Mimi Khalvati's The Chine

I heard Marilyn Hacker read poems from this collection back in March at the PSA's "Tribute to Carcanet Press and Michael Schmidt." Khalvati's a master of the poem sequence. Highlights of this book for me included the sequence "The Inwardness of Elephants" and her corona, or sonnet cycle "Love in an English August"--not only deft deployment of the true Elizabethan sonnet (perfect rhyme schemes--no shadow sonnets here) but true to the corona form as well, the last line of each sonnet the first line of the next, making a perfect crown of fourteen fourteen-lined poems. Brilliant.

Whoring and Pirates. Oh boy!

I've had this book for years. I think I bought it at a used bookstore or flea market, already a bit dog-eared and yellowing. I've been trying to work my way through it since I've returned from Jamaica (it's a bit dry).

My favorite bit so far? Describing the great earthquake of 1692 that sunk Port Royal, Jamaica as "a fitting punishment for the new Sodom." Doesn't seem quite like an objective history...what's wrong with whoring and pirates? I'm obsessed with Port Royal, by the way, this city sunk beneath the sea. Still trying to find quite how to write about it, but it will come.

And I learned about the Alco, small Arawak dogs that couldn't bark. This little tidbit has become central to the bestiary/beast fable I'm working on which I started when staying at Erna Brodber's Blackspace. The Curse of the Alco...

Lorna Goodison's Turn Thanks

I thought I had finished reading this about five years ago and realized I stopped half-way through...missing all the good poems in "Part 3: The Mango of Poetry" such as "County, Sligoville" and "Letter to Vincent van Gogh." A happy Sunday discovery to read/re-read.

I'm working on an "homage" poem to Lorna called "Workshops with Lorna." It grew out of the many questions I received in Jamaica when Kei would mention I worked with her, namely, "what was it like?" And so my poem will begin "Since you asked what is was like, what was said..."

Elizabeth Bishop's (Alice Quinn's, really) Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box

Clearly a labor of love for Alice Quinn. I found her copious endnotes far more pleasurable than the fragments and abandoned poems. Remind me to destroy my fragments folder before I die.

My favorite quotes:

"Translating poetry is like trying to put your feet into gloves."

"...the situation of the poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight, and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye."