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Cavafy. Connery. Vangelis. Oh my….
I recommend full screen mode for this.Read More
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Cavafy at 150
A spread from Constantine Cavafy’s last passport, listing “Poet” as occupationand two discrete birth dates, both erroneous.www.cavafy.com “What is it, I wonder, about our increasingly cosmopolitan, multi-cultural and multilingual cities, whether New York or Athens, that needs a poet like Cavafy? What are the best ways to learn and go on learning from his poetry? How can we reconcile public legacies with the privateness of literature?” I won’t say that scholar and translator Karen Van Dyck fully answers these questions in “Forms of Cosmopolitanism,” but her ponderings are fascinating to say the least.Read More
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Out and Back to Ithaka
Startling and yet imaginatively right to see images of the Southwest here. Are those Anasazi cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde or Canyon de Chelly? Powerful images in any case. And the resonant voice of Sean Connery leading us from one to another, borne along by the current of Vangelis’s music. Lovely! The translation is uncredited on YouTube but is by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. It’s available in The Essential Cavafy and at various locations online, including the amazing C. P. Cavafy site.Read More
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If the Suit Fits…
Thanks to James at the venerable ursprache for posting this: Like a good tailor who fashions a suit that fits one man (or even two) resplendently; and an overcoat that might suit two or three—thus for me might my poems be made “to fit”, in one case (or perhaps in two or three). This comparison is somewhat deprecatory (only in a superficial sense); but it is, I think, accurate and reassuring. If my poems do not fit in a general sense, then they fit in a particular sense. This is no small matter.Read More
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Welcome, Welcome, Little Star
I can’t remember now how I heard about this new lit mag, but I it must have been from a trusted source because I coughed up the subscription fee when I really shouldn’t be subscribing to any more publications, the bedside stack of which sometimes trips me up when I get up in the middle of the night to … well, you know. Anyway, Little Star turns out to be a beautiful magazine, physically in The Paris Review tradition–200 perfect bound, cleanly laid-out pages–but its content is focused primarily on poetry.Read More
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Open and Closed, Part 6
A couple of readers have wondered what happened by my posting of so-called School of Quietude poems. Well, here’s another batch, all drawn from The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems, by William Stafford. This little selection was hard to arrive at because Stafford wrote so many poems, even the weakest of which carry fragments of brilliance.Read More
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Istanbul in Winter
A wonderful essay/memoir on discovering Cavafy, by Richard Tillinghast.Read More