Archive for the ‘poems’ Tag
Solace for staycationers
A lot of folks aren’t able to travel as has been their wont these days. One new acquaintance and partner had been planning a short tour of Germany and Italy last summer, a plan put off until at least next summer.
To help them suffer their enforced staycation, I offer this poem from Ladonian Magnitudes, “European Decadence in medias res” to remind them of what they are missing and offer some solace. A recording of the poem follows.
European Decadence in medias res
They’re cutting the gelato in Sirmione
with pure azure lakewater.
In Siena City Hall two old pigeons hunched
on the bitch-wolf’s back trickle lime down
to her teats suckled by the twins.
In the Old City they serve una vera grappa
senese I’ve always passed over at the S.A.Q..
In Otterndorf the Matjes Dutch sushi
raw herring is swimming in salmonella.
In Charles de Gaulle Theseus a clochard
begs our last cents. “If we miss our connection
I’ll strangle somebody!” I said when we finally
found our flight home and remembered I’d said it
arriving. Air France dejeneur croissant et eau de source.

For the Love of Dante redux
Every Easter Week I read through Dante’s Commedia.
Last year, to mark the occasion, I recorded a poem “The book I can’t read closed beside me…”. As Easter Week has come around again, and, since making that last recording, I’ve been fortunate enough to invest in a new microphone, I’ve re-recorded a cleaner, crisper, and hopefully more lively version.
You can read that original post and hear the new recording, here.
“Why scribble in lingo 3 peoples reads?” up at “Poetry Pause”
The League of Canadian Poets has kindly included this fourteen-line poem in its “Poetry Pause” series, which you can read, here.
Synchronicity-invoked Dangerous Supplement
By “meaningful coincidence,” the day I downloaded and taught myself the software I needed to make the raw Zoom footage of the launch for my latest chapbook at least a little more presentable, a Canadian poet-critic shared he’d just published an essay on “‘counterfactual’ poetry anthologies, ” a topic essayed by one of the poems from that chapbook‘s Toronto Suite: “Literary Life in the Capital””

“As on a holiday” launch, for your poetry viewing pleasure…
The March 24, 2021 launch of my latest chapbook is now up online: if you missed the event, you can catch it here.
As on a holiday: teaser #3

My latest chapbook, As on a holiday, launches Wednesday 24 March.
It’s a challenging book to present orally/aurally, as the poems are all very short. The reader, too, therefore, is faced with the question of exactly how to connect all these short poems. In the tradition of postmodern poetry, such as that of Homer, Dante, and Cervantes, the collection includes a poem that suggests an approach, the first of Farnad Songbook, read here:
Looking forward to seeing you all at the launch!
As on a holiday: Teaser #2

The launch of my new chapbook, As on a holiday, is getting closer. Today, I offer as preview (pre-hear?) two poems from the section “Made in Germany”.
Everything you need to tune in you should find here.
As on a holiday: Teaser #1

I launch my chapbook As on a holiday (Cactus Press) in just over a week. Between now and then I’ll be posting short readings from the book to pique your interest if not whet your appetite.
The first is part of the “London intermezzo” from the section “Made in Germany”.
The FB Event page for the Zooom launch Wednesday 24 March is here.
“Does Anybody Buy Books Today?”
“Developers” are changing the face and character of cities all over the globe, no less in Montreal, Canada.
The city’s Plateau / Mile End neighbourhood has been undergoing gentrification for years, but a recent flashpoint has been the threatened eviction of a longstanding used bookstore, S. W. Welch. The landlord’s jacking the rent caused such an uproar that locals organized a “read-in” in support.

The story was widely covered in local media, including a number of telephone interviews with one of the landlords, Danny Lavy, quoted in the poster, above. Lavy’s words struck me as so representative of a certain mindset (like those that inspired Basil Bunting’s “What the Chairman Told Tom”) I quickly cobbled them together into a poem of my own.
You can hear the poem, here:
(You can read another poem about the changes in Mile End, here.)
Hölderliniae

Yesterday, thanks to Cæsura, I got wind of Nathaniel Tarn’s forthcoming collection, The Hölderliniae, a book of poems wherein, “via affairs of love and polity, Tarn speaks through Hölderlin, and Hölderlin speaks through Tarn.”
I received this news with a mix of excited interest and rueful disappointment. On the one hand, like so very many, I hold Hölderlin’s poetry in very high esteem, not least because of its relation to the enduring pertinence of Jena Romanticism, so you can bet a copy of Tarn’s new book will be in my hands warm, if not hot, off the press. On the other, drafts of my own palimpsestic engagements with Hölderlin’s poems, specifically “Heidelberg” and “The Neckar”, now seemed somehow pre-empted.
Of course, Tarn is hardly the only poet to mix things up with Hölderlin this way. In 2018, The Song Cave issued Jonathan Larson’s translation of Friederike Mayröcker’s Scardanelli, and a friend brought to my attention Endre Kukorelly’s H.Ö.L.D.E.R.L.I.N. (1999).
But, then, it occurred to me I had composed poems I could include in this company. Like Mayröcker, my poems allude to Hölderlin by the nom de plume he himself adopted during his (so-called) madness. The first, from Grand Gnostic Central, “Holy Crow Channels Scardanelli” “condenses” some of Hölderlin’s late poetry. The second (graciously published by Dispatches from the Poetry Wars), “Ein Zeichen sind wir…” (We are a sign…) plays off these famous words from a draft of Hölderlin’s “Mnemosyne” and gives a twist to some of the themes common to Hölderlin’s poetry in general.
Time to get back to work on my own Hölderliniae. “I’m told you’re disappointed I have yet / as Scardanelli would write to sing / of Heidelberg…”
Holy Crow Channels Scardanelli
for Moritz Gaede
When from the sky bright bliss itself
Calms and quiets the afternoon through
The pleasant world I’ve made my friend
I am no more, I live no more gladly
Life’s lines various harmonies rich
With peace as who today men brightly halo
Is known, which depth of the spirited succeeds
Of a man say I, if he is good
Daedalus’s spirit and the wood’s is yours
The said, that the earth herself turns from
And perfection is without complaint
When unseen and now past are pictures
So shines nature with her splendour from the earth
“Ein Zeichen sind wir”
Like preScardanelli Scardanelli would put it
The Thunderer himself just a heartbeat cut
The current crashing my chronocide, and twice
Since noon the same software CTD’d in concurrence.