Poetry Monday

Over at Roaring Out, it’s Poetry Monday, featuring a poem by Tamara Madison from Wild Domestic Watch the video here

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A Little Ditty for Dancing with the Stars

A Little Ditty for Dancing with the Stars Elliott batTzedek You’re an asshole, Nancy Grace I flinch when I see your accusatory face or even your right breast, hanging out. About your character I have no doubt, for you called for the lynching of a disturbed young mother. So I’d be afraid now, too, if [...]

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Bly’s 8 Stages of Translation: Stage 8, far more than the back of a rug

from Robert Bly’s Eight Stages of Translation       Our last stage is making the final draft. We read back over all our earlier drafts—perhaps a half line we said better in one of them. We have to make our final adjustments now. [...] During this stage we allow ourselves, at last, the pleasure of examining other [...]

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Bly’s 8 Stages of Translations: Stage 7, the very painful stage

from Robert Bly’s Eight Stages of Translation       We are nearly finished now. During what I will call the seventh stage we ask someone born into the language to go over our version. Perhaps we go back to the native speaker who helped us in the first draft; if we did not get such help then, [...]

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In which I let Rabassa and Barnstone duke it out about memory, error, and the ethics of translation

In his book If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, Gregory Rabassa asserts lots of interesting and valuable stuff, then this clinker on pp. 61-62: The completion of work is best done in translation, where the translator can work at things denied the author in his own language, even the way Saint Jerome mistakenly [...]

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Tisha B’Av – Reconsidering Lamentations 5

1Remember, O Lord, what is come upon us. Consider and behold our disgrace. 2Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, Our houses to aliens.        Lamentations 5 פרק ה א זְכֹ֤ר יְהֹוָה֙ מֶֽה־הָ֣יָה לָ֔נוּ הַבִּ֖יטָ [הַבִּ֖יטָה] וּרְאֵ֥ה אֶת־חֶרְפָּתֵֽנוּ: ב נַֽחֲלָתֵ֨נוּ֙ נֶֽהֶפְכָ֣ה לְזָרִ֔ים בָּתֵּ֖ינוּ לְנָכְרִֽים: 1Pay heed, O Lord, to what we bring upon us consider and [...]

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“I am not part of this crime”

from Neruda’s “Letter to Miguel Otero Silva,” translated by Robert Bly [...] I took life, and I faced her and kissed her, and then went through the tunnels of the mines to see how other men live. And when I came out, my hands stained with garbage and sadness, I held my hands up and [...]

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April 8th – A Poem in the Stead of Killing My Coworkers

A Poem in the Stead of Killing My Coworkers Elliott batTzedek All I want to say to everyone and everything is Get the fuck away from me! Hardly the stuff of poetry. But why not? It is the most primal human emotion, older than love, more visceral than hunger. It was Get the fuck away [...]

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Making a Manuscript—Structuring Intuition

Inspired by Michelle Ovalle’s description of her process, a few notes on my own, up to this point. I’ve no idea where the manuscript as it exists will go as I revise over the next few months, but at least I feel now there is something there, some key structural element. When I started last [...]

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The world is always burning

yeah, this is how poetry is written… The Law Gerald Stern in Everything is Burning, 2005 The world is always burning, you should fly from the burning if you can, and you should hold your head oh either above or below the dust and you should be careful in the blocks of Bowery below or [...]

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