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Ramblebarrow continues with Judge Mark Wolf, Chief Judge of the United States District Court in Massachusetts, in this second of two episodes devoted to our conversation.
 Judge Mark Wolf Ramblebarrow returns for the fall season…and my first guest is Mark Wolf, Chief Judge of the United States District Court in Massachusetts. Listen to the first of two podcasts here:
Judge Wolf has been reading and thinking about poetry for many years, and has both given talks about Judging and Poetry, and also delivered many beautiful eulogies for friends and family in which he has turned to poetry to find elements of endurance and compassion.
I spoke with Judge Wolf earlier this month in his bright, high chambers in the Joseph P. Moakley Courthouse in downtown Boston. His windows overlook Boston Harbor, and our talk is punctuated by horns and other waterfront sounds. Books of and about poetry line his desk– W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Seamus Heaney, Louise Glück, C.P. Cavafy–and during our talk Judge Wolf reaches for these and thumbs through them for a quote or a stanza. Also lining the room are the portraits and pictures of the judges who came before.
This is the first of two episodes devoted to our conversation: please look for the next part very soon.
We’re back! More episodes of ramblebarrow are on the way soon…
My next guest is the Honorable Mark Wolf. As the Chief Judge of the US District Court of Massachusetts, Judge Wolf is familiar with, and inhabits, the space of Law–but as a reader of poetry whose desk is covered with books by poets such as Seamus Heaney, W.H. Auden, and C.P. Kavafy, he is also keenly aware of the ways in which language’s power dismisses the boundaries between realms of human experience. Watch for the podcast coming September 20th.
 ONI BUCHANAN is a young American poet and pianist. She and I spoke on June 16th–our conversation ranged from the origins of her formal inventiveness (a childhood spent making codes and puzzles), to the ways in which playing piano produces “pools of images” from which she draws in her poems, to her latest poetic projects, which include an interactive video game. Oni speaks with wonderful clarity about her poetry–we discuss in particular“The Mandrake Vehicles” (a multimedia poem that exists both on the page and as a Flash animation CD), “(A) Version,” “The Practice,” and one of the several poems entitled “Dear Lonely Animal”–all poems from her latest collection, Spring. The texts of these poems appear below. Listen to the podcast here:
Oni has performed solo recitals throughout the U.S. and abroad, at such venues as the Instituto Brasileiro de Administração Municipal (IBAM) and the Centro Cultural Laurinda Santos Lobo in Rio de Janeiro, BRAZIL, the University of Guelph, the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts in Chicago, the Lane Series in Burlington, the Silberman Series at Allegheny College, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Harvard University Hall Concert Series, among many others. Ms. Buchanan received her Master’s degree in piano performance from the New England Conservatory of Music and her Bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia. She has released three solo piano CDs on the independent Velvet Ear Records label. Ms. Buchanan is also an award-winning poet, with an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her second poetry book, Spring, was selected by Mark Doty as a winner of the 2007 National Poetry Series Open Competition, and was published by the University of Illinois Press in September 2008. Her first book of poems, What Animal, won the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series competition (chosen by Fanny Howe), and was published in October 2003. Oni’s poems are featured in several anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2004 and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, and have been published in numerous journals across the country, including Conduit, Seneca Review, and Gulf Coast.
A Flash version of Oni Buchanan’s kinetic poem “The Mandrake Vehicles” is on permanent display at the Conduit website, and she is currently at work on two other motion- and technology-driven poem projects.
Throughout the program I have used solo piano pieces performed by Oni: they are all from her second album, Portraits, Pictures and Prints for Piano, and they are, in order of play: Mussorgsky (1839-1881)–Pictures at an Exhibition:“Tuileries“; Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983)–Danzas Argentinas: “Danza de la moza donosa”; Claude Debussy (1862-1918)–Estampes: “Pagodes”; Francois Couperin–”Le Drôle de Corps” (The Funny-Looking Fellow).
Continue reading Lonely Animals
This spring, if you were lucky enough to be a student in a class called “Art and Politics” at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, you would have found yourself at each session in the room with artists and public figures such as Carlos Fuentes, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Jorie Graham, or Gerry Adams.
This long line of celebrated people came to help their friend, Rose Styron (the Spring 2009 Institute of Politics Fellow whose course this was), to speak with Harvard undergraduates about how the voices of artists and writers can effect change in the world.
For an hour in her office in the busy Kennedy School (where you can hear people, buses and other traffic going by), Rose Styron shared with me both some of her thoughts on poetry and politics, and stories of some of her travels for Amnesty International and other human rights groups. Listen to the podcast here:
 Rose Styron is a poet, journalist and human rights activist, and was also the wife of the late novelist William Styron for over 50 years. She has published three volumes of poetry (From Summer to Summer, Viking, 1965, Thieves’ Afternoon, Viking, 1972 and By Vineyard Light, Rizzoli, 1995) and collaborated in translations from Russian (Modern Russian Poetry and Poets on Street Corners both Viking Press.) Her poetry appears in a variety of publications.
For over half a century, Rose Styron has inhabited a glittering and fascinating literary and social world (she has counted as friends artists as diverse as Arthur Miller, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Sting); and has used that position to fight for human rights for many years, in many countries. In 1970, following an Afro-Asian writers conference in Moscow and Tashkent, Styron joined the founding group of Amnesty International USA and has since served on the board of many NGOs, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The Reebok Human Rights Foundation, The Lawyers Committee For Human Rights, Equality Now and the Project on Justice (based successively at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and at Tufts University) traveling widely on their behalf in Latin America, the USSR, Central Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia. Her most recent involvements have been South Africa, Cuba, and Northern Ireland. Also, she has chaired PEN’s Freedom-to-Write Committee, AI USA’s National Advisory Council, and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Awards.
Her articles on human rights and foreign policy have been published in periodicals such as The New York Review of Books, The Nation, and The New Republic, her interviews, book reviews and essays in American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Ms. Magazine, Vogue, Ramparts, The Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Chicago Sun Times, etc. “Voice of America” produced Writer’s World, her international series of conversations with publicly-engaged novelists and poets.
Styron currently serves on the boards of the Academy of American Poets, the Association to Benefit Children, and The Brain and Creativity Institute at USC. Styron is an overseer for New York University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Council of Foreign Relations.
The music you hear in the podcast this week: the piano piece is a Bach Fugue (#9) and the other is “Air and Simple Gifts,” the John Williams piece based on Aaron Copeland’s arrangement of the old Shaker Tune “Simple Gifts“–played by cellist Yo-Yo Ma along with Itzhak Perlman on violin, Gabriela Montero on piano and Anthony McGill on clarinet at the inauguration of President Barack Obama.
 William Powers is a writer and journalist. He began his career at The Washington Post, where he was a staff writer and columnist specializing in the media. He created The New Republic’s first media column. In recent years his writing has appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, New York Magazine and McSweeney’s. He is a two-time winner of the National Press Club’s award for best American media commentary. He has been a frequent commentator on National Public Radio and other broadcast outlets. Powers is currently writing a book based on his essay, “Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper is Eternal,” which he wrote as a fellow at Harvard University in 2006-2007 The book will be published by HarperCollins in 2010. He lives on Cape Cod with his wife, writer Martha Sherrill, and their son.
Powers has been thinking about paper, new reading technologies and the myth of paper’s demise; during his career as a media critic, he has witnessed the rise of the blogosphere and the onset of an age of hyperconnection. I spoke with Bill (from his home on Cape Cod) about how poets, in particular, have helped him to understand the philosophical problems of connecting with others and the world–they have been peculiarly interested in the question for centuries. Listen to the podcast here:
One story he tells is of finding–while researching the history of paper–a broadside of a poem by Robert Frost called “A Considerable Speck (Microscopic)” printed by the paper historian and artisan Dard Hunter. The poem enacts the discovery of a mite–a “speck” that turns out to be alive–on the sheet of paper on which the poet writes. The tiny creature who “didn’t want to die” runs from the god-like pen of fate. The poet spares it not because of any “collectivistic” love (or communist love for “the little guy”), but because it has mind enough to trace out its desire to live on this sheet of paper. Which is the poet’s work on its most elemental plane. [This image of the broadside shows a poem that is slightly different from the one finally published: instead of "Political collectivistic love," the published version reads "collectivistic regimenting love".]
We also talk about Walt Whitman connecting in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and “Chants;” Mary Oliver’s hummingbird in “A Summer Story,” and “The World I Long For” by Korean poet Kim Kwang-Kyu (1941- ). Other comments on connectedness and disconnectedness come from William James’ “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” Continue reading Works on Paper
 Aerial view of Valle de la Luna, in the Desert of Atacama, Chile (Gerhard Hudepohl 2009)
The Chilean poet Raúl Zurita tells of growing up in Santiago, Chile, where it did not snow, making snow out of cotton and seeing the snowy summits of mountains only in the distance. Here in New England, where he has been teaching for the spring term at Tufts University, Zurita has stayed up all night watching the snowstorms blanket everything in silence.
 I spoke with Zurita at his home in Somerville, Massachusetts, with Anna Deeny, who has translated his early book Purgatorio (due in November from the University of California Press) and work from Las Ciudades de Agua (Cities of Water) and Zurita/In Memoriam. Anna joined me for the second ramblebarrow podcast (rambling on translation), and joins me again, this time in conversation with Zurita. Listen to the podcast here:
Because Zurita’s reading voice is so rich and sonorous, Anna thought that listeners would want to hear him reading the full poems…the counterpoint between their voices shows how flexible emotionally and tonally the poems are.
Zurita first reads from Purgatorio (1975) ; the poems meditate on the unreal lunar landscape of the Chilean desert of Atacama, imagining it suspended in the air. It is a way of imagining all laws suspended; but it inverts the evil implications of that suspension manifest in Pinochet’s dictatorship, instead transforming it into a cosmological redemption inseparable from the landscape. Later, he reads from the series of poems addressed to or in the voice of the late Japanese film director, Akira Kurosawa, which come from Las Ciudades de Agua (The Cities of Water) and Zurita/In Memoriam.
These fluid blocks of prose poetry, suspended on the page (”like aquariums”), are dream-narratives in the voices of those who have suffered or died as a result of Pinochet’s regime. This includes Zurita (who was detained and tortured during the coup in 1973), and countless others–the world registers the shock of inhumanity together (”we were all in the cordillera, and we were all dead”). The poems have particular poignancy considering Pinochet’s practice of releasing bodies from planes as they flew over the mountains, volcanoes, and canyons of the desert.
To the right is a scene from Akira Kurosawa’s film Kurosawa’s Dreams, from the dream called “the blizzard” in which four men are caught in a blinding snowstorm at the top of a mountain, and nearly freeze to death…but at the last moment one of the men finds the strength necessary to wake up, and finds they are already home at their camp.
Harvard University junior and translator of Farsi Sally Morrell has recently translated Mirza Habib’s Persian version of the 1824 novel by James Morier, “The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan.” Sally was born in Cambridge, MA, but grew up in Memphis, TN. At the age of fifteen, she began studying Persian. She now studies French and Persian literatures, focusing on translation theory and the relationship between text and image. She has also done research on Persian expatriates in France and their role in shaping the contemporary Persian literary canon. Aside from her studies, Sally writes poetry and works on the Bow & Arrow printing press in her home at Adams House.
Listen to the podcast here:
Morier’s original idea was to write a bestselling travel narrative: not uncommon for Englishmen abroad in exotic places. But the novel wasn’t great, and in its own right it wasn’t very popular. But it was translated into French, and
after a few years there became more demand for books that provided information about the foreign places to which Europeans might travel. This “ethnographic value” remained Hajji Baba’s most salient until the Persian poet Mirza Habib translated it from an existing French translation, and made it into another literary animal entirely. According to Sally Morrell and other scholars (e.g., Kamran Rastegar), the work gained nuance, depth of characterization, Persian idiom, and moral awareness. And one of the ways by which it gains these new layers of sophistication is through Mirza Habib’s inclusion of poetry–voices in verse or dialogue or moral parable. The story was obviously later sensationalized…
 We speak with the translator and critic Anna Deeny; Deeny has translated the poems of Raúl Zurita, and came to translation by way of music and Latin American literature. Anna grew up in Maryland, outside of Washington, DC, and, with her sister, used to perform musical accompaniment while her mother recited her original poetry for live audiences. She also studied theater in Rome after college. Her plays are The Clockmaker, House of America, La straniera, Tela di ragno, and Sobras (written with Chilean novelist Andrea Jeftanovic). They’ve been performed in the US, Italy, and Spain. Anna teaches in the History and Literature Concentration at Harvard University. Anna and I spoke about her first encounters with poetry, problems in translating, reading with Zurita, and more. Listen to the podcast here:
photo by Miserere
Anna’s translations of Zurita’s Purgatory (with a foreword by C.D. Wright) will be available in November from the University of California Press, and her most recent translations of selections from In Memoriam/Zurita and Las Cuidades de Agua (The Cities of Water) appeared in BOMB Magazine’s Americas Issue in January. Other poems from the same books are currently being published in the Chicago based journal “string of small machines.” Also this year, Daniel Borzutzky’s translation of Canto a su amor desaparecido (Song of His Disappeared Love) will be published by Action Press and William
Rowe’s translation of INRI will be published by Marick Press.
Raúl Zurita is a renowned Chilean poet and author of Purgatorio, Anteparaíso, La Vida Nueva (The New Life), In Memoriam/Zurita and Las Cuidades de Agua. He was born in Valparaiso, Chile, in 1950, and in the 1970s he was detained and tortured during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. His work addresses the difficulty of communicating in the aftermath of suffering, and uses experimental and combinatory forms to suggest some strategies for “saying something to someone” about his experience. The photo here shows one of the monumental earthworks (another was skywriting over New York City), in which “ni pena, ni mieda” (which Deeny translates as “no shame, no fear”) is written on the sands of a Chilean desert.
 Patrick Pritchett is a poet and critic whose works of poetry include Reside, Burn: Doxology of Joan of Arc (chax press), and Antiphonal, a chapbook issued by pressed wafer press. Pritchett’s poems and reviews have appeared in Hambone, Colorado Review, New American Writing, Shiny, Bombay Gin, Prairie Schooner, American Book Review, Rain Taxi, and Jacket, among others. He has taught at the University of Colorado, and is a Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University.
The first ramblebarrow podcast features poet Patrick Pritchett on George Oppen and poetry in the wake of disaster. We talk about Oppen as the “anti-Pound,” the art of the shipwreck, and read “The Image of the Engine” as a lyric of silent witness. We also read one of Patrick’s poems, “Homage to Samperi,” and find out about one of Patrick’s favorite Halloween costumes. See other poems we discuss:
Continue reading rambling on disaster
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