A new issue of ka mate ka ora focusing on the myriad facets of poetry translation was launched in Auckland last Friday. It includes articles by Laurie Duggan, Jack Ross, Jacob Edmond, Cilla McQueen, Jane Zemiro and others. Read the journal here.
A poetry symposium coming up in Auckland, New Zealand at the end of March - short takes on long poems (click on the symposium title for program & info | plus, here is a link to Duckwalking a Perimeter, the poem I'll be presenting - for anyone who's going to NZ).
In An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, originally published in France (Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien) in 1975, Georges Perec notates the comings and goings from a couple of cafes, a bar tabac and a bench in Place Saint-Sulpice over three days in October 1974.
Here is a short extract from the book-
Small poodle-type dog.
A sort of double of Peter Sellers, with a very pleased
expression on his face, walks by the cafe. Then a woman
with two very young children. Then a group of 14
women coming from the rue des Canettes.
I have the impression that the square is almost empty
(but there are at least twenty human beings in my line
of sight).
A postal van.
A child with a dog
A man with a large "A" on his sweater
A "Que sais-je?" truck: "La collection 'Que sais-je'
a réponse à tout [The 'Que sais-je' collection has
an answer for everything]"
A spaniel?
A 70
A 96
Funeral wreaths are being brought out of the church.
It is two thirty
A 63, an 87, an 86, another 86, and a 96 go by.
On her blog When Is A City, Christina Juhlin selects some quotes from Georges Perec on writing urban and ordinary life here.
Mina Loy wrote two pieces on Gertrude Stein. A few decades ago now, I read Gertrude Stein in The Last Lunar Baedeker, a selection of Mina Loy's writings edited by Roger Conover and published by the North American poet and photographer Jonathan Williams' press The Jargon Society, in the UK in 1982. You can find that lengthy piece here.
Now, in Stories and Essays of Mina Loy edited by Sara Crangle, published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2011, there is a shorter piece on Gertrude Stein. Mina and Gertrude met in Florence sometime around 1910 or 1913, and became friends. This piece is Mina Loy's introduction for Gertrude Stein (originally written in French) for a Paris salon run by US expatriate Natalie Barney in 1927.
Please click on the images to enlarge them. (The French original follows the English translation). Please excuse the wonky pages.
Hope Mirrlees : Collected Poems, edited by Sandeep Parmar has been published by Carcanet in the U.K. It has a great Introduction and extensive notes on the poems.
Hope Mirrlees was born in Kent in 1887. She grew up and was educated in Scotland and, in 1910, went to study classics at Cambridge, where she met her companion, Jane Harrison. She moved to Paris in 1922 to live with Jane Harrison at the American University Women's Club in Montparnasse. Jane died suddenly from leukaemia in 1928. Hope Mirrlees moved, in the 1940s, to South Africa and didn't publish again until 1962. She died in England in 1978.
Even though it was first published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1919 I didn't read Hope Mirrlees' long out-of-print PARIS - A Poem until ninety years later. It is experimental, unlike her other poems which are conventionally organised into left-justified stanzas. The late Virginia Woolf scholar Julia Briggs called PARIS - A Poem “modernism’s lost masterpiece, a work of extraordinary energy and intensity, scope and ambition.”
As I've said, PARIS - A Poem has been out of print for a very long time. It could only be found as a pdf file on the web here. Now, it's included in the Collected Poems and Mike Tortorello's Pegana Press has published a limited edition of the poem. According to him Paris - A Poem influenced T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Virginia Woolf. My poem American Memories, Melbourne was directly influenced by Hope Mirrlees. You can scroll down to the end of this post to read it.
Philadelphian novelist and biographer of Hope Mirrlees (a limited edition), Michael Swanwick, has annotated PARIS - A Poem.
Here is my poem influenced by Hope Mirrlees' PARIS - A Poem. It was written in late 2009.(Click on the title for a full size version).
American Memories, Melbourne
Sydney poet, John Tranter, likes these booklets so much he has them all stitched up...to see the transformation visit his web journal.
Little Esther Books, Box 10114, Adelaide BC, South Australia 5000
The second instalment of the feature I compiled for Jacket2, 'Fifty-one contemporary poets from Australia', has been published. It is ordered, in the interest of objectivity by a recently invented ‘downunder’ method — the reverse alphabet and includes work from Pete Spence, Jaya Savige, Tracy Ryan, Gig Ryan, David Prater, Peter Minter, Geraldine McKenzie, David McCooey, John Mateer, and Cameron Lowe, along with artwork by Pete Spence. Read it here.
The first instalment includes Mark Young, Tim Wright, Fiona Wright, Adrian Wiggins, Alan Wearne, Corey Wakeling, Ann Vickery, John Tranter, James Stuart and Amanda Stewart, along with artwork by Louis Armand and Paul Sloan. You can read the introduction and Part One here.
There are three further instalments to come.
Paul Sloan, gouache on paper, 2011
