Spring Break 2010 (1)

As I typed the title of title of this post, I kept getting prompted to allow for Spring Break 1, 2, 3 etc. Suddenly I remembered that those were the titles from last year. And here I was using them again because here it is spring break again. Only this time I am not at the VCCA. I am home. And not going away. But will stay home and try to do in Brooklyn what I have done in the past in Virginia. Read, write, translate, think. I'll pay attention to the NCAA basketball, which will be more distracting here because the tv will be readily available but it is also downstairs and my study is upstairs. Maybe I can treat waking in the morning and walking the dog as I would waking and taking the long walk to the studio. Or I can do my summer thing and simply stumble out of bed, make some tea, and get to the study and get to work.

Which a little bit I have done tonight. I admit to some facebook viewing but mostly I spent the night talking with Pablo, a good long one with the major focus, I think, on an appreciation for Borges as a poet, in particular the sonnets. Stephen Kessler had just sent me a copy of the edition he edited for Penguin and it is quite beautiful. Not all the translations work but I don't need those and the nice thing is to have all of the sonnets in the same place. Pablo and I also talked about John Berryman's Dream Songs which I have been reading and really believe to be something special. I had this realization that it is not a poem in three voices but one in four, with the poet there as a kind of spectator of whom you are very subtly conscious--he is almost not there at all but then comes the realization that yes, oh yes, there is someone else.

Pablo was talking about the question of a crisis of representation in his own work. My realization is that he could think about this not as a crisis of but a journey of and from and toward.

Other things came up, one of those great long conversations, mainly about poetry but with enough basketball thrown in to make it worthwhile.

One of those nice things: Tourist at a Miracle was listed as one of Small Press Distributors Recommended Books for March 1-15 (go to www.spdbooks.org/Search/Default.aspx?categoryId=53). Happy.

Spent some listening to Jesse play his new song tonight. It's very good. Worked on a new poem. So sort of like VCCA. Completely like home.

Another week closer to something

One of those days in which I noticed how quickly the teaching week had gone by--Lorca, Langston Hughes, Jayne Cortez, Ezra Pound, James Weldon Johnson. In one of my poetry workshops today, a student did a workshop of his own translation of Baudelaire which went well though I think it was a bit of a surprise for most of the students. It's a poetry writing workshop and it was a good thing for them to think about the ways translating poetry could test them as poets.

And today in the mail arrived the new Borges Poems of the Night and The Sonnets. They are part of a general series on Penguin edited by Suzanne Jill Levine and the editors for these were Efraían Kristal for Poems of the Night and Stephen Kessler for the Sonnets. They are both beautiful bilingual editions, good crew of translators for both. Worth having in the library.

Check out tomorrow:
Werd Hosted By Beth Cheng
Type: Music/Arts - Listening Party
Where: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onword/page/3
When: Friday, March 26 from 11:00 am to 12:00 pm PST (2-3 EST).

Tourist at a Miracle will be one of the three books reviewed. Don't know how it will go but I'm hoping well. The others are The Intricated Soul New and Selected Poems Sherod Santois (Norton) and All American Poem Matthew Dickman (Copper Canyon Press).

Saludos,

Mark