"From symbols and notions to literary and religious allusions,
this chart contains [W.H.] Auden's view of the world (and of worlds beyond), at least as he envisioned it in the 1940s."
[more inside]
posted by Iridic
on Feb 1, 2013 -
17 comments
Jacket2 has digitzed all 10 editions of
Roof magazine, an important publication in the development of
language poetry.
Featured poets include (pulled from a quick glance): Robert Duncan, Michael McClure, John Ashbery, Michael Castro, Robert Creeley, Alan Ginsberg, Diane Wakoski, Peter Inman, Octavio Paz.
posted by Think_Long
on Feb 1, 2013 -
3 comments
The poet Jayne Cortez passed away this past December 28th in New York City (
New York Times obituary). She started publishing her poems in the late 1960s and in the 70s began performing her poetry backed by music,
first in
collaboration with bassist Richard Davis, and then backed by her own band The Firespitters. Some of their tracks have found their way to YouTube:
I See Chano Pozo,
If the Drum Is a Woman,
There It Is,
Maintain Control & Economic Love Song I,
Everybody Wants to Be Somebody,
Takin' the Blues Back Home,
Talk to Me (for Don Cherry),
I've Been Searching,
You Can Be and
Endangered Species List Blues. Just two years ago she performed solo with her son by Ornette Coleman, drummer Denardo Coleman:
Find Your Own Voice,
I'm Gonna Shake and
She Got He Got. In 1997 she was featured on University of California television network in the series
Artists on the Cutting Edge where she read poems and discussed her work. Finally,
here's a brief clip from the 1982 documentary Poetry in Motion, where she was interviewed.
posted by Kattullus
on Jan 5, 2013 -
4 comments
The Poetry Translation Centre pairs living poets from Asia, Africa and Latin America with English-language translators and then puts the resulting translations online. You can browse the poetry by
country,
language,
translator or
poet. Besides the
hundreds of individual poems, all presented in the original and both literal and poetic translations, many have been recorded in dual readings by translator and poet, and put online as videos or mp3s (look for the microphone or camera icon). There are also
podcasts to download,
articles to read, and
chapbooks to purchase. It is absurd to single out a few poems as favorites, but nonetheless, here are a few that struck me hard,
Birds by
Kajal Ahmad, translated by
Mimi Khalvati,
Cataclysm and Songs by
Conceição Lima, translated in a
workshop, and
Survivors by
Choe Young-mi, translated by
Kyoo Lee and
Sarah Maguire (who is the founder and director of the Poetry Translation Centre). If these poems do not hit you, no need to worry as there are literally
hundreds more to read.
[via The Guardian]
posted by Kattullus
on Jan 2, 2013 -
5 comments
Perched high up above the Thames in downtown London every month this past year a different writer has spent four days living in a replica of the Roi des Belges, the boat Marlow travels up the Congo in Joseph Conrad's
The Heart of Darkness. Each author would write a short text during their stay "which explores London, rivers, the work of Joseph Conrad, or even all three." They would be visited on the last day by a journalist from The Guardian who recorded them reading their essay, poem or short story. Among the poets, historians and novelists were Adonis, Jeanette Winterson, Teju Cole, Michael Ondaatje and Kamila Shamsie. These recordings, each prefaced by a short interview, are all available on the Guardian website, to stream or download. Below the cut there is a link to each recording, with a short description.
[more inside]
posted by Kattullus
on Dec 31, 2012 -
7 comments
With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. December 2012 marks the 40th anniversary of
Invisible Cities -- the sublime metaphysical travelogue by author-journalist
Italo Calvino. In a series of pensive dialogues with jaded emperor
Kublai Khan, the explorer
Marco Polo describes a meandering litany of visionary and impossible places,
dozens of surreal, fantastical cities, each poetically reifying ideas vital to language, philosophy, and the human spirit. This gracefully written love letter to urban life has inspired
countless tributes, but it's just the most accessible of Calvino's fascinating literary catalogue. Look inside for a closer look at his most remarkable works, links to English translations of his magical prose, and collections of artistic interpretations from around the web -- including
this treasure trove of essays, excerpts, articles, and recommended reading.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 30, 2012 -
26 comments
Poetry Reincarnations. "I hope you may enjoy these glimpses at some of the long-gone poets and literary figures, etc., in the form of scratchy old movies, as if they had been filmed by candle light."
posted by Iridic
on Sep 20, 2012 -
6 comments
Akhmatova's work ranges from short lyric poems to intricately structured cycles, such as Requiem (1935–40), her tragic masterpiece about the Stalinist terror. Her style, characterised by its economy and emotional restraint, was strikingly original and distinctive to her contemporaries. The strong and clear leading female voice struck a new chord in Russian poetry. Her writing can be said to fall into two periods – the early work (1912–25) and her later work (from around 1936 until her death), divided by a decade of reduced literary output. Her work was condemned and censored by Stalinist authorities and she is notable for choosing not to emigrate, and remaining in Russia, acting as witness to the atrocities around her. [more inside]
posted by Egg Shen
on Aug 20, 2012 -
11 comments
“Aaliyah would have been on Twitter. It is fucked up that she is dead.” Poet and Twitter entity
Patricia Lockwood talks with HTMLGIANT about Twitter, literature, twitterature, comedy, poetry, sexting, Aaliyah and Olive Garden. Lockwood suggests that there may be something substantial and heretofore unexamined rumbling in the bowels of certain Twitter communities and people (such as
@graeyalien and
MeFi's own @gregerskine.)
posted by naju
on Mar 7, 2012 -
29 comments
An internet search, even in these days of abundant information, yields only that the pamphlets can be found in various library collections, and that they continued to be produced into the '70s. And that Edmund Wilson once sent one, "Mr. P. Squiggle's Reward," to Nabokov, calling it "one of the oddest of many odd things that are sent me by unknown people." He also got the title wrong, dubbing it "Mr. P. Squiggle's Revenge," which is probably significant. But that’s it: nothing about Volk or McCalib.
Epitomes was a series of pamphlets published by Elwin Volk and Dennis McCalib. Few traces of Volk's life are to be found, but he seems to have been a lawyer, and wrote at least a
couple of
pamphlets about law, which he self-published in Pasadena. McCalib is equally elusive. A man by that name contributed to
an issue of One: The Homosexual Viewpoint in 1964. A Dennis McCalib also used the pseudonym
Lord Fuzzy. The aforementioned "Mr. P. Squiggle's Reward" got a
curt, two half-sentence dismissal in Poetry Magazine, otherwise these pamphlets seem not to have troubled the literary world. Someone donated
their manuscripts to UCLA where they rest undigitized in
fourteen boxes. But Library of Congress has scanned a total of
twenty-six pages in
high resolution.
posted by Kattullus
on Jan 27, 2012 -
9 comments
How well do you really know old Arty? It all began with the Welsh: The The Annales Cabriae (inside) and parts of the Welsh oral tradition (later collected into
the Mabinogion) give a very different picture of the popular King Arthur than contemporary readers are familiar with: no Lancelot, three or four different Guens, no love triangles or Holy Grails. A look at the vast scope of the Arthurian legend.
[more inside]
posted by kittenmarlowe
on Dec 19, 2011 -
30 comments
Reading Blaise Cendrars is like stepping into another universe. His fiction is unlike anything else I've ever read. His poetry influenced the mighty Guillaume Apollinaire and helped shape the face of modernism. But it is his mockery of biographical detail and the very notion of literature that fascinates me the most. If, like me, you're not a fan of autobiography, then Blaise Cendrars is the memoirist for you.
posted by Trurl
on Nov 30, 2011 -
10 comments
"The prominent literary critic Marjorie Perloff has recently begun using the term 'unoriginal genius' to describe this tendency emerging in literature. Her idea is that, because of changes brought on by technology and the Internet, our notion of the genius—a romantic, isolated figure—is outdated. An updated notion of genius would have to center around one's mastery of information and its dissemination. Perloff has coined another term, 'moving information,' to signify both the act of pushing language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process. She posits that today's writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine." --
Kenneth Goldsmith on why "genius" is an archaic concept, and how literature in English has fallen half-a-century behind advances in visual arts and music
posted by bardic
on Sep 22, 2011 -
44 comments
R.M. Berry on Samuel Beckett's peculiar writing style: "It's as though the narrator's words were almost thoughtless, accidental, written by someone paying no attention to what he or she says." Beckett is best known for his play
Waiting For Godot, in which "nothing happens, twice", but he was also an accomplished writer of prose, ranging from the relatively simple
Three Novels to the extremely minimal
Imagination Dead Imagine. Some of Beckett's more challenging short plays are available on YouTube:
Play (
pt. 2),
Not I (the famous "mouth" play), and
Come and Go, one of the shortest plays in the English language (ranging between 121 and 127 words, depending on translation).
Once he interviewed John Lennon and found out who the eggman really was. Beckett's final creative work was his poem
What Is the Word.
posted by Rory Marinich
on Jun 25, 2011 -
41 comments
A Cyclops' cave the wanderers brave
And find much milk & cheese
But as they eat, foul death they meet
For them doth Cyclops seize.
From
The Young Folks' Ulysses [PDF], by H. Lovecraft, poet, aged seven. One of the "freely available editions of obscure, outlandish and otherwise outré works of semi-fine literature" from
the electric publishing wing of
kobek.com.
posted by Iridic
on Mar 28, 2011 -
8 comments
Devadasi are women in southeastern India who were dedicated in their youth to the goddess Yellamma. When they reach puberty they are forced into sex work. Once they were women of high status, but now they've been relegated to the outskirts of society. The devadasi practice goes back a long way in history, and was once celebrated in poetry.
When God Is a Customer, a collection of translated classical Telugu poems about the devadasi, is free to read online. Their modern life is described by
William Dalrymple in The New Yorker and in a
video interview with filmmaker Beeban Kidron which includes clips from her documentary Sex, Death and the Gods. The devadasi have been targeted by exploitative Western media for a long time, but have recently
started to hit back, using
the internet to disseminate their views.
posted by Kattullus
on Jan 22, 2011 -
14 comments
Figment.com is a new, free community and platform for young people to share their fiction writing, "connect with other readers and discover new stories and authors. Users are invited to write novels, short stories and poems,
collaborate with other writers and give and receive feedback on the work posted on the site." (
Via)
posted by zarq
on Dec 5, 2010 -
19 comments
They think of me as a scholar, an intellectual, a pen-pusher. And I am none of them. When I write, my fingers get covered not in ink but in blood. I think I am nothing more than this: an undaunted soul. [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on Nov 24, 2010 -
9 comments
Arthur Rimbaud Documentary [via pb] is an impressionistic tour of Rimbaud's life, from a provincial upbringing, through his teenage poetic revolution, to his world travels and moderately successful business career in the Horn of Africa, featuring contemporary photographs, some taken by Rimbaud, and readings by Joan Baez. His poems (
English translations,
French, with some translated into English,
earlier translations, with French originals) were fundamental in overthrowing the established traditions of writing and his personal story has long been an inspiration to those who chafe under the strictures of society. Ruth Franklin wrote about
the whole arc of Rimbaud's life in The New Yorker, while Edmund White focuses on Rimbaud's bull-in-a-china-shop
entrance into fellow poet Paul Verlaine's bourgeois existence in The Guardian. You can also read
earlier biographical writings on Rimbaud, including
his sister Isabelle's hagiographic account. Rimbaud's poetry has been set to music, perhaps most notably by electronic musician Hector Zazou and chansonnier Léo Ferré (links to music below the cut).
[more inside]
posted by Kattullus
on Nov 7, 2010 -
13 comments
