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The Arrow
I thought of your beauty, and this arrow,
Made out of a wild thought, is in my marrow.
There’s no man may look upon her, no man,
As when newly grown to be a woman,
Tall and noble but with face and bosom
Delicate in colour as apple blossom.
This beauty’s kinder, yet for a reason
I could weep that the old is out of season.
William Butler Yeats
(1865-1939)
The Arrow
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The Philosophy of Modern Song is Bob Dylan’s first book of new writing since 2004’s Chronicles: Volume One—and since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.
Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his extraordinary insight into the nature of popular music.
He writes over sixty essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone.
He analyzes what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal.
These essays are written in Dylan’s unique prose. They are mysterious and mercurial, poignant and profound, and often laugh-out-loud funny. And while they are ostensibly about music, they are really meditations and reflections on the human condition.
Running throughout the book are nearly 150 carefully curated photos as well as a series of dream-like riffs that, taken together, resemble an epic poem and add to the work’s transcendence.
In 2020, with the release of his outstanding album Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan became the first artist to have an album hit the Billboard Top 40 in each decade since the 1960s.
The Philosophy of Modern Song contains much of what he has learned about his craft in all those years, and like everything that Dylan does, it is a momentous artistic achievement.
Bob Dylan has released thirty-nine studio albums, which collectively have sold over 125 million copies around the world. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature and has been awarded the French Legion of Honor, a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. His memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, spent a year on the New York Times bestseller list.
The Philosophy of Modern Song
by Bob Dylan
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
November 1, 2022
Language: English
Hardcover
352 pages
ISBN-10: 1451648707
ISBN-13: 978-1451648706
$22.50
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The Rights of Women
Yes, injured Woman! rise, assert thy right!
Woman! too long degraded, scorned, opprest;
O born to rule in partial Law’s despite,
Resume thy native empire o’er the breast!
Go forth arrayed in panoply divine;
That angel pureness which admits no stain;
Go, bid proud Man his boasted rule resign,
And kiss the golden sceptre of thy reign.
Go, gird thyself with grace; collect thy store
Of bright artillery glancing from afar;
Soft melting tones thy thundering cannon’s roar,
Blushes and fears thy magazine of war.
Thy rights are empire: urge no meaner claim,—
Felt, not defined, and if debated, lost;
Like sacred mysteries, which withheld from fame,
Shunning discussion, are revered the most.
Try all that wit and art suggest to bend
Of thy imperial foe the stubborn knee;
Make treacherous Man thy subject, not thy friend;
Thou mayst command, but never canst be free.
Awe the licentious, and restrain the rude;
Soften the sullen, clear the cloudy brow:
Be, more than princes’ gifts, thy favours sued;—
She hazards all, who will the least allow.
But hope not, courted idol of mankind,
On this proud eminence secure to stay;
Subduing and subdued, thou soon shalt find
Thy coldness soften, and thy pride give way.
Then, then, abandon each ambitious thought,
Conquest or rule thy heart shall feebly move,
In Nature’s school, by her soft maxims taught,
That separate rights are lost in mutual love.
Anna Laetitia Barbauld
(1743 – 1825)
The Rights of Women
Anna Laetitia Barbauld wrote this poem in 1793,
in response to Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman´.
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In O, artist and writer Tammy Nguyen returns to Vietnam to visit the caves of the Phong Nha Karst.
This journey into the Karst’s “wind-carved teeth” resounds with the traditional songs of Nguyen’s guides, whose melodies produce the O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O that echoes through narratives woven together around it as a visual and sonic spine: the story of Nguyen’s Uncle Van, an opportunistic businessman who traded in Vietnamese porcelain vessels; her coming-of-age as a child with missing teeth, and the material and mineral histories of the veneers that eventually completed her “American Smile”; the plastic paradise of the man-made island of Forest City, a simulacrum of natural beauty kept uncannily bright and lush by the flow of global investment capital; and, behind it all, a retelling of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave that supplies what the original parable lacked: an understanding of fantasy’s role in the construction of a sublime.
In O’s anti-allegory, the personal and geopolitical sit uncomfortably alongside one another. The shape of a bowl becomes the mouth of a cave. The uncanny naturalism of Nguyen’s zirconium veneers reflect Forest City’s manicured paradise.
What emerges is a kaleidoscopic meditation on the play of language across scales: how it rebounds between our stories of self and the semantic regimes of global capital alike.
Tammy Nguyen is a multimedia artist and writer whose work spans painting, drawing, printmaking, and publishing. Intersecting geopolitical realities with fiction, her practice addresses lesser-known histories through a blend of myth and visual narrative. She is the founder of Passenger Pigeon Press, an independent press that joins the work of scientists, journalists, creative writers, and artists to create politically nuanced and cross-disciplinary projects. In 2008, she received a Fulbright scholarship to study lacquer painting in Vietnam, where she remained and worked with a ceramics company for three years thereafter. Nguyen received an MFA from Yale in 2013 and was awarded the Van Lier Fellowship at Wave Hill in 2014 and a NYFA Fellowship in painting in 2021. She was included in Greater New York 2021 at MOMA PS1 and has also exhibited at Nichido Contemporary Art in Japan, Smack Mellon, Rubin Museum, The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre in Vietnam, and the Bronx Museum, among others. Her work is included in the collections of Yale University, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, MIT Library, the Seattle Art Museum, the Walker Art Center Library, and the Museum of Modern Art Library. She is Assistant Professor of Art at Wesleyan University.
O
by Tammy Nguyen
Binding:Paperback
Pages:144
Publ.date:9/1/2022
Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse
Product Number:9781946433916
ISBN: 978-1-946433-91-6
Price: $ 30.00
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Poems
No Muse will I invoke; for she is fled!
Lo! where she sits, breathing, yet all but dead.
She loved the heavens of old, she thought them fair;
And dream’d of Gods in Tempe’s golden air.
For her the wind had voice, the sea its cry;
She deem’d heroic Greece could never die.
Breathless was she, to think what nymphs might play
In clear green depths, deep-shaded from the day;
She thought the dim and inarticulate god
Was beautiful, nor knew she man a sod;
But hoped what seem’d might not be all untrue,
And feared to look beyond the eternal blue.
But now the heavens are bared of dreams divine.
Still murmurs she, like Autumn, ´This was mine!’
How should she face the ghastly, jarring Truth,
That questions all, and tramples without ruth?
And still she clings to Ida of her dreams,
And sobs, ´Ah! let the world be what it seems!’
Then the shy nymph shall softly come again;
The world, once more, make music for her pain.
For, sitting in the dim and ghostly night,
She fain would stay the strong approach of light;
While later bards cleave to her, and believe
That in her sorrow she can still conceive!
Oh, let her dream; still lovely is her sigh;
Oh, rouse her not, or she shall surely die.
Stephen Phillips
(1864 – 1915)
Poems
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Travel
The railroad track is miles away,
And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn’t a train goes by all day
But I hear its whistle shrieking.
All night there isn’t a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And hear its engine steaming.
My heart is warm with the friends I make,
And better friends I’ll not be knowing,
Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,
No matter where it’s going.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1892 – 1950)
Travel
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The Italian Soldier
Shook My Hand
The Italian soldier shook my hand
Beside the guard-room table;
The strong hand and the subtle hand
Whose palms are only able
To meet within the sounds of guns,
But oh! what peace I knew then
In gazing on his battered face
Purer than any woman’s!
For the flyblown words that make me spew
Still in his ears were holy,
And he was born knowing that I had learned
Out of books and slowly.
The treacherous guns had told their tale
And we both had bought it,
But my gold brick was made of gold –
Oh! who ever would have thought it?
Good luck go with you, Italian soldier!
But luck is not for the brave;
What would the world give back to you?
Always less than you gave.
Between the shadow and the ghost,
Between the white and the red,
Between the bullet and the lie,
Where would hide your head?
For where is Manuel Gonzalez,
And where is Pedro Aguilar,
And where is Ramon Fenellosa?
The earthworms know where they are.
Your name and your deeds were forgotten
Before your bones were dry,
And the lie that slew you is buried
Under a deeper lie;
But the thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.
George Orwell
(1903 – 1950)
The Italian Soldier Shook My Hand
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Taken from ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’, published by New Road, 1943. Poem written 1939
More in: Archive O-P, Archive O-P, George Orwell, Orwell, George
In a landscape scarred by conflict, two women begin a quest for a lost child and a lost world of peace.
Bound together by love and acceptance, their story and path interweave with fellow outcasts — people like the ever-suave Dame Blanche, Sister Asunta, martial artist and magician, Master Wu Wu, and the lost soul, Tulip — but whether peace is simply the end of war or something deeper is something they must discover for themselves.
A haunting tale, told in a series of visionary prose poems, The True Story of Cowboy Hat & Ingénue interweaves memory and yearning to ask questions that reflect on our past and, disturbingly, on our futures.
Maria Jastrzębska is a Polish-born poet, editor and translator. Her most recent collection was At The Library of Memories (Waterloo Press 2013) and her selected poems, The Cedars of Walpole Park, have been translated into Polish by Anna Błasiak, Paweł Gawroński and Wioletta Grzegorzewska and published bilingually (Stowarzyszenie ŻŻwych Poetów 2015). Old Knives is a selection of her work translated into Romanian by Lidia Vianu and published bilingually by Integral Contemporary Literature Press (2017). She was co-editor with Anthony Luvera of Queer in Brighton (New Writing South 2014). She co-translated Iztok Osojnik’s selected poems Elsewhere with Ana Jelnikar and her translations of Justyna Bargielska’s selected poems The Great Plan B are published by Smokestack Press (2017). Her work features in the British Library poetry and translation project Poetry Between Two Worlds. Dementia Diaries, her literary drama, toured nationally with Lewes Live Lit in 2011. Her poems have been much anthologized from The Virago Book of Wicked Verse (1992) to This Line Is Not For Turning — An Anthology of Contemporary British Prose Poetry (Cinnamon Press 2011) and Hallelujah for 50ft Women (Bloodaxe 2015). Maria lives in Brighton and you can discover more about her work on her website. (https://mariajastrzebska.wordpress.com/)
The True Story of Cowboy Hat & Ingénue
Maria Jastrzębska
Prose-poetry
Language: English
Publisher: Cinnamon Press
2018
Paperback
70 pages
ISBN-10: 1911540033
ISBN-13: 978-1911540038
Price: 14,27 euro
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At Melville’s Tomb
Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.
And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.
Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.
Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides . . . High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.
Hart Crane
(1889 – 1932)
At Melville’s Tomb
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Michael Rosen was dangerously ill from COVID at the beginning of 2020 and as doctors told him, if he hadn’t received treatment, he would have ‘gone’.
While he was in hospital, 42% of the patients on his intensive care ward died. He spent three months in hospital, of which nearly seven weeks were in an induced coma, followed by several weeks recovering in an ordinary ward and then in a Rehabilitation Hospital.
He couldn’t walk and his memory was damaged. Three years later his hearing and eyesight are still badly affected (‘I can’t hear with my left eye, I can’t see with my left ear and I get muddled’).
Following his best-selling COVID memoirs Many Different Kinds of Love: a story of life, death and the NHS and Sticky McStickstick: the friend who helped me walk again, his new collection for grown-ups records his bewilderment with what’s happened, and shares his thoughts about the politics of the pandemic – the ‘crazed incompetence’ of the Tory government and the war against the ‘Oldies’ that led to over 200,000 dead in the UK.
Unforgiving, whimsical, grim, warm, philosophical and comical, The Advantages of Nearly Dying is a book about hospital appointments, waiting-rooms, blood-tests, brain-scans, eye-tests – and a song of praise for the NHS.
Michael Rosen, an English poet, scriptwriter, broadcaster, and performer, has been writing for children since 1970. He lives in London with his wife and five children.
The Advantages of Nearly Dying
Poems by Michael Rosen
Published: 1s Paperback edition , t March 2023
Publisher: Smokestack Books
Language: English
Paperback: 220 pages
ISBN-10:1739772296
ISBN-13:978-1739772291
£8.99
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Même féerie
La lune mince verse une lueur sacrée,
Comme une jupe d’un tissu d’argent léger,
Sur les masses de marbre où marche et croit songer
Quelque vierge de perle et de gaze nacrée.
Pour les cygnes soyeux qui frôlent les roseaux
De carènes de plume à demi lumineuse,
Sa main cueille et dispense une rose neigeuse
Dont les pétales font des cercles sur les eaux.
Délicieux désert, solitude pâmée,
Quand le remous de l’eau par la lune lamée
Compte éternellement ses échos de cristal,
Quel cœur pourrait souffrir l’inexorable charme
De la nuit éclatante au firmament fatal,
Sans tirer de soi-même un cri pur comme une arme ?
Paul Valéry
(1871-1945)
Même féerie
Poème
Album de vers anciens
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