Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has emphasized the significant role of literature in the uprising of Islamic Awakening.

Ayatollah Khamenei made the remarks in Tehran on Monday at a meeting with the Iranian and foreign literati who attended the International Congress on Islamic Awakening Literature.

He asked the literary figures from Islamic countries to write poetry that would have a great influence on the uprising of the Islamic Awakening.

At the meeting, guests from Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Bahrain and several other countries recited their poetry in honor of Prophet Muhammad (S), the Islamic Awakening, and the 33rd anniversary of the victory of the Islamic Revolution.

The Leader also stated that the concept of the poetry with the central theme of the Islamic Awakening must give insight into the Islamic nations, saying, “Special attention needs to be paid to the literature of Islamic Awakening and its lofty goals and processes.”

He emphasized that the role of religion, faith in God, and Quranic concepts must also be covered in the poetry of the Islamic Awakening since any movement rooted in religious beliefs will be invulnerable and everlasting.

He also said he regarded the uprising of the Islamic Awakening a true awakening which will not end and will continue; and the history of the Islamic ummah will surely change with God’s permission.

In anticipation of Anne Carson’s new book, Antigonick, New Directions’ Tom Roberge rounds up excerpts of reviews of her last, Nox, writing:

A few weeks back, I had the pleasure of talking to hundreds of booksellers — in groups of about eight at a time — about Anne Carson’s forthcoming book, Antigonick. Of course I mentioned her previous book, Nox, and of course I ended up saying “beautiful book-in-a-box” dozens of times over the course of three days. Which led me to wonder (since I wasn’t here at New Directions when Nox was first published, and didn’t read every review of it) how the various reviewers chose to describe the physical nature of the “book.”

Roberge counts New York Magazine, The Guardian, Publisher’s Weekly, New York Times Book Review, Times Literary Supplement, The Believer, and others; as well as his favorite bits, from Meghan O’Rourke at The New Yorker, who likened the box’s size to a Bible; and Dan Chiasson at the New York Review of Books, who waxed fondly about the accordion book:

“Accordion-fold” books are their own minor genre, and are often homemade: folding a sheet of paper, first this way, then that, is among the simplest ways to make a book, requiring no binding. This chain-link form is especially suited to panoramas, alphabets, bestiaries, souvenir books, and almanacs. The format allows for the simultaneous representation of episode and arc, individual and ensemble: stretched out along the length of a table, you can see all at once the succession of English monarchs, or the stages of the evolution of man, or one hundred full-color views of Paris.

Great post! Though there was also Stephen Burt on the subject for the London Review of Books. Burt ultimately found the overwhelmingly positive critical appreciation of Nox a testament to something else:

Its rapturous reception testifies – through no fault of her own – to Carson’s celebrity, and to the aura her work holds, with its sources and blank spaces. That reception also testifies – again, through no fault of Carson’s – to the continuing prestige but diminished actual interest that poetry as such seems to hold these days. For many readers, and not a few editors, Nox and its ‘poetry of a kind you’re not used to’ has turned out to be poetry of the most welcome kind: a work you can admire and interpret simply by opening the box and unfolding the pages; a book of poems you don’t even have to read.

Celebrity aside, a lot of us do read this amazing book. Looking forward to the next—also a visual feat, with illustrations from Carson’s former student Bianca Stone and hand-lettered text from Carson herself.

The bad news is that state funding for California libraries has been completely eliminated. There’s not really any good news about that except that it was expected. This past July, state library funding was sliced in half, and there was a trigger amendment attached to the budget that would eliminate state funding for public libraries at midyear if the state’s revenue projections were not met. Needless to say, they weren’t.

Now libraries in the Bay Area, as in the rest of the state, will lose funding for literacy programs, InterLibrary Loans, and miscellaneous expenses such as librarian training programs and books. Libraries in rural areas will be hit the hardest because they receive more state funding than libraries in larger cities with larger budgets.

These cuts are not new. State funding for libraries has been dwindling for the past decade. The Public Library Fund, which provides direct state aid to public libraries for basic service, has never received its full appropriation from the Legislature since it began in 1983 (which was also the end of Jerry Brown’s first stint as governor). State funding lasted a little over twenty years.

The December 2011 monthly report from Berkeley Library Director Donna Corbeil reads, “There will be no immediate impact on the Library as this reduction was anticipated.” Keep your eyes on the word immediate. “We’re still pretty concerned about how this will affect our libraries in the long term,” Corbeil said.

The next month’s report, from January 2012, states, “For the last two years as the state’s budget situation worsened the Library set aside its Public Library Funds receipts as a temporary alternative funding source.”

In the 1999/2000 fiscal year, libraries received $56.8 million from the state. That was a good year. By the 2008/2009 year, libraries were only getting $12.9 million. That was a bad year, but, in retrospect, still pretty good. Libraries now get nothing.

Corbeil hopes that the California Library Association will help local librarians organize a campaign against the elimination in funding but says it’s not up to her to put out a call for action.

Read more about it here.

More from the article:

From 1950 to 1953, anti-war poet Sankichi Toge (1917-1953) lived at one of the apartments, where he composed one of his representative works while looking out the window at a nearby river. A monument to Toge stands on the apartment grounds.

Hiroshi Maruya, 86, a poet who had close ties with Toge, says he visited Toge at his apartment here once after Toge published in 1951 a collection of poems about the atomic bomb, and the two discussed poetry through the night.

On the demolition, Maruya said, “It’s a shame, but it can’t be helped. The monument has become old and hard for people to notice. I hope the demolition leaves something to let people know that Toge’s apartment was here.”

The Third Coast International Audio Festival recently aired an audio documentary about Anne Sexton, which covers her life, her poetry, her therapist, and her fraught relationship with her family.

The story— produced by Charlotte Austin of Whistledown Productions— draws on transcripts of Sexton’s conversations with her long-time therapist (which were controversially released following her death in 1974), along with interviews with Sexton’s daughters.

The story makes for pretty intense listening and begins about halfway through the hourlong program, which you can find here.

Here’s a snippet from a Guardian article:

Protests about the cancellation of Forsyth’s Saturday morning music and interview show, which is being dropped in July when Olympics coverage begins, grew over the weekend as objections poured in from famous fans. The musician Edwyn Collins told the BBC on Twitter that Forsyth was the “jewel in your crown”, adding “it’s not too late to change your mind. This is daft”; Rankin’s fellow crime writer Val McDermid said it was “time we organised a protest march”, Franz Ferdinand singer Alex Kapranos called Forsyth “the best thing on Scottish radio you fools!” and even Scotland’s deputy first minister Nicola Sturgeon got involved, asking “how can BBCRadioScot even think about axing the brilliant janiceforsyth show? They should change their minds.”

Signatories to an online petition which states that it is “essential that this show be maintained … to allow a new generation of listeners [to] discover great music”, and that “replacing it with news and sport is a unsuitable alternative”, have now hit 900, while Rankin’s protest poem, published in the Sabotage Times, describes Forsyth as “akin to a goddess, / While coming across to her listeners as really quite modest”.

Dismissing BBC Radio Scotland as “numpties”, Rankin then calls their reasons for cutting the show “shite”. “Saturday mornings without her will leave a hole in her fans’ trannies, / So my plea to Radio Scotland is: DON’T DO THIS, YA BUNCH OF FANNIES!”

The poem itself can be found here.

In more radical radical poetry journal news, you’ve got to check out Esque Mag Issue 3, called “Revolutionesque,” which was just released today. For this one, editors Amy King and Ana Božičević asked contributors to respond to the idea of revolution. “We didn’t define what we mean by that. Whether it lives in your home, in the financial district, or the district of your heart, you defined your revolution and told us what it is. Here are y/our findings.”

It’s beautiful. And the TOC contains Diane DiPrima, Paige Taggart, Dan Hoy, John Ashbery, Sara Jane Stoner, Dot Devota, Jan Clausen, Filip Marinovich, Rachel Levitsky, Cara Benson, Thom Donovan, Sophie Podolski translated by Paul Legault, Gloria Frym, David Buuck, Patricia Spears Jones, Kristin Prevallet, Richard Loranger, Lily Brown, Amy Lawless, Jon Cotner, Lisa Samuels, David Brazil, Ossian Foley, Laynie Browne, Sharon Mesmer, Dana Teen Lomax, Brian Howe, Jennifer Karmin, Dale Smith, Elizabeth Treadwell, and many many other delights (108 in total!). Noelle Kocot has 13 poems here — almost a chapbook!

There’s also a special Naropa section in this issue, featuring Allan Andre, Angela Stubbs, Ariella Ruth, Jessica Hagemann, Lauren Artiles, Lindsay Miller, Matthew Wedlock, and Meryl DePasquale.

Looks like HTMLGIANT should do another survey; this one would surely rise up (had to).

Ezra Pound’s beautiful translation of a poem by Li Po, from Pound’s great early book Cathay, is a compendium of all his many gifts. Somewhere Pound says that the ideas in poetry should be simple, even banal, and universal and human; he points out that the chorus in Greek tragedies always sticks close to home truths of the sort “All men are born to die.” “Exile’s Letter” has this universal simplicity (“There is no end of things in the heart”). It is about the sadness of parting from dear friends. As someone who was himself often living far from writer-friends, Pound knew all about the exquisite melancholy of leave-taking.

White also provides some nice context for the original poem, explaining that the Chinese had “the world’s first civil service and no hereditary nobility. All prominent scholar-bureaucrats could secure positions only by passing rigorous Confucian examinations” and then moving to new parts of the empire. So long periods of separation and dislocation weren’t unusual. White writes:

The pain of repeated parting and the precariousness of the scholar’s life is played out here in a landscape of pellucid pools and beautiful pleasure pavilions filled with dancing girls and gifted musicians. We hear about the “blue jeweled table” and “water clear as blue jade” just as we hear about “vermillioned girls.” Several times we’re told that the participants in these transitory revels are drunk; in traditional China drunkenness was seen as sympathetic, sociable, evidence of sincerity. The most famous Chinese poet of all, Li Po, was said to have drowned while trying to embrace the moon’s reflection when he was drunk. The saying went that someone was a Confucian in office and a Taoist out of office; Taoism was associated with eccentricity, drinking, and writing poetry, while Confucianism was much more staid and official. This poem demonstrates the tension between the two religions—and the two approaches to life.

Check out the rest of White’s post and read Li Po’s poem here, or see how the poem originally looked when it was published by Poetry back in 1915.

In conjunction with the Woodberry Poetry Room’s 80th Anniversary, the Poetry Room presented an oral history of the indefatigably friendly, flamboyant and metaphysical poet Frank O’Hara, featuring his dear friend and Harvard classmate, John Ashbery. This intimate and vibrant exchange of memories and anecdotes was introduced and moderated by Ron Padgett, author of “How to Be Perfect” and “Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard.”

Enjoy!

Contributors in the new issue include Sara Deniz Akant, Brian Ang, Jerimee Bloemeke, Feng Sun Chen, Amy De’Ath, Emily Dorman, Patrick Dunagan, Purdey Kreiden, Pierre Klossowski (trans. Reena Spaulings), Ben Lerner, Mark Levine, Joe Luna, Anthony Madrid, Jessica O Marsh, Chris Martin, Jeff Nagy, Tim Shaner, Josh Stanley, Jonty Tiplady, Catheringe Wagner, and Elisabeth Workman. Bedazzle yourself here.

Poetry, OWS reports, reviews (are there any bad reviews in this one?), and OH, the dream reviews. And oh, the audio. Enjoy.

Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions ranges widely and covers collaborations between poets and painters in the 1950s and 1960s; the complex role played by the “true abstraction” of the feminine in the work of John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler; the intricate weave of verbal and visual arts throughout the postwar period from Abstract Expressionism to Pop to Conceptualism to feminist and queer performance art; and the unfolding, diverse careers of Mayer, Notley, and Myles from the 1970s to the present.

By asking us to rethink the ways in which we conceptualize “schools” and “avant-gardes” and drawing our attention to larger, compelling questions about how and why we read—and how gender and sexuality inform that reading in the first place—Nelson not only fills an important gap in the history of American poetry and art but also gives an inspired performance of the kind of lively, audacious, and personally committed criticism that befits her subject.

You can get this one straight from the press, or ask your local bookseller to order it. Hurrah!

The Brodsky Museum v. Financial Trouble: The Brodsky Museum can’t lose. Not with America on its side.

Ross Ventrone v. the NFC: It may be a fair match on the gridiron, but do not challenge Ventrone to a round of the dozens.

Geoffrey Hill v. Carol Ann Duffy: Duffy takes the side of the ever-popular text message. But Hill comes through in the clutch with a surprising sense of humor.

Occupy Wall Street v. Wall Street: WS has got the guns, but OWS has the color commentary, from Eileen Myles, Ariana Reines, Matthew Connors, Mike Andrews, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Ben Tausig, Dan Hoy, and others.

Ler Devagar in Lisbon v. Daikanyama T-Site in Tokyo: Yes, they’re both beautiful bookstores. But which is first place, and which is the first loser?

To Get an MFA v. To Not Get an MFA: This recurrent debate is why god created the University of Phoenix.

Paul Durica v. the Poetry Archives: It’s a formidable foe, but our main sifter is taking our firetrap of back issues for all it’s worth.

Poetry v. Prayer: When Jericho Brown, Kazim Ali, and Dunya Mikhail bring their A-game, we’re all winners.

Practices v. Peculiarities: Why pick one when you can have both? That marginalia you like is coming back in style.

Three moments of silence for Wislawa Szymborksa, Stacy Doris and Dorothea Tanning, respectively.

We at Harriet are deeply saddened to report the loss of poet and translator Stacy Doris, who died on January 31 at the age of 49 after a battle with cancer. We discussed Doris’s book-length poem The Cake Part (Publication Studio, 2011) just recently. This work, which acts as “an eruption of all the repressed joy and terror of [the] 18th century revolution, back into our time, into the 21st century,” was released with a series of video adaptations of the book, in which many of Doris’s poets and friends in the Bay area and beyond enacted their parts or songs with a rather plucky and loving spirit. It’s clear that Doris “begins with complexity and mixture and continues with complexity and mixture.”

In April of last year, Eric Baus pointed us to a recording of Doris reading “Love Letter (Lament),” which appears in her book Paramour. The poem begins with a note to the reader that Baus excerpted from:

“It was written between 1995 and 2000 in the South of France and in North America by a willful female author who, nagged and baffled by questions of poetic form’s future, set out, as if she had all the time in the world on her hands, to catalogue, through strategies of parody and vivisection, an eclectic variety of Western Prosodic models. For subject matter the theme of love, certainly the most prevalent topic of poetic tradition, was readily selected.”

A willful female author, indeed: Her books included Paramour (Krupskaya, 2000) and The Cake Part, as mentioned, as well as Knot (University of Georgia Press, 2006), Cheerleader’s Guide to the World: Council Book (Roof Books, 2006), Conference (Potes & Poets, 2001), Une Année à New York avec Chester (P.O.L., 2000), La vie de Chester Steven Wiener ecrite par sa femme (P.O.L., 1998), and Kildare (Segue Foundation, 1994). Poetry Center Director Steve Dickison tells us that a new book of poetry, Fledge, will be published this Spring by Nightboat Books.

Doris was also a translator, noted for her work with contemporary French poetry: She co-edited two anthologies, Twenty One New (to North America) French Writers (Raddle Moon, 1997) and Violence of the White Page (with Emmanuel Hocquard, Tyuonyi, 1991). She also contributed translations to Aufgabe’s recent vital feature on French poetry and poetics.

Dickison writes that “Stacy moved to San Francisco with her husband Chet Wiener to begin teaching for the Department of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University in the Fall of 2002. An innovative and powerful teacher, she deeply influenced her many students. The Poetry Center is planning events for mid-April in celebration of her life and work, as poet, translator, and teacher.” Watch their website for more information.

Via The Poetry Project, we’ve also heard that poet Laynie Browne is collecting written responses to the life and work of Stacy Doris for The Volta, where Browne is a contributing editor. Those interested in contributing can send submissions to info at poetry project dot org.

Our hearts go out to Doris’s friends and family. A film of her reading in Paris, 2007.

Flavorpill points us to “The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World,” including a converted 1920s movie palace in Argentina, a cavernous room filled with floating candles in China, a building with a tree growing up through the middle of it in the Netherlands, and a store with a flying bike and books stacked to the ceiling in Portugal. Yes, please.

Now hear this:

The apartment-museum of Russian-born Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Joseph Brodsky may open in the city as a joint cultural project between Russia and the U.S., City Hall said.

Vasily Kichedzhi, deputy governor of St. Petersburg, said that City Hall was ready to take an active part in opening a museum devoted to the poet, who emigrated to the U.S. in the 1970s. However, the project could be too expensive for the city budget, he was quoted by Interfax as saying.

Therefore, the city would welcome a joint Russian-American project, Kichedzhi said during a visit to Brodsky’s apartment together with American Consul General to St. Petersburg Bruce Turner on Tuesday.

Kichedzhi said the long period of time during which Brodsky lived in the U.S. had a significant influence on the poet’s creative works.

Currently, City Hall is considering two options for opening the museum: Either buy the last apartment room that it does not yet own from its occupant, a 74-year-old woman reportedly asking 17 million rubles ($562,000) for her 44-square-meter room — the most paid for any of the other four rooms was 10 million rubles ($330,000) — or make a separate entrance to Brodsky’s rooms in the apartment.

The safety has been either added or released from New England’s roster, or placed on the practice squad, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 times since August, the Boston Herald reported.

In between the chaos, Ventrone has been cranking on his side hobby as a blossoming poet.

Tucked into a quiet corner at Media Day, Ventrone was asked by Sports Illustrated’s Peter King if Patriots teammate Tom Brady has read his work.

“Tom has seen my poetry,” Ventrone said. “I think Tom enjoys it. I think Tom enjoys the Suburban Poet.”

Ventrone told King that he first debuted his work at an in-house Patriots rookie show last season. Scrambling around for something to impress his new teammates, he broke out the notebook and put his deep thoughts to paper.

“I was like what can I do, what can I do?” Ventrone said. “So I just wrote a funny poem for the team, and it stuck and I called myself the ‘Suburban Poet.’”

For more, including a reading, go here. Ventrone enters the show @1:35 mark. He reads a poem beginning at the 4:00 mark.

And don’t forget to write your sausage poem.

The Guardian provides a nice biography and links to an interview with Szymborska from 2000, in which she confessed to not knowing anything, with her characteristic blend of humor, candor, and mischief:

“Everyone needs solitude, especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation,” she said, going on to wonder why anyone would want to interview her. “For the last few years my favourite phrase has been ‘I don’t know’. I’ve reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don’t know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world.”

The New York Times obituary offers helpful advice on how to pronounce Szymborska’s name (vees-WAH-vah shim-BOR-ska) and characterizes her poems as a beguiling mix of the personal and the political, writing:

Much of her verse was contemplative, but she also addressed death, torture, war and, strikingly, Hitler, whose attack on Poland in 1939 started World War II in Europe. She depicted him as an innocent — “this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe” — being photographed on his first birthday.

The NYT also quotes Szymborska’s “Cat in an Empty Apartment,” a eulogy written from the perspective of an abandoned cat, which ends:

Nothing seems different here,
but nothing is the same.
Nothing has been moved,
but there’s more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.
Footsteps on the staircase,
but they’re new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.
Something doesn’t start
at its usual time.
Something doesn’t happen
as it should. Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.

The New Yorker links to the sixteen poems she published in the magazine between 1992 and 2006, Ron Silliman posts a video of Szymborksa reading in Polish, Gawker cites her funny Nobel Lecture riff about poets being “hopelessly unphotogenic,” and GalleyCat quotes her poem “Consolation,” calling it “a fond way to remember the literary life of the great poet”:

hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation,
general merriment and celebration,
and the dog Fido,
gone astray in the first chapter,
turns up barking gladly
in the last.

JacketCopy’s obituary includes one of Szymborska’s great quips (“I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems”) and a Q&A from 1996, when the poet spoke with the L.A. Times’ Warsaw bureau chief following her Nobel win.

For a Polish perspective, check out The Warsaw Voice and Polskie Radio, which contains remembrances by Polish writers Tomasz Jastrun and Janusz Głowacki. That article concludes with reflections by journalist and critic Lawrence Weschler who worked for many years as a correspondent in Poland:

“Her poems are as light as a feather, at at the same time very deep. I am both very sad and grateful for the great gift of wisdom that we all received from Wisława Szymborska. She handed it out very generously. What else can one expect?”, he has said.

Weschler recalled that she did not want to visit he United States, saying that she did not like long journeys.

“When we tried to persuade her to come, she said: ‘I’d come if you arranged meetings with Woody Allen and Jane Goodall, the famous expert on chimpanzees.’ Once we made all the arrangements, she said it was a joke.”

First up, poet and TC editor Lucy Ives interviews one of our favorite poetic narrativistes, Renee Gladman, about “essays, ditties, half words, partial masks, and being a sentence writer.” A bit from that:

LI: What should you be doing with your writing?

RG: If I were a really good drawer I would give up writing and just make beautiful line drawings, or at least for a while that would suffice, but I don’t draw well enough to abandon writing. Sometimes I go around and talk about the sentence and prose, and for a while I was really stuck on how thoughts exist in a preverbal way. I was thinking about how in our minds we have many things going on simultaneously, as images, half words, gestures, partial marks, and from that multiplicity we go into the single line of articulation, of expression. I kept trying to point back to that threshold moment, that translation or becoming. The linguistic selection process, what you decide to privilege, is fascinating to me, but it’s hard to know what to say about it. It makes writing a very interesting space. Writing is not a map, but something that comes after mapping.

LI: Do you think about a reader in that sense?

RG: It’s bewildering enough trying to grasp “the person” in space and time; imagine trying to think about the reader as you write. For me, writing is a kind of pursuit of company that never comes. That comes, but then leaves or gets taken away; a pursuit that, because I write fiction, is embedded in the narrative. It gets acted out in the events of a narrator and another character or group of characters. I guess it is possible to see something about the reader in here.

LI: In the Ravicka novels, the linguistic gesture is itself a character.

RG: It would be much easier to talk about this if we were talking about poetry. In Turkish, when you bring food out to people, the people who are receiving it say, “Health to your hands,” and the person who brought the food says in return, “Health to you.” An encounter could have a bigger sort of performance behind it, so you’re not just saying, “Thank you,” but, “May birds fly through your hair at night.” I wanted to embed in narrative these other symbolic possibilities. Somehow we get the idea that we can’t say what we want, maybe it will make us cry or be too big for our hearts to contain. So we say, “Hi,” but what we really mean is, “Will you pick me up and carry me across the street?”

Read it all.

Next, Triple Canopy has the latest on Occupy through a survey of writers including Eileen Myles, Ariana Reines, Matthew Connors, Mike Andrews, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Ben Tausig, Dan Hoy, and others. Find their “Call and Response” here.

Wendy Martin, director of the Tufts Poetry Award program and vice provost of CGU, observed that in the 20th Anniversary year of the Kingsley Tufts awards “these poets carry forward a tradition marked by distinguished past winners including Robert Wrigley, Tom Sleigh, Matthea Harvey, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Chase Twichell. CGU is proud to be able to make these important awards.”

The Cloud Corporation is Donnelly’s second book. His first, Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove), was published in 2003. His poems have been widely anthologized and translated, and they have appeared in such periodicals as A Public Space, Fence, Harper’s, The Iowa Review, jubilat, Lana Turner, the Nation, the New Republic, and the Paris Review.

This spring he is the Theodore H. Holmes ’51 and Bernice Holmes Visiting Associate Professor at Princeton University’s Program in Creative Writing and Lewis Center for the Arts. He has been poetry editor of the Boston Review since 1996 and is on the faculty of the Writing Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.

“I’m among the many people in this country who have had to go into significant debt just to get by,” Donnelly said of the seven difficult and sleep-deprived years he spent writing The Cloud Corporation. “All the anxiety in the book about the economy and the struggle to make ends meet isn’t just for effect—it’s all very personal. This prize will give my family and me a measure of financial stability that would otherwise have taken a decade or more to achieve. But as true as all that is, it’s the honor of having had The Cloud Corporation chosen for this distinction that I really can’t wrap my head around.”

Larson’s Radial Symmetry, was selected by well-known poet Louise Glück as winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets and published by Yale University Press in 2011. In addition to the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, her work has been honored by a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation Poetry Prize. She has spent the last decade working as a molecular biologist and field ecologist. She lives in Arizona with her husband and daughter.

“My husband and I worked so hard to budget for a babysitter just so I could have a few hours a week to write,” she said. “This award allows me to continue my work. You have no idea what a gift that is.”

The Kingsley Tufts award, now in its 20th year, was established at Claremont Graduate University by Kate Tufts to honor the memory of her husband, who held executive positions in the Los Angeles Shipyards and wrote poetry as his avocation. The award is presented for a work by a poet who is past the very beginning but has not yet reached the pinnacle of his or her career.

The Kate Tufts Discovery Award was initiated in 1993 and is presented annually for a first book by a poet of genuine promise.

Serious congrats to you both!

A lot of people have written extensively on this topic, and one need only Google “should I get an MFA?” to see what they have to say; I won’t expend effort attempting what many have already done better and more thoroughly elsewhere. (For the widest possible divergence in views, see the opinions of Lan Samantha Chang [for] and Anis Shivani [against].)

I will, however, mention a few things that I think have been missed over the course of these discussions, as well as reiterate points I think are worth revisiting.

First and foremost: never, never, never go into significant debt for an art degree. For any reason. Ever.

Weinstein is a recent MFA grad from NYU, who managed to work full-time while accruing no debt. His feelings on the matter are based on said experience; and he’s pretty positive:

To my mind, the MFA is good for a whole bunch of things: qualifying you to teach undergraduates, getting you used to writing on a deadline, giving you access to a community of writers, giving you time to focus on your writing, meeting a lot of cool and influential writers, and introducing you to the work of poets and writers you otherwise might not have read are just a few examples. Thing is, a lot of these perks are attainable outside the structure of the MFA degree. If you’re working in, say, journalism, and you’ve got a couple of poet/writer friends already, you’ve pretty much got everything you need (unless you really, really want to teach creative writing at the college level.)

And there are a few bad habits I think are instilled (or at least abetted) by the MFA: emphasizing attention to contemporary writing at the cost of attention to the classics (i.e. anything written before World War One), editing by committee (though I’m inclined to think anyone who can be cowed by a room of ten graduate students would be similarly influenced outside of the workshop), and reliance on the artificial structure offered by class deadlines and requirements as a proxy for individual discipline chief among them. But I’m convinced that the benefits of attendance far outweigh the potential disadvantages, so long as you choose a program that’s a good fit and that won’t break the proverbial bank.

Makes sense to us! Oh what’s that, how’s the job market? (Well, don’t forget your PhD.) And then there’s that conversation…

She made it to 101 years old; we are stunned. Gallerist NY tells us that Dorothea Tanning, surrealist painter and poet, has died. “According to her publisher, Graywolf Press, she passed away of natural causes while sleeping.” Graywolf Senior Editor Jeffrey Shotts wrote today:

We are honored to have published her two poetry books, the first of which was published when she was 94 and the second of which was published just last fall when she turned 101. As she herself remarked, with her usual wry self-awareness, she was ‘the oldest emerging poet.’ The fact that she could have such an illustrious career as a visual artist and, so late in that career, then turn to poetry with such forceful craft and signature imagination is a triumph of her unparalleled vision and indomitable spirit. Working with her over two books has been one of the greatest delights of my career as an editor.

Gallerist NY on the evolution of Tanning’s art career:

Ms. Tanning, active as an artist for some eight decades, is perhaps best known for the Surrealist paintings she produced in the 1940s and ’50s. Like Magritte, her work often took the form of realistic depictions of disturbing, surreal situations, as in 1943′s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, in which two apparently entranced young women are confronted by a giant yellow sunflower.

In another iconic work, Birthday (1942), a topless woman in a dress sprouted with dark roots of some sort opens a door that looks out down a hall way filled with a long series of identical doors. A winged beast crouches on the ground beneath her. The work provided the title of her first memoir.

Ms. Tanning was born in 1910, in Galesburg, Ill. (“where nothing happens but the wallpaper,” she once quipped), and by age seven she had decided to become an artist. She studied briefly at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago but abandoned her studies after a matter of weeks, moving to New York in 1935 at the age of 22.

Inspired by the Museum of Modern Art’s Alfred Barr-curated “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” exhibition, she set sail for Paris in 1939, hoping to meet the Surrealists, who had by that point all left the country in the hope of avoiding the war. Returning to New York, she designed imagery for department stores and married Homer Shannon, a relationship that lasted six months.

In 1941, Ms. Tanning joined the Julien Levy gallery, a stronghold of Surrealism at the time, and she fell in with the group, meeting artists like Breton and Tanguy, whose ghostly color palette and amorphous shapes were an influence on some of her work of the time. She also met artist Max Ernst, then married to dealer Peggy Guggenheim, and the two fell in love, moving to Arizona together in the mid 1940s. The pair married in a joint ceremony with Man Ray and Juliet Browne, and moved to France in the 1950s, where they worked until 1976, when Ernst died.

As her career progressed, Ms. Tanning was commissioned to make sets and costumes for the ballets of George Balanchine and other performances and public venues. The Drawing Center presented a retrospective of this body of work in 2010, marking the centennial of her birth.

Later in her career, Ms. Tanning’s work became increasingly abstract, and she experimented with other mediums, like sculpture, printmaking and weaving. By the 1980s, she became increasingly focused on her writing, publishing numerous poems and two memoirs.

We pointed to MoMA’s recent celebration of her life and work just recently; and even picked Tanning’s Coming to That as one of the best poetry books of 2011. Read an excerpt from the book here. Ms. Tanning, you will be greatly missed. Photograph of Dorothea Tanning above by Man Ray, 1948.

The Associated Press and The Polish Cultural Institute have both just reported that poet Wislawa Szymborska died today. More:

Her personal secretary says that Poland’s 1996 Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska has died. She was 88.

Michal Rusinek said Wednesday that Szymborska died “quietly, in her sleep.” She resided in the southern city of Krakow.

The Nobel award committee’s citation called her the “Mozart of poetry,” a woman who mixed the elegance of language with “the fury of Beethoven.”

Szymborska has been called both deeply political and playful, a poet who used humor in unforeseen ways.

The winner of the Goethe Prize in 1991 and, yes, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996 (her Nobel speech can be read here), Szymborska once said, “I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.” Also a translator and essayist, her poetic output was small and careful, with no more than 250 published poems. Poems New and Collected, in English, was published in 2000. Other collections of her poems that have been translated into English include People on a Bridge (1990), View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems (1995), and Monologue of a Dog (2005).

“Hence the indispensable / silver lining,” you can read and listen to her poem “Consolation” here. As well, read “Clouds,” below.

Clouds

I’d have to be really quick
to describe clouds—
a split second’s enough
… for them to start being something else.

Their trademark:
they don’t repeat a single
shape, shade, pose, arrangement.

Unburdened by memory of any kind,
they float easily over the facts.

What on earth could they bear witness to?
They scatter whenever something happens.

Compared to clouds,
life rests on solid ground,
practically permanent, almost eternal.

Next to clouds
even a stone seems like a brother,
someone you can trust,
while they’re just distant, flighty cousins.

Let people exist if they want,
and then die, one after another:
clouds simply don’t care
what they’re up to
down there.

And so their haughty fleet
cruises smoothly over your whole life
and mine, still incomplete.

They aren’t obliged to vanish when we’re gone.
They don’t have to be seen while sailing on.

— Wisława Szymborska

(Translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh)

Paul Durica has been combing through Poetry’s archives month-by-month and he surfaces each time with so many great finds that it’s hard to choose just one. To bring a few more of these images to light, we’ll be posting from time to time what we’re calling “Back Page B-Sides”—images from Poetry’s history that didn’t make it into the print issue, but that are too good to forget.

In this edition, we’d like to shine the spotlight on two gems from the January 1925 issue:

In September 1924, Methodist minister Lawrence Hight and his alleged lover Elsie Sweeten were tried for murdering their respective spouses with arsenic. At the joint trial, the two turned against each other, with Sweeten claiming she was never Hight’s lover and was coerced by him into signing a confession.

Alva N. Turner, who published several poems in poetry, was apparently present at this trial and wrote the above poem, “The Psychological Moment of Love,” based on the scandalous story. It’s clear where his sympathies lie:

She answered the last embrace
Of the arms of the commonplace preacher,
With the thin hair, thinning,
With wrinkles and suspected wrinkles.
They were short arms, like his heavy short body,
And suggestive of his helpless short hope.

Hight was sentenced to life, while Elsie receive thirty-five years but was acquitted at her second trial held in 1927. You can read the full poem here and view a scan of a front page story on the trial, complete with photo of Hight, here.

The January 1925 issue also includes poems by Yvor Winters, Witter Bynner, and others. It was in the News Notes section, near the end of the issue, that we found another unusual offering:

A frequent Poetry contributor, Clifford Franklin Gessler lived in Hawaii and wrote many poems about his adopted state. (See Poetry’s October 1924 issue for his “Beorhtgar to the Dusk-Woman of the Sea-Caves”.) In this issue, we learn more about the extent of Gessler’s Hawaiian interests.

Gessler and his friend Mike Mitchell were creating “Hawaiian Pidgin poems” and had decided to translate some work by Poetry foreign correspondent, Ezra Pound. Gessler sent the editors Mitchell’s translation of Pound’s “An Immorality.”

“For our readers’ enlightenment,” the editors wrote, “we quote both versions”:

Sing we for love and idleness—
Naught else is worth the having.

Though I have been in many a land
There is naught else in living.

And I would rather have my sweet
Though rose-leaves die of grieving

Than do high deeds in Hungary
To pass all men’s believing.

Mr. Mitchell’s islanders improve the poem thus (the words needing explanation are wuhine–woman; hanahana–work; pau–finished; holu holu–run about; make, pronounced mucky–dead):

Wahine, hanahana pau
Be number one we sing.
Spose holuholu anyside
More better anything.
I like more better this time play
(For bimeby make, doh)
Be too much smartuh, people speak:
“I think so, I dunno.”

There you have it. Many thanks to Paul Durica for all his sleuthing. You can do your own hunting in the Poetry archive online. If you find something interesting or odd, be sure to let us know at editors@poetrymagazine.org.

A bit on the texting:

“When the laureate speaks to the Guardian columnist to the tremendous potential for a vital new poetry to be drawn from the practice of texting she is policing her patch, and when I beg her with all due respect to her high office to consider that she might be wrong, I am policing mine,” said Hill, in a lecture entitled “Poetry, Policing and Public Order”. The Oxford professor of poetry has previously described difficult poems as “the most democratic because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing they are intelligent human beings”, saying that “so much of the popular poetry of today treats people as if they were fools”.

Then, on her poetry:

Having dismissed Duffy’s texting comparison, Hill moved on to her poem, “Death of a Teacher”, which is quoted in the interview: “You sat on your desk / swinging your legs, reading a poem by Yeats // to the bored girls, except my heart stumbled and blushed / as it fell in love with the words and I saw the tree / in the scratched old desk under my hands, heard the bird in the oak outside scribble itself on the air.”

The “eloquence” of the poem, he suggests, “might be enhanced if the third line were allowed to retain its position below the second” (there is a stanza break), but Hill really doesn’t hold out much hope for its rehabilitation. “What Professor Duffy desires to do I believe – and if so it is a most laudable ambition – is to humanise the linguistic semantic detritus of our particular phase of oligarchical consumerism. And for the common good she is willing to have quoted by the Guardian interviewer several lines from a poem by herself that could easily be mistaken for a first effort by one of the young people she wishes to encourage,” he said.

“I respond to this excerpt in two ways, each radically incompatible with the other. My first response is this is democratic English pared to its barest bean and I would not myself have the moral courage to write so. My simultaneous incompatible response is this is not democratic English but cast-off bits of oligarchical commodity English such as is employed by writers for Mills & Boon and by celebrity critics appearing on A Good Read or the Andrew Marr show,” he said.

He lightens up a little bit, but you’ll have to make the jump for that.

Before reading his final few poems, Strand checked his wristwatch. “Back in the 60s,” he told us, “poets would read for two to three hours…there was never such a display of self-love. Not only that, sometimes they would say, ‘Let me read that one again…so you can really hear it.’”

We all laughed; obviously, the current poetry scene is far different then the one Strand came into prominence to in the 1960s, which as he once told an interviewer for the Poetry Foundation, was really a swingin’ time to be writing in verse. Or something like that.

“Groupies were a big part of the scene,” he said. “Poets were underground pop stars, and when we made the campus circuit, girls would flock around. It wasn’t bad. I rather liked the uncertainties of my life then.”

The West Coast is excited about the East Coast! And rightly so: The LA Times alerts us to MoMA’s new exhibition, where art meets the print world, in a big way. New Yorkers, we should all go spend our free time at Print/Out, an exhibition of more than 200 works of printed materials such as artists’ books from MOMA’s collection, including pieces by Martin Kippenberger, Ai Weiwei, and SUPERFLEX.

The MoMA promo copy reads:

Over the last two decades, the art world has broadened its geographic reach and opened itself to new continents, allowing for a significant cross-pollination of post-conceptual strategies and vernacular modes. Printed materials, in both innovative and traditional forms, have played a key role in this exchange of ideas and sources. This exhibition examines the evolution of artistic practices related to the print medium, from the resurgence of ancient printmaking techniques—often used alongside digital technologies—to the worldwide proliferation of self-published artists’ books and ephemera.

Jacketcopy goes on:

The exhibit will be on the museum’s sixth floor. Another, Printin’, will be on the second, in the Paul J. Sachs Prints and Illustrated Books Galleries. It takes as its start “DeLuxe,” a portfolio of 60 works by Ellen Gallagher, and then “brings work by more than 50 artists from multiple disciplines in a sweeping chronology that extends from the 17th century to the present day, to propose a free-flowing yet incisive web of associations that are reflected in DeLuxe.” Both exhibits will be up from mid-February to mid-May.

An associated exhibit opened this week: Print Studio in the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building. The independent Brooklyn-based Reanimation Library is among the projects that can be found in the Print Studio through March 9, where interactivity is encouraged. The Reanimation Library is a showcase of books that have fallen out of circulation that have strong visual components. Its “outdated and discarded” books, it writes, “have been culled from thrift stores, stoop sales, and throw-away piles, and given new life as a resource for artists, writers, cultural archeologists, and other interested parties.”

Speaking of the Reanimation Library! We were just reading about them on BOMBLOG, where Zack Friedman has interviewed lead reanimator Andrew Beccone about “how to put life back into works ranging from taxidermy to a million random numbers to a 19th-century dentist’s rewriting of the Bible.” They also chat about how the library situates itself in terms of “cultural detritus,” finding inspiration in the DIY music scene, the MoMA show, how Beccone tracks down his books, the library’s home in Brooklyn’s interdisciplinary Proteus Gowanus, and the visual art that’s been generated from the collection, which includes a Jen Bervin weaving “for a show that the library did at GRIDSPACE. In that show, each artist was asked to respond to the RAND Corporation’s 1955 book, A Million Random Digits. Jen’s weaving was an abstracted facsimile of one page in the book.”

Beccone, Friedman writes, is “a Minnesota transplant, library school grad, and occasional post-punk drummer. Beccone is interested in cultural detritus, things we as a culture created but have discarded, and the Reanimation Library is a way of figuring out how to put them back into (a kind of) circulation. More than archaeology, the library also aims to be a space for generative projects of all kinds, a resource for artists and the discerning public.” Beccone also discusses the current branching off of the library:

To date, I have set up four branch libraries of the Reanimation Library in other cities: Philadelphia, London, England, Carlisle, PA, and Chicago. I am currently working on a branch in Providence that will run in March and April of 2012. Branch libraries are temporary, site-specific manifestations of the Reanimation Library that provide a way to engage people who might otherwise be unable to visit the main library in Brooklyn, and to exhibit library-generated artworks. Like the main library, branches are hybrid spaces that contain elements of libraries, galleries, and studio workspaces, without fitting neatly into any one of these categories. Each branch library contains a collection of books that has been gathered from sources in its local community; I usually arrive in the city a few days or weeks ahead of time to collect and catalog as many books as I can. I like the idea that Reanimation Libraries can exist anywhere, and that the raw material to assemble them is just sort of scattered around. It’s simply a matter of bringing it all together. More info about branches can be found here.