If you happen to be in New Delhi on Wednesday, the Russian Cultural Center of Science and Culture jointly with the Literary Club “Parichay Sahitya Parishad” is holding a literary evening dedicated to the birth anniversary of the 20th century Russian poet Anna Akhmatova.  ”She wrote with apparent simplicity and naturalness and her rhyming was classical compared to such radical contemporary writers as Marina Tsvetaeva and Vladimir Mayakovsky.” June 23, 2011, 5:30 p.m RCSC, 24, Ferozeshah Road, New Delhi, India

Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata were stealing back Mexico for the people.  Freedom was being won with blood.  Mexico was in the throes of a revolution. The great first quarter of the twentieth century Mexico was fertile ground for not only revolutionaries, but also artists. Mexico was indeed succeeding to a modern world.  Mexico, always the symbol and champion of the underdog, the poor, the hungry has always held on strong to its icons.  They were roughhewn in their prismatic, threadbare ponchos, sombreros, and dark mestizo skin that glowed amber under a romantic, warm desert sun in a landscape of infinite flowers, cobble stone, and chirping monkeys. And like inventing memories from photographs, our images of Mexico have been always invented by this imagery.  It’s the murals of Diego Rivera, the gardens and portraits of Frida Kahlo and the poems of Octavio Paz that paint of landscape of a bygone Mexico – poorly preserved by kitsch, refrigerator magnates, and theme restaurants. We always wonder what happened to the good old days when they’re seemingly gone forever.  Certainly one of the most influential icons of Mexico’s good old days is the photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo. (READ MORE….)

“they say nothing is wasted: either that or it all is.” Dark Night Poem, Charles Bukowski

“The paths are rough. The knolls are covered with broom. The air is motionless. How far away are the birds and the springs! It can only be the end of the world, ahead.”

It is true that Arthur Rimbaud was a rabble-rouser and a libertine with louse infested hair, but he was a genius, on par with Mozart, whose provocative, symbolic lyricism was seemingly divined.  At only the tender age of 17 and 18 Rimbaud composed some of the most transcendent poetry the world had ever seen – Victor Hugo described him as “an infant Shakespeare.”   A bright star indeed – whose comburent creativity seemed to burn out like a magnesium flash: at 21 the fire was out completely and Rimbaud quit poetry for good – at 37 he was dead. Rimbaud, who was raised on a farm in Charleville-Mézières, believed in some way that poetry was mysticism – that the poet was a “seer” by the practice of a “systematic derangement of all the senses.” This derangement meant total abandonment of morality, judgement, and all things that make a modern man refined, and refined Rimbaud was not.  In the early 1870s he developed a relationship, that some debate was homosexual in nature, with the much older poet Paul Verlaine. The two poets would visit London in 1873 where Verlaine would attempt to assassinate his young lover, but it was by Verlaine’s side that Rimbaud would write his masterpiece Illuminations, an ”intense and rapid dream.” A long awaited new translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, translated by John Ashbery, considered a “major literary event,” is due out this May by W.W. Norton and Company. books.wwnorton.com

The atom, a tuna, laziness, love—the everyday elements and essences of human experience glow in the translucent language of Neruda’s odes. Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) wrote three books of odes during his lifetime.Odas elementales was published in 1954, followed in subsequent years by Nuevas odas elementales and Tercer libro de las odas. Margaret Sayers Peden’s selection of odes from all three volumes, printed with the Spanish originals on facing pages, is by far the most extensive yet to appear in English. She vividly conveys the poet’s vision of the realities of day-to-day life in her translations, while her brief introduction describes the genesis of the poems.  To write simply of simple things was a task the poet undertook consciously, following his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, the “social conversion” that resulted from a visit to Macchu Picchu, and the writing of his epic Canto general(California, forthcoming). (more…)

I’ve dreamed of you so much you’re losing your reality.
Is there still time to reach that living body and kiss
on that mouth the birth of the voice that’s dear to me?
I’ve dreamed of you so much that my arms, used to crossing on my chest
as I hug your shadow, couldn’t fold themselves around the shape of your body, maybe.
And faced with the actual appearance of what’s haunted me and ruled me for days and years,
I would probably turn into a shadow.
O what a sentimental pair of scales.
I’ve dreamed of you so much there’s probably no more time for me to wake up.
I sleep standing up, my body exposed to all the appearances of life and love and you,
the only thing that counts for me today. I’d probably reach for the first lips and face that came along,
than your face and your lips.
I’ve dreamed of you so much, walked so much, talked, slept with your phantom
that maybe there’s nothing left for me to do but be a phantom among the phantoms
and a hundred times more shadow than the shadow
that strolls and will go on strolling cheerfully over the sundial of your life.

~ Robert Desnos

Dylan Thomas, outside the Ashmolean, Oxford c.1946 © Francis Reiss

‘Wake up,’ she said into his ear; the iron characters were broken in her smile, and Eden sank into the seventh shade.  She told him to look into her eyes.  He had thought that her eyes were brown or green, but they were sea-blue with black lashes, and her thick hair was black.  She rumpled his hair, and put his hand deep in her breast so that he knew the nipple of heart was red. He looked in her eyes, but they made a round glass of the sun, and as he moved sharply away he saw through the transparent trees; she could make a long crystal of each tree, and turn the house wood into gauze.  She told him her age, and it was a new number.  ‘Look in my eyes,’ she said.  It was only an hour to the proper night, the stars were coming out and the moon was ready.  She took his hand and led him racing between trees over the ridge of the dewy hill, over the flowering nettles and the shut grass-flowers, over the silence into sunlight and the noise of a sea breaking on sand and stone.” (Dylan Thomas, from “A Prospect of the Sea.”)

Hollywood, 1946

Scent of cedar on this Los Angeles evening
scent of the new born day arrives at half past magic
the glory of the morning sun rising on our broken hearts
as they beat three beats in unison
The sounds of waves with a triple z cascade
below the mountain top down the coast we descend
The toke of two pipes made of apples
Cherry pies in between virgin thighs with a glance of nostalgia the memory of
Remains….
(excerpt of an Untitled Poem by Adarsha Benjamin)