The Scarlet Fever: Marina Tsvetaeva - Henry Parland 19th May at Russian bookstore, NY, USA

Henry Parland, the Swedish poet and novelist of Russian-Scottish ( Family Parland, originally McFarlaine, considered to have originated from Scotland)-Baltic descent who became one of the founders of modernism in the 1920s Finland. He never set foot in Sweden and never fully mastered the language in which he wrote. Parland died in Vilnus in 1930, at the age of only 22. Parland’s biography is strangely intertwined with the tragic life of one of the greatest Russian poets of the century, her family, and her circle.

Irina Mashinski is a bilingual poet and translator, the author of seven books of poetry in English. Free admission 19 May · 19:00 - 20:00 at Russian Bookstore No.21, 174-176 Fifth Avenue (23&22 Str), Manhattan. Presented by Russian-American Cultural Center and Cardinal Points Journal.

Learn more about Parland's book Reduction (if printing Veloxpapper) , often simply called decomposition published in 1932. I am now longing to read this as the following description reminds me of Joyce, Woolf and Tarantino. Henry and his jealous and drama of love with Ami is the book's main subject which begins with Henry deciding to write a novel about the deceased Ami. The book differs from earlier romantic love stories, Ami and Henry drawn together by chance and Henry "have the most boring of the Amis society". I like this; it is translated by google from Swedish but I think you get what it means. They communicate with gestures, clothes, travelling by car and dining. I would like to compare it Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence; in fact I would like Orhan Pamuk to compare it for me.

More information at: http://www.russianamericanculture.com/Current_Exhibitions.php, http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Parland, and
http://www.stosvet.net/index.html

Brownsbank Cottage and the Biggar Poetry Garden

Brownsbank Cottage is the traditional farm labourer's cottage at Candy Mill in South Lanarkshire, Scotland where Christopher Murray Grieve ('Hugh MacDiarmid') lived from 1951 until his death in 1978. MacDiarmid's legacy remains spectacular, often controversial and challenging; some critics say his early lyrics are his finest work, while his epic poem ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ (1926) is one of the great poems of Modernist literature. Many including Allen Ginsberg made a pilgrimage to the cottage to visit the poet and his wife but it needs your help.


The cottage continues to be a centre of literary activity but need support from the international Scottish diaspora and poets.


A writing residency – the Brownsbank Fellowship – in association with the Scottish Arts Council and South Lanarkshire Council, has been held by poetsJames Robertson, Matthew Fitt, Gerry Cambridge, Aonghas MacNeacail, Linda Cracknell, Tom Bryan and Carl MacDougall.  The residency came to an end in December 2010 following local government support cuts.  However, in partnership with Creative Scotland (the successor organisation to the Scottish Arts Council), it is intended to offer the Cottage during the summer months as a funded writers retreat, with a view to it becoming part of the network of artist retreats/residencies envisaged under the Scottish Government's Creative Futures programme. 


If you can help make this happen or offer support in any way, get in touch with the poet Andrew McCallum who is Secretary of the Brownsbank Committee.

You can find out more about Hugh MacDiarmid and Brownsbank Cottage here http://www.brownsbank.org.uk/



Visit the Biggar Poetry Garden virtually here http://biggarpoetrygarden.weebly.com/index.html or if you happen to be in Biggar, you'll find the Poetry Garden at the top end of Biggar High Street. The garden has an open submissions policy for poets and artists. Full contact details are on the website.

Three rules of tweet poetry

The first immutable rule is there must be 140 characters or less and this of course implies that you must be working digitally; type or hand write a draft by all means but it is the ruthless counter at Twitter that will ultimately OK what you put down. This might encourage a syllabic approach where tweet poety has a fixed number of syllables no matter the stresses in the line, Marianne Moore might be used as a model

poetandgeek poetandgeek.com 

One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry

1 minute ago Favorite Reply Delete

Second rule is that there can be no returns or paragraphs, and no line breaks other than those shown by the space character or (if you must) the forward slash; this is where the haiku/tweet poetry analogy breaks down for me. A haiku in Japanese would be written in a single vertical line; the English version is usually divided into three phrases (often lines) so perhaps tweet poetry is truer to the original Japanes presentation. But the display area in Twitter being what it is, you will see line breaks where the text wraps; and this acts as an uncontrolled counterpoint to the haiku.

poetandgeek poetandgeek.com 

the first cold shower even the monkey seems to want a little coat of straw

4 seconds ago Favorite Reply Delete

Third rule is that tweet poetry is of the moment; or gnomic. I think this gives us much more useful avenues to explore with their roots in Nordic/Old English riddles. The approach is much less strict in its form but usefully has a strong stress pattern, poetic technique including balance, alliteration, metaphor, and better still, the caesura or break in the line is part of its phrasal expression. So counting the space character as an unstressed syllable is part of this oral tradition of poetry. Academics have suggested that riddle writers had their own grammars, distinct from that governing regular speech which frees contemporary writers to formalise poetry under the twitter restrictions.

poetandgeek poetandgeek.com 

He hates silence I am quiet We are together A lord made me faster sometimes stronger but he lasts longer I rest he runs on Without him I die

8 minutes ago Favorite Reply Delete

Of course, there may be no rules at all in which case I am joining the Dylan Thomas, Chus Pato, Walt Whitman school of tweet poet...

poetandgeek poetandgeek.com 

pursued by all hidden wrens in town who scold me from the skeletons of bushes at the corner of each road the dead leaves scuff, I walk home

23 minutes ago Favorite Reply Delete