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A Thousand Years of Joy
Web Site for More Info On Facebook HereRead More
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Adios, Galway Kinnell
Galway Kinnell Galway Kinnell, who died on Tuesday, was perhaps the second or third living poet I ever met. He had been invited to read at the University of Northern Colorado, where I was a student. I was 20. I had already witnessed the deep, wild energies of Robert Bly in performance, but based on reading Kinnell’s Body Rags I knew not to expect that kind of splash. And Kinnell’s wildness did prove to be of a quieter kind. His sensibility was resolutely earthbound, images were tactile, the the music thick and twisty like a Celtic knot. He did not stimulate; he involved.Read More
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Robert Bly at 86
Laurie Hertzel of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune paints a tender portrait of Robert Bly reading last week at the University of Minnesota, with some assistance from his friend and fellow poet Thomas R. Smith. Bly’s new book, Stealing Sugar From the Castle: Selected and New Poems 1950-2013, almost (unbelievably) escaped my notice, but my copy is on the way. I’ve noted before the influence Bly had on me when I was first trying to write poems.Read More
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Göran Sonnevi’s First Book in English
The Economy Spinning Faster and Faster by Göran Sonnevi My rating: 4 of 5 stars I thought I’d done fairly well with keeping up with one of my favorite poets, Robert Bly—both with his own books and his translations—so I was surprised when I read, in the recently published Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer, that Bly had been working on translations of poems by Swedish poet Göran Sonnevi, whose work I became a fan of when I encountered it in 1993, in A Child Is Not a Knife: Selected Poems of Göran Sonnevi, beautifully translated by…Read More
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From a Rocking Boat…
A few weeks back I realized that by the end of 2012 I would be putting up my one-thousandth post on The Perpetual Bird. And here it is—saved for New Year’s Eve! I’ve noodled over it for days with the intention, as always, to offer something interesting, provocative, insightful, and/or unusual.Read More
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Khayyam and Kabir and the Spirit of Opposition
The woman who uploaded this image of her Rubaiyat tattoocalls it “my creed.” The quatrain goes like this (her translation): Don’t remember the last day,Don’t cry for the future,In the past and in the future don’t believe,Live today and don’t lose, in the wind, your life. Over at Informed Comment, Juan Cole—a professor of History at the University of Michigan and an astute analyst of the nexus between Middle Eastern and American politics—has been translating poems of the great 11th century Persian poet, mathematician and philosopher Omar Khayyam.Read More
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Contrarian
I have a knee-jerk reaction to contrarians. I automatically like them. It takes me a while to step back and decide how valuable their views are because I enjoy their spirit of opposition. I’ve been following a contrarian named Thomas Brady for some time now. His blog is Scarriet. I like the punning sneer at the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, and I like some of Brady’s critiques of the current situation of poetry. But I’ve come realize that his views aren’t finally very valuable, despite his contrarian credentials. The problem is this: Brady is a fundamentalist.Read More
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Friday Notebook 10.14.11
I’m posting this two days late because the calendar and I have been on the outs lately, both work and personal deadlines slipping like fish through the pirate-skeleton’s bony fingers…. A detail from Lascaux. The photographer’s watermarkdoes not date from the paleolithic. The following passages are drawn from Clayton Eshleman’s Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld. I’ve never developed a liking for Eshleman’s poetry, which takes up much of this book, but the prose sections are illuminating: Poetry twists toward the unknown and seeks to realize something beyond the poet’s initial awareness.Read More
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Tranströmer Wins the Nobel
My Introduction to Tranströmer: fromRobert Bly’s Seventies Press,translated by Bly, 1970, with theSwedish originals en face I have heard the Swedes singing cheek to cheek.I do not think they will sing to me. But that’s ok. I feel like they’ve sung to me—sort of—because Tranströmer was on the No Bull Prizes list I posted back in 2007. The NYT calls his poetry “bleak but powerful,” which is only half true, because Tranströmer (it seems to me) is seldom bleak.Read More