Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Psalm 118 is an abecedarian, as is Geoffrey Chaucer's translation of a French prayer, "An ABC." The abecedarian is an ancient poetic form that follows an alphabetical order. Psalm 118 consists of twenty-two stanzas, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In Chaucer's poem, the twenty-three stanzas go from A to Z (skipping J, U, and W). The modern abecedarian is now more of a mnemonic device, but the tone of prayerful petition lingers. Secular prayer and sacred memorial, Devi S. Laskar's "Elegy Abecedarian" calls us to remember the eight people murdered in Acworth and Atlanta just last month. Six of the eight people killed by a white suspect were women of Asian descent. Among the six was Suncha Kim...

Watched "Love after Love" (2017) yesterday and loved it. Directed by Russell Harbaugh, it starred a terrific ensemble cast of Andie MacDowell as mother, and Chris O'Dowd and James Adomian as her two sons, all trying to come to terms with their husband/father's death. Nov 25 - had breakfast with PYR and first interview. She's a great storyteller. I've written 6 of the poems for A History of Singaporeans in America. Got the idea to name the poems a la Chaucer. The Host. The Ceramicist. The Prodigal. The Regular. The Lawyer. The Whore. PYR is The Lady. The book's epigraph is from Henry James: “‘Ah then she’s not French,’ Isabel murmured; and as the opposite supposition had made her romantic it might have seemed that this revelation would have marked a drop. But such was not the fact; rarer even than to be French seemed it to be American on such interesting terms.” — Portrait of a Lady 

from Seth Lerer's review of Alastair Minnis's Fallible Authors: Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath : From the so-called "academic prologues" to canonical Latin texts, Minnis recovered a critical idiom that could explain the nature of authorial intention, the quality of reader response, and the relations of form and rhetoric that would inform not just the reading of classical and religious writers, but the writing of imaginative, vernacular fiction. Compilatio and ordinatio were the governing prinicples of literary structure: the first, an activity of reading, bringing source materials and previous authorities together; the second, an act of writing, organizing this material into structures that would give voice to an argument.  *** from Then and Now, a 1922 review of Isaac Rosenberg's poems by Ernest de Selincourt: His definition of "simple poetry," in a letter to Mr. Gordon Bottomley, is itself an indication of the difficulty of his approach...

A poem written on a work of art is called ekphrastic. What about a poem written on reading another poem or poet? I don't mean poems that allude to other poems or that gossip about other poets, like Thom Gunn's "Keats at Highgate," much as I like that sonnet; I mean poems whose subject is the experience of reading itself. A poem like Keats' "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," for instance. And why do poets write poems about their experience reading other poems? Some of it has probably to do with the common instinctive response to beauty: we want to reproduce it, whether by telling someone about it, by drawing what comes to mind, or by blogging about it. Some of it has to do with trying to make sense of, or impose some form on, a powerful but inchoate experience; it relieves psychic pressure. Some of it has to do with claiming literary ancestors or mentors or rivals, or with distracting readers' attention from the real ancestors, mentors and...