In anticipation of returning to Ireland after seventeen years, I’ve been reading Yeats again, wondering if I will find the country much changed, as some say it is; wondering, too, what words there are to describe where we are now, in November 2010.

Here is a poem on the virtue of speechlessness.

On Being Asked for a War Poem

I think it better that in times like these
A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.

From The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)

Flux Film 001 | Morse from Proper Medium on Vimeo.

Artist John Morse has come up with a clever way of spreading haiku around Atlanta. His project, dubbed “Roadside Haiku,” uses bandit signs, those not very attractive, cheap white plastic corrugated advertisement signs that are ubiquitous in metropolitan areas. In keeping with the general aesthetic of bandit signs, Morse uses large black lettering, and the poems begin with catch phrases commonly found on bandit signs.

Morse has written 10 haiku, each printed on 50 signs for a total of 500 scattered across Atlanta. Here are some examples:

BUILD PERSONAL WEALTH
In the comfort of your home!
Read to your children.

LOSE UGLY WEIGHT FAST!!
Feel Happier! Healthier!
Dump your bigotry.

You can also check out the signs on Morse’s Facebook page.

For more information on the project, visit Flux Projects or see this article from the Guardian.

Come on, poetry books! Don’t be so modest. You’re too beautiful to sit around in that frumpy old bathrobe. Here are a few looks you could try on!

Christine Hume, Shot; Counterpath Press, 2009

Susan Briscoe, The Crow’s Vow; Signal, 2010

Alex Lemon, Fancy Beasts; Milkweed Editions, 2010; Cover and interior design by Christian Fuenfhausen

C.K. Williams, Wait; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

Gillian Conoley, The Plot Genie; Omnidawn Publishing, 2009

Kim Addonizio, Lucifer at the Starlite; W.W. Norton & Company, 2009

Although poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) is not a pop lyricist, the words to one of his best-known poems, “Le Pont Mirabeau” (”The Mirabeau Bridge”), were put to music by Marc Lavoine, pictured above on the cover of his CD titled simply Marc Lavoine (2001). “Le Pont Mirabeau,” the first track on the CD, is a bridge in Paris that spans over the Seine River. Apparently Apollinaire had to walk over the bridge to get to the home of painter Marie Laurencin, his girlfriend from 1907 to 1912. It is also the bridge where poet Paul Celan likely killed himself in 1970. His body was found miles downstream.

Below is Lavoine, since the 1980s a successful French actor and crooner, singing “Le Pont Mirabeau.”

The poem has been translated into English many times and in many ways. Here are a few well-known attempts to translate it. Some of the differences come from the translators’ struggle to replicate the rhyme scheme in English without straying too far from the meaning in French. But a more literal translation, without regard to rhyme, would also be open to question. The meaning even in French is ambiguous (as this brief and useful summary of the poem, in French, points out).

Below is the text of the poem, as well as a more or less literal, though debatable, translation.

Le Pont Mirabeau

By Guillaume Apollinaire
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

Les mains dans les mains restons face à face
Tandis que sous
Le pont de nos bras passe
Des éternels regards l’onde si lasse

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

L’amour s’en va comme cette eau courante
L’amour s’en va
Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l’Espérance est violente

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure
Under the Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine
And our passion
Must I remember again
Joy always came after the pain

Comes the night, strikes the hour
The days go by, but I remain

Hand in hand, let’s stay face to face
While under
The bridge of our arms move
The waters so weary of our eternal gaze

Comes the night, strikes the hour
The days go by, but I remain

Love passes by like this flowing water
Love passes by
In the way that life lags
And hope brings violence

Comes the night, strikes the hour
The days go by, but I remain

The days pass, and the weeks pass,
Neither time past
Nor the passion returns
Under the Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine

Comes the night, strikes the hour
The days go by, but I remain

A while back I mentioned the popularity of cell phone novels in Japan, the land of the tiny and compact. Well, now the rage seems to be the Twitter novel. It’s probably not really possible to write an entire novel in 140 characters, even if they do happen to be information-packed Chinese characters, but it is certainly an interesting concept, and bully for the Japanese for trying! It is likely that most Twitter novelists serialize their novels.

The web site Japan Trends reports that by the end of 2009 there were more than 30,000 Japanese Twitter novels. In addition to novels, Japanese forms of poetry have also appeared on Twitter. Some novels have been anthologized into print versions as well.

To find examples of Twitter novels, just search for #twnovel on Twitter, and you will get your fill. I wonder what the next “literature” trend in Japan will be?

Fisher poets are people who write poetry and are involved with the fishing industry.

The Newport gathering featured such fisher poets as Gene Red Hawk Davenport of Reedsport, who specializes in Native American storytelling, and Jon Broderick, a high school teacher who fishes in Alaska every summer and who cofounded the Fisher Poets Gathering in Astoria. FisherPoets on the Edge also hosted a poetry writing workshop, films, open-mic poetry, and music.

The Astoria gathering for 2010 is still in the works, but the 2009 event brought together more than 70 fisher poets, with readings and workshops in several venues in downtown Astoria. The gathering is open to the general public, so mark your calendars!

I love these Faber and Faber Poetry books, designed by Justus Oehler of Pentagram. This series uses color so beautifully, setting up the rule of three colors (one for the background, one for the title, and one for the author) and then playing with the way the colors complement or contrast with each other. The color combinations vary from vibrant contrasts—like lavender and yellow on greenish blue—to three shades of purple. The size of the text depends on what fits on the page. So Lachlan Mackinnon is never going to have big text, but Alice Oswald can. They also have a tactile feel, being printed on textured, uncoated paper.

And then they break the rule slightly for this one, befitting the wonderfully weird title:

I was collecting some images of these myself and admiring the way they look next to each other, and then I discovered that Faber Books has put together a Flickr set of them! Check it out.

This is also a clever tie-in: get a Faber Poetry poem-a-week widget for your blog or Facebook profile here: http://www.52poems.co.uk/. I just added it to my Facebook profile.

And there’s yet another tie-in: mugs and playing cards. For when you need to buy a gift for the poetry reader in your life, I guess. You could buy them an actual book, but who knows what they already own, right? Or perhaps you’re looking for a present for someone who is generally literary but might be bummed out if you just gave them a book. It’s too bad they had to pick the three most recognizable names (Eliot, Plath, Heaney—the fourth was clearly chosen because it mentions cocoa). I might have actually bought a mug that said “Ooga-Booga” or “Hare Soup.” I would definitely wear a T-shirt bearing the title “Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid.”

• Fiona Tinwei Lam, Enter the Chrysanthemum. Designer: David Drummond.
• Naomi Guttman, Wet Apples, White Blood. Another one by David Drummond! Check out FaceOut Books for bigger, better pictures and some insight from the designer.
• Cate Marvin, Fragment of the Head of a Queen.  I don’t know who designed the book, but I do know that the cover art is by Arturo Herrera.
• Mary Ruefle, The Most of It
• Richard Meier, Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar
• Rebecca Wolff, The King

(Andrew Hood, Pardon Our Monsters; Harry Thurston, Animals of My Own Kind; Christopher Willard, Garbage Head)

On his blog he often lets readers in on his creative process by posting designs in progress. In this post he explains how he created the cover image for Don LePan’s forthcoming novel Animals, for which he appears to have smashed some Delft china—but it’s in fact some cheap plates and a little Photoshop magic.

Drummond discusses the evolution of the cover for Pure Product by Jason Guriel here.

And Ukula magazine has this interesting article on the creation of a Véhicule cover (Postscript by Geoffrey Cook), talking to Drummond, the publisher, and the poet.

• Chuck Stebelton, Circulation Flowers (Tougher Disguises, 2005), designed by James Meetze, the founder of Tougher Disguises. See this interview with the poet at Kicking Wind, which touches upon the book design.

• Matthew Rohrer, A Green Light (Wave Books, 2004), designed by Jeff Clark, a.k.a. Quemadura

• Chelsey Minnis, Poemland (Wave Books, 2009). Pink fur! I don’t know who designed this — if you do, please comment! [Update: another one by Quemadura, according to commenter Narnia Hamilton!] It’s too small to see in this photo, but if you click here you can see that the book title is in the bar code label.

• Janet Holmes, F2F (University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), designed by Jeff Clark

• Alex Lemon, Hallelujah Blackout (Milkweed Editions, 2008), designed by Brad Norr; art by Natalie Salminen Rude

• Christian Peet, The Nines (Palm Press, 2006), designed by Derek White. White demonstrates the evolution of the cover here.