The Laughing Thrush

O nameless joy of the morning

tumbling upward note by note out of the night
and the hush of the dark valley
and out of whatever has not been there

Fresh Air from WHYY, April 21, 2009 · W.S. Merwin won his second Pulitzer Prize for poetry on April 20 for The Shadow Of Sirius.

In a 2008 interview, Merwin read a few of his poems and talked about memory, mortality and acceptance in his poetry.

Posting here will only be occasional for the next couple of months--I'm in the middle of moving. I'll begin posting regularly again once my life gets settled.

-Tanya

KAY RYAN: It's apparently the way I think. I would like to say that, if a poem feels really dense, it isn't good. I mean, if you put it in your hand and it falls through your hand, that's no good. It's got to float.

If you have this idea of compressed language, it gives people a sense that it's going to be dense and kind of oppressive, whereas I would like to think that it can be highly selected, but not make you feel that you've just had a vitamin pill.

"Curiously, it is almost impossible to find...modest assessments when one turns to contemporary poetry. Indeed, the problem of neglect or insignificance evaporates in a situation in which, in spite of the vast numbers writing (800 to 1,000 books of poetry are published in the United States per year; thousands of other poets publish in journals and quarterlies), we have no minor poets. Everyone today, like those above-average children of Lake Wobegon, is brilliant and sui generis."

Poet's Puffery JEFFREY H. GRAY Chronicle of Higher Education February 27, 2009

"I think that [Bob Dylan is] one of the best contemporary American poets, even if you just look at the lyrics stripped of the music. He's been an important link between some of the great poets behind him, like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and in turn he's been an inspiration and subject for poets like Paul Muldoon and [Allen] Ginsberg."
-Kevin Barents

"Of course there are good reviewers who write interesting, thoughtful, and provocative pieces about American poetry. But look for yourself at the vast majority of reviews in journals, in print and online, and ask yourself whether for the most part the writers are doing a good job of actually describing what the poems are trying to do, how they are doing it, and why anyone would be driven to write (not to mention read) these poems. Are these reviews in any way truly helpful for understanding poetry?"

The historical list of laureates provides an odd mix of proper poets and political placemen who, regardless of talent, have almost always proved an irresistible target for the barbs of their peers.

BLUR

Out east on the desert freeway,
after the rain blowing in from the coast
had been blocked by the mountains doing their work,
the sky was fearless and the sun, half arisen now,

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Mom's Canoe by Rebecca Foust (Paperback - Feb 28, 2009) Texas Review Press

Mom’s Canoe

Do you remember your old canoe?

Wooden wide-bellied, tapered ends

made to slip through tight river bends

swiftly, like shadow.

Read rest of poem @ Foust's webpage

_________________________

Too Long a Solitude by James Ragan (Paperback - Feb 28, 2009)

University of Oklahoma Press

James Ragan

RICHMOND HILL

It is my habit to walk a hill until it levels out

or until it thinks it has seen enough of sloth

and the way I map one foot flat in front of the other,

each step shorter, wider than the first, a platypus of sorts,

Read rest of poem @ Rattle

________________________

Persephone in America (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry) by Alison Townsend (Paperback - Feb 5, 2009)

SPIN

I don’t remember if the bottle was a Coke or a Fresca,

just that the glass was cool against our hands

in the warm, empty tool shed. Where we’d gathered

after swimming all afternoon at Debbie Worthman’s

eighth grade pool party, everyone’s skin damp

Read rest of poem @ Rattle

New Poetry Books 2009

All-Night Lingo Tango (Pitt Poetry Series) by Barbara Hamby (Paperback - Feb 28, 2009)

all-night lingo tango

All night I watch the worst movies—musicals of the Nazi blitz,
Zapruder films of my own assassination, the armada
battles between the hideous phiz of my Aunt Priscilla and my
young, beautiful mother, my bit part—sliding from the womb,

Read rest of poem

Find other poems from the book

Peter Cole, a senior lecturer in Judaic Studies at Yale and one of the publishers of the press Ibis Editions, is a MacArthur-holding translator and publisher of Hebrew and Arabic poetry and fiction. He is also a decent poet in his own right, whose work is notable especially for the way it often combines his own lines with those of translated poets. His latest collection  is called Things On Which I've Stumbled (New Directions, 2008).

Sometimes the translations in the book appear by themselves, as does the small excerpt of al-Ma'arri's "The Necessity of What Isn't Necessary." At other times they're combined with Cole's own lines, as in book's title poem, which can also be found on-line at Narrative Magazine. (Log in for free to read the 23 page piece.) It incorporates translated pieces of poetry, grocery lists, personal letters, legal contracts, and other documents found in a "geniza" of discarded Hebrew texts. Cole narrates his own struggles to grasp the texts, putting the translated poems in italics, as in this excerpt:

…I feel driest watching the rain

a man responding
in despair, calling
softly, thirsty—

with brandy in a glass beside me;

as he chooses
between the walls at noon
……………………..
but not now, as my mind ranges
back over silence’s changes—

mercy

and leaves me wondering just how we see

It’s fascinating to read the translated fragments on their own, but Cole offers a format for reading them and seeing how other people’s minds might make sense out of the collection. The title of this poem and book comes from an idea in Isaiah that there are certain mysteries one can only grasp by stumbling through them, as Cole does while translating and writing.

On a whole, Things On Which I've Stumbled is an intriguing, though at times hermetic, collection. Though Cole provides ten pages of copious explanatory notes at the back of the book, many of the longer poems, both original and collage, appear to be written mainly for the enjoyment of academic audiences. At a recent reading at Yale, for instance, Cole referred to one called "Notes on Bewilderment" as "a kind of giant sea worm," written in a five-line structure he developed to digest different bits of material he picked up from conversing with other Yale professors about topics like Spinoza and Rothko and "the quiet ecstasies of kabblablah."

Cole's academic poetry, like much academic poetry, is both frustrating and seductive. It's frustrating in that one often has to take notes and do research to understand some of the longer poems, without always trusting that the work will pay off in a general meaning, a new understanding of an idea, a quiet religious ecstasy, or an aesthetic high. Since Cole is sparse with his images, it's not as aesthetically rewarding to read his work as it is other difficult poets like Eliot or even Zukofsky, whose poetry Cole's is often compared to.

On the other hand, if one does the work necessary to understand Cole's poems, one might, (one hopes) feel part of the elite club that grasps what Cole is trying to do. And his formal poems about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict are especially fine pieces of political poetry. In these, the restraint that makes some of his academic and personal poems hard to sympathize with tones down the emotionally charged topics, portraying them in a moving and thoughtful manner.

Ten out of the twenty poems in Things On Which I've Stumbled can be found on-line. This might be a problematic marketing strategy for the book itself, but it's nice for readers who want to easily check out Cole's work. In addition to the title poem at Narrative, here's the rest of the best:

Coexistence: A Lost and Almost Found Poem Poetry Foundation

Possibly the best poem in the book. Made up of Cole's couplets and quotations from Deuteronomy.

*

Four Poems by Peter Cole, Jewcy (Actually, there are five poems in the group: "(Valent)Lines For A," "Homage To Agnes," "The Rain," "Something More," "The Ghazal of What Hurt")

*

And here's an interview by Bob Lerner with Peter Cole at Bomb, in which Cole talks about what he’s doing in the book. It contains a paragraph on one of his poems about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict:

“…One of the more confrontational short poems in the book—‘Palestine: A Sestina’—uses what is at this point a cliché of a form to take on an acute problem that has come to seem hackneyed to much of the world. My goal there was, first of all, to find a form that would force me to repeatedly employ a word that, let's face it, makes many people uncomfortable. It's not a word one can use neutrally. But there it is, stanza after stanza, defying, as it were, the imposition of a ‘formal’ solution and churning up complicated feelings and connections as it does. It's an experimental poem in a reactionary mode."

PALESTINE: A SESTINA

 Hackles are raised at the mere mention of Palestine,

let alone The Question of—who owns the pain?

Often it seems the real victims here are the hills—

those pulsing ridges, whose folds and tender fuzz of green

kill with softness. On earth, it’s true, we’re only guests,

but people live in places, and stake out claims to land. 

Read rest of poem, plus two others, "Improvisation on Lines by Isaac the Blind" and "The Meaning of This," at Jewcy.

Free Poetry Valentines from the Academy of American Poets!