Holding Poet in New York in my hands

Just came from Grove where they gave me copies of the book which, yes, is really now out. Review copies started going out today, as did copies to the stores but many won't get it to their shelves until after Christmas. Some of the smaller independent stores may. Anyone on my review list, look for a copy. If you are not on my review list and can actually write a review, let me know as soon as possible.

The book really looks good. I'm one of those who usually hates how his work looks--maybe this feels different, maybe since it's Lorca (through Medina and Statman) that I can feel this way. Still, the old fear that having done something won't change the world. And yet, to feel a small part of literary history--for the moment, I'll take it.

As for events, I'll try and do some updates but the old list still holds (starting with the New School party 1/31, the first Thursday of AWP--I'll be doing a big e-mailing of the e-card in early January). We're taping a 10 minute segment for City Voices for PBS on January 18 (an all day affair) but I don't know when it will air. Info to follow. Also, let your West Coast friends know about the February appearances in SF and Santa Cruz. And St Marks here in New York on 3/26!

The semester is over. Which means a little rest and a chance to post more in the days ahead and in the next semester when my teaching load is considerably lighter (fewer students). It also means that my website should be up in the next three or four weeks (Jesse's help is critical here).

Have been writing a lot lately and may post some of the new poems for comments, though I think I'm interested still in hearing responses to the Celia Cruz poems.

A note from Lynn Chandhok, who gave a wonderful reading last week in Brooklyn:


• The poem "Muharrum at 203 Jor Bagh" will be the featured poem this Monday, December 24 on Poetry Daily (www.poems.com).
• I was named a runner up for the 2007 Paumanok Poetry Prize, and as part of the prize, will read at Farmingdale State University next spring.
• Seven of the poems from The View from Zero Bridge have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes.

You can go to her website by clicking the link to the right.

More soon.

Abrazos a todo!

long sunday

A lot of time spent with student work, good short critical responses to Lorca, good and interesting poems responding to same. It's time consuming but important work.

The local farmer's market actually had fresh poblano peppers! A few weeks ago they said there'd be no more for the season (I've been making chiles relllenos as our Sunday dinner for a good part of September and October, playing with different fillings). But Jesse and I walked over this early afternoon, wonderful fall day, and there they were, a little small, but just right anyway. The day went long and so I won't make them until tomorrow. But that will be fun. They are a lot of work but worth the time (the charring/sweating process can be tedious, so you need some good music and a drink). Looking at a ground beef, black bean, garlic, onion, tomato, sliced steak, various spices filling.

The Lorca heirs were satisfied with our responses to their questions. Too much slow down on production of book may be avoided. Hope so. But the Medina/Statman translation of Poet in New York should be out in January, which was always the plan. I fear the pre-Christmas appearance that was promised may not happen. Reviewers can contact me through this blog and let me know if they haven't received review copies by mid December.

Okay, Bama lost. But it was a good game. That fumble on the sack was a killer.

Lorca all day long

Spent most of today working on the responses/questions of the Lorca family, sending them to Pablo, getting his response to my response, then getting back to him so he could send it off to Sr. Montesinos along with a note thanking him and telling him how much we've appreciated working on the book. A lot of work, but worth it.

Half-time Alabama 20, LSU 17. Roll Tide.

(I've been asked why I'm a Tide fan--I actually have no idea but it's been for so many years--and for some reason I'm partial to the SEC in general. Really messes me up during March when I make my brackets and go for the teams I hope will win over the teams I know will win).

okay, it's been a few hectic days

Finally got to see the new APR and really like the way it looks--they have us listed on the cover and the poems read well. APR generously sent me a whole bunch that I can bring to the ALTA (American Literary Translators Association) conference next week in Dallas and Grove has made up the cards for the book, so I'll begin doing the book promo for real next week.

As for the book, the Lorca heirs have sent in some questions and Pablo and I have been working the last few days to answer them. Some make some real sense and some don't, but it's been interesting to get the take from the family on the work that we've been doing. Their questions may slow down production, but the book will still be a January pub--review copies will be a little latrer than expected (and there may be no copies in time for Christmas).

Managing the world: this is a hard teaching semester for me--teaching 3 sections on Poet in New York (as a reading/creative writing course) a sectrion of writing fellows (these four are all 2 credit, but they take up a lot of energy) and a regular 4 credit intro poetry writing class. Normally today (Friday) is a day I'd have to take a breath but I went to an all-day technology conference that was pretty exciting. The real problem is trying to figure out how to make it all fit into the kind of teaching I do. Blogs actually figure into it (have to figure out how). There was some interesting technology that I think might come in handy for a course I'm teaching next semester on Spanisg Surrealism (the big focus will be from the generation of 27 untuil 1938, though there will be some before--French surrealism, etc, and I'll try and focus on Lorca, Bunuel, Dali, and Miro--I'm still working it out in my head and asking folks for advice). The multi-media stuff will be interesting to work with. I can see maps of Spain with Miro paintings and Bunuel shots emerging out of a Google earth. How this all fits into teaching I've no idea, but I like the imagery.

Tomorow Alabama and LSU. That's a big one for the SEC fan in all of us.

milestone

A small milestone today: normally I write most of the first drafts of poems in a small moleskin notebook (I always carry one around, something I learned from my friend and collaborator on The Alphabet of the Trees poet Christian McEwen--though I'm not sure she carries a moleskin--it's just the idea of always having a notebook handy). I've found what this has meant is that I write most of my poems someplace else and not in my study. In my study is where I revise, it's almost as though I need (or like) multiple places for beginning and then a central place for working to make the poems better and better.

So there are usually two notebooks that are active at once: the notebook I'm writing in and the notebook I'm writing from. I like to have that distance from the first version to the one I'm going to start revising. Mostly this is to make sure I think the poem is still worth working on. At any rate, as of today, I only have one notebook, the one I'm writing in because in a big push this weekend I finished typing and printing the poems from the notebook I started on 15 February 2007 and finished on 14 June 2007. Which means a nice pile of poems to begin seriously revising over the next weeks. Which is something I'm excited about because revision is something I really like (I'd say love but it's also sometimes so frustrating, but I suppose so is love). I have to say that when I had a residency at VCCA last March (I was on leave last semester) I got a chance to revise with an intensity I'd never had because I arrived with a over one hundred poems. Some I realized pretty quickly I didn't want to work on, but most I did. So for eight, nine, ten hours a day, that was all I did, revise, revise revise (of course I also worked on Poet in New York, sometimes talking with Pablo three or four times a day)., I might have started ten or fifteen new poems the whole time there. It was just working and re-working. What emerged was my Celia Cruz fue la voz tropical manuscript, which I continue to revise even as I'm working on new poems.

So the milestone is the retirement of this notebook, all these new poems to think about. The current moleskin I probably won't finish it for another month, maybe two (this has been a hard working semester) and it's unlikely I'll even begin typing out any poems that are in there until then.

I like when things like this happen, when I feel like I've accomplished something, even as I'm still in the middle of it.

La muerte hoy da presencia a la vida ayer

A lot happening this past week:

Yesterday there was a nice exhibit of paintings by Lang students on the Skybridge at Lang who had gone to Sri Lanka with Pamela Lawton as part of Teaching and Making Art Everywhere/Sri Lanka, a good crowd, Sri Lankan food. This is a part of the educational partnership that Lang has with Making Art Everywhere, which I'm on the board of, and which should be expanding its work beyond Sri Lanka in the coming year or so (thinking about Nepal).

The night before Jeff Wright, who I haven't seen since the Cover magazine days (ten years or so ago?), when I was a Contributing Writer, invited me to a reading he was giving with a few other people at the Education Alliance in Chinatown. It was a small setting, small library and the readers got the other people in the room involved by having us read from their work, round robin, all good fun.

Today, broadsides that Ryan Burkhardt did of mine and Pablo Medina's translation of Lorca's Waltz in the Branches arrived, very pretty and simple. It's one of the poems the Florida Review is publishing. The broadside is in an edition of 100 so I have a lot of signing to do.

New poem today, inspired by the line from Fuentes "La muerte hoy da presencia a la vida ayer." Poem had nothing to do with the lines, except that it got me thinking about the present and the future in this way that made sense to me and was also a little frightening.

20 October 2007

Day two of blogging, what does one say--worked/revised two poems (measuring, power play--still need some work) but happy with them--it's a funny thing to write about the poems without showing them but if they're not ready? And since what they're about is themselves (one is about travel? about understanding and not understanding? the other is about how to see those who one doesn't want to be affected by as powerless?).

Long walk with Jesse and Cannonball, Jesse helping out because I think I bruised or broke some ribs a week or so ago and they really hurt if I exert myself (a sneeze when we got back doing me in).

Also wrote to Jonathan Mayhew jonathanmayhew's blog because he sent me his chapter on Koch and Lorca and it has some very good work in it. It reminded me of the work that Pablo Medina is right now doing on Octavio Paz, Paz's idea of the problem with North American poetry being that it lacks a certain quality due to the loss of (the eradication of) Native American culture. Williams and Crane, I think, try to do something about this, but it does suggest why North American poetry owes so much to European poetry (despite Whitman?) and why there's a different kind of rootedness (secretas raices, as Paz puts it) in Latin American poetry, though less so in places like Argentina which has a similar problem with Native American culture.

Here is something that makes me happy (it arrived yesterday):