Poems

Black Milk Todesfuge the Poetry of Paul Celan

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PaulCelan_NewBioImage
 
Paul Celan (/ˈsɛlæn/; 23 November 1920 – c. 20 April 1970) was a German language poet and translator. He was born as Paul Antschel to a Jewish family in Cernăuți (German: Czernowitz), in the then Kingdom of Romania, (now Chernivtsy, Ukraine), and adopted the pseudonym “Paul Celan”. (Celan in Romanian is pronounced Chelàn, and was derived from the syllables of his surname). He became one of the major German-language poets of the post-World War II era.
 
Celan remained imprisoned in a work-camp until February 1944, when the Red Army’s advance forced the Romanians to abandon the camps, whereupon he returned to Cernăuţi shortly before the Soviets returned. There, he worked briefly as a nurse in the mental hospital. Friends from this period recall Celan expressing immense guilt over his separation from his parents, whom he had tried to convince to go into hiding prior to the deportations, shortly before their death.
 
A version of Celan’s poem Todesfuge appeared as “Tangoul Morţii” (“Death Tango”) in a Romanian translation of May 1947. Additional remarks were published explaining that the dancing and musical performances evoked in the poem were images of realities of the extermination camp life.
 
Celan became a French citizen in 1955 and lived in Paris. Celan’s sense of persecution increased after the widow of a friend, the French-German poet Yvan Goll, unjustly accused him of having plagiarised her husband’s work. Celan was awarded the Bremen Literature Prize in 1958 and the Georg Büchner Prize in 1960
 
Celan committed suicide by drowning in the Seine river in Paris, around April 20, 1970.
 
The death of his parents and the experience of the Shoah (The Holocaust) are defining forces in Celan’s poetry and his use of language. In his Bremen Prize speech, Celan said of language after Auschwitz that:
Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, ‘enriched’ by it all.
 

An Animated English Translation of Paul Celan’s famous work Todesfuge
 

Here it is read in the original German by its author Paul Celan
 

 
A further English translation where Todesfuge (Death Fuge) is entitled Black Milk
 

*Editors note: The actual Reading of Paul Celan’s works in original text German together with their English translations starts appx 28 minutes after a lengthy introduction

 
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Derek Walcott.Poet of Oceanic Scales & Large Canvases.

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Derek Walcott
 
 
Born on the island of Saint Lucia, a former British colony in the West Indies, poet and playwright Derek Walcott was trained as a painter but turned to writing as a young man. He published his first poem in the local newspaper at the age of 14. Five years later, he borrowed $200 to print his first collection, 25 Poems, which he distributed on street corners.
 
Walcott’s major breakthrough came with the collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (1962), a book which celebrates the Caribbean and its history as well as investigates the scars of colonialism and post-colonialism.
 
His recent collections include Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), The Prodigal (2004), Selected Poems (edited by Edward Baugh, 2007) and White Egrets (2010). In 1992, Walcott won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel committee depicted his work as “a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.”
 
In addition to his Nobel Prize, Walcott’s honors include a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, and, in 1988, the Queen’s Medal for Poetry. He is an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He is Professor of Poetry at Essex University.
 

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Gold: (PoeimaPoetry) A New Book Of Poetry by Barbara Crooker.

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Barbara Crooker’s poems have appeared in magazines such as The Green Mountains Review, The Hollins Critic, The Christian Science Monitor, Smartish Pace, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Nimrod, The Denver Quarterly, The Tampa Review, Poetry International, The Christian Century, America and anthologies such as The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Good Poems for Hard Times (Viking Penguin), Boomer Girls (University of Iowa Press), and Commonwealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Penn State University Press). She is the recipient of the 2007 Pen and Brush Poetry Prize, the 2006 Ekphrastic Poetry Award from Rosebud, the 2004 WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the 2004 Pennsylvania Center for the Book Poetry in Public Places Poster Competition, the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, the 2003 “April Is the Cruelest Month” Award from Poets & Writers, the 2000 New Millenium Writing’s Y2K competition, the 1997 Karamu Poetry Award, and others, including three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, fifteen residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; a residency at the Moulin a Nef, Auvillar, France; and a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. A thirty-two time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and five time nominee for Best of the Net, she was a 1997 Grammy Awards Finalist for her part in the audio version of the popular anthology, Grow Old Along With Me–The Best is Yet to Be (Papier Mache Press). Her books are Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book competition and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance, which came out from Word Press in 2008 and won the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; More (C&R Press, 2010); and Gold (Cascade Books, a division of Wipf and Stock, in their Poeima Poetry Series, 2013). Her poetry has been read on the BBC, the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Company), and by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. She has read her poems in the Poetry at Noon series at the Library of Congress, in Auvillar, France, and many other venues.

www.barbaracrooker.com,

Barbara Crooker appeared frequently in the old Poetry Life & Times over the last decade & at present her works can be viewed at the New Poetry Life & Times www.artvilla.com/plt   I am pleased to introduce yet another and her latest book of poems, which has already received good reviews, so there is little more that I can add to that.  robin@artvilla.com  editor@artvilla.com

 

In Search of the Goddess. Robert Graves. Poetry.

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robert Graves

robert Graves
From Wiki
Robert Graves) (24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985) was an English poet, scholar/translator/writer of antiquity specializing in Classical Greece and Rome, novelist and soldier in World War One. During his long life he produced more than 140 works.
During his lifetime he published more than 140 books, including fifty-five collections of poetry (he reworked his Collected Poems repeatedly during his career), fifteen novels, ten translations, and forty works of nonfiction, autobiography, and literary essays. From 1961 to 1966, Graves returned to England to serve as a professor of poetry at Oxford.

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