Driving through Chicago Blues

On the Weary Blues

When Hughes writes the blues it sways and it shakes

To the heat of that night and that rhythm it makes.

His pen his piano, his paper the mic,

And he sings a sad song all the lonesome ones like.

 

O Blues! Cries Hughes as he plays for those fools.

 

The fools with crushed dreams that cry through a song,

A song still bursting with hope gone for too long.

A song in a song, blues all the same.

The good ole days never came never came.

 

If my pen could sing...

“All I could do was hang my head and moan” belts out Big Joe Williams in Delta Blues. Blues all seem to come from this mutual desperation to relieve some deep emotion that has been building up down in the soul. Whether it is grief, frustration, or just depression, emotion is what fills up a blues song to the brim. The blues are marked by swaggering tunes and slow melodious beats. It seems ironic, however, that these songs that sing of the troubles and hard times end up bringing happiness. The blues are really an escape where sharing emotion through song can bring people to together. Blues appeal to the ears with the simple beats and rhythm, but the blues reach people the most when they hit home with the emotion of the song. It is emotion that pours out the lyrics, cues the banjo, and blows soul through the harmonica.

Poetry in Translation

The mission of Circumference Magazine is essentially to introduce a new array of poetry by translating poets that would normally be unavailable to American readers. The poems are published in a biannual publication and appear side by side with the original poem and its translation. The online journal is relatively plain in design and contains a complete list of the magazine issues and included works. The site also contains links to samples of a select few of the works as well as a few video clips of the works being read aloud. One of the works which is sampled is

“Death was Waiting for us Elsewhere”

Written by: Ivan Wernisch

Translated by: Jonathan Bolton

Wernisch provides a wartime description of a village that he passed through as a soldier. Wernisch’s journal-like description of the landscape displays a heightened sense of awareness of his surroundings. He describes the landscape saying, “The sun warmed us,/ the yellow and purple forests were fragrant
/ The red of cranberries was everywhere”. However, his romantic descriptions of the landscape are abruptly broken by the harsh realities of the war. He writes, “But the strange thing was: you could smell fish more than the stench of corpses.” Wernisch juxtaposes the use of monotone statements of fact with similarly dull statements about death to suggest the inevitability of his own death. This theme is apparent as the poem concludes, “
but death was waiting for us elsewhere/ 

The night was white and pink.” The poem appears in translation below its original form on the website, however, the quote from the beginning of the poem is not translated which keeps a feeling of originality about the work. The poem appears in the same format in the original work as in the translation with regard to structure and punctuation. Although the translator's contribution to the work is unapparent, the content of the poem would suggest little room for the translator to alter much of the work.

My Type of Poetry

Hello faithful readers. My name as you know is Bobby Powers, and I am a freshman at Notre Dame. I am in a contemporary poetry class which has assigned me with the task of examining poetry and presenting my opinions on this blog. As will become apparent, the most important aspect of poetry to me is a poem’s ability to entertain the reader. Whether it be by thought provoking psycho analysis or cheesy slap stick humor, a poem is only as good as its ability to captivate the reader’s attention. I personally enjoy poems which take on an original format or style, that introduce completely different outlooks on life, and that use humor as a device to entertain.

Excerpt from “i am unemployed”

By: Tao Lin

“- to be angry at the national book award people but to channel that anger into taking a hammer into the forest and attacking wild animals and smashing trees and wearing an owl suit and dropping out of tall trees like a real owl and screaming and mauling campers and smashing deer and paralyzing them and eating them alive and then I think that wait a minute, that seems wrong, is bad advice maybe; but then it seems there is a prologue to my nightmare and i watch it and enjoy it and it is horrifying and shocking and it is in pill form and i swallow it and it changes everything and it’s brilliant and i wake up smiling”

Tao Lin follows my golden rule of poetry in this excerpt: entertain the reader. The poem is both shocking and amusing and in a style of dry humor that is unique to Tao Lin. He utilizes an outlandish stream of conscious style in this poem that is accentuated by his lack of punctuation and informal grammar.

Using this style he is able to touch on some of the more basic human sentiments such as anger and frustration while embodying some of the more animalistic aspects of these emotions.

And so it begins...

Apparently someone thought it was a good idea for me to start a blog...what were they thinking?