#poetry wire

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Can a poem bring about a bountiful harvest? Can a poem reveal the energy of souls? Can a poem bring God into the hearts’ of humanity? Even if it could do any of these things, can a poem sustain them? And if it could sustain them, for how long? Isn’t that the paradox of writing poetry and of becoming a poet?

David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Poet’s Journey: Chapter 5

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I do not mean to make the “eat your vegetables because there are starving children in India” argument. But, also, c’mon. While many of the world’s poets are deeply preoccupied with war and hierarchy, with exploitation and power, there is a pervasive sinisterlessness in American poetry. There is hash and rehash of the quotidian, an alarmlessness, a niche of the nada. Deftness has become a substitute for compassion. Style a stand in for thinking and feeling. Self-destructive forms are now glorified over measured insight.

 David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Something More Than Style

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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: A New Poetry Emerges from Iran

Here are some interesting websites for the Iranian poetry curious among you:

Poetry International Rotterdam features articles and links to Iranian literary magazines, publishing houses, and writers, including the Iranian PEN Centre in Exile, which is a limited resource.

The Translation Project brings Iranian-inspired projects to the world in literary translation.

The Poetry Translation Centre in London includes translation of about two dozen Iranian poems that includes “The Boat That Brought Me” by Azita Ghahreman:

Behind these eyes that look like mine old names are fading away, the past lies crumpled in my clenched fist - a coppery bird in coppery wind, this vast place has covered me from head to toe.

I am not stripped of word and thought but sometimes what I want to say gets lost like a moon smudged with cloud, or when I splutter on a drink. My tongue trips up when I speak of that journey though the blood in my veins felt the truth of death. As I traced my footsteps through the tracery of my old language Summer whispered to me and my frozen fingers began to put out shoots even as I began to love the cold ebb and flow of tides.

Sometimes I miss the boat that brought me here, now that I am witness to the icy eyes of a Swedish winter, under these tired old clouds, while that suitcase still holds a patch of the sky-blue me.

[therumpus]

Isn’t it also the case, then, that a poet must disappear somewhat as the writer in the writing of the poem? If we want the reader to do anything, we must put the reader’s needs ahead of ours. At some crucial point in the process of writing the poem, I mean, we must put the reader’s interests ahead of ours.

David Biespiel's Poetry Wire: The Art of Communion

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It used to be I would pile the books, as I say, wherever I could find space in the studio. I’d just stack them on the little electric radiators (we have no heat up here!). I’d tip them gently onto the little electric white box fans. Then there are the chairs I try to reserve for visitors. But there are no places for them to sit now. Nor is there a place on the back of those chairs even to hang my jacket — the slender ledges of the chairs are balancing a couple dozen of the books too.

David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Moderate Giftedness

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As American poets begin to sift through the ashes of the last decade of war and its impact on American life, as American poets continue to assert our predisposition for peaceful unification, as American poets write in favor of amity and cessation and pacifism over war and extreme violence and tribalism, it is well too that we not underestimate the vile of tyranny in order simply to be peace-loving.

David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Fading of September 11

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Still, it’s Heaney’s tangling with the urgencies of political convolution and those of poetic impulse that has always drawn me to his writing. That, and he had the best ear of any cat in the business. His renditions of our nouns and verbs as “pure being” are inspirational to any poet who cares about the musicality of the art. I say “our” nouns and verbs but that’s not quite right. Heaney wrote in a language imposed upon his Irish tongue. He wrote both in English and against it.

David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Death of the Natural

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I exaggerate. I oversimplify. I generalize. But there’s no cynicism here. American poetry is a mess. Long live American poetry.

David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Cynicism of Mark Edmundson, Or Poetry Is Still Not Dead