Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
Due to popular demand, and as a concession to common sense, we've decided to put poems here on our website — one poet per week.
This week, we present Forrest Gander. Following in the footsteps of many New Directions poets, Forrest is a Renaissance man with degrees in geology and literature. He's written novels, poetry, and criticism, and has translated, as well. His most recent collection, Core Samples from the World, has been named a finalist for the 2012 NBCC Award in Poetry.
The collection is a collaboration with three photographers that travels the globe exploring the tension between the foreign and the familiar, and what emerges is an empathetic portrait of the world's fundamental nature. To give you an idea of the unique structure Gander has created for the mixture of poetry and short essays, as well as the scope of landscapes, here's the table of contents:
One:
Evaporation
A Clearing With photos by Raymond Meeks
Xinjiang: The Pamirs Poetry Journey
Two:
Evaporation
Tinajera Notebook With photos by Graciela Iturbide
Mexico: A Core Sample through 24 Hours
Three:
Evaporation
Moving Around for the Light, A Madrigal With photos by Lucas Foglia
Bosnia-Herzegovina: Life is Waiting
Four:
Evaporation
Lovegreen With photos by Raymond Meeks
Chile: Pigs of Gold
* * *
Below are three poems, two from the second section, and one from the fourth. Enjoy.
* * *
Evaporation 2
In increments enunciated (Oh) within
where the meanings (in increments) lie
bare (she says) (Oh, to her friend)who is watching (I am watching) a cat slink
(while we walk) keeping pace with us
through the fenestrated walls (adobe) ofa ruined house (Oh, this finger) in the village
where she grew up (her accent
makes clear) This finger, she says,delighted, holding it up,
has a heart in it! (Pulse)
And thinking I don’t see (the friend), shetakes (from her purse) a toothpaste tube
(purse open) as she walks (we walk)
(where’s the cat?) along the softpath between (adobe) walls,
squeezes toothpaste
on her finger (with its heart) and smearsit (looking away) against her upper
and (still looking away) lower teeth
then touches me (with her breath)
* * *
from "The Tinajera Notebook"
So the present
hoses itself out. And with it—Sitting in the lobby of the clinic,
its walls painted
like children’s rooms with starfishand trains and jungle birds
and the children shuttling back and forth, the nurse
calling their name and a few wordsin English or Spanish, the children
taking their mother’s
or father’s hand,trailing the nurse past
a registration desk, down
the hall, the sequence of closed doors,toward the one door open. Radiance inside. Bald
children wearing hats, and a bald baby in a mother’s arms, and
here in the lobby, where I wait for youto be X-rayed,
some stranger whose exhaustion
can’t be fathomed, begins to snore. If thisis the world and its time, as irrevocably it is,
when I step out into sunlit air
suffused with sausage smoke and bus exhaust,with its relentless ads
for liquor and underwear,
where am I then?
* * *
from "Lovegreen"
That the trunk, submerged in air,
whirling leaves, thresholds-out. On the bark of
its leader stem, a black-capped
chickadee pins caterpillars and lacewings.
Its water-sprouts and spurs unpruned,
unbraced, the Yellow Transparent tree’s
boughs release the girl open-mouthed
pumping her two-wheeler
across a meadow softly-furred
as a bumble bee, her plastic bag
pendant with hard apples
from one handlebar swaying—
Coffee cut with honeysuckle.
The unprimed pump won’t give up its water.
Mosquito hawk clings to the barn wall’s shadow.
* * *
If you happen to be in New York on March 7, the NBCC finalists reading is free and open to the public, and Forrest will be there. All of the details are here.
Head over to Slate to read the entirety of Patti Smith's wonderful introduction to Albertine Sarrazin's Asrtagal.
ND editor Michael Barron interviewed Elaine Lustig for Bomb's blog. Read it here.
May 2013 News from New Directions
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In this week's issue of The New Yorker, you can read an excerpt from The Unknown University entitled "Mexican Manifesto". Enjoy.
Lina Meruane interviews Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas in the current issue of BOMB. Read it here.
Congratulations to Enrique Vila-Matas, whose novel Dublinesque is on the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Shortlist.
While in Denmark last August for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art's Literature Festival, César Aira sat down to discuss his "ideal fairy tale." Watch it here.
Rebecca Ariel Porte, in a beautiful essay written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, dicusses Susan Howe's Sorting Facts: Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker, addressing Chris Marker's films, as well. Definitely worth a read — here.
In one of the most creative reviews we've seen in a while, Bookslut's Lightsey Darst discusses all four collections in the first set of New Directions Poetry Pamphlets. Enjoy it here.
Calling it "breathatkingly subversive" in a review for the New York Review of Books, Yasmine El Rashidi discusses That Smell's English debut. Read it here.
Saying that the reading experience comes with a "sad sweetness," Vol. 1 Brooklyn dives into The Bridge Over the Neroch & Other Works, a newly translated collection by Leonid Tsypkin. Read it here.
Writing for Bookslut, Christopher Merkel reviews the 65th anniversary edition of the classic modernist text. Read it here.
Writing for The Washington Post, Scott Esposito reviewed our new edition of Queneau's Exercises in Style. Read it here.
In recent episode of Marfa Public Radio's "Talk at Ten", DeWitt read from and discussed Lightning Rods. You can listen to the entire program here.
The finalist shortlist for the annual Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction was recently announced, and Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods is among them. Congratulations!
In an essay entitled "Walking with Walser", The Quarterly Conversation tackles A Little Ramble and a book by Elfriede Jelinek that was inspired by Walser.
Poet Luljeta Lleshanaku recently contributed to The Paris Review Daily's "Windows on the World", a series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. Read it here.
Music & Literature's spring 2013 issue is devoted to László Krasznahorkai, the director Bela Tarr, and the artist Max Neumann. Needless to say, we're fans. Check it out here.
Poetry editor Jeffrey Yang recently spoke to The Atlantic's "By Heart" about George Oppen, grief, and the new collection Time of Greif: Mourning Poems.