Author Archives: Ann Kjellberg

All Poets Bulletin: Help Us Make a Poetry Style Guide

Your editor is troubled that she has not been able to find an authoritative guide to styling poetry typographically. For some reason the usual sources are silent on this point. Plunging bravely into the breach, we attempt one here, inviting comment. The world will little note, nor long remember, etc., but for some of us […]

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“Arcanum” by William Logan

As soon as I see the word arcanum in any proposition, I begin to suspect it. —Descartes   Like Hegel’s cows, chewing in the final dark of reason, a domestic passion lies within the salus of a language. Writing is a privacy. I seal up that child of silence; it turns its blank, dull face […]

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More Rozewicz!

We considered the work of Polish poet Tadeusz Rozewicz in February, when Norton published a major new selected poems translated by Joanna Trzeciak. Now arrives from Anvil the third edition of their selection of Rozewicz, They Came to See a Poet, translated by Adam Czerniawski and first published in 1982. How interesting!  There is rather […]

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Viva Jane Jacobs!

This week we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Jane Jacobs’s epochal Death and Life of Great American Cities. There is so much about this book that speaks to our time. To begin with, the very neighborhood that Jacobs defended from Robert Moses is struggling to preserve its streets from another giant institution […]

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On Grief, Kathrin Stengel

In my love for the other, I desire death and life at the same time: death because I want to balance out the injustice of his death, and life because now I have a completely different appreciation for it. And even though the urge to live is stronger than the wish to die, life from […]

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Faiz Ahmed Faiz, 100 Years

This year marks the centenary of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the great poet of modern Urdu. Faiz was born in a small Punjabi village in British India and studied English and Arabic literature in Lahore before becoming a prominent public intellectual and advocate for an independent Pakistan. He is celebrated for expanding the traditional Urdu forms […]

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Turkey’s Melih Cevdet Anday

Atom translated by Sidney Wade and Efe Murad H My house has one room Inside it a lunatic turns and turns Electron Now here now on the other side of the moon Both here and behind the moon Nucleus I knocked on the door of a lighthouse A nutcase opened it   Voice translated by […]

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Poems by Turkey’s Yahya Kemal

Evening Music translated by Sidney Wade and Yurdanur Salman   In the antique gardens of Kandilli, As the evening settles, veil over veil, The aching pleasures of memory prevail. No one comes or watches from balconies. In the middle of a lonely road the breeze Is toying with the October leaves. The hours deeper and […]

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The Moyea Valley Fire, Denis Johnson

When, in the summer of 1920, Robert Grainier came back from a job in the Robinson Gorge with four hundred dollars in his pocket, riding in a passenger car as far as Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and then in a wagon up the Panhandle, a fire was consuming the Moyea Valley. He rode through a steadily […]

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Paul Bowles, Inside the cafés and salons of Morocco

“Worlds of Tangier,” Published in Holiday, March 1958 In the summer of 1931, Gertrude Stein invited me to stay a fortnight in her house at Bilignin, in southern France, where she always spent the warm months of the year. At the beginning of the second week she asked me where I intended to go when […]

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