John Ashbery: "Interesting People of Newfoundland"

John Ashbery was born on this date (July 28) in 1927. In recognition of the occasion, I suggest readers view the above video, which was recorded upon Ashbery’s winning the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize for his volume, Notes from the Air: Collected Later Poems. The video clip contains an excerpt from the Judges’ Citation—including the observation that “Ashbery’s is one of the best and most intense poetry productions of the twentieth century. Its famous difficulty does not repel: it invites”—and Ashbery reading one of his poems, “Interesting People of Newfoundland.”

The complete Judges’ Citation appears as follows: “The pleasure of reading John Ashbery’s poetry defies explanation. The YOU the author makes reference to is ME, the transcription being rendered, paradoxically, by a poet who eschews autobiography; thus the I as well as the YOU names the reader. Ashbery’s is one of the best and most intense poetry productions of the twentieth century. Its famous difficulty does not repel: it invites. It offers a ‘site of survival,’ a real mirror for human beings today, providing a place of honour and dignity for the very personal and secret hidden in everyone. His poems reach the private part of each individual. No wonder he has declared in interviews that he’s ‘like everybody else’—the body breathing inside the poem is as much himself as ourselves. But the person who knows how to observe and therefore how to be unique is John Ashbery, ungraspable, inexplicable and as mysterious as the Delphic oracle. In Notes from the Air, Ashbery has taken the opportunity provided a long-living poet not to collect but to select what in his opinion constitutes the best part of his later production. These ‘notes’ proceeding from the air or written by it honour the defining economy of poetry, unique lexical territory where one cannot go against the plurality of meaning embodied in words. He grants unity to this volume by sequencing poems deftly linked, forged with the delicateness of time, its overwhelming theme. The vigilant eye cast on this selection is omnipresent, and does not let a single detail go loose. With this personal organization of the most meaningful part of his work, Ashbery offers a new way of reading it, testing language by virtue of the American tongue, making it a true ‘remnant of energy’ for which only the poet can take responsibility.”

As a way to celebrate John Ashbery’s birthday, readers will find additional articles concerning him on “One Poet’s Notes” in the following posts: “John Ashbery: ‘Forties Flick,’” “John Ashbery, Pierre Martory, and Jackson Pollock,” “John Ashbery and Fairfield Porter,” “John Ashbery: 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,'” “Poet of the Year: John Ashbery,” “John Ashbery: 'My Philosophy of Life,'” and “Poetry, Painting, and Economy: Rothko, Warhol, and Ashbery.”

John Keats's "Bright Star": Romantic Poetry and Romance Film

In the past few months readers have witnessed a series of events that have renewed interest in the brief life and influential works of John Keats. In the spring W.W. Norton published Stanley Plumly’s Posthumous Keats: a Personal Biography, a wonderful book concerning the English Romantic poet who died at the age of 25 in 1821. This weekend a greatly refurbished villa home of John Keats in Hampstead, North London—where a number of Keats’s famous poems were composed—has been reopened to the public. An important development in Keats’s life also occurred at that house, since it is the location where he met and fell in love with Fanny Brawne, who inspired some of his most emotional lyrics. The two were engaged but never married due to Keats’s worsening health and early death.

Now, a new Jane Campion film, Bright Star, focusing on John Keats and his relationship with Fanny Brawne, is in the process of being released. Readers can view a promotional preview clip above. The film’s title arises from Keats’s magnificent poem by the same name (below), composed in 1819-1820 and believed to be addressed to Fanny Brawne. Campion’s depiction of Keats in Bright Star was warmly received when premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and the work received a nomination for the Golden Palm award. Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turin described the movie as “one of the most deeply moving romantic films in memory,” perhaps allowing readers to apply the term “romantic” in more than one manner. Bright Star will be presented at various venues, such as the Toronto Film Festival, in the upcoming months and then will be available for general public release this fall.

BRIGHT STAR

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen masque
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.


—John Keats

Best of the Web 2009: Elise Paschen and VPR

Congratulations to Dzanc Books on the July publication of Best of the Web 2009, their annual print anthology of the finest literary works appearing in online literary journals. Also, I am pleased to report that Valparaiso Poetry Review is once again represented in the series with Elise Paschen’s “Hive,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2008-2009 issue (Volume X, Number 1) alongside other poems by Paschen and an interview with her. Paschen’s poem was selected for Best of the Web 2009 from among many hundreds of nominations across the entire spectrum of online magazines eligible for consideration.

This year’s anthology was guest edited by Lee K. Abbott. Nathan Leslie is the Best of the Web series editor at Dzanc Books. To mark the release of the 2009 volume, Dzanc Books is currently conducting a promotional sales price for both this issue and last year’s edition, which also included work from Valparaiso Poetry Review—“Prophet Township” by Jared Carter and “Walking an Old Woman into the Sea” by Frannie Lindsay. I recommend both anthology collections for readers who wish to view the kind of fine material that is now appearing in online literary journals.

To repeat an important point I have made before, I value all the poems and depend on all the poets in Valparaiso Poetry Review. Yet, I welcome the admirable efforts of the anthology’s editors to bring attention to the growing number of excellent works being published in online journals.

In fact, as I noted in a recent “One Poet’s Notes” post, “Online Literary Journals: Coming of Age,” I believe such attention informs readers and encourages writers to view online journals with increasing respect. Also, I am pleased when an opportunity arises for one of VPR’s splendid poets to reach a larger audience and find the greater recognition she deserves through inclusion in the anthology. Again, I congratulate Elise Paschen on the selection of her wonderful poem for this honor, and I offer it below as a preview of the very good work one will find in Best of the Web 2009:

HIVE
—For Stephen


Tucked in a cleft of arm you hunt
for milk. Roseate. Areola.

I circumnavigate the signs
pictured on your pajamas. Arrows

point east and west; a violet hive;
bear: tail end up in honey-pot.

Cars drone outside. I comb back tufts
of hair. We burrow in these chintz

pillows, sink deeply down in sofa.
For now, we are a pair spied on

by animals. (A rabbit pokes
its ear, antennae-like, from under

cushions.) I’ve read “during the summer
honey flow, worker bees will travel

55,000 miles to gather
nectar to make one pound of honey.”

A foot kicks off its sock. You sip,
roaming many miles, honey-seeker.

Days tumble. I would like to buzz
into the orchid of your ear.


—Elise Paschen

Ernest Hemingway: The Writer's Life

When I prepared for my Ph.D. tests, the university required students to choose four major areas on which they would be judged through written and oral exams. As a poet, I selected three topics covering various periods in poetry: Elizabethan Lyric Poetry, Nineteenth Century Poetry, and Twentieth Century Poetry. However, for my fourth section I chose Ernest Hemingway and Modern American Fiction. That final choice resulted from advice that one should include a second genre as a change of pace in readings and as a way to make oneself more eligible for possible teaching positions. (Indeed, for similar reasons I completed an independent program in Film Studies.)

As it turns out, over the years some of my favorite courses to conduct have been my seminars on Hemingway, as well as related classes concerning William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The different rhythms of prose and the array of approaches in the narratives of fiction frequently offer to me a fresh perspective that later informs my views on various styles of poetry as well. In fact, snippets of scenes in the condensed short stories or the vignettes one finds in Hemingway’s writing sometimes resemble contemporary free verse or prose poem pieces.

However, on this date (July 21) that marks Hemingway’s birth in 1899, I am again reminded of the author but not by such concerns. Instead, I note the current controversy surrounding the release of a new version of A Moveable Feast by Hemingway’s publisher, Scribner—a text chronicling the author’s life and early writings in Paris that is listed as a “restored edition.” The debate concerning this volume can easily be seen in a couple of contrasting notices about the book’s appearance. In yesterday’s New York Times commentary, A. E. Hotchner, a close friend of Hemingway and author of books about the novelist, takes Scribner to task for its involvement, declaring the publisher has a duty, as “guardian of the books that authors entrust to them,” to preserve A Moveable Feast in the manner it was originally released. Although the book was published posthumously, Hotchner believes Hemingway’s intended work was maintained in the first edition since it did not differ from the pages he’d read about the writer’s life. He reports: Hemingway “gave me the completed manuscript of the Paris book to give to Scribner’s president, Charles Scribner Jr.”

The new version of A Moveable Feast has been edited by Sean Hemingway, the grandson of Ernest’s second wife, Pauline, who does not receive the most favorable treatment in the initial version. Indeed, in today’s issue of The Writer’s Almanac, the 1964 edition is described as having been fashioned by Hemingway’s fourth wife, Mary, who “edited extensively the memoir manuscript, patching stuff together from various sources. She included things he'd explicitly stated that he didn't want published, and excluded other parts of his unfinished memoir manuscript.” The Writer’s Almanac aligns itself with Sean Hemingway, a curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, who is described as correcting the record for his grandmother, “a woman who was much maligned in the edition of the memoir edited by Mary.”

In opposition, Hotchner claims: “Because Mary was busy with matters relating to Ernest’s estate, she had little involvement with the book.” He also suggests Mary did not create anything extra that the novelist did not wish to be included in his memoir. Instead, Hotchner labels the new book “a frivolous incursion.”

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.

Apparently, readers will have to make up their own minds about this matter. Nevertheless, this debate and the newly edited version of A Moveable Feast should serve to spark interest in Hemingway once again, for both his writing and his life, which so many times seemed as dramatic or adventurous as those lives of the characters in the fictions he composed.

On his birth date, I’d prefer readers view another statement Hemingway presented about life and writing. In 1954 when Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, he informed the selection committee he could not attend the banquet to receive the honor due to health issues, and he issued a statement to be read at the Stockholm ceremonies by John C. Cabot, the United States Ambassador to Sweden:

Having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory nor any domination of rhetoric, I wish to thank the administrators of the generosity of Alfred Nobel for this Prize.



No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.



It would be impossible for me to ask the Ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.


Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.


For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.



How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.



I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you.

Ernest Hemingway later recorded his speech, the audio of which is available.

Forty Years Later: "Moonlight in the City"

On this date forty years ago (July 20, 1969) the Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the Moon. There are few occasions in the chronicles of civilization that as clearly and immediately exemplified the ability of humans to achieve great accomplishments. Many regarded the lunar landing as one of the crucial events that mark and divide all of history. Indeed, after viewing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking along that desolate and cratered surface appearing in ghostly images on television screens across the country and around the world, a nation’s shared pride seemed to indicate little remained impossible any longer, and one might think the distant perspective of Earth’s blue jewel—as seen in photographs from its satellite nearly a quarter-million miles away—almost certainly would contribute to a greater humility among all humanity. In fact, when they departed, the astronauts left behind a plaque declaring: “Here men from Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”

Nevertheless, despite the magnificent achievement demonstrated by a human presence on the Moon, as well as subsequent incredible advances in space technology, the luster of such a moment appears to have dimmed in the decades since then. Perhaps due to NASA’s abandonment of manned travel to the Moon or beyond, and maybe because the continual parade of scientific and technological discoveries over the following years has somehow overshadowed the daring exploration by those Apollo astronauts, the significance and impact of their brave adventure apparently now needs to be reintroduced to new generations.

Certainly, since that night I have always perceived the lunar expedition as symbolic of new hope and the possibility for a brighter future, as well as other critical elements of emotion. At the same time, I remember considering contrasts discerned between the close-up picture of footprints created by men loping over the pristine lunar surface and some difficult scenery evidenced among the everyday environment of my own urban neighborhood. Consequently, in my poetry I have drawn from memories of that day four decades ago, particularly in the following piece, which perhaps appropriately also happens to be the opening poem for my new collection, Seeded Light, due out from Turning Point Books in October. Therefore, an apt and timely preview of poetry from the new volume:

MOONLIGHT IN THE CITY

One July evening when I was eleven,
not a block from the waterfront, the day

yet hot, I waited by myself in the middle
of a vacant lot and watched as a fresh wash

of moonlight began to flow over rooftops,
and the sky beyond dust-covered billboards

just started to fill with clustered stars.
The splintered grids of far-off apartment

fire escapes glittered against their backdrop
of red brick as if lit by the flick of a switch.

In this distance, even the paired lines
of elevated train tracks, stretching like bars

along the edge of the shore, appeared
to shine, and those symmetrical rows

of windows on the warehouses below
seemed almost to glow. Warning lights

pulsed all along the span of that great
bridge over the river, as hundreds of bright

buds suddenly stippled those rippling
waters now deepening to the blue of a new

bruise. Steel supports wound around
one another into braided suspension cables

dipping toward either end and glinting
beneath that constellation still slowly

showing in the darker corridor overhead.
Already, I could see the outlines of lunar

topography, and I thought of that old
globe my grandfather had once given me

only days before he died—of how
I’d felt its raised beige shapes representing

the seven continents, and of the way
he told me he’d been to every one of them.

Somewhere in the city, summertime
sounds—the high screams of sirens

and muffled bass thumps of fireworks—
played like the muscular backup music

pumping from some local garage band.
But I stood listlessly under sharp-angled

shadows cast by street lamps, among
an urban wreckage of broken cinder blocks

and glistening shards of shattered panes,
and I listened to the wind-clank of chain-link

fencing around that grassless plot of land,
knowing that night my father was far away

again, driving deliveries along an interstate,
and my mother was sitting alone at home,

as were her neighbors, awaiting the first
broadcast of a man walking on the moon.


—Edward Byrne

[First appeared in Greensboro Review]

"The Day Lady Died": Fifty Years Later

. . . she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Billie Holiday’s death on this date fifty years ago (July 17, 1959) inspired one of the most famous American poems in the second-half of the twentieth century, Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died.” In a previous post at “One Poet’s Notes,” “Grace Hartigan and Frank O’Hara,” I have included the poem, as well as an artwork of the same title by Hartigan.

Matthew W. Schmeer: "Chess"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Matthew W. Schmeer’s “Chess,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue (Volume VII, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Matthew W. Schmeer is the author of a chapbook of poetry, Twenty-One Cents (Pudding House Press, 2002). His poems have appeared in Connecticut River Review, Natural Bridge, Segue, Sojourn, Soundings East, and Talking River Review, as well as other journals. Schmeer, the editor of Poetry Midwest, is an associate professor of English at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an excellent work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

Henry David Thoreau on the Nature of Poetry and the Poetry of Nature

It is as if nature spoke.

Henry David Thoreau was born on this date (July 12) in 1817. In his writings Thoreau admired the role of the poet, especially as one who reflects wisely upon the importance of nature. The following excerpt from Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers contains a few of his views about the place of poetry and the poetry of place.

“What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery, —for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.

“The wisest definition of poetry the poet will instantly prove false by setting aside its requisitions. We can, therefore, publish only our advertisement of it.

“There is no doubt that the loftiest written wisdom is either rhymed, or in some way musically measured, —is, in form as well as substance, poetry; and a volume which should contain the condensed wisdom of mankind need not have one rhythmless line.

“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds. What else have the Hindoos, the Persians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians done, that can be told? It is the simplest relation of phenomena, and describes the commonest sensations with more truth than science does, and the latter at a distance slowly mimics its style and methods. The poet sings how the blood flows in his veins. He performs his functions, and is so well that he needs such stimulus to sing only as plants to put forth leaves and blossoms. He would strive in vain to modulate the remote and transient music which he sometimes hears, since his song is a vital function like breathing, and an integral result like weight. It is not the overflowing of life, but its subsidence rather, and is drawn from under the feet of the poet. It is enough if Homer but say the sun sets. He is as serene as nature, and we can hardly detect the enthusiasm of the bard. It is as if nature spoke. He presents to us the simplest pictures of human life, so the child itself can understand them, and the man must not think twice to appreciate his naturalness. Each reader discovers for himself that, with respect to the simpler features of nature, succeeding poets have done little else than copy his similes. His more memorable passages are as naturally bright as gleams of sunshine in misty weather. Nature furnishes him not only with words, but with stereotyped lines and sentences from her mint.”

Popcorn and Poetry: Dylan Thomas Film on DVD

Popcorn and poetry! Those readers looking for a summertime movie that involves a literary figure might be interested in the DVD release of The Edge of Love, a film about love and war, especially since it missed American theaters after it debuted last summer at the Edinburgh Film Festival. The film presents Matthew Rhys as Dylan Thomas in a story loosely based upon actual occurrences during World War II, when Thomas was caught between two loves, his old flame (portrayed by Keira Knightly in a singing role) and his wife (played by Sienna Miller), who also began a close relationship of their own. The plot is further complicated by the marriage of Knightly’s character to a soldier deployed at the battlefront, played by Cillian Murphy.

Tuesday, July 14, is the DVD release date for The Edge of Love. When it premiered, reviews for the film were mixed, but this production directed by John Maybury was widely praised for its atmospheric recreation of the historical period, as well as the locations in war-torn London and the countryside of Wales. In addition, the actors generally were lauded for their performances. I will avoid any spoilers, but the movie provides romance, drama, action, music, and the poetry of Dylan Thomas.

Jeff Newberry: "Pantoum on a Line by Weldon Kees"

The VPR Poem of the Week is Jeff Newberry’s “Pantoum on a Line by Weldon Kees,” which appeared in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue (Volume VII, Number 2) of Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Jeff Newberry is the author of A Visible Sign, a chapbook of poetry published by Finishing Line Press in 2008. His poems and essays have appeared in various literary journals, including Barn Owl Review, Copper Nickel, Cortland Review, The Eleventh Muse, Gulf Stream Magazine, G.W. Review, Hobble Creek Review, Permafrost, Poetry Southeast, and storySouth. Newberry is a doctoral candidate in the creative writing program at the University of Georgia, and he teaches in the English department at Abraham Baldwin College.

Tuesday of each week “One Poet’s Notes” highlights an excellent work by a poet selected from the archives of Valparaiso Poetry Review, except when other posts with news or updates preempt the usual appearance of this item, with the recommendation that readers revisit it. Please check the sidebar to view the list of poets and works that have been past “Poem of the Week” selections. Additionally, readers are reminded that VPR pages are best read with the browser font preference in which they were set, 12 pt. Times New Roman, in order to guarantee the stanza alignment and the breaks of longer lines are preserved.

THE VEILED SUITE: THE COLLECTED POEMS, Agha Shahid Ali (VPR Editor's Pick)

Editor's Pick: Recommended Reading

In correspondence received from readers of Valparaiso Poetry Review over the years, one regular feature of the journal, “Recent and Recommended Books,” repeatedly has been complimented and noted for its usefulness. Accompanying each issue of VPR, this page lists current volumes of poetry or poetics, as well as other books concerning poets, such as biographies, readers of the journal might wish to examine.

Despite the fact that a number of the collections cited have been reviewed within the issues of Valparaiso Poetry Review or in the posts of “One Poet’s Notes,” the editor’s blog, the unfortunate reality is that most of those worthy books received do not get enough specific attention and could be overlooked, lost among the long list annually tucked away in the additional pages archived at VPR. Therefore, to increase awareness about more of those valuable collections that have not been a subject of individual commentary or review in Valparaiso Poetry Review, “One Poet’s Notes” offers a continuing series of brief notices, known as “Editor’s Picks,” containing additional information concerning highly recommended books.

The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems, Agha Shahid Ali. W.W. Norton, 2009.

With this entry, “One Poet’s Notes” begins a regular series of posts titled “Editor’s Picks,” focusing on recently released books concerning poets, poetry, or poetics. I am pleased this continuing feature opens with a recommendation of The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems by Agha Shahid Ali. Many who read Valparaiso Poetry Review or the editor’s blog regularly regarded Shahid as a friend who delighted all, whether in his poetry or in his personal interaction with others. My thoughts of Shahid consistently bring a smile to my face. His trips to Valparaiso University for readings and his meetings with creative writing students in my classes or in individual conferences can be counted among the most enjoyable experiences with visiting writers. Shahid also provided a number of very pleasant memories involving his ebullient personality—his ability to energize and entertain everyone—especially during various times we met at writers’ conferences.

In addition, I recall a conversation we had as he was about to accept a position as professor of English in the creative writing program at the University of Utah, where I had obtained my PhD, and Shahid sought my reassurance that he would enjoy the move. About that time, Shahid also requested that I write a ghazal for an anthology he was compiling and he agreed to someday be a “featured poet” in an issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review. Sadly, I never got around to sending a ghazal to him, and VPR was unable to present an issue featuring his poetry since Shahid was diagnosed with brain cancer shortly after starting his tenure at the University of Utah. Shahid had witnessed this terrible medical condition in his beloved mother, as she had passed away only a few years before.

Agha Shahid Ali died in December of 2001 at age 52, but his legacy as a poet now exists in this new volume of collected works, which also includes a succinct and informative introduction by Daniel Hall. As Shahid wrote in the volume’s title poem, the last he composed before his death: “I’m still alive, alive to learn from your eyes / that I am become your veil and I am all you see.”

Praise for the Work of Agha Shahid Ali:

“It’s amazing that Agha Shahid Ali has already been gone eight years. He spent too little time among us. So it’s even more wonderful that his brilliant, funny, and tragic poetry has now been collected in this superb volume. The last couplet of the penultimate poem, ‘Tonight,’ somehow says it all: ‘And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee— / God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.’” —John Ashbery

“Agha Shahid Ali’s Kashmir, in his poems, is our own lost but inalienable homeland. . . . But the grace and wit, the perceptions and illuminations they serve, their accent, are his own.” —W.S. Merwin

“Ali so artfully sustains his contemplation that upon entering his work we experience the play of light through the many prisms of intelligence.” —Carolyn Forché

“Wondrous Poems, mystically intense.” —David Ignatow

“Combining human elegance and moral passion, Ali speaks for Kashmir in a large, generous, compassionate, powerful, and urgent voice. . . . Few poets in the country have such a voice or such a topic.” —Hayden Carruth

“As a Kahmiri, Ali is aware of the historical vicissitudes that breed violence and hatred in people who once lived together peacefully. His poems speak to the enduring qualities of love and friendship.” —Michael Collier

“What is timeless in these poems is the power of grief—sheer cliffs and drops of despair that he masters and spins into verse with astonishing technical virtuosity.” —Carol Muske-Dukes

Bruce Springsteen sings Bob Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom" in East Berlin

In the city’s melted furnace, unexpectedly we watched

With faces hidden while the walls were tightening . . .
And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

On this Independence Day weekend, the above video appears to offer an appropriate blend of political poignancy and human celebration of a need for freedom: Bruce Springsteen sings Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom” at a concert in East Berlin during July of 1988, a year before the Berlin Wall crumbled twenty years ago in November of 1989.

As the camera pans a crowd of nearly 200,000 East Berlin citizens dancing, clapping, and chanting along with this iconic American song, one can feel the energy and desire for freedom that soon would translate into news clips of individuals sitting atop the Berlin Wall with chisels, dismantling the symbol of Communism and the Iron Curtain that stood for decades, where the years of Cold War global conflict had been framed by John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan making famous statements declaring their allegiance with the people of Berlin.

Indeed, the images of young folks opening the barrier between East and West piece by piece remain among the most exciting ever witnessed on television, as their courageous acts indicated a close to the Cold War was at hand. Today, my son possesses a piece of the Berlin Wall, which continues to exist as a concrete reminder of the value of freedom. Obviously, at the time those audience members could not know how near they were to liberation; however, as one looks back with the knowledge of subsequent events, the concert footage seems even more moving, even more suitable for watching on Independence Day.