Poet and memoirist Mark Doty's new and selected poems Fire to Fire was awarded the National Book Award last night at the NBF's annual gala event in New York City.

You can listen to Doty read a few poems here, read an excerpt from Fire to Fire here, and listen to Julie Bernstein chat with Doty here.

In November of 1944, a Jewish Hungarian poet known for mixing innovative and classical styles, was shot into a mass grave with his notebook of last poems in his coat pocket. One of 3,200 Hungarian Jews forced by fascist militia to march hundreds of miles in retreat from Tito’s advancing armies, Miklós Radnóti remained under that mound for eighteen months before he was unearthed and later identified by his wife. What she found in that notebook damp with his body fluids were his last poems, including love poems scribbled to her, Fanni, known to her friends as Fifi. In August 2008, I flew to Budapest, Hungary, to meet with the 96-year old widow of the poet Miklós Radnóti.

Riding the bus down to the Hotel Monaco to meet Charlie Kaufman, I suddenly have a terrible piercing pain in my right eye. Every time I blink, it’s like a bit of glass under my eyelid rolls along the surface of my eye. I yelp and frantically try to drag the thing out, but I only seem to make it worse.

I stumble off the bus, finger to eye, thinking, yes, this is the perfect way to meet the writer and director of "Synecdoche, New York," a movie as much about pain and decay as about creativity and inspiration.

In the hotel lobby, I sit blinking and Kaufman--short, wiry haired, in a leather jacket-- walks up and points at me. “You here for Kaufman?” he asks.

Here is Alfred, proud and excited, enjoying the honor of having his poem "Corrido Blanco" included in the Berkeley Poetry Walk. I have borrowed the photograph from Lorna Dee Cervantes's blog. Lorna was there sharing in Alfred's excitement. Last month as a way to memorialize him, three of Alfred's students--Robert Reyes, Harold Terezón, and Yo--got together to brighten up his plaque. Here are some photographs from our sidewalk cleaning/reading in memory of Alfred Arteaga.

Medusa Head

On the north African coast where the Wadi Lebda meets the sea, just east of what is now called Tripoli, Libya, the Phoenicians built a trading post more than 3000 years ago. During the Roman Empire, and particularly during the rule of Septimus Severus, it blossomed into Leptis Magna, a magnificent city rivaling Carthage.
Medusa Head

Now that there is renewed hope that action can bring about change, are we going to see a return to explicitly political art?

I went to see the dance company DV8’s latest production, To Be Straight With You, which is described on their website as ‘a poetic but unflinching exploration of tolerance, intolerance, religion and sexuality.’

If someone described a poem that way, I would expect the worst:

It must be quite an honor to have one of your poems selected for a poetry plaque on the Berkeley Poetry Walk. Ron Silliman said somewhere that it (his inclusion on the walk) is one of the most memorable and satisfying honors he has received. One problem that arises, however, is keeping these tributes clean and unobstructed. Since I am a Berkeley graduate student with little money, I would like to offer my cleaning services for a small fee to be discussed at a later date. If you are either a poet on this Poetry Walk or the follower of such a poet (For a list of all the poets, please consult the Addison St. Anthology), you may be interested in the following services.

I will have to agree with Olena that now that Sarah is back in Alaska, I can now stop tourettically clicking the refresh button and begin to think about poetry.

To assess the last three months? It’s been an obsessive relationship I have had with the Internet. Occasionally I managed to extricate myself from the cold glow of my computer and transform obsession to action: a stint to Philly, for instance, where I canvassed for Obama in immigrant neighborhoods. While Obama’s Ivy-League education was a handicap to working-class white Americans, all I had to do when speaking to Korean immigrants was mention “Harvard” and “Obama” and they clapped their hands and demanded an extra Hope button for their minister.

But other than those rare occasions, I basically had an intravenous tube running from my veins to dailykos, FiveThirtyEight, talkingpoints, andrewsullivan, huffingtonpost (even a gander at the National Review to see who else might be defecting from the Right) and all online newspapers. I’ve had conversations with poets who moaned about procrastinating due to their helpless addiction to the Internet. Perhaps Nate Silver (he of FiveThirtyEight) should do a graph on the productivity level of writers from the month of September – November. Can you imagine the sharp downward slant marking everyday you wasted hours monitoring polls from Zogby to Gallup? Am I just speaking for myself?

From the deck of Robert Adamson's house

Hot damn, here I am, I was thinking as I looked out from the porch across the Hawkesbury River to the wild preserve on the other side. I’m right where Duncan and Creeley stood, and like them, I’m about to go out at night on the river with that famous Australian poet, fisherman, birder, scrapper, lover, “etc. etc.” as Creeley would say, Robert Adamson.

the river was never the same
that night Duncan gathered the southern stars
into his being the black water plopping with fat mullet
(from “Black Water”)

Big Presses allow titles to gently fade out. Small presses go belly up (which brings me to another question—will the recession affect poetry? Perhaps this will be a boon—no longer able to afford the luxuries of hardcover fiction or spend triple digits at the hippest tapas restaurant, stressed out Americans will turn to economically undemanding poetry collections for solace after the glazed remains of their Spam dinner-- but I will save this for another post). So with these two factors, thousands of remarkable titles are lost in the ether—if it’s not for the library, one must troll the used bins or cough up an eye-popping amount for a collector’s item on Amazon (currently, I covet Jed Rasula’s Imagining Languages which is going for $125.00). Stephen Sohn had similar thoughts about Myung Mi Kim’s Dura:

Imagine my surprise when I started my internet search and discovered not only that the collection was already out of print, but that the only used copies I could find were priced well over seventy five dollars. Dura had become a “collector’s item.” And while the price might have seemed high at the time, when I think about the incredibly rich critical terrain that has already emerged in relation to Kim’s oeuvre and even more specifically, Dura, I am not surprised that what used copies were left so difficult to obtain.

Well, the fabulous press Nightboat Books has just reissued Dura.

Poets give the mind a motion too changeable and bewitching, to consist with right practice. We must avoid their specious tropes and figures and the vicious abundance of phrase, this trick of metaphors, this volubility of tongue, which makes so great a noise in the world. I saw the soul of Hesiod bound fast to a brazen pillar and gibbering, and the soul of Homer hung on a tree with serpents writhing about it, this being their punishment for what they had said about the gods. For they deserved to be chased out of the lists and beaten with rods. No one can interrogate poets about what they say. The dialectic cannot engage them. Most often when they are introduced into the discussion some say that the poet’s meaning is one thing and some another, for the topic is one on which nobody can produce a conclusive argument. The wit of the fables and religions of the ancient world is well nigh consumed: they have already served the poets long enough; and it is now high time to dismiss them; especially seeing they have this peculiar imperfection, that they were only fictions at first. Poets are liars. Their creation is far removed from the truth, and this, it seems, is the reason why it can produce everything, because it touches or lays hold on only a small part of the object and that a phantom. The very fact that they are poets makes them think that they have a perfect understanding of all other subjects of which they are totally ignorant.

There are many rich people here, many fine, even spectacular houses, but also modest bungalows and cottages. For a town of 57,000, Santa Cruz has an astonishing variety of architectural styles, with conical towers, shingled turrets, spindled porches and lacy bargeboards hanging from gables. There are tiny apartment complexes sharing intimate, narrow courtyards, and a streamlined moderne doctor’s office with a fluted, tiered tower shaped like a one-candled birthday cake, with weathervane in place of flame. Here, the rich surf until sunset, the poor stroll, while sea lions lounge on crossbars under the not too tacky pier.

FSG released two gorgeous editions of the late Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño's posthumous opus 2666 on Tuesday, and New Directions released his first collection of poetry to be translated into English, Romantic Dogs, last month. Both have caused quite a stir in what Books sections we have left in the weeklies and dailies of America this week, as well as in the onlinosphere.

The PoFo feature this week is an in-depth essay by Ben Ehrenreich on Bolaño's relationship with poetry--the poets who populate his fiction as well as the Chilean's own "Infrarealist" dossier.

This is fast on the heels of Jonathan Lethem's lengthy postmortem in Sunday's New York Times Book Review, which the Old Gray Lady complimented with another appraisal by Janet Maslin today (accompanied by a photo with a weird Taliban-esque doctor job. W, may I ask, TF?) .

The Village Voice chimed in with their own glowing review. New York speculated the book could be the best of the year, and the Boston Phoenix one-upped that by saying it could be the next great American novel.

(I'm going to add more fuel to the fire right here by announcing that the poet trapped inside A-Rod's body? It's Roberto Bolaño's. Fact.)

The LA Times chuckles about all the hubub on its blog here, and it should be noted that I had all of these suckers beat with my story in Paste back in October, but whatever.

The first hundred pages of Bolaño's Savage Detectives are a romantic boho poet's dream creation myth, and I highly recommend anyone unfamiliar start there. Or, if you just want to dip a toe in the Bolaño, then the short story collection Last Evenings on Earth is always available for short flights, bus trips, and coffee/cigarette insomnia jags. I've only started in on Romantic Dogs this week, but I'm sure others have taken more time with it and might offer some opinions here. Maybe? Yes? Well, whenever you're ready, the comments section is open, so feel free.

UPDATE: Finishing Romantic Dogs I turn to the back cover and belatedly read this appraisal:

"A witty, sardonic poetry, the likes of which could be called 'unimproved'--lacking the polish of a shiny commodity. With Bolaño, we encounter not only 'fist-fucking' but 'feet-fucking' in a poem that also mentions Pascal, Nazi generals, Shining Path bonfires, and a teenage hooker. With Bolaño, the explicit description of a sexual encounter is fragmented by temporal disjunctions, heuristic leaps of thought and a barking dog; in the end, God and an author show up . . . The poems shine their beery light on life's romantic dogs: dreamers, detectives, and poets who do double time as saints and martyrs."
--Forrest Gander, The Nation

Yes.

now that we are all done with the important business of sending sarah back home and moving into my new house (!) (um, revise that clause accordingly), i am officially ready to honor my contract with the poetry foundation by bringing things back down (or is it up?) to hank moody style solipsism and, if the opportunity presents itself, POETRY. HI!

here were/are some of the things i was thinking about while unpacking boxes and boxes of poetry and poisoning rats. (okay, mice, and lots of fiction, too, but still):

Although it's not essential to this visual poem or an appreciation of it, mIEKAL aND has produced a translation of what you see above; it begins like this...