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They asked me what I thought of the atomic bomb. I said I had not been able to take any interest in it.
I like to read detective and mystery stories. I never get enough of them but whenever one of them is or was about death rays and atomic bombs I never could read them.
What is the use, if they are really as destructive as all that there is nothing left and if there is nothing there nobody to be interested and nothing to be interested about. If they are not as destructive as all that then they are just a little more or less destructive than other things and that means that in spite of all destruction there are always lots left on this earth to be interested or to be willing and the thing that destroys is just one of the things that concerns the people inventing it or the people starting it off, but really nobody else can do anything about it so you have to just live along like always, so you see the atomic [bomb] is not at all interesting, not any more interesting than any other machine, and machines are only interesting in being invented or in what they do, so why be interested.
I never could take any interest in the atomic bomb, I just couldn’t any more than in everybody’s secret weapon. That it has to be secret makes it dull and meaningless. Sure it will destroy a lot and kill a lot, but it’s the living that are interesting not the way of killing them, because if there were not a lot left living how could there be any interest in destruction.
Alright, that is the way I feel about it. They think they are interested about the atomic bomb but they really are not not any more than I am. Really not. They may be a little scared, I am not so scared, there is so much to be scared of so what is the use of bothering to be scared, and if you are not scared the atomic bomb is not interesting.
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.
Gertrude Stein, 1946
(First published in Yale Poetry Review, December 1947)
Stein, Gertrude
(1874-1946)
Reflection on the Atomic Bomb
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Alice in Winterland is the story of a strange and subversive wonderland, of a worm who thinks he is a caterpillar and the Baba Yaga who became a witch. It’s a book about life in post-Soviet Russia, mad hatters, tears and temptations. It is a story of exile, heartbreak, loneliness and longing, about falling down a cultural and linguistic rabbit hole.
Julie Egdell has been published in magazines and anthologies in the UK, Mexico and France in Bloodaxe’s Hallelujah for 50ft Women and Ek Zuban’s The Break-Out Anthology. She also features in theDark Matter 4 chapbook published by Black Light Engine Room Press. Alice in Winterland is her first full-length collection. She lives in Whitley Bay.
Growing up in Whitley Bay, Julie Egdell never knew how much she had in common with Lewis Carroll’s Alice. But when she went to work in St Petersburg she discovered that she was the spitting image of the Russian version of Alice – not Tenniel’s blonde school-girl, but the dark-haired ‘Alisa’ of Soviet illustrated children’s stories, sarcastic and cruel and very Russian. A new city, a new language and a new identity. What could possibly go wrong?
I watch boats come in.
Not so many as years gone by, but a few.
I am not an English rose
but a thistle on this bank,
hard and sharp.
In the northern city,
the only place I have
to call home.
(from: Collingwood)
Julie Egdell:
Alice in Winterland
Poetry
Publisher: Smokestack Books
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0995563594
ISBN-13: 978-0995563599
Released on December 31, 2017
Price: £7.95
Paperback
84 pages
# New poetry
Julie Egdell
• fleursdumal.nl magazine
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Weg van mijn stilte
In het venster waaien de bomen
met hun takken maken ze de wind
maar nu het winter is en ze
naakt zijn blijft het toch waaien
Bij de haard benee’ bomen ze zacht
de boze woorden mogen ze niet storen
als die wakker worden galmt
de onmin door de slaande wind
In mijn kamer slaat een boomtak
tegen de ijsbloemen op het raam
waar ik jouw naam op schrijf
dat je van hier bent weggewaaid
weten de bomen, ik heb het ze verteld
het is net zoiets als loslaten
als vallend blad, dat voor altijd
weg van mijn stilte, weg van mij waait
Niels Landstra
Op 24 november 2018 verschijnt de Vijfde dichtbundel: Entree naar de hemel van Niels Landstra. Niels Landstra is a poet and writer, who lives and works in Raamsdonksveer (nl)
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“I am the man,” wrote Artaud, “who has best charted his inmost self.” Antonin Artaud was a great poet who, like Poe, Holderlin, and Nerval, wanted to live in the infinite and asked that the human spirit burn in absolute freedom.
To society, he was a madman. Artaud, however, was not insane, but in luciferian pursuit of what society keeps hidden. The man who wrote Van Gogh the Man Suicided by Society raged against the insanity of social institutions with insight that proves more prescient with every passing year. Today, as Artaud’s vatic thunder still crashes above the “larval confusion” he despised, what is most striking in his writings is an extravagant lucidity.
This collection gives us quintessential Artaud on the occult, magic, the theater, mind and body, the cosmos, rebellion, and revolution in its deepest sense.
Title Artaud Anthology
Author Antonin Artaud
Edited by Jack Hirschman
Publisher City Lights Publishers
Format: Paperback
Nb of pages 256 p.
First published 1963
ISBN-10 0872860000
ISBN-13 9780872860001
$15.95
# new books
Antonin Artaud
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Sinds de vertaling van Marko Fondse van Majakovski’s werken uitkwam, vijfentwintig jaar geleden, is diens poëzie niet meer weg te denken uit de Nederlandse boekhandel. De ongeëvenaarde lenigheid van de taal die Fondse wist aan te boren zette de dichter hier voorgoed op de kaart.
Met de ge-update versie van de poëzie van Majakovski zijn zijn beroemde poèma’s en andere gedichten nu weer beschikbaar. Het bekende Een wolk in broek en Mens, die dateren van voor de revolutie van 1917, laten de gepassioneerde (liefdes)dichter in optima forma zien. De grote gedichten Ik heb lief en Daarover, van na de revolutie, zijn twee positieve uitzonderingen op de socialistische poëzie waaraan Majakovski zijn dichterschap ten slotte offerde: daarin keert de bravoure van zijn vroege lyriek even terug.
Deze uitgave van Majakovski’s poëzie is voor de gelegenheid aangevuld met een grote hoeveelheid gedichten uit zijn enorme oeuvre. Vele daarvan verschenen niet eerder in Nederlandse vertaling. De herziening en uitbreiding zijn in handen van Majakovski-vertaler Yolanda Bloemen.
Alles waarvoor de dichter Vladimir Majakovski (1893–1930) hartstochtelijk leefde en werkte, de revolutie en de opbouw van het socialisme, is een eeuw na zijn geboorte grondig in diskrediet geraakt en ineengestort. Naar Majakovski’s socialistische poëzie kijkt bijna geen mens meer om. Wel wordt zijn voorrevolutionaire werk nog gelezen: de gedichten van Een wolk in broek tot en met Mens, een ding, met hun unieke mixtuur van lyrische, epische en dramatische kwaliteiten. Na 1917 wist Majakovski zich nog twee maal van zijn socialistische preoccupaties los te maken in de twee grote poëma’s Ik heb lief en Daarover (1921-1923).
Auteur: Vladimir Majakovski
Titel: Verzamelde gedichten
Vertalingen: Marko Fondse, Yolanda Bloemen e.a.
Taal: Nederlands
Uitgever: Uitgeverij van Oorschot
Bindwijze: Paperback
Verschijningsdatum: september 2018
Druk: 1e druk
Afmetingen: 21 x 13 x 2,9 cm
Aantal pagina’s: 480
ISBN-13 9789028280915
ISBN-10 902828091X
€ 29,99
# new poetry translations
Vladimir Majakovski
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The Poetry Deal is the first full-length collection of individual poems in decades from legendary feminist Beat poet, Diane di Prima.
Framed by two passionate, and critical, prose statements assessing her adopted home city, The Poetry Deal is a collection of poems that provide a personal and political look at 40 years of Bay Area culture. Often elegiac in tone, the book captures the poet’s sense of loss as she chronicles the deaths of friends from the AIDS epidemic as well as the passing of illustrious countercultural colleagues like Philip Whalen, Pigpen from the Grateful Dead, and Kirby Doyle.
She also recalls and mourns out-of-town inspirations like Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Audre Lorde, and Ezra Pound. Yet even as she laments the state of her city today, she finds triumph and solace in her own relationships, the marriages of her friends, the endurance of City Lights, and other symbols of San Francisco’s heritage.
Born in Brooklyn in 1934, di Prima emerged as a member of the Beat Generation in New York in the late ’50s; in the early ’60s, she founded the important mimeo magazine, The Floating Bear, with her lover LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). In the late ’60s, she moved to San Francisco, where she would publish her groundbreaking Revolutionary Letters (1971) with City Lights. Her other important books include Memoirs of a Beatnik, Pieces of a Dream, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, and Loba. She was named San Francisco Poet Laureate in 2009.
“The Poetry Deal is fresh flame from a revolutionary fire that continues to burn. Every woman of every age should carry it in a purse with their pepper spray. Diane is the ultimate weapon.”—Amber Tamblyn, author of Dark Sparkler
Title The Poetry Deal
Subtitle San Francisco Poet Laureate Series No. 5
Author Diane di Prima
Collection San Francisco Poet Laureates
Publisher City Lights Publishers
Publication 2014
Format Paperback
ISBN-10 1931404151
ISBN-13 9781931404150
pages 120
Price $11.95
# new books
Diane di Prima poet
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More in: #Beat Generation Archives, - Book Lovers, - Book News, Archive O-P, Archive O-P, Art & Literature News
1 Stern und 7 kazamogipuffel
1 Stern und 7 kazamogipuffel
macht 13 zakopaddogei
zubtrahiere 5 franschöse Männlin
macht 1 Libanotterbett
nehme 3 Quentlin Klotzpulfer
legs in himmelsdeifelsnamen
dabei, wirst sehen wohinst
kommst wnr bällt wnr heult
wnr pfaucht wnre Daugen däht
Hugo Ball
(1886-1927)
gedicht
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A Victor Hugo – Poéme
De votre amitié, maître, emportant cette preuve
Je tiens donc sous mon bras le Rhin.
—J’ai l’air d’un fleuve
El je me sens grandir par la comparaison.
Mais le Fleuve sait-il lui pauvre
Dieu sauvage
Ce qui lui donne un nom, une source, un rivage,
Et s’il coule pour tous quelle en est la raison.
Assis au mamelon de l’immense nature,
Peut-être ignore-t-il comme la créature
D’où lui vient ce bienfait qu’il doit aux Immortels:
Moi je sais que de vous, douce et sainte habitude,
Me vient l’Enthousiasme et l’Amour et l’Étude,
Et que mon peu de feu s’allume à vos autels.
Gérard de Nerval
(1808 – 1855)
A Victor Hugo – Poéme
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More in: Archive M-N, Hugo, Victor, Nerval, Gérard de, Victor Hugo
In this haunting collection of poems we travel through zones of violence to reach the crystalline depths of words – –
Meena Alexander writes `So landscape becomes us, / Also an interior space bristling with light`. At the heart of this book is the poem cycle ‘Indian Ocean Blues’, a sustained meditation on the journey of the poet as a young child from India to Sudan..There are poems inspired by the drawings of children from war torn Darfur and others set in New York City in the present. These sensual lyrics of body, memory and place evoke the fragile, shifting nature of dwelling in our times.
Meena Alexander is an award-winning author and scholar whose previous volumes of poetry include Birthplace with Buried Stones, Quickly Changing River, Raw Silk, and Illiterate Heart (winner of the PEN Open Book Award), all published by TriQuarterly/Northwestern. Her poetry has been translated into several languages and set to music. She is also the author of an acclaimed autobiography, Fault Lines, as well as two novels; an academic study, Women in Romanticism; and a collection of essays, Poetics of Dislocation. Alexander is Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York and teaches at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Atmospheric Embroidery
Poems by Meena Alexander
Trade Paper – $17.95
NorthwesternPress
ISBN 978-0-8101-3760-8
ISBN 978-0-8101-3761-5
Publication Date June 2018
Categories: Poetry
Page Count 112 pages
new poetry
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The story of literature in sixteen acts—from Homer to Harry Potter, including The Tale of Genji, Don Quixote, The Communist Manifesto, and how they shaped world history
In this groundbreaking book, Martin Puchner leads us on a remarkable journey through time and around the globe to reveal the how stories and literature have created the world we have today. Through sixteen foundational texts selected from more than four thousand years of world literature, he shows us how writing has inspired the rise and fall of empires and nations, the spark of philosophical and political ideas, and the birth of religious beliefs.
We meet Murasaki, a lady from eleventh-century Japan who wrote the first novel, The Tale of Genji, and follow the adventures of Miguel de Cervantes as he battles pirates, both seafaring and literary. We watch Goethe discover world literature in Sicily, and follow the rise in influence of The Communist Manifesto. Puchner takes us to Troy, Pergamum, and China, speaks with Nobel laureates Derek Walcott in the Caribbean and Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul, and introduces us to the wordsmiths of the oral epic Sunjata in West Africa. This delightful narrative also chronicles the inventions—writing technologies, the printing press, the book itself—that have shaped people, commerce, and history. In a book that Elaine Scarry has praised as “unique and spellbinding,” Puchner shows how literature turned our planet into a written world.
Martin Puchner is the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. His prize-winning books range from philosophy to the arts, and his bestselling six-volume Norton Anthology of World Literature and HarvardX MOOC (massive open online course) have brought four thousand years of literature to students across the globe. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Martin Puchner
The Written World
The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization
Random House Trade Paperbacks
Paperback
Jul 24, 2018
464 Pages
$20.00
ISBN 9780812988277
new books
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Proceeding from Hélène Cixous’s charge to “kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing,” The Fix forges that woman’s reckoning with her violent past, with her sexuality, and with a future unmoored from the trappings of domestic life.
These poems of lyric beauty and unflinching candor negotiate the terrain of contradictory desire—often to darkly comedic effect.
In encounters with strangers in dive bars and on highway shoulders, and through ekphrastic engagement with visionaries like William Blake, José Clemente Orozco, and the Talking Heads, this book seeks the real beneath the dissembling surface.
Here, nothing is fixed, but grace arrives by diving into the complicated past in order to find a way to live, now.
Often I am permitted to return to this kitchen
tipsy, pinned to the fridge, to the precise
instant the kiss smashed in.
When the jaws of night are grinding
and the double bed is half asleep
the snore beside me syncs
to the traffic light, pulsing red, ragged up
in the linen curtain.
(From “Woman Seated with Thighs Apart”)
Lisa Wells is a poet and nonfiction writer who lives in Tucson, Arizona. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, the Believer, Denver Quarterly, Rumpus, Third Coast, and the Iowa Review.
Lisa Wells (Author)
The Fix
Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
1 edition (April 15, 2018)
Series: Iowa Poetry Prize
Language: English
Product Dimensions:
6 x 0.3 x 8 inches
ISBN-10: 1609385470
ISBN-13: 978-1609385477
Paperback
70 pages
$19.95
new poetry
lisa wells: the fix
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Jenny Xie’s award-winning debut, Eye Level, takes us far and near, to Phnom Penh, Corfu, Hanoi, New York, and elsewhere, as we travel closer and closer to the acutely felt solitude that centers this searching, moving collection.
“Magnificent . . . [Jenny Xie] braids in the lonesomeness and sorrow of being unmoored and on your own.”—The Paris Review, Staff Picks
Animated by a restless inner questioning, these poems meditate on the forces that moor the self and set it in motion, from immigration to travel to estranging losses and departures. The sensual worlds here―colors, smells, tastes, and changing landscapes―bring to life questions about the self as seer and the self as seen.
As Xie writes, “Me? I’m just here in my traveler’s clothes, trying on each passing town for size.” Her taut, elusive poems exult in a life simultaneously crowded and quiet, caught in between things and places, and never quite entirely at home. Xie is a poet of extraordinary perception―both to the tangible world and to “all that is untouchable as far as the eye can reach.”
Jenny Xie was born in Hefei, China, and raised in New Jersey. She holds degrees from Princeton University and New York University, and has received fellowships and support from Kundiman, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and Poets & Writers. She is the recipient of the 2017 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets for Eye Level and the 2016 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize for Nowhere to Arrive. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, the New Republic, Tin House, and elsewhere. She teaches at New York University.
“For years now, I’ve been using the wrong palette.
Each year with its itchy blue, as the bruise of solitude reaches its expiration date.
Planes and buses, guesthouse to guesthouse.
I’ve gotten to where I am by dint of my poor eyesight,
my overreactive motion sickness.
9 p.m., Hanoi’s Old Quarter: duck porridge and plum wine.
Voices outside the door come to a soft boil.”
(from “Phnom Penh Diptych: Dry Season”)
Title Eye Level
Subtitle Poems
Author Jenny Xie
Publisher Graywolf Press
Format Paperback
ISBN-10 1555978029
ISBN-13 9781555978020
Publication Date 03 April 2018
Main content page count 80
$16.00
new poetry
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