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
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
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
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
Frank O'Hara was a New York poet, even though he lived less than half of his 40 years in the city. He grew up in Grafton, MA, was a sonarman in WWII and roomed with Edward Gorey at Harvard before moving to the city he would forever be associated with. Naturally, there was am
article on him in The New Yorker a couple of years ago. We're lucky enough to have a number of
videos of O'Hara, including
a reading of the lovely "Having a Coke with You. There's also quite a bit of
audio of him, and I can't but recommend
this mp3 of John Ashbery, Alfred Leslie, Bill Berkson and Michelle Elligott reminiscing about O'Hara at the MOMA, where he worked. And there are quite a
few of his
poems available
online, as well as five of the
poem-paintings he did
with Norman Bluhm.
[more inside]
posted by Kattullus
on Feb 15, 2010 -
16 comments
Brindin Press has lots of poetry translations into English online, concentrating on
French,
German,
Italian and
Spanish, though
more than 40 other languages are represented as well. A
boatload of translators is represented, from those toiling in obscurity to big literary names (e.g. there are translations of Catullus poems by
Ben Jonson,
Jonathan Swift,
Louis Zukofsky,
Aubrey Beardsley and
Thomas Hardy). There is also a
section of quirky poems. Finally,
here's a rendition of Goethe's Der Erlkönig that substitutes the elfish king with a dalek.
posted by Kattullus
on Sep 27, 2009 -
4 comments
[Ezra Pound] worked on and for poetry as others might work on a major scientific discovery or a drawn-out military mission. Thus, as Sieburth reminds us in his introduction to The Pisan Cantos, when, on May 3, 1945, Pound was arrested at his home in the hills above Rapallo, he immediately put a small Chinese dictionary and a copy of the Confucian classics in his pocket. Working as he then was on his Confucian translations, he knew that, wherever the military police were taking him, he would need these books.
From
Pound Ascendant by Marjorie Perloff. Ezra Pound's ability as a translator of Chinese poetry has long been disparaged by sinologists, such as George A. Kennedy in
Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character. Other academics have sought to defend him. Two examples are Zhaoming Qian's
Ezra Pound's encounter with Wang Wei: toward the "ideogrammic method" of the Cantos and Stephen Tapscott's
In Praise of Bad Translations: Ezra Pound and the Cultural Work of Translation (pdf). Eric Hayot draws the contours of this long-running debate and explores its significance in
Critical Dreams: Orientalism, Modernism, and the Meaning of Pound's China. Pound's
Cathay in full and a public domain
audiobook version (iTunes link).
posted by Kattullus
on Apr 30, 2009 -
16 comments
The Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies is your one-stop shop for pre-Columbian Central America awesomeness. There are so, so many wondrous things on that site, I don't quite know where to begin. I suppose John Pohl's
scholarly introduction is a natural place to start. But maybe you just don't have time to read anything and just want to dive into pretty, pretty pictures. Perhaps the most user-friendly databases are Justin Kerr's photographs
Maya Vases (e.g.
1,
2,
3) and
Pre-Columbian Portfolio (e.g.
1,
2a,
2b,
3). From there you can delve into the collection of Linda Schele's
photographs (e.g.
1,
2) and
drawings (e.g.
1,
2,
3). There are more image databases but let me direct you to the collection of
old Maya, Aztec and Mixtec books which are simply stunning (e.g.
1,
2,
3,
4 [last link pdf]). You can read more about
Mayan and
Mixtec codices and download high resolution versions of the entire books. There are also Maya
dictionaries,
glyph guides,
linguistic maps and a
who's who. There is also classic
Mayan and
Aztec poetry in translation. I'm telling you, that's not even half of what this amazing site has to offer.
posted by Kattullus
on Nov 29, 2008 -
19 comments
Chinese Poems is a simple, no frills site with over 200 classical Chinese poems, mostly from the Tang period. The poems are presented in traditional and simplified chinese characters, pinyin and English translation, both literal and literary. Here's Du Mu's
Drinking Alone:
Outside the window, wind and snow blow straight,
I clutch the stove and open a flask of wine.
Just like a fishing boat in the rain,
Sail down, asleep on the autumn river.
Among other poets featured are
Li Bai (a.k.a. Li Po),
Du Fu and
Wang Wei. As a bonus, here's the entire text of Ezra Pound's
Cathay, most of whom are from Li Bai originals.
posted by Kattullus
on May 19, 2008 -
15 comments
Selections of Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Calligraphy from the collection of The Library of Congress. 373 individual pieces from ranging in time from the 9th to the 19th Century, all explained and some translated. A few personal favorites (note that very high quality scans can be viewed by clicking the appropriate link after clicking thumbnail):
marriage decree,
verses on tragic love,
practice sheet,
verses 10-11 of the 48th chapter of the Qur'an,
poetic verses offering advice,
frontispiece of Qur'anic exegesis and
quatrain by Rumi. There are also four special presentations:
Calligraphers of the Persian Tradition,
Ottoman Calligraphers and Their Works,
Qur’anic Fragments and
Noteworthy Items. This last presentation also features representational art, for instance images of
The battle of Mazandaran and
the Persian king Bahram Gur hunting.
posted by Kattullus
on May 12, 2008 -
11 comments
People with a History is "an online guide to lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans history." Ranging from
the first stirrings of civilization to the modern day, People with a History gathers together original sources and academic articles dealing with queerness throughout history. To give you a feel for the wealth of material on the site, here are a few pages that caught my interest:
The Vikings and Homosexuality,
Coptic Spell: Spell for a Man to Obtain a Male Lover,
an acount of a gay marriage ceremony described by Michel de Montaigne,
But Among Our Own Selves (an 18th Century gay ballad),
a chapter from The Life of St. Theodore of Sykeon, a 7th Century Byzantine monk and bishop, which mentions
adelphopoiesis, or the
rite of brothermaking,
Wu Tsao, 19th Century Chinese lesbian poet, and finally
Polari: The Lost Language of Gay Men.
posted by Kattullus
on Feb 2, 2008 -
15 comments
Asemic is a magazine of asemic writing, which is writing without semantic content. The editor is Australian Tim Gaze, who's made the asemic books
Aussie Runes and The Oxygen of Truth, volumes
1 and
2. "Only words lie; asemic texts cannot lie."
[more inside]
posted by Kattullus
on Oct 13, 2007 -
74 comments
Sean Bonney's translations of Baudelaire are unconventional. Instead of following the form of the French originals they are semi-concrete typewriter poetry. In a
review of the book,
everyone's cup of tea, onedit magazine says that they are "certainly the best translations of Baudelaire in English ever written." Which might explain why they published 35 of them in their latest issue. You can listen to Bonney read his translations
here [mp3]
posted by Kattullus
on Jul 18, 2007 -
61 comments
Jónas Hallgrímsson (1807-45) was an Icelandic Romantic poet and natural scientist. Dick Ringler, a professor at The University of Wisconsin, has a site that contains
50 poems and prose texts by Jónas in parallel English/Icelandic versions. Also on the site,
a guide to traditional Icelandic verse,
a biographical sketch of the poet and a
map of Iceland with places Jónas wrote about marked. Here's his short
Above the Ford:
The cliffs on life's swift current/are cleft by shallow valleys./Masses have queued to cross there ---/crowds of billy-goat milkers./We'll go upstream, God willing,/to walk the hawk-high ridges/and pitch ourselves --- impetuous ---/plumb in the roaring torrent! [Today is Iceland's Independence Day]
posted by Kattullus
on Jun 17, 2007 -
13 comments
MNMLST POETRY is an essay by
Bob Grumman about a strand of poetry that he claims is "unacclaimed but flourishing". Here are poems in this vein by
Aram Saroyan (
2),
jwcurry,
LeRoy Gorman,
bpNichol,
Michael Basinski,
John M. Bennett,
Karl Young,
John Martone,
Ian Hamilton Finlay and finally some
mathemaku by Bob Grumman, the essay's author.
posted by Kattullus
on Jun 8, 2005 -
12 comments
