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Sarah Vaughan

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Compiled by Richard Seidel
Sequenced by Renée Rosnes
Supervised by Bryan Koniarz
Mastered by Allan Tucker at Foothill Digital, New York City
Production and research coordinated by Carlos Kase
Art directed by Hollis King
Designed by GrowingStudio, Bklyn
Illustrations by Amélie Hazard
Art production directed by Sherniece Smith
Photographs by Chuck Stewart
Liner notes by Al Young
Notes edited by Peter Keepnews
Special thanks to the Institute of Jazz Studies

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“Keeping track of the Iraqi death toll isn’t the job of the United States,” a student said, “and besides, how would we count the dead?”

Take their limbs strewn about the streets—
multiply by a thousand and one.

Ask everyone in Baghdad who has lost
a brother. Cousin. Sister. Child — to speak
their name in a recorder.

Go to every school, stand
at the front of the class, take roll;
for every empty desk, at least two dead.

Find every shop that sells cigarettes—
ask how many more cartons they’ve sold this year.

Go to the bus station and buy ten tickets –
offer them free to anyone who wants to leave.

Go see the coffin-maker. Ask how much
cedar and pine he’s ordered this month.

The dead don’t require much. They don’t speak
in numbers or tongues, they lie silent

waiting — to be counted

Persis Karim
Copyright © 2008 by Persis Karim

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The New York Times
September 27, 2007

By MOTOKO RICH

The cloistered community of American poetry has, in recent months, become a little less like Yeats’s Land of Faery, where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue, and a little more like Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.”

The board of the 97-year-old Poetry Society of America, whose members have included many of the most august names in verse, has been rocked by a string of resignations and accusations of McCarthyism, conservatism and simple bad management.

The recent turmoil was driven, partly, by fierce discussion among board members earlier this year after they voted to award the Frost Medal, an annual honor given by the society, to John Hollander, a prolific poet and critic. The concern was whether it was proper to take into consideration some past remarks made by Mr. Hollander — remarks that some felt were disturbing — in bestowing the medal. Of course, as with many a board squabble, personality disputes and misunderstandings also played their part in the fracas.

Last Friday, William Louis-Dreyfus, who had been president of the board for the last six years, officially stepped down and quit the board, becoming the fifth person on the 19-member board to resign this year. This spring Walter Mosley, the novelist, resigned, and he was later joined by Elizabeth Alexander, a poet and professor of African-American and American studies at Yale University; Rafael Campo, a poet and professor at Harvard Medical School; and Mary Jo Salter, a poet and a professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Mr. Louis-Dreyfus, who runs an international commodities trading and shipping firm and dabbles in writing poetry, said he resigned partly to protest what he regarded as an “exercise of gross reactionary thinking” among the other board members who left in the wake of the award to Mr. Hollander, a retired English professor at Yale.

When Mr. Hollander was considered for the award three years ago, some members raised comments he had made in interviews, reviews and elsewhere that they felt should be examined when judging his candidacy. In one example, Mr. Hollander, writing a rave review in The New York Times Book Review of the collected poems of Jay Wright, an African-American poet, referred to “cultures without literatures — West African, Mexican and Central American.” And in an interview on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” a reporter paraphrased Mr. Hollander as contending “there isn’t much quality work coming from nonwhite poets today.”

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By Margaret Rees
World Socialist Web Site

Poster for the 2007 release of the movie Beowulf

Use this version to print | Send this link by email | Email the author

Directed by Robert Zemeckis, screenplay by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, inspired by the poem Beowulf

Heroic tales of conquest over malignant foes in the face of incredible odds always reverberate in the imagination. Beowulf, the famous poem written sometime between the seventh and tenth centuries in the Anglo-Saxon language known as Old English, and about the heroic battles of a brave warrior against two ogres and a dragon, has just this effect.

The poem’s origins lay in oral story-telling or singing for an unlettered audience and would have probably been told over several nights of feasting. The anonymous poet further developed on this tradition to create one of the most important works in any vernacular European language in the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire. In fact, the poem comprises one tenth of all that is left of Old English poetry. It was not, however, discovered until the sixteenth century and not published until 1815 in Copenhagen.

First page of the manuscript of the poem Beowulf

In recent years the 3,000-line poem, which has long been studied for its literary and historic significance, has become more accessible to modern audiences with a powerful new translation by Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney and several audio recordings. And late last year Beowulf became the subject of a movie by Hollywood director Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future and its two sequels, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Forrest Gump and numerous other big-budget works).

Zemeckis’s Beowulf is the product of almost ten years of screenwriting work by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, who were closely involved in the filming and described the movie as a “cheerfully violent and strange take on the Beowulf legend”. Zemeckis was apparently scathing of the original poem, which he had been forced to study in junior high school, but responded enthusiastically to Avary and Gaiman’s “treatment”.

The poem is set in Scandinavia and Beowulf, from Geatland (now southern Sweden), pledges to Danish king Hrothgar that he will fight the monster Grendel who has been preying on local inhabitants. Beowulf corners Grendel in Heorot, a large mead hall, and rips off his arm. Beowulf then has to combat Grendel’s mother, who wants revenge. To do so he dives into the depths of a dreadful lake, infested with serpents. Grendel’s mother tries to stab him with her sword but Beowulf eventually prevails and kills her.

As blood bubbles up in the backwash, the onlookers are afraid that the ogre has killed Beowulf but he resurfaces and, having discovered Grendel’s corpse, carries the monster’s head. Beowulf returns to Heorot where he is hailed by Hrothgar who gives him land and many other honors.

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