Ada Limon Named 24th U.S. Poet Laureate
Ada Limon, author of six poetry collections and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, was recently named the new U.S. Poet Laureate, taking over the position held for three years bv Joy Harjo. A professor in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte, Limon called her appointment “an incredible honor” and the shock of a lifetime.” https://www.npr.org
Rumi’s Little Book of the Heart
This inspiring little book, with translations by Maryam Mafi and Azima Melita Kolin, offers an excellent introduction to the life and poetry of 13th-century Sufi poet Mowlana Jallaledin Mohamad Rumi (Hampton Roads, 2016). Born in Persia on September 30th, 1207 (in what is now Afghanistan), Rumi was the son of a renowned Islamic teacher/theologian, a role Rumi himself later assumed. But it wasn’t until the age of thirty-six when he met Shams of Tabriz, a wandering Sufi mystic, that Rumi’s spiritual genius blossomed, notably in the form of his ecstatic, voluminous poetry. In poem after poem he reveals an overwhelming experience of love that “appears on the wings of grace,” and questions, “How can one remain sober drinking Your wine?” Working from Forouzanfar’s edition of Rumi’s The Divan, Mafi and Kolin have created a lively collection that respects it source yet still feels contemporary. Interspersed among the poems are samples of Persian calligraphy by Hassan Behras Shayjani and Rumi’s signature emblem by Nutan Gungorencan.
The Essential Rumi
At a conference in 1976, Robert Bly handed Coleman Barks some dated translations of the 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi, with the comment that, “These poems need to be released from their cages.” This was the beginning of a lifelong commitment for the former University of Georgia professor, now 85, whose streamlined versions of the great Rumi have now sold well over two million copies.
To say the poems in Barks’s The Essential Rumi (Harper One, 2004) are spiritual may be somewhat misleading. They don’t deal in hope or certainties, or conventional notions of good and bad. What they offer is clarity, openness, and an invitation to share in Rumi’s generous spirit. But there’s also the grief of separation and longing for the beloved — for union, for ecstasy, for the meeting of heaven and earth. In its mature phase, Rumi tells, us, love becomes “oceanic” and “begins to move with the whole” and (there is) “No better love than love with no object.”
Rumi was the son of a Moslem theologian and served in the same capacity for many years, but his poetry isn’t doctrinaire. It stems from a wide knowledge of religion and deep insight into the “living marrow” of being. Coleman Barks’s translations in The Essential Rumi (2004)containnot only Moslem references, but several Christian, Hebrew, Buddhist, and Sufi references, as well. In one poem, “How Finite Minds Most Want to Be,” Jesus, Joseph, and Moses are referenced; in another, “The Well of Sacred Text,” both the Qur’an and the Bible are mentioned in the same line. There are several other examples that demonstrate a kinship of faiths and Rumi’s fluency with their stories. In “A Pilgrimage to a Person,” he says, “Be a pilgrim to the kaaba inside a human being,/and Mecca will rise on its own.” To be “inside the majesty,” to “become a lover,” this was Rumi’s message and the heart of his realization.
I think of these poems almost as living things, as scrapings of DNA from the life of an extraordinary teacher/poet, one whose songs go beyond belief and provide a direct view into “the radiant depth of the self,” as Barks has put it. Jacob Needleman summed up the importance of these translations: “Through Coleman Barks’s inspired renderings, we tired, modern people have come not only to love Rumi, but even — a little — to love who and what Rumi himself loved.” In addition to the poems, which are themselves teaching devices, the introductory comments at the beginning of each section in The Essential Rumi are an education — in culture, history, religion, the use and limits of metaphor, and the fluidity of identity. And if that’s not enough, the volume closes with several savory sounding recipes. Like the poems, they’re guides for living a nourishing life.
Interviews
This interview with poet John Silbey Williams by the editors of the River Heron Review (https://www.riverheronreview.com, July 6, 2022) focuses on craft and offers some of the most practical advice I’ve ever heard from a writer. The author of nine books of poetry and winner of multiple awards, Williams also serves as editor of the Inflectionist Review.
Nicole Vassell interviews poet and playwright Claudia Rankin for The Independent (https://www.independent.co.uk), June 24, 2022. The author of Citizen, An American Lyric, called one of the most influential poetic works of the 21st century, Rankin speaks candidly here about racism and her new play, The White Card.
Writing Opportunities
New Women’s Voices Chapbook Contest, sponsored by Finishing Line Press, is now accepting poetry manuscripts “by a writer who identifies as a woman and has not yet published a full-length manuscript.” Open until September 15th, the contest offers publication and a prize of $1500.
Blue Mountain Review, an online journal out of Athens, Georgia, is currently accepting poetry, fiction, and visual arts (no simultaneous submissions) “What we sing saves the soul,” reads the introduction to their website. https://www.bluemountainreview.submittable.com/submit
Next time: The poetry of Japanese Zen poet Ikkyu (Crazy Cloud), and more.
Jerome Gagnon Blog 