#dan chiasson

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Joni Mitchell, Self Portrait, 'Taming the Tiger' album cover art (1991-97)

[Peintures]

* * * *

Mitchell writes about emotional information: who controls it, and how it is squandered or hoarded, withheld or weaponized. This requires some reconnaissance, which for Mitchell involves falling in and out of love, over and over—not so much a research method as a form of self-surgery. Her songs report on those lessons, which are, in an instant, in performance, happily forgotten. She is always thinking about the ways in which calculation fails, as guile yields again and again to innocence. 

As she put it in “Song for Sharon”: “I can keep my cool at poker / But I’m a fool when love’s at stake.”

--Dan Chiasson The New Yorker

[djmarinizelablog]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Summary:

Levi and Hange finally get to live their dream of staying in the woods, but are they really content with it?

Levi quickly puts his clothes on, tries to smoothen the strands sticking out of his bedridden hair and tells himself, well, shit, so much for peace and quiet. 

When he steps out, the grass crunches underneath the soles of his feet, loud and crisp. The humming stops for a bit, and so does his world—

“Hange.”

“Took you long enough, Levi.”

This fic is for my Levihan Easter Eggschange 2021; I hope you find (and like) it! Many thanks to @immagoudaboi for beta-reading and to @levihanweek for hosting this event!

If you like this fic, please consider supporting me on Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/djmarinizela

[aaknopf]

Dan Chiasson's The Math Campers, to come this fall, is a book in part about fatherhood and adolescence—his own, his kids', and the new freedoms as well as existential threats that shape their world. Today's poem, from a multipart piece entitled "Over & Over," is dedicated to his sons.

from “Over & Over”

my awareness seems to extend this day    past the trap my body set for me past its small, pitiful adjustments    of head here wings here antennae here what does it matter, the head and wings    and antennae if my awareness soars over the tops of the pines    with their spiny flowers still green like a drone flown by a teenage pilot    over the rooftops, silent yawp past near meadows over the stop and shop    its dragonfly landing gear ready now it zooms in on the roots which grip    the soil and feed on its decay your hand and mine at the same angle    you there, in the future, fleeing me

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Dan Chiasson's forthcoming collection, The Math Campers

Browse other books by Dan Chiasson and catch up with him on Twitter, @dchiasso

Share this poem and peruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series

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[theblackestofsuns]

Angelica Alzona’s illustration for Dan Chiasson’s review of the poetry of Natalie Scenters-Zapico in this week’s New Yorker magazine.

[womenintranslation]

"Professor Emily Wilson’s Twitter feed (@EmilyRCWilson) provides her readers with insights into the art of translation. In recent posts, she has analyzed the challenges a translator faces, with examples from the Odyssey and Oedipus Tyrannos (forthcoming from Norton).

Wilson also uses Twitter to compare short passages from different English translations of the Odyssey.  She comments on how translators such as George Chapman (1615), Alexander Pope (1725), T.E. Lawrence (1932), Robert Fitzgerald (1961), Richmond Lattimore (1965), Robert Fagles (1996), Stanley Lombardo (2000), and Stephen Mitchell (2013) have interpreted different words, phrases, and concepts from the original Greek into English.

In a blog post for The New Yorker, Dan Chiasson wrote about how "Wilson’s presence on Twitter is quietly revolutionary, a new kind of experience for readers, poets, translators, and really anyone who likes to watch knowledge take shape in an open format, its seams exposed" ("The Classics Scholar Redefining What Twitter Can Do", March 19, 2018). Charlotte Ahlin has also written about her Twitter feed for Bustle ("The Sirens In 'The Odyssey' Weren't Sexy For The Reason You Think, According To The Epic's First Female Translator", April 4, 2018)."

[fivepanel]

When you ran towards me, I said, Stop there, stop now, you'll end up in a strangers life; and when you ran away I said the same words over again, louder.

'Natural History: Poems,' by Dan Chiasson

[jumpinjulianofnorwich]

In the story of the bees, the lovers fall asleep as flowers and wake as flesh, human flesh stung so deep, so many times, it hurts the bone. The way a wheel turns in space, in place, over and over and gets nowhere- with agony added, that's what the lovers feel. Scholars translate the inscription above their bodies, Beware-my body is spoiled meat, my spit will parch you, it will never be your sweet milk. They are made of such strange wishes. Once he cupped a bee inside his bare palms on a dare, and felt it slowly electrocute itself. They are made of such strange dreams, bee-like dreams: a peach orchard she never played in as a child, where overnight the peaches never turned to stone.  Who slept as a wildflower, slept as a metaphor, wakes to feel real pain, the scholars say, even as the lovers write forever in myth-land. Scholars, if they do down to the riverbank, under the anchorage, you know the spot, if the lovers lie down together there, will they wake as flowers?

“Made-Up Myth” by Dan Chiasson from Natural History

[aaknopf]

A spring love scene, in the hands of poet Dan Chiasson, becomes a comic lesson on the importance of tone in poetry.

Tulip Tree

Out late and the night is a ruin, my voice says the night is a ruin, my voice doesn’t say a thing, my poem says my voice doesn’t say a thing, your voice says my poem says my voice doesn’t say a thing. Your parents own the tulip tree we lie under, but they don’t own the night. Nobody does, not even taxpayers! That’s why instead of overhearing a guitar or, from behind curtains, watching people change, instead of telling stories I “obsess,” as you say, about my tone of voice. People change. Sometimes at night, curtains drawn, they turn infinite upon each other, just for fun. I want fried clams, the ones with gritty fat bellies. If I strike the apocalyptic tone you like, won’t you drive up Route 1 with me, right now, to find those clams? More on this book and author: 

Learn more about Natural History by Dan Chiasson

Browse other books by Dan Chiasson

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