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Frost In The Poetry Aisle


Caveat emptor: I am not a huge Robert Frost fan. I don’t dislike him. I’ve got a nice volume of his collected poems at home. But that’s more because he is someone you want to have in your library (by the way, check out this article – it talks about how having a physical library is very important for children; a library of one hundred books will give your child a 1.5 year head start in reading comprehension over her/his peers and a five hundred volume library a 2.2 year advantage), not because he’s someone I turn to in certain moments of melancholy or confusion or whatever (that would be Anne Carson, William Wordsworth, Paul Eluard, Shakespeare, and Kenneth Rexroth, among others).

So when I first heard a middle aged couple talking a little too loudly next me near the poetry shelves of the soon to be closing downtown DC Barnes and Noble, trying to decide between editions of Frost, I felt some never to be spoken, but nonetheless curt (if they had ever been spoken) words rise up.

But, it didn’t take more than a moment of thought to realize my mistake. Eavesdropping, some poem by Frost had struck the man forcefully and now he had to have a book of his poetry. Surely this is the goal? What poetry lovers and promoters want to see happen?

I hope you found some more poems in whichever edition you chose, sir.

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Weekend Reading: Paywalls


The only way to get the real news on our government is through subscription-only, insider-only publications. Which is to say that you, the ordinary citizen, do not get to see it.

Remember Clive James fondly (even if, for myself, I am less fond of rhyming poetry than he is).

I know this homeless camp and think what is happening is a shame and a tragedy. All you need to do is pass by to see that it is community, not just a random squatting ground.

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‘My Life As A Foreign Country’ By Brian Turner


My Life as a Foreign CountryI saw Brian Turner speak for the second time when I saw him at the Hill Center (kudos to those folks for partnering with the Post‘s Ron Charles on this series). The first was when he read at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

I knew him as a poet, but My Life as a Foreign Country is very expressionistic memoir. More Jean Genet than Frank McCourt and more like Breton’s Amour Fou than any traditional prose book.

The book, about his time as a Marine in Iraq, grows progressively more disjointed and disturbing over its course, as if mapping the psychic damage and dislocation of a war without purpose nor end. It begins as an expressionistic, but still recognizable autobiographical form. Childhood. Parents. Why he joined the Marines. But fragments of his father’s military service, his grandfather’s, and even the Civil War appear. Incidents in Iraq are overlaid with nightmares and fears, before finally horror, memory, fear, mental illness, and reality merge, without the relief of Turner distinguishing them for the reader.

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Weekend Reading – The Making Of Schiller


photoFriedrich Schiller’s strange education at a military academy that promoted poetry, rhetoric and Enlightenment principles. Also, caning.

This does not actually reassure me. It’s more like the second coming of Rod McKuen.

So, while poetry only bookstores aren’t exactly blossoming everywhere, there are a lot more than there were just a few years ago (when it was really just Grolier’s in Cambridge and Innisfree in Boulder) And while it might be an exaggeration to call them wildly profitable, they clearly can be economically viable.

The unrecognized republic of Zaqistan.

In search of the new flâneur.

.

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In Translation, Volume 5


Can I meet with an adventure?
Director of young at the end of the way
you’re on,
salt. And a strong evidence,
intense send over Australia’s lately.

Talk to you
of salt,
a concept that will,
if you’re taken.
That is good.

At First
that will take like floating
but do you want a splash of color
cut fashion

But finally we ended up in the

Hey, you want it, so you better
street!!!.

So in the end

So let’s just say we keep walking
you down to the car

Up here to eat noodles over there.
Come over here to live.

So there were born into this world,
I know that

Many women
a street
Let’s see, Alpha..

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In Translation, Volume 4


New Mission

of
you
love
…Jarhead
fight
patience
discpline
heart
brave,
hey!

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‘Artful’ By Ali Smith


9780143124498While enviously browsing  the art theory section of the bookstore in the National Gallery of Art, I saw this book and was immediately intrigued by it.

Artful is not exactly non fiction, not exactly a novel, and not exactly a collection of essays, but is something of all three.

Smith’s husband, apparently a university lecturer on literature, has recently died and the book is structured around his notes for four undelivered lectures. She digresses, extensively quoting from poetry and sometimes assembling ‘new’ poetry from lines from poets like Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and others to create a ‘new’ poem. She is even, briefly, haunted by visions or hallucinations of her late husband visiting her and stealing things (though she also recognizes that it must be she who is actually the thief, because her husband is not there.

It’s a beautiful book, but my expectations were too high, I fear. Nonethless, it is beautiful and a moving, highly literate elegy.

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In Translation, Volume 3


Eat the wind
taking in the view

The Kitchen, the wind, the food is delicious,
when dark

 

 

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In Translation, Volume 2


Check out ‘In Translation, Volume 1’ for more info on what the heck this is.

I don’t know what to say,
but wanted to say
thank you, I was born.

She’s asking you to
God,
they want to pin cure cover.
Protect the safe journey.

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In Translation, Volume 1


I have a number of Thai friends and family and I follow some of them on Facebook.

However, I do not speak nor read Thai, so I hit the Facebook translate button and the results are endlessly interesting.

In fact, I have decided that they are secretly poetry, so I will now be posting them as found poetry.

Today, wish you were out 😇
the last day of being
the priest asked the charity
that I’ve already done this from the beginning until now,
the old me in the eyes, your cousin, the picture of you,
do you think it is medicine for the ship?
Him, angel eyes, you may be the eyes, him, her son, so the woman, her eyes,
and ask them to you, to stand in the times with it, Amen