Vitro Nasu

Charles Simic

(Photo via )

“History is a cookbook. The tyrants are chefs. The philosophers write menus. The priests are waiters. The military men are bouncers. The singing you hear is the poets washing dishes in the kitchen.”
— Charles Simic

Charles Simic Pulitzer Prize winning poet dies at 84

There Is Nothing Quieter

By Charles Simic
February 1, 2021

Than softly falling snow
Fussing over every flake
And making sure
It won’t wake someone.

Published in the print edition of the February 8, 2021, issue, The New Yorker.

Author of dozens of books, Simic was ranked by many as among the greatest and most original poets of his time, one who didn’t write in English until well into his 20s. His bleak, but comic perspective was shaped in part by his years growing up in wartime Yugoslavia, leading him to observe that “The world is old, it was always old.” His poems were usually short and pointed, with surprising and sometimes jarring shifts in mood and imagery, as if to mirror the cruelty and randomness he had learned early on.
His notable books included The World Doesn’t End, winner of the Pulitzer in 1990; Walking the Black Cat, a National Book Award finalist in 1996; Unending Blues and such recent collections as The Lunatic and Scribbled in the Dark. In 2005, he received the Griffin poetry prize and was praised by judges as “a magician, a conjuror”, master of “a disarming, deadpan precision, which should never be mistaken for simplicity”. He was fluent in several languages and translated the works of other poets from French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian and Slovenian.
In 1964, Simic married the fashion designer Helene Dubin, with whom he had two children. He became an American citizen in 1971 and two years later joined the faculty of the University of New Hampshire, where he remained for decades.

His first book, What the Grass Says, came out in 1967. He followed with Somewhere Among Us a Stone is Taking Notes and Dismantling the Silence, and was soon averaging a book a year. A New York Times review from 1978 would note his gift for conveying “a complex of perceptions and feelings” in just a few lines.

“Of all the things ever said about poetry, the axiom that less is more has made the biggest and the most lasting impression on me,” Simic told Granta in 2013. “I have written many short poems in my life, except ‘written’ is not the right word to describe how they came into existence. Since it’s not possible to sit down and write an eight-line poem that’ll be vast for its size, these poems are assembled over a long period of time from words and images floating in my head.”

Grove Atlantic – “Also a Poet”

Ada Calhoun – Also a Poet (her homepage)

Also A Poet
Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me
“Also a Poet is packaged as a love triangle: father, daughter and O’Hara. It’s actually a tetrahedron from which all kinds of creative characters pop forth. It’s a big valentine to New York City past and present, and a contribution to literary scholarship, molten with soul.” — New York Times

Ada Colhoun was named after Ada Katz, wife of Alex Katz who painted many portraits of Frank O’Hara and his wife.

(Rembrandt Polish Rider was Frank O’Hara’s favorite painting)

In “Having a Coke with You,” as in much of his work, the poet admixes life and art. Here, life seems to come out on top: person over portrait (except maybe Rembrandt’s Polish Rider in the Frick). Scroll down to see a video of Frank O’Hara reciting “Having a Coke with YOu’

“Variations on a Theme” Ada Calhoun’s favorite poem by William Carlos Williams

Washington Post interview

Kenji Miyazawa cultivated a life as a thinker, a practicing buddhist, a geologist/agronomist, and idealsitic educator and reformer.

From Who is Kenji?

In the introduction to his collection of short stories, The Restaurant of Many Orders, he set himself up as an experimental medium for the chaotic processes of natural phenomena. Kenji Miyazawa was born on Aug 27, 1896. Today he is known mostly for writing children’s stories.
He saw himself as a simple vehicle for reprocessing nature itself. “These stories of mine,” he wrote in 1923, “all came to me from moonlight and rainbows, at places like railroad tracks and fields and forests.”
Kenji Miyazawa, Rebel with a Cause (collection of essays)

He was 37 when he died. (wiki)
Almost totally unknown as a poet in his lifetime, Miyazawa’s work gained its reputation posthumously,[2] and enjoyed a boom by the mid-1990s on his centenary.[3] A museum dedicated to his life and works was opened in 1982 in his hometown. Many of his children’s stories have been adapted as anime, most notably Night on the Galactic Railroad. Many of his tanka and free verse poetry, translated into many languages, are still popular today.

Kame neko (oven cat- a sample story by Kenji Miyazawa)

Drawings by a buddhist/poet/geologist/agronomist/socialist

The World of Kenji Miyazaki

Things to Think

Think in ways you’ve never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you’ve ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about
To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven,
Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.
Robert Bly

A Billy Moyers – Gathering Men, Robert Bly

Mark Rylance How Robert Bly Changed My Life

Robert Bly – Poetry Foundation

Robert Bly wiki

Etel Adnan Art

Poetry Foundation

tk

Exhibition – Etel Adnan Lights – New Measure

She was born in Beirut in 1925 to a Greek mother and Syrian father; grew up speaking French, Arabic, and Greek; and as an adult has lived for extended periods in Lebanon, the United States, and France. She began to paint in the late 1950s, while working as a professor of philosophy in Northern California. It was a period when, in protest of France’s colonial rule in Algeria, she renounced writing in French and declared that she would begin “painting in Arabic.”

While Adnan’s writings have been unflinching in their critique of war and social injustice, her visual art is an intensely personal distillation of her faith in the human spirit and the beauty of the natural world. She has stated, “It seems to me I write what I see, paint what I am.” Adnan creates her paintings decisively and intuitively.

(Via Guggenheim)

The Luminous Abstractions of Etel Adnan (New Yorker)

The Moon Glows the Same

Matsuo Bashō 1687

The moon so pure
a wandering monk carries it
across the sand

Matsuo Bashō

Interview – Michael Andre Talks about his Poetry Photo via

Michael Andre: Years Skip By Like a Stone Across a Pond

Michael Andre is a Canadian, poet, critic and editor living in New York City. Andre hosted radio shows in Chicago and New York. He interviewed, published, and occasionally socialized with W. H. Auden and Eugene McCarthy, Beats like Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, John Cage and Andy Warhol.

Andre is the editor of Unmuzzled OX, an occasional magazine of poetry, art and politics which began in 1971 as a quarterly and has produced 16 volumes. Andre edited and published two books by Gregory Corso, Earth Egg and Writings from OX.

Ray Johnson

Shoe
John Cage took me to a party for Buckminster Fuller. I was surprised to meet my friend Ellen Burstyn, and introduced her to John. We gabbed until Merce Cunningham arrived. John excused himself. “Who was that?” hissed the Oscar-winning actress. A month later I read in The Times that Burstyn and Cage had hosted a lavish party for Fuller. They forgot to invite me.

John Cage Shoes blog“>Merce danced in John Cage shoes.

Happy birthday-Michael Andre

Michael Andre told me about Benedetta Barzini’s father.

This is an amazing book
On page 37
Beyond Realism
You Know the details of the kangaroo. – Leonard Cohen.

(Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti)
Gary Sneider remembers Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Happy birthday Gary Snyder (May 8 1930)

“Range after range of mountains.
Year after year after year.
I am still in love.”
― Gary Snyder

“Clouds sink down the hills
Coffee is hot again. The dog
Turns and turns about, stops and sleeps.”
― Gary Snyder, Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems

Reality Insight (poem on youtube)

Paris Review Interview here.

Poetry foundation

”Poetry a riprap on the slick rock of metaphysics”
“Once Only almost at the equator almost at the
equinox
exactly at midnight from a ship the full moon in the center of the sky.”

The Last Word (obit)

SF Gate Ferlinghetti dead

Farewell to Ferlinghetti – Paris Review

I didn’t get much sleep last night
thinking about underwear
Have you ever stopped to consider
underwear in the abstract
When you really dig into it
some shocking problems are raised
Underwear is something
we all have to deal with
Everyone wears
some kind of underwear
The Pope wears underwear I hope
The Governor of Louisiana
wears underwear
I saw him on TV
He must have had tight underwear
He squirmed a lot (excerpt from Poetry Foundation)

Photo by Elsa Dorfman

Bob Dylan and Lawrence Ferlinghetti

See paintings by Ferlinghetti

Lawrence as the statue of liberty

Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation — oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

(via)

Louis Gluck

The American poet Louise Glück – awarded this year’s NobelPrize in Literature – was born 1943 in New York and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Apart from her writing she is a professor of English at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
Glück seeks the universal, and in this she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs, present in most of her works.
The voices of Dido, Persephone and Eurydice – the abandoned, the punished, the betrayed – are masks for a self in transformation, as personal as it is universally valid.
Louise Glück is not only engaged by the errancies and shifting conditions of life, she is also a poet of radical change and rebirth, where the leap forward is made from a deep sense of loss.
In one of her most lauded collections, The Wild Iris (1992), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, she describes the miraculous return of life after winter in the poem “Snowdrops”:

Louise Gluck Weebly com

You will hear thunder and remember me

October

Louise Glück – 1943-

Is it winter again, is it cold again,
didn’t Frank just slip on the ice,
didn’t he heal, weren’t the spring seeds planted

didn’t the night end,
didn’t the melting ice
flood the narrow gutters

wasn’t my body
rescued, wasn’t it safe

didn’t the scar form, invisible
above the injury

terror and cold,
didn’t they just end, wasn’t the back garden
harrowed and planted—

I remember how the earth felt, red and dense,
in stiff rows, weren’t the seeds planted,
didn’t vines climb the south wall

I can’t hear your voice
for the wind’s cries, whistling over the bare ground

I no longer care
what sound it makes

when was I silenced, when did it first seem
pointless to describe that sound

what it sounds like can’t change what it is—

didn’t the night end, wasn’t the earth
safe when it was planted

didn’t we plant the seeds,
weren’t we necessary to the earth,

the vines, were they harvested?

Lockdown – Coronavirus

Taylor Mead

My Arm for a pillow
I really like myself
Under the hazy mooon

Yosa Buson

Translated by Robert Hass

(Senior Trip)

(Happy birthday Michael Ondaatjie– Sept 12)

See photos of him from his life here
In Ceylon

76 facts you might not know about on Michael Ondaatjie

31. Ondaatje calls his novels “cubist,” by which he means that he eschews linear narratives and experiments with the form.

See a photo of Ondaatjie and Ralph Fiennes here.
Breaking the Rules

One of his beloved books “Coming Through Slaughter” is a fictional story of New Orleans, Louisiana about 1900, very loosely based on the lives of jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden and photographer E. J. Bellocq. Winner of the 1976 Books in Canada First Novel Award.
New Orleans and vicinity at the turn of the century is the setting for the novel. Consider the places where the action occurs: N. Joseph’s Shaving Parlor, the river, Shell Beach, the Brewitts, Webb’s cottage, the streets of Storyville, Bellocq’s studio, Bolden’s home with Nora and the children, the mental hospital.

Willem Dafoe interviewed Michael Ondaatjie
He has given many interviews but the interview with William Dafoe, Michael became more open and revealing. He said, “I went into a tailspin after The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. I won an award for it in Canada and I went into this hole. So I wrote Coming Through Slaughter, which was a huge fury about fame. It was on a very small scale, but it was big enough. I mean, the thing is to continue to avoid being self-conscious. To write and forget that you wrote other books.”
“I have a tendency to remove more and more in the process of editing. Often I’ll write the first chapter last, because it sets up the story. The last thing I wrote in Coming Through Slaughter was “His geography,” almost like a big landscape shot, with buried clues you can pick up later. ”

On the genesis of plane crash image for English Patient:

“WD: Where did you get the central image of the plane crash, do you even remember?
MO: I just got the image and it was there. The artist, Joseph Beuys, was in a plane crash in the far north, not in the desert, but I already had this image in my head. It was one of those things where I’d heard about Beuys and his obsession with felt and that worked its way in too. That was enough. I didn’t need to know anymore. The medicine man… ”
He then continues to talk about Herodotus, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley.
“MO: I had already read some of him. Then there was a reference to him in one of the explorer’s desert journals; one guy who said, “I was responsible for our library on one of our expeditions. But our library was only one book, Herodotus” And I thought that was great, because he was an historian writing about a place where these guys are many hundreds of years later. The idea of a contemporary history and an ancient history that links up… These explorers in the 1930s were out of time. I love the idea of them checking out sand dune formations. I love historical obsessives. And I kept thinking of writers like Charles Olson and Robert Creeley in some odd way. Creeley in his toughness, brittleness and lovely guarded lyricism was a clue for me about the patient, Almasy. And this wonderful, heroic era of exploration that was then ignored, while the twentieth century became more mercenary or mercantile. Also Herodotus’ sense of history is great because it’s very much based on rumor. “

The End Judges Everything by Herodotus (with original greek text)
The world according to Herodotus
Herodotus’ Histories

Michael O. shares birthday with these two historical figures.
Lorenzo di Medici
9/12/1492 – 5/4/1519
Florentine ruler (1513-9)

Francis I
9/12/1494 – 3/31/1547
French king and patron of the arts and scholarship (1515-47 )