Check out our interview with Jen Hadfield, who won the TS Eliot Prize for poetry earlier this month. Life has been whirl for this 30-year-old poet since winning the award in front of a packed house in London. Now she’s back in Shetland and adjusting to life as Britain’s brightest young poet.
Here’s a novel (pardon the pun) eco tip from Reuter’s and Australia’s ABC News:
Loo poetry can help tackle global warming: study
Poetry in the loo can cut down on paper use too, says a Japanese group campaigning to save toilet paper as part of the country’s battle against global warming.
Simply pasting a “toilet poem” at the eye level of a person seated in the cubicle can help cut toilet paper use by up to 20 per cent, a study by the research centre Japan Toilet Labo showed.
“That paper will meet you only for a moment,” reads one poem.
“Fold the paper over and over and over again,” says another.
Or just: “Love the toilet”.
Now the group is looking to have its posters displayed in 1,000 public toilets.
“We asked ourselves what we could do for the environment in the toilet?” Ryusuke Nagahara of the Japan Toilet Labo said.
“The answer is to save toilet paper and save water.”
Toilet paper use in Japan has been increasing in recent years, according to an industry body, possibly because of a rise in the number of public toilets, where people tend to use more paper.
“It’s because it’s free,” an official at the Kikaisuki Washi Rengokai said.
“At home, people are more inclined to scrimp.”
70 years ago today, Irish poet William Butler Yeats died on the Côte d’Azur. To mark this anniversary, I was going to note his life and works but I found an interesting tidbit surrounding his death.
Apparently, Yeats had very conscientiously planned his epitaph and location of his grave site but in his last days he reportedly told his wife, “If I die, bury me up there [on the cliff-side cemetery of Roquebrune] and then in a year’s time when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo.”
If you do the math, you’ll note that 70 years ago was 1939 and by autumn, World War II broke out. Moving a body to a new grave wasn’t really possible and it took 10 years before Yeats remains we exhumed.
Before the coffin left France, a local lawyer paying tribute to the poet jokingly said that Yeats had decided to spend his last days in Roquebrune to preview “heaven on earth”. But rumour had it that Yeats “residence” was a permanent one.
So begins the snowball…
In 1988 a book came out that claimed that the grave near Ben Bulben, County Sligo most likely contained not Yeats remains but that of one or more Frenchmen since Yeats had accidentally ended up in a pauper’s grave in Roquebrune.
Not to be outdone, along comes a rumour that the Sligo grave was the final resting place of Englishman, Alfred Hollis who coincidentally died in Roquebrune and was buried next to Yeats and whose remains had somehow disappeared. This rumour was purportedly backed up at the exhumation when the certifying doctor identified a corset among the remains - a corset Mr. Hollis was known to wear.
By this time, the Yeats family had had enough and through a letter to The Irish Times, stated their certainly that these rumours were false and unfounded. They confirmed the body had been moved from the original grave and that the remains had been carefully identified - the poet’s abnormally large bone structure and a truss worn due to a hernia helped with this.
I’m sure the Yeats family hoped that this would be the final word on the matter but the rumours apparently do still persist and pop up to this day — like here, I guess!
See W.B. Yeats’ 1939 obituary from The New York Times.
Death by W.B. Yeats
Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;
Many times he died,
Many times rose again.
A great man in his pride
Confronting murderous men
Casts derision upon
Supersession of breath;
He knows death to the bone –
Man has created death.
Not only is President Obama an avid reader, apparently he’s written a good poem or two in his time. I came across this poem, apparently written by Obama at the age of 19, posted on the blog The Best American Poetry.
Pop
Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken
In, sprinkled with ashes,
Pop switches channels, takes another
Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks
What to do with me, a green young man
Who fails to consider the
Flim and flam of the world, since
Things have been easy for me;
I stare hard at his face, a stare
That deflects off his brow;
I’m sure he’s unaware of his
Dark, watery eyes, that
Glance in different directions,
And his slow, unwelcome twitches,
Fail to pass.
I listen, nod,
Listen, open, till I cling to his pale,
Beige T-shirt, yelling,
Yelling in his ears, that hang
With heavy lobes, but he’s still telling
His joke, so I ask why
He’s so unhappy, to which he replies . . .
But I don’t care anymore, cause
He took too damn long, and from
Under my seat, I pull out the
Mirror I’ve been saving; I’m laughing,
Laughing loud, the blood rushing from his face
To mine, as he grows small,
A spot in my brain, something
That may be squeezed out, like a
Watermelon seed between
Two fingers.
Pop takes another shot, neat,
Points out the same amber
Stain on his shorts that I’ve got on mine and
Makes me smell his smell, coming
From me; he switches channels, recites an old poem
He wrote before his mother died,
Stands, shouts, and asks
For a hug, as I shink, my
Arms barely reaching around
His thick, oily neck, and his broad back; ’cause
I see my face, framed within
Pop’s black-framed glasses
And know he’s laughing too.
— Barack Obama
Poetry is everywhere. Folks are debating Elizabeth Alexander’s unauguration poem. The TS Elliot Prize was packed to the rafters. Sadly, the poetry ranks also lost one its number today - British poet John Fairfax has died at 78. The Guardian carries the story.
John Fairfax, who co-founded the creative writing community Arvon, is remembered for works such as Bone Harvest Done and Adrift on the Star-brow of Taliesin. He also worked with Ted Hughes and Arvon’s co-founder John Moat on a book called The Way to Write.
Have you ever wondered what happens when you get a lot of poets and fans of poetry crammed into the same room? John Walsh writes at The Independent about the TS Eliot poetry award, which he hosted earlier this week.
When I first attended a PBS (Poetry Book Society) readings evening, which features short-listed poets, it was a modest enterprise, attended by maybe 50 souls who’d grudgingly ventured out into the January night. Long trench coats hung from the backs of wooden chairs, and the poets had to clamber over each other to reach the stage. As years went by, word spread about the readings, and more people came, forcing the Society to book a 550-seat auditorium at the Bloomsbury Hotel. Last year, it was so crowded, there was some unseemly barging for space in the front row – not something one associates with poetry-lovers. This year, the organisers took a chance on hiring the 950-seat Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s South Bank. By 7.30 on Sunday, it was crammed to the gills and I had the honour of being Master of Ceremonies.
It sounds like poetry is doing fine. Here is another Jen Hadfield poem (that’s Jen Hadfield, the winner - not Jed Handfield as one careless blogger called her yesterday)
Self-portrait as a Fortune-telling Miracle Fish by Jen Hadfield
I’m disappointed in the gods that formed me thus
in the likeness of the wall-eyed Halibut;
in my longing, a Meagre or Eelpout;
in my maudlin, a Poor Cod or Bitterling.
I’m disgusted with whichever of you
chose jealousy-with-an-overbite
to be my consort, my symbiotic groupie
and yet some rogue demi-deity
gave a posy of dubious virtues –
made me transparent; electric;
a Wide-eyed Flounder; a Crystal Gobi;
a Stargazer; a Velvet-belly;
a Deepsea Angler, blind,
were it not for this proboscis
that lets me troll my little lantern
in the silt and dim
off the continental shelf.
And my daemon’s a dogfish – I think –
A Starry Hound, a blunt and hungry hobo,
scrounging, starveling, sleeping on the go.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, William DeWitt (W.D.) Snodgrass died Tuesday after a 4-month battle with inoperable lung cancer. January 5 was his 83rd birthday.
In 1960, Snodgrass won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his first book, Heart’s Needle. The poetry of Heart’s Needle expressed the angst he felt after losing custody of his daughter in a bitter divorce.
Prior to World War II, Snodgrass aspired to a career in music but after the war, he hoped to become a playwright. Somehow from there he drifted into poetry where he found his niche. Snodgrass was the author of more than 30 books of poetry and translations.
British poet and playwright Adrian Mitchell died last week at the age of 76, reports The Guardian.
I met him in 1962 at one such reading, for Arnold Wesker’s Centre 42 arts festivals for working- class audiences. He leapt on stage in a many coloured coat like a Blakean challenger and a rock’n'roll hero. He had fine music-hall timing, and a gravity under all the quickfire jokes and patter. He began to bring out a steady flow of poetry volumes, from Out Loud (1968) to Tell Me Lies (it will be published next year) – 15 books of free, syncopated, carnivalesque poems about love, war, children, politicians, pleasure, music. ‘He breathed in air/He breathed out light/ Charlie Parker was my delight.’
With their zany Ralph Steadman covers, these books quickened the reader’s imagination. Opening a new one was like an invitation to a party where the dancing never stopped. “He has the innocence of his own experience,” said Ted Hughes; “the British Mayakovsky,” said Kenneth Tynan; “the kind of tenderness sometimes to be found between animals,” wrote John Berger.
My colleague Stephanie Naylor has penned an excellent article about studying the poetry of Wilfred Owen. The war poet died 90 years ago.
Dulce et Decorum Est is one of the most vivid and horrific poems of World War I. The poem is made all the more powerful by the fact Owen was killed in action at the age of 25, just days before the war ended. The poem was published posthumously in 1920.
The first time I read Dulce et Decorum Est was in high school. It immediately resonated with me and to this day I still get goose bumps when I read it. I continue to debate whether reading this poem sparked my interest in the Great War era, or if it was an already present connection to that time that allowed this poem to impact me so deeply. Regardless how it happens, poetry can be an incredibly powerful tool to help understand an event, an experience, or even a lost generation.
Just in time for Halloween we have put together a little feature on the life and poetry of Edgar Allan Poe as well as the 10 most expensive Poe works ever sold on AbeBooks.