So the London Review of Books comes in the mail and you turn immediately to the page that would be the inside back flap if the LRB were a book rather than a tabloid-shaped effort at an intellectual broadside.
The inside back cover has the classifieds and the LRB has the world's finest personals. The first each week is from an outfit that calls itself Infidelities and boasts that it is not only discreet but "bespoke" -- "A personal professional bespoke individual service," a phrase with as many adjectives as a poem by Robert Lowell, and which provides new eviudence of the astonishing rise of "bespoke" as a word of choice.
But the week's best personal is a little further down in the list: << Aspiring priest seeks guardian temptress for daily confession in Gothic music hall. johndonne@wiltonsmusichall.com >>
It could be a coded message directed to a Guardian reporter with a liking for Gothic architecture from a witty sonneteer, the author of a book on Augustine's Confessions, who played Sky Masterson in a college production of Guys and Dolls. Or maybe not. Try reading Donne's "The Extasie" or "The Sun Rising" with this advert in your brain. -- DL
It is impossible to translate; we are always translating:
Alone at a café table set on uneasy cobble under some broad-leaved tree, I wait for my lunch and enjoy a breeze. At last. At last a breeze, at last a moment to consider the past several days, the rush and press of them, memories already shifting into an unsorted memory I will call “Lisbon” before long. 10 days in and I too have shifted, easily navigating tram, metro, train and the often steep, slick cobble underfoot as I follow the Disquiet schedule of lectures, readings, workshops and events around the city, Lisbon built like San Francisco upon hills along a waterfront. What I have learned: to move slow in the afternoon(now), how to count change(or be short-changed), how to say “no Portuguese,” passably.
It’s the time in a trip you begin to think, “I could stay,” your other life for the moment the memory. Traveling, like a translation of experience from one life to another, is itself a “placeless place” you may begin to feel at home in.
Translation, the movement of meaning from one language to another, is the topic of many discussions here where a number Luso(Portuguese)-American writers work alongside the general diversity of north American participants. Each guest writer, scholar, or cultural leader—and the list is formidable—has touched on this paradox that lies at the heart of all human communication. As the world renowned fiction writer António Lobo Antunes said last evening through headphones and the voice of a translator(!), “Translation is the black and white version of a color photo.” Or, as Paula Rejo, a magical realist painter puts it, “You always see the light reflected.” Or in the words of Jacinto Lucas Pires, another fiction writer, “Translation is a shadow language.”
Language itself, our method of connecting thought to thought, can be experienced as a sort of floating space between people, a space that we try and inhabit together.
Well, let’s have a poem then, this by Nuno Júdice.
LISBON LIGHT
The light crossing the room between
the two windows is always the same, although
on one side it’s west - where the sun is now - and on
the other it’s east - where the sun has already been. In the room
west and east meet, and it is this light
that makes my gaze uncertain for not knowing
which hour held the first light. Then I look at the thread
of light stretched between both windows, as if
it had no beginning and no end; and
I start pulling it inwards into
the room, winding it up, as if I could
use it to tie up both ends
of the day into midday, and let the time be
stopped between two windows, west
and east, until the thread
unwinds, and everything
begins all over again.
Nuno Júdice from A Matéria do Poema, 2008 Translation by Ana Hudson, 2009
Centro Nacional de Cultura, a historical literary foundation and primary sponsor of Disquiet, has an excellent website to introduce you to more of Nuno’s work as well as that of other Portuguese poets in translation, Poems from the Portuguese.
What? Music too? I have spoiled you. Here, fadista Camané gives an introduction in his native tongue just to give you a sense of that, too.
Let’s begin with oral poetry, which I ended the last blog post on, because I neglected to note that the cowboy poets have nothing on the Basques who sell tickets in the tens of thousands for their oral poetry competition, broadcast on national television, to name the Bertsolari Txapelketa, the national championship of bertsolaritza, a complicated Basque oral tradition of improvisational poetry that’s composed on the stage to compete in an appropriate melody constructed by the poets, three cycles (or sequences of bertsos) of poems that respond dramatically to the challenges posed by the emcees. And let’s not forget the Tibetan epic King Gesar, perhaps the longest epic poem ever conceived, whose many “incarnations span the Tibetan and Mongolian languages, Buddhist and non-Buddhist paradigms, verse and prose, and oral and written forms of composition… No “complete” version of King Gesar has ever been recorded.” Nothing totalizing exists but luckily we can still hear parts of it today.
Now to change tracks completely, I need begin by confessing to being a detail in a recent piece in the AWP Writer’s Chronicle by poet and SUNY Nassauprofessor Pramila Venkateswaran about Recent Trends in South Asian American Poetry. This admission prefaces my response to it, so let me be the first to acknowledge the taint in my lenses, if it exists, since no poet likes to be told they have a most successful poem or that they have written an academic’s volume when it’s clear they haven’t been very deeply investigated or even fully read. Made aware of this possible defensive posture, I’m actively working against it, I promise you, because there’s much in Venktaswaran’s readings of Meena Alexander and particularly Reetika Vazirani to admire. Having co-edited Reetika Vazirani’s posthumous book Radha Sayswith Leslie McGrath, and having helped publish it for Drunken Boat, I was pleased to see this perceptive reading of her earlier work: “She [Vazirani] goes beyond the immigrant tale to delve into the language that embodies the fragmentation of the exile. Multiple voices, broken lines of conversation—almost like long distance conversations that are cut off when phone lines go dead – mix of languages, quotes from letters and from the past that reappear, and observations in the present tense make her poems dynamic and ever-shifting.” That’s a deft embodiment of the form of World Hotel, an impulse towards verbal fracture and white space that would grow ever more extreme in her last collection.
However my main problem with the essay is that there’s nothing recent about it. It’s a roundup of the usual suspects who constituted and indeed broke necessary ground for a generation of South Asian poets over two decades ago. A.K. Ramanujan, Chitra Divakaruni, Meena Alexander, Reetika Vazirani, and Agha Shahid Ali, Vijay Seshadri thrown in as the conceptual bracket, someone who has “distanced himself from the immigrant theme,” as if that’s unanticipated or that Seshadri should have felt such compulsory obligation. They are all iconic poets - two of whom have tragically passed on - but if they’re said to constitute “recent trends,” then break out the fat shoelaces (foot fetishists beware)
Oh yes, yes my friends. There's happiness at Yale every summer -- an entire course on happiness taught by Professor Lawrence Vogel, a professor of philosophy at Connecticut College. Larry's one of the best lecturers I've ever known, and he kindly invites me to speak to his students about the subject of happiness from the point of view of poetry.
This year I'll be talking about the Ericksonian psychosocial stages across the lifespan and how they're reflected in the poetry of Carl Sandburg, Jane Kenyon, Czeslaw Milosz, Jane Hirshfield....and some of my own work.
The class is free and open to the public. It meets tomorrow morning (Wednesday, June 29th) in room 209 of Linsly-Chittenden Hall, on the old campus of Yale University. Here is a link to the campus map:
The class is small and consists of a great group of students both international and American. I'm a believer in interaction and questions, so if you're within thinking distance of New Haven tomorrow morning, and want a little mind-massage, come!
If you went “beyond the pleasure principle,” where would you be going, and with whom? (a) the Italian Renaissance with Vasari (b) the Spanish Inquisition with Loyola (c) the French Revolution with Saint-Just (d) the Trojan War with Ares or Poseidon (e) the American century with Henry Ford
Extra credit:
1. Name the dudes above. Who is the third who sits always by their side? II. Although the question just asked has no correct answer, Freud liked to ask it because (1) By these means he would be able to tell the sheep from the wolf (2) He felt that the only one thing that was inevitable besides death and taxes was history (3) He felt that those who didn't know their history were doomed to repeat it. (4) He believed that history to the defated may say Alas but cannot help or pardon. (5) He and Wittgentstein spent hours analyzing the remark they overheard from a disgruntled student: "History is a waste of time." -- DL
One of the more intriguing aspects of being in Wyoming for this Easterner has been exposure to cowboy culture. Parts of the West retain in their vast spaces a tunnel to the past of the land and thanks to some locals, I was given clues on how to distinguish between genuine and poseur cowboys. For one thing, a real cowboy never enters an establishment with a cowboy hat on his head. Also, he when he takes his hat off, he places it with the hole to the sky, so as not to let the luck fall out. Indeed real cowboys have their own list of etiquette, which includes never turning your horse's tail to a cow, never touching another person's tack and - rather obviously - keeping the branding to your own cattle. Other famous codes include Gene Autry's earnest wisdom ("The cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man or take unfair advantage") and the genius comic epigrams of Will Rogers who has a few of my favorite bits of advice: The quickest way to double your money is to fold it and put it back in your pocket; Never kick a cow chip on a hot day; and of course, if you're riding ahead of the herd, take a look back every now and then to make sure it's still there.
But what I didn't fully realize until my trip out West was how popular poetry is to these ranchmen. And in case, it's hard to discern, here's a poseur cowboy:
Cowboy poetry in America dates back to the time of the long-distance cattle drives from Texas to Kansas that followed the Civil War, as a kind of entertainment and diversion for lonely trailhands and itinerant cattle-herders gathered around a fire. You can read a good history of the movement in this essay by Rod Miller in RATTLE and Western and Cowboy Poetry at the Bar-D Ranch is clearly the Dial of the movement, including a Lariat Laureate, gatherings and festivals and a rural library project where you can suggest libraries, particularly those serving ranching communities. From the looks of it, cowboy poetry is one of the healthiest segments of contemporary poetry, with it's own raging debate between the formalists and the free versers.
Jim Valvis is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist who lives in Issaquah WA. His poetry is finely crafted, keenly observed, and often laugh-out-loud funny. There is an integrity in his work that, coupled with his 5-star writing chops, is deeply moving. His poems are smart, but never smart-aleck; personal but never self-absorbed; witty, but never flippant. I love his work and was very proud to publish his poem, "The Extension" , in the most recent issue of Praxilla (click and read it, hurry hurry - it kicks ass!). You can find his work in many journals, both online and in print, including A Handful of Dust, Boston Literary Magazine, Gargoyle, Crab Creek Review, and many, many others. His first full-length collection, How To Say Good-bye, is scheduled for publication in September by Aortic Books. I can't wait.
In the meantime, here is one of Jim's poems. It originally appeared in the now-defunct Wormwood Review in about 1994.
The Disease
"I smack," she said, "the oriole riding the rodeo of disinfected dreams."
"Huh?" I said.
"But lately the pontification of the shedding serpent slips into perfection."
"What the hell are you talking about?" I said.
"It's poetry," she said.
"Well," I said, "cover your mouth, goddammit. I can't miss any more days at work."
On Saturday, I posted about the birds that reside in the trees near our Ithaca home. While writing the piece, I discovered the Cornell Macaulay Library archive of bird sounds, which helped me find which birds made what sounds. Last night, at dusk, I turned up the volume on my laptop speakers and played the cardinal songs over and over again to see what would happen. As one might have predicted, the cardinals emerged from the trees and swooped toward me, circled around, bobbed and weaved, and retreated. This continued until it struck me that I might be messing up their biorhythms or mating habits so I stopped, but not before I caught the confused male, above, on the telephone wire.
The big Cub Scout Jamboree – Must be summer of ’55 or ’56 -- Hundreds, perhaps thousands of Cub Scouts from across the city, And near the end a kid I don’t Know approaches me, he says, ‘You mouth off to your parents?’ Puzzled but intrigued by his question I say ‘Not that much’ – and now it is he That seems puzzled, as with evident Concern he asks, ‘Why not? Look, ‘There is my father in an undershirt ‘And green janitor pants.’ And he yells, ‘Hey stupid! Dad! Hey numb nuts!’
Hi all - glad to be the guest blogger for this week and in fact writing this first entry on the last day of the Jackson Hole Writers Conference where I was poetry faculty for the last few days. Beyond the cowboys, the Teton Mountains and the wandering pronghorn elk, there was also a lot of writing and talk about writing taking place. Yesterday I was the leader of one of these sessions with poet Laurie Kutchins and our subject was Uprising: the Role of Poetry in Revolution.
We began the session by sharing the good news that after 80 days in prison, Chinese dissident artist and human rights activist Ai Weiwei had been freed. Unfortunately he refused to speak publically and shut down his Twitter account. Mr. Ai is the son of the famous modern Chinese poet Ai Qing, who like his son was an outspoken critic of the regime. As a result, he spent time interned in labor camps and was censored by the authorities. It's with bated breath we wait to hear Mr. Ai speak openly and freely again. As he famously carved on one of his artworks, "Without freedom of speech there is no modern world, just the barbaric one."
Keeping him in mind, we read one of the foremost Misty poets, Bei Dao and his poem "Wintering" in a translation by Tao Naikan and Simon Patton. The poem begins:
Waking up: the northern pine forest— The urgent drum beats of the earth The alcohol of sunlights stored in the tree trunks Is stirring the ice of darkness As the heart and the wolf pack howl to each other
As poet Michael Palmer has said about his work, "Bei Dao has followed a path of resistance that abjures overt political rhetoric while simultaneously keeping faith with his passionate belief in social reform and freedom of the creative imagination." We get that sense in this poem, which is rich in imagery of the natural world, seeded with the poignancy of its decline. One of the members of the workshop wondered if Bei Dao might have been familiar with Sylvia Plath's poem "Wintering" (I think not), which has a similar mood, "This is the room I have never been in/ This is the room I could never breathe in/ The black bunched in there like a bat."
