Sarah Browning

At the recommendation of Sam Hamill, I've been reading the poet Wang Ping this morning. Highly recommended. Here's an excerpt from her poem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem:

For the false desire and fate,
For tears turned into flame and cries stifled
in smoke, dip the apple in honey.
Dip hatred, blood, dip hope and despair,
dip remorse hidden in the gut,
the laughing cry from every child's lips.
For Isabel and Nava, for every lost soul
to resettle in the cradle of roots,
dip Bethlehem, dip Jerusalem,
dip bombs, tanks, check points,
dip the world ploughed with sorrow
in the sea of honey.

Go to Wang Ping's homepage: http://www.macalester.edu/~ping/ and click on the title Jerusalem, Jerusalem to read the full poem. A form that mixes poetry and prose, many voices and timeframes. Almost collage-like.

William O'Daly's translation of Pablo Neruda's Still Another Day (Copper Canyon Press), was nominated this year for the Quill Awards, a kind of People's Choice publishing awards. The nomination itself was a small miracle, as the other nominees were the poetry best-sellers, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Maya Angelou, and an anthology edited by Garrison Keillor. One guess who won. OK, I'll tell you - Maya Angelou. But Bill, my fellow board member of the national Poets Against War, went to the fancy schmantzy event in NYC and was interviewed for the Today Show about being a poet and translator. Imagine! It's scheduled to air October 26. I'll post info if the date changes. Congrats, Bill! Here is his report from the NYC trip:

I want to thank you all for your support, in its many and varied forms, during the Quill Awards voting process.

In the poetry category, Maya Angelou won for her single-poem book, “Amazing Peace,” written and read on the occasion of the lighting of the 2005 National Christmas Tree. Certainly Maya’s fame played a large role in the voting, a phenomenon borne out by the winners in certain of the other categories as well. But fame didn’t always swing the vote, even when it didn’t go as I personally had hoped, for in a number of instances the “readers’ choice” aspect of the awards selected, in my view, lighter fare over sustenance. For instance, another personal disappointment was seeing Joan Didion’s incredible “The Year of Magical Thinking” lose to John Grogan’s “Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog.” While “Marley and Me” comes highly recommended as an entertaining and enlightening read--if one owns a lovable canine (and our small family does)--I would encourage anyone who has suffered the loss of a human loved one to read Ms. Didion’s clearly and keenly written, cumulatively powerful book on transforming that loss into deeper understanding and a richer engagement with life.

On the other hand, one of the more delicious moments of the ceremony saw conservative political strategist and former aide to Vice-President Cheney, Mary Matalin, present the award for Politics/History/Current Events to “An Inconvenient Truth,” by Al Gore. While Mr. Gore could not be at the ceremony, his Rodale Press editor was there to accept, and to her credit Ms. Matalin greeted the editor with warmth and grace--shortly after comparing her own husband of many years, liberal political strategist James Carville, to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.

Commensurate with the Quills’ mission of promoting the written word, I did experience an unexpected but substantial win. Mike Leonard of The Today Show chose yours truly to interview at various times and locations during the event, and the next morning in Central Park and on the surrounding streets, for one of his slice-of-life “mini-essays.” As a fellow nominee, Mr. Leonard was far more interested in
what drives poets and writers to do what they do than he was in the awards themselves, and he felt that was the real undercurrent story of the Quills. He was happy just to be nominated, feeling that was the real “win,” and he does not feel that in our celebrity-driven culture there is sufficient understanding of the passion to make, to create, to transform…without much thought of tangible rewards or awards. Somehow he selected me to represent that view, so naturally I took advantage of his largesse to shamelessly stump for Pablo Neruda and Copper Canyon Press, while addressing the overriding theme that he had established for the interview. The wiser, more grounded moments of the interview are provided by Kris (my wife), as he interviewed her also, and he even asked Kyra, who turned nine years old the day
of the ceremony, what she “would be leaving NYC with.” Her answer: my Mom and Dad. Now that’s grounded (even if the tenor of Mr. Leonard’s question escaped her), and she had a fabulous birthday, absolutely loving NYC. At any rate, the piece is scheduled to air on The Today Show on Oct. 26, two days before the major NBC primetime broadcast of the substantially edited ceremony. If the date changes, I will let you know.

Read about in The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061009/lindorff

(with thanks to Richard Peabody)

Then do something about it:

• Tell your Representative (if you have one - we in DC don't have voting representation) to support Rep. Peter DeFazio's resolution requiring a Congressional vote prior to military action against Iran. http://democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/80
• 
  Join 60,000 people who have signed the petition: http://www.dontattackiran.org

Sunday, October 29 at 2 p.m. The Writer’s Center is pleased to host a celebration of the Washington area’s thriving small press community. Editors of several literary journals and book publishers will share anecdotes. This will be an informal gathering and celebration, not a formal panel discussion on the State of Literature. The editors, we're sure, will have some good stories. The program will include writers and editors from Bogg, Dryad, Gargoyle, Gival Press, Minimus, Passager, Potomac Review, Pretend Genius, WordWorks, Washington Writers' Publishing House, and WordWrights!
At the Writer’s Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, MD 20815. Free admission and light refreshments. For more information on this and other programs, please visit our web site, www.writer.org, or call 301-654-8664.

Check out poet Kathi Wolfe's great piece in the Washington Blade on the parallels and intersections of these two identities: http://washblade.com/2006/10-13/view/columns/wolfe.cfm. Then read some of Kathi's poems at: http://washingtonart.com/beltway/wolfe.html

Apologies to any loyal readers I may still have for being a Bad Blogger... Events, which I will write about soon, have overtaken my life, making it hard to get here.

The strange week we've had being on my mind, I thought I'd paste here what I wrote in an email yesterday to a friend living in Hong Kong. That he is out of the country gave me some perspective on the weirdness of it all. More soon.

Public life here is very weird right now, with the Foley page scandal (did I need to read those IMs? It's like the Clinton thing - the cum-stained dress forever lodged in our imaginations...); the horrid, awful shootings of girls in schools, with their powerful undertow of misogyny; and, almost lost in it all, the signing away of habeas corpus in this miserable detainee bill.

How could it be a weirder time? Well, how about this - in the VA US senate race, the Republican incumbent Allen called a Democratic worker of South Asian descent "Macaca," which turns out to be a derogatory term for dark-skinned people in French-speaking Algeria, where Allen's mother grew up. Then it turns out Allen's mother came from a prominent Jewish family, grew up Jewish, converted, hid her past from her son his whole life - it comes out via the press last month. Jokes such as "Mel Gibson asked for his campaign contribution back" abound. So, last night, a staffmember for a Democrat running for VA House seat refers to Allen in an email as George "Macacawitz" Allen... and is promptly forced to resign. Allen's campaign issues a statement that this "continues a pattern of anti-Semitism among Democrats." Hunh? "Macacawitz..." Couldn't make this stuff up.