by Nonfiction Editor, Erin Blakeslee

Billy Collins, judge of Sycamore Review's 2008 Wabash Prize in Poetry, is featured on the cover of the new Poets & Writers (September/October 2008).  A charming profile by Elizabeth Kelley Gillogly in the magazine's print edition is well worth checking out.

Guidelines for the Wabash Prize in Poetry can be found here.

August Kleinzahler has a new book of poems reviewed at the NY Times. It looks pretty good.

Recently, I became aware of the anthology Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak. The title alone raised some red flags for me; I am accustomed to hearing of poems coming from a prison, but from a military torture facility? It seems Dan Chiasson of The New York Times had a similar reaction.  He wrote a review of the book ("Notes on Prison Camp") back in August, shortly after the collection was released.

The story behind the book is something like this: a group of lawyers trying to represent the prisoners (sorry, "detainees") at Guantánamo have arranged with the Pentagon and the University of Iowa Press to have poems written by the inmates translated and published. I suppose we are to assume that these were written during all of that free time they have, in some free moment when they just had to express their emotions in a way that only poetry would allow.

Here's an excerpt from Chiasson's review:

[R]eading “Poems From Guantánamo” is a bizarre experience. “The Detainees Speak” is this book’s subtitle: but putting aside the real question of whether lyric poets ever “speak” through their art, in the sense of revealing a historical person’s actual life story (they have rarely done so through poetry’s long history, and often poets “speak” least revealingly precisely when they claim to be telling the truth), in what sense could these poems, heavily vetted by official censors, translated by “linguists with secret-level security clearance” but no literary training, released by the Pentagon according to its own strict, but unarticulated, rationale — “speak”?

Given these constraints, a better subtitle might have been “The Detainees Do Not Speak” or perhaps “The Detainees Are Not Allowed to Speak.” But the best subtitle, I fear, would have been “The Pentagon Speaks.” To be sure, it’s hard to imagine a straightforward propagandistic use for the lines “America sucks, America chills, / While d’ blood of d’ Muslims is forever getting spilled”; but you can’t help suspecting that this entire production is some kind of public relations psych-out, “proof” that dissent thrives even in the cells of Guantánamo.

I got a clearer sense of my initial reaction after I read Chiasson's conclusion, in which he points out the historical context that the book evokes:

[I]magine a volume of Osip Mandelstam’s poetry released by the Soviet government in 1938, or an anthology of poems by Japanese internment prisoners released by our government during the Second World War.

It makes me feel a bit dirty, as an aspiring poet, to see poetry being used in such a way. I'm wondering which would help me more: a shower, or some mouthwash.

New translation by Simon Armitage reviewed at the NY Times.  The reviewer compares it to Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, comments on how considerate Armitage is to sound, and closes with,

Five years ago, W. S. Merwin published a learned, lyrical translation. Now Simon Armitage has given us an energetic, free-flowing, high-spirited version. He reminds us that “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” still wields an uncanny power after 600 years. We’re fortunate that “our coffers have been crammed / with stories such as these.”

It's interesting that old epics are getting popular new translations (Robert Fagles's new translation of The Aeneid got a lot of buzz), so does this signal the return of the epic?

By Patrick Nevins, Managing Editor

Tony O'Neill has a great piece about Charles Bukowski on Guardian Unlimited. Buk's final posthumous collection is out now, and O'Neill thinks it's about time for a reappraisal of his work. I couldn't agree more.

...the wonderful Charles Simic!  Simic was named yesterday as the nation's 15th poet laureate.  According to James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, Mr. Simic was chosen because

“He’s very hard to describe, and that’s a great tribute to him. His poems have a sequence that you encounter in dreams, and therefore they have a reality that does not correspond to the reality that we perceive with our eyes and ears.”

I couldn't agree more.  One of my favorite Simic quotes comes from his essay, "The Power of Ambiguity," in which he states, "The secret of...art is not in what you put in, but in how much you leave out."  In another essay from this same collection (The Metaphysician in the Dark), he says simply, "My view is that poetry is inevitable, irreplaceable, and necessary as daily bread."  You gotta love that.  

Read the article, in which Simic also states that he largely began writing to impress girls, here. 

From Lot 49: Last August, AOL accientally released the search logs of around 658,000 users.  This quickly became an internet privacy scandle, which led to the resignations and firings of several AOL employees.

Nothing too unusual here: so far, it's just another event in the ongoing loss of our rights to privacy.

What is odd--downright mysterious, actually--is the log of search queries attributed to user 23187425, which reads more like one side of an highly associative IM conversation than a list of search queries.  So in some sense, this log is readable in a literary way.  So much so that Superbunker (in support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) is publishing the log in a book entitled i feel better after i type to you.

Thomas Claburn, who first made slight altercations for the sake of readablility to the log and republished them online (see above), wrote this about it at Lot 49:

Whether it's fact or fiction, confession or invention, the search monologue is strangely compelling. It's a uniquely temporal literary form in that the server time stamps make the passage of time integral to the storytelling. It could be the beginning of a new genre of writing, or simply an aberation. But it does beg further explanation. What circumstances prompted the author to converse thus with AOL's search engine?

I do find it compelling, and maybe he was right to not call it poetry as I have.  But then maybe there are a lot of poets writing today that are no longer working in poetry, however that has been defined in our culture, but in some "new genre of writing."  It certainly makes one wonder.

(Via Poetry Magazine.)  My second year at Oberlin College, a girl in the Creative Writing Program drowned.  Her name was Emma Howell.  I didn't know her, but I remember it making everyone in the department there a bit more somber.  Her parents set up a poetry prize for Creative Writing students which, if I remember correctly, I tried in vain to win. 

Now, her father has pulled together a bunch of her poems into a book called "Slim Night of Recognition."  I often have misgivings about a poet's work being published posthumously, but in this case, it seems somehow okay.  From what I can find surfing the web, the work is supposed to be shockingly good.

John Darnielle of Mountain Goats fame has set himself quite the task: writing thirty poems about his favorite black metal band.  He's up to number thirteen so far, which ends: "I just wanna keep on loving you, great snake of the infinite void." 

If this is the sort of thing that does it for you (and why wouldn't it be?), you should check out the song "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton," which is quite funny and quite moving.  It's on the album All Hail West Texas.  You can also read our review of the MG's last album, Get Lonely, here.

Adrienne Rich has written about the importance of poetry even in these oh-so-postmodern times.  The Guardian piece navigates nicely between political and "pure" poetry:

Poetry has the capacity to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossession, the subjection of women, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom - that word now held under house arrest by the rhetoric of the "free" market. This on-going future, written-off over and over, is still within view. All over the world its paths are being rediscovered and reinvented. 

NPR has an interview with Kris Delmhorst, who worked with poems by George Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Walt Whitman, E.E. Cummings and others for her new album Strange Conversation. 

She's got one of those smoky, old-timey voices that the kids seem to be responding to these days.  Possibly a stocking stuffer for that poet in your life? 

Danny Radcliffe has revealed his secret desire to be a poet after he's done acting.  He's quitting acting, in fact, to pursue this dream.  Good on you, mate. 

"Harry Potter" star Daniel Radcliffe recently said he wants to quit acting to become a poet but has no plan to sign up for any poetry workshop classes in college. 

The 17-year-old actor - who has just finished shooting the fifth installment of the magical film franchise, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" - has revealed he hopes to explore his hidden writing talent in the future but has ruled out going to college because he already has a career.

Well, college isn't for everyone.  Actually, it's refreshing to hear about someone who wants to just write, and not get all sidetracked going to college.  Just write, kid.  Write your little wizard heart out. 

But be careful.  Some mean old people are going to tell you that you shouldn't write unless you go to college and get an M.F.A.  In reality, M.F.A.s are just useless pieces of paper that help snobs recognize each other at literati parties.  Real writers don't need them.  In fact, real writers don't really need to write all that much.  They just drink a lot of coffee and feel tortured.

Did you know Chekhov was a doctor, not a writer like everyone thinks?  I didn't.  And he only wrote during the month of November, did you know that?  He didn't sully his art by practicing it and working long hours at it, the way he did his medical profession.  He didn't treat writing like a job or a career.  It was mostly a hobby to him.  He did it for fun, in fact, and to make himself feel good.  Like keeping a diary.

So do yourself a favor: don't go to college, don't put yourself in a place where your writing will be scrutinized or criticized, where you'll meet other writers and read their writing, where you'll connect with a supportive community, where you'll be forced to write on a deadline and set goals for yourself.  Participate in something like NaNoWriMo, which is completely different than a writing workshop (because it's only a month, not two or three years).

And everybody knows, the less time you spend on something, the less seriously you take it, the better you'll be at it.  It's like magic, like dumb, blind, stinking magic.  And if there's anything you know, Danny, it's that magic is real.

Thanks to Sarah Layden for the heads up.  Seems that Anna Journey, winner of Sycamore's 2005 Wabash Prize for Poetry, has discovered a previously unpublished Sylvia Plath poem in the archives at Indiana University.  The poem appears to be a reaction to Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby written in Plath's senior year in college.  It will be published in Blackbird, VCU's online literary magazine (as soon as tomorrow, if their site is to be believed).

Read Anna Journey's Sappho at the Edge of the Bayou, winner of the Wabash Prize for Poetry.