Poems: Wislawa Szymborska

When Wislawa Szymborska (1923-) received the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, I recall saying: "Who?"  My knowledge of 20th century Polish poetry was five writers deep: Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), Adam Zagajewski (1945-), Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998), Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969), and Jerzy Andrzejewski (1909-1983). Milosz I knew of because he won the Nobel Prize in 1980, and I began seeing his work here and there, then started reading it, with astonishment, when I got to college. Zagajewski because when I was in college, one of his major translators, the poet and critic Stanislaw Baranczak, was on the faculty, and perhaps as a result, Z's poetry seemed to appear everywhere. Herbert I learned about from one of my fellow Dark Room members--they abounded in information like that. Gombrowicz was a name I'd seen for years, always in relation to his highly praised--but unread by anyone I knew--novels Ferdydurke (1937) and Pornografia (1966). I would lying if I said I had gotten more than 25 pages into either. Andrzejewski--I don't even know, though he was allegedly on the Nobel shortlist as well, like Zagajewski probably is. Not a single woman, no Szymborska, among them.

Then Szymborska came to world attention, and I started to see her wry, wittily ironic, deeply human and humane, often melancholy, sometimes heart-piercing poems in translation.  She has, at least to my ear and mind, a gift for boring utterly into the core of the moment the poem invokes, with wit and an undertone of sadness, sometimes so plangent, as is the case with the second of the poems I'm posting below, that it's almost painful.  A few years ago, 2006 I think it was, the writer Thomas Glave came to the university, and as part of his preparation for speaking to my "Situation of Writing" class, he asked that I have them read several poems that broached the writer's ethical responsibilities and challenges by Szymborska. I had not read these myself, so they were a revelation (I should have expected no less from Thomas, who is himself a revelation).

I say all of this as a set-up for me to post two poems by Szymborska, who remains one of the great living poets. The first I came across on the Nobel Prize site, and the second I read first in The New Yorker, and as soon as I read and reread it about 10 times, I tore it out and put in my "poetry" file.  Once upon a time, in my pre-professor days, that little file was a "sanity" file, and I would paste the poems up on the glass walls of my office, and whenever I'd hit of rough patch of bureaucratic nonsense, or my then-boss would, well, perform as the entire staff dreaded, I'd look at those poems and be transported to another place. And I'd write (a bad) one myself. Back to Szymborska: We're lucky to have her around, and if you like these poems, I urge you to go read more.

THE THREE ODDEST WORDS

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no non-being can hold.

Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.
Copyright © Wislawa Szymborska, S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh

I AM TOO CLOSE

I am too close for him to dream of me.
I don't flutter over him, don't flee him
beneath the roots of trees. I am too close.
The caught fish doesn't sing with my voice.
The ring doesn't roll from my finger.
I am too close. The great house is on fire
without me calling for help. Too close
for one of my hairs to turn into the rope
of the alarm bell. Too close to enter
as the guest before whom walls retreat.
I'll never die again so lightly,
so far beyond my body, so unknowingly
as I did once in his dream. I am too close,
too close, I hear the word hiss
and see its glistening scales as I lie motionless
in his embrace. He's sleeping,
more accessible at this moment to an usherette
he saw once in a traveling circus with one lion,
than to me, who lies at his side.
A valley now grows within him for her,
rusty-leaved, with a snowcapped mountain at one end
rising in the azure air. I am too close
to fall from that sky like a gift from heaven.
My cry could only waken him. And what
a poor gift: I, confined to my own form,
when I used to be a birch, a lizard
shedding times and satin skins
in many shimmering hues. And I possessed
the gift of vanishing before astonished eyes,
which is the riches of all. I am too close,
too close for him to dream of me.
I slip my arm from underneath his sleeping head -
it's numb, swarming with imaginary pins.
A host of fallen angels perches on each tip,
waiting to be counted.

Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.
Copyright © Wislawa Szymborska, S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh

Poem: Tan Lin

Lest we forget that in the digital age new kinds of poems are possible, and that writers are creating them, here is one by Tan Lin (19_?-), my former colleague and one of the most original creative people I know. I'll just say that this piece, from 2002, mirrors several that he discussed, displayed and performed during a brief visit to the university around that period.  One of his aims, he argued, was to create poetry that mirrored early 20th century Modernist French composer Erik Satie's (1866-1925) concept of "musique d'ameublement," or "furniture music." The pieces he showed did not have musical accompaniment, but this piece does, matching an ambient soundworld to (semi-)ambient language. If you're so inclined and have the technological means, you might hook the piece up to your speakers and let it play as you go about your business.

I'll just add that one of Tan's most recent works, Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary. The Joy of Cooking [AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL POEM PAINTING FILM PHOTO HALLUCINATION LANDSCAPE], from Wesleyan University Press (2010), is actually a multiplatform, multi-concept(ual) creation, that keeps proliferating, like a (capitalistic) rhizome (which is, in part perhaps, what he's after).  It manages to send up numerous forms by embodying what amount to zombie forms of them all.  I posted photos of the book launch a while back, and I recommend the main book, from Wesleyan too. You can, like the ambient audiovisual piece below, dip and out, and even prepare a meal--it has recipes, of a sort--while you're at it. He also has a novel, wildly heralded by the writers and scholars I know who've read it, on the way. I never know what he's going to come up with, but it's never boring (even when that's his ostensible aim).

Click on the image, or the link below, to see the poem play as it should, and about this one, I can say, enjoy!

OR: click on the link below:
Pennsound: Dub Version

© 2009 Tan Lin. Used with permission of Tan Lin. Distributed by PennSound.

Poem/Translation: Paul Celan

The other day amid a river of tweets I spotted a mention of Paul Celan (1920-1970), and for reasons known only to the deeper currents of my mind, the following poem popped into my head. Almost like an automatism. I even tweeted in response: "Arnica, eyebright." The poem, as is probably well known, was Celan's response to an encounter with his old friend, the esteemed philosopher and Nazi Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). This Wikipedia entry sums up what went down:

On one of his trips, Celan gave a lecture at the University of Freiburg (on July 24, 1967) which was attended by Heidegger, who gave Celan a copy of Was heißt Denken? and invited him to visit his work retreat "die Hütte" ("the hut") at Todtnauberg the following day and walk in the Schwarzwald. Although he may not have been willing to be photographed with Heidegger after the Freiburg lecture (or to contribute to Festschriften honoring Heidegger's work) Celan accepted the invitation and even signed Heidegger's guest book at the famous "hut".

The two walked in the woods. Celan impressed Heidegger with his knowledge of botany and Heidegger is thought to have spoken about elements of his press interview Only a God can save us now, which he had just given to Der Spiegel on condition of posthumous publication. That would seem to be the extent of the meeting. "Todtnauberg" was written shortly thereafter and sent to Heidegger as the first copy of a limited bibliophile edition. Heidegger responded with no more than a letter of perfunctory thanks.

As the poet and critic Pierre Joris points out in his thorough account and translation, Celan, who survived the Holocaust, was expecting an apology, which he never received. The Wikipedia entry suggests Heidegger's indifference, his coldness, in response to the poem, which, at least to me, is unsurprising. He had by this point long retreated into a kind of mental Hütte, no? I won't attempt to interpret the poem, since Joris has already done so (as others, like Hans Georg Gadamer and John Felstiner have before), though I think that careful reading outlines the events clearly (deutlich) enough, but what strikes me so powerfully is the strangeness, the disorientation, the language almost aurally knotting itself; to give one example, there is the moment of hyperbaton at the end, with the humidity of the day, the dampness (from the heat, sorrow and disappointment, or, metaphorically, tears in the heart), preceding its qualification, an amplification (viel--very).  The entire poem feels this way, almost a bit dizzying, a record of--what?--a visit, but also a revisiting, a trip to the Death Mountain ("Todtnauberg") which leaves its grief-mark like the burst of the beautiful and haunting healing flowers'' names,"Arnika, Augentrost," or those ominous "star-dice" on the well's head--in part, as this poem.

Below is my translation, which is admittedly flawed, as my German is rather provisional (I studied it many years ago, in high school, after trying to teach it to myself), but where I think it works is that I have tried to capture not only the literal translation, with the nuances Joris suggests (and his reading was very helpful to me), but Celan's strange music, rendered into English. Rather than suggesting that you enjoy the poem, I'll say instead, read, and reflect.

TODTNAUBERG

Arnika, Augentrost, der Trunk aus dem Brünnen mit dem Sternwürfel drauf, in der Hütte, die in das Buch —wessen Namen nahms auf vor dem meinen?—, die in dies Buch geschriebene Zeile von einer Hoffnung, heute, auf eines Denkenden kommendes Wort im Herzen, Waldwasen, uneingeebnet, Orchis und Orchis, einzeln, Krudes, später, im Fahren, deutlich, der uns fährt, der Mensch, der's mi anhört, die halb- beschrittenen Knüppel- pfade im Hochmoor, Feuchtes, viel.

Arnica, eyebright, the drink from the well with the star-dice on top, in the hut, written in the book —whose name did it take down before mine—? written in this book the line about a hope, today, for a thinker's coming word in the heart, forest sod, ungraded, orchis and orchis, separated, crudeness, later, while driving, clearly, who drives us, the man, who is listening too, the half- trodden club- paths on the high moor, humidity, plenty.

Copyright © 2011, Paul Celan. Copyright © 2011, Translation by John Keene.

Poem: Robert Lowell

Yesterday's poem got me thinking about another poem that treats the US Civil War, a poem I had to read in high school and did not fully understand, could not really understand or bear, even, until I returned to it, and its author, in college. I speak of Robert Lowell (1917-1977), who had died only a decade before and whose name and fame were still widely known and accepted. They have both dimmed quite a bit since then, as his peer and friend, Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1917), has seen her star ascend, and many of the poets of his generation (Theodore Roethke, Karl Shapiro, John Ciardi, Randall Jarrell, etc.) are even less invoked. (Another almost exact contemporary, Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), has also become better known and canonical over the last 30 years.)  Lowell's career had many stages, controversies, summits and pits, but when he published the poem below, "For the Union Dead," in the eponymous 1964 volume, he was at the zenith of his fame.

Its title invokes his friend and former teacher Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead," while also touching upon many of Lowell's touchstones: Boston, especially the city of his youth; New England and its place in the country; political and social liberalism, and his own conflicts concerning his and the country's difficulties in grappling with race and racism; modernization and the shifts the country was experiencing; his own aging; the power and limits of art to invoke, witness, imagine, commemorate; and so much more. Formally, it shows his shift to the looser, more open style of his mid-career, while still demonstrating his skill as a versifier, his sureness of meter, rhetoric, figure.  His use of the "n" word still jars, but far less; I think it stopped me when I was a teenager, tearing more at the wound that its use in other circumstances--by white classmates, in books like Huckleberry Finn and Wallace Stevens's poetry--had already created. Now I can see why it was necessary, for Lowell, here. The national wound that Shaw and the black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry confronted in 1863, reanimated so vividly in the 1989 film Glory (which won Denzel Washington his first Academy Award) still festers to some degree, though their bravery and that of all who fought and won that terrible war has gone a long way--including, at the moment of this poem's writing, during the Civil Rights Movement, which involved those "Negro children" on the TV Lowell cites--towards suturing if not fully healing it.


FOR THE UNION DEAD

"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now.  Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back.  I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile.  One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common.  Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now.  He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die--
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year--
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast.  Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone.  Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.


From Life Studies and For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell, published by Noonday Press (a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.). Copyright © 1964 by Robert Lowell. All rights reserved.

Poems: Frances E. W. Harper & Walt Whitman

Just a quick note to congratulate poets Rigoberto González and Joan Larkin on jointly receiving this year's Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America! I know Rigoberto personally and am especially delighted that he has received this incredible honor, whose prior recipients include Ed Roberson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Angela Jackson, Kenneth Koch, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many other great poets.
 
***

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the Confederate assault on Ft. Sumter, South Carolina, which was the opening salvo of the US Civil War (1861-1865), the largest and most destructive war on American soil in our nation's history. At the end of the war, over 600,000 soldiers and civilians were killed and a great deal of the South was physically devastated, but by the horrific institution of slavery, as it had come to be in the US, had ended, and soon, two new Constitutional amendments, the 13th and 14th, would initiate the process begun in parts of the country half a decade before, to ensure equality to all Americans. The country too, though sundered in deep ways we are still reckoning with, was stitched together like the halves of an immense and thick, multicolored quilt that had been torn apart, and it too continues to be expanded and recreated.

Poets wrote about the war during its unfolding and afterwards; in fact, people still continue to write poetry--and novels, historical studies, comic books, etc.--about the US Civil War, not least because of its fundamental role in the new society, the new country, the new America, that it brought into being.  Today's selections are two poems written by figures who lived through the antebellum and Civil War era, two writers without whom the fields of African American and American literature, respectively, could have developed. They are Frances E. W. Harper (1825-1911) and Walt Whitman (1819-1892). Both are well enough known (Whitman certainly, but Harper too, as her works are now central to most explorations of 19th century African American literature and culture, Black/women's writing, feminist studies, and so on.) Harper published her first book, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (echoing her and our ancestor Phillis Wheatley's 1773 volume Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral) in 1854, while the first version of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, one of the greatest collections of poetry in American or any literature, appeared in 1855. Each poem speaks for itself, so I'll just say: enjoy.  

AN APPEAL TO MY COUNTRYWOMEN

by Frances E. W. Harper

You can sigh o’er the sad-eyed Armenian
   Who weeps in her desolate home.
You can mourn o’er the exile of Russia
   From kindred and friends doomed to roam.

You can pity the men who have woven
   From passion and appetite chains
To coil with a terrible tension
   Around their heartstrings and brains.

You can sorrow o’er little children
   Disinherited from their birth,
The wee waifs and toddlers neglected,
   Robbed of sunshine, music and mirth.

For beasts you have gentle compassion;
   Your mercy and pity they share.
For the wretched, outcast and fallen
   You have tenderness, love and care.

But hark! from our Southland are floating
   Sobs of anguish, murmurs of pain,
And women heart-stricken are weeping
   Over their tortured and their slain.

On their brows the sun has left traces;
   Shrink not from their sorrow in scorn.
When they entered the threshold of being
   The children of a King were born.

Each comes as a guest to the table
   The hand of our God has outspread,
To fountains that ever leap upward,
   To share in the soil we all tread.

When ye plead for the wrecked and fallen,
   The exile from far-distant shores,
Remember that men are still wasting
   Life’s crimson around your own doors.

Have ye not, oh, my favored sisters,
   Just a plea, a prayer or a tear,
For mothers who dwell ’neath the shadows
   Of agony, hatred and fear?

Men may tread down the poor and lowly,
   May crush them in anger and hate,
But surely the mills of God’s justice
   Will grind out the grist of their fate.

Oh, people sin-laden and guilty,
   So lusty and proud in your prime,
The sharp sickles of God’s retribution
   Will gather your harvest of crime.

Weep not, oh my well-sheltered sisters,
   Weep not for the Negro alone,
But weep for your sons who must gather
   The crops which their fathers have sown.

Go read on the tombstones of nations
   Of chieftains who masterful trod,
The sentence which time has engraven,
   That they had forgotten their God.

’Tis the judgment of God that men reap
   The tares which in madness they sow,
Sorrow follows the footsteps of crime,
   And Sin is the consort of Woe.

Online text © 1998-2011 Poetry X. All rights reserved.
From Poems | The Black Heritage Library Collection, 1895

BEAT! BEAT! DRUMS!

By Walt Whitman

1

BEAT! beat! drums!—Blow! bugles! blow!   
Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force,   
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation;   
Into the school where the scholar is studying;   
Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride;  
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, plowing his field or gathering his grain;   
So fierce you whirr and pound, you drums—so shrill you bugles blow.   
 
2

Beat! beat! drums!—Blow! bugles! blow!   
Over the traffic of cities—over the rumble of wheels in the streets:   
Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? No sleepers must sleep in those beds;
No bargainers’ bargains by day—no brokers or speculators—Would they continue?   
Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing?   
Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge?   
Then rattle quicker, heavier drums—you bugles wilder blow.   
 
3

Beat! beat! drums!—Blow! bugles! blow!     
Make no parley—stop for no expostulation;   
Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer;   
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man;   
Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties;   
Make even the trestles to shake the dead, where they lie awaiting the hearses,     
So strong you thump, O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.    

From Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia: David McKay, [c1900]; Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/142/

Poem: Ronaldo V. Wilson

"This is a song for the genius child." - Langston Hughes

Hughes was incontestably a genius, as is Ronaldo V. Wilson. (But his soul already runs wild, as did Hughes's.) Ronaldo's first book, The Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008) is a novel-as-poem, or poem-as-novel. And also uncategorizable. It erects chapters-as-mirrors onto a life that is akin to but isn't Ronaldo's. Unless you look closely. But you won't see what you think you're seeing. Or not seeing. And you cannot put it down. The book won the 2007 Cave Canem Prize, which proves that its judges are visionary and a lot more progressive than many people stomping around the literary world claiming to be on the newest tip, but who probably wouldn't have given a book this fresh the time of day, even if they thought they had the moves. Ronaldo's second book, Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoems, 2009), is equally remarkable, worthy of the highest praise, demanding repeated readings. You think you grasp it but you really don't. He's like that.

I carried around one of his manuscripts, dipping into and out of it in amazement, for several years. Whenever I would read it it was as if I were reading something revelatory and unexpected. I always say that there are some poets it's better to see in person before you read their work than after, and some it's better to see after you've read their work, but Ronaldo is an artist and thinker who's worth seeing at any time. He is the only poet and critic I've ever known who can incorporate push-ups, phone conversations, Tagalog, and a host of other things as part of his reading/performance, and pull it off. Flawlessly. His emails are even poems, whether he's reading them aloud or you're reading them on your screen--and some appear in Poems. When I first met him, at NYU, he was doing pull-ups without breaking a sweat. The arms are important. But then what should anyone expect of a Grand Slam champion?  Paris, watch out! Below is a poem from his second book, treading as it does between beauty and menace, splendor and almost unspeakable horror, all of it packed tightly into every fiber of the Black Object's body, breaths, words, silences. Would you remember "red"?

THE BLACK OBJECT's CATALYST

Your face gets to a lake, wind chimes, and pear, sliced near a window. This fruit, laid in a spiral and locked to Jarlsberg cheese, staircased in a row with crackers, is yours. In celebration of your face, you think -- if you were born to vitiligo lips, and naps, instead of clear skin and curl, what $65,000 per square acre land would you ever get to see? On the drive to this spot, there were llamas in a field, African long-horned steer, goats that look like they've been amputated in half. Pine trees wave in the wind and reflect on the glass table on a deck that extends over the water. On the railing is an abalone's husk. Its meat is gutted, mother of pearl left to catch ash. What if your face were stripped away from this house? Would you remember red: the hummingbird's throat?

Ronaldo V. Wilson, from Poems of the Black Object, Futurepoems, 2009. Copyright © Ronaldo V. Wilson. All rights reserved.

Poem (Novel Excerpt): Anne Carson

One of the things about original artists is that it sometimes takes a while for their work to be assimilated by the wider culture, if that ever occurs. Sometimes it does, at least to some extent, at other times it doesn't, and in their time, the critics will often ride their same hobbyhorses and commonplaces, usually championing what they know and venturing occasionally a bit out to inspect, with some people being completely passed over except by their peers, or some cases, by peers from generations to come.  An artist whose work suggested to me from the very first that she was an original presence is Anne Carson (1950-). I read her extraordinary collection Glass, Irony and God (New Directions, 1995) immediately when it came out--with its introduction, as if it needed one, by the utterly original and still passed-over Guy Davenport--with stupefaction. Here was a writer whose poetry looked like, well, no one else's I'd seen before, at least no one else really of her time, even as it was in conversation with many works of the past and present. (Just as startling was her 1997 essay in The Threepenny Review, "Economy, Its Fragrance." I remember talking about that piece for weeks on end with writers I knew; its aroma lingers still.)  Carson also published another strikingly original book that year, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (Knopf, 1995), and, I learned in those days before the internet as we know it, an idiosyncratic scholarly study, Eros, the Bittersweet, with Princeton University Press in 1988 that pointed, in its strangeness, to what would appear 7 years later.

Carson has gone on to become one of the best known poets in the English language. She is widely acclaimed, has won many major awards (though not, unfortunately, the Pulitzer Prize), and now teaches at New York University after having spent many years at McGill University and later the University of Michigan teaching the classics, the area of her training and the subject of many of her critical texts and foundation of many of her creative works. Earlier this year I blogged about her most recent gift to the literary world, yet another utter originality, her accordion-printed elegy-in-a-box, Nox (New Directions, 2011), which is, I felt and feel, less a poem than a poetic performance and artifact. I shall leave it to others to interpret that. Instead, I am posting a snippet from Carson's novel-and-myth in poetry, one of her finest works, the Autobiography of Red (Knopf, 1998), which allegedly retells, as only Carson can, the Greek lyric poet Stesichoros's (632/629 BCE-556/553 BCE) story of Geryon, a queer little red monster. Of course "retells" is a really reductive way of describing what Carson does, which is to animate a distant world with elements drawn from our own, but with such metaphorical and imagistic power that it is a completely new world we both recognize and view in awe altogether.  One of Carson's key skills in all her work is her capacity to, as the Russian formalists described it, enstrange, to make the familiar so strange that it feels new, and the strange and new oddly familiar that we imagine we can, at some level, grasp it.

Here is a one little snippet from Autobiography of Red describing a moment nearly every mother faces but in such a way that it feels as if it were conjured from a mind running on a different track. Enjoy!

V. SCREENDOOR

His mother stood at the ironing board lighting and cigarette and regarding Geryon.
  -----

Outside the dark pink air
was already hot and alive with cries. Time to go to school, she said for the third time.
Her cool voice floated
over a pile of fresh tea towels and across the shadowy kitchen to where Geryon stood
at the screen door.
He would remember when he was past forty the dusty almost medieval smell
of the screen itself as it
pressed its grid onto his face.  She was behind him now. This would be hard
for you if you were weak
but you're not weak, she said and neatened his little red wings and pushed him
out the door.

Anne Carson, from Autobiography of Red, Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Copyright © by Anne Carson, 1998. All rights reserved

Poem: Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye (1952-) is a poet whose work I came to only as an adult, through my experiences teaching 7th and 8th graders. I had never heard of Nye, a native of St. Louis and the daughter of a Palestinian father and white American mother, but at some point during my combined poetry class, working with fellow poets Mattie Michael and Caitlin O'Donnell, a classmate at NYU, I was flipping through an anthology of poetry--perhaps it wasn't for children though I want to say it was--and happened upon Nye's work.  It seemed as though after that moment I would see one of her poems everywhere, though more likely I just began to notice her poems, and read them.

Sometimes coming to poetry and poets happens this way; it does with me. Nye had released her collection Red Suitcase only a year before, so that might also have been why her name rode the air--or my mind's air--but she has since published a number of other volumes, including most recently You and Yours (Boa Editions, 2005), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award.  Nye has been a resident at various points of Ramallah, Jerusalem, San Antonio, and many other places, and has received a wide array of awards.  She is now a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, lives in San Antonio, and has traveled around the globe promoting the arts and cultural exchange. The poem below suggests multiple readings, in the various senses of that term. As you read it, slowly, let its language and images ride on your mind's air.

THE MAN WHOSE VOICE HAS BEEN TAKEN FROM HIS THROAT

remains all supple hands and gesture

skin of language
fusing its finest seam

in fluent light
with a raised finger

dance of lips
each sentence complete

he speaks to the shadow
of leaves

strung tissue paper
snipped into delicate flags

on which side of the conversation
did anyone begin?

wearing two skins
the brilliant question mark of Mexico
stands on its head
like an answer

From Red Suitcase. Copyright © 1994 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Published by BOA Editions, Ltd. All rights reserved.

Poem: Akilah Oliver

Tonight I participated in a celebration of the life and work of the poet Akilah Oliver (1961-2011, photo at left by Theresa Hurst), a poet, lyricist, teacher, mentor, activist, mother, friend, and inspiration to many. (She was also a native St. Louisan who grew up in Los Angeles.) It was an incredibly moving event, and brought me closer to Akilah, I think, than I had ever experienced during the period that I knew her and her work, which was mostly from afar. One of the highlights of the evening was hearing so many of her former students from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University, Summer Writing Program, talking about how important she was to them, how her charge to "keep writing" really served as a creative spur, and the work they read testified to this.  I read a snippet from an earlier version of Akilah's book The Putterer's Notebook: an Anti-Memoir, that I found online, on Trickhouse's site; it turns out that Akilah, a meticulous editor, had pared it away, but I loved the memoiristic anti-memoir feel of it, and, as reading it aloud made clear, it is as much poetry as it is prose.

From an earlier version of The Putterer's Notebook: an Anti-Memoir:

you were not concluding a desire, backed

  against the wall, your upper thigh

  exposed through the riddling stockings   

as  an event can simultaneously be happening

  and not be occurring, a very first morning

a passing across the self, & my old friend

  the radio, red velvet hot pants,

  a fashion show graduation from the Sears

  Charm School for girls, mix and match 

I wanted a self so badly, I turned the dial

  to see what was on the other side,

  joan armatrading, we tried chance translations

  of ‘jah’ based loosely on context clues, that girl

  my sister, I saw her last month in l.a. at the wedding,

  I thought she’d be a surfer or the wife of an O.G.,

  surprise all the time, Christian lady, you look so much

  younger now, as if all the blighted

  apartments have been repaired 

 what a pretty world out there

I am a new occupant, but this particular morning,

  for example, found me wandering in terrorist shadows 

The death dreams are often sexualized, the first,

  a morphing pool of consecrated limbs floundering

  and touching in what appeared a murky body pool

to get to, one had to pass through a portal,

  not a door exactly, more like a veil, it was duplicitous

  its appearance, both sensuous and repelling, quicksand like,

  pleasure in the going down, the limbs indistinguishable

  from the souls,  a man who was neither good nor evil

  seemed to be the sentry

I kept telling him not to go, I couldn’t stop him

  from going, I tried to trick him with an earth-based

  attachment to me to keep him from going, I had to witness

  him go down there with the altered bodies,

  there to that feast

 

a recovery that exposes itself as an expectation

            as if to speak requires dream

            single lines staged as tracks

            we are not stating a truth

            a truth would require more negotiation

              than water rights

            an expectation relegates mystery to a rack

            it may be true that he was saying “dismissal”

            it may be true we expected more, then

             gradually less

            as if a dream expires

Poem: Adélia Prado

Yesterday's post was my 1,300th! Not bad after my rather obvious but unavoidable blogging decline last of the last few years.

Let me offer my deepest thanks to everyone who made my experience--meeting with young scholars, chatting with a class, and a reading in the early afternoon--at Williams College yesterday so wonderful: thank you, faculty, students and staff!

I also realized while in the car back to the Albany airport that while I love looking at mountains, I really don't think I'd want to live on or in the midst of them, at least not during wintertime in the Northern Hemisphere. But the Berkshires wowed me nevertheless.

Now, to today's poem, which is by a Brazilian poet I've mentioned once on here (I searched, having thought I'd highlighted her before): Adélia Prado (1935-), a native of Divinópolis, Brazil, and a contender, year after year, for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Prado began publishing fairly late, her first book titled Bagagem (Baggage), appearing at the age of 1976. She has since published poetry, fiction, drama, and critical work, including O coração disparado (1978, winner of the Prêmio Jabuti), Soltem o cachorro (1979), Terra de Santa Cruz (1981), Poesia reunida (1991).

In 1990, Ellen Watson translated a number of Prado's poems, which Wesleyan University Press published in the volume The Alphabet in the Park:  Selected Poems. I recall checking this this book out of the library many years ago, but must admit I recall little of it except the small canvas and intimate address of Prado's poems, the way they felt like stepping through a doorway into the living room of her heart.

I found the following poem, translated by David Coles, on Antonio Miranda's website, which describes Prado as " a Catholic intimist poet who writes about the instantaneous apprehension of reality and the transformation of this reality through a critical, and yet sensual Christian experience of the world." Check out his site, and Watson's book, for more of her poems.

FATALE

The young boys' beauty pains me,
sharp-tasting like new lemons.
I seem like a decaying actress,
but armed with this knowledge, what I really am
is a woman with a powerful radar.
So when they look through me
as if to say: just stick to your own branch of the tree,
I think: beautiful, but coltish. They're no use to me.
I will wait until they acquire indecision. And I do wait.
Just when they're convinced otherwise
I have them all in my pocket.

From Poesias reunida, by Adélia Prado, Copyright © 1991.  Translation by David Coles.

Poem: Sadakichi Hartmann

Since I've between splitting my tweeting @harriet_poetry, I thought it might be a good option to introduce a different form every day (evening, really) to provide a prompt for folks. Among the forms or genres I've suggested so far are senryus, sestinas, ekphrastic poems (I provided a very simple painting I came across on Morse St. in Chicago) and today's, the mesostic. People have written and blogged or sent me original poems, which is both amazing and heartening--and they've been strong pieces to have been written so fast. The first night, though, I suggested a "nocturne," since the prompting came fairly late in the evening, and people replied with opening lines. That got me thinking about poets who write nocturnes, and about a US poet who's little remembered today but was an early pioneer in a number of ways, no least among them as one of the first major Asian American poets: Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944, photo Modern American Poetry Site). A native of Japan with mixed Japanese-German descent, Hartmann grew up in Germany, and moved to the US in the 1890s.  A critic, actor, friend and participant in the Modernist movement, heavily influenced by symbolism, he was also one of the first pioneers of the English-language haiku.  Below is his "Nocturne," from his original 160-issue typed 1904 manuscript, which I copied from Google Books using their "Clip" function. It's not amazing that the text is online (Google!), but it is amazing that with their tool I could save it, send, embed it, or, as you see, repost it here.

From Drifting Flowers on the Sea, by Sadakichi Hartmann, manuscript edition, 1904. Copyright © Sadakichi Hartmann.

Poem: Juan Felipe Herrera

Okay, now how many of you have heard of or read the work of this incredibly talented poet, Juan Felipe Herrera? Show of hands. Of course I can't see them, and I know some are waving. But I do wonder, because despite how outstanding and prolific a poet he is, I rarely see his name mentioned in the same breath as many others of his generation. Born in 1948 in California, Herrera has published about 25 books, which include works for children, a novel in verse, and bilingual texts. One of the things I particularly like about his work is its versatility, of subject matter, voice, and form. While he draws frequently from his life, he will also set aloft a conceit like the one below, flavored by and steeped in his experiences yet resonant far beyond his own biography.

Like May Swenson, he can do a lot of different things well, and has been known to move words in very interesting ways around the page.  Herrera finally received some major props in 2008 when he won the National Book Critics Circle Award, becoming the first Latino poet to receive it. Herrera attended UCLA, Stanford, and Iowa, and has taught at California State University, Fresno and University of California, Riverside, where he directs the Art and Barbara Culver Center for the Arts. He has also taught poetry in California prisons, and works with local schools and community colleges in and around Riverside.

EL ÁNGEL DE LA GUARDA


(The Guardian Angel)


I should have visited more often.
I should have taken the sour pudding they offered.
I should have danced that lousy beggar shuffle.
I should have painted their rooms in a brighter color.
I should have put a window in there, for the daughters.
I should have provided a decent mountain for a view.
I should have nudged them a little closer to the sky.
I should have guessed they would never come out to wave.
I should have cleaned up that mole, the abyss, in the back.
I should have touched them, that's it, it comes to me now.
I should have touched them.

(From Woodland Pattern Bookstore's site) From Lotería Cards and Fortune Poems: A Book of Lives, by Juan Felipe Herrera, Linocuts by Artemil Rodrígues Copyright © City Lights, 1999. All rights reserved.

Remembering MLK Jr. + Poem: June Jordan

This is the 43rd anniversary of the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), one of the most tragic events in a year and era of horrors. His murder was a terrible blow to the African-American Civil Rights movement and to the push for equality for all Americans, of all races and ethnicities, genders, sexualities, religions, classes, but it also challenged those whom he had led, with whom he had walked, for whom he had fought, to keep going, and our society was irrevocably changed for the better because of him.  Rev. Dr. King was shot in cold blood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where he had gone earlier in the spring of 1968 to support striking black sanitation workers, who were pushing for equal pay and conditions. I AM A MAN. In his final months, Dr. King stood and marched with the working people, with his brothers, who were only asking for fairness, decency, equal treatment. That struggle, like so many others, continues as I type this entry. It was during his return visit in April 1968, the day after he had spoken to the Mason Temple, the world headquarters of the Church of God in Christ, that he was killed. But I'm not saying anything most readers here do not already know.

The great poet June Jordan (1936-2002), whom I first encountered in my college years, awed and later got to meet and hear read several times, including towards the very end of her life when she also participated in a remarkable conversation at NYU with Toni Morrison, wrote the following poem in tribute and memory to Dr. King.  I am not alone in considering him to be one of the greatest figures ever to have emerged from this society, and one of the most extraordinary people in history, for his vision, his bravery, and his courage, and I think that June Jordan captures this in the most boiled-down form, almost a distillate of thought and feeling, that pours and then rills, like tears, down the page. June Jordan, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, was a native of New York and attended Barnard and the University of Chicago. She published her first book in 1968, and went on to publish nearly 30 more books. She taught at a number of colleges and universities, and when I first encountered her work, she was a professor at SUNY Stony Brook, but she went on to teach at the University of California-Berkeley. She was beloved as a teacher, but also deeply admired for her political outspokenness and her bravery in coming out. I can recall more than a few poems of hers that did not stint in telling it like it was, whether the issue was the dreadful governments of the time, or the contours of her private life.

In 1991 she founded the highly acclaimed Poetry for the People program, which, as its website says, "continues to pursue Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of a beloved community for all."  One visionary, writing in tribute to another.

POEM
In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.

I

honey people murder mercy U.S.A.
the milkland turn to monsters teach
to kill to violate pull down destroy
the weakly freedom growing fruit
from being born

America

tomorrow yesterday rip rape
exacerbate despoil disfigure
crazy running threat the
deadly thrall
appall belief dispel
the wildlife burn the breast
the onward tongue
the outward hand
deform the normal rainy
riot sunshine shelter wreck
of darkness derogate
delimit blank
explode deprive
assassinate and batten up
like bullets fatten up
the raving greed
reactivate a springtime
terrorizing

death by men by more
than you or I can

STOP


II

They sleep who know a regulated place
or pulse or tide or changing sky
according to some universal
stage direction obvious
like shorewashed shells

we share an afternoon of mourning
in between no next predictable
except for wild reversal hearse rehearsal
bleach the blacklong lunging
ritual of fright insanity and more
deplorable abortion
more and
more

June Jordan, “In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.” from Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Copyright © 2005 by The June M. Jordan Literary Trust. Reprinted with the permission of The June M. Jordan Literary Trust, www.junejordan.com.

Source: The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997)

Tribute to Akilah Oliver, April 8, 2011

Last month, the poet, teacher, performer, activist, mother, sister, and friend to so many, Akilah Oliver (1961-2011), admired, respected and beloved by many in the poetry community, passed away suddenly. (I wrote up a little tribute, but have not yet posted it, so that's coming.) For many this has been great loss of an important and energizing creative spirit who died far too young. This Friday, April 8, 2011, in Chicago, the Midwest Naropa Writers and Red Rover Series are co-presenting A Toast in Your House: a memorial reading to celebrate the life & work of Akilah Oliver.

Here's the info. If you can come and celebrate her life and work, want to hear her poetry, and support the engagement with art and life that she represented, please do.

***

A Tribute to Akilah Oliver

FRIDAY, APRIL 8th
8-10pm

A Toast in Your House:
a memorial reading to celebrate
the life & work of Akilah Oliver

Featuring:
Adrienne Dodt
Krista Franklin
Jenny Henry
Jennifer Karmin + dancer J’Sun Howard
John Keene
Kevin Kilroy
Marie Larson
Todd McCarty
Marissa Perel

Hosted by Rebecca George
& Luis Humberto Valadez

at Outer Space Studio
1474 N. Milwaukee Ave
Chicago, IL

logistics --
near CTA Damen blue line
third floor walk up
not wheelchair accessible

$4 suggested donation
All funds will be donated to assist the Oliver family with the costs
associated with Akliah’s departure and to keep her work alive!

Co-presented by the Midwest Naropa Writers & Red Rover Series
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/redroverseries

AKILAH OLIVER was a poet, a dedicated teacher, and an inspiration to the lives she touched. Her books include An Arriving Guard of Angels, Thusly Coming to Greet (Farfalla, McMillan & Parrish, 2004), The Putterer’s Notebook (Belladonna, 2006), a(A)ugust (Yo-Yo Labs, 2007), and A Toast In The House of Friends (Coffee House, 2009).  She taught poetry in New York at The New School, Pratt Institute and The Poetry Project. She also taught at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, http://www.akilaholiver.com.

What Happened to the New Translation of Dr. Zhivago?

This is was going to be a short post, because of limited time, but I wanted to register something literary and poetry-related I noticed during break that I said I'd blog about.  I had been jonesing for the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of Russian poet Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)'s extraordinary and lone novel, Dr. Zhivago (1956), for which, along with his poetry, he was awarded the 1959 Nobel Prize in Literature, which the Soviet authorities pressured him to decline. The novel itself was not published in Russia until 1988, in the pages of Novy Mir, a major Soviet literary journal, but it did appear internationally in 1957 because Pasternak had given a copy to Italian publishing magnate Giangiacomo Feltrinelli to smuggle out of Russia, which he did, and then promptly had the novel published in Italian, as Il Dottor Zhivago.

Since I'm trying to be concise, I will not delve into all the particulars of the novel, which covers the period from before World War I through the Russian Revolution and the subsequent Civil War there. The Russian authorities despised it; they thought it critical of Stalin, the Soviet State and its ideology, and Marxism. They deemed it counterrevolutionary, too formally experimental, abstract, etc. It is not a conventional novel except in girth. It has a confusing plot, cares little about fluid transitions between scenes, features jarring approaches to characterization, and so forth. At the end of it Pasternak appends poems "by Yuri Zhivago," that offers a fuller demonstration the eponymous protagonist's poetic gifts, but which mainly underline Pasternak's greatness as a poet. A novelist and poet I admire told me many years ago over coffee that he found Dr. Zhivago "tedious," and then, finally confessed that he hated it.  I was surprised, but with a bit of distance, I can understand why he did and why Dr. Zhivago isn't to everyone's taste. (David Lean's 1965 movie, starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie was a popular success and a critical bomb, and only partially captures the novel's depth and grandeur.)

Yet, Dr. Zhivago repeatedly presents, at least from the impression I formed from the initial, 1958 English translation of the book, a powerful demonstration of Pasternak's poetic skill; again and again, his descriptions of the landscape, of people, of politics, all of it, come alive through metaphor, simile, synecdoche, metonymy, and other figurative means to the extent that the world of the novel, its background and foreground, almost seem to bristle with life. I should note that the name of the protagonist Yuri Zhivago, points to this, as zhiv- in Russian is the root meaning "life," and Pasternak earlier had published a book of poems entitled My Sister, Life (1921), which had a tectonic effect on Russian poetry. After Stalin began his clampdown, Pasternak turned to prose, and published two books that are among my favorites for their lyrical strangeness and intensity, the short memoir Safe Conduct, and the stories, including the haunting "Aerial Ways" (I have probably read this story 10 times), which together constituted the collection A Childhood in Luvers.  Around the time of the shorter prose works he began writing portions of the long novel, and there are continuities of style. Again, the striking use of metaphors and personification are here, as are the idiosyncratic explorations of time and history, and so much else that flowers in the novel. And in the memoir-with-stories edition that New Directions published many years ago, the poet Babette Deutsch (1895-1982) translates with a flourish many (all?) of his poems included in that collection. Pasternak himself translated works from English and other languages, and Russians loved his translations of William Shakespeare's plays, which critics appraised as being too much Pasternak and too little Shakespeare.

I've already gone on too long. Okay, So let me get to it: Pevear and Volokhonsky are broadly acknowledged as among the most important and best translators from the Russian. Their version of Mikhail Bulgakov's (1891-1940) The Master and Margarita (1967) is so entrancing that I did not want to put it down.  They also famously rendered as whole as is humanly possible Leo Tolstoy's (1828-1910) War and Peace (1869), including leaving in the rivers of French (which was the social language of the Russian aristocracy of the novel's epoch) that fill the book, and they restored Tolstoy's peculiar uses of repetition, which the previous best-known English translation had shorn away. So it was with real eagerness that I grabbed the copy of Dr. Zhivago I saw on sale at one of the moribund Borders (RIP) here in Chicago; I was sure, given their proved skill, and the glowing reviews I'd read, that it would improve the earlier version by many bounds.

But, here's the thing: Pasternak is a poet. And as I began to read the new translation, I kept wondering, where are those poetic passages from the earlier, allegedly "flawed" 1958 version, by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, that I even underlined and noted years before? I don't read Russian, unfortunately for me, but I could see that a laxity, vaguenesses had crept in; the crystalline concision of Pasternak's imagery appeared off compared to the earlier book. Again and again I found myself searching the text for those moments from Hayward's and Harari's version and finally realized that, for all their skill, Pevear and Volokhonsky appear to have blown this one a bit.

Though P&V are more literal, the prose has become, well, "tedious" to me, though I haven't given it up yet, since I know the story and still do enjoy it. If you don't believe me, I've done you the favor of having already (not tonight, a week ago) typed up the earlier and the P&V versions of some of the passages that caught my eye the first go-round. Which, I ask you, is more poetic? Is more compelling? Even as fiction? Now, I also wonder, were the critics who praised this new version even aware of this? If not, why not? How closely did they read the novel, and did they recall any of the earlier prose, which, as you'll see below, almost brands itself into your memory. I'll stop there because this has gone on far longer than I intended, but what do you think?

***

Dr. Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), originally published in Italian translation from the Russian, in 1957.

English translation 1958, translated from Russian by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, "The Poems of Yuri Zhivago" by Bernard Guilbert Guerney, Wm. Collins Sons & Co., Ltd., London, with authorized revisions to the English, Pantheon Books Inc., New York, NY.

English translation 2010, translated from Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, with an introduction by Richard Pevear, Pantheon Books Inc., New York, NY

Hayward & Harari (HH): Turning over and over in the sky, length after length of whiteness unwound over the earth and shrouded it. p. 4

Pevear & Volokhonsky (PV): From the sky endless skeins of white cloth, turn after turn, fell on the earth, covering it in a winding sheet. p. 4

HH: Crows settled on the heavy branches of firs, scattering the hoarfrost; their cawing echoed and re-echoed like crackling wood. p. 5

PV: Crows landed on the hanging fir branches, shaking down hoarfrost. The cawing carried, loud as the cracking of a tree limb.

HH: The half-reaped fields under the glaring sun looked like the half-shorn heads of convicts. p. 6

PV: The sun scorched the partly reaped strips like the half-shaven napes of prisoners. p. 5

HH: Neat sheaves rose above the stubble in the distance; if you stared at them long enough they seemed to move, walking along on the horizon like land surveyors taking notes. p. 6

PV: Its ears drooping, the wheat drew itself up straight in the total stillness or stood in shocks far off the road, where, if you stared long enough, it acquired the look of moving figures, as if land surveyors were walking along the edge of the horizon and taking notes. p. 5

HH: Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviëv or Kant or Marx. p. 9

PV: Every herd is a refuge for giftlessness, whether it's a faith in Soloviev, or Kant, or Marx. p. 8

HH: It was hard to keep one's eyes on the shimmering river, which, like a sheet of corrugated iron, reflected the glare of the sun. Suddenly its surface parted in waves. p. 10

PV: It was painful to look at the river. It gleamed in the sun, curving in and out like a sheet of iron. Suddenly it wrinkled up. p. 10

HH: Orioles kept making their clear three-note calls, stopping each time just long enough to let the countryside suck in the moist fluting sounds down to the last vibration. p. 10

PV: At every moment you could hear the pure, three-note whistling of orioles, with intervals of waiting, so that the moist, drawn-out, flutelike sound could fully saturate the surroundings. p. 10

HH: A heavy fragrance, motionless, as though having lost its way in the air, was fixed by the heat above the flower beds. p. 11

PV: The stagnant scent of flowers wandering in the air was nailed down motionless to the flowerbeds to the heat. p. 10

HH: Russia, with its fields, steppes, villages, and towns, bleached lime-white by the sun, flew past them wrapped in hot clouds of dust. p. 12

PV: Past them in clouds of hot dust, bleached as with lime by the sun, flew Russia, fields and steppes, towns and villages. p. 11

HH: The rising sun had cast the long dewy shadows of trees in loops over the park grounds. The shadow as not black but dark gray like wet felt. The heady fragrance of the morning seemed to come from this damp shadow on the ground, with strips of light in it like girl's fingers. p. 17

PV: The sun was rising, and the ground in the park was covered with the long, dewy, openwork shade of trees. The shade was not black, but of a dark gray color, like wet felt. The stupefying fragrance of morning seemed to come precisely from the damp shade on the ground, with its elongated light spots like a young girl's fingers. p. 15

HH: ...and the boat was dragged in to shore as if by a boathook. There the stems were shorter and more tangled; the white flowers, with their glowing centers looking like bloodspecked egg yolks, sank and emerged dripping with water. p. 19

PV: The boat was drawn to the bank as if by a hook. The stems beecame entangled and shortened: the white flowers with centers bright as egg yolk and blood sank underwater, then emerged with water streaming from them. pp. 16-17.

HH: Purple shadows reached into the room from the garden. The trees, laden with hoarfrost, their branches like smoky streaks of candle wax, looked as if they wished to rest their burden on the floor of the study. p. 39

PV: Violet shadows reached from the garden into the study. Trees peered into the room, looking as if they wanted to strew the floor with their branches covered with heavy hoarfrost, which resembled the lilac streams of congealed stearine. p. 35

HH: In winter the street frowned with a forbidding surliness. p. 44

PV: In winter the place frowned with gloomy haughtiness. p. 39

HH: The weather was unseasonable. Plop-plop-plop went the water drops on the metal of the drainpipes and the cornices, roof tapping messages to roof as if it were spring. It was thawing. p. 44

PV: The weather was trying to get better. "Drip, drip, drip" the drops drummed on the iron gutters and cornice. Roof tapped out to roof, as in springtime. It was a thaw. p. 39

Poem: May Swenson

Baseball season has officially begun, and I haven't blogged about it at all, not just because I've been busy, but because, to a degree surprising to me, I find myself less interested than in the past. I've been feeling this way with all professional sports, but whereas I could point to specific reasons (the strikes, the lockouts, the greed of the owners and many players, the misuse of public dollars to underwrite stadiums for millionaires and billionaires with little beyond ephemeral emotional and psychological benefits for the majority of people) for my waning interest in the NBA, NFL, the NHL (I still haven't gotten over their owner-labor crisis years ago), with baseball it feels as though it's struck suddenly. Perhaps it's maturity or just growing old.

Perhaps it's a deeper sense that rather than taking comfort in this pastime as the country and world fall apart, I find it more of a distraction than anything. Perhaps it was the refusal of superstar Albert Pujols, to accept a contract of somewhere around $200 million for 8 years, allegedly with an ownership stake in the team once he required.  This sort of contract would have been par for the course in the 1990s or even the money-crazy early 2000s, but since the economic crash? Not that someone already as rich as Pujols (who received a $100 million contract in 2004) or many of his peers would notice.

But--a little flame still catches for baseball. I have, in fact, glanced at the box scores of the Cardinals, Yankees, Cubs, and a few other teams. I have the free version of MLB Baseball on my phone. And I hope that the Cardinals, rather than the Cubs, can come back with a deal--say, one leg of the Saint Louis Arch?--to persuade their superstar to sign up again before a rival team snatches him. That is, if the rival team has the money to lavish on him as well.

Here then is a baseball poem, titled "Analysis of Baseball," by May Swenson (1913-1989, photo above by Laverne Harrell Clark © Arizona State University). Swenson was one the prolific 20th century American poets and a true original. An editor at New Directions until 1966, she later went on to serve as a writer in residence at a number of universities (this was the era before writers entered or even looked to the academy as a chief place of employment), conducted workshops at many different venues, and published 17 books of her own poetry and translations of other poets, as well as works for children, plays, and critical essays. Among her awards was the Bollingen Prize from Yale University Press. When I was younger she was very widely known and read, though I don't know if she's on minds and tongues as much these days, though she ought to be. Here then is her baseball poem, and yours.

ANALYSIS OF BASEBALL

It’s about the ball, the bat, and the mitt. Ball hits bat, or it hits mitt. Bat doesn’t hit ball, bat meets it. Ball bounces off bat, flies air, or thuds ground (dud) or it fits mitt. Bat waits for ball to mate. Ball hates to take bat’s bait. Ball flirts, bat’s late, don’t keep the date. Ball goes in (thwack) to mitt, and goes out (thwack) back to mitt.

Ball fits mitt, but not all the time. Sometimes ball gets hit (pow) when bat meets it, and sails to a place where mitt has to quit in disgrace. That’s about the bases loaded, about 40,000 fans exploded. It’s about the ball, the bat, the mitt, the bases and the fans. It’s done on a diamond, and for fun. It’s about home, and it’s about run.

May Swenson, “Analysis of Baseball” from New and Selected Things Taking Place (Boston: Atlantic/Little Brown, 1978). Copyright © 1978 by May Swenson. All rights reserved.

Manning Marable (1950-2011)

It saddened me tremendously to learn of Manning Marable's (1950-2011, Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) passing this past weekend from pneumonia after many years of battling sarcoidosis.  Marable had not long ago completed his magnum opus, his huge, deeply researched and richly revelatory biography (including, it has been reported, an outing) of Malcolm X (1925-1965), one of African-America's iconic figures.  The 600-page biography is slated to appear on store shelves tomorrow. I am planning to dive into the Malcolm X biography, entitled Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, as soon as I can, so I'll write more about that later, but I did want to point out that Marable was not just a major scholar--he taught history most recently at Columbia University, where he founded and directed the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, and where I met him in person at a conference in the late 1990s--but a lifelong Left activist and Black culture worker, who figured out a way to make this multi-pronged approach to life, scholarship, and political engagement work. Among his many achievements, in addition to teaching at the Cornell University, Fisk University, Colgate University, University of Colorado-Boulder and Ohio State University, he founded the journal Souls; served as chair of the Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS); served on the Advisory Board of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, the Board of Directors for the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network (HSAN); was active in the 1970s in the New Democratic Movement; and wrote, co-wrote, edited, or co-edited over 20 books, including the one that almost immediately made him famous, 1983's How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (South End Press, 1983).

I can attest to the fact that this is a book people who probably have picked up few books of history (outside of school) over the last 30 years actually read, and discussed; I can recall being a 20-something in Cambridge and Boston, and hanging out with politically savvy, cult-nat types, and Marable's arguments were as fluent on their tongues as Marx's or anyone else's. Marable, to the little extent I knew him, was the kind of person who could easily and would have joined us, and chatted and listened to us, schooled us, without ever being pedantic or talking down. Even publishing with Boston's progressive South End Press was a noteworthy step.  Though he didn't know me from the wallpaper at the Columbia conference, he was pleasant, generous, funny, and encouraging, the very model of what I imagined and still hope the best professors would be like. And, I should add, he was not, at least in my experience, homophobic either. With his wife, anthropologist Leith Mullings, and Sophie Spencer-Wood, he published the beautiful volume Freedom: A Photographic Portrait of the African American Struggle (Phaidon, 2002), which offers not only indelible imagery from the long Black American struggle for freedom, but also the editorial expertise of leading scholars. The work represented something I wish more of the best scholars, especially those of color, would aim for: producing works that might allow non-academics to enjoy the fruits of their hard work and brilliance.

One of the things I most admired about him was his willingness to speak out. We don't have a media system that gives voices like his much hearing, but that never stopped him, nor did careerism or fear or indifference or the many other things that do curb people, however necessary--people have to live--these limitations are.  His passing is a great loss for Dr. Mullings and his family, for the history and African-American Studies professions, for African American scholars and thinkers, for politically engaged people on the Left, for Columbia University and his colleagues and students, and for the United States.  My deepest condolences to his family, and please, go buy his biography of Malcolm X if you can afford it.

Poem: Joshua Marie Wilkinson

I am surprised I've never featured a poem by Joshua before, though I have mentioned him on this blog, I think, but he's a friend and local favorite, a wonderful poet and teacher and filmmaker and critic, who has lots of pots cooking wonderfully on the creative stove. Here is his bio from his blog:

Joshua Marie Wilkinson is a poet, teacher, editor, and filmmaker born and raised in Seattle. He is the author of five books, most recently Selenography, with Polaroids by Tim Rutili (Sidebrow Books 2010). His first film, a documentary about Califone co-directed by Solan Jensen, is called Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape (IndiePix Films 2011). He lives in Chicago. He's at joshuamarie |at| gmail |dot| com.

Actually he has many more books out--tiny gemstones of books--that you can find on his blog, which he made fun of in an interview with bomb, though blogs really old-hat now and established--and according to the New York Times allegedly being abandoned by the young'uns and some old'uns (Ron Silliman?). He also doesn't mention Rabbit Light Movies, his visual archive of poets reading their work and other fine things, or evening will come, the new online journal he edits. Or that he teaches at the fine university that I can walk to and have from time to time, Loyola University of Chicago.

Anyways, here's Joshua's poem, beginning "cuttings," from Selenography, and read it aloud and see if you can't hear his breaths as he reads, those "thes" hanging in the air:

cuttings
shoveled

up into a fortress
hiding behind where
the dead
woman bakes lemon
& mincemeat pies
we live inside the

seam of the wind the
breaker's froth the
swarm's
sleepy landing

a pond divided

by an upside-down moon more
animals learn to hollow
grow wary

& withhold their math from us

From Selenography, by Joshua Marie Wilkinson, with Polaroids by Tim Rutili.  Copyright © Joshua Marie Wilkinson and © Photography by Tim Rutili, Sidebrow Books, 2010. All rights reserved.

Poetry Month + Poem: Camille T. Dungy

It's (Inter)National Poetry Month, and for all of April I'll be wearing a new hat, as the poetweeter at @harriet_poetry! (See the feed at right.) If you're on Twitter, please do join in.  Today I've asked people to tweet their secret cities (cf. Alberto Ríos) and what poetry book they'd print for free on McNally Jackson's Espresso Book Machine and give away if they could, while also quoting snippets of poets from Gwendolyn Brooks to Bhanu Kapil to Earl of Rochester to Gil Scott-Heron.  Also, I posted a link to Japanese-German poet Yoko Tawada reading her poetry, and links to other poems up today!

I'll still be tweeting when possible at @jstheater, and I'll aim to blog a poem here daily, though perhaps without the commentary of previous years. It's my 6th year in the blogiverse, by the way (actually back in February, if you can believe it!).

Also, a few congratulations are in order:

1) to my former student Michael Lukas, whose first novel, The Oracle of Stamboul (Harper, 2011), has appeared to great acclaim this past February!

2) to my former student Christopher Shannon, one of the houdinis behind CellPoems, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize!

3) to my former student Miriam Rocek, who will soon see one of the stories she wrote while an undergraduate published online!

***

Now, for the month's first poem, one of my favorites from the 2009 (was it two years ago that this book appeared?) anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press), by its visionary editor Camille T. Dungy, whom I first met at Cave Canem back in 2001. She is the author of two highly regarded books, Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2011), and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006), and the forthcoming Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), winner of the Crab Orchard Review Open Book Prize, and, in addition to the Black Nature volume, has coedited with Matt O'Donnell and Jeffrey Thomson From the Fishhouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (Persea Books, 2009).  She's Associate Professor at San Francisco State University. And now her poem!

Language

Silence is one part of speech, the war cry
of wind down a mountain pass another.
A stranger's voice echoing through lonely
valleys, a lover's voice rising so close
it's your own tongue: these are keys to cipher,
the way the high hawk's key unlocks the throat
of the sky and the coyote's yip knocks
it shut, the way the aspens' bells conform
to the breeze while the rapid's drum defines
resistance. Sage speaks with one voice, pinyon
with another. Rock, wind her hand, water
her brush, spells and then scatters her demands.
Some notes tear and pebble our paths. Some notes
gather: the bank we map our lives around.

From Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille T. Dungy. Copyright © University of Georgia Press, 2009. All rights reserved.