dumbfoundry

A publishing company sought recently to exploit that enthusiasm by creating Enpitsu de Oku no Hosomichi (Tracing the Narrow Road to the Deep North with a Pencil) — a book that has tracing paper between each page so that readers too can copy Basho’s poems as a form of meditation.

"Hey, all you hep cats and kitties who dig on the roll - time to put on your duct taped beret and dark glasses, light up a clove cigarette and pen your best poem about the ubiquitous tape that holds the universe together."

"We’re looking for poems by people about the work they personally do or have done, paid or unpaid, blue- or white- or no-collar. And for poems about the work of looking for work, how our hours at work affect the rest of our lives and the process of retiring from work..."

"Curious about what goes on at the Cave Canem Summer Retreat? Read DOG BYTES to get daily updates from our 10th Anniversary Retreat from Cave Canem Poet and National Poetry Series winner Tyehimba Jess."

Here is a quotation from Keillor's introduction to his anthology, Good Poems:

'When you compare Bishop to, say, her friend and mentor Marianne Moore, the mentor pales severely. Marianne Moore was a dotty old aunt whose poems are quite replicable for anyone with a thesaurus. A nice lady, but definitely a plodder, and it would be cruel punishment to have to write a book about her. Her contemporary, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who played the glamorous broad and taxi dancer to Moore's bunhead librarian, wrote more that is still of interest, whereas Moore's reputation must be due to the fact that, in the republic of letters, there are many more Moores than Millays. From Millay it's a straight shot to Anne Sexton, a writer of profound exuberance and wit and a hot number, and her cohort, the beautiful horsekeeper, Maxine Kumin, two women who, forgive me, make St. Sylvia Plath look like a tuna salad.'

You've recently been published in other literary forms - a play, a novel. Does this mean that you are coming up against the limits of what poetry can do for you? Or are you taking poetry into the 'enemy camp'?

[John Kinsella]: ... other genres have always accompanied my poetry and explorations of poetic form. I question genre division, and my recent novel, Genre, is an example of this. It challenges our preconceptions regarding form and prescribed reading patterns. Poetry is limitless, but so are other forms. I'm never not a poet, no matter what I write. But then, maybe I'm always a playwright, a novelist, a critic and so on. The enemies of poetry tend, in my mind, to be internal rather than external - those who attempt to define exactly what constitutes poetry, and more worryingly, what doesn't. For me, a poem must achieve what it sets out to do in its own terms. I recognise the 'limits' of tradition - of line length, rhythm, metre, rhyme, etc - and employ them regularly, but only to explode what it is I should or shouldn't be doing.

"The purpose of this blog is to attempt to stem the flow of plagiarism through education about our rights and by exposing the names of poets PROVEN to have posted a poem written by someone else."

Look inside the minds of the cream of Australia's emerging authors. Thirteen authors present their finished works alongside the jottings, thoughts, and notes that gave life to that work...

Kilkenny Labour Party Councillor Seán Ó hArgáin has launched a National online petition calling on the Director General of RTÉ and the Head of RTÉ Radio One to rescind the decision to remove the arts programme ‘Rattlebag’ from the Radio One schedule. The petition can be found on Cllr. Ó hArgáin’s website, www.ohargain.com, and he has contacted arts organisations throughout the country to support the demand for the retention of the programme.

“I believe this decision is one of the most short-sighted RTÉ have made in recent years. As a loyal listener to the programme since its inception, I am outraged that RTÉ can so flippantly remove a programme with a huge listenership, and one which has played a vital role in the promotion of the arts, and indeed has created vital criticism of and discussion of the arts in Ireland.

"I am not opposed to the change in the National broadcaster’s line-up, but it should not impact on major programme’s which are central to RTÉ’s role as a public broadcaster. I also welcome the concern of the Arts Council on this issue, and I note their intention to meet with RTÉ management in this regard.”

Cllr. Ó hArgáin called on the public to support the petition and to ensure the continuation of Rattlebag into the future.

A Call For Manuscript Submissions by Filipino Poets

for

“The Filamore Tabios, Sr. Memorial Poetry Prize”

DEADLINE: November 30, 2006

[...]

PRIZE: The winning manuscript will garner U.S.$1,000.00 for its author and be published by Meritage Press (www.meritagepress.com).

SUBMISSION FEE: None because Meritage Press prizes all poets.

ELIGIBILITY: Poets of full or partial Filipino descent, living anywhere around the world. All such poets are encouraged to send your best work. Whether you’re an “emerging” vs “established” poet is irrelevant as judging will be based only on the merits of the submitted manuscripts.

The purpose of the Native Women in the Arts residency is:

* To generate written material on subjects pertinent to art, culture and the advancement of Indigenous peoples.
* To support Aboriginal Women writers by providing a one or two-week residency in order to create and complete publishable academic works.

Next deadline for the Writer in Residence is July 1, 2006.

Below is a list of books sent for review to Jacket, and as yet not assigned to a reviewer. If you would like to offer to review a book, please read this page: Reviewing for Jacket.

[...]

Consumer Information Warning: The blurbs below were supplied by the publishers of those books, and the lyrical effusions emanating from them do not necessarily indicate a fit of enthusiastic endorsement by Jacket’s Quality Control Lab.

If one of the great poetic tricks is to take the particular and make it universal, Dante pulls off an even greater one here: he takes the universal experience of suddenly - as it were - waking up in middle life without any real idea of how to go on, and makes that first of all particular, then more profoundly universal, so that his, and our, individual mid-life fretfulness becomes incorporated into an entire cosmology.

Write a contemporary poem, avoiding pastiche or parody, entitled 'The Experiment'. It may be of any length up to 50 lines.

You're used to publishers asking for your best poems for their books and journals. Marion Street Press wants something else: the rough drafts leading up to those poems.

The rough drafts will become part of Poem, Revised. This book, to be published in 2007, will be a collection of 50 to 100 poems accompanied by their rough drafts and comments from the poets on how and why they revised the poems.

Poem, Revised will provide useful instruction for those seeking to learn the revision process, and a fascinating "behind-the-scenes" look at the poetry creation process.

What Jeet [Thayil] is trying to do with Indian poetry in English is an archaeologist's job: to recover what was lost, to take scattered shards and isolated schools of poets and fit them together in a pattern. It was Fulcrum's editor, Philip Nikolayev, who first broached the idea of a special issue of Indian poetry. It took Jeet nine months of concentrated work to put it together, and a revised version of this anthology, with sensitive portraits of several poets by photographer Madhu Kapparath, will be published by Penguin India later this year in 60 Indian Poets: 1952-2007. It's one of the most ambitious, and most significant, anthologies of Indian poetry to emerge in recent times.

Renowned Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe earned the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1972 and has also been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His body of work depicts the effects of western customs on traditional African society. He will be recognized with an honorary doctorate of letters [...]

...the show goes beyond the core calligraphic tradition showing Arabic and Persian poetry, both ancient and modern and Sufi writers. There are additional examples of how contemporary artists have woven script into their abstract work. Other artists inspired by ancient scripts have created their own vocabulary.

The poet kept the notebook on a bedside table in 1976 when he began an affair with Betty Mackereth, his secretary.

It slid down the back of the table where it remained for a quarter of a century before being found by a junk dealer and eventually sold to a book seller who is putting it up for sale on Thursday.

In an outraged piece for The New Republic, Helen Vendler labeled the drafts 'maimed and stunted' and rebuked Farrar, Straus and Giroux for choosing to publish the volume. But the posthumous publication of drafts is hardly an uncommon practice. What exactly is it about publishing her drafts that seems so troubling to so many?

i. Just bits you sell in passing as you fall.
Few SM fans extend to drilling teeth,
but you don't stop. It seems to be your call-
ing. I command you: Stop. Come lay one wreath,
just one, to lay your longings out to rest.
They've run from dawn to vespers. There's the bell.
You always ran to put yourself to test,
but shadows lengthen. Longings like yours dwell
too long in skulls like yours, and drive men mad.
El Cid would dream like you, but then would act —
while you but scream in slumber. If you had
his energy, you'd long ago have packed
your weapons, and have died in one last bout.
The theory: Go inside. Grab. Fetch it out.
[...]

Twelve fellows were chosen (down from the usual 20; the [45th UP National Writers Workshop] itself was cut down to a week from the usual two):
Bernice C. Roldan (UP Diliman, fiction in English);
Jimmuel C. Naval (UP Diliman, fiction in Filipino);
Zosimo E. Quibilan, Jr. (ADMU, fiction in Filipino);
Raymond John A. de Borja (UP Diliman, poetry in English);
Joel M. Toledo (UP Diliman, poetry in English);
Lourd Ernest H. de Veyra (UST/UP Diliman, poetry in English);
Ariel Dim. Borlongan (FEATI University, poetry in Filipino);
Paolo M. Manalo (UP Diliman, poetry in Filipino);
Allan B. Lopez (UP Diliman, drama);
Liza Magtoto (UP Diliman, drama);
Mario I. Miclat (UP Diliman, creative nonfiction in English)
Virginia M. Villanueva (UP Diliman, creative nonfiction in English).

On Sunday 2 July, Magma is sponsoring the reading by Don Paterson, Ledbury Festival's Poet in Residence.

Six young poets have written works taking a look at Welsh politics to be performed at the new Senedd building.

We wish to appoint an experienced Researcher to work with an archive in relation to the writer, Laura Riding Jackson. Ideally you will have proven experience in the research of American modernist poetry and you will be a specialist in the work of Laura Riding Jackson.

Her pen-name for the competition was 'Rhywun Arall' (Someone Else). She said this was not a reference to someone else having eventually won the crown last year, when her pen name had been 'Hywel Gwynfryn'.

"now hay(na)ku friendly"

This year's Griffin competition, the sixth, attracted 444 submissions from 20 countries. The founder opened the candle-lit evening, which had a Silk Road theme in the food and décor, by welcoming guests from Europe, the United States and other parts of Canada.

"It's a bit like sex. You know, you enjoy it more. You know a little bit more about how to keep it going. This is quite general and glib, but in the beginning you write for the high of finishing it, of getting through. Now the reward is feeling that you're on the right track and can work at it. But, even having said that, paradoxically, the quicker the better. Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep."