Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Gregory Woods reviews Ganymede Unfinished , edited by Bryan Borland as a tribute to the late John Stahle. ... It is an apt tribute to Stahle, serious and stylish; even if it is, perhaps, less selective than he might have been with some of its weaker material. The creative content gets off to a reassuringly solid start, with fine poems by Jee Leong Koh and Matthew Hittinger.... *** Yew Leong Lee launches a new journal dedicated to literary translations. Conceived in Singapore, but edited from different parts of the world, Asymptote  is now calling for submissions of translations of fiction, non-fiction, drama and poetry. From the website: Already in the lineup for our quarterly online magazine, slated for a Jan 2011 launch, are a despatch from Afghanistan, translated from the Farsi, about the plight of women in the context of the ongoing war, an essay from Japan by a noted mathematician cum essayist entitled “Literature and Mathematics”, a group of poems from Melih Cevdet And...

Six of my "Translations of an Unknown Mexican Poet" appear in PN Review 188 (July-August 2009). The current issue is not online, but you can buy it there. If you subscribe to the website, you will find a rich archive of past issues. I am inordinately pleased about this publication. I do see myself writing primarily in, and out of, the English poetic tradition (hello, Shakespeare, Keats, Auden, Larkin, and Gunn!), and this publication makes a private conversation public to an English readership. Serendipitously, the "Translations" are written in the form of English sonnets. A British connection: Chroma , Britain's leading gay lit/art journal, published a long, glowing review of Ganymede #4. It mentions generously all photographers and writers, and this is what it says about my poems: It’s fitting that Jee Leong Koh’s poetry follows after Panichi’s photographs as Koh is in a dialogue with the visual arts as well. Simmering with violence and bodily harm, Koh’s p...