Robert Creeley died of respiratory complications yesterday. - March 31, 2005. I just got introduced to his poetry ("emotions compressed in short, sparse sentences and an emphasis on feeling") two weeks ago when I picked up a book of his poems at the public library..
"I had wanted a quiet testament and
I had wanted, among other things,
a song." - Robert Creeley
Creeley once wrote, quoting Melville, "Visible truth is the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things."
Not a good year for poetry - Beat & Surrealist Poet Philip Lamantia died on March 7 .. and also, anti-war poet Sadako Kurihara, herself a "Hibakusha" (survivor of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima), died at age 92. Acclaimed poet, playwright and novelist Julia Darling died April 14th, aged 48.
I am currently reading a book, which is a compilation of 15 great Soviet Poets of the 20th century - Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetayeva, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Yesenin, Nikolai Zabolotsky, Boris Poplavsky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesenksy, Igor Holin, Henri Sabgir, Bella Akhmadulina, and Joseph Brodsky. Ofcourse, the father of Russian poetry is Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837).
Of all these poets, I had only heard and read a little bit of Akhmatova and Brodsky and of course, Pasternak - but not for his poetry but because of Dr. Zhivago and his rejection of the Nobel Prize. Also, though I have not read his poems yet, I have seen a big book of the collected poems of Yevtushenko at the public library and intend to enjoy it sometime. It is amazing how much amazing literature one is not even aware of!
Marina Tsvetayeva, who was not popular while she lived and lived in exile for a better part of her life but whose work has been increasingly resurrected in modern Russian pop songs and even Shostakovich set some of her songs to music, earning her cultural icon status. She has been thought to be one of the leading Soviet poets by such authorities as Pasternak and Paul Celan. Even Rainer Maria Rilke was a big fan and wrote to her in 1926: "You, poet, do you sense how you have overwhelmed me . . . I'm writing like you and I descend like you the few steps down from the sentence into the mezzanine of parentheses . . ."
And speaking of Rilke, another amazing person I recently read about, though not a poetess herself, is Lou Andreas Salome (1861 - 1937). Reading a book of poems (Book of Images) by Rilke, I read about Salome and so looked her up online ..
LOU ANDREAS-SALOMÉ was born in 1861 in St Petersburg. She studied theology at the University of Zurich. As a young woman, she travelled to Italy, where she met Nietzsche, who proposed marriage to her. She rejected him, although she remained close to him and his circle. In 1887 she married the Orientalist Friedrich Carl Andreas. She first met Rilke in 1897, and in 1899 Rilke traveled with Lou Andreas-Salomé and her husband in Russia, visiting among others Leo Tolstoy. From 1911 she was closely involved with Freud and his Viennese circle. In addition to novels, she published studies of Nietzsche, Freud and Rilke..She died in 1937 in Göttingen.
Wow..must have been quite a woman... hangs out with Freud and the Viennese circle; Neitzche proposes to her; and Rilke, who was besotted with her, though she was much older than him, says of her: "... I felt at first so confused that I could scarcely separate my impressions, and thought I was drowning in the breakingw aves of some foreign splendor." ..
One of my favorite poets is Pablo Neruda, whom Gabriel Garcia Marquez called him the "greatest poet of the 20th century - in any language." Reading him, I wish I knew Spanish...if his poetry can be so beautiful and alive in translation, what music could be enjoyed in the original! (I had no idea till today (Apr 3, 2005) that his real name is "Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto")
Tobias Hill's useful tips on line breaks in poetry. - 'It's worth remembering that poetry is an oral form at heart'
What an interesting real-life story of cuckoldry, illicit love, and friendship! ee (Edward Estlin) cummings, one of America's most popular poets and painter, was supported by a wealthy friend, Scofield Thayer, as a struggling young writer and artist but soon found himself drawn to his patron's wife... as explored in EE Cummings: A Biography by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno. The author has been accused of plagiarism according to an article in the May issue of Harper's Magazine. Wyatt Mason, a Harper's contributing editor, alleges the book is "jammed with instances of wholesale borrowing - not only of research but of storytelling and language" from the 1980 biography "Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings" by Richard S. Kennedy
The Best Poems of the English Language by Harold Bloom
Arthur Miller, the Pulitzer prize-winning playwright whose most famous fictional creation, Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman," came to symbolize the American Dream gone awry, has died. Death of a Salesman was the first play to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. A recent play, "Finishing the Picture",' which debuted last year dealth with his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, which ended in a divorce in 1961. He married painter, Inge Morath, who died in 2002. Just couple months back, the 89 year old Miller announced that he has been living with 34 year old artist Agnes Barley at his Roxbury, CT farm since 2002, and that they are planning to marry.
Read about the always-giving noble life of Mary Wollstonecraft, known more for being the mother of Mary Shelley. She is also the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman an can be often considered to be one of the earliest feminists - though a different and quite contrary brand than the feminism today.
