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Sea Poems of Juan Ramón Jiménez
The great Juan Ramón Jiménez often drew inspiration from the sea, and a great many of his sea poems are brought together in The Poet and the Sea, translated by Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney. What follows is one of my favorites: IDEAL ARRIVAL February 11 To Joaquín Sorolla Suddenly, the afternoon opens out, like a golden fan, a great royal illusion.Read More
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Me and Julio (Redux)
Just a few more passages from Diary of Andrés Fava, which—like any book by Cortázar—is a strange and wonderful reading experience. The first passage demonstrates qualities I love about this writer: a profound, clear-eyed sympathy for even “unimportant” creatures combined with a classical devotion to the truth of any situation. Any writer, in prose or verse, would do well to study the way he shapes these seven sentences…. I was arriving in Chacarita to catch the subway when I saw a little white dog die.Read More
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Sam Hamill: “I can’t imagine a poetry without conscience”
Don’t miss this excellent interview with Sam Hamill. His Habitation: Collected Poems is forthcoming in September from Lost Horse Press.Read More
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Me and Julio Down by the Playa
Julio Cortázar Per my annual habit of reading Spanish masters in México, I’m indulging in another Archipelago Books offering of Julio Cortázar, his early-but-posthumously-published Diary of Andrés Fava. The translation by Anne McLean is smooth, witty, obscure where it needs to be, and altogether delightful.Read More
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Adios, Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez, 1927-2014 Sad news today in El País: the Colombian journalist and one of the greatest fiction writers in world literature, Gabriel García Márquez, has died at the age of 87. The following details are taken from the El País article. Born in the Colombian village of Aracataca on March 6, 1927, Márquez was the oldest of 11 children, seven boys and four girls. In 1944, at age 16, his parents sent him to school in Zipaquirá, near Bogotá, where he discovered the writings of Kafka, Woolf, and Faulkner.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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The Footnote Club
There’s a whole fraternity of … writers convinced of their greatness and obsessed with their status. They seem genuinely important in their own time, but the farther away from them you get, the more special pleading they seem to require. The proof is never on the page. It takes work to see why they mattered, why they provoked so much controversy, why they were read or performed at all. Call them the footnote club, or the asterisk brigade.Read More
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Borges: The Art of Poetry
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Advice from Ko Un
Buy at Indiebound SOME ADVICEby Ko Un (tr. Brother Anthony of Taizé and Lee Sang-Wha) Poemsblock the path for better poems.Poemsblock the path for subsequent poems. Poems, poems, my blue poems! Escape somehow from the history of poetry,from fashions of poetry,from a hundred years of poetic authority. Be born trembling, wild and alone.Read More