Nie Zhenzhao asked me to write a poem about West Lake in Hangzhou, a frequent subject of Chinese poetry. He wants to do a collection of poems by foreigners about West Lake.
Kit Robinson in conversation with me on Close Listening, recorded on October 6, 2019: MP3
We talk about Robinson's early Dolch Stanzas and its vocabulary, based on a list of the most frequently used words English, his use of short lines, changes in his more recent, "late" work, his connection to Tom Raworth, and the relation of his day jobs to his work as a musician and poet.
I very much appreciate Runa Bandyopadhyay's response to Near/Miss together with her translation and commentary on "Thank You for Saying Thank You" and "Thank you for Saying Your're Welcome," in Aparjan.com (Kolkata, W. Bengal). I initially posted a rough Google translation of the Bengali essay, which prompted Bandyopadhyay to do her own quick translation. She writes:
The word Nirvana in the google translation triggers me to translate my Bengali commentaries into English because I feel the word Nirvana doesn’t go along with a poet. A poet always longing to reborn like a Bodhisattva, whose longing was not only for him but also for others, his desire of salvation along with all distressed creatures of the world on his way of enlightenment. A poet’s expansive consciousness puts him from certainty to uncertainty, from comfort to discomfort, from insanity to sanity and only he could see how the actual world revolves. A poet thinks that the interior of the boundary is the exterior and the exterior is the interior - I am free and you are imprisoned and so he always try to give a hand to distressed.
Here’s my letter to the New York City Landmarks and Preservation Commission, sent at the request of Franklin Furnace and the campaign to landmark the Whitman 99 Ryerson Street House in Brooklyn. The commission turned down the original request because it did not consider this site sufficiently important given that Whitman lived there only a short time (and because of the condition and suitability of the house). It is possible the commission will reverse its decision.
