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Here's a really interesting new Publisher's Weekly article about one of the most important poetry presses around, and how it got started, Wave Books. One of the most unique things about Wave Books was the poetry bus tour they ran in 2006, a cross-country tour where poets would hop aboard, travel, give readings, and tour throughout the country (a kind of Ken Kesey/Merry Prankers-reminiscent venture.)
Last Friday publishing legend Robert Giroux (of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) passed away. He had an amazing life, editing many of the greatest writers of the 20th century, including T. S. Eliot, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor, and Virginia Woolf.
Turtle Point Press has just published an intriguing new collection by Devin Johnston, called Sources. This is Johnston's third book of poems. The below poem, one of my favorites from the new book, discusses this theme of origins as well.
“Sparkling with energy and intelligence, these poems are likes chips in a mosaic, spare, hard, precise, and with a classic humanity and grace.” — David Malouf
The Greeks
Ladder and source,
we find no ease
never quite
at home at home.
No, never, not
darken the page
in a childish script.
Winter has come.
Ladders lean
against the sky,
sources whistle
past our lips.
Pacing rugs
or battered roads
we wait for what
we know we know.
A few more recent releases:
The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door
By Robert W. Bly, Leonard Lewisohn
Written over a period of 15 years, this is a collection of poems by Persian poet Hafez (a fellow Persian poet to Rumi), by Robert Bly and Persian scholar Leonard Lewisohn.
"Robert understands the wild assertions of Hafez and his transparency. Robert’s translations have the nimbleness and daring of the lover. This is the book we have been waiting for." — Coleman Barks
The New York Times has said that "Jorie Graham's poetry is among the most sensuously embodied and imaginative writing we have."
"Our most formidable nature poet" — Publishers Weekly
Selected work from Doty's seven books, along with a generous collection of new work.
"Doty’s facility with his chosen form...is so natural that the craft in his work is all but invisible; he makes the damnably difficult look deceptively simple." Booklist
Seven Notebooks
Poems
By Campbell McGrath
And a short excerpt from Seven Notebooks:
An ant to the stars
or stars to the ant—which is
more irrelevant?
Weekend Jet Skiers—
rude to call them idiots,
yes, but facts are facts.
Clamor of seabirds
as the sun falls—I look up
and ten years have passed."
—from "Dawn Notebook"
I hid my love when young till I
Couldn't bear the buzzing of a fly;
I hid my love to my despite
Till I could not bear to look at light:
I dare not gaze upon her face
But left her memory in each place;
Where eer I saw a wild flower lie
I kissed and bade my love good bye.
I met her in the greenest dells
Where dewdrops pearl the wood blue bells
The lost breeze kissed her bright blue eye,
The bee kissed and went singing by,
A sunbeam found a passage there,
A gold chain round her neck so fair;
As secret as the wild bee's song
She lay there all the summer long.
I hid my love in field and town
Till een the breeze would knock me down,
The bees seemed singing ballads oer,
The fly's bass turned a lion's roar;
And even silence found a tongue,
To haunt me all the summer long;
The riddle nature could not prove
Was nothing else but secret love.
In case you hadn't seen it yet, Pulitzer Prize-winner James Tate has a new book out called The Ghost Soldiers.
“Mr. Tate’s gift is such that many of [his] poems move me at least to plain envy of what he can do.”
–W.S. Merwin
"It's rare that a poet so far into his career—this is Tate's 15th collection—comes up with something new; quietly, Tate has found a fresh way of telling some of America's stories."
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Cherubic
I took my daughter Kelsey to the train
station. As the train was leaving, we waved
and waved to one another. I never saw her again.
She went on to become the fi rst woman on the moon.
How she got there nobody knew. And she never
came back, as far as I know. And she never wrote
me a letter, she never called. I just hope she’s
happy, my moonbeam. Every night I’m at my telescope.
I’ve seen dinosaurs, snow leopards, fl amingos.
I saw a one-eyed dog wagging its tail. I saw a
mail truck. I saw a sailboat, but, of course,
there is no water. I saw a sign for water pointing
to the earth. I saw a sign for hamburgers
pointing to the earth. And I saw a little girl
fall off her tricycle. A poof of atomic tangerine
dust, that’s all. I never saw the girl again.
The tumbled tricycle’s wheels kept spinning.
Sleep, I said, sleep, little baby.
Congratulations to this year's Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass, for his book Time and Materials. The book had previously won the National Book Award, so this is quite a feat.
Audio of Hass reading his work and reflecting on his writing process is available from UC Berkeley.
From Time and Materials:
Ezra Pound's Proposition
Beauty is sexual, and sexuality
is the fertility of the earth and the fertility
Of the earth is economics. Though he is no recommendation
For poets on the subject of finance,
I thought of him in the thick heat
Of the Bangkok night. Not more than fourteen, she saunters up to you
Outside the Shangri-la Hotel
And says, in plausible English,
"How about a party, big guy?"
Here is more or less how it works:
The World Bank arranges the credit and the dam
Floods three hundred villages, and the villagers find their way
To the city where their daughters melt into the teeming streets,
And the dam's great turbines, beautifully tooled
In Lund or Dresden or Detroit, financed
By Lazard Freres in Paris or the Morgan Bank in New York,
Enabled by judicious gifts from Bechtel of San Francisco
Or Halliburton of Houston to the local political elite,
Spun by the force of rushing water,
Have become hives of shimmering silver
And, down river, they throw that bluish throb of light
Across her cheekbones and her lovely skin.
Cruelest Month is back. I'm looking forward to sharing and discovering with you what's going on in the world of poetry–onwards we go! –Rob
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