More valentines

Proposal


Marry me before there is more death
in this world, before those we love

turn to ash. Each year, the trees grow
older. Each year, I believe the branches

will be full of bells and veils.
I have bent trumpets into rings,

folded sonnets into doves.
Don’t say we’ll wait

for an autumn of amber leaves.
It may not come. Don’t tell me

I look the way I did the day
my eyes closed with wine. I see my face

in the weathered sky. Marry me
before we become the dry bark

and leaves of those decrepit trees,
faithless that a winter rain will come.

Lory Bedikian
from The Book of Lamenting (Anhinga Press)
Winner of the 2010 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry

A sort of valentine

My Funny Valentine in Spanish

for Philip Levine

In the 7-11 parking lot, white boys are terrorized
By a Lincoln stereo punching out 98-decibel jazz. The scene
Reminds them unconsciously of high-art cinema shot
In ferocious blue illumination: the deep wax job
Of the Continental telegraphing the luster of the streetlights.
The stone-colored lawyer in an elegant linen jacket
Leaning on the fender while the digital self-service pump
Carries on its decisive artifice. Turned up this loud
Past midnight. Miles Davis is a cool apocalypse
Like nothing these boys on stolen skateboards ever entered,
A neighborhood in which no one remembers the depth
Of the aether where antifreeze and motor oil pool.
Or the white ghosts of congressmen obliterating angels' hairs
With their otherworldly logic. This is the music they play
In the tunnels of the underground where subways run
From Cambodia to East LA. In the barrios, children speak
The subjunctive—If this were bread, could one eat it?—
And the love of God is a drug, like the love of death.
The abuela behind the 7-11 counter shuffles
And lays out the cards. Her abuela taught her this.
Five of clubs, three of diamonds: Every low card
Whispers its password and its alibi. There's an occult
Future here. Somebody makes it. Somebody loves somebody
And crosses the great water for a promise, on a dare.
Rodgers & Hart. The boys on their skateboards listen
To the trumpet whose language nobody taught them.
Mi enamorada graciosa, it might be singing. Mi corazon.
One morning somebody wants to blast somebody's lights
Into a pure cobalt vapor floating at the Pleiades' heart.
One morning the cash register and the Lotto machine are eclipsed
By a mist of tear-gas-shadowed perfume, the exhaust of the LAPD.
And one morning—Neruda made it past tense in invincible Spanish
That could not translate Franco into hell, or contradict
The bullets that distorted Lorca—Everything is aflame.
One morning the fires/Come out of the earth/Devouring people.

T.R. Hummer
from Walt Whitman in Hell


Other T.R. Hummer poems posted @ Against Oblivion:
"Fallacy of Accident"
"After"
"Zero"
"Useless Virtues"
"Olive Bread"
"The End of History"
"Blue Alexandrine"

I Lurve You. -- Happy Valentine's Day

_______

It Is Here (click here for audio)

(For A)

What sound was that?

I turn away, into the shaking room.

What was that sound that came in on the dark?
What is this maze of light it leaves us in?
What is this stance we take,
to turn away and then turn back?
What did we hear?

It was the breath we took when we first met.

Listen. It is here.

Harold Pinter
from Collected Poetry and Prose


Click here to purchase via Powell's Books.









Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott
from Collected Poems: 1948-1984


Click here to purchase via IndieBound.


Other Derek Walcott poems @ Against Oblivion:

"Forty Acres"

Early Valentine's Day with Frank O'Hara

All this week, because it's Valentine's Day tomorrow, I'm going to try to post a favorite love poem. Not necessarily love poems in the way we normally think of them, though I'd guess that kind will pop up, too. I'm going to post the poems that regularly come to mind when I think of the love poem. They may or may not be typical/atypical. But either way, it'll be a good distraction from the dissertation stress and a way to keep my hooks in poetry. So, today: two by Frank O'Hara.

_______

Having a Coke with You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look

at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn't pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience

which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it


Animals

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

Frank O'Hara
from Selected Poems


Click here to purchase this book via IndieBound.


Other Frank O'Hara poems published @ Against Oblivion:

from "Mayakovsky"
"Poem"
"A Quiet Poem"
"The Day Lady Died"

Extreme Makeover: Writing Edition

I've got a new post up this week at Rock & Sling online, an experiment in community writing and revision partly inspired by the ABC television show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition which came through Knoxville and my neighborhood last month.

I've wanted to do something like this for a while, but couldn't put it together because I didn't feel like I had the proper platform. Sure, I can participate in these kinds of workshops in person with local writing communities. I even co-direct one, The Brian M. Conley Young Writers' Institute, for the University of Tennessee. But I've had this idea of an online revision workshop kicking around for a while and now finally have the opportunity to give it a whirl.

Here are a couple clips and an excerpt from my entry:

I think it was a Monday last month that the road leading to our street was overtaken by flatbed semis hauling shipping containers, front loaders, and other sundry heavy equipment. Hearing all the racket from a location that was maybe a couple hundred yards from our back porch and just beyond the leech field and bramble, I only thought it peculiar. Figured it was the city installing new sewers or natural gas lines. 

That night, after the afternoon’s hullabaloo, I came home from work to find cop cars, projection lamps, and a roadblock sitting a few yards from where I normally turn into my street. I was waived down by a man wearing a windbreaker labeled “Security.” He asked me where I was going. I said I was trying to get home and he told me I could no longer go down this road and so I needed to find another route around to my street. 

I found out a few days later that the producers and crew for the ABC television show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition had the road blocked in preparation for filming an episode. A Knoxville family was going to have their home completely demolished, hauled away, and replaced with a home that would meet all their housing needs and reflect all the wishes and personality of that family. By the end, it took maybe twelve days total for setting up, for the old to come down and the new to go up, and for hauling the equipment away. It also took the participation of 3000+ local volunteers. 

Reflecting on this event’s impact on our community, I was reminded of these words about revision from poet/critic Robert Pack: “Creation in its largest sense, then, must be though of as a process of creation, destruction, and re-creation. In this process we may become aware of powers we did not know we possessed.” Of course Pack is discussing the writing process but his words are equally applicable to what Knoxville has re-learned from the revision process of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition: the combined spirits of volunteerism and community-building can produce great things. 

It is within this framework that I’d like to issue a challenge to the Rock & Sling community. On Sunday, February 12, let’s each commence an extreme makeover of our own. Call it Extreme Writing Makeover, if you like. Each volunteer will choose a piece or writing to revise, one that needs to be demolished and rebuilt. Two weeks later, on February 26, we’ll meet again at Rock & Sling to share with our community our newly (re)built pieces and our thoughts about revision.

_______

Our university has had some very enjoyable readings the last few weeks, particularly one from UTK lecturer Erin Elizabeth Smith who brought in a standing-room only crowd to the twelfth floor of McClung Tower for a reading from her new collection The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake, 2011).

Erin's reading delivered the kind of gut punch that I needed at that moment. It is easy to be discouraged and distracted by rejections, manuscript near-misses, writing the dissertation, etc. I'd lost connection to the expressive value of simply sitting down with a pen and writing. Listening to a poem like the one I'll post below, I was reminded of the jouissance of writing, of moving beyond play and thought, past simple enjoyment or the limiting amusement of cerebrality, and into that state where the pleasure of writing becomes pain, a pain that just feels so good. Here's the poem:

Love Song for Myself

It is true.  I love you,

though you hang your wet towel on doorknobs,

leave your dishes in the sink for days.

Though you're ugly when you cry,

and each time I try to leave you,

quietly, while you sleep with someone else,

you call me a sonofabitch, though I'm a girl,

and our mother is a nice enough woman.

In high school, I hated you. 

The way you'd alphabetize your Joni Mitchells,

your bad girl punk, how you were never thin enough

despite the months I fed you nothing

but grapefruit and toast.  Hated the skirt

you'd wear that made that linebacker pin you

against his locker, your sandals nearly off the floor.

Yeah, I called you lots of names.  Sabotaged your senior prom,

sending you with a boy who would surely love you if you asked.

And the first time, in the Travelodge, when you bled like new

road kill, I laughed, knowing you'd hold your breath each time

you passed the place, like it was a graveyard,

like you'd breathe in your own busted soul.

But things change.  By twenty you were pretty hot

crossing and uncrossing your legs

for a boy you had no intention of fucking.

Drinking cheap beer on your back porch, alone,

the early summer sun rusting your shoulders. 

That night you played gin in the video store parking lot

the way the asphalt marked your legs like Braille.

I remember these things and love you for them.

But you are still unfaithful,

our pillows never enough, the bath barely warm

before you're reaching for a towel.

Don't you know that this is what some people would give

their left lung for, the kind of love

that leaves the mouth

of your heart

so wet, so bare.

Erin Elizabeth Smith

from The Fear of Being Found

Three Candles Press

"...whatever else we might think of this world - it is astonishing."

I first encountered Szymborska in my entry-level poetry writing workshop taught by Laurie Lamon who introduced her work as "essential." Later, after I expressed interest in Szymborska's poems, I was encouraged to seek out her Nobel Prize speech titled "The Poet and the World." I printed it out at the college library and still have it what must be twelve or thirteen years later. Here's one part I underlined and asterisked:

This is why I value that little phrase "I don't know" so highly. It's small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself "I don't know," the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself "I don't know", she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying "I don't know," and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize. 

Poets, if they're genuine, must also keep repeating "I don't know." Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that's absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying.

Yesterday I sent her poem "Clothes" to my poetry email list with the following comment, "This morning I took her collection View with a Grain of Sand off the shelf. It was an essential collection to me as an undergraduate and one I return to every so often now when I seek a quiet voice with a quiet authority to stir me some...If you don't know her work, I encourage you to seek it out."

In response, one of my friends wrote back saying, "Yes, 'seek' is the word she followed and we should too." I quite like this idea of "seeking" as being an integral part of her work and that it should be our attitude, too, that we ought to seek after poetry. Feels religious to me. It feels consequential and faithful, and rereading and transcribing these poems included below, poems which I'd bookmarked years ago in my copy of View with a Grain of Sand, I am reminded of the necessity of poetic desire and invitation/invocation, and that writing poetry ought to also involve as much hunting and hustling and humor and cleverness and yearning for the unknown depths of the human experience.

_______

The Onion

The onion, now that's something else.
Its innards don't exist.
Nothing but pure onionhood
fills this devout onionist.
Oniony on the inside,
onionesque it appears.
It follows its own daimonion
without our human tears.

Our skin is just a coverup
for the land where none dare go,
an internal inferno,
the anathema of anatomy.
In an onion there's only onion
from its tip to its toe,
onionymous monomania,
unanimous omninudity.

At peace, of a piece,
internally at rest.
Inside it, there's a smaller one
of undiminished worth.
The second holds a third one,
the third contains a fourth.
A centripetal fugue.
Polyphony compressed.

Nature's roundest tummy,
its greatest success story,
the onion drapes itself in its
own aureoles of glory.
We hold veins, nerves, fat,
secretions' secret sections.
Not for us such idiotic
onionoid perfections.


True Love

True love. Is it normal,
is it serious, is it practical?
What does the world get from two people
who exist in a world of their own?

Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason,
drawn randomly from millions but convinced
it had to happen this way--in reward for what? For nothing.
The light descends from nowhere.
Why on these two and not on others?
Doesn't this outrage justice? Yes it does.
Doesn't it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles,
and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts.

Look at the happy couple.
Couldn't they at least try to hide it,
fake a little depression for their friends' sake?
Listen to them laughing--its an insult.
The language they use--deceptively clear.
And their little celebrations, rituals,
the elaborate mutual routines--
it's obviously a plot behind the human race's back!

It's hard even to guess how far things might go
if people start to follow their example.
What could religion and poetry count on?
What would be remembered? What renounced?
Who'd want to stay within bounds?

True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life's highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn't populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.

Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there's no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

Wisława Szymborska
from View with a Grain of Sand


Other Szymborska poems @ Against Oblivion:


"The Joy of Writing"

"Well...How did I get here?"

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack

And you may find yourself in another part of the world

And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile

And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife

And you may ask yourself, "Well...How did I get here?"

from "Once in a Lifetime," The Talking Heads

The last few months have been a process of “Ok.” As I wrote in my last post at the end of August, “There's a lot going on: dissertation writing, teaching, working on the new manuscript, other university commitments, and Baby is a only few weeks away (finally!).” Apparently the semester swallowed me whole, but that’s…okay. (Anyone else hear Stewart Smalley there?)

So, where’ve I been? A short list:

• Teaching the Intro to Poetry literature course to 32 of some of my all-time favorite students. These folks were sharp, enthusiastic, and a joy to meet with three times per week. They were one of those groups that really will be missed, and I hope they’ll keep in contact. A lot of young critical and poetic talent there.

via cartoonstock.com

• Working as Asst. Director of the Writing Center; mentoring a group of MA English students in writing center practices and composition pedagogy.

• Dissertating! My old goal of finishing the critical introduction by Thanksgiving was not realistic, but it’s only December 7 and I’m not that far behind. Graduation is in May and the bulk of the dissertation is about finished, so I’ve got time to keep working, writing, and improving. And reading!

• Entering the academic job market. Though this process has been almost like a second job itself, the experience has been, dare I say it?, enjoyable. Fingers crossed.

And here's the latest Poetry/Manuscript News:

• That poem that was under “second read” consideration at a “favorite journal” (Boston Review) ended up getting rejected, but then it got nominated for an AWP Intro Journal Award. Although this means I can’t follow through on my plans to submit it elsewhere, at least until the results of the contest are released, I’m thankful to my department for nominating me.

• Didn’t end up winning the Ruth Lilly Fellowship for which I was a finalist. Still, an honor to be on the short list.

• Speaking of the short list: another honor to have Praise Nothing listed as a finalist for the National Poetry Series. That felt like a win in itself.

• Praise Nothing has been a finalist twelve times, and though I’m starting to feel like a bit of an “also ran,” I’m still optimistic about my chances. Received a letter a few days ago from a Midwestern university press saying I’m a finalist and in the running still for their two publication prizes. Results should be soon. And just to keep it all in perspective, to demonstrate again how nuts and seemingly arbitrary this whole thing is, the day after receiving the finalist notification I got a form letter rejection from a major poetry publisher who had me as a finalist last year and who had encouraged me to resubmit the manuscript if by chance it wasn’t picked up in the meantime. So it goes. Currently waiting on eleven contests/open submissions. News should start to steadily roll in over the winter and early spring.

The biggest news is my wife and I had our first child, a boy, in late September, which is also a major reason, in case you’re wondering, why I’ve disappeared from the blogosphere and why my poetry email list has slumped. Other priorities. I’m all about The Boy.

This coming semester will be interesting. I’ll be teaching every evening and I’ll be primary childcare during the day. For some reason, I think I’ll have more time to write, and if that’s the case, I’ll carve out time for blogging. But if not, now you know the deal.

Rock & Sling: A Journal of Witness

I don’t anticipate writing much about The Boy on this blog, mostly because we want to have as much control over his presence on the internet as possible. E. has started a family website for that, something we can take down if necessary, though I’ve yet to publish my first blog post there.

Finding a way in to writing about him and about fatherhood has proven difficult because it is hard for me to be unmasked in such a public way, though I have recently dipped my toe into those waters in a post at the website for the journal Rock & Sling.

The piece is called “Coleridge and the Greater Romantic Fatherhood,” and explores the lyric process of becoming a daddy. Here’s an excerpt:

Before my son arrived, poet friends’ divinations were at odds. Some, mostly those without children, expressed grief for the death of my old writing life. Some told me poems would surely pour forth from me like [insert bad simile]. I told both camps all I wished for was an approximation of what Coleridge had in his rural cottage in “Frost at Midnight”: my slumbering babe and some of the frost’s “secret ministry,” some nighttime quiet in which to work, and, hopefully, a proper stand-in for the ashy bit of fluttering soot that might also “make a toy of Thought” even here in my ever-so-suburban office/nursery. 

Reality check: the boy is only just now sleeping at most five hours straight through and the only time to sit with my notebook and my feet up is in my dreams.

So, I'll be writing about poetry for them twice a month. I hope you'll visit their website and consider subscribing.

If you've made it this far in reading this latest update, thank you. I hope to keep it going.

Ok Ok Ok Ok Ok

You might recognize the field and barn in the background of this image. Not too long ago I posted a picture of the abused horses that used to be protected within these fences.

Sadly, the people who ran the shelter had to sell the land. The horses are gone, the field is groomed for sale. No doubt the grass will be paved straightaway to attract condo/apartment developers---errrr...I think I'm going to pull some Ammons off the shelf today.

The other day, though, I was heading to the post office to send out the manuscript to another contest, and saw this on the telephone pole. Had to snap a quick photograph. (Apologies to the guy in the black Mustang who had to wait momentarily while I pulled over.)

My guess is its a sign for the next crew to come along the access road, something about electrical or gas lines. And that's kind of a nice idea, and how like poetry, isn't it? Putting these signs out there for the next reader, whoever they are, for whenever they happen by.

I've chosen to take the pole's message personally, or at least as a reminder: all will be "OK."

It's true. It will.

There's a lot going on: dissertation writing, teaching, working on the new manuscript, other university commitments, and Baby is a only few weeks away (finally!).

And in terms of the poetry, this week will also be a busy one. I'm waiting for word on a "second read" of a poem from the new manuscript which is under consideration at one of my favorite journals.  I'm also waiting to hear about the 2011 Ruth Lilly Fellowships for which I'm a finalist, which will probably be announced on Wednesday or Thursday. And I'm also waiting for an email from a big-league book contest about which the coordinator said, roughly three weeks ago, the winners would be announced in "the next few weeks." So, needless to say, this is a week I've been looking forward to.

Sure, it occupies my mind at times, but, you know, not to worry. Sometimes a sign appears to direct the electricity lines of our hearts, and this is one that I'm taking with me out into the world.

The Monday Tape

The new academic semester started up last week and I ran out of steam for blogging. I'm working on a couple entries, and hope to get them posted this week and next.

Not a whole lot of news on the poetry front: revising poems, waiting to hear back on poems and manuscript submissions, teaching poetry, writing about lyric. Same old same old and loving this life.

And now, being that it's Monday...

The Top 5 Links to Books/Degrees/Industry/Magic/Etc

5. I've started looking for jobs and encountered this comic this morning: For Lack of a Better Comic

4. What else can you do with an English major but work at a bookst---Oh, wait. Nevermind.

3. Every book President Obama's read since his campaign. Via The Daily Beast:

2. Brian Joseph Davis defends MFA Programs @ The Huffington Post

1. Poets & Writers has a new list of the Top 15 Creative Writing Doctoral Programs

The Ciardi Translation

I received a kind email from a poet-friend yesterday evening. Despite a long and difficult day of teaching, she still made time to send a note of congratulations: Praise Nothing was named a finalist for the 2011 John Ciardi Poetry Prize.

I knew the winner’s name had been released (congrats to Karen Holmberg for winning the prize), but I hadn’t yet received any notification. What a happy surprise! Before this email, I figured any note from the contest organizers was lost or, more likely, not coming since the winner had already been chosen. But this finalist status is, hopefully, an indicator that acceptance is truly a matter of the manuscript finding the right readers at the right time.

This same friend who emailed also recently encouraged me to NOT overhaul the manuscript if publication doesn’t happen this round. Her advice is yet another reason why I am so thankful to have the online poetry community with whom to share news, both good and bad. People who will drop you a line out of nowhere just to encourage you: these are my kind of people. As I said to her in an email reply, “Genuine belief and support within a community: I'd be lost without it.”

www.meganharlan.com

Last January, I plunked down the $25 Ciardi Prize entrance fee for a few reasons: I admire Steve Gehrke’s Resurrection Machine which BkMk published; a colleague introduced me to the fine people at BkMk at the last AWP and they were quite nice, really seemed to support and believe in their authors; BkMk is in Kansas City; and they publish good books (see Megan Harlan’s Mapmaking which I bought at AWP). The underlying reason for submitting there, however, was the name: Ciardi.

I often say that Milton was the first poet that blew my mind. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: “Milton? Really?” And this statement, for some out there, probably lumps me in with various accusations of sadism, misogyny, or some kind of orthodox authoritarianism. Well, it’s true about the mind blowing. Mostly. Just ask me the next time we see each other. It’s not really an uncommon story, I think. In early high school, Satan rocked my world. But I digress…

Speaking of Satan and my underlying reason for submitting (to the contest), in some respects I think it is fair to say that before my somewhat more complex feelings of sympathy for Milton's shape- and size-shifting Satan, and before the ensuing theological confusion that caused me so much consternation, there was Dante's ice-encased, bat-winged, three-headed horror show version which seemed right out of a nightmare or a movie I'd never be given permission to see. Looking at these interpretations, though, I'm not sure which is really more horrific. Blake's, I think. Certainly it's more energetic and enticing...

Milton's Satan interpreted by William Blake
via Phil Coppins

Dante's Satan interpreted by Gustave Dore
via Wikipedia

My love of Divine Comedy all goes back to eighth grade and checking out Ciardi’s translation of Inferno from the school library. I never checked books out from the library unless I had to for a report of some sort, and so I think I must have heard of this title from a movie or television. Not sure what would have triggered the idea otherwise. But there was danger in this book. As well as something daring. Frightening. Even something about this book that made it seem bad for me. (Picture Jerry and George reading Tropic of Cancer. That was me, but with a 14th-century Italian epic poem. Same deal.) I doubt I even knew it was poetry, but I decided that I would read the entire darn thing. Every word. And I did.

The cover. via
betterworldbooks.com

I know that I liked it, but don’t really remember a whole lot. I have strong sensory memories of the edition’s cover, and remember feeling sickened by some of the descriptions of Hell, and I vaguely remember Ciardi’s vision of Satan and thinking that he must have it wrong. Ciardi, I mean. I’m not sure why I thought that, but then I didn’t have enough sense to know the book wasn’t written by John Ciardi and the title of the book wasn’t "Dante’s Inferno."

Over the years I’ve read many translations of the Inferno, and only a few of the whole Divine Comedy. I prefer the John Sinclair prose translations which, while earning my MFA, Garrett Hongo insisted I read. I dutifully complied, and didn’t look back. I frequently reread portions of Purgatorio. Still, not so much for Paradiso, though maybe it's an acquired taste, or maybe it gets better with age. Hell, I should probably give it a try now. I am, after all, acquiring age, if not taste.

This fall, my poetry students will start off reading four different translations of “Canto 1”: Ciardi and Pinsky’s different verse translations, Sinclair’s prose, and the Birk & Sanders free verse. They’re going to write about their own poetics and incorporate their translation preferences. It’s a short writing assignment, but students almost always exceed the word count on this one. There’s something about Dante that really sinks his hooks in you. (Obviously.) For me, anyway, that process started early and with Ciardi, and I’m happy to remember that this morning, and happy to celebrate community, legacy, and poetry.