Iron Age

A.E. Stallings discovers that Hesiod's Works and Days (an excerpt of her translation appears this month in The New Criterion) remains as fresh and relevant as ever:

I live in Greece, a transplant from over the sea. Translating this poem during the Greek financial crisis, I have, to my surprise, found it topical and resonant. The ancient poem speaks eerily to the moment, with its concerns about debt, corruption, justice, employment, and poverty. And who in Greece is not in a lawsuit with his brother over an inherited property? (Greece still lacks, disastrously, a complete land registry.) When Hesiod declares, disgustedly, that “this is an iron age indeed,” it is a line that could be spray-painted on the walls of Parliament. The Works and Days, far from being a fusty relic, demonstrates Pound’s dictum: “literature is news that stays news.”

Sound Of Sense

Exploring the way emotion in poetry "inheres as much in the sound, as in the denotative meaning of the words," David Yezzi reflects on what he's learned from poetry readings.

Hearing an author read his work aloud, I frequently feel that I have understood it for the first time. Aspects of the work that I’d missed in silent reading come clear. I never realized how funny Middlemarch was until my wife and I took turns reading it to each other on a cross-country car trip. A friend told me recently that the same thing happened to him with the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Finnegans Wake at a Bloomsday celebration in New York. I recently spent an afternoon with the British poet laureate Andrew Motion, who said that, as he saw it, the notion of a poet finding his or her “voice” is directly connected to the poet’s own speaking voice; his examples included the BBC English of Philip Larkin and the mandarin mid-Atlantic melodies of Anthony Hecht.

(Photo of Toronto poet Marc di Saverio by Patrik Jandak.)

Breaking Bad

A frustrated David Yezzi—who compares today's verse to "a spayed housecat lolling in a warm patch of sun"—wants poets to stop playing it safe:

How did the main effects of poetry ever boil down to these: the genial revelation, the sweetly poignant middle-aged lament, the winsome ode to the suburban soul? The problem is that such poems lie: no one in the suburbs is that bland; no reasonable person reaches middle age with so little outrage at life’s absurdities. What an excruciating world contemporary poetry describes: one in which everyone is either ironic, on the one hand, or enlightened and kind on the other—not to mention selfless, wise, and caring. Even tragic or horrible events provoke only pre-approved feelings. Poetry of this ilk has a sentimental, idealizing bent; it’s high-minded and “evolved.” Like all utopias, the world it presents exists nowhere. Some might argue that poetry should elevate, showing people at their best, each of us aspiring to forgive foibles with patience and understanding. But that kind of poetry amounts to little more than a fairy tale, a condescending sop to our own vanity.

"The Rock"

A new poem by David Solway.

"My Father's Stamps"

A new poem by Jason Guriel.