If you took an Uber in Washington, D.C., a couple of years ago, there was a chance your driver was one of the greatest living Uyghur poets.

 

Let there be a man who lived through the winter
Let him fill his inner pocket with rain
and find a farmer
sowing his fields with wind seeds
and let him say to the farmer: “Here I am.”

Three Poems by Tahir Hamut Izgil

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/tahir-hamut-three-poems/

Atlantic article.

https://www.theatlantic.com/the-uyghur-chronicles/

"Nothing There: The Late Poetry of John Koethe" by Robert Hahn

 "And that is why artists keep trying—to speak to something beyond the confines of the page, to move the stars to pity."

from "Nothing There: The Late Poetry of John Koethe" by Robert Hahn

https://kenyonreview.org/reviews/the-swimmer-by-john-koethe-738439/

 I am thinking about poetry and that can only be a good thing.

With a little old driver, so lively and quick, I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.

 

Helen and I were walking the dogs thru the neighbourhood looking at the decorations. I had put up some outside lights and the interior was bursting with the tree, Nutcrackers and various Santas. I did say that what I really wanted to add was one of the older style plastic Santa or Snowman figures. Friday we went on the 2nd or 3rd non-grocery/hardware shopping trip since this all started. We went to Inglewood, a neighbourhood known for it's small shops. We had ordered several of the items ahead of time and everyone was very careful. I assume the grinches were at the malls or the various demonstrations. We visited several shops and picked up delicious burgers on the way home, also ordered online. But the highlight of the day was finding this fellow in Murphy's Mid Century a store we have frequented for years. I saw him thru the window before the store opened and we passed by again we were waved in and you can imagine what I looked at first. Coincidence can be a funny thing but it worked for me yesterday and I am delighted with our Christmas display, a little light for a gloomy time.

"Cards in each mailbox, 

angel, manger, star and lamb, 

as the rural carrier, 

driving the snowy roads, 

hears from her bundles 

the plaintive bleating of sheep, 

the shuffle of sandals, 

the clopping of camels. "

from Christmas Mail

by Ted Kooser

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55886/christmas-mail

Venetian Lagoon 2016

 "Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;"

from September 1, 1939
W.H. Auden

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/31/wh-auden-september-1-1939-poem

Atomic Sleep

 

“a series of luminous tracks that betray invisible electrons startled from atomic sleep,”

D. G. Jones

https://thewalrus.ca/startled-from-atomic-sleep/

First I selected the Pound from a Free Library while on a walk with the dogs. Then as we passed again I went beck for the Homer.

"For he has only just got back from abroad, and from a region so remote that one might well give up all hope of return once the winds had blown one astray into the wise expanse of sea, which is so vast and perilous that even the birds cannot make their passage in the year."

from Telemachus with Nestor

I often pick  up different editions of titles I already own,  especially if they are older editions by well known publishers. I enjoy reading different introductions and or notes for the same works. I also enjoy the sense of engagement with the past. The name in the top right corner indicates they came from the same person. And that person seems to have keep them for some time. Sadly there are no annotations. 

"All night, and as the wind lieth among
The cypress trees, he lay,"

from Speech for Psyche in the Golden Book of Apuleius

We looked for Pound's grave when we visited Cemetery Island in Venice. But it was a crowded graveyard and we settled for the grave of Igor Stravinsky.

"I had not thought death had undone so many." T.S. Eliot

Photos, Canadian Poets and the image of the farm

Ten miles from anywhere eighty years and more,
Where the frozen roadstones grind iron shoes and tires
     And the timberwood’s last stand
Lives only in brushwood and long memories,―see,
The new-peeled posts are marching, the taut wires
     Sing to the naked land,

Sing to the valley of slash and beaver-meadow,
The stone-pocked fields and bog-born stunted alders
     And the black hills rising sheer
As mountains of iron and sand round the Genie’s castle
(The age-old view of eyes that each November
     Look back on a wasted year)

from Gentleman's Farm 

by John Glassco

W. S. Merwin, Poen and Conservationist, September 30, 1927-March 16, 2019

We lost another poet, W.S. Merwin, Friday. 

I think it is safe to say he was a favourite of mine. 

I hope he has passed through the gate 

and found his friends waiting there.

For the Anniversary of My Death

W.S. Merwin

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day   

When the last fires will wave to me

And the silence will set out

Tireless traveler

Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer

Find myself in life as in a strange garment

Surprised at the earth

And the love of one woman

And the shamelessness of men

As today writing after three days of rain

Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease

And bowing not knowing to what

"I turned

uphill to come to the top gate and the last barn 

the sun still in the day and my shadow going on 

out into the upland and I saw they were milking 

it was that hour and it seemed all my friends were there 

we greeted each other and we walked back out to the gate 

talking and saw the last light and our shadows gesturing 

far out along the ridge until the darkness gathered them 

and we went on standing here believing there were other words 

we stood here talking about our lives in the autumn. " 

                                      From his poem Gate

A lovely discussion of the poem Gate can be found here at The Globe and Mail's,  How Poems Work;

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/how-poems-work/article4129599/

Links to tributes can be found here

https://www.staradvertiser.com/2019/03/16/hawaii-news/w-s-merwin-prize-winning-poet-and-ardent-naturalist-dies-in-his-maui-home/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/obituaries/w-s-merwin-dead-poet-laureate.html 

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/03/15/crashing-w-s-merwins-wedding/

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/15/509122300/poet-w-s-merwin-who-was-inspired-by-conservation-dies-at-91

https://theamericanscholar.org/there-is-no-time-in-the-garden/#.XI0yoBNKi9Y

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/144293/remembering-ws-merwin
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/W-S-Merwin-poet-of-austere-lyricism-who-twice-13692721.php

https://www.vogue.com/article/ws-merwin-obituary?verso=true

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/15/ws-merwin-poet-laureate-dies-91

First draft/ The Poems Themselves

When the poet dies
it isn't like the end of coal
or the domestic auto industry.
The assembly lines don't pause
lake freighters aren't stilled at their docks
few jobs are lost, mortgages defaulted.

If they were old
maybe the poems ended years ago,
and their publisher has been compiling
their old essays for decades.

And after some lamentations, public
private, their world will still
save for the whispering, 
rustling of the poems themselves
as someone in need of something
alights among them
and learns of the smell of an old barn
in 1956 or the look on the faces of deer.

Guy