The Best American Poetry

Contemporary Manifestations of the Beloved by Roger Sedarat

My experience with the ghazal, as both a translator from the classical Persian as well as an Iranian-American poet writing in the form in English), gets me thinking comparatively, both in terms of time and space. New translations of any great writing will always appear, in part because literary styles change along with a reading audience. Thinking about how this form reaches from the 13^th and 14^th centuries to today, even as it spans regions (from Iran to America), continues to offer a kind of intercultural space for some postmodern funkiness.

I didn’t think, out of all the things in the world to blog about, that I’d find myself here, but to make it worthwhile, I want to focus on form in relation to theme. If I remember correctly, T.S. Eliot has that great metaphor about theme or meaning in a poem as analogous to the meat the burglar throws the guard dog as he sneaks into the home for the jewels (the style). To a great extent, the “beloved” in the ghazal has served as the desired object, especially for Persians, who adapted the longing for the divine into such a sensual and tangible form, wherein the beloved becomes the material manifestation of divine presence. As a result, writers like Hafez began juxtaposing the high and the low, esoteric theological matters with full red lips, long before rock n’ roll was invented, let alone rap or hip hop.

Of course, some of these depictions do not safely fall under the rubric of political correctness. This makes the current writing of the form that much interesting, when considering a Persian writer like Simin Behbahani who, while honoring the form of the ghazal , inverts the gender of the beloved, a politicized/feminist statement on the centuries old tradition. 

For all their erudition, readers then and now are still dogs, regardless of the desired object, so I thought if only to satisfy my own hunger, I’d throw out contemporary manifestations of the beloved—objects of transcending desire—as they surface in different kinds of writing. Again, it’s not like these have direct relevance to the form, but they do capture something of the spirit of longing for the beloved, albeit within the context of the culture in which they are written. Here’s a little list arising from a survey of some favorites. They are off the top of my head—lines to and for various beloveds—and admittedly they tend to get too male/chauvinistic. I really would like to see collective posts here, various lists from men and women:

 

Wendy let me in I wanna be your friend

I want to guard your dreams and visions

Just wrap your legs round these velvet rims

And strap your hands across my engines

                                                            --Bruce Springsteen

“Pray and play, play and pray.”

                                                Miles Davis

 

“I’ll get you my pretty, and your little dog too.”

                                                            --Wicked Witch of the West, Wizard of Oz

 

“In this country first you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the woman.”        

                                                                                                       --Tony Montana

 “Oh, wait’ll I get dat wabbit!”

                                                 --Elmer Fudd

 

“Oh no, Mrs. Robinson. I think, I think you're the most attractive of all my parents' friends. I mean that.”

                                                                                                --Benjamin (from The Graduate)

 “What am I living for, if not for you?”

                                                    --Fred Jay and Art Harris (Song)

 

“Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.”

                                                                                                --Vince Lombardi

“I put her on my plate, then I do the dishes.”

                                                           --Lil’ Wayne

“Hello cowgirl in the sand…”

                                                --Neil Young

 

“Ah beer, the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.”

                                                                          --Homer Simpson

 

“God it’s so painful when something is so close, but still so far out of reach.”

                                                                                          --Tom Petty

 

“Hey Mr. DJ, I just wanna’ hear, some rhythm and blues music…on the radio”

                                                                                                            --Van Morrison

“I eat men like air.”

                                    --Sylvia Plath

 

“See that look in their eyes, Rock? You gotta get that

look back, Rock. Eye of the tiger, man.”

                                                --Apollo Creed, Rocky III

 

“The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face

Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place.”

                                                                                                --Bob Dylan

“COOKIES!!! UMM-NUM-NUM-NUM-NUM”

                                                                        --Cookie Monster

 

“What they want, I don’t know, they’re all revved up and ready to go.”

                                                                                    --Ramones

 

"Lil' Wayne Writes Ghazals"--A 21st Century Introduction to a Classical Persian Form

“Lil’ Wayne writes ghazals.” This from Program Coordinator and poet Reynold Martin to the amazing group of teens doing spoken word (and so much more) at Urban Word as he introduced the workshop I gave on the ghazal a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to poets doing well with the form in English—especially the likes of Marilyn Hacker, Suzanne Gardinier, and the late Agha Shahid Ali—more often than not the form needs little introduction. Thankfully, it also lends itself to so much clever invention in our trans-cultural age that it spontaneously receives an introduction like the one from Reynold.  

One of the many classical masters from Iran aptly defined Persian verse by saying, “Poetry is in the rhyme.” That may sound a bit antiquated, even among contemporary  Iranian writers, who tend to break away from the established Persian form of the ghazal. Yet rhyme of course endures, insisting on making itself heard, whether in the original poems of Rumi and Hafez or the lyrics of Lil’ Wayne. In asking the teens at the workshop why rhyme keeps coming, and also what is it about rhyme for Rumi and others that inherently makes for us  a kind of spiritual connection, versions of the same response answered both questions. Basically, as they observed, it links what might not belong together, cleverly connecting as it helps us to remember.

I get the gist of Reyold’s comparison, but following the workshop I needed to explore it for myself. First, a very brief recap on the form of the ghazal. Sticklers will rightly get upset and say I’ve glossed too much here, but it’s a blog entry, for goodness sake. Rest assured, there are ample resources out there to better and further introduce the form. I’d say a good place to start is Shahid Ali’s introduction in his anthology: Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English. Anyway, here is a short overview, followed by a comparative analysis to Lil’ Wayne and others:

The ghazal is a poem comprised of autonomously closed couplets, wherein each stanza stands independently from others. A recurring rhyme followed by a repeated phrase concludes both lines of the first couplet as well as the second line of the remaining couplets. Typically, the convention calls for the poet or persona to include his or name in the concluding couplet. Emerging in 7^th Century Arabia, the form became especially well known through the 13th and 14th century verse of Persian poets such as Rumi and Hafez, making its way to later poets writing in Urdu such as Ghalib. It has been adopted by other poets writing in Hebrew, Turkish, German, Spanish, and English.

 To give an excellent example, here are a few lines from Shahid Ali’s poem, “Even the Rain,”

 Even the Rain

 by Agha Shahid Ali

 What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain?

But he has bought grief's lottery, bought even the rain.

 

"our glosses / wanting in this world" "Can you remember?"

Anyone! "when we thought / the poets taught" even the rain?

 

After we died--That was it!--God left us in the dark.

And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain.

 

Drought was over. Where was I? Drinks were on the house.

For mixers, my love, you'd poured--what?--even the rain.

 

The first couplet reproduces in both lines what the following couplets will copy only in the second line: the recurring rhyme followed by the word or phrase. In the last couplet, typically the poet mentions his or her name or a pseudonym as a kind of signature.

It’s worth noting that after Rumi met his esteemed teacher, Shams-y-Tabriz, who reoriented him in time and space (whirling him into a true poet as opposed to a mere learned academic), roughly ¾ of what he wrote was in this form. It’s also worth speculating why. Each couplet, unlike an entire western sonnet, coheres unto itself, remaining closed. You could scramble a given ghazal and get an interesting poem in flux, even as each couplet maintains its autonomy (which is why in the Urban Word workshop we could each write our own couplet and then make an entirely unified ghazal in a very random way that seemed to fit together as if by author intentionality).

 This obviously puts productive pressure on the form and specifically the rhyme + the recurring word, in a great way. One would, and should, have to read tomes like Annemarie Schimmel’s The Mystical Dimensions of Islam to fully appreciate how the philosophy of Sufi mysticism underpins this form and vice versa, creating a seemingly disjointed world that unexpectedly unifies through musicality of the form. And here is where English does fall short compared to Persian, Urdu, (and other languages I’m sure). In Iran, the form itself literally sings. I write now listening to Sufi music streaming on RadioDarvish.com, an internet site that serves as my kind of go to station for any kind of writing or translating. The great Mohammad Reza Shahjarian sings a ghazal by the 13th century classical Persian poet, Saadi. 

At the tomb of Hafez , the 14^th century master’s poetry is sung on loudspeakers.

 Translations by Marilyn Hacker and original English ghazals from Shahid Ali are about as good as examples one can get of the form in English. Add to this the introduction of supplementary music (which becomes integral thanks to the form, and the poetry itself) by Coleman Barks. Even so, the form, if only as analogy, can be compared to some masterful lyrical songwriting that uses the crux of such repetition.

 Before getting to Lil’ Wayne, consider another great songwriter (and no stranger to appropriation of middle-eastern mysticism) invested in similar repetitions, Bob Dylan. Here are a few couplets/lyrics from “Shelter from the Storm”:

I was burned out from exhaustion buried in the hail

Poisoned in the bushes and blown out on the trail

Hunted like a crocodile ravaged in the corn

"Come in" she said

"I'll give you shelter from the storm".

 

Suddenly I turned around and she was standing there

With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair

She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns

"Come in" she said

"I'll give you shelter from the storm".  

 Of course this is not a ghazal; it’s an American song, a very good one at that. But as a song, it embodies the spirit and, to a certain extent, the letter of the form . The last two lines work as an extended repeated phrase, while each third line varies the “orn” rhyme. In part, constructions like these enable Dylan to go the distance and branch out in so many interesting ways while returning to an inherently satisfying (and darkly spiritual) repetition.

To conclude with where we started (very much like a ghazal), Lil’ Wayne in his own way does indeed approximate the form as well. It’s too much to get into how deftly he puns to reinvent cliché, politically charge his own self-reinvention with humor, etc. Even so, at some point it’s really worth going into the kind of correspondence between his rhyme in this respect and the likes of Hafez. Like the latter, for Lil’ Wayne much of the poetry is indeed in the rhyme. Going back to Tha Carter II Album, consider these lines from “I’m a Dboy:”

 

Thinkin' of a masta plan

I get money but I'm thinkin of a fasta plan

I'm tryin' to cash it in

I got 5 in thet garbage can and the Wrap Saran

I need cash advance

See I know three sold

The other two a jam

I'm a sit on one and whip the other one much as I can

Hot ass fuckin sadan

Windows rolled down no sound

Them bricks got the speakers drowned

I ain't listenin for shit but sirens

I ain't tryin to get to my ships sunk fuck you pirates

I'll touch you cowards

It ain't nuthin to a boss

The niggaz in the hood tryina floss and ya head gotta cost nigga

Take a loss nigga

SS five five all black with the top chopped off dat

Catch me in the spots where the shots pop off at

I ain't tryin to prove nuttin I'm jus tryin to move somthin

 

[Chorus]

 I'm a d-boy

Bitch I'm a d-boy

Ho I'm a dough boy

I got the scope in the rope for them jackboys

I got money in my pocket

I got money in my block

I got the money in the power

 

Now, I know this is a stretch, and I’m getting myself in trouble (and Reynold along with me). All, or most any kind of pop song has a refrain, so how can one just say willy nilly chorus= repeated phrase? One can’t, unless the series of rhymes can be said to equal one long rhyme, and the rhyme functions at this level of musicality and inventiveness. We are at best still dealing with an analogy as opposed to an equation, but I’d maintain we are closer to the ghazal than may at first be realized.  

 

James Fenton, Our Man in the States

James Fenton is an English poet who has always defied the stereotype. He is a splendid poet, who comes to us via Auden by way of John Fuller, and he served as Oxford Professor of Poetry for five years in 1990s -- as high an honor as the British academic establishment knows. But he is nothing if not versatile: he has been an influential London theater critic, has worked on musicals, and has written stimulating articles and books about the political turmoil he witnessed at first hand in Asia

The once and future political journalist, New York-based at present, is weighing in on the American scene for the London Evening Standard. I will past an excerpt from his report of July 15. You may read the whole piece here. 

<<<
. . . the stalemate cannot hold any longer. We see this in the murmurings from the ratings agencies Moody's and Standard & Poor's. America's credit-worthiness is, predictably, at risk of a downgrade. We see it also in the surprising readiness of certain figures on the Right to listen to a creative proposal from Mitch McConnell, which hands over to the President the ability to approve the raising of the debt ceiling, in such a way as - it must be hoped -will saddle him with the obloquy for doing so.

There is nothing middle-of-the-road about McConnell. He's the one who, at the mid-term elections, claimed that the Republicans' chief priority from now on was simply to destroy Obama. He modified his language later, but his message remained sternly negative.

Now, however, he seems ready to jump before the train is wrecked. Someone appears to have read him a lecture on the price of intransigence and given him, perhaps, a salutary fright.
>>> 

Please attend the New School poetry forum featuring James Fenton on Monday, October 3, 2011 at 6:30 PM in The Bark Room, 2 West 13 Street. Fenton will read for about thirty minutes, then takes questions from moderator David Lehman.

True North [by Stephanie Paterik]

“Poetry is astounding,” Charles North [pictured at left, interviewed by David Lehman at the New School on 22 February] writes, “if you don’t spend too much time on it.”

At 69, North has spent more than four decades writing, studying and teaching poetry. He established himself as an influential member of the New York School, published ten books and serves as poet-in-residence at Pace University.

He pulled back the curtain on his work at a New School forum last Tuesday night, telling a packed audience how he came to poetry in his twenties, invented a new poetic form and collaborated with the brightest writers of his generation. Many were in attendance, including Tony Towle and Ron Padgett, who cheered North on from the front row. Students filled the seats and sat in the aisles to hear him read a retrospective of work, including poems from Complete Lineups and Cadenza.

North can demystify his process, but the results are no less astounding. Whether he is arranging characters into a baseball lineup or parodying a sappy love song from South Pacific, you get the sense he is constantly inventing (and often playing).

He created the “lineup” poem when a fellow Columbia University student sought help with a dissertation. “Here’s your dissertation,” North cracked, handing over a baseball-style lineup of revered writers.

It became a game, and North eventually cranked out seventy lineups about everything from famous lovers to tall people. You need not understand baseball to appreciate the image of Julia Child on first base and Abraham Lincoln in the outfield. And if you do understand baseball, you get to puzzle and delight over North’s selections. Here’s how our poetic general manager lines up literary terms:

Pun  ss
Paradox  1f
Metaphor  cf
Simile  rf
Hyperbole  1b
Irony  c
Understatement  2b
Zeugma  p

(Click here to hear him read several more.)

North gets a lot of credit for the lineup, but many of his poems drip with invention. He told the audience he wrote a poem called “The Nearness of the Way You Look Tonight” after he and his wife, Paula, parodied the Rodgers and Hammerstein song “Younger Than Springtime.”

Who's on first? Charles North at the New School

We'll post a full report soon but here's a taste of what you missed if you couldn't make it to Charles North's reading and interview last week at the New School. Fantastic! 

Video by Stephanie Paterik.

-- sdh 

An Evening With John Ashbery [by Stephanie Paterik]

John Ashbery, who forged his poetry career out of a genius ability to surprise us, spent last Monday evening talking about the art of chance.

The poet visited an audience of 300 people at The New School to read poems from his most recent book, Planisphere, and from Illuminations,  his translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s prose poems due this spring from Norton.

Ashbery repeatedly encouraged the audience to invite chance into their work. Slam words together, he said, welcome surprises in your titles, your sestinas and your writing prompts.

His own ability to surrender control and piece together disparate items helped him master both poetry and collage. (He exhibited 30 years of his collages in 2008.) And it has produced astonishing lines like “nobody knows I’m a nudist” and “how can I lick some calendars?” both from poems he read Monday.

David Lehman, the event’s moderator and the New School’s poetry coordinator, asked Ashbery how the processes of poetry and collage compare.

“In my case, they’re very similar,” Ashbery said. “It’s taking something and saying, ‘that would look nice next to something else, perhaps that thing over there.’ The element of chance plays a very important role. Something is ripped out of its context and forced into a new one, creating a new kind of meaning.”

This is why he is so fond of the cento, he said, a form composed of lines taken from other authors. It allows him to preserve his favorite lines of poetry “as a kind of scrapbook.”

And the sestina? It’s both torture device and thrill ride, Ashbery said, “a cruel, iron maiden form” that gives one the sensation of riding a bicycle downhill.

“The form brings an element of chance to play in a poem,” he said. “The lines will end with six words you couldn’t possibly have imagined before writing the poem. I welcome it as a way of opening and exploring new territory in a poem.”

 

Photo credits: bottom, (c) Star Black (2011); top and jump, Stephanie Paterik.

The Ashbery Poetry Forum

In the next few days we will have a full report on the John Ashbery Poetry Forum at the New School on February 7. Meanwhile, here is Mr. Ashbery answering one of the moderator's questions.

Photo credit: Stephanie Paterik (2011)

Lawrence Joseph at the New School [by Stephanie Paterik]

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote “don’t be confused by surfaces; in the depths everything becomes law.”

Few poets understand this sentiment as poet and longtime lawyer Lawrence Joseph does. Joseph, who teaches at St. John's School of Law, has published five books of poems, and the Rilke quote serves as an epigraph for his book of prose, Lawyerland, which humanizes lawyers – for better or worse – by recreating their intimate conversations.

Joseph spoke at a New School forum last week about his decision to follow the path of poets who earned their living outside the literary world. And he read several poems from his books Into It and Codes, Precepts, and Taboos: Poems 1973-1993.

Imagine Perry Mason reciting verse in lieu of a closing argument and you have an idea of what it’s like to hear Joseph read. He offered an intense and authoritative reading of Some Sort of Chronicler I Am, which describes a panhandler on the 3 train with scant sympathy for the man’s spiel about contracting AIDS. 

“Specified ‘underclass’ by the Department of Labor/ —he’s underclass, all right: no class/ if you’re perpetually diseased and poor. … —blessed , indeed; he’s definitely blessed. His wounds open here, on the surface:/ you might say he’s shrieking his stigmata.”

 Tidy couplets counterbalance the tough tone of this poem. As in so much of his work, Joseph captures the beauty and brutality of life through an unflinching lens and applies order to it. Everything becomes law.

Chronicler also alludes to famous writers who witnessed life through other professions, including Wallace Stevens, a lawyer, and William Carlos Williams, a physician.

Variation on the theme of Time [by Lera Auerbach]

 VARIATIONS ON THE THEME OF TIME

 I. 

Time
with time
shrinks
in size,
worsens
in quality.

I search
memories,
trying 
to remember
one
perfect
moment
from childhood
when past
was still
my future.

II.

 

Time exits,
tip-toeing.
I stand
alone
in this empty
room,
erasing
my past,
harvesting
the words,
burning them
in the silence
of music.

All that I own
has turned 
into ashes.

I open the door
and breathe in
cold air.

III.

Time 
in places
becomes 
so thin,
you can see 
through its 
fading material.
You see 
the dim valleys,
You see 
strange shapes
shifting, 
changing,
blending. 

Time 
with time
loses 
its colors –
the ancient 
pyramids
are now 
all-gray.
Time likes 
gray-ness,
it can rest 
for a while,
it can cuddle 
in a cradle
of forever 
beyond.

Time 
also 
gets 
tired
sometimes.

In its sleep 
Time hears
the gray 
clouds 
sing.

[by Lera Auerbach]

Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Irremovable Soul [by Stephanie Paterik]

Jennifer Michael Hecht is “a minor famous atheist,” as she puts it. Her bestselling book Doubt: A History made her a cult figure among skeptics and catapulted her into the public speaking circuit.

At a New School poetry forum last week, the popular philosopher, professor and BAP blogger spoke to the home crowd, musing on her career, poetry and soul (more on that later). In addition to life after Doubt, she discussed her latest nonfiction project, Stay, and her most recent book of poems, Funny. 

Hecht, the rare poet with a Columbia Ph.D. in the History of Science, read from her first book of poems, The Next Ancient World, which serves as a love letter to future anthropologists.

In “Please Answer All Three Of The Following Essay Questions” she asks: “If someone wanted to make you/
slap them, hard, would it be better for him or/
her to say that your father didn’t like to hear you/
sing, or to say that your mother purposefully pricked/ her finger and bled into the coleslaw she brought/
to the physics-department picnics every year.”

Hecht recited “Villanelle If You Want to Be a Bad-Ass” and “Cannibal Villanelle,” prompting moderator David Lehman to ask why she delights in the form.

“I fall in love with lines,” she said, “and the Villanelle repeats the line.”