poetry kanto

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2/13/11 11:39 am - Jane Hirshfield Japan visit: Feb. 24, 25 readings

For those interested...
(forwarding this received information)

Contact for further information

tayako@vos.nagaokaut.ac.jp


Jane Hirshfield Poetry Reading

Date: Thursday, February 24, 2011. 15:00~17:00
Place: Dokkyo University

Contents:
1. Lecture 15:00~15:40
'What I found in Basho'

2. Poetry Reading 15:50~16:30
Poetry Reading (including bilingual reading by students)

3. Welcome party 16:30~17:00


Date: Friday, February 25, 2011
Place: Niigata City Hall, reading, Niigata, Japan

Please contact the email address above to confirm the dates and all details for either the Niigata or Tokyo event.

2/10/11 04:42 pm - Jeffrey Angles, Yosuke Tanaka & Emiko Miyashita reading Feb. 13

Translator, poet, and visiting professor at Tokyo University is giving a talk/poetry reading with the poet Yosuke Tanaka and Emiko Miyashita about translation and contemporary poetry on 2/13 (Sun)


朗読とトーク「言葉の演奏~詩の翻訳と朗読をめぐって~」

■ 田中庸介(詩人)、ジェフリー・アングルス( 翻訳家)、宮下惠美子(翻訳家)による朗読とトークショーを開催いたします。ぜひご参加ください。
たくさんの方の参加が予想されますので、早めのご予約をおすすめいたします。
お問い合わせ・ご予約は、電話またはEメールにてお願いいたします。


2/13(日) 13:30 開場 14:00 開演
会費 2000円
後援 思潮社

数寄和(すきわ)
TEL 03-3390-1155
Eメール contact@sukiwa.net



作家略歴


田中庸介

1969年東京に生れ、杉並に育つ。西荻在住。
1989年「ユリイカの新人」としてデビュー。
趣味はピアノと山歩き。
『山が見える日に、』(思潮社)
『スウィートな群青の夢』(未知谷)


ジェフリー・アングルス

米国オハイオ州生まれ。
西ミシガン大学准教授。
2009-10年は京都の国際日本文化研究センターで研究。
2011年1-3月、東京大学比較文学比較文化研究室の客員准教授として来日。
高校生の時、日本に留学して以来、日本文学に魅せられ研究者の道を邁進。
大衆文学から純文学まで、特に現代詩を精力的に英訳。
英訳詩集に、
新井高子訳詩集『Soul Dance』(ミて・プレス、2008)
伊藤比呂美訳詩集『Killing Kanoko』(アクション・ブックス、2009)など
多田智満子訳詩集『Forest of Eyes』(カリフォルニア大学出版部、2010)で2009年度ドナルド・キーン翻訳賞受賞。


宮下惠美子

4歳から6歳までアメリカ、イリノイ州にて過ごし、15歳から17歳までをアフリカ、ガーナ共和国アクラにて過ごす。
同志社大学文学部英文学卒。
1993年に「天為俳句会」主宰・有馬朗人(当時、東大総長)に師事。
「天為俳句会」同人、「晨」(大峯あきら代表)同人、俳人協会幹事、国際俳句交流協会評議員。
1997年より海外の俳句と関わり、アメリカ、イギリス、カナダの俳句大会に参加。
同時に俳句の英訳・和訳を始める。
以後、日本語と英語による朗読・講演などを国内外で行う。

 

1/21/11 06:36 pm - PK 2010 poem on Verse Daily

Verse Daily featured a poem by Poetry Kanto 2010 poet J.P. Dancing Bear today. The poem, entitled "Gacela of Twilight Bats", is archived at the Verse Daily website for Jan. 20, 2011.

http://www.versedaily.com/

12/29/10 04:12 pm - Yoko Danno (PK 2010)-- 'trilogy' 1970 poetry book re-issued

Poet, translator and editor (& PK 2010 contributor) Yoko Danno re-issued her 1970 poetry book "trilogy" this year from The Ikuta Press, entitled "Trilogy & Hagoromo: A Celestial Robe."



from Winter Journey:


Reflection


as usual

she
looked
in the water:

the thin
ice

screened her

from
the world

below




(Available at Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Trilogy-Hagoromo-Celestial-Yoko-Danno/dp/4915813126/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1293605364&sr=1-4

12/29/10 12:00 pm - literary Japan updates/websites

JIPS (Japan International Poetry Society) blog:

http://jipsociety.wordpress.com/


Ikuta Press (Kobe) website:

http://www.ikutapress.com/


YOMIMONO blog: http://yomimono.wordpress.com/


YOMIMONO articles about, in The Japan Times & Koe Magazine:

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fb20101226a2.html

http://www.koemagazine.com/page/62/


YOMIMONO at Amazoncom:

http://www.amazon.com/Yomimono-15-Suzanne-Kamata/dp/1453808132/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1293591533&sr=1-1

12/22/10 12:58 pm - reissue of William Heyen's LORD DRAGONFLY, 2010

PK contributor (2007) William Heyen's 1981 classic Lord Dragonfly has been reissued by H NGM N BKS, and editor Nate Pritts' accompanying essay is well worth reading as well (see link & excerpt below).

(Editor's Note: Mr. Heyen's title invokes for me the rice paddy not far from my house in North Kamakura which pulsates with dragonflies of varying sizes, shapes and colors during hot, humid summer days.--A.B.)

********

Beginning Again: On Reissuing William Heyen’s Lord Dragonfly

by Nate Pritts

In 1992 I was a seventeen year old college freshman in Brockport, New York, a town where it’s always fall or winter, where the Erie Canal dominates both landscape & mood, all full of bird shadows, & where sunflowers look stark & lovely against the weathered brick of academic buildings.

Seventeen & I walked up the stairs of Lathrop Hall on the SUNY Brockport campus to my first college English class & the hallway chalkboard/message center told me:

xii.

Lord Dragonfly
sees me from all sides
at once.

************
(to continue, follow link--
http://coldfrontmag.com/features/on-reissuing-william-heyens-lord-dragonfly

11/3/10 11:48 am - 2010 Pushcart nominations for Poetry Kanto (issue #26 soon available)

Alicia Ostriker (New Jersey)

HEAVEN

Among the goddesses one is my mother
now she dances in a hall of light

to the applause of many multitudes
healed at last of her asthma

breathing without the least difficulty
now she completes a Sunday crossword puzzle

and emits an enchanting perfume
my dad is drawn to her side, his brow springing with curls

they do a fox-trot, his smile is tranquil, his shirt starched
no more rage no poverty no shrieks—

from rows of gilded chairs the reverent
audience rises as the couple bows—

for when an August sun massages me
when I bathe in my sweat, when the rasp

of cicadas rises and lifts me like a swimmer
easily floating beyond where the surf breaks

my mind is a cervix
I can imagine anything



J.P. Dancing Bear (California)

Gacela of Rememberance
for Ashley Schaffer


What the birds have done is bury love behind crimson 

curtains so that there is always a tree to honor 

the elaborate root system left behind.



Let no axe or chainsaw come between loving

memory and the living. One never counts the rings

of years on the stump-corpse—there is no time



for such detailed pettinesses. These birds say,

let memory be a golden crown—complete

with halo—behind the royal red robes.



When we pull back the rolls and rivers of fabric

we reveal the riches, the riches of our lives. We
remember the splendor of the spirit tree.




Katherine Riegel (Florida)

HYDRA

What’s neat is I can see me with all my heads!
—Charlotte Alessio Manier, 4 years old, on looking at her reflection in the back of a silver pinwheel


1. This head sits by the window, watching others in the frenetic clasp of fun, envious, sun-starved, growing.

2. Gold adorns this head like a blossom.

3. This head sings songs of torment from the bottom of the sea.

4. This head has a tongue of stone.

5. To tie a headstrong girle from love, is to tie the Furies again in fetters.*

6. After cutting off Medusa’s head, Perseus lifted it by its snaky hair.

7. This head imagines a late summer day, drifting dragonflies, the shade of a gnarled tree, the taste of apples.

8. This head makes a shadow on the sidewalk. It opens its mouth, and the concrete speaks.

9. This is the head of a girl aflame in a world waiting for combustion.




Bill Wolak (New Jersey)

THE GIFT


Stay still awhile.
Relax through the long interludes
when the extended aisles of our arms
withdraw into a paralyzed torpor.

There is a moment when nothing moves inside us,
when a strained exhaustion resonates throughout us,
a hushed pause that hastens our revival,
an hiatus that lulls the aching and delight
we balance between.

Our eyebrows are stitched together;
still I see you in the orange afterimage;
my eyes closed as tightly
as stars with ingrown light.

For me, you have the gift
to transform your dreams
into your presence.

Now you have subdued all my snakes
and I, in turn, have savored
all the aquatic spices
of your skin’s opening shudders;
I have divined the lost children scurrying
inside your forest of I’s.

Be still awhile
as the trance of or brief reprieve
subsides with a slow turning of keys
in the hatchet-hewn stump of the heart.



Ginger Murchison (Georgia)

Whitman’s Hermit Thrush


The brightest star down, it’s this gray-brown meager bird’s
sweet, reedy mourning, that one brittle pitch,

grief large enough for the pain, an orange wire
right through the brain, a bullet to bite on,

one piece of clean, cold metal scraping another
like hunger, a train with its brakes on.

That tiny shy bird looks like nothing out there, but that one clear note
of song on and on is the screech of a screen door—

somebody leaving
or someone come home.




Temple Cone (Maryland)

Offertory



The emerald tree boa doesn’t long for the moth’s wings.
The camel accepts that it cannot hunt squid in the depths.
Only man desires to be otherwise, to rewrite creation’s score.

If you were to paint nothing but turkey buzzards feasting
On road-kill, you would stand closer to God. You must believe
He loves those bare, scalded heads, how they root about.

Such is the love that drove Leonardo to dig up cadavers,
To chart rivers of muscle, forests of tendon, caverns of bone.
Botticelli’s Venus proclaims the body’s alien, unyielding beauty.

But to inspect our own hearts and find them, like Blake’s rose,
Devoured by worms—wouldn’t we turn from such thoughts,
Build warplanes, skyscrapers, and dams, and scorch the ground?

When the president appears on television, dogs howl in the kitchen,
Madmen howl in their rooms, murderers howl from death row,
Storm winds howl, and a howling city of misery sinks into a swamp.

So when the muzzein calls from the minaret for prayer, let us go.
When the priest raises the communion, though we are sinful, let us go.
When the burnt child begins asking for water at 3 am, let us go.

10/31/10 09:51 am - Roundtable Launches the Read Japan Project, By Teri Tan

(from Publishers Weekly)

A high-profile symposium on literature in translation took place in Tokyo Monday afternoon, brining together a group of distinguished book editors, publishers and literary magazine editors from the U.S., the U.K. and Japan.
Sponsored and organized by The Nippon Foundation, it featured editors Deborah Treisman (fiction; The New Yorker), John Freeman (Granta), John Siciliano (Viking/Penguin), Lexy Bloom (Knopf/Vintage), and publishers James Gurbutt (Constable & Robinson/Corsair) and Julian Loose (Faber & Faber). The panel also included Mariko Ozaki, deputy cultural editor of Yomiuri Shimbun—one of Japan’s five national newspapers that have daily circulation above 13 million copies—and Yutaka Yano, editor-in-chief of The Monthly Shincho, a literary magazine that has been around for more than 100 years.

The event, held at The Nippon Foundation headquarters, marked the launch of the non-profit organization’s Read Japan project, an initiative aimed at promoting translation of Japanese originals into English. More than 200 attended. Editors from 16 publishing houses—including Japan’s big four (Kodansha, Shinchosha, Bungei Shunju and Shueisha)—as well as writers, foreign rights agents, translators, academics, journalists, literary critics and booksellers made up the crowd.

(read more)

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/international/trade-shows/article/44960-roundtable-launches-the-read-japan-project.html

Read Japan Project

http://www.nippon-foundation.or.jp/eng/ReadJapan/

10/13/10 06:20 am - Poetry at the Celt -- Ueno -- 10/17

(courtesy of Wayne Pounds)

Friends

Poetry at the Celt (Ueno) is having it's 3rd-Sunday-of-the-month Hi-jinx
and Jollification this coming Sunday, 10/17. Starts at 5, and that's Happy Hour.

Last month was a modest success. This should be a more boastful one. David
Brennan and the "Pogue-light" bad Boys from Borstal will be playing again at 7.

Performances welcome in any language, English, Japanese, whatever you got.

Map's at http://www.warriorcelt.jp/contact_us.html.

Wayne Pounds
secretary pro-temp &
boy from barstool

10/9/10 03:42 pm - Some Poetry Highlights of 2010 Japan Writers Conference

Poetry lovers, you won't want to miss this wonderful line-up of American poets & translators offering a wide range of poetic voices and styles at this year's Japan Writers Conference at Nihon University in Tokyo!

MORGAN GIBSON (Nonzen Poems 2010), ARTHUR BINARD, LEZA LOWITZ (Yoga Heart, 2010), TAYLOR MIGNON (Japlish Whiplash, 2010), JOHN GRIBBLE, BERN MULVEY, SAWAKO NAKAYASU (Texture Notes, 2010)


Morgan Gibson: “SIXTY YEARS OF COUNTERCULTURAL POETRY, a poetry reading with commentary, Q&A, discussion ” In the context of the Counter Culture climaxing in the 1960’s and continuing to the present, I will present and encourage critical discussion of my poetry written from 1950 on and published in America and Japan. For discussion: what is the meaning and value of countercultural poetry? Highly recommended as background readings: Kenneth Rexroth’s Complete Poems, 2003; American Poetry in the Twentieth Century, 1971, and the Rexroth Archives, Bureau of Public Secrets, http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/ Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture, 1968. MORGAN GIBSON is a poet, essayist, and critic who has also published short fiction and two short plays.He won poetry and fiction awards from Oberlin College, a Fiction First Award from Mutiny magazine, and a Scholarly Book Award from Choice for Revolutionary Rexroth: Poet of East-West Wisdom, which was later updated for the Light&Dust Online Anthology of Poetry at http://www.thing.net/~grist/ld/rexroth/gibson.htm Gibson taught writing, creative and otherwise, literature, and related subjects at American universities for two decades, primarily the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 1961-72, where he received a Uhrig Award for teaching creative writing. Later he taught at Japanese universities for another two decades. His archives are in the Morgan Gibson Collection in the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library.


Leza Lowitz & Christopher Yohmei Blasdel: “The Zen of Poetry: Reading and Shakuhachi Concert followed by Q & A” The Six Treasures of the Lotus Sutra: Leza Lowitz Reads from Yoga Heart: Lines on the Six Perfections with Musical Accompaniment by Christopher Yohmei Blasdel on the Shakuhachi. Lowitz and Blasdel have collaborated on numerous occasions setting poetry to music and bringing out the music of poetry. LEZA LOWITZ has published over 15 books, all still in print and many about Japan. Among her awards for fiction, poetry and co-translation are the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, a California Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, and the U.S. -Japan Friendship Commission Award from the Donald Keene Center at Columbia University, with Shogo Oketani. Her newest book is Zen Poems, forthcoming from Stone Bridge Press (Spring 2011), based on the Six Paramitas (Six Perfections) of Mahayana Buddhism from the Lotus Sutra (Saddharmapundarika). She began her study of Buddhism and yoga as a teenager, and considers it her life's study. She opened Sun and Moon Yoga studio in Tokyo in 2003.

Arthur Binard, “Home Improvements, or Being Better To Be As Good--Translating Picture Books and Poems.” Translation is a little like moving a house. A structure which was sound in its original language often ends up crooked and weakened in a new language. It is the translator’s job to make improvements. In this session problematic close translations which led to creative solutions will be examined. Arthur Binard is a poet, translator, children’s book author, and radio commentator. His translations into English include The Family of Fourteen series by Kazuo Ewamura and Once Upon A Home Upon A Home by Ken Hirata. He has translated into Japanese Eric Carle’s Pancakes, Pancakes! and Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young.”

Bern Mulvey and John Gribble: “There’s No Business Like Po’ Business: Contests, Publishing and Other Issues in the Poet’s Life” So you’ve written some poems. And you think they’re pretty good. Now what? Two regularly-publishing poets will talk briefly about their experiences with literary journals, contests, how they find the places to which they submit, money, and let you in on some of the secret meanings of things: SASEs, CLs, IRCs, and the dreaded “simultaneous submissions.” Also, with regards to contests, how to separate the scams from the legitimate opportunities? Can research improve your odds? Are there contest judges that should be avoided...and why? Then it’s your turn. Bring your questions and experiences. Bern Mulvey has published poems, articles, and essays in English and Japanese. His poetry collection, The Fat Sheep Everyone Wants, won the 2007 Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize. His chapbook, The Window Tribe, won the 2004 White Eagle Coffee Store Chapbook Prize. New poems have appeared this year in Agni, Beloit Poetry Journal and Poetry East, with more forthcoming in Field. He is co-coordinator of the Japan Writers Conference. John Gribble’s poems have appeared in RUNES, Margie, The Mid-America Poetry Review, Pearl, and other publications in the US, UK, and Japan. He is a native Southern Californian, a Tokyo resident since 1993, and co-coordinator of the Japan Writers Conference. His collection of poems Another Wrong Fedora was published by Printed Matter Press in 2005.

Taylor Mignon: “Poetry Performance of Japlish Whiplash: Madness, Word Play & Rhyme are the Methods” Mignon will be reading from his virgin book of poems and from his companion volume The Thomas Kilbilmer Conflict Model Motel, with a special guest. After his performance, Mignon will try to discuss how he has shaped his particular idiomatic, avant-gardistic approach ("Sound Poetry with meaning" — musician, Samm Bennett), with reference to projectivism, syllabic meter, word play and variously nuanced approaches. Has the "quietness" of Japan helped in his verbal approach in performing poetry? Questions on organizing readings as well are welcome. _____:


Sawako Nakayasu: “An Inter-lingual Poetry Reading: texts written or performed using both Japanese and English” Sawako Nakayasu will present a poetry reading and discussion in which the poems are not translations, but are written using a combination of Japanese and English. Some works originally written in English have been reinvented for the purposes of reading in Japan to bilingual audiences, thus they deliberately explore the semantic and sonic continua between the two languages. Poetry is deliciously capable of occupying these liminal spaces between languages, where it ceases to be identifiable as any particular language – with a nod to Zukofsky’s notion of “Upper limit music, lower limit speech,” the limits of poetic language in performance will also be considered. Sawako Nakayasu was born in Japan and has lived mostly in the US since the age of six. Her most recent books are Texture Notes (Letter Machine, 2010), Hurry Home Honey (Burning Deck, 2009), and a translation of Kawata Ayane’s poetry, Time of Sky//Castles in the Air (Litmus Press, 2010). Her translation of Takashi Hiraide’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (New Directions, 2008) received the 2009 Best Translated Book Award from Three Percent. More information is available here: http://www.sawakonakayasu.net/
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