dumbfoundry

The Sixth Annual Meritage Press Babaylan Speaks Holiday Poetry Contest, for Filipino poets. Deadline: 31 December 2006

Deranged: Poems on Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. Deadline: 31 December 2006

Other Voices' 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets. Deadline: 1 January 2007

Linh Dinh: "Soon, I can see it coming, someone will publish a poem in a legit journal, an entire book even, composed with a poetry software."

The lady on the desk seems torn between taking me seriously and sliding her hand towards the panic button. I'm in the reading room of the British Library and I've just asked to see the original manuscript of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Behind me, a couple of dozen readers, poring over ancient maps and documents, have overheard my outrageous request and have raised their eyes to just over the rim of their spectacles. The lady says, "You do realise it is one of our most priceless possessions?" [...]

I've never been in the British Library before, and with my new membership card laminated less than an hour ago, I'm beginning to wish that was still the case. At this stage, the best course of action would be to say something like, "My name is Simon Armitage, I'm a published poet, and I've been commissioned to translate the poem." [...]

"There are 12 illustrations," I tell her, attempting to demonstrate some knowledge of the manuscript, but then the Alan Bennett in me tells me I might have been a little abrupt, so I qualify this with, "I think."

The lady says, "We have some nice postcards of them. You can buy them downstairs in the gift shop." Ten minutes later I'm on a bench at King's Cross waiting for the next train. From a little paper bag I pull out six or seven postcards. The lady was right. They are indeed very nice, and beautifully reproduced. [...]

Well-known konkani poet Henry Mendonca (Known as HM) has been selected as the 'DAAIZ POET OF THE YEAR 2006' in the online konkani poetry-writing contest 'Tinteranth Pinturam' conducted by DAAZ.COM. He will receive prize amount of Rs.7500 and a certificate during Daaiz Literary workshop 2007 in India. [...]

Kolkata, December 17: In a bid to preserve the ancestral property of late poet and Sahitya Academy winner Binay Majumdar, located in Thakurnagar Simulpur area in North 24- Parganas, the residents of the area are now demanding that the state government take over the property. The common people are apprehensive that the property spread over six bighas with six rooms will now fall into the hands of miscreants and get ruined. [...]

Yeh mein hoon, yeh tu hai, aur beech mein hai sapna.

The immortal words in which noted Punjabi litterateur Amrita Pritam once described her relationship with Imroz, a man much younger and a partner for over four decades.

In the city on Saturday, Imroz described Amrita as: "Tuu akhar akhar kavita te kavita kavita zindagi".

A well-known painter who worked for several Urdu magazines as an illustrator before he joined Amrita Pritam to bring out the renowned Punjabi literary magazine, 'Nagmani', Imroz said he took to writing poetry only after Pritam's death. "Pehlan kavita us vich utradi see te hun kagaz te (earlier, my poetry lived her, and now it does on paper)," he said today.

Talking about his relationship with Pritam, Imroz said: “We never used the word 'love' for the two of us. This concept of 'I love you' is very filmy, and I never fell in love with Amrita Pritam on first sight. [...]

Loquats, the strange Bermudian use of the word 'to', and water from rooftops were just some of the concepts that baffled Jamaican writer and professor Mervyn Morris when he was asked to select poems for a new Bermudian anthology of poetry.

Still, Mr. Morris said the best poetry shone right through the veil of vernacular.
Mr. Morris read 400 entries and selected 80 of the best for the Bermuda Anthology of Poetry produced by the Ministry of Community & Cultural Affairs. The book was launched at a special reading held at Berkeley Institute last Sunday. [...]

He said issues of identity, class, religion and landscape appeared over and over again in the Bermudian poems he read. He was also surprised by the number of poems about incest. [...]

Reb Livingston, poetry powerhouse and small press visionary, stops by today to give us her 'best of' gift list as we enter the holiday season.

J D McClatchy damns Sylvia Plath as "spoiled, petulant, phony, cold, ambitious" then asks, "Can Hughes (her husband) himself have been a bowl of cherries?" Mischievously, this quote appears directly below a passage of Ted Hughes on Plath.

He lived in Devon for almost 40 years, until his death in 1998. He loved the county, and particularly Dartmoor and it's there, in one of the most remote areas, a great granite stone inscribed with his name has been placed [...]

The voice of poet Sameeh Al Qasem spread throughout the Shepherd Hotel and into Bethlehem's night sky. The occasion was the opening of the sixth annual Jerusalem poetry, literature and creative cultural forum. [...]

The poet Ali Ahmad Sa'id (b. 1930), known by his pseudonym "Adonis," a 2005 candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, left his native Syria for Lebanon in the 1950s following six months' imprisonment for political activity. In 1973, he received his Ph.D. from St. JosephUniversity in Beirut; in 1985, he settled in Paris, where he now works as a writer and literary critic. Among other occupations, he has edited the modernist magazine Mawaqif (Viewpoints), and translated some of the great French poets into Arabic.

The following are excerpts from interviews with Adonis, which aired on ANB TV on November 26, 2006 and on Dubai TV on March 11, 2006.

This is a facsimile of Emily Dickinson's herbarium -- the dried, pressed plant collection that she made as a teenager -- and includes an introduction by Dickinson scholar Richard B. Sewall and a catalogue of the plants by Ray Angelo, of Harvard University. The original is part of the collection of Dickinson's archives at Harvard's Houghton Library; it was little known until now, in part because it is so fragile that it has been kept under wraps. [...]

It contains 424 specimens on 66 pages. In an introduction, Sewall writes, "Take Emily's herbarium far enough, and you have her." [...]

Interestingly, she includes a flowering stalk of marijuana, presumably a lawful and openly grown herb in her day. [...]

[...] Factory School’s Southpaw Culture series has reissued a book far more obscure than Prairie Fire—a collection of anonymously authored inspirational/agitprop, and sometimes feminist, poems from the same period and presumably the same (and related) folks who, though dangerously misguided, and destructive for U.S. progressive politics, still smell sweeter than those in and around the U.S. government who worked to actively, and often violently, undermine democratic governments abroad and domestic protest at home. [...]

The failure of these poems is also the failure of the politics behind them, just as the failure of the politics is a failure of the poetics: the shackling of imagination to principle, the desperate need to be so clear and so accessible that nothing in particular is left to say, and an identification with the struggles of others so crushing that it fatally represses the struggles within oneself. This book provides telling evidence that you can judge a movement by its words, especially when the movement was primarily an act of rhetoric, a poem-in-action. [...]

The archives of poet Zbigniew Herbert were today handed over to the National Library in Warsaw by the poet's wife Katarzyna and sister Halina Herbert-?ebrowska.

The collection spans a considerable number of handwritten and typed scripts, including the famous "Cogito" cycle, as well as notes and drawings. [...]

WORK on a £1.3 million project to transform the historic home of poet John Clare into one of the region's premier tourist attractions is expected to begin in two months. [...]

If planning officers give the go-ahead ,work could start as soon as February and would be completed by April 2008. [...]

We turn to renowned poet and professor Martin Espada, who some call the Latino Poet of his generation. Martin Espada teaches creative writing and poetry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is the Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts. Just before the program we spoke with him on the line from Amherst and asked him to read a one of his poems to mark the death of Augusto Pinochet. [...]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the San Francisco poet, publisher, painter and founder of City Lights bookstore, is now a commander. A commandeur, actually.

The French government has given Ferlinghetti the title of Commandeur des Arts et Lettres, citing his poems such as ``A Coney Island of the Mind'' (1958) and his role in publishing Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg in the 1950s and '60s. The French consul general, Frederic Desagneaux, presented him with a medal and a Gallic hug during a reception Friday evening at the French consulate in San Francisco. [...]

We're looking for chapbooks of quality writing to place as e-chapbooks on our site. Our intention is to eventually publish them in print in cheap formats, probably around 200 copies. If we have funds, perhaps through fundraisers, we might go through Lulu to publish them or a look at a good local printer [...]

"Dear Filipino Poets:
You are invited to submit to a fun poetry contest. No submission fees. E-mail submissions. Details below:

SIXTH ANNUAL HOLIDAY POETRY CONTEST
Sponsors: Meritage Press
Judge: Michelle Bautista
Deadline: December 31, 2006

ABOUT THE JUDGE:
Gura Michelle Bautista is a 4th degree black belt in the Kamatuuran school of Kali under the direction of Tuhan Joseph T. Oliva Arriola. She teaches Kali in Oakland, CA. She recently released her inaugural book Kali’s Blade, a collection of poetry and prose. She is a SF Bay Area poet and performer, having worked with Kearney Street Workshop, Bindlestiff Studios, Asian American Theater Company, KulArts, and Teatro Ng Tanan. She has been published in Going Home To A Landscape, Babaylan, maganda magazine, Eros Pinoy, Asian Pacific American Journal, TMP Irregular and MiPoesias Magazine.

ABOUT THE CONTEST:
All poets are encouraged to submit by e-mailing 1 or 2 poems to MeritagePress@aol.com. (Send no more than 2 poems). Please present poems within the body of the email as we do not open attachments.) Please include your full name along with your e-mail address. However, the poems will be sent without your names to judge Michelle Bautista, thereby allowing the poems to be read on their own merit. All poets are welcome to submit — it doesn’t matter whether you’re established or emerging as the work is read on its own merit."

What's more, I am beginning to make sense of poems that I've always found tricky. The tightness and compactness of Shakespeare sonnets, for instance, dictates that, unless you are one of those freaks of nature who can soak this stuff up effortlessly, they take a depressingly long time to learn. But once you have them by heart - which is of course by head - the poems stay with you, resonating in what Seamus Heaney calls the echo chambers of the mind. They unfurl and display their self-delighting inventiveness: time and again, walking down the street, I have little insights and epiphanies.

International congress of prophetic poetry is a good opportunity for honored muslim poets to compose their clearest thoughts and be melodious with the scent of prophet of kindness for the paind ear of the world in a year which has been adorened by well _ known name of the great prophet ( god" s blessing be on him .)

All muslim poets have time to send their newest poems about the great prophet's tradition , virtues and dignity in one of these languages Persian , Arabic , English or turkish to the secretariat of prophetic poetry congress until 5 bahman 1385 ( 5 moharram 1428 _ 25 january 2007 ) . there is no limitation in the number and form of sent poems .

The board of judges will invite superior poets for participation in the congress which will be held near Imam Reza' s divine shrine .

And valuable presents will be granted to the owners of superior works and they will be published in the poem collection of this congress . [...]

For centuries, people in the northern hemisphere have been so entranced by aurora borealis, the eerie display of lights that invade their winter skies, that they wove myths and legends around these lights.

Colour Catchers, an all-star cast poetry performance that will be hosted on Dec. 12 by Leicestershire poet, Siobhan Logan, will be exploring some of these myths and legends. [...]

Known Ukrainian poet Dmytro Pavlychko made a speech, having noted that it is the first full height monument to the great writer ever erected in the south east of Ukraine. [...]

As a part of the Annual Ivan Franko Memorial Days in Lviv the day of Sunday, 30 May 2004, was set as the Open Doors' Day in Lviv Museum of Ivan Franko. It is not a mistake, just a reminder. Everyone could come to see for free the interior of the last shelter of a great person where Ivan Franko spent the last 14 years, probably, the most difficult years of his life. Here he slipped away at 4 pm on 28 May 1916 having no one of his big family at his side.

You see, everyone could come, but there were only THREE visitors this day. The first one was a reporter from Lviv "Vysoky Zamok" newspaper who was obliged to write an article. The second one was a little bit strange person who dropped in by chance - he actually was on his way home from a church - oh, yes, it was the day of Trinity holiday, one of the most important religious holidays of Ukrainian Christians. The thirds and virtually last (it was almost closed) where us... Couple of days later I asked myself: how many visitors come to the Museum on usual days?...

Altyd Jonker, a play paying tribute to the late Cape poet Ingrid Jonker, is being staged at the Oude Libertas Amphitheatre in Stellenbosch until Saturday.

The play claimed several awards at the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival this year, including kudos for its director and set design. It details the poet's life. [...]

Who is the best American poet writing today? Though the news will not be welcome to prize juries, literary philanthropists, and the people who choose the poems for the subway, I think it may be Frederick Seidel. There is a reason why Mr. Seidel, whose first book was published more than 40 years ago, has not accumulated the cargo of honors that turn so many poets his age into mere worthies: no Pulitzer, no National Book Award. Indeed, if you go to the "about the author" section of Mr. Seidel's new Web site, you will find no curriculum vitae at all. Instead, Mr. Seidel offers a clipping from a 1962 issue of the New York Times, about the controversy that resulted when a panel of poets chose his first collection, "Final Solutions," for the 92nd Street Y's inaugural poetry prize. Though the judges included Robert Lowell, the sponsor refused to publish the book, on the grounds that it libeled a living person. [...]

A Neolithic tomb in the Orkney Islands will provide an atmospheric backdrop to a poetry reading celebrating famed local poet and author George Mackay Brown. [...]

To write the Life of Thomas Hardy is an epic undertaking. [...]

One day in November 1912, Mrs Emma Hardy was decidedly off-colour. [...]

A slow mental deterioration over the course of some years, delusions of grandeur, perhaps a disorganized knee joint, pain of a degree sufficient to require treatment with an opiate, and at the end, back pain followed by sudden death: there has to be a strong suspicion that Emma had been suffering for years from neurosyphilis, may well have had incipient General Paralysis of the Insane and the lightning pains of Tabes Dorsalis, possibly Charcot’s Joint. Other pathologies could of course be invoked to explain one or other of her symptoms and illnesses over her latter years, but only quaternary syphilis would accommodate all of them under a single diagnostic umbrella. The cause of death was surely not gallstones, impacted or otherwise – it was much more likely to have been a ruptured aortic aneurysm, which in 1912 was again more likely than not to have been syphilitic in its aetiology. [...]

But is there any further evidence that this indeed had been the state of affairs, and Emma’s fate as I have suggested? We know for certain that at a particular point in their long, childless marriage Emma Hardy had withdrawn all affection from her husband, never to restore it. This seems to have occurred around 1891, some twenty-one years before her death. In his biography of Hardy, Michael Millgate mentions that Emma had a debilitating ’flu-like illness in the autumn of 1891 (not the season for true influenza) which could have been florid secondary syphilis, at which point the diagnosis may have been made. At about that time she began a diary, entitling it “What I think about my husband”; it was found and destroyed after her death. [...]

The 2006 Swedish Cikada Prize has been awarded to well-known Korean poet, Ko Un, a two-time nominee for the Nobel Prize for literature in 2005 and 2006. [...]

LESBIAN love scenes, three-in-a-bed romps and secret affairs - the legend of Dylan Thomas is about to get a warts-and-all Hollywood makeover. [...]

It features a fabled attack on the poet's home by Killick, involving a machine gun and the detonation of a hand grenade, which took place when Killick returned from abroad, only to hear neighbourhood gossip about his wife's behaviour. [...]

"At Christmas, we all ate together. My father's aversion to the noise of children, whereby he ate separately, was forgotten today. [...]

'The Who' guitarist Pete Townshend is convinced that he was a Sufi poet in his last life, especially after he "found himself" through the course of a "Muslim mission". [...]

"I was attracted to his interest of the Persian poets, so I went off to Islam and read a lot of Sufi writing and became utterly convinced in some previous life I'd been a Sufi. It explained why I do all that turning, which is done in Islamic prayer, on stage, and the windmill thing with my arm," Townshend said.

It's one thing to learn a foreign language well, quite another to learn it well enough to be able to feel in it, and harder still, if not impossible, to master an alien idiom so completely as to convey the force of what you feel. A few modern writers have made the leap: Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov in English, Samuel Beckett in French. But all three wrote their best work in prose. I can't think of a single poet, who has written great, or even noteworthy, poetry in a language other than his or her own. Poetry, it seems, can only be written well in one's mother tongue. This was the opinion of W.B. Yeats who dismissed Rabindranath Tagore's English verse, even though it won the Bengali poet a Nobel Prize. In our own day, one has only to read a few poems by the late Joseph Brodsky to realize that his English verse is, for the most part, hopelessly inept. Brodsky struggles constantly to escape the confinement of his adopted idiom but his English falters, always in small but fatal ways, in the process.

A subtler example is provided by the English poetry of the Austrian poet Rose Ausländer (1901-1988). [...]

John Steffler was announced Monday as Canada's third parliamentary Poet Laureate. Steffler, who lives in Montréal,Pauline Michel, who finished her two-year tenure last month. [...]

Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda has won the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's top literary award. [...]

Oswald LeWinter, Albert Einstein’s 75-year-old grandson, came to Istanbul to attend a conference entitled “Meetings at the Center of the World,” which is organized by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality.

According to a great number of eminent scholars and highly respected experts in Persian Literature and Poetry, there are many Iranian poets who can be considered as the Titans or the Kings of the Persian Poetry. The same groups of scholars and experts also believe that there are only five Iranian poets who are well known internationally and have influenced not only the Literature of their homeland, Iran, but they have also inspired the Literature of many other countries around the world. Those poets can be listed as Ferdowsi, Khayyam, Saadi, Mowlana Jalaledin Rumi, and Hafez. In this article, the life stories and the works of those famous poets as the First Iranian Kings of Persian Poetry are briefly studied and discussed. [...]

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said poetry is the emotional expression of justice seeking, God worshiping and love as the the three divine and human exalted values.

Addressing a group of scholars attending a seminar in Tehran to honor Iranian classical poet Beedel Dehlavi, the president said Iranian and Islamic civilization has nourished prominent personalities and has been a center for manifestation of exalted values. [...]

• justice seeking,
• God worshiping and
• love

"[...] 6. Realize that people want you to be a famous immortal poet.

Audiences want you to succeed. They want to have a good time, want you to be interesting, stimulating, informative, entertaining, and perhaps they even want you to be sexy in an intellectual-tweed-jacket kind of way. One technique often mentioned is to envision the audience naked. The audience knows this and they, in fact, are often envisioning you naked. Let this be a source of comfort to you."

We are not the only ones. This Garden is huge, and there are poets everywhere, under trees, on the grass, in front of benches and lakes on whose banks herons strut, both the famous and the less known, young and old and in between, men and women, Danes, Americans, Germans, Muslims, you name it, over a hundred of us. Staked in the grass before us, two signs announce our names, blue-inked in fat felt pen.

There's news here that is very difficult to report, which is that kari edwards died yesterday of a heart attack after struggling with a bout of pneumonia.

kari's work as a political activist and writer are remarkable and thankfully largely in print, and hir blog work re: gender issues, environmental issues, and the anti-war movement is accessible at Transdada.

Tuesday, December 5, 2006 6p-8p

A Fence Books Reading co-hosted by Christopher Stackhouse & Rebecca Wolff

If you're in town (NYC), please come and hear three excellent young poets.

Tina Brown Celona
Ariana Reines
Daniel Brenner

"I was a deep fan of this Pittsburgh Press poet, and I solicited him for his work. We struck up a conversation - me, a 20-something poet soon to graduate and he a retiring insurance agent.

He told me: avoid academia. AWP is evil. The only way to be true to your art is to create a tension against it in your day job.

At the time, I scoffed. I was going to be a Professor of Poetry.

It's 10 years after and counting. I never landed a teaching job after my Lecturer of English fellowship at Purdue. Instead, I've found a rewarding living as a copywriter . . . and playing in bands on the weekends.

That insurance agent Poet I scoffed at is Ted Kooser."

transdada
transsubMUTATION

Ron Silliman's post
Mark Young's post
Michelle Detorie's post
Chris Murray's post

Word for Word
in Tarpaulin Sky
Interview in Raintaxi
in the Poet's Corner

Her latest/last work

The writer will receive:

* A bursary of £3000, plus return travel costs from the USA to the Isle of Jura
* Accommodation in the Isle of Jura distillery lodge for the month of August 2007
* The option to bring family/partner (N.B. travel costs will only be covered for the writer)
* A hire car

Scottish Book Trust will also seek to negotiate the writer's agreement to:

* Produce one short story (or other piece of creative work) inspired by the retreat to be broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in May 2008 (subject to acceptance of work by BBC) and reproduced in a publication and/or online and/or via a podcast
* Acknowledge the Isle of Jura retreat and bursary in next published book/work
* Participate (potentially with other authors who carry out retreats) in an Isle of Jura event at Edinburgh International Book Festival in August 2007 (subject to EIBF agreement, all costs to the writer will be covered)
* Participate in a Tartan Week literary programme in New York (April 2007/April 2008, all costs to the writer will be covered)
* Collaborate with artist/printmaker from Glasgow Print Studios to make limited edition print inspired by the Isle of Jura


Criteria
Applications are open to writers of poetry and fiction resident in or from the USA, whose work has been published in English in both the USA and the UK.

Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda has won the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's top literary award.

The Poetry Archive celebrated its first anniversary today, unveiling on its website a selection of newly-recovered historic recordings of poets from Siegfried Sassoon to Stevie Smith.

Members of the Poetry Archive worked closely with staff at the BBC to retrieve the remarkable recordings, many of which were believed to have been lost forever. [...]