A Country Shaped By Poetry

In Somaliland, poems were often recited to pass the time by men leading camel trains and by women weaving mats to cover their domed huts. Like the lives of the nomadic people who spoke them, the poems were cyclical. When their speakers moved, they brought their animals and their poetry. At each stop along this annual migration, the women would reuse the verses as they built their thatched homes and the men would recite them as they moved their herds to water.

But poems also served a utilitarian, public purpose: they could be deployed to argue a court case or to make peace between warring families. And their lines were powerful in ways few other nations could understand. In Somaliland, an autonomous region perched at the northern tip of Somalia, poetry had sparked wars, toppled governments, and offered paths to peace. Nina Strochlic, Noema

Louise Glück by Colm Tóibín

Louise Glück was reticent, careful about what she said. She could be distant. There was always a sense that her real life was lived in dreams and memories, in her imagination, in her time alone. With students, sometimes she suggested that they try silence, not working at all. That, she believed, might be best for someone who was writing the wrong poems or producing too much.

In her own poems, she worked with silence, breaking it, creating more space for it, leaving gaps, writing lines that would hold as much implication as they could. Colm Tóibín, The Guardian

Tremplin poetique

De l’autre côté

Qu’y a-t-il de l’autre côté ?
Je ne sais pas.
Mais pourquoi je ne peux pas passer ?
Je ne sais pas.

Les potagers sont-ils plus colorés là-bas ? Les vaches moins timides ?
Les coquelicots plus grands ?
Je ne sais pas.

Et pourquoi les oiseaux peuvent-ils passer sans être dérangés ?
Personne ne pense à les retenir ?
Je ne sais pas.

...

questa settimana un detour a Lione, a questa bell'iniziativa delle biblioteche pubbliche della città per stimolare la produzione e lettura della poesia. Quest'anno il tema era "le frontiere". Tremplin poetique

 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and activist, dies at 101

SAN FRANCISCO — Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, publisher, bookseller and activist who helped launch the Beat movement in the 1950s and embody its curious and rebellious spirit well into the 21st century, has died at age 101.

Ferlinghetti, a San Francisco institution, died Monday at his home, his son Lorenzo Ferlinghetti said. A month shy of his 102nd birthday, Ferlinghetti died “in his own room,” holding the hands of his son and his son’s girlfriend, “as he took his last breath.” The cause of death was lung disease. Politico

L'ho conosciuto, all'inizio degli anni '80, quando stavo a San Francisco e ricordo bene la sua libreria, City Lights, nel quartiere italiano - almeno allora - della città.

Un bel ritratto di Louise Glück

Her poems are controlled and highly charged, restrained but also exposed, unafraid of and perhaps also terrified by outcry. [...] The sounds in her poems emerge tentatively and then bravely, and sometimes fiercely, from within their rhythms. Glück knows what a tone needs when it seeks to be truthful. She has a knowledge, both baleful and enabling, of how little can be said that is true, and how much dark energy that is then released in the effort to speak. In her poems, tone itself is both held in and released. Her work is filled with voice, often hushed and whispering, as though she is exploring a difficult aftermath or the shape of the soul.

If there is one poem by her that gives us a sense of her great talent and the bravery of her voice, it is the opening poem in her collection The Wild Iris, which begins:

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Colm Tóibín, The Guardian

The War Between the Houses

Was Emily Dickinson a radical poet of the avant-garde, challenging the regularized notions of predominantly male poets and editors regarding stanza shape, typographical publication and distribution, spelling and punctuation, visual and verbal presentation, erotic love, and so on? Or was she a poet of restraint, who restricted herself to a few traditional patterns of meter and stanza, referred to the wayward Whitman as “disgraceful,” and wore her prim white dress as a sign of those renunciations best expressed in that wildest word “No”?
It is a conflict reaching back to what has come to be called “The War Between the Houses” ... Christopher Benfey, nybooks.

Marianne Moore

“Mon Dieu, what a mother!,” one of Moore’s literary friends, the suffragist Alyse Gregory, confided in a letter to a friend. The domination of Mary Moore over her daughter—the pair lived together in ostentatious frugality until Mrs. Moore’s death in 1947, when the poet was about to turn 60—riveted the New York literary world during their lives. Gregory added that Mrs. Moore was “inexorably, permanently, eternally rooted and not to be overlooked, and remorselessly conversational.” Yet Mrs. Moore had her distinguished admirers, too. The artist Joseph Cornell saluted her “almost silent way of saying important things.” Edmund Wilson told Allen Tate that Mrs. Moore was one of the most intellectual women he knew. theatlantic.

Linda Leavell, Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore (FS)

Joyce Carol Oates: To Marlon Brando In Hell

Because you suffocated your beauty in fat.
Because you made of our adoration, mockery.
Because you were the predator male, without remorse.
Because you were the greatest of our actors, and you threw away greatness like trash.
Because you could not take seriously what others took as their lives.
Because in this you made mockery of our lives.
Because you died encased in fat
And even then, you’d lived too long. port.

Day Jobs of the Poets

 

Grant Snider illustrates the day jobs of famous poets.

At the mid-point of the path through life

E' uscita una nuova traduzione di Dante. Ma... mi lascia piuttosto perplessa. 

At the mid-point of the path through life,
I found
Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way
Ahead was blotted out. The keening
sound
I still make shows how hard it is to say
How harsh and bitter that place felt to
me. . . .

Il  traduttore è Clive James, un poeta australiano. La casa editrice Liveright Publishing. nytbr.

Anne Carson

Anne Carson was uncomfortable with the idea of a traditional profile: a journalist following her around for a few days, like a private detective, noting her outfits and mannerisms, shadowing her on errands, making lists of furniture and wall decorations and pets, quizzing her students, standing behind her holding his breath while she tried to write in her journal. Carson is a private person. She prefers to be alone. (When her husband is traveling, Carson will call and tell him, “I miss you, but I’m having a great time.”) Her book jackets have no author photo. Her back-flap biography — “Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living” — is so minimalist that it sounds like a parody of a back-flap biography. ...
In the end, she agreed to exchange some e-mails.  ...
Here, just to give the flavor, are some excerpts from the e-mails of Anne Carson. ...
On teaching: “when i began to be published, people got the idea that i should ‘teach writing,’ which i have no idea how to do and don’t really believe in. so now and then i find myself engaged by a ‘writing program’ (as at nyu, stanford) and have to bend my wits to deflect the official purpose.” dall'intervista via e-mail di Sam Anderson ad Anne Carson. nyt.

Harlem Rent Party Advertisements

Langston Hughes faceva la collezione dei biglietti che pubblicizzavano i rent parties. "Hosts of these gatherings opened up their apartments for a night, charging a fee to guests in return for live music, dancing, and socializing. Food was extra, and the accumulated cash went to help the hosts pay their rent". slate.

Marie Ponsot

Marie Ponsot, a poet known for her bold reimaginings of traditional forms, has been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, one of the most prestigious (and richest) in poetry, which comes with a $100,000 award.
Ms. Ponsot, 91, joins John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin, Lucille Clifton, Adrienne Rich and others on the list of winners of the prize, which was founded in 1986 to honor lifetime achievement. Her work includes the collections “Easy,” “Springing” and “The Bird Catcher” (winner of the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award), as well as translations of more than 30 books from French.
As part of the honor, Poetry magazine will publish 11 of her poems in its May issue. nyt.

Sulla traduzione

Un bell'articolo di Tim Parks sulla traduzione e in particolare sulla difficoltà di rendere il suono e il ritmo dell'originale, oltre al senso. 
"Another way of approaching the question of what is different about translation, might be to look at a text where the usual relation between semantics and acoustic effects is radically altered. Everybody knows the opening of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”:
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
...
Here is a heroic Italian version by Milli Graffi: 
Era cerfuoso e i viviscidi tuoppi,
Ghiarivan foracchiando nel pedano
Stavano tutti mifri i vilosnuoppi,
Mentre squoltian i momi radi invano. nybooks.

Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky in un'intervista inedita del 1987.

"I write little poems when I feel like it. Over the years it became my profession. What started out as a deviation became my occupation, and from there came discipline and routine. I trust inertia more than the creative impulse. Stravinsky said, “I do it for myself and my probable alter ego.” I think that every writing career starts as a personal quest for personal betterment. To achieve some kind of sainthood, to make yourself better than you are. You quickly notice that the pen operates more efficiently than the soul". tinhouse.

Dan Chiasson su David Ferry e Orazio

Ferry’s translations of Horace are among the predominant texts in contemporary American poetry, teaching American poets (I’m one of them) the Horatian tones—the modesty, civility, and gossip; the swift, fly-by urbanity—that went missing from much of the best American poetry of the seventies and eighties. How strange to have the American vernacular put back in our mouths by this roundabout method. newyorker.

Perché i businessmen dovrebbero leggere poesia

Ce lo spiega dettagliatamente John Coleman:
I've written in the past about how business leaders should be readers, but even those of us prone to read avidly often restrict ourselves to contemporary nonfiction or novels. By doing so, we overlook a genre that could be valuable to our personal and professional development: poetry. Here's why we shouldn't.
For one, poetry teaches us to wrestle with and simplify complexity.
Poetry can also help users develop a more acute sense of empathy.
Reading and writing poetry also develops creativity.
Finally, poetry can teach us to infuse life with beauty and meaning. ... harvardbusinessreview.

Dogfight

Il 19 novembre Michiko Kakutani, critica letteraria del New York Times, ha pubblicato la sua recensione al libro di Calvin Trillin, Dogfight (Random House) - una divertente satira delle ultime elezioni americane in versi - anch'essa in versi. Eccone un assaggio:

This book lacks a certain je ne sais quoi
Some Trillin rhymes are unnecessarily blah.
Maybe the poet’s tired of pols and their game
And so fallen back on lines that are lame.
Still, a weary Trillin is better than none,
So this isn’t a book the reader should shun. nyt.

Over the Wall

Leggo con ritardo un bell'articolo di Roger Angell - 92enne redattore e collaboratore del New Yorker - sulla moglie morta di recente. Si intitola "Over the Wall", ed è uscito sulla rivista il 19 di novembre, ma purtroppo non è disponibile on-line. Esprime con garbo sentimenti sinceri; sentimenti che riconosco, primo fra tutti lo stupore, soprattutto al tempo che passa di fronte all'eternità. E poi cita una bella poesiola del suo step-father, E.B. White (nella foto Roger Angell con la moglie Carol nel 1966):


Hold a baby to your ear
As you would a shell:
Sounds of centuries you hear
New centuries foretell.

Who can break a baby's code?
And which is the older -
The listener or his small load?
The held or the holder?

Poetry Magazine

Ho letto con grande piacere l'articolo di Liesl Olson su Poetry magazine, la rivista di poesia fondata a Chicago da Harriet Monroe 100 anni fa e diretta in gran parte da donne. Poetry ha avuto un ruolo importante nel diffondere il modernismo negli Stati Uniti e ha contribuito a fare di Chicago un centro culturale. "Monroe is the most celebrated woman of Poetry magazine—and arguably its most important editor—though many women helped to edit Poetry both in Monroe’s time and throughout the magazine’s 100-year history. They include Monroe’s indispensible first assistant, Alice Corbin Henderson; writer and war correspondent Eunice Tietjens; poets Jessica Nelson North and Marion Strobel; and Margaret Danner, a highly successful African American poet who worked with Karl Shapiro and Henry Rago in the 1950s and 1960s. Like Monroe, these women navigated a larger literary culture dominated by men. poetryfoundation.
Nella foto da sinistra a destra: Harriet Monroe, Alice Corbin Henderson, Eunice Tietjens, Marion Strobel, Margaret Danner.