Listening In
iphone Denver by poet Rick Bursky
-There’s a piece called “How to Unfeel the Dead” by Lance Olsen in Artifice that knocked my socks off.
-A review of Edith Grossman’s Why Translation Matters, something I’ve been thinking a lot about. Richard Howard summarizes Grossman’s thesis:
In the end, Grossman warmly (after all) and gratefully rehearses the twofold answer to the question of her title: translation matters because it is an expression and an extension of our humanity, the secret metaphor of all literary communication; and because the creation of any literary translation is (or at least must be) an original writing, not a pathetic shadow or tracing of the inaccessible “original” but the creation, indeed, of a second — and as we have seen, a third and a ninth — but always a new work, in another language.
-I was tired this year at the AWP Conference. I couldn’t sleep past 5am, and my head swam in treacherous waters all day. New CollAge magazine had a table—we sold about 2.5 copies—at which I sat for 15-20 minute intervals before getting the jitters and flying the coop. Lots of wandering around the Denver Convention Center, admiring the big blue looming bear, sneaking peaks at the car show, listening in:
IN THE HALLS
I can’t just get drunk and flirt with all the students—
Jesus wouldn’t come down and have sex with me like that.
I feel like my arms look like big white baby harp seals.
I’m glad nobody got raped.
I got my MFA in deleting words. I don’t know anything
about throwing babies.