Issue 6 of the acclaimed literary annual FULCRUM features previously unpublished and uncollected writing by Samuel Beckett, Robert Frost and Octavio Paz; original scholarship on "Samuel Beckett as Poet" by Christopher Ricks, Eliot Weinberger, Marjorie Perloff and others; a large special section on "Poetry and Myth"; a debate between the poets John Kinsella and Rosanna Warren; and a full-length translation of George Seferis's Thrush by George; Raymond Federman's translations of poems by Boris Vian; a great deal of outstanding current poetry and literary criticism; and visual art.

The "Samuel Beckett as Poet" feature, edited by Philip Nikolayev, presents Beckett's neglected masterpiece "Ceiling" and other uncollected and unpublished poems, essays by Christopher Ricks, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Marjorie Perloff, Eliot Weinberger, Simon Critchley, Anne Atik, S. E. Gontarski, Seán Lawlor, David Wheatley, Mark Nixon, Daniel Albright, Chris Ackerley, life drawings of Beckett by Avigdor Arikha, and a previously unpublished conversation between Octavio Paz and Eliot Weinberger on Beckett. An number of the essays quote Beckett's unpublished correspondence and manuscripts.

FULCRUM 6 also presents previously unpublished lectures by Robert Frost from 1944-1954 ("The Claims of Poetry," "The Most Dangerous Phrase in America," and "The Natural and Supernatural Bounds of Science"), transcribed with annotation and commentary by Frost scholar James Sitar.

The special "Poetry and Myth" section, edited by Cliff Forshaw and David Kennedy, presents a variety of essays and poems on the subject.

Poets published in FULCRUM 6 include Landis Everson, Alexei Tsvetkov, Joe Green, George Seferis (translated by George Kalogeris), Ben Mazer, Boris Vian (translated by Raymond Federman), Francisco de Quevedo (translated with an introduction by Christopher Johnson), John Kinsella, Rosanna Warren, Jeet Thayil, Geraldine Monk, John Hennessy, Harriet Zinnes, Fan Ogilvie, Daniel Sofaer, Alex To, W. N. Herbert, Giles Goodland, and a great many others.

"FULCRUM has in only a few years established itself as a must-read journal, a unique annual of literary and intellectual substance positioned on the cutting edge of culture." —Billy Collins

"FULCRUM serves as a primary resource for anyone interested in diverse poetic practices not only from these States, but also from around our trembling globe."—Michael Palmer

FULCRUM 6  is 730 (!) pages long and offered at an artificially low price. Please visit  FULCRUM's website for more information. Click on "Issues" to view the complete table of contents, and on "Buy" to acquire the current or past issues.

Jacket magazine has just published Larissa Shmailo's review of my latest book of poems, Letters from Aldenderry (Salt Modern Poets, Cambridge, UK). It begins thus:

In his famed essay, Isaiah Berlin maintains that thinkers can be divided into two camps: foxes, which do many things, and hedgehogs, which do one thing extremely well. In Philip Nikolayev's Letters from Aldenderry, the Nabokovian wordplay, neologisms, puns, mastery of many lyric and experimental forms — indeed, the creation of a lyrical experimentalism — suggest a fox is afoot here.

Yet we have the opening poem "Eagles." Admiring the symmetrical kettling of the raptors, Nikolaev begins to suspect their perfection and wonders whether they, falcon infringers of copyright, are using electronic devices to scan his reading material, "Shakespeare and the Pathos of Rambling." The essay in question is by James Wood and describes the genesis of the stream of consciousness technique in Shakespeare.

Click here to read the rest of the review.

For more information about the book and its author, click here.

Since is has been not implausibly divined that my Letters from Aldenderry ring of birds, I must fess up to my obsession with the feathery bipeds (who by the way are essentially dinosaurs biologically). I am decent at recognizing bird calls (I have a few CDs of those) and did once spend a sultry night in June conversing under a full moon with a lovely mockingbird through an exchange of twitters (the poets Jeet Thayil and Ben Mazer who were with me bear witness).

Anthropomorphic birds, ornithomorphic humans. Here's a poem that Vivek had no way of knowing (I didn't include it in my book):

               INSTINCT

      Into the hills walk lame horizons

      edging their perilous way

      while we whistle in this ark of air

      note after note of recognition,

      of sensate response.

      Right now we're in mid broad daylight,

      but nightwardbound we flutter,

      differently we'll twitter then,

      stars in, stars out in the dark,

      behind waving twigs.

      Feathered tweet chat of nature,

      calls of presence and desire,

      childish chirrup and chirp, sweet

      fruit, primal bond, the spirit's

      temporary relief.

      Wilt the dogwoods of youth slowly,

      while fife we in song what we intuit

      inside, impassably into it,

      with it stay and simply put

      owe our souls to it.

This one came to me while listening to Olivier Messiaen's bird-inspired Catalogue d'oiseaux, a favorite of mine, with the virtuoso Hakan Austbo at the piano (the very CD that's referenced below).

The American mockingbird, although named for its almost supernatural sound-mimicking ability, is among the world's greatest songbirds (the Russian nightingale's equal, but in a different style). Mockingbirds practice and perfect their singing over the years, so the seasoned individuals are the best performers. A master mockingbird always performs solo, by himself (only the males of the species sing). I have sometimes listened to them for hours. Each of them has, indeed, a "catalog" of tunes that they can vary almost infinitely. Another curious thing about mockingbirds is that they are strictly monogamous -- true romantic lovers. It's a pity no one, as far as I can tell, has yet recorded a mockingbird CD: I would love to buy one.

Here is my mockingbird poem, which concludes the book (reproduced with the publisher's permission from Letters from Aldenderry):

EARTH

But what to make of the diminished lot,

of what man could have got and yet has not?

But let him simply while away the day,

and soon this will not matter anyway.

Walking in vain across a cloudy sky,

he scans the grasslands with an acid eye,

like a slightly more modern Robert Frost.

But what of what man had yet somehow lost?

Staring at nature helps him to forget,

to come to terms, to cancel out the debt.

All night he whistled with a mockingbird

and now on his old keyboard types a word

or two into the world and falls asleep.

The land has willows, something needs to weep.

I was moved by Vivek Narayanan's response to my new book, Letters from Aldenderry. I was afflicted with the doldrums first thing in the morning, but then I was sent it, and somehow it's made my day. Here at last is the kind of falling asleep over the page that flatters the author. No mean poet himself, it's opportune that Vivek should bear a Sanskritic first name that refers to the power of intelligent discernment, while his last name flows from a name of Vishnu. O Vishnu, I wish I were in Chennai too right now, I know those siestas and fans. Here, with my slight editorial abridgments, is a version of what appears today on the Annandale Dream Gazette site:

It is very hot at the moment in Chennai, and I confess to a long siesta some afternoons. On one such, I was reading Philip Nikolayev's new collection Letters from Aldenderry [...] and I eventually drifted into a warm sleep with the book nearby.

It was one of those soft-skied dreams, with the scent of rain approaching. I remember that at one point there were old friends, and someone with a pipe. There were several lines of poetry, but I sort of seemed to know already that, on contact with waking life, these were just going to dissemble into unimpressive doggerel. They brought pleasure nevertheless. What slowly came to dominate the dream, however, and what is now most of what I can remember, was a sound emerging from the background, a sound like that of dozens of birds (different species, different conversations) going at the same time, the way you sometimes hear it going into a park at twilight. Instinctively, on a deep physical level, I associated this sound with Philip's book, and this brought me pleasure. But there was something menacing about the sound as well -- listened to with a feel for individual birds, it was an intricate network of songs and patterns, but listened to as one collective sound, it slowly moved towards insidious nightmare. There was something about death, about Philip's exuberant book having a dark side, which somehow helped me cope and feel like something was being demonstrated to me by the dream, like I ought to sit down and figure it out. But the sound, which at points was an insistent screech, refused to go, remained always in the background.

I woke up with a sense of relief -- at first. A minute or two later into waking comprehension, I noticed the sound was still there. Actually, it was being made by the ceiling fan in the bedroom, squeaking on its hinges. Some of you will know that in certain states of mind, a ceiling fan can be a terrible thing to notice, especially if it is making a multi-tonal squeaking sound that might be mistaken for a cacophony of birds. Was the fan going to fall on me? It did not, but I worried that it would fall on my grandparents who, in less than a week, were going to sleep on the same bed.

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I want to test-fly this here blog with a few remarks about an artist I admire hugely: Samuel Gareginyan. He originated in Soviet Armenia but now lives and works in Boston. His work is on the covers my own books and of Katia's and on the cover of and within the first issue of Fulcrum (see my "Pics").

I wrote this poem for him not too long ago:

Eternal City
For Samuel Gareginyan

He who says that in art
one finds not the object
but its myth, himself stands
monastically thin
and looks like his own
self-portrait, the same eye
staring out at you,
marking your silhouette
against the wall or posture at table
with its wild precision.
He needs so few things that he got rid
of the chairs in his studio for want of space
and stands for hours as he finishes
Dionysus' hairy thigh
or the nymph's coy hand,
still on the hefty shoulder.
When out of his window
in war-torn Armenia
he gazed at the ruins
of Erevan's tall gardens
reduced to firewood,
he understood that to revive a place
one must by an effort of the soul
rebuild it from scratch, so he painted
his Eternal City
over three years in several apartments,
first there then here, and I
am now bound to roam it forever,
a myth impossible to exit.
When he went to real Rome,
he didn't like it,
although he did shudder
at the sight of aesthetic treasures
long photographed by his heart
to the obscurest detail.
He says there was too much food
and it was too good,
a distraction for the mind,
which must be hungry.
A feast once in a while is OK,
but Europe doesn't need any
more beauty: now an artist can live
only in America.

(Reproduced with the publisher's permission from my book, Letters from Aldenderry).

Here is a very so-so image of Gareginyan's Eternal City.

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Gareginyan's work is like no one else's. He is in a deep sense quite the Renaissance master, both temperamentally and technically -- he has internalized Renessance technique to a perfection unmatched among the living, and Leonardo would surely have been impressed with a range of SG's works -- yet he is also a post-Romantic artist of personal vision, whose staunch "perspiration" transmutes into sheer inspired wonder. He is distinctly modern and unrepentantly steeped in myths of his own invention, which are nevertheless continuous with the rest of civilization. A cordial heat emanates from his paintings in our age of removed, gelid styles.

Visit Gareginyan's site for more information by clicking here. But keep in mind that these online images cannot begin to convey the infinite subtlety of his brushstrokes, of the multiple evolving layers of paint on each canvas. To see those you need to be face to face with the originals.