Check out my new blog at the link below!

http://www.ninandrews.com/blog/

Goodbye Maine! Goodbye Blog!

There were so many birds on the beach, and then there was just this one last hanger-on.
Like this post . . . a last hanger-on. From now on, most of my posts will be at at ninandrews.com
Please check it out!

Check out ninandrews.com

This might be my last post at this site. I am moving my blog over to ninandrews.com where I have archived some of my comics and updated some things. Much work left to be done, but check it out!

Early Morning Walk

Notice that the dogs are wearing their winter coats!  They're always hoping to catch one of those gulls!

I LOVE MAINE!

Every summer I think I will write when I am here in my favorite place on earth.  And I do write--a little.  But I like to think playing-- or just staring out the window is sometimes a necessary interval in a writing life. Hah! 

Wallace Stevens and the Pond at the End of Time

In The State of the Art by David Lehman, Lehman writes that when President Clinton was president, he hosted a "Millennium Evening" to celebrate American poetry.  The event was beamed to 220 sites and was  cybercast, and a transcript was made available to the public.  Lehman commented: "it was no less pleasurable for the accidental transformations that hasty typing produced--as when Wallace Stevens's 'the palm at the end of the mind' turned into 'the pond at the end of time.'"

CSU Interview Questions about Life after the Book of Orgasms

http://www.csupoetrycenter.com/news-1/2015/6/29/5-questions-with-nin-andrews

Whitman

“O you singer, solitary, singing by yourself—projecting me;

O solitary me, listening—nevermore shall I cease perpetuating you;
Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there, in the night,
By the sea, under the yellow and sagging moon,
The messenger there arous’d—the fire, the sweet hell within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me.”

WYSU

http://wysu.org/timfrancisco

Huffington Post!

http://bit.ly/HuffPo_NinAndrews

Rochester!

On June 23, BOA will host its 7th annual Poetry Is Jazz event in Rochester, held in collaboration with the Rochester Contemporary Art Center (RoCo), during the Rochester International Jazz Festival. We hope you will join us for this FREE event , as we celebrate poetry, jazz, and art. Stop by, have a drink, and say hello! Tuesday, June 23, 6:00-8:00PM Rochester Contemporary Art Center 137 East Avenue Rochester, New York A special thank you goes out to our sponsor, Lavin, O'Neil, Cedrone, and DiSipio: Attorneys at Law, for their generous support of this event!    Cheers, BOA Editions, Ltd.

Featuring BOA poet Nin Andrews  Poetry reading | Book signingNin Andrews will read from her new book Why God Is a Woman, released in May 2015, and from her previous BOA title, Sleeping with Houdini. Set on a magical island where women rule and men are the second sex, Why God Is a Woman is the story of a boy who, exiled from the island because he could not abide by its sexist laws, looks back with both nostalgia and bitterness and wonders: Why does God have to be a woman? Celebrated prose poet Nin Andrews creates a world both fantastic and familiar in which gender roles are turned upside-down, and where all myths, logic, and institutions support the dominance of women.

Napping Weather

Baudelaire on poetry

The actual quote from Baudelaire is: "Always be a poet, even in prose."

On Poetry: Stevens and Whitman

I'm still stuck on Chapter 2011 in David Lehman's State of the Art in which he quotes famous poets definitions of great poetry.  I have the woman in the comic quoting Stevens.  The man is quoting Whitman.

On Poetry, Shelley, Stein, Jarrell (Frost)

You can see this comic better on the BAP blog . . .

http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2015/06/monday-comic-by-nin-andrews.html

from Two Translations of "Some Like Poetry" by Symborska

The first is translated by C. Cavanagh, the second by J. Trzeciak.  
I was reading David Lehman's, State of the Art, in which he compares these two translations.  He writes: 
So profound is the difference that the concurrent appearance of the two translations seemed itself to constitute a literary event--an ambiguous parable that could yield lessons ranging from the familiar ('"poetry is what is lost in translation'") to the paradoxical ('"poetry is mistranslation").

MIPO!!!

https://mipo.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/magzter2.pdf

I edited this issue of MiPo and am pretty excited about it.  Check it out!

"I PANT, I SINK, I TREMBLE, I EXPIRE!" from Shelley's "Epipsychidion"

"One hope within two wills, one will beneath

Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,

One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality,

And one annihilation. Woe is me!

The winged words on which my soul would pierce

Into the height of Love's rare Universe,

Are chains of lead around its flight of fire—

I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!"

from the last lines Shelley's "Epipsychidion"

Birthday Cake and Reading at Youngstown Lit!

To read to friends and celebrate my birthday at the same time---what a perfect night!
And I usually hate birthdays!

SPRING AT LAST

Come on already! Stop taking photos!

The Dreariest Journey by Shelley

I never was attached to that great sect,
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.


Note:  I've been reading David Lehman's The State of the Art.  This poem was discussed in the chapter titled 2013 with the subtitle, "It was his poetry that kept him going."  It begins with the sentence:  "Shelley's 'Defense of Poetry' (1821) culminates in an assertion of poetry as a source not only of knowledge but of power.  

I've been thinking about that.  Poetry, a source of power. 

There is poetry in Erie, PA

Karen Schubert and I read at Poet's Hall In Erie on Friday night--a reading hosted by the amazing Cee Williams whose poetry and generosity of spirit blew us away.  Cee opened with a list poem in which each line began, There is poetry in . . .

I have been thinking about that ever since.  Today there is poetry in the blue bells, poetry in the just-planted spinach and lettuce and kale, poetry in lunch-an omelet with onions and peppers and coffee, and I know there is poetry in the nap I about to take . . .

I am a firm believer in the poetry of naps.

Interview with Larry Moore of Broadstone Books with an Excerpt from Philip Brady's New Book

INTERVIEW

Shelley

“[Poetry] strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bear the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms.”

Plume!!!

http://plumepoetry.com/2015/04/featured-selection-11/

AWP --Book Signing at 11:00 but

Prosody Interview!

http://prosodyradio.com/archives.html

THANK YOU Laurin Wolf for interviewing me for Prosody!  There are so many great interviews archived there.  This interview was my first chance to read from WHY GOD IS A WOMAN.  I was pretty nervous actually because the book is so different--all of the poems are part of an overall story of this world where the women rule.  So they can't be read out of order without some explaining.

Comic of James Cummins' poem, "Fling"

https://books.google.com/books?id=gO0AK7qCvmoC&pg=PA1051&lpg=PA1051&dq=James+Cummins+%22Fling%22&source=bl&ots=-6RmndAbfu&sig=6qqwjag--CEXp4SLCP9xj_9TqTg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=XSAQVcn7FM7nsASxlIKwDg&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=James%20Cummins%20%22Fling%22&f=false