Patrick Kanouse's Blog, page 60

Lu Ji's "Wenfu"

I have been reading The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry translated and collected by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping. So far it is quite nice. Recently, I read the selection of Lu Ji's Wenfu (translated by Barnstone and Ping as "The Art of Writing" but in Wikipedia as "On Literature").  According to Barnstone and Ping, a translator can easily write more lines commenting on the poetry than lines in the poem. I thought I'd share a couple of the sections from the book. This is from the section titled...

Billy Collins, the Kindle, and Poetry

Billy Collins has recently made a splash about how his poetry appears on the Kindle. Now while I think that Mr. Collins poems routinely carry on beyond their climax and interest, he does raise up a good point: How poetry appears on e-reading devices. Unlike printed pages, the user has control over the text size on e-readers, which means that a reader can adjust the text size upwards so that original line breaks are not maintained. And this is a big deal for poems, for the line is critical (th...

Slate's Jim Lewis on Christopher Logue's "Translation" of The Iliad

I have since I read it admired Christopher Logue's "translation" of the Iliad. Here's an article at Slate by Jim Lewis that describes quite well Logue's efforts here.

I very much recommend diving into this work (spread across three volumes:  War Music: An Account of Books 1-4 and 16-19 of Homer's Iliad , All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad Rewritten , and  Cold Calls: War Music Continued .

Inception: A Review

This past weekend, I saw Christopher Nolan's newest film: Inception . Prepared as I was to like this movie, I was not prepared for how impressive this movie turned out to be. In fact, this film may be one of the finest movies I have seen in a very long time. For all the hype about Avatar and how that would alter movie-making and expectations, it comes nowhere near Inception's vision.

I saw Avatar and was thoroughly unimpressed. In fact, I was shocked that it was even considered for an Oscar nom...

Poem in The Furnace Review

One of my poems is now at The Furnace Review . I hope you enjoy.

Two "Theories" of Poetry

While traveling back and forth from a wonderful vacation in Florida last week, I spent much of my airplane time reading the latest issue I had of The New York Review of Books. In that issue, an article by Charles Simic quotes Tony Hoagland from his essay "Sad Anthropologists":

A poem is a heroic act of integration that binds into rough harmony the chorus of forces within and outside the soul. A poem struggles to orchestrate, prioritize, cohere, and coordinate these potentially shattering...

What the *$%?

I have slowly been reading Ted Berrigan's The Sonnets . I have had the book for a while, but only ventured into reading it a couple of months ago. I am only finishing it because I started it, and it is a small book, but I am thoroughly bored. While not as drastically obscure as Geoffrey Hill's recent poetry of the past decade, still Berrigan ventures into absurdity. From Sonnet L:

...as I was saying winter of 18 lumps
Days produce life locations to banish 7 up
Nomads, my babies, where are you...

W.H. Auden on Andrei Voznesensky

The Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky passed on June 1, 2010. His obituary can be read at The New York Times. I had a familiarity with some of his poetry (in an anthology compiled by Yevgeny Yevtushenko). To me, two comments by W. H. Auden in a 1966 article at The New York Review of Books was particularly interesting: 

a poet who knows that, whatever else it may be, a poem is a verbal artifact which must be as skillfully and solidly constructed as a table or a motor-bicycle.

and

One of the...

Nine Years...Can I Have Another Bazillion?!

Today is our anniversary...nine years and counting. I could go on and on (like my vows) about my wife and how much I cherish her. Suffice it to say, that the single best moments in my life are the moments I spend with her. I could not ask for a more perfect person to spend my life with.

I always like to think in this photo she is thinking, "The future's so bright...."

At the Tombs of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon: A Video and Reading

While in Greece several years ago, we visited Mycenae, site of  supposed tombs of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon. I wrote this poem and dedicated it my friend Keith, who lived in Greece at the time and shared his home and time with us.