========

I am willing to be ignorant,
to embrace ignorance
as an activity not a fact.

No one instructed me in this.
I was taught to take action,
apply what I know and not wait.

Learning not knowing has
been, is slow, is the reception
of new matter, of transmission
from elsewhere, sitting in
the train, watching the
landscape move.

Not being ignorant for a while
until I know, but continually
unknowing even while actions
are carried out, having an
awareness, a recognised stream
of emptiness flowing always
alongside my Socratian self.

========

========

No wonder we know for
sure that the word comes
from god, or the great tree,

or some thing or being
beyond and behind
or above the word

so powerful that when
we hear it we partake
of its divinity.

No wonder we know
that all words are creations
and being written or spoken

are recreations,
and being seen or said
again, fall further from

their origin; that
the word is only visible
for an instant

it evaporates cannot be kept,
nor resorted to,
cannot be offered as proof

or dangled as enticement;
beautiful words flash from our
mouths as bubbles

from fish,
as seeds in the wind
already in decay

before they convey birth,
everyone knows to ignore
the contamination of interpreters.

========

When something issues forth
from the void, from no visible
or understandable source

we know it is sacred
and immortal, because
having no beginning

it can have no end,
we can easily agree
to this, listening when

we speak or read,
hearing only so far back
before words vaporize.

We hear them issue forth
not seeing or knowing
an end for any let loose

to dance away from us.

========

The idea or remembrance of something
outside, beyond, not cosmically
significant, not requiring years of
yoga, or fasting, the ontological
recall of something else
of elseness, of elsnessness,
the emptiness into which
such remembrance can come,
undefined, without specific aim,
the idea or remembrance,
the listening, I forget now
what it was I wanted,
or wanted to forget.

========

Georgette Heyer

Re-reading Georgette Heyer

or call 01223 339243 to make a credit/debit card booking

Seattle
===============

2009-10 Poetry Series
Presenting Sponsor: Seattle Times
Bookstore Sponsor: Open Books: A Poem Emporium

==========================================

Old School Square

6th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival-January 18-23, 2010

Festival lectures, readings and other ticketed events are open to anyone who wants to experience the best of the best in the poetry world. Will you be part of our audience? Will you open yourself up to a new experience of language? We promise you an experience that you will never forget.

=================================

Library of Congress

About Poetry at Noon

April 20 — Shakespeare’s Birthday Reading. [No submissions; just come and enjoy professional actors' reading.]

Gregynog Hall

Recycling Myths, Inventing Nationshisto

Images courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London and the University of Wales.
Contact Details
Recycling Myths, Inventing Nations
Department of English & Creative Writing
Aberystwyth University,
Hugh Owen Building,
Aberystwyth,
SY23 3DY
Tel: (01970) 622534 Fax: (01970) 622530 Email:myth2010@aber.ac.uk

==================================

UNESCO to celebrate Mark Centenary of Cuban Writer’s Birth (from the Cuban News Agency)

The United Nation Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) included the commemoration of the centenary of Cuban writer Jose Lezama Lima’s birth in the list of anniversaries to be celebrated by the institution in the 2010-2011 period.

The celebration was considered by the international organization at the request of Cuban institutions and was announced to the Cuban Permanent Delegation in UNESCO by Ahmed Sayyad, assistant director general for Foreign Relations and Cooperation.

The Cuban poet, essayist, narrator and editor Jose Lezama Lima was born in Havana in 1910 and died in 1976, and is considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century in Cuba.

He founded the Origenes magazine and a literary group and among his best- known works are the essays La expresión americana (American Expression) and Tratados en La Habana (Treaties in Havana), the novel Paradiso, and poetry books Muerte de Narciso (Death of Narcisus), Enemigo rumor (Enemy Rumor) and Dador among others.

The celebration of Lezama’s birth centenary by UNESCO and other activities to be held in Cuba to mark the date, will contribute to the international projection of the date and the promotion of the writer’s work.

==============================

Charles Olson

Call for Papers

CENTENARY CONFERENCE
June 4-6 2010
Simon Fraser University
Vancouver British Columbia

One hundred years after his birth, and fifty years after The New American Poetry anthology transformed the landscape of contemporary poetry, Charles Olson, arguably one of the most influential figures in twentieth century literature, remains a puzzlingly marginalized figure. As Ben Friedlander writes in Olson’s Collected Prose, it is “as if the unread Olson were the necessary ¾ submerged berg making possible the ¼ ice floe.” In the spirit of bringing Olson back into the polis—and delving into the “3/4 submerged” portion of this “maximal” figure—the Charles Olson Centenary Conference seeks new readings of Olson’s poetry, poetics, and his influence on twentieth and twenty-first century literature and culture. Topics to be addressed could include (but are not limited to):

● Black Mountain College reconsidered
● The New Canadian Poetry? Olson north of the border
● Olson, economics, and democracy
● Olson, geography, and the spatial turn
● Olson and American history
● Olson and the archive
● Olson / Melville / Shakespeare
● Olson and Mexico
● Olson, Women, and the Feminine
● Olson and his contemporaries
● Olson and 21st century poetry
● Olson’s influences/Olson’s influence
● Poetry as research
● Poetry and the polis
● The politics of poetic form

Please submit abstracts of 250-500 words to Stephen Collis at

olson-conference@sfu.ca

by October 1 2009. More information and conference updates will be available at http://www.sfu.ca/olson-conference.

King’s Lynn Norfolk, UK

The Poetry Festival 25-27 September, 2009

Full details of the Poetry Festival will be posted on their website once they become set for more info see:

http://www.lynnlitfests.com/nextfestival.asp

Festival tickets at the door
or in advance from:
Tony Ellis at Messrs Hawkins,
19 Tuesday Market Place, King’s Lynn
01553 691661 (office hours)
01553 761919 (other times)

Introducing the poets of the 2009 Poetry Festival:

Peter Porter

Porter was born in Australia in 1929. Bookselling and advertising work brought him to London in the 1950s, leading to him becoming a freelance writer and broadcaster in the 60s. He published his first collection of poetry, Once Bitten, Twice Bitten in 1961. There followed his most critically acclaimed work, The Cost of Seriousness in 1978, and prizes followed: The Automatic Oracle (Whitbread Prize 1988), the Gold Medal for Australian Literature (1990), Max Is Missing (Forward Poetry, best Collection, 2002) and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2002. Porter’s latest collection is Better Than God (2009).

===========================

Moniza Alvi

Moniza Alvi was born in Lahore, Pakistan, and came to England when she was a few months months old. She grew up in Hertfordshire and studied at the universities of York and London. Peacock Luggage, a book of poems by Moniza Alvi and Peter Daniels, was published as a result of the two poets jointly winning the Poetry Business Prize in 1991. Since then, she has written six poetry collections, including: The Country at My Shoulder (1993, shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award), Carrying My Wife (2000), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; How the Stone Found its Voice (2005) inspired by Kipling’s Just So Stories and most recently, Europa (2008), a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize. Also published in 2008, Split World includes poems from her first five collections. Moniza Alvi now tutors for the Poetry School and lives in London. In 2002 she received a Cholmondeley Award for her poetry. www.moniza.co.uk

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Pascale Petit

Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in London. She has published four poetry collections. Between her debut collection, Heart of a Deer (1998) and her latest, The Treekeeper’s Tale (2008) are, most notably, The Zoo Father (2001) and The Huntress (2005). Both were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and were both Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement. She was named, in 2004, by the Poetry Book Society and Arts Council as one of the Next Generation Poets. Petit has won numerous writers’ awards. She tutors at Oxford University, Tate Modern, Arvon Foundation, The Poetry School, and is currently the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Middlesex University.
www.pascalepetit.co.uk

=============================

Eli Tolaretxipi

Born in 1962, Tolaretxipi still lives and works in San Sebastian, Spain. She has published two poetry collections in Spanish and her poetry has also been translated into French and Italian. Amor muerto naturaleza muerta (Past Love Still Life) was published in 1999 and was praised for its poetics of unease. Her second volume Los lazos del número (The Loops of the Figure) appeared in 2003. Structurally dazzling, its poems deal with perception, dream and the nature of poetry. Tolaretxipi’s poetry is similar in texture to that of some of the English-language women poets she has translated into Spanish, Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath among them. She appears at King’s Lynn with her translator, Philip Jenkins.

==============================

Kit Wright

Poet and children’s author Kit Wright was born in 1944 and educated at Oxford University. He lives in London. He lectured in Canada, before working as Education Officer at the

Poetry Society in London (1970-75) and was Fellow Commoner in Creative Art at Cambridge University (1977-9). He was awarded an Arts Council Writers’ Award in 1985. Wright’s books of poetry include The Bear Looked Over the Mountain (1977), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award, and Short Afternoons (1989), which won the Hawthornden Prize and was joint winner of the Heinemann Award. His poetry is collected in Hoping It Might Be So: Poems 1974-2000 (2000). Wright’s latest book of poetry is The Magic Box: Poems for Children (2009).

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Michael Hulse

Hulse has won many awards for poetry, not only the first prizes in the National Poetry Competition and the Bridport Poetry Competition (twice), but also the Society of Authors’ Eric Gregory Award and Cholmondeley Award. He is back reading in Kings Lynn via tours of the US and Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, and many parts of Europe. Hulse’s poetry has been described by Simon Armitage as “compelling” and “moving”, by Peter Porter as “very accomplished indeed”, and by C. K. Stead as “clever, various and engaging”. In 2002 a book of new and selected poems appeared as Empires and Holy Lands, and a new collection is due soon. Currently he teaches poetry and short fiction in the Creative Writing Programme of Warwick University’s English department.

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John Hartley Williams

John Hartley Williams was born in Cheshire, in 1942. He grew up in London and the universities of Nottingham and London. Since 1976 he has been a teacher at the Free University of Berlin. His first collection of poems was Hidden Identities (1982). Subsequent collections include: Bright River Yonder (1987), Spending Time with Walter (2001), Mystery in Spiderville (2003) and Blues (2004). Williams’ work has appeared in numerous anthologies, and he has contributed reviews and articles to many poetry magazines. His most recent work is Café des Artistes (2009). www.johnhartleywilliams.de

==================================

Lachlan Mackinnon

Born in Aberdeen in 1956, Lachlan Mackinnon was educated at Charterhouse and Christ Church, Oxford. He teaches English at Winchester College and reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and the national press. His first award was the Eric Gregory Award in 1986, preceeding his first collection Monterey Cypress (1988). The Coast of Bohemia followed in 1989. His poems Staying With Friends and Elegy are included in New Writing 7: An Anthology (1998). After writing critical studies of modern poetry and Shakespeare, he saw the publication of his latest collection of poems, The Jupiter Collisions. His accessible poems are described as modest, meditative, without hyperbole or rhetoric. He lives with poet, Wendy Cope.

Info from the Acadamy of American Poets:http://www.poets.org

Please join the Academy of American Poets as we present a poetry reading at Central Park’s Summer Stage, featuring three contemporary poets.

June 18, 2009, 7 p.m.
SummerStage, Rumsey Playfield in Central Park, Enter park at W. 72nd Street or E. 69th Street, New York, NY

Free and open to the public

Featured Poets Elizabeth Alexander, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and Sharon Olds

=================

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER
is a poet, essayist, playwright, and teacher . She composed and delivered “Praise Song for the Day” for the inauguration of President Barack Obama. In addition, she has published several books of poetry, including The Venus Hottentot (Graywold, 1990), Body of Life (1996), Antebellum Dream Book (2001), and American Sublime (2005), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was one of the American Library Association’s “Notable Books of the Year.”

================================

Sharon Olds

SHARON OLDS
is the author of Satan Says (1980), which received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Olds’s following collection, The Dead & the Living (1983), received the Lamont Poetry Selection in 1983 and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other collections include Strike Sparks: Selected Poems (2004, Knopf), The Unswept Room (2002), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), The Gold Cell (1997), The Wellspring (1995), and The Father (1992), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Olds held the position of New York State Poet from 1998 to 2000. She currently teaches poetry workshops at New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program.
Sponsored by Academy of American Poets, Co-presented by SummerStage and the City Parks Foundation

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THOMAS SAYERS ELLIS
is the author of The Maverick Room (Graywolf, 2005), which was awarded the 2006 John C. Zacharis First Book Award. He is also the author of The Good Junk (1996); a chapbook The Genuine Negro Hero (Kent State University Press, 2001) and the chaplet Song On (WinteRed Press 2005). His Breakfast and Blackfist: Notes for Black Poets is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press, Poets on Poetry Series.

Info: (212) 274-0343
academy@poets.org

http://www.poets.org

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