January 19, 2012

Alice Major

POETRY AND SCALE

Flying changes the scale of things. From up here at 40,000 feet, the immense boreal forest of northern Canada looks like lichen on rock, as though the huge landscape below had been reduced to a boulder. An hour or two from now, when we begin the descent to my northern city, the quarter-sections of cultivated land will become a quilt of human textures, the grain of corduroy or twill. The cars sliding along the highway will become insects and then toys. Then the wheels will bump down, everything will become its “real” size once more, and I’ll be home.

Whether child or adult, we are fascinated by changes in scale. Look how long people will spend making model ships—the exquisite tangle of thread that’s exactly the right thickness to represent rope—or the bridges for a model railroad. Look at our fascination with bonsai, a whole landscape on a ceramic dish.

When I was a kid waiting for an Ontario spring to arrive, I used to loiter by melting piles of snow at the side of the road, fascinated by the way they created miniature systems of river and waterfall, channel and dam. Years afterwards, on my first trip to Jasper in the Rocky Mountains, I had the strangest sensation that my childhood landscape had been blown up to a gigantic scale. The wide valley where the Athabasca River makes its way through braided channels and white cascades tumble down mountainsides was the grown-up version of my old walk to school.

“Scale invariance,” this tendency for certain patterns to look the same as you get closer up or further away, is a common feature of the natural world: branches on a tree, cloud shapes, coastlines, the hierarchies of bronchiole and alveoli in the lungs. It is also a feature of intriguing mathematical objects known as “fractals,” which have become increasingly relevant to studying the world’s varying phenomena since mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot began working with them in the 1970s.

We are used to the idea of dimensions and the objects that go with them—one-dimensional lines, two-dimensional squares or triangles, three-dimensional cubes, pyramids, spheres. We learn to manipulate such objects mathematically: area equals length times width; radius and circumference can be used to establish the volume of a sphere. We use these formulae to think about our world and forget that very few objects are this simple.

Because we are creatures who evolved in the natural world, scaling relationships give us intense pleasure. They allow us to recognize a deep interrelatedness in the world’s disparate phenomena, where its parts are related both to larger structures and smaller ones. We are amazingly good at extracting fractal relationships from the incoming stream of wavelengths—sound and light—that pour in on us. In fact, recognizing fractal relationships is quite possibly central to how our visual and hearing systems distinguish random noise from meaningful data.

Aesthetically, we are particularly fond of fractals that fall in a certain range of self-similarity, more at the middle. Patterns that repeat too exactly are monotonous; others that don’t repeat at all are uninteresting for a different reason. A pure monotone is the auditory equivalent of a straight line—a uni-dimensional repetition of a single wavelength that could quickly drive us mad. “White” noise, its opposite, is made up of all possible wavelengths. It’s the hiss from speakers or an old television, a featureless blanket that we quickly tune out.

Instead, we like the sound of water, where we hear self-similar clusters of wavelengths repeated for shorter and longer periods, or the rustle of leaves in the wind. We like the patterning of mountain peaks with smaller and larger versions of the same shapes laid over each other. Or clouds.

“Glory be to God for dappled things,” wrote poet-philosopher Gerard Manley Hopkins. His line wouldn’t have had read nearly so well if he’d written, “Glory be to God for fractal objects,” but it comes to nearly the same thing.

* * *

And poetry? Any genre that ranges from haiku to epic can obviously exist on many scales. But fractal relationships are especially relevant in considering the fate of poets.

I was flying home from a conference of the League of Canadian Poets in Toronto. It was early summer, 2005, and I had a snug secret in my pocket. I had taken a phone call the previous day from the Mayor of Edmonton, confirming that I had been selected as the city’s first poet laureate.

My emotions were mixed. When the idea of establishing the post had first been mentioned casually, I felt cool to the idea. Of course it is important to pay attention to an art form that typically ekes out a lichen-like existence on inhospitable tundra. But the notion of banging one poet on the head with a civic club and saying “You’re it” went against the grain of what poetry is to me. It seemed to play into the whole cult of celebrity, making poetry a kind of reality-TV game show. Who will struggle through when everyone else is thrown off the island?

But then, when the local political will to establish a poet laureate coalesced into reality, my ideals deserted me. I was urged by friends to put my name forward as a candidate, and when I did so, I found that I wanted that honour.

I was to be interviewed by a jury for the post; they would quiz me on my ideas about the position. Please be prepared to read a poem aloud for the jurors, I was told. But because I was away for the conference on the necessary date, I had to phone in at a designated time.

The interview experience fell into a fractal dimension somewhere between epic and comic verse. In an obsessively interconnected culture, making a long-distance call may not seem like a big deal. But poets do not meet in posh conference centres with videoconferencing technology. I was staying in a phone-less dorm room in Victoria College’s Burwash Hall. The League meeting was in the stony-pillared vaults of Hart House. I was sternly refused permission to make a long-distance call from any of its offices. I did not own a cell phone.

I didn’t exactly want to make the call from a public phone booth, so I jumped in a cab, having borrowed the key to the League’s office—only to run into the snarl of Toronto’s downtown rush-hour. The cab lurched into a line of traffic and sat there clucking like a constipated hen. After ten sweating minutes, I flung a bill at the driver, leapt out and galloped back to Victoria College on foot. The offices with their forbidden phones were now all locked up for the business day. I pleaded for someone, anyone, to point me to a place where I could make a relatively private phone call. For god’s sake, I’m looking for a phone not a personal teleportation device.

They directed me back to the basement of Burwash Hall, where a phone was mounted on the wall in a bare, booming corridor just outside the dorm’s laundry room. The long white walls made an appropriate setting for a Hitchcock film—god only knows what might be tumbling behind the glassy occularity of the dryer doors. It felt as though I should be dialing 911 and hoarsely mouthing “help, help” into the mouthpiece instead of conducting a long-distance poetry reading. My voice came out in an un-laureate-like croak when I finally connected and introduced myself to the receptionist, who sounded dubious about accepting reverse charges from a frog in an echo chamber.

“Please hold,” she said. “The jury isn’t quite ready for you yet.”

I waited the long minutes on the phone, reading over the lines of a poem to get used to the sound of my voice in this theatre of the absurd and praying that no one would come out of the laundry room with a basket of sheets or a revolver while I was declaiming. The things I do for art.

But perhaps the weird acoustics stood me in good stead. For here I was, flying back home as the soon-to-be-official-civic-poet. The plane may have been at 30,000 feet, but I was probably 5,000 feet above that. Yet my emotions were still mixed. Yes, I’d wanted it. But part of me could also imagine the yuck-yuck reaction from the world’s bigger ponds: “Edmonton? Where the hell’s that? And they think they have poets there?”

In vain, I tell myself that my city’s population is about three times the size of Shakespeare’s London and we’ve got as much right to poets as anywhere. But the insecurity lingers, and the problem is a fractal one of scale.

* * *

Years earlier, I’d come to this city that would become home from the other direction—from a much smaller city even further west, where I’d worked as a newspaper reporter for a couple of years. In Williams Lake, British Columbia, I had covered city council, sitting in on evening meetings that staggered on until after midnight.

My very favourite story as a reporter concerned the beaver dam debacle. Williams Lake—the lake itself—was dammed at its exit by enterprising rodents. As spring began melting snow from the surrounding hills every year, the lake levels backed up and up, getting ominously close to the front doors of houses built along its shore. The province’s fish-and-wildlife protectors did not want to do anything to destroy the dam because eventually the cold meltwater would descend to the bottom of the lake and flush up the warmer, stagnant layers below. This stale water would then pour over the top of the dam as part of a natural cycle of renewal.

The hell with flushing out lakewater, says Mayor Tom—that dam is going to flush out people’s basements. So he goes out himself in a canoe one night with a couple of sticks of dynamite to blow a hole in a dam.

I felt that this kind of escapade must be typical of small-town politics. Surely the assemblies of larger communities must act with more sense of proportion, more sophisticated analysis of issues. I came to Edmonton thinking that a city of three-quarters of a million people would be governed by a city council somewhat more dignified in its proceedings. However, I found the human dimension doesn’t change much. There were huge uproars when a new mayor didn’t want to wear a large beaver hide that came with the official chain of office. For her, it was a statement about animal rights; for the rest of council it was a rejection of the city’s history as a great fur-trading post.

For me, it was more of a fashion statement—wearing that beaver hide is like having a great round furry pond draped over your shoulders from which your head sticks up like a lonely lotus bud. Only a mayor built like a buffalo can carry it off.

The whole silly debate occupied more column inches in the paper than the approval of millions of dollars in road repairs. You might think this sort of thing happens just because we’re out here on the lone prairie and the winters are long. But then you watch televised proceedings from the national capital in which the level of discussion is hardly higher. Human beings don’t change scale much, regardless of the size of the stage they walk on. The distribution of capacities and talents is much the same in any group of humans. Making the group larger doesn’t lead to a corresponding increase in the individual IQs clustered under the Bell curve. To this extent, human beings are not fractal.

However, assemble us into progressively larger groups and fractal patterns do tend to emerge. The qualities that make a good poet are a complex of linguistic ability, creativity and the desire to invest the time and effort necessary to succeed; these qualities are more or less uniformly scattered through the population. The qualities that make a famous poet are not so different, but they are compounded with something that can only be described as luck. The process of poetic fame is governed by fractal patterns.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his essay “The Black Swan: Roots of Unfairness in Arts and Literature,” points out that literary or academic fame is analogous to stock-market booms. There’s a “winner-take-all” effect—one book in 800 will account for half of sales in any given year, while the other 799 eke out a meager share of the pickings. We jump hopefully into the publishing cab and go nowhere much.

The phenomenon operates much like the Mississippi river system scooping up the water from smaller and larger tributaries in an immense drainage basin. It becomes impossible for a water droplet to cut its own channel to the sea. The pattern is not caused by malice or design or even by commercial greed. Taleb points out that the same pattern emerges with academic citation system, supposedly free from such commercial interests. If you are the lucky researcher whose paper first gets cited out of all the researchers who may be working on the same problem, you’ll go on getting cited by all the future researchers. And the bigger the drainage basin, (i.e., the larger the number of contributors like authors or researchers) the higher the concentration into one main channel will be.

An idealized mathematical process can be subdivided forever. However, the real world is not scale-independent in that way. In our world, most things are not subject to one fractal pattern but to two or more simultaneously. Such multifractals tend to come to a natural limit. Patterns that work at small sizes don’t work at large ones; hierarchies emerge in response to physical constraints. The early days of an embryo’s existence can be nourished without a central circulatory system, but fairly soon that doesn’t work any longer and cells need to specialize.

In poetry, the physical constraint we are up against is time—the public’s time. In any one life, there’s only so much time to read books. Few citizens can take on 300 poetry books—the number published annually in Canada alone. You need a process for deciding which ones are worth your while. In isolated tribal systems, there are only so many bards, so many works, and each of them can be absorbed and recognized. In large urban societies, we depend on some kind of filtering system.

Fame is just what happens when you can’t know every book personally—when you have to fly at 40,000 feet to get across the country in a manageable amount of time. Its filtration system is essentially an information-exchange process made up of little magazines, poetry contests and prizes, and includes the luck of proximity to the whole tag team of mentors, publishers, reviewers. It’s less hierarchy than swamp bed or compost pile. Only those poems or poets who are very sturdy, accidentally lucky or both will survive. The great advantage of being a poet is that the filtration system is so damn slow. A novelist will usually have a one-time chance to cut a channel with her book. For the poet, reputation is more marsh than Mississippi—an ecology that lets a lot of us flourish locally, which is where we’re really needed anyway.

Note:

Excerpted from Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science, to
be published by the University of Alberta Press in fall, 2011.

from Rattle #35, Summer 2011
Tribute to Canadian Poets

__________

Alice Major has published nine collections of poetry and a novel for young adults, and served as the first poet laureate for the city of Edmonton from 2005–2007. She emigrated from Scotland with her family at the age of eight, and grew up in Toronto before working as a weekly newspaper reporter in central British Columbia. Major has lived in Edmonton, Alberta since 1981, and is past president of the Writers Guild of Alberta, and the League of Canadian Poets.

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November 21, 2011

Art Beck

THE IMPERTINENT DUET::
TRANSLATING POETRY WITH ART BECK

#2: ODI ET AMO – HATE AND LOVE AND THE POET’S SOUP

I.

For those who’d rather avoid reading a treatise on the Latin classics—relax. That’s not where this is going, at least not where I intend it to go. This is going to be an exploration of echoes, rather than antiquity. But that said, let’s start with Catullus. And with a two-line poem of Catullus that, as much as it’s poetry, could as well be graffiti on an ancient wall. His “carmen (song) 85” written in the 1st century BC.

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
Nescio, sed fierei sentio et excrucior.

This is a much translated poem, but also a “much adapted” piece, both in poetry and music, as it resonates down the years. It’s a love poem of sorts, but also a poem that sticks in the throat of Catullus’ love poems. The two lines combine complex emotions with a simplicity of expression—and that very simplicity, I think, makes it more difficult to directly translate its poetry out of the Latin. Because of this, odi et amo tends to migrate into as many adaptations and variations as translations.

Before even approaching a translation of this poem, maybe it’s helpful to talk a little about Catullus. Saint Jerome, compiling his chronological tables some 400 years later, notes Catullus’ birth in 87 BC and later, notes that “Catullus died in Rome at the age of thirty” in 57 BC. (And why does it seem more than ironic that the name of the great ascetic scholar should be forever linked to Catullus this way?)

Modern scholarship tends to use the dates 84 BC to 54 BC. Still making Catullus thirty at his death. He traveled in high Roman circles, was acquainted with Julius Caesar, and was a friend of Cicero. Readers of this piece are probably either going to already know an awful lot about him, or not enough. I don’t have the qualifications to say much that’s meaningful to the former, and there’s not enough space in this article to address the latter. So, for the sake of moving forward, let me just generalize that Catullus wrote some of the most bittersweet love poetry of his, or any other, epoch.

According to legend—and I’m of the mind that research at this distance isn’t much more than legend—his inamorata was a married woman some ten years his senior, named Clodia. She was the sister of a notorious libertine, Clodius Pulcher. Sexually notorious in her own right, she was rumored to have poisoned her husband, Metellus, who died in 59 BC—either two or four years before Catullus’s death.

But by that time, Catullus had been supplanted as her lover. Catullus may have been the romantic poet every sentimental woman wants. And Clodia, the goddess slut every romantic poet craves. But she had priorities beyond poetry. Clodia was accused of many things, but never sentimentality.

No one knows how long Catullus’ affair with Clodia lasted, but it was intense. Evoking Saphho, he called her “Lesbia”; wrote famous poems to her sparrow. And other poems whose translated lines are common currency still. One of the most read is song #5:

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimenus assis.

Let’s live, my Lesbia—and love:
the stern opinions of the old
aren’t worth a cent to us.

Soles occidere et redire possunt:
nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,
nox est perpetua una dormienda…

Suns set and rise again: For
us, once our brief light sets,
there’s only night and an endless sleep.

From there the poem goes on to talk about a thousand kisses, then a hundred, and another thousand, alternating between hundreds and thousands into the unquantifiable.

Catullus’ thousand desperate kisses continue to multiply. The poem has exploded into translations and imitations from the Renaissance to today. The first stanza was beautifully translated by Sir Walter Raleigh. And there’s Andrew Marvell’s “To a Coy Mistress.” A poem that seems hugely indebted to Catullus V. Except Marvell’s “the grave’s a fine and private place/ But none, I think, do there embrace” seems coldly cerebral next to Catullus’ nox est perpetua una dormienda. And embrace, a tepid substitute for a thousand kisses.

A present day poet, Joseph Campana (in his Book of Faces, a volume whose poems revolve around Audrey Hepburn) also bends Catullus V to his purpose:

Let us live, let us love—Audrey!
The old men talk but they’re
not a copper to your gold (this
I know) you’re gold rising
and falling you are daytime.
You’re brevity and light and
I am the sleeping darkness…

And let’s not forget Raymond Chandler, who’s said to have adapted his title, The Big Sleep from Catullus V.

___

II. That’s the Sweet, but now for the Bitter

A friend recently observed that when it comes down to it, sweet love poems really aren’t that interesting. “When I go to readings,” she said, “to open mics… It’s when they start shouting about their exes, that p…., or that c…. That’s when you hear the applause.” A good many of Catullus’ poems are nasty epigrams, some as prurient as Martial’s. In fact, Martial, that consumate bad boy of Roman poetry, writing a few generations later, cites Catullus as a mentor.

Catullus could rant as well as—well actually, much better than—any open mic poet. But sometimes the rancor of his great love turning sour is a quiet scalpel that slices deeper than any rant. And that helpless wound comes down to us, almost clinically, in Odi et Amo.

Here’s the Loeb Classical Library prose rendering. A simple statement: “I hate and love. Why I do so, perhaps you ask? I know not, but I feel it, and I am in torment.”

But too simple? Too prosaic. Sounding out the original, even if you can’t read Latin, the words seem resonant, charged, vital.

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris?
Nescio, sed fierei sentio et excrucior.

The first sentence seems to offer only one translation choice—I hate and love. But hate may not be the most productive translation choice. Hate in English tends to have an active component of anger. Odi is often used more passively, the way you’d hate the taste of headcheese. Not especially the way you’d hate a mortal enemy. When Horace says: Persicos odi, puer, apparatus—“I hate Persian trappings, boy”—he’s not talking about going to war against Persia. Rather, a sense of aesthetic distaste. Softened to something more reactive than active, Catullus’ odi takes on more nuance, less self certainty.

And in choosing just how to interpret odi, I think you also have to consider the word order—in which odi comes before amo. Latin is an inflected language and word order is often flexible. But in this case you have one verb preceding the other, one image preceding the other. If odi is intended to be an active, aggressive emotion you’d think it would, more often, be preceded by love troubles—rather than precede love.

Trying to think of examples where aggression becomes love, you can come up with some dark, extreme images. A sated sadist fondling her prey. Maria Goretti’s assailant turned suddenly remorseful. Othello’s too late epiphany.

On the other hand, if odi is interpreted as something more passive, an instinctive dislike or aversion—then the helplessness of amo in this poem seems underscored. One falls in love, the way we always fall in love, despite ourselves. Stumbling into an unwanted, yet deeply wanted wound.

Or as another friend once observed: Lovers, meeting for the first time, often feel initially annoyed with each other. And that annoyance is just the heart’s immune system struggling to avoid the pain to come.

But in any case, one of the reasons these two lines of poetic graffiti have endured is that they resonate in every direction like a stone dropped in a pool. There’s no one right way of reading the poem. It speaks to the dark extreme fringe as well as to the myriad varieties of commonplace heartbreak. Catullus’ odi and amo co-exist like yin and yang, constantly circling and constantly nourishing each other.

Going forward into the line, the identity of the “you” in the second sentence also offers some possibilities if you imagine a real rather than rhetorical “you” who’s asking “why?”. Maybe the speaker’s lover? Maybe Catullus is really talking to Clodia, not the reader? Maybe he’s even being nagged to explain himself. Cast this way, the first line could validly be interpreted as: I’m repelled and I love. Why that’s so, maybe you do need to know.

___

III. The Rosy Crucifixion?

The second line opens unequivocally enough. Nescio—“I don’t know”—sed fieri sentio—“but I feel it happening”—et excrucior.

And with et excrucior we get into the question of “false friends” in translation. Words that strongly resemble words in another language, but in fact mean something else. Crucio in Latin, and crucifigo derive from the same root, but crucio means to torture, and crucifigo to crucify. A subtle distinction, but one doesn’t necessarily kill you—the other does.

So the speaker in Odi et Amo is tortured not crucified. Probably the better equivalent would be “racked.”

The Nobel winning Greek poet, and sometimes translator, George Seferis remarked in one his journals that it’s impossible for us to read Homer except through the experience and patina of intervening history. So that the great classic works take on shades of meaning that were only potentially there in the original.

I couldn’t agree more. The best poems (especially in translation) acquire a life of their own beyond their original intent and mutate in their dialogue with succeeding generations of readers. They speak to us through a phone line interwoven with the fiber optics of our past and their future.

For us, some 2,100 years after Catullus, crucifixion (false friend or not) can never escape the weight of the sacramental—an energy of life as well as death. This was hardly the case when Catullus wrote. But that historic/cultural patina seems to—not add to—but actually draw weight out of Catullus’ poem. It’s where the poem wants to go now.

I don’t know exactly what inspired the title of Henry Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion. My guess is it had more to do with the Rosicrucians than Catullus. But Odi et Amo would make a perfect epigraph for the relationships in those novels. And, for me, it’s almost impossible to not read crucifixion into excrucior. And to not finally translate the poem as something like:

I’m repelled and I love. Maybe you do have to know why.
I don’t know, but I feel it happening and I’m crucified.

___

IV. Echoes

As with song #5, Catullus #85 has echoed down the centuries. When I queried an American Literary Translators chat group for examples, one person responded: “I thought of Racine’s Andromaque, the sentence that used to be taught in all the lycees classiques in France: Ah! Ne puis-je savoir si j’aime ou si je hais? Alas, am I incapable to know whether I love, whether I hate?”

The speaker, in this case, is a woman, Hermione, but the emotion is universal, certainly not just male.
And Odi et Amo has always for some reason brought to mind some lines from Paul Schmidt’s very loose, very lyrical translation of Rimbaud’s Drunken Morning:

It began with a certain disgust, and it ended—
Since we could not immediately seize upon eternity—
It ended in a scattering of perfumes.

A not particularly torturous ending. But in my memory those lines are always mixed up with lines that occur a little later in the translated poem:

It began in utter boorishness, and now it ends
In angels of fire and ice.

Not explicitly Catullus, but lines Catullus would certainly understand. And Henry Miller as well, since he adapted the poem’s last line—Voici le temps des Assassins—as the title for his study of Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins.

In the early twentieth century, Louis Zukofsky did a homophonic “translation” of Odi et Amo that makes “sound” if not imagistic sense. Not everyone’s cup of tea. But still an echo:

O th’hate I move love. Quarry it fact I am, for that’s so re queries.
Nescience, say th’ fiery scent I owe whets crookeder.

Jospeh Campana also uses an adaptation of Odi et Amo in his Audrey Hepburn-centric Book of Faces:

I hate, I love (Audrey….

I know nothing,
I feel it happening:
the torment (mine).

But two of the most interesting and lyrical contemporary adaptations come from Frank Bidart. In both cases, he begins with a simple “I hate and love.” And he omits the second line of the original, managing to compress a compressed Latin poem even more. The last line in his first version, from his volume The Sacrifice reads: “Ignorant fish who even wants the fly while writhing.”

The second variant of that last line appears in his later collection, Desire, with the Bidart poem now entitled “Catullus Excrucior”: “The sleepless body hammering a nail nails/ itself hanging crucified.”

With Bidart, you get the sense that it’s not the lover, but love itself that’s odious. Love, itself that you can’t live with, or without. Then you realize the original Catullus can also be read this way. Realize just how protean the deceptively simple Latin is.

___

V. Catullus and Old Helmut Soik

Catullus was a young poet, and he’s still a poet for the young. There’s a sense of trespass when the old read Catullus that Yeats famously caught in his poem “The Scholars”:

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men tossing on their beds
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;

Lord what would they say
Did their Catullus walk their way?

I’m no longer young and I’m going to sidetrack here to someone even older: Helmut Soik, a poet who for some reason has been on my mind lately. We’ll wander a bit, but soon be back to Catullus. In fact, re-reading Soik was one of the catalysts that started me re-reading Catullus and it seems appropriate to give Helmut the last word.

Indulge me, if you will, as I backtrack to somewhere around 1978. That was when Soik, a German poet my father’s age came to visit. We were both enjoying a pretty good year. I’d just published a book length poem based on Casanova’s memoirs that had gotten some nice buzz. And Helmut’s first (bilingual) volume of poems in English translation was recently out. We shared the same small, but hot at the time, California publisher.

Helmut came to San Francisco to read, and we spent a few great days together. We wandered the neighborhoods—North Beach, the Castro, the old and new Chinatowns, and pondered the tombstones at Mission Dolores. His conversational English was only a little better than my stumbling German, but his fluent half sister Tanya accompanied us and our dialogue moved along as easily as a movie with subtitles.

And Helmut’s life could have made a movie. Born in 1914, he belonged to what, for Germans, was definitely not their “greatest generation.” In his youth he was a prodigy, publishing his first volume of poetry at 16. And his second, five years later, along with critical studies of Rimbaud and others. He was a pacifist, active in avant-garde circles and had little interest in anything but literature and the arts. The sort of life the young Catullus may have led. And he had a sweetheart, the young love of his life.

But then, of course, he was drafted. And ended up at the Eastern Front. War stories are notoriously unreliable. But the way Helmut told it, he was exhumed unconscious from under a pile of corpses after the battle of Stalingrad by a band of Russians. He was a cherub, then, he said. Despite being nearly thirty. A lost kid, through and through, and some angel must have touched his captors. Rather than shoot him or send him off with the other POWs, they adopted him as sort of a mascot and just put him to camp work. He looked back with genuine nostalgia at that interval. I’m not sure how long it lasted, because somehow the dates seem as out of whack as the concept. Although it all seemed quite logical when he was telling it.

Then, as the story goes, when the war was finally over the Russians just shook hands and sent Helmut walking home. This is what I don’t understand. Were they the Red Army or a band of irregulars? Or just a disillusioned unit improvising their own rules. Helmut was never really clear about anything except how fond he was of those Russians. In any event, he somehow made his way across shattered East Europe to what he thought was a German town.

But war had redrawn the borders and he found himself in newly Soviet Poland, conscripted to hard labor in the salt mines. He was finally repatriated in 1950. And spent the rest of his aesthetic (and personal) life practicing a sort of discipline of alienation. His mature poems dissect both the Hitler years and the postwar “German miracle” with a deeply humane cynicism. He settled, miraculously back into life with his old sweetheart, but avoided any non-menial pursuit except poetry—content to be “useless” to society. You come away from reading Soik with the sense that Nazism isn’t just an era that ran from 1933 to 1945, but rather a nasty strain woven into humanity from which Helmut had taken permanent leave. The title of his American volume, Rimbaud under the Steel Helmet[1] is apt.

But the poems are wide ranging, and Soik’s volume begins with poems in honor of other poets: Tu Fu, Lorca, Rimbaud, Belli, and, yes… Catullus.

Von Catull las ich in der stunde der dämmerung
daß er in seinem dreißigsten jahr starb
in der todesstunde alleingelassen
in einem dreckigen hinterhaus
der großstadt Rom.
Die sexbombe Claudia Pulcher mied sein
bett von toten küssen und schweigen….

I read about Catullus in the twilight hour,
the way he died in his thirtieth year,
left alone at the hour of his death
in a filthy back alley tenement
in the metropolis of Rome.
Sexpot Claudia Pulcher wanted nothing
to do with his bed of dead kisses and silence…

Later in the poem:

…Was nützte es ihm
daß der pontifex maximus
seinetwegen staatstrauer trug
daß die zehntausend luxusnutten
in den heiligen straßen
schluchzten
die jeunesse doree absichtlich schmutzige anzüge trug…

…What use was it to him
that the Pontifex Maximus declared
official mourning on his behalf,
that ten thousand exquisite whores
sobbed
in the sacred streets, that
the gilded young all changed into soiled robes…

But at the end, Helmut’s question and his old man’s answer:

Und trotzdem
was blieb erspart ihm?
Schon sein früher tod
trug zur geniebildung bei.
Die demonstrieung weiblichen verfalls
an seiner angebeteten geliebten
vielleicht fünfzehn jahre später
blieb erspart ihm
Und das heißt doch wirklich
corriger la fortune!

And for all that
what, if anything, was he spared?
His early death, for one thing, solidified
his image as a genius. And it spared
him as well from watching his heartthrob’s
menopausal decay some fifteen years
later. You could say dying was really
the ace up his sleeve!

Helmut died a few years back. The story may be embellished a bit, passed from his sister to our mutual editor. But as I heard it, he was hiking up a not too strenuous mountain trail in a popular resort. And happened to be trudging behind a woman who caught his practiced eye. “What a nice ass you have,” he said.

She stopped, turned, looked him over, smiled and said: “Coming from an old goat like you, even a compliment is an insult.”

A couple of days later, peacefully watching television in his cabin, he died. Helmut wasn’t spared much in his long life. But if the account of his last days is to be believed—even at eighty-something, that ache still glowed.

___

VI: The Poet’s Soup

Catullus died famous and young—Soik, old and obscure. Googling Helmut Maria Soik, the only recent references I could find were to the bilingual collection I mentioned above and a German volume of poems published in 1980 whose title translates to Ramblings about the Possible Existence of Hell.

His obscurity wouldn’t surprise Helmut who, in a long, somewhat Brechtian, poem titled “Night and Nothing” (Die Nacht und das Nichts[2]) said:

A man went to bed
with a bundle of poems,
wrote on his knees
despite the cold in the room.
He knew:
for industrial society
for competitive society
he was useless.

Later in that poem he asks the big question:

Teach me comrade!
Teach me in my ignorance!
Give me the answer!
Who gives the poet
his soup?

Wer gibt dem dichter die süppe? Who nourishes a poet? In one sense, it’s our poetic ancestors. Soik was nourished by Catullus, as Catullus was nourished by Sappho. But this can only go so far, provide only part of the calories a poet needs.

Süppe is the daily ration of the humble and misfortunate, of mendicants, internees, conscripts, and labor camps. From the threads running through Helmut’s work, I’ve always felt his poetry was nourished forever after by his captor-saviors in the Russian forest. Whatever the real story, I’ve come to imagine them as a band of survivors whose priorities had probably come down to avoiding the twin grinding jaws of Hitler and Stalin.

And would Catullus’ insistent songs still be nourishing us if Catullus hadn’t been nourished by Clodia? Not Lesbia/Clodia—the eternal muse, the eternal ideal. But Clodia the woman who lived, aged, grew, faltered and plotted to survive. Who bemused and captured and spooned out the stony, prisoner’s soup of poetry to Catullus.

Notes:

[1] Rimbaud under the Steel Helmet is still in stock at SPD books. www.spdbooks.org

[2] The excerpts from Soik’s Die Nacht und das nichts are as translated by Georg Gugelberger and Lydia Perera in the original 1976 Red Hill Press edition. The excerpts from his Catullus poem were retranslated for this article by Art Beck.

__________

Art Beck is a San Francisco poet and translator who’s published two translation volumes: Simply to See: Poems of Lurorius (Poltroon Press, Berkeley, 1990) and a selection Rilke (Elysian Press, New York, 1983). His recent articles on Horace and Rilke in John Traintor’s magazine Jacket can be accessed online at: www.jacketmagazine.com

 

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October 10, 2011

Reviewed by Art BeckThe Drunken Boat

THE DRUNKEN BOAT AND OTHER POEMS FROM THE FRENCH OF ARTHUR RIMBAUD AMERICAN VERSIONS, BILINGUAL ADDITION
tr. by Eric Greinke.

Presa Press
PO Box 792
Rockford, MI 49341
ISBN# 0-9772524-7-7
108 pp., expanded 4th addition, 2007
www.presapress.com

Arthur Rimbaud had, arguably, the most productive adolescence in modern literary history. Born in 1854 and raised by a difficult and single mother on the edges of poverty, he nonetheless began publishing accomplished poems in his early teens. The title poem of this selection–Le Bateau Ivre–was written at the age of 16, and marks the beginning of a brief career that impacted not just French poetics but world poetics generations later. It’s hard, for example, to imagine Howl without the touchstone of Rimbaud. And it’s become a commonplace observation that each new crop of poets finds itself searching for the “new Rimbaud.” In the American imagination, Rimbaud, has become the brilliant bad boy personified. James Dean on poetry steroids. A patron saint of the Beats and rock musicians.

Somewhere in his very early twenties Rimbaud stopped writing. As suddenly as any suicide. Which only adds to the mystique. After a year or two of wandering, he went to work for a colonial merchant firm in North Africa. Part adventurer, part fortune hunter, he peddled arms as well as trading in coffee and tusks.

He might have continued for years, living as far away as he could from the scenes of his turbulent youth. Denying–as he was said to have–that he’d ever written poetry when the subject of poems by a certain Rimbaud circulating in Paris came up. “Preposterous.” But a knee that slowly began to swell with a persistent tumor finally forced him back to France for medical attention.

In 1891, his right leg was amputated in Marseille. In July of that year, he returned home to his family. Would he also have eventually returned to literature? Invalided, with nowhere else to turn? And, if so, to what kind of aesthetic in the fast arriving twentieth century?

We’ll never know. Stifled and sick, he resolved to go back to the colonies. But made it only as far as the hospital in Marseille. The swelling in his knee had been diagnosed as a carcinoma, which had evidently spread. He died in November, 1891, barely 37 years old. As brief as it was, the roughly ten year period of his poetic production seems significantly longer when viewed in the context of his, also, brief life.

Translations

If you browse the internet, you can find a number of individual Rimbaud postings and a few small press volumes, but, surprisingly, for all his popularity, there seem to be only a handful of major press collections. I’m no doubt overlooking some, but primary translators include Louise Varese and Wallace Fowlie in the 1950s, Paul Schmidt and Oliver Bernard in the 1960s, and Wyatt Mason, whose complete Rimbaud appeared in 2002. In any case, this group provides a wide backdrop for Greinke’s versions. Also noteworthy are the twelve adaptations of Rimbaud pieces included in Robert Lowell’s 1958 volume Imitations.

I’m attracted to Greinke’s approach for a several reasons. First, because he’s a poet who’s unapologetically trying to translate poetry into poetry. A tough proposition requiring shameless intuition and not only the courage–but the inner need to risk “poetic flight.” The need to work without a net.

The paradox of scholarly, linguistic translation is that by the time you do your research and test your facts, the poem’s as often as not gotten tired of you and refuses to come out and play. There are notable exceptions, but I’m also of the opinion that the disciplines that make for an accomplished linguist may also work against what John Berryman characterized as “the freedom of the poet.”

The problem, of course, with poetic “intuitive” translation is that when you shoot from the hip, you have to accept that from time to time, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot.

Another reason I’m attracted to Greinke’s approach is that for him Rimbaud is a labor of love, not a “project.” In his introduction he talks about a feeling of déjà vu when first encountering Rimbaud. And describes what seems an almost compulsive sense of appropriated ownership. An annoyance at the existing translations. A need to do his own. To a non-translator, these feelings may sound a little over the top. But to any one who translates poetry they’re instantly recognizable. Greinke’s only saying what most poetry translators think, but usually think twice about saying.

Greinke also recognizes that “a literal translation is never possible…” And that “in many ways, a translation is a new poem, modeled on the original.”

I personally would take this concept even further. I’ve often felt that a translator needs to look beyond the words and beneath the text for the roots of the original poem. But maybe, the best metaphor for this was one given by Robert Pinsky at recent reading of his version of The Divine Comedy. When the question of accuracy came up, Pinsky opined that somewhere–in whatever place these things exist–is the Platonic ideal of The Divine Comedy. Dante tapped it first, and no one will ever do it better. But Dante’s American and Chinese, and German, and etc. translators need to find that place that Dante tapped and try to tap it themselves.

“Common Ground”

In the introduction to his 2002 Rimbaud volume, Wyatt Mason draws a distinction between what he considers Fowlie’s almost prosaically trot-like versions and Schmidt’s highly personalized, poetic–but spun–translations. In his versions, Mason wants “to find common, rather than middle, ground between the two poles.”

It may be informative to see where Greinke fits here. One of his better pieces, I think is “Ma Boheme,” a light and early poem but full of the “adolescent exuberance” that Greinke finds lacking in existing translations. Rimbaud’s first stanza reads:

Je m’en allays, les poings dans me poches crevees;
Mon paletot aussi devenait ideal;
J’allais sous le ciel, Muse! et j’etais ton feal;
Oh! la la! que d’amours splendides j’ai revees!

Schmidt’s version seems, on surface, straightforward, until after comparing it you realize how much of Schmidt has been added (But as Mason points out, this may come down to a matter of taste).

I ran away, hands stuck in pockets that seemed
All holes; my jacket was a holey ghost as well.
I followed you, Muse! Beneath your spell,
Oh la la, what glorious loves I dreamed.

With Mason, we lose what seems an interjected “holey ghost,” but we also seem to lose some of the voice.

And so off I went, fists thrust in the torn pockets
Of a coat held together by no more than its name.
O muse, how I served you beneath the blue;
And oh what dreams of dazzling love I dreamed.

Does Greinke find the “common ground” that Mason is looking for?

So, I’m walking along, hands in torn-out pockets
& my coat is looking really perfect
Under the Romantic sky, & I’m a slave
To my dreams of splendid love!

On first reading, I miss the “Oh! la la!” of the original, but yes, maybe oh la la does Frenchify the poem too much. And “I’m a slave” really replaces it well. What really differentiates Greinke’s version though is that unlike the other two (both of which are undeniably good)–is that it reads like a poem written in English. And I think this was accomplished by tapping the roots as well as the words of the original. By “internalizing” the original and letting the new poem shape itself in the new language. Rather than forcing the French into English.

It’s also interesting to look at another instance of a poet appropriating the original: Robert Lowell’s version from “Imitations”:

I walked on the great road, my two fists lost
in my slashed pockets, and my overcoat
the ghost of a coat. Under the sky I walked,
I was your student, Muses. What affairs

we had together…

Whether you prefer Greinke or Lowell in large part comes down to taste. But both versions seem exemplary of what happens when a poem is internalized by a translator and then re-created in the target language, as opposed to just translating the text.

That being said, you also have to question whether–by migrating “muse” into “romantic sky”–Greinke loses what may be the one serious point of the passage? The young Rimbaud’s dedication to “the Muse,” i.e. Isn’t it poetry he’s a slave to, not love? But I think Greinke may compensate enough for this later in the poem: “…as if I was in some fairy tale, I shouted poems / as I went & I had a room at the Milky Way / & of course the stars were rustling like leaves.”

Greinke’s best passages exhibit that kind of fluidity and unstrained melody.

From “The Clever Maid”:

In the brown dinette, perfumed
with the aroma of varnish & of fruits, at my ease
I scarfed a plate of various foreign
Delicacies, & I sprawled in my big chair.

or the maid “At The Green Inn”:

That one–never one to avoid embraces!–
Giggling, served me buttered bread
With warm ham on a multicolored plate.

Poop

Greinke’s preface states that he wants to bring across the “musical and painterly qualities” of the original. Along with the “adolescent exuberance … and the feeling.” The inference is that much of this rests in the music and metrics. As he puts it: “Restoring the surface qualities has…been one of my goals. The meaning emerges when the tone and persona are restored.” But if Greinke’s strength is musicality, I think there are places the pursuit of sound may work against him.

For me, “Le Couer Vole“–“The Stolen Heart”–seems an almost impossible poem to capture in translation because its outer surface of jaunty, slangy rhyme protects something shattered within. Enid Starkie devotes a chapter to it in her biography of Rimbaud. And Wallace Fowlie discusses the poem and its presumed basis at length in his 1946 treatise The Myth of Childhood.

As the legend goes (and perhaps it’s been revised in more recent biographies?), Rimbaud, while visiting Paris during the Commune uprisings, was sodomized, either willingly or not, in a military barracks. He was sixteen and Starkie considers it his first real sexual experience. He transmuted the experience into a poem with emotions that Starkie characterizes as both violated and fascinated. First entitling it “Couer Supplice” (“Tortured or Martyred Heart”), later changing the title to “Couer de Pitrie” (“Buffoon’s Heart”) before settling on “Stolen Heart.”

The French first stanza is:

Mon triste couer bave a la poupe,
Mon coeur couvert de caporal;
Ils y lancent des jets de soupe
Mon triste couer bave a la poupe:
Sous les quolibets de la troupe
Qui pousse un rire general,
Mon triste coeur bave a la poupe,
Mon Coeur couvert de caporal.

Fowlie’s translation begins as follows:

My sad heart slobbers at the poop
my heart covered with tobacco-spit.
They spew steams of soup at it.
My sad heart drools at the poop.

Or in the 1962 Oliver Bernard version (on the WEB) entitled “The Cheated Heart”:

My poor heart dribbles at the stern
Under the gibes of the whole crew
Which burst out in a single laugh,
My poor heart dribbles at the stern
My heart covered with caporal.

Looking at the French rhyme scheme, if you didn’t know the content and background of the poem, you’d be inclined to presume this was something a lot lighter, a clever vulgar sound poem along the lines, say, of Jandl’s “Otto’s Mopps.” But reading Starkie and Fowlie–and if the story is at all credible–you start to view the protective shell of rhyme and slang as a tough ostrich egg with a small fatal crack from which the yolk is beginning to leak.

When Rimbaud sent the poem off to his young teacher and mentor Izambard, he stressed “This does not mean nothing.” And “I implore you not to score it too much with your pencil or with your mind…”

Izambard, however didn’t realize what the poem was. He later said he thought it “a hoax in the worst of taste.” But wanting to appear broadminded, he answered Rimbaud with what he thought was a clever parody of the poem. Starkie dates the beginning of the end of their friendship from this letter.

It would be hard to criticize anyone for being less than successful in capturing “Le Coeur Vole,” but I think Greinke’s beginning tries too hard.

My sad heart gushes in poop,
My heart drenched in tobacco spit;
They vomit currents of soup
My sad heart drowns in shit.

The sounds work, but the image they bring across is that of a conscious sentimentalist making tough fun of himself. Not a 16 year old boy, losing his anal virginity and “dribbling at the stern.” Substituting “poop” (as in shit) for the French poupe–a nautical term for stern from which we derive “poop deck” is arguably okay, because I think in this case poupe signifies astern as in behind. But “gushing” and later “drowning in shit”–while musical and jaunty, as well as nautical–just seem to kill the essential image. While “dribbles,” or, the even more complex, “drools” retains the damaged heart of the poem.

…de Fleuves Impassibles

Another instance where image may be unduly sacrificed for sound is at the very beginning of the title poem, “The Drunken Boat.”

The original begins:

Comme je descendais des Fleuves impassibles
Je ne me sentis plus guide par le haleurs:
Des Peaux- Rouges criards les avaient pris pour cibles,
Les ayant cloues nus aux poteaux de couleurs.

The voice speaking, is that of the boat itself. Wyatt Mason’s translation is:

While swept downstream on indifferent Rivers,
I felt the boatmen’s tow-ropes slacken:
Yawping Redskins took them as targets
Nailing them naked to totem poles.

My own French is atrocious, but piecing out the stanza from a dictionary and with some help from French speaking friends, my stab at a trot is something along the lines of:

As I descended the impassive Rivers, I sensed
myself no longer guided by the (hauling) bargemen.
Howling redskins had taken them as prey (or targets)
and nailed them naked to painted poles.

Louise Varese translates the stanza as:

As I came down the impassible Rivers,
I felt no more the bargemen’s guiding hands,
Targets for yelling red-skins they were nailed
Naked to painted poles.

Note that Varese changes “impassive Rivers” to “impassible Rivers.” Impassibles (impassive) seems a “false friend” that’s almost impossible to resist in the context of a river. And Schmidt, possibly wanting to have it both ways says “I drifted on a river I could not control.”

Greinke moves this further along:

As I flew down the raving river,
Free at last of the boatman’s hands
That nailed themselves to my mast,
That forced me into Indian waters

Certainly a melodious entry to a poem rich in sound. But what Greinke has done is to switch the images. He’s objectified the impassive river system into a “raving river.” And turned the raiding band of scalpers into an abstract–“Indian waters.” He’s also interjected a–for me–surreal image of a boatman nailing his own hands to the mast. Does a translator have the right–in creating a new poem in English–to bend the original this much? Yes, of course. I have no doubt that if Rimbaud were translating, he’d have no compunctions. But to me there are several questionable consequences.

One of these is to remove an image that marks this as the poem of a, albeit brilliant, sixteen-year-old. And I don’t know what’s worse–losing the “impassive Rivers” which to me impart a sense of expulsion and alienation. Or losing the Redskins with all their adolescent energy. And the sense of ordinary workaday river commerce suddenly invaded by the wild.

One thing that strikes me is that, not only is Fleuves plural in the original–it’s also capitalized–which seems to imply the name of a system of waterways flowing to the ocean in whatever imaginary country we’re in. Do we really want to give that animist presence up?

Another unintended (or maybe intended?) consequence of leaving out the murderous Redskins is that of sanitizing the stanza the way stage productions of Huck Finn refer to Jim as “River Jim.” Are the Indians essential to the poem?–maybe not. But, I think the “expelling” impassive Rivers foreshadow the poem’s penultimate stanza, where the now exhausted boat yearns to return to a childhood scene. A childhood the sixteen-year-old Rimbaud already felt expelled from? In Greinke’s sensitive rendering:

If ever I shall return, it will be to the pond,
Where once, cold and black toward perfumed evening,
A child on his knees set sail
A leaf as frail as a May butterfly.

“The Drunken Boat” is a long poem and a translation doesn’t sink or swim on one stanza. But if Rimbaud is the lifelong companion he seems to be for Greinke, I’d hope that in some future revision, he might revisit that first stanza.

But then again, there’s Robert Lowell’s “imitation” which turns the impassible rivers into the “virgin Amazon.”

I felt my guides no longer carried me–
as we sailed down the virgin Amazon,
the redskins nailed them to their painted stakes
naked, as targets for their archery.

Another example illustrating how different poetic translators will look for the “poem” in different aspects of the original. There’s no “correct,” definitely no final, version. What resonates for one translator, may be static to another’s ear.

__________

Art Beck is a San Francisco poet and translator who’s published two translation volumes. Simply to See: Poems of Lurorius (Poltroon Press, Berkeley, 1990) and a selection Rilke (Elysian Press, New York, 1983). He’s currently trying to atone for some of his earlier Rilke versions by retranslating the Sonnets to Orpheus.

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September 19, 2011

Art Beck

THE IMPERTINENT DUET:
TRANSLATING POETRY WITH ART BECK

#1: SPANISH DANCING ABOARD THE QUEEN ELIZABETH
(in collaboration with Silvia Kofler)

I. A Small Question of He or It

At this year’s American Literary Translators Association conference, Silvia Kofler, an old friend and colleague, showed me a translation of Rilke’s “Spanish Dancer” that she’d come across in an anthology. “Look how they translated this line! Why?” And so began a conversation. While I take full blame for the vagaries of the translation at the end
of this piece, this essay is really a joint endeavor, a record of the dialogue between Silvia and myself.

Silvia is a native Austrian who emigrated to the United States in her twenties. She’s a published poet in both English and German. Rilke is, of course, a poet she’s known since her school days, but it’s worth noting that Rilke is not, for contemporary German readers, the ubiquitously read icon he is in America. A German speaking poetry reader might delve into Rilke as often as contemporary Americans read, say, Wallace Stevens.

And as for us with Stevens, the German reader often has to slow down and mull over just what it is that Rilke is saying. But in this case, Silvia seemed emphatic.

Silvia’s issue was a line in Rilke’s “Spanish Dancer.” Und plötzlich ist er Flamme ganz und gar. The line comes immediately after the first stanza and is, in fact, a stanza unto itself. “Spanish Dancer,” an extended metaphor set in a Paris nightclub, is one of Rilke’s least opaque poems. Most, if not all, Englishspeaking translators have roughly followed Herter Norton’s 1938 translation. Norton’s reading of the first stanza and the stand-alone line that follows is:

Wie in der Hand ein Schwefelzündholz, weiss,
eh es zur Flamme kommt, nach allen Seiten
zuckende Zugen streckt -: beginnt im Kreis
naher Beschauer hastig, hell und heiss
ihr runder Tanz sich zuckend auszubreiten.
Und plötzlich ist er Flamme ganz und gar.

As in one’s hand a sulfur match, whitely,
before it comes aflame, to every side
darts twitching tongues – : within the circle
of close watchers hasty, bright and hot
her round dance begins twitching to spread itself.
And suddenly it is altogether flame.

Why, Silvia asked, did they translate er as it when it should be he?

The answer that Rilke’s myriad translators would uniformly give her is that in German, unlike English, inanimate nouns are gender specific. Either masculine or feminine. Der Tanz is masculine. And so in German, the pronoun for dance is “he.” And er, in this case, refers to the dance.

It’s logical. There’s no “he” mentioned anywhere else in the poem. And, as I said above, I’m not aware of any English or American translator who’s treated the line otherwise.

But, no, no—Silvia said. Sure that’s “logical,” but it’s not the way a native speaker would read this poem—at least at first. This, after all, is a very erotic piece and it’s as much about a man watching as a woman dancing.

Which got me thinking. Grammar has rules that seem logical, but poetry has it’s own linguistic logic. And Rilke, especially, has his own poetics. His imagery can be as musical as his metrics—often fugue-like and ambiguous with interchangeable melody and harmonic lines as it were. In this context, it may well be that another native speaker might read this line differently than Silvia has always read it. But why does she read (and want to read) er as a he rather than a gendered dance? What happens when you interject a specific man into the poem?

First, to me, the effect is reminiscent of a film director zooming in on a face in the crowd. It crystallizes and personalizes the eroticism of the dance. And second, it stops you (at least in German) because you have to ask yourself—did Rilke really mean “he”? And so that image might (for another German reader) flash and disappear if you finally settle on “it.” But the image is there, at least subliminally.

And one shouldn’t overlook the poem’s line structure. Rilke has set one stand-alone line between two five line stanzas. He’s making us stop; the standalone line doesn’t flow smoothly from the Tanz in the previous stanza. Read by itself, without referring to the previous stanza, er is just as readily he as it.

It’s hard for an English speaker to connect with this, because we have so few gender specific inanimate nouns. What’s happening in the German, seems to me, to be similar to what happens if you come across something like:

The queen boarded the Queen Elizabeth
then she promptly set out to sea.

Is the “she” that sets out to sea the queen or the ship? You stop to think, and may say, what’s the difference because both, in fact, set out to sea. But you stop to think. And the image of the queen and the Queen both come to mind.

__________

II. But How in the World Can You Translate Something Like That?

I’m not sure, but I think it’s a good example of why poems as resonant as Rilke’s benefit from regular re-translation. It’s a commonplace observation that Rilke has become overdone in English. There are commercial reasons for this—he’s in the public domain, and most of the selections sell. Sadly, most of the selections read like workshopped versions of each other. So the only reason to do another version is to try to bring something across that hasn’t been attempted. And I think that’s a good enough reason here.

__________

III. So Here’s the Attempt

Some tricks just can’t be duplicated. I can’t think of a masculine English noun remotely equivalent to “dance.” My first thought was to just choose “he”—as Silvia seems to have done. Say something like and suddenly he’s utterly on fire.

That’s consistent, it adds a close-up of a face in the crowd that instantly focuses the poem, makes the dance as much a dialogue as a performance. I can understand why Silvia was so incensed at losing this aspect in the translation she read.

But then, is that too onedimensional? Does it lose the resonance implicit in choosing
between images? You could also dodge the issue entirely and say: and suddenly, completely, helplessly: -fire. Leaving out both “he” or “it.”

If you took that approach, you could stretch Beschauer—spectators, watchers—into something more gender specific and overtly erotic, like voyeurs.

But then you lose that wonderful effect of a close-up, zoom in.

And—as Silvia pointed out to me as our dialogue progressed—there’s another subtlety in the way Beschauer is used. This is another masculine noun, but also one that in German normally takes its singular or plural form from whether it’s prefaced by the masculine der (singular) or the feminine article die. In this case, it’s not prefaced by a definite article, because the plural is inferred from Kreis—the circle of spectators.

Even so, Silvia observed—the lack of the usual definite article might subtly nudge the German reader into the ambiguity of er in the standalone line.

Most of this isn’t possible in English. So finally, the best approach may be to try to find the tangled resonance of “he/it” elsewhere in the poem. And just overtly go with what seems Rilke’s intent.

__________

Rainer Maria Rilke

SPANISCHE TÄNZERIN

Wie in der Hand ein Schwefelzündholz, weiss,
eh es zur Flamme kommt, nach allen Seiten
zuckende Zugen streckt -: beginnt im Kreis
naher Beschauer hastig, hell und heiss
ihr runder Tanz sich zuckend auszubreiten.

Und plötzlich ist er Flamme ganz und gar.

Mit Ihren Blick entzündet sie ihr Haar
und dreht auf einmal mit gewagter Kunst,
ihr ganzes Kleid in diese Feursbrunst,
aus welcher sich, wie Schlangen, die erschrecken,
die nackte Arme wach und klappernd strecken.

Und dann: als wurde ihr das Feuer knapp,
nimmt sie es ganz zusamm und wirft es ab
sehr herrisch, mit hochmütiger Gebärde
und schaut: da liegt es resend auf der Erde
und flammt noch immer ergibt sich nicht -,
Doch sieghaft, sicher und mit einem süssen
grüssenden Lächeln hebt sie ihr Gesicht
und stampft es aus mit kleinen festen Füssen.

Rainer Maria Rilke
—tr. Art Beck


SPANISH DANCER

The way a sulfur match, cupped in the hand, whitens
before it flames, licks out in every direction: –
within the intent ring of watching eyes,
the quick, bright heat of her circling
feet shivers until it flares.

And suddenly he and the dance are altogether fire.

With a blink, she ignites her hair,
then instantly with seductive mastery,
whirls her entire dress into the bonfire
from which her naked arms rear
up like startled rattlesnakes.

As the fire finally clings to her like a slip,
she strips it off completely, aristocratically tosses
it aside with a haughty shrug. And watches:
There it lies, smoldering on the ground, still
burning and unwilling to surrender. And with
a smile on her face and a sweet “hello,” she
stamps it out with small, sure steps.

from Rattle e.6, Spring 2009 (PDF)

__________

Art Beck is a San Francisco poet and translator who’s published two translation volumes: Simply to See: Poems of Lurorius (Poltroon Press, Berkeley, 1990) and a selection Rilke (Elysian Press, New York, 1983). He’s currently trying to atone for some of his earlier Rilke versions by retranslating the Sonnets to Orpheus.

Silvia Kofler teaches at Rockhurst University and is editor/publisher of the poetry magazine, Thorny Locust. Her latest poetry collection, Radioactive Musings, was included in the Kansas City Star’s Top 100 books of 2007 by local authors.

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September 3, 2011

Maryhelen Snyder

THE ART OFWAITING:
THE PARALLELS OF POETRY AND THERAPY

O you and me at last, and us two only!
—Walt Whitman

There are only the two of us. The poet and the page. The therapist and the client. These are the central creative activities of my life. And each is an intimate experience that I and others have compared to that of being a midwife. Because the fact is that the primary satisfaction lies in waiting. And then, as a poem or a person emerges, in being receptive, and sometimes astounded.

Neuroscience is daily revealing more about the not-yet-formulated, not-yet-materialized energy of the brain in repose, an energy virtually infinite and vastly more intense than the motor activity of putting language on paper or applying language to therapy. Formulated energy springs from the chaos of possibility. I wait and I trust: trust the muse to tell me what she is wanting to sing, and the client to tell me what is alive in her in this moment.

* * *

Sometimes a client has failed to notice that I am present—or I have failed to notice it myself! We slip into something that is simply a repetition of already thought thoughts, already assumed problems, already stale ways of seeing each other (or, rather, of not seeing). If I notice that I am bored or restless, anxious or discouraged, my task is to be attentive to my mind, to stop with my pen in mid-air so to speak, or stop a therapy session in midsentence. If my client is boring me, then I am boring myself. I might say: Wait, let’s take a moment to notice I’m here, you are there. Two human beings. We matter to each other.

Something shifts. Perhaps we are quiet together, perhaps we take time to breathe, perhaps my client takes time, with my guidance, to experience this moment in his body, in the sights and sounds around us, in his current feelings and thoughts, in our relationship, to discover what wants to be said now. This is a parallel process to the one Lucille Clifton often described as discovering “what the poem wants to say.” What is emergent from the latent energy of the embodied and relational mind, from what neurobiologist and Mindsight author Daniel Siegel describes as the “open ended plane of possibility.”

What is the mysterious “energy” that allows every aspect of the mind to come into play? As though the two hemispheres and the frontal cortex stretching back in evolution to its origins, and all the stuff of existence that makes each self a self-in-world, and the deep “light” within that no-one can name, suddenly got switched to on? Whatever it is, apparently the capacity to surrender to the creative intelligence available to consciousness exists in all of us. Sometimes “we” intend it, sometimes it takes us by surprise without conscious intention.

I watched a documentary on the life of Whitman in which the narrator points to a manuscript revealing the very beginnings of the writing of Leaves of Grass. Whitman’s handwriting suddenly changes. He is become new. Magical and musical language and the truth of experience is available to him as though from a bottomless well.

As therapist and poet, I have done my homework. For some 60 years of my thus-far life, I have been studying my two primary crafts. I have the degrees, the certificates, the licenses, the publications—and I do believe that much of this training and this almost daily practice, have made some difference. But the biggest difference resides in my openness to the shift to a new beginning.

* * *

The word poem comes from the Greek poien, to make or construct. Although my poem can be created within a wide range of structures, I remain conscious, as poet, of each part within the whole, as well as of the whole.

Sometimes I choose my container before embarking. Certainly, in the case of therapy, I have chosen that the session will last a certain amount of time and take place in a certain location. Beyond this, I let the form emerge almost entirely from the co-created meanings that emerge in the therapeutic dialogue. Sometimes I choose to work within a particular structure, as a poet might choose the sonnet form before beginning, or part way through the poem. In my own case, I attempt to never be more committed to the container than to the ever-emergent meaning and “music.” The moment is always guiding me; at least, this is what I strive for.

One structure that has come to define my work as a therapist is that of “becoming the other.” This is a form of empathic listening in which I quite literally enter the “lifeworld” of a client by speaking as if I am that client. We don’t understand the neurology of what makes this possible, but Martin Buber found the best language I have discovered to date. He writes of the “bold step” involved in taking the consciousness within another human being into our own. He says that this step requires “the deepest stirring of our own being.” He expressed to Carl Rogers, in a recorded dialogue, his belief that empathy is not an accurate enough word to describe this possibility, that a preferred word is inclusion.

I have a rather strict structure for using this method, a structure I can teach to couples and other therapists in the same way I can teach the form of the villanelle to students of poetry, step by step with examples and practice. But with therapy, as with the poem, following the form will not be
enough.

In one of my favorite sonnets, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote of “Chaos” trapped in a poem:

I have him. He is nothing more nor less
Than something simple not yet understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good.

These lines have precise parallels to the therapeutic relationship and to the client’s struggle with internal chaos. Carl Rogers’ person-centered approach had a rigorous, consistent, and open-ended form to which I can re-call myself when I wander away (and permit the client to wander away) from the flow of creative intelligence that is available when we are listening for it.

What has been called “aesthetic knowing” or “poetic intelligence” is different in nature from reasoned knowing. It informs both poetry and therapy, this in the activity of “becoming the other.” Sometimes I do this silently—in my own mind—as I listen. I attune to the body language and to the implicit meanings. I exercise the miracle of intuition. Einstein tells us that he did not arrive at the theory of relativity with his rational mind. Something else, something inexpressible and inexplicable, happened.

In a play, entitled Explain This Moment, that is likely no longer in print, Harry Willson created this opening scene: A grandfather is dying in the next room (off-stage). His daughter and young grandson are front stage. The boy asks his mother to explain death. She tells him that some things can’t be explained. He looks at her disbelieving, and insists that she can make sense out of death, that everything can be explained. She kneels down in front of him, takes his shoulders between her hands, and looks intently into his face. “All right, then,” she says, “Explain this moment.” I remember a stillness in the audience as we all felt the impossibility of that.

When I consciously choose to enter the space of my poetic intelligence about the other, I say what I did not know I knew about their lived experience. The client often responds with words like these: “How did you know that! I feel exactly what you expressed—but I didn’t know I felt it until you said it. It’s as though two of us existed in my one mind.”

And the truth is that I don’t know how I knew it (as we often don’t know where the clear insight and language of a poem comes from). Nor did I consciously know I knew it until I said it. And I’m not always right, so I quickly self-correct if what I say doesn’t resonate as true for the client. I have no concept of “resistance” in the vocabulary of my work as a therapist. My attunement either fits or it doesn’t.

* * *

There comes a moment (often many moments) in virtually every therapy session and certainly in the creation of any poem when I realize that I don’t know what I am doing or where I am going.

Perhaps relevantly, my mind’s heart just went to the battlefields on which American soldiers currently risk and lose their lives and the lives of our so-called enemy. So I will give space to this flight of my mind away from the apparent subject of this essay. It is perhaps most on the battlefield that we don’t know what we’re doing, where we need to be forgiven because we know not what we do. But it is also on the battlefield that we are taught to act quickly and forge ahead. It is not a moment when we can stand in the stillness of not knowing, not knowing why I am dropping this bomb, killing this man who is likely as young and brave and terrified as myself, destroying this home and family and child, murdering people I would likely love if I knew them. We must act, and act irreversibly. In this respect, the therapist’s role seems more dangerous than the poet’s. In the irreversible present moment, she has the power to allow herself to be seen as an expert, to pathologize, diagnose, medicate or at least recommend medication, hospitalize, intensify self-doubt, hatred and despair. And likewise, she has the expert’s power to encourage, to keep families at least temporarily intact, to heal internalized trauma. She is asked, even begged, to know.

In the therapy session, however, as in the poem, we can and must stand at least for awhile in not knowing. We cannot allow urgency, necessity, or habit to guide us. We must be capable, as Keats’ often quoted letter to his brother reminds us, of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without
any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

This concept of opening space wide for not knowing allows something to happen that is contrary to all our pedagogy and up-bringing and to cultural discourses worldwide. It is no wonder that the oracle at Delphi was amazed by Socrates. How did he achieve this wisdom of knowing that he did not know? My favorite therapists and philosophers and poets have stood in this space. Quakers have no creeds or beliefs. They perceive the “inward light” as either an actual lived experience, or not. They perceive Jesus as one who experienced the “Father” (not a gendered word in Aramaic) in himself and in us. Faith, then, becomes a commitment to such experience, a willingness to trust it. This awareness is at the heart of all so-called religious experience, but often gets lost in the rigidities of institutions and rituals and cultural discourse.

Again, we can’t explain this with our rational minds. What does it mean for a poem or a human being to embrace nothingness, emptiness, and notknowing? The poet Rumi wrote, “Way out beyond ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” These words are widely quoted because we know what they mean experientially without being able to explain them any more clearly than in poetic language. The didactic poem and the didactic therapist may be momentarily reassuring—but we require the mystery. We do not want these lines from famous poems to be explained or turned into the prose of interpretation; they can’t be.

* * *

The poet makes of experience a metaphor, from the Greek metapherein, “to carry beyond.” This metaphorical experience of carrying, or being carried, beyond the event itself, to its hidden and potential meaning is the impetus and the result of the creative acts of poetry and therapy.

A powerful “mystical” experience in my own life occurred several weeks after my older son almost died of a grand mal seizure that left him not breathing, and then unconscious for close to an hour. I was terrified. One day, with a friend, I was exploring my fear, entering it as fully as I knew how, when these words “came” to me fully formulated and not rationally believable: We live in an absolutely perfect universe, and the whole thrust of existence is to participate in that already existing perfection. I could not accept this with my rational mind—but the words seemed to literally push against my locked voice and cry themselves out. And when I said them, over and over and over, they felt right to me—and I cried with the release of fear
and grief.

The etymology of the word perfect reveals that it means made thorough, through and through. It is not a static end point; it is a context, an ever-repeated origin for the infinite nature of creation. The poet and the therapist, alive in the movement-in-relation that is our actual experience, allow our love affair with the world to step forward, not in spite of the mundane or the tragic, not in spite of failure and betrayal and loss, but with all of it in the embrace of radiant consciousness.

* * *

A final word about the nature of this creative energy. I drove down a street in my neighborhood many years ago listening to an audio tape of a talk given by Krishnamurti. He was describing the difference between effort and energy, how energy comes to us most often when we give up all effort. A man had come to Krishnamurti because he was suffering with the knowledge that he had not really loved his now deceased wife. Krishnamurti simply invited him (them) to sit quietly with the fact of that. At a certain moment in this practice of stillness and waiting, the man felt an “enormous energy” arising out of the darkness of his experience, and “that,” said Krishnamurti, “was love.”

__________

Maryhelen Snyder is a psychotherapist and writer living in northern Virginia. Her poems and essays have appeared or will appear in numerous literary journals, including, most recently, The Gettysburg Review, Sojourners, and Passager. She has published two books of poetry and a memoir, No Hole in the Flame (Wildflower Press, 2008). Her essay on the work of Emily Dickinson, “Guarding Master’s Head,” appeared in last winter’s issue of Poet Lore.

from Rattle #34, Winter 2010

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June 18, 2011

Richard Brostoff

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN POETRY AND PSYCHOLOGY

Blake, in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, embraces an inversion of our conventional beliefs: “It indeed appear’d to Reason as if Desire was cast out, but the Devil’s account is that the Messiah fell & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss.” What poetry may refer to as the abyss, our wilderness or wild, psychology more likely refers to as the unconscious. Poetry offers psychology its own perspective on the reaches of this realm, a unique repository not only of energy, but also of imagery, metaphor, paradox, inversion, contradiction, and often enough, beauty. Rather than a territory to be conquered, poetry valorizes and embraces the resources of the unconscious; it celebrates rather than subdues its creative genius. The poem invites our fascinated commerce with our deep world beneath the world; it invites us to linger in the sensory experience of its inhabiting. Stay awhile, it says.

Often enough, having entered an underworld, the poem suggests: you were here once, lived here, knew this, and the sense of discovery is a bit like walking into that odd, half-ruined city below the city in Rome—sitting there all the time waiting to be recovered, entered and explored in all its strangeness. At other times our underground world opens like a brief visitation. As Jane Hirshfield has written: “There are openings in our lives/ of which we know nothing./ Through them/ the belled herds travel at will,/ long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.” (Hirshfield, 3)

The psychological view comes to us from Freud, who believed the unconscious was a realm to be journeyed to, conquered and tamed. If Freud’s early ambition was to be a military general, he found, ironically, not an external front but an internal frontier to be subdued. For Freud, the domain of aggressive and libidinal impulses was largely instinctual, and unconscious energies were, at best, to be sublimated. If psychoanalysis’ methods allowed entrance to this unseen world, it was not to linger and bring back its wisdom, but, through insight, to make conscious and therefore colonize its foreignness and potentially dangerous energy: “the therapeutic effort of psycho-analysis…is to strengthen the ego, to widen its field of vision, and so to extend its organization so that it can take over new portions of the id. Where id was, there shall be ego.” (Freud, 80) Freud’s extraordinary discovery of an alternate, secret world inside each of us is often underappreciated, the idea having become integrated into our cultural ideology. Yet, while disturbances of the psyche, a kind of overflow of the “id,” can lead to dis-ease, excess or psychosis, Freud may have nonetheless undervalued the unique resources of the void or abyss, of chaos, of strangeness itself.

Of course the terrain of poetry is not one of unstructured wilderness; it insists, much like psychology, on the ordering, structuring principle of craft (in some ways analogous to the ego or analyst), which holds, with form, in dynamic tension the disorder and storm force of the abyss. In the vessel of language, irreducible metaphor and structure, poetry holds in suspension contradiction and paradox, our conflicts and wild energies; it achieves a dynamic balance between the visible and invisible worlds, surface and depth, valorizing neither at the expense of the other.

On the surface of things, of course, the mediating presence of language is the essential medium of psychotherapy as well as poetry. If one wants to understand the life of another realm, another country, and communicate with those who live there, one must become conversant in their language. Poetry offers a less abstract, more sensory, Anglo-Saxon directness—a language of the body, as opposed to a more conceptual, Latinate language. At worst, the intellectual language of psychoanalysis serves as an obstacle course to feeling. When I return to my psychotherapy office in the afternoon, after writing a poem in the morning, my mind is more fluent and at ease with trope. As is true for our dream life, image and metaphor suggest an older, primal means of understanding and representing the world, a language in themselves. The practice of writing facilitates the metaphormaking facility of imagination (that sixth sense, as Emerson suggested), which has its roots planted in the unconscious. Like a traveler in a foreign country, one becomes immersed in its odd expressions and syntax, conversant with the illogical logic of its ways, entranced with its strange linguistic fauna and flora. Falling into the rabbit hole of imagination, into my shadow world certain mornings, warms up my ability to speak the dialect of the place, and therefore aids me as a therapist in speaking more directly to another’s wilderness, to the precincts of the heart. It aids in piercing the elaborate web of resistances and defenses on the borders of the deep life, in piercing the veil of our everyday lives.

Still, poetry is entranced not only with the strangeness and signification of our deep life’s language, but with the materiality of verbal surfaces, texture and tone, sonic life—the music of its making. I believe the psychologist is enlivened, steadied in his or her joint journey with a client by this simultaneous appreciation for the surface—the “manifest content” of the patient’s associations as well as its “latent content,” to use the language Freud used to discuss the interpretation of dreams. Close attention to verbal construction, to rhythm and the orchestrations of sound—to the aesthetic surfaces of a patient’s “productions”—energizes the journey, and, often enough, offers a portal to the interiors. Curiosity, deep attention, appreciation for the forms of our expressions—these are crucial values of the poet no less than the therapist. Fascination with the surface draws us in, invites us to “know the world more magnificently,” as Jane Hirshfield has said of poetry, and is the hook that draws us into depth.

Yet if a fascination with “surfaces” remains an energizing value of poetry, and a potential source of illumination for psychology, no less important is poetry’s comfort with uncertainty. Poetry, like the unconscious, is a domain of “ands” rather than “ors,” tolerates and even valorizes contradiction, drift and counter drift; it multiplies its meanings, embraces difference, remains comfortable with its elusiveness, its mystery. “Do I contradict myself, very well, then I contradict myself,” as Whitman wrote. How much room there is for multiple truths, for the slipperiness of truth, its fragmentary nature, its penchant toward inversion. Poetry is as likely to gesture toward or deconstruct its own assertions as to finally insist on them. Psychology interprets; poetry leans into its truths. It “tells it slant,” as Emily Dickinson said. Poetry is less likely to offer an overarching interpretation of its images and associations. The poet surrenders to his or her journey of discovery, without restless hankering after final truths; he practices, as Keats called it, “negative capability.” Poetry therefore keeps one humble as a therapist, suspicious of too much didacticism, definitive or final truth—suspicious of the one who, finally, knows. It’s not that the therapist or analyst wants to deconstruct him or herself, or fail to offer guidance and interpretation, or surrender the authority at best earned through study and experience, but rather to be wary, and to allow some of the values of poetry to penetrate the inevitable fault lines of his or her psychological and conceptual terrain.

One central aspect of that psychotherapeutic terrain and its framework remains Freud’s suggestion that the therapist be a kind of blank slate onto which the patient might project pieces of him or herself or his or her past. Analysts have therefore traditionally attempted to remain reasonably silent. Elsewhere Freud advises the analyst to have the objectivity and distance of a surgeon. The risk is in becoming absent, a kind of absentee landlord of the patient’s psychic real estate. When I attended my first analytic conference in medical school in the late seventies, I was surprised to find the central discovery of several papers presented that afternoon was that the analyst’s real presence mattered, that there were in fact two people in the room.

Poetry has served as a kind of model for me in this regard, because one of its central impulses is toward presence: it seeks to embody itself in the moment of its activation as it is read, to embody and unfold itself in voice, breath, and rhythm, and in the particularity of the world. Rather than beginning with an overarching interpretive frame as psychology does, poetry begins in specificity. It feeds the phenomenal world through the eye of its needle, takes up residence, and seeks to waken itself. While it searches out “insight” as well, it does so as a flowering on the taproot and stalk of its inhabiting presence. Poetry reminds me to lean into my inhabiting presence as a therapist, as well as to keep building toward understanding from the ground up, from specificity, from “the thing itself ” as Williams said; it reminds me not to be overly attached to what Nietzsche calls a “reification” of our ideas and interpretive frame. “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove,” the therapeutic hour, like the poem, “must ride on its own melting,” as Frost would have it, finding its own pathway and “law” as it goes.

Of course one might equally well outline the multiple ways psychology illuminates, even nurtures the poet and the poem. Certainly, psychology’s conceptual framework and methods, its lens, can be extraordinarily helpful in interpreting image and metaphor, the “associations” of an early draft, and therefore help the author find a poem’s “focus.” It can be terrifically helpful for writer’s block, or helping the poem “come out,” to say all it needs to say, or to understand and overcome, or perhaps embrace its resistances, or to understand the poem’s “transference” to an audience. But I mean only to be suggestive here. These ideas are for another essay.

A larger question remains: To what extent can poetry and psychotherapy mutually illuminate the shadows of the other? In a dialogue between poet and psychologist, how often might one attempt to dominate or colonize the conceptual or artistic domain of the other, or is it possible for each to engage in mutual, concentrated listening, allowing the brightness of the other to expand the realm of his or her awareness? What remains critical is to find a mutually empowering manner of relating in which neither dominates, but nudges one another toward their distinct, sometimes mysterious selves. At best they might throw one another into relief, clarify their respective resources, their particular “genius.” Science has taught us when two ecosystems meet and overlap, land and ocean for instance, sudden fresh pockets of life appear, new niches where life might be nurtured. Similarly, when two disciplines meet, such as poetry and psychology, one might hope they settle into a long-lasting relationship in which the vital contribution of each creates new forms of understanding, as well as the rich unfolding of the other.

__________

WORKS CITED

Hirshfield, Jane. “The Envoy,” Given Sugar, Given Salt (Perennial, 2002).

Freud, Sigmund. “Lecture 31,” New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Standard Edition of the Complete Works of SigmundFreud (Hogarth Press, 1932).

__________

Richard Brostoff is a psychiatrist and has worked in the mental health field for over 25 years. He studied literature at Bennington College and Brandeis, and medicine at Duke and Harvard. His literary work has appeared in Texas Review, Atlanta Review, Gulf Stream, Confrontation, Permafrost, Wisconsin Review, Magma (London), Verse Daily, and many other journals. His chapbook, Momentum, was published by La Vita Poetica. In 2000, Brostoff was awarded the grand prize at the AEI International Poetry Festival, and in 2003 was editor’s choice for the Robert Penn Warren Award. He also received an international publication award from the Atlanta Review and was a finalist for the Iowa Review Poetry Prize in 2010.

from Rattle #34, Winter 2010

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June 4, 2010

T. S. Davis

THE RECRUDESCENCE OF THE MUSE: ONE POET’S JOURNEY

Freedom is only truly freedom when it appears against
the background of an artificial limitation.
          —T. S. Eliot

Rhythm and rhyme. Rhythm and rhyme. Rhythm and
muthafucking rhyme.
          —George Clinton

I went through graduate school in poetry under the workshop paradigm that came to dominance in the 1960s as a result of professors who had rejected formal verse for free verse in their own writing. The thinking was that there was no need to teach the outdated metrical rules, forms, and techniques of traditional poetry because rhyme and meter had been replaced universally by free verse. In many cases, this resulted in an abdication of teaching altogether and the professor became simply a workshop facilitator for the many student voices who critiqued each other’s work. This was a qualitative change in the study of prosody which is the study of rhythm, rhyme, meter, stress, and language in poetry. For the first time, poets were being trained to be poets without being taught the traditional techniques of writing poetry. I could understand the teaching of the techniques of free verse in place of rhyme and meter, but free verse prosody itself seemed to be in its exuberant infancy, and still not well defined, despite 100 years of Whitman’s progeny. So no system of versification, whether traditional or modern, was taught. The only prosody I learned was that of my fellow graduate students as we sat around and talked about our poems and how to write them. For two decades afterwards, by default, I wrote free verse poetry pretty much exclusively.

Except that I also wrote songs and was the singer for several rock bands. As I brought my poetry skills to bear on my lyrics, the use of meter and rhyme in my songs began to influence my poetry. Soon, even without music, I found myself counting measures and stresses and enjoying a newfound strength in the implosive power of a more formal prosodic structure. The line between my poems and songs began to blur as more frequently I took poems and adapted them to rhyming lyrics.

I remember looking at one of my older poems one day. It had been written back in the graduate school workshop almost twenty years before. Out of habit, I scanned the unrhymed lines to determine the rhythm pattern. To my surprise and revelation, I had written a perfect iambic pentameter blank verse poem at a time when I prided myself as a rebel against convention. Iambic pentameter is a line of ten syllables with the rhythmic stress on every other syllable, for a total of five stresses or beats per line.

Although there are many other rhythm patterns, iambic pentameter poetry constitutes the overwhelming majority of all English poetry written prior to the twentieth century. The fact that I could unconsciously but flawlessly write an entire poem using that rhythm made me think that somehow it was not just an artificial construction but one of the natural and fundamental rhythms of the English language, maybe even its heartbeat. Yet as a poet, I was ignorant of how to consciously manipulate it, or any of the other accoutrements of traditional prosody, to my own ends. At that moment, I knew this had to change if I were to grow as a poet. I could not afford to ignore what had been so painstakingly learned and perfected by generations of poets before me. To figure out where poetry was going, I felt I had to know where it was coming from. Or as Eliot put it, “There is no escape from metre; there is only mastery.”

That was the day I started teaching myself the prosody that had its antecedents in old Anglo-Saxon—the language modern English grew out of—the prosody that was born in Chaucer, and then refined through Shakespeare, Pope, Keats, and countless others. I realized I had accepted the benefits of the new without bothering to learn the lessons of the old.

At the same time, in the late 1980s, I was also beginning to listen to hip hop under the influence of my young nephew, who was still in high school, and had made it his goal to open his old rocker uncle’s ears to the new sound by sending tape after tape of his favorite groups. I was often amazed. Present were many of the elements of free verse prosody wedded to heavily cadenced rhyme: vocal presence or persona, wordplay, the specificity of vocabulary first engineered by Whitman, speed and breath control, the most personal of details jumbled with broad political swipes, braggadocio and humor, repetition and litany, all tied together with heavy meter and rhyme.

I started scanning the lyric sheets from Public Enemy and other groups. There were lots of metrically irregular lines, but iambic pentameter and tetrameter (four beats per line) tended to predominate. The traditional metrical “rules” were broken wide open, such as the prohibition against rhyming unstressed or weak syllables. In fact, what was considered frivolous and even clownish in traditional rhyming was the mark of highest skill in hip hop—the rhyming of words with multiple syllables or all the syllables of a multi-syllabic word being rhymed with a run of shorter words. Several slant or off rhymes could be used to “evolve” a rhyme into a completely different rhyming sound in the course of several lines. Enunciation could be exaggerated to make assonant and consonant rhymes prominent. These last two skills are what make Eminem such an amazing rapper, for instance. Traditional prosody tries to hide end rhyme with enjambment, making sure the sentence does not end with a rhyming word at the end of a line, but instead wraps into the next line. This hides the sound of the end rhyme in the middle of the sentence. But in hip hop prosody, the rhyme is proudly emphasized. In fact, overwhelming the listener with a plethora of rhyming sounds is much of the point in hip hop.

How ironic that as free verse prevailed from mid-century onward, it took a group of artists from outside the academy, way outside, from America’s black ghettoes, to revolutionize poetic prosody irrevocably, despite their lack of acknowledgement from the academy even today. I think the academy preferred to set up the more pedantic of the New Formalists as a less dangerous paper tiger to argue against. At least the New Formalists flattered the academy by desiring recognition from it. But doctrinaire fascination with traditional technique, combined with contempt for Modernism, made the New Formalists an easier target to be labeled reactionary, thus discrediting their return to form.

So the true innovators in the resurgence of formalism were the rappers who embraced the power of rhythm and rhyme but radically transformed both to meet the needs of their content, breaking and making rules as they went. Being outside the academy, the full impact of their influence has yet to be felt. But it eventually will be, in the same way, for instance, that Bob Dylan and John Lennon tangentially influenced an earlier generation of poets. The impact has already been fully felt among younger poets, slam poets, and performance poets in general who eagerly use the full toolbox of techniques available to them including meter and rhyme. One prominent example of this new type of poet who commands respect in hip hop and academic circles is Saul Williams.

Ironically, some in the academy complain that this formalism among rappers and young performance poets has occurred without conscious awareness or appreciation of traditional English prosody. They may have a point. But they can’t have it both ways. As guardians of the canon, they hid the keys to the toolbox and then complained that the keys were stolen.

T. S. Eliot himself had predicted that the free verse experiments of Modernism would eventually lead poets back to formalism. He saw the deviation from traditional prosody as a necessary corrective, as a “contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse.” Presumably, the same fate of monotony would eventually befall free verse itself without an infusion of formalism for contrast. Eliot explains himself best in his essay “Reflections on Vers Libre” from which the quotes above are taken. But he demonstrates his concept of contrasting fixity with flux most demonstrably in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

A couple of years ago, I was asked back to my undergraduate alma mater for a poetry reading and to sit in on a class taught by my old mentor, the poet Ron Bayes. Ron is an excellent teacher. He is a Modernist, an Imagist, a Pound scholar, and completely eclectic in his aesthetic tastes. What little I knew about formalism before graduate school I had learned from him as an undergraduate when he had made me write in all the major forms, much to my grumbling and dislike at the time.

The class was discussing “Prufrock” that day and I was expected to provide them with some insight into the master. I had dusted off my slim volume of Eliot in preparation and reread the poem for the hundredth time. But since the last time I had read it, I had written about 75 Shakespearian sonnets. A sonnet is typically a fourteen line poem of iambic pentameter meter with a strict end rhyming pattern. The type of sonnet written by Shakespeare always ends with a rhyming couplet. So my eye was trained to take in fourteen lines at a gulp. My mouth dropped open as I read the first stanza, composed of twelve lines, followed by a space, and then the famous rhyming couplet, “In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo,” for a total of fourteen lines.

This was something I had read many times, but never really recognized for what it is. Eliot opened “Prufrock” with an embedded sonnet! Can this really be, I thought? I scanned ahead. The next time the famous couplet appears in the poem, it’s also preceded by a discrete stanza of twelve lines. Quickly I looked back to the beginning sequence to scan the meter. Four beats, five beats, six beats, three beats per line, and so on, irregular regularity, the way some heartbeats are classified. Taking into account slant rhyme and off rhyme, I scanned the sonnets this way. The first I artificially broke into lines of three, tercets, to make the rhyme structure more obvious: AAB CCB BDD EFF GG. For the second I used the traditional quatrain, lines of four, to the same purpose: ABCA BDCD EFFE GG. From these scansions, it was clear to me that Eliot fully knew what he was doing. Continuing to read through, I found other remnants of form, pieces of potential sonnets, but never again complete fourteen line poems.

I pointed all this out to the class, using a chalk board to demonstrate, letting them sound out the beats and rhymes. It seemed to be a revelation to them as well. I suggested that this poem was the object lesson of the place Eliot occupied in poetry. He relied heavily on forms, but shattered them for contrast, for fluidity, for the sake of the poem rising out of the ruins of what had gone before. I suggested the class look at the poem structurally as a tightly controlled explosion of form to counter the prevailing view that Eliot wrote outside of form, or formlessly. I suggested his work echoed the cubism of Picasso, built upon and growing out of the representation that preceded it, but deconstructing it, taking it apart and exposing its architecture to suggest that what we take for granted as natural is really just the bias of familiarity. The poem demonstrated Eliot’s point in its transmogrification of the old into the new. Eliot knew the old rules. But he had the street cred and the balls to break them.

Eliot’s concept is not that far from Robert Frost’s notion: “Work easy in harness.”

When I started my self-study of traditional English prosody, I set myself the task of learning the old rules, the old forms, with the clear intention of using what I learned to push my own poetry into the future, to build on the prosody of the canon, including the prosody of free verse incidentally, but to “Make it new,” in the words of Ezra Pound. What I did not anticipate, but probably should have, was that the form would also make me new.

In my own writing, primarily Shakespearian sonnets now, I often deviate from the traditional metrical rules of accentual syllabic poetry by using a looser and freer scansion that conforms to my own idiosyncratic modern ear. Instead of parsing each arcane type of metrical unit (and practically every rhythmic deviation from iambic pentameter has a name), I count the overall beats in the line in much the same way it was done in Old English or Anglo-Saxon, the predecessor to Modern English. In my prosody, any number of unstressed syllables can be glossed over because what really matters is that strong thumping beat, similar to the sprung rhythm of Gerard Manley Hopkins. And like Geoffrey Chaucer, who basically “invented” iambic pentameter by combining the heavily stressed beats of Anglo Saxon with the syllabic poetry of his day, I have no prohibition on using a four beat or six beat line as needed. In fact, I often use the hexameter or Alexandrine couplet (six beats per line) for the final rhyming couplet of a sonnet. If the Alexandrine line divides naturally into two tercets, I find that the rhythm signals a distinctive counterpoint to the preceding pentameter. It slows down the reading and creates a visceral change in emotional content.

My cobbled aesthetic creates its own acceptance problems when I submit my poems for publication. On the one hand, I’ve received letters from editors who heartily objected to my formalism. On the other hand, I’ve received letters from editors who heartily objected to my cavalier notions of scansion when all my lines were not perfect iambic pentameter. I’ve found my work is often considered too formal for the free verse mags, too ragged for the formal mags. But what I find particularly comical are some of the descriptions of what an editor is looking for in Poet’s Market. Often an editor will say that if a submission is rhymed, it must be of the “highest quality,” whereas no such demand is enjoined on free verse. Apparently mediocre free verse submissions are less suspect and welcomed. Editors also ask that no “greeting card verse” be submitted, but apparently no restrictions apply to unrhymed free verse doggerel.

When I was a young man, I was much more confident about my ideas of the world and the impact I intended to have on the world. I had no doubt that my art, obscure as it was at the time, would one day take its place in the great canon of literature. I had all the time in the world to make it so. But now, at the age of sixty, I no longer have that time, and I certainly haven’t received the level of accolade that as a young man I had anticipated would automatically follow the recognition of what I naively thought was my undeniable talent. It has not helped me, of course, to buck the dominant academic paradigm of free verse with my turn to an invented formalism in late career. I look back wistfully, not so much with regrets, as with the desire to be able to talk to that young man, to tell him some things I have learned about the nature of life, and of poetry.

But looking back, I also realize I didn’t have much to say then in my poetry that wasn’t just an extension of my fairly rigid ideology. The older I got the less confident I was and the more I understood how little I knew about the world and how little my work is likely to influence the world. Paradoxically, now I seem to have more to say and I’m a better writer than I’ve ever been, though less well known than I once was. Somehow one needs to know less to know more.

I often think about the story of Antonin Artaud. He sent some poems to an editor who basically told him they sucked. Artaud struck up a correspondence with him, vehemently defending and explaining in prose pieces his rejected poems. The editor replied that the poems still sucked but that his defense of them—full of angst and passion and paradox—was brilliant, and he wanted permission to publish it. Those pieces became the prose poetry for which Artaud is most revered today. And his rejected poems still suck!

What this says to me is that beneath the assertion, is the real question.

I toyed with rhyme and meter for years, working it into my poems, creating new forms of my own fancy. And then one day in 2002, under the influence of a cobalt blue Arizona sky, alcohol, and John Keats, I took a leap and started writing Shakespearian sonnets, one after the other, exclusively. The first ones were like a child’s finger-painting, full of spirit, but naïve, as I was somewhat ignorant of what I had undertaken. But the sonnets came one after another, usually one a week, for months, and I was exhilarated. After a couple dozen, I thought if Shakespeare could write 154 of these suckers, then I can write 155! And so I set myself the juvenile task of doing just that. As stupid as that may sound, it has often been a motivator for me when nothing else was. I just recently broke through 100 sonnets, some good, some bad, but I continue to write them. But the better I get at writing sonnets, which is another way of saying the better I become at understanding the form of the sonnet, the harder they become to write, and the longer they take.

From the beginning what really surprised me was this: I didn’t know where they were coming from.

When I started writing poetry over 40 years ago, I wrote all free verse. I was making up all the rules then under the influence of the Modernists, deciding the shape or shapelessness of each poem according to what I needed to express myself, yet much of what I wrote then tended to sound the same. My content determined my form. And there is a point of view that says that is as it should be, that form should serve content.

But now, 40 years later, I come to the same template for each poem—fourteen lines of iambic pentameter with a rigid rhyme scheme—yet I am continually amazed at how different each sonnet can end up sounding, at how this form can put the poetry under such intense pressure and yield such different results.

I’m also amazed at what I end up saying because usually I’m six to eight lines into the sonnet before I know what the poem is actually about, such are the hidden alleyways that rhyme and form lead you through. Toi Derricotte, in an interview in Rattle, once said, “I think a lot of times poems know things that we’re not ready to know yet, and we write the poem and then we figure it out.”

And even when I do know, I never know how it will end until it just does, because the rhyme controls where it goes. And that’s really odd because there is no stronger nor assertive couplet in English prosody than lines thirteen and fourteen of a Shakespearian sonnet. How could one start a sonnet not knowing where it’s going but knowing that twelve lines later a lyrical certainty, an epigram of unimpeachable elegance, would be required?

What this says to me is that beneath the question, is the real assertion.

It also says that my form determines my content.

Or maybe something else does, masquerading as form.

At the risk of waxing mystical, I must admit that writing sonnets has rejuvenated my belief in what the ancients called the Muse. Sonnets can be incredibly labor intensive and agonizing to write. So “finding” my way through the maze that the form creates, eliminating one rhyming dead end after another yet eventually coming out the other end, all gives me the strong intuitive feeling that I have been guided, led, coaxed into places I would not normally go by the “form” and made to discover what seems to have already and always existed. The more well wrought the sonnet, the more organic it feels, the harder it is to imagine a time when it did not exist.

This is a shock for a long time materialist such as myself. I do not pretend to understand it. I often feel like a translator of an ancient language no one else speaks with an incumbency to ensure the received wisdom is meticulously transcribed and correct. I never really felt that way writing free verse. Writing free verse, I often felt the exhilaration of what Kerouac called “spontaneous composition” when a free verse piece seemed to burst forth from nowhere completed on first writing with little or no editing needed. But I never felt the deep laborious ache that resolves so beautifully at the end of writing a good sonnet.

I have learned a few things about Shakespearian sonnets, commensurate with my modest chops. I usually start with a line I really like. Since I usually don’t know what I’m doing, I might as well start with something I like. There is absolute freedom in that first line, in fact, in the first two lines. But after that, the direction is dictated by the rhyme. If you’re used to writing free verse, this will come as a shock to you. You will need to learn to follow, not lead, or you will quickly find yourself down a rhymeless dead end, a babbling cul de sac, and have to hit the backspace key over and over until you’ve eaten that first line or two you loved and you’re staring at blank paper again. That’s when what you thought this sonnet was about crumbles and you realize George Clinton nailed it: “Rhythm and rhyme. Rhythm and rhyme. Rhythm and muthafucking rhyme.” At that point you have a choice to make: quit, or trust the form to show you where to go.

Years ago, when I told a poet friend I was writing sonnets, he said that he assumed I was writing a free verse poem first and then manipulating it to make the shoe fit. I just laughed at the fanciful notion that I could impose the sonnet onto a poem. No, instead, the sonnet allows entrance—what you do inside determines whether you’re worthy of the form. It doesn’t conform to you; you conform to it.

But even with the form pulling you in the direction of a particular rhyming sound, the choices of where you can go in the labyrinth of the sonnet are still pretty much inexhaustible. Yet like the I Ching, the wisdom a sonnet can reveal as you write it is often serendipitous.

You may choose to bleed a sentence from the first quatrain into the second quatrain at line five in a Shakespearian sonnet, and that’s okay, but unless you wish to drive yourself crazy, truly crazy, trust me, put a period at the end of line eight. The first eight lines set up the problem. Line nine is “the turn,” and like “the river” in poker, fortunes should change, possibilities appear, or more in keeping with the extended metaphor, you should feel the centrifugal force of going too fast around a hairpin curve. So like Shakespeare himself, start line nine with a nice qualifier, such as but, or yet, or at least start a new sentence to signal your reader that change is coming.

You’ve now only got four lines to solve your dilemma. By now, the sonnet should have revealed to you what it’s about, what problem you are trying to resolve. Only four lines are left to basically end the poem, the first time, that is. Most sonnets have an organicity, a degree of resolution, by the end of line twelve. But it ain’t over yet: the biggest challenge of any Shakespearian sonnet is the final rhyming couplet.

The word sonnet in Italian means “little song.” And it is that, but “little” is also deceptive. A sonnet is little in the way a firecracker is little or in the way a toddler squalling his heart out on the floor is little. I think of the sonnet as a pattern of energy tightly pressurized and shaped by the tight constraints of the form. Eliot’s injunction of an “artificial limitation” is relevant again. At the risk of sounding ludicrous, I compare a sonnet to the internal combustion engine. Gasoline will always burn, but if you add a spark to a mixture of gasoline and air inside a cylinder, the resulting explosion is shaped by the cylinder and directed toward the end where a piston moves. It is the constraint of energy that creates the power. In a sonnet, that constrained energy is directed toward the final rhyming couplet, and the power, the tension, is released there. The couplet is no denouement. It is a full on climax, in every nuance of the word.

The final rhyming couplet is why I write Shakespearian sonnets instead of Petrarchan sonnets. Those two lines can be some of the most powerful and elegant lines in English poetry. They definitively end the sonnet on a much higher level of meaning than line twelve, while often standing alone at the same time as though a rarefied form of English haiku: “In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo.”

A sonnet needs its couplet, but a couplet can often lead its own life. Any of us would be proud to be included in the canon for a body of work, for a book, or for a single poem. I would settle for a single rhyming couplet, cut off from its sonnet and author, anonymous and unattributed, quoted by unknown speakers at funerals, weddings, toasts, in bars, or in moments of triumph or despair. Is there any higher calling than to put your words on the tongue of the world? That is what the couplet should strive for, that is what anyone as a writer of sonnets should live for.

Unless of course…the couplet is crap. My best critic is Sue, my partner of twenty-five years. I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve thought I was done with a new sonnet, exhilarated that I had stumbled through it gracefully somehow without it all falling apart, and allowing myself to rise after hours of rearranging approximately 125 odd words to read it aloud to her, only to have her say something like: “You know I really like it—up until the last two lines. Somehow they feel a little weak to me. You need to rework them.”

Dejected, intoxicated with rhyme, I’d return to my desk and try once more to fashion two elegant lines, for hours if need be. I try not to stop until I’m done—I don’t dare risk the loss of momentum because I already have too many twelve line sonnets in want of one good couplet sitting stranded and helpless in a digital doc. And if I feel the Muse is listening, real or imagined, you can bet I will continue to quietly sing my “little song,” to whisper my rhymes into the ear of the Muse. I also know that if it comes too easily, somehow it’s not earned. When a breakthrough finally arrives, from somewhere, nowhere, often simple, or obvious, or understated, no matter how tired I am, and sonnets are exceedingly laborious, I feel elated, relieved, awed, overwhelmed, and most interestingly, grateful, not for something I’ve done, but for something I’ve discovered. Any pride I may feel is on behalf of the beauty of the sonnet itself.

As a young man I tried to show the world something that I thought was coming from me. Now I try to show the world something I have found. It can be argued that literary vision is different for the young than for the old. The young choose their ideas and try to change the world with them. And that is good. The old allow the world to change their ideas. And that is good.

Yet I would argue that the path one takes is continuous. The choices you make today are the basis for whom you will become tomorrow. Just as the person you were as a child is still within you, so the person you have not yet become exists within you as well. Just as the person you are today has answers to the questions you asked when you were young, the person you have not yet become has answers to the questions you are asking today. So a conversation with your past and your future is entirely appropriate, necessary, and for poets, that conversation occurs in poetry.

But I do not mean to suggest the way to Nirvana is to ensconce yourself in traditional forms like the sonnet. After all, you are who you are, so “Come as you are,” in the words of Kurt Cobain. In fact, your view of the world and your character may lead you to destroy old forms and invent new ones in the same way Whitman used free verse as an axe to splinter nineteenth century prosody. If the Muse is poetry idealized, then as times change, so must the ideal—the Muse always demands the new. As poets we all need to be cognizant that the new tradition Whitman founded is still the dominant paradigm today and retains the faint aura of insurrection though it is now over 150 years old. No longer the revolution, free verse is now the status quo. And the Muse?—the Muse is bored, has been for a long time.

New art, whatever form it takes, can be brutal when it finally breaks free, suppressing what came before in order to gain dominance. But it also builds on top of what it obliterates. The Modernists ransacked the past for their influences, and they chose well: Greek literature, Japanese and Chinese poetry, the troubadours, Dante, the English Metaphysical poets, among others. What’s important now is not whom they chose, but that they chose. Because that is the task that faces us. All poets before us have stood precisely at the crossroads we now face. We would be stupid to ignore their counsel. Without their work, however antiquated by current popular tastes, our own prosody would not exist. Any true formal revolution in poetry will be a step into the future, not the past. But it is the fixity of the past that distinguishes the flux of the future.

What transcends time and form is the ancient heartbeat of our Mother Tongue, old Anglo Saxon. It beats now strong, now faint, now regular, now irregular, but it beats still today in line after line of your poetry and mine. We can choose to palpate it, or not. But as Chaucer put it, “The lyfe so short, the craft so long to lerne.”

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T. S. DAVIS is the author of two books of poetry, Sun + Moon Rendezvous and Criminal Thawts. He lives in Asheville, NC.

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