while I’m gone
you and the nightingale are in charge
my snail
uguisu to / rusu wo shite ore / katatsuburi
Except that the uguisu is not actually a nightingale; it’s the Japanese Bush Warbler, Cettia diphone. It has often been translated as ‘nightingale’ because it has similar poetic associations; it is famous in Japan for its song (YouTube) which announces the [...]
text-o-possum…the future!
'Bluetooth laser virtual keyboard encased in elegant possum.'
(del.icio.us tags: computers possums )
That Which Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stranger – New York Times
via Mind Hacks, an extraordinary article about an ultra-long distance cyclist: 'The craziness is methodical, however, and Robic and his crew know its pattern by heart. Around Day 2 of a [...]
I know Jee on the internet — originally via PFFA, the online poetry forum, but also now through his blog, Song of a Reformed Headhunter — so I already knew I liked his poems. And as a bonus, Equal to the Earth serves as my book from Singapore for the Read The World challenge.
Jee is, to [...]
According to the dust jacket, Srečko Kosovel is ‘often called the Slovene Rimbaud’.* Mainly, as far as I can gather, because he wrote all his poetry very young; not, like Rimbaud, because he decided to run off and do something else, but because he died at 22.
I found The Golden Boat: Selected Poems of Srečko Kosovel [...]
The whitethroat on the gorse bush knows
the opposite of cold is song;
the beetle on the burnet rose
knows the whitethroat to be wrong.
The Butterfly’s Burden is a translation of three books by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish who died earlier this year: The Stranger’s Bed (1998), A State of Siege (2002) and Don’t Apologise for What You’ve Done (2003). It’s a parallel text edition, which always makes me feel terribly learned, but in practice is just a [...]
A link from C. Dale Young sent me to this article which is rather unflattering about a scheme to promote poetry in Seattle. What got me going, though, was this, from someone defending the scheme in the comments:
On comprehending poetry: you say “Poetry, by its very definition, is a difficult thing to write and to comprehend.” Certainly [...]
Surroundings: Education for Leisure
'It’s good to see the authorities finally getting to the root of the problem of street violence. For years it’s been obvious that studious poetry-reading youths have been terrorising our streets, and how it’s taken so long for the authorities to make the connection between poetry readers and knife crime is beyond [...]
One for the Read The World challenge. Wikipedia only mentions one writer from Vanuatu: Grace Mera Molisa. There was a copy of Black Stone, her first book of poems, for sale on AbeBooks, so I thought I’d give it a punt.
This is political poetry: Black Stone was published in 1983, just three years after Vanuatu gained [...]
Silver Lake on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
Autochromes are a kind of early colour photography. This one is particularly fabulous, but check out the whole set.
(del.icio.us tags: autochromes photos )
Running for Office: It’s Like A Flamewar with a Forum Troll, but with an Eventual Winner
OK, fair's fair, this is quite funny.
(del.icio.us tags: Kansas politics )
Marc Steinmetz [...]
I realised that Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900 – 1937 was about to close, so I popped in today for a quick gander. As ever at the BL, the range of material was impressive: they really do own a lot of stuff. Eliot, Bretton, Man Ray, Lorca, Mayakovsky, [...]
One obvious point to make in passing: even if there is some kind of profound connection between someone’s political leanings and the form they choose when they write a poem*, that connection is not stable over time.
It meant something different to be writing sonnets in 1520 than to be writing them in 1820 or 1920. [...]
Today is William Blake’s 250th birthday. Happy birthday, William.
The Chimney-Sweeper
A little black thing among the snow,
Crying ‘weep, weep’ in notes of woe!
‘Where are thy father and mother? Say!’
‘They are both gone up to the church to pray.
‘Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smiled among the winter’s snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And [...]
This is a biography of Charles Darwin’s grandfather. He was a doctor by trade, and one of the most highly rated in the country, but was one of those classic Enlightenment figures whose interests included botany, meteorology, physics, chemistry, engineering, philosophy and just about anything else that came his way. And for a few years [...]
Apparently someone has declared that poetry is dead again. Or still dead.
As a critical stance this lacks originality, but never mind. I’m just surprised anyone thinks they can tell. Looking back at the canon, the total difference between a Golden Age Of Poetry and a leaden one is two or three great poets who happen [...]
Teju has a couple of great posts about names and what they mean (1, 2), specifically relating to Yoruba. Which set me thinking about Anglo-Saxon naming.
I have no idea exactly what relationship the Saxons had with their names, and I don’t know what academic work has been done on it—I’m just going on the impression [...]
It’s Poetry Thursday, and I don’t feel like writing a poem after napowrimo. Instead, some thoughts about poetry and ‘truth’. It always used to annoy the hell out of me when I heard people suggest that poetry—or more generally literature, or art—was somehow a search for truth, or that the success of a piece of [...]
If you started reading this blog in the past 11 months, you may not know about Napowrimo. Napowrimo is modelled on Nanowrimo—National novel-writing month—a scheme which encourages people to try to write a novel (or at least 50,000 words) in the month of November. Napowrimo is national poetry-writing month, and the target is a poem [...]
I didn’t want my post on rails and crakes to suffer from poetry bloat, so I didn’t quote it before, but John Clare isn’t the only Dead Famous English Poet who mentioned corncrakes in a poem.
This is the mowing scene from Upon Appleton House, to My Lord Fairfax by Andrew Marvell. I went through modernising [...]
It’s end-of-year list time. These weren’t all first published this year, and I daresay I’ve forgotten some, but they are at least all books I’d recommend. In no particular order:
Rembrandt’s Eyes by Simon Schama.
I blogged about this before. Simon is a serious historian (rather than, say, a journalist who writes occasional books) who writes brilliantly [...]
If poems were not easily reproduced — if, as with paintings, owning a copy of a poem was obviously a poor alternative to owning the original — how much would an original Armitage sell for? A Larkin? An Eliot? A Marvell?
Well, I’ve finished Richard Holmes’s Shelley:The Pursuit. I didn’t find it as gripping as his superb biography of Coleridge, but it became more enjoyable as it went along. Mainly, I think, because Shelley became much more likeable as he matured personally, politically and poetically. Not that he became less radical, or completely lost the restlessness [...]
Why is it that almost every poetry journal in existence is titled according to one of two models?
The [placename] [publication]
or
[catchy, non-poetry-related noun]
Surely the language allows other possibilities?