Ciaran Carson

These are by no means the only places online where one may find poems written by Ciaran Carson, but it’s a start. First, the “official” pages:

• His Academy Of American Poets page (yes, I know he’s Irish, but I’m still glad he’s present there, since he’s not on the Poetry Foundation site) feature four poems: the anaphoric “Fear,” the condensed lines of “Home” and “Let Us Go Then,” and the imagery of violet in “The Assignation.”
• His Poetry Archive page also has four poems with (unfortunately low-volume) audio readings: “Belfast Confetti,” the first poem of his I’ve read and still among my favorites, the imagery of white this time in “Snow,”  the cute “Catmint Tea,” and “Fear” again.

Carson has translated Irish epic poems, from the traditional heroics of The Táin to the erotic farce of The Midnight Court, as well as Dante‘s Inferno.  He has also “adapted” sonnets by Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stephane Mallarme in The Alexandrine Plan (and used the same Alexandrine line for his own book-lengh sonnet sequence The Twelfth of Never). It seems appropriate then for his work to be translated as well in:

• a Spanish-language essay on “the quotidian violence” in Carson’s work that contain the English texts and Spanish translations of “Belfast Confetti,” “Night Out,” “Campaign,” and “Ambition”
• an Italian-language essay on Carson’s “poetic maps and stories of Belfast” that feature the English texts and Italian translations of “Turn Again,” “Loaf,” “Punctuation,” the celebrated “Dresden” (as well as, once again, “Belfast Confetti” and “Campaign”), “Smithfield Market,” “Travellers,”  and “Slate Street School”

Here are two big-name periodicals with one poem each:

• “Through” from The New Yorker
• “Second Time Round” in The Guardian

Finally, two other sources:

• a discussion thread on The Blue Dragon has two moving poems of love and potential loss: “Pas De Deux” and “The Story of Madame Chevalier”
• an unpublished personal anthology of favorite poems from 2000 B.C. to 2000 A.D. include three poems by Carson: “Bagpipe Music,” “Dresden” once again, and “Hamlet.”

Seven for Today

There’s too much work to be done for me to read any of these right now, but apparently not so much work that I can’t take note of the URLs here:

1. The Anagram, the Palindrome & One-Dimensional Cosmology: Because I do love mathematics. Or, more precisely, I want to love mathematics, but only on my own terms.
2. Admittedly, “Music for Shuffle” isn’t really something to read, but something I will download and play and enjoy in its infinite variety. I have a feeling this might be a really good piece of music to listen to while writing.
3. “Don’t Look Now and Roeg’s Red Coat” is an evocative article on an evocative article of clothing in an evocative film.
4. I could have sworn I once had a read-along children’s book version of Tron. That’s now lost, but this has been found.
5. Peter Bogdanovich talks about what we really mean, or what we really should mean, when we talk about “poetry in film.”
6. “Angry Nerds” has a funny title, but serious philosophical AND social consequences in its discussion of the dangers of misunderstanding Nietzsche.
7. Chad McCail makes beautiful art.

I’d like to mention that the first two were  from the Twitter timeline of Christian Bök, who has delighted me in so many ways. I think I’ll do practice drills in French using his reading and translation of Rimbaud’s “Voyelles.”