Ali Akbar Khan 1922-2009

Photo Credit: By Lawson Knight

ALI AKBAR KHAN, SUPREME SIDDHA, brother of legendary hermit musician Annupurna, son of the great wizard Ustad Alauddin Khan, who broughtt the solo instrumental music of the West to the USA, in his performances w. Chatur Lal at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1950's- who taught thousands of students at his school in San Raphel, California,which I was privileged to attend, who taught me the melodies for the Mira Bai Bhajans which you have heard on many occasions -who gave me a scholarship to study at the Conservatory of Music in Basel - Heaven is blessed to receive him.

from an email by Louise Landes Levi, June 20, 2009



for a video of Ali Akbar Khan, click here

Obituary from the Washington Post

More links to come

Allen Ginsberg--83rd Birthday, June 3

Garrison Keeler on the Writer's Almanac this morning gave a fine and intelligent homage to Allen on his birthday today, June 3.
The Bard lives on. You can listen to it below.

Remembering Tiananmen Square June 4, 1989-Twenty Years Ago

To read the compelling story of Shi Tao's poem, June, click here. Shi Tao is one of many Chinese writers currently imprisoned. His poem, June, was selected by the Pen Poem Relay to be rranslated in every language and circle the globe.

June

by Shi Tao

My whole life

Will never get past “June”
June, when my heart died
When my poetry died
When my lover
Died in romance’s pool of blood

June, the scorching sun burns open my skin
Revealing the true nature of my wound
June, the fish swims out of the blood-red sea
Toward another place to hibernate
June, the earth shifts, the rivers fall silent
Piled up letters unable to be delivered to the dead

Translated to English from Chinese by Chip Rolley.

Irina Mashinski on Boris Pasternak & Marina Tsvetaeva

May 29th

Tomorrow Pasternak dies
in Peredelkino, where on his grave
we spent our youth
reciting "August,"
surrounded by quiet men in dark suits ––
they almost liked the lines.

Tomorrow is the day, the 30th. And three months from tomorrow
Tsvetaeva will hang herself
in a Tatar town on the black Kahma river
Kahma - a tribute to the fuller, solemn
Volga, which rolls her waters south farther from the yoke.
the town with a hook-like name: Elahbuga

A tributary to the yet unknown,
if only I could give her all my blood
to fill those cobalt rubble veins of a laborer!
If only - all the pine tree air to fill his tormented lungs -
I, illegitimate offspring,
looking for the two of you

on every bank
of each big frozen river
where boats are stuck in hardened hummocks.

Born in Moscow, Irina Mashinski (Mashinskaia) immigrated to the U.S. in 1991. A bilingual poet and translator, Mashinski is the author of six books of poetry and a winner of several prestigious Russian national literary awards. Her poetry has been translated into Serbian, Italian, English, and French and is regularly featured in most of the leading literary periodicals and anthologies in Russia and abroad. Her new Russian books of poems, Volk (Wolf) and Peschanik, (Sandstone, Selected Poems ) are scheduled to come out in the summer and fall of 2008 in New York and Moscow. Ms. Mashinski is a co-editor-in-chief of the Storony Sveta (Cardinal Points) major literary magazine published in the US. She graduated from Moscow University magna cum laude and is a current graduate of the MFA in Poetics at New England College. In the US, she has taught Mathematics, Science, Meteorology, and Russian History in high schools and colleges of New York and New Jersey.

The Lilac Thief

OK, it's that time of year and I'm a sucker for lilacs. I steal them by the armfuls past midnight or in the hours just before dawn when there's no one else around. The heirloom bushes at Memorial Park appear diseased this year. Here's a poem I wrote about them a few years ago at the height of my prowling for lilacs on other peoples' property or in abandoned places.

The Lilac Thief

This year I looked for lilacs
off the beaten track
in places no longer tended –

A different kind of boundary,
long rows where once houses stood,
lots now empty.

I love the deeper purple of old bushes,
their crushed bloomets falling into my hand
taken from gnarled bark bearing heavy plumage.

I am the local lilac thief,
that one who stops to follow
the scent of unseen blossoms.

Jacqueline Gens

2003