A Call in the Midst of the Crowd, a collection of poems by Alfred Corn, first published by Penguin in 1978. After a series of opening lyrics, comes the title poem, an autobiographical sequence in four parts, following the seasons during a year in New York. Interspersed among the poems are prose excerpts about the geology, history, structure, and fine arts of the city. Literary comments drawn from authors including Whitman, James, Wharton, Stevens, Crane, Lorca. Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, and Frank O'Hara. In the appendix to his book "The Western Canon" Harold Bloom placed this volume on his list of twentieth century works that he regards as candidates to be included in the permanent canon of modern Western poetry. Four Seasons Press is proud to publish old books in ebook form for today's readers. Such is our mission.
Very pleased to announce that two books by Fan Zeng in English are now available on Amazon.com
A master of Chinese painting and calligraphy, Fan Zeng is also a renowned scholar of Chinese classics and a poet. He holds numerous distinguished positions, including an endowed chair at Peking University, President of Chinese Painting Research Institute, Honorary Doctorate from the University of...
Now available on Amazon.com
A master of Chinese painting and calligraphy, Fan Zeng is also a renowned scholar of Chinese classics and a poet. He holds numerous distinguished positions, including an endowed chair at Peking University, President of Chinese Painting Research Institute, Honorary Doctorate from the University of...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0996283595 Now in paperback on Amazon.com
At the age of twenty, Peter Rand flunked out of college, left his comfortable home in California, crossed the ocean, and roamed the world to pursue his destiny as a writer. In Africa, this young drifter, an inexperienced stringer for the New York Herald Tribune, stumbled into revolution. He was l...
Now in paperback on Amazon.com
This collection of thirty-six poems introduces Alfred Corn as a poet of rare and enduring quality. As a group, the poems read something like the logbook of a voyage, a quest for the self, for a world habitable to spirit, and for an art adequate to experience. The culminating poems of the book is ...
Now in paperback on Amazon.com
Rong Rong is the pen name of Chu Peirong. Born in February, 1964, in Ningbo City, Zhejiang Province, China, graduated from the Chemistry Department of Zhejiang Normal University in 1984. Having worked as a teacher and government clerk, she is currently the editor-in-chief of a literary magazine t...
We're proud to be the publisher of Fan Zeng's second book in English, Laozi and Zhuangzi: an Attentive Interpretation. Mr. Fan Zeng is the author of more than 150 books, of which about 130 books are in the collections of the National Library of China.
We're proud to publish this collection of poems by Rong Rong.
Rong Rong is the pen name of Chu Peirong. Born in February, 1964 in Ningbo City, Zhejiang Province, China, graduated from the Chemistry Department of Zhejiang Normal University in 1984. Having worked as a teacher and government clerk, she is currently the editor-in-chief of a literary magazine ti...
http://www.alfredcorn.com/audio-video.html
Characters treading not quite level pineBoards number, first, Carafe, who’s sweating beadsOf coolant on her Delft-blue leaves and birds.Then enter Sirloin, crusty, rare, supine,Giving his aromatic agonyAway in pink tears drained into the darkPlatter’s symmetrically branching tree.Sharp Knife sta...
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Updating our website. We are getting there...
Happy birthday to our Poet Alfred Corn. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46335/and-then-i-saw
My body, laid out on a marble slab.
Coming soon from Four Seasons Press...On the Art of Chinese Painting by Fan Zeng
Poetry in Translation
Alfred Corn: Roads Taken -- A celebration for Alfred Corn at The Poets House, New York
The Poets House in New York hosted a program on October 8, 2016, to celebrate a life devoted to poetry and literary writing. Alfred Corn gave a reading and b...
Alfred Corn: Roads Taken
Since the first book of poems, All Roads at Once was published in 1976, Alfred Corn has published twelve books of poems; two novels, titled Part of His Story...
Literary Partners Program presents: Roads Taken: A Celebration of Alfred Corn | Poets House
Since the first book of poems, All Roads at Once was published in 1976, Alfred Corn has published twelve books of poems; two novels, titled Part of His Story and Miranda’s Book; two collections of essays; and The Poem’s Heartbeat, a study of prosody. Fellowships for his poetry include the Guggenheim...
Four Seasons Press
Four Seasons Press's cover photo
click to hear the poet read his poems.
Roving packs you eel your way through pay no mind to what must, if they see,look like a shadow loping along alone,now slowing, stopping for the misted warmthetched panes suffuse in the Hound and Rose's matchedbilateral doors. Ale glow that lights up halfof the fatman's baldpate football head,left pa...
An excerpt from BITTERSWEET, a novel by Leslie Li
Chapter 2 The Miracle (1893)
By her fourth year, Bittersweet was already too spirited for her father to look after her. Finger games and short walks with him no longer satisfied her, so she habitually led him to the rice paddies where her mother and thirteen-year-old brother plowed and planted the flooded fields. Might, she suggested, she do what they were doing? Later, she would plead for the pins, needle, and thread that her nine-year-old sister used to mend the family's cloth shoes. She would pull her father's hand, so she could follow her seven-year-old sister who gathered rushes and duckweed at the river bank. Her six-year-old sister was finally put in charge of looking after Bittersweet. By the time she was five, Bittersweet was carrying dry grass and firewood to the stove and watching the fire to make sure it didn't go out.
To be continued...
BITTERSWEET is available on Amazon.com
Photo by Joanne Wang
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOVJIC6gTj0
To a Muse, a poem by Alfred Corn from the collection of A Call in the Midst of the Crowd.
Poetry in Translation
Four Seasons Press's cover photo
ANTARCTIC
---a poem by Alfred Corn
Polar, antipodean, the father King
penguin would (if penguins did) think of us
as bodies hanging downside up, footsoles
adhering to the planet’s inhospitable, broiling half.
Pinfeathers glossy-smooth as ermine, the lower
part of his dinner suit can incubate
an oval solid, resting on black talons—
one blood-warm venture left to him in trust
the morning mother brooders metronomed
off on their way to ice brinks overland.
Instinct and hunger pushed them, plunged
their flock into resounding tanks of turquoise brine
to gulp a cache of fish for transport home.
....
The entire poem is published in the collection of TABLES, available on Amazon.com
Photo from The Winged Migration
An excerpt from BITTERSWEET, a novel by Leslie Li
Chapter 1 Small Happiness (1889)
Lao Li's wife slipped out the back door of her house. She paused on the threshold, tilting her head to one side, listening for the snores of her husband. Hearing the sounds, deep and rhythmic, she grabbed the shovel in the lime shed, scurried along the back wall of the hutong, turned the corner of the narrow alleyway and leaned against the rain-splashed bricks.
She had done a terrible thing, and now, in the darkest part of night, she was trying to make amends before the gods grew even angrier with her. Weren't the claps of thunder from their hands? Weren't the bolts of lightning that they threw down, illuminating her crime, proof of their anger? Then again, Lao Li's wife thought, they had sent the wind and rain to muffle the sound of her shovel. They had sent a moonless night to help conceal her crime. And so, now, as she dug behind the house, the blade of the shovel sliding easily into the rain-softened earth, she alternately begged forgiveness of the gods and thanked them for their mercy. Once, she cocked her head, fearing a baying of dogs which might rouse the villagers, then she remembered the dogs had disappeared years ago during the famine and had never reappeared. She resumed her digging.
To be continued...
BITTERSWEET is available on Amazon.com
Photo: JW
Mu Xin Museum, Wuzhen, China
Toming: Do you like to be called a writer in exile? If you are one, can you compare yourself to writers in exile from other countries?
Mu Xin: Joyce said that being in exile is his aesthetics. I believe that aesthetics is my exile: I refer to the infinite traveling in the conceptual world, in which each one of us is given our own share of fate. Homesickness is unavoidable; it is a matter of what attitude we have toward it. The homesickness of philosophy, for example, is the interest in theology. The homesickness of literature is the interest in humanity. When someone's homesickness is excessive, he is no more than a homemade clod. If you ask me why I left China, it's just that I went for a stroll and strolled too far away.
---An excerpt from Mu Xin: The Literary Odyssey, available on Amazon.com
Photo by Li Gang
“Once on Zanzibar, I quickly formed a feeling of familiarity with the place and the people. The town was a warren of narrow streets that ran between high walls of houses with dark, heavy wood doors ornamented with fixtures of gleaming brass, or cool doorways that opened onto cool interiors, and open spaces of bright tropical trees and lush green foliage. The atmosphere was swollen with heat, and sensual, and busy with wild birds of exotic blues and reds and yellows, dipping and flying high, crying as they went, noisy with the sounds of shouting brown barefoot boys, bicycle bells, honking horns. The air was thick with the smell of curry, herbs, fish, sweet food, garlic. Sometimes you heard wailing music. It was humid and languorous, but also electric: There was a promise to all the color and noise and bustle, anticipation among the restless humid bodies that seemed to go unrealized. You got up every day with a sense of expectancy, and every night you went to bed somehow unfulfilled. It was a place ripe with conspiracies that died on the vine.”---An excerpt from My Zanzibar Revolution, a memoir by Peter Rand, available on Amazon.com
Happy birthday to our author Peter Rand.
At the age of twenty, Peter Rand dropped out of college, left his comfortable home in California, crossed the ocean, and roamed the world to pursue his destiny as a writer. This photo was taken in Africa.
"God knows how many books and how many readers of the Old Republican era have been destroyed. Mu Xin’s life had been witness to an increasingly violent series of cultural cracks. Mu Xin refused to be displaced by the cracks and actually maintained continuity. This is the underlying background of my book. Caught in the intervals of countless such breakdowns, sometimes surviving in between the cracks, sometimes managing to avoid the cracks, and sometimes surviving beyond the cracks, Mu Xin had managed to keep his footing right in the middle of world literature."---Chen Danqing, an excerpt from Mu Xin: the Literary Odyssey, available on Amazon.com
Oil Painting by Chen Danqing
"By the time Bittersweet and her two companions reached the outer gate of Dragon's Head, the villagers were already on their way to market or milling about their doorways. They all knew why she was traveling that day, and they wished her a pleasant journey. As she answered them with words of thanks and farewell, she realized she was already homesick for the hutongs, the rice paddies, the limestone peaks, and the green river of her husband's village, and she was already anxious about being a simple rustic in a big city." ---An excerpt from Leslie Li's novel "Bittersweet", available on Amazon.com
Photo via Internet
ON THE BEACH
In this dark
will we know each other
the North Star
changes its mind
And strands of cloud
go with the drift
of prevailing currents
no answer comes forward
It may be the tide
will turn bringing
the barest outline
a remembered form
Enduring a world of water
I keep dreams company waiting
for the stars to wheel in place
as image story future
-----A poem by Alfred Corn from ALL ROADS AT ONCE
Photo by Joanne Wang
An excerpt from CHINA HANDS by Peter Rand
"It was a great walled city of the plain, a terminus for camel caravans from the Gobi Desert. “The autumn days were glorious in Peking,” Helen Snow wrote.9 In the winter, sometimes it snowed. Then, for a time, it glittered icy and brilliant white in the winter sun below a deep blue dome of sky. At night the city was still and silent under the vast and starry heavens."
Photo: Temple of Heaven by JW, Nov. 2015
Four Seasons Press
Mu Xin said: "I Ching, (The Book of Changes) was all but a pack of pitiful schemes and calculations of a suffering, disaster-stricken nation. Wisdom of the weak. The same for The Art of War. When weak, one has to calculate. Look at the Westerners fighting in a battle in the old days, he said: a platoon is lined up in a square, one row falls, another row moves forward. Row after row dies, the drumbeat never dies. As he was saying this, a laugh broke out of him." An excerpt from Mu Xin, the Literary Odyssey
Chen Danqing: "I would really like to know if there is any other person who has ever talked about writers the way that Mu Xin did. I would like to know of anyone who, in any other country, treated the history of literature in this fashion. How I wish that writers in other countries could have come and listened to the way that Mu Xin was talking about them. They can never know that this person never stopped talking to them, making suggestions, asking questions, pushing them into a corner. Likewise, they will never realize how this person sang their praises over and over again. And even less will they know that this same person, with the guile and empathy of a Chinese old man, saw through their secret pain and had even badmouthed them." ---An excerpt from Mu Xin: the Literary Odyssey
Photo: Mu Xin in Central Park, New York, 1993
In this conversation, Bloom speaks with Michael Skafidas about his devotion to teaching and his influence as a critic, why he does not need to Google and how he regrets not having met yet Sophia Loren.
Michael Skafidas: You have written over 40 books and you are often referred to as an academic superstar. A reviewer noted recently, "Bloom is no Whitman or Melville ... yet he seems at times almost as large as any of these, so vital and particularized is his presence." Can poet and critic indeed be equal seers?
Harold Bloom: I am not in competition with Whitman or Melville or any of the figures I write about. Despite of my old age, in early September, I will start my sixty-first consecutive year of full-time teaching at Yale. For me, teaching, reading and writing are simply three words for the same phenomenon. I am primarily a teacher and proud of it because it is one of the most honorable things one can be. My function is to teach my students or my reader how to appreciate really great writers in every sense of appreciation, meaning to evaluate; meaning once you've established for yourself and by the criteria of all the great works of the past from Homer and the Bible, considered as literature, through Dante and Shakespeare and Milton and up to the present day, with Proust and with Joyce. Once it is perfectly clear that one is dealing with really great and profound literature that is marked by cognitive power, aesthetic beauty, originality and above all, of the deepest human relevance, then appreciate it in the sense of not only enjoying it and communicating the enjoyment of it but apprehending it, deepening your understanding of it.
Harold Bloom, the giant of American literary criticism, an original mind and provocative presence on the international literary scene, said this about Alfred Corn's poems: "The title poem is an extraordinary and quite inevitable extension of the New York tradition of major visionary poems, which goes from Poe's 'City in the Sea' and Whitman's 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry' to Hart Crane's 'The Bridge' and Ashbery's 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.'...Corn achieves an authority and resonance wholly worthy of his precursors. I know of nothing else of such ambition and realized power in Corn's own generation of American poets. He has had the skill and courage to confront, absorb, and renew our poetic tradition at its most vital. His aesthetic prospects are remarkable, even in this crowded time."
Alfred Corn, whose first collection John Ashbery called “a brilliant beginning,” opens this second volume with such evocative and formally innovative poems as “Darkening Hotel Room,” “The Three Times,” and “The Adversary” −− ag...
TO THE END OF THE PIER
---A poem by Alfred Corn from the collection of All Roads at Once
Sunday walk:
overhead, clouds sketching
questions against the blue, asking me to answer,
as if I could walk into knowledge, all in white
light. . . . Water shows brighter than stone: I would
go and watch at the pier.
.....
To be continued. To read the complete poem, please order the book from Amazon Kindle store.
New York, NY
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Beijing, as it's called Peking before 1949, written and read by Peter Rand, author of China Hands:
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