- A Rough Mind-Map of Ezra Pound Sometimes it helps to draw out the context around things. Â This is how I made sense of Ezra Pound and his place in modernist poetry as I was thumbing through his Translations on Christmas Eve. Â I always knew he’d helped propel T.S. Eliot into stardom, but I actually didn’t realize how close he was with […]
- “These Are No Sonnets for an Idle Hour”; Italian Poetry in Translation Ever since I was an undergraduate at UMBC, I have been awestruck by the impossibility of such things as translating poetry. Â It cannot truly be done without re-creating the poem into a new form, because of the obvious limits of word-for-word translation. I spent my final year at UMBC studying Guido Cavalcanti’s poems in […]
- What Would I Want? Sky. “LET us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent […]
- Well. “The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.” -Paul Muldoon [ Banksy in Utah found by BWJones ]
- Mercy is Entirely the Subject I ducked into my favorite local coffee shop early this morning and ordered an Americano in a warm mug. Sitting down, I felt slightly naked because I didn’t have a book with me. I always carry something. (I think it’s like policemen who carry guns.) At least I had my little moleskine journal. Knowing that […]
- Haiku, For Joy Joy strains to find herLate at night there is stirring-November arrives. Very impressive where’s waldo-ing, particularly as I have not yet met Joy face-to-face. Yes, I have met joy, and we shake hands and then play dodgeball. (Or, we play dodgeball and then shake hands?) But I have not yet met Joy. “One for sorrow, […]
- Am I A Falcon, A Storm? Two bags packed, one to go. Last night I had three teenage girls in my living room to help me “sort my clothes.” To allow a sixteen-year old the right to advise you on what you ought pack in your suitcase is both enlightening and frightening. To have three of them is to invite a […]
- Go to the Limits of Your Longing I came across this old poem from long ago, the one that my mentor in college ripped from her Rilke’s Book of Hours, and mailed to me in a letter. I tacked it to every bedroom wall I lived within for many years. Now I’m unsure of where that tattered page could be. Yet, words […]
- Names Written on Water – Part 2 [I promise to turn the topic to something less heavy soon.] I wept from my belly a lot today as I spent many hours at a viewing of an old friend. I dug up a simple poem that I wrote in 2000, because it paints a similar scene to my today: At the Viewing of […]
- Names Written on Water In 1999 I spent a semester studying in Rome. Just outside the old Roman walls, there is a Protestant cemetary where a great many famous Englishmen are buried. I wandered into that cemetary one perfectly overcast afternoon and spent time talking with God about life. I needed a break from the hustle of emotions that […]