Burton Watson is one of the world’s best-known translators of Chinese and Japanese literature. He has taught at Columbia, Stanford, and Kyoto Universities and now lives in Tokyo. He is the winner of the PEN Translation Prize and in 2005 was awarded an American Academy of Arts and Letters Prize in literature. His numerous translations include The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry (1984), with Hiroaki Sato, From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry (1981) and, Late Poems of Lu You, The Old Man Who Does As He Pleases (2007).
“Whoever ponders on four things, it were better if he had not come into the world: what is above, what is below, what was before time, and what will be hereafter.”
THIS WEDNESDAY: AMY KING, RICHARD SIME & L.B. THOMPSON
read this Wednesday, April 22 / 7pm / free at: *BARRETTE / 601 Vanderbilt Ave. @ Bergen St. / Brooklyn, NY
wheelchair accessible / drink specials
+ AMY KING is the author of I’m the Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi, and forthcoming, Slaves to do These Things (Blazevox Books). She teaches English and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College, moderates the Poetics and Women’s Poetry listserves, and co-curates The Stain of Poetry: A Reading Series (http://stainofpoetry.wordpress.com/). Please visit her at http://amyking.org for more.
RICHARD SIME grew up in rural North Dakota, graduated from college in Minnesota, moved to New York City to attend graduate school at NYU, drifted into publishing, and eventually returned to school at Sarah Lawrence College, where he earned an MFA in fiction writing and where a course on prosody planted a seed. He began to write poetry in workshops at the New School in New York City and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, where he returns each summer. His work has appeared in Barrow Street, Provincetown Arts, Radical Faerie Digest, and Passager.
L.B. THOMPSON received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and her M.F.A. in Poetry from New York University. Her poetry has been published in journals including Fence, Pool, Lyric, The Women’s Review of Books and The New Yorker. She received an award for emerging women writers from the Rona Jaffe Foundation in 2002, and won the Center for Book Arts’ annual chapbook competition in 2003. L.B. teaches English to college freshmen, works as a free-lance copyeditor, and lives on the North Fork of Long Island.
Barrette
601 Vanderbilt Ave (at Bergen St, Prospect Heights, Brooklyn) — 718-230-5170
Subway: B, Q to Seventh Ave ; 2, 3 to Grand Army Plaza
The Stain of Poetry: A Reading Series presents
April 24th @ 7 PM - Stain Bar - Williamsburg , Brooklyn
Jennifer Burch, Heather Green, Chris Hosea, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Daniel Lin, Barry Schwabsky
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Jennifer Burch holds a B.A. in Fine Art from Amherst College and an M.A. in Literature from the University of Kent in Canterbury , England . Her first book, No Matter, was released by The Winged Way (September 2008). Jennifer has published work in Article, Free Verse, Guernica , Left Facing Bird, Sal Mimeo, and Verse, and is included in Green Integer’s forthcoming anthology, The Gertrude Stein Awards. Jennifer lives in Brooklyn , New York , where she writes and teaches yoga.
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Heather Green’s work has appeared in Barrow Street , DIAGRAM, The Hat, Lungfull!, Pebble Lake Review, Tarpaulin Sky, and other journals. She’s the author of the chapbook The Match Array (Dancing Girl Press, 2008) and lives in Boston .
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Chris Hosea’s poems appear in VOLT, Swerve, Denver Quarterly, Article, Harvard Review, Iowa Review, and The Literary Review. With Cecily Iddings, he edits The Blue Letter, a free direct-mail poetry newsletter. He works at the Marymount School and lives in Brooklyn .
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Sueyeun Juliette Lee edits Corollary Press, a chapbook series devoted to new work by writers of color. Recent work has appeared in Effing, One Less, and online at critiphoria.org. Her chapbooks include Mental Commitment Robots (yo yo labs), Perfect Villagers (Octopus Books) and Trespass Slightly In (Coconut). Her first full-length collection, That Gorgeous Feeling, is out from Coconut Books. She currently lives in Philadelphia .
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Daniel Lin has a chapbook, TINDER, from Nightboat Books (2004), and has recently published poems in Unsplendid and The Jewish Quarterly. He was a N.Y. Times Fellow at NYU and a Tennessee Williams Scholar at Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
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Barry Schwabsky is an American poet and art critic living in London . His new collection of poems, Book Left Open in the Rain, is published imminently by Black Square Editions and is available from Small press Distribution. He writes reguarly for The Nation and Artforum (where he also co-edits the international reviews section), among others. He is the author of Opera: Poems 1981-2002 (Meritage Press) and The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press) as well as several chapbooks of poetry and contributions to dozens of books and exhibition catalogues on contemporary and modern art.
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Hosted by Amy King and Ana Božičević
stain bar
766 grand street
brooklyn, ny 11211
(L train to Grand Street , 1 block west)
John Martone, Bob Arnold and a few other poets currently make up the Cid Corman School of Ethics and Poetry. They keep their line lean and close to the metaphysical bone, trim the fat from their working vocabularies down to a hundred, solid, one or two syllable words, keep their eyes on the particular to somehow deliver the existential truth to us all. Sometimes they venture near the edge of language itself and come back talking about Buddhism and death, but usually they tell us what it means to garden or build things in ten words or less. Buddha bless the Ciddites one and all. Suck it up, stoicially confront the essential, frame the poem with plenty of blank paper and have done with it. Then make a book of it. I generally approve of the proposition. However, from what I can see it’s a bit of a hit or miss endeavor. Not surprisingly, Cid seems to write Cid poems the best, though a gentleman in the U.K. (whose name slips my mind at the moment), often rivals the master in linguistic subtlety. With Cid and the U.K. fellow less is often more, but with most Ciddites, less is usually less.
John Martone never rivals Cid, but he does sparkle on occasion.
hand axe
mostly
eye
As one who’s marveled at the flaking on a middle paleolithic hand-axe of black speckled flint, I can “dig” the insight, but John, I think–at least from the context–is talking about a less glamorous, more contemporary manifestation:
in this
new world
cut brush
all
morning
bind it
up
yes w
honey
suckle
These poems are from a tiny sequence titled “new world.”
The charm of cutting, binding, picking, planting, brick-laying, and all of the hard drudgery of farm labor is lost on me, though it wasn’t lost on Cid–a city boy from the beginning. I grew up on and around farms, with horses, sheep, pigs and chickens. My father was a farrier and a hay dealer and I helped him do what he had to do to keep us all fed. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t glamorous. Laboring with one’s hands is not always liberating, and those who do so are not automatically ennobled by what they do. Moreover, from where I sit in Japan I can visit shrines and temples any time I want. The good people with whom I work are Buddhists in the same way that many Americans are Methodists, so the allure of an exotic religion that may capture someone’s imagination in Illinois escapes me after living close to two decades in Asia. That old Z-word–Zen–is, as most Japanese say, Buddhism for Americans. Strip away the exoticism and what are you left with? Mostly wee existential reports tricked out in what I like to call “ZENglish.”
“my sweat soaked through this notebook”
For the non-sweating, or for those who have never bent and hoed and picked, this might be an insight worth pondering.
I haven’t truly done justice to the complete sequences, however. They do indeed succeed in building up their own resonances as they proceed, but the lack of “rich” language and invention (the kind I enjoy) and the repeated toodle of ZENglish, tires this old country boy out. On the other hand, I’m certain there are gems to be harvested from these collections for those who have the time to look and savor. Please write to John Martone for more information:
I’ve just finished this great biography of the Wittgensteins, which focuses primarily on Paul, the one-armed pianist. If you are at all interested in the genetic under-pinnings of genius, eccentricity, suicide, and cancer read this fascinating account. The fact that Ludwig’s oldest brother Hans was a mathematical and musical prodigy–or, as Waugh avers–something of a Rain Man–is worth the price of the book alone. To imagine him disappearing in the Florida Everglades on some mysterious quest, or gliding off the deck of a ship on the Chesapeake bay and clipping the waves like a monocle-wearing king-fisher never to resurface c. 1903 makes the book absolutely essential reading. Waugh also points out that the structure of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus resembles Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief and tells the conditions under which Ludwig became a Tolstoyan–all new information to me. The writing style is relaxed, intelligent, and generous to the reader. The pictures are memorable. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.
or Concept development for the Ultimate Aesthetic Expreience!
Haptic poetry floats about mid-way between low impact and high impact on the horizontal axis, and easy and hard on the vertical! Plus the map is in color! I love it! Please take a look at www.haakonfaste.com/publications/strategic_map.pdf
PO/EMS resemble earlier texts of mine in dissecting familiar words but are, I think, different in wit and in allowing easily for pseudo-words, which is to say they have both signature and significance.
Dedicated to the memory of Jackson Mac Low, a great American experimental/anarchist poet
Editors are invited to select as many (or few) as they wish, distributing them, if an editor prefers, over several pages or even several issues.
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