dumbfoundry

Maureen Cannon, a heavy hitter in the world of light verse who in the last four decades published more than 1,000 poems, most written in under a minute, died on Thursday at her home in Wyckoff, N.J. She was 84 and had lived in Ridgewood, N.J., for many years. [...]

In 'Kannadi Thundugalum Malligai Pookalum' ('Glass Pieces and Jasmine Flowers'), poet Vatsala plainly foregrounds the complexity of themes in her work: "Forgive me...," she writes, "My poems/like pieces of glass soaked in blood and pus/tire you./Exhausted after a day's work,/reclining in an easy chair/what you need/are beautiful poems/that caress your heart."

Such complexity runs through the works of several contemporary poets who weave together the personal and political in their writing. Five such women writers came together to read their poems on January 17, 2007, at the Alliance Francaise auditorium in Chennai. [...]

More than 30 Minnesota women poets will read at Open Book on Saturday, celebrating publication of a new anthology to which they contributed, and Thom Tammaro, co-editor of "To Sing Along the Way," can't remember the last time so many women poets agreed to gather for a local event. [...]

[...] Perhaps as a corrective and a cautionary, "The Bourgeois Poet" should be taught to the thousands taking M.F.A.'s in creative writing who wish to become poet-professors. As I said I tried it myself but found the work too hard. There’s a subdued but relentless hurly-burly in academia that swallows up discretionary time. It's like living with a slight backache, not fatal but enervating. Besides, academic salaries are falling behind and it's become questionable if poet-professors have truly achieved bourgeois status. Maybe lumpen bourgeois. [...]

The legacy of the great Italian poet Torquato Tasso, once considered almost a peer of Dante, is hiding in plain sight. Although he is no more than a footnote today, he was once wildly popular, quoted by philosophers, emulated by poets, and a source of inspiration to painters and composers. Even his sad and tormented life was an obsession for the romantics, inspiring a play by Goethe, a poem by Byron, a painting by Delacroix and a symphonic study by Liszt.

The characters who romped across the pages of Tasso's 1575 masterpiece, the epic poem "Gerusalemme Liberata," ("Jerusalem Delivered") live and breathe still, in paintings by Nicolas Poussin and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, who captured them redolent with sexuality and pink-hued youth. And from the earliest days of opera in the 17th century, composers have turned to Tasso's intertwined tales of romance and heroism. Handel, Haydn, Rossini, even Dvorak wrote operas based on Tasso's amorous young things: the knights Rinaldo and Tancred, and their paramours Armida and Clorinda. If you've been to a museum, or to a concert of Italian madrigals, you know them well, even if you've never heard of the poet whose former fame is as astonishing as his current oblivion.

On Saturday, the Washington area's best period instruments group, Opera Lafayette, will give the first musical installment of something it calls "The Armida Project," a look at two immensely influential and beautiful operas based on the sorceress who is perhaps Tasso's most enduring character. [...]

Burma’s poet laureate Tin Moe is dead, and Burmese people at home and abroad are still sending condolences and holding ceremonies in Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Europe and California, where he died last Monday.

In Burma, artists, writers, poets, film directors and literary masters, including Ludu Daw Amar and others, expressed sadness and sorrow—except for the military rulers.

The regime still wants to distance itself from Burma’s "revolutionary poet" who stalwartly sided with Burma’s democratic movement and detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Colleagues said the regime’s newspapers won’t publish an obituary for Tin Moe, who died at age 74. The news of the poet's death first reached Burma through Burmese shortwave radio stations based in the West. [...]

The secretary of the First Fajr Poetry Festival would like to make it a major event for Iranian poets every February.

"We see filmmakers rushing to send their works to the Fajr film festival. We hope the Fajr Poetry Festival becomes a major concern for Iranian poets," Alireza Qazveh said at a meeting with the organizers of the festival in Mashhad on Friday.

The provinces of Khorasan Razavi, Fars, and Isfahan will host the festival from February 5 to 12. [...]

For the last two weeks, I’ve been teaching a Poetry Class on the Northern New Mexico’s College Campus in El Rito and have realized their library is nil to nada. Granted there are many helpful books in the library (I did see a collected Plath), but the library is lacking those books that you and I have read that have turned the power on, and helped us see ourselves, others, or the world(s) in neon. Fiction, History, Art (anyone have an extra Ernst book?). Basically, send anything.

Kazim Ali, you brilliant devil! He's the third person I've known to go on Jeopardy, and the second poet. Finally, a monetary value gets attached to skill with wordplay...

Three-month residency for a writer based in Scotland

May, June and July 2007
Deadline for Applications: 15 February 2007

We invite applications from individuals who write in any form, including prose (fiction and non-fiction), in poetry or drama.

The Scottish Arts Council funds four other three-month residencies, one of which is for an international writer, whose residency will run almost concurrently with that of the Scottish writer. We anticipate that this will enhance the experience of both artists, as will the turnover of crafts, performing and visual artists, who altogether make up a community of ten people at any one time.

The writer will be provided with a fee of £3,900, accommodation on site (which includes a workspace), the support of Cove Park’s staff and access to all of the organisation’s facilities.

On Friday, January 26 at 8pm, poets Ron Padgett and Kenward Elmslie will be reading at the Albright-Knox to help celebrate the opening of Joe Brainard, People of the World: Relax! at the UB Art Gallery. Both prominent members of the New York School of poets, which included luminaries such as John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara and Ted Berrigan, Elmslie and Padgett were close friends and sometime collaborators of the late painter and writer Joe Brainard, whose work will be on display at the UB Art Gallery through March 3. I recently had a chance to interview Ron Padgett via email. [...]

Limpopo author, poet and activist Vonani Bila was tossed into a Kenyan cell on Saturday when airport officials refused to accept his passport.

Bila, who was invited to attend the World Social Forum (WSF) in Nairobi, says he was held for three hours in a cell at Jomo-Kenyatta Airport and "treated like a hooligan." [...]

For the first time, the city will host an International Bengali Poetry festival held in collaboration with the Eastern Zonal Cultural Centre (EZCC) and the International Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) from January 27.

The three-day festival will be inaugurated by Information and Broadcasting Minister P R Dasmunshi at the EZCC complex and 'Aikatan' at Salt Lake here.

Over 400 Bengali poets are expected to take part in the festival "which will be the largest of its kind ever held anywhere," according to the International Bengali Poetry Festival Committee. [...]

Well-known Burmese poet U Tin Moe, or Ba Gyan, died in a Los Angeles hospital on Monday afternoon after collapsing at a tea shop.

U Tin Moe was considered the greatest Burmese poet and writer of his generation. He was jailed by the Burmese military in 1991 before leaving the country in 1999 for Belgium, Norway and later the US. [...]

A long-standing supporter of Burma's pro-democracy movement U Tin Moe was highly regarded for his satirical and strongly worded political pieces. Both his name and his poems are banned in Burma.

Publishing another male poet sort of puts me in a bind. I don't want to be perceived as a press that only publishes male poets. I have a special interest in publishing a book by a female poet next. Before I start reading submissions for the next contest entries, I'd like to read manuscripts from female poets.

Please send manuscripts of 65 - 90 pages to:

three candles press
PO Box 1817
Burnsville MN 55337

TEA PARTY magazine seeks submissions of fiction, poetry, photography, visual art, comics, and feature essays for its upcoming issue #17, to be published in Summer 2007. As a non-profit arts & culture magazine based in Oakland and San Francisco, we publish work by writers, artists, intellectuals, and activists from diverse cultures, communities, and fields of study. Our core focus is the intersection of creativity and social justice. We are distributed in independent bookstores both nationally and in Canada.

If you've never read Tea Party before, we strongly suggest you check out sample content at www.tparty.org or www.teapartymagazine.org to get a sense of what we publish. Or, better yet, call your local independent bookstore and pick up an issue. For submission guidelines see our website or send a SASE to the address below.

Our theme for Issue #17 is TRANS• in all its many shades of meaning. As a prefix or abbreviation, TRANS• can mean "across, beyond, through, on or to the other side, into another state or place, change, the opposite side of," or can even refer to something farther and allow us to experience new, in-between states. What does TRANS• mean to you? What words or associations does it conjure? Here are just a few possibilities:
TRANS• lation
TRANS• formation
TRANS• ition
TRANS• cultural
TRANS• cendence
TRANS• gender
TRANS• fer
TRANS• portation
TRANS• position
TRANS• generational
TRANS• action
TRANS• cription
TRANS• mission
TRANS• ence
TRANS• plant
TRANS• parency
TRANS• fat
TRANS• creation

How does TRANS• speak to our experience as individuals and as communities, and what meaning does TRANS• have for us as a society at this particular point in history? We welcome other ways you can think of to relate to this theme. Surprise us!

In the centenary year of the births of WH Auden and Louis MacNeice, celebrations are scheduled for both. In many ways Auden might seem the stronger candidate; but there are signs, some of them coming from Ireland and its jealous feuds, that MacNeice is going to have just as much attention. [...]

In his lifetime, he was sometimes treated as just one leg of Roy Campbell's composite caricature creature "MacSpaunday", along with his fellow "30s" poets - Spender, Auden, Day Lewis. But since his unexpected death in his mid-50s in September 1963 (he was the first of the four to die), there has been little doubt that the star of his reputation has been rising. This new and very handsome Collected Poems is one sign. [...]

Greek scholar Marina Theocharidou believes that Iran's Abolqasem Ferdowsi is a poet for all times. At the Ferdowsi and Homer Conference that opened at Athens' National Research Foundation on January 19, Theocharidou said, "Ferdowsi is a poet of all eras, who expressed the idea that good and evil guarantee or endanger man's happiness." [...]

Ferdowsi (940?-c.1020?) has been called the Homer of Persia. He was born near Tus in the Khorasan region and married at the age of 28. About eight years later he began the work for the "Shahnameh" ("Book of Kings"). It took Ferdowsi 35 years to complete the great epic poem.

The "Shahnameh" contains 60,000 rhyming couplets, making it more than seven times the length of Homer's "Iliad".

QUETTA: Literary circles in Balochistan condemned the arrest of prominent nationalist Balochi language poet Mubarak Qazi at a meeting of the Executive Council of the All Balochistan Academy in Turbat on Saturday.

Qazi, who is widely known for his rhetoric against military operations in the province, was arrested from Pasni in Gwadar district and has been held by police for many months. His family and fans accuse the government of registering fake cases against him.

Dr Hanif Sharif, a Balochi poet who was also allegedly held, tortured and then released by intelligence agencies in November 2005 for his anti-government works, presided over the meeting. [...]

[...] In his latest poetry volume, Tender Moments, Osundare, one of the most celebrated poets in Nigeria and Africa, sacrifices his characteristic overt cerebral poetry replete with political agitation and social engagement for love poetry. This has come as a big surprise. Osundare admits the surprise is at two levels: subject matter and thematic focus.

The poet speaks with inflection, “This is certainly my first love poetry volume, but not my first love poems. Virtually every volume of poetry I have produced has one thing or another to do with love. Even when I am talking politics, there are times I talk politics in romantic terms. Thus, the love we have for our country intermeshes with the love we have for our lovers. We cannot separate the two. So, there is some kind of surprise at that level. [...]

Part of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival's intent is to present poets that can engage the audience.

"Generosity is key to teaching," says festival creator Miles Coon. "Tom Lux is generous with his time; he responds to e-mails. His sign up sheet was filled with names who weren't his students. He's a phenomenally generous teacher."

For years, Lux taught at Sarah Lawrence, but in the recent past he's been happily ensconced at Georgia Tech. Tom Lux has published 17 books of poetry, been a Guggenheim fellow and, in 1995, won the prestigious Tufts Award for poetry. Herewith, some excerpts from a recent conversation. [...]

£1400 FIRST PRIZE

The main rules are very simple:
1. The poem can be on any subject and must be your own original work.
2. It must be exactly 14 lines long (excluding title).
3. It must be written in English.
4. You must never have received any kind of payment, however small, for the poem.
5. There is no limit to the number of entries by any poet.
6. Entrants must be over 16 years of age on 10th January 2007.

Jenny Boully's [one love affair]* nominated for five Coldfront Awards: Best New Book of the Year; Best Second Book; Best Book-Length Poem; Best First Lines; Best Technical Innovation.

[...] Nagra is that rare thing: an unknown poet whose debut collection is being published by Faber, Britain's leading poetry house. [...]

Poet Mohsin Bhopali died at PNS Shifa Hospital of pneumonia on Tuesday. He was 74. He left behind his wife, four sons and two daughters.

Born in Bhopal, Mohsin Bhopali started composing verses in 1948 and became a disciple of Seemab Akbarabadi and Saba Mathravi. He later migrated to Pakistan. Bhopali made his mark in poetry with ghazals, but gradually won acclaim in other forms with his versatility.

It was his consummate skill in Haiko that established him as a master. He had the distinction of being Pakistan's first Urdu poet to write Haiko. He set another trend in Urdu poetry with Nazmaney -- a form improvised by him. [...]

This is a themed blog (poems about poetry) that will lead to a print anthology. Dan Waber invited five of his favorite poets to send him an ars poetica they'd written along with the names and email addresses of five other poets. He then invited those twenty-five poets to do the same. He then invited those hundred and twenty-five poets to do the same. He then invited...you get the picture.

Every poem submitted will appear on this blog, one per day. The print anthology will be published by Paper Kite Press when the editors (Jennifer Hill-Kaucher and Dan Waber) determine that a book length collection of the very best of these poems exists, which, at a poem a day, is likely to take a year or more.

Japan's Royal Family showed off their poetry writing skills at a recent reading ceremony. Princess Kiko and Prince Hisahito reflected on one of their own traditional Japanese poems at the annual imperial verse reading ceremony on Monday. [...]

The pieces were all written in traditional tanka style - an ancient Japanese poetry form consisting of five-lines and 31-syllables. [...]

The University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Centre for Creative Arts will present a provocative line-up of poetry and film at this year's World Social Forum. The WSF, hosted between 20-25 January in Kenya - its first time in Africa - will see more than 80 000 people from global civil society descend on Nairobi to actively engage with the social struggles facing the world today. [...]

The poetry component is a satellite project hosted by Poetry Africa, which last year celebrated its 10th year. Participating poets include Dennis Brutus (South Africa), Chiwoniso (Zimbabwe), Susan Kiguli (Uganda), Lebogang Mashile (South Africa), Bantu Mwuara (Kenya), Pitika Ntuli (South Africa), and Shailja Patel (Kenya). Entitled Poetic Perspectives on Migration, the poetry performances will take place on 19th January at the GoDown Arts Centre in Nairobi and on 23rd January at a World Social Forum venue. [...]

Farewell ceremony with the People’s poet Nabi Khazri was held in the Azerbaijan State National Academic Drama Theater, APA reports. Deputy Prime Minister, people’s writer Elchin Efendiyev said that it is a great loss for the Azerbaijani literature and culture. [...]

Poet and novelist Carlos Nejar, born and raised in the city of Porto Alegre, is a grandson of Lebanese and Syrians. He was born listening to his grandfather speaking in Arabic and participating in colony parties. Nejar is considered one of the great Brazilian poets. In an interview to ANBA, he discussed the Arab influence on his work.

From the publication of her first collection, Only a Rose for Support (1957) onwards, Hilde Domin, who has died aged 96, won almost every German literary and cultural award, including the Rilke, Nelly Sachs and Hölderlin prizes. In an era of prose, her distinctive poetry rapidly attained the status of modern classic in her homeland. Direct and affectingly simple, her work elicited a rare warmth of emotional response beyond the narrow confines of the academy. "A refugee from the east," she once wrote, "can recognise himself in my poems as much as an intellectual." [...]

The National Endowment For the Arts Announces 2005 Recipients of the nation's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. Among the 12 winners was Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman, Yiddish singer, songwriter, poet. This is the first time that a Yiddish writer or singer has received this prestigious award. The fellowship includes an award of $20,000, a ceremony on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. and a performance. [...]

It is his 12th collection of poems, and harks back to a summer in the early 1960s when he spent rush hours travelling to work on the District and Circle line of the London Underground.

The grapevine says the city’s English poetry scene is obsolete. On the contrary, says poet Arundhathi Subramaniam. [...]

Why on earth would an Indian choose to write English poetry? [...]

"I began to imagine his life," said [W.T. Pfefferle], "and although I have never done it this way before, I just started to create a life for him. I knew he had a wife and a son. I knew something about his world and I just began to write poem after poem that explored his world."

ROME (AP)—Dante Alighieri, traditionally portrayed as a stern figure with a large hooked nose, is now showing a softer side, thanks to a reconstruction of his face by Italian scientists.

In most artistic Renaissance renditions, the most distinguishing features of the author of 'The Divine Comedy were a prominent nose and lower lip and a generally severe expression.

The new face—based on drawings, measures of Dante's skull by a professor in the 1920s, a plaster model and computer technology—shows softer traits: large eyes, a rounded jaw and a gentler expression, although the nose remains crooked.

'He looks like a man who lived in the world, who had his share of bad luck and sorrows,'' said Francesco Mallegni, an anthropologist and professor at Pisa University who reconstructed the Florentine poet's head with a team of experts.

A book printed on rhamnoneuron paper with autographs of 200 poets will be a special gift for poetry lovers from the HCM City Writers’ Association on Vietnam Poetry Day in 2007.

“Each poet will write down on a page of rhamnoneuron paper his or her favorite poems, stanzas, or even short lines as well as signature. We will put each page on a hard piece of paper board and make an A3-size book,” said Poet Truong Nam Huong, the representative of the poetry department of the HCM City Writers’ Association. [...]

University researchers have been awarded a grant of almost £900,000 to produce a new edition of the works of a medieval 'giant' of Welsh poetry.

Rare item for the collector. This typed manuscript of a poem titled THE STOLEN MOUNTAIN has the author's famous poet DOUGLAS STEWART'S explanations hand written underneath. Circa 1950s.

A group show of work by 40 international artists dealing with the themes of fear and distrust, set against the backdrop of the War on Terror and its social repercussions, Paranoia is presented as a challenge. It is "surely a concern that contemporary art in the UK has been approaching these issues to a lesser extent than abroad", suggests the curator in his statement, identifying political naivete as the reason for this failure to engage.

On this showing, good taste may be a more likely explanation. [...]

Renowned nawayat poet Shabbir Baida expired in the night falling between wednesday and thursday at 2:15am. He was 61. As reported earlier, he was seriously injured in an accident on 3 April 2005 in Dubai while crossing the road. He was immediately rushed to the Dubai Government Rashid Hospital. He had fit attack soon thereafter, after which he lapsed into coma. He died without recovering consciousness since then. He was shifted to Bhatkal on 27 September 2005 but didn't recover and last night he breath his last in this world. [...]

Snare Books invites entries for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. The prize is awarded annually to the best poetry manuscript by an emerging Canadian writer (who has published two books or less).

ONE of the country's biggest arts centres, Amakhosi Theatre and Township Square, will this year introduce a storytelling and poetry festival on Heroes Day.

The inaugural festival will be held at the Matabeleland North provincial capital, Lupane, at the Hall and Mqoqi Centre.

The project is part of Amakhosi's vision of developing arts and discovering hidden talent in remote areas as well as avail opportunities for artistic development and growth nationwide. [...]

A little-known poet who was turned down by a succession of publishers beat competition from several literary heavyweights, including the Nobel prizewinner Seamus Heaney, to win a prestigious literature award yesterday.

John Haynes collected the poetry prize in the Costa Book Awards, formerly the Whitbread Book Awards, for Letter to Patience, set in a small, mud-walled bar in northern Nigeria at a time of political unrest. [...]

'Writing poetry is an unnatural act. It takes great skill to make it seem natural,' she wrote. 'Most of the poet's energies are really directed towards this goal: to convince himself (perhaps, with luck, eventually some readers) that what he's up to... is really an inevitable, only natural way of behaving under the circumstances.'

Registrations are now open for Midsumma Festivals premier event Out Poetry Now!, a two part series workshop with one of Australia's best experimental poets, Michael Farrell. [...]

Excited: that’s the way you feel when an Osundare refers to you as the new Bernth Lindfors of African literature. Amanze Akpuda has slogged out his guts in literary criticism to earn such a rare endorsement from the acclaimed bard. Often when others hardly say that everything in the garden is not rosy for contemporary Nigerian literature, Akpuda, through his compulsively reading essays and spellbinding lectures, whether at the ALA Conference in Accra, or ANA Convention in Yenagoa, holds forth for his contemporaries. [...]

Transnational poetic configurations are one of the most significant forms of contemporary writing in Britain. [...]

It may have taken two weeks for anyone to notice, but police are investigating the theft of a massive bronze statue of a Ukrainian poet from a local park. [...]

A Cameroonian poet and journalist has been charged and arrested for purposefully infecting several women with the HIV/AIDS virus.

Exiled in Poland, Simon Mol, 33, is accused of infecting at least four women who have informed authorities. The Warsaw prosecutor's office says the investigation is ongoing. [...]

An editor once rejected a poem of mine with the comment, “I don’t like poems that are about poetry.” I feel sorry for him, constricting his possible sources of pleasure in such an arbitrary way, just as I feel sorry for those who feel compelled to mutilate their bodies, abstain from alcohol or remain celibate. Poems that have some connection with human life are always fascinating to me, and to deny that poetry is part of human life seems a strange thing for a poetry editor to do.

The only son of Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet WB Yeats has died. [...]

AN anthology of more than 100 contemporary poems by 27 Bahraini writers will be published in English next year.

Pearl, Dreams of Shell showcases the work of Bahraini poets, who span several generations, from the youngest Sawsan Dahniem born in 1980 to the oldest Abdul Rahman Rafie in 1932. [...]

Reading Toronto states "the city is a book with 100,000 million poems." Torontoist is aware of many poems that have been written by Toronto poets, but thinks there is ample room in the GTA for a few more (maybe a million-or-two would improve the present un-poetic monstrosity that is Dundas Square). We're also curious to know where new poems are being written: During TTC commutes? On the picturesque grounds of Casa Loma? Under the Gardiner?

So, after much thought, we decided to create (and map out) a poetry contest with some great prizes (not to mention fame!) for the winner.

The Deets: Please send previously unpublished poems about Toronto, poems set in Toronto, and/or poems about Torontonians to poetry@torontoist.com. If the connection to our city in your poem isn't apparent, please divulge the pertinent Toronto details. We also want to know where your poem was written, so please indicate its co-ordinates (closest intersection is fine). One poem per person, under 100 lines, and please copy it to the body of your email or a Word .doc (.jpg or .pdf for visual poetry is great). The judging process will be blind, so please don’t put your name on attachments. No entry fee, of course.

Deadline: March 15, 2007. [...]

The birth of the bananaconda was an accident of insomnia, cable television, and tropical produce.

"Books happen in odd ways," said poet Jack Prelutsky, creator of the bananaconda, a constrictor with the skin of a fruit. [...]

Prelutsky was recently named the first ever "Children's Poet Laureate," by the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation. It's a title, complete with $25,000 cash prize and an inscribed medallion, he will hold for two years, a sort of blessed community service that compels him to give two major public readings and act as adviser, ambassador and pollinator of his art. [...]

Pay for the postage, and I'll stuff a big envelope full of as many of literary journals as I can (5 or 6 per envelope), and I'll include a returned copy of last summer's RATTLE.

The cross-country skier who fell through thin ice on Rangeley Lake was a Trinity College professor and poet, authorities said.

Hugh Ogden, 69, of Glastonbury, Conn., was crossing Rangeley Lake on cross-country skis to get to the mainland from his camp on Naramantic Island when he fell through the thin ice and drowned on Sunday, Maine Warden Service Sgt. John Blagdon said.

Ogden wrote several poetry books, won honors from the National Endowment for the Arts and Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize in Poetry. Last year, he was nominated to become Connecticut's poet laureate. [...]

"Graywolf Press in St. Paul, Minnesota, has completed a $1 million fundraising campaign, thanks largely to individual donors — a feat that has implications for other nonprofit literary presses, Minnesota Public Radio reports."