The Voice of Sheila Chandra by Kazim Ali

 

The Voice of Sheila Chandra
by Kazim Ali
(Alice James Books, Oct. 2020)

Reviewed by AM Ringwalt

KAZIM ALI’S THE VOICE OF SHEILA CHANDRA

April 20, 2021
by AM Ringwalt

The Voice of Sheila Chandra, the latest collection of poems from the U.S.-based author Kazim Ali, concludes in question: “Do you remember / Which question / Needs answer.” In a book with form blown open by subtle and sustained interrogation, the relationship between audience and performer surpasses static binary. This final question functions as a verbal haunt: who is its intended recipient? In The Voice of Sheila Chandra, the reader must comb through the text’s intersecting questions and answers—spanning three expansive poems and four hymn-like interludes. Ali is consumed by his sonic influences, so much so that his documented acts of listening generate distinct performances on the page. These poems are mediums for his listening, his embodied mortality. He writes: “To hear is to make real.”

 

John Ashbery

John Ashbery by Adam Fitzgerald

The Bomb

July 1, 2014

Through his translations from the French, John Ashbery joins a body of great twentieth-century American poets who have sought to trace their lineage from elsewhere, as much to undermine prevailing literary conventions as to inform us about those other traditions. In the twin prose and poetry volumes of Ashbery’s Collected French Translations, recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a compelling argument can be made—that the wild diversity and vitality of innovative American poetry operates today, in large part, because of what the translator-poet found in Raymond Roussel, Arthur Rimbaud, Giorgio de Chirico, and Max Jacob. By influencing Ashbery so decisively throughout a seven-decade career, these Frenchmen have shaped us all.

Mark Strand / Eating Poetry

by Sergei Sarakhanov

EATING POETRY

by Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. 
There is no happiness like mine. 
I have been eating poetry. 

The librarian does not believe what she sees. 
Her eyes are sad 
and she walks with her hands in her dress. 

The poems are gone. 
The light is dim. 
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up. 

Their eyeballs roll, 
their blond legs burn like brush. 
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
 
She does not understand. 
When I get on my knees and lick her hand, 
she screams. 

I am a new man. 
I snarl at her and bark. 
I romp with joy in the bookish dark. 

Read also
BIOGRAPHY OF MARK STRAND
Mark Strand / With Only the Stars to Guide Us
Mark Strand at John Cabot University
Mark Strand / The Art of Poetry
Mark Strand / The Everyday Enchantment of Music
Mark Strand / The Coming of Light
Mark Strand / Eating Poetry
Mark Strand / From the Long Sad Party
Mark Strand / My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer

Mark Strand / Always

Gift by Leonard Cohen

 

Gift

by Leonard Cohen

 

You tell me that silence
is nearer to peace than poems
but if for my gift
I brought you silence
(for I know silence)
you would say
This is not silence
this is another poem
and you would hand it back to me.

As the mist leaves no scar by Leonard Cohen

 

As the mist leaves no scar

by Leonard Cohen

 

As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill,
So my body leaves no scar
On you, nor ever will.

 
When wind and hawk encounter,
What remains to keep?
So you and I encounter,
Then turn, then fall to sleep.

 
As many nights endure
Without a moon or star,
So will we endure,
When one is gone and far.

Steer your way by Leonard Cohen

 

Steer your way 

by Leonard Cohen

 

Steer your way through the ruins of the Altar and the Mall

Steer your way through the fables of Creation and the Fall

Steer your way past the Palaces that rise above the rot

Year by year

Month by month

Day by day

Thought by thought

 

Steer your heart past the Truth you believed in yesterday

Such as Fundamental Goodness and the Wisdom of the Way

Steer your heart, precious heart, past the women whom you bought

Year by year

Month by month

Day by day

Thought by thought

 

Steer your path through the pain that is far more real than you

That has smashed the Cosmic Model, that has blinded every View

And please don’t make me go there, though there be a God or not

Year by year

Month by month

Day by day

Thought by thought

 

They whisper still, the injured stones, the blunted mountains weep

As he died to make men holy, let us die to make things cheap

And say the Mea Culpa, which you’ve gradually forgot

Year by year

Month by month

Day by day

Thought by thought

 

Steer your way, O my heart, though I have no right to ask

To the one who was never never equal to the task

Who knows he’s been convicted, who knows he will be shot

Year by year

Month by month

Day by day

Thought by thought

 

BOOK OF THE DAY
REVIEW

The Poems of Seamus Heaney review – collected works reveal his colossal achievement

This article is more than 1 month old

The complete works, including previously unpublished poems and expert notes, are brought together in one volume for the first time

Philip Terry
Thu 9 Oct 2025 

Baudelaire introduced ordinary objects into poetry – likening the sky to a pan lid – and by doing so revolutionised poetic language. Likewise, Seamus Heaneyintroduced Northern Irish vernacular into the English lyric, peppering his lines with words like glarry, the Ulster word for muddy; kesh, from Irish ceis, a wickerwork causeway; and dailigone, “daylight gone” or dusk, from Ulster-Scots. It is this that gives his writing a mulchy richness and cultural resonance that remain unique in contemporary poetry. One of the key poems in North (1975) is a version of Baudelaire’s The Digging Skeleton, to which Heaney brings an Irish flavour – the skeletons dig the earth “like navvies”. It’s especially rich as digging for Heaney is also a metaphor for writing, while the archaeological metaphor resonates with the darkly symbolic bog poems.

James Schuyler at the door of his apartment in Florence, Italy, May 1948. Photo: Chester Kallmann, courtesy Ridenour family

James Schuyler at the door of his apartment in Florence, Italy, May 1948. Photo: Chester Kallmann, courtesy Ridenour family

THE ART OF BIOGRAPHY:

JAMES SCHUYLER

The celebrated New York School poet and Pulitzer Prize–winner James Schuyler is the subject of Nathan Kernan’s new biography, A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler. Kernan narrates the wild turns in the poet’s life with great skill, from his peripatetic youth, through his years in the influential circle of W. H. Auden, on to his critical friendships with poets and artists such as John Ashbery, Jane Freilicher, Frank O’Hara, and Fairfield Porter. Here Raymond Foye, a friend of Schuyler’s (and the poet’s literary executor), talks with Kernan about the genesis of the project and some of the breakthroughs and challenges he encountered in its construction.

The Colleted Poems of Bob Kaufman

 

“AN UNIMAGINARY LANDSCAPE THAT EXISTS IN A REAL UNREAL WORLD”

Bob Kaufman was, it’s often said, a poet of the streets, a poet whose life and work manifested a deep knowledge of its nooks and crannies, its hustles, its dogged, imaginative techniques of survival, and its flashes of surreal poetic clarity. The street is a place of protest, but also of homelessness, of addiction, of those cast outside without access to shelter, property, labor, the legitimized forms of social life. In moments of social unrest, the street comes alive, as autonomous zones are established and the police—that permanent army of occupation—are pushed back. But the street is also where the crowd splinters into many voices, heard and unheard. Like so much of the life of the street, Kaufman’s work has fallen through the cracks. In his lifetime, Kaufman published just three full-length books: Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (1965), Golden Sardine (1967), and The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978 (1981). Kaufman lived a peripatetic existence predominantly around San Francisco’s North Beach bohemia, with a spell in New York’s Lower East Side. He died at the early age of sixty in 1986.

Mark Strand / Giving myself up

Giving myself up

By Mark Strand
BIOGRAPHY

Mark Strand / Renunciar a mí mismo

I give up my eyes which are glass eggs.

I give up my tongue.

I give up my mouth which is the constant dream of my tongue.

I give up my throat which is the sleeve of my voice.

I give up my heart which is a burning apple.

I give up my lungs which are trees that have never seen the moon.

I give up my smell which is that of a stone traveling through rain.

I give up my hands which are ten wishes.

I give up my arms which have wanted to leave me anyway.

I give up my legs which are lovers only at night.

I give up my buttocks which are the moons of childhood.

I give up my penis which whispers encouragement to my thighs.

I give up my clothes which are walls that blow in the wind

and I give up the ghost that lives in them.

I give up. I give up.

And you will have none of it because already I am beginning

again without anything.

Regardless by Adelaide Love

 

Ilustration by Golriz Rezvani

Regardless 

by Adelaide Love

Sleep is the ax, I’ve heard men say,
That chops one third of life away.
Well, put my third upon the block;
I need eight hours by the clock.