In each issue of Mythic Passages, Michael Karlin points you to some of his favorite poems published on the World Wide Web. This month's poems come from Galway Kinnell, Pablo Neruda, and Jelaluddin Rumi as translated by Coleman Barks. Both Galway and Coleman will be featured guests at Mythic Journeys 2004.

Please share thoughts on the poems with michael@mythicjourneys.org.

Galway Kinnell received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his Selected Poems. Other works include A New Selected Poems, Imperfect Thirst, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone, What a Kingdom It Was, The Book of Nightmares, Body Rags, and Mortal Acts, Mortal Words. He has also published translations of works by Yves Bonnefroy, Yvanne Goll, François Villon, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Galway Kinnell teaches as the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University. He currently serves as Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.  He is a guest speaker at Mythic Journeys 2004.

Born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto in southern Chile on July 12, 1904, Pablo Neruda led a life charged with poetic and political activity. In 1923 he sold all of his possessions to finance the publication of his first book, Crepusculario ("Twilight"). He published the volume under the pseudonym "Pablo Neruda" (which he adopted in memory of the Czechoslovak poet Jan Neruda) to avoid conflict with his family, who disapproved of his occupation. The following year, he found a publisher for Veinte poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada ("Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair"). The book made a celebrity of Neruda, who gave up his studies at the age of twenty to devote himself to his craft. In 1927, Neruda began his long career as a diplomat in the Latin American tradition of honoring poets with diplomatic assignments.  He continued to write while serving in Burma, Argentina, and in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.  He was the Chilean Consul to Mexico, elected to the Chilean Senate, and joined the Communist Party, a step that eventually led to his expulsion and exile from 1943 - 1952.  For the next twenty-one years, Neruda continued a career that integrated private and public concerns and became known as the people's poet. During this time, Neruda received numerous prestigious awards, including the International Peace Prize in 1950, the Lenin Peace Prize and the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Diagnosed with cancer while serving a two-year term as ambassador to France, Neruda resigned his position thus ending his diplomatic career. On September 23, 1973, just twelve days after the defeat of Chile's democratic regime, the man widely regarded as the greatest Latin-American poet since Darío, died of leukemia in Santiago, Chile.

In 1976, Coleman Barks began translating the poems of Jelaluddin Rumi, a thirteenth-century Sufi mystic, a poet as famous in the Islamic world as Shakespeare is in the West. He has since become the primary translator bringing Rumi’s poems into contemporary English, publishing sixteen volumes of Rumi’s poetry, including The Glance: Songs of Soul-Meeting and The Essential Rumi. A poet in his own right, a publisher, and teacher of contemporary American poetry, he taught for thirty-four years at the University of Georgia, Athens, where he was named Poet and Professor Emeritus of English. Currently, he collaborates in performances with musicians, including members of the Paul Winter Consort. His work was featured in two PBS series with Bill Moyers, The Language of Life (1995) and The Sounds of Poetry (1999). He is a guest speaker and Advisory Board Member at Mythic Journeys 2004.