"Olives” is an excavation of the letters and sounds thereof. (A perfect anagram ghost line haunts me—I only realized after the poem had “set”—“O Elvis.”) I love how multilayered the Seferis poem is, arising out of du Bellay’s, “Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage,” travelling through the lost Smyrna of Seferis’s childhood and the Cretan Renaissance’s Erotokritos back to the Odyssey, and the Aegean's eternal now.
A. E. Stallings on "OLIVES" and "Upon a Line of Foreign Verse" |
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"An Interview with Dana Levin"
"But the truth is that the lyric and the civic—the personal-psychological and the socio-political nest inside each other, inform each other, merge and separate and synthesize, constantly birthing new forms of self and world. I hope Now Do You Know Where You Are evokes this nesting quality."
via SOUTHEAST REVIEW |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Olivia E. Sears on Ardengo Soffici's "Rainbow"
"It was striking to me that Soffici wrote this poem full of beauty and tenderness, while he was (simultaneously) preparing for war....Soffici had written years before about existential dread and about his efforts to combat the void: 'Art for me is the only way to escape the concept of nothingness that otherwise haunts and terrifies me.' In these poems, he filled that void with color, shape, sound, and alchemical transformation." |
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Apply to the Bread Loaf Translators' Conference
June 2 to 8, 2023
Join our award-winning faculty in the heart of Vermont’s Green Mountains for a week of introductory and advanced workshops along with an inspiring schedule of lectures, classes, and readings. Financial aid is available. Rolling admissions through February 15th. Apply now |
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