Poem: Akilah Oliver

Tonight I participated in a celebration of the life and work of the poet Akilah Oliver (1961-2011, photo at left by Theresa Hurst), a poet, lyricist, teacher, mentor, activist, mother, friend, and inspiration to many. (She was also a native St. Louisan who grew up in Los Angeles.) It was an incredibly moving event, and brought me closer to Akilah, I think, than I had ever experienced during the period that I knew her and her work, which was mostly from afar. One of the highlights of the evening was hearing so many of her former students from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University, Summer Writing Program, talking about how important she was to them, how her charge to "keep writing" really served as a creative spur, and the work they read testified to this.  I read a snippet from an earlier version of Akilah's book The Putterer's Notebook: an Anti-Memoir, that I found online, on Trickhouse's site; it turns out that Akilah, a meticulous editor, had pared it away, but I loved the memoiristic anti-memoir feel of it, and, as reading it aloud made clear, it is as much poetry as it is prose.

From an earlier version of The Putterer's Notebook: an Anti-Memoir:

you were not concluding a desire, backed

  against the wall, your upper thigh

  exposed through the riddling stockings   

as  an event can simultaneously be happening

  and not be occurring, a very first morning

a passing across the self, & my old friend

  the radio, red velvet hot pants,

  a fashion show graduation from the Sears

  Charm School for girls, mix and match 

I wanted a self so badly, I turned the dial

  to see what was on the other side,

  joan armatrading, we tried chance translations

  of ‘jah’ based loosely on context clues, that girl

  my sister, I saw her last month in l.a. at the wedding,

  I thought she’d be a surfer or the wife of an O.G.,

  surprise all the time, Christian lady, you look so much

  younger now, as if all the blighted

  apartments have been repaired 

 what a pretty world out there

I am a new occupant, but this particular morning,

  for example, found me wandering in terrorist shadows 

The death dreams are often sexualized, the first,

  a morphing pool of consecrated limbs floundering

  and touching in what appeared a murky body pool

to get to, one had to pass through a portal,

  not a door exactly, more like a veil, it was duplicitous

  its appearance, both sensuous and repelling, quicksand like,

  pleasure in the going down, the limbs indistinguishable

  from the souls,  a man who was neither good nor evil

  seemed to be the sentry

I kept telling him not to go, I couldn’t stop him

  from going, I tried to trick him with an earth-based

  attachment to me to keep him from going, I had to witness

  him go down there with the altered bodies,

  there to that feast

 

a recovery that exposes itself as an expectation

            as if to speak requires dream

            single lines staged as tracks

            we are not stating a truth

            a truth would require more negotiation

              than water rights

            an expectation relegates mystery to a rack

            it may be true that he was saying “dismissal”

            it may be true we expected more, then

             gradually less

            as if a dream expires

Poem: Adélia Prado

Yesterday's post was my 1,300th! Not bad after my rather obvious but unavoidable blogging decline last of the last few years.

Let me offer my deepest thanks to everyone who made my experience--meeting with young scholars, chatting with a class, and a reading in the early afternoon--at Williams College yesterday so wonderful: thank you, faculty, students and staff!

I also realized while in the car back to the Albany airport that while I love looking at mountains, I really don't think I'd want to live on or in the midst of them, at least not during wintertime in the Northern Hemisphere. But the Berkshires wowed me nevertheless.

Now, to today's poem, which is by a Brazilian poet I've mentioned once on here (I searched, having thought I'd highlighted her before): Adélia Prado (1935-), a native of Divinópolis, Brazil, and a contender, year after year, for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Prado began publishing fairly late, her first book titled Bagagem (Baggage), appearing at the age of 1976. She has since published poetry, fiction, drama, and critical work, including O coração disparado (1978, winner of the Prêmio Jabuti), Soltem o cachorro (1979), Terra de Santa Cruz (1981), Poesia reunida (1991).

In 1990, Ellen Watson translated a number of Prado's poems, which Wesleyan University Press published in the volume The Alphabet in the Park:  Selected Poems. I recall checking this this book out of the library many years ago, but must admit I recall little of it except the small canvas and intimate address of Prado's poems, the way they felt like stepping through a doorway into the living room of her heart.

I found the following poem, translated by David Coles, on Antonio Miranda's website, which describes Prado as " a Catholic intimist poet who writes about the instantaneous apprehension of reality and the transformation of this reality through a critical, and yet sensual Christian experience of the world." Check out his site, and Watson's book, for more of her poems.

FATALE

The young boys' beauty pains me,
sharp-tasting like new lemons.
I seem like a decaying actress,
but armed with this knowledge, what I really am
is a woman with a powerful radar.
So when they look through me
as if to say: just stick to your own branch of the tree,
I think: beautiful, but coltish. They're no use to me.
I will wait until they acquire indecision. And I do wait.
Just when they're convinced otherwise
I have them all in my pocket.

From Poesias reunida, by Adélia Prado, Copyright © 1991.  Translation by David Coles.

Poem: Sadakichi Hartmann

Since I've between splitting my tweeting @harriet_poetry, I thought it might be a good option to introduce a different form every day (evening, really) to provide a prompt for folks. Among the forms or genres I've suggested so far are senryus, sestinas, ekphrastic poems (I provided a very simple painting I came across on Morse St. in Chicago) and today's, the mesostic. People have written and blogged or sent me original poems, which is both amazing and heartening--and they've been strong pieces to have been written so fast. The first night, though, I suggested a "nocturne," since the prompting came fairly late in the evening, and people replied with opening lines. That got me thinking about poets who write nocturnes, and about a US poet who's little remembered today but was an early pioneer in a number of ways, no least among them as one of the first major Asian American poets: Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944, photo Modern American Poetry Site). A native of Japan with mixed Japanese-German descent, Hartmann grew up in Germany, and moved to the US in the 1890s.  A critic, actor, friend and participant in the Modernist movement, heavily influenced by symbolism, he was also one of the first pioneers of the English-language haiku.  Below is his "Nocturne," from his original 160-issue typed 1904 manuscript, which I copied from Google Books using their "Clip" function. It's not amazing that the text is online (Google!), but it is amazing that with their tool I could save it, send, embed it, or, as you see, repost it here.

From Drifting Flowers on the Sea, by Sadakichi Hartmann, manuscript edition, 1904. Copyright © Sadakichi Hartmann.

Poem: Juan Felipe Herrera

Okay, now how many of you have heard of or read the work of this incredibly talented poet, Juan Felipe Herrera? Show of hands. Of course I can't see them, and I know some are waving. But I do wonder, because despite how outstanding and prolific a poet he is, I rarely see his name mentioned in the same breath as many others of his generation. Born in 1948 in California, Herrera has published about 25 books, which include works for children, a novel in verse, and bilingual texts. One of the things I particularly like about his work is its versatility, of subject matter, voice, and form. While he draws frequently from his life, he will also set aloft a conceit like the one below, flavored by and steeped in his experiences yet resonant far beyond his own biography.

Like May Swenson, he can do a lot of different things well, and has been known to move words in very interesting ways around the page.  Herrera finally received some major props in 2008 when he won the National Book Critics Circle Award, becoming the first Latino poet to receive it. Herrera attended UCLA, Stanford, and Iowa, and has taught at California State University, Fresno and University of California, Riverside, where he directors the Art and Barbara Culver Center for the Arts. He has also taught poetry in California prisons, and works with local schools and community colleges in and around Riverside.

EL ÁNGEL DE LA GUARDA


(The Guardian Angel)


I should have visited more often.
I should have taken the sour pudding they offered.
I should have danced that lousy beggar shuffle.
I should have painted their rooms in a brighter color.
I should have put a window in there, for the daughters.
I should have provided a decent mountain for a view.
I should have nudged them a little closer to the sky.
I should have guessed they would never come out to wave.
I should have cleaned up that mole, the abyss, in the back.
I should have touched them, that's it, it comes to me now.
I should have touched them.

(From Woodland Pattern Bookstore's site) From Lotería Cards and Fortune Poems: A Book of Lives, by Juan Felipe Herrera, Linocuts by Artemil Rodrígues Copyright © City Lights, 1999. All rights reserved.

Remembering MLK Jr. + Poem: June Jordan

This is the 43rd anniversary of the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), one of the most tragic events in a year and era of horrors. His murder was a terrible blow to the African-American Civil Rights movement and to the push for equality for all Americans, of all races and ethnicities, genders, sexualities, religions, classes, but it also challenged those whom he had led, with whom he had walked, for whom he had fought, to keep going, and our society was irrevocably changed for the better because of him.  Rev. Dr. King was shot in cold blood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where he had gone earlier in the spring of 1968 to support striking black sanitation workers, who were pushing for equal pay and conditions. I AM A MAN. In his final months, Dr. King stood and marched with the working people, with his brothers, who were only asking for fairness, decency, equal treatment. That struggle, like so many others, continues as I type this entry. It was during his return visit in April 1968, the day after he had spoken to the Mason Temple, the world headquarters of the Church of God in Christ, that he was killed. But I'm not saying anything most readers here do not already know.

The great poet June Jordan (1936-2002), whom I first encountered in my college years, awed and later got to meet and hear read several times, including towards the very end of her life when she also participated in a remarkable conversation at NYU with Toni Morrison, wrote the following poem in tribute and memory to Dr. King.  I am not alone in considering him to be one of the greatest figures ever to have emerged from this society, and one of the most extraordinary people in history, for his vision, his bravery, and his courage, and I think that June Jordan captures this in the most boiled-down form, almost a distillate of thought and feeling, that pours and then rills, like tears, down the page. June Jordan, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, was a native of New York and attended Barnard and the University of Chicago. She published her first book in 1968, and went on to publish nearly 30 more books. She taught at a number of colleges and universities, and when I first encountered her work, she was a professor at SUNY Stony Brook, but she went on to teach at the University of California-Berkeley. She was beloved as a teacher, but also deeply admired for her political outspokenness and her bravery in coming out. I can recall more than a few poems of hers that did not stint in telling it like it was, whether the issue was the dreadful governments of the time, or the contours of her private life.

In 1991 she founded the highly acclaimed Poetry for the People program, which, as its website says, "continues to pursue Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of a beloved community for all."  One visionary, writing in tribute to another.

POEM
In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.

I

honey people murder mercy U.S.A.
the milkland turn to monsters teach
to kill to violate pull down destroy
the weakly freedom growing fruit
from being born

America

tomorrow yesterday rip rape
exacerbate despoil disfigure
crazy running threat the
deadly thrall
appall belief dispel
the wildlife burn the breast
the onward tongue
the outward hand
deform the normal rainy
riot sunshine shelter wreck
of darkness derogate
delimit blank
explode deprive
assassinate and batten up
like bullets fatten up
the raving greed
reactivate a springtime
terrorizing

death by men by more
than you or I can

STOP


II

They sleep who know a regulated place
or pulse or tide or changing sky
according to some universal
stage direction obvious
like shorewashed shells

we share an afternoon of mourning
in between no next predictable
except for wild reversal hearse rehearsal
bleach the blacklong lunging
ritual of fright insanity and more
deplorable abortion
more and
more

June Jordan, “In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.” from Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Copyright © 2005 by The June M. Jordan Literary Trust. Reprinted with the permission of The June M. Jordan Literary Trust, www.junejordan.com.

Source: The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997)

Tribute to Akilah Oliver, April 8, 2011

Last month, the poet, teacher, performer, activist, mother, sister, and friend to so many, Akilah Oliver (1961-2011), admired, respected and beloved by many in the poetry community, passed away suddenly. (I wrote up a little tribute, but have not yet posted it, so that's coming.) For many this has been great loss of an important and energizing creative spirit who died far too young. This Friday, April 8, 2011, in Chicago, the Midwest Naropa Writers and Red Rover Series are co-presenting A Toast in Your House: a memorial reading to celebrate the life & work of Akilah Oliver.

Here's the info. If you can come and celebrate her life and work, want to hear her poetry, and support the engagement with art and life that she represented, please do.

***

A Tribute to Akilah Oliver

FRIDAY, APRIL 8th
8-10pm

A Toast in Your House:
a memorial reading to celebrate
the life & work of Akilah Oliver

Featuring:
Adrienne Dodt
Krista Franklin
Jenny Henry
Jennifer Karmin + dancer J’Sun Howard
John Keene
Kevin Kilroy
Marie Larson
Todd McCarty
Marissa Perel

Hosted by Rebecca George
& Luis Humberto Valadez

at Outer Space Studio
1474 N. Milwaukee Ave
Chicago, IL

logistics --
near CTA Damen blue line
third floor walk up
not wheelchair accessible

$4 suggested donation
All funds will be donated to assist the Oliver family with the costs
associated with Akliah’s departure and to keep her work alive!

Co-presented by the Midwest Naropa Writers & Red Rover Series
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/redroverseries

AKILAH OLIVER was a poet, a dedicated teacher, and an inspiration to the lives she touched. Her books include An Arriving Guard of Angels, Thusly Coming to Greet (Farfalla, McMillan & Parrish, 2004), The Putterer’s Notebook (Belladonna, 2006), a(A)ugust (Yo-Yo Labs, 2007), and A Toast In The House of Friends (Coffee House, 2009).  She taught poetry in New York at The New School, Pratt Institute and The Poetry Project. She also taught at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, http://www.akilaholiver.com.

What Happened to the New Translation of Dr. Zhivago?

This is was going to be a short post, because of limited time, but I wanted to register something literary and poetry-related I noticed during break that I said I'd blog about.  I had been jonesing for the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of Russian poet Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)'s extraordinary and lone novel, Dr. Zhivago (1956), for which, along with his poetry, he was awarded the 1959 Nobel Prize in Literature, which pressure from the Soviet authorities fored him to decline. The novel itself was not published in Russia until 1988, in the pages of Novy Mir, a major Soviet literary journal, but it did appear internationally in 1957 because Pasternak had given a copy to Italian publishing magnate Giangiacomo Feltrinelli to smuggle out of Russia, which he did, and then promptly had the novel published in Italian, as Il Dottor Zhivago.

Since I'm trying to be concise, I will not delve into all the particulars of the novel, which covers the period from before World War I through the Russian Revolution to the subsequent Civil War there. The Russian authorities despised it (they thought it critical of Stalin, the Soviet State and its ideology, Marxism, counterrevolutionary, too formally experimental, etc.). It is not a conventional novel except in girth; it has a confusing plot, it cares little about fluid transitions between scenes, its mode of characterization can be jarring, and so forth. At the end of it Pasternak appends poems "by Yuri Zhivago," that you should read to fully appreciate the character's poetic gifts, but which mainly underline Pasternak's greatness as a poet. A novelist and poet I admire told me many years ago over coffee that he found Dr. Zhivago "tedious," and then, finally confessed that he hated it.  I was surprised, but with a bit of distance, I can understand why he did and why Dr. Zhivago isn't to everyone's taste. (David Lean's 1965 movie, starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie was a popular success and a critical bomb, and only partially captures the novel's depth and grandeur.)

Yet, Dr. Zhivago repeatedly presents, at least from the impression I formed from the initial, 1958 English translation of the book, a powerful demonstration of Pasternak's poetic skill; again and again, his descriptions of the landscape, of people, of politics, all of it, come alive through metaphor, simile, synecdoche, metonymy, and other figurative means such that the world of the novel, the background and foreground, almost seem to bristle with life. I should note that the name of the protagonist Yuri Zhivago, points to this, as zhiv- in Russia is the root meaning "life," and Pasternak earlier had published a book of poems entitled My Sister, Life (1921), which had a tectonic effect on Russian poetry. After Stalin began his clampdown, Pasternak turned to prose, and published two books that are among my favorites for their lyrical strangeness and intensity, the short memoir Safe Conduct, and the stories, including the haunting "Aerial Ways" (I have probably read this story 10 times), which were part of A Childhood in Luvers.  Around the time of the shorter prose works he began writing portions of the long novel, and there are continuities of style. Again, the striking use of metaphors, which sometimes personify the landscape, are here, as are the idiosyncratic explorations of time and history, and so much else that flowers in the novel. And in the memoir-with-stories edition that New Directions published many years ago, the poet Babette Deutsch (1895-1982) translates with a flourish many (all?) of his poems included in that collection. Pasternak himself translated works from English and other languages, and Russians loved his translations of William Shakespeare's plays, even critics criticized for being too much Pasternak and too little Shakespeare.

I've already gone on too long. Okay, So let me get to it: Pevear and Volokhonsky are broadly acknowledged as among the most important and best translators from the Russian. Their version of Mikhail Bulgakov's (1891-1940) The Master and Margarita (1967) is so entrancing that I did not want to put it down, and it lodged in my brain for months.  They also famously rendered as whole as is humanly possible Leo Tolstoy's (1828-1910) War and Peace (1869), including leaving in the rivers of French (which was the social language of the Russian aristocracy of the novel's epoch) that fill the book, and they restored Tolstoy's peculiar uses of repetition, which the previous best-known English translation had shorn away. So it was with real eagerness that I grabbed the copy of Dr. Zhivago I saw on sale at one of the moribund Borders (RIP) here in Chicago; I was sure, given their proved skill, and the glowing reviews I'd read, that it would improve the earlier version by many bounds.

But, here's the thing: Pasternak is a poet. And as I began to read the new translation, I kept wondering, where are those poetic passages from the earlier, allegedly "flawed" 1958 version, by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, that I even underlined and noted years before? I don't read Russian, unfortunately for me, but I could see that a laxity, vaguenesses, the concision of Pasternak's imagery, appeared off compared to the earlier book. Again and again I found myself searching the text for those moments from Hayward's and Harari's version and finally realized that, for all their skill, Pevear and Volokhonsky appear to have blown this one a bit. Though likely more literal, the prose has become, well, "tedious" to me, though I haven't given it up yet, since I know the story and still do enjoy it. If you don't believe me, I've done you the favor of having already (not tonight, a week ago) typed up the earlier and their versions of some of the passages that caught my eye the first go-round. Which, I ask you, is more poetic? Is more compelling? Even as fiction? Now, I also wonder, were the critics who praised this new version even aware of this? If not, why not? How closely did they read the novel, and did they recall any of the earlier prose, which, as you'll see below, almost brands itself into your memory. I'll stop there because this has gone on far longer than I intended, but what do you think?

***

Dr. Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), originally published in Italian translation from the Russian, in 1957.

English translation 1958, translated from Russian by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, "The Poems of Yuri Zhivago" by Bernard Guilbert Guerney, Wm. Collins Sons & Co., Ltd., London, with authorized revisions to the English, Pantheon Books Inc., New York, NY.

English translation 2010, translated from Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky, with an introduction by Richard Pevear, Pantheon Books Inc., New York, NY

Hayward & Harari (HH): Turning over and over in the sky, length after length of whiteness unwound over the earth and shrouded it. p. 4

Pevear & Volokhonsky (PV): From the sky endless skeins of of white cloth, turn after turn, fell on the earth, covering it in a winding sheet. p. 4

HH: Crows settled on the heavy branches of firs, scattering the hoarfrost; their cawing echoed and re-echoed like crackling wood. p. 5

PV: Crows landed on the hanging fir branches, shaking down hoarfrost. The cawing carried, loud as the cracking of a tree limb.

HH: The half-reaped fields under the glaring sun looked like the half-shorn heads of convicts. p. 6

PV: The sun scorched the partly reaped strips like the half-shaven napes of prisoners. p. 5

HH: Neat sheaves rose above the stubble in the distance; if you stared at them long enough they seemed to move, walking along on the horizon like land surveyors taking notes. p. 6

PV: Its ears drooping, the wheat drew itself up straight in the total stillness or stood in shocks far off the road, where, if you started long enough, it acquired the look of moving figures, as if land surveyors were walking along the edge of the horizon and taking notes. p. 5

HH: Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviëv or Kant or Marx. p. 9

PV: Every herd is a refuge for giftlessness, whether it's a faith in Soloviev, or Kant, or Marx. p. 8

HH: It was hard to keep one's eyes on the shimmering river, which, like a sheet of corrugated iron, reflected the glare of the sun. Suddenly its surface parted in waves. p. 10

PV: It was painful to look at the river. It gleamed in the sun, curving in and out like a sheet of iron. Suddenly it wrinkled up. p. 10

HH: Orioles kept making their clear three-note calls, stopping each tie just long enough to let the countryside suck in the most fluting sounds down to the last vibration. p. 10

PV: At every moment you could hear the pure, three-note whistling of orioles, with intervals of waiting, so that the moist, drawn-out, flutelike sound could fully saturate the surroundings. p. 10

HH: A heavy fragrance, motionless, as though having lost its way in the air, was fixed by the heat above the flower beds. p. 11

PV: The stagnant scent of flowers wandering in the air was nailed down motionless to the flowerbeds to the heat. p. 10

HH: Russia, with its fields, steppes, villages, and towns, bleached lime-white by the sun, flew past them wrapped in hot clouds of dust. p. 12

PV: Past them in clouds of hot dust, bleached as with lime by the sun, flew Russia, fields and steppes, towns and villages. p. 11

HH: The rising sun had cast the long dewy shadows of trees in loops over the park grounds. The shadow as not black but dark gray like wet felt. The heady fragrance of the morning seemed to come from this damp shadow on the ground, with strips of light in it like girl's fingers. p. 17

PV: The sun was rising, and the ground in the park was covered with the long, dewy, openwork shade of trees. The shade was not black, but of a dark gray color, like wet felt. The stupefying fragrance of morning seemed to come precisely from the damp shade on the ground, with its elongated light spots like a young girl's fingers. p. 15

HH: ...and the boat was dragged in to shore as if by a boathook. There the stems were shorter and more tangled; the white flowers, with their glowing centers looking like bloodspecked egg yolks, sank and emerged dripping with water. p. 19

PV: The boat was drawn to the bank as if by a hook. The stems beecame entangled and shortened: the white flowers with centers bright as egg yolk and blood sank underwater, then emerged with water streaming from them. pp. 16-17.

HH: Purple shadows reached into the room from the garden. The trees, laden with hoarfrost, their branches like smoky streaks of candle wax, look in as if they wished to rest their burden on the floor of the study. p. 39

PV: Violet shadows reached from the garden into the study. Trees peered into the room, looking as if they wanted to strew the floor with their branches covered with heavy hoarfrost, which resembled the lilac streams of congealed stearine. p. 35

HH: In winter the street frowned with a forbidding surliness. p. 44

PV: In winter the place frowned with gloomy haughtiness. p. 39

HH: The weather was unseasonable. Plop-plop-plop went the water drops on the metal of the drainpipes and the cornices, roof tapping messages to roof as if it were spring. It was thawing. p. 44

PV: The weather was trying to get better. "Drip, drip, drip" the drops drummed on the iron gutters and cornice. Roof tapped out to roof, as in springtime. It was a thaw. p. 39

Poem: May Swenson

Baseball season has officially begun, and I haven't blogged about it at all, not just because I've been busy, but because, to a degree surprising to me, I find myself less interested than in the past. I've been feeling this way with all professional sports, but whereas I could point to specific reasons (the strikes, the lockouts, the greed of the owners and many players, the misuse of public dollars to underwrite stadiums for millionaires and billionaires with little beyond ephemeral emotional and psychological benefits for the majority of people) for my waning interest in the NBA, NFL, the NHL (I still haven't gotten over their owner-labor crisis years ago), with baseball it feels as though it's struck suddenly. Perhaps it's maturity or just growing old.

Perhaps it's a deeper sense that rather than taking comfort in this pastime as the country and world fall apart, I find it more of a distraction than anything. Perhaps it was the refusal of superstar Albert Pujols, to accept a contract of somewhere around $200 million for 8 years, allegedly with an ownership stake in the team once he required.  This sort of contract would have been par for the course in the 1990s or even the money-crazy early 2000s, but since the economic crash? Not that someone already as rich as Pujols (who received a $100 million contract in 2004) or many of his peers would notice.

But--a little flame still catches for baseball. I have, in fact, glanced at the box scores of the Cardinals, Yankees, Cubs, and a few other teams. I have the free version of MLB Baseball on my phone. And I hope that the Cardinals, rather than the Cubs, can come back with a deal--say, one leg of the Saint Louis Arch?--to persuade their superstar to sign up again before a rival team snatches him. That is, if the rival team has the money to lavish on him as well.

Here then is a baseball poem, titled "Analysis of Baseball," by May Swenson (1913-1989, photo above by Laverne Harrell Clark © Arizona State University). Swenson was one the prolific 20th century American poets and a true original. An editor at New Directions until 1966, she later went on to serve as a writer in residence at a number of universities (this was the era before writers entered or even looked to the academy as a chief place of employment), conducted workshops at many different venues, and published 17 books of her own poetry and translations of other poets, as well as works for children, plays, and critical essays. Among her awards was the Bollingen Prize from Yale University Press. When I was younger she was very widely known and read, though I don't know if she's on minds and tongues as much these days, though she ought to be. Here then is her baseball poem, and yours.

ANALYSIS OF BASEBALL

It’s about the ball, the bat, and the mitt. Ball hits bat, or it hits mitt. Bat doesn’t hit ball, bat meets it. Ball bounces off bat, flies air, or thuds ground (dud) or it fits mitt. Bat waits for ball to mate. Ball hates to take bat’s bait. Ball flirts, bat’s late, don’t keep the date. Ball goes in (thwack) to mitt, and goes out (thwack) back to mitt.

Ball fits mitt, but not all the time. Sometimes ball gets hit (pow) when bat meets it, and sails to a place where mitt has to quit in disgrace. That’s about the bases loaded, about 40,000 fans exploded. It’s about the ball, the bat, the mitt, the bases and the fans. It’s done on a diamond, and for fun. It’s about home, and it’s about run.

May Swenson, “Analysis of Baseball” from New and Selected Things Taking Place (Boston: Atlantic/Little Brown, 1978). Copyright © 1978 by May Swenson. All rights reserved.

Poem: Joshua Marie Wilkinson

I am surprised I've never featured a poem by Joshua before, though I have mentioned him on this blog, I think, but he's a friend and local favorite, a wonderful poet and teacher and filmmaker and critic, who has lots of pots cooking wonderfully on the creative stove. Here is his bio from his blog:

Joshua Marie Wilkinson is a poet, teacher, editor, and filmmaker born and raised in Seattle. He is the author of five books, most recently Selenography, with Polaroids by Tim Rutili (Sidebrow Books 2010). His first film, a documentary about Califone co-directed by Solan Jensen, is called Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape (IndiePix Films 2011). He lives in Chicago. He's at joshuamarie |at| gmail |dot| com.

Actually he has many more books out--tiny gemstones of books--that you can find on his blog, which he made fun of in an interview with bomb, though blogs really old-hat now and established--and according to the New York Times allegedly being abandoned by the young'uns and some old'uns (Ron Silliman?). He also doesn't mention Rabbit Light Movies, his visual archive of poets reading their work and other fine things, or evening will come, the new online journal he edits. Or that he teaches at the fine university that I can walk to and have from time to time, Loyola University of Chicago.

Anyways, here's Joshua's poem, beginning "cuttings," from Selenography, and read it aloud and see if you can't hear his breaths as he reads, those "thes" hanging in the air:

cuttings
shoveled

up into a fortress
hiding behind where
the dead
woman bakes lemon
& mincemeat pies
we live inside the

seam of the wind the
breaker's froth the
swarm's
sleepy landing

a pond divided

by an upside-down moon more
animals learn to hollow
grow wary

& withhold their math from us

From Selenography, by Joshua Marie Wilkinson, with Polaroids by Tim Rutili.  Copyright © Joshua Marie Wilkinson and © Photography by Tim Rutili, Sidebrow Books, 2010. All rights reserved.

Poetry Month + Poem: Camille T. Dungy

It's (Inter)National Poetry Month, and for all of April I'll be wearing a new hat, as the poetweeter at @harriet_poetry! (See the feed at right.) If you're on Twitter, please do join in.  Today I've asked people to tweet their secret cities (cf. Alberto Ríos) and what poetry book they'd print for free on McNally Jackson's Espresso Book Machine and give away if they could, while also quoting snippets of poets from Gwendolyn Brooks to Bhanu Kapil to Earl of Rochester to Gil Scott-Heron.  Also, I posted a link to Japanese-German poet Yoko Tawada reading her poetry, and links to other poems up today!

I'll still be tweeting when possible at @jstheater, and I'll aim to blog a poem here daily, though perhaps without the commentary of previous years. It's my 6th year in the blogiverse, by the way (actually back in February, if you can believe it!).

Also, a few congratulations are in order:

1) to my former student Michael Lukas, whose first novel, The Oracle of Stamboul (Harper, 2011), has appeared to great acclaim this past February!

2) to my former student Christopher Shannon, one of the houdinis behind CellPoems, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize!

3) to my former student Miriam Rocek, who will soon see one of the stories she wrote while an undergraduate published online!

***

Now, for the month's first poem, one of my favorites from the 2009 (was it two years ago that this book appeared?) anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press), by its visionary editor Camille T. Dungy, whom I first met at Cave Canem back in 2001. She is the author of two highly regarded books, Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2011), and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006), and the forthcoming Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), winner of the Crab Orchard Review Open Book Prize, and, in addition to the Black Nature volume, has coedited with Matt O'Donnell and Jeffrey Thomson From the Fishhouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (Persea Books, 2009).  She's Associate Professor at San Francisco State University. And now her poem!

Language

Silence is one part of speech, the war cry
of wind down a mountain pass another.
A stranger's voice echoing through lonely
valleys, a lover's voice rising so close
it's your own tongue: these are keys to cipher,
the way the high hawk's key unlocks the throat
of the sky and the coyote's yip knocks
it shut, the way the aspens' bells conform
to the breeze while the rapid's drum defines
resistance. Sage speaks with one voice, pinyon
with another. Rock, wind her hand, water
her brush, spells and then scatters her demands.
Some notes tear and pebble our paths. Some notes
gather: the bank we map our lives around.

From Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille T. Dungy. Copyright © University of Georgia Press, 2009. All rights reserved.

Photos: Dust of Suns

Here are a few more photos from and several iPad drawings I did  during my lulls in that performance of Raymond Roussel's The Dust of Suns! (The supersaturated and black-and-white photos are courtesy of the Hipstamatic app Joel suggested.)  I already miss my eyepatch and cape--well, the cape. I shall have to get one, and a top hat as well. Enjoy!

"Jacques" from backstage

Joel before his scene

Excitement building backstage

Joel and Joshua, backstage

The top-hatted Terojuku tree

Before the play

During the play

Jacob S., backstage

Backstage, during the final evening

Sarah, backstage, during the play

Yours truly, in cast photos, as M. Valdemont (photo by Jacob K.)

Chicago Staged Reading: Roussel's Dust of Suns

It's been a while since I've posted (including missing my 6th blogaversary--I'll finish that post soon), but when I haven't been traveling I've buried under paper this quarter, with no let up for the next few weeks.  Between my classes, all the great undergraduate and graduate students whose work I'm supervising, and a committee I served on (whose work is now done), I haven't had much time to breathe.

I did, however, happily agree to participate last winter in the wonderful event below, the Chicago Poetry Project's staged reading of French author Raymond Roussel's (1877-1933) strange and enchanting 1926 effort Dust of Suns (La Poussière de soleil), one of his several failed efforts at the art of the stage. I say failed, because like nearly all of Roussel's work, this play was a bust at its premiere, yet his strange methods of composition, involving homonymic play, have stood up well over the decades, and like his (failed) poetic and novelistic projects now show him to have been ahead or at least in the more interesting currents of his time.

Chicago-based poet, critic and sage John Beer is mounting and directing the production, which will take place at the eerily named Charnel House, on West Fullerton in the Logan Square neighborhood (it's 3-4 blocks from the Blue Line El stop nearby), over the next three days. It's free, so if you happen to find yourself with a few hours, a desire to laugh (the play is often quite funny), and even the slightest interest in seeing yours truly in an eyepatch and cape, please do come see it.

The Chicago Poetry Project presents
a staged reading of the play
  

Raymond Roussel's The Dust of Suns

Created By
John Beer

March 4-6; Fri, Sat 8pm; Sun 3pm. ALL PERFORMANCES ARE FREE.

Location
The Charnel House
3421 W. Fullerton St., 773.871.9046

About Roussel and the play:

French poet, novelist and playwright Raymond Roussel (1877-1933) faced almost universal incomprehension and derision during his lifetime, for works that neglected traditional character and plot development in favor of the construction of elaborate descriptions and anecdotes based on hidden wordplay. While the premieres of his self-financed plays caused near-riots, admirers included Surrealists Andre Breton and Robert Desnos, who called The Dust of Suns (1926) “another incursion into the unknown which you alone are exploring.” Roussel never enjoyed the posthumous fame of his hero Jules Verne, but he has exercised a powerful fascination upon later writers and artists including the French Oulipo group, Marcel Duchamp, John Ashbery, Michel Foucault, and Michael Palmer. New editions of his novels and poetry are forthcoming this year from Princeton and Dalkey Archive.

Like much of Roussel’s writing, The Dust of Suns has a colonial setting. Against the backdrop of fin-de-siecle French Guiana, a convoluted treasure hunt unfolds. Along the way, Roussel fully indulges his penchant for bizarre invention and juxtaposition. The Frenchman Blache seeks his uncle’s inheritance: a cache of gems whose location lies at the end of a chain of clues that includes a sonnet engraved on a skull and the recollections of an albino shepherdess. Meanwhile, his daughter Solange is in love with Jacques—but all Jacques knows of his parentage is a mysterious tattoo on his shoulder...

This script-in-hand performance of Roussel’s play, directed by John Beer, with design by Caroline Picard, features an array of Chicago writers and artists.

Performers include: James Tadd Alcox, Joshua Corey, Joel Craig, Monica Fambrough, Sara Gothard, Judith Goldman, Samantha Irby, Lisa Janssen, Jennifer Karmin, Jamie Kazay, John Keene, Jacob Knabb, Francesco Levato, Brian Nemtusak, Travis Nichols, Jacob Saenz, Larry Sawyer, Suzanne Scanlon, Jennifer Steele and Nicole Wilson.

My iPad drawing of John Beer at rehearsal

"Our Addressability": Claudia Rankine's Intervention @ AWP

One event that continues to reverberate now that the 2011 AWP Conference has ended is author and critic Claudia Rankine's "performance of sorts," as she called it, or intervention, as I and others have chosen to call it, concerning Tony Hoagland's racist poem "Change," at the Academy of American Poets' reading (with Charles Wright) on Thursday, January 5, 2011. I was unable to attend, but almost immediately afterward I read Tisa Bryant's short but moving report on it. Several days later, Rankine posted her remarks on her website, and so I will link to them here, and then post Tisa's report. Let me begin by saying I am a huge fan of Rankine's work, but have never had the opportunity to meet her. I hope to someday soon. I also should add that before this I had never read Hoagland's poem, and in general know little about his work, though I have seen his book of essays.

Rankine's powerful, cogent remarks and intervention (click on AWP).  The final two paragraphs:

Let me just say, Claudia Rankine, thank you.

Tisa's original report of the event, which originally appeared on Facebook. I won't excerpt it, since it ought to be read in full, and has been reposted, so I think it's okay to post it here. (I have not included Hoagland's poem, which you can reach via the link above.) Tisa, thank you.

Claudia Rankine at AWP: Afterthoughts on an Emotional Experience

by Tisa Bryant on Sunday, February 6, 2011 at 9:59pm

At the start of her reading at the Omni Hotel, Claudia Rankine said she would have writer Nick Flynn read the following poem by Tony Hoagland, respond herself to the poem, then read Mr. Hoagland's response to her, then end with a closing poem.  And that's what happened.

Context & Notes:
I am not able to fully reproduce Ms. Rankine's response to the poem, or his response to that, so those who were there, or who spoke to Ms. Rankine afterward (I didn't), please add your voices to this.

Mr. Hoagland was Ms. Rankine's colleague at the time "The Change," was published.  Ms. Rankine's response deftly asked questions about what this poem said and meant, to her, to others, said about her, or others.  She began by saying something like, "I don't like to use the word 'racist'..."  but went on to unpack the images of big, black, girl, monstrosity, wrongness, whiteness, paleness, tribalness, Americanness, womanness, collegiality, and more, with the big question, "What the fuck," in trying to make sense of Hoagland's imagery.  She asked repeatedly, "Am I that Black girl?" At some point, she asked Mr. Hoagland what he meant by the poem, and he said that "the poem is for white people."  Then Ms. Rankine began questioning what that meant, or could mean, but was clear that this was her speaking for him in her imagination.  That she could not know for sure.  So she did what perhaps we don't do as often as we should (because we are often shamed for it, somehow.): she asked him what he meant.  I felt it, because it so mirrored my thought process in trying to figure out, "Is that person a racist, or am I...being emotional? Not thinking right?"

For some reason, Mr. Hoagland only had two days, prior to this event Friday, February 4, to respond to the poem, though it was clear to me (though I'm not totally sure now) that Mr. Hoagland was fully aware of and consented to his role in this dialectic in absentia.  He responded that Ms. Rankine was naive in her thinking about race and racism, that it's much worse than she seems to believe or know, that it's a problem how interrogations of race in poetry are often from a brown POV, it's a problem how readers of poems assume the speaker of the poem to be that of the poet, and it's a problem that liberal white guilty people's poems are ineffectual, dishonest and boring.  He said he'd rather get dirty up to his elbows in the muck of humanity (or racism, can't remember) than try to keep himself polite, neat and clean.  He called himself a racist and a misogynist, as well as a single mother, and a string of other identity markers I can't recall now, but were provocative in their complex contradictions.  He also said, "Is this poem for white people?  Perhaps."

Ms. Rankine ended with a poem that centered on the unfulfilled promise of America, and, it seemed to me, our current administration under President Obama, using the same phrase to start each line.  The poem, as did her initial response to Mr. Hoagland, made explicit reference to genocide of indigenous peoples in North America.

Charles Wright followed Ms. Rankine, he being the headliner of the evening, apparently.  In reading his second or third poem, he named a Chinese poet from a particular dynasty.  He said, "I took a line from this Chinese poet's work, then I laundered it.  Then I scalped it."

Ms. Rankine's presentation was bold, inspiring, very calculated, artful.  I was upset, shaken on many levels, by the entire evening, including Charles Wright's reading, but also heartened.  And confused.  As I read back, I find it disturbing how inexact my recounting of Ms. Rankine's words are, in comparison to my recall of Mr. Hoagland's.  The elegance of Ms. Rankine's interrogation of the poem, the context in which she read it, and trying to make meaning of it all, is something I felt as much as heard.  I'm reminded of one of my favorite sayings, about how nothing erases a Black woman's righteous anger faster than a white woman's tears, and here, I can replace tears with "cold, hard logic" or "objectivity," as Mr. Hoagland's response was short, terse, declarative, inelegant.  Or, I'm just a bad listener and can't remember specifics of Ms. Rankine's first response to the poem.  Still, in the construction of her presentation, her response and his, I think, I feel, that there's something quite intentional being performed here, about race and racism, authorship and authority.  I am struck by how quickly the people I was there with dispersed, also in silence, or to a safety.  In hindsight, for myself, silence was safest.  Perhaps still safe.  I hazard here to speak.  Therefore, please note that I am still processing.  So.

Should I, as in Ms. Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely, take the "I" to be a fiction, a construction, the speaking voice of a creative piece, not the author herself?  Are Ms. Rankine and Mr. Hoagland in fact in agreement, that Mr. Hoagland is not a racist, but that the poem should be understood not as his voice, but as a simple act of mimesis, the amplifying mirror of white people's racism?  Does his saying "I did it on purpose, it's all intentional," absolve him of responsibility, or free him from any charge of racism, because he calls himself a racist?  Or was he, in my emotional first estimation, responding to Ms. Rankine in a patronizing way, as if she was being an emotional little girl who just wasn't thinking right, seeing right?  Ms. Rankine's presentation certainly made these questions clear, and totally subverted the down home western pastoral romance (my view) of Charles Wright's poems.  Or, I just couldn't listen to them without populating his landscape with Chinese launderers, bloody scalps and hanging trees.

Here is Sarah Jaffe's response, "The Condition of Being Addressable: A Response to Claudia Rankine at AWP." Thank you, Sarah Jaffe. A quote:

Hoagland may be aware of the legacy of racism in this country, but he is unaccountable to the power that that legacy has bequeathed to him. And one aspect of that power is the power to name (“We suffer from the condition of being addressable”). In “The Change,” when Hoagland employed an array of racist, exoticizing stereotypes to describe the black tennis player, he flaunted that power. He used language irresponsibly and stridently, without regard for where it fell. If there is another language, an alternate discourse, that can possibly ever serve as a challenge to the dominant mode of careless naming, it is one that illuminates, at every step how connected we all are to each other, and to the institutions in which we live with, in, and in spite of. That is the language that Claudia Rankine practices and one that I was so grateful and moved to hear.

Here is Laura Hartmark's response, "How Tony Hoagland Renames Hate as Change." Thank you, Laura Hartmark.  A quote:

A poem that addresses race and racism by accurately depicting a reality and asking what can be done to repair what has gone wrong may appropriately be entitled, “Change.” Hoagland’s poem is more appropriately entitled, “Hate.” But to call it what it is, there would have to be an admission of racist hatred, and said admission is sadly absent from the poem.

Lastly, there are some readers who defend the poem by stating that it exposes how things are. To that, I can only quote Anaïs Nin: “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

I am still thinking about all of this, though I think the core of Rankine's response, and Hartmark's critique, offer valuable ways of approaching a work like Hoagland's poem. Claudia Rankine has since posted this open call for responses on her site, so this might be a way of responding:

Dear friends,

As many of you know I responded to Tony Hoagland’s poem “The Change” at AWP. I also solicited from Tony a response to my response. Many informal conversations have been taking place online and elsewhere since my presentation of this dialogue. This request is an attempt to move the conversation away from the he said-she said vibe toward a discussion about the creative imagination, creative writing and race.

If you have time in the next month please consider sharing some thoughts on writing about race (1-5 pages).

Here are a few possible jumping off points:

- If you write about race frequently what issues, difficulties, advantages, and disadvantages do you negotiate?

- How do we invent the language of racial identity--that is, not necessarily constructing the "scene of instruction" about race, but create the linguistic material of racial speech/thought?

- If you have never written consciously about race why have you never felt compelled to do so?

- If you don’t consider yourself in any majority how does this contribute to how race enters your work?

- If fear is a component of your reluctance to approach this subject could you examine that in a short essay that would be made public?

- If you don’t intend to write about race but consider yourself a reader of work dealing with race what are your expectations for a poem where race matters?

- Do you believe race can be decontextualized, or in other words, can ideas of race be constructed separate from their history?

- Is there a poem you think is particularly successful at inventing the language of racial dentity or at dramatizing the site of race as such? Tell us why.

In short, write what you want.  But in the interest of constructing a discussion pertinent to the more important issue of the creative imagination and race, please do not reference Tony or me in your writings.  We both served as the catalyst for this discussion but the real work as a community interested in this issue begins with our individual assessments.  

If you write back to me by March 11, 2011, one month from today, with “OPEN LETTER” in the subject heading I will post everything on the morning of the 15th of March. Feel free to pass this on to your friends. Please direct your thoughts to openletter@claudiarankine.com.


In peace,
Claudia
openletter@claudiarankine.com

Walking Poem: A March Against Censorship

On Friday afternoon, after spending a little time at the university's info table, talking up the MA/MFA program and Triquarterly Online, I headed to the corner of Connecticut Ave. and Woodley Road, just up the block from the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel and a stone's throw from the National Zoo to join the participants in SAYING IT: A Walking Poem Against Censorship. Co-organized by Cara Benson, Caroline Crumpacker, Tina Darragh, Jennifer Karmin, and Dana Teen Lomax as part of the Belladonna* Collaborative, and reprising Jennifer Karmin's 2006 Walking Poem Project in Chicago, nearly a dozen people, joined at various points by DC residents themselves, walked through the chilly but picturesque Washington streets to the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Monument at M St. NW, just a few blocks down from Dupont Circle (a place where I spent many a day and night in my youth), for a moment of silence, a reading of the US Bill of Rights and the UN Charter on Human Rights, and some of the impromptu poems that passersby and participants along the way (including at the conference) had drafted.  We also answered inquiries from people we encountered about what "censorship" meant (letting them know that all of the marchers were not in agreement about either the meaning of the term), received a good deal of affirmation from younger people, and talked among ourselves about the importance of political action of this sort at an increasingly institutionalized even like AWP, in which networking and politicking assume increasing importance. Many thanks to the organizers, fellow participants, and everyone who joined us, even temporarily, honked, smiled, or even registered what this little intervention was trying to get across.

Caroline Crumpacker, Dana Teen Lomax, Jennifer Karmin & David Emanuel
 
DC poets Phyllis Rosenzweig & Tina Darragh, collecting impromptu poems

Rosenzweig and Darragh talking and walking with a DC resident
 
Cara Benson, pink poster in hands, at the crosswalk
 
What the doorman wrote (for Rosenzweig and Darragh)
 
With Longfellow (me, Cara Benson, Jennifer Karmin, Dana Teen Lomax, Caroline Crumpacker, Phyllis Rosenzweig & Emily Skillings (standing above)
 
Reading, declaiming, listening
 
Dear America: a sandwichboard poem (Dana Teen Lomax & Jennifer Karmin)

Google's Poetry Translation Software

The more my workload increases, the more I find myself dreaming of books, writing, reading, blogging, immersing myself in works of imaginative writing. But there simply is not enough time. Such is the irony of my life these days, but one result is the scarcity of posts here. I don't want to quit blogging, but sometimes I fear it's too difficult to keep it up. Ah well--it's a new year, so I'll keep trying.

***

Desparapluies, one of my brilliant former undergraduate students, works at Google (I think she's still there!), and I was thinking of her and her honors project, and of the countless works of undergraduate and graduate works I've read, as well as of the vast body of literature out there, including my own modest contributions, that would pose challenges to Google's new Poetry Translation software. Poetry, even the seemingly simplest of it, gives many readers a mental workout, so you need not extrapolate too wildly to consider how difficult it remains for artificial intelligence.

But why? Poetic language in almost every language has traditionally involved prosody, figuration, rhetorical devices, rhyme and other sonic devices, allusions and symbolic registers rooted in the language and culture in which it was produced, and the overall and often intricate interplay between all of these elements, in part because it arose out of orality, for which all of these aspects of poetry are required, and while computers have been increasingly able to perform extraordinary complex intellectual tasks, including readable, often idiomatic translation of prose, poetry and poetic language entails many more potentially insurmountable hurdles.  Even the idea of paraphrasing poetry, whether in translation or not, can present difficulties; what, for example, is the paraphrase--or, to put it another way, a précis or simple meaning rendered in prose--of Stéphane Mallarmé's famous poem, "Ses purs ongles très haut....," a sonnet most likely remembered for its dazzling use of the teleuton "-yx"?

Google software engineer Dmitriy Genzel and his team presented a paper at the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) conference at MIT this past October, in which they focused on the "purely technical challenges around generating translations with fixed rhyme and meter schemes."  Part of the team's debate has centered on the importance of preserving form and meter in translating poetry, and in his blog post Genzel cites Vladimir Nabokov arguments about the impossibility of maintaining such features, while approvingly noting computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter's arguments on behalf of trying to do so.  As anyone who has read my many poetry translations on here or elsewhere knows, I agree wholeheartedly with Hofstadter.

Genzel continues in his Google post:

A Statistical Machine Translation system, like Google Translate, typically performs translations by searching through a multitude of possible translations, guided by a statistical model of accuracy. However, to translate poetry, we not only considered translation accuracy, but meter and rhyming schemes as well. In our paper we describe in more detail how we altered our translation model, but in general we chose to sacrifice a little of the translation’s accuracy to get the poetic form right.

One interesting thing to consider here is their belief in a baseline fidelity in terms of the "translation's accuracy"; one thing most translators of poetry in particular recognize, following in the wake of theorists like Walter Benjamin, is that the possiblity of perfect accuracy is an impossibility, that we can never completely capture all the nuances of the source language or recapture an Ursprache in which both languages would be equal. Something is always lost and something else is gained in the process of carrying something across. For poetic language, this raises a host of questions and issues which to which some eminent scholars and translators like Lawrence Venuti, for example, or my colleague Reg Gibbons, have devoted careers, but I will just say that in the case of some poems "translation accuracy," which is to say, semantic accuracy and fidelity, may in some cases be less important that other elements of the poem, such as rhythm, feeling, figuration, and so forth.

That said, I think this Google project is incredibly important, particularly because of its potential effect on translation software in general.  As I heard NPR Science Consultant Robert Krulwich noting today on All Things Considered, since so much online material is now no longer just in English, accurate translation software, especially of the kind that can minutely and subtly parse a range of languages, will open up even more material to readers all over the world, and that includes we (primary) Anglophones.  It will probably not eliminate the need for those devoted to the translation of literature, however; I can think of a host of works of literary fiction off the top of my head, not all of them formally experimental, that would give the best translation software out today a run for its money.  But in the future, who knows?

One last point about the Google poetry translator that will prove a useful tool, I imagine, for poets and others interested in digital and electronic poetries and natural language processing:

As a pleasant side-effect, the system is also able to translate anything into poetry, allowing us to specify the genre (say, limericks or haikus), or letting the system pick the one it thinks fits best.

This entire blog entry could thus become a poem, and in Urdu or Chinese, with the click of a few buttons. In a year or two, that is.

5th International Festival of Poetry in Caltagirone

Last year I posted a writeup and photos from the 4th International Festival of Poetry in Caltagirone, Italy, and I recently received a flyer and information about this year's event, which will take place this upcoming weekend in that exquisitely picturesque and lively mountaintop city in Sicily's interior. 

Organized by some of Sicily's finest poets, Maria Attanasio and Josephine Pace, this year's festival looks like it will be even bigger. The US representative will be Chicago-based poet, translator and scholar Jennifer Scappettone, whose collaborative environmental poetry performance piece "Park," at Fresh Kills Park I blogged about earlier this summer, and Spanish poet, poet and critic Miguel Ángel Cuevas, from Sevilla, will also be reading from his work.

To all the poets, translators, artists, poetry-loving attendees, Siciliani e Caltagironesi, have a wonderful festival!

Quote: Julia Alvarez + New Books + Playlist

"I think that one of the reasons I began as a poet, and poetry was my first love, in English, was because...I especially like cadenced, rhymed poetry, and poetry in English was a way of still speaking Spanish. Because it made language more musical, more cadenced...rhyme, of course, because every other word in Spanish rhymes with an "a" or an "o" ending, so there was a way in which, to me, English poetry was a way to speak Spanish in English."
--author Julia Alvarez (1950-), in conversation with J. Robert Lennon, Writers at Cornell podcasts

+++

Congratulations to Patricia Spears Jones, a poet I've known and admired since my Boston days, whose new book of poems Painkiller (Tia Chucha Press, 2010) is now out!

Congratulations also to my colleague Ed Roberson, whose new book of poems To See the Earth Before the End of the World (Wesleyan Poetry Series, 2010) is now out!

And congratulations to Duriel E. Harris, my fellow Poets Theatrician, whose new book Amnesiac (Sheep's Meadow Press, 2010) is now out!

I'm hardly saying anything new when I note that these are three of the most original and interesting poets writing today, so if you can, please pick up their books and support them and poetry publishing in general!

And finally, congratulations to Bahian author Valdeck Almeida de Jesus, whose new book Yes, I am Gay. So, What?: Alice in Wonderland (iUniverse, 2010) is now out. I wrote a brief introduction to this novella, which Valdeck has written in both English (he's the author of 3 English-language books) and Portuguese (to be published soon, and he's already issued 15 books in his native language). It is, to put it simply, quite a tale!

You can purchase all of these books at your local bookstore (if they don't have them in stock, ask that they order 2 copies, so that one will be on the shelf for someone else), directly from the publisher, or via Barnes & Noble or Powell's.

+++

It's been a while since I've posted a playlist of music I've been listening to of late, so here are a dozen or so pieces on my playlist:

"Whip My Hair" - Willow Smith (I haven't tired of this song yet!)
"Tenderoni" - Kele
"Monster" - Kanye West, featuring JAY-Z, Rick Ross, and Nicki Minaj)** I love this entire album--one of Yeezy's best!
"FANTASY" - Battles
"Summer Mood" - Best Coast
"Walk Tall" - Kele
"Dust" - Van Hunt
"Free" - Marcus Miller and Corinne Bailey Rae
"Samba em Preludio" - Esperanza Spalding
"Dead Strings" - Tyondai Braxton
"These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You) - Etta James
"King of the Beach" - Wavves
"Speakers Going Hammer"- Soulja Boy Tell Em
"Mojo So Dope" - Kid Cudi

& anything by Aretha Franklin, who has cancer. May she defeat it and keep making her incomparable music for years to come. As I tweeted earlier, "I say a little prayer for you..."


And a few videos of the above:

Kele, "Tenderoni"

Best Coast, "Walking Away"

Tyondai Braxton, "Dead Strings" (Part 1/2)

Kanye West (featuring Nikki Minaj and Bon Iver), "Monster" (live at the Bowery Ballroom) [I would have paid a prince's ransom to see this show live!]

Battles, "Fantasy" (not an official video)

Killing the Humanities, Not So Softly

What is the value of having French departments at universities these days?  Departments of Italian, Slavic, East Asian or African languages and literatures? Departments of philosophy? The (European) classics and classical studies?  Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (comprising both the College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences) even has a department of Sanskrit and Indic Studies, and another one focusing specifically on Celtic language and literatures: still worthwhile? And yes, having listed all of these, I must add English and American literatures?

You can be sure my answer to all of these is a resounding yes, and my arguments for their value would necessarily go beyond any immediate self-interest.  Across the country, however, and especially at certain public institutions, both before but now particularly in the wake of the ongoing economic turmoil, humanities departments (and, to be fair, departments, programs and faculties more generally) are under assault.  The initial post that caught my attention about this was Stanley Fish's October 11, 2010 New York Times Opiniator blog entry entitled "The Crisis of the Humanities Official Arrives." In it he noted that on October 1 of this year, George M. Philip, the president of SUNY Albany, had decided to eliminate the departments of French, Italian, Russian, classics, and theater.  Fish, a famous professor of literary and cultural studies, public critic and intellectual, and a former dean at the University of Illinois-Chicago, went on to make some problematic assertions.

These included that the moment for French studies and theory, once the darling of the lit crit and cult studies set, was long gone and that the only foreign language literary and cultural game nowadays was Spanish (no Chinese? No Arabic?), and that humanities departments didn't earn their keep (we'll return to this below), before laying out the process by which Philip announced the end of these departments. What Fish did not do, because he could not, was turn to what he called the outdated "pieties" of the 19th century to defend the humanities, since as a "progressive" academic he no longer dared fool himself or readers that he believed in them (Enlightenment, pshaw!).  Nor, it appears, does the SUNY Albany president, who noted rather bluntly that "that there are comparatively fewer students enrolled in these degree programs." Fewer bodies, so the departments and those who teach in them must go.

The fervor and furor of the comments were enough that Fish again blogged about the situation, in a post entitled "Crisis of the Humanities II."  He began by noting that:

The respondents make a number of points, but two are made repeatedly: (1) The humanities not only pay for themselves but help fund the sciences and (2) I dismiss traditional justifications of the humanities — the transmission of the best that has been thought and said, the humanities enhance society, and so on; you could recite them in your sleep — but I myself either have nothing to offer or end by offering a weak version of what I have dismissed.

His main response instead was to cite commentary by administrators who spoke to him about cuts in state funding, which meant that there was no way that humanities departments at public institutions could make up the difference in lost funding in the same way science, engineering or business studies departments could.  This then led to another point, quite interesting to me as a writer of fiction and poetry, a translator, and so on, as well as someone engaged in humanities work (writing about and teaching literature and the arts), which was that the humanities and arts people consume--the plays, the novels, the films, etc.--outside universities are quite different from the scholarly and critical study of them, and that what scholars and administrators ought to be doing is to justify those activities on their own merits, based on their contributions to their fields and related ones, to the production of knowledge itself, rather than arguing about benefits to the larger culture, to the "man on the street," in a directly instrumental way. (Though extrapolating outwards from this argument is a larger argument hinging on instrumentality.) Fish continued that a defense of humanities work would assist (sympathetic) administrators in making a case to legislators (and private funders, since this is an increasing component of public university funding) for the validity of humanities programs. Or, as Fish wrote:

Do you want a university — an institution that takes its place in a tradition dating back centuries — or do you want something else, a trade school perhaps? (Nothing wrong with that.) And if you do want a university, are you willing to pay for it, which means not confusing it with a profit center? And if you don’t want a university, will you fess up and tell the citizens of the state that you’re abandoning the academic enterprise, or will you keep on mouthing the pieties while withholding the funds?

In yesterday's New York Times, eight scholars offered differing thoughts on the university humanities crisis, with some, important figures in humanities fields, suggesting that in fact French departments should, at least at some institutions not wealthy enough to support them, go the way of the Dodo bird. This comports with a larger societal trend I've written about before, in which the neoliberal model, once restricted to a small economic sphere, has since the Reagan-Thatcher era been increasingly applied to every aspect of American life, and is now not only part of the DNA of university administrations, but increasingly of society's view of how universities should operate. As I say, public universities are feeling the severest brunt of this.  The University of Iowa has, like the University at Albany-SUNY, placed several departments or programs on the block. At Texas A&M University, the Wall Street Journal reports, all departments and faculty were subjected to a cost-benefit analysis, to see whether they were producing a net gain or loss in financial terms. So flawed has this process been that the administration pulled the spreadsheet listing the results from the University's website. The WSJ article notes, however, that Texas's legislature passed a law requiring all its universities to post online "the budget of each academic department, the curriculum vitae of each instructor, full descriptions and reading lists for each course and student evaluations of each faculty member. The law, the first of its kind in the nation, requires the information to be accessible within three clicks of the college's home page," and accessible in 3 clicks. Other university systems, the WSJ points out, have pressed the issue of "accountability" in a variety of ways, yet none appear to focus on the various non-monetary values of the work that faculty and graduate students undertake.

That said, back in August, the Times reported that there was a constituency apparently quite interested in the humanities--seniors. Though humanities programs are under budgetary and rhetorical attack, seniors are increasingly seeking them out as subjects for continuing educational-stage study. Mary Walshok, the associated vice chancellor at the University of California, San Diego's Extended Studies and Public Programs School offered one of the best and simplest rationales for the importance of the humanities (it might not please Stanley Fish, but it sounds appropriate to me):

“From where we sit, the humanities are more critical than ever because of their role in helping to understand the political and cultural context of the world we live in today,” Ms. Walshok said. “They contribute to Americans’ capacity to be good citizens, as well as enrich many areas of professional practice, given the effects of the global economy on so many spheres of work.”

Making the rounds today (I originally saw it, interestingly enough, on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog site) is a disturbing yet comical video that synthesizes many of the most negative discourses about pursuing a degree in the humanities today--in literary studies today--and being a professor of English. Note also the commentary about politics near the end.  View it, and you'll see exactly what I mean (I particularly loved the mention of Harold Bloom, though nowadays wouldn't students mention Gayatri Spivak, or Stephen Greenblatt, or Marjorie Perloff, or Charles Bernstein?):



Lastly, Marc Bousquet's heartening ("inspiring") response to the video is here, on the Chronicle of Higher Education site.

Update: from Pierre Joris's Nomadics blog, here is Hélène Cixous's letter to University at Albany-SUNY president Philip:

November 29, 2010
Open Letter to :
George Philip, President
University at Albany-SUNY

Dear President Philip,

In April 2007 I visited the University at Albany, extremely happy to have been invited by Professor David Wills to participate in a conference organized around my work. I had the distinct impression that the university was an institution focused on intelligence and culture, a place open toward the future, thriving on new initiatives. I encountered very high quality faculty and graduate students and found the sciences of thinking represented there to be strong and alive. I had the feeling of excitement experienced by every scholar or student of knowledge who is able to work with an engaged and motivated group of like minds.

One can judge the future of a country by the space that it provides for the Humanities. The warm welcome I received from the New York State Writers Institute, added to the intellectual atmosphere of the programs in French, Italian and Theatre, made me think that SUNY-Albany was a privileged place for emerging research, and that it possessed, in particular, the good political sense to watch over its interests. You cannot imagine how stupefied and indignant I was to learn that that institution was about to mutilate itself.

I don’t wish simply to be scandalized. I don’t want to believe that you are going, of your own account, to destroy your own riches. I’ll allow myself only to ask you to stop the ill advised process that will surely and irremediably weaken you. It is as if one were to cut out one’s own tongue. Don’t do that.

In 1968 I founded the Université de Paris 8, which still remains an experimental jewel within the French university system. I know full well that one has to struggle in order to allow the proper values for insuring the worthy and dignified development of students to flourish. They are your children, whom you must provide with the best opportunity for succeeding in the world. And, as Aeschylus said, “blood once shed cannot return to the veins”. Beware of doing something that is irreversible.

I would be very sad to know that the University at Albany had stifled its own breath. I want to believe, dear President Philip, that you won’t make the wrong choice.

Hélène Cixous
Professor Emerita Paris 8 University
A.D. White Professor at large Cornell University
House playwright Théâtre du Soleil Paris
Writer, author of 70 volumes of fiction and theory
cc. Susan Phillips, Provost
Edelgard Wulfert, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
David Wills, Professor, Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures