Richie Hofmann: Pick of the Week [ed.Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Male Beauty

 

I bought a bag of hard green pears today.

I came home and sat in our room

listening to music for hours,

solo piano, things from France, from the beginning

of the century.

When we were very young, your forgiveness

humiliated me. I knew

you would be asleep when I got back.

It is night outside

and raining. It is the same night

that fills the ruins.

You are naked, drowsy, lost. Stay like that.

In my favorite recordings,

you can hear the pianist breathing.

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Richie Hofmann’s new book of poems is A Hundred Lovers, published by Alfred A. Knopf. He is the author of Second Empire (2015), and his poetry appears recently in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The Yale Review. The recipient of Ruth Lilly and Wallace Stegner fellowships, he teaches at Stanford University.

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                                                Troy Caperton, Sleeping Endymion. 2016

Comments

[Grace Cavalieri]

oh, that last line will stay forever

[Bill Nevins]

beauty--In my favorite recordings,

you can hear the pianist breathing

[Robert Engelman]

Pablo Casals breathed often on his cello recordings, I believe. It was either he or a pianist I can't remember who could also be heard occasionally softly grunting while playing beautiful passages. Just the mention of the body sounds is poetry to my ears, reminding me of similar late-night wonder. Solo and quieter Irish traditional recordings often include feet tapping like a heartbeat. Real human bodies make music, and record.

[Don Berger]

"...It is the same night / that fills the ruins." Remarkable words that almost seem they couldn't be thought, but just rose out of somewhere other.

[lally]

deceptively 'simple' like the paintings of alex katz or the poems of frank o'hara (last lines of this evoke the last lines of o'Hara's 'the day lady died')...lots of resonance for me...

[Clarinda]

Such beauty. I once sat very close to the stage where yo yo ma was playing. I could hear him breathing. Transcendent.

[Gerald Fleming]

M. Lally's comment "deceptively simple," right on the nose. Lovely poem.

[Eileen Reich]

Beautiful poem.

[Susan Campbell]

Terrific

[Dr. Earle Hitchner]

I recall watching a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation clip of pianist Glenn Gould playing Bach’s GOLDBERG VARIATIONS on June 3, 1964. What mesmerized me, in addition to the utter genius of Gould’s fingering of the keys, was how his mouth and lips moved in tandem with his playing. I could detect no sounds emanating from them, yet you could readily tell from their incessant movement how immersed Gould was in the music. It was otherworldly to watch and hear. The last two lines of Richie Hofmann’s impressive poem “Male Beauty” made me think of that. They say the piano is the instrument closest in overall effect to the human voice. Richie Hofmann’s poem evokes that, giving voice through writing to the mysteries of human attraction, whether aural, visual, or both. I can hear the poem breathing.

[Peter Kearney]

This poem is like a diary of different days, but not in chronological order. They suggest an extended period of time like that required for hard green pears to ripen. When the poet eventually comes home one night, he finds his beloved is sleeping but not soundly, for he is drowsy, perhaps restless and murmuring, a little like a breathing pianist.