Category: Poets

From Lea Goldberg’s Diary

The greatest and only crime: spiritual laziness. And within that spiritual laziness, one doesn’t even acknowledge it, making it seven times worse.  –Peter Cole, Hebrew Writers on Writing

Russians Reciting Poetry as Prayer

Countless former prisoners described how memorized verse consoled them. It preserved their past life and their continuity with it. And it was something the authorities could not take away.  Once stories about prisoners reciting poetry…

Journals and Commonplace Books

It was becoming a habit with [Thoreau] now to work back over his journals and to reread books, to reengage old subjects in the light of new interests, to revise and recopy his own earlier…

Books Inspected This Afternoon

Arthur Waley, Confucius: Analects Kenneth Rexroth, Classics Revisited Ezra Pound, New Selected Poems and Translations Ai Weiwei and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ai Weiwei Speaks David Hinton, The Selected Poems of Tu Fu  Ezra Pound, Confucius:…

What Came First

I was reading C.K. Williams’s book On WhitmanSeptember 2010And I scribbled on page 97 these three.. A NameAn AvowalA Maxim– Kelly McBride“You Are My Hero”Seven times down, eight times up The “Hero” referenceI’d first scribbled…

Paradise and Inferno

The World War I poet Ivor Gurney wrote: “There are strange Hells within the minds War made.” If a new Vietnam War poem is ever written in America, it will be a descent into that…

With Gratitude for Rexroth

Kenneth Rexroth, 100 Poems from the JapaneseNew Directions, 1964 Dear EJ Kenneth Rexroth—poet, polymath, anarchist, and pacifist—is a fine guide to Chinese and Japanese poetry.  He provided six books of translation for the enrichment of…

Dylan’s Tweets

Yesterday I had lunch and spent some time with Andrew Ivers, a gentleman and a scholar, at Courtesy Diner on Hampton. Of course, we eventually came around to Bob Dylan, after Andrew gave me a…