Comments for Which Silk Shirt

Comment on Possibilities of Breath: Charles Olson by Margaret Randall

Margaret Randall — Thu, 17 May 2012 13:28:14 +0000

Olson’s impact on several generations of poets was big, like his breath and like his own poetic legacy. Along with his ideas about breath, his cosmopolitanism was important. And I think that sense of the world–backward in time as well as expansive–is being reflected today in a poetry that is “larger” in so many ways. Perhaps the Internet has helped many of us expand our horizons: who we read.
But also, very much I believe, the fact that racial and gender and even to some extent class lines have broken down. We KNOW the poetry of so many more people living in so many more different ways in so many places. For U.S. American poets, especially, who traditionally tended to be quite insular, this opening out has been important.
Olson lived and wrote at a particularly male-centered time. Most of the great poets of the era were men, and men absolutely possessed by a male-only or male-centered world vision. It wasn’t until the next generation that our great female poets–Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, Joy Harjo, etc.–took center stage and began to be widely read, heard, appreciated.
But back to the idea of breath, last weekend I attended a particularly powerful reading at The Outpost Performance Space here in Albuquerque. It was called “Beauty is a Verb” (after the very fine anthology by the same name) and brought together seven extraordinary writers from around the county, all of whom suffer from a severe physical disability. With a blind poet whose reading drew us to her fingertips moving across the Braille page, a deaf poet who read to us in American Sign Language while her interpreter, from a seat in the audience, translated into English, a woman with laryngeal dystonia (she described her condition as one in which pieces of words fall away), and a poet with spastic cerebral palsy, among others, full resonant breath was sometimes hard to come by. We listened and learned about other complex and powerful breath lines.
Today I think we understand Olson’s gift, and also that there is a great deal more that poetry can give us when we are willing to receive it in all its splendid range of sources and forms.

Comment on Possibilities of Breath: Charles Olson by John Crawford

John Crawford — Thu, 17 May 2012 03:51:28 +0000

I met Olson at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, and met with him a half dozen times before his death. He was indeed a formidable man, about 6 feet 8 and 300 pounds. When he said breath, well, he had a big one. He was both a caring man and a bully, overcome at times by his emotions. That said, his theory of breath came out of the same school of poetry as Pound and Williams–privileging oral poetry (Pound was a classicist who knew enough Greek and Latin to get by; his sense of meter was largely one of length, not stress, of the vowel sounds; Williams believed in following speech rhythms but was far more learned than that suggests; Olson took his cue from classical Greek).

Olson’s chief poetic disciple–when they could get along–was Robert Creeley. Olson didn’t inspire the Beats exactly, but he tolerated them. I think the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets used him. He was a great believer of myth in poetry, and, like Ezra Pound with the Cantos, he was an epic poet–his Maximus poems were probably the crucial text of the Sixties. It’s a lot of reading, but it’s probably worth it. The later criticism, after his death, not so much–it’s not only that it’s academic, it’s positively Oedipal. All these younger men had wanted to be his sons–so they murdered him again, with their torturous prose.

Pound, Williams, Olson were very “male” poets–aggressive, building whole political and cultural empires. They were superceded, it seemed to me, by a more democratic set of poets in the seventies and eighties–a mix of writers in and out of the academy, many more women, multicultural too. The “other side” of poetry by that time was another line of succession, from Whitman to Ginsberg–not quite of the school of Olson, more open to the free play of the mind, still hobbled by a kind of gay machismo but not so much to the detriment of women or minorities. And I would stop periodizing here, because we’re still in one, yet to be described. In a time of increasingly brutal change, our cultural memory seems to be struggling to be heard again. One of the important poets of this later generation is surely Adrienne Rich.

Comment on Prompt 27: A Woman Calls 9-1-1 by kim Corbet

kim Corbet — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:13:33 +0000

this made me homesick for Arkansas as it reminded me why I haven’t been back since we slid mom’s ashes into the hole on top of my dad.

Comment on Writing to Heal by john crawford

john crawford — Fri, 04 May 2012 18:23:48 +0000

And this has marvelous redemptive power, for herself and others. The writer should know the promise that’s contained in such powerful, redemptive expression.

Comment on Spring Poem by Boris Pasternak by Gerry Camp

Gerry Camp — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 17:35:36 +0000

I really liked Doctor Zhivago when I read it many years ago, but I never knew Pasternak as a poet until now. Thank you for sharing this lovely poem, and especially for including the link to several of his other poems. I’ve printed them out and will be enjoying them in the days to come.
–Gerry

Comment on Poetry Stamps! by john crawford

john crawford — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 17:44:56 +0000

The post office has always had an interest in promoting culture awareness–sometimes even to the point of controversy. My favorite stamp was a portrait of Paul Robeson, the great athlete, actor, writer, and singer, who was also an anti-racist, anti-fascist activist and a communist. That stamp wasn’t even available in some post offices, but it says something about a truly cosmopolitan approach to culture that it’s important for others to heed.
John Crawford

Comment on Pulitzer Unwilling to Pick a Winner by Margaret Randall

Margaret Randall — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:32:46 +0000

If one looks at the Pulitzer for fiction for the past several years, the awards are nothing short of astonishing. Astonishingly wanting, that is. Compare the titles chosen with novels of the import of The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, to name just one that didn’t receive the prestigious prize. I can’t remember every single novel that appear last year, but I would be willing to bet that if we had a list most of us could pick several winners. It seems to me that we all need to stop judging works of art by whether or not they win the big prizes.

Comment on The Need to Return: Four Writers on Family and Heritage by Margaret Randall

Margaret Randall — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:02:31 +0000

Lauren, you put together a very special event. I was proud to be part of it. Each voice was so individually strong and so diverse when compared with the other three. You had a great vision in bringing us together, and I too felt that the audience responded very well. Thanks again!

Comment on The Need to Return: Four Writers on Family and Heritage by darryl

darryl — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:08:01 +0000

Thanks, Lauren, for organizing such a celebratory and inspiring afternoon. Thanks,too, to all of the readers – Margaret, Richard, Lauren, and Elaine – for their magical and musical words, but more for their willingness to share fragments of their lives with clarity, honesty, and bravery.

Comment on Finding the Road, Taking a Step by cantueso

cantueso — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 16:34:50 +0000

I quoted the mosquitos and the charca because I could not remember where to find Machado’s “Wagner y su homúnculo activo” in my books. It was also difficult to find online, as I did not know that PDF pages somehow do not respond to the Google buscador.
I found it finally, and there was also a translation into English, but I don’t know whether it is good.
http://www.armandfbaker.com/translations/misc/misc_prior_to_193

6.pdf

Mas dejemos
abstrusas filosofías.
Añoremos
—en esta Hesperia de Europa—
¡oh hermanos! los viejos días
de un siglo de masa y tropa,
y de suspiros amargos,
y de pantalones largos,
y de sombreros de copa.
Siglo struggle-for-lifista,
cucañista,
boxeador más que guerrero,
del vapor y del acero.
Siglo disperso y gregario,
de la originalidad;
siglo multitudinario
que inventó la soledad.
Bajo el pintado carmín,
tuvo salud y alegría;
bajo su máscara fría,
fue del candor al esplín.
Siglo que olvidó a Platón
y lapidó al Cristo vivo.
Wagner, el estudiantón,
le dio su homúnculo activo.
Azotado y errabundo,
sensible y sensacional,
tuvo una fe: la esencial
acefalía del mundo.