Category: Poetry

As part of a poetry festival in Madrid, Luzinterruptus stuffed 1000 envelopes with poems and small lights and hung them in a garden outside the festival. On the final night of the event, people could take an envelope as a keepsake or address the envelope to a friend or loved one. Luzinterruptus collected the envelopes and sent them off. You can see pictures of preparing the poems and lots of photos of the installation here (the site is written in Spanish, but there’s an English translation if you scroll down).

While I’ve read a fair amount of poetry, aside from the 13th century Persian mystical poet Rumi, it’s all been western writing. Then the other day on the radio I heard an interview with Reza Aslan about his new anthology Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East and the website Words Without Borders, both of which feature English translations of international poetry.
After I got home (because I seem to only listen to the radio when doing errands in the car!) I spent a happy hour reading Rumi translations (for instance, here) and the poetry on Words Without Borders. Here’s a Rumi poem, translated by Shahram Shiva, that I especially liked:

I said, meet me in the garden.
You know the one–
it is called Smiling Spring.
There are nightingales chirping away,
wine and candle lights,
and companions as soft as
pomegranate blossoms.
You think this all would sound so perfect!
But without you by my side,
what use is the Smiling Spring?
And when you are with me,
what use are pomegranate blossoms?

My world has been full of poetry this past week. First I found the American Life in Poetry project, former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s website. Then last week For Colored Girls opened — the movie adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. A choreopoem is Shange’s term to describe a performance blending music, dance and poetry. I’ve gotten the play from the library.
I had to drive to Albuquerque the other day — 60 miles one way, much of it pretty desolate. But on either (populated) end, I noticed stands of trees in glorious shades of yellow. On arriving home, I read these poems in the NY Times, celebrating fall and marking the end of daylight saving time.
Finally, catching up on the pile of New Yorker magazine’s by my bed, I read about a poetry contest sponsored by the Miami Herald. They asked people to write 6 lines in honor of the newest member of the Miami Heat, LeBron James. They got more than 1,100 entries from 31 states and Canada! And they gave out all sorts of awards besides “best” — including “best dinosaur poem”, “audience favorite” and “best poem attempting to get a date with LeBron.” And this groaner awarded “Best use of Akron” to Skully of Akron, Ohio

I don’t want to sound too Cavalier
Once he was ours And now he’s there
But The Decision
has created A local schism
And that aint no an-AKRON-ism

Read more from the contest here or the New Yorker article here.

As part of its Learning blog, the New York Times has a weekly Poetry Pairing series, where they “collaborate with the Poetry Foundation to feature a work from its American Life in Poetry project alongside content from The Times that somehow echoes, extends or challenges the poem’s themes.”
The poem for this week is The Exam by Joyce Sutphen, about a long marriage…

I am thinking
of my parents, of the six decades they’ve

been together, of the thirty thousand
meals they’ve eaten in the kitchen,

Finding a picture for this post was a challenge — it’s from an article about pairing cheese with wine & beer in the Oregonian. It immediately resonated with me (and side tracked my blog writing for quite some time), as the article starts “I suppose I’m biased, but for me tasting cheese is one of life’s major pleasures.” (The photograph is by Mike Davis.)