All about: anthology

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 ...
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 ...
Reading: To the barbarian by Elke Lasker-Schüler
Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945) lived a bohemian life and is famous for her love poetry. So let's read a love poem by her hand today. I found some nice English translations by Johannes Beilharz: To the barbarian I cover your face With my body and soul at night. I plant cedars and almond trees On the ...
Reading: The Vacation by Wendell Berry
Today I read a poem whose author is still alive, and I'm a fan. Wendell Berry (b. 1934) is a very versatile and prolific author of essays, novels, poetry - as well as a small farmer in his birthplace in Kentucky. Here is a fresh and simple poem about a man on vacation: The Vacation ...
Reading: The Panther by Rilke
Rilke (1876-1925), of course. His Duino Elegies have been called the 'waste land' of German poetry. Of the poem the Panther that he wrote in 1902 inspired by a panther behind bars in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, there exists several translations. I like this one by Stephen Mitchell best: The Panther His vision, from ...
Reading: A list of some observation by Joseph Brodsky
Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), Russian-American genius and lover of poetry, should be part of our anthology. Sentenced to hard labor in northern Russia in 1964 and exiled to the US in 1972, he had suffered from what mother Russia had become in the twentieth century. He wrote this seemingly simple list of observations: A list of ...
Reading: A Dream by Boris Pasternak
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) was a hero of Russian literature, and not just for the famous Doctor Zhivago. He translated Goethe, Schiller and Shakespear and published influential books of poetry, including his breakthrough 'My sister, Life'. The English Wikipedia page on Pasternak is has lots of details that I am not going to mention here. I read ...