Joy Harjo, Katie Halper, and (me!) at PEN World Voices. Harjo was incredibly charismatic and a great storyteller. I asked her what she thought about the notion of time as a musician. Once the event was over, she took over as the house DJ for a little dance party. What an artist!
photo © Beowulf Sheehan / PEN American Center
Source: penamericanParis-based collective records music video to support Cameroonian writer, poet, and politician Enoh Meyomesse, who is currently serving 7 years in prison.
Click here to read an interactive timeline or click here to send an e-letter to Cameroonian authorities.
Source: pen.orgPEN Launches Interactive Timeline to press for release of new Honorary Member Enoh Meyomesse.
Click here to learn the story of Enoh Meyomesse and take action.
Source: dannielschoonebeek
I’m sick to death of lists. So I wrote 100 pieces of advice for American poets as part of my monthly column for The American Reader. Bring it on, Reagan Estate. I will neither cease nor desist.
Do you guys like libel? Danniel Schoonebeek offers up 100 pieces of advice for American poets at The American Reader.
Source: penamerican
Read for Liu Xiaobo!
PEN International, in partnership with the Dublin-based human rights group Frontline Defenders (www.frontlinedefenders.org), will be launching an international campaign for imprisoned Chinese poet and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo in early December 2012, and is asking for your support. The campaign is aimed at pressuring the Chinese authorities at this time of leadership transition to release the acclaimed writer from his harsh imprisonment, the fourth year of which will be marked on 8 December 2012.
We are gathering video recordings of writers and poets around the world reading excerpts of Liu Xiaobo’s poetry, which will be uploaded onto a website and used as the basis for a series of actions and events leading up to 10 December (International Human Rights Day). The videos will be placed online at the launch of the campaign, and an edited compilation will be created for use in campaign events.
The process for uploading a video is very simple. Please click here for instructions for submitting your video recording, and writing samples by Liu Xiaobo (in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Farsi and Chinese). A campaign paper with recommended actions will follow next week.
Thank you for taking part in this campaign.
The Athol Fugard Theatre in Cape Town, South Africa. Devil’s Peak looms in the background.
I’ve had a fantastic week at the Open Book Festival in Cape Town, where I’ve been traveling on behalf of PEN with the poet Cathy Park Hong. You can find more posts at penlive.tumblr.com penamerican.tumblr.com and returnofthedeji.tumblr.com. Got it?
We’ll be posting content from the festival over the next few months.
—Deji Olukotun
Source: penamericanFrom left: Poet and professor Cathy Park Hong, PEN Freedom to Write Fellow Deji Olukotun, and Executive Vice President of South African PEN Margie Orford
Today, I spoke with Cathy Park Hong and Margie Orford at the Cape Town Book Festival about the work of PEN American Center, PEN International, and South African PEN. After our lively discussion—which ranged from linguistic diversity to digital media—Cathy read a translated work from a South Korean poet. It turns out that Cathy, the author of the new collection Engine Empire (Norton), is a translator and used to be a journalist.
A great event, with more to follow.
—Deji Olukotun
Source:
Seamus Murphy/VII for The New York TimesSaheera Sharif, the founder of Mirman Baheer (upper center); Ogai Amail, a poet and member of the group (bottom left); also pictured are other members of the poets’ group.
By ELIZA GRISWOLD
Published: April 27, 2012
In a private house in a quiet university neighborhood of Kabul, Ogai Amail waited for the phone to ring. Through a plate-glass window, she watched the sinking sun turn the courtyard the color of eggplant. The electricity wasn’t working and the room was unheated, a few floor cushions the only furnishings. Amail tucked her bare feet underneath her and pulled up the collar of her puffy black coat. Her dark hair was tied in a ponytail, and her eyelids were coated in metallic blue powder. In the green glare of the mobile phone’s screen, her face looked wan and worried. When the phone finally bleeped, Amail shrieked with joy and put on the speakerphone. A teenage girl’s voice tumbled into the room. “I’m freezing,” the girl said. Her voice was husky with cold. To make this call, she’d sneaked out of her father’s mud house without her coat.
Like many of the rural members of Mirman Baheer, a women’s literary society based in Kabul, the girl calls whenever she can, typically in secret. She reads her poems aloud to Amail, who transcribes them line by line. To conceal her poetry writing from her family, the girl relies on a pen name, Meena Muska. (Meena means “love” in the Pashto language; muska means “smile.”)
Source: pen.org
September is all about banned books here at PEN American. We reached out to writers, editors, literary illuminati, and PEN staff to write about the banned books that matter to them most. Today’s piece comes from Larry Siems, director of PEN’s Freedom to Write program.
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy
in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in
Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a
consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out
of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in
Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton
treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral
nations! invincible mad houses! granite cocks! monstrous
bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees,
radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is
everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the
American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of
sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the
flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal
screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation!
down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the
holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to
solitude! waving! Carrying flowers! Down to the river! into
the street!
—from “Howl,” Part II
When I was 19 and Ginsberg was in his early 50s, I won the job—won because I had a car—of picking him up at O’Hare Airport and driving him to South Bend, where every year Notre Dame had the bad judgment to give a band of sophomores $15,000 to organize a literary festival. I knew nothing and my car, a fishtailing behemoth of a Buick, sucked; its systems could go dark and shut down for no reason, even at highway speeds. I dreaded a breakdown, or anything else that would drag out what were sure to be 120 very awkward miles.
But Ginsberg was lovely. Cheerful, comfortable, sane, witty, he shared just enough of himself to put me at ease, so by the time the snow starting falling there was no anxiety at all to settling in to a cautious, responsible speed.
Somewhere near Gary, mid-conversation, Ginsberg dove for his shoulder bag and scribbled a note. I was dying to know, and within a few miles I’d worked up the nerve to ask him what he wrote.
“Did you see that last sign?”
I tried to picture it coming toward me again in the snow.
“It’s a perfect haiku,” he said.
And as he said that, I could read it. And it was true:
Exit 11
Indiana State Police
No Public RestroomsI saw, for the first time, what it really means to be a poet—to have the habit of mind where the universe reveals itself through linguistic forms the way, for physicists, it whispers its truths through math equations.
That was in February, 1979, twenty-three years after the first public recitation of “Howl” and twenty-one years after a California judge cleared Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg’s publisher, and Shig Murao, the City Lights Bookstore manager who sold a copy ofHowl and Other Poemsto an undercover cop, of obscenity charges.
Nearly three decades later, closing in on the age Ginsberg was that winter, I found myself summoning a box of files from the PEN archives because, incredibly, “Howl” still scared people. A few years before, the FCC had raised the fine for violations of its obscenity standards to up to $325,000 per offending word. Now, on the 50th anniversary of Ferlinghetti’s and Murao’s court victory, WBAI-FM radio in New York was balking at broadcasting the poem for fear of incurring bankrupting fines.
The box contained records, some with Ginsberg’s own comments and correspondence, of earlier FCC skirmishes, most recently a 1995 decision in a case in which PEN and Ginsberg were co-petitioners. That decision had widened the window during which “Howl” and other material deemed not obscene but indecent could be broadcast, from midnight to 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. Now, in 2007, we had lost Ginsberg, and things were clearly trending in the opposite direction.
In that same box was another batch of files filled with messages and notes from Ginsberg, these ones often fired off and faxed as he was preparing to travel overseas. I’m heading to these countries, he would say. Who are the writers in jail or in trouble there? Whose case should I be pressing?
I’d been to some of those same countries by then. I hadn’t known I was following in his footsteps, in a way, not as a poet but as a representative of PEN. But wherever I went, it was clear he had been there; the worse the repression a country had suffered, the more the writers remembered Ginsberg’s visits, and the better they knew his work. “Howl” may still agitate censors in the U.S., but I’ve heard the phrase “starving hysterical naked” in so many beautiful strange accents and cadences that I hear it now as a natural exhalation of the earth.
To read more pieces from Banned Books Month, click here.
Larry Siems is the author of The Torture Report,which presents a comprehensive analysis of torture in the post-9/11 years, and editor of Between the Lines: Letters between Undocumented Mexican and Central American Immigrants and Their Families and Friends.
