Three pictures of Mandelstam

Ernest Fenollosa

Thus in all poetry a word is like a sun, with its corona and chromosphere; words crowd upon words, and enwrap each other in their luminous envelopes until sentences become clear, continuous light-bands.

My list of 20 poetry books that made me first fall in love with poetry

In one of Ron Silliman's recent links updates there was a posting for the above. Since looking at that I have found myself mentally compiling a list. Here it is (in no order, although the order tends to be fairly close to the order in which I read them, the first one I was 16 or 17):

-Dante "Inferno"
-Jim Carroll "Fear of Dreaming"
-Allen Ginsberg "Howl"
-Allen Ginsberg "Kaddish"
-Lawrence Ferlinghetti "A Coney Island of the Mind"
-Lawrence Ferlinghetti "A Far Rockaway of the Heart"
-Arthur Rimbaud "Illuminations"
-Arthur Rimbaud "A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat"
-Mina Loy "The Lost Lunar Baedeker"
-"Complete Poems of Hart Crane"
-Bob Kaufman "Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness"
-Gregory Corso "Long Live Man"
-"Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas"
-Federico Garcia Lorca "Poet in New York"
-Guillaume Apollinaire "Alcools"
-Andre Breton "Earthlight"
-"Selected Poems of Rene Char"
-"Selected Poems of Pierre Reverdy"
-"Collected Poems of Stephane Mallarme"
- Octavio Paz "Draft of Shadows"

I feel cheated. There are at least ten more books I can think of right off the top of my head that should be on here. The fact is that whenever I read a "miracle in words" I fall in love with poetry again.

Samuel Vasquez

To write poetry is to begin beyond all knowledge. One paints to see, one writes to hear. "One paints to know what painting is", one writes poetry to know what poetry is. The storyteller writes about what he knows, the poet writes to know. Poetry is the most extreme experience of language, and the requirement of maximum yield from the word takes place at the frontier where there is a tear in language itself.

Samuel Vasquez

Imagination is not an avoidance of reality. Imagination is a responsible (and committed) re-entry into reality, and in that re-entry the poet adds his poem to pre-existing reality making the poem a reality in itself.

Angel Crespo aphorisms

Poetry is like a needle in a haystack. When the poet finally finds it, he hides it again among the chaff.

Poetry is like a hunter who takes his hawk up to the mountain and then hunts it.

Poetry is like a field sown with wheat. The master comes and asks, "Who's the swine that got rid of the locusts?"

The poet is like a hunter who has a bow and rifle: he sends arrows into the air and then tries to shoot them down.

When the poet finds the penny, he feels poorer than when he was looking for it.

Imaginations doesn't invent images, but harmonizes them with the initial nothingness of the poem.

If you can call a butterfly a flying flower, can you call a flower a stationary butterfly? No. Poetry is not a roundtrip ticket.

New links

It has been quite awhile since I have updated my links. Several sites to add:


New European Poets blog http://neweuropeanpoets.blogspot.com/

Free Library Podcast (podcasts of events at the Philadelphia library, a recent Breytenbach lecture available) http://libwww.library.phila.gov/podcast/

11th century Japanese poetry manuscripts http://bunka.nii.ac.jp/SearchDetail.do?heritageId=87216

Muse India (wonderful online periodical devoted to Indian literature, with a strong emphasis on poetry. Special sections on poetry in Marathi, Indian English, Tamil, Gujarati, Manipuri and more) http://www.museindia.com/pissue.asp

Bookworm (Terrific program, over 900 shows archived including the past few years available as mp3 downloads. Eshleman, Ashbery, Coral Bracho have been a few of the guests) http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw

UniVerse: A United Nations of Poetry http://www.universeofpoetry.org/

Douglas Messerli's PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) Blog started late in 2008 has the biographies, selected bibliography and in many cases several poems by 164 poets from around the world thus far http://pippoetry.blogspot.com/