Poetry

Reading: It’s this way by Nazim Hikmet
Of the first modern Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet (1902-1963) I enjoy the longer pieces 'On Living' or 'Some advice to those who will serve time in prison', but here I want to read a short poem translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk: It's this way I stand in the advancing light, my hands hungry, ...
Prayer
Give us the courage to think for ourselves to question the authority that lives in us When blackness befalls the history we make Don't seduce us to become what we hate most In the name of the father, the son, and the holocaust.
Profession: poet
I am a poet. Where do I work? In a bank. In a bakery. At a gas station. At a convenient store Or in a flower shop. The people just need me around While they go about their business, I sit in silence I don't say a word but the people know they know a ...
Reading: To Death by Anna Akhmatova
Today I read fragment number 8 from the cycle 'Prologue', called 'To death' by one of the most famous Russian poets of the twentieth century, Anna Akmatova (1889-1966) in a translation by A.S. Kline . Translations of a lot of other Akhmatova poetry is also available on his website. To Death You’ll come regardless – ...
Reading: Tenebrae by Emile Verhaeren
The Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916) was one of the most prominent poets of his day. "His Black Trilogy, Les Soirs (1888), Les Débâcles (1889), and Les Flambeaux Noirs (1889–90) explores the spiritual abandonment of a soul lost in the recesses of its own involution." (Donald Flanell Friedman) I discovered the English translation of a ...
To survive myself I forged you like a weapon, like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling. (Pablo Neruda)
Reading: The Meaning of Simplicity by Yannis Ritsos
Let's do another Ritsos (1909-1990) poem today. I've read 'Injustice' before but felt like more Ritsos. You are looking at a translation by Edmund Keeley here, quoted (not 'reprinted'!) from an anthology of international poetry: The Meaning of Simplicity I hide behind simple things so you'll find me; if you don't find me, you'll find the ...
Reading: Injustice by Yannis Ritsos
Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990) is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century (according to Luis Aragon, the greatest). Brilliant as his arcane, mythological works (The fourth dimension about the house of Atreus) are, critics consider his shorter poems that transform simple experiences into surrealist insights, his best work. Dicit George Economou: Ritsos "records, at times celebrates, ...
Reading: Under the poplars by Cesar Vallejo
The Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo (1892-1938) was a very innovative poet who write lines praised for their authenticity. Edith Grossman says, he “created a wrenching poetic language for Spanish that radically altered the shape of its imagery and the nature of its rhythms […] He saw the world in piercing flashes of outrage and anguish, terror and pity