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Guillevic’s Geometries
Guillevic The great French poet Guillevic has been a personal favorite of mine ever since I came across Denise Levertov‘s translation of his Selected Poems in 1970 or ’71. I’ve read Englished volume of his, I think, and only one failed to capture my imagination, the sequence published by Unicorn Press under the title Euclidians; as translated by Teo Savory, the poems struck me as a bit loose-jointed, somehow overly relaxed. Besides, I’m terrible at math, and each poem either addresses or is written in the voice of a particular geometrical figure—so the collection felt like an exercise.Read More
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Char Contra Conceptual Writing*
René Char “The poet is that part of man rebellious to calculated projects.” —René Char, from his preface to Furor and Mystery (1948). _____________________________*Viz., con artists like Kenneth Goldsmith: “I will refer to the kind of writing in which I am involved as conceptual writing. In conceptual writing the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work.Read More
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Library Adventures 1
Philippe Jaccottet Distances Swifts turn in the heights of the air;higher still turn the invisible stars.When day withdraws to the ends of the earththeir fires shine on a dark expanse of sand. We live in a world of motion and distance.The heart flies from tree to bird,from bird to distant star,from star to love; and love growsin the quiet house, turning and working,servant of thought, a lamp held in one hand. —Philippe Jaccottet, Selected Poemstr.Read More
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The Music of Borges
I’ve had great amateur fun in the past playing with translation, which for me is an adventure as much in sound as in meaning. While reading the new Penguin bilingual edition of Jorge Luis Borges’s sonnets, a book that highlights a side of Borges American readers may be unfamiliar with, I was struck by how strong the translations are overall. (This is a tribute to the collection’s editor, Stephen Kessler.) So strong are these versions, in fact, that the weaker ones—a fraction of the 137 poems gathered here—really stand out. One version in particular, Alan S.Read More
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A Noiseless Patient Poet
Far be it from me to diss Marjorie Perloff, an often illuminating poetry critic. But when Jerome Rothenberg offered up this extract from her introduction to some German translations of Rae Armantrout‘s poems, a strange feeling crept over me: the sensation that she was slipping, I mean. Perloff, typically precise to a fault, here becomes a slightly vague promoter of a poet she’s a fan of. To wit: [U]nlike Williams (or Levertov), Armantrout was never a poet of concrete particulars: from the first, her minimalist lyrics were breaking the Williams mold.Read More
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Time Concentrating On Itself
I have little to say about Guillevic’s The Sea & Other Poems (translated by Patricia Terry, introduction by Monique Chefdor, foreword by the poet’s daughter Lucie Albertini Guillevic) except: Buy it. Buy it now. This is a desert island book. I feel bound to quote from it, but nothing as brief as I have time for can do justice to Guillevic’s extended sequences in which menhirs, a canal, salt flats, and the sea speak.Read More
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A Secret Feast
I bought the Lebanese poet Joumana Haddad‘s Invitation to a Secret Feast: Selected Poems for three reasons. First, the book’s title is beguiling; second, the selection is edited and partially translated by Khaled Mattawa, whose work as a poet and translator I’ve admired for some time; third, she is associated with the Shiir magazine group whose tutelary presence was Adonis (Ali Ahmad Sa’id), a man who in my humble opinion should have been awarded the Nobel Prize years ago. Haddad defies every common American stereotype of Arabic women.Read More
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The Voice of Cortázar
I discovered this on Matthew Stewart’s excellent blog Rogue Strands and was bowled over by it: the great Julio Cortázar reading his prose poem “El Aplastamiento de las Gotas.” Enjoy! Here’s Paul Blackburn‘s wonderful translation, from Cronopios and Famas: FLATTENING THE DROPS I don’t know, look, it’s terrible how it rains. It rains all the time, thick and grey outside, against the balcony here with big, hard, clabbering drops that go plaf and smash themselves like slaps, slop, one after the other, it’s tedious.Read More
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Mexico Books 2009: The Violent Foam
Unless one is promiscuous by nature, one needs a decent interval between leaving one lover and finding another.* One needs a similar interval after reading writers as strong as Bolaño and Parra. But I’d brought a stack of books to Mexico with me, and some secret drive to read them all before coming home made me move directly on to Daisy Zamora’s The Violent Foam: New and Selected Poems, published by Curbstone Press in 2002.Read More
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A Gift
I’ve been reading with immense pleasure a translation of the great French poet Guillevic’s Art Poétique (scroll down for the publisher’s description), brought over into crisp English by Maureen Smith. As the cover description says, this book “is a highly personal account of the process and experience of writing poetry,” which makes it sound like a dry business. It isn’t. Guillevic’s poems amount to a subtle and varied meditation on the nature of poetry and the nature of the poet. He is sometimes tentative, sometimes assertive, and never doctrinaire.Read More