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Encountering a Poet Workshops—Mark Your Calendar!
Mark your calendar! Workshops on the work of Naomi Shihab Nye, Robert Bly, Pablo Neruda, and E. E. Cummings. Presenters will be Lynn Kincanon, Joseph Hutchison (Moi), Evan Oakley, and Marj Hahne. Kudos to the Loveland Public Library and Loveland Poet Laureate Program for such an exciting series! Registration is required at lovlib.org/events.Read More
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James Wright: A Life in Poetry
I just finished Jonathan Blunk‘s powerfully moving biography, James Wright: A Life in Poetry. It is everything a great biography should be: a delicate balance between passing time and the abiding genius that seems to irrupt from a region outside of time. Given his family background, Wright was a person who should never have fallen in love with language, but thanks to some sensitive and insightful early teachers, he did, and so we have the opportunity when we read him to fall in love with it in poem after poem.Read More
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A Review of Larraín’s Neruda
Neruda, a “sacred monster”? Well, ask Roberto Bolaño. And yet: With his new film, Neruda, Chile’s master of the political gothic, Pablo Larraín, exhumes a sacred monster: namely, his nation’s 1971 Nobel Laureate, the poet Pablo Neruda. Hardly a biopic, Neruda focuses on a brief, if dramatic, period in its subject’s life—a fifteen-month period from January 1948 through March 1949 during which the poet, an elected senator and an outspoken member of the banned Chilean Communist Party, went underground, finally escaping over the Andes to Argentina.Read More
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Something of a Ramble…
Seed Magazine has this illuminating conversation between linguist/anti-war activist Noam Chomsky and evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers. Their overarching topic is “deceit,” but the subtopics they touch on (“groupthink,” “maintaining credibility,” and “denial”) are powerful contributing factors to the human ability—exacerbated by bureaucracies and media—to deceive ourselves and others. In the discussion of “groupthink,” Trivers makes an observation that may explain why political poetry is so difficult to write well.Read More
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Indispensable Neruda
What can I say? If there’s an indispensable 20th century poet it’s Pablo Neruda. With all his flaws, as a person and a poet (but “what soul is without flaws?”, as Rimbaud asked rhetorically), Neruda’s poems are illuminations. He’s been translated by everybody, it seems, but among his best servants in that regard has been William O’Daly. Here are a couple of poems from O’Daly’s 2008 translation of The Hands of Day. Bird Here in the tree it sings. It is a solitary bird, lifelong,full of water that falls,of crazy light that climbs,of guttural crystal,of ceaseless trill.Read More
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The Openness of Coral Bracho
Readers of this blog know I’m a fan of openness. But defining “openness” is impossible: the very nature of it defies definition. And it’s easy to confuse it with “anything goes.” I once fell to arguing with a friend who insisted that anything an artist says is art is art; some poets have made the same assertion for their own writing. Can I be a fan of openness without sharing that assertion? I guess it comes down to suggesting the kinds of openness I’m actually a fan of.Read More