How does one gather thoughts on the death of Octavio Paz? What words does one write that will transcend, when referring to someone who wrote so lucidly as in this excerpt from one of his essays: “Poetry shares a border with philosophy and religion but only to contradict them.
Watch Olivia Maciel read and translate some of her poetry from The Guild Lit Channel:
I’ve done some heavy lifting
And flexed my abs against the absolute
On the monastery farm
I’ve tried and tried the treadmill of the true
But it’s as nothing, schoolmarm,
To what I’ve tried with you
I ran into Miss Adventure
At the Bluebird Cafe
I pressed myself upon her
She kinda gave way
I said I’m racked with guilt
For having made so free
She gave her head a tilt
She said don’t you see
In this mouth I gather darkness, an aria,
rosewater tongue, tympanic bone,
a poem more quiet than quietness,
a bronze song, something undone, salvia,
a crushed butterfly.
– Simone Muench, “Elegy for the Unsaid”
Broadside of “Elegy for the Unsaid” by Simone Muench, “Try” by Jennifer Grotz, and “burdens” by Quraysh Ali Lansana
Roger Reeves, Simone Muench, and Jason Koo at the Poetry Center of Chicago’s Six Points Reading Series, August 29, 2014.
More & more I see the human form, a nothingness which longs to be the sea. Lives infinitely repeated down to atomic thinness like footfalls in a strange house.
Wednesday, December 13, 1995
Monday, May 5, 1997
Thursday, April 18, 2002
From the province of spring everlasting
bring back a rose that remains half-open,
from the drydock of mute old men
bring back the miracle of a tear,
from the delta of good intentions
bring back the seed that will change a life.
– Lisel Mueller, “Spell For A Traveler”
Broadside of “Spell For A Traveler” by Lisel Mueller
Listen to Lisel Mueller’s 1995 Poetry Center of Chicago reading:
Audio recording of the Poetry Center Reading Series featuring Billy Collins, Andrei Codrescu, Ron Padgett, Lucille Clifton, Mark Perlberg, Li-Young Lee, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Anne Waldman, Yusuf Komunyakaa, Lisel Mueller, Ted Kooser, Paul Carroll, Jorie Graham, and Paul Hoover.
Pirene’s Fountain interviews Lisel Mueller With Ami Kaye PF- Lisel, thank you so much for gracing Pirene’s Fountain with your presence today. Perhaps we can begin this interview by hearing about some of your early writing experiences and how you entered the world of poetry?
When you said that you wanted to be useful
as the days of the week, I said, “God bless you.”
Then you said you would not trade our Mondays,
useful for two thousand years,
for the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.
American poet Stanley Moss reads three of his poems from his collection No Tear is Commonplace, published by Carcanet Press (2013). Available here http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781847772503 The poems collected in No Tear is Commonplace stage a passionate, curious, and often combative relationship with the world and the forces that shape human life and death.
Some of the self-containment of my old face
has been sandblasted away. The “yellow wind”
is blowing and my mouth and face burn
from the Gobi dust that scorches the city
after its historic passage over the Great Wall.
When I was young, I hosed the Atlantic salt
off my body, the salt was young too.
In Rejoicing: New and Collected Poems, Stanley Moss’s recently published collection, Moss quotes Baudelaire’s sly aphorism: “God is the sole being who has no need to exist in order to reign.” For more than 40 years, Moss has been addressing that sole being without worrying whether He exists or…
The Operature is a durational live performance, installation and augmented reality poem that engages histories of forensics and anatomical science and spectacle.
Read an interview with Judd Morrissey and Lori Talley:
Jessica Pressman: My Name is Captain, Captain . is a book-lovers work of electronic literature, both in its remediation of print and in its tightly written poetry. What do you perceive as the relationship between this work and print?
I am a feather on the bright sky
I am the blue horse that runs in the plain
I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water
I am the shadow that follows a child
I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows
– N. Scott Momaday, “The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee”
American Indian writers today owe a great deal of thanks to N. Scott Momaday, who paved the way for literature about Indians written by Indians when he won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel House Made of Dawn.
Watch N. Scott Momaday read some of his work and discuss his life:
