As I mentioned in my first entry last month, I’m new at blogging and will learn as I go. Hopefully, it won’t take too long before I can at least fake my way into something that looks like its supposed to look. “Just LOOK intelligent,” my mother told me as a child. I’ll try.
Responses to Charles Cote’s Poems
A few days ago, I posted three poems from I Play His Red Guitar by Rochester poet Charles Cote. If you read them and would like to send me a short response, please send it to kfhastings (at sign) mac (dot) com. Meanwhile, here are partial comments I received from two California poets, Gregory Randall and David Beckman. (Our cross-country conversations have begun!)
From Gregory Randall: I can see why you appreciate his work — it feels…graceful, felt, propulsive, no superfluous words and a rehabilitating of old forms to new needs. I’m eager to read more NY poets…It must take an incredibly evolved nature to turn the terrible and horrific into a poetry that can be shared and can endure (Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Hernandez…). And so, I re-read Charles Cote’s poems and realize how generous he must be to toil so hard on behalf of us, his readers, to turn his journey through loss into a journey we can all share.
From David Beckman: “I Curse You, Melanoma, Curse” is a controlled outburst of pain, driven by the courage to make of a poem a sieve through which pain is washed. For Cote, technique and vocabulary are in the service of life deeply lived and the white anger of its loss. “Tin Man Villanellle,” is a thrumming meditation on fear that both contains it and, if anything, deepens its hold…”Ultimately, these are poems that deliver what we yearn for: awe at the human spirit struggling under pressure and relief for its strength.
Other News
Congratulations, Gwynn O’Gara!
Sonoma County, California poet Gwynn O’Gara‘s new collection, Clio’s Daughter With Head on Fire has placed as a finalist in the Faulkner Society Poetry Collection contest and has won the Shirley Holden Helberg grant of $1,000 from the National League of American Pen Women, judged by Upstate New York poet Philip Memmer.
News from Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield tells me that her new book, Ledger, will be published by Penguin Random House with a publication date of March 10, 2020. Her first reading from the book will be held at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. More on this book soon.
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