#don share

[starminesister]

Started this afternoon: Who Reads Poetry: 50 Views from Poetry Magazine, edited by Fred Sasaki and Don Share

[tasavvur]

Crece la sangre, agranda la expansión de sus frondas en mi pecho... Blood blooms, spreads its wide foliage in my chest...

Miguel Hernández, tr. Don Share, from I Have Lots of Heart: Selected Poems.

[citylightsbooks]

5 Questions with Poet Don Share, Editor of Poetry Magazine

Don Share was at City Lights Bookstore on Thursday, November 9 (pictured above) discussing the new book, Who Reads Poetry: 50 Views of Poetry Magazine (published by University of Chicago Press). He is the editor at Poetry Magazine.

City Lights: If you’ve been to City Lights before, what’s your memory of the visit?  If you haven’t been here before, what are you expecting?

Don Share: Like so many others, I made my first pilgrimage to City Lights as a very young poet. The Pocket Poets Series were the first poetry books I collected and treasured (even picking up multiple copies of them wherever they turned up), so of course, I had to see their home. All this was before the Internet, when one had to travel around to find such havens for poetry as City Lights; I can still remember my trembling excitement as I first walked through the door!

What's the first book you read and what are you reading right now?

I don’t know what the first book I read was––it was probably the old Winnie the Pooh books with the great illustrations by E.H. Shepard. But the first book I pored over was This Is New York, by M. Šašek. I still have a copy! I grew up in the periphery, dreaming of big cities, so this book felt like going on a huge trip every time I reread it. The first poetry book I owned and read was Ginsberg’s HOWL and Other Poems and then, of course Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara followed by Auden’s selected in a Faber paperback edition with a Hockney drawing of him on the cover. I still have them, too!

What I’m reading now is the critical edition of D.H. Lawrence’s poems because I’m a nerd and the price dropped for some reason; and Fay Zwicky’s collected poems––an utterly life-changing book!––that John Kinsella generously sent me all the way from Australia.

Which 3 books would you never part with?

Delmore Schwartz’s Summer Knowledge, R. Meltzer’s Gulcher: Post-Rock Cultural Pluralism in America (1649-1993) (so I never forget how to laugh), and Janet Frame’s The Pocket Mirror (so I never forget to stay sane).

If your book had a soundtrack, what would it be?

Nas’s version of the Memphis Jug Band tune “On the Road Again” (not to be confused with the Canned Heat song with the same title).

If you opened a bookstore tomorrow, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

I would open a bookstore in any place I had to live, because I could never live in a place that didn’t have one. It would be called Books Piled Up on the Floor, because that’s how I organize books; and the bestseller would be The Poems of Basil Bunting, edited by Don Share.

Check out Poetry Magazine, which you can find basically anywhere (including at City Lights Bookstore) and check out the new book Who Reads Poetry? available from University of Chicago Press, at City Lights, and at your local independent bookstore.

[poetryfoundation]

(The Poetry Foundation)

3. is your child’s voice louder than required? In an enclosure or a cave it is difficult to gauge one’s volume. The proscenium of the world. All the rooms we speak of are dark places. Because he cannot see his mouth, he cannot imagine the sound that comes out. --Oliver de la Paz

The editors discuss Oliver de la Paz's "Autism Screening Questionnaire — Speech and Language Delay" from the July/August 2017 issue of Poetry magazine.

[tasavvur]

Mi corazón, una febril granada de agrupado rubor y abierta cera, que sus tiernos collares te ofreciera con una obstinación enamorada. My heart is a feverish pomegranate of clustered crimson, its wax opened, which could offer you its tender pendants lovingly, persistently.

Miguel Hernández, tr. Don Share, from I Have Lots of Heart: Selected Poems.

[malaisequotes]

“Hunger is the most important thing to know: to be hungry is the first lesson we learn. And the ferocity of what you feel, there where the stomach begins, sets you on fire.”

Hunger by Miguel Hernández, translated by Don Share

[j2parman]

Perhaps again as in my poem, it is the need to write which comes first, and engenders the things it hardly dares to handle. So Pasiphae is the only myth adequate to the particular horror story I am engaged on. Oh yes, I've taken care to make Bloodaxe as telling as I can: and another, abler age would have made a tragedy out of him as scarifying as anything the Greeks had; but in fact he is driven only by his own nature. Pasiphaë has something more monstrous and more terrifying to submit to, of her own volition, but in the universe-busting mission that someone has to face - a few in each generation. In some degree I scorn Bloodaxe; but I do not scorn Pasiphae.

Basil Bunting, quoted by Don Share in the notes to Briggflatts, The Poems of Basil Bunting, Faber & Faber, 2016, p. 345.

[j2parman]

Those fail who try to force their destiny, like Eric (Bloodaxe); but those who are resolute to submit, like my version of Pasiphaë, may bring something new to birth, be it only a monster.

Basil Bunting, quoted by Don Share in his notes to Bunting’s Briggflatts, The Poems of Basil Bunting, Faber & Faber, 2016, p. 345.