“Traveler’s Ode” is a song/poem of exile and diaspora. As a "sung-poem" this "ode" harbors a confluence of folk influences: the Vietnamese sung-poetry tradition of ca dao meeting an inspiration of a capella melody from an American bluegrass folk ballad, “Pretty Bird," by Hazel Dickens. In my own singing/writing of the poem, I explore—bodily and spatially—the phenomenon of echo as a metaphor for memory: how the invisible repercussions of events continue to live and repeat in our bodies, our selves, long after an event has occurred.Dao Strom on "Traveler's Ode" |
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Jorie Graham Reveals Her Real Subject
"But while these ecological and existential concerns are always present—the future feels shorter, 'the permanent is ebbing'—it seems to me that Graham’s great subject since her first book was published, in 1980, has always been and continues to be human consciousness, the manifold and many-folded self. The vastness of mind contained within the fragile column of the body."
via THE NEW YORK TIMES |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Moira Egan on Franco Buffoni's "The Acne Eruptions of Eleanor of Aquitaine"
"Handling, embracing, paying extremely close attention: these are, I think, ways to describe the kind of close reading that is necessary to translation. To me, translation is an act of affectionate close reading in the original language, and then, 'close writing,' to the best of my ability, in the target language. As translators, we know that reproducing a poem in another language is a sheer impossibility." |
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