Word: poems
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Rich began by reading her poem “The Art of Translation,” which celebrates the act of translation itself as an art form...
During the recitation of her poem “Seven Skins,” her words took a sensational and knowing tone when she began to describe an intimate session between a Harvard man and a Radcliffe woman...
...excellent new translation of these poems makes clear why they have mattered so much for so long. One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each: A Translation of the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu by Peter McMillan reveals the vivid emotions that have kept the heart of the collection beating all this time. The poems of the Hyakunin Isshu are waka: 31-syllable verses of five lines. Like the better known haiku, which they spawned, waka have a brevity and a strictness of topic and word-choice that demand economy of expression. They exemplify the idea that art is born of constraints and dies...
...served as texts for cultural education - a staple of calligraphers and students, who memorize them in order to learn classical Japanese grammar. When I was a college student studying in Kyoto, where almost all of the hundred poets lived and wrote, I tried to memorize a few of the poems myself. I had got as far as the third (in fact, I never got further) when I went to dinner at a teacher's house one night and discovered that the teacher's mother - a city social worker - was a Hyakunin Isshu fan. She humored me by asking...
...black voices swelling with nostalgia to return to their African roots, Douglass stayed put. Poet Langston Hughes grieved in verse that "(America never was America to me) ... (There's never been equality for me,/ Nor freedom in this 'homeland of the free')." But his lament is couched in a poem whose title, like its author, yearns for acceptance: Let America Be America Again...