BEOWULF: A new translation Many modern Beowulf translations, while excellent in their own ways, suffer from what Kathleen Biddick might call “melancholy” for an oral and aural way of poetic making… The sense of loss or nostalgia for the old form seems a necessary and ever-present shadow over modern Beowulfs. What happens, however, when a contemporary poet, quite simply, doesn’t bother with any such nostalgia? Michael Davidson: "Tom Meyer’s Beowulf reenacts the dark grandeur of a poem that is as much a story of vengeance as it is of courage and loyalty. Meyer brings the poem’s alliterative, inflected line in concert with post-Poundian lineation to give the reader a vivid sense of our oldest poem’s modernity." Free download from independent publisher Punctum Books.
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posted by the mad poster!
on Aug 25, 2012 -
47 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
1,143,839,622,748,050,000,000,000,000 Sonnet Anagrams and
oodles of other oddities from Mike Keith involving constrained writing, mathematics, music, and the number π.
posted by Wolfdog
on Jun 26, 2012 -
12 comments
Peasant culture and Russian folklore in Soviet animation (~400 minutes whereof): Soviet animation abounds in
fantasies about the natural,
wholesome lives of
honorable, strong-willed
Russian peasants and folk
heroes and their
struggles against villainy and
adversity.
Decorated with splendid folk art motifs that verge on
horror vacui, these cel-animated cartoons are excellent aids for learning about (popular conceptions of) Russian folk material culture: decoration, architecture,
dress, weaponry,
textiles, domestic culture, manners, and so on.
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posted by Nomyte
on May 4, 2012 -
13 comments
A great deal of poetry was written about the Great War, much of it by soldiers in the trenches. Two period books of World War I poetry and poets are
The Muse in Arms and
For remembrance, available in a variety of formats at archive.org. There is also
The First World War Digital Poetry Archive which mostly has things from the most well-known authors, but many of these are available as scans of the original documents. (The interface is a little iffy on the DPA; click on a person, then use the search for "any poem" to get a full listing of what's available)
posted by curious nu
on Mar 22, 2012 -
9 comments
Sierra DeMulder is one of the most accomplished and recognizable young women in the world of slam poetry. The two-time National Poetry Slam champion has spent the past five years energizing audiences at colleges and poetry events across the nation, seamlessly weaving complex issues of identity and gender with the honesty of heartbreak. Her piece
'Paper Dolls', recently shared on
Project Unbreakable (previously), is very, very good.
TRIGGER WARNING - subject matter pertains to sexual assault.
posted by lazaruslong
on Mar 9, 2012 -
31 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
"everything is good that / has a good beginning / and doesn't have an end / the world will die but for us there is no / end!" Thus ends
Victory over the Sun (
part 1,
part 2), the "first Futurist opera".
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posted by daniel_charms
on Dec 21, 2011 -
8 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.
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posted by kittenmarlowe
on Dec 19, 2011 -
30 comments
