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Hi Annette, thanks so much for your interest! Yes, the anthology is available for preorder at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Iron-Moon-Anthology-Chinese-Worker/dp/1945680032/
Wu Xia's resistance via softness
Wu Xia works in a clothing factory. She frequently works twelve-hour days or twelve-hour nights. At the age 35, she has been working in various factories for 21 years, or nearly two-thirds of her life. What is striking about Wu Xia, and this comes through clearly in her appearance in the documen...
Hi Annette, thanks so much for your interest! Yes, the anthology is available for preorder at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Iron-Moon-Anthology-Chinese-Worker/dp/1945680032/
Wu Xia's resistance via softness
Wu Xia works in a clothing factory. She frequently works twelve-hour days or twelve-hour nights. At the age 35, she has been working in various factories for 21 years, or nearly two-thirds of her life. What is striking about Wu Xia, and this comes through clearly in her appearance in the documen...
Wu Xia's resistance via softness
Posted Oct 28, 2016 at The Best American Poetry
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The dark fantastical world of the poet Wu Niaoniao [by Eleanor Goodman]
Posted Oct 27, 2016 at The Best American Poetry
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A Product's Story, A Worker's Story [by Eleanor Goodman]
Posted Oct 26, 2016 at The Best American Poetry
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The Death of a Poet [by Eleanor Goodman]
Posted Oct 25, 2016 at The Best American Poetry
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Iron Moon and the Lives of Chinese Worker-Poets [by Eleanor Goodman]
Posted Oct 24, 2016 at The Best American Poetry
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One Chinese Poet's Tribute to Seamus Heaney (Eleanor Goodman)
Homages to Seamus Heaney have been pouring out from his friends and admirers across the world, including, it turns out, China. On August 30 and soon after, my poet friends here in Beijing and around the PRC posted expressions of their sadness, often along with a Chinese translation of one of Heaney’s poems. “Digging” is a particular favorite here, as elsewhere. The piece below is my translation of the distinguished Chinese poet Zang Di’s (臧棣) own private eulogy to Heaney, printed here with his p... Continue reading
Posted Sep 16, 2013 at The Best American Poetry
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The Politics of "Don't Speak" [by Eleanor Goodman]
As everyone has heard by now, this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Chinese novelist Mo Yan. Nearly any selection would create controversy—from sour grapes to complaints about literary quality to accusations of political maneuvering on the part of the Nobel committee. This year, what strikes me is the substantial difference between what is being said in the US about the choice, and what is being said in China. Outside of Chinese literature specialists, the major reaction in th... Continue reading
Posted Oct 13, 2012 at The Best American Poetry
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A More Whimsical Note [by Eleanor Goodman]
Posted Aug 21, 2010 at The Best American Poetry
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Consider the Lobster and the Marinating Cat [by Eleanor Goodman]
Posted Aug 20, 2010 at The Best American Poetry
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Reading David Foster Wallace Without a Net [by Eleanor Goodman]
Two years ago next month, the writer, philosopher, and literary genius David Foster Wallace hanged himself in his backyard. I didn’t know DFW, and initially I disliked his work. True, I took some pride in the fact that we attended the same alma mater and shared professors (many years apart). But I’d badmouthed DFW’s novels to friends as “mannered and faddish,” a criticism along the lines of James Wood’s coinage of the category “hysterical realism.” I resented his footnotes and piling up of details and jump-and-splice style of narration. I thought his tone was arrogant. Then two months before DFW died, a friend loaned me Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. Somewhere in the middle of the second story, “Death Is Not the End,” I abruptly got it, and I devoured the rest of the book with a feeling of voracious pleasure and nausea, as though I were compulsively eating an entire three-layer chocolate cake with jalapeno frosting. What I realized was that DFW wasn’t trying to make his readers feel stupid, or to intimidate them, or to bludgeon them with his own unreasonably encompassing intellect. He was simply trying to get his readers to feel something, to break through the anesthetized shell most of us walk around in all the time. He was trying to bring empathy back into our lives, an awareness of others as well as of ourselves. In this way, he was in a lineage not of literary figures, but of religious leaders—gurus and sages and mystics. He just also happened to be able to tell an incredible story on the page. It wasn’t until this summer that I could finally pick up Consider the Lobster, one of his incredible collections of essays. For me, DFW’s work is inescapably recontextualized by his death: everywhere in his books are hints of the kind of flagellating self-hatred that must be behind suicide. Evidence of the cruel cost his writing exacted from him is there in the amusing confessions and casually self-deprecating meta-commentary. But perhaps, and I believe this simultaneously, his writing was the only thing that could keep him alive, until—in the midst of brain-chemical issues created by the psychotropic drugs he was taking and then not taking—it wasn’t enough. There are questions we want to ask every time an artist commits this act of ultimate self-destruction. What makes some creative people find life unbearable, and do they find it more unbearable than investment bankers or store clerks or construction workers? Is there something about the kind of sensitivity and openness required to do creative work that makes people more vulnerable to the suffering in this world, including their own? Did writing save DFW or drive him crazy? How could someone so brilliant have been so cruel to himself and so uncertain of his own talent? And for god’s sake, why didn’t somebody save him from himself? But we can’t save others from themselves: we can only love them when they’re here and continue to love them once they’re... Continue reading
Posted Aug 19, 2010 at The Best American Poetry
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What Appears To Be Really Is [by Eleanor Goodman]
Posted Aug 18, 2010 at The Best American Poetry
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Apocalypse Now...Or a Little Later? [by Eleanor Goodman]
Am I unusual in feeling that there’s something increasingly schizophrenic about our public life? According to the New York Times, BP’s apocalyptic oil spill continues to kill giant sea turtles by the boatload and destroy the unique biodiversity of Louisiana along with threatening the rest of our east coast ecosystem, all without any real censure or punishment from the US government—but you’ll be relieved to know that six-pack abs and shag rugs are back in vogue! Then there’s the fact that the Pakistanis are drowning (if the cholera doesn’t get them first), Greece may topple even faster than the euro, most of Thailand is still under a state of emergency, and China continues to bulldoze its way to the top of the global dog-pile at terrifying environmental and humanitarian cost. Our own politicians are unabashedly in the pockets of big business and no one is protesting the outrageous economic practices that led to the massive meltdown in 2008, at least no one with any political clout. But there’s good news to balance it all out: apparently the White House pastry chef is taking a stand against the industrialization of our food supply by growing his own rhubarb on the South Lawn. Take that, agribusiness. Does it all seem like a Monty Python skit to you too? The human capacity for self-destruction shows itself on micro and macro levels, in the individual psyche and in societies as a whole. Maybe the doomsday cultists like Jim Jones and Shoko Asahara (who led the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway 15 years ago) are just giving expression to the strange fact that we find a kind of satisfaction in hurting ourselves, or hurting our neighbors, which is the same thing in the end. The suicide bomber’s first victim is himself. Or is it a kind of myopia? Great civilizations have disappeared before: the Mayans, the Incas, the Roman Empire, the Phoenicians, the Mongol Empire, the Egypt of the Pharaohs, the Ottoman Empire. But, come on, that won’t happen to us. Today there’s an oil spill, but they (whoever they are) will figure out how to clean it up, and the solution won’t involve us having to sacrifice anything. Harnessing the largest source of energy in our solar system, that big ol’ ball of fire called the sun, is “impractical” (so sayeth our policy makers and corporate scientists) not because we don’t know how to do it, but because it would put the energy companies out of business. We may be mortgaged up to our necks after the housing bubble, but a reduction in our standard of living is literally inconceivable: we’ve lost the imaginative capacity necessary to envision a different possible future. As easy and satisfying as it is to rail against the oil executives at BP with their multimillion dollar salaries and tenuous relationship with the truth, perhaps we should keep in mind that we made them with our greed for SUVs, two-dollar tchotchkes, McMansions in the country, and petroleum-made plastic... Continue reading
Posted Aug 17, 2010 at The Best American Poetry
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A Poet of the World (by Eleanor Goodman)
Jared Smith is a poet I have admired for many years. I met him once by chance, on a day in July so humid that even the trees looked resentful, and we had a long conversation about art, the place of poetry in contemporary society, and what it means, or should mean, to be a writer. I found him to be a unique mix of the visionary, talking about poetry in unabashedly mystical terms, and the modern scientist (he started working in the high tech industry before it was an industry). His poetry embodies the same seeming contradiction, and that is one of the things that makes it so impressive. Also impressive is how prolific and consistently topnotch a writer Smith is. This spring alone, he put out two books, a new collection titled Grassroots [Wind Publications], and a compilation, Looking into the Machinery, Selected Longer Poems, [Tamarack Editions]. Both books are exciting forays into the mind of this important poet of the modern experience. Song catch me as snow falling into air...... Song of the blood of this land, fill these veins Song burning in earthen fragments, filling the granite bonds of city, building the bones of time, Sing in the arteries of my mind. So begins “Song of the Blood,” a book-length poem published in 1983, which serves as the launching point of the Selected Longer Poems. The incantatory call for attention, the invocation of the Muse, which is both apart from and part of the body itself—it is this sense of the orphic made concrete in granite and bones that makes Smith’s work so powerful. One can see a young man’s passion in this poem, the pulse and avidity of a seeker just starting out. This sense of discovery and curiosity, of the desire to fill oneself with the world irrespective of the cost both psychic and practical, is a theme throughout Smith’s oeuvre. Take the beginning of Section III from “A Trout in the Pick-up on Papago,” a recent poem composed for the collection: When I am hungry, I rise to the surface and the universe settles a dusty miller which I take into my bloodless lips; the universe then settles around me. The bones dry out over time, crumble away but they always hold what built them. They hold the sun and they hold the darkness and every shade of color from in between. These are the same concerns, the same hunger for inspiration, the same seeking, and the same bones. Yet the position has shifted: the voice here is slower, calmer, more philosophical than incantatory despite the repetitions. There is a wonderful sense of circularity, the sense of a highly-attuned poetic mind returning to the same place, and, as Eliot wrote, knowing it for the first time. A sense of intellectual and spiritual restlessness is a vital characteristic for any poet, but a poet also needs musicality, linguistic creativity, and an eye for keen observation. And a feel for love, which is what fills... Continue reading
Posted Aug 16, 2010 at The Best American Poetry
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A Modest Meditation on Home [by Eleanor Goodman]
Posted Aug 15, 2010 at The Best American Poetry
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Thanks for the kind remarks, David and Stacey. I love Stevens' "Sunday Morning", but the poem on this topic that speaks to me most is Rilke's first Duino Elegy: "For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure / and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us." That sense of awe, for me, is the impulse behind art. I felt that same mix of intense aesthetic pleasure and fear in Pere Lachaise. I think Stevens is pointing to the fact that despite our desire for it, there is no "imperishable bliss", only a fleeting sense of joy, and such is a given life. Death, by providing the door through which beauty comes and goes, is both a looming horror and a solace.
Visiting Paris, or, A Short Meditation on Death [Eleanor Goodman]
Right around the time of my last birthday, I started to think seriously about death. I spent the next several months writing and ruminating on the emotional fallout. I was reminded of that time last week, in Paris sleeping on a narrow mattress on the floor of an apartment belonging to a stranger...
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