Spain’s King Juan Carlos gave Gelman a medal symbolizing the Cervantes Prize at a ceremony in Alcala De Henares, the birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, the author of “Don Quixote.”
To read Gelman’s work in translation find out more “Unthinkable Tenderness: Selected Poems”—edited and translated into English by Joan Lindgren, with a foreword by Eduardo Galeano–click here.
Riehlife National Poetry Month Editor Stephanie Farrow writes:
Dear Friends,
It has been such a treat to share poetry during this past month. Thank you all for participating! Because today is the last day, I’d thought initially that the final poem should be deep and meaningful, inscrutable perhaps and profound—something along the lines of what the New Yorker would print. Then I thought, “Naw. Poetry is for all of us, not only the denizens of ivory towers.” So, in the interest of keeping it ‘umble, here are my final two offerings.
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THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY
–for the students, who put me in my place
by David Citino (1947-Oct. 17, 2005)
from Paperwork
(also appears in Poets on Place…see below)
I’m all mouth, mustache, cane, grandiose Italian nose,
I squeak, speak in tongues, Cleveland, Little Italy.
But for you, these fevered weeks, I’m cuckoo,
vireo and finch, redbird, nighthawk, jay—
a squawk, a call at the windows of this stanza
called The Writing Room. Poetry, I try to say,
I crow, I swear. Poetry poetry poetry poetry.
Click here and scroll down to read complete entry in W. T. Pfefferle’s September 2003 road trip visit with Columbus, Ohio-based poet David Citino.
David Citino has one of those offices every professor wants, full of books, spacious, well lit from inside and out. It’s big enough to play racquetball in. He’s a terrific host, and we sit next to each other in front of his desk and we chat about the book a while before I begin asking him about the role place plays in his work. Citino’s lived in Ohio his whole life, born in Cleveland, now 30 years in Columbus. For him, Ohio is a place that he takes with him on any journey in his own writing. (Tales from W.T. Pfefferle’s year-long journey around the country assembling material for his book Poets on Place (Utah State University Press, Spring 2005) © W.T. Pfefferle 2005)
Click here to read my review of Poets on Place.
And finally, from Polish-born poet Adam Zagajewski
DEFENDING POETRY, ETC.
by Adam Zagajewski
from Eternal Enemies(translated by Clare Cavanagh)
Yes, defending poetry, high style, etc.,
But also summer evenings in a small town,
Where gardens waft and cats sit quietly
On doorsteps, like Chinese philosophers.
Barry D. Yelton, author of Scarecrow in Gray, (September 2006, Universe) based roughly on the Civil War experiences of his great-grandfather is currently at work on the sequel.
Barry says:
As to my work, I am a bit of a poet, a bit of a novelist, and a whole lot of Southern. I come from the hill country of North Carolina, which is a unique place unto itself. Our accents tend to have a bit more twang and a little less honey than those you hear in the movies. We were also ambivalent about secession, unlike our rabid cousins in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana.
You can keep up-to-date on Barry and his writing by clicking here.
ALABANZA: IN PRAISE OF LOCAL 100
Martín Espada
Alabanza[excellent video!]
(for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees
Local 100 working at the Window on the World restaurant,
who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center)
Alabanza.Praise the cook with a shaven head
and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye,
a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo,
the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle
glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea.
Alabanza. Praise the cook’s yellow Pirates cap
worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane
that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua,
for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked
even before the dial on the oven so that music and Spanish
rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza.
Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up,
like Atlantis glimpsed through the window of an ancient aquarium.
Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen
could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations:
Ecuador, México, República Dominicana,
Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning,
where the gas burned blue on every stove
and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers,
hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs
or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans.
Alabanza. Praise the busboy’s music, the chime-chime
of his dishes and silverware in the tub.
Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher
who worked that morning because another dishwater
could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime
to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family
floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs.
Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen
and sang to herself about a man gone. Alabanza.
After the thunder wilder than thunder,
after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows,
after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs,
after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen,
for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo,
like a cook’s soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us
about the bristles of God’s beard because God has no face,
soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations
across the night sky of this city and cities to come.
Alabanza I say, even if God has no face.
Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul
two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other,
mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:
Teach me to dance. We have no music here.
And the other said with a Spanish tongue:
I will teach you. Music is all we have.
Crazy Ali Poet of Turkey Photo by Marcy Burns
An unexamined life is not worth living. —Socrates
An examined life is worth curating. —Janet Riehl
Like a museum curator chooses what to put in the exhibit and where to put it, we all choose where and when and with whom to place the events that make up our lives.— Christa Avampato in New York
What is a curator? Wikipedia tells us the word “curator” comes from Latin cura or care, and means manager or overseer in this original form.
In a cultural heritage institution such as an “archive, gallery, library, museum or garden” a curator “is a content specialist responsible for an institution’s collections …and catalogs. [concerned with] tangible objects whether it be inter alia [Latin for “among other things”] artwork, collectibles, historic items or scientific collections.”
The curator decides “what objects to collect, oversees their care and documentation, conducts research based on the collection, and shares that research with the community.” In the United Kingdom, the term curator applies to those who “monitor the quality of contract archaeological work…managing the cultural resource.”
In contemporary art a curator organizes exhibitions. “In this context, to curate means to pick objects and arrange them…finding a theme to link a set of works, or finding works to fit a desired theme. In addition to selecting works, the curator often is responsible for writing labels, catalog essays, and other supporting content for the exhibition.”
Christa Avampato in New York:Curating a Creative Life writes about how she came to the subtitle for her blog. I was intrigued by the phrase “Curaging a Creative Life” and asked her to say more. Christa says she was inspired by window dressers, set designs, and museum exhibits when she first moved to New York City over a decade ago. She wanted “to be someone who designs and chooses what goes where and how it all hangs together. I wanted to be a curator.”
Christa Avampato says, “I am also intensely interested in narrative and story lines. I am a writer. And I curate that writing.”
What is the hardest job of a curator? Choosing among the treasures.
Christa Avampato says, “We are choosing, and therefore curating, the different pieces of our lives. Our lives are creations always evolving, morphing into something different than they were yesterday… With every new interaction, there is a new learning and we incorporate that, somehow, into how we approach the next interaction, and so on.
“Like a museum curator chooses what to put in the exhibit and where to put it, we all choose where and when and with whom to place the events that make up our lives.”
I really like this phrase and concept. You see, I’m a documentarian, a daughter of a documentarian…and my recent passion is journal harvesting. Hey, Christa…fly out to St. Louis and help me curate my life, would ya?
And while you’re here, we’ll do workshops on my favorite book by Carol Lloyd, Creating a Life Worth Living, possibly the most useful book on transition and life design and choosing for creative people ever written.
Sign of the times: Google “blackberry” and what comes up is a mechanical device, not a fruit. To find the fruit on Google, you must type in “blackberry fruit.” Vis: more people have likely held Blackberry devices in their hands these days than have gone berrying and experienced the pleasures Kinnell describes in his delicious poem.
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BLACKBERRY EATING
Galway Kinnell[click for bio]
Mortal Acts, Mortal Words[click to own]
I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.
The Hidden Singer
by Wendell Berry
from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry (Copyright © 1998)
The gods are less for their love of praise.
Above and below them all is a spirit that needs nothing
but its own wholeness, its health and ours.
It has made all things by dividing itself.
It will be whole again.
To its joy we come together—
the seer and the seen, the eater and the eaten,
the lover and the loved.
In our joining it knows itself. It is with us then,
not as the gods whose names crest in unearthly fire,
but as a little bird hidden in the leaves
who sings quietly and waits, and sings.
Freida Wheaton gets around. She’s a board member of Dance St. Louis and a member of the Ballet Ball Committee. Freida’s fun and saavy. She assembled a group of friends and supporters to join her at table #33. Freida, Salon 53 and friends provided Bronze Sponsorship to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
Reception and dinner at the Spiering Room at the Sheldon Concert Hall launched a memorable evening. We walked over to the Fabulous Fox where we entered a VIP stage door and slipped into our good seats. The performance began with a retrospective film of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (founded by Alvin Ailey and then turned over to Judith Jamison as artistic director and Masazumi Chaya as associate artistic director).
Then, ah! the performance of: Firebird (1970), The Golden Section (1983), and Revelations (1960). Revelations [watch video here] is considered to be Ailey’s signature piece, and consists of these three movements: Pilgrim of Sorrow, Take Me to the Water, and Move, Members, Move.
Michael Uthoff, artistic and executive director of Dance St. Louis (housed at the Centene Center for Arts & Education) hosted the evening.
The champagne dessert reception with dancing to the Ralph Butler Band capped the evening. For me, the highlight was sharing the parquet floor with a four-year-old nymph who pirouetted as I taught her how to go in and out of “the basket” in the jitterbug move. What fun!
Wow! Go over the Bill Moyers Journal for links to poetry videos and transcripts of your favorite poets.
Hey, Hal Manogue! Here’s a video of Coleman Barks reciting Rumi that will set you up for several days!
I left The Space (see post below) to rush home through our big thunder and lightening storm…headed for Bill Moyers’ Journal on PBS…featuring an interview with Reverend Jeremiah Wright and looking for insights into… Black Churches, Black Theology and American History
James H. Cone’s quotation set the tone of Rev. Wright’s conversation with Moyers:
Black churches are very powerful forces in the African American community and always have been. Because religion has been that one place where you have an imagination that no one can control. And so, as long as you know that you are a human being and nobody can take that away from you, then God is that reality in your life that enables you to know that.
Moyers showed the entire sermon that has created such a firestorm and clipped to death. In context, it means something different from what the soundbiters would have us believe.
People, let’s use our critical intelligence here. Cultural critiques can come in passionate forms, but let us not condemn the messenger nor the message. Let’s examine what’s being said. Let’s examine the rhetorical history of the vehicle that delivers the message. Let’s drop our search for drama, spectacle, and sensationalism.
