Monthly Archives: October 2012

Charles Simic

29 Monday Oct 2012

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‘Poetry shockingly stark in its concepts, imagery and language’ – the words of retired English professor Victor Contoski in the Chicago Review.

His words describe the work of Serbian-American poet Dusan ‘Charles’ Simic: a man born Belgrade at the start of the Second World War who immigrated to America as a teenager.

Simic’s experience of growing up in an environment where frequent bombings from the command of both Hitler and Stalin forced his family to evacuate has been the foundation of his poetry.

Watching them out of the corner of the eye,
The earth trembling, death going by . . .
(‘Two Dogs’ by Charles Simic)

Simic only started learning English during his mid-teens yet his passion for the language and the ability to express his ideas in a moving and imaginative way has lead him to become a renowned poet.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 from his book of prose poetry ‘The World Doesn’t End’ (1989), Simic has also been the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the PEN Translation Prize for his interpretation of the works of Serbian poet Vasko Popa in ‘Homage to the Lame Wolf’ (1979).

Simic was a past editor of The Paris Review has been named as the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress.

On receiving this honour the man born in Serbia responded ‘I am especially touched and honored to be selected because I am an immigrant boy who didn’t speak English until I was 15’.

Having arrived in the US Simic attended school in Chicago and earned a degree from New York University after completing his draft in the US Army.  He went on to become a Professor at the University of New Hampshire.

‘What the Grass Says’ was his first published collection of poems in 1967.  One poem from that publication is Simic’s ‘Stone’:

Go inside a stone

That would be my way.

Let somebody else become a dove

Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.

I am happy to be a stone.

Elizabeth Alexander

26 Friday Oct 2012

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Barak Obama…

”Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself, others by first do no harm or take no more than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?”… (Praise Song For the Day)

American poet, playwright, University Professor and essayist, Elizabeth Alexander has achieved much in her 50 years, not least being asked to recite a poem she had written -especially for the occasion -, entitled “Praise Song For the Day” at the inauguration of Barack Obama on January 20th 2009.  Only the fourth poet to read at an American Presidential inauguration, the Poetry Foundation applauded the choice of Elizabeth to carry out such an honour, declaring that “her selection affirms poetry’s central place in the soul of our country.”

Born in Harlem in 1962, she grew up in Washington DC and with a father who was the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chairman, attending the March on Washington at the age of two was not out of the ordinary. As Elizabeth herself said “Politics was in the drinking water at my house”.  Having joined Boston University to initially study fiction writing, it was the poet Derek Walcott who saw her poetry potential through her diary and encouraged her to change her course option and study under him instead.

Since 1990 when her first book of poems, The Venus of Hottentot, was published she has had four more volumes published – Body of Life (1996), Antebellum Dream Book (2001), American Sublime (2005) – a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize -and her first young adult collection, co-written by Marilyn Nelson, Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color (2008) in which the poems give the reader a glimpse of what may have been going on in the minds of the students, the small details of their lives and what their hopes and fears may have been.  Like the poet and author Denny Bradbury in her poem “Wisdom Of Trees” from her new collection in which she writes of the inevitability and beauty within the death and subsequent rebirth of one of nature’s elements that sees all:

…”Yet trees will reach their searching branches
Up into the wind and rain
They live and die as nature dances
Next year they grow and live again.”

Elizabeth Alexander combines the young girls’ mix of fear and hope with regards to the colour of their skin and the reaction by their neighbourhood in her poem entitled “We”:

..”Our mothers have taught us remarkably
to blot out these fears, black them out, and flood
our minds with light and God’s great face.
We think about that which we cannot see:
something opening wide and bright, a key.”

As the 2007 winner of the first Jackson Prize for Poetry, awarded by Poets and Writers Inc., Elizabeth is quoted as saying the following with regards to one element of her profession:

“Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.”

Gary Soto

16 Tuesday Oct 2012

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“… I peeled my orange
That was so bright against
The gray of December
That, from some distance,
Someone might have thought
I was making a fire in my hands.”
(“Oranges”)

Gary Soto

Gary Soto

Born in 1952 Gary Soto, is a Mexican-American poet and author whose work is derived from the observations of daily life, portrays of working class characters and his own memories.  With his father dying when Gary was only five years old, his initial poor record as a student was reflective of the struggle his family had to find work, which left little time for anyone to encourage him in his studies. Yet he was still drawn to great writers such as John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, amongst others, and, as he says himself “In short, I was already thinking like a poet, already filling myself with literature.”  He knew he wanted to become a writer after reading the works of novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez and whilst studying for his BA in English had the opportunity to work with the poet Philip Levine, whose portrayal of the working classes within his writing can be seen to have influenced Soto’s own works.

Author of 11 poetry collections for adults, he has received many awards, amongst which include the US Award of the International Forum in 1976 for his first collection of poems entitled “The Elements of San Joaquin” which offers a grim portrait of Mexican-American life, depicting the violence of urban life,  the exhausting labour of rural life (Soto himself worked in the fields of San Joaquin and the factories of Tresno in his youth) and the futility of trying to recapture the innocence of childhood, whilst his second collection “The Tale of Sunlight” (1978) which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

His poetry concentrates on daily experiences, often reflecting back on his life as a Chicano – a US Citizen of Mexican descent – and throughout his poems, novels, short stories, plays and books for young people he deals with the realities of growing up.  The American author, Joyce Carol Oates, herself a writer of both poetry and prose, describes Soto’s poems as “fast, funny, heartening and achingly believable, like Polaroid love letters or snatches of music heard out of a passing car, patches of beauty like patches of sunlight, the very pulse of light”.

Like Denny Bradbury, whose new collection of poems incorporates sections that follow a theme such as the seasons, spirituality and love, Soto’s poetry and prose focuses on everyday experiences whilst at the same time evoking the harsh realities that often shape life for Chicanos such as crime, poverty and racism.  In his writing for children and young adults he tackles themes such as choices, alienation and family life and Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, writing for the New York Times Book Review describes Soto’s stories as “sensitive and economical”, praising him for staying within the teenager’s universe.

Just as Denny in “Broken In Time” writes:

…“However we perceive us to be

We will be brought down by time”, Soto’s poem “Saturday At The Canal” talks of how

…“ The years froze.
As we sat on the bank.  Our eyes followed the water,
White –tipped but dark underneath, racing out of town.”

Using his own experiences within his work, Soto says “Writing is my one talent.  There are a lot of people who never discover what their talent is… I am very lucky to have found mine.”

Princess of Black Poetry

14 Sunday Oct 2012

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Yolanda Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni

Yolanda Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni

Yolanda Cornelia ‘Nikki’ Giovanni is an inspirational woman.

The 69-year-old Grammy Award Nominee from Tennessee prides herself as ‘a Black American, a daughter, a mother, a professor of English’.

These past thirty years have really brought her name to the forefront of modern day civil rights and equality activists, however her involvement expands another 20 years previous.

Giovanni graduated from the prestigious Fisk University with honours but it was not without its problems.  She was expelled in 1961 for her increasingly vocal views on racial equality.  In 1964 this rebellious youngster was readmitted but continued to pursue the political topics.

This determined individual met influential black poets such as Robert Hayden and LeRoi Jones, and became involved in the Black Arts Movement, and restored the Fisk chapter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Her first book of poetry ‘Black Feeling Black Talk’ was published in 1968.

This collection of poems, along with ‘Black Judgement’ and ‘Re: Creation’ were very much influenced by the black power movements of the time.  High-profile assassinations such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and Robert Kennedy caused uncertainty in a world already pulled apart by racism.  In her own way, Nikki tried to bring some understanding to the situation and champion a drive for solidarity.

Such was the impact of her words that ‘Black Feeling Black Talk’ sold over 10,000 copies within the first year.

However her early work was received with mix views.  Just as some were inspired by her ideas, others were apprehensive and in some cases felt she was expressing ideas without seeing the overall picture.

Poet Don L. Lee has commented ‘Sometimes Nikki oversimplifies and therefore sounds rather naive politically’.  Yet he also understands her motives for writing the way Giovanni does: ‘she conveys such urgency in expressing the need for Black awareness, unity, solidarity’.

As The Poetry Foundation have highlighted, Nikki ‘publicly expressed the feelings of people who had felt voiceless’.

Many could relate to her ideas as she wrote in a very personal way.

In her work ‘Black Judgement’ Giovanni is proud to publish her poem ‘Nikki-Rosa’, an honest account of life with her family, but highlighting too the black-white divide in understanding the life of an african-american:

and I really hope no white person ever has cause
to write about me
because they never understand
Black love is Black wealth and they’ll
probably talk about my hard childhood
and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy

Although these early poems sealed her title as the ‘Princess of Black Poetry’, these were just the beginnings of a long and illustrious career.

Many of her published works have received honours and awards.  ‘The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection’ was a spoken-word album which was nominated for a Grammy Award and National Book Award.  Her autobiography ‘Gemini’ was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Giovanni has been the recipient of over twenty honorary degrees, named Woman of the Year by numerous editorials and has received Life Membership and Scroll from The National Council of Negro Women.

Black Enterprise named her a Women of Power Legacy Award winner for work that expands opportunities for other women of color.

Nikki Giovanni is a professor at Virginia Tech, where she teaches writing and literature.

From her poem ‘Choices’, simple but effective advice for all of us:

if i can’t have
what i want    then
my job is to want
what i’ve got
and be satisfied
that at least there
is something more
to want