At The New Republic, Ruth Franklin celebrates the work of the late Wislawa Szymborska, and explores the brilliance of Polish poetry throughout the last half-century.

“Assuming that there weren’t any mind-altering chemicals in the run-off from Nowa Huta, the notoriously polluted steelworks outside Krakow (where Szymborska spent nearly her entire life), we can only conclude that Poland’s postwar poetic greatness was largely a historical accident—the collision of a deep and enduring literary culture with Europe’s ghastliest battleground.”

(Via The Book Bench)

Artist Jason Novak brings us his illustrated poem “The Cost of Noise.”

Enjoy: …more

A lot, really. First of all, we’re about to chat with Aase Berg and Johannes Gorannson about Berg’s book Transfer Fat It’s the first time we’ve done a translation, and we’re very excited to be able to talk with both the poet and the translator. Look for the transcript later this month.

February’s book is D. A. Powell’s Useless Landscape. Those are in the mail and we’ll start talking about them soon. Look for my essay on why I chose this book later this week. March’s book will be Linda Hogan’s Indios, and Camille Dungy will be leading that discussion.

Finally, this really isn’t book club news, but what the hell. The Rumpus is holding a fundraiser at the AWP convention, so if you’re going to be in Chicago on March 1, come by 826 Chicago. Readers include Nick Flynn, Cheryl Strayed, Peter Orner, Sommer Browning, Brian Spears and Stephen Elliott.

“Urban planners, artists, and citizens around the world must open poetic space within increasingly cramped, increasingly bottom-line-driven cities. Our political animalness gets claustrophobic. We require the commons to encounter each other and the physical landscape.”

Poem Forest involved participants reciting 15 lines from 2500 years of poetry at pre-established locations throughout the 50-acre old-growth forest that was recently renovated in the New York Botanical Garden. Jon Cotner, the artist behind the project, discusses his thought process and walks us through an audiovisual tour.

NPR’s All Things Considered is starting a monthly project that brings poets into the newsroom before unleashing them to write a poem “reflecting on the day’s news.” Their inaugural poet is Rumpus Poetry Book Club author Tracy K. Smith. You can read or listen to her poem here.

To truly commit a poem to memory is to commit your life to that poem. Out of all the many verses I’ve memorized over the last year, no other has so fully enveloped my days than John Ashbery’s “Poem at the New Year.” So much so that its evocative and elegiac images mark all my mythologies, memories, lies, fantasies, evasions, romances. …more

You just texted me two cock pics
It used to be more artful
The way you did it, the composition.
Like last week. It just stopped raining.
I have a cold quicksilver feeling.
I could put this in a place where you could find it
But I am hiding it here.

One time
I wanted you to call me
So I held my blackberry to my forehead.

Why am I so stupid. Do you know why? World, …more

A Rumpus Original Poem by Kristina Marie Darling

beloved. The raison d’être of the melancholic’s affliction. Consider the graceful line of his wool coat, its fabric dark against the towering snowdrifts. …more

HTML Giant converses with Nate Slawson about his new book Panic Attack, USA. Slawson also discusses the American sonnet, how music led him to poetry, and author readings.

“And I do a lot of rocking: reading books, writing, giving readings. I never sit when I give a reading. I need to dance a little. I need to love-up the microphone. Sometimes people joke me (if you do it to my face it’s cool) and/or I can sense there’s what the fuck? vibe in the crowd, but I think almost everyone realizes 1) it’s something I can’t not do and 2) it’s something that’s a part of the poems. Though I hope some people like the sway of my hips.”

Harriet, aka the Poetry Foundation blog, has posted an excerpt of the Rumpus Poetry Book Club’s recent chat with T. R. Hummer. Watch as I learn what the Bald Man Fallacy is and more. Fortunately, they didn’t quote my alternate reading of the poem. I appreciate that.

The discovery of a 500 year-old poem pasted in the back of a a 1561 edition of works by Geoffrey Chaucer sparked an investigation into the poem and its author, Elizabeth Darce.

“On the one hand it’s not brain surgery. It’s not a major discovery like DNA or something. But I think I’m right in saying that we don’t have any other nonreligious Latin poetry written by a woman possibly at all—and certainly in this period. So it’s the only love poem written in Latin by a woman ever until maybe the 18th century. That’s kind of astonishing really.”

(Via Poetry Foundation)

The Rumpus Poetry Book Club discussion with T. R. Hummer, in its entirety: …more

Mike Cohen has undertaken the endeavor of writing one short poem a day for an entire year. He’s almost a month in and going strong. Check out Project365 here.

We may not do lists here at The Rumpus, but that doesn’t stop us from pointing out when people connected to us get put on them. The NY Times has released its list of 100 Notable Books of 2011, and right there on the first page are Matthew Zapruder’s Come On All You Ghosts and Tracy K. Smith’s Life On Mars, which was a Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection back in May. Congratulations to everyone included in the list.

Double

I drink a Belgian and explain
to my father, over the phone,
why several of his thirty-nine …more

THE TRANSLATORS

After reading about Caesar
And Pompey, we searched
Until we found a nearly perfect
Antique plate. Speaking …more

The last poem I loved was “Nothing Twice” by the well-known Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. I loved all of her poems that followed, but “Nothing Twice” was the first Szymborska poem I ever read. Last week, I was on my way to the train station in Amsterdam, when I found a large bookstore. As most avid readers, I couldn’t just walk past. So I decided to spend an hour there, and I stumbled upon Szymborska’s collected poems. …more

New York folks: Don’t miss The Language of Objects tomorrow evening at MoMA.

“Rob Walker, contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and co-organizer (with Joshua Glenn) of the creative writing project Significant Objects, which seeks to transform objects through stories about them, orchestrates an evening of responses to objects in the exhibition Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects.”

Participants will include Kenneth Goldsmith, poet; Ben Greenman, author and editor, The New Yorker (who we interviewed this September); Leanne Shapton, illustrator, author, and publisher; and Cintra Wilson, culture critic.

Find more details and ticket information here.

The week I decided to move to Los Angeles, I read a book of poetry by a woman who had lived there for four years, hated it, left it for New York, and couldn’t stop writing poems about it.

It seemed fitting. Except Becca Klaver came “back East,” leaving Los Angeles, whereas I’m about to set up shop there. …more