CruelestMonth.com

Frost...no, wait...CHEKHOV!

I keep hearing snippets about the discovery of a lost Robert Frost poem.  VQR certainly knows what I'm talking about.  Ted Genoways, VQR editor and an accomplised poet, came upon "War Thoughts at Home" in the University of Virginia's special collections.  He says more here.

Yet discovery abounds elsewhere.  This past April, NBC's Brian Williams shared with us "The poem nobody knew was lost."  Heart strings astrum I watched as an eighty-seven-year-old Frost read at JFK's inauguration.  Let Brian Williams guide you here.

THIS JUST IN - (Bud, you're gonna love this!)

Box set, HUZZAH!  The Tales of Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett.  I've been waiting on this for sometime now.  The moment is sweet.

See you on Saturday!

- MS

Dodge Poetry Festival

Tomorrow Stanhope, New Jersey will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Dodge Poetry Festival.  Four days of readings, discussions, musical interludes and MORE!  You can't possibly see it all.  I'm looking at an ecstatic brochure this instant and I can hardly convey...I can hardly convey the...what?  Actually, I can't convey it at all.  It's a big event with a mass of poets and readers descending on the Festival's birthplace in Waterloo Village.  Billy Collins calls it, "the most energetic festive, and high-spirited celebration of poetry I have ever seen."  For an up-to-date program visit www.dodgepoetryfestival.org.  Rides are available.

UPDATE! I will be taking the Poetry Bus (not to be confused with the Wave Poetry Bus) at 8am Friday morning to the Dodge Poetry Festival.  I will be giving away Ecco and Harper Perennial books out of a backpack.  Also, I'll recap on Saturday w/ photos, etc.  Is anyone else going?

- MS

I'm Fragile Right Now

Mad drama in the NYC.  Last night, after class, the shrieks of mice are filling my apartment.  My roommates, the dolts, have been sitting through it all, repeating to each other, "Damn.  Those mice are noisy."  Didn't we ask our super to put down traps?  Didn't he promise to?  Do you think, perhaps, that the mice have been "caught"?  Friggin dumbasses.  Lo' and behold, I find two poor little mice stuck in a sticky trap.  I take them outside and try to free them, but I'm afraid I only made it worse.  I cried a little.

Now today, not understanding the implications of "kitchen renovation," I walk into a sound-storm of drills, sanders, and hammers.  Don't they know I'm fragile right now?  Everyone seems a little shell-shocked.  As you know, this is a creative environment.  Everybody's fragile.  Anyway, one might find shelter at 3 Quarks Daily (poor transition, anyone?) -- a blog-esque compilation of the best from around the web, covering science, design, literature, current affairs, art, and anything else they deem "inherently fascinating."

- MS

Henry Shukman

I came across two of Henry Shukman's poems in the London Review of Books earlier this summer.  I am late coming to him though, as Google reveals his golden age to have been between 2002-04, that is, until he has another one, as poets often do.  The poems I read are not free online, but this one does the same as those, and it happens to be exactly what I love about the others: 

He begins with images that feel distant, quiet, for the most part, still, reduced in all dimensions to become small and seemingly transparent.  The effect is strange--I was totally disarmed of my expectation of meaning or message. He opens this poem, "Snowy Morning," musing on childhood memories, and they take form on the page without the kind of gravity one would expect of their subject--death. But the poet's childhood approach to death is fascination and disbelief tangled in excitement. It is such a familiar feeling and brushed onto the page so lightly, without any push in one direction, that I passed on into the second part of the poem without much more than a quieted mind.  But then he begins to expand the poem, in terms of time, yes, and space, perhaps, but primarily in terms of meaning. He isn't clever as much as he is graceful.  I read his poems and feel, at the end, that he hasn't so much pulled a blindfold from my eyes and revealed some hidden truth, as much as he has merely grown an idea or memory, pointing to each leaf as it unfolds.  It's like transforming a film of soap on a wand into a bubble. It has that quality, too, of being a seemingly obvious chain of events and, at the same time, magical. 

Snowy Morning

When we were nine or ten and used to play
at dying — hands clasped to the chest,
Goodbye, beautiful world, I love you! —
we didn't believe it could ever really be done.

Say goodbye to everything? A gunshot wound
in 'Alias Smith and Jones' could set us thinking —
please please don't die — or a feathered mess
that had been a pigeon squashed on the road.

Even Divinity class, that final sponge of vinegar
on a speartip. Goodbye, beautiful vinegar.
Now, under the shag of decades, after so much
contact with things, it takes a morning like this.

Snow has fallen, a light crust. On the white field
green trails zigzag where the horses wandered,
a crazy scribble shows where they fed.
There they are now, two statues stooping.

All the ewes are sitting, thawing their grass.
Puddles crunch like caramel. Little snowfalls
crumble down a hedge. The silver-birch
trembles with its own twigs' shadows.

And under the rusty chestnut I walk
through a rain of crystals. There isn't much to say.
This is a day that decides by itself to be beautiful.
This field is a bride. How are we to say goodbye?

-Henry Shukman

-AH

Oulipo

Like I always say, you learn about some obscure yet terribly interesting academic frivolity everyday. 

It may be obvious why a poetic form as austere as the sonnet qualifies as an Oulipian constraint. Less obvious may be the extent to which any literary form—the very effort, in fact, to express oneself in words—limits, in often arbitrary ways, what a writer might express and how she might express it. In this sense, tragedy and comedy, the interoffice memo and the detective novel, all differ from the most extreme constraints only in degree. Hence, Jean Lescure: “What the Oulipo intended to demonstrate was that these constraints are felicitous, generous, and are in fact literature itself.”

The Believer has a wonderful Oulipian essay available in full online.  As more constraints are introduced and explicated (though, they're not done all at once) -- N + 7, Beautiful Outlaw, Lipogram, etc. -- the more impressive the results.  George Perec, a famous practitioner of Oulipo, wrote a full-length novel and lipogram, La Disparition, that excluded the letter e.  That's giddy stuff!  If you read the essay, however, you'll know that my reaction is that of the "enthusiastic layman" -- a better description of myself I've yet to hear.  So dig in.  Every paragraph is a juicy bit of new information. 

Here's a site with links to a number of Oulipo resources.

- MS

The Poetic Tell-All

Forty-Five: Poems by Frieda Hughes (due out this December).  The daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes looks back on 45 years of loves, losses, pain, and hope in this beautiful and revealing poetry collection. 

Breaking 45 years of near silence on some of the most private matters. Hughes finally opens up through the medium she knows best -- breakdance fighting (kidding, it's poetry).  In this ambitious project, Hughes shares the pain she endured after losing her mother, fighting bulimia, losing her father to cancer, three marriages, two divorces, and her stepmother's rejection.  Though there has been much grief in her life, she also shares her successes, her loves, and ultimate triumphs as an accomplished poet and painter.

The poems in this collection proceed year by year from her birth to the time of its completion.  "On my forteith birthday, April 1, 2000, I wanted to celebrate what was a significant date for me.  Being a poet and a painter, I thought of my writing a poem and painting a picture for each year of my life, from birthday to birthday -- the paintings to express the emotions that couloured each year and the poems to provide the actual subject matter which provoked those emotions."  Radio broadcaster and Times columnist Libby Purves provides the forward, in which she says, "It is an original way to record your life, this partnership of short lyrics and large canvases -- but then, it has been an original life.  We are privileged to share it."

By all means, be intrigued.  I have one galley to spare.  If you would like it, the first person, and only the first since I have but one, to e-mail me at [email protected] with the subject line "Forty-Five" and their address in the text will receive a galley.  You'll know if it's already been claimed, so go ahead a write me if there is no indication.

*The galley has been claimed.

- MS

True to his nerd

The Boston Globe has an article on the beloved John Hodgman:

``Writing paragraphs about nonsense is what at least at this point I want to do," he says. He admits it's self-indulgent, but it's where his heart lies. ``Warts and hobos and all, this is what I'm interested in." And the success of his book, which has 200,000 copies in print, seems to honestly surprise him.

Via Elegant Variation

- MS

GaGACK!

Bud of Chekhov's Mistress has a  great post "On Amateur Book Reviewing," which responds to an interview with Lev Grossman posted at Critical Mass (great site, by the way).  I don't have much to say on the issue, mostly because I'm leaving work in twenty minutes, but I will venture this: Go METS!

- MS

St. Martha Shall Be the Cook

And even St. Ursula will have to laugh. Oh! The joys of a German heaven!  (I wonder, actually.)  These refrains are from "Das himmlische Leben" ("The Heavenly Life"), which is from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn).  At first, Gustav Mahler set "Das himmlische Leben" as an independent song, then in his Fourth Symphony, he uses it to evoke a number of Christian symbols.  It's all terribly interesting, as I'm sure you agree.  More information can be found in books on the composer, no doubt.  Maybe even on the web.  Whether or not you choose to enlighten yourself further, I thought I would direct you to the New York Philharmonic downloads for "DG Concerts" (whatever that means) where you can import concerts directly to your iTunes.

Exchange of the night (intermission, two ladies, one walking up the right side of the stairs, one walking down the left):

- (under breath, in passing) You're going the wrong way.

- (turning around) Excuse me, what did you just say?

- You were walking on the wrong side...

- Whatever lady, you're getting old...and stupid!

- MS

Apple Valley Review

In the Fall issue of the Apple Valley Review a large number of poems with attractively quirky titles. This one seemed shiniest. The poem proves a good read, too.

“Mark Twain and Dorothy Quick Sit for Photographs, 1907”

by Rob Hardy

It was beautiful, surpassingly beautiful, enchantingly beautiful; and now it is lost, and I shall not see it any more.
—Mark Twain, Eve’s Diary (1906)

In the beginning of another century,
they sat in the garden, her head on his shoulder,
her white dress drifting against his white suit,
snowflake and glacier, two clean white pages,
as if he were God, and she an outgrowth of His own rib,

Adamless.  She was the first of the well-behaved
little girls he collected in old age—his Angelfish,
floating decorously in white dresses through
his billiard room, or sitting for photographs, their bodies
a concentration of chemicals and sunlight.  Here,

he holds a cigar in his right hand, and she holds a black
box in her lap—a purse or a Brownie camera—
and it is hard with our post-Freudian eyes not to read
sex into the picture, lurking symbolically like a snake.
Puberty would expel them from his garden.  His angels

would fall into bodies that marked time, and would only
remind him he was old.  He wanted them to stay
as they were in photographs, shimmering beside him,
white on white, a comet for the beginning
and for the end of life.  He collected them in the photographer’s

black box, the bright images of his Angelfish swimming
out of darkness, their white bodies developing
into pure absence.  Here, his cigar will never burn down,
and can never be enjoyed,  and the photograph can only show him
his desire to possess an innocence he has already lost.

- AH