Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Serendipity, to have two of my "Palinodes in the Voice of My Dead Father" appear in Flypaper Lit , which calls Ohio home, when I'm here in Ohio for Elnora's memorial service. GH and I have lost three parents between us in the last three years. The palinodes give voice to the tension between mourners, as in every family, and then the possibility of reconciliation. Five of the palinodes also appeared in PN Review 255 . 

At Gatwick South Terminal waiting for my Norwegian Airlines plane to Madrid. Last night's reading at the London Review Bookshop must rank as one of the more memorable ones. Tickets were sold out and the bookshop packed with about 80 people. Michael Schmidt spoke about the net of PN Review/Carcanet that welcomes all schools of fish. The first to read, I had a slight sore throat and so paused a couple of times, but carried on like the National Service-trained soldier that I am. The most enjoyable moment for me was to refer briefly to the banning of Lee Tzu Pheng's poem "My Country and My People" from the airwaves because it was deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about nation-building. It was a pleasure to hear the four contributors to New Poetries VI, Rebecca Watts, Joey Connolly-Wright, Vahni Capildeo, and John Clegg. Get the anthology to hear the most exciting poetic voices now in the UK. After the reading, I met Richard Price and enjoyed talking to him. Also spoke ...

I have made two visits to China so far, in 2010 and 2012. On both trips, I was chaperoning a group of students on their travel-study program. As a chaperone, I was supposed to be the responsible adult when what I wished to be was the irresponsible student. We saw a lot of temples, the most impressive, to me, being the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. I did not know how to write about what I saw, until I read ALOE AND OTHER POEMS by the New Zealand poet Diana Bridge. I bought the book after reading her lovely poems on trees in PN Review. After reading ALOE, I wrote this response in my blog: "Bridge is a poet of seeing. A scholar of Chinese culture and Indian art, she writes her finest and most ambitious poems by viewing and reflecting on ancient artifacts. Her poems are about Chinese vases, Japanese prints and Indian temples. Her descriptive powers are considerable, and her meditations never uninteresting. "Sequence, Sarnath" in the early part of the book i...

I have five poems in PN Review 205 . Also, in the issue, poems by Sinéad Morrissey, Tara Bergin, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, David C. Ward, Alex Wylie and others. Get a copy! Subscribe! I am particularly taken by Tara Bergin's poem "Looking at Lucy's Painting of the Thames at Low Tide Without Lucy Present." Its every move is a surprise, but all are united by the opinionated, offhand voice. The work of Simon Jarvis is new to me. His three short poems are sharp and evocative, especially the perfect "Colloquium." Of the reviews, I enjoy David C. Ward's take-down of William Logan's selected early poems Deception Island . Who but Logan would allow himself to be blurbed as "the most hated man in American poetry"? I agree with Sasha Dugdale's estimation of Tiina Aleman's translation of Doris Kareva (conscientious but ultimately unsuccessful), and has bought Luljeta Lleshanaku's Haywire on the strength of Dugdale's strong recommendatio...

PN Review 202 is filled with interesting translations, of Jean-Paul de Dadelsen by Marilyn Hacker, Hester Knibbe by Jacquelyn Pope, Pier Paolo Pasolini by N.S. Thompson. I like most the poetry of Raymond Queneau, translated by Rachel Galvin. The fourteen short lyrics from his book Hitting the Streets describe his walks about Paris with a keen eye and a sharp ear, and an imagination that is lively and sympathetic. "The Concierges" observes an "old verdigrisy grey-beard/ sobbing in his doorway." "Rue Paul Verlaine," with its amulet of a street name, begins with a vision of a street that the street hardly understands: Sometimes I have a strange, penetrating vision Of a street made of off-white and maternal tin on either side the walkway beats like a wing while the road bears all the weight of its being The ghosts of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, besides that of Verlaine, haunt these poems as well as these streets. "Rue Paul Verlaine" is written i...

Five poems inspired by Eavan Boland appear in PN Review 194 . They are "Attribution," "The Rooms I Move In," 'Not Demonstrative," "A Whole History," and "What the River Says." They mark my third appearance in the poetry journal edited by Michael Schmidt. They will be a part of my fourth book tentatively titled Infinite Variety . *

On my way to school on Thursday, I was completely excited by reading Campanu's poems in PN Review 192. A Romanian poet (1932-94) exiled by the Ceausescu regime to Constanta (Roman Tomis that also hosted Ovid's exile), he wrote about place and placelessness in a voice at once witty, regretful and lyrical. The poems from The Ovid Complex (1989) are astonishing. The combination of thought and sight: Drift is what they worship here: on the cast iron shore the sea is rolling its dice and the heron, the only bird who cane make flying look difficult, hauls himself up on a ramp of wind like a geriatric on his stairlift. (from VIII) The knotty self-questioning expressed in self-irony: "I test my weakness... against some idea of fortitude, my impatience against the stoic or the socialist ideal... and I'm happy enough to be found wanting, or would be if I knew what it was I wanted. (from I) I have bought McGuinness's book Jilted City , which contains these t...

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...