Litmag Roundup: New York Edition

Refresh yourself on the last batch of picks here.

Spending the next few weeks in New York and Boston. Regular posting will return late August.

Low-hanging fruit:

• Rae Armantrout’s “Errands” in the New Yorker.  If you haven’t yet, check out her collection Versed, which won this year’s Pulitzer.
• Frederick Seidel watches 4th of July fireworks off the Hudson in “Downtown.” Independence Day poetry likely reached its acme with Elizabeth Bishop’s “View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress” though – which manages to capture the celebratory pomp of the holiday as well as a reticence to embrace it. Bishop hears the parade, muted through her library window:
  

  On the east steps the Air Force Band
  in uniforms of Air Force blue
  is playing hard and loud, but – queer –
  the music doesn’t quite come through.

• Also in the New Yorker: a former poetry teacher of mine, Catherine Bowman, with “The Sink.”
• Karl Kirchwey, “Wissahickon Schist” in Slate.

New Poetry Books, May 2010

Look back at the updated list of new poetry books from April.

Poetry publishing in May is a bit like church the week after Easter. No one shows up. After National Poetry Month, presses take a rest. Accordingly, this month sees only 37 new titles, less than half of April’s 86. To add to that, fewer new collections this month look interesting than in April – when not only the most books are published, but also some of the most high-profile.

Feel free to contact me with additions or corrections or to send review copies. Chad Post already covers new works in translation, so those efforts are not duplicated here.

The list: New Poetry Books, May 2010

A few that look especially interesting:

• Deborah Digges’ posthumous The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart: Poems.  When she died last spring, Digges left this final collection of work. The title piece appeared in the New Yorker. Additionally, seven of her poems are featured at the Academy of American Poets.
• Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected, by Christopher Howell.  University of Washington Press’ publicity page features the poem “Home is the Sailor.“
• Joanna Klink’s Raptus.  Her “Poetry” appeared in Jubilat as well as “I Would Remain by Night with You” in an issue of Boston Review.
• Ghost Lights, a debut from Keith Montesano. The poem “Long After the Flames” was reprinted on Verse Daily.
• Anne Waldman’s Matriot Acts. A 2005 edition of Jacket Magazine featured her work and a profile.

img/Paul Nash

Litmag Roundup

Refresh yourself on the last batch of picks here.

New and Recommended Poems

• Lucia Perillo contributes to The New Yorker.  Last month, Folio Found recommended her recent collection Inseminating the Elephant.
• “A Correction” by Idris Anderson in Agni.
• Also in The New Yorker, Richard Wilbur writes “A Prelude.“
• Poetry features a handful of works from Eleanor Ross Taylor, who was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize last month.  The selection is solid, start perhaps with “Where Somebody Died.”  We’ll be posting more on Taylor, but her Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2008 (Southern Messenger Poets) is well worth a read.
• In the New Criterion, Adam L. Dressler writes of “The Lacedaemonian boy.“
• Mary Jo Salter won Poetry Northwest’s Theodore Roethke Prize for her “Unbroken Music” and “From a Balcony, Lake Como.”
• Robert Pinsky examines two Robert Frost poems at Slate, asking: Was Frost a Modernist?

img/Nobuyoshi Araki

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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Theater in Translation – Toshiki Okada’s Enjoy

Periodically we’ll write on works for the stage. Folio Found was named for a book of plays after all.

New translated theater is rare enough that it deserves special notice. Enjoy by Toshiki Okada, trans. Aya Ogawa, has extended its run through May 1. Presented at 59E59 in New York, the play has received strong reviews and (not to sound like an ad) offers an incredible $5 student rush ticket policy.

In the New Yorker:

Toshiki Okada’s play, about part-time workers at a Tokyo manga café, is a delightful study in frustration. Anecdotes are eagerly introduced, then derail before arriving at a point. Ideas are overexplained into incoherence. Ambition dissolves in a nervous laugh. This is the first production of an Okada play not directed by the playwright himself, and the first one performed in English. He put his work in good hands: the director, Dan Rothenberg, displays an acute understanding of Okada’s experiments with movement and shifting perspective, Aya Ogawa’s brilliant translation meets the challenge of finding an English equivalent for Okada’s highly colloquial Japanese, and the actors are wonderfully loose and nimble. In short, it’s a treat.

The Play Company, dedicated to “an international view of contemporary playwriting,” does phenomenal work year after year.  Their translation program takes particular care to highlight the distinction between academic translation and translation intended for the stage:

The U.S. lags behind other countries in translating foreign work, and our exposure to production texts is limited. Many American translations come from the academic world and, while useful for study, are not suitable for professional performance.

img/carol.rosegg

Litmag Roundup

• The Missouri Review publishes a series of “Dream Poems” by Richard Bausch.
• Joanna Klink talks poetry in Jubilat.  Looking forward to her next collection, Raptus, which Penguin is releasing this May (preorder a copy).
• Rae Armantrout in Poetry.
• Robert Bly in the APR, “Nirmala’s Music.”
• Bly is hitting the magazines hard this month.
• Poetry Northwest announces its newest issue with a poem by Rick Barot. He is the author of Want: Poems– a book worth a few readings.
• After this week’s premiere of Treme on HBO, I like to imagine John Goodman reciting this poem.  Fady Joudah in Callaloo – behind a wall for subscribers and libraries.
• Atlanta Review has the most bizarrely charming web presence.  I’m not even sure this is the entirety of Michael Lee Phillips’ prize-winning poem, but it’s still a solid narrative piece.
• Adam Zagajewski, translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh, in Five Points.

img/yayoi.kusama