Matthew Thorburn is the author of three books of poems, most recently This Time Tomorrow, published in March by the Waywiser Press. His work has been recognized with a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, as well as fellowships from the Bronx Council on the Arts and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. He lives in New York City, where he works as a communications manager for an international law firm.
Welcome, Matt
-- sdh
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For others, bravery in poetry is about the courage to say what needs to be said.
Yet we undeniably live in a time and place where “bravery in poetry” means something very different than it has in the past. This bravery has sometimes meant putting aspects of one’s life on the line.
Still, bravery is and always has been an infinitely broad rage of experience. In some cases it manifests most profoundly in what is not said.
All this and more was broached at The Poetry Society of America and PEN World Voices Festival’s “Bravery in Poetry” presentation last week at The New School. Several contemporary poets discussed the work of poets they feel have demonstrated bravery and risk-taking in their work and lives.
Mary Karr talked about the “brute facts in unvarnished terms” in the work of Zbigniew Herbert.
“Risking something is more than unconventional line breaks,” said Karr, as though reminding us of a different time and place, one in which what was risked was significant, one today’s young poets may struggle to channel.
Yet, to Herbert, who shrugged off such accusations, it was never about bravery—it was simply a matter of taste.
Concluding “The Power of Taste” he writes:
It did not require great character at all
we had a shred of necessary courage
but fundamentally it was a matter of taste
Yes taste
that commands us to get out to make a wry face draw out a sneer
even if for this the precious capital of the body the head
must fall
Herbert raises the important question of whose place it is to qualify one’s bravery.
Yusef Komunyakaa talked about “the severe bravery” and “lack of hesitation” in the work of Muriel Rukeyser.
As someone who “breath[ed] in experience” and “breath[ed] out poetry,” Rukeyser’s life and work were about “learning the so-called Other,” said Komunyakaa.
Edward Hirsch’s depiction of Joseph Brodsky as “a party of one,” (in “I Sit By The Window”: “My song was out of tune, my voice was cracked, / but at least no chorus can ever sing it back”) and one who saw poetry as a form of existence for which he must make the largest possible case came closest to my own realm of experience, and the tensions between declaring oneself a poet and standing by the lifestyle (though I would never dare compare my “bravery” to Brodsky’s).
In perhaps the most moving presentation of the evening, Henri Cole took on James Merrill, who eventually succumbed to AIDS-related illness, though he, arguably, never directly addressed the experience of his illness in his work, nor did he tell anyone but his close friends he was sick.
“I hate the word ‘elegant’ to describe him,” said Cole, who sees the word as a slur by critics for Merrill’s homosexuality.
Merill, said Cole, did not want to be treated as a sick person despite the moral pressures of the time to speak out.
“His silence was heroic,” said Cole. “He denied himself the comfort.”
Maybe we don’t have to be as socially and politically courageous in our work as the writers who came before us, though we struggle still, and forever will, to be personally courageous. The bravery our predecessors took on is a luxury for us but, potentially, a detriment as well. Will we ever learn to be as bold as they were—as they remain in their immortalized words—if not presented with the challenges they helped remove?
(Ed note: this is a second review of the May 1 "Bravery in Poetry" event. Read Sharon Preiss's take here.)
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ALEXANDER POPE (5/21)
She’s weepin’ inurr Poarridge,
Creyin’ inurr SOUP:
An’ naebody’s there
To wape urr Tairs,
Etsept for Alikzandurr POOP.
She’s bocked intae a Cairner;
She’s come to the Aynd o’ urr ROOP:
An’ hü should be the Hongman if naw
For Alikzandurr POOP.
Tha’ Soon of a Divvel’s gawturr!
Ah dinna ha she’ll COOP:
For she ga’ praignant wi’ a Dawtair
An’ the Father is Alikzandurr POOP.
An’ the fainal Vairse ’ll tell yaboot
Tha Deeth o’ urr last HOOP:
For tha Beebee hath coomootuvvair an’ it looks
Like Alikzandurr POOP.
Alikzandurr Poop!
Alikzandurr Poop!!
Naebody’s there
To wape urr Tairs,
Etsept for ALIKZANDURR POOP.
•
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CHRISTINE HUME (5/21)
Christine Hume
To the crack of doom
She’ll lower the boom
On her birthday
The fruit of the loom
Cannot help but consume
· KING TUT in his tomb
On her birthday
We must never presume
To harass the legume
Of borascible Hume
On her birthday
We’ll give ’er some room
Or illegal perfume
Or a mop and a broom
On her birthday
☎
King Tut on my foot!
Cashed out and kaput
Cannot but consume
Canopic his tomb
Illegal legume
Borascible Hume
She’ll lower the boom on her birthday
She’ll lower the boom on her birthday
•
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I want to kick off my stint here with a painting, a favorite poet, and a poem called “Poem.”
At the beginning of last year I paid a visit to the Tibor de Nagy Gallery for what felt like a belated Christmas gift. It was one of those January days in New York – cold but sunny, no snow, milder than a January day ought to be – when you half-forget it’s winter, and I had brought my wife along to check out a compact but wonderful show of pictures by Elizabeth Bishop. “Small paintings on paper,” the Times called them; a selection of her works in watercolors, gouache, ink and graphite.
Some I recognized from other places. Merida from the Roof you would know as the cover art of The Complete Poems 1927-1979, the salmon-colored paperback we all owned (and probably still have, because it’s so portable) before the Library of America edition and the one simply called Poems were published. And her painting of a tiny-looking Louise Crane kicked back on an enormous bed I’d seen reproduced in The New York Review of Books, in a piece celebrating her centennial.
The show also included an assortment of “Bishopiana” (the Times again) such as a pair of her binoculars (produced by Abercrombie and Fitch!), two of her desks from Brazil – heavy, rough-hewn, rustic-looking things – as well as some folk art sculptures from South America, a birdcage (I think it was a birdcage) and a couple of paintings. The desks didn’t thrill me the way I thought they might, though I did run a finger along the edge of one just to touch it.
No, the moment of amazement came when I looked up from that desk and realized what else I was looking at, hanging a little off to one side. It really was “About the size of an old-style dollar bill”— or so I’d imagine, never having seen one. (I take it on faith, since EB said so.) 4 and 3/16 by 9 11/16 inches, oil on masonite, in an old wooden frame. A mini widescreen landscape: one-third sky, blue-gray and cloudy; one-third dark ground, with light and dark houses and barns; one-third water, vaguely (cloudily?) reflecting the sky and clouds. Poor painting, it didn’t even have a name – or a date. Untitled, nd, by George Hutchinson – “Your Uncle George, no, mine, my Uncle George.”
It was the painting Bishop describes – and in describing, gradually arrives at a sort of definition of what a poem is for her – in the poem she called “Poem”:
Life and the memory of it cramped,
dim, on a piece of Bristol board,
dim, but how we live, how touching in detail
– the little that we get for free,
the little of our earthly trust. Not much.
About the size of our abidance
along with theirs: the munching cows,
the iris, crisp and shivering, the water
still standing from spring freshets,
the yet-to-be-dismantled elms, the geese.
I snapped a quick picture when I had the little room to myself, but it came out blurry. (You can click through a slideshow of all the pieces here; this painting is image #19.) And I thought – just for a minute, just to enjoy thinking it – what if I bought it, what if I could take this relic home and hang it over my desk? Because it seemed amazing to me that, all these years later, here it was: the actual painting. It existed. Because if it were in someone else's poem, it might not, but because it was in Bishop's, it did. And because this was a gallery, almost everything on show was also on sale. Though of course the thirty-something-thousand-dollar price tag was beyond me, and anyway I think it was already marked "sold."
But just to know it was still out there, that it might again hang over someone’s desk, or in their foyer (as it once did in Bishop's aunt's house), made me very very happy. There's a poem in this that I haven't written yet. And I'll have more to say this week about Bishop's poem and what it means to me.
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If you are looking forward to tonight's Eileen Myles & Rebecca Wolff reading at the KGB Bar -- the season finale of KGB Monday Night Poetry -- just hold it right there. Due to a scheduling conflict, the event has been postponed to this Friday evening, May 24, at the same time -- 7:30 PM (doors @ 7).
KGB Monday Night Poetry was founded in 1997 by David Lehman and Star Black. It is currently hosted by John Deming and Matthew Yeager. Thanks for a great season everyone -- see you Friday!
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Dear Bleaders,
White sky out there seemed to call for this poem by Timothy Donnelly, of the wonderful Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit and The Cloud Corporation.
Epitaph by His Own Hand
From the morning he started
peeling his first potato
he felt like he'd been peeling
potatoes for eternity-
all that fell about his ankles
like clouds' inky shadows
smudged across pastures
of an afterlife clearly
put farther away from him
the harder he worked for it.
-Timothy Donnelly
It's true! Potato peelings look like clouds. Or rather like the shadows of clouds.
Every time you peel a potato you pick up just where you peeled your last potato. Life is just one long potato peel interrupted by weeks of nonsense and then returns, at last, to the spud and the knife.
No, but I like the misery of this little poem. Don’t always gnaw the heel of the bread, stop working hard for your reward.
Instead, look up at the clouds and see them from upside down, as if they were on the ground around your chair, flapping down from your lap as you sheer thin shapes off a bulbous, knotty loaf of the stuff, whatever it is. Busy day.
Don't kill yourself and I will return to encourage you yet again.
love,
Jennifer
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The cheapest motel in Barstow,
There I received my education,
Groaning air conditioner
No match for faked orgasms
Unavoidable through walls
Nor could even the TV set prevail
Over whores’ continual bogus
Jollifications day and night.
So never fake an orgasm, girls,
That was the lesson I took away.
Do I look older than twenty-four?
It's because my soul is old.
What I've learned from fucking
Needs more than one lifetime
But I hate any God bullshit,
I hate any whore with the heart
Of gold bullshit, I love how laptops
And cell phones have made pimps
Obsolete, I like the word cunt better
Than pussy and I love the word slut.
Giving pleasure to women is what
Men want but most don't know
They want it, the dumb fucks,
How lame is that? Dorks! Hello?
Well, here is the key to the mint:
Class with a touch of wicked sleaze.
A hundred and nine men I've fucked
This year and the biggest prick was
Ten inches long, seven around,
And the smallest was zero point five.
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(This is the fourth and last installment in a short series about the PEN World Voices Festival.)
Every spring, for nine years running, the PEN World Voices Festival brings an astounding array of writers from all over the globe to New York City for a weeklong exchange of ideas and celebration of matters of literary exigence. Next year, even if you can get to only a few of the myriad events scheduled, you’ll get to be part of a remarkable conversation about life and literature that you won’t soon forget.
Burma: Sunday, May
5, 2013.
Burma’s Poetry Scene is active and vibrant. And so is its poetry scene. The former is sanctioned by The State and includes Heroic Verse about the Official History of the Country. It can be studied in schools and can be recited without fear of recrimination. The latter has sometimes been outlawed. It makes a distinction between The Glorious History of the State and personal history, between the sanctioned experience of The Citizens of the State, and the personal experience of the individual people who comprise Burma’s cities and countryside. Burma’s poetry, with a small “p,” glorifies language and learning and openness, and it has often been read and shared in only small teahouses and private homes. In its past it’s been fed carefully and secretively from the few scant volumes of international poetry that have been translated into Burmese from other languages. And though the Official Government does not accept the latter as Burma’s Official Poetry, it is celebrated for its bravery both here in the US and abroad.
On the final day of PEN World Voices, the well-known Burmese
poets Zeyer Lynn and Khin Aung Aye joined anthologist James Byrne to present a
discussion and reading of modern and contemporary Burmese poetry as it is
practiced by this dedicated and thriving community. Byrne, who lives in the UK,
is
the editor of the international poetry magazine, The Wolf, and he recently helped co-translate and co-edit a book
newly available in the US, Bones Will
Crow: An Anthology of Burmese Poetry.
The three writers spent the afternoon choosing poems to read in both Burmese and English and discussing the fraught history of poetry in a country shackled by a military dictatorship that has had limited communication and interaction with the outside world and has all but quashed forms of expression not sanctioned by the state. Most notions of the modern world in general and of Modernism in art had to be carefully smuggled back in to Burma by students who studied abroad in the 1930s. Books and ideas were translated and traded clandestinely, while the approved channels of education remained woefully behind the times. As late as 1968, even forward leaning Burmese poets were deliberating the value of poetic devices like free verse and colloquial speech, devices that, while in common use in other poetries around the world, were still little used by contemporary poets of Burma.
The poems read on this day, though, were fresh and contemporary and full of tension and play. Not all the poetry was political, but the background shading of many of the pieces was colored by freedoms denied, experienced, or yearned for, whether the poems were narratives of personal experience, lyrics of flashing beauty, or modern epic inventions. These are poems neither supported by- nor supportive of- the government, and should you be traveling in Burma, you won’t hear them read as part of the annual poetry competition there. But through the efforts of these poets and anthologists, and others like them, the door through which poets and poetry can travel to and from this country has been opened just a little bit wider.
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My interest in classical poetry is not casual, but I haven’t let it take over my life either. In fact, I dropped out of a doctoral program in classical philology in 1965, with only a thesis between me and the Ph.D. Newsweek's Paris bureau was a better way to fund my life than grading paper’s and exams written by Harvard freshmen.
I fully intended to complete my dissertation on Theocritus's use of rare Homeric vocabulary (as a covert sign that by inserting these relics of the heroic into his poems of rustic and urban love he was signaling his departure from the Homeric mode.)
I did in fact read my way through the Theocritus scholarship, such as it was in 1965, at the Bibliothèque Nationale in wintry dark mornings before the Newsweek office came to life. Then I would take the Métro to my chic/shabby office in the Herald Tribune building, where I switched from Hellenistic Greek to mid-twentieth-century modern French.
Operating in a modern language was, for someone hitherto confined to Greek and Latin, a release into postclassical exuberance. For me, Racine was a blast from the present. Newspapers—I read seven a day—and magazines—30 a month—were artifacts of a Latinity gone mad over the millennium since Louis the Bald and his half brother Louis the German swore mutual allegiance in 842 at Strasbourg, in Latin, Old High German and Proto-French, forming an alliance against their elder brother Lothair, the Holy Roman Emperor. The French text is the first known written example of any Romance language.
But for a classicist, the French language that had subsequently evolved, the language I was immersed in all day at my desk and on the low-fidelity phone and in interviews, felt viscerally like a supercharged adventure in linguistic time travel.
At the most mundane level, the syntax of French as spelled out in a standard grammar was pretty much a replay of Latin syntax, slightly streamlined. Even the noun genders were mostly the same (Latin neuters had become masculine). But even in the fairly tight historical process that had transformed Latin words into their obvious French descendants (historia> histoire), there were plenty of faux amis, false friends. These traps were somehow more acceptable when they involved English-French cognates that looked the same but weren’t (fastidieux was a boring, annoying fellow, not a guy with overly meticulous standards of grooming or behavior). But words that had evolved out of their Latin sense into some new and unexpected meaning in modern French were embarrassing ambushes and simply unfair.
A female colleague came into the office one morning after a date with a Frenchman. “He tried to kiss me goodnight,” she said, “but I told him: ‘Je ne baise pas tout le monde.’ And then he really threw himself at me. I nearly had to call for help.”
It would not have been useful to her if she had known that baiser came directly from Latin for kiss. Catullus, for example, wrote to his beloved: “Da mi basia mille.”
Give me a thousand kisses.
And in other poems, he used the verb for kissing, basiare,(quem basiabis, who will you kiss?)
Both words came into French, superficially intact, but the resulting verb, baiser, coarsened over time, lost its kiss signification. The noun stayed clean and unchanged (the Bond film “From Russia with Love” played in France as “Bons Baisers de la Russie,” sweet kisses from Russia, echoing a thousand holiday postcard greetings. But the verb, by 1965, meant “fuck” and fuck alone. To say kiss me, nowadays, you have to co-opt embrasser, which can no longer mean hug. In 2002, facing forced early retirement after 19 years as the editor of the leisure and arts page of The Wall Street Journal, I remembered my long-abandoned thesis on Theocritus and his ironic intertexts pilfered from the Iliad and Odyssey. I still had my notes from almost 40 years back. Maybe I should finally write the thing.
I called Harvard. Did my graduate work still count? I thought I heard a yawn at the other end. “You want to reapply? We’ll send you the green form. But you know you owe $500 for each semester you haven’t registered.”
“We’re talking about a lot of money here. I’ve been away for 70 semesters.”
“Don’t worry, there’s a cap of a thousand dollars.”
So I filled out the single-page form, wrote the check—and waited for the university archives department to send me a paper copy, officially sealed, of my graduate school record (paid for by a $3 check), as well as a letter of recommendation from a member of the classics department. When I first noticed this apparently innocent requirement, I nearly abandoned the project. The professors I had known were either long gone from Cambridge or, in most cases, dead. Then I checked the departmental website, where I found a picture of Wendell V. Clausen, the expert on Hellenistic and Latin poetry who had been the original director of my dissertation, alive and emeritus.
He wrote the letter. I wrote the thesis and, as a white-bearded doctorandus, received my second Harvard degree on June 9, 2005.
Did this mean that in the lively world that now studies Theocritus and the other poets of 3d-century BC Alexandria, the few hundred unusual Homeric words I noticed lurking in decidedly unHomeric contexts in Theocritus, are now universally read as tacit declarations of antiheroic intent? If so, no one has told me about it.
I would be lying if I said that I have been besieged with fan mail from awed Hellenists around the globe. Nor have I heard that my name is on everyone’s lips at the biennial Groningen Workshops on Hellenistic Poetry in the Netherlands. I’m in no rush for recognition. After all, Theocritus waited 2500 years for me to notice what he did to Homer.
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(This is the third installment in a short series. Stay tuned for more about the PEN World Voices Festival.)
Every spring, for nine years running, the PEN World Voices Festival brings an astounding array of writers from all over the globe to New York City for a weeklong exchange of ideas and celebration of matters of literary exigence. Next year, even if you can get to only a few of the myriad events scheduled, you’ll get to be part of a remarkable conversation about life and literature that you won’t soon forget.
Obsession: Joy Harjo on Time: Friday, May, 3 2013.
Imagine that Time is not merely the linear ticking off of
seconds, one following the other in the ever-progressing movement of this
moment to the next. Imagine instead that it is fluid, immense, infinite, and
that you could dive in and out of it at any point you choose.
Imagine that your daydreams and déjà vus, your waking thoughts of other places – even places you’ve never been too – are not merely idle wanderings or fluke tricks of the mind, but are actually travels to and knowledge of other realms.
Imagine not dismissing these daydreams and sensations, but developing them, allowing them to flower as full experiences in their own right, and honoring them as real travels through and with Time, not just flights of fancy.
Such is Joy Harjo’s experience with Time. For her, Time is a being that can be bent, one that can be worked with, altered, conjoined, entered into or exited from at various points other than the here and now.
Time is Harjo’s “Obesession,” and her talk on Friday night was one of a new PEN mini-series that heard Lewis Lapham expound on Smoking, Andrew Solomon explore Sleep, Simon Critchley discuss Memory Theater, and Naomi Wolf muse on Truth. I suspect not a single one of these other intellects brought the audience to the mystical territory that Harjo reached in her travel through Time.
In her recent memoir, Crazy Brave, Harjo opens with a very early childhood memory. “[S]omething happened that changed my relationship to the spin of the world. It changed even the way that I looked at the sun,” she writes. She then describes her first experience with “this suspended integer of time.” As she and her father are driving down the road on a hot Oklahoma summer day, the radio plays a jazz tune:
I wonder what signaled this moment, a loop of time that on first glance could be any place in time. I became acutely aware of the line the jazz trumpeter was playing…I don’t know how to say it, with what sound or words…I followed that sound to the beginning, to the birth of sound. I was suspended in the whirling stars. I grieved my parents’ failings, my own life, which I saw stretching the length of that rhapsody.
Is it possible for a human being to stand so far out from the fabric of Time she can see the entire pattern of life that would make sense of the senselessness of some aspects of the world? This is Harjo’s design is honoring her travels with Time.
Surrender to the elasticity of time allows for a more fluid interpretation of our life’s story. “Words and stories are energetic beings,” Harjo explained during her talk. If we allow for a non-linear relationship to time, we may be able to alter outcomes that seem set in stone.
She told a mythic story of someone being falsely accused of murder and an angry mob about to inflict its own brutal justice. In the moments she had before her fate was sealed, the accused was able to leave the here and now and travel to genesis of the story where she saw the crime and the true perpetrator. Coming back to the present, rather than simply denying and pointing out the actual criminal, the accused began a story and song of the entire origin of the event, so that the identity of the murderer became so obvious he confessed and the crowd retreated from their mistaken target of justice. Is it possible to travel back to the dawning of an event and explore its physical and psychic sources so that the story ends differently than it seems it ought to? Harjo’s own specific use of language in her talk demonstrates her convictions: “I was in a story not too long ago,” she says as she begins weaving her next story.
With the audience in an otherworldly hush as the conversation ended, Harjo exclaimed on ending a bit early, “Oh, I thought we’d have to be here till midnight!” Time.
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I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say
by Anthony Madrid
A creative communications, branding, and resources consultancy founded by Victoria C. Rowan
