Tag: lyric poetry
-
* stepping out with rita dove & holderlin
My translation of Borges two weeks ago received a great response on here – thank you all for your kind words! This week’s poem, “Reading Holderlin on the Patio with the Aid of a Dictionary” by Rita Dove, evokes some of the fascination and thrill of working out a poem from one language to another, how…
-
* remembering galway kinnell
Given this week’s news of Galway Kinnell’s passing, I find myself heading into Dia de los Muertos this weekend with him on my mind. I had the pleasure of attending a reading he gave alongside Phil Levine in NYC. The two great poets chatted at their table before the reading. When the time came to…
-
* jamming with Yosano Akiko
Around the same time that I read Takuboku Ishikawa (see last week’s post), I also delved into the work of Yosano Akiko – famed tanka poet and friend to Ishikawa. I was so taken up by her work that I couldn’t help but respond to her in several tanka. Here’s one: she speaks of the…
-
* one year later & three chinese poets
[the lyric poet] always says “I” and sings us through the full chromatic scale of his passions and desires – (Nietzche) Think what you will of Nietzche, he goes overlooked as a poet – and I don’t mean his actual poems but more the spirit with which he approached his writing. Like the quote above…
-
* Linda Pastan, apples & the friday influence
This week on the Influence: Linda Pastan! What moves me about the lyric below is how it follows the turns of simple tone and lets the subtleties gleam. What does that mean? Peep the line: maybe the wind would wind itself – with its alliterative w’s, but also how the word wind turns over in meaning and pronunciations from noun to verb, seamlessly.…
-
divagations, & the friday influence
Elms – C.K. Williams All morning the tree men have been taking down the stricken elms skirting the broad sidewalks. The pitiless electric chain saws whine tirelessly up and down their piercing, operatic scales and the diesel choppers in the street shredding the debris chug feverishly, incessantly, packing truckload after truckload with the feathery, homogenized,…
The Friday Influence 