SubscribeThe Book of Psalms
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The Book of Psalms: A Translation With Commentary
trans. Robert Alter - Publisher: W.W. Norton
- Year: 2007/2009
- Pages: 560
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- What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?
- №58
Any time one deals with a book which has been translated, you’re opening up a whole new can of worms above and beyond the quality of the book itself. I noted this with some hesitancy when I reviewed Orhan Pamuk’s Snow—or, more accurately, a translation of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow.
Biblical translation is even tougher: the politics it involves go beyond mere word choice and touch things which people hold as sacrosanct. Maybe you think I’m exaggerating, but consider as an example the movement of Christians who believe that the only correct version of the Bible is the King James Version. Mess with canon at your own peril.
Posthumous Keats
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Posthumous Keats
by Stanley Plumly - Publisher: W.W. Norton
- Year: 2008/2009
- Pages: 400
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- What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?
- №56
Here is the answer to what is perhaps a burning question: what happens when poets write biographies?
Stanley Plumly is the poet laureate of the state of Maryland, a professor at the University of Maryland, and an accomplished (read: published) poet; I am otherwise unfamiliar with the man’s poetry, but I take it upon quick research that he is famous in the skeletal sort of way that modern American poets can be. By this I mean that unless you live in Maryland, or perhaps are the sort of person who buys books of poetry by modern poets, you’ve likely never heard of him, and this is indicative of a much larger issue about modern poetry: everybody writes it (at least when they’re young), but it’s ceased to be a matter of prestige, or a form of art held dearly by the public. Where perhaps it may once have been fashionable, it’s been usurped by pop music, which is a more immediately accessible form of art which fulfills the desire for catharsis.
1 hundred hiccups
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1 hundred hiccups
by Michael Kadela - Publisher: EM Press
- Year: 2002
- Pages: 134
- See the rest of this year's listings
- What is 52 Books in 52 Weeks?
- №13
1 hundred hiccups is a book of poetry by a semi-local poet of my (very general) acquaintance. Actually, my (signed) copy is disturbingly well-worn. I bought it back in 2002 when Mike Kadela and his publisher showed up at a reception for a literary magazine (I was only a high school senior at the time); at the time, I had heard only a small portion of Kadela’s repertoire (including some that I’ve never seen published). I’ve posted a poem by him before; I’ve also reviewed a fellow “slam poet,” Jack McCarthy.
I’ve read the whole book several times, but it’s usually been picking poems at random. This week, I sat down and read the whole thing from cover to cover. When I could guarantee my privacy, I liked to read them aloud, occasionally gesticulating or frothing slightly. The assonance and playful nature sound even better when vocalized and inflected.
It is difficult to review 1 hundred hiccups without devolving into a spew of fawning superlatives. It might simply be my own biases, but there’s a particular effortlessness with words here, a natural talent for the poetic voice that imbues all hundred pieces.
the bleeding beat
the bleeding beat,
it sows so sweet a misery
that only jumps its sombre pace
when landing at her feet.
But Oh! What Dreadful Havoc /Her countenance
Hath She Wrought /a cannonball
Upon the Ramparts /to armor plates
Of My Heart /and mortar walls
and in her lacking?
lonely notes. from pianos black
with minor keys,
the sombre march of major locks.
Stars shriek
of their radiant heat
their burning hearts
beset by light
that only marks their very edges,
tiny deaths of blinding white.
And Oh! What Fiery Spirit /My bosom rent
Must She Court /by basest shades,
With All the Blazes /its edges bound by
Of Her Heart /spans of days
and in her laughing?
children's knees. the lonely bones
from bulbs derived,
while cutting fine their filaments.
this bleeding beat,
it sows so sweet a misery
that only leaps its solemn cant
when landing at her feet.
id est ‘a poem about hands’
a five-legged creature, violently still
upon a binding chord of minor keys,
befitting major locks,
has with its muted exhortations
cloven wax from wick and
rue from blight and
sea from salt.
a leaf of flesh, its tangled skein
scrying spring while lined with rime,
a piquant son of deciduity
—sunward turned and hot of mien—
exacerbates decline.
and so, with efficacious speed
it flicks from word to word
and glyph to glyph,
chortling in silence at the postmodernity
with which it does the deed.
Platypodes
depending on the state of reference,
the duck-billed platypus is either—
the last evidence of God’s great sense of humour
- or -
an ikon of general Antipodal alienness
- or -
an egg-laying emblem of Wonder
- but -
regardless of opinion,
the duck-billed platypus is neither
concerned
- nor -
remote.
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