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Poetry Can Newsletter January 2011
Funny Poem of the Week by FunnyPoets.com
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[News] 1 January 2011
PIW 1 january 2011
Happy New Year to all our readers! Our first issue of 2011 presents six fantastic poets: on the Israel domain, Dan Pagis, whose Hebrew-language poetry engages in dialogue with German Romantic and neo-Romantic traditions; Anat Zecharya, a young poet who forthrightly expresses women's desires, examining the power dynamics between sex and politics; and Yair Hurwitz, whose poems look at the interplay of death and language, the way poetry can console and act as a communicative bridge between the dead and the living. The PIW USA domain brings us Jane Hirshfield, whose Zen poetry celebrates small details and fleeting moments; Dean Young, who combines extravagant imagery and freely-associative leaps of thought in unique, collage-like poems of great energy and humour; and Yusef Komunyakaa, whose work here includes a series of imaginative poetic interpretations of the deadly sins.
Read the full editorial, articles, poems and translations in the current issue of PIW at www.poetryinternationalweb.org
Later this month . . .
We return on January 15 with poems in Japanese written by Chinese-born poet Tian Yuan, along with English translations by William I. Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura. We'll also give you a taste of what's to come in our special 27 January issue celebrating National Poetry Day in the Netherlands and Flanders, in which you'll find new poems by Remco Campert, translated into English by Donald Gardner especially for PIW.
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[Poetry Chaikhana] Ramon Llull - January (from The Book of the Lover and Beloved)
Here's your Daily Poem from the Poetry Chaikhana --
 | January (from The Book of the Lover and Beloved) By Ramon Llull English version by Jordi Miralda Escude
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 / Photo by trix0r / |
| ============ Thought for the Day: Let each experience ============ | Here's your Daily Music selection --  MC Yogi Elephant Power |
Hi Omss -
It's January... a new year. A new pathway, new possibilities, perhaps a new vision of yourself.
I thought we might take a page from Ramon Llull's meditations on sacred love and the Divine Beloved. We have thirty-one verses, one for each day of the month, inspiring us day-by-day to discover how to be true lovers of the Divine. So many wonderful lines here, each line a reminder that we can bring the same giddy intensity to the lover's passionate quest for sacred union...
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Ramon Llull was in many ways a Renaissance man several centuries before the European Renaissance. In his youth he was a wealthy adventurer, politician, administrator, romantic poet, troubadour, and womanizer. He then went through a powerful religious conversion, became a Franciscan, a philosopher, a theologian, one of Europe's first novelists, a mathematician, an astrologer and alchemist, and a rationalist mystic.
Ramon Llull was born in Palma, the capital of the island kingdom of Majorca (now part of Spain). He was raised in a wealthy family and received an excellent education, learning to speak Catalan, Latin, Occitan, and Arabic.
While still a young man, Llull became an important administrator to King James II of Majorca. He married and had two children, though he was often traveling and he developed a reputation as a womanizer.
At some point he had a profound experience of spiritual conversion. In his dictated autobiography, he says he was composing a poem to seduce a young woman, when he turned to his right and had a vision of Christ on the cross, a vision that was repeated five times.
In the aftermath of his conversion experience, Llull became a Franciscan tertiary -- that is, dedicating himself to the Franciscan way of life but without taking monastic vows.
Ramon Llull began to dedicate himself to intellectual and spiritual pursuits. He wrote on alchemy and natural history. He practiced astrology. He wrote what is considered by some to be the first true novel in a European language, Blanquema. And he wrote his mystical meditations on the nature of divine love called The Book of the Lover and the Beloved -- inspired, surely, by Sufi mysticism, with which he would have been familiar, and laying the groundwork for later mystical meditations on European "courtly love." The breadth of his esoteric writings earned him the epithet "Doctor Illuminatus."
Llull, however, shared the European prejudices of the time, and he focused a great deal of his philosophical writings on strengthening Christian debate in order to convert Muslims and Jews to Christianity. He developed an elaborate rationalist form of mysticism in order to bring European Christian thought to a more equal footing with the highly developed Muslim and Jewish philosophies of the era. To this end, he even invented logical "machines," logical pneumonic devices of concentric wheels that could link philosophical and scientific ideas together in surprising and compelling ways. Filled with his missionary zeal, Llull spent his later years traveling through Europe and North Africa.
Although our modern world teaches us that we need to recognize and respect the rich diversity of religious and spiritual traditions, rather than such attempts at conversion and conformity, we should not overlook the depth of insight and stunning range of life experience exhibited by a figure like Ramon Llull.
Many blessings,
Ivan
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Ivan M. Granger's original poetry, stories and commentaries are Copyright © 2002 - 2011 by Ivan M. Granger.
All other material is copyrighted by the respective authors, translators and/or publishers.
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