ケイ・ライアン「ホーム・ツー・ルースト」(朗読) Kay Ryan reading “Home to Roost”
About Ryan’s work, J. D. McClatchy has said: “Her poems are compact, exhilarating, strange affairs, like Erik Satie miniatures or Joseph Cornell boxes. She is an anomaly in today’s literary culture: as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost” (Quoted here).
Samuel Barber: “Sure on This Shining Night”& “The Crucifixion” Cheryl Studer, Soprano
The composer Samuel Barber worked with several texts by poet and writer James Agee to produce some of the most stunningly poetic settings by any American composer. The first of these two songs, the spectacularly lovely “Sure on This Shining Night” is surely one of the great American art songs. The other song here comes from Barber’s Hermit Songs, and is based on a translation by Howard Mumford Jones of a medieval Irish text.
Jeffers brought enormous learning in literature, religion, philosophy, languages, myth, and sciences to his poetry. One of his favorite themes was the intense, rugged beauty of the landscape in opposition to the degraded and introverted condition of modern man. Strongly influenced by Nietzsche’s concepts of individualism, Jeffers believed that human beings had developed an insanely self-centered view of the world, and felt passionately that we must learn to have greater respect for the rest of creation. (From the Academy of American Poets’ biography of Jeffers)
The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads—
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
Adrienne Rich reads “What Kind of Times Are These”
This film was part of the Poetry Everywhere project airing on public television. Produced by David Grubin Productions and WGBH Boston, in association with the Poetry Foundation. Filmed at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. For more information, visit http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/poetryeverywhere/.
Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) Today, America lost one of its most epoch-making poets. Adrienne Rich was a feminist, humaniatrian, and deeply caring writer who helped change what it meant to be poet in the modern world while opening the possibilities of language to new, daring directions.
From “Diving into the Wreck”
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
For the complete poem, plus an audio file of Adrienne Rich reading her this poem in the year 2009, click here.
ジャック・ケルアックの「アメリカン・ハイク」 Jack Kerouac reads “American Haiku”
Thoughts, photographs, books, poems, videos, and experiences collected from both sides of the Pacific.
太平洋両岸、特に日本と北米からの感想、写真、詩歌、書評などの雑記。
ジェフリー・アングルス
ウェスターン・ミシガン大学 准教授・日本文学
現代日本文学・翻訳家
Jeffrey Angles is an associate professor and translator of Japanese literature. He teaches at Western Michigan University.
ツイッター(主に日本語):
Twitter (mostly in Japanese):
http://twitter.com/jeffreyangles