in a facsimile edition of her handwritten pages; two volumes of selected correspondence between poets John Wieners and Charles Olson; Charles Olson Memorial Lectures by poets Diane DiPriima and Edward Dorn; selected letters of Michael Rumaker; and letters to and from poet Joanne Kyger. * The document series is curated and published by the City University of New York Center for the Humanities. The Center's webpage for the Series 3 (the group of publications listed above) is <a href="http://centerforthehumanities.org/lost-and-found/publications/series-3">here</a>. In the page at this link, if you hover your mouse pointer over the "Series" link, you'll get a dropdown with links to Series 1 and Series 2. Series 4 is forthcoming.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Apart from the above, Persea Books will be publishing a translation of Life's Good, Brothers, a novel by poet Nazim Hikmet. Persea had uncorrected proof copies of the book at their bookfair table, which I didn't get one of; they said they're expecting that the finished edition will be out in April this year.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Also, poet friend Margaret Randall reports that The Feminist Press,in association with City University of New York, last I knew) will be publishing <em>Costa Brava (Savage Coast)</em>, a previously unpublished novel by poet Muriel Rukeyser that takes place in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. The novel is named among the forthcoming items at the back of the CUNY "Lost & Found" pamphlets listed above, with a projected publication date of 2013.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I plan to look for both of these.</span><br />
Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-75367646293843796332013-02-15T18:21:00.000-06:002013-02-15T18:21:10.245-06:00All Through The Night<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My new book, <em>All Through The Night: New and Selected Poems</em>, has been published by Red Dragonfly Press.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The book includes a generous sampling of my poems covering about 30 years of work. Around one-third of the poems are taken from previous books of mine; the remainder haven't been collected in books before. The book includes an Introduction by poet Dale Jacobson, and an author afterword by myself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The publisher's webstore page for the book is <a href="http://www.reddragonflypress.com/all-through-the-night-by-lyle-daggett/">here</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In the page at the above link, if you scroll down a little below the cover art image, you'll find a box with a brief description of the book; if you click on the Comments leak along the upper border of the box, you can read the cover blurbs by poets Lorna Dee Cervantes, Floyce Alexander, and Robert Edwards.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The front cover art (shown in the webpage at the above link) is drawing of the moon in its phases, done in November-December 1609 by Galileo Galilei. (In the webpage, if you hover your mouse pointer over the cover image, it will display a slightly larger version of the image.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">My big thanks to my publisher Scott King for his great work on the book design and preparing it for publication. Check out the website of <a href="http://www.reddragonflypress.org/">Red Dragonfly Press</a> for more of the excellent books of poems the press has published.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span>Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-17595418187786991892013-01-12T20:59:00.003-06:002013-01-12T20:59:45.743-06:00Wally Kennedy<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Wally Kennedy, one of my early poetry teachers, died this past Thursday morning January 10, at the age of 84. Wally lived a long and robust and creative life, and he touched the lives of many people, myself among them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I was in a poetry writing class that Wally and two other people taught, during my last year of high school, 1971-72. At the time I entered the class, I'd been writing poems for about three years. The class was one of the great formative times in my life as a poet and in my life overall. I'll talk here a little about the class and about Wally.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The full name of the class was Poetry and Songwriting. It was part of the Urban Arts program, a federally funded program (of the sort that right-wing politicians and corporate tyrants are trying to eliminate these days), where high school and junior high students in Minneapolis met for part of the day with working artists away from conventional schools, and learned and worked on their own art. In addition to the Poetry and Songwriting class, the program included classes in theatre, dance, filmmaking, photography, art, music, and other creative work. During high school I knew a lot of people, from my own school and others, who were taking Urban Arts classes. Wally Kennedy was the director of the overall program, and also one of the teachers of the Poetry and Songwriting class.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In addition to Wally, the other teachers of Poetry and Songwriting were poet Gary Isensee and musician Ted Unseth (later a founding member of the local band the Wolverines).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The class met the first two hours each morning (on school days) at Crosby House, a large old brick house in south Minneapolis near the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The house had once belonged to one of the families that founded, in the early 20th century, the Washburn-Crosby Company, which later became General Mills.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In the fall of 1971, there were about two dozen of us in the class. We showed up at 8:30 in the morning. We would start each morning with a yoga exercise known as the Sun Salutation, made of lots of bending and breathing, reaching toward the floor and working our way back up to standing. This had the effect of somewhat calming our minds before class. Then we gathered in a small room upstairs, sitting on the floor in a circle, and Gary or Wally would give us a writing exercise to do. Then we would scatter to the various corners and back hallways of the house, and write for a while, and then we would come back to the small room, and we would take turns reading out loud whatever we had written that morning. (During this time, the students among us who were musicians or becoming musicians also sometimes met with Ted Unseth, who lived in the attic apartment in the house and was a kind of part-time janitor there.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The first day of class, Wally sat with us and talked for few minutes, and he had us go and walk around outside the house for a little bit, and told us to find something that had once had life in it, and to write about it -- try to find, he said, something of the life the thing had once had, write however you respond to that. People came back with all manner of things -- a small broken-off tree branch, some moist tree bark with spots of pale fungus, I can't remember what else. I found a couple of small red berries that had dropped from a bush. (I sat looking at them for a few minutes, and I found them transforned to two men rolling around in a small rowboat on rough water at night. That's where I started when I started writing.) Wally and Gary would always do the writing exercises along with us. For this one, Wally himself wrote about a horse skull that sat on a shelf mounted on one of the walls upstairs -- one of the few items on mostly bare walls.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Some of the other writing exercises I remember from that year: one morning Wally brought in a bag of his family's kitchen garbage, spreadnewspaper on the floor, and emptied the bag on the newspaper, and told us to write about it -- write about the notion of garbage, of waste, of the waste in the world, of waste (if we felt it) in our own lives. Another time, Gary Isensee brought in a sealed mason jar half full of muddy murky water and weeds and grass, with a dyed blue Easter egg sitting in the water, set the jar in the middle of the room, and told us to write about it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Other exercise were a little more conventional: write a poem in three parts -- first the dream, then the myth, then the reality underlying them. Write a poem that ends suddenly. Write a sympathetic poem about someone or something you strongly dislike. One on occasion Wally read out loud Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem "Pied Beauty," talked about how the poem developed building image upon image, and asked us to try to write a poem like that.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Once of the exercises I liked best was when Gary one day brought into class many paintings -- the pages of small art books, taken apart from the bindings. He told us to take three of the pictures from the pile, and write a poem that found some type of connection between the three images. The three I picked were all paintings by Francisco Goya, the first time I'd seen work of his. Goya has since become one of my favorite painters.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">There were other times when we visited the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker Art Center (both of which were fairly close by), and a couple of times we visited churches in the neighborhood and wrote our responses to the architecture and the religious symbols and the general feeling of the places. Sometimes Wally or Gary would have us just go to the park a block from Crosby House, and write about the life going on in the park or the buildings surrounding it in the neighborhood.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">One of the things that I came to like the most about the class was the general mood of quiet most of the time. When we would gather after writing, and read out poems out loud, we did it almost ritually -- Wally commented once that the class sometimes reminded hiim of a religious service. People spoke, mostly, only when strongly moved to. People spoke politely. When we read our poems, there was very little talk before and after -- maybe a brief word introducing a poem now and then, maybe a short comment of appreciation after someone read a poem. No active critiquing, most of the time. No agression, no competitiveness. Such things would have seemed a violation of the creative circle.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Over the course of the year we came to feel a high level of trust in each other, during the class sessions as such, and in the conversation that went on in and around the class. After all these years I'm still lightly, loosely in touch with a few of the people from the class.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">All of the above deeply affected me, my intentions with writing poems, my thinking about what poetry is. To this day I often feel that I have little to say about poetry, of any theoretical nature, that could be in any way useful. Not entirely, but much of the time. When I talk about poems, or write book reviews, I find it easiest to refer to specific poems or quoted passages from poems, and talk about them as examples.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">To get a real sense of just how crucial the Poetry and Songwriting class was for many of us, it might be worth remembering that during those years, poetry tended to be at least as much on the fringe of the mainstream culture as it is now. All of us in the class were in one way or another outcasts or loners or the shy quiet ones sitting over in the corner, the ones who went home after school and sat in our rooms and read books. I don't know if we'll ever know how many of our lives were saved by the opportunity to be in that class and to write and to share our writing with others who were doing the same thing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Sheryl Noethe, Mary Stoyke, Mark Ostrander, Michael Shannon, Ernie Batson, Sally Brenner, Robbie Kacheroski, Jack Pearson, Holly Enkel, Lolly Kuusisto, Bruce Bailey, Michele Jackman, Mary Evans, Janice Thurs... I've named here some of the other people who were students in the class during the first half of that year. Mid-year, about twenty more people joined the class, and my memory grows hazy trying to think of names. The Poetry and Songwriting class took place through three years, and I was in it the middle year of the three. Not necessarily everyone in the class has continued writing poetry, and of those who have, not everyone is doing anything public with it. But it shaped our lives hugely at a time when we deeply needed it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Now and then Wally Kennedy would arrange for us, whoever was interested, to go with him to visit other schools in the area, for a day or part of a day, and read our poems, and do writing exercises together with the other students. I enjoyed that a great deal. He also now and then arranged for us to go to large events of one kind or another and read our poems to audiences -- I remember specifically a symposium of family practice doctors, a conference of teachers, and a meeting of the St. Paul Junior League. Members of other Urban Arts classes (especially the theatre and dance classes) often came to such events and performed as well. Also, on two occasions that year, the entire poetry class did a mass reading at the Walker Art Center, which was a great and joyful experience.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Over the years since then I had just occasional contact with Wally. We continued to remain friendly whenever we did happen to talk. He came to listen when I did a poetry reading at a local coffeehouse sometime back in the 1990's. In more recent years, he sent me a copy of a memoir of his childhood, <em>Who Do You Think You Are?</em>, full of lively stories of his early years in North Dakota and elsewhere as his family moved around. And, just this past fall, he sent me a copy of <em>Urban Arts: How Students Thrived in Their Arts Community</em>, a memoir/history he'd written about the Urban Arts program. I found great wellsprings of memory bubbling up as a read through the book, especially the section on the poetry class. (I don't find a website for the publisher; the book gives the publisher as Ytterli Press, 2211 Buford Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55108.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I had the opportunity to be part of a living and growing and thriving community of artists, my own age and older, from very early, almost from the very time I started writing poems when I was 14. The Urban Arts program was not the only such program in Minneapolis at the time, there were a couple of others that also afforded creative opportunities to people my age. The Poetry and Songwriting class was, in any case, an essential piece of my life. I can't imagine who I would be today without it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thank you, Wally.</span><br />
Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-75607764128974417282012-12-17T20:49:00.001-06:002012-12-17T20:49:04.796-06:00The events in Connecticut<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Found an article I liked on the killing of the children in Connecticut this past Friday. The article, in the website of <em>CounterPunch</em> magazine, comments on the underlying culture of violence that create the ground where such terrible acts take shape.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">We live in a society whose political and economic and cultural leaders routinely promote the notion that if you have a problem, the best way to deal with it is to go get the biggest gun you can find, and walk in shooting.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">"These dead," wrote poet Tom McGrath, "weren't put down by Cheyennes or Red Chinese: / The poison of their own sweet country has brought them here."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">(The above from McGrath's poem "Something Is Dying Here," in his book <em>Movie at the End of the World</em> published by Swallow Press; also can be found in McGrath's <em>Selected Poems</em> published by Copper Canyon Press.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The <em>CounterPunch</em> article is <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/17/behind-the-connecticut-massacre/">here</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span>Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-71209844157737020422012-11-18T18:28:00.001-06:002012-11-18T18:28:08.988-06:00Immersed in proofreading<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To anyone who comes by here from time to time, I haven't gone away -- I'm in the middle of proofreading the galleys for my next book, <em>All Through the Night: New and Selected Poems</em>, to be published by <a href="http://www.reddragonflypress.org/">Red Dragonfly Press</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Should be back soon.</span>Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-72887966607558425942012-10-03T21:25:00.001-05:002012-10-03T21:25:40.838-05:00Albuquerque Cultural Conference 2012<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This past weekend I attended this year's Albuquerque Cultural Conference, which took place from Friday September 28 through Sunday September 30. Once again it was a shimmering exciting three days, rich with warmth and creativity.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I made attempts at taking notes part of the time, though I often became so engrossed in the discussions and events that note-taking fell by the wayside. What follows here is a happy and somewhat disorganized account of what I saw of the conference.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Friday evening was a reading by a dozen great poets at the Outpost performance space. A large crowd showed up, I'd guess at least a hundred people (though I'm not great at estimating these kinds of things), a lively buzzing all through the room. The poets who read included Anya Achtenberg, Margaret Randall, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Luis J. Rodriguez, Levi Romero, Damien Flores, Jessica Helen Lopez, Andrea J. Serrano, Susan Sherman, David Martinez, Mary Oishi, Richard Vargas, Lenore Weiss... I hope I'm not forgetting anyone.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The conference events on Saturday and Sunday took place at the Harwood Arts Center, a little west of downtown Albuquerque. The daytime events were mainly panel discussions, though not as dry and stuffy as that suggests -- the panelists' presentations were invariably followed by active discussion by the audience, with much give and take. It wasn't an academic conference.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Saturday morning I attended a panel on <strong>The Southwest Border</strong> (with panelists Tony Mares, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Roberto Rodriguez, and Irene Vasquez), dealing with political and cultural issues related to immigration, nationalism, the distinction between political borders and natural ones (such as mountain ranges, rivers, and so on); and a panel called <strong>Culture and Community of the Border</strong> (with panelists Michelle Otero, Kamala Platt, Sandra Soto, and Luis Rodriguez), which in many respects expanded on the first panel. Sandra Soto spoke about how the cities of Phoenix and Tucson were designed largely for wealthy white residents (with golf courses among the prominent features of the cities), and with Chicano/a people and indigenous people relegated to working as service workers; she spoke also of the large role the prison industry plays in the economy of Arizona. Luis Rodriguez talked about the concept of "borderless imagination," and the basic distinction between a world outlook of greed and ownership and capitalism on the one hand and cooperation, sharing and collectivity on the other. "The U.S. Constitution," Luis reminded us, "is a limited warranty." True people's power comes not from such a document, but from our acting collectively in the world.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">At midday I listened to an interesting presentation by Antonia Darder on the work and ideas of the writer Paulo Freire, particularly his essential book <em>Pedagogy of the Oppressed</em>. Darder gave a succinct summing up of the main concepts Freire deals with in the book.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Saturday afternoon I attented the panel <strong>Crossing Borders of our Own</strong> (with panelists Margaret Randall, Susan Sherman, Anya Achtenberg, and Glenn Weyant) -- I particularly enjoyed Weyant's talk and presentation of his sound sculpture "Sonicanta," created by recording sounds various people made by drumming and otherwise touching sections of the border wall that the U.S. government has put up between the United States and Mexico; and the panel Building a Culture of Resistance, with panelists John Crawford, Roberto Rodriguez, Jeff Biggers, and Antonia Darder.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Saturday evening featured another poetry reading, this time at the Harwood Arts Center, and again with multiple poets: Jeff Biggers, Jessica Simpson, Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, Mike Henson, Lyle Daggett, Peter Street, Merimee Moffitt, Marilyn Stablein, Olivia Romo, Fred Whitehead, Kamala Platt... and I'm sure I'm forgetting some people.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">*</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I flew into Albuquerque on Thursday -- each time I've gone to the conference, I've found it helpful to get there a day early, to give myself a chance to adjust to the altitude (something like 4500 feet higher than Minneapolis). Even with that, I found myself fatiguing toward evening (and surely this was partly because of the high-energy days). After the Saturday evening reading I went back to the hotel and caved in to sleep.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Sunday morning the first panel I attended was <strong>Cosmopolitanism -- Some Existing Cultures</strong>, featuring panelists Anya Achtenberg, Fred Whitehead, Peter Street, and Mike Henson. Several people in this panel talked about the notion of regionalism, in its useful and its inhibiting forms: regionalism as a way of grounding oneself in order to see and interact more fully with the rest of the world; and regionalism as an isolation, provincialism, a narrowing of perspective and outlook.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Also Sunday morning I took part as a panelist in the panel <strong>Survival is an Act of Resistance</strong>, featuring John Crawford, Fred Whitehead, Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, and myself; we talked about the work of writer Meridel LeSueur, poet Thomas McGrath, poet Roy McBride, and poet Carol Tarlen, in the context of the long and living tradition of insurgent cultural work.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Sunday afternoon I attended the panel named <strong>Community Writing I: Theory and Practice</strong>, featuring panelists Mandy Gardner, Brian Hendrickson, Mike Henson, and Olivia Romo; and the panel <strong>Local Cultural Publishing</strong>, featuring panelists John Crawford (publisher of West End Press), Jeanetta Calhoun Mish (publisher of Mongrel Empire Press), Gary Brower (publisher of <em>Malpais Review</em>), and Richard Vargas (publisher of <em>The Mas Tequila Review</em>) -- the discussion in this panel became quite animated when we got on the topic of electronic publishing vs. print publishing, with people voicing many energetic points of view.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">We closed the conference with a wrap-up and evaluation meeting late Sunday afternoon. I went back to the hotel and holed up for the night, and came back to Minneapolis on Monday.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">One of the things I appreciate most at such events is the informal time to meet and talk with people, both old friends and people who become quick new friends. A number of us were staying at the same hotel, and tended to meet and talk in the hotel breakfast room in the early morning before the conference started at the Harwood center a mile away. I had much time to visit with long-time poet and writer friend Fred Whitehead, and with poet Peter Street who had come from a coal mining town near Manchester, England, and was visiting and traveling with Fred.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Other friends I saw there were writer Margaret Randall, artist Barbara Byers, writer Demetria Martinez, poet Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, poet Mike Henson, Anya Achtenberg, and Lorna Dee Cervantes. And i was pleased to meet and get to know poet Susan Sherman, poet P.J. Laska, and poet Lenore Weiss. And once again, my apologies to anyone I'm forgetting -- there were a lot of us there.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">*</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I came away from the conference with several books of poems, all of which I recommend:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>The Light that Puts an End to Dreams: New and Selected Poems</em> by Susan Sherman, published 2012 by <a href="http://www.wingspress.com/book.cfm/145/The-Light-that-Puts-an-End-to-Dreams/Susan-Sherman/">Wings Press</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Listening to the Dark</em>, poems by Peter Street, published 2012 by <a href="http://www.pennilesspress.co.uk/books/listening_to_the_dark.htm">Penniless Press</a> in the U.K.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Savage Sunsets</em>, poems by Adrian C. Louis, published 2012 by <a href="http://www.westendpress.org/store/book/savage-sunsets/">West End Press</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island</em>, poems by Lenore Weiss, published 2012 by <a href="http://www.westendpress.org/store/book/cutting-down-the-last-tree-on-easter-island/">West End Press</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">*</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">There was a little rain in Albuquerque the night of the Friday reading; the rest of the time I was there the weather was mild and bright during the days, with a steady cool breeze most of the time. Between the conference events during the day I spent much time captivated by the amazing blue color of the sky, that high desert mountain sky that seems almost a solid substance.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Many of the people and publications I've mentioned above have websites, and I haven't linked to all of them; I urge you to search the web to find out more.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The website of the Albuquerque Cultural Conference is <a href="http://albuquerqueculturalconference.org/">here</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I want to go again next year.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span>Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-67333326301638770142012-09-16T22:35:00.000-05:002012-09-16T22:35:01.150-05:00A fierce and relentless music<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This past summer I've been reading the <em>Collected Poems</em> of <strong>Naomi Replansky</strong> (published this year by <a href="http://www.blacksparrowbooks.com/isbn.asp?isbn=1574232150">Black Sparrow Books</a>, which is now an imprint of David R. Godine, Publisher.) These are poems of a hard-boned lyricism, a tenacious mind of political and philosophical inquiry, written in the context of the massive sorrows and upheavals of a dark and insurgent century.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Naomi Replansky was born in 1918 in Brooklyn, New York; she began writing poetry as early as the age of 10, and was published in <em>Poetry</em> magazine when she was 16. She was active in the Young Communist League in her teens and twenties. The <em>Collected Poems</em> includes no biographical note; the little bit I know of her life and work is through her friendship with poet <a href="http://aburningpatience.blogspot.com/2008/04/footsteps-of-early-workers.html">Thomas McGrath</a> and the <a href="http://aburningpatience.blogspot.com/2008/03/in-memorys-country.html">"Marsh Street Irregulars"</a> (poets who gathered around McGrath during the years he was in Los Angeles in the 1950's and early 1960's), and from scattered other sources</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The <em>Collected Poems</em> is comprised of two previous books of poems; a section of new and previously uncollected poems; and a few of Replansky's translations of several poets (from German, French, Yiddish, and Greek). It includes poems written -- or completed -- over several decades, from the mid-1930's through 2011. (All of the poems are dated with the year or approximate time period of completion.) Replansky has famously commented that she writes slowly.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Many of Replansky's poems have an deceptively simple sing-song quality, echoes of the rhymes children sing when they're playing, though the voice throughout the poems is of someone who has lived and seen much in the world. From the poem "Ring Song," dated 1944 (in the Collected Poems, from which all of the quoted passages here are taken):</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">...When that joy is gone for good</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I move the arms beneath the blood.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">When my blood is running wild</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I sew the clothing of a child.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">When that child is never born</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I lean my breast against a thorn.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">When the thorn brings no reprieve</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I rise and live, I rise and live.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">No matter how apparently internalized the landscapes seem to be in Replansky's poems, I keep finding clear threads weaving out of the labyrinth into the large daylight world. Her poems often travel remarkable distances.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">One night when it was midnight in the bed</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I turned my head and said:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The red thread of error looped around my wrist</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Leads far away.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I cannot now untwist</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Myself antagonist</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">From childhood stampings, from streets fierce in play.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I stumbled through the thicket of the law,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I wrestled, losing, with a man of straw,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I reared at shadows and I walked on cloud.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And from the fugitive I took</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The many-colored cloak</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And wore it somberly, as though a shroud.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I loved when sure of loss</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Then stood and cursed my loss</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And swore myself star-crossed.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And though I found a word, though at my breast</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I warmed a word, I still was like a bird</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">That broods the offspring of another's nest.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">(From the poem "The Journey Here," dated 1945.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Though Naomi Replansky's poems are not like those of any other poet I've read, I do find resemblances or resonances now and then in her poems that remind me of the work of various other poets. William Blake comes to mind right away; Replansky herself has named Blake as a poet important in her own work. Also Muriel Rukeyser, at times, in the great candor of expression (though the careful footsteps of Replansky's poems feel different to me from the surging music that run's through much of Rukeyser's work). Another poet I think of sometimes, reading Replansky, is Bertolt Brecht: in the dance and the play, in the rhetorical strength and the persistent questioning. (Replansky worked with Brecht for a little while, translating poems, when she spent some time in Los Angeles in the late 1940's.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">-- When you are tall, you who are small,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Then take this word home from me:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">It's only your brow's honest sweat</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Will grow the money-tree.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">-- Now I am tall my sweat falls down,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And honest all the time,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">But scant and silver in the yield,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And thin as the thinnest dime.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">-- Look here, goodlooking, life is short,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Grab from it what you can.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">It's arms apart, and wide the heart,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And catch a wealthy man.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">-- It's arms apart, and wide the heart,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And who comes marching in</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">But some poor guy with a loving eye</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">To make my hunger twin.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">-- All's double-cross, and yours the loss,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">So why not share the loot?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">O fling your coins in the field of chance</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And watch the tree take root.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">(From the poem "The Money-Tree," dated 1940.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Not all of the landscapes in Replansky's poems are interior; not all of the poems read as moral allegory or choral movement. Sometimes Replansky looks steady and close-up at a plain literal thing going on in plain sight. Here are some lines from the poem "On the Street," dated New York City, Winter 1988:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Her cough won't stop. Her bruises will not heal.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">She plans her battle-plans for the next meal.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And she is mocked by smells from restaurants</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And wasted warmth that steams from subway vents.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">No place to hide between concrete and sky:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Snow or knife or passerby</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">At any time can penetrate her rags.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Mumbling, she guards from thieves her plastic bags</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Amd spreads her cardboard mattress for the night</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">In shallow doorways raw with sulphurous light.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">What happens to the psyche when we live in the night of empire? What becomes of our search for true human connection in the daily machineworks of commodities and profits? How do we find our living bodies and touch, and speak? These are among the questions Naomi Replansky's poems ask and confront.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">That heart so hesitant</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">but chief among the guests.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The riddles of that bird,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">the answers of that lamp.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The not-so-silent fish</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">who bring word of the drowned.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The street whose every stone</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">cries Paris to the world.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">They come, they bring their friends,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and each is eloquent.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Their voices enter me</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">through any door they find.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Now this loud day withdraws</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">to its allotted place</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">among the other days</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and there it is become</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">a thing, and animal</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">that looks from liquid eyes,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">speaks softly, if at all.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">(From the poem "The Things, the Animals," dated 1953.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Each day we wake and try to make out way through the fogs and mutterings of half-lives and half-truths, what passes for the official version of existence in the ruins of capital investment and imperial conquest. The desire for real life, the striving for unblurred truth, are part of the breath and pulse that the great majority of us in the world share with each other, however much our commonality may sometimes be obscured. Naomi Replansky's poems offer a fierce and relentless music, reaching toward the greater life toward which we aspire and for which we struggle.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Here, in the quick-changed scenes of the waning night,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Failure climbs over failure as if triumphant.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">In a cold blue light, age bares its gums, and sickness</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Mixes its poisons.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I try to return to the underwater canyons</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And the salt creatures and their blind entwining,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">But I drift above. My eyes remain wide open</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Beneath closed lids.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I drift above. Till at last I am wholly awake</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And streaming with light I stand on the shore of the day.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Now my dawn-phantoms</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Withdraw, sun-dazzled.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">(From the poem "Waking in Alarm Before the Alarm," dated 1972.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Naomi Replansky's blog (named simply <strong>Naomi Replansky</strong>) is <a href="http://naomireplansky.blogspot.com/">here</a>.</span><br />
Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12345339.post-57102292512974657802012-09-15T18:57:00.000-05:002012-09-15T18:57:07.359-05:00Test post<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Typing a test post to see if the new Blogger user interface is working properly on my blog now.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Testing the <span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">font change</span> function here. Testing the <strong>bold</strong> and <em>italic</em> functions here.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Testing the link function here: this is a link to the webpage of my publisher, <a href="http://www.reddragonflypress.org/">Red Dragonfly Press</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">Testing the font size function; this sentence is smaller.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: large;">Testing the font size function again; this sentence is larger.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">This sentence is normal size.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />Lyle Daggetthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10731915540520704368noreply@blogger.com2