The New York Review of Books

Celebrating the UK’s National Poetry Day, here are a few poems from our favorite poets:

Walking around in the park
Should feel better than work:
The lake, the sunshine,
The grass to lie on,
Blurred playground noises
Beyond black-stockinged nurses—
Not a bad place to be.
Yet it doesn’t suit me,

— Toads Revisited by Philip Larkin

Bobby Breen’s. His Boston fireman’s gift
With BREEN in scarlet lacquer on its spread
Fantailing brim,

Tinctures of sweat and hair oil
In the withered sponge and shock-absorbing webs
Beneath the crown—

Or better say the crest, for crest it is—
Steel ridge, leather-trimmed, hand-tooled, hand-sewn,
Tipped with a little clasp of beaten copper…

— Helmet by Seamus Heaney

Drop into it.
Noise so clamorous it sucks.
You rush your pressed-flower hackles out
To the perimeter.
And here it comes:
That unpremeditated joy as you
—The Uzi shuddering warm against your hip
Happy in danger in a dangerous place
Yourself another self you found at Troy—
Squeeze nickel through that rush of Greekoid scum!

— From ‘All Day Permanent Red: the First Battle Scenes of Homer’s Iliad Rewritten’ by Christopher Logue

Photo: Louis MacNeice (far left) with Ted Hughes, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, and Stephen Spender at a Faber and Faber cocktail party, 1960 (Mark Gerson)

Posted at 2:18pm and tagged with: christopher logue, homer, iliad, national poetry day, philip larkin, poem, seamus heaney, the new york review of books, one column,.

March 29th 2012

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Christopher Carroll, The Unbearable Truth of War

Simone Weil once wrote that “nothing of all that the peoples of Europe have produced is worth the first known poem to have appeared among them.” She was referring to the Iliad, and, judging by the recent raft of translations, adaptations, and novelizations of the poem, we would seem to agree. Four new English versions, all published within a few months of each other, enter a market already glutted with Iliads, many of them—like Richmond Lattimore’s recently reissued classic 1951 translation and Robert Fagles’s widely used 1991 rendering—still vital. Now, the New York Theatre Workshop has staged An Iliad (up through April 1), a play that compresses the entire epic into a one-man, hundred-minute performance.

While translations abound, dramatizations of the Iliad are fairly uncommon. Of course the poem has inspired countless plays—Aeschylus, for instance, called his tragedies “scraps from Homer’s banquet.” But these typically focus on a single episode, like the Greeks’ efforts to persuade Achilles to return to battle in Book 9. The entirety of Homer’s text runs to over 15,600 lines and would take about 24 hours to recite from beginning to end; it also has hundreds of characters—men, women, gods, demigods, a crying baby, and two immortal, talking horses, among others. Remarkably, An Iliad’s ultra-condensed script—co-written by the actor Denis O’Hare and the theater director Lisa Peterson—not only attempts to encompass almost all of this, but it also places that burden on a single character.

Photo: Denis O’Hare as The Poet in the New York Theatre Workshop’s An Iliad

Posted at 5:02pm and tagged with: Iliad, Christopher Carroll, Denis O’Hare, Stephen Spinella, Lisa Peterson, Homer,.

Christopher Carroll, The Unbearable Truth of War

Simone Weil once wrote that “nothing of all that the peoples of Europe have produced is worth the first known poem to have appeared among them.” She was referring to the Iliad, and, judging by the recent raft of translations, adaptations, and novelizations of the poem, we would seem to agree. Four new English versions, all published within a few months of each other, enter a market already glutted with Iliads, many of them—like Richmond Lattimore’s recently reissued classic 1951 translation and Robert Fagles’s widely used 1991 rendering—still vital. Now, the New York Theatre Workshop has staged An Iliad (up through April 1), a play that compresses the entire epic into a one-man, hundred-minute performance.

While translations abound, dramatizations of the Iliad are fairly uncommon. Of course the poem has inspired countless plays—Aeschylus, for instance, called his tragedies “scraps from Homer’s banquet.” But these typically focus on a single episode, like the Greeks’ efforts to persuade Achilles to return to battle in Book 9. The entirety of Homer’s text runs to over 15,600 lines and would take about 24 hours to recite from beginning to end; it also has hundreds of characters—men, women, gods, demigods, a crying baby, and two immortal, talking horses, among others. Remarkably, An Iliad’s ultra-condensed script—co-written by the actor Denis O’Hare and the theater director Lisa Peterson—not only attempts to encompass almost all of this, but it also places that burden on a single character.

Photo: Denis O’Hare as The Poet in the New York Theatre Workshop’s An Iliad

The New York Review of Books

Happy National Poetry Day