Per Contra Poetry Summer 2008

Per Contra Poetry Summer 2008

Rhina P. Espaillat, The Per Contra Interview with Miriam N. Kotzin

"My poet grandmother wrote down my first poems verbatim, and then she and my aunt Rhina taught me to write them down for myself. It was something I knew my grandmother did, and I loved hearing her recite, and loved to be read to from books of poetry and stories. It seemed like a form of play at first, and it's never wholly lost that quality of play for me, even after I learned, years later, that this particular "game" was sometimes a way to deal with sorrow, and it became a more 'serious' pursuit."

After Apple-Picking by Robert Frost - Click Here

Birches by Robert Frost - Click Here

Mending Wall by Robert Frost - Click Here

The Death of the Hired Man by Robert Frost - Click Here

The Silken Tent by Robert Frost - Click Here

the gods i, the gods ii, the gods iii, the gods iv, the gods v, the gods vi, the gods vii, the gods viii, the gods ix, the gods x, the gods xi, the gods xii by Donald Kuspit

The Artist as Hero by Carter Ratcliff

Carter Ratcliff, The Per Contra Interview with Miriam N. Kotzin

"So a poet ought to pay attention to everything from Tom Swift to Shakespeare, whom I haven’t mentioned much as I haven’t mentioned air, because you can take it for granted that I breathe when write. A poet ought to read everything from Heraclitus to the respectable newspapers and the headlines of the tabloids one sees when one is checking out of a supermarket. Just the headlines. Because there are, after all, limits to what one can read."

Sirens by David R. Slavitt

Break In by Lewis Turco

Lewis Turco, The Per Contra Interview with Miriam N. Kotzin

"By January of 1954, while I was still nineteen years of age and not yet two years out of high school, my poems were appearing more or less regularly in the little magazines, and I’d had several poems appear in Our Navy, a monthly slick, which had begun to publish a poetry column for which I suspect I was responsible — other sailors, having seen my poems perhaps, had begun sending in their own."

Translation

Frosting by Rhina P. Espaillat

"Without the long history of this universally disparaged art, there would be none of the intellectual and aesthetic cultural crossbreeding that gave us Homer, the Hebrew Bible, Virgil and Dante, to name only a few of the texts without which our literature would be unrecognizable. Clearly our view of the world and of ourselves as a species depends, in large measure, on what authors distant in space and time have left us in all the world’s languages."

On the Street and One Day You Will by Gagan Gill Translated by Arlene Zide and the Poet

Pietà by Gabriela Melinescu translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Inger Johansson

I Don’t Write Because Others Wrote Before Me by Ana Minga Translated by Alexis Levitin

Tobacco Dogs IV by Ana Minga Translated by Alexis Levitin

Box of Souvenirs by Carolina Patiño Translated by Alexis Levitin