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"A new literary network revives an old Pashtun tradition."
"In a private house in a quiet university neighborhood of Kabul, Ogai Amail waited for the phone to ring. Through a plate-glass window, she watched the sinking sun turn the courtyard the color of eggplant. The electricity wasn’t working and the room was unheated, a few floor cushions the only furnishings. Amail tucked her bare feet underneath her and pulled up the collar of her puffy black coat. Her dark hair was tied in a ponytail, and her eyelids were coated in metallic blue powder. In the green glare of the mobile phone’s screen, her face looked wan and worried. When the phone finally bleeped, Amail shrieked with joy and put on the speakerphone. A teenage girl’s voice tumbled into the room. 'I’m freezing,' the girl said. Her voice was husky with cold. To make this call, she’d sneaked out of her father’s mud house without her coat.
Like many of the rural members of Mirman Baheer, a women’s literary society based in Kabul, the girl calls whenever she can, typically in secret. She reads her poems aloud to Amail, who transcribes them line by line. To conceal her poetry writing from her family, the girl relies on a pen name, Meena Muska. (Meena means 'love' in the Pashto language; muska means 'smile.')"
"I watch the woods for deer as if I’m armed.
I watch the woods for deer who never come.
I know the hes and shes in autumn
rendezvous in orchards stained with fallen
apples’ scent. I drive my car this way to work
so I may let the crows in corn believe
it’s me their caws are meant to warn,
and snakes who turn in warm and secret caves
they know me too. They know the boy
who lives inside me still won’t go away.
....."
"Because this evening Miss Hoang Yen
sat down with me in the small
tiled room of her family house
I am unable to sleep.
We shared a glass of cold and sweet water.
On a blue plate her mother brought us
cake and smiled her betel-black teeth at me
but I did not feel strange in the house
my country had tried to bomb into dust.
In English thick and dazed as blood
she told me how she watched our planes
cross her childhood’s sky,
all the children of Hanoi
carried in darkness to ..."
"There was another life of cool summer mornings, the dogwood air and the slag stink so gray like our monsoon which we loved for the rain and cool wind until the rot came into us. And I remember the boys we were the evening of our departure, our mothers waving through the train’s black pluming exhaust; they were not proud in their tears of our leaving, so don’t tell me to shut up about the war or I might pull something from my head, from my head, from my head that you ..."
" As the popular girl walks among us with the microphone,
most of our stories are about loss,
or include exquisitely precise
medical and pharmaceutical details,
as if the words could suture the wounds, or save us even one last breath.
I came to dance with the Puerto Rican women
of my class of 1967, and to ..."
"From a car, through a world that’s turned to corn, red barns, huge machinery, and a church that says, “Read the Bible, it will scare the hell out of you!”
From the banks of the Iowa River, where a snake comes out of the grass like a belt, testing the air with its buckle-tongue
From the Mark Twain Diner with a Mark Twain Burger and a Mark Twain cup of tea
From another car, Chicago’s stickleback in the rearview and the Lake’s blue lung swollen with fishing boats
From space, as in the installation by Aaron Koblin in the Museum of Modern Art that shows air traffic over the United States as colored lights, a slow firework spraying in and out during the day, careful and beautiful
From a tour boat in Chicago, where the not-half-decent docent tells us that this building has one hundred and ninety-eight floors, including parking, and was designed by, you guessed it, Merrill, Owings and Skidmore
From the booth of a bar with a sign that says, 'I’m Irish, what’s
your excuse?'
....."
"Jane Kenyon was born in 1947 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and grew up in the midwest. She earned a B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1970 and an M.A. in 1972. That same year, Kenyon married the poet Donald Hall, whom she had met while a student at the University of Michigan. With him she moved to Eagle Pond Farm in New Hampshire. During her lifetime Jane Kenyon published four books of poetry—Constance (1993), Let Evening Come (1990), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), and From Room to Room (1978)—and a book of translation, Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova (1985). In December 1993 she and Donald Hall were the subject of an Emmy Award-winning Bill Moyers documentary, 'A Life Together.' At the time of her death from leukemia, in April 1995, Jane Kenyon was New Hampshire's poet laureate. A fifth collection of Kenyon's poetry, Otherwise: New and Selected Poems, was released in 1996, and in 1999, Graywolf Press issued A Hundred White Daffodils: Essays, Interviews, the Akhmatova Translations, Newspaper Columns, and One Poem."
"The first hot April day the granite step
was warm. Flies droned in the grass.
When a car went past they rose
in unison, then dropped back down. . . . ....."
"Today is April 1st and the start of one of our favorite months. It is National Poetry Month! In April every year, the Academy of America Poets celebrates Poetry Month. On the Poets.org site it states, "Inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, National Poetry Month is now held every April, when publishers, booksellers, literary organizations, libraries, schools and poets around the country band together to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American culture. "
Beyond the waves that lap the sandy beaches
my balcony looks down on, there must be
no distant shoreline, only open sea
that stretches toward the west until it reaches
the sky to make an infinite horizon,
....
"In Szymborska surface is depth, the path of negation has the effect of a quiet but tremendous explosion of being. "My identifying features / are rapture and despair". The farther in one travels among the clear mirrors of her language pictures - crystalline clarity that in some way exists to lead one to a final enigma - the more one feels the world's obtrusive unambiguousness being transformed. A shimmer of wonder and of particulars hovers over the world's motionless base of rock, to whom she gives voice:
"I don't have a door", says the stone.
I would sum up Wislawa Szymborska's undertaking as a deeply transformative word-work with the state of the world. One that is best summarized in her own words in the poem Discovery:
I believe in the refusal to take part.
I believe in the ruined career.
I believe in the wasted years of work.
I believe in the secret taken to the grave.
These words soar for me beyond all rules
without seeking support from actual examples.
My faith is strong, blind, and without foundation."
"And who's this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?
That's tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers' little boy!
Will he grow up to be an LL.D?
Or a tenor in Vienna's Opera House?
Whose teensy hand is this, whose little ear and eye and nose?
Whose tummy full of milk, we just don't know:
printer's, doctor's, merchant's, priest's?
Where will those tootsy-wootsies finally wander?
To a garden, to a school, to an office, to a bride?
Maybe to the Burgermeister's daughter?
Precious little angel, mommy's sunshine, honey bun.
While he was being born, a year ago, ...."
"Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence-this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word "woods."
Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.
Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with ...."
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"Many things in the world have
already happened. You can
go back and tell about them.
They are part of what we
own as we speed along
through the white sky.
But many things in the world
haven't yet happened.
....."
"Never mind what you think.
The old man did not rush
Recklessly into the coop the last minute.
The chickens hardly stirred
For the easy way he sang to them.
Red sun is burning out
Past slag heaps of the mill. The old man
Touches the blade of his killing knife
With his fat thumb.
I’m in the backyard on a quilt
Spread out under the heavy dark plums
He cooks for his whiskey.
He walks among the hens singing..."
"That night we drank warm whiskey
in our parked car
beyond woods now lost to the suburbs,
I fell in love with you.
What waited was the war ..."
"Bruce Weigl (born January 27, 1949, Lorain, Ohio) is an American contemporary poet who teaches at Lorain County Community College. Weigl enlisted in the United States Army shortly after his 18th birthday and spent three years in the service. He served in the Vietnam War from December 1967 to December 1968 and received the Bronze Star . When he returned to the United States, Weigl obtained a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College,[1] and a Master of Arts Degree in Writing/American and British Literature from the University of New Hampshire. From 1975-76, Weigl was an instructor at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio.
Weigl's first full-length collection of poems, A Romance, was published in 1979. After he received a Ph.D. from the University of Utah in 1979, he was an assistant professor of English at the University of Arkansas and later held the same position at Old Dominion University. Weigl additionally served as the president of the Associated Writing Programs.[2]
During the 1980s, Weigl published two more poetry collections, The Monkey Wars and Song of Napalm. In 1986, Weigl became an associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and was later promoted to a professor of English.[3] In 1999, he published two more poetry collections, Archeology of the Circle: New and Selected Poems and After the Others. He left Penn State in 2000 and took a position at Lorain County Community College as a distinguished professor."
Gerald Stern, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the first Poet Laureate of New Jersey, is among the newly announced, 2012 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
"We can learn a lot about poetry from the way that poets read their poetry. I have always loved reading the beat poets because of the natural musicality in the poems. Listening to the recordings that they made can make the poetry come to life all the more. When I first listened to the recording of American Haikus by Jack Kerouac, and its accompaniment by Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, I was beside myself that a poet could be so lively and serious in the same recording. Kerouac had a voice that was created to read poetry, which also made his prose reading come alive. Not all poets are blessed in the way that Kerouac and the other beats were. Some poets read their work and make you think they want to put you to sleep. It is possible to learn from even these poets, though. When we listen to dull poetry readings, we can ask ourselves why the poem fell flat? Was it the poem or the reading that made it dull? What part, if any, peaked your interest? Why? Why was your interest not sustained?"
"There's just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.
And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest garment,..."
"Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come. ....."
A whole new freshman class
of leaves has arrived on the dark twisted branches
we call our woods, turning green now—color of
anticipation. In my 76th year, .....
"I've mentioned inspiration. Contemporary poets answer evasively when asked what it is, and if it actually exists. It's not that they've never known the blessing of this inner impulse. It's just not easy to explain something to someone else that you don't understand yourself.
When I'm asked about this on occasion, I hedge the question too. But my answer is this: inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."
There aren't many such people. Most of the earth's inhabitants work to get by. They work because they have to. They didn't pick this or that kind of job out of passion; the circumstances of their lives did the choosing for them. Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring - this is one of the harshest human miseries. And there's no sign that coming centuries will produce any changes for the better as far as this goes.
And so, though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings."
"I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of ...."
"Write it down. Write it. With ordinary ink
on ordinary paper; they weren't given food,
they all died of hunger. All. How many?
It's a large meadow. How much grass
per head? Write down: I don't know.
History rounds off skeletons to zero.
A thousand and one is still only a thousand.
That one seems never to have existed:
a fictitious fetus, an empty cradle,
a primer opened for no one,
air that laughs, cries, and grows,
stairs for a void bounding out to the garden,
no one's spot in the ranks.
It became flesh right here, on this meadow.
But the meadow's silent, ....."
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