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Literary Schadenfreude (via Gothamist)

Poet Clive James wrote a poem in which he gloated over finding a competitor's book in a remainder bin.  Honestly, though, the best place to find contemporary poetry books is the 50% off stacks at The Strand.  The last time I was there I found a number of fantastic and current books of poetry but I'll resist naming names just in case being remaindered or discounted hurts anyone's feelings.  One book was dedicated by a young author to a Major Poet.  Even more devastating was the discovery of a personal letter penned by the author (in blue-tinted calligraphy) nestled within the pages of this book.

 

Nobel to Salinger?  Nah, He's American.  (via Gothamist)

Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which administers the Nobel Prize in Literature, got a lot of flack for stating that U.S. Literature was "too isolated, too insular."  He then went on to say that "[t]hey don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature."  That much is true.  Translated literature makes up a pathetically small percentage of book sales in the United States.  U.S. literature, on the other hand, is widely translated into other languages.  I think that next year's prize should go to a translator.   

A Conversation with Shirley Kaufman by Eve Grubin

"I began to know Hebrew poets through my work in translation. A small group of English speakers—writers, translators, and teachers at the Hebrew University—met together twice a month to read the work of John Ashbery.

There was also an Israeli poet who was translating Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror into Hebrew, and he needed some help. We all wanted to keep up with what was happening in English and in translation, as well. That group went on meeting and reading for years."

First OSU Ph.D. in Yiddish studies a trailblazer in field by Jennifer Hambrick

I came across a very interesting profile on Colleen McCallum-Bonar, a scholar of Yiddish literature and possibly the only African-American working in this field.  In the article, she discusses her research interests and also addresses the issues of race that pervade this field of study.

Her doctoral dissertation, “Black Ashkenaz and the Almost Promised Land: Yiddish Literature and the Harlem Renaissance,” compares the Yiddish-language poetry of Jewish immigrants to America and the poetry of African-American writers between 1915 and 1935....

Some of the themes that recur in the Yiddish-language writings of authors of the period, such as Jacob Glatstein and Leivick Halpern, include the idea that African-Americans and Jews in America have a mutual understanding of their histories of oppression at the hands of a white majority.

“Authors say that blacks are our brothers in arms essentially, that we have this kind of shared experience in terms of being in the U.S., being poor in the U.S., being minorities in the U.S. and being mistreated in the U.S.,” McCallum-Bonar said.

Silent Story: One Process for the narrative arc in chapbooks

Poet Justin Evans on narrative arcs in poetry collections:

[A] narrative arc is more than a hook upon which to hang your poems. Poetry at its very center must remain, as my friend and mentor Dave Lee has said, a participation sport. It is not, as the Moderns would suggest, art for art’s sake. The audience is not superfluous. Poetry must be shared, and in that sharing, a story is the poet’s best bet. As each poem tells a story, it only makes sense that a chapbook consisting of a small suite of poems be more than a gathering of good poems. There must be a reason all of these poems are in one place.

To accomplish a successful narrative arc, I advocate the hidden narrative--- the story only the poet knows....use it during the writing of poems for a chapbook and then destroy it, revealing only that information you the poet deems absolutely necessary. So construct a narrative just for you. Don’t draft the narrative because that is prose, but always have the entire story in your conscious thought while writing the poems.

And saving the best for last---

Diagramming Sarah Palin (via Slate)