poetry | ZETEO

Kids Traveling To A Boarding School Through The Himalayas, Zanskar, Indian Himalayas; photo by Timonthy Allen

Thoreau Bashing

October 18, 2015 by Ed Mooney

Am I that unusual or touchy to think that “scum” is an unpleasant, if not vulgar, label to have squarely pinned to your back? In “Pond Scum” (The New Yorker, October 19) Kathryn Schultz does just that as she blithely presents a “misanthropic,” “horrible” Thoreau. Apart from the vulgarity of greeting him thus, the piece offers a deeply distorted picture of the iconic writer of woodlands and ponds, rivers, meadows, and mountains. As it happens, Thoreau loved people as well […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: literature, poetry, reading

Images, Beauty, and Terror

October 11, 2015 by Ed Mooney

Images have impact! In my previous post, Zeteo 10/04, I considered Rilke’s poem “The Archaic Torso of Apollo,” where the poet conjures the image of a broken statue of Apollo as he views it in a museum. He traces the impact as his eyes follow the contours of the god’s torso. The image — what he sees — is complex: he sees stone and also a person or god. Is the uptake religious/aesthetic? Or is the impact one to the […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: literature, philosophy, poetry, Rilke

A Sudden Collapse of Ice

September 15, 2015 by Ana Maria Caballero

Poems can sometimes behave like short stories, like very short stories. They set the scene, bring the reader in and then leave them with an uncertain longing. In just fifteen lines, the poem below tells the story of two couples, of neighbors, of marriage, of winter. The title lets the reader know what to expect from the very beginning: there is to be a crossing over to an intimate landscape for a chilling view of the life of others. Chilling, perhaps, […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR • Tags: books, literature, poetry, reading, writing

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Notes On Mirrors, Already Lost

September 14, 2015 by William Eaton

Everything after aches river & bones & the unsaid naming itself endlessly. He comes to me in dreams, and I reach for needle & thread to close the tear at his knee. This morning I found ants in the saltshaker, a pattern repeated in new snow peppered with black walnuts. I confess, with my tongue I press His body to the roof of my mouth, sometimes I feel rose petal, sometimes blister. — “Notes On Mirrors, Already Lost” by Patty […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: elegy, grief, poetry, relationships

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What might poetry give us?

September 3, 2015 by William Eaton

. . . re-embracing one of lyric poetry’s most traditional themes: the hopes and dismay of intimate, romantic relationships. . . . the LANGUAGES OF SELLING AND POLITICS never stop invading all of us and putting the same emptinesses on all of our tongues. Writing poetry today, I am tempted to say, is as difficult as learning to live by oneself.

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: capitalism, Emily Dickinson, language, love, philosophy of language, poetry, relationships, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Wittgenstein

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The New Amerikan Thing

September 1, 2015 by Ana Maria Caballero

Juan Felipe Herrera’s story is a nice one. Born in California in 1948, he grew up picking crops with his migrant worker parents in the San Joaquin and Salinas Valleys. After graduating from San Diego High School, Herrera went on to complete degrees at UCLA, Stanford and the prestigious University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has published over fourteen collections of poetry, children’s books, young adult novels and served as California’s Poet Laureate in 2012. His work is a key part […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR • Tags: books, chicano, literature, mexico, poetry, writing

“Living between sand and skin”

August 20, 2015 by William Eaton

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been pondering these lines from the poem Going Back, which was written in Catalan by Gemma Gorga; translated to English by poet, linguist, and translator Anna Crowe; and published in Six Catalan Poets (Arc Publications, 2013). This poem might be one of those rare gems that transcends those large questions of poetry in translation, such as whether the conversion should focus on the vocabulary, the overall sense, the meter and rhyme, or something else […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: Catalan, identity, poetry

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Early Mid-Life Crisis

August 18, 2015 by Ana Maria Caballero

There is an undocumented age crisis that occurs in the early thirties. Indeed, the onset of this decade might mark the actual “coming of age.” Eighteen is still shrouded by the incredulous, protective shield of childhood, as is any age before twenty nine. But thirty-three is different. It is lucid and stunned and dismayed at the same time. I held this notion as an inkling until reading the poem below by German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, which confirmed it as […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR • Tags: aging, literature, poetry, reading, writing

Larkin, Not Really in Translation

August 13, 2015 by William Eaton

“Counting” is a beautiful little Philip Larkin poem that I had not read before encountering it in a bilingual collection, with French translations: La vie avec un trou dedans. Thinking in terms of one Is easily done — One room, one bed, one chair, One person there, Makes perfect sense; one set Of wishes can be met, One coffin filled. But counting up to two Is harder to do; For one must be denied Before it’s tried. This may also […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: New York Review of Books, Philip Larkin, poetry, translation, Victor Hugo

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ZETEO

Zeteo (ζητέω): to challenge, question, dispute, explore the forgotten and ignored

Tag: poetry

Thoreau Bashing

Images, Beauty, and Terror

A Sudden Collapse of Ice

Notes On Mirrors, Already Lost

What might poetry give us?

The New Amerikan Thing

“Living between sand and skin”

Early Mid-Life Crisis

Larkin, Not Really in Translation