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.
A few months back we shared the wonderful news that poet Michael Palmer has been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters with an award for general excellence in literature. The ceremony itself is happening right now in New York, and so we're taking the opportunity to say "Congratulations" again.
The second and last section of Michael Palmer’s new poetry collection, Thread, is a cycle of eighteen dream-like lyrics also titled “Thread,” and subtitled “(Stanzas in Counterlight).” Here are three poems from this section, a section of shadows and echoes, of wings and the slaughter of wings, where figures of the dead are spoken to and listened to.
Nighthawk and sun-bird
beauty of the world beauty of the world
How can one write beauty of the world?
Fumbled for each other in the dark
familiar, unfamiliar, the touch
of watery air
walls, weight of watery air
cards scattered across a table,
game of chance they had played
* * *
Circling lost
through the narrow streets
of the Old City
among the shuttered shops
they hear nothing
but the howling of dogs drifting down
from the hills above
from the dark
of the parched hills
threnos—thread—lament
barely vibrating web
of sleep’s winding streets
* * *
Nighthawk and sun-bird
Who will tell of it
Shore’s eyelid, earth’s rim
light from extinguished stars
bathing us
in time’s wake
time’s long
stream of slaughter
and song
Some love
the one more
some the other
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.