May 10, 2019 at 8:58 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Recommended, Traveling, Women Writers)
Tags: Cork, Fridays, Ireland, poetry, translation
Self spent all morning in the Blue Room, reading poetry.
Lina’s Eyes
from Dimitrova’s collection A Visit to the Clockmaker (Southword Editions, 2005), translated from the Bulgarian by Gregory O’Donoghue
Lina, my blind colleague
always came to classes
with her mother.
They’d take the front seats
& while her mother jotted notes
Lina listened with a solemn face.
(I heard it was a medical mistake —
the nurse pushed the wrong button,
the technicians did not repair the laser?)
Once I dared meet her gaze,
peeped out of my eyes
& waved a signal lamp as
they do directing aeroplanes.
I saw just two blank windows.
Behind the masonry a prisoner
walked to & fro hoping to get
used to the darkness.
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April 6, 2019 at 4:03 pm (Books, Conversations, Publishers, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Chinese writers, literary awards, Northern Ireland, novel, poetry, Saturday
Mammy! The heads! They took the heads! Where are the heads? Where’s Lassie, mammy? Where’s daddy? Have the brothers found Lassie? Where’s daddy? Where’s Lassie?
This novel, which won the Man Booker, fully deserved to win.
Graywolf Press has now given self two books that absolutely shattered her: this one, and the translation of Liu Xia’s poetry collection, Empty Chairs.
That is all.
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March 31, 2019 at 5:35 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Personal Bookshelf, Publishers, Recommended, Sundays, Women Writers)
Tags: causes, Just published, Literary Magazines, poetry
Ray Murphy, from a letter quoted in the Introduction by Glenna Luschei:
Virtually all of my writing about opiates stems from writing about injury. I never address opiates as a recreational drug. Be interesting to see how many other submissions you get that come out of injury and pain, and then progress into dependency and possibly full-blown addiction.
The second piece in the issue is Marsha de la O’s Paradise Motel. An excerpt:
Black flame, blue spoon, now the shadow
draws close a cloak as wide as Lake Michigan,
robed and rocked in god’s water, rippling
indigo. From out on the street the rush of cars
weave through their harmonies —
those vessels I’ve entered one by one,
riding out currents on a raft of fire.
Marsha de la O’s new collection, Every Ravening Thing, is just out from Pitt Poetry.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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March 10, 2019 at 6:03 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Sundays, Women Writers)
Tags: English writers, history, poetry, reading lists, wisdom
Two books self put on hold are waiting for pick-up at the downtown Redwood City Library: one is Milkman, the prize-winning novel by Irish writer Anna Burns. The other is nonfiction by Doris Kearns Goodwin about Leadership.
The rain seems to be holding off a bit. She planted some lilies and spread organic fertilizer around her roses.
She really needs to get on with her writing, always difficult when she’d much rather be planting. To help her, she’s reading Jenny Lewis’s memoir in poetry of her father’s time in the British Army: Taking Mesopotamia (Carcanet, 2014)
This is a re-read. Self has known Jenny for five years. She heard Jenny read at the British Museum. She was there when Jenny read from her new collection, Gilgamesh Retold, at the Woodstock Poetry Festival in Oxfordshire, last November.
The collection begins with two quotes, the first from the epic of Gilgamesh, the second from Lord Grey of Falloden.
Here’s what Lord Grey has to say about the taking of Mesopotamia, 1919:
- I think the best thing would be if, at the end of the war we could say we had taken and gained nothing. Taking Mesopotamia, for instance, means spending millions on irrigation and development with no immediate return . . . keeping up a large army in an unfamiliar country and tangling every kind of administrative question.
Self loves the idea of an occupying army taking and gaining nothing.
Stay tuned.
Sunday Morning, First Day of Daylight Saving, March 2019
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March 4, 2019 at 4:44 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Surprises, television)
Tags: Literary Magazines, Mondays, poetry
Self hangs on to everything. This is important. Why else would she have a copy of the literary journal Fugue in her closet? An issue from 2011?
Nevertheless, she picks up the issue, opens to a random page, and finds Mark Wagenaar’s poem:
That The Unified Field Theory Must Somehow Include Donald Trump’s Hair
(An Excerpt)
Add the video of the dog playing the accordion
to the List of Things That Remind Me of Seville,
right beneath rainwater baths & patios of bitter oranges.
I never found who was playing, though from the jaunty
tuneless songs the musician had a great sense of humour.
You could also add the dog to the List of Things I’d Watch
Instead of “The Apprentice,” which is a list that would reach
La Giralda from here. I’m not sure hair can be that bad,
whether it’s real or some sort of Trump l’oeil, but I’m sure
it falls somewhere in the Unified Field Theory, which includes
the zebrafish’ new eyes, & the ghostly hair of nebulae —
the theory of another way to count it all up, to name the world
around us, blackbird, thorns in deadfall, thirst sudden as flight.
From the Contributors’ Notes: Mark Wagenaar’s book, Voodoo Inverso, won the 2012 Pollak Prize. He lives in Denton, TX
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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February 1, 2019 at 3:12 pm (Artists and Writers, destinations, Links, Places, Recommended, Tel Aviv, Traveling)
Tags: art, Cee Neuner, England, Fridays, Israel, literary festivals, poetry
Thanks once again to Cee Neuner for the Fun Foto Challenge!
Last October, self was in the historic English town of Winchester, which was hosting a Poetry Festival. The next Winchester Poetry Festival will be October 2020.
Winchester, England: City Map, October 2018
Tel Aviv Artist Reuven Rubin
A friend made this bag for self.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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January 22, 2019 at 5:10 pm (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Links, Personal Bookshelf, Publishers, Recommended, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: causes, Literary Magazines, poetry
An Excerpt from Snow
by Dorianne Laux
It wasn’t snowing, and then it was,
like death, like my sister’s texts
that just stopped: I’m in the hospital
then a phone call: We did everything
we could: endocarditis, valve leakage,
her heart on heroin. She wasn’t addicted
and then she was, on and off, for years
her and her daughter, my niece, living
on the streets, every few weeks, a phone call:
Amazing issue.
Kudos, Prairie Schooner.
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December 30, 2018 at 10:56 pm (Artists and Writers, Links, Places)
Tags: poetry, websites
Self loved this tracking of a moment — the musing, melancholy tone.
Rantings Of A Third Kind
Posted in Haiku
“Sundays, yes, those fun days” Gun Roswell
Sundays
Take a walk long outside
Seaside, a long stride, up
The hill and down to the beach
Scenery to be seen, with
Just one scene, nature and
Man made structures, side by side
Hard to divide, growing together
Over the years, soon there
Is nothing to separate them, under cover
From prying eyes, but alas
I am here now and
I spy, before it all disappears in
To the background of nature
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November 27, 2018 at 5:47 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Recommended, Traveling)
Tags: England, London, poetry
Guy’s and St Thomas’ (an excerpt from the poem published in The New Statesman, 23-29 November 2018 issue)
When I’m here in a particular
character of mind
any woman of a certain height —
hair plaited neat
to meet the working day —
becomes my mother
in that year of early mornings
she worked at GDRU
close to this stretch of the river
close to Hay’s Galleria;
the aquarium that is still here
though she is not
to walk with me as we scrutinise
tropical fish
laughing in the uncomplicated
manner that comes
of understanding. And after,
a bankside stroll
Kayo Chingonyi’s latest book, Kumukanda (Chatto & Windus, 2017), won the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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October 28, 2018 at 5:48 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Recommended, Sayings, Sundays, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, discoveries, Northern Ireland, poetry, Tyrone Guthrie Centre
Self really likes that the cottage is full of poetry books. Every time she comes, she discovers someone new.
She found a book called Landscape of Self (Belfast: Lapwing Publications, 2015) by Aine MacAodha.
Here’s the first half of a poem called
To My Children When I’m Gone
Some mountains are higher than others
Winter can cause frost bite.
Without a bit of darkness
We may not appreciate the light afterwards.
Remember the good in the world
The take your breath smiles
The smile from a stranger in a strange place
The beauty in a daisy chain
The elegance in a buttercup
The wonder of a webbing spider
The warmth of a heart
When another’s fiery arrow hits it
Love and goodness costs nothing
Hatred causes illness
Treat the nature around you with respect
Treat your spirit with kindness others too
Manners are easily carried.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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