The Song Of Iron by Lola Ridge

The Song Of Iron

Not yet hast Thou sounded
Thy clangorous music,
Whose strings are under the mountains…
Not yet hast Thou spoken
The blooded, implacable Word…

But I hear in the Iron singing –
In the triumphant roaring of the steam and pistons pounding –
Thy barbaric exhortation…
And the blood leaps in my arteries, unreproved,
Answering Thy call…
All my spirit is inundated with the tumultuous passion of Thy Voice,
And sings exultant with the Iron,
For now I know I too am of Thy Chosen…

Oh fashioned in fire –
Needing flame for Thy ultimate word –
Behold me, a cupola
Poured to Thy use!

Heed not my tremulous body
That faints in the grip of Thy gauntlet.
Break it… and cast it aside…
But make of my spirit
That dares and endures
Thy crucible…
Pour through my soul
Thy molten, world-whelming song.

… Here at Thy uttermost gate
Like a new Mary, I wait…

Charge the blast furnace, workman…
Open the valves –
Drive the fires high…
(Night is above the gates).

How golden-hot the ore is
From the cupola spurting,
Tossing the flaming petals
Over the silt and furnace ash –
Blown leaves, devastating,
Falling about the world…

Out of the furnace mouth –
Out of the giant mouth –
The raging, turgid, mouth –
Fall fiery blossoms
Gold with the gold of buttercups
In a field at sunset,
Or huskier gold of dandelions,
Warmed in sun-leavings,
Or changing to the paler hue
At the creamy hearts of primroses.

Charge the converter, workman –
Tired from the long night?
But the earth shall suck up darkness –
The earth that holds so much…
And out of these molten flowers,
Shall shape the heavy fruit…

Then open the valves –
Drive the fires high,
Your blossoms nurturing.
(Day is at the gates
And a young wind…)

Put by your rod, comrade,
And look with me, shading your eyes…
Do you not see –
Through the lucent haze
Out of the converter rising –
In the spirals of fire
Smiting and blinding,
A shadowy shape
White as a flame of sacrifice,
Like a lily swaying?

III

The ore leaping in the crucibles,
The ore communicant,
Sending faint thrills along the leads…
Fire is running along the roots of the mountains…
I feel the long recoil of earth
As under a mighty quickening…
(Dawn is aglow in the light of the Iron…)
All palpitant, I wait…

Here ye, Dictators – late Lords of the Iron,
Shut in your council rooms, palsied, depowered –
The blooded, implacable Word?
Not whispered in cloture, one to the other,
(Brother in fear of the fear of his brother…)
But chanted and thundered
On the brazen, articulate tongues of the Iron
Babbling in flame…

Sung to the rhythm of prisons dismantled,
Manacles riven and ramparts defaced…
(Hearts death-anointed yet hearing life calling…)
Ankle chains bursting and gallows unbraced…

Sung to the rhythm of arsenals burning…
Clangor of iron smashing on iron,
Turmoil of metal and dissonant baying
Of mail-sided monsters shattered asunder…

Hulks of black turbines all mangled and roaring,
Battering egress through ramparted walls…
Mouthing of engines, made rabid with power,
Into the holocaust snorting and plunging…

Mighty converters torn from their axis,
Flung to the furnaces, vomiting fire,
Jumbled in white-heaten masses disshapen…
Writhing in flame-tortured levers of iron…

Gnashing of steel serpents twisting and dying…
Screeching of steam-glutted cauldrons rending…
Shock of leviathans prone on each other…
Scaled flanks touching, ore entering ore…
Steel haunches closing and grappling and swaying
In the waltz of the mating locked mammoths of iron,
Tasting the turbulent fury of living,
Mad with a moment’s exuberant living!
Crash of devastating hammers despoiling..
Hands inexorable, marring
What hands had so cunningly moulded…

Structures of steel welded, subtily tempered,
Marvelous wrought of the wizards of ore,
Torn into octaves discordantly clashing,
Chords never final but onward progressing
In monstrous fusion of sound ever smiting on sound
in mad vortices whirling…

Till the ear, tortured, shrieks for cessation
Of the raving inharmonies hatefully mingling…
The fierce obligato the steel pipes are screaming…
The blare of the rude molten music of Iron…

Lola Ridge
(1873-1941)
The Song Of Iron

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The Hurting Kind. Poetry by Ada Limón

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness—between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves—from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.

“I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers,” writes Limón.

“I am the hurting kind.”

What does it mean to be the hurting kind?

To be sensitive not only to the world’s pain and joys, but to the meanings that bend in the scrim between the natural world and the human world?

To divine the relationships between us all?

To perceive ourselves in other beings—and to know that those beings are resolutely their own, that they “do not / care to be seen as symbols”?

With Limón’s remarkable ability to trace thought, The Hurting Kind explores those questions—incorporating others’ stories and ways of knowing, making surprising turns, and always reaching a place of startling insight.

These poems slip through the seasons, teeming with horses and kingfishers and the gleaming eyes of fish.

And they honor parents, stepparents, and grandparents: the sacrifices made, the separate lives lived, the tendernesses extended to a hurting child; the abundance, in retrospect, of having two families.

Along the way,we glimpse loss. There are flashes of the pandemic, ghosts whose presence manifests in unexpected memories and the mysterious behavior of pets left behind. But The Hurting Kind is filled, above all, with connection and the delight of being in the world.

“Slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still / green in the morning’s shade,” writes Limón of a groundhog in her garden, “she is doing what she can to survive.”

Ada Limón grew up in Glen Ellen and Sonoma, California. A graduate of New York University’s MFA Creative Writing Program, she has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry. She is the author of three books of poetry, Lucky Wreck (Autumn House Press, 2006), This Big Fake World (Pearl Editions, 2007), and Sharks in the Rivers (Milkweed Editions, 2010). She is currently at work on a novel, a book of essays, and a new collection of poems. Ada Limón became the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States in July of 2022.

The Hurting Kind
by Ada Limón (Author)
Publisher: ‎ Milkweed Editions
May 10, 2022
Language: ‎ English
Hardcover: ‎120 pages
ISBN-10: ‎1639550496
ISBN-13: ‎978-1639550494
$17.99

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Ik sta helemaal alleen. Biografie Theo van Doesburg

Theo van Doesburg (1883 – 1931)
was behalve beeldend kunstenaar ook criticus, tijdschriftredacteur, architect, dichter en wat al niet. en wat al niet.

Alles in zijn leven deed hij met een enorme gedrevenheid en doorzettingsvermogen. Steeds verkondigde hij luidruchtig zijn visie, en hij was niet gediend van tegenspraak.

Voortdurend was hij bezig zijn leven en dat van anderen richting te geven.

Als redacteur van De Stijl, het tijdschrift dat hij in 1917 met Piet Mondriaan en andere geestverwanten had opgericht, kwam hij in contact met iedereen die er in het modernistische Europa toe deed.

Over Van Doesburg zijn duizenden publicaties verschenen, maar deze monumentale biografie, waarvoor de auteurs talloze archieven in Europa en Amerika raadpleegden, is de eerste die alle facetten van dit veelkantige leven belicht.

Hans Renders (1957), verbonden aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, schreef de geruchtmakende biografie van Jan Hanlo en is als criticus werkzaam voor Het Parool en Vrij Nederland. In 2000 publiceerde hij bij De Bezige Bij het boek Braak, over het vermaarde tijdschrijft van de Vijftigers waarin onder meer Remco Campert en Lucebert publiceerden. In 2004 verscheen zijn biografie van Jan Campert, Wie weet slaag ik in de dood en een bloemlezing uit het dichterlijke oeuvre van Jan Campert. Datzelfde jaar verscheen de door hem samengestelde uitgave Gevaarlijk Drukwerk. Een vrije uitgeverij in oorlogstijd. Renders is mede-oprichter van de Jan Hanlo-Essayprijs, redacteur van ZL (Literair-Historisch Tijdschrift) en medewerker van Histoire des Médias; Revue d’histoire en American Journalism History.

Sjoerd van Faassen is geassocieerd onderzoeker bij rkd- Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis en werkte mee aan Van Doesburgs Oeuvrecatalogus. Hij bezorgde twee uitgaven met Van Doesburgs correspondentie, en publiceerde onder meer een monografie over Nederlands-Belgische modernistische netwerken in het interbellum. Hij is redacteur van het cultuurhistorische tijdschrift Rode Haring. Onder zijn redactie verscheen onder meer Roomse ruzie, over het literaire tijdschrift De Gemeenschap (1925-1941).

Ik sta helemaal alleen
Biografie Theo van Doesburg
Auteur(s): Hans Renders, Sjoerd van Faassen
ISBN: 9789403134314
NUR: 641
Type: Gebonden
Aantal pagina’s: 784
Uitgever: De Bezige Bij
Verschijningsdatum: 29-09-2022
Prijs: 49,99

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An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe by Heidi Seaborn

Poetry. An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe is a middle-of-the-night poetic conversation with Marilyn Monroe that explores obsessions, addictions, abuse, objectification, marriage, work, children, childlessness and death.

Pressing on the themes of her acclaimed debut, Give a Girl Chaos, Seaborn illuminates the biographical and emotional journey of Marilyn as intimacies whispered between two women.

These are women who have lived “on the glittering edge” and know that when a third husband “draws a blank page from his typewriter,” it means she needs to go to work in a world dominated by men.

In An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn is a resilient, intelligent feminist who understands how to accumulate and wield power in the 1950’s. She is also vulnerable, exploited, and broken in so many ways.

We see the speaker discover Marilyn until “then she is everywhere,” a haunting presence that becomes both muse and reflection. Seaborn invites us into the poetic soul of the world’s most famous woman with poems that celebrate and mourn. An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe is a sequined meditation on what keeps us up at night and what fills our dreams.

Heidi Seaborn wrote poetry as teenager then pursued a career as a business executive. She moved 27 times, raised three children, divorced and remarried and then after a 40-year hiatus, returned to poetry in 2016. Since then she’s authored two full-length collections of poetry and three chapbooks of poetry, won or been shortlisted for over two dozen awards and been published widely. She is Executive Editor of THE ADROIT JOURNAL and holds an MFA in Poetry from NYU and a BA from Stanford University. She lives in Seattle.

An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe
by Heidi Seaborn (Author)
Paperback
June 10, 2021
Pages: 84
Publisher: ‎ PANK Books (June 10, 2021)
Language: ‎ English
ISBN-10: ‎194858719X
ISBN-13: ‎978-1948587198
$18.00

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Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head. Poems by Warsan Shire

With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a young girl, who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own way toward womanhood.

Drawing from her own life, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women and teenage girls. In Shire’s hands, lives spring into fullness. This is noisy life, full of music and weeping and surahs and sirens and birds. This is fragrant life, full of blood and perfume and shisha smoke and jasmine and incense.

This is polychrome life, full of henna and moonlight and lipstick and turmeric and kohl. The long-awaited collection from one of our most exciting contemporary poets, this book is a blessing, an incantatory celebration of resilience and survival. Each reader will come away changed.

Warsan Shire is a Somali British writer and poet born in Nairobi and raised in London. She has written two chapbooks, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth and Her Blue Body. She was awarded the inaugural Brunel International African Poetry Prize and served as the first Young Poet Laureate of London. She is the youngest member of the Royal Society of Literature and is included in the Penguin Modern Poets series. Shire wrote the poetry for the Peabody Award–winning visual album Lemonade and the Disney film Black Is King in collaboration with Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. She also wrote the short film Brave Girl Rising, highlighting the voices and faces of Somali girls in Africa’s largest refugee camp. Warsan Shire lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children. Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head is her full-length debut poetry collection.

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head
Poems
By Warsan Shire
Category: Poetry
Publisher : ‎ Random House Trade Paperbacks
(March 1, 2022)
Language: ‎ English
Paperback‏
96 pages
ISBN-10: ‎ 0593134354
ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0593134351
$17.00

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A Little Poem by George Orwell

A Little Poem

A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

And later still the times were good,
We were so easy to please,
We rocked our troubled thoughts to sleep
On the bosoms of the trees.

All ignorant we dared to own
The joys we now dissemble;
The greenfinch on the apple bough
Could make my enemies tremble.

But girl’s bellies and apricots,
Roach in a shaded stream,
Horses, ducks in flight at dawn,
All these are a dream.

It is forbidden to dream again;
We maim our joys or hide them:
Horses are made of chromium steel
And little fat men shall ride them.

I am the worm who never turned,
The eunuch without a harem;
Between the priest and the commissar
I walk like Eugene Aram;

And the commissar is telling my fortune
While the radio plays,
But the priest has promised an Austin Seven,
For Duggie always pays.

I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And woke to find it true;
I wasn’t born for an age like this;
Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

George Orwell
(1903 – 1950)
A Little Poem

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Joseph Roth: Rot und Weiß. Wanderer zwischen den Städten

»Ich habe die weissen Städte so wiedergefunden, wie ich sie in den Träumen gesehn hatte.

« Von Lyon über Vienne, Les Baux, Nîmes, Avignon und Arles, Tarascon nach Marseille – mit dreißig Jahren geht Joseph Roth den klingenden Namen der Sehnsuchtsorte seiner Jugend nach, sein frühester Traum erfüllt sich und er wird dort, wo er nie war, »wieder ein Kind«.

Ausgestattet mit einem Reportageauftrag der »Frankfurter Zeitung« geht Roth 1925 auf eine Reise durch den französischen Midi: »Die weißen Städte« des unteren Rhônetals und der Provence mit Marseille sind sein Ziel. Es sind die Orte, in die er sich als Kind aus dem galizischen Schtetl Brody gewünscht hat.

Was er als Reisebuch unter dem Titel Die weißen Städte komponiert, sollte so nie gedruckt werden. Das Buch, ein Schlüsselwerk Joseph Roths, erhält sich bloß als Typoskript. Auch in den späteren Werkausgaben und Anthologien findet es entweder entstellt oder nur in anteiliger Überlieferung Aufnahme. Nun werden Die weißen Städte erstmals vollständig, anhand des im Literaturarchiv Marbach verwahrten Typoskripts von Roths letzter Hand veröffentlicht.

Wie Joseph Roth auf seiner Reise durch Südfrankreich eine Traumreise in ost-westlicher Richtung reflektiert, hatte er zuvor die umgekehrte Route genommen: 1927 erscheint sein Großessay über das Ostjudentum Juden auf Wanderschaft, geschrieben für »Westeuropäer, die auf ihre sauberen Matratzen nicht stolz sind«.

Von galizischen Städten und dunklen Bethäusern – aber auch von Ostjuden in den westeuropäischen Ghettos von Paris, Wien und Berlin schreibt Roth. In der Zusammenschau mit den Weißen Städten, mit denen die Juden auf Wanderschaft vielfach korrespondieren, finden wir uns in der zentralen Stelle von Joseph Roths Werk, zwischen persönlichem Essay und literarischem Schreiben, zwischen der Feuilleton-Gewitztheit des Journalisten und der Poetik des Prosadichters.

Volker Breidecker führt durch beide Texte, reichert sie an durch Lektüren von Briefen an Freunde und Zeitgenossen, unveröffentlichten Texten aus den Archiven und entdeckt uns durch die tiefe Kennerschaft der Materialien in einem biographischen Essay den Joseph Roth der 1920er-Jahre.

Joseph Roth (1894–1939) war österreichisch-jüdischer Romancier und Journalist. Nach Kindheit und Jugend im galizischen Städtchen Brody wird Roth mit Stationen über Lemberg und Wien zu einem der wichtigsten Autoren der Zeit zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen. Er stirbt verarmt und nach schwerer Krankheit noch vor dem Ausbruch des Zweiten Weltkriegs 1939 in Paris.

Volker Breidecker (geb. 1952 in Mainz) ist als Literaturwissenschaftler und Publizist einer der besten Kenner Joseph Roths und seiner Zeitgenossen. Für die Andere Bibliothek erschloss er Leben, Werk und Schicksal von Grete De Francesco in ihrer wiederentdeckten Studie Die Macht des Charlatans (Band 434, Februar 2021).

Joseph Roth
Rot und Weiß
Wanderer zwischen den Städte
03.2022
Seitenanzahl: 334
Originalausgaben
Bandnummer: 446
Mit einem Nachwort von Volker Breidecker.
Originalausgabe, nummeriert und limitert.
Fadenheftung mit Lesebändchen.
Buchgestaltung: Buchgut, Berlin
ISBN: 9783847704461
44,00 EUR

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Wings in Time. Poetry by Callie Garnett

Callie Garnett’s first full-length collection of poems, Wings in Time, is a book one watches as much as reads.

Whether it be her memories of browsing now-extinct video stores, the tender lessons learned from children’s public television (Garnett’s mother is a long-time writer for Sesame Street), a student job at a CD & record shop, or Zoom meetings during quarantine back in her parents’ home, the four sections of this book nod toward media’s shifting formats and mirror the coming of age of the poet herself.

Garnett’s experiences and evocations have here been transcribed, recorded, rewound, shared and edited over emails, and nearly float context-less, full of the desire to touch the immaterial and the dematerialized.

Callie Garnett is the author of the chapbooks Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015) and On Knowingness (The Song Cave, 2017). Her poems have appeared in the PEN Poetry Series, the Poetry Foundation, No Tokens, The Recluse, and elsewhere. She works as an Editor at Bloomsbury Publishing.

Wings in Time
Callie Garnett
Pub Date:9/1/2021
Publisher: The Song Cave
ISBN978-1-7372775-0-7
Binding:PAPERBACK
Pages:110
Price: $ 18.95

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Teething. Poetry by Megha Rao

A story told in verse, Teething begins when Kochu, a young boy in Kerala, is caught kissing the neighbour’s son. All hell breaks loose, ending in Kochu taking his own life.

Years after the scandal, after discovering his suicide note, his oldest sister, Achu, sets out to uncover the mysteries of their dysfunctional family by putting pieces of their past back together.

Along the way, she discovers things she never noticed – their mother’s brokenness and obsession with the church, their father’s disturbing secrecy inside the bedroom, and, of course, their own individual traumas that stopped time altogether. Soon, Achu realizes that none of them will ever truly grow up until they live their lives all over again, from the very beginning.

Megha Rao is a confessional performance poet and a surrealist artist. Her work has been featured on platforms such as Penguin Random House India, Firstpost, The Open Road Review, New Asian Writing, The Alipore Post, Spoken Fest, Why Indian Men Rape and Thought Catalog. Megha is a postgraduate in English Literature from the University of Nottingham, UK, and is currently spending her time between Mumbai and Kerala.

Teething
by Megha Rao
Language: ‎ English
Publisher: ‎HarperCollins
(December 20, 2021)
Paperback
88 pages
ISBN-10: ‎9354894305
ISBN-13: ‎978-9354894305
$14.12

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Eva van Manen: Hoe zijn we hier gekomen?

De debuutbundel van artiest, songwriter en producer Eva van Manen.

Geveld door Covid-19 brengt een jonge vrouw twee maanden door in bed. Beperkt in haar bewegingsvrijheid, springt ze heen en weer tussen situaties waarin machtsverhoudingen een rol spelen. Ziek- tegenover gezond zijn, mannen tegenover vrouwen en het geheel tegenover het individu.

Als jonge vrouw die een zwaar ziekbed heeft beleefd, kan ze zich niet ontrekken aan de pure willekeur. Het is toeval wie ziek wordt, wie binnen bepaalde grenzen geboren wordt en wie als vrouw.

In Hoe zijn we hier gekomen? spit ze in haar herinneringen op zoek naar de wortels van de vraag hoe we hier gekomen zijn. In dit land, dit lichaam en dit politieke klimaat. De bundel is een aaneenrijging van schurende situaties en gedachten, in verre oorden en dichtbij huis.

Eva van Manen (1989) is artiest, dichter, songwriter en producer. Haar debuutalbum Politiek & Liefde overbrugt stijlen als rap, elektronica en gitaarpop met een persoonlijke invalshoek. Ze onderzoekt waar politiek en liefde elkaar treffen. Het lied Omdat we verdergaan afkomstig van Politiek & Liefde werd genomineerd voor de Annie M.G. Schmidtprijs 2021.

Hoe zijn we hier gekomen?
Eva van Manen
Uitgave: Paperback
Datum: 29-06-2021
Poëzie
Omvang: 80 pagina’s
Hollands Diep
ISBN: 9789048860906
Prijs: € 19,99