Samiya Bashir's Blog, page 5

Following the artistic paper trail

Following the artistic paper trail - The Irish Times
Wed, Feb 01, 2012

"It may be Minimalist but Richard Gorman's work has a sensual richness..."

{shrug}
Eh...what can I say? Agreed.

Read the rest here.
#art!

.http://scryptkeeper.blogspot.com
www.samiyabashir.com

Adonis: a life in writing | Books | The Guardian

Adonis: a life in writing

'A creator always has to be with what's revolutionary, but he should never be like the revolutionaries. He can't speak the same language or work in the same political environment'. Interview by Maya Jaggi

Adonis, the greatest living poet of the Arab world, ushers me down a labyrinthine corridor in a stately building in Paris, near the Champs Elysees. The plush offices belong to a benefactor, a Syrian-born businessman funding the poet's latest venture – a cultural journal in Arabic, which he edits. Fetching a bulky manuscript of the imminent third issue of the Other, Adonis hefts it excitedly on to a coffee table, listing the contributors "from west and east", many of them of his grandchildren's generation. He turned 82 this month. His eyes spark: "We want new talents with new ideas."

A Syrian-born poet, critic and essayist, and a staunch secularist who sees himself as a "pagan prophet", Adonis has been writing poetry for 70 years. He led a modernist revolution in the second half of the 20th century, exerting a seismic influence on Arabic poetry comparable to TS Eliot's in the anglophone world. Aged 17, he adopted the name of the Greek fertility god (pronounced Adon-ees, with the stress on the last syllable) to alert napping editors to his precocious talent and his pre-Islamic, pan-Mediterranean muses. Since the death of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in 2008, it would be hard to argue for a poet of greater stature in a literary culture where poetry is the most prestigious form as well as being popular.

... Read the rest here.

http://scryptkeeper.blogspot.com
www.samiyabashir.com

It's funny because it hurts.

Need more tips?

Perhaps try these for your next blurb and/or review:

"a very generous book" – The poet has included a ten pound note in every copy.

"the language is muscular" – The poet has done the proper stretches before writing.

"startling" – I dropped the book on my foot and was startled by its sheer weight.

"addresses the poet's roots" – The poet will be going to a different hair stylist next time.

"resonates" – The poems are written on a large bell.

"very necessary work" - It was necessary the poet published the book, if their reputation as a currently publishing poet was to be upheld.

"like a palimpsest" - It seemed like recycled paper was used.

Click here to read / "borrow from" the rest.http://scryptkeeper.blogspot.com
www.samiyabashir.com

Just Breathe

A pretty mesmerizing art installation posted on Drunken Boat. Ahhhh...

One Hundred and Eight – Interactive Installation from Nils Völker on Vimeo.

http://scryptkeeper.blogspot.com
www.samiyabashir.com

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS | Beautiful Equations

The LA Times gives it up for one of my all time favorite writers. Can we get a s-l-o-w c-l-a-p please? (thank ya)


Illustration of Percival Everett © Joe Linton

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS | Beautiful Equations:

Over the course of more than 20 books, Percival Everett has produced as rich a body of fiction as just about any contemporary American writer, but mainstream literary recognition has proved elusive. As an African-American writer deeply interested in the American West, and one with an experimentalist bent, he's certainly no marketer's dream. His books range so freely — from satire to absurdism, from realism to metafiction — that it's difficult to get a fix on him. Then again, the same might be said of Cervantes, Sterne, or Twain.

Identity is the bedrock of the rational. Aristotle's theory of identity holds that each entity has a specific nature. An owl cannot be a monkey; an elevator cannot be a marimba. Destabilize identity and the ground beneath our feet crumbles: We risk falling into madness. It's no accident that Everett's two variations on Greek myth, For Her Dark Skin (1990) and Frenzy (1997), bring readers inside the minds of Medea and Dionysus, those avatars of the irrational. Indeed, so thoroughly do his books complicate identity and undermine logic — in terms of both content and form — that they elude critical categories.

Click here to read the full piece.

Am I glad as hell that Greywolf is re-releasing Erasure. Yep. About a billion more people need to read that book. Also, it's hilarious. Also, read the piece. Want the rest? Good. Seriously: Click here to read the full piece.http://scryptkeeper.blogspot.com
www.samiyabashir.com

Gospel's Hugin & Munin think this sledding crow is tight.

Sledding Crow:

It is a remarkable demonstration of the intelligence of the crow, which sits on a smart branch in the animal tree within the family Corvidae. There is something so deliberate about this play: the crow uses a toy; it searches for the best sledding path; it repeats the adventure down the roof; it keeps upright with its feet planted on the lid when, as a bird, it could simply fly. The bird does not want to travel down the roof, it wants to slide down the roof.

While you're at it, check out Mischief the Talking Raven, Joe the Talking Crow, and definitely Gospel: poems for a whole lot of raveny goodness! Click the poem to the right for a taste!


http://scryptkeeper.blogspot.com
www.samiyabashir.com

Some sweet poets get the NBCC nod!

National Book Critics Circle: Video: NBCC 2011 Finalists Annoucements at Artists Space, NYC - Critical Mass Blog
Congratulations to my beloved poets Laura Kasishke, Yusef Komunyaka, and Aracelis Girmay on this beautiful nod to their awesomeness:

Poetry finalists, all demonstrating a mastery of form while advancing their art, included Laura Kasischke (Space, in Chains, Copper Canyon Press) and Yusef Komunyakaa (The Chameleon Couch, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), as well as relative newcomer Aracelis Girmay (Kingdom Animalia, BOA Editions). They were presented by 2010 finalist Kathleen Graber.

Winners of the National Book Critics Circle Awards will be announced at the awards ceremony on Thursday, March 8, at 6:00 p.m. at the New School's Tishman Auditorium in New York.

Click here for the complete list of finalists and to read the full article.

http://scryptkeeper.blogspot.com
www.samiyabashir.com

Guernica / The Harmonizer

A pretty schweet interview with Kwame Dawes by Camille Goodison in last month's Guernica:
The HarmonizerCamille Goodison interviews Kwame Dawes December 2011

The Emmy Award–winning poet and crisis reporter on Haiti's continuing struggles and Jamaica'sAIDS crisis, how Afro-Caribbean music has influenced the writing of V.S. Naipaul and Langston Hughes, and his new role as editor of Prairie Schooner.

... For nineteen years, home for Dawes was South Carolina, where he founded the South Carolina Poetry Initiative and the University of South Carolina Arts Institute. One of his latest anthologies, Home Is Where presents the poetry of over two dozen poets from the Carolinas writing about the South as home. Two recent anthologies, Red: Contemporary Black British Poetry and Jubilation: An Anthology of Poetry Celebrating Fifty Years of Jamaican Independence continues this work featuring the writing of international poets from a variety of schools.

Dawes now teaches at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where he is also editor-in-chief of Prairie Schooner.

—Camille Goodison for Guernica

Kwame Dawes: ... Maybe that is the power of poetry. It somehow transcends news cycles, and becomes a part of our collective imagination. That is the beauty of the art form I like to play with.

Click here to read the rest.http://scryptkeeper.blogspot.com
www.samiyabashir.com

Poet Terrance Hayes Appointed to President Obama's National Student Poets Program

Terrance Hayes Appointed to President Obama's National Student Poets Program-Department of English - Carnegie Mellon University
Award-winning poet and Department of English ProfessorTerrance Hayes has been chosen to serve as a panelist for President Barack Obama's new National Student Poets Program (NSPP), the country's highest honor for young poets presenting original work. Hayes is one of four literary leaders who will judge students who received a National Scholastic Art & Writing Award for poetry. Five high school students will be selected to serve for a year as national poetry ambassadors.

"This is good exposure for CMU's Creative Writing Program to kids who are interested in writing," said Hayes, who won the2010 National Book Award for poetry. "Poetry seems to be becoming more popular in high school, but there's room to grow around what their sense of it is - from slam to hip hop and the relationship between page and stage."

NSPP was created by the President's Committee on the Arts & Humanities, which is chaired by First Lady Michelle Obama, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services through a partnership with the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers. The winning student poets will receive college scholarships and opportunities to present their work at writing and poetry events. They also will be featured at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.
Read the rest.http://scryptkeeper.blogspot.com
www.samiyabashir.com

Yum. More poems.

Can't stop won't stop with the poems online.
That's not true. I'm stopping now. I've got work to do.
Before I do though, here's a good poem by a good poet who I also here is a pretty good person. The schweet trifecta.

Dear Empire [these are your temples]
by Oliver de la Paz

Dear Empire,

These are your temples. There are rows of stone countenances, pillar after pillar. As if walking through a forest filled with alabaster heads: here, the frown. The gaze. The luminous stare.

Smoke from the incense curls, shapes itself against the archways, rubs against the grooves of the columns. Only a few men press their heads to their hands.

Outside, archeologists excavate a stone torso. Bound in coils of fraying rope, it rises before us, pulled upwards by a backhoe. Its form momentarily hides the sun, though as it sways, the light strikes our eyes. Saying yes. Saying no.

http://scryptkeeper.blogspot.com
www.samiyabashir.com