Song of a Reformed Headhunter

It stands for Greater New York Independent Publishers Association. The audience was small tonight, at Cornelia Street Cafe, but the readers were all interesting in various ways. Four of the seven poets reading were queer, though GNYIPA is not a queer organization. I read "Hungry Ghosts," "For Lonely," and "Blowjob." Helen Dano came all the way from the Bronx, where she worked, to attend the reading, and bought a book. Perry Brass also bought a book, as well as Siddhath whom I met at the reading. The ratio of buyers to audience must be one of the highest ever for me. After the reading, I had a nice dinner with Helen at the oyster bar across the street.

In teaching the tanka, Kimiko drew our attention to the niceties of translating Japanese poetry into English. From Sato 1999 Symposium on translating Asian languages (see Manoa 11/2): Finally, to state the obvious, syllabic value differs from language to language. Japanese is a polysyllabic, vowel-laden tongue; English isn't. English can express, on average, twenty to twenty-five percent more than Japanese can with the same number of syllables. You can guess what happens when the 5- and 7-syllable formations are applied in translating traditional tanka and haiku: the result usually says more than the original does. Well, does all this matter? After all, Japanese and English are so different. Because the languages are different, shouldn't the assumption be that forms can't be transferred? Japanese poets may regard tanka and haiku as one-line poems, but it's highly doubtful that they have any notion of the "line" in the Western sense and, anyhow, one-line po...

A mostly white audience was in the house last night for the reading. They listened appreciatively and applauded politely after each reader finished. I missed the spontaneity at other readings, when the audience would murmur or snap their fingers or call out on hearing a particularly good line, and clap wildly after each poem. "We are so quiet," I turned round and said to the black lesbian writer sitting behind me. "I know what you mean," she said immediately. I particularly enjoyed Jennifer Militello's reading. Her poems were strong in imagery. I traded ETTE for her book Flinch of Song , published after ten years of sending out and coming in as finalist, never winner, for numerous contests. She submitted it to Tupelo Press alone three times, before it finally won the press contest. Now she has a second book to send out, and not sure if Tupelo will take it. I read the poem published in Los Angeles Review , "What We Call Vegetables." First time I rea...

Shared a table with Nemo and his Exot Press at the fair this year. I thought I would like the CUNY Graduate Center better than last year's location in LGBT center, but as the afternoon went on, the Concourse felt more and more sterile and the lighting harsher. Nemo described the place aptly as a filing cabinet. The LGBT hall was grungier and more homey. I sold six copies of ETTE, one to Roxanne Hoffman, one to David, one to Nemo, and a couple to friends who knew me on Facebook, and whom I met for the first time in person. At the poetry reading, I was moved by the sight of Mr. Leslie of the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation crying at the reading of Persistent Voices , an anthology of poems by writers who died of AIDS. I thought I would like my poems to provide some kind of comfort to someone grieving like him. They may not be about AIDS, but they could have an aesthetic shape that gives a recuperative effect.

The film follows in the tradition of making a love story out of war material. The eponymous character (Cate Blanchett) signs up to be a British courier in occupied France in order to search for her downed pilot lover Peter (gorgeous Rupert Penry Jones). Working with a local resistance leader Julien (Billy Crudup), Charlotte learns that war kills and makes fools of those it spares. Aided by British treachery, the local resistance, all communists, were killed by the Germans. Julien has to decide between giving up his father Levade (Michael Gambon) and two Jewish children he has been hiding to the French collaborationist police. The cruelties of war are heart-wrenching, but not particularly new. More interesting is what the film says about love. Love with the pilot was instantaneous and physical. It was powerful enough to motivate a woman to put her life on the line by going into service. But the awful experience shared with Julien finally binds Charlotte more closely to him than romanc...

Paul Stevens, the editor of The Chimaera , wrote a warm appreciation of Equal to the Earth : It would be simplistic in the extreme to categorise Jee Leong Koh as a Gay poet, or an ethnic Chinese or Singaporean poet, or an Asian-American poet, or a poet in the English tradition, or a post-colonialist poet, or whatever. His work reflects all of these contexts and more, but also handsomely transcends them and amounts to an oeuvre greater than the sum of its contexts. . . . More .

It is nearly impossible to summarize True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound.  Its method is one of accretion, of numerous small verbal echoes that may not appear much on their own, but add up to a profound and persuasive thesis. In this Ricks follows, as he acknowledges, Eliot whose critical idea it is. In this also Ricks follows, I think, the poets' working method, which lives on a predecessor's words and in turn gives life to them. Auden is right when he wrote that Ricks is the kind of critic every poet dreams of having. Intellectually searching, Ricks does not propound an overarching theory of influence, in the manner of Harold Bloom. He is not after grand synthesis but quivering alertness. And so he shows that Geoffrey Hill is more generous and sympathetic in his poetry than in his prose towards Eliot. Ricks's defense of Eliot's late poetry against Hill's attack is thrilling to read. In the second of ...