What am I reading? Allot of Slavic literature....
I spent August reading through all of Mandelstahm whom I have loved since college and now I am reading Matvei Yankelevich's masterpiece of translations and Daniil Kharms.
Here is another poet/author whose work is all but ignored in the United States. But along with Witold Gombrowitz and Viktor Shklovsky this Kharms is a real treat and Yankelevich's translations are masterpieces of poetry in their own right.
The first part of the book are short prose poems that could also be stories or even flash fiction, Then there are fine formal poems and the book opens and expands until one is totally enthralled with its depth and verve. Along with Mandelstahm Kharms was murdered by Stalin. This is something that needs to be proclaimed loudly when people dare to say they are Marxists. I for one am now a Kharmsist as I am a Gombrowitzist and a Shklovskyist before him. Go out and buy this book it is all the poetry you need to get through our raw times....
I am also reading Mark Nowak's Coal Mountain Elementary. I have the honor of introducing Mark later this month at a reading of the Poetry Center of Chicago http://www.poetrycenter.org/?q=node/917 Of all the poets writing in the American idiom today Nowak is one of the few who can hold a candle to great Latin American poet activists. This book is a tour de force. It is about Coal Miners in China and the US and great photos by Malaysian photographer Ian Teh. The book illustrates the weakness in so much of today's poetry. It lacks both a global focus and a political conscience. This is a book to bend the genre and to show to a world what really matters before the world....
No comments:
Post a Comment