Paul Muldoon on The Colbert Report, Hilarious
June 23, 2009
If you missed poet Paul Muldoon on The Colbert Report, including the poet and Stephen Colbert reading Muldoon’s poem “Tea,” you must watch it now:
Paul Muldoon on The Colbert Report
Colbert is doing more for bringing poetry to a wider audience than just about anybody. Shall we compare Stephen Colbert to a Summer’s Day?
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When a poet goes missing does anyone hear? Yes.
May 11, 2009
This weekend, the Los Angeles Times reported that award-winning poet Craig Arnold, who went missing in Japan in late April, is presumed to have died after a fall.
The American search team, established by his employer, the University of Wyoming after the official Japanese search was ended, tracked Arnold to the edge of “a high and dangerous cliff, and there is virtually no possibility he could have survived the fall,” according to a release quote in the Times.
According to the report, Arnold was fascinated with volcanoes and had traveled to Kuchinoerabu-jima, a tiny Japanese island, to visit the volcano there and was in Japan on a creative exchange fellowship and was blogging about his trip: Volcano Pilgrim.
Reports of his missing buzzed through Twitter a couple of weeks ago after he failed to report after his trip to the volcano.
Very sad news, indeed.
Here is a link to Craig Arnold’s page on the Poetry Foundation web site, which includes several of his poems.
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Who wants to be an Arab poetry millionaire?
May 5, 2009
Gulf poets compete in Millions' Poet competition
A couple of decades ago I had an idea for an all-poetry cable channel. We would have talk shows hosted by and featuring famous poets, films about poets, live readings and workshops, and possibly even feature length movies, dramas, and comedies. (Stephen Dobyns’ Saratoga Hexameter, would have made a good source for a mini-series.)
I shelved the idea after realizing the only way I could afford to develop The Poetry Channel was to develop my other idea — The Disaster Channel. “All disaster, all the time,” was the tag line; 24/7 of disaster coverage, disaster movies, and disaster reporting. My wife said she would divorce me if I went ahead with that idea. (The Weather Channel has since taken the best parts of the format to the bank and is planning to launch a separate channel this spring.)
I now see what my idea was missing: I needed a poetry contest reality show! In the most unlikely of places, Dubai television personality Nashwa Al Ruwaini has launched Millions’ Poet, sort of a Gulf version of American Idol, in which Arab poets battle it out for 5 million United Arab Emirates dirhams (more than $1.3 million). 70 million viewers tuned in to see the finale, according to news sources. Amazing.
Here is what Nashwa Al Ruwaini says about it in an editorial that appeared in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer:
Three years ago, when I devised the format of Millions’ Poet, it was with little more in mind than creating an entertaining, original, and youth-oriented television show. Now in its third season, with more than 15 million viewers each week, the show has become the Gulf countries’ most prestigious poetry competition and a platform for young male and female poets to voice their thoughts before a broad audience. Most unexpectedly, it has also helped spur some progress in the region’s attitudes toward women.
Read the full editorial here: Millions’ Poet
Here is an article about Saudi poetess Ayda Al-Jahani, who is featured in the editorial and who made it to the final four in this usually male-dominated competition: Ayda Al-Jahani
And a link to an NPR Morning Edition story on her: NPR
If anyone has links to English translations of Ayda Al-Jahani’s work, will you please comment below? Thanks.
Deborah Digges, Struggling Without Light
April 18, 2009
“Once I asked myself, when was I happy?
I was looking at a February sky.
When did the light hold me and I didn’t struggle?”
–Deborah Digges, “Broom”
I guess the light stopped holding her. Deborah Digges died a week ago, an apparent suicide, having fallen from the top of McGuirk Alumni Stadium at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
I’m saddened by the suicide of this remarkable poet. And wondering why so many poets seem to burn so hot they flame out and can’t find their way out.
I was troubled by the suicide of biologist Nicholas Hughes, whose mother took her own life in a famous episode many years ago, earlier this month. And I was troubled by the mass suicide of Indian farmers reported earlier this week.
Clearly Ms. Digges struggled. Failed marriages. The death of her last husband three years after marrying him. Rescuing her son from the brink.
Yet it doesn’t make it any easier, thinking of her standing at the top of that stadium in Amherst, contemplating or not. Did she hesitate, reconsider?
She was, as Tufts English Department Chairman Lee Edelman said, “a poet of breathtaking talent and astonishing verbal dexterity. Her poems join a keen and unsentimental intelligence with a passionate love for the particularities of things in their beauty, their transience, and their complexity.”
I remember when Ms. Digges’ first collection, Vesper Sparrows, came out; it was quite an achievement. Poet Jorie Graham, whose work I greatly admired at the time (1986) wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Ms. Digges poems asked “of nature that it sing along and provide, at every turn, proof of our rightful place among things.”
She wrote from the intersection of humanity and nature, and often explored the interstices between the two. She seemed filled with and fully committed to understanding our relationship with the natural world, but also our destructive tendencies.
Here is Deborah Digges’ poem “Trapeze,” in its entirety. And a link to an audio file to hear her read it:
See how the first dark takes the city in its arms
and carries it into what yesterday we called the future.
O, the dying are such acrobats.
Here you must take a boat from one day to the next,
or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand.
But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening,
diving, recovering, balancing the air.
Who can tell at this hour seabirds from starlings,
wind from revolving doors or currents off the river.
Some are as children on swings pumping higher and higher.
Don’t call them back, don’t call them in for supper.
See, they leave scuff marks like jet trails on the sky.
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