Winter in Mexico

The NY Times ostensibly reports on winter in Mexico City. The article notably gives Homero Aridjis, author of the Solar Poems, space to plug his most recent collection:

“We are a solar people,” he said. “This is a solar city.”

Is there some kind of reciprocal agreement? Do Mexican papers quote Wendell Berry on the weather in Kentucky?

Publishers Weekly Poetry Reviews

Following a site redesign, Publishers Weekly’s poetry reviews have became nearly impossible to find without a print subscription. Craig Morgan Teicher, PW’s poetry editor, realized this problem of accessibility and made a tumblr to solve it.  Recent posts include the Best Poetry Books 0f 2010:

• Nox by Anne Carson
• The Eternal City by Kathleen Graber
• By the Numbers by James Richardson
• Wait by CK Williams
• Come on All You Ghosts by Matthew Zapruder

Heaney wins 2010 Forward Prize

Seamus Heaney (who we’ve posted on a fair amount in the past: here and here) can at last add a Forward Prize to his long list of awards. Human Chain (available here) was named the best book of poetry published in the UK.

Julia Copus won the prize for best single poem, with ‘An Easy Passage.’ Read the poem at the Guardian. Hilary Menos won best first collection with Berg (available here).

From time to time, I’ll post an overview of the reviews for recent books – starting with Human Chain. Some are ecstatic, praising his humble style and unadorned, meditative verse. Others are less positive, citing the same qualities. Brandon Robshaw, in the Independent, sums up critical opinion: ‘The poetic voice is quiet and contemplative – perhaps a bit lacking in fireworks. But that is what admirers of Heaney love.’ The reviews:

• Adam O’Riordan, Telegraph: A
• Troy Jollimore, The Washington Post: A
• William Logan, NY Times Book Review: D
• Kate Kellaway, The Observer: A
• Brandon Robshaw, Independent: B
• Alan Taylor, The Herald Scotland: A
• John Boland, Irish Independent: C
• Eamon Grennan, The Irish Times: A

Monday links: summer digest

• A fair amount has been written on the suicide of Kevin Morrissey, managing editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review.  Suffice it to say, Morrissey’s work at one of our greatest literary journals will be missed. At this time, the winter issue has been canceled.
• The Forward Prize announced its 2010 poetry shortlist for the UK’s best poetry collection. The Forward Prize shortlist: Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain, Robin Robertson’s The Wrecking Light, Lachlan Mackinnon’s Small Hours (reported by PBS as “Lachlan McKinnon”), Fiona Sampson’s Rough Music, Sinéad Morrissey’s Through the Square Window, and Jo Shapcott’s Of Mutability. Before the winner is announced on October 6, I’ll be posting a roundup of criticism for the titles along with my own reviews.
• In case betting on high school track & field meets has gotten too tame for you. Ireland’s largest bookie has the Forward Prize spread: Lachlan MacKinnon on top with 5/2 odds.
• Rachel Zucker examines the long poem, leaving us with a strong and exhaustive list of modern pieces:
  

  I’m talking about “Hymn to Life,” “A Few Days,” and “The Morning of the Poem,” all by James Schuyler. I’m talking about The Descent of Alette, by Alice Notley; way, by Leslie Scalapino; Midwinter Day, by Bernadette Mayer; Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson; My Life, by Lyn Hejinian; “Howl,” by Allen Ginsberg; “Song of Myself,” by Walt Whitman; Model Homes, by Wayne Koestenbaum; David Antin’s talk poems; “Not a Prayer,” by Heather McHugh; “A Poem Under the Influence,” by David Trinidad; Paterson, by William Carlos Williams; Iovis, by Anne Waldman; Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein; The Angel of History, by Carolyn Forché; The California Poem and The Book of Jon, by Eleni Sikelianos; Plot, by Claudia Rankine; Deepstep Come Shining, by C. D. Wright; “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” by John Ashbery; Jane, by Maggie Nelson.

• The ALR’s poetry editor Jaya Savige takes a look at Australian literature and calls the publication of Philip Mead’s Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian Poetry a significant event for Australian poetry criticism. As of now, the book isn’t available for purchase in the US.

img/ Heidi Norton

Tuesday links

• David Biespiel calls for poets to involve themselves in civic discourse in the cover article for the new issue of Poetry. “American democracy needs the citizen-poet to address a gamut of difficult-to-solve public issues such as cultural fragmentation, national health care, decrepit infrastructure, threats of terrorism, energy consumption, climate change, nuclear proliferation, warfare, poverty, crime, immigration, and civil rights. ” He continues: “And just as soon as the American poet actually speaks in public about civic concerns other than poetry, both American poetry and American democracy will be better off for it.” But culture rarely has the civilizing effect Biespiel hopes for. Take, for example, Peeling the Onion, where Günter Grass describes lusting after masterpieces of art – Botticelli, Caravaggio, Frans Hals, Rembrandt – only to enthusiastically join the Waffen-SS as a 17-year-old. Artistic and moral faculties develop separately, he would later write. Poetry is unlikely to make us civically engaged, vote smarter, or even better people in the timeframe demanded by elections.
• Poet Karl Kirchwey looks at Derek Walcott’s new book, White Egrets, in the NYTimes Book Review.
• I recently linked to an Edith Grossman article in Guernica and a review of Why Translation Matters in the Times Book Review.  Chad Post reviews the book over at the Quarterly Conversation, arguing that her thoughts on translation (especially the poetry section) are worth the price of admission, but that the book is ultimately “a bit misguided” as a defense of the art.
• The poetry of Langston Hughes has been adapted by Walter Marks and Kent Gash at the UrbanStages Theater. (Extended through May 9). A favorable notice in the New Yorker:
  

  This new musical, about the life of the poet Langston Hughes, does a beautiful job covering a lot of ground. We learn about the time Hughes spent hanging out in Harlem with Zora Neale Hurston in the nineteen-twenties, when they were young and unknown, and that during the Harlem Renaissance he was subsidized by a rich white woman with connections in publishing who found out about his poetry from her maid; we are also told that he became so angry about what he saw on the streets of Harlem in the nineteen-forties and fifties that he lost, for a while, his patron, his friends, and his ear for poetry. But what’s astounding about this show, directed by Kent Gash, with music by Walter Marks, is how well Hughes’s evocative verse, used as dialogue and for all the lyrics, lends itself to the biographical musical-theatre genre. Because the poetry is deep and gorgeous, the book (co-written by Gash and Marks) and the lyrics are, too. And it doesn’t hurt that the singing—jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues—and the dancing, choreographed by Byron Easley, are inspired.

• Harvard UP announces the Murty Classical Library of India series with the goal of providing critical editions of works from Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Persian, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, and other Indian languages.

Theater in Translation News

• Strawdog Theatre’s production of The Good Soul of Szechuan by Bertolt Brecht is receiving solid reviews in Chicago. Dir. Shade Murray uses a 2008 translation by David Harrower (Blackbird, Knives in Hens). Through May 29.
• August Strindberg’s Creditors gets a new translation by David Greig.  Ben Brantley writes favorably about the production, directed by Alan Rickman (Through May 16 at BAM Harvey Theater):
  

  In the world of August Strindberg, where everyone is always armed and dangerous, it takes only 90 minutes to destroy a marriage. That’s the time required to perform the thrilling new interpretation of “Creditors,” which opened Tuesday night at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. When this impeccably acted three-character drama has put the last of those minutes to cruel and careful use, you’re likely to feel you’ve had the breath knocked out of you. Despite yourself, you’ll probably be smiling too.

img/Richard Barnes

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Weekend links

• “To sustain the legend, one has to be unaware of these decisive letters,” Camus wrote of Arthur Rimbaud’s letters home after abandoning France and poetry. “They are sacrilege, as the truth sometimes is.” Rimbaud is compelling because he wrote great poetry, not because he composed it all before the age of 21. Dismissing his adolescent hobby, he spent the rest of his life as a traveling merchant in the Middle East and Africa. But it is best not to glamorize Rimbaud’s remaining years as mysterious or exotic. As a businessman, the poet was overwhelmed with tedium, writing home at the age of 34: “I’m always very bored; in fact I’ve never known anyone be more bored than I am.” Although it does not illuminate his poetry any more, it is nonetheless exciting that two French booksellers have discovered in a flea market the only clear photograph of Rimbaud as an adult. If you haven’t read any Rimbaud, start with the Mason edition.
• Seth Abramson writes in defense of the MFA.
• Korean author Ko Un has finished Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives), his 30-volume epic poem. Green Integer released a selection from the first third in 2005.
• Salon and McSweeney’s have launched a content partnership, starting with a piece by Elif Batuman. For years, McSweeney’s ran an entertaining sestina contest. Batuman wrote The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, an enjoyable book on Russian literature. She spoke at McNally Jackson Books last month and put on a great time for all of us in the audience.
• Eileen Battersby investigates the state of Irish writing, wondering “Do Irish writers engage with contemporary life or are they stuck in the past?”

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Monday links, Pulitzer edition #2

• The 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry was awarded today to Rae Armantrout’s Versed. The deserving book seemed a good bet for the prize, as mentioned earlier on this site. Here are three poems from the collection in the most recent edition of NO. Finalists are Angie Estes’ Tryst and Inseminating the Elephant by Lucia Perillo.
• Broadway musical Next to Normal won the drama prize,  its citation appended with the following note: “Moved into contention by the Board within the Drama category.” The Pulitzer board has been known to intervene when dissatisfied with the jury’s selection – most famously when the board awarded no prize in 1963, objecting to sexual themes in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. This year’s strange citation might have something to do with another of the finalists: In The Next Room or the vibrator play.
• Jennifer Higdon’s Violin Concerto, premiered at the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, won this year’s award for music. Congratulations to the winning composition – and my town’s orchestra!
• The Times favorably reviews Charles Bernstein’s new selected poems, All the Whiskey in Heaven, as well as translator-extraordinaire Edith Grossman’s new book, Why Translation Matters. To go along with the book’s publication, Grossman wrote an interesting piece on translating Don Quixote for Guernica magazine.
• The Australian looks at Les Murray’s new collection, Taller When Prone.
• In a letter to Paul Demeny, Folio favorite Arthur Rimabud wrote: “I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by an immense, long, deliberate derangement of all the senses.” Many have interpreted this ‘derangement’ as some sort of synesthesia.  In the American Journal of Human Biology, Kevin Mitchell reviews a new overview of the phenomenon,  Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia.

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Friday links, Pulitzer edition

• Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists will be announced Monday, April 12. Some of Folio Found’s favorite recent books have won the prize. Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife, the 2006 awardee, comes to mind as among the top few books of the past decade.  The National Book Award tends to have a fair degree of overlap, so good bets are: Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy; Rae Armantrout, Versed; Ann Lauterbach, Or to Begin Again; Carl Phillips, Speak Low; and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Open Interval.
• Derek Walcott describes the process of writing his poem “XLVIII” from Midsummer.
• Following recent turmoil in Kyrgyzstan, there are fears the US might lose its lease on the Manas airfield, used as a refueling station against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Non-US air bases cannot be named after US citizens, so the center’s name refers to the Epic of Manas, one of the few living oral epics.  If you want a taste, watch this short video about manaschi Sayakbai Karalaev.
• The Guardian looks at Gerard Manley Hopkins.

img/david.sherry