| Subject: Re: Poet Laureate Shakes up Newsroom |
Author:
bluesies
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Date Posted: 17:54:31 01/26/01 Fri
Author Host/IP: pa08.merr.com/209.83.15.77
In reply to:
Isis
's message, "Poet Laureate Shakes up Newsroom" on 11:29:36 01/26/01 Fri
Isis,
Thank you so very much for sharing this wonderful peice! It's great to have such wonders accessible by the stroke of a key---especially, as we try to grow as (*smiles*) "poets". Thank you!!!
>Updates for the Mind and Soul: Poet Laureate Shakes Up
>the Newsroom to Find a Cure
>for "Poetry Blindness"
>[San Francisco Chronicle, December 6, 1998]
>
>Lawrence Ferlinghetti
>
>When I was dubbed Poet Laureate of San Francisco last
>October at the Main Library, I made the
>foolhardy proposal that I write a column called
>"Poetry As News" for a daily newspaper. Just my
>luck that David Kipen, the new Book Editor of The San
>Francisco Chronicle , was there and
>took me up on it. Now I'm faced with the challenge of
>substantiating the argument, that poetry can
>be news, that there are poems written long ago, or
>yesterday, that can still be news to us. So here
>goes, and I hope to hear loud cries of epiphany in the
>newsroom.
>
>That the editor should ask me for poetry at all is
>itself surprising, given the notorious reluctance of
>daily newspapers to publish poetry of any kind, much
>less review it. This is one reason why most
>poets live in a kind of poetry ghetto, compared to
>their prose brothers. Having staggered through
>journalism school, I understand the editors' poetry
>blindness. They as well as many book editors
>and readers seem to have a block when confronted with
>the typography of poetry on a page, as if it
>were some strange species of writing too difficult for
>the rational mind to decipher.
>
>What must a poem have that would persuade newspaper
>editors to publish it and nonliterary
>readers to read it? The answer must be that it has to
>be news of some kind, or have some news
>hook to hang it on. ( The New York Times not so long
>ago sent me a note saying that its policy was
>now not to print any poetry unless it was directly
>related to current events.)
>
>Poetry is news, and news is poetry, if it conveys more
>than information, more than word of
>happenings, if it is also news of the soul, news of
>the passions, news of living and loving and dying
>in all its subjective depths. Which doesn't mean it
>has to be dead serious, though humor is "the
>divine butcher" (as Gregory Corso said) since it
>destroys deep passion and sublimity in poetry.
>
>The greatest poets of all ages have brought us news of
>the mind and soul of their times, just as
>architecture reveals the soul of civilizations (and
>what will future archaeologists conclude upon
>uncovering the ruins of our own heartless stone and
>steel?)
>
>To begin with the very beginnings, with the Greek
>lyric poets five or six hundred years before
>Christ (that beautiful early Christian hippie with the
>beat beard and sandals). Sappho of Lesbos, for
>instance. Like Walt Whitman, like Dylan Thomas, like
>Allen Ginsberg, Sappho could write poems
>that were both loud and soft, public and private. Her
>news of the heart (that involuntary muscle)
>speaks to us today as it did long ago.
>
>I have made my own version of some of her loveliest
>poetry, based on two modern translations of
>it, one by Richard Lattimore and one by Willis
>Barnstone whose new Sun & Moon Classics edition
>of Sappho is the most beautiful I've ever seen:
>
> Lyrics by Sappho
>
> He seems a god to me
> he who looks in your eyes
> who sits close to you to hear
> your soft voice your low laughter
> It shakes my spirit
> Under my breast my heart is shaken
> Let me but look at you
> and my voice dies
> My tongue struck silent
> my skin afire
> my eyes empty of light
> my ears muted in thunder
> and sweat breaks upon me,
> fever shakes me,
> and I turn paler than grass
> as if death has brushed me
> and forever changed me
>
> *
>
> Some say the fairest thing on black earth
> is an array of horsemen
> or soldiers marching
> or a fleet of ships at sea
> But I say the one you love
> is the loveliest
> And this so easy to show--
> For fairest Helen forsaking
> her husband king
> fled away to warring Troy
> forgetting daughter and parents
> Aphrodite's hot gaze
> having led her far astray
> As I am, alone without my love
> who has forsaken me
> whose supple way of walking
> whose lighted face
> I for one would rather see
> than all the glittering chariots and soldiers
> armored for glorious battle
>
> Copyright © 1998 Lawrence
>Ferlinghetti
> All Rights Reserved
>
> Back to City Lights home
> Top of page
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