Poet Ghalib to be remembered at unique two-day event

February 2, 2010 |16:58 | Poets  By : Team X

Poet Ghalib to be remembered at unique two-day eventWhen the kathak maestro Uma Sharma, writer-diplomat Pavan K Varma, heritage activist Firoz Bakht Ahmed, poet Gulzar Dehlvi, bureaucrat Abid Hussain and the couplets of Ghalib go together.

The churning produces Yadgar-e-Ghalib - a two-day commemoration of Mirza Ghalib Dec 26-27 on the occasion of the inimitable poet's 212th birth anniversary.

Ghalib was born Dec 27, 1797. Coming in the wake of reports of the misuse and vandalisation of Ghalib's haveli by holding of wedding receptions.

The cultural programme will seek to give new life and meaning to his ancestral property in the old city, according to Firoz Bakht Ahmed, heritage activist and secretary, Ghalib Memorial Movement.

Danseuse Uma Sharma will begin the first day of the event (Dec 26) with a candle light procession from Town Hall, Chandni Chowk, to the Gali Qasimjan haveli of Mirza Ghalib.

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Poets expose their souls while reciting spoken words

February 1, 2010 |16:10 | Poets  By : Team X

The spotlight focuses on center stage as a poet prepares to expose his soul to a crowd of expectant listeners. He has no script in hand or cue cards in his pocket. Instead, everything is etched into his mind and spoken at a moment’s notice.

This is what Walter Blackmon experiences every time he steps on stage to recite spoken word. While this form of expression is a popular activity, many like Blackmon say poetry also works well to relieve stress. Blackmon said his definition of poetry embodies life itself.

“Poetry is life,” Blackmon said. “There’s so much going on in the living of it that inspiration is all out there and a lot of things you can not help but speak on.” Blackmon finds this inspiration in everyday life. “I practice or write pretty much every day,” Blackmon said. “When I perform it, I do it from memory. A poem kind of just comes out of you; you have to let it out.”

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Poems for Haiti

January 30, 2010 |17:02 |   By : Team X

Leading poets including Roger McGough and poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy are taking part in a live poetry event in Westminster tonight to raise money for the Haiti earthquake relief efforts. Poetry Live for Haiti will be held at Central Hall, Westminster, from 2.30pm. Welsh poet laureate Gillian Clarke and poet Elaine Feinstein read their poems for the Haiti aid appeal.

An introduction to the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

January 28, 2010 |15:46 | Poets  By : Team X

The very name Samuel Taylor Coleridge seems to reverberate like some mysterious timpani. Those magical titles of his vibrate and echo over an infinite distance: Kubla Khan, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Frost at Midnight … Or for that matter the notorious Person on Business from Porlock. Almost unnecessary, one might think, to turn back to the poems themselves at all (do they still do so in schools?). Those proverbial titles seem to hold all the poetry.  So it easy to forget how strange, how captivating, how haunted Coleridge's actual poems are. Why is it, for example, that so many of them are set at night? Why do their outer landscapes always dissolve into inner dream worlds? Why are they so full of guilt? And yet why are they also so often suffused with beautiful, healing, glimmering moonlight?  One answer to all these questions (especially popular among recent film-makers) has always been drug addiction. Step forward, Coleridge the lyrical smackhead. Coleridge's poems are explained away as forms of drug-induced hallucinations. It is certainly true that Coleridge began taking opium as a schoolboy in London, experimented with it throughout his 20s in the West Country and Germany, and was seriously addicted by the time he settled in the Lake District in 1801 aged 29.  Five poems in this selection have a sufficiently bewildering range of traumatic subject matter to be classed (mistakenly) as psychotic. In clinical notes they might be described as follows: the sexual fantasies of a Mongol warlord; the hallucinations of a paranoid sailor; the hysteria of a young woman assaulted by a lesbian demon; and the masochistic mutterings of a suicidally depressed lover. They end with the first ever – and truly terrifying – poem of drug withdrawal, The Pains of Sleep, dated 1803.  It is also true that Coleridge, like many addicts, was incapable of domestic stability. He abandoned his wife and three children in 1804 and travelled restlessly for some 12 years to Malta, Sicily, Italy, London, Leicestershire, the Lakes once more, then back to London again, finally washing up in 1816 on Highgate Hill – in the attic room of a kindly physician, Dr James Gillman. The last four poems in the selection, all disturbingly autobiographical, were written at Highgate. You can still walk under his colonnade of lime trees outside No 3 The Grove, and look up at his top-floor window.  But opium is a feeble explanation of Coleridge's genius. Born in Ottery St Mary, Devon in 1772, the son of a doting clergyman who died when Coleridge was only nine, he grew up as a lonely, intellectually precocious and astonishingly talkative child. Coleridge was quickly thrown out of both university and the army ("Discharged, insane"), made an unhappy marriage, and failed to establish promising careers in either in journalism or the church. Instead he met William and Dorothy Wordsworth in 1797, and became a poet.  Coleridge's subsequent career was marked by intellectual brilliance, financial chaos and painful emotional dependence on the Wordsworth household (or later versions of it). That household included Wordsworth's entrancing sister-in-law, Sara Hutchinson, with whom Coleridge fell desperately and unrequitedly in love. This part of his story is still little known, even to the film-makers. Sara is the secret subject of Dejection – but also of dozens of his later poems, including the one written 30 years later when he was 61, Love's Apparition. This emotional dependence, and the extreme ideas of being bewitched, possessed, enchanted, outcast, damned or redeemed which it involved, were far more significant for his poetry than any drug dependence.  Like all the Romantics, Coleridge was interested in exploring such extreme states of mind and feeling, "the dark groundwork of our nature" as he called them. But he was unusual in that he combined this with a lifelong fascination with philosophy, psychology and the physical sciences (especially chemistry, through his great friend Humphry Davy). These gave extraordinary range, authority and depth to all his writing. In a memorable snub to the philosopher Godwin (an early proponent of the Two Cultures), Coleridge announced: "the activity of science being necessarily performed with the passion of hope, it is poetical". He was never sentimental in his poems, though frequently so in both his life and his letters. He proved himself a heroic weeper and moaner on many occasions. But he was also very funny and self-mocking; and, one should add, immensely lovable.  Coleridge was fascinated by the way the imagination works. He distinguished it from what he called superficial "fancy", and described it in a wonderful phrase as "the esemplastic or shaping power". He invented the influential notion of the "willing suspension of disbelief". He cultivated the impression that his poetry was uncontrolled and spontaneous ("a waking dream"), but in fact his astonishing notebooks show that it was brilliantly crafted and structured. There are at least two separate versions of Kubla Khan, three of The Ancient Mariner, and perhaps five of Dejection. It is not known how many versions of Christabel he attempted, and left unfinished.  Coleridge defined poetry not as an uncontrolled hallucination, but as an act of supreme attention. He wrote this superb definition in a letter of July 1802. "A great poet … must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent desert, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an enemy upon the leaves that strew the forest, the touch of a blind man feeling the face of a darling child."  He was technically skilled and versatile. He turned his hand to sonnets, ballads, elegies and songs as well as the memorable, intimate blank verse of Frost at Midnight, one of a whole series of Conversation Poems like The Nightingale and This Lime Tree Bower My Prison, which could have easily filled this entire selection. So too could his other ballads, including The Three Graves, The Dark Ladie, Love (which inspired Keats's Belle Dame Sans Merci), and Alice Du Clos.  His gift for releasing the musical and rhythmic qualities of language was almost preternatural. It is possible to hum Kubla Khan out loud without the words, and still recognise it. In 1816 Charles Lamb remarked that when Coleridge himself recited the poem, "it irradiates and brings heaven and Elysian bowers into my parlour while he sings or says it."  His psychological use of symbolism deeply impressed Baudelaire (see Baudelaire's poem L'Albatros). In his little known later poems such as Limbo, Coleridge's sense of human powerlessness and despair are subtly and deliberately undermined by the use of the natural, active symbols of nature. Perhaps for this reason he has remained a favourite of some of our most powerful modern poets – notably Ted Hughes, Andrew Motion and James Fenton.  Finally, it should be said that Coleridge is often paired with his great friend and colleague, William Wordsworth. But they are utterly unlike each other, both as men and as poets. In my experience, you must either love one, or the other; and I have made my choice.aThe very name Samuel Taylor Coleridge seems to reverberate like some mysterious timpani. Those magical titles of his vibrate and echo over an infinite distance: Kubla Khan.

The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Frost at Midnight … Or for that matter the notorious Person on Business from Porlock.

Almost unnecessary, one might think, to turn back to the poems themselves at all (do they still do so in schools?). Those proverbial titles seem to hold all the poetry.

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Chilling with poetry

January 27, 2010 |15:59 |   By : Team X

 

For Jeffrey Plumbline, emcee and one of the organisers of ‘Chill and Relax’, Sunday, January 10, was a day to ensure that upcoming poets and art lovers enjoy some good poetry. The event, held in the quiet ambience of Bambuddha Bar, Victoria Island, Lagos, was initially devoid of music as the organisers declared their intention to maintain ‘Chill and Relax’ as a pure poetry event.

Poetry and wine

Ola Opesan opened the night with an uncompleted poem titled ‘Struggle.’ “The full title is actually ‘Street Trader Struggle’, this is a part of it,” Opesan explained before he read the poem which celebrates the average Nigerian for whom every day is a day to ‘hustle, bustle and struggle.’

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Poem of the day – “It Starts With Sand”

January 26, 2010 |13:41 | Poem of the Day  By : Team X

A very good war poem for ya, by a Hampstead resident. The dryness, tension, danger in Afghanistan captured in a few lines, through a soldier’s eyes.It starts with sand-
Rock, mud
saturate dry air.

Glass cracks and webs.
Steel snaps.
Shards fire into reeds.

Fingers drop to
triggers.
rifles scan as

The pulse penetrates
armor,
Funneling past parched lips

Through stiff chests,
further
Deep into stomachs

Flooding muscle
marrow.
Discharging to legs, toes.

Running in the veins,
always with the blood.

An introduction to the poetry of Lord Byron

January 25, 2010 |17:56 | Poets  By : Team X

An introduction to the poetry of Lord ByronByron was first and foremost a poet. His output, in every conceivable metre, iambs and anapaests, blank verse, hudibrastics and heroic couplets, terzains, quatrains, sixains, rime royal, spenserians and ottava rima, was enormous. His last poem is written in Sapphics, one of the most difficult forms of all.

That his body of work should be so little read, when every year sees the publication of ever more prurient versions of his life, is absurd and disgraceful.

Readers who lap up egregious hypotheses about Byron and fail to familiarise themselves with his works are short-changing themselves. Don Juan is by far the greatest comic poem in English. It should be as well-known in England as the Orlando Furioso is in Italy. That it isn't is partly the fault of Matthew Arnold, who sent us all off in a wild goose chase after high seriousness. We labour still under a delusion that comedy is a lower form than tragedy, and can never arrive at greatness or profundity.

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Through the poet's eyes

January 20, 2010 |15:35 |   By : Team X

In Dot-to-Dot, Oregon, Sid Miller writes about his journey along seven routes through different areas of Oregon. This book of poems encompasses a poem for each small town or urban city that the author visits. From expectations and atmosphere to personal experiences and his love for his wife, Miller’s book is a refreshing collection that varies from page to page.

Miller has been an Oregon resident for the last seven years and is the founder and current editor of the Burnside Review, a literary journal here in Portland. He attended Portland State from 2000 to 2002, and majored in English. He's had three poem collections published, and has submitted work to other predominate publications.

In the forward of the book, Miller explains his thinking process, and how he made the revelation to write a book of poems like this one. After living in Oregon for nearly seven years, he felt he really hadn't experienced many places and monuments in the state he now called home.

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Poem of the week - La Gioconda by Michael Field

January 19, 2010 |13:52 | Poems  By : Team X

Leonardo Da Vinci's portrait of La Gioconda, more familiarly known as the Mona Lisa has fascinated many writers, her famously inscrutable half-smile a powerful stimulus for imaginative interpretation, ranging from the lyrical to the licentious.

Poem of the week La Gioconda by Michael Field

Almost as well-known as the mischievous re-touchings of the surrealist painters, the heady prose description by Walter Pater was considered by WB Yeats to be so original and poetic that he lineated it himself so as to form the opening "poem" of his 1936 anthology, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: "She is older than the rocks among which she sits;/ Like the Vampire/ She has been dead many times …"

"Only by printing it in vers libre can one show its revolutionary importance," Yeats claimed, rather suggesting that Pater's splendid phrase-making was better poetry than art criticism: better, perhaps, though possibly not quite good enough.

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A call to poets - stay alive

January 16, 2010 |15:40 |   By : Team X

Sometimes it seems as though poets, in particular, move in an endangered artistic world. Think Sylvia Plath, above; John Berryman, Anne Sexton. And, last month, Rachel Wetzsteon, an accomplished poet who took her own life at age 42.

Writer Jennifer Michael Hecht, who teaches at the New School, knew Wetzsteon; her death got her thinking about artists grappling with suicide. "I’m issuing a rule," she writes. "You are not allowed to kill yourself." Where we once had religious proscriptions against suicide, Hecht's is a secular injunction. She cites community, creativity and gratitude. And, while this is too late for her friend, she offers a lifeline:

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