Why is poetry important?
Poetry is the home of metaphor, without which there is no knowledge; it is original science.
Showing posts with label Joshua Weiner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joshua Weiner. Show all posts
Monday, 8 July 2019
Monday, 1 July 2019
Joshua Weiner : part four
When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
I return to the Scottish border ballads, especially "Edward" and "Sir Patrick Spens"; poets from the English Renaissance--Wyatt, Gascoigne, Ralegh, Spenser, Fulke Greville, Sidney, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Campion, Donne, Herbert, Jonson, Henry King, Marvell. I turn to the Romantics--Blake's Songs, Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, Coleridge, Keats, Clare; also Dickinson & Whitman. I find renewal in the poems of Hardy and Hopkins; Frost, Stevens, Williams, D.H. Lawrence, Pound, Moore. And Mina Loy. And then later, Sterling Brown, Auden, Roethke, and especially Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell; also Gwendolyn Brooks, and Larkin. I find it in Ammons, and Creeley, also Kenneth Koch, and Ginsberg. Ted Hughes and Adrienne Rich, Gary Snyder and Derek Walcott. Thomas McGrath and Robert Duncan. Seamus Heaney and Roberts Pinsky & Hass. Anne Winters and David Ferry. I save the first for last, Thom Gunn; Thom Gunn, most. This is my DNA, my rhythm book, my source and sorcery; these are the constellations of my night sky.
I return to the Scottish border ballads, especially "Edward" and "Sir Patrick Spens"; poets from the English Renaissance--Wyatt, Gascoigne, Ralegh, Spenser, Fulke Greville, Sidney, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Campion, Donne, Herbert, Jonson, Henry King, Marvell. I turn to the Romantics--Blake's Songs, Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, Coleridge, Keats, Clare; also Dickinson & Whitman. I find renewal in the poems of Hardy and Hopkins; Frost, Stevens, Williams, D.H. Lawrence, Pound, Moore. And Mina Loy. And then later, Sterling Brown, Auden, Roethke, and especially Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell; also Gwendolyn Brooks, and Larkin. I find it in Ammons, and Creeley, also Kenneth Koch, and Ginsberg. Ted Hughes and Adrienne Rich, Gary Snyder and Derek Walcott. Thomas McGrath and Robert Duncan. Seamus Heaney and Roberts Pinsky & Hass. Anne Winters and David Ferry. I save the first for last, Thom Gunn; Thom Gunn, most. This is my DNA, my rhythm book, my source and sorcery; these are the constellations of my night sky.
Monday, 24 June 2019
Joshua Weiner : part three
What poets have changed the way you thought about writing?
Too many to name. I think I'm a little changed by every poet I read seriously, by which I mean continually and intentionally for a period of time. Mina Loy, whose work I was immersed in for years, helped me better understand the relationship of verbal density to expansive consciousness; she became one of my few courage teachers, you could say. And Wallace Stevens did something of the same though entirely differently, by connecting, very powerfully, the sensual world to actions of mind, and with such strong physical sensation in the language. I notice that when I read him for a spell, and I look up from the book, the world around me looks perceptively changed, my brain feels like it's suddenly doing something unusual that's separate from reading. Reading Stevens for me is a little like taking LSD, but easier to be with other people. It didn't change the way I thought about writing as much as it made me hyper aware of how, at the granular level of the syllable, the interaction of those language-sounds affects me.
Too many to name. I think I'm a little changed by every poet I read seriously, by which I mean continually and intentionally for a period of time. Mina Loy, whose work I was immersed in for years, helped me better understand the relationship of verbal density to expansive consciousness; she became one of my few courage teachers, you could say. And Wallace Stevens did something of the same though entirely differently, by connecting, very powerfully, the sensual world to actions of mind, and with such strong physical sensation in the language. I notice that when I read him for a spell, and I look up from the book, the world around me looks perceptively changed, my brain feels like it's suddenly doing something unusual that's separate from reading. Reading Stevens for me is a little like taking LSD, but easier to be with other people. It didn't change the way I thought about writing as much as it made me hyper aware of how, at the granular level of the syllable, the interaction of those language-sounds affects me.
Monday, 17 June 2019
Joshua Weiner : part two
What other poetry books have you been reading lately?
I've been reading Tom Pickard, early work up through his latest, Fiends Fell Journal, published last year by Flood Editions, beautifully edited and produced by Devin Johnston at Flood, he does such great work, and he has a keen feeling for English poetry that deserves a better audience in the U.S.--the reissue of Roy Fisher's A Furnace, edited by Peter Robinson, is a good example of a book that really needed a champion, and Devin stepped in, impeccably. I've also been taken by the recent W.S. Graham books--Michael Hofmann's edition for NYRB, and the new Faber selected. It was an anniversary year last year for Graham, and I'm eager to see the new issue of Chicago Review, with its Graham feature, which should hit stands presently. Hofmann's own feeling for Graham, the choices he's made, has helped me really hear what's wonderful in that work. I've also been reading through Donna Stonecipher's books, one by one, a remarkably consistent body of work--six books out, it's clear she knew what she was about from the very beginning. The most recent books of hers--The Cosmopolitan, Model City, Transaction Histories, and the chapbook from Catenary Press, Ten Ruins--all devoted to the prose poem, are certainly some of the most formally rigorously defined in that genre, which from the outset defies definition. I've also recently enjoyed new first books by Lindsay Bernal, Liz Countryman, and Joshua Mensch, all quite different from each other, and books that I admire and find auspicious. Otherwise, I've been immersed in the German translations and essays of Michael Hamburger, collected in a recent omnibus from Carcanet--more than any other poet writing in English, Hamburger gave us a comprehensive image of what German poetry accomplished in the 20th century. Though, as post-script, I'd add that I just got my hands on David Gascoyne's Collected Verse Translations, which I'm working through, with special attention to "Hölderlin's Madness," a cycle of the German Romantic's poems, translated quite freely--I think Gascoyne was working with a French translation from German, which rather triples up the translation layers, quite interestingly--and antecedent to Hamburger's edition, which was really the first complete translation into English. That's all rather heavy. The book I just finished and enjoyed immediately rereading and am still rereading is Anthony Madrid's There Was an Old Man with a Springbok, which you can hear is a limerick; in fact the book is over 140 limericks that are as good as anything by Edward Lear, and of a demented genius that is 100% Madrid. They are light verse in the most serious way, the sensibility a kind of extraordinary verbal champagne spiked with a gabillion bubbles of technical virtuosity. It's the most dangerous book I've read all year.
I've been reading Tom Pickard, early work up through his latest, Fiends Fell Journal, published last year by Flood Editions, beautifully edited and produced by Devin Johnston at Flood, he does such great work, and he has a keen feeling for English poetry that deserves a better audience in the U.S.--the reissue of Roy Fisher's A Furnace, edited by Peter Robinson, is a good example of a book that really needed a champion, and Devin stepped in, impeccably. I've also been taken by the recent W.S. Graham books--Michael Hofmann's edition for NYRB, and the new Faber selected. It was an anniversary year last year for Graham, and I'm eager to see the new issue of Chicago Review, with its Graham feature, which should hit stands presently. Hofmann's own feeling for Graham, the choices he's made, has helped me really hear what's wonderful in that work. I've also been reading through Donna Stonecipher's books, one by one, a remarkably consistent body of work--six books out, it's clear she knew what she was about from the very beginning. The most recent books of hers--The Cosmopolitan, Model City, Transaction Histories, and the chapbook from Catenary Press, Ten Ruins--all devoted to the prose poem, are certainly some of the most formally rigorously defined in that genre, which from the outset defies definition. I've also recently enjoyed new first books by Lindsay Bernal, Liz Countryman, and Joshua Mensch, all quite different from each other, and books that I admire and find auspicious. Otherwise, I've been immersed in the German translations and essays of Michael Hamburger, collected in a recent omnibus from Carcanet--more than any other poet writing in English, Hamburger gave us a comprehensive image of what German poetry accomplished in the 20th century. Though, as post-script, I'd add that I just got my hands on David Gascoyne's Collected Verse Translations, which I'm working through, with special attention to "Hölderlin's Madness," a cycle of the German Romantic's poems, translated quite freely--I think Gascoyne was working with a French translation from German, which rather triples up the translation layers, quite interestingly--and antecedent to Hamburger's edition, which was really the first complete translation into English. That's all rather heavy. The book I just finished and enjoyed immediately rereading and am still rereading is Anthony Madrid's There Was an Old Man with a Springbok, which you can hear is a limerick; in fact the book is over 140 limericks that are as good as anything by Edward Lear, and of a demented genius that is 100% Madrid. They are light verse in the most serious way, the sensibility a kind of extraordinary verbal champagne spiked with a gabillion bubbles of technical virtuosity. It's the most dangerous book I've read all year.
Monday, 10 June 2019
Joshua Weiner : part one
Photo credit: Ralph Alswang.
What are you working on?
I'm finishing a translation from German, of Nelly Sachs' 1959 volume, Flight & Metamorphosis, something I've been working on for a couple of years, with the help of Linda Parshall, a German scholar and friend. The translation is very close to finished; now I have to write the introduction and compile the notes. It'll be the first translation of the entire volume, one of her two masterpieces (the other, Glowing Enigmas, translated in full by Michael Hamburger about 50 years ago).
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