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.

lots of snow and then I got sick and it is Valentine's Day

It was wonderful to see all the snow come down in Brooklyn on Tuesday and into Wednesday. The back got its workout with shoveling and the legs with walking in the snow (Jesse took video and photos, go to band of the land.com to see some of these). Then the week wore on and I wore out and collapsed Thursday night. No fun as I'd hoped to have a nice long weekend for relaxing, reading, and writing. There is a difference between sleeping when sick and sleeping when healthy. The biggest one is that you can read but in the former the words never stay on the page or in your head.

But it meant lots of radio on as well, and going back and forth between NPR news, discussion and music and sports talk on baseball. Pitchers and catchers report this week. Always that pleasure, harbinger of spring.

I think I have managed to do a little reading that counts: some Ezra Pound (for teaching and for pleasure), Huidobro, Stroud, Vargas Llosa and E.B. White. Read Nick Thran's book of poems, Every Inadequate Noise which came out a few years ago, very good. He has a new one coming out next year. Stephen Kessler's The Mental Traveler arrived in the mail and I look forward to reading that. Also now reading Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin which is good if not a little too happy with itself (can one really observe all that much in a single instant?)

Tourist at a Miracle news: A west coast/Bay Area reading trip for the end of September seems to be coming together (more later on this). At least two confirmed and two very likely dates/places.

I'm being interviewed on the Moe Greene Poetry Hour out in California on February 26, 6:30 EST and 3:30 PST. More info later on this for life listening and podcast downloads.

It is Valentine's Day. Save your money and just remind your loved ones just how much you love them. Words mean most.

abrazos,

Mark

long time away

Okay, so a lot has gone on since the last time I made an entry. I guess I need to get better at simply blogging on a daily basis but that isn't my habit. I guess if I have the choice of writing a poem or writing on a blog I'd rather work on a poem.

But I am just back from the ALTA conference in Dallas and it was really more than I expected. Good conversations with Stephen Kessler about translating in general, about Lorca in particular. He's a good poet (been reading his book After Modigliani, some nice stuff, check it out on Creative Arts Press) but he's also done some important translations, a selected Cortazar with City Lights and Cernuda's prose poems.

Also saw C.M. Mayo (her blog is Madame Mayo and should be looked at) who, like Stephen came to the panel I was on on translation and collaboration and is a wonderful translator. Other folks I got to spend good time with were Alexis Levitin, Aliki Barnstone, Douglas Unger, Esther Allen. Alexis and I were walking along, ran into Gregory Rabassa and Willis Barnstone and Alexis had to race off and I had a good 25 minute conversation with these two about Garcia Lorca that made the whole conference in itself worth it.

But that seemed to be the strength of the conference: conversation. I went to a number of panels, bi-lingual readings, but it was really something to just sit and talk with people whose appreciation for literature matched my own. I've felt humbled often by the privilege of translating Poet in New York, given how little translating I've done compared with some of these other folks (maybe that made me naive enough to not realize what I was getting into--why others have not done it). But I had no sense from anyone other than support, that they were as excited about this as I was.

So the work will go on. People have been writing and commenting on the translations in APR. Thank you. Some comments at ALTA about the ones in Subtropics.

And I've even been getting more of my own poetry written, which is hard given all the Lorca work. Tonight I went to a reading at ICP which was tied into the current exhbit on photos of the Spanish Civil War. Phillip Levine read from Orwell, as did one of the other readers but for me the highlight was Monica de la Torre reading from Cernuda and Guillen (too often forgotten from the Generation of 27) and Margo Jefferson (Lang colleague) read two Neruda poems inspired (?) by the murder of Lorca (whose assasination Willis Barnstone had an interesting take on, which Margo and I talked about and has appeared in the writing of Jaime Manrique--that Lorca was murdered because he was gay, for no other reason, and that he was shot from behind and up his backside).

In the days to come I plan on posting links to sites I like--not sure how to do this so anyone out there who knows, give a helpful holler.

Abrazos.