Poetry – Page 19

Seamus Heaney

August 31, 2013 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“In ‘Station Island’ (1984) — a dazzling reworking of Dante, set on an Irish island known for centuries as a place of religious pilgrimage — all the themes of Heaney’s work come together in an orchestral whole. Here, the present, past and myth merge and overlap, and the competing claims on an artist emerge in the form of ghosts: literary ghosts, ghosts from the poet’s own past and ghosts from Ireland’s past: a young priest ‘glossy as a blackbird” and a shopkeeper cousin shot in the head, who ‘trembled like a heat wave and faded.’ ” […] –Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, August 30, 2013

Mary Jo Bang’s New Translation of Dante’s Inferno

November 3, 2012 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“. . .Bang worked on the project for six years after being inspired by Caroline Bergvall’s poem, Via (48 Dante Variations), which is composed entirely of those first three lines from 47 different translations.
‘How might the lines sound if I were to put them into colloquial English? What if I were to go further and add elements of my own poetic style?’ Bang writes in her note on the translation. ‘Would it sound like a cover song, the words of the original unmistakably there, but made unfamiliar by the fact that someone else’s voice has its own characteristics? Could it be, like covers sometimes are, a tribute that pays homage to the original, while at the same time radically departing from it?'” [. . .] –Mike Melia, PBS Newshour, November 2, 2012

Contributed by Julie Heyman

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Draft 98: Canzone” (2009)

June 18, 2012 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“After the experiences spoken of already, after I found that the luminous bit of phosphorescence in the dark room was a bug, pulsing blue, I wanted to show how these data are vectored. Yet even the lyric may trip and fall unwitting into brambles. Do I need again to prove myself vertiginous? I now open the book backward, as if shifting poles, and pass into a mirroring account of alphabets. Every off chance is the index of what has already been articulated, opening onto the same scrubby field. The master poet trembled. People watched him and wondered. He could barely articulate one shuddering, shattered word, but struggled, shaking, and thereby achieved exactitude and bearing. As for me, years later, I stumbled through a cracked gate, scarcely knowing why and how I was brought to this place. Its ownership in fact was common property, though at first it had seemed fenced off–Vietato l’ingresso. People watched me and shrugged. However, having finally come here, to an open book, I thought it plausible to write of the intersections, so that others might recognize their fate in mine as well as mine in theirs. Hence I composed a canzone that begins ‘I carried my soul the other night.'” –Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Jacket Magazine, Fall 2009

Read the full poem here.

Mark Lilla, “Filippic” (2011)

September 27, 2011 By Professor Arielle Saiber

A poem for the Brooklyn Book Festival

The F train
Is the brain train.
iPad lasciate,
Voi ch’intrate,
Eve’s backlit apple,
Gold ‘n delicious,
Tempts us not.
We have spines to break,
Penguins to tame.
Thou user!
Thou blue of tooth!
Thou faceless face,
That hath no book!
@ us, towns talk & captions contest
While black-rimmed dandies
Wink at the straphangers
Who grin at the infinite jest.
But banished shalt thou be
Back into space,
No means of return,
No options, commands, or escape,
While we, the Brooklyn d’&eacutelite,
Knuckles bared, planted feet,
Bend dead trees at will
And inspect our kill.
Recycle that, battery boy.
I got your charger right here.

— Mark Lilla, The New York Review of Books, September 16, 2011

T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915)

May 3, 2011 By Professor Arielle Saiber

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
[. . .]

Read the full poem at Poets.org

Seamus Heaney

Mary Jo Bang’s New Translation of Dante’s Inferno

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Draft 98: Canzone” (2009)

Mark Lilla, “Filippic” (2011)

T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915)

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