One of the most moving accounts I read this week was in Front Porch Republic. A writer named Jessica Birke looked at the family home where she grew up, the one that will likely be sold after her parents ae no longer there, and wonders what will happen to the place. She had me at the first line: “The land is mostly quiet now.”
Next Wednesday, Oct. 7, Tweetspeak Poetry is hosting its Random Acts of Poetry. It’s an annual thing, in which you commit random acts of poetry in public places, including social media. (No, you don’t have to recite poetry in public; you can chalk your driveway, if that works.) One year, and I believe it was 2015, we were in London when the day arrived. My wife thought I was crazy, and I probably was, but I left short poems on slips of paper in our hotel’s restaurant, in the café at the National Theatre, on the rube and the bus, and in a pew at St. Martin-in-the-Field Church on Trafalgar Square. (I suppose you could say I committed quiet, anonymous acts of random poetry. I almost felt like a poetic counterpart to Banksy.) Anyway, you can find the details and suggestions here.
Yesterday was the anniversary of a vicious attack on the Jewish community on Manchester, England. We’ve had attacks here in the United States, but we haven’t been seeing the rise of anti-Semitism that Britain seems to be experiencing. Perhaps it’s because we’re a larger country. But you just don’t expect to see an attack on a synagogue in the Britain you’ve experienced many times and the Britain of your imagination. But it’s there, and it’s getting worse. Robert Largan at The Critic Magazine looks back in anger at what happened and what it means.
I’ve been reading a biography of the poetPaul Celan(1920-1970). I must confess my ignorance; I’d never read his poetry before. And I thought, for what turned out to be an explainable reason, that he was French. I was close – he lived in France for about the last 20 years of his life.
It was the biography, published this year by Anna Arno (and translated from the Polish,) that lead me to his poetry, which has been collected into two, rather large, volumes. Memory Rose into Thresholdcovers his early poems; Breathturn into Timestead covers the later poems. The two volumes are more than 700 pages each; pat of the reason is that the poems are published in both English and the language Celan wrote poetry in – German.
I hesitated before deciding whether to write about The Dance, the new collection of poetry by Christian Wiman. It wasn’t because I didn’t like; I did, enormously. It was more like the experience of entering the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, or the little chapel in the crypt of St. Bride’s Church in London. You feel the weight of the experience and the inevitable silence, even in a crowded room.
With The Dance, you’ve stepped into a quiet that demands you listen without speaking.
I’ve had this experience before with Wiman’s writing, both his poetry and his memoir, My Bright Abyss. That memoir was so intense that I needed three months to read it, sometimes only a paragraph or a page a day. I was reading it when I took an overseas trip, and I deliberately left it home because I knew it would overshadow everything I was about to see.
