Jacqueline Woodson Named Young People’s Poet Laureate

The Poetry Foundation names a Young People’s Poet Laureate every two years. In 2015, the $25,000 laureate title has been awarded to Jacqueline Woodson.

“Jacqueline Woodson is an elegant, daring, and restlessly innovative,” says Poetry Foundation president Robert Polito.“So many writers settle on a style and a repertoire of gestures and subjects, but Woodson, like her characters, is always in motion and always discovering something fresh. As she once told an interviewer, ‘If you have no road map, you have to create your own.’ Her gifts, adventurousness and generosity, suggest she will be a terrific young people’s poet laureate.”

Woodson was born in Columbus, Ohio, and grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, and Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of more than 30 books for children and young adults, including From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun (1995), which was named a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and won a Jane Addams Children’s Book Award; Miracle’s Boys (2000), which won the 2001 Coretta Scott King Award and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Hush (2002), a National Book Award finalist; Locomotion (2003), also a National Book Award finalist; Coming on Home Soon (2004), a Caldecott Honor Book and a Booklist Editors’ Choice; and Behind You (2004), included in the New York Public Library’s list of best Books of the Teen Age. Three of Woodson’s books have been named Newbery Honor Books: Show Way (2005), Feathers (2007), and After Tupac & D Foster (2008). Her recent books include the young adult novel Beneath a Meth Moon (2012) and Brown Girl Dreaming (2014), a novel in verse about Woodson’s family and segregation in the South, which won a National Book Award and was named a Newbery Honor Book.

In an op-ed for the New York Times, Woodson described how she wrote the book: “As I interviewed relatives in both Ohio and Greenville, S.C., I began to piece together the story of my mother’s life, my grandparents’ lives and the lives of cousins, aunts and uncles. These stories, and the stories I had heard throughout my childhood, were told with the hope that I would carry on this family history and American history, so that those coming after me could walk through the world as armed as I am.”

Woodson was awarded a Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults, a St. Katharine Drexel Award, and an Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers’ Literature. Jonathan Demme is adapting Beneath a Meth Moon for the screen. Woodson currently lives in Brooklyn with her family.

“Woodson’s lyrical, deeply empathetic work is enthralling to all readers, making her the ideal ambassador for young people’s literature,” said Katherine Litwin, Poetry Foundation library director. “We couldn’t be more honored and excited to have her join us for the next two years in this important role.”

In recognition of Woodson’s achievements, the Poetry Foundation’s web site is featuring her in a Poetry off the Shelf podcast and an interview.

Alice Notley Wins $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

Alice Notley has been awarded the 2015 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Established in 1986, the prize recognizes the outstanding lifetime achievement of a living U.S. poet. At $100,000, it is also one of the nation’s largest literary prizes.

The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize is sponsored and administered by the Poetry Foundation who is also the publisher of Poetry magazine. The award will be presented, along with the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism, at a ceremony at the Poetry Foundation on Monday, June 8. The winner of the award for poetry criticism will be announced later this month.

Born in 1945, Alice Notley is recognized as one of America’s greatest living poets. From her Poetry Foundation bio:

She has long written in narrative and epic and genre-bending modes to discover new ways to explore the nature of the self and the social and cultural importance of disobedience. The artist Rudy Burckhardt once wrote that Notley may be “our present-day Homer.” 

Rare Poetry Manuscripts Fetch Record Prices

Though poetry often seems undervalued, it seems fitting that poetry month should be highlighted by a sale that sets record-breaking prices for some rare examples of work by well-known authors.

The sale was held in three parts by Bonhams in London and represents a lifetime of collecting by poet and scholar Roy Davids. Bonhams says it was the finest “collection of poetry ever to come to auction. In Mr David’s own words, ‘it would now be impossible for the present collection to be even approximately replicated.’”

The Charlotte Brontë manuscript we wrote about last week fetched more than double its pre-sale estimate of £40,000-45,000, or roughly $61,000-68,000 US. When the hammer fell, the poem written by a 13-year-old Charlotte Brontë had fetched £92,450 ($142133.).

The poem, “I’ve Been Wandering the Greenwoods,” was hand-written in the tiny script the Brontë children are known to have used in an effort to save paper.

The sale represents a world record for a work by Charlotte Brontë, because even though she wrote around 200 poems, most of her work is already held by institutions and thus seldom comes on the block, making this offering quite rare.

The same sale also brought a record price for the last known manuscript poem by John Keats. That manuscript was from the draft of his well known early poem, “I Stood Tiptoe on a Little Hill.” The manuscript consists of 33 lines from the work scribbled on both front and back showing how the poet revised his thoughts as he wrote. Estimated at £40,000-45,000, it sold for a world record £181,250 ($278,654.).

Nor were these record breakers the only sharp prices in the sale. W. H. Auden’s “Stop All the Clocks” sold for £23,750 ($36,513), Robert Burns’ “Afton Braes’ sold for £39,650 ($60,958) and Lord Byron’s “Sun of the Sleepless” was purchased for £26,250 ($40,356).

Rare Brontë Poem WIll Highlight Sale

A rare handwritten poem by a 13-year-old Charlotte Brontë will go on sale at Bonhams in London tomorrow.

The catalog description of Lot 62 reads as follows:

BRONTË, CHARLOTTE (1816-1855)AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPT POEM WRITTEN IN HER MINUSCULE HAND SIGNED 'C. BRONTE', dated by her 14 December 1829 and with the autograph note 'from the Young Mans Intelligencer', on a small slip of paper (c. 3 x 3 inches, formerly part of the address leaf of a letter - on the verso survive 'Miss Br' and 'Rev' with a hand-inscribed postal rate), [Haworth Rectory], 14 December 1829 

I've been wandering in the greenwoods And mid flowery smiling plains I've been listening to the dark floods To the thrushes thrilling strains 

You can see the full poem and the balance of the description here.

Bonhams has put an estimate of £40,000-45,000 and roughly $61,000-68,000 US.

The same sale includes photographic portraits of author Kingsley Amis taken by Mark Gerson and Christopher Barker, each valued at $610-760, an autographed manuscript of Louisa May Alcott’s poem “To the First Robin” valued at $4500-6100 and manuscript pages and a photographic portrait of Elizabeth Barrett Browning with values between $12,000 and $24,000.

Details of tomorrow’s sale can be seen here.

Meanwhile Miranda K. Pennington writes charmingly at The American Scholar about what it would be like just to hold Brontë’s manuscript:

I’m not fond of the Brontë sisters’ poetry. It contains few hints of the passion that made their fiction so radical and satisfying. Charlotte didn’t include “I’ve been wandering in the greenwoods” in the volume of poetry she and her sisters published, but I would spend my last dime on this precious scrap if I could. Why? Because Charlotte Brontë made it. She tore off a bit of paper and wrote on it. A messy writer myself, I’m charmed by the way she wrote “From enameled ground,” and then inserted “the fair” before “enameled” so the line is crowded with the addition. Her handwriting is so small it needs a magnifying glass to be deciphered.

You can see the full piece here.

Nobel Winner Walcott Protests

Nobel Prize-winning author Derek Walcott is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore. According to Caribbean Book Blog:

If there’s one thing that pisses off Derek Walcott, it’s the Caribbean governments’ blatant disregard for the development of the literary arts and their seeming indifference to the plight of the region’s writers and artistes.

This isn’t a new theme for Walcott. He has often been vocal in his criticism of the government of his homeland, St Lucia, “citing the absence of a theatre and a museum on the island – to this day -- as a shame and a betrayal of the people.”

But recent transgressions have the writer, who will be 83 this month, more riled than ever.

“I don’t want to make a judgment that is going to incriminate any one party or any government. Saint Lucia is going through a very tough economic crisis and naturally the arts suffer. What we have to do is keep thinking that no matter what the crisis, the arts are a necessity. But we have to have the money to sustain them. So, yes, more should be done but we need to look for subsidies for sustaining the arts. We still do not have a museum or a theatre – and that’s criminal. And no party should excuse itself for not doing that for the people. These things are not for the artistes, they are for the people of Saint Lucia.”

Walcott was a bit more acerbic when he was informed that the year-old St Lucia Labour Party government had created a new ministry called the Ministry of Creative Industries. He seemed shocked at the title. 

“That’s the name of a ministry? Someone who was creative did not do it? It’s not a nice title. I don’t know what creative industries means!”

Walcott, who is in St Lucia for Nobel Laureates Week, became even more upset when a reporter told him about a new multi-million dollar luxury resort dubbed Freedom Bay that is about to be built in Soufriere, on the island’s west coast, in the vicinity of the celebrated Pitons. It is near a UNESCO World Heritage site that the author helped work to protect in the early 1990s.

In addition to the Nobel Prize for Literature, Walcott’s illustrious career has included the Cholmondeley Award, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, the T. S. Eliot Prize and in 1972 he was named as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. He is currently Professor of poetry at the University of Essex.

The story in Caribbean Book Blog is here.

A Poetic Birthday

In addition to today being the birthday of the very Dewey who organized the library and the anniversary of the day in 1884 when Mark Twain first published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Writer’s Almanac lets us know that it is also the day of birth of a whole lot of poetic power.

Most notable, of course, is the Belle of Amherst, Emily Dickinson, who was born on this date in 1830. From Writer’s Almanac:

She spent most of her adult life in her corner bedroom in her father’s house. The room contained a writing table, a dresser, a Franklin stove, a clock, a ruby decanter, and pictures on the wall of three writers: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Thomas Carlyle. Her favorite author was Shakespeare. She eventually wrote more than 1,700 poems. In the year 1862 alone, she wrote 366 poems -- about one per day.

On this date in 1925, Pulitzer Prize-winning Carolyn Kizer was born in Spokane, Washington.

Kizer is unapologetically proud of her ability to perform her own poems, something she has worked very hard at. “Dylan Thomas was a success not because he was a great poet, but because he read magnificently. There are only a couple of women who read well, and I'm one of them. I'm modest about my poetry, but I'm not modest about my reading. I've worked hard to be good at it, and I'm proud of it.”

Another poet, Thomas Lux, was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, on this day in 1946.

“He's known for his surreal, funny poems with titles like “Commercial Leech Farming Today,’ ‘Traveling Exhibition of Torture Instruments,’ ‘The Oxymoron Sisters,’ and ‘Walt Whitman's Brain Dropped on Laboratory Floor.’ 

He describes contemporary American poetry as “Burgeoning, chaotic, many, many good poets, a growing cultural profile, a healthy, squawking, boisterous, fractious, inclusive, tradition and (true) innovation marrying or colliding.”

The Writer’s Almanac piece is here.

Holiday Gift Guide: Jack Kerouac Collected Poems

Looking over our shoulders, it’s easy to underestimate the poetic art of Jack Kerouac. We remember little beyond On the Road, one of the defining works of the Beat Generation. The book celebrated a life of drugs and jazz on the road in an elegant stream of consciousness screed. Helping the idea that there was little to the writer beyond The Road is the fact that Kerouac himself died too young. He was just 47 and died of an internal hemorrhage attributed both to a lifetime of heavy drinking and a bar fight a few weeks before. Life fast, die hard: this is not the epithet of a master. And yet.

I used to sit under trees and meditate
On the diamond bright silence of darkness
and the bright look of diamonds in space
and space that was stiff with lights
and diamonds shot through, and silence

(from Buddha)

Or this:

Someday you’ll be lying
there in a nice trance
and suddenly a hot
soapy brush will be
applied to your face
--it’ll be unwelcome
--someday the
undertaker’ll shave you

(from 2nd Chorus)

It’s been reported that Kerouac loved poetry and loved making poems and said that his novels were a direct outgrowth of the diverse poems that filled his notebooks throughout his life. Poetry was important to Kerouac, personally and to and for his art. A new book from The Library of America illustrates this as well as anything I’ve seen.

Jack Kerouac: Collected Poems is edited by poet, painter and short story writer Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell. “Jack Kerouac was like a man observing his river,” Phipps-Kettlewell writes, “sitting in the rain, letting it soak through his clothes, his skin, his being; a man weighed down, feeling the cold, his tears as opaque as his heart.”

The book brings together all of Kerouac’s major collected works along with many uncollected poems, some of which have been published here for the first time. ◊

Jones Atwater is a contributing editor to January Magazine.

Irish President’s Poems Slammed

When a critic says that a poet’s work is “a crime against literature,” you know punches are not being pulled. But when it turns out that the poet in question just happens to be the president of your country, something larger might be at play. In the Irish Independent, books editor John Spain writes:

BEING President is no protection from the critics. In one of the most scathing reviews ever published here, the new book of poetry by Michael D Higgins has been torn apart by a leading critic.

Professor Kevin Kiely says that the President's latest book is "lame, stale and stilted", that it is "bland, imprecise and ultimately incomprehensible" and that it's so bad that Michael D Higgins "can be accused of crimes against literature".

The book being ripped up here is called New and Selected Poems and was published recently by Liberties Press. Kiely, whose credentials to pronounce on Irish poetry are firmly intact, seems determined in his review to eviscerate the work.

Prof Kiely is particularly dismissive of the attempts at philosophising in some of the poems, saying Mr Higgins's "quasi-philosophical verse, not even humble fireside or armchair philosophy, is similarly cringe-worthy".

President Higgins’ reaction to the critique was not reported on though, as Spain points out, at an upcoming PEN event where Higgins will be presenting an award, “They won't be stuck for a topic of conversation at the dinner.”

Michael D. Higgins is the ninth president of Ireland. He took office on November 11, 2011.

Poet Ruth Stone Dead at 96

Celebrated poet Ruth Stone died at home of natural causes in Ripton, Vermont, on November 19th. Born in June of 1915, Stone was 96 when she died. From The Huffington Post by way of AP:

Widowed in her 40s and little known for years after, Ruth Stone became one of the country's most honored poets in her 80s and 90s, winning the National Book Award in 2002 for "In the Next Galaxy" and being named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for "What Love Comes To." She received numerous other citations, including a National Book Critics Circle award, two Guggenheims and a Whiting Award.

In a lovely obit, Hillel Italie writes:

Her poems were brief, her curiosity boundless, her verse a cataloguing of what she called "that vast/confused library, the female mind." She considered the bottling of milk; her grandmother's hair, "pulled back to a bun"; the random thoughts while hanging laundry (Einstein's mustache, the eyesight of ants).

"I think my work is a natural response to my life," she once said. "What I see and feel changes like a prism, moment to moment; a poem holds and illuminates. It is a small drama. I think, too, my poems are a release, a laughing at the ridiculous and songs of mourning, celebrating marriage and loss, all the sad baggage of our lives. It is so overwhelming, so complex."

The Poetry Foundation described Stone as “an important, if relatively unknown, American poet.”

Commenting on the "odd neglect" of this "major talent, "Sandra Gilbert mused in Women's Review of Books that "sheer bad luck" is in part to blame for Stone's obscurity.

You can read more about Stone’s work and life here.

Holiday Gift Guide: The Illiad by Homer translated by Stephen Mitchell

If high school literary abuse makes the very mention of anything by Homer cause your eyes to roll up into your head, you’re in for a treat. In this new translation of The Illiad (Free Press) author Stephen Mitchell starts things off on a wonderful note. “We return to the Illiad because it is one of the monuments of our own magnificence. Its poetry lifts even the most devastating human events into the realm of the beautiful, and it shows us how vast and serene the mind can be even when it contemplates the horrors of war.”

It is this sort of care and passion that have seen Mitchell move towards becoming one of the significant translators of his time. His translations have included Tao Te Ching, Gilgamesh, The Bhagavad Gita and The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.

But it is not just the clarity of thought and language that make this a better English language translation than the ones you might have tackled back in high school. It’s actually better researched, as well. This is the first translation based on the work of preeminent Homeric scholar Martin L. West who brings previously omitted material to the table, resulting in a text that is, in some ways, thematically altered from any you might have read -- or tried to read -- before.

But nothing trumps Mitchell’s language here and his understanding of the text. “Of course,” he writes in the introduction, “we can only perceive in the Illiad what we bring to it, and there are as many ways too see it as there are minds that see.”

In his new translation, Mitchell brings us his vision. And that clarity? It brings us what he sees. ◊

Linda L. Richards is the editor of January Magazine and the author of several books.

Holiday Gift Guide: The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane by Patrick Lane

If the person on your list has a particular interest in Canadian poetry, The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane (Harbour) is a handsome and complete collection.

For many years considered by many to be one of his country’s leading poets, Patrick Lane was born in Nelson, British Columbia and currently lives in Victoria. In the time between he has lived many places all over North and South America. And he’s crafted a lot of words. The author of 27 books of poetry, a novel, a short story collection and a memoir. In a career that spans over 50 years, Lane has won every award available to him, including the Governor General’s Award, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence.

Winter is silence
when ice gathers on crows’ wings
and nothing can be salvaged from dreams.

The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane provides a fantastic overview of Lane’s awe-inspiring body of work and brings together, as the preface tells us, “all the poems that Lane wants to preserve,” some of them revised for this publication. ◊

Monica Stark is a contributing editor to January Magazine. She currently makes her home on a liveaboard boat somewhere in the North Pacific.

Poems for the Royal Wedding

As I write this, we are spinning rapidly towards the event that will finally make all the royal wedding hoopla cease. Meanwhile, though, in these last remaining hours before the much-ballyhooed event, the wedding sounds seem ceaseless. In fact, there’s so much of it that even a literary journalist doesn’t have to look very hard (or even at all) to find tie-in stories. And so here is the last possible (I think!) literary related royal wedding story. At least, it will be until the books start to come out.

Britain’s Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, whose duty it is to keep verse in the British consciousness, wrote a poem for the occasion. The Telegraph was gently scathing:

With no names or dates or places mentioned, the poem might apply to anyone. Anyone with an interest in rings, that is. There are bell rings, tree rings, lipstick rings, some other sorts of rings that aren’t really rings at all unless you stop and think about them in a new way. Ringworm is missing, as are the rings of Saturn, and those left on bartops by perspiring cocktail glasses.

But, The Telegraph says, if it’s not an especially inspiring poem, there are good reasons:

It comes as no real surprise that it is not a tremendously heartfelt poem. Duffy is in her fifties, a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, openly bisexual, and from a Glaswegian working-class background. I may be doing her a disservice here, but I do not imagine her on the VIP guestlist at Boujis. She can have no real sympathy with the newlyweds and for their part I doubt they will have even heard of her.

What The Telegraph does not point out -- and that The Mirror does -- is that, as poet laureate, Duffy commissioned the worked 20 other poets, “with the theme of vows, to be used at weddings and civil partnerships in the UK. ‘Poetry is our national art and this is a part of that, this is a celebration of the whole country and for all couples and everyone.’”

The text of Duffy’s poem, as well as those of the other poems she commissioned, appeared in The Guardian last weekend. It seems to me to be a worthy celebration of the verse form, not to mention an occasion that will be remembered and remarked upon for decades.

You can read the poems in The Guardian here.

April is National Poetry Month

Into rhyming couplets? Free verse? Limericks? Whatever your poetic passion, April is your month and the nice people at Knopf Doubleday want you to know they’re giving their best stuff away. One poem at a time, one day at a time. You’ll find a brief video and a little box where you can enter your e-mail address to sign-up for their Poem-A-Day give away.

After you sign up, you’ll start receiving some real gems from some of the world's best poets every morning. I signed up a short while ago, and this week alone I received little nuggets of gold by Cynthia Zarin, Leonard Cohen, and Marge Piercy.

Now, if that’s not a good way to wake up every day, I don’t know what is.

To sign up for your free poems, point your browser here.

Bella Akhmadulina Dead at 73

The important Russian poet, Bella Akhmadulina, passed away on November 29th at her home outside Moscow. Her husband reported she had suffered fatally from a heart attack. She was 73. From The New York Times:

Ms. Akhmadulina came to prominence during the post-Stalin thaw, when a loosening of censorship led to a flowering of the arts. Along with the poets Yevgeny Yevtushenko (her first husband) and Andrei Voznesensky, she became one of the bold new voices in contemporary Russian literature, attracting ecstatic audiences of thousands to readings at concert halls and stadiums.

Her poetry was resolutely apolitical, making her a target of official criticism. Her early poems, usually in rhymed quatrains, offered random observations on everyday life -- buying soda from a vending machine, coming down with the flu -- in dense, allusive language enriched by coined words and archaisms. A sprightly sense of humor and an audacious way with images marked her from the outset as a distinctive talent.

The Times obituary is here. You can read translations of some of her poems here.

April is National Poetry Month

In both Canada and the United States, April is National Poetry Month, with official events scheduled all over North America.

In the United States, a good starting point is Poets.org where the month-long event is explained and where all sorts of poetry related material is collected:

Inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, National Poetry Month is now held every April, when publishers, booksellers, literary organizations, libraries, schools and poets around the country band together to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American culture. Thousands of businesses and non-profit organizations participate through readings, festivals, book displays, workshops, and other events.

In Canada, start with the Web site of the League of Canadian Poets where festivities are underway for the 12th annual event. This year, there’s a strong environmental tie-in. Since Earth Day also takes place in April, this seems like a natural link.

As a society we continue to change: politically, ecologically, culturally and economically. Poet and NPM participators across Canada will be exploring these topics through readings and events: how changing climates affect you, your community and the larger communities of Canada... and the world. Each day becomes a defining moment in our history. Do Climate Changes inspire you to write, to express your passion and compassion? Does change necessarily mean progress?

As well as thoughtful rhetoric, the site includes links to national events, contests and other poetry related material.

If Canadian poetry is what does it for you, definitely take a gander at Canadian Poetry 1920-1960 (New Canadian Library/M&S), a fantastic collection of the very best of Canadian poetry during the stated period and including 250 poems by 44 poets from all regions of the country. Writes editor Brian Trehearne:

The poets in this anthology ... considered it one of their primary obligations to modernize Canadian writing, to bring the country's poetry out of late Romantic stasis after the Great War into a fertile and combative response to the .... modern era.

Clearly, then, Canadian Poetry is not a book meant for armchair dreaming, but is a serious study of the animal under discussion. Don’t let that put you off. Fortunately, it takes more than examination from the ivory tower to dampen the verve found in this collection of voices. P.K. Page, Earle Birney, Irving Layton, Dorothy Livesay, so many more. Editor Brian Trehearne is a Professor in the Department of English at McGill University and he really knows his poetry, but he’s sometimes a bit of a buzz kill. Unless you love the smell of academia in the morning, don’t read the editor’s preface or afterword before you’ve engaged deeply in this river.

Poet P.K. Page Dies at 93

The Canadian literary community is saddened today by news that one of the country’s best-loved poets has died. From CBC News:

Canadian literary grand dame P.K. Page, long renowned for her poetry and other writing, has died at the age of 93.

Page died early Thursday morning at her home in Victoria, CBC News has confirmed.

A companion of the Order of Canada, the British-born, Canadian-reared Patricia Kathleen Page was considered among Canada's most esteemed writers.

January Magazine most recently discussed Page’s work last year when contributing editor Monica Stark reviewed Page’s children’s chapbook, The Old Woman and the Hen (Porcupine’s Quill). “It’s a tiny, special, lovely little book,” Stark wrote, “clearly intended to be cherished.”

Page’s official Web site is here. Wikipedia includes extensive information on her here. The portrait of Page at left was done in 1947 by the painter, graphic artist and film producer Alma Duncan (1917–2004). It is held by Library and Archives Canada and can be seen online here.

Holiday Gift Guide: Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names by Soraya Peerbaye

The thing that first attracted me to Soraya Peerbaye’s debut collection was its title. Let’s face it: Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names (Gooselane Editions) is, on the surface of things, such an odd thng to call a collection of poetry, it’s almost ludicrous. As much as I might have wished to walk away from the slender volume, I couldn’t. The name held me fast.

As it turns out, the title comes from the book’s fourth section, the part that deals with a trip Peerbaye took to the Antarctic Peninsula. “Horizon pulls: a trick knot. The seal undoes itself.”

As much as the crazy title might have been the thing that initially drew me, Peerbaye’s writing convinced me in a moment. I offer the opening stanza of “Zistoire,” the first poem in the collection, by way of example:

I’ve learned that the story comes from the invitation to come in. The embrace, his cheek against mine, the stubbled feel of a sun-hollowed sea urchin. He leaves his shoes at the door, hangs hit coat on the banister; I put on the kettle. The story comes from the invitation to come in.

Though the poems that make up the collection are quite different in style and meter and substance, Peerbaye’s writing is consistently muscular and ephemeral, two adjectives that would seem not to belong together in the same sentence yet, somehow, with this writer’s work, it does. As I said, this is a debut, and it’s wonderful. I can’t even imagine what comes next.

Happy Birthday to Ezra

Ezra Pound was born on this day in 1885. From Writer’s Almanac:

Pound was born within a few years of James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, D.H. Lawrence, Marianne Moore, Hilda Doolittle, and T.S. Eliot, and he was instrumental in promoting the careers of each one of these writers -- as well as many, many others. He was a champion of modern poetry and prose; Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair proclaimed that it was Ezra Pound “more than anyone who made poets write modern verse, editors publish it, and readers read it.” He was extraordinarily generous with his clout, often described as “the poet's poet.” Pound’s mantra was “Make it new.”

Pound died in Venice, two days after his 87th birthday. His legacy survives.

Canada’s “Melancholy bard” at 75

Last year the CBC described him as “Poet, musician, novelist, ladies' man, monk, actor.” Whatever you call him, though, it’s hard to believe that “Canada’s melancholy bard,” Leonard Cohen, will turn 75 later this month. It’s less difficult to understand that he won’t do it alone and it will all be done with great style.

Cohen will issue in his 75th year in his home town of Montreal at a birthday gala and silent auction. The event will be held on Monday, September 21st in the Atwater Library Auditorium, 1200 Atwater Avenue in Westmount/Montreal. Special guests will include David Seaman, Erica Ruth Kelly, Paris Elizabeth Sea, Michael Mirolla and other writers and poets. Tickets for the event are $75 and all proceeds will benefit the Leonard Cohen Poet-in-Residence program at Westmount High.

If you can’t wait for your Cohen fix -- or a trip to Montreal is out of the question even though Montréal in September is perfect -- several celebrations are being held across Canada to launch the book, You’re Our Man. In the collection, 75 of the world’s best poets reflect on the poetry of Leonard Cohen. A list of the contributing poets is here.

For more details on both the gala and various launches to be held to celebrate the publication of You’re Our Man, check the Public Poetry’s blog.

Selected Poems by Robert Bringhurst

A new book by Robert Bringhurst is always a noteworthy event. Bringhurst is an author, typographer, translator and award-winning poet and each of his books is a work of art on every level.

It seems to me there is something even more special about Selected Poems (Gaspereau Press), a single volume that brings together selections from several of Bringhurst’s collections including The Beauty of the Weapons and The Calling. It also includes a new series of poems called “The Living.”

The ear of language rests
On the breast of world,
Unable to know and unable to care
Whether it listens inward or outward.

Everything about Selected Poems is extraordinary. The first hint of it is in the plain black cover, no image. The title and the author’s name are printed in silver ink in a plain, serif font. This stark understatement is typical of Bringhurst. And the book’s deceptively simple production speaks volumes for the work itself. Just enough, always. A little less, perhaps, than another might give, but it’s the correct less. The right less. Somehow defining the work by what is not there as much as by what is.

Those who already enjoy Bringhurst’s work will want to add Selected Poems to their collections. And if you’ve never before encountered his sparse, elemental imagery will find this collection a perfect place to start.