February 2011
21 posts
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Vietnamese Folk Poems
During the war in 1971-72, John Balaban traveled the countryside in South Vietnam tape-recording the sung poetry known as ca dao, an oral tradition in which Vietnamese have been composing for hundreds of years. Sung by ordinary individuals without accompaniment, about 5000 ca dao are thought to exist at any one time. The poems in this group are part of a bilingual collection called Ca...
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“She read the book of sorrows as it turned its pages one after the other and...”
– From Naguib Mahfouz’s ‘Morning and Evening Talk’
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““Her uncle, Shaykh Qasim, said to her, “I saw you in a dream dancing...”
– From Naguib Mahfouz’s ‘Morning and Evening Talk’
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I am trying to write a poem that will honour the walrus’ plight…it is hard and I am trying to stop the ‘I’ of me taking over..I have an infallible love for large and ungainly animals (read: hippo, manatee), want to think of them more, not less..
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According to Busan maritime police, the pirates were provided a meal of rice, kimchi fried rice, doenjang soup, fried egg and japchae. The police said they cleaned their plates, and slept very, very well at night.
In the morning, the pirates were given a breakfast of rice, dongtaetguk, fried egg, kimchi and tofu. Once again, they cleaned their plates.
Asked in English about Korean food, one...
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Tuesday Poem: The Cowboy by James Tate
Someone had spread an elaborate rumor about me, that I was in possession of an extraterrestrial being, and I thought I knew who it was. It was Roger Lawson. Roger was a practical joker of the worst sort, and up till now I had not been one of his victims, so I kind of knew my time had come. People parked in front of my house for hours and took pictures. I had to draw all my blinds and only...
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“…by bestowing upon her a cosmic map of her own proper boundaries.”
– Anne Carson - ‘Dirt and Desire: Essay on the phenomenology of female pollution in antiquity’
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Short Story: These Are Mysteries by Sarah...
These are mysteries: Why is the dog lying dead on the side of the road? And whose shoe is that, sitting a few feet away? Why has one tree lost its leaves? The others are full. They shade the road. Who is selling raspberries? They are displayed beneath a striped umbrella, and they look delicious. What are those big flocks of birds wheeling in the sky? Also: ...
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“I suppose I had always hoped that, through an act of will and the effort of...”
– Lyn Hejinian ‘My Life’
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January 2011
15 posts
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WatchTuesday Poem: The Deer by Wendy Burk
Another video poem…I found this awesome website: Moving Poems
This is an on-going anthology of the best videopoems, filmpoems, animated poems, and other poetry videos from around the web, appearing at a rate of one every weekday most weeks.Other names for this genre include filmpoetry and (rarely) cinepoetry, and animated poems form an important...
