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Friday Notebook 03.04.2011
Another week lost to remunerative work—just one fragment huddled on my notebook’s page: The broken bellsounds over the broken fields.Black chopped earth,scattered clouds. Not substantial enough for a Friday Notebook entry, I think. So here’s another unpublished poem drawn from an old notebook. This one comes with a back story. * I remember being tremendously excited about this one. It felt like a breakthrough. I had so much confidence in it that I chose to read it before an audience that included some dauntingly talented poets: Bill Matthews, Jack Collom, Judith Moffett, and Reg Saner among them.Read More
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Dismissive
Comment streams on blogs are often where the action is, but sometimes it’s where the posturing is, where authoritative-sounding voices make cryptic and/or designedly outrageous statements, without fear of being asked to … well, support their views. Case in point: a commentator named Iain Keenan wrote this in reply to Silliman’s post today: “Robert Bly did a lot more damage to the European and Latin poets he advocated than the ones he criticized.” This in the context of some sort of defense of Surrealism. In the hope of figuring out exactly what Mr.Read More
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Adios, Andrei
Andrei Voznesensky has passed away in Moscow, age 77. Robert Bly has written about Voznesensky in a piece collected in Reaching Out to the World: New & Selected Prose Poems: Andrei Voznesensky Reading in Vancouver Andrei Voznesensky has a curious look like a wood animal, one that often lives not far from marshes, near places where the deer sink in up to their knees.Read More
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For Whom Do Poets Speak?
Linh Dinh is right, of course, in this powerful brief statement on poetics, which takes as its touchstone a powerful stanza by Czeslaw Milosz. The question is why. Why do we (poets, yes, but citizens as well of a system—there are no nations, really, not anymore—designed to maintain the hegemony of a mendacious, thieving elite) … why do we tolerate and even promote poetry that is superficial, trite, and purposely “uncreative,” utterly lacking in scope and depth? Why do we write about what we wish rather than what we know? I’m not talking about politics, per se.Read More
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Robert Bly and the Habit of Being
Here’s a wonderful, in-depth profile of Robert Bly, with several related videos. Thanks to Jilly Dybka for linking to it on her Poetry Hut Blog. As I’ve noted elsewhere, Bly was a crucial influence for me—one I had to overcome, of course, or I suppose integrate would be a better word. I admire Bly as a poet and translator, but also for his decision early on to lead a life centered around poetry, with as little compromise as possible with Caesar.Read More
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Dharwadker’s Kabir
Kabir: The Weaver’s Songs, translated and with an illuminating 96-page introduction by Vinay Dharwadker (also includes extensive notes to the poems, a glossary, and bibliography). The historical Kabir is thought to have lived from 1398-1448 in the eastern half of northern India. His poems were literally songs, and the poems we have today are the product of a long process of revision by Kabir’s followers.Read More
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Open and Closed, Part 8
I’ll never forget the evening I first encountered Robert Bly. He’d come to read at the University of Northern Colorado, where I was an undergrad English major with poetic pretensions. I’d heard of him but never read his poems. The event took place in one of those featureless industrial classrooms with accordion partitions, and the audience was large enough to fill the second room, so Bly ended up reading into a long narrow space awash in humming fluorescence.Read More