not necessarily the safest place to be

"I was having a lot of problems with my dad. . . We had an argument, and [my dad] says, 'You didn't suffer. He says what you are you whining about? You had easy duty.' Which was true."

"Right. But. . . it's still the military. You're still away from home. It's still not necessarily the safest place to be . . . that's where I struggle with the hierarchy of service. . . [E]veryone served. We just served in different capacities."

The Life and Times of a Korean Veteran Renaissance Man

Once he gets going, this artist-writer-veteran-polio-survivor-German-translator-mime-masseuse-soldier-on-the-Korean-wall-during-Vietnam is good. Have a listen.

 

Eugene N.

 

Michael Weingrad's Eugene Nadelman arrived from Philly.

new Nadelman review

Consider Philadelphia in the 1980s in a new review of Eugene Nadelman by Michael Weingrad.

W. H. Auden

"As a young man, W. H. Auden renounced his faith. He wrote his most popular poems during this period of unbelief in his native England—notably the rousing civil-war poem “Spain.” As such works skyrocketed him to fame, Auden recognized that he was being tempted into soaring rhetoric and sweeping moral judgments that failed to reflect the subtleties of real life. Believing such a performance to be unethical, he abjured his position as national icon and fled to America."

He liked to be alone

"Margaret Obank writes: Mahmoud was a completely secular person, rather philosophical, an avid reader, elegant in his dress, and supremely modest in his opinion of himself. He liked to be alone, but would always be ready to speak on the telephone."

The Third Martini

The Third Martini by Chris Benson offers "[g]ood poems, incredibly inexpensive for the value."

note from January 6

from poet Lamont Steptoe

 

life, Charlie, not literature

"Twenty years ago in the hands of the law, he had wrestled with the cops. They had forced him into a straight jacket. He had had diarrhea in the police wagon as they rushed him to Bellevue. They were trying to cope, to do something with a poet. What did the New York police know about poets! They knew drunks and muggers, they knew rapists, they knew women in labor and hopheads, but they were at sea with poets. Then he had called me from a phone booth in the hospital. And I had answered from the hot grimy flaking dressing room a the Belasco. And he had yelled, 'This is life, Charlie, not literature!' . . . [W]hen Humboldt cried, 'Life!' . . . [h]e only meant realistic, naturalistic life. As if art hid the truth and only the sufferings of the mad revealed it."

~~ from Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

disappeared

 America is better at ignoring its poets.

Nobel Prize for Literature 2020

The 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to American poet Louise Gluck. 

Support Jessica Smith

You can support poet-adjunct Jessica Smith by selecting two of her collections. Her books include Organic Furniture Cellar and life-list.

even "a bag of dirt"

If someone hands me a bag of dirt and tells me it’s a poem, it gets to be a poem. It might not be a poem that satisfies me intellectually or brings me any delight, I may not want to spend much time with it, but it’s a poem because the person who built it called it a poem.

— Kaveh Akbar (@KavehAkbar) March 18, 2019

Anne Boyer

Anne Boyer, a poet based in Missouri, has won the $40,000 Cy Twombly Award for Poetry. Find her work through her website.

underground Persian poetry scene

Underground poet Iraj Fereshteh introduces us to ten voices from the margins composing poetry in contemporary Iran:

I slightly deviate from the routine of your page and, instead of providing a list of my favorite Iranian poets, introduce some contemporary Iranian poets less read in North America. My main criterion for these choices is how successfully the poets’ works have created space for new voices and expressive forms in Iranian poetics. What these writers have achieved is immense in that their contributions have occurred despite censorship at home and the discomforts of exile abroad. 

I recommend reading:

Granaz Moussav as a token of thousands of women poets in Iran, who have created a formidable voice in the country’s literary scene.

Maryam Hooleh for her formalistic experiments, especially for her aggressive, impatient, fragmented flooding metaphors. Also, for the multicultural multilingual (Kurdish-Persian) fabric of her poetry.

Fateme Ekhtesari for her postmodern ghazal movement (along with other post-ghazalists): for her modernization of the aging Persio-Arabic form Ghazal, and as importantly for re-popularizing the genre among the youth and hence generating thousands of young poetry readers.

Leili Galedaran for her “action poetry” and dramatizing her feminist language poetics on stage.

Saghi Ghahraman as an example of tens of Iranian queer poets, documenting the experiences of the LGBT community and constructing a strong contemporary Persian queer poetics—contributing to a several-century-old tradition in Persian literature.

Mohammad Azarm for elevating the earlier schools of Persian language poetry to higher levels by underlining the spatial and visual aspects of language, both on paper and on stage in his “performance poetry”.     

Ali Ghanbari for his genre games, blurring the genre lines between poetry and prose, and creating new genre possibilities in Persian poetry. 

Sasan Sheibaninejad for his postmodern “collage poetry”, in which he re-mixes ancient Iranian poetry with today’s language and decorates his contemporary poetry by sampling old masters’ words.       

Ali Abdali for his digital poetry and for code-composing Persian poetry into thought-provoking multimodal forms.

Reza Pishro as a voice from the powerhouse of Iranian hip hop. And because he dropped out of primary school, had no formal education when growing up in the street alleys of homelessness and addiction, yet today his audio texts are consumed by thousands—if not millions—of youth men and women.              

Iraj Fereshteh is an underground Iranian poet composing digital and found poetry. Follow the links here and here to listen to his poetry.

Interview with Don Riggs

Don Riggs, the Poet-Laureate of this blog, was interviewed recently by News & Press from the Future Fire. Below is one of his recent sonnets posted to Facebook and set for the entire world to read.

Contemporary Realist Composition
(In the Right Now)

I've been getting up around 3 lately,
sometimes having gotten a word or phrase...
or concept for a poem in a dream
and sometimes not knowing whether I have
but writing anyway on my yellow
pad on the assumption that there may be
something I don't consciously remember
but if I start writing and don't wake up

too much it will inform my chance jotting
so coming to the same thing, but tonight
I haven't gone to bed yet and except
for nodding off over my reading, I
haven't slept but I thought I'd write something
anyway just to see whatever comes.

Wright Library, Saturday, March 5

I'm happy to announce that I'll be reading from "Frade Killed Ellen" or Auggie's Revenge at 3 p.m. as part of an author fair at Wright Library in Oakwood, Ohio (Dayton metro area) on Saturday afternoon, March 5.

Featured authors: Peggy Barnes, Molly Campbell, Barbara Cerny, Ed Davis, Ann Hagedorn, Katrina Kittle, Alex Kudera, P. Andrew Miller, Rebecca Morean, Sharon Short. 

Wright Library Poets: Matt Birdsall, Cecile Cary, Grace Curtis, Betsy Hughes, Fred Kirchner

Wright Library Writers: Harold Coffman, Donald Peacock, and James Tajiri

The Event will be held from 2 to 4 p.m. in Wright Library's front reading rooms.   

Kenneth Goldsmith in The New Yorker

I'd read so many online responses to Yi Fen Chou (the "pooped" poet), Vanessa Place, and Kenneth Goldsmith that I did something I rarely do these days.  Which was to sit in the library and read the entire Alec Wilkinson piece on KG, a poet I'd never heard of until the last few weeks, despite spending the majority of my life in University City in West Philly. It's almost a surprise I wasn't born in Clark Park, right where John Ebersole has sworn off white poets writing about race and dreamed up Public Pool. Based on Ebersole's online poetry personality, I'd assume he is a migrant to University City, not someone like me who grew up there, but I don't know. Anyway, the un-New Yorker-ish "resentfully" (an "ly" from those guys?) is noted, a jab that doesn't add anything to the profile, but in a life of grading, parenting, commuting, surviving, it was reading to enjoy. It was a break, a chance to read an extended profile of a writer, and I've enjoyed many of these over the years, often when I was previously unfamiliar with the writer's creative work, and mostly from Harper's Magazine or The New Yorker. Wilkinson's profile captured KG's quirks. I saw multiple points of view about his poetry's value, or not, thoughts about his copying, and I appreciated he's read Ulysses several times and much admires Benjamin, Joyce, etc. (these guys aren't my guys, but it's disturbing that they could be dismissed as dead white guys). Goldsmith comes across as a nerd-dandy-intellectual of sorts, somewhat aware that he is playing the poet-fool, out there hustling in funny clothes. So he's a human being—a goof?, a jerk?—but not a murderer. He's a wealthy man, perhaps, but no doubt, this is only relative to the pervasive poverty in the world of poetry (news alert: in fact, he is rich by any definition although the pervasive poverty of poetry remains). His projects sound creative, if not poetic, and he'd tell you, I think, he's a plagiarizer by more than one definition. It would make sense to me if his appropriation did not stand the test of time although with art, and the commerce surrounding it, one never knows. Past poets who mastered PR and marketing in their own lifetime have managed to stay in print long after it. I'm thinking mainly of Allen Ginsberg, whose strategy (sorry, I meant spontaneous impulse to do this or that) included meeting late in life with writers associated with WWII fascism, Celine and Pound, protesting nukes and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, and standing in the background of Bob Dylan music videos (for more detail, read American Scream). Even when he rambles on race, I doubt The Donald will reference KG as "one of those New York Jew poets who cracks out of tune," but KG, VP, and PP's detractors have gotten me reading more poems. It reminded me to hunt down some poetry and prose from a writer I associate with Philly, Linh Dinh, as well as some new ones, Franny Choi, Nomi Stone, Jenny Zhang. And by coincidence I heard Candace Wiley and Skip Eisiminger read poetry at an event I organized down here. My version of Philly poetry has nothing to do with KG. It starts with Lamont Steptoe and Don Riggs, and it extends to so many talented others who've mainly lived in South Philly, Center City, particularly back when it was affordable, or even in the suburbs. These poets have studied and taught variously at Penn, Drexel, Temple, CCP, and other schools; some are from the region and others moved to Philly because an artist could afford its cost of living. After Alec on Kenny, I was on a roll, reading about and by all manner of older affluent why-pee-poes. I read most of the Jane Smiley interview in the new print copy of The Paris Review, highly recommended, and then a chunk of the Bernie Sanders profile from Mother Jones. From the New York Review of Books, I read a paragraph or two of George Soros on Ukraine, but that was all I could stand although I often recommend his father Tivadar's book on surviving the Holocaust in Hungary. I thought I'd read in the print version that Goldsmith had relatives on both sides who died in the Shoah, but when I returned more recently to the online version of the article, even after some skimming, I could not find this detail although that's not to say that these facts had been disappeared.

Clemson University literary reading

Award-winning faculty read fiction and poetry in Daniel Studio on Wednesday, September 30 from 3 to 4 p.m. Join Professor Emeritus Skip Eisiminger, 2015 Best of American Poetry winner Candace Wiley, and award-winning novelist Alex Kudera for a fun free literary reading you won't want to miss. Please see the Clemson calendar or Facebook invitation for more information.

jose kozer

Daniel Dragomirescu of Contemporary Literary Horizon sent me this poem:

JOSE KOZER

(CUBA - UNITED STATES)

MY FATHER, WHO IS STILL ALIVE

  

My father, who is still alive,

I don’t see him, and I know he has shrunk,

he has a family of brothers burned to ashes

            in Poland,

he never saw them, he learned of the death of

           his mother by telegram,

he didn’t inherit even a single button from his father,

what do I know if he inherited his character.

My father, who was a tailor and a Communist,

my father who didn’t speak and sat on the

            terrace,

to not believe in God,

to not want anything more to do with men,

sullenly withdrawing into himself against Hitler, against Stalin,

my father who once a year would raise a glass

              of whisky,

my father sitting in a neighbour’s apple

              tree eating its

              fruit

the day the Reds entered his village

and made my grandfather dance like a

           bear on the Sabbath,

and made him light a cigarette and smoke it

          on a Sabbath,

and my father left the village for ever,

went away for ever muttering his anger against

         the October revolution,

for ever hammering home that Trotsky was a

         dreamer and Beria a criminal,

abominating books he sat down on the

            terrace a tiny speck of a man,

and told me that the dreams of men are

           nothing more than a

           false literature,

that the history books lie because paper

         can take anything.

My father who was a tailor and a Communist.

*When I followed the Jose Kozer link above, I noticed that he is the age my father would be (b. 1940), and both had immigrant parents from Czechoslovakia.