Meandering home

Reading: In the Midnight Hour by Charles Wright

Charles Wright (b. 1935) is of course 'one of the best poets of his generation'. Raised in rural Tennessee. Influenced by Ezra Pound. Many prizes. I learn that is poetry forms a complex whole, so we are looking at a fragment here: In the midnight hour This, too, is an old story, yet It is ...

5 January, 2018

anthology, Charles Wright, darkness, prayer

Poetry

Reading: Tenebrae by Emile Verhaeren

The Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916) was one of the most prominent poets of his day. "His Black Trilogy, Les Soirs (1888), Les Débâcles (1889), and Les Flambeaux Noirs (1889–90) explores the spiritual abandonment of a soul lost in the recesses of its own involution." (Donald Flanell Friedman) I discovered the English translation of a ...

28 October, 2017

anthology, darkness, Emile Verhaeren, Flanders

Poetry

Poetry is always celebration or its opposite. Making blackness the word for everything: A symbol, a sound, To fill us and to fill the tombs in our midst.

12 October, 2017

blackness, celebration, darkness

Poetry

Reading: M – Black Monday by Marcin Świetlicki

Today there is this compact poem by Marcin Świetlicki for our ideosyncratic anthology. As usual, I'll say what struck me about these lines. The moment when all the town's streetlamps light up simultaneously. The moment when you say your incredible "no," and suddenly I don't know what to do next: die? go away? not respond? ...

24 September, 2017

anthology, darkness, light, love, Marcin Świetlicki, separation

Poetry

Miroslav Holub: The end of the world

I would like to publish an eclectic anthology. I don't know yet who will be included or excluded, it is a journey of first steps. Today, I try to say what I like about this little verse by the Czech immunologist and poetic giant Miroslav Holub, called 'the end of the world'. The bird had ...

21 September, 2017

anthology, darkness, Miroslav Holub, poem

Poetry