August 19, 2012

“Blue Hand” by Virginia SlachmanPosted by Rattle

Virginia Slachman

BLUE HAND

The artist must search deeply into his own soul, develop and
tend it, so that his art has something to clothe, and does not
remain a glove without a hand.
—Wassily Kandinsky

Today at the glass factory I fell in love with a blue-veined reticulated glass

hand. Heavy, cold and translucent, it is not a hand held out in love

or forgiveness. This hand is simply a hand, simply itself

devoid of intention. I admire most, beyond its heft and cool

presence, its detachment. I am much too fond

of detachment. As was Kant; his devotion to disinterest

spawns beauty like Athena sprung from the head of Zeus. Across the way

men in overalls dismantle an old house—whining power tools

mix with wood’s hollow call. I should be reading

Lorca but instead I’m flipping through a book on ornament, page after page

of hand-wrought symmetry in gilt and finely wrought intricacies;

the knots, the flowers, the pendulous, hanging and spotted

pointillistic moments of pure color and form. Today I sent my daughter

a new pair of gloves—black, supple leather with a cashmere lining. I can

still feel the weight and smooth elegance of that blue hand, cold

as my mother’s the day she died. I wasn’t with her though I recall the March

day. I make myself picture touching her hands, cool and a little

blue, the veins full of motionless tide that just seconds before

had rocked to a halt after the pump stilled. For Lorca, the darkness of death

is the light of the imagination. I’m not sorry to be devoid

of feeling. Its absence leaves the mind’s blue light

cool and composed, yet even it struggles against the infinite which is

without reason. There is nothing of use to say about our private

losses. The house across the way is now merely mounds of stacked

bricks—clay and straw molded by men gone to dust long before the cool

calculation of economy judged it

extraneous. The book’s heft contains millennia we’ve strived

against disorder, constructing geometry’s repeatable patterns—

squares the haven of protection, lines of predictable journeys

and a good end; countless lotus baptizing us over and over in pure

radiance. How we make whole the fragments of reason—a vase, a wall,

a stone relief … things that call to mind

what is lost. My talisman is the body’s enactments: a blue hand

standing in a pool of light. And my daughter’s—warm, thriving.

—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011

__________

Virginia Slachman: “My poems are frustrating and bull-headed. This poem (I thought) was about art, about an eerie blue glass hand I saw and couldn’t get out of my mind. But of course it’s not about art. It’s about what terrifies us—love and loss.” (web)

October 25, 2012

STORM CROP by Stacie LeathermanPosted by Rattle

Review by Anita Sullivan Storm Crop by Stacie Leatherman

STORM CROP
by Stacie Leatherman

BlazeVOX [books]
76 Inwood Place
Buffalo, NY 14209
ISBN: 978-1-60964-051-4
2011, 120 pp., $16.00
www.blazevox.org

I admit it. I have a fixed idea of what a poem should do and be. It’s not the same fixed idea still held by many members of the largely non-poetry-reading public, who after 100 years of evidence to the contrary, will persist with the bewildered question, “Isn’t poetry supposed to rhyme?” It’s certainly not the same idea I held five years ago, much less six months. Nonetheless, over many years of relishing what I believe to be an enormous variety of poetic material, I–like many other poets and readers of poetry–have naturally developed a set of limits beyond which a thing simply doesn’t do what I expect poetry to do.

This is reasonable, of course–to have borders around your reading preferences, provided you water them now and then so they won’t petrify or ossify, and you can still chop your way through to the jungle outside. But to be a good reader, when and how am I allowed to be annoyed, puzzled, and just plain bored by a published grouping of words presented to me as “poems,” that, in the end, I am unable to muster any sustained attention for, even if I know the work represents a skilled and passionately realized version of a category of poetry fully robust in our time?

This is the dilemma that I face when I am confronted with what I understand to be “language poetry”–that is, poetry that offers words and word-groupings for their own sake, not so much for what they mean, but simply to let them have a go as beings at large in their own world. I am at a loss to know how to read this stuff.

In my own bewilderment, I hereby offer a brief chronicle of a recent journey through a collection of such poems by Stacie Leatherman, called Storm Crop.

* * *

The collection is arranged as an abecedarium, which means in this case that each poem’s title is simply a letter of the alphabet, in alphabetical order–27 poems including an extra at the end. This would tend to suggest to the reader that the subject matter will be pretty wide open.

Sometimes “abecedarium” is called a poetic form, but I don’t think it is, because letters of the alphabet alone do not invite or cause a repeatable pattern complex enough to wrap itself around an entire poem. Leatherman herself, in an interview with Emprise Review, responds to the matter of the abecedarium by vacillating back and forth between how important form is to her work, and how much she feels the necessity to flout it. “Too much control can be death to a poem,” she says, and on the other hand, “Form has always been important to me.” She seems to regard the abecedarium as a “strict parameter” (i.e. poetic form) and thus chose it as a way to organize her poems. But she adds, “I didn’t do too much C is for that, L is for that, before it started to wander away.” I think she enjoyed keeping the letters as titles because they gave her freedom from form, and offered a lantern in the dark whenever poetic inspiration faltered. Not a bad way to operate at all.

And speaking of lanterns in the dark, the alphabet acted for me as a set of training wheels while I was floundering through the poems trying to figure out how they were meant to be read. In the end, I basically left the fickle alphabet behind, because it seemed to me that what emerged instead of a “form,” or even a coherent set of ideas, was a structure more like subatomic particles in a cloud chamber, tending to coalesce around certain areas or fields. In this case, the two main force fields that I eventually felt my way into were the brain and the body.

All language poetry, by my understanding, is fundamentally word-oriented, and brain-oriented. In using the word “brain” I am deliberately calling up the split between “mind” and “body,” and I would place “brain” firmly with the physical–that is, the bodily realm. This kind of category talk invokes the three-way physical (body), emotional (heart), spiritual (soul, mind, imagination) model that has been around for centuries in a variety of religious and cultural contexts.

I receive Leatherman’s as primarily brain/body poems rather than mind/body poems. And this may be, for me, the rub. Since I am very much a mind and heart poet (I say that clinically, as in a category, not arrogantly, as in “I am a warm vibrant person and you are a cold intellectual fish”), it has been difficult for me to find a way into these poems at all, much less a charitable one. The same holds true for other poems or collections that compute for me as “language poetry.” Here, then, is my–what shall we say–my incomplete gloss of Storm Crop.

* * *

A – The first poem opens with (what turns out to be) a declaration of the brain and body theme: “the body’s metric/not the end but the anarchic, semantic crust….” The reader feels the immediate excitement of a journey that might include tantalizing literary allusions as well as some viscerally satisfying realism.

There is also, in this first poem, the suggestion of a game, a kind of treasure hunt. What are the rules? See if you can find, buried among the wooly fragments, a discrete thread to hold onto. In this case, the thread keeps re-appearing as the letter A itself, standing alone as if it were a character: “A for birds of paradise”; “A is for order. Paradox”; “A for the before that was never before.”

The ascetic, martinet reader is somewhat mollified. Perhaps the seemingly interchangeable sentence fragments that signal this to be language poetry will have a cumulative purpose after all.

B – Here the poet continues the alphabet game with a new device. “Dear B,” the poem begins. How charming! A letter to a letter. Reading further in this lineated poem, I found references to letter-ish matters, such as Braille, “unabridged edition.” And the word “letter” itself is repeated often enough to satisfy the neophyte treasure hunter. In addition, the body is featured as a kind of counter to the brain, so that the reader might begin to think back to the opening of the A poem and suspect “Oh, this collection is going to be a neat game, in which the alphabet is utilized in a dazzling variety of ways, and there is a battlecock and shuttledore between physical and mental….”

Feeling cautiously excited, I moved ahead to C, D, and E.

C – But alas, already the poem seems to regret signing a contract with the abecedarium, and begins to wiggle out of any further obligations to continue that game. Granted, there are a lot of C words poked into this poem, but they lack whimsy, imagination, any suggestion of an attempt to resonate with one another or anything else. They seem to be there simply out of a vague, residual duty to C-ness, with no need for either music or meaning.

D – The alphabet weakens even further. “Eventually D knocks, we want nothing to do with it,” says the poem in the 2nd long paragraph of a four-paragraph prose poem. The poem seems to sputter, making spasmodic feints with the letter as if the poet is trying to work herself up to a subject.

E – This poem is built out of questions which seem to emerge from a despondent lover questioning her value as a physical being. The body theme asserts itself once more. But the questions feel empty, lacking the heft of true anguish. Perhaps if there were a context around them, they would have a chance to growl and crawl and start generating that strange miasma that always seems to rise above a good poem….

At this point (deprived of my miasma) I felt myself descending into a slough of despond, so I thought to change my attitude by changing my reading strategy. This kind of poetry seems to call for a “gang reading” approach–I mean, surely the devotees of the genre must have developed a skimming technique, a way of ingesting all the verbiage that only peripherally involves the expectation of clarity and new insight. I tried a kind of Scrooge McDuck approach–if you remember the Disney comic book character who used to enjoy his swimming pool full of money: “First I dive around in it like a porpoise; then I burrow through it like a gopher; then I toss it up and let it fall onto my head.”

“What’s the speech of sand?” says the F poem, and “Precision, my dear, isn’t everything,” admonishes G.

Bolstered by these insights, I just jumped into the pool, letting the words flow over me, hoping they would sink into nooks and crannies of brain, heart, and spirit they might not usually sink into. Above all, by this time, I wanted to feel something.

I found many wonderful lines, such as “I joyous,” unexpectedly in the middle of the letter J poem. In the L poem I got a sniff of surrealism, and wanted more. The R poem was musical in its religious imagery and repetitions, and probably would qualify as my favorite in the collection.

But. Nevertheless. “What is it, exactly, I missed,” says the Z poem (without a question mark), and I would say the same. For despite my efforts I came away from this collection feeling my insides all cluttered with words, as happens with the flash-flash images during the preview segment of the contemporary movie-theatre experience. I could not get away from my habitual need for some kind of moving-towards, a charging up, a clearing of paths; instead the whole thing felt static, confused, and in some way disingenuous. “What is essential is invisible to the eye,” said the Little Prince, and I agree this might well be so. But in a good poem what is essential is urgently present somewhere, or it is not. Both possibilities do exist. I simply could not, in this collection, read my way into a sufficient vitality to keep my imagination alive.

____________

Anita Sullivan is an essayist and poet who writes about early keyboard temperaments, translation, gardening, religious philosophy and Greek islands. She has published two essay collections, a poetry chapbook and a full-length collection of poems. She is a member of the poetry-publishing collective Airlie Press, and lives in Eugene, Oregon.

March 5, 2013

IN VITRO by Leland JamiesonPosted by Rattle

Review by Preston M. Browning, Jr. In Vitro by Leland Jamieson

IN VITRO: NEW SHORT RHYMING POEMS POST-9/11
by Leland Jamieson

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN-10: 1441471219
ISBN-13: 978-1441471215
2009, 146 pp., $13.95
www.createspace.com

I am a prose man. Although I spent more than thirty-five years teaching in English departments and though my wife, Ann, was a poet and my daughter, Sarah, is a poet as well, poetry was never my real cup of tea. (I probably should confess here that after my first date with the woman who became my wife, I spent the night writing a sonnet for her.) Shakespeare, along with Donne and Milton, had taught me to love the sonnet; Wordsworth’s and Keats’ sonnets also left an indelible memory of greatness. Both in Chicago and in Yugoslavia, where I spent a Fulbright year in the late seventies, I experienced unbounded joy when leading a class through an hour’s discussion of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Teaching Frost, Eliot, Gwendolyn Brooks, Roethke and Sylvia Plath was an unfailing source of satisfaction as well. I have more recent favorites, among them Ernesto Cardenal, Martin Espada, Sam Hamill, Carolyn Forche, Richard Wilbur, Daniela Geoseffi, Roberto Bolano, and Derek Walcott.

But the life blood of my teaching career lay with the fiction writers—Melville, Edith Wharton, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison, Walker Percy, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich, among many others. And Faulkner. Divine Faulkner! More than a decade since my last class, the high I experienced when observing the excitement of students as we explored together that tortured labyrinth Joe Christmas traverses in Light in August still remains fresh in memory. Great poetry I admired; great fiction I virtually worshipped.

Thus when asked to review Leland Jamieson’s second book of poems, In Vitro: New Short Rhyming Poems Post-9/11, I hesitated. But not for long. For Jamieson is a poet of great talent, who has mastered the practice of writing formal verse, and whose work deserves to be more widely known and read. In this volume one finds at every turn of the page poems exhibiting extraordinary agility in yoking together contraries and sometimes (strange) conjunctions leading to the kind of revelations that truly superior poetry always provides.

Specifically, what the reader finds in this poetry is a world where the personal and the philosophical reside harmoniously—and make music together. Many of the poems are dedicated to friends or family members and a good number are rooted in events or relationships involving the poet or close family. Yet Jamieson’s poetry—much of it, at any rate—is nothing if not intellectual. By this I do not mean that it is freighted with big ideas, though it doesn’t hurt to have read some of the writings of Rupert Sheldrake such as The Sense of Being Stared At: and Other Aspects of the Extended Mind or to be familiar with the legends concerning the Anunnaki astronauts that supposedly visited earth many millennia ago, as recounted “in cuneiform on clay tablets sometime prior to the collapse of Sumer in 2023 B. C.”^[1] Jamieson’s major sources for this lore are books by Zecharia Sitchin, Earth Chronicles and The Lost Book of Enki. I shall return to this subject when discussing some of Jamieson’s final selections.

No one contemplating these poems can have any doubt that this writer has spent many years reading philosophy, theology, and recent scientific theories and discoveries; or that the knowledge thus acquired permeates his reflections on life’s disappointments, triumphs, and ironies and the pitfalls that inevitably await those who refuse to learn from the past or whose hubris leads them to assume that their generation or they individually will escape the fate that all humans suffer when they willfully ignore the lessons history or nature might teach them. But these themes are almost always dealt with without the odor of moral superiority—this former preacher seldom preaches.

Another way of coming at this matter is to note that reading In Vitro from beginning to end is like listening as Leland Jamieson recounts memorable events from his life, a sort of poetic memoir—one might even call it an intellectual or spiritual autobiography—highlighting such occasions as the death of his father when the poet was quite young, his mother’s remarriage, going off to an Episcopal boarding school in North Carolina, transferring from Trinity College to UNC at Chapel Hill, getting married to Gretchen, his sweetheart of many years, studying for the ministry, disillusionment with his role as a clergyman, and various efforts—none fully satisfying—to find the right vocation until, that is, he hit upon writing formal verse. Like the accomplished artist he is, this poet brings to bear upon the subject or event an oftentimes surprising discovery of meaning, a kind of “ah ha” moment. Though it’s a minor example in this collection, the following sonnet tells the story.

Scotman’s Prophecy

“I doubt you’ll easily find a line of work
you’ll step irrevocably in, long term,”
a college prof had said. “Your knee may jerk,
but wiggle-worms in you will make you squirm.”
If you’re like some, you’ll think you’ll go beserk
as you try out each job, ‘til one affirms
your joy in it, and lifts your civil smirk
with eyes more lively than a pachyderm’s.”

Turns out my teacher had sure sixth sense.
I first tried out the church, then show biz, life
insurance sales, consulting, thence
recruiting—tiresome, all. Where was that fife
and drum corps I could prance beside for miles … ?
Retired, my ”feet” dance rhymes—my eyes bright smiles.

Here the final two lines do the work of the traditional heroic couplet with revelation laced with irony: Only in retirement did the poet find the vocation that had eluded him in each of the careers he had undertaken. Now it is with dancing “feet” of poetic lines that end with rhymes that a wholly fulfilling vocation has been discovered.

In Vitro contains 88 poems, all of which exhibit Jamieson’s commitment to creating formal verse. Jamieson has stated that “teaching myself to write end-rhyming metrical verse is the single most liberating thing I have ever done in my entire writing life. What it liberates is feeling.” There is nothing very original about this discovery—we might recall Wordsworth’s description of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Shortly, however, we will examine Jamieson’s theories concerning how in formal verse feeling and thought are given equal expression to create a holistic “harmony” in the brain not possible in poetry that eschews regular meter and rhyme.

The sonnet appears to be Jamieson’s favorite form and more often than not the metrical pattern is the traditional iambic pentameter. In this volume, however, we encounter poems of various lengths; one, “No Razzmatazz?” contains nineteen stanzas of seven lines each. Because this poem presents in miniature the poet’s search for and discovery of his true vocation from the time of his arrival, a green, introverted “Florida Cracker,” at Trinity College in Hartford to the moment he knows he’s arrived at his soul’s home, it is worth quoting a few lines from this piece. Here are three stanzas that appear toward the poem’s end.

Such brightness often made him blink,
surprised to stumble on a view,
an overlook that was in sync,
with more than he had known he knew!
Why, he’d not dreamed he had a clue.
Thus deep within each heaving lung
his voice fledged wings for Mother Tongue.

She chants of consciousness man shares
or slowly withers up in drought.
She greens his outlook when she dares
him, “Gaze beyond your known redoubt,
and venture on a walkabout.
Seek vistas new to your eyes’ reach.
I, Mother Tongue, will give you speech.

I am the Future, Presence, Past.
I’m morphic Resonance. I form
chaotic thought and feeling massed
like iron filings quick to swarm
magnetic force fields and transform
themselves with order on a saucer—
looking to force fields for their author.

At this juncture I wish to explore Jamieson’s rather passionate dedication to rhyme, regular meter and all the other features of formal verse. I shall in a moment summarize his own explanation of this commitment, but first it may be helpful to quote a few lines from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. In a chapter entitled “The Domain of the Word,” this scholar writes:

Anthony Hecht is a lyric poet whose verse has been published in numerous collections and in The New Yorker and other leading magazines … Hecht’s poems are crystalline, elegant to the point of refinement, constructed with a rigorous attention to form. A Vivaldi concerto could provide a passable musical analogy to his writing. He often uses the sonnet, or even earlier canzoni of the kind used in the Middle Ages … The rules of these forms are so rigid that even Dante complained that to write according to them was like hanging chains upon himself … Yet, paradoxically, it is by following such demanding discipline that poetry can liberate the writer—and the reader—from the jumbled onslaught of raw experience. ^[2]

In a slender volume entitled Making Metaphor Poems by Simile & Rhyme: A Guide for High School Teachers, Jamieson offers his own rationale for writing formal verse. First, he calls attention to recent research about “the effect of line, meter, and rhyme in poetry with regard to its impact on the human brain” and then notes that in numerous languages ranging from English, Spanish, Greek, and Hungarian to the languages of Zambia and New Guinea,, “all utilize in their most well-established poetry lines that are a similar length in elapsed time when spoken.” Jamieson continues:

… the line length in all these languages does not exceed the elapsed time that the conscious mind consumes as it speaks, grasps, and understands the line’s content within what is called ‘the present moment’ of hearing. On the other hand, the line is not so short that it allows other thoughts to intrude into the unconsumed “present moment.” The biological or “neural length” of a present moment of hearing is roughly 3 seconds.

Jamieson notes that iambic pentameter and iambic tetrameter are both securely established as favorites of English-speaking poets, with pentameter taking “an average 3.3 seconds to speak, tetrameter 2.4.” Jamieson claims that “these are congruent with lower frequency brain waves associated with the brain’s heightened creativity.”^[3]

In reading iambic metrical end-rhymed poetry aloud we are drawn by the underlying auditory rhythm (ta-TUM, ta-TUM, ta-TUM) as well as by the periodic end-rhymes. Scientists say the brain is driven by them. These rhythmic drivers bring about a cooperative feedback loop across the corpus callosum between the (rational) word-strength of the left hemisphere brain and the (feeling) image-strength of the right hemisphere.^[4]

The conclusion that this line of reasoning leads to appears to offer definitive support to the theories of Csikszentmhalyi, to wit: “When the right and left hemispheres are united in this feed-back loop, we (whether as poets making a poem, or readers of it, or listeners to it) experience our world more holistically. This is especially true for experience we consider ambiguous.” Left-brain thinking by itself “cannot accomplish this holistic integration for us.”^[5]

Does the writing and reading of formal verse really help in making sense of the jumbled, often chaotic matter of everyday experience, allowing our apprehension of and response to a world as “holistic” when it seems almost daily more fragmented and random? Obviously Jamieson believes it does and thus his commitment to creating formal verse has about it a kind of “religious” fervor. Perhaps it is true that, as Auden wrote, “poetry makes nothing happen”—certainly not in the world of politics where “Ignorant armies clash by night,” as Matthew Arnold famously observed. But individually, I think we can affirm with certainty, the creators and readers of poetry are changed by the words, the ideas and the cadences of poetry. If it’s mere fancy word play, why bother? A skillfully wrought parody of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” might then be as valuable as the original.

As suggested earlier, in this body of verse, we find great depth of feeling, always restrained by a slightly mirthful irony; before we read far into the book, we come to expect a witty turn as the poet discovers where his intellectual and emotional peregrinations have led him. One of my favorite poems in this volume is “Persimmons, Pseudopods and Such,” in which Jamieson rallies all his skills as a craftsman while addressing weighty subjects: mind, romantic love, sex, cultural restraints and the collision of the four. This is a poem of six stanzas of varying length. Here are the first two:

Which is more worthy to live by?
Romance (a dreamland in my head)
or groin-gland instincts close to thigh?
Which makes the richer planting bed?
Plus my reptilian brain’s a gland.
So’s limbic. Neocortex too.
(How easily glands get out of hand
deciding what is best to do.)

More, mind’s non-local, linking heads.
Its resident pseudopod projects
and “vibs” with other ‘pods whose spreads
(invisible) each intersects.
So? Head? Groin? Mind? It’s hard to say,
given how glands all interplay.

The classic mind-body split: intellect versus sexual drive; glands interacting to the confusion, even consternation, of the individual. The human condition caught in fourteen lines—a perfect sonnet. A lesser poet might have ended here. But Jamieson sees multiple possibilities yet to be unraveled. In the fourth stanza he reflects on “puppy love(or fear)” and the adolescent’s narcissism driving the novice in such matters to the point at which “we’d play so brazenly we’d drown/ in mirror-pools that serve the throne/ of Estrogen-Testosterone.”

The fifth stanza begins with a question normally not asked, “Now I’m grown up—what is grown up?” and proceeds to reflect on how the commercial world depends on human glands and the fluids they secrete for its successful functioning:

No ad man eats unless adroit
cajoling me with training cup
to juice the glands he would exploit.
Testosterone fuels auto sales.
Estrogen seeks out “buys” for women.
But glands dry up as we furl sails
and munch our rock-hard green persimmon.

As a country boy in Virginia seventy some years ago, I was frequently impatient to savor the succulent flavor of the ripe persimmon, a wild fruit that needed a few frosts to dissipate its bitterness when still green. I can still conjure up the quite disgusting taste that caused my entire mouth to revolt when I bit into a green specimen.

The final stanza again employs the persimmon image and blends it with an image of the pseudopodium (or “pod”) as goad (here sound comes into play, with “pod” being virtually identical to “prod”). This word is used in zoology to describe “A process formed by the temporary extension of the protoplasm of a cell or a unicellular animal, serving for taking food, for locomotion, etc,”^[6]

Persimmon-bitter, culture’s pod
projects against both yours and mine
from birth to death. Although a fraud,
it’s common … and thus seems benign.
Its pseudopod can make us ashen—
though it may school us in compassion.

The word “pod,” first used in the second stanza, reappears in the third: “When stared at from behind, I turn/ The starer’s pod directs my eyes./ Our eyes now touch by sight, and yearn/ for more, or none, and mobilize/ according to intent I read/ as he or she acts well, or odd.” This word denoting a mere—but functional—protrusion of a the most basic unit of life is here called into service to describe a fundamental human interaction—a friendly greeting perhaps, though it could be a frightened or embarrassed moment of mistaken identity: “A friend? Or not? My ‘brains’ accede/ as starer calls—or turns, faux pased …”

This image of the pod as a primitive human accessory or faculty gets picked up in the final stanza, now identified with culture, that bundle of do’s and don’ts, of restrictions and injunctions, that weight of shame and guilt from which few individuals are entirely free; from childhood most feel its goad. And though its demands and prohibitions may seem a “fraud” (arbitrary?), they do frequently perform a function essential to civilized life—the teaching of compassion. And compassion, or, more precisely, its oftentimes absence in human affairs, many of Jamieson’s poems wish to proclaim, is the point of it all.

Frequently, and especially in the final selections of this volume, Jamieson makes refers to the theories of Zecharia Sitchin concerning alien creatures who once invaded Earth and, in fact, created the human race. Some readers may be put off by Jamieson’s seeming credulity, ascribing verity to what, at first glance, appear to be at best fascinating myths. And not myths shared by any “primitive” tribe, nor by the bulk of the primitive tribe we call “homo sapiens.” Who were these creatures from the planet Nibiru, these Anunnaki astronauts who supposedly invaded Earth millions of years ago in search of gold and, using in vitro technology, implanted in apes a human mind tainted with an avaricious, violent spirit? (It was these slaves who mined the gold taken back to Nibiru and they and their descendants who have wrecked planet Earth with their greed and lust, raping the Earth and dominating women in the process.)

I suspect many readers of In Vitro may respond like a library clerk at Yale who, when displaying for Jamieson and his wife the cuneiform tablets on which Sitchin has based his theories, replied to a question regarding Sitchin’s books, “We don’t do sci fi at Yale.” Although I have read with delight and taught a couple of books by Ursula LeGuin, I too don’t normally “do sci fi.” While I don’t wish to enter a debate as to whether Sitchin’s ideas can be taken seriously as based in fact, I have found Jamieson’s use of those ideas in his poetry immensely engaging and sufficiently tantalizing to impel me to seek opinions from scholars who can shed light on those ideas’ authenticity. The following comments by one of them, Kenneth Pollinger, inspire me to seek further evidence:

Having read 13 prior books by Zecharia Sitchin I can attest to his superb scholarship. There Were Giants Upon the Earth, his latest, is probably his most important since he states that there are SKELETAL remains in the Natural History Museum in London which could possibly finally end the debate about whether his works are “myth” or historical FACT. His main approach here is built around Pre-Diluvial and post-Diluvial “gods, Demigods and Pharaoh lists” (the Lists of Kings of Manethro; and also those of Borossus), as well as the genealogical line of the Hebrew Bible. He accumulates much information about all these beings thus presented and weaves a fascinating history of their interrelationships and how they are related to: a) the beginning of creation, b) the beginning of evolution, c) the creation of Mankind, d) the Deluge, e) longevity, NOT immortality, f) and finally, how there are skeletal remains of a “Queen Puabi” and a “Prince Meskalaindug”(who are, respectively, a “goddess” and a “demi-god”), which, if their DNA and mtDNA are tested, could provide the MISSING LINK (that small but crucial group of “alien” genes—223 of them?) that genetically upgraded a Homo Erectus or Homo Ergaster to Homo Sapiens, some 300, 000 years ago.^[7]

I consider unarguable Prof. Pollinger’s subsequent speculation that if DNA testing should prove that Sitchin’s theories are, in truth, historical fact, a revolution in biblical and religious interpretation would be inevitable . Clearly, Leland Jamieson came to this conclusion some years ago, and his later poems reflect, I think, a rejection of the Judeo-Christian account of how the creation and human species came into existence. Moreover, the later poetry embodies a “system” of ethical and quasi-religious beliefs that comments on the proclivities those slaves of millennia ago passed on to their descendants over the ages and unto our present generation—violence, warfare, oppression of the weak, including women. Let us examine two poems in which these theories of Sitchin’s play a part: “Bagged in Baghdad” and “Woven in Sun.”

Bagged in Baghdad

With thanks to Zecharia.Sitchin

For G. K. J.

Before I lay me down to sleep
I pray—the Lord?—my soul to keep … ?
But Deity’s no astronaut
from Nibiru whose first cheap shot
was pirating away Earth’s gold
deep-mined from every vein and fold.

Nor was the cheapest shot gold ore,
but stealing apes’ genetic core.
Lords hybridized ”Man” with lord code—
designed “smart apes” to bear the load
of muscling gold ore out of mines
while lords lay back on their behinds.

Lords taught us, too, to fight their wars
for land and wealth—slave matadors …
Before I lay me down to sleep
in reeking bloodshed we now reap
For Our lord—wait! Let’s not torment
Astral intelligence’s intent.

Einstein said , Dark is lack of light—
cold, heat—and evil, good. (Despite
man’s intellectual overlays,
it’s plain—it’s no cathedral maze
of stone we grope, our fingers crossed,
bloodied, cobwebbed, and, like us, lost.)

I thank Astral Intelligence
for feeling still intact with sense
which thrives and guides us as evolved—
that’s free of need to be “Absolved.”
It calls us toward a common good
and seeks, for Earth, one neighborhood.

But greed shouts out “Technology!”
as though it were the end-all-be-
all. “Gulp the black gold. Yellow! More!”
Dismissing Light, and Good, we war—
the leitmotif of leitmotifs
of Niburian lords’ beliefs

Jamieson’s poems are instinct with “Astral Intelligence,” that is, the mind’s activity that avoids the pure abstractions of Descartes’ cogito but instead binds together emotion and thought interacting to bring about, as noted earlier, holistic results. In this poem and others Jamieson takes aim at the modern world’s naïve faith in science to always make life on planet Earth “better” and its addiction to technology to achieve that end. Blinded by greed, we moderns continue to pursue our destructive ways, consuming heedlessly resources that are not inexhaustible, always crying for more. And, ignoring the common good, we employ warfare as our chief modus operandi. Reverence for and preservation of the Earth—and the creation of a global community based on principles of justice, peace and sustainability—should claim our unwavering attention.

Now let us return to “No Razzmatazz?” in order to determine what light the final stanza of this somewhat autobiographical poem can shed on the entire intellectual enterprise In Vitro represents: “I do not answer when called ‘Anile’/ My rhyme and meter help you scroll/ the ground-waves of Gaia’s channel./ Now, bear with me and slowly troll/ those force fields we two can cajole—/ no razzmatazz—to break real news/ ’til consciousness is what folks choose.”

If I understand him correctly, Jamieson is here telling his readers—conjuring his readers may be more precise—to read his poetry as a kind of manifesto; to join him in a process of expanding consciousness that will eventually permit our species to escape from the pathologies—blood-drenched strife, ruthless oppression, soul-destroying addiction to accumulation of wealth—that have plagued us throughout all our ages on Earth. Gaia (Earth) should be our teacher, but always Gaia studied by “mindfulness.”

In a sonnet entitled “Woven in Sun (A poem for Valentine’s Day),” Jamieson begins the third quatrain with this line: “Poetry calls on hearts’ and brains’ joint wit.” Now his consummate skill in creating brilliant metaphorical language is manifest as he continues: “aligns and lifts it in a weft that’s one/ felt shuttling mindfulness—so lickety-split/ we glimpse new holograms woven in sun.” As we would expect, the couplet pulls together the threads of this poem but seems, to my mind, to raise a perplexing question: “These guide us, storm-tossed Astral word-winged birds,/ homing by vaster means than wings or words.”

The “holograms woven in sun” would appear to be constituted of Astral Intelligence, a gift from the sky, the sun. But what of Earth’s (Gaia’s) role in teaching humans how to break the grip of the psychological/spiritual pathologies imparted to the species when created? A possible answer may be this: mindfulness, the cure that could save humans from self-destruction—always implied in the species’ lust for more when living on a finite planet—is the fruit of collaboration between sky and Earth, sun and planet, Astral Intelligent and bodily urges, mind and heart, and, finally, male and female.

I have recently watched on PBS, for the second time, Ken Burns’ extraordinary Civil War series and have been reminded of how blood-drenched our US history is. According to a Marine officer training recruits, the nation has been at war every seven or eight years since its founding. And our “American empire” is only the last in a long, sad trajectory of empires—call them “dominator societies,” if you wish—that have defied the efforts of churches, synagogues, mosques, wise men, bishops, priests, gurus, imams, theologians, rabbis, ethicists, popes, brilliant intellectuals, and Jack and Jill to understand those human propensities that lead to robbery, rapine and bloody conflict. And that cause humans largely to shun an all-out effort to create on the Earth a “neighborhood” where all inhabitants might share equally the bounty of the fields, the rivers, the “fruited plain.” The poetry of Leland Jamieson deals, directly at times, but more often indirectly, with these questions. And seems to offer a kind of “cure.” Although he doesn’t state unambiguously that writing and reading formal poetry is a form of therapy, he implies that in the comments regarding the holistic effects of such practice. And perhaps it is.

At the very least, to read the poems of In Vitro is surely a mind-expanding experience. But neither Jamieson nor I should be thought naïve enough to believe that any kind of poetry will save us humans from our “worst angels.” Perhaps we are hard-wired to bring about our own destruction. Jamieson apparently believes we are. For in the book’s final brief poem, “Coda for the 21^st Century,” the speaker says as much, noting that humans are “spirits shamed, deep down, to be made fools/ of gold Earth can’t support in this abyss/ of conflict where your lust for power rules …/ Won’t solace cosmic souls awaiting lives/ you aliens tweezed with your in vitro tools …”

So, are we left with only the beauty of Jamieson’s language and thought to carry us through rough times? Maybe. I like to think, though, that there’s more. Dana Gioia has stated that “the writer’s most important spiritual obligation is to be truthful.”^[8] Leaving aside the question of the factuality of the stories of aliens who created humans, Jamieson speaks the truth about our spiritual state. And thus helps us as we struggle to achieve the mindfulness that could lead to more sane, more humane, more harmonious lives in what might become a genuine global neighborhood. I now risk the charge of naivete: paradoxically, reading In Vitro causes me to give a very slight edge to the proposition that the human race will endure. And create of our strife-infected communities a neighborhood? I make this very tentative prognosis haunted by Jake Barnes’ final comment in The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”

Notes:

See “Notes,” p. 131.
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), 249. Emphasis added.
Making “Metaphor Poems” by Simile and Rhyme: A Guide for High School Teachers (CreateSpace, 2009), 29.
Ibid., 29-30.
Ibid., 30.
Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary (1960).
Kenneth Pollinger, “Myth or Reality: The Scholarship of Zecharia Sitchin” (Amazon Review, May 24, 2010). It should be noted that a number of scholars posted on Amazon consider Sitchin’s scholarship less than professional and his conclusions unreliable.
Interview in The Formalist, Vol. 13, 2002.

__________

Preston M. Browning Jr. holds degrees from W&L, UNC at Chapel Hill and the University of Chicago (Ph.D., Religion and Literature). His translations of Central American poems have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine and The Literary Review and his own poems in, among others, Poetry East, Mobius, and The Lyric. He is the author of Flannery O’Connor: The Coincidence of the Holy and the Demonic in O’Connor’s Fiction and Affection and Estrangement: A Southern Family Memoir. He is currently working on a manuscript tentatively entitled Struggling for the Soul of One’s Country and Other Subversive Essays. He lives in Ashfield, Massachusetts, where he manages Wellsping House, a retreat for writers.

January 11, 2013

“Finding Yet Another Way to Say What Can’t Be Said Any Other Way” by Art BeckPosted by Rattle

Art Beck

THE IMPERTINENT DUET:
TRANSLATING POETRY WITH ART BECK

#3: FINDING YET ANOTHER WAY TO SAY WHAT CAN’T BE SAID

The American Literary Translators Association is a loosely knit, unique organization where academics and professional linguists interact with an eclectic mix of creative writers and poets. (A number of its members wear all the above hats.) A perennial topic at annual conferences is the question of translating poetic form. What follows is adapted from my notes for a 2003 panel talk on translating form in poetry. “Reading papers” is strictly forbidden at ALTA panels, and hopefully this piece retains some of the conversational dynamic of an ALTA conference.

Let me preface by saying that I plan to talk about some specific Rilke poems—some of which I translated in “free-form” in the late ’70s. And re-translated more formally in the last several years. But before getting specific, I’d like to talk about what I think are some of the general questions inherent in translating form into similar form. Some of these have to do with something as basic as positing a definition of poetry.

I don’t know if my experience is similar to yours, but for years I happily wrote poetry without giving much of a thought to poetics. It wasn’t until I started translating that questions of theory began to get insistent.

Until then, I have to confess I never asked myself what constituted a poem. But when you take on the task of translating someone else’s poem in someone else’s language into a poem in your language—you do have to ask yourself—just what is a poem?

I began translating poetry in the early ’70s—a time when hardly anyone thought of writing in anything but free verse. This made defining a poem harder than, say, in the 19th or early 20th century when end line rhyme schemes dominated. Then a poem either rhymed or—it wasn’t a poem.

Along these lines, a 19th century American translator of Horace, William Peterfield Trent wrote:

When the translator makes up his mind to attempt a close approximation to the Horatian meter, it would seem that he should eschew the use of rhyme as likely to operate against that effect of likeness to the original which he is striving to secure. But, since the use of rhyme in lyric poetry appears … to be essential at present if the English version is to be acceptable as poetry, this close approximation can be desirable in a few special cases, only.

From the 18th through the 19th century, Horace was almost universally cast in strictly rhymed translations. Of course, this kind of thing grates today. Horace wrote in formal meters, but rhyme was only an incidental embellishment in his poetry. Why artificially impose a rhyme scheme that isn’t there? But can’t the same objection be made to ignoring a rhyme scheme in the original?

What Trent said is also good to keep in mind if anyone is inclined to question why the modernists felt the need for liberation from rhyme schemes. But, now we’re liberated and we face the other side of the coin.

There’s a 1948 entry in the Greek Nobelist George Seferis’ (mid 20th century) diary that contrasts formal and informal ages and implicitly points up one of the problems inherent when an “in-formalist” tries to mimic a formalist. To quote Seferis:

In Byzantine art everything is traditional, predetermined by tradition … It is a “god-given” art … it issues from the “Sacred Scarf,” the icons are miraculous because they are god-given; its basis is imitation. And yet, in spite of what people say, it has lived, with intermittent reflowering, for so many centuries. In this art the excellent artist excels by a minute deviation from the traditional … The ultimate evil of the Byzantines is ossification, the ultimate evil for us is dissolution.

In other words, in formal periods the craft may lie in the constraints—but the art is always a jailbreak. The in-formalist trying to imitate the formalist needs to remember that breaking into jail isn’t very exciting.

Of course, informal poetry, as Seferis says, has its own danger—dissolution. The danger of becoming mere “words on paper.” For me, one working definition of a poem—formal or informal—is: an arrangement of words that has reached the point of becoming something that can’t be said in any other way—the point where language talks back to you.

But this is of course hopefully the case with the poem you’re translating. So how do you find another way of saying what can’t be said any other way?

I’m going to offer the opinion that one way you can’t do it is simply by imitation. From the time Robert Lowell used Imitations as a title for his collection of loose translations, I’ve always disliked calling translations “imitations.” And I think Lowell’s translations are the opposite of what I perceive as “imitation.” For me, imitation is akin to a slavish art forgery.

Conversely, I think a successful poetic translation reaches into the original, and draws as much directly from the landscape that’s portrayed as from the original poem’s portrayal. The object of the translation is, ideally, not the “portrait,” but the subject of the portrait: A new poem that attempts to tap the same source the original poem tapped.

That, of course, is what Lowell was doing and, while his caveat not to expect a literal translation was appropriate, I wish he had used a different word. I’d have preferred “performance.”

What I think is essential to a “performance” is—for want of a better word—what I characterize as the “internalization” process. The long, slow taking in of the original until you reach a point where you’re no longer working with the energy of words in the source language, but in your own. So that like a fledging swimmer plucked from a pool and tossed into a river, the poem and its images either sink or swim on its own in English. (Or whatever language you’re writing in.)

The implication with any performance is that the performer won’t be invisible. But that presence may be more or less noticeable. For example, you can’t listen to John Lewis’ adaptations of Bach without being aware that Lewis is a jazz pianist having a dialogue with Bach. What he’s playing isn’t quite jazz, isn’t quite Bach—but there’s a distinct sense that Bach might tap his foot and smile. Glenn Gould is a pure classical pianist, but are his renditions of the Goldberg Variations—music originally written for a plucked keyboard and reborn with all the dynamic nuances of the pianoforte and Gould’s rich ear—any more “pure Bach” than John Lewis’ syncopated renditions?

Which brings us back to breaking in and out of jail. What happens with Gould and Lewis—with any performer worth listening to—is that they’re enraptured—arrested if you will—by the piece they’re performing. They’re already in jail and free to plot their break.

ORPHEUS

In poetry, the “jailbreak” is the difference between writing into a form or out of a form. Perhaps it’s worth remembering that Rilke whipped out the 55 Sonnets to Orpheus in what he claimed was a two week space in 1922. It’s obvious he wasn’t writing into but out of the form—the way Charlie Parker might roll out chorus after chorus of the blues. I use Parker as an example, rather than someone more traditional, say Jimmy Rushing, because in the Orpheus sequence I think Rilke stood the traditional sonnet on its head.

The sonnet form often takes on an almost geometric progression leading to a “closed conclusion.” The Sonnets to Orpheus, and even some earlier Rilke sonnets such as Archaic Torso, tend instead to take flight and end with harmonic ambiguities and open statements. It’s worth noting, I think, that when Rilke returned to the sonnet form for this late in life sequence, he said he wanted an “open,” “conjugated” sonnet, i.e. something both akin to and yet not a traditional sonnet.

One of the problems in translating these poems formally is that I don’t think we have any precedent for them in the traditional closed iambic logic of the English sonnet. They almost require a new sense of form in English. I’ve always felt that Rilke stands with one foot in the 19th and century with the other firmly planted in 21st. So for me, the main danger in translating these essentially modern—maybe even still emergent—poems is that in chasing form we may risk pushing back into the 19th century rather than to following to where the poem is pulling us.

But conversely, how can you ignore the question of form in a poem like #5 Volume 1 of the Sonnets to Orpheus. My translation is still in an early draft, but far enough along I think to demonstrate a point.

As an aside, one reason I’m tentative about the quality of my translation attempt is that Rilke’s poem has such big historic echoes—Shakespeare’s sonnet #55: “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme … ”

And Horace’s Ode #30, book 3, which Shakespeare probably drew on for his sonnet #55. The Horace ode opens (in Burton Raffel’s translation): “The monument I’ve made for myself will outlast/ brass, reaches higher than Egyptian/ kings and their pyramids … ”

Rilke, in his sonnet, focuses not on his own mastery, but on the prototypical mythic poet, Orpheus, who serves throughout the sequence as a persona for Rilke, the poet and man. And distinct from its predecessors, Rilke’s sonnet speaks to the vulnerability as well as durability of poetry. It begins:

Errichtet keinen Denkstein. Laßt die Rose
nur jedes Jahr zu seinen Gunsten blühn.
Denn Orpheus ists. Seine Metamorphose
in dem und dem. Wir sollen uns nicht mühn …

Don’t erect memorials of stone. Just let the rose
bloom every spring as his token. Because this
too is Orpheus—another of his metamorphoses
into one thing or another. Why stress ourselves

deciphering all his names? If there’s singing,
now and forever, it’s Orpheus as he comes and goes.
Isn’t it enough that every so often he lingers
a few days with the rose petals in the bowl?

So much of him has to wither so you can know.
That frightens him too, as he fades. But just as his
word goes beyond what’s here, what’s now—

he’s already there: alone where you can’t be.
The bars of the lyre strings don’t cramp his
fingers. Even transgressing he obeys.

A poem, I think, not only about the coexistence of life and death in poetry, but, incidentally, about form and the jailbreak of art.

SOME SAMPLES—FREE VS. “COPY” FORM

Below are samples of my old and more recent translations of two of the Sonnets to Orpheus. The first versions date from a volume I published in the early ’80s and obviously the translations aren’t in sonnet form.

Let me tell you a little of what I was trying to do. At the time Rilke wasn’t the icon in America he’s since become. The only translations I was aware of were Mrs. Norton’s and Mac Intyre’s and a few others dating from the ’30s and ’40s. But this was also the time that David Young’s iconoclastic translations of the Duino Elegies started coming out in Field. They bowled me over. Young recast the Elegies in William Carlos William-like triplets that seemed to energize and focus the rambling poems. This was a poet I didn’t recognize in Norton or Mac Intyre. So I started playing with translating Rilke on my own—not the Elegies but the New Poems and Orpheus sonnets. Above all. I wanted to hang onto that “21st century leg.” Not only, sad to say, did I not have the slightest interest in the sonnet form, I couldn’t have written one if I wanted to. I was a child of my time.

I still like some of those old translations although I wouldn’t do them this way again. I imagine some of you may like them, and others will grit your teeth. But—I think—for reasons other than formal vs. informal. It’s interesting that the editor of the chapbook series these first appeared in was a budding formalist and I got surprisingly warm feedback on my 1983 volume from other dedicated formalists. But for a lot of people, these won’t sound like the Rilke they’ve come to love. It’s the voice not the form—and that voice was intentional on my part.

I’m also including my recent, more “formalist” translations. The new versions were prompted by a challenge from someone I respected, but the re-translation went far beyond a re-casting as “faux sonnets.” In revisiting the Sonnets to Orpheus, I found that in my young enthusiasm I’d often left half the poem on the table. But what didn’t change much, I think, was the voice—for me Rilke’s “voice” seems to live in the harmonic, half elusive images—not especially the rhyme or meter. Rather in a more subtle underlying music that resonates with what might be said as much as with what’s said.

I should note that I use the term faux-sonnet because none of these use full rhyme. Some of it may be a continued lack of skill on my part, but over time I’ve also come to feel that English has come from being the language of a small island to being a planetary language. There’s no longer any one correct way to speak it. It’s too dynamic and fluid. And for me at least, it likes assonance and corresponding words and hints of rhyme. When I find myself using full rhyme, it’s usually in a comic mode.

For readers accustomed to a “different” Rilke voice, I can only offer that as with any performance, the choices are personal and will vary between performers. I think it’s wonderful that America is rich enough to have dozens of versions of the Sonnets to Orpheus—the Germans can only have one. But, of course, they’ve kept the best for themselves.

—from Rattle e.8, Spring 2010 (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). His chapbook, Summer with all its Clothes Off, is reviewed by Ellaraine Lockie in Rattle E-Reviews. His article on Rilke, And Yet Another Archaic Torso– Why? can be accessed in the Australian online journal Jacket at: www.jacketmagazine.com

May 5, 2012

A LITTLE IN LOVE A LOT by Paul HostovskyPosted by Rattle

Review by Barrett Warner A Little in Love a Lot by Paul Hostovsky

A LITTLE IN LOVE A LOT
by Paul Hostovsky

Main Street Rag
PO BOX 690100
Charlotte, NC 28227-7001
ISBN 978-1-59948-303-0
2011, 90 pp.,$14.00
www.mainstreetrag.com

Journeyman poet Paul Hostovsky is lucky that Major League Baseball doesn’t drug test poetry. The piss in his collection, A Little in Love A Lot, is full of steroids. His poems begin so easy and innocent, but then the juice kicks and Hostovsky plugs in another amp. In the sonnet “Pop Flies,” two buddies hit pop flies to each other. A bully comes along, walking his Doberman Pinscher:

He asks me gruffly for a turn at bat, and the Doberman
growls…silently surrender
the bat and ball. A wind dies on the schoolyard.

He tosses the ball up, swings at the exact second
that the Doberman, sniffing a game, jumps for the ball
and catches the bat in his head—suddenly there’s blood
everywhere, the Doberman’s seizing, dying…

What happens in the schoolyard tends to happen in the bedroom–a rumbling before each poem transforms choir boy into werewolf. Hostovsky skillfully uses both personalities, the night and the day of himself, to cut through the world’s barriers in order to feel empathy. He writes: “The way out/ isn’t under or/ over or around/ or even through./ It’s with. With/ is the only way out.”

Make no mistake, these are not dark alley poems, but Hostovsky’s fears of dying unloved and alone shade the Wonder Years neighborhood of these ballads, rants, and comedies. For most of us the great abyss is only the shallow grave. Hostovsky’s is the Grand Canyon. If you squint you can see him at the bottom working a shovel, digging the hole deeper. When he reaches Hell he keeps on going, laughing at times, yelling out his love songs: “the background music…/ so loud it was in the foreground.”

These urgent poems of desperate, funny, compelling observations are placated by the metaphor of love and sex in the author’s quest for empathy. True connection between spouses, lovers, friends, neighbors, demented aunts, fathers and sons is almost impossible for Hostovsky, in spite of an otherworldly harmony teasing him at every jagged turn. Porcupines mate after all. So do elephants. Even a turkey buzzard will raise its feathered hem and wink for love.

Move over Woody Allen. In “Love and Death” a couple makes love “on her all-encompassing couch” and afterwards, sipping tea, the speaker volunteers, “I love sitting here opposite you in our underwear,/ talking about death.” Hostovsky is just warming up. “I assert there really is no death, there is only// life, which has no opposite because/ it is all-encompassing.” His lover then tells the story of a relative dying of pancreatic cancer, three months of the kind of pain no one else could bear for three hours. The speaker gives her “a peck” and goes “into the kitchen to make more tea.” There, he watches the flame for three minutes waiting for the water to boil.

The characters in Hostovsky’s poems look out the same window but witness very different versions of life. Agreements are rare, polite arguments are plenty. People seem to work out a system of taking turns being right and wrong, giving love, receiving it. “The Debate at Duffy’s” begins: “She said that sex was a yearning of the soul./ He said it was a very compelling argument/ of the body.” The two argue the length of the baseball game being played on television while filling and draining their cups until she wins “in the bottom of the ninth.” Another poem, “Kiss,” takes place on a train “heading south/ all the seats/ facing north/ like the meeting/ of east and west/ our heads turning slowly/ on the headrests/ towards each other/ like two completely/ different ways of life/ coming together.” The poem ends with the suggestion of kissing: “exchanging aloft/ the moist and crumpled/ messages”–of our lips, Hostovsky wisely lets the reader suppose.

Opposites might attract, but they also might blow each other’s brains out. “We are all attracted to suffering/ and repulsed by it, too./ This doesn’t make the world go around exactly./ It isn’t a law of physics technically./ But it may have something to do/ with the relationships of bodies/ in the universe.” “Cholera” parodies magic realism. A lover has read Love in the Time of Cholera whereas the speaker can’t get past fifty pages without dreaming of cholera. He says, “I think cholera is one of those words, that,/ if divorced from its meaning, would make a beautiful/ name for a girl. Like Treblinka.” The lover “gave me a pained look in the dream then, and I wondered/ if it meant you didn’t agree with me, or if it meant/ that what you were eating didn’t agree with you./ Either way, it was plain to see that you were suffering.”

Hostovsky modulates this contrary world of apartness between intimates by offering several poems which convey the resemblances between strangers. In “Waiting Room” a woman with a portable oxygen tank stands in front of the exotic fish tank: “The woman looks like the fish/ with her bulging eyes and her yellow rain coat.” In “Uncanny”:

Bob Dylan in his late 60’s
looks a lot like my mother.
It’s partly the nose,
Partly the big hair.

Hostovsky understands that gesture is essential to holding the doubtful reader at bay. He’s made a career out of it, working as a sign language interpreter. One of the hearing, his is a blended family of a deaf partner, and one deaf and one hearing child. Perhaps this experience is why a young speaker doesn’t just raise his hand for emphasis, he holds his “palm up in the air like one who is trying to ascertain the truth about whether or not it has started to rain.” Likewise, the co-ed in his German class has a charming defect: “I whispered Ich liebe dich into her umlaut—that pair of moles on her left earlobe.” Such fantastic detail and kinetic gesture would rival that in any silent movie. They keep the poems moving too quickly for the reader to dare jump off. It’s best to just hang on for the climax. Some poets like Billy Collins will gently lay down a reader in the soft bed of a poem’s ending and perhaps give the reader’s toe a wiggle pinch. Hostovsky often will leave us lying in a ditch, dashed and wrecked with enervating surprises. His brilliant seduction begins when we’re just coming-to after an unexpected turn. Hostovsky weaves the abstract and the concrete when we’re most vulnerable. In “Tree Poem” a father sits in a tree contemplating suicide after a day at work. He does this every day when he arrives home. After twenty lines of deliberation, “he climbed down from the tree in the car in the garage/ every time, and walked back into his life with a few/ leaves and twigs still sticking to his head.” Sticking. Nice, very nice.

“Miracles” also weaves the abstract, but also is one of those rare wildcards Hostovsky sometimes deals which explain the greater sum:

Spiritual texts are the most boring in the world.
None of them mentions a bicycle,
or a ferris wheel, or baseball, or sea lions, or ice cream.
They just lump them all together into “the world.”
The “world of appearances.”The “world of illusions.”
You can walk through this world and not
believe it for a minute…
And when the doctor comes in with his numbers
which are your numbers, you can
not believe that either. You can let them fall from his lips,
skim your ear, pool on the floor where your eyes
and his eyes have fallen. He won’t
mention the bicycle, or the ferris wheel which is
taking up a lot of room right now in the little
examining room where a sea lion has clambered up
onto the table and is barking, and the baseballs are flying,
and the vendors are hawking ice cream—because he can’t
see them. He can’t perform a miracle.

A Little in Love A Lot is Hostovsky’s miracle, because finally, the miracle is not about sea lions or feeling detached from a lover or dying. The miracle is language itself. These are poems about poetry, each of them an impossible glancing shot, salted with nods to the masters. Writing about a graveyard where he steals quarters off “Naughton’s tombstone” which are left there by descendants, Hostovsky is writing about stealing from traditional poetry, getting it how he can, “because I need them/ for the parking meters/ when I’m driving…Naughton has plenty/ and doesn’t drive anymore anyway.” Alone in a Burger King, Hostovsky remembers Rilke’s commandment about making art, and guiltily believes he cannot call forth riches from his experience. Quite suddenly a family enters, “and while their parents order they play/ duck duck goose, touching all the tables,/ and all the chairs, the girl behind the boy/ following him, copying him and laughing/ louder and louder, because it’s all so wonderful/ here at Burger King, which they seem to have/ all to themselves, except for one man in a booth/ smiling, writing something down on a piece of paper.”

____________

Barrett Warner’s poetry has appeared in Gargoyle, Comstock Review, Natural Bridge, Freshwater, Quarter After Eight, and others. His chapbook Til I’m Blue in the Face was published by Tropos Press.

October 1, 2012

On Translating Nikos Gatsos’ Amorgos by Anita SullivanPosted by Rattle

Anita Sullivan

ON TRANSLATING NIKOS GATSOS’ AMORGOS

I want to tell you about a Greek poem I once spent an entire year translating, even though it’s only eight pages long if scrunched into the generic single-spaced, 11-point online screed that passes for elegant reading nowadays.

The booklet I translated from was 35 pages, double-spaced, in a lovely italic font, and thus would qualify as “free-range” by allowing enough pacing room for each of the many wild creatures enclosed therein.

Legend has it that Nikos Gatsos wrote “Amorgos” during a single night in 1943, when he was 33 and World War II was tearing his country apart. The poem is divided into six sections, each one composed in a totally different style, but each part achingly lyrical and stunning in the force and uncanny aptness of its images. I have no idea why this poem remains so little known outside of Greece.

It may find its way to a wider audience now, because of the recent popularity of “language poetry,” which it resembles but most certainly is not. “Amorgos” has been called “a surrealist epic,” and if you accept this (which I do), you are taking on the idea that the work must be downright nuclear in its fission capacities. That is, in order to fit the entire Story of Greece into a poem slightly shorter than Eliot’s Four Quartets without directly mentioning Odysseus, Helen, Troy, the Argonauts, or any of the Olympian gods, is an awesome feat. The poem imbricates–a word I learned recently–which means it is constructed like overlapping roof tiles. You can’t stop reading, not because there is a plot that keeps you hanging, but because you are always sliding down to the next little section of roof.

For me, “Amorgos” feels like a kind of cross between Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Rilke’s “Duino Elegies.” I was driven to translate the entire poem because at a very vulnerable time in my life, someone in a dark coffee house passed me a fragment from the end of Part I:

And so she sleeps, my tender love, naked among cherry blossoms,
a girl unwithering as an almond branch,
with her head leaning on the crook of her arm, and her other hand
resting upon her golden coin,
upon its comforting warmth, while slowly and quietly like a thief
from the window of spring, enters the Morning Star that shall waken her!

Notice! Notice! Notice! The exclamation point so unashamedly placed at the end. A quick glance through the rest of the poem shows how rare, how deliberate was this placement, like setting a stone into a mosaic. A poet earns trust by such delicate attention to the doorways through which love may pass unemcumbered.

The golden coin, the almond branch, the thief, the Morning Star–all these are essential poetic material in Greek tradition, but you don’t have to know that to feel yourself swimming in what could become “formula” if carelessly arranged. As soon as I learned enough Greek to read this fragment in the original, I sought out the rest. At the time I was unable to find an English translation of the entire poem*, so I sat with my dictionary and began to generate a picture puzzle by translating word, after word. This is a foolish and desperate way to go about such a task, but sometimes it’s the only way possible.

My original translation has disappeared, as if it were eaten by the wild and the holy. This is as it should be. But later, I found that several others had fallen in love with the poem and like me, had sought to transfer it into English with some of its original power intact.

In reverse, can you imagine translating Gerard Manley Hopkins into anything else? Or Ginsberg’s “Howl” for that matter? Such poems are part charm, part riddle–the meaning is so embedded in the language itself that your translating criterion becomes something totally insane, like: I want the readers of this poem in English to end up lying on the ground in the exact same position as the original Greek readers must have been flung after they read the poem for the first time in 1943.

Coming cold, from another culture, to a lyric poem that makes syntactic sense (that is, it’s mostly constructed in complete sentences), but whose vocabulary of icons is meant to set up an entire super-structure of ideas made from the stuff of shared myth–you have to be very methodical and beat back your tendency to “poeticize.” Only thus will the roof-tiles begin to overlap on your page, and then–even more miraculously–you will start to feel entire sub-sections coalescing into larger tiles, and the whole poem will reveal itself as an ancient Greek Chorus rising in enormous shadows from where it has been long flattened across the stones. The chorus has something to say that builds in increments. Here is one increment, from Part 2:

And may your heart not yield
May your tears not fall on this implacable earth
As once on the icy wastes rolled the tear of a penguin.

Two important images here, water and eyes, will keep returning. For example, in the third stanza of Part 3:

In the courtyard of the embittered the eye has run dry
The brain has turned to ice and the heart petrified

In the short Part 5 he again combines wet with dry: “…amid sighs, tears, hunger, lamentations, and the ashes of underground wells.”

Thus the poem builds, as does Nature herself, accreting material by way of a spiral motion.

With what might seem an almost draconian economy, almost every “thing” the poet mentions comes back around again, filtered, enriched and purified by intercourse with other “things” being similarly whirled. In the opening lines, which immediately evoke the voyage of Odysseus, and which I believe reflect the overcharged imagination of the young poet heading into his all-night writing binge, he quickly veers away from what might have turned into a deliberately crafted parody or extended metaphor on this theme. And by that veering, he is able to introduce a variety of images that ring out over and over throughout the rest of the poem:

With their country tangled up in their sails, and their oars hanging
in the wind
The shipwrecked sailors slept like stunned dead beasts amid sheets
of sponges
But the eyes of the seaweed are twisted towards the sea
Hoping the south wind will bring them back to life again
with newly-dyed sails
For one lost elephant is always worth more than the trembling breasts
of a girl
May the roofs of the deserted mountain chapels light up
with desire for the evening star
May birds come in waves to the masts of the lemon trees
With a new way of walking, a steady white breathing
Only then shall come the small-winded bodies of swans
who have been waiting immaculate, motionless and tender
Amid the steam-rollers of commerce and the cyclones of market-gardens
When the eyes of the women turned to coal and the hearts of the
chestnut-sellers were broken
When the harvest was stopped and the hopes of crickets began.

Gatsos is dealing from a dear, cherished and largely traditional core-collection of images: the sea, tender young love, eyes, birds, fruit trees, winds and stars by name and location–all remnants of a centuries-old horticulturally-based, and seagoing village society. The images are both specific to Greece and universal (some of one, some of the other), and he doles them out with such finesse that there is always time to forget one before it comes around again. This is essential. In Part 4, for example, the water that has been locked up in ice and in dryness, suddenly begins to flow:

Wake, murmuring water, from the root of the pine tree to find the eyes of sparrows and to revive them by watering the earth with the fragrance of basil and the whistling of lizards.

If there is a central idea emerging from the poem, it would be “persist, do not give up in the face of this current misery and dreadfulness.” Why? Because…

Somewhere an immortal rock exists where a human angel once passing by, inscribed his name and a song as yet unknown by anyone…

When this stone is found again, and the song bursts out, then the world will change:

…the snows will melt on the mountains, the wind will sing like a bird, the swallows will come to life, the osiers will quiver, and men with cold eyes and pale faces, hearing the bells in the cracked belfries ringing by themselves, will find holiday caps to wear and gay-colored ribbons to tie on their shoes. For then no one will ever joke again, the blood of brooks will overflow…and the timid girls will come slowly and quietly to cast their last garments into the flames and to dance about them nakedly…

Gatsos might have neatly wrapped the poem up at the end of Part 4: “but I keep in my fingers the music for a better day.”

Or, with Part 5, a short rant on the quixotic nature of humans.

But instead, he closes with a love poem to Poetry whom he is, in real life, about to abandon. It is an extraordinarily tender and brave lament, from a gifted bridegroom who makes the choice to renounce the One he loves best. “Poems come easily to me. It is the making of a poetry that is difficult. The telling of the truths,” he said later, after this poem had become famous in Greece.

“Amorgos” was a rapid journey through a treacherous swamp by someone with an uncanny and totally flawless gift for stepping on the few solid stones hidden beneath the surface so as never to drown in the mud. What Gatsos feared, I believe, is not that he would start missing stones, but that the swamp would gradually turn into a shallow pool of pebbles and he wouldn’t even notice. This would be bad for him, but also bad for Poetry itself. So, to avoid the curse of his own potential glibness, this young man chose for the rest of his life to restrict his word skills to translating other poets, and writing song lyrics**. To me this seems a tragic act, fully worthy of his mythical heritage.

With Part 6, the final section of ‘Amorgos,’ he sings an achingly beautiful farewell to Poetry:

Year after year I wrestled with ink and mallet, my tormented heart
With gold and fire to make you an embroidery
The hyacinth of an orange tree
A flowering quince to console you
I who once touched you with the eyes of the Pleiades
And embraced you with the mane of the moon, and we danced together
In the summer meadows
On the stubble fields, and we ate together the cut clover
Dark, vast wild one with all those pebbles around your neck, all those
Tiny colored stones in your hair

__________

*The excerpts from “Amorgos” are my own translations, from the 1987 edition, published by Ikaros, Athens. I have been guided by the translations of Sally Purcell: from her 1980 version, posthumously published in 2004 as a 64-page book by Anvil Press Poetry, London; and of Diana Gilliland Wright, copyright October 2007, www.nauplion.net. Other translations are available, for example from Kimon Friar and Marjorie Chambers, and I have another one or two floating around as anonymous xeroxes. The more the better, is what I say.

** This is in no way meant to imply that song lyrics can never be “as good as real poetry,” although they usually are not. What I mean here is that Gatsos himself apparently saw a difference between being a words-only poet, and being a poet who wrote his words to be set to music, and he deliberately chose to maintain that distinction in his life work. An excellent book of his song lyrics in Greek comes from Ikaros, Athens, 1995 (third edition), and the title, which is lineated like a small poem, translates “blow breeze, blow me/ but don’t let up until. . .”

The final song in this posthumously-published collection is a segment of a cycle entitled “Mani Vespers,” that the publisher indicates in an epilogue was a large, many-part work the poet had been occupied with for years. The book was delayed in publication because Gatsos wished to have the cycle included in its entirety, but apparently died before he was able to finish it. Is it possible that he was working his way back into poetry through the medium of his beloved songs?

__________

Anita Sullivan is and essayist and poet who writes about early keyboard temperaments, translation, gardening, religious philosophy and Greek islands. She has published two essay collections, a poetry chapbook and a full-length collection of poems, and writes regularly for the Weekly Hubris. She is a member of the poetry-publishing collective Airlie Press, and lives in Eugene, Oregon.

December 13, 2012

Interview with Bruce CohenPosted by Rattle

INTERVIEW WITH BRUCE COHEN Bruce Cohen's Disloyal Yo-Yo
ON
DISLOYAL YO-YO

Dream Horse Press
PO Box 2080
Aptos, Ca 95001-2080
ISBN-10: 0982115539
ISBN-13: 978-0982115534
80 pp., $17.95, Paper
www.dreamhorsepress.com

Note: The following interview was conducted by Timothy Green over email during August of 2009.

GREEN: When I came across Disloyal Yo-Yo, my first thought was, Can this really be Bruce Cohen’s first book? We’ve published several of your poems and an essay at Rattle, and your work always has the consistency and depth of someone well into a poetry career. Tell me about the book’s journey. Did you only recently start sending manuscripts around, or have you been shopping them for a while? What was the lag-time between first poem published, and first book published?

COHEN: That’s so nice of you to say that, Tim. I can’t, of course, speak for other poets, but I surmise that the notion of the “first book,” for many, may be a misnomer. If anyone were foolish enough, or had bad enough taste, to publish what would have, in actuality, been my first book, I don’t think you’d be tossing around words like “consistency” and “depth.” I was extremely lucky to have studied at The University of Arizona in the late ’70s with Steve Orlen and Jon Anderson and, although I did not entirely appreciate it at the time, I was surrounded, inspired and greatly influenced by some of the most talented poets of my generation, who happened to be friends and fellow classmates. To name-drop just a few, David Rivard, Michael Collier, Bill Olsen, Tony Hoagland and David Wojahn. It was clear to me, being realistic not humble, that I was simply not as talented as those folks, nor was I as ambitious. Furthermore, I was a little intimidated, and not at all attracted to the prospect of scratching and clawing to get a book out in the hopes of landing a university job in Podunk.

I recognized a few things about myself—I was in love with my girlfriend, soon to be wife, and wanted to raise a family. And I intuitively suspected that if my career were dependent upon poetry, my poetry might get stale and suffer. I didn’t want to publish a weak book. I liked money and comfort a little more than most poets seem to. And I worshipped poetry to the point that I didn’t really feel in a rush to publish. I knew I would compose poems for my entire life; it would be a constant in my world. That knowledge calmed me, left me less anxious. I felt that I could take my time, hone my craft, and I aspired to have every poem in my book published in magazines before I would send it off, which I did. In fact, if I remember correctly, I was so un-ambitious I originally thought if I could have just one poem accepted at a really good magazine, I would be satisfied. And I was, and am, honestly. The Ohio Review. Wayne Dodd was kind enough to have been receptive to my poems. And, as corny as it sounds, the fact that my poems were in the same magazine that had published James Wright was gold star. The acceptance note literally brought a tear to my eye.

The books now are gravy. Stuff occurred though, none the least of which was one son, then another, then another. I luckily landed well-paying gigs right out of graduate school as a director of academic support programs for athletes—first at The University of Arizona, then UC Berkeley, and, for the past twenty years, at The University of Connecticut. My anti-poetic career. My wife and I balanced our lives quite hectically—working different hours, getting the boys to all their sports’ events, music lessons, their brief and painful stints in Boy Scouts, SAT prep classes, the whole shebang. All the while, though sometimes sporadically, I kept writing and working on poems. To answer your question, in a nutshell, Disloyal Yo-Yo is comprised of poems that transpired over a ten-year period, and a good deal of the subject matter is what my pal Tony called “Domestic Surrealism.” Frankly, I had nothing else to write about as that was my day-to-day. Earlier poems are stashed somewhere. I always read a good deal of poetry and kept up with the new voices, and I came to the point where I said to myself—not egocentric mind you—that a good number of the first books that I was reading seemed no better than my stuff.

Only a couple of years ago did I start really thinking about sending my manuscripts out, so I read up on the contemporary process and thought, Jeez, it’s a lottery now! My best hope, I thought, was poetry-nepotism. I had good connections, but unfortunately my friends are honorable and ethical. I wonder where they went wrong? I was horrified that poets had to pay money for even a chance. It seemed to prey on the weak. What a scam, I thought—we helpless, meek poets were being victimized by The Man. Frankly, I felt a little deflated. I assumed my work would not stand out and my chances were non-existent. Nevertheless, I submitted to a few of the big contests without acceptance, although I think I was like a semi-finalist or finalist in some. I assumed they told many people that they were, just teasing-carrots to entice poets enough to keep them sending in their dough. So I said the hell with it and began concentrating on writing more intensely. The boys got older, driving themselves to games and such, so I started submitting poems, publishing in the magazines, and I eventually applied for a grant and was fortunate enough to get one. So I decided I’d put together a couple of manuscripts and be business-like about it. I took a chunk of the grant money and sent two manuscripts out to about fifteen places. I sort of forgot about them and all of a sudden, within the same week, I think, I got lucky, and both manuscripts were accepted. Voila.

GREEN: It’s great that you can keep poetry in perspective—few seem to do that, at least overtly. I’ve always felt that the writing is what matters, having that level of engagement with your own experience, and that everything else that may or may not come with it is incidental. So let’s talk about the writing process. Most of the poems in the book seem to start with a premise—exact life-time, the deli line of the dead, etc.—and then you let your imagination run with it. You might say the poems themselves are the disloyal yo-yos—once you let them go, we as readers have no idea whether they’ll come back to where they started, of if they’ll fly off to someplace new. Freedom and surprise, not as subjects, but as aesthetics, seem central. Is that what your writing process is like? Do you ever know where you’re going before you start to write, or is it always a surprise?

COHEN: Clever-clever, Tim—I never thought of the poems being disloyal yo-yos, but you are probably right. I like that notion, yes. If I recognize, or even get a whiff of, where the poem is going while I’m writing I stop writing or take a side street, walk backwards, hail a cab, something different. I’m constantly bored with myself, like most people I guess, (maybe that’s why we write poems and have hobbies) so why on earth would anyone wish to write what he already knows? If you know the outcome, why bother. Watching reruns of Law & Order is the exception however. Most of us, it seems, are not all that sharp—language is infinitely smarter, wiser, and funnier, than we. I’ve learned to trust it, see where it takes me. If I’m not writing out of language, I follow a situation that bangs my funny bone; it hurts badly, but I laugh, and likewise, follow those impulses. I’m as surprised by the direction of my poems as the reader must be. I hardly know what I’m doing till its over. I rarely have a clue.

That is applicable to most things in my life. I find the type of art that I enjoy most, whether it’s music, painting, cuisine, poetry, whatever, is surprising, mysterious, familiar but unfamiliar, posing questions, euphonious, shocking to the senses. I like to be simultaneously startled and comforted. I guess I am in a constant state of confusion and bewilderment and I’d rather not know what I think until I see how things string out, then, I want it all to have seemed inevitable. I guess I trust my sub-conscious, my intuition, “Leaping” as Bly suggests. In life I am afraid and often paralyzed, in poems I am fearless because nothing really is at stake at the moment of composition. I can throw poems out on their ears and try again. Nobody is watching me; it’s a secret murder. I am constantly struggling to figure out my poems during composition, to recognize truths and rhetorical patterns as I go along, unravel pleasing musical and intellectual puzzles that reveal themselves to me if I’m patient and quiet. For many years, because of long work-hours and young kids—we played zone—I wrote with one foot against the door which made my poems not fully realized, rushed out of necessity. I have a stack of unfinished poems. Now that I have a little more time, as I said, as soon as I can see around the next corner of a poem I go in a different direction, but not arbitrarily though, just another choice that seems to make sense at the moment. I don’t care how long a poem sits, even if it pesters and nags me.

For poetry, I live on my own time. If the poem wants to get worked on, seduce me, tell me something I don’t already know. Force me to work on you. It’s my job to listen, which I take seriously, but the poem has to meet me half-way. Perhaps that’s why end-rhyme drifted so far out of fashion. The sound of each word restricts, limits, your word choice and ultimately handcuffs your imagination. Then again, if you listen carefully, all words rhyme, so I don’t stress much about music although I love, love, a line with an abundance of accents, muscular lines, and I like imaginary handcuffs, handcuffs that I invent for myself in each poem, and I try like hell not to repeat my patterns, although I suppose we all do. The handcuffs are not kinky; I can still type with them on. I like to let my poems have their own lives; I like my poems to be sixteen-year-old inquisitive kids with a new driver’s license. Not reckless, just a little wild, a little Marlon Brando in his youth, but not stupid. I hope I have given them the proper guidance; I hope I raised them right, but ultimately they have to make it in the world on their own. Emily said something wonderful in a poem about that but I can’t remember what it is right now. Maybe I’ll wake up at 2 a.m., remember, and not write it down, which is one of my best poetic techniques. I don’t like to remember too precisely; I find it restricting. Life is surprising, shouldn’t art be? I am in constant wonder. I was taught to reinvent poetry every time I sat down to write. This is an intimidating concept for many writers; who wants that responsibility? Who is so brilliant to invent an art form? I know it’s impossible, but I find it extremely liberating. I have my own personal rules of course, but they change from poem to poem, and I make an effort to engage in linguistic and imagistic venues that are unfamiliar to me, to fracture my own rules, even within the same poem. I like to find new, cool moves in others’ poems and try to incorporate them into my own (I probably shouldn’t admit this).

When I was a kid, I learned basketball moves from Earl “The Pearl” Monroe. After a game I’d go out to the court and fantasize that I was “The Pearl” and imitate his signature spin move. Once I mastered his moves, I’d throw in my own little wrinkle, and the personal challenge for me would be to make my new move not seem at all like Earl’s. Earl in clever disguise. There are few truly original artists, no? Maybe none. Although everything I just said is truthful, it is also a lie. Does that answer your question Tim?

GREEN: Ha, yes, in about five different ways! So given this, that wild teenager behind the wheel, how do you put a coherent book together? Of all the poems you felt were good enough to be in the book, what percentage fit? How big is the B-side? And once you have that body of work that feels like a book, how do you go about ordering it? I noticed that “Domestic Surrealism II” precedes just plain “Domestic Surrealism.” What’s the reason to that rhyme?

COHEN: Oh, nice catch! I’m really bad at math, counting in particular, and thought nobody would read the book closely enough to notice. Actually, there was a point that I wrote a whole series of Domestic Surrealism poems, most of which I had to junk. The survivors, for whatever reasons, kept their original titles so when it was time to put the manuscript together I was concerned with the poems’ content, not the titles. I thought it interesting, as well, in a small way, to emphasize that the order that poems are written is not necessarily the proper order that they should appear in a book. I like books that have varied styles, which seem to have their own logic. I like the themes of individual poems to sort of play off one another; I like poems to be reactions to previous poems in manuscripts. I like the poems to snowball so that the book feels as though it has more substance and inertia than any of the individual poems. I’m not saying I accomplished this, but that’s, at least, what I was striving for. I like record albums that have no pauses between songs. Ultimately, my favorite poems are poems that seem to be born out of necessity and some form of obsession, poems that seem as though they had to be written, that spill over into something that’s life affirming, life altering, or life-repair, ideas and language that can no longer be contained in its human perception-form.

I also like loads of personality in voice, a normal human being talking to me. The poems in this collection, in my mind, are thematically connected in that way and in voice. Many are of the domestic variety, the day-to-day with raising my family, death of parents, nostalgic memories, swimming in their mildly surrealistic pools. I threw out a lot of poems that seemed to repeat and diminish strategies. I have many stalled poems, poems that run away from home and never call. I write many poems that simply never amount to much, are not pleasing to my aesthetic. So, the B-side takes up the lion’s share of my poetry universe.

As corny as it may sound, the poems that I ultimately selected for Disloyal Yo-Yo were poems that had meaning to me. I didn’t feel that this book could endure the same whimsy as some of my more recent stuff. In some ways, I think of this book as being somewhat flat, speaking directly. Order…that’s a tricky question…I ordered the poems the same way I write: intuitively. But because the book was composed over a number of years I was graced with a variety of styles, within my own limitations of course, and I love books whose poems seem varied but from the same voice. They were poems, I guess, that I wanted to have an attachment to, that were attached to me, and were personal without being exclusionary. As much as I can muster, I think of the book as being sincere, heartfelt.

GREEN: Well I think you succeeded on all those goals—if “imaginative” is the first adjective that comes to mind, then “honest” is certainly the second…the domesticity of “Domestic Surrealism” —there’s a sense that your true psychological home is within these poems. Do you ever feel naked, now that the book is out in the world? It’s one thing to confess to facts about your personal history, but it’s another thing altogether to expose the inner-workings of your own mind. I’m thinking in particular about the first poem in the book, “Sober Trees,” which ends with a revelation about the emptiness that fills half a life. Do you ever worry that family, friends, co-workers in your “anti-poetic career,” will read the book and learn a little too much?

COHEN: Yes, on all accounts. When I was younger I was quite worried that family, friends, drinking buddies, anti-poetry pals, would get to know more than I wanted to share, or think something strange about me. I didn’t know how the polar aspects of my life would fit together. It took time; the components had to come together, like a brash wine. Many of my “athletic” compatriots didn’t even know I wrote poetry until the book came out. Naturally some teased me in a semi-good-natured way. I didn’t want to mix my worlds; outer space DNA doesn’t inbreed well with human blood…many movies attest to that fact.

But now that I’m older, I guess I simply don’t care. I am who I am, comfortable in my cross-breeding alien skin. My real friends accept me for my inconsistencies, contradictions, complexities and flaws. Plus, my wife says my friends from the other world simply scratch their heads ’cause they don’t read poems and won’t spend the time to figure them out anyway…and, they’re probably too embarrassed to admit their ignorance of art or laziness. Some were kind enough to come to my first reading, bought the book and invented a compliment about one or two of the poems. I appreciated that. I guess I’m at the point in my life that I have no qualms about being myself and I hope my new poems benefit from that.

GREEN: I like that metaphor; poetry really is its own planet. Or maybe a little moon falling forever around the regular world. What do you think poetry’s place should be? What’s its purpose? You seem very grounded as a poet, happy to have it as just one aspect of a broader life. Do you feel content with our current cultural cosmology? I guess what I really want to know is, do you think your athletic friends’ disinterest in poetry is equivalent to a poet’s disinterested in, say, football? Is there any difference?

COHEN: I’m probably talking out of both sides of my mouth here, but I think poetry is elite and commonplace; most people don’t read contemporary poetry and certainly most people don’t spend the amount of intense time trying to compose it in a serious way, but if you stopped almost anyone on the street, I bet virtually everyone, at some time or another, has written a poem and certainly has read a poem. I’m a blue collar type of poet, an ordinary, regular American guy, who happens to have read a great deal of literature simply because I like it, in the same way I enjoy a number of things.

Even though I probably could, I find it pretentious and annoying to make esoteric literary allusions in poems, so I don’t. (Yeah, I get it; you’re smart and well read.) I like accessible poems, though some might argue that some of mine are not. I’m not a footnote type of guy and I’m sort of lazy and don’t want to look stuff up. Now which Greek God was that? What was his super power? But my approach to writing is not lazy; it’s blue collar, working man. I write something every day whether I feel like it or not and put my time in. I go to work sick. I’m rarely inspired and I have no patience for waiting for some sort of Muse. In fact, I don’t think I have a Muse, I just try to talk to people in my poems who I know and want to talk to. My father got up at five every morning, went to work and never complained. I try to do that—especially with my poetry. Lunch pail stuff.

Many of the “athletic” people whom I’ve been friends with for many years are not what you might think. Many are extremely thoughtful, well-read, interesting people, open to ideas. And they work hard and laugh off failure. What I learned from them is you recruit 20 players and, if you’re lucky, you get one who is good. They move on. I have no qualms about writing twenty poems to get one decent one. It’s a sort of rain off a duck’s back approach. I’m rarely wedded to any one particular poem. If it doesn’t work out; I write another. People involved in sports still have to fracture the myth that they are only interested in physical prowess and intellectualism is not part of their lives. Athletes, by and large, respect hard work and accomplishment, in any realm. I guess I don’t see them as that different from poets I know and respect…so I guess I would respectfully disagree: I don’t think as a rule of thumb, that poets are disinterested in football or vice versa. Everyone seems different, right? After a billion gene possibilities at this point of Man’s existence, we’re all mutts anyway.

But getting back on track, I do think on some level that poems should be accessible to anyone willing to read carefully. An alien could not come to earth and watch a football game and appreciate all the idiosyncrasies and nuances or even the rules of the game, without instruction. Poetry is similar I think, except, the average person does have the linguistic skill to appreciate a poem with no training, if the poet does a good job. Why do people love Frost so much? Plain talk? There’s something to be said about the simple and direct.

There are moments in my life that something happens and a line from a poem I love pops into my brain and I have a life-insight due to that poem and conversely have a deeper understanding of the poem than I’d ever had. It’s as though I instinctively knew the poem was wonderful and I should remember it, but I didn’t know why or when I’d have to draw on it. Then it happens, and it is. I have no idea what poetry’s purpose is for anyone other than myself. It helps me digest the world so that it goes down easier. It’s comforting in that I know there are others out them like me; it makes me less lonely. It makes me recognize something I didn’t know I knew, or explains something that I sensed but never fully grasped.
And images. I love inventive images and the music of American diction. And surprises and life-insight. I like the way interesting people talk, people who are excited or resigned to something. I get bored easily so I enjoy folks who have lots of interests, lots of passion…I don’t find it inconsistent for someone to love the New York Football Giants and John Ashbery. In fact, those are the people I like best. That’s how my boys were raised and they seem fairly well grounded and normal. You can bring up any topic and they seem comfortable with the conversation; all things are simultaneously important and unimportant. In fact, didn’t the Ancient Greeks, (one son alluded to them as the Ancient Geeks) who were fairly smart guys, have to pass some type of intellectual test before qualifying for the Olympics? I think I remember reading that somewhere.

It’s a Zen thing, too, I think: all things being of equal value, having their place. As much as I love poetry and find it useful in my everyday life, I’m not sure it’s more important to me than the Giants winning the Super bowl and, clearly, I recognize that it’s not important to everyone. Should we be pedaling poetry door-to-door like religious zealots? Passing out pamphlets? Poetry helps me understand what it is I am and sports help me forget, abandon myself temporarily, as do other things: gardening, TV, etc. It’s a sort of ying and yang see-saw. If you think about the show Kung Fu, Grasshopper was quite spiritual, exploring the intricacies of the natural and human dimension, or lack thereof, with Master Po, unraveling the nature of the universe in prime time. But, when confronted with bad guys, who often were one dimensional (clue), and who demonstrated a single obsession, he would kick their ass, in perfect slow motion. Hence, you can be a tough guy and poet. I guess those type of poets are my favorites, except Rilke. I like Rilke but he wouldn’t survive in a street fight, unless Rodin had his back.

So I appreciate you saying I’m grounded. I have tried to keep things in balance, in perspective. I do the best I can at my job, raising my family, working on poems, given my own imperfections and flaws. As I said, my wife and I made some serious sacrifices to make sure the boys got to their games and music lessons, do/did well school—and did my poetry suffer, my production, as a result? Of course, but that’s who I am. And that suffering may have contributed to my development as a poet. Poetry is what I studied in college, what I have always done since I was a kid; it’s been a central passion in my life; it’s been a constant. When things are going badly in life it is a pal and mistress, when things are going well, it patiently waits on the sidelines, holding an umbrella for me, to ward off rain or the excessive sun. It has no demands and infinite demands on me. Although poetry is somewhat different, of course, from song lyrics, most everyone enjoys music, so can’t we say almost everyone loves poetry? One can almost always hear the radio blasting from passing cars in summer when the windows are rolled down. We all sing along in our cars or in front of the mirror in our private teenage rooms. And the molecules of the music evaporate into the air. So maybe poetry is a kind of artistic physics, and our cultural cosmology is that real poetry can neither be created nor destroyed. Wow! How did I get here?

GREEN: Well, that’s what I was trying to get at—I think there’s a tendency to overvalue contemporary poetry, in a way, simply because it’s under-appreciated in our culture. If I had to choose between poetry and recreational sports, I’d probably choose poetry, but it wouldn’t be an easy decision. They’re each important in entirely different ways, and I’d never thought of it in terms of yin/yan before, but that model fits. And strangely, it’s the action of sports that quiets the mind, and the inaction of poetry that disquiets.

Let’s take a little breather—tell us your five favorite poems, if you can. Not your own, but no restrictions, just the first five that come to mind. I see interviewers ask about favorite poets all the time, but I think it’s more interesting to be specific. Gives us something of digestible length to run and look up.

COHEN: Oh God, Tim, that is a wicked hard question…I love so many poems, and my favorite poems are not necessarily written by my favorite poets, but maybe they are… What do my choices say about who I am as a writer? I would say, Lowell, “Memories of West Street” and “Lepke,” two Larkin poems, “Reference Back” and “Talking in Bed,” “Musee De Beaux Art,” Auden of course, “Refusals,” Jon Anderson, and Weldon Kees, one of the Robinson poems, but I can’t remember which one…I’ll have to look it up.

GREEN: Well that’s why I asked it—three of the poems you mentioned I’ve never read. I’m going to run off to Google when we’re done and see if I can find them. There are so many great poems in the world, sometimes the best thing poets can share is simply suggested reading.

Okay, back to you. It seems this is the year you’ve cashed in on your patience—this fall, your second book, Swerve, is coming out from Black Lawrence Press, just six months or so after your first. In an email to me, you described Disloyal Yo-Yo as the “older and more civilized” book. So what does the uncivilized Bruce Cohen look like? How does Swerve swerve? Tell us a little about the book.

COHEN: I would like it documented, in this interview, that yesterday I was at the Mets’ game with two of my sons and we witnessed the first game-ending unassisted triple play since 1927!

I think in Disloyal Yo-Yo, mostly, I’m talking to myself, and if other people eavesdrop, so be it. In Swerve, the pace and voice and music are more frenetic, obsessive. I am talking to others, more publically, mostly. For lack of a better description, I think the poems are a little more zany, out there, anxious, unafraid. Stylistically, I was influenced by those poets who had a more quirky sensibility and a tone, who wrote with heavier accents and more in-your-face alliteration, internal rhymes and bluntness. Quirkier syntax. Not that I’m a very subtle writer, but I think I pushed that envelope a little and the poems are unabashedly brash and speedy. Not seeing, or caring to see, that which is in front of me, going faster than I probably should in poems—not in real life; in real life I’m a wicked slow driver, I swerve when a little girl runs into the road following her soccer ball or a couch falls off the pick-up in front of me after a tire blows out, but I keep going, because, in life, mostly that’s what we do. We close our eyes, hope for the best, and keep going. That’s what we have to do to make any sort of progress in small and large ways. We all know people who are frozen in a particular time due to some horrific catastrophe or life-altering event, and it’s sad. They live forever in that terrible moment. We pity them and secretly, or not so secretly, are glad it is not happening to us. Life gets thrown at you from every direction, meteorites hit the earth, and maybe the people who survive are the ones who dodge the flying objects, who are able to swerve. Those who are light on their toes without heavy suitcases.

And I want to be among them. I never wanted to be a helpless victim in art; I never wanted to be afraid to take risks in poems: I always aspired to say “the hardest thing.” Even though it’s possible, I never wanted my poems to sound like other people’s poems. I believe the poems in Swerve have a little more courage and gusto than Disloyal Yo-Yo, more confidence, a little more of myself. In life, I’m extremely responsible. In my newer poems, not so much. I hope that you never know what I will do or say. So you have to pay attention and hold onto your wallet or you may crash or find yourself alone on a deserted street with no way of getting home, no ID. You can’t even prove who you are, and you might have to start from scratch, re-invent the world, and would that be such a terrible thing? In art, of course not.

GREEN: Or football! Thanks, Bruce, this has been terrific.

—from Rattle e.7, Fall 2009

Rattle: Poetry

… without pretension since 1995.

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