When pianos are not played,
they become very sad,
they collect silent notes.
Unplayed music floats –
invisible dust of overtones.
The dead are waiting expectantly:
so many keys – 88 – all untouched.
The day of silent music
sheds the signature of uncaptured Time.
(“What are you practicing now?”
my mother asks me quietly.
Her eyebrows raised. I shrug.)
In 1928, André Breton published the novel Nadja, loosely based on a brief affair. Text from the back cover the Grove Press edition, translation by Richard Howard, calls the novel “the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life” and goes on to state, “The first person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work — pictures of various ‘surreal’ people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in Nadja’s presence and which inspire him to meditate on their reality or lack of it.” Breton invented a genre, the book as photographic prose poem, which has found new life today.
In Breton’s day, taking all the photos and having them printed and readied for publication were arduous tasks; today all that is almost an afterthought. Some creative artists today have been stimulated to try to reinvigorate the photograph in its relation to text, thereby heightening both the potential of image, usually produced via that mundane accessory, the smart phone, and the text, which often lingers in some nebulous zone, neither poetry nor prose, a different gambit from the blending of the two that entranced French authors last century.
When Claudia Rankine used photos in her epoch-marking Citizen, the images were usually in the mode of illustrations, or jumping-off points for her verbal manifestations. In her follow-up, the massive and in some ways more experimental Just Us: An American Conversation (2020), the photos are still illustrative, often historical in nature, but they are simultaneously more deeply embedded in the book’s meaning.
A more experimental approach, one with deeply satisfying results in terms of the co-habitation of word and image is s*an d. henry-smith’s Wild Peach, published by Futurepoem in 2020. henry-smith is an artist and writer, and everything about Wild Peach makes it clear the book has been thought about as an object in its entirety. The endpapers and dividers are a dusky mustard yellow. The typography and layout of the titles is raw and energetic. Eager to get to the first section, “in awe of geometry & mornings,” one turns the page and finds a centered photo of a hazy view of a dried-out field being moisturized by the obscuring fog above it. Turning the page again brings us to the book’s first text, “dirty nails,” which begins, “eat me Infinity Serpent High Priestess of Sun the flowers we ate went straight to my hips rosy red w/ sweet water linen draped I feel so squishy today…” An erotics of the word reminding me of de Kooning’s erotics of paint is quickly palpable. Yet this short text ends surprisingly, “…I inhale light dirty pupil learns today how mud purifies & an increased sensitivity to nightshades I lift my head from the train tracks it is nice to sweat it reminds me that I am open whether I like it or not the conditions will decide”. This book is open, “dirty nails” beseeches almost that, despite everything not in our favor, we too should lift our heads from whatever train tracks we may find them on, to live in the squishiness of our real.
As the book continues, it swerves and peaks, picks up velocity, then swoops. All along, it is bringing us, however we are: “if it doesn’t cost me my life, it doesn’t cost anything at all.” Suddenly that line reminds me of a line from a different context, but now they are inextricably bound. It’s from a rehearsal by the Grateful Dead; before they start, Jerry says, “We’ve got nothing to lose but our lives.” I love that line too, because our lives are the most valuable things we have (wait a minute, did I not know that before reading Wild Peach?), and yet we must risk everything in any moment if we (the planet) are to survive. As henry-smith puts it in “calm down calm down,” “I’ve wasted a lot more time than necessary looking for the tools / they’ve always been right before me”. Wild Peach is a lush volume, the poetry as much as the photos, which are mostly of nature, but viewed in a way that makes it contemporary. Relevant nature. The more I read and look, the more I am amazed by its generosity.
Marianna and I are at a summer retreat.
I am five years old. I have a wooden recorder
with me, a block-flute. I blow out melodies.
My parents left – they have some urgent matters.
What urgent matters could there be during the summer?
I play my flute. Igor is here with us.
He is a genius, a chess prodigy who has won
chess games against the former world champions.
He is my brother, and he has very long legs.
When Igor walks, I must run after him like a dog.
I quickly get tired. Igor puts me on his shoulders.
I imagine myself as an eagle, a stormy petrel, a seagull.
Igor runs; I fly after him – I am the wind.
The wind plays the flute. Grownups lie.
I know – my grandma, Musenka, is dead.
That’s why my parents left.
I will never see her again. Ne-ver.
“Iga, do you know?” I ask, landing my flight.
“No,” he answers seriously.
Igor is almost an adult. Grownups lie.
(He Knows)
Wang Ping on the rooftop of Rudy Burckhardt's apartment building in NYC. Photo by Rudy Burckhardt.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Our Prayers on Father’s Day
Dear God, we are not child actors. We are children. Real children.
Dear God, where is my papa and mama? We just walked 3,000 miles, fighting coyotes along the way. We thought we’d be safe once we crossed the Rio Grande.
Dear God, you said everyone is born equal, every life is a gift, and the kingdom of heaven resides in the mustard seed.
Dear God, we are small and young. Some of us just learned to walk, some still wear diapers, and some are still nursing. Are we not your tiny mustard seeds, dear God?
You say a kid must not be boiled or eaten in mother’s milk. Why are you ripping us from our mother’s breasts, from our father’s hands?
Dear God, we have lost everything: our country, our home, our friends and tomorrow. We have nothing left but our papa and mama. Please give them back.
Dear God, here’s my mama’s number. Here’s my papa’s number. Here’s my aunt’s number. I have it memorized. Please call so we can get out of this dog kennel.
Dear God, you cried for donkeys moaning under loads and falling on the roadside. Are you crying for us, as we fall off la bestia, crushed under tren de la muerte?
Dear God, you wept when you heard starving baby ravens crying from the nest. Are you weeping for us, Lord, as you hear our wailing for papa and mama from the cage?
Dear God, we followed your law to flee from danger: a burning forest, a roaring tsunami, a raging war, violent gangs.
But dear God, it’s been months since I was yanked from mama’s breasts, since I’m left in the cage, crawling in circles . . . as I turn the tender age of 11 months old.
Dear God, we didn’t want to leave home, walk 3,000 miles, or fall off la bestia.
Dear God, we are not criminals or child actors. We just want our mama and papa. Our parents are not criminals or actors. They just want to raise us. There’s no script. Our only word is to live, like all God’s children.
Do not turn off the light on us, dear God. Do not throw away the key to our cage. Give back our papa and mama, dear Lord. Do not forsake us, alone, terrified, drowning in our tears. Hear our cries on Father’s Day. Hear the cries of our fathers and mothers, dying from the death sentence of separation.
Dear God, please let us be children again, like arrows in the hands of a warrior. For we’re your mustard seeds, your heritage, keys to thy kingdom of heaven, dearest God.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Wang Ping was born in China and came to the U.S. in 1985. Her publications of poetry and prose include American Visa, Foreign Devil, Of Flesh and Spirit, New Generation: Poetry from China Today, Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, The Magic Whip, The Dragon Emperor, The Last Communist Virgin, Flashcards: Poems by Yu Jian, Ten Thousand Waves, and Life of Miracles along the Yangtze and Mississippi (AWP 2017 award for non-fiction). She won the Eugene-Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities and is the recipient of an NEA felllowship, the Bush Artist Fellowship for poetry, the McKnight Fellowship for non-fiction, and many other awards. She received her Distinct Immigrant Award in 2014, and Venezuela International Poet of Honor in 2015. She is the Minnesota Poet Laureate 2021-23, appointed by International Beat Poetry Foundation. She’s also a photographer, installation artist, and flamenco dancer. Her multi-media exhibitions include “Behind the Gate: After the Flood of the Three Gorges” and “Kinship of Rivers,” shown at schools, colleges, galleries, museums, lock and dams, and confluences along the Mississippi River. She is professor emerita of English at Macalester College and founder and director of Kinship of Rivers project.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Rudy Burckhardt 6 fotos,1992
My dog
whimpered
quietly
in his sleep.
His legs
were twitching –
he had a nightmare.
I woke him up
gently
with a lie:
“It’s all right,
I will never
leave you
alone.”
(1)
At times like this, I feel sorry for postal workers.
It must be very stressful to be one.
To always have to sort things out while thinking of viruses.
One can easily distinguish a postal worker who thinks of viruses from the one who doesn't.
Those who think wear gloves and masks. But most of them do not; most of them are young and careless.
At the beginning of the pandemic, an entire hotel in China that was converted into a hospital for coronavirus patients had collapsed suddenly, killing everyone inside.
How does a building suddenly collapse?
How does a human being?
What is the breaking point?
What is that something, usually insignificant in itself, that makes all the difference between life and death?
I think of Sylvia Plath.
How she returned to her dirty home (her housekeeper left), overwhelmed by unhappiness, with her two small children always in need of her care.
If she had returned to a spotlessly clean and welcoming house instead of a messy one full of dirty dishes and laundry, would she still have killed herself?
Perhaps, but maybe not then.
Maybe the breaking point would still hold a while longer.
(2)
Last year there was a postal worker who was overwhelmed by his responsibilities of daily deliveries of packages.
He just had too many parcels to deliver to too many houses and not enough time allotted to do so.
Even if he worked past his hours, he still could not manage all deliveries and be often scolded by his superiors for the delays.
At first, he kept undelivered packages in the trunk of his car in hopes of delivering them the next day, but the next day he would have a new bunch of boxes, and soon the trunk of his car was too full.
After a while, he gave up on the idea of being able to deliver everything, so he left all packages he could not deliver in a shed next to his house.
He hoped to deliver them one day when his daily load would be lighter, but such a day never came.
After a while, the shed was full of packages, and he had to keep the new ones in the garage.
He never opened the boxes.
In his mind, he never stole them, he just kept them for better delivery times.
It was not his fault that better times were slow in coming.
Nobody appreciated any of his past accomplishments (for he did make numerous safe and timely deliveries) when police discovered his shed and his garage full of packages belonging to other people.
He tried to argue that the packages didn't belong to anyone – they were still in transit on the way to their final destination, but some of them were in transit for over a year and, after all that time, were considered missing in action like lost soldiers.
(3)
Sometimes my poor head makes me feel like the trunk of this poor man's car with too many deliveries scheduled in too short a time, and I feel like giving up.
At night, I stare into all these packages in my head.
I try to imagine what lies within each.
I look at the names of people and imagine them as characters in my book.
Then the clock chimes and reminds me that it is too late for everything.
Too late even to try.
(4)
A dog doesn't know if something is too late.
Unless it's related to food.
Because, as far as a dog is concerned, food always comes too late and never too early.
(5)
Life is mostly unbearable. And full of wonders.
Partially, it is unbearable because it is full of wonders.
Just think of all the undelivered wonders the postal worker kept in his garage.
But many wonders would not fit into any packaging and can't be delivered because they are just too great.
Like the night when Venus and the moon were so close together, and we sat on the bench next to the ocean and felt so happy about the present moment that it also felt sad.
Great happiness is always sad because it overflows and spills into sadness; happy sadness because it is just too vast to stay happy.
The chorus of frogs after the storm is like that.
Also Gesualdo's music and the Montserrat cathedral – you almost hate it, it's so beautiful.
A good book feels like that: overflowing without beginning or ending, even without a middle, happening all at once and about everything and nothing in particular.
The only thing that separates a good book from nonexistence is its two covers: that's not much of protection from nothingness, not much at all.
(1)
The problem with the future is that it is unforeseeable –
the great unknown is full of opportunities for dreadful disasters.
Their multitudes are inexhaustible.
The stars are the pores of our reality.
They shine because that’s how we see the light of another world.
The Arctic fox dances its foxy dance, pretending to be a woman,
pretending to be a nurse.
The seal waits underwater. It knows it is being hunted.
The stars are not the pores; they are pills,
round white pills the woman-fox is giving me.
Pills for pain, pills for sleep, pills for blood pressure,
pills for muscle aches, pills for adrenal gland function,
pills for inflammation or rather against inflammation,
pills for/against nausea. And steroids.
And more pills for pain. Killers of pain.
(How many universes did I swallow today?)
(2)
Everyone is very kind to me. So kind, it breaks my heart.
Everyone is doing their best. Or his or her best.
I feel generous with the pronouns. I think pronouns are so yesterday.
So are all nationalities, religions, sexes, and any other boxes of definitions, including self-definitions.
If everyone were so kind, there would be no need for any of these limiting concepts.
I understand how beautiful it would be, how connective, how whole and wholesome,
and it breaks my heart that it is not yet universally so.
I cry from the unbearable weight of my love that I cannot express.
My husband, concerned, asks if I’m in pain.
“No, on the contrary,” I try to explain what I feel. “I understand what it means to be ‘we.’
I am the seal; I am the fish it ate; I’m the polar bear waiting for the seal to breathe;
I’m the polar bear hunter, waiting for the polar bear to strike the seal.
I’m the polar bear hunter’s mother, wishing to feed the polar bear
so that the bear could feed her son one day; I am the polar bear hunter’s girlfriend,
enjoying the safety of the aroma of the Lancôme perfume.
I am the surgeon searching for the patient who has his initials drawn on her belly.
I am the patient praying to be her surgeon’s masterpiece.”
(“You are on drugs. It’s the painkillers,” says my husband.)
(3)
Where do all lost things go?
Perhaps, lost things are dislocated not in space but in time.
It is why something may disappear and then later appear right in front of your eyes –
where you have already looked for it and more than once.
Instead of moving in space, they fall into the holes in the fabric of time.
Because time is made of porous material and things may fall through.
Sometimes things reappear, moved back by some internal tides;
at other times, they disappear without a trace,
and new strange things appear instead.
It is hard to hold on to your belongings when they keep falling
through the porous realities of time and space.
It’s quite difficult, especially lately, to hold on to myself
with all these electrons, protons, and neutrons misbehaving as particles
and waves the moment you try to observe what they’re doing.
Just think of all the effort my poor self needs to put together
in order to hold some kind of a recognizable shape of a body
instead of just becoming a soundwave or melting into a puddle.
(No wonder I feel exhausted all the time.)
(4)
Yesterday I learned there is such a thing as repulsive gravity.
By repulsive, I don’t mean ugly or unpleasant.
Apparently, gravity can be not only attractive,
thus attracting things ever closer the way earth
doesn’t let us float away and fall into space,
but also repulsive, meaning always repelling things
further and further away.
In all likelihood, this universe was made by such repulsive impulse,
resulting in the Big Bang and all its consequences.
It is why we are still expanding, universally speaking.
(Just think of it: all we are is a hiccup of some repulsive shudder.)
(5)
Time in the hospital – sleepless nights, leg compressors, IV drips,
blood-pressure measurements, vital signs checks every hour, medications.
You wish to sleep, but your sleep is continuously interrupted by machines, nurses,
and your own body. You melt one drop at a time and float restlessly in the night.
And you still need to repeat your name and date of birth
each time you are given the meds. You swallow a bunch of stars
and start feeling that the repulsive gravity which made the Big Bang
is just around the corner, and the reversal could happen at any moment.
You are internally running extremely fast while not moving at all.
(And you’re still naked under the hospital robe.)
You know
you're getting closer to the North
when trees disappear.
The world without trees.
At first, you don't notice that the trees are missing.
Then you feel the absence of something important,
but you are not sure what it is.
By the time you understand that the trees are gone,
you are too far North to turn around.
(After a while, there is no way back.)
In the Arctic they say –
this world is porous,
that's why there are
Auroras in the sky.
You can glimpse the light
of the other worlds
through the tiny holes
in the material of our world.
Shamans can travel
through different worlds
in search for answers.
They fly through the pores
and find their way back.
Sometimes such flights
are not possible, thus
many questions still
remain unanswered.
A dermatology-inclined friend
explained to me once –
when a pore is clogged,
nothing can go in
or out until
it explodes. At times,
I feel like a blocked pore
that needs an explosion.
(My cat gently examines
the strings of the piano
as if sniffing unborn music.)
I need an opening to breathe.
Is that what writing is –
the making of an opening?
Far in the Arctic,
a polar bear can wait
for hours and hours next
to the breathing hole
made in ice by a seal.
A seal needs to breathe.
Sooner or later, it will come
to the surface to gulp air.
That's when a polar bear,
if quick and attentive,
can kill the seal.
That's when
a polar bear hunter
can kill the polar bear
who is hunting the seal,
because you cannot
see white on white.
They say in the Arctic,
“If you see a polar bear,
it's the very last thing
you will ever see.”
(There are no cats in Svalbard.)
A book can only lead to another book –
a trail of steps in the snow:
reassuring but disappearing before your eyes.
Why do we voluntarily subject
ourselves to harsh conditions?
Why?
I gave my Arctic friend Gaya
a fancy perfume bottle from Lancôme.
"This is so perfect," she beamed.
"Polar bears hate French perfume."
(Her boyfriend, an Inuit, a polar bear hunter, only chuckled.)
If I cannot weave a protective blanket of words,
I could at least leave some breadcrumbs.
Breadcrumbs could be useful.
Not as useful as a hot meal in good company.But still.
Breadcrumbs can help you find your way back.
That is if you can turn around.
If not, breadcrumbs could feed your followers.
Maybe your followers could rescue you one day.
They could also drown you or feed you to the polar bears.
(But one shouldn't assume a pessimistic view.)
The reason why no cats are allowed in Svalbard
is, perhaps, because cats have nine lives.
Before you come to Svalbard, you sign an entry form.
Many things are not allowed on Svalbard.
For example, feeding polar bears.
Or dying.
If you die, you will be fined,
because dying is not allowed in Svalbard.
(Dying and bringing cats.)
An outstanding column on Vivian Maier, the little known photographer:
https://robertharbisonsblog.net/2020/11/11/vivian-maier-street-photographer/
The great Mad Ave mad men could not have created a better ad for TWA. -- DL
(1)
I learned that a friend of mine was going through a tough time. His mother died, and he had debilitating neck pain. He needed to write the obituary and arrange for the funeral. His mother had dementia. Was he able to say goodbye? I did not ask.
I don't know which scale would measure grief. Such a scale doesn't exist.
Physical pain is easier to manage. If it is yours. Because at some point, the pain stops defining you.
Grief buried deeper, so deep it can't be torn away, it becomes you.
In the Arctic, old babushkas, when they become unable to take care of themselves, hope to be killed by a polar bear. When they become too ill and weak, they look for the bear to eat them. I asked why. Being devoured by a wild animal didn't seem to me like an attractive way to finish life.
"The bear will be nourished by eating me," explained an old Inuit woman. "The bear will become strong and fat. Then one day, my son will kill that bear. My son and his family will eat the bear's meat, make healing mixes from its fat, and make trousers from its fur. Thus, through the polar bear, I will nourish my son and keep him warm, even past my life, even past my death."
Post mortem motherly care.
(2)
A few years ago, I travelled to Greenland and stayed in Nuuk in the apartment of a polar bear hunter. A polar bear hunter's home looked like an IKEA house made by children constructors of adult sizing. Everything was modern, functional and perfectly unremarkable.
A photograph on the wall showed a polar bear (or rather its fur) covered in blood, soaking in a bathtub. I realized it was the same bathtub in which I had showered that morning. It had rubber ducklings as lucky ornaments. Perfectly, chillingly, unremarkable bathtub.
(3)
"I wish I could make a blanket of protective words to shield you," I wrote to my friend, whose mother died after suffering dementia for several years.
“A protective blanket of words” could be a definition of poetry.
“Could be” because, like everything else, it rejects any definitions.
Poetry is no different than spell-making or alchemy.
As if words could make a difference.
As if anything could still make any difference.
In the world gone mad with apocalyptic craziness and fear, can words remain protective talismans?
(4)
Bears in the Arctic are suffering from global warming. They're skinny and weak; they couldn't kill even old babushkas on their suicide mission.
If I could stitch a protective blanket of words, I would make one for the polar bears, another one for the suicidal babushkas on their mission to feed the polar bears, and the third one for the polar bear hunters. I would then make a gigantic frozen quilt for the Arctic to protect it from climate change and even a bigger blanket for the entire world to save it from madness.
Every stitch would be a word of love, a talisman against impending disaster.
But I never learned how to make blankets or quilts. I can mend sounds and strings but not threads. The thoughts made of words are unravelling, and I can't weave them together.
Ami entends-tu le vol noir des corbeaux sur nos plaines/… C'est nous qui brisons les barreaux des prisons / …Motivés, motivés/ Il faut rester motivés!/ Motivés, motivés/ Il faut se motiver!
– “Motivé, Le Chant des partisans” - Zebda
Here is an odd fact such that one only learns when the extent of one’s activity is staring into space, listening to shards of famous operas and wondering about the history of words floating listless in the Zeitgest. The English “quarantine” – “40 days isolated” is cognate with the French “quarantaine”, which also means “forty-something”.
I mention this because, just to see how she’s been holding up in le moment bizarre – I mean, what with the shelter in place orders, the remote working, the masks, the absence of mountebanks, monoliths and UFOs, the eternal grinding gears of – …. Of...what? Exactly? Love? Longing? – I mailed the photographer Sarah Meunier the other day.
Sarah not too terribly long ago, graciously sent readers of the Best American Poetry a Joyeuses Fêtes! in portraits of the people of Bagnolet, the little Paris suburb where we both live. Motivée, in spite of all, maybe because of it all, too, Sarah keeps on scanning the horizon, not just the ceiling.
All indoor, online, hygienically confined, of course, Sarah’s horizon has lately had to be herself, which is as close to a virtuous philosophy as one can get in, in fact, some say it's as close to wisdom as one can get. She titles her series Quarantaine/Le Confinement mis à nu.
As I say, Sarah Meunier looks in while looking out; I, on the other hand, look out while looking in. Clearly, her looking loop not only starts differently than mine but gets stretched and molded differently, too.
I’m waiting with dead hands for the theaters to reopen, for the mountebanks to peacock, waiting to rush into a crowd and see Gaëlle Bourges’ OVTR (ON VA TOUT RENDRE) and Liz Santoro & Pierre Godard’s MUTUAL INFORMATION. Both at the Atelier de Paris/CDCN. Both pieces remind me of the infinite variety of the Dance that powers the quantum wave we are. Bourge’ll do it through extravagance of movement, Santoro through precision of it.
Sarah Meunier, in contrast, looking inward to look outward, will be spending her end-of-the-year breakout cultivating her post-Covid Expo-Choc of Comic-book style shots and reflecting on Quarantaine/Le Confinement mis à nu, an experiment, she says, in “becoming (my)own object”, which at the same time looks at how much the objects of her life are part of her as a subject.
Quarantaine/Le Confinement mis à nu twists 21st-century selfies into gartered-nude poses and postures, like the mouldering Playboy pin-ups my grandad kept into his fishing trailer at Burr Oak lake.
While Sarah Meunier says she did her pin-ups for fun and to keep her hand in, she also says that a bout with her self-object allowed her to get more comfortable – in her 40s – with herself as a being in a sexual as well as a professional as well as ordinary posture, just like everybody else.
Sarah’s take on Playboy philosophy discovers the now-obscure eroticism in Any-woman’s dusting, tidying and service. Sarah’s Playboy eye sees herself through a old-fashioned-become-ironic style (and persistent paradigm) and, slipping man-pleasing unmentionables among her naked world of mop handles, canned soup and empty fridge lets herself find or reveal a sassy-assed provocation in her own daily bending, reaching and lifting.
Sarah’s fans, with time to get ruffled up, have got ruffled up by her Quarantaine series – largely because, she says, preening around naked rather than painting portraits of everybody else, forced them to let her come out of the box of their expectations. She was also pleasantly surprised, she says, to have a mostly positive response from her woman fans and friends.
But, Sarah says, while getting out of the outside-expectations box and getting peer support were both a great relief to her, she was puzzled that her quotidian-level collaborators seemed to have already accepted her as having a life and a sex and all that jazz. She wonders why she had doubted that so long.
So, Sarah Meunier says, it turns out that the on-going effort to be a whole person rather than a packaged series of socio-culture types and roles meets less resistance, whether outside or inside, than she had expected.
When we went to Burlington, Vermont, in September 2018, as guests of Major and Didi Jackson, we discovered Barr Hill gin (sublime), sipped a drink that a local cafe owner concocted in Major's honor, went to a party, chatted with Dan Fogel, got photographed with a US senator, and drank coffee in the window on Sunday the 17th, our last day, with a newspaper in my pocket and Stacey's camera capturing the moment:Photo credit: Stacey Lehman
Happy anniversary to us!
Photo by B. A. Van Sise.
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
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