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Showing posts from December, 2009

Limberlost Press

I have this bad habit, you see. I don't read books inasmuch as I read authors . Once I get my hooks into something good, I want it all. Which leads one to unfortunate (but lucky) circumstances like owning everything Peter Matthiessen ever put to paper, an ouevre which will give me lasting pleasure into my dotage, or owning all the volumes in the Poems of the Millenium series. I despair even of completing all the books in my library, let alone the 5 or 6 or 20 new ones I pick up every month. I tell myself I have no other public vices, and I purchase at will. So, recently, in my desire to buy all the Ed Dorn I could get into my system, I picked up his last book, Chemo Sabe --from Limberlost Press --a beautiful oversize chapbook of poems written as Dorn was dying of cancer. Light holiday reading in other words. The papers on this book are exquisite, the type is large enough to read comfortably--not always the case--and it's generally a fine product before you even get to the wo

Brian Trimboli: " THINGS MY SON SHOULD KNOW AFTER I’VE DIED"

THINGS MY SON SHOULD KNOW AFTER I’VE DIED I was young once. I dug holes near a canal and almost drowned. I filled notebooks with words as carefully as a hunter loads his shotgun. I had a father also, and I came second to an addiction. I spent a summer swallowing seeds and nothing ever grew in my stomach. Every woman I kissed, I kissed as if I loved her. My left and right hands were rivals. After I hit puberty, I was kicked out of my parents’ house at least twice a year. No matter when you receive this there was music playing now. Your grandfather isn’t my father. I chose to do something with my life that I knew I could fail at. I spent my whole life walking and hid such colorful wings.

Miklos Radnoti

Hi. I'm still alive. The kids and I are trading off the flu. But--and this is important--I found my Collected Paul Blackburn. And all my poetry books--72 linear feet--are shelved. Via Silliman's blog , I'm reminded of one of the great and sad stories of poetry: Miklos Radnoti . The first few graphs of Camille Martin's loverly post are below. November 10 marked the sixty-fifth anniversary of the murder of MiklĂłs RadnĂłti, a Jewish Hungarian poet killed by Hungarian Nazi collaborators during a three-month death march and buried in a mass grave. A year and a half later, when his wife, Fanny, located and exhumed his body, a notebook of his poems was found in his coat pocket. RadnĂłti had continued to write poetry during his internment in various work camps, his slave labour in a copper mine, and his forced march across his native Hungary, bearing witness to the horrors to which he ultimately succumbed. As a tribute to him, I’m reproducing six of his poems below. Th