Poetry Rules

I swear if there is a place I'd love to live in Rome, it is the "Beata Solitudo" house on the Appian Way . As the name suggests it is quite secluded and solitary. The absolute best time of the year to see it is right at the end of March or early April when wisteria blooms and its lilac flowers make it look even more beautiful. I walked all the way from Cecilia Metella Mausoleum today to admire it. It is such an idyllic place.

I have always been fascinated by Plath's bee poems, the culminating section of Ariel . They are haunting. The poems date back to the Fall of 1962, just a few months before she committed suicide. Despite the idyllic setting of Court Green in Devon where she was writing them, these poems set the tone of her "breakdown" and they also mark the incipient end of her relationship with Ted Hughes . As she writes in her diary, on October 9, 1962: "Everything is breaking: my dinner set is breaking in half, the health inspector says the cottage should be demolished. There is no hope for it. Even my beloved bees set upon me today when I numbly knocked aside their sugar feeder, and I am all over sting..." I have reread Sylvia's bee poems several times in the past few days and I am captured by their imagery, by the powerful metaphor of how painful the poetry craft can be. Muse bring me a sting, I shall write... Justin Fitzpatrick, The Arrival of the Bee Box 

I have spent the past two weeks writing about the end of the Fifties and reading an incredible amount of correspondence by the Poet dating to those years. I truly love letters. They tell us so much about who writes them. They are so vibrant, full of enthusiasm and the closest thing I know to real life. I always have the impression I am there myself. Re-living whatever happened. Conversing amiably with Beat poets and many others. I must also find answers to doubts, though. Sometimes I just feel like I have a huge jig-saw puzzle to complete and, when things do not match, I return to the Poet. This morning I had to write to him a long e-mail dealing with his Dartmouth years, his Mayakovsky translations, meeting Allen Ginsberg , an amazing reading of " Howl " by Jack Gilbert and an argument with Robert Creeley . I am looking forward to moving forward. Even if my "forward" is not literal. I have already written a huge amount of the Poets' life in the Sixties an...

This has been a busy poetic week in so many ways. I have been writing the biography each and every day, some days adding just a few hundred words, some other up to a thousand. I don't mind the uneven pace--as it pretty much depends from my daily work schedule--but it is very important for me to keep the wip rolling. This morning I have finished tweaking the review I wrote for a really beautiful chapbook. And, I truly hope to find a home for it soon. I feel this work will stay with me for a long time. I love it when poetry touches me this way. I have also finished translating the last poem in the poetry manuscript of a SF poet that is due to be published here in Italy in the coming Fall. The poet and I are very happy regarding this collaboration. Last, but not least, I have also translated 2 poems from French by Michel Butor that are a thing of Beauty. Butor is such a exquisite poet. It is a joy to be able to translate him into Italian. And, I should not fail to mention th...

Writing a biography can be quite a demanding exercise. It is not all about writing an unbiased account or simply researching into the life of your subject-matter, it is not all about corresponding with people who have known your man, but it is also "reliving" a life and trying your best to feel what the other person felt. It is wearing someone else's shoes all the time. It is feeling the empathy. Experiencing the happiness and the grief. It is knowing, on a day like today, where the poet's thoughts will be, what he will do--as he has done for the past 34 years--to whom and what he will write. People change, but habits don't. And so, yes, his sadness is my sadness today and I will cope with it in the best way I can. I shall write about Jack.