Month: november 2017

Learning: Definition game
Dear Miru, I taught you definitions and how to describe something without using the word for it. It is a game now, but later you'll understand why that is useful. You are good at it. I asked you to describe an ice-cream and you said a thing that children eat by licking and that is ...
The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. - Derek Walcott
Poëzie is een daad (Campertparodie)
Poëzie is een daad van erkenning. Ik erken dat ik lees, dat ik niet alleen lees. Poëzie heeft geen toekomst, denkend aan de huur, aan de electriciteitsrekening, aan jou als je koud bent. Poëzie is mijn adem, beweegt mijn pen, aarzelend soms, over het papier dat daarom vraagt. Koenraad was postbode, maar genas zichzelf door ...
Reading: Stagnant water by Wen Yiduo
Chinese poet Wen Yiduo (1899-1946) was assassinated by the Kuomintang. According to many, he was an important figure in Chinese intellectual life. He "Wen never resolved the conflicts that existed within him: The elitist and the proletarian, the scholar and the activist, the traditionalist and the innovator, the personal man and the public man, fought ...
Reading: La fausse morte by Paul Valéry
Paul Valéry (1971-1945) I found a short poem in a remarkable translation by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody: The Faux Death Humble, tender, against the charming tomb, ______Unfeeling monument That out of shadows, leavings, offered love ______Conjures your weary grace, I fall, dying against you, dying — Yet, No sooner fallen across the low grave Whose lawn littered ...
⇒ ...but I don't want to be a cynical asshole ⇒ ...but I don't want to be a naive idiot ⇒
Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse. - Joseph Brodsky
Reading: Words from Confinement by Cesare Pavese
Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) is another soul that belongs in our cosy anthology. Pavese grew up in Nietzsche's Turin, graduated on a thesis about poet Walt Whitman and was placed under house arrest in Brancaleone Calabro, in the south of Italy after the Mussolini regime discovered he had received letters from a jailed anti-fascist. Today's poem ...
Reading: The drowned woman by Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes (1930-1998). British giant of poetry. Married twice with ladies who committed suicide, then a third time to live a quiet rural life until his death from cancer. Very prolific. Today I want to read this poem about a drowned woman, published 1957, six years before Plath's suicide at age thirty, which charges it ...