Monday, October 12, 2015
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year
Hello. I hope all goes well. I plan to reread "A" again this December, and I invite you to join me. Last December I enjoyed my annual reading of the poem, but I felt like I would have gotten more out of it if I had read more supplemental material on it and Zukofsky, so I had planned to do that this December. I may do that, but I have other reading plans this year (like finishing rereading Proust). We will see. In any event, I look forward to reading some Zukofsky after a dry spell. I just finished reading William Carlos Williams' Collected Poems this weekend. I also will teach Pound's anthology Confucius to Cummings at the end of this semester, so I look forward to some Zukofsky/Proust/Pound/Williams synergy to go along with the new Star Wars film.
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
Catullus 22, etc.
Happy New Year - the Year of the Drum!
I had thought about discontinuing this blog, but here it goes. I enjoyed this Youtube video on Catullus 22: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IwWkiX5xg0 . It begins and ends with the poem in Latin, with a detailed analysis in between. The Zukosfkys' version made more sense when I read it again after watching the video.
For '15 I've started reading another book of poetry, Fitzgerald's translation of The Odyssey. Embarrassingly, I've never read the whole Odyssey. I used a line of Pound's as an excuse: he said no decent translation existed in English. Well, since I hope to finish my book on Wilson and Joyce by the end of 2016, it seemed like a good time to read some Homer to help me understand Ulysses.
I now have bookmarks in fifteen books of poetry: The Collected Poems of Ray Bradbury, which I may finish this year during a "science fiction week" I have planned this summer; a book of Chaucer; a bilingual Inferno which I hope to finish in May as the Dante Society at my high school finishes the Inferno; The Portable Dante; The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson; The Collected Poems of Robert Frost; an iBook by Robert Herrick; The Odyssey; a volume of Irish poetry; The Collected Poems of Patrick Kavanagh (the poet Desmond Egan told me "to do myself a favor" and buy this book thirty years ago); From Totems to Hip-Hop edited by Ishmael Reed; The Faerie Queen by Spenser; The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams (as I make my chronological trek through film history, I read his poems for each year - I plan to read his 1954 poems this month, and I plan to finish the book when I reach 1962 later this year); "A" (I just finished my annual read through - I may work on "A"-24 and/or the index Zukofsky compiled between now and December); and the Complete Short Poetry by Zukofsky, which includes Louis and Celia's versions of Catullus.
I had thought about discontinuing this blog, but here it goes. I enjoyed this Youtube video on Catullus 22: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IwWkiX5xg0 . It begins and ends with the poem in Latin, with a detailed analysis in between. The Zukosfkys' version made more sense when I read it again after watching the video.
For '15 I've started reading another book of poetry, Fitzgerald's translation of The Odyssey. Embarrassingly, I've never read the whole Odyssey. I used a line of Pound's as an excuse: he said no decent translation existed in English. Well, since I hope to finish my book on Wilson and Joyce by the end of 2016, it seemed like a good time to read some Homer to help me understand Ulysses.
I now have bookmarks in fifteen books of poetry: The Collected Poems of Ray Bradbury, which I may finish this year during a "science fiction week" I have planned this summer; a book of Chaucer; a bilingual Inferno which I hope to finish in May as the Dante Society at my high school finishes the Inferno; The Portable Dante; The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson; The Collected Poems of Robert Frost; an iBook by Robert Herrick; The Odyssey; a volume of Irish poetry; The Collected Poems of Patrick Kavanagh (the poet Desmond Egan told me "to do myself a favor" and buy this book thirty years ago); From Totems to Hip-Hop edited by Ishmael Reed; The Faerie Queen by Spenser; The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams (as I make my chronological trek through film history, I read his poems for each year - I plan to read his 1954 poems this month, and I plan to finish the book when I reach 1962 later this year); "A" (I just finished my annual read through - I may work on "A"-24 and/or the index Zukofsky compiled between now and December); and the Complete Short Poetry by Zukofsky, which includes Louis and Celia's versions of Catullus.
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