National Poetry Month: Humberto Ak'abal

Humberto Ak'abal (Guatamala, b. 1952)

Freedom

Blackbirds, buzzards, and doves

land on cathedrals and palaces

just as they do

on rocks, trees, and fences...

and they shit on them

with the complete freedom

of one who knows that god and justice

belong to the soul.

early hours

In the high hours of the night

stars get naked

and bathe in the rivers.

Owls desire them,

the little feathers on their heads

stand up.


from
The Farrar Straus Giroux book of Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry

A brilliant, moving, and thought-provoking summation of many poetic paths, The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry invites us to look at an illustrious literary tradition with fresh eyes. Ilan Stavans, one of the foremost scholars of Hispanic culture and a distinguished translator, goes beyond easy geographical and linguistic categorizations in gathering these works.

This bilingual anthology features eighty-four authors from sixteen different countries writing in Spanish, Portuguese, Mapuche, Nahuatl, Quechua, Mazatec, Zapotec, Ladino, and Spanglish. The poems are rendered into English in inspired fashion by first-rate translators such as Elizabeth Bishop, Galway Kinnell, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Mark Strand, and Richard Wilbur.

National Poetry Month: poems, all kinds

Spring has sprung (at least the calendar says so) and April is the month for poetry. Today marks the beginning of National Poetry Month. Poets.org provides a list of resources for fans of meter and rhyme, as well as for devotees of trochees, sestinas, limericks, haiku, sonnets, odes, epics, and the occasional iambic pentameter. Check in your local community for open mic events and more formal readings, and be sure to support your own community poets. "Jubilate!" as Jonathan Williams, founder and earstwhile publisher of the Jargon Society would say. "There's lots more corn-bread in the kitchen!"

Poem In Your Pocket Day: Join thousands of individuals across the U.S. by carrying a poem in your pocket on April 14, 2011.

Poetry & the Creative Mind: Each April, The Academy of American Poets presents a star-studded celebration of American poetry.

30 Poets, 30 Days: Throughout each day during National Poetry Month, a selected poet will have 24 hours to tweet his or her daily insights before passing the baton.

Poem-A-Day: Great poems from new books emailed each day of National Poetry Month. Sign up for your daily dose of new poems from new spring poetry titles.

Spring Book List: Check out the new books of poetry available each spring.

Poem Flow for iPhones: Available through the iTunes store, this innovative mobile app features daily poems presented as both fixed and animated text.

National Poetry Map: Find out what is happening in your state by visiting our redesigned and updated National Poetry Map.

"Diddley Bow"

michael a michael

one string slider bouncing twang sound like meringue blended with tambura steady kickin' drum harp blowin' blues low bass dub 21st century blues movement to the other side ain't no hiding place the sound is right in your face striding gliding no form in the way blending sending sounds into cyberspace ("Diddley Bow" originally appeared at Literary Kicks.)

"This Strange, Old World," Katherine Anne Porter: "Utopias are steadily on the decline"

The writing of Katherine Anne Porter has slipped out of literary fashion these days -- her sharply-drawn observations and difficult, flawed characters aren't the easy stuff of today's contemporary fiction. Her one major novel, Ship of Fools, was published more than 45 years ago and was the best-selling novel of 1962. Her short stories are seldom anthologized, but they are gems of beauty and precision. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter won her a Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1966.

She was a guest at the writer's colony Yaddo in upstate New York often in the 1940s, and completed Ship of Fools there. Ms. Porter -- who once declared "my life has been incredible, I don't believe a word of it" -- was a prolific letter writer throughout her life, and the brief, sharp book reviews written from the '20's through the ''50s's, collected here by Darlene Harbour Unrue, are written in a familiar, just-between-us style of a personal letter between writer and reader. The result is a witty and unique literary salon-of-one.

This collection of published reviews shows Miss Porter, not surprisingly, was just as conscientious and thoughtful about the craft of her fellow authors as she was of her own writing. Although many of the books Miss Porter reviews in This Strange, Old World (University of Georgia Press, 2008) were not considered major works at the time, their issues were of obvious interest to her as a writer: history, travel, culture (especially of Mexico), independent women discovering their growing social and economic equality. She finds contemporary parallels of this burgeoning freedom in surprising literary places:

"... Mary Wollstoncraft must have found her world a singularly dreadful one: she was a woman cursed with deep emotions, a quick argumentative mind, a frustrated religious conscience, and a rigid set of moral scruples. She had picked up the pedantic social theories which heralded the nineteenth century, and J.J. Rousseau's sentimental humanistic libertarianism now bore fruit in some horrid schemes to right all social wrong. Her radical feminism seemed monstrous to her times. Her delicate high beauty did not save her from a life of hardships incident to the disaster of having been born with an inquiring mind. She was thirty-five before she had a lover, and then a basely inferior one. She bore her child out of wedlock and was deserted.

... She stuck to her principles and her pride (and lived to be) the wife of William Godwin, a pedant and charlatan, and the mother of Mary Shelley. Her Vindication of the Rights of Women remains a monument to her boldness, her anger, and her frustration. Her luck was the worst of them all."

It's a rare treat to read criticism that enhances and illuminates its subjects with such grace and style. There are nice touches of wit, too, without being cruel, even with authors that may undoubtedly deserve it. "Utopias are steadily on the decline," Miss Porter comments on one author's conclusion that the solution to the rise of feminist ideas is a return to "good, old-fashioned, romantic, hearty masculinity."

She finds an equal target in Catherine the Great of Russia: "Female despots in the making do not suffer from a mother fixation," she writes in a witty review emphasizing Catherine's political -- and marriage -- ambitions.

These brief reviews, written mainly on deadline, still echo the finely crafted style of Miss Porter's short stories. They also require the reader to read between the lines; much is implied. But they manage to be entertaining and worthwhile, years later, and anyone interested in Katherine Anne Porter should not miss reading them.

At Athens' Dog Ear Books: Michael Gray, "Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes"

Michael Gray has been tracking his favorite music and musicians since the early '70s, when his first book about Bob Dylan, Song & Dance Man, was published in 1972. Since then he's been busy documenting the history of rock and pre-war blues for an uncounted number of publications and publishers. Thursday night in Athens he'll visit Dog Ear Books at 7 p.m., part of his American talk tour which retraces the official Willie McTell Trail from Statesboro.

McTell has an Atlanta connection as well. He made his first records here, and In 1940 he recorded for John and Ruby Lomax somgs for the Library of Congress. Then in the 1950s he returned to commercial recording for several record labels with material that was performed in Atlanta radio station studios. And there's no telling if his spirit wanders through Blind Willie's blues club in Virginia-Highlands, but there's no doubt he would feel right at home at the club that bears his name.

This is not Gray's first visit to Athens. He came to town more than a decade ago researching his book Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes: in Search of Blind Willie McTell (Chicago Review Press, re-published 2009). At the time he interviewed Sister Fleeta Mitchell, who knew McTell at the Georgia Academy for the Blind, in Macon, when she had been a young girl. As he posted recently on his Willie McTell blog, Athens resident Sister Mitchell passed away just weeks ago at the age of ninety-eight. Gray writes about his visits in 2000 that it was "... amazing to be able to be told first hand in the 21st Century the details of life for Willie and his fellow-pupils in a segregated school in the early 1920s."

Before his visit at Dog Ear Books, Gray will be giving several talks at UGA. Today at 4 p.m, at the Miller Learning Center on the UGA campus, he'll give a Dylan presentation which is free and open to the public. Tomorrow at 3:30 p.m. also at the Miller Learning Center, he'll talk about his McTell book, with the visit to Dog Ear Books at 7 p.m. For bookstore information: 706-244-4580.

His big, personal website is a worth a good browse for those interested in music history, with suggestions for further reading and listening, as well as links to his own books The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (republished in paperback 2008), and the upcoming audiobook version, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia Greatest Hits, which is coming in April.

Ramona Ausubel: from "The Animal Mummies Wish to Thank the Following"

For generous donations in support of their preservation, the animal mummies wish to thank the Institute for Unforbidden Geology, the Society for Extreme Egyptology, the Secret Chambers of the Sanctuary of Thoth Club, and President Hosni Mubarak, who may seem to have been around a long time, though not from a mummy’s point of view. They wish to thank the visitors who make it to this often-skipped corner of Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, which bears none of the treasure of King Tut’s tomb. And to the British colonial government, without whom the animal mummies might still be at rest, deep in granite tombs, cool and silent.

They would like to thank Hassan Massri of Cairo, Alistair Trembley of London, and Doris and Herbert Friedberg of Scarsdale, New York, for their support of climate-controlled cases to house the animal mummies for the rest of time. The animal mummies will admit they are somewhat surprised that this is what the afterlife has turned out to be: oak and glass cases, Windexed daily; a small room, tile floor, chipping paint; the smell of dust and old wood. Even for the permanently preserved, the future is full of surprises. ...

The museumgoers wear shorts and hats and T-shirts with names of places on them: Kenya, Paris, Cleveland, as if they are trying to communicate their origin to the dumb natives. We do not care what dirty modern city you sleep in, what sad vacation you once took, the cat mummies think. Where they came from? Where they lived? At the feet of queens; on the banks of the mighty river. The cats were a million gods. In those days, when a cat died, its family shaved their eyebrows in mourning. If a man killed a cat, whether he meant to or not, he was sentenced to death. Those were days of justice.

Last week, when the squat man in a blue suit clomped up the stairs to their dusty little museum tomb and hung a plaque on the wall stating The Animal Mummies Wish to Thank the Following, with a list of donors, the cat mummies thought, Do we? Do we really? Doris and Herbert Friedberg? Next, they figured, they would be told to bow down to a group of ten-year-olds and their imbecilic drawings of pyramids. You’ll have to find a vole to do that, the cat mummies snickered. If the cat mummies must be grateful for one thing, it is that they are forever-cats, and not forever-rodents. The cat mummies can think of nothing so embarrassing as that—the great gift a vole gets is, finally, to die. If he is very lucky, his toothy little life comes to an end at the paw of a stealthy feline.

The cat mummies allow themselves one fantasy: if only there had been no such thing as an archaeologist. To think of the day they were dug up makes the cat mummies sick. Awake for the first time in thousands of years, they peered out, wanting to see, finally, the afterlife. Instead: the inside of a crate, the inside of a canvas tent, and then someone began, with fine tipped tools, to dissect them. If only they had remained entombed in the cool earth with their kings. We were not afraid of eternity, of forever, they think. They would have made the journey to the other side, no matter how long it took. No matter how furiously, how magnificently long. ...

This is an excerpt from "The Animal Mummies Wish to Thank the Following" which was originally published on The Paris Review blog on March 24, 2011. Ramona Ausubel is the author of the novel No One Is Here Except All of Us, forthcoming from Riverhead in 2012. Image from The Paris Review.

Anne Trubek ("A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses") tonight in Decatur

Just because you are or have been one of the most famous writers in America does not guarantee you a house museum. Of course,there is little consensus as to who are the greatest American writers. Academics disagree. Does Jack London count? How about Ayn Rand? Plus,the general public's conception of the "greats" is often at odds with academic trends. John Steinbeck is often one of the first names Americans will cite when thinking of our "best," and he is almost universally taught in our schools. But few academics study him these days -- though of course his reputation may spike back up again someday. Modern Library's list of the hundred greatest English-language novels has many American authors with no house museums ... the "greats" on the list are much fewer."

(from A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses, by Anne Trubek)

Fans of The Grapes of Wrath will be glad to know that Steinbeck is one of the few American authors on the Modern Library's list with a house museum they are able to roam. Literary house-hunters take note: Tonight at the Decatur Public Library, Anne Trubek will discuss her new book of essays about visits to writers' homes published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. The presentation is free and begins at 7:15 p.m.

From the Georgia Center for the Book:

We join with our good friends at The Wren's Nest in Atlanta and the Southern Literary Trail to present a program by Anne Trubek, the author of a wonderful new book, ”A Skeptic’s Guide to Writers’ Houses.” The book explores special places that celebrate the lives of writers with a vivid style that is part memoir, part travelogue, part rant and part literary analysis. Whether your favorite is Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, William Faulkner or Joel Chandler Harris, you’ll find some terrific insights in her book. Her appearance of part of the activities of the Southern Literary Trail, a three-state project that helps draw attention to the homes of classic Southern authors in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.

Adds The Wren's Nest blog:

Not since Brock Clarke’s An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England has there been a book so prominently featuring the words “writers” and “homes” or “houses” in the title.It should come as no surprise then that we’re bringing Anne Trubek to the Decatur Library for a rousing discussion of just how bizarre writers’ homes really are.

Big ups to the Georgia Center for the Book for co-hosting this event as a part of the Southern Literary Trail. Books will be available for purchase, you bet.If you can’t stand the wait, amuse yourself with Ms. Trubek’s essay in the New York Times’ Sunday Book Review.

For more information contact the Georgia Center for the Book or The Wren's Nest, which is the home of author Joel Chandler Harris.

"In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology," edited by Jack Hirschman

Even in the anything-goes decade of the 1970s the work of film-maker, author and playwright Pier Paolo Pasolini appeared over-the-top. His art was too much for some, who found his open homosexuality too challenging, and yet his Communist politics didn't go far enough for others. His life and work didn't hew to perceived boundaries, and his polemics challenged even revolutionary ideologues to the point of anger.

In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology presents the first translations of much of Pasolini's work in English, and although the book covers a dizzying amount of ground from poetry to polemics, it's a valuable resource toward an understanding of the Italian multi-media artist, who relished confronting realism with firebrand idealism and constantly questioned the effect of mainstream culture on human values.

This constant shift toward extremes of thought kept even his admirers off balance, and it may not be unrelated that his murder at the age of 53 remains a mystery of unresolved motive, an un-captured assailant, and a creative life cut short just at the point of a robust middle-age. Many point to his final essay, "What Is This Coup? I Know," as a cause of his final confrontation between art and life in a polarized and very politicized Italy.

These personal politics make Pasolini's inscrutable creativity a great source of intellectual challenge and interest for his translators and others interested in Pasolini's creative process. He was willing to consider many ideas in his desire to understand the simple thing that art creates: a reaction, no matter how inexplicable or iinescapable. Jack Hirschman, himself a multi-faceted artist, has edited these translations not so much with an eye toward easy comprehension (which Pasolini himself would likely abhor) but with a depth of feeling in the language, a sorting-out of ideas.

Class-consciousness, to get into the head of an American, needs a long, twisting road, an immensely complex operation: it needs the mediation of idealism, let’s say the bourgeois or petty-bourgeois variety, which for every American gives meaning to his entire life and which he absolutely cannot disregard. There they call it spiritualism. But both idealism in our interpretation and spiritualism in theirs are two ambiguous and incorrect words. Better, perhaps, it’s about the moralism (Anglo-Saxon in origin and naively adopted by the other Americans) that rules and shapes the facts of life, and that, in literature for instance — even the popular kind — is exactly the opposite of realism. Americans always need to idealize in the arts (especially at the level of average taste; for instance, the “illustrative” representation of their lives and their cities in their popular movies are forms of an immediate need to idealize).

The poems, essays and reviews feature an array of translators. Pasolini's earliest poetry -- strong, declarative, youthful -- is translated from the Friulian by Lucia Gazzino ("I leave my image to the conscience of the rich ... Long live the courage and the sorrow and the innocence of the poor!"). A growing disillusionment in a poem from 1960, "The Rage," is captured by musician Jonathan Richman ("I can't pretend now that I don't know the world / or that I don't know how it wants me.") Because he was also a film-maker much of Pasolini's writing is visually evocative: this is especially so of autobiographical poems that circle about ideas of youth and vulnerability but also the enthusiasm of the young ("I'm insatiable about our life / because something unique in the world can never be exhausted," he writes to one lover.)

I know, because I wake up with so much strength in my head:

the strength to suck up the new, sweet

power of daylight woken ahead of me,

and to express the absolute, already attained in secret and

in peace, with the most naked words: it's grief, my pain

that always has a reason, is never without an object,

is not neuroses, it's anger, disappointment,

it's fear, it's fury that physically bleeds

in my chest and throat.

Ah, morning! I know it, it's summertime, steady

as a sea, in it's freshness

the city's ready for an entire day,

and its noises are sheer and deeply grieving

like human beings become cool

doves, gentle elephants ... animals in life ...

(Summer, 1961)

As his poetry -- and world-view -- matures to a kind of wary disenchantment in the political upheavals that never really seem to change anything, he attaches a deepening mistrust of the right wing in politics. But he also faulted the hippie culture for losing its energy as it spread into a bourgeois mainstream of "hipness" and "cool" ideas that were co-opted into advertising and the culture at large.

Yet he held fast to his cantankerous heroes for their indomitable spirit: Ezra Pound, for one, even though he had ardently supported Fascism during the war -- and after it, as well. This is, after reading several of the essays here, a provocative stance meant as a pin-prick to easy categorization. Many of his more blatantly acid judgements ("Neruda is a bad poet") read as asides to a larger arguments rather than generalities by themselves.

Reading the twisting and ideological essays in translation, one might understand the difficulty in determining Pasolini's intent and his expression. Philosophical word-play and semantics can spring their own traps in any language. Since the writer himself was walking an ideological balance-beam of ideas it is uncertain whether the often complex result is Pasolini's thought, or the individual translator's effect of the phrasing he chooses. This is less so in the poetry, which offers itself a wider field of meaning.

The individual concerns of Pasolini's essays -- fascism, racism, intolerance, poverty -- remain universal though his targets are specific: the very first essay included, "Civil War," is a Pasolini blast aimed at racism of all kinds: "It is racist hatred -- that is, nothing less than the exterior aspect of the deep aberration of every conservatism and every fascism." It would be more than interesting to read what the agent-provocateur would make of recent political uprisings, as well as the latest outrages by Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, and what's about to happen as we peer with one eye covered into the future. A reader has a pretty firm idea it would be best to keep our wits about us.

His last observation -- "we're all in danger" -- was made in a final interview hours before he died in a mysterious assault, and it acts as an ultimate warning and a final lesson to watch out for all the traps, to be wary of the comfortable solutions that seem not to threaten us, but to enfold us in their easy choices. In our own creative life, and in our culture of affluence, many times these are traps we make for ourselves.