September 2013 - Poetry Foundation

founded in 19 1 2 by h a r r iet monroe
September 2013
FOUNDED IN 1912 BY H ARRI E T M ONROE
volume ccii • number 5
CONTENTS
September 2013
POEMS
w.s. di piero
411
Nocturne
Tombo
nate klug
414 Milton’s God
Squirrels
Observer
atsuro riley
418
Thicket
george kalogeris
420
Rilke Rereading Hölderlin
katharine coles
421
From the Middle
maureen n. mclane
422
One Canoe
Best Laid
Every Day a Shiny Bright New Day
meghan o’rourke
Sun In Days
426
eliza griswold
434 Water Table
Forecast
Sample
Lisbon
Sirens
P oetry N ot W ritten F or C hi l dren
T hat C hi l dren M i g ht N e v erthe l ess E n j oy
lemony snicket
441
All Good Slides Are Slippery
maram al-massri
444 “Knocks on the door”
Translated by Khaled Mattawa
carl sandburg
Doors
ava leavell haymon
446
The Witch Has Told You a Story
katerina rudcenkova
447 “Yes, I live inside the piano”
Translated by Alexandra Büchler
ron padgett
447
Poem
liz waldner
448
Trust
stuart mills
449
In the Low Countries
carrie fountain
450
Burn Lake
henry parland
452 “My hat”
Translated by Johannes Göransson
richard brautigan
453
A Boat
sherman alexie
454
From “Bestiary”
zachary schomburg
455
The One About the Robbers
franz wright
457
Auto-Lullaby
dorothea lasky
458
Monsters
lorine niedecker
459
campbell mcgrath
460
“A monster owl”
Dawn
graham foust
And the Ghosts
john ashbery
463
This Room
eileen myles
464
Uppity
comment
kay ryan
467Specks
michael hofmann
481
Sharp Biscuit — Some Thoughts
on Translating
frederick seidel
492
La Vita Nuova
fanny howe
497
Second Childhood
clive james
501
Interior Music
letters to the editor
511
contributors
513
Editor
Senior Editor
Associate Editor
Managing Editor
christian wiman
don share
fred sasaki
valerie jean johnson
Editorial Assistant
lindsay garbutt
Consulting Editor
christina pugh
Art Direction
alex knowlton
cover art by chris raschka
“Little Bird,” 2013
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POEMS
w.s. di piero
Nocturne
Where are you now,
my poems,
my sleepwalkers?
No mumbles tonight?
Where are you, thirst,
fever, humming tedium?
The sodium streetlights
burr outside my window,
steadfast, unreachable,
little astonishments
lighting the way uphill.
Where are you now,
when I need you most?
It’s late. I’m old.
Come soon, you feral cats
among the dahlias.
w.s. di piero
411
Tombo
In Safeway yesterday, a young man sat on the floor,
pulled off his shoes, granted audience to us,
his fellow seekers, and picked his naked feet.
He smiled, our brother, at the story he told
of deliverance at the hand of Master Tombo,
lord and creator, whose round energy
lives in us surrounds us surrounds our milk
our butter our eggs: see Him there,
in the Slurpee glaze upon the freezer case?
In that elder by the yogurt shelves?
I believed his happiness and coveted
a tidy universe. He picked his feet
while a child whimpered by the melons, her nanny’s
mango aura made the cold blown air
touch my brain, I smelled myself in my aging body
and felt my silly bones collapse again.
I wanted Tombo’s dispensation to save
this faint believer and the indifferent world
that rivers through and past me. Down my aisle
lavender respired from the flower stall
and Security spoke kind words to our prophet.
Oh I love and hate the fickle messy wash
of speech and flowers and winds and the tides
and crave plain rotund stories
to justify our continuity. To the Maya corn was god,
spilled blood made corn grow,
the blood gods shed watered needy ground
and became People who worshipped the corn.
Tombo’s grace carries us, convinced, from one
inarticulate incoherent moment to the next.
Tonight the wet streets and their limelight sigh.
Orion turns, burning, unchanged again.
Bread rises somewhere and its ovens scent the trees.
My poor belief lives in the only and all
of the slur of what these are, and what these are
412O
P O E TRY
streams toward loss in moments we live through.
As children we were lost in our opaque acts
but fresh and full in time. I remember
how I touched a girlish knee, how one boy
broke another’s face, how we all stood
in hard gray summer rain so it would run
down the tips of noses to our tongues.
w.s. di piero
413
nate klug
Milton’s God
Where i-95 meets the Pike,
a ponderous thunderhead flowered;
stewed a minute, then flipped
like a flash card, tattered
edges crinkling in, linings so dark
with excessive bright
that, standing, waiting, at the overpass edge,
the onlooker couldn’t decide
until the end, or even then,
what was revealed and what had been hidden.
414O
P O E TRY
Squirrels
Something blurred, warmed
in the eye’s corner, like woodsmoke
becoming tears;
but when you turned to look
the stoop was still, the pumpkin
and tacky mum pot wouldn’t talk —
just a rattle
at the gutter and a sense
of curtains, somewhere, pulled.
Five of them later, scarfing the oak’s
black bole,
laying a dream of snakes.
Needy and reticent
at once, these squirrels in charred November
recall, in Virgil,
what it is to feel:
moods, half-moods,
swarming, then darting loose; obscure
hunches that refuse
to speak, but still expect
in some flash of luck
to be revealed. The less you try
to notice them,
the more they will know of you.
nate k lug
415
Observer
Not seeing me, not even looking,
K. on her silver cruiser charms her way
through the last long moment
of the changing light:
snow boots and a Seychelles Warbler’s
old blue tights,
a rolled-up yoga mat in her basket
wobbling like a wild tiller as she pedals.
It feels illicit and somewhat right
to stand across the intersection
without shouting
her name, or even waving.
According to the internet
tutorial, the fact that photons
turn into tiny loyal billiard balls
as soon as we start watching suggests
no error of method
or measurement, but rather,
as far as anyone can tell,
an invisibly unstable world,
a shaking everywhere
that seeing must pin down and fix.
So, that morning I stumbled on you
out, alone, bending through
416O
P O E TRY
the traffic at Orange and Edwards Streets:
a someone else then
whom I, alone,
can never otherwise see —
there has to be a kind of speech
beyond naming, or even praise,
a discipline
that locates light and lets it go.
nate k lug
417
atsuro riley
Thicket
We come gnawed by need on hands and knees.
As a creature (nosing) grubble-seeks a spring.
As bendy-spined as bandy snakes through saltshrub yaupon
needle-brake.
For darkling green;
for thorn-surround.
This absorbing
quaggy
crample-ground.
Of briar-canes (intervolved with kudzu-mesh) and mold.
Of these convoluted vines we grasp to suck.
To taste the pith —
the lumen the cell-sap pulse.
To try to know
some (soursharp) something about something.
418 O
P O E TRY
Lumen is as lumen does.
‘A little room for turmoil to grow lucid in.’
In here where Clary set her cart-tongue down (and dug, and brailled).
In here where Tynan breathed.
We grasp to suck to taste what light.
Let loose the bale that bows us down.
— Bow down.
atsuro riley
419
george kalogeris
Rilke Rereading Hölderlin
Footnotes to the tower. For “He spends the summer
There, in a state of violent agitation,”
Read: “It’s there, in his agitation’s most violent
State that Hölderlin suspends the summer” —
Like a yellow pear above the untroubled water.
For the lost, disheveled decades of derangement,
Translate I was struck by Apollo as you
Must change your life. For sonnets that sing their own
Spontaneous, Orphic necessity to praise,
Think naked as a lightning rod he waited.
For necessity insert Anangke. But for
Anangke, “Lord, just one more summer, please.”
For summer, the lyre. Hölderlin in his tower.
Until autumn, when the leaves start falling. Whoever
Has nowhere to go will never get home now.
420O
P O E TRY
katharine coles
From the Middle
How much of everything is pure
Getting ready. Dressing, pushing the button
Asquint through its machined furl
Only to unbutton, the eyes-open moment
Revealed. Ask any animal: nudity isn’t
The same as nakedness. Once you’ve seen
A dangling, you can’t unsee it, and
From that anything might ensue.
There’s the rub. Taking the long view
You could say the future is romantic
I suppose. Also something you
Could never do without, though its brica-brac is purely theoretical, until
It’s arranged. Or not. Then, a miracle?
k atharine co les
421
maureen n. m c lane
One Canoe
Recalcitrant elephants
begin to attack.
The angry young males
of murdered mothers.
Any Martian could see it
how we did it
The historian of the future
is amazed. So much feeling
once in so many bodies.
But maybe they were different
didn’t think or feel that much.
Apocalypse is easy
Thinking’s hard
Should we summon
a Roman Stoic to narrate?
Someone secretly thrilled
by the gore?
The clouds move through
an Adirondack sky unscored
by satellite towers.
People want what they want
& what they want is never one thing.
All that desire
sliming a space rock
422O
P O E TRY
Shivering the air
a loon’s cry.
There is only so much
you can care for or carry
& for this there is
no one canoe
maureen n. m c lane
423
Best Laid
it’s clear
the wind
won’t let up
and a swim’s out —
what you planned
is scotched.
forget the calls,
errands at the mall —
yr resolve’s
superfluous
as a clitoris.
how miraculous
the gratuitous —
spandrels,
cathedrals.
on a sea
of necessity
let’s float
wholly
unnecessary
& call
that free
424O
P O E TRY
Every Day a Shiny Bright New Day
it’s good not to drink
it’s good not to piss
in the sink & it’s good
not to think
the clarion ring
of a glass clinking
with ice good to hear it
fade into a past
you can’t sing
your dumb blues
is over. admit
it was always
borrowed. you paid
no dues you did
no time
but the time spent
sodden. what you thought
I think. your
higher power’s
drunk. god’s
the biggest alky
in the sky
the clouds are whiskey
sours passing by
maureen n. m c lane
425
meghan o’rourke
Sun In Days
1
I tried to live that way for a while, among
the trees, the green breeze,
chewing Bubblicious and by the edge of the pool spitting it out.
The book open on my chest, a towel
at my back
the diving board thwoking,
and leaving never arrived Cut it out
my mother said my brother
clowning around with a water gun Cut it out.
The planes arrowed into silence, fourteen,
fifteen, sixteen, always coming
home from summer over the bridge to Brooklyn.
The father stabbed on Orange Street,
the Betamax in the trash,
the Sasha doll the dog chewed up, hollow
plastic arms gaping. Powdered pink lemonade,
tonguing the sweet grains
liquid-thick.
I could stand in that self for years
wondering is it better to
anticipate than to age Imagining
children with five different men,
a great flood that would destroy
your possessions and free you to wander.
Bathing suits and apples and suntan oil
and a mother bending over you
shadow of her face on yours. It’s gone,
that way, the breeze, the permanent pool.
A father saying “ghost” and the sheets
slipping off the oak tree’s bough.
When I wake, leaves
in the water. You could say green
forever and not be lying.
426O
P O E TRY
2
The pond near the house in Maine
where we lived for one year
to “get away” from the city the pond
where the skaters on Saturdays came,
red scarves
through white snow,
voices drawing near and pulling
away, trees against the clouds. Trying to live
off the land for a while. Too hard
in the end my father said. What did he say?
Forget it you weren’t listening He wore
fishing overalls most days and stank of guts.
Our shouts slipping, the green garbage cans
edging the white scar pond,
so many days like secrets about to be
divulged . ..
White snow;
to stink of fish guts but to be trying
to live:
the pond near the house
and the sound of voices drawing near.
As you aged you got distracted, indebted.
In the hospital around my mother
the machines beeped,
the long leads of the heart monitor,
drooping parabolas.
It’s not worth dying for she said. What
was it she meant? Swollen shells, the desiccated brown
seedpods we used to pinch onto our noses
and skate about putting on airs.
Then the books opened
their pages and with our red woolen
scarves flying and the Freezy Freakies’
once-invisible hearts reddening
meg han o’rour k e
427
into the cold we disappeared.
Evian bottles skitter against the chain-link fence.
It’s gone that way the green
planes arrowing into silence gum wrappers
slipping to the ground.
O wild West Wind be thou our friend
and blow away the trash.
Salvage us from
the heap of our making and
Cut it out my mother said Stop worrying
about the future, it doesn’t
belong to us and we don’t belong to it.
3
The surface more slippery, slick
and white the ice. I stand at the pond’s edge
gather the information darkening there
hello algae
hello fish pond
my mind in the depths going.
On the beach I dig, tunnel
to the hands of the woman who stitched
this red shirt holes all the way to China.
It got so easy to
get used to it,
the orchestration of meaning
against the night, life
a tower you could climb on
not a junk heap pale picture books
yellowing on the shelves. It got
so I close my eyes
and walk along the hospital hall.
The iris quivering in the March light,
a nurse taking my mother’s pulse
not paid enough to help us
as we wished to be helped. And your hope
428 O
P O E TRY
left behind
turning the pages of magazines,
the models in Prada. As a girl
it was a quest, to feel exploded every second,
pudding pops
and Vietnam vets
standing on the corner shaking their Styrofoam
cups.
Holding her
cup my mother stands, petting the dog,
it’s 1982 the sun tunneling in she drinks her coffee
Cut it out or Forget it or Hello.
Look, I’ve made a telephone for us.
Put that cup to your ear, and I’ll put it to mine,
and listen I just need to find
one of those Styrofoam cups
and what about you where did you
go what kind of night is it there
electric synthetic blackened or burnt.
4
At night they come to you
distorted and bright, like an old print on a light box,
present, present,
not quite.
Are we inventing them as we sleep,
or are they still happening
in a time we can’t touch?
The hockey game on the blue
tv glowing and slowing I come home
to a man slumped on the couch not-quite-saying
a greeting all the gone ones there
the slap of skates all gone
and the commentator it’s going on forever
the blade moving along rink
says What a slapshot what a shot.
You make a life, it is made of days and
meg han o’rour k e
429
days, ordinary and subvocal, not busy
becoming what they could be,
dark furlings of
tiny church feelings, mysterious, I mean,
and intricate like that high-windowed light —
intricate and mysterious
I come home.
Near our house we hung out
on the Promenade after school the boys smoking
the security systems in the Center blinking a disco
party blue red / blue red the East River
reflecting scraped sky cornices and clouds
we could hear the roar of cars across
it and taste the chemical air
of the offices the fathers worked in
we’d been there to pick them up
for the long weekend in the Catskills
the hum-gray computers, the ibm Selectrics
massive on the desks, eleven, twelve,
thirteen, riding the graffitied subways,
flirting, the boys grabbing us calling hey hey.
Changeable one day to the next.
Jon talking of atheism
blond hair in strips
At night the bomb mushrooming
over the Statue of Liberty, white
blinding everywhere.
Oh, she said, don’t worry
just a dream
just a dream.
Everyone is scared of Russia.
Imagine
she laughed We used to
have to hide under our desks!
Forget it
you weren’t listening I was trying
Don’t worry it gets you nothing
to tell you something
the air cold
the maples bare your mother pregnant
430O
P O E TRY
Come on the horses are past the window
with a son much younger than you
of the house she rode them past
the river where all the Catholic kids sailed ice boats
uncles taking cash to wire home to Ireland.
The future isn’t here yet, it’s always
going to be, but I’m holding you,
walking the Promenade, thirty-six,
the ferry crossing the river again.
5
and for a while
rain on the dirt road
and the pastured gray horse
holding Chex Mix
up to its fuzzed mouth pockets of time
all summer eating ghosts in the arcade
Pac-Man alive quarter after quarter
I keep trying Cut it out she said and
forget it I was trying to tell you
my father cooking fish in the kitchen
licking his thumb
to turn the page.
In the meantime you try
not to go into a kind of exile —
Oh, you read too many books, says my friend
Dan Here’s the tv. And the small voices
of children
enter the room, they sound
so narrow and light and possible. But
don’t you think we’re always making the same
standing at the car rental
kind of mistake we began by making
at the last minute, rushing to call
our fathers before setting off
for vacation. It’s warmer
meg han o’rour k e
431
this August than it has been for decades.
Still the sun bathing us isn’t preposterous
or cold.
Grace: imagine it
and all the afterworld fathers sleeping
with their hair perfectly
combed
faces mortician-clean
unlike
the ones they wore.
In the motel Reagan on tv
his hair
in that parted wave the milk prices up,
my mother says, inflation. Key Food
on Montague, the linoleum tiles dirty and cracked,
the dairy case goose-pimpling my skin.
Those tiles are still there.
She is dead now and so is he.
I know it seems bare to say it
bare to bare linoleum tiles.
You who come after me
I will be underfoot but Oh,
come off it, start again. We all live
amid surfaces and
and I
wish I had the Start over Come on thou
Step into the street, amidst
the lightly turning trash,
your hair lifting in the wind Remember
I have thought of you
the lines of our skates converging
in a future etc. etc., the past
the repository of what can be salvaged, grace
watering the basil
on the windowsill, until
the day comes of looking back at it all,
like a projectionist at a movie
432O
P O E TRY
slipping through the reel, the stripped sound of time —
I tried to live that way for a while
Bubblicious and
spitting it out
Only forget it you
were
if I could hear your voice again I could pretend
Rise and shine she called in the
morning Rise and shine
leaves in the water intricate and
the dying Dutch elms the cool blue pool
pockets of time
Sun-In bleaching our hair
the faces they wore arcade ghosts
and lilacs by the door in Maine
where she leaned close to me said smell
the planes buzzed a purple light fingers
sticky if I could only hear it
again you could say forever tonguing
the sweet grains you could say forever and not be
meg han o’rour k e
433
eliza griswold
Water Table
My earliest wish was not to exist,
to burst in the backyard
without violence,
no blood, no fleshy bits,
mute button pressed
alone behind the rectory
where no one would see me.
This wasn’t a plea to be found
or mourned for, but to be unborn
into the atmosphere. To hang
in the humid air, as ponds vent upward
from the overheated earth,
rise until they freeze
and crystallize, then drop
into the aquifer.
434O
P O E TRY
Forecast
The pack is filing
from my nowheresvilles
filling the halfway hotels,
braving the ruts and calling
one another via satellite.
A dollar says hello.
At home I try growing
a new life, one of many
women bored by
my womb’s mystery.
Who has time
to run a thumb
between her legs
and calculate
the temperature —
chipper and bitter
netherworld weathergirl.
eliza g riswo ld
435
Sample
When you said no,
I went for your dresser,
opened the top drawer,
broke the paper seals
on the two sterile cups,
and wiped my dirty
thumbs inside.
Because our stubborn love
won’t die, I have to kill it,
will it dead. Or so
I thought until I passed
a cycle on my own.
You’ve no idea
what’s grown
inside me
since I bled.
436O
P O E TRY
Lisbon
We meet midway to walk white cobbles
under a fish-flesh gray sky.
Europe is collapsing; we are collapsing
always and again no matter how hard
we love one another. I don’t understand
our failure, where the feed loops
back and spits us into another country,
another junior suite reenacting this same,
same beat of a scene that begins, rises,
never ends, always ends —
Our intentions don’t meet,
their courses set differently
by a force you don’t believe in,
could be as simple as life. I want
to be the wife you don’t want.
You won’t let go of my wrist.
I resist, threaten, bully, acquiesce.
We write the next act of The Alchemist
in New York, Lisbon, a beach,
a bar, star-crossed maybe
from different galaxies. You approach,
I retreat. You retreat, I reproach.
The manic two-step jitters
over North Africa’s dunes
farther than our hero, Santiago, can see.
I rise in the night to find the sharp knife
that came with the pears as a courtesy.
eliza g riswo ld
437
Sirens
My transgressions pile against the garden wall
(built when Rome began to weaken, scarred
by a cannonball.) I gossiped; I snubbed
a dinner guest. I watch until the wall writhes
with awful feral cats fed by shrunken widows
and the odd librarian. I’ve begun to be depleted
by your absence; one of love’s worst symptoms.
For years, I’d had the sense to hold myself apart.
I’ve been here long enough to kill
two mint plants and a lavender,
then resurrect their better part.
I’d like to let you die on the vine.
Not you, the You I Dream,
who follows through on waking.
See how the watcher sees the storm
but doesn’t get wet. Be that.
Be what?
Be wiser than the heart.
438 O
P O E TRY
poetry not written for children
that chi l dren mig ht ne v erthe less enjoy
Edited by Lemony Snicket and illustrated by Chris Raschka
lemony snicket
All Good Slides Are Slippery
The poems contained in this children’s poetry portfolio are not made
for children. Poetry is like a curvy slide in a playground — an odd
object, available to the public — and, as I keep explaining to my local
police force, everyone should be able to use it, not just those of a
certain age.
In general I am suspicious of anything written specifically for
children. It is, of course, acceptable to write something to a specific
child — “Dear Elizabeth, I have reason to believe this cake is poison,
so please leave it alone and I’ll take care of it later” — but things written by someone who is thinking only of children far too often have
an unfortunate tone. If you have ever seen an adult hunch over and
begin talking to a child in the high-pitched voice of an irritating simpleton, then you know the tone I mean. It is a tone that takes the fun
out of everything, even everything fun.
Speaking of fun, some time ago I found myself locked in the basement of the Poetry Foundation building. It is a handy place to hide
from the authorities, a horrible place to forage for snacks, and a wonderful place in which to get some reading done. The basement is
crammed with the efforts of poets living and dead, famed and forgotten, terrific and terrible. There are books of poetry everyone knows,
and little pamphlets no one has heard of. There are anthologies,
a word which here means “a book containing a bunch of poems gathered together, often for no good reason,” and there are loose pages,
scrawled and printed and typed with sestinas and epithalamiums and
forms of poetry that have yet to be given names.
By the time it was safe for me to emerge, blinking, onto the streets
of Chicago, I had gathered together the poems you now find here.
I asked my associate Chris Raschka to provide some illustrations, and
I have added a few notes which may or may not be appreciated. There
are poems by men and women, living and dead, familiar to millions
and unknown to everybody. The only things that all the poems have
in common is that they are all strange in some way, because all great
literature is strange, the way all good slides are slippery.
If you are a child, you might like these poems. Of course, you
might not. Poems, like children, are individuals, and will not be liked
lemony snic k et
441
by every single person who happens to come across them. So you
may consider this portfolio a gathering of people in a room. It does
not matter how old they are, or how old you are yourself. What matters is that there are a bunch of people standing around in a room,
and you might want to look at them.
442O
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“Knocks on the door”
Knocks on the door.
Who?
I sweep the dust of my loneliness
under the rug.
I arrange a smile
and open.
— Maram al-Massri
tr. by Khaled Mattawa
Doors
An open door says, “Come in.”
A shut door says, “Who are you?”
Shadows and ghosts go through shut doors.
If a door is shut and you want it shut,
why open it?
If a door is open and you want it open,
why shut it?
Doors forget but only doors know what it is
doors forget.
— Carl Sandburg
Starting to read something, such as a portfolio, is like opening a door, so I thought it
would be interesting to start with two poems about doors written by two very different poets. Maram al-Massri is a Syrian woman who now lives in the city of Paris,
France. Carl Sandburg is an American man who doesn’t live anywhere, due to death.
444O
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The Witch Has Told You a Story
You are food.
You are here for me
to eat. Fatten up,
and I will like you better.
Your brother will be first,
you must wait your turn.
Feed him yourself, you will
learn to do it. You will take him
eggs with yellow sauce, muffins
torn apart and leaking butter, fried meats
late in the morning, and always sweets
in a sticky parade from the kitchen.
His vigilance, an ice pick of hunger
pricking his insides, will melt
in the unctuous cream fillings.
He will forget. He will thank you
for it. His little finger stuck every day
through cracks in the bars
will grow sleek and round,
his hollow face swell
like the moon. He will stop dreaming
about fear in the woods without food.
He will lean toward the maw
of the oven as it opens
every afternoon, sighing
better and better smells.
— Ava Leavell Haymon
446O
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“Yes, I live inside the piano”
Yes, I live inside the piano,
but there is no need for you
to come and visit me.
— Katerina Rudcenkova
tr. by Alexandra Büchler
Poem
I’m in the house.
It’s nice out: warm
sun on cold snow.
First day of spring
or last of winter.
My legs run down
the stairs and out
the door, my top
half here typing
— Ron Padgett
Sometimes a poet gets very interested in some story or event we’ve all heard many
times but never thought much about. Haymon’s poem is from a book called Why
the House Is Made of Gingerbread. “Vigilance” means “waiting alertly.” “Unctuous”
means “trying very hard to please someone in a way that is often irritating.”
In the poem by Ron Padgett I know exactly what he means. In the poem by Katerina
Rudcenkova I have no idea what she is talking about. I’m not sure which I like better.
lemony snic k et
447
Trust
If I would be walking down the road
you told me to imagine and I would and find
a diner kind of teacup sitting on its saucer
in the middle then I would feel so good
in my life that is just like mine
I would walk right up and look into my face
eclipsing the sky in the tea in the cup
and say, “Thank you, I have enjoyed
imagining all this.”
— Liz Waldner
d
“Eclipsing” is a word which here means “blocking the light from,” as the moon sometimes does of the sun, and vice versa. One of the things I like about this poem is how
polite it is.
448 O
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In the Low Countries
They are building a ship
in a field
much bigger than I should have thought
sensible.
When it is finished
there will never be enough of them
to carry it to the sea
and already it is turning
rusty.
— Stuart Mills
“The Low Countries” refers to an area in Europe, near the coast. “Sensible” is a word
which here means “full of common sense.” Poetry usually isn’t.
lemony snic k et
449
Burn Lake
For Burn Construction Company
When you were building the i-10 bypass,
one of your dozers, moving earth
at the center of a great pit,
slipped its thick blade beneath
the water table, slicing into the earth’s
wet palm, and the silt moistened
beneath the huge thing’s tires, and the crew
was sent home for the day.
Next morning, water filled the pit.
Nothing anyone could do to stop it coming.
It was a revelation: kidney-shaped, deep
green, there between the interstate
and the sewage treatment plant.
When nothing else worked, you called it
a lake and opened it to the public.
And we were the public.
— Carrie Fountain
“Silt” is a kind of dirt. “Revelation” refers to when something is revealed, like a secret
or another dangerous idea.
450O
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“My hat”
My hat
was run over
by a trolley
yesterday.
This morning
my coat took a walk
to some place
far away.
This afternoon
my shoes
happened to get assassinated.
— I’m still here?
that’s just
i t.
— Henry Parland
tr. by Johannes Göransson
452O
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A Boat
O beautiful
was the werewolf
in his evil forest.
We took him
to the carnival
and he started
crying
when he saw
the Ferris wheel.
Electric
green and red tears
flowed down
his furry cheeks.
He looked
like a boat
out on the dark
water.
— Richard Brautigan My favorite part of the Parland poem is the space between the letters of the last word.
My favorite part of the Brautigan poem is the title.
lemony snic k et
4 53
From “Bestiary”
My mother sends me a black-and-white
photograph of her and my father, circa
1968, posing with two Indian men.
“Who are those Indian guys?” I ask her
on the phone.
“I don’t know,” she says.
The next obvious question: “Then why
did you send me this photo?” But I don’t
ask it.
One of those strange Indian men is
pointing up toward the sky.
Above them, a bird shaped like a
question mark.
— Sherman Alexie
454O
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The One About the Robbers
You tell me a joke about two robbers who hide from the police. One
robber hides as a sack of cats and the other robber hides as a sack of
potatoes. That is the punch line somehow, the sack of potatoes, but
all I can think about is how my dad used to throw me over his shoulder when I was very small and call me his sack of potatoes. I’ve got a
sack of potatoes he would yell, spinning around in a circle, the arm not
holding me reaching out for a sale. Does anyone want to buy my sack
of potatoes? No one ever wanted to buy me. We were always the only
two people in the room.
— Zachary Schomburg
A “bestiary” is a book of beasts. Alexie is of Native American, or “Indian,” descent.
“Joke” is a much more difficult word to define.
lemony snic k et
4 55
Auto-Lullaby
Think of a sheep
knitting a sweater;
think of your life
getting better and better.
Think of your cat
asleep in a tree;
think of that spot
where you once skinned your knee.
Think of a bird
that stands in your palm.
Try to remember
the Twenty-first Psalm.
Think of a big pink horse
galloping south;
think of a fly, and
close your mouth.
If you feel thirsty, then
drink from your cup.
The birds will keep singing
until they wake up.
— Franz Wright
The Twenty-first Psalm is a song in the Bible. The Bible contains some fantastic
poetry, although I’ve always preferred Franz Wright’s.
lemony snic k et
4 57
Monsters
This is a world where there are monsters
There are monsters everywhere, racoons and skunks
There are possums outside, there are monsters in my bed.
There is one monster. He is my little one.
I talk to my little monster.
I give my little monster some bacon but that does not satisfy him.
I tell him, ssh ssh, don’t growl little monster!
And he growls, oh boy does he growl!
And he wants something from me,
He wants my soul.
And finally giving in, I give him my gleaming soul
And as he eats my gleaming soul, I am one with him
And stare out his eyepits and I see nothing but white
And then I see nothing but fog and the white I had seen before was
nothing but fog
And there is nothing but fog out the eyes of monsters.
— Dorothea Lasky
458 O
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“A monster owl”
A monster owl
out on the fence
flew away. What
is it the sign
of? The sign of
an owl.
— Lorine Niedecker
The word “monster” automatically makes a poem more interesting.
lemony snic k et
4 59
Dawn
5am: the frogs
ask what is it, what is it?
It is what it is.
­­— Campbell McGrath
And the Ghosts
they own everything
— Graham Foust
Many, many poems are too long; hardly any are too short.
460O P O E TRY
This Room
The room I entered was a dream of this room.
Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.
The oval portrait
of a dog was me at an early age.
Something shimmers, something is hushed up.
We had macaroni for lunch every day
except Sunday, when a small quail was induced
to be served to us. Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.
— John Ashbery
A quail is a small bird. Like many small birds, it is said to taste like chicken. “Induced”
is a word which here means “persuaded, usually through trickery.” Some people
think John Ashbery is one of the greatest poets in the world. Other people don’t
understand his work at all. I count myself in both categories.
lemony snic k et
4 63
Uppity
Roads around mountains
cause we can’t drive
through
That’s Poetry
to Me.
— Eileen Myles
“Uppity” refers to someone who acts as if they are more important than they are, as
in the sentence “Is it uppity of Lemony Snicket, who is not a poet and knows very
little about poetry, to edit his own poetry portfolio?”
464O
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comment
“Reference Back” from The Complete Poems by Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett. Copyright © 2012 by the Estate of Philip Larkin and reprinted by permission
of Faber and Faber Ltd. and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, llc. “Something Matters but
We Don’t” by William Bronk reprinted by permission of the Trustees of Columbia
University in the City of New York. “My cocoon tightens, colors teaze” by Emily
Dickinson reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst
College, from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, edited by Ralph W.
Franklin, Cambridge, Massachusetts (The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright
© 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College). “The
Poet Hin” by Stevie Smith reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing.
kay ryan
Specks
While writing a poem the hot wire of thought welds together strange
chunks of this and that.
It can’t completely combine the disparate elements and make a
new element of them, but it can loosen the edges of mutually disinterested materials enough to bond them so that a serial lumpy going
on is achieved, crude emergency bridges made, say, of brush and old
doors, just barely strong enough to get the thought across before the
furious townspeople show up.
Because thought is stolen, of course, ripped out of a case and carried off in a sack.
Anything nearby is pressed into service to forward the thought.
The lathered horse falls out of the picture as the horseman hurls himself and the sack onto the speeding train. When he leaps to a crane,
the train falls away, and so on, according to the laws of attention and
expedience.
And you will note the presence of “speed” in the middle of expedience: only high speeds permit the transmission of thought, the
brief mutations of substance, the continued whispered advance of
some articulation that is at once autonomous and at the same time
completely the product of what’s available to make itself out of.
Thus we could not separate thought from conversion; we must
see the two forces melted into one, thought as conversion itself, and
thus never static, never possessable, but like the edges of combustion
where the creosote is bubbling to explode in a ripply red line advancing across the desert.
•
k ay ryan
4 67
It’s not so much what poems are, in themselves, but the infinitely
larger optimism they offer by their intermittent twinkles: that beneath the little lights on their tiny masts, so far from one another, so
lost to each other, there must be a single black sea. We could have
no sense of the continuousness of the unknowable without these
buoyant specks.
•
The poem is a space capsule in which impossible combinations feel
casual. The body of the capsule is of necessity very strong to have
broken out of gravity. It is the hard case for the frail experiments
inside. Not frail in the wasted sense, but frail in the opposite sense:
the brief visibility of the invisible.
•
Because what I am transporting in my hands is both weightless and
invisible, and because it must be held loosely, it is impossible to know
at the time if I have carried it or if what I have done is a comical act,
a person pretending to carry something carefully; a farcelike delicacy
of manners.
468 O
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Some people have one great dream in life which they fail to fulfill.
Others have no dream at all and fail to fulfill even that.
— Fernando Pessoa
I have a note beside this that says: ha ha perfect Pessoa.
Maybe some of us are wired backward and respond paradoxically
to stimuli. Maybe what we think is orange is blue. But I for one have
always laughed in the presence of the dismal. Not a rueful laugh but
with fresh relish. I cannot tire of Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet or Larkin’s
night terrors. They are voluptuaries of the bed of aridity.
•
Yes, to write is to lose myself, but everyone gets lost, because
everything in life is loss. But unlike the river flowing into the
estuary for which, unknowing, it was born, I feel no joy in losing myself, but lie like the pool left on the beach at high tide, a
pool whose waters, swallowed by the sands, never more return
to the sea.
— Fernando Pessoa
As distinct as Pessoa is, he is nonetheless one of the category of
writers who find themselves and their reactions so far outside the
conventional that they have no tools but those they construct for
themselves for knowing anything, for finding their bearings. They
must synthesize gravity, direction, time, substance. They can’t use
anyone else’s.
It explains these writers completely. It is as though the atmosphere, beautiful and breathable to everyone else, were toxic to them,
a poison gas. They are urgently occupied with building a conversion
machine. Oh, and this conversion machine can never be finished.
Every day it has to be built over again, but differently. To an outside
eye, the machines would look identical, but to the poet, panicking
for lack of air, something has gone wrong again. It all has to be undertaken again — from scratch.
k ay ryan
4 69
Dust of Snow
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
a change of mood
and saved some part
of a day I had rued.
— Robert Frost
470O
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I have a terrible time remembering anything, so I really appreciate a
poem I can hold onto.
But additionally, greatness in a poem can be calculated as the relationship between means and ends: the bigger the disproportion the
greater the poem. Which makes “Dust of Snow” ridiculously great.
It is one sentence. Only two words go to two syllables. It doesn’t
have any metaphors. You could cover it up with a matchbook.
Nothing keeps the poem from being metabolized. The rhymes
button perfectly into their button holes. The picture is black (crow)
white (snow) and utterly simple. That’s all there is, out in the snow
of the empty page.
So it begins sinking into the mind and turning into our own personal shift: how any little surprise can dislodge everything. A bad day
can go on forever; release from it is the putting-right of the universe.
It takes such perfect intuition to know to shut up like this, to know
that all you have to do is get the crack started and let the crack continue in the reader.
The amount you need to say is so hard to gauge. How much can
you not say, and something will still have the charge of the unsaid?
There is a point at which what is said is too pale, or frail, one fears, to
tip the mind into the unsaid. And the reason for the pallor might not
be punctilio but a genuine failure of force.
But there is no failure of force here. Frost does what needs to be
done to make his poem work. And if it takes a minor adjustment to
conversational phrasing to get the rhyme, he makes it. I mean, no one
would say “saved some part of a day I had rued.” It’s not quite speech.
Frost goes on and on about the “sound of sense,” but you notice he’ll
do what he has to do to make the poem stick in your head. Because
above everything else, as he says in his Paris Review interview, “you’ve
got to score.”
And back to the idea that it doesn’t use any metaphors: of course it
is also only a metaphor. If it were just a little Vermont stamp we would
forget it. No, it’s the break-line where the welding of the world comes
loose.
k ay ryan
4 71
Reference Back
That was a pretty one, I heard you call
From the unsatisfactory hall
To the unsatisfactory room where I
Played record after record, idly,
Wasting my time at home, that you
Looked so much forward to.
Oliver’s Riverside Blues, it was. And now
I shall, I suppose, always remember how
The flock of notes those antique negroes blew
Out of Chicago air into
A huge remembering pre-electric horn
The year after I was born
Three decades later made this sudden bridge
From your unsatisfactory age
to my unsatisfactory prime.
Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently we could have kept it so.
— Philip Larkin
472O
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His old mother hovers about, listening from the hall beyond the bedroom where he has ineffectually barricaded himself with his record
player. It takes Larkin just six lines to set the trap.
I always want to laugh at the perfection of these setups. We know
this desperate stuckness well from his other poems. There could almost be a Chinese character, one single figure that would mean in all
its pent-up intensity, “Larkin’s fix.” He’s always in Larkin’s fix.
He’s such a comically unattractive character. It’s a marvel to me
that he exposes himself so mercilessly. Another marvel to me is the
sleight of hand that Larkin works on us from inside these suffocating chambers, dumping the emotional contents from stanza to stanza,
room to room, mother to son, ear to ear, creating a sense of permeability and interpenetration while at the same time walling the poem
up with contrary rhetoric. The effect is classic Larkin: irresistible fluidity completely boxed in.
“Blindingly undiminished” is sophistry. Things were never as they
once were; I mean, even when they were, they weren’t. But that
doesn’t take a thing away from the fact that these terrible nostalgic
gusts (to which we are constantly susceptible) feel true. They are
made up by us; they are abetted by the lyric temperament; we visit
them and suffer phantom perfection.
The quick flash in the dark created by the phrase, “blindingly undiminished” — and extinguished by every other line in the poem — is
the breeder reactor for the whole thing. It is such an unbearably
intense radiation that only a sad sack like Larkin can wrap it in a sufficient number of wet blankets to make it bearable to us.
Again and again it’s this threatened availability of everything we
ever desired that puts the fire under Larkin’s kettles. How could we
stand his poems otherwise? Why would we?
Today I feel the opposite of Borges, who wished all poetry could
be anonymous, or at least his. I want the human trajectory, the
feeling of the personal struggle against paralysis and despair and
ridiculousness. I want Larkin to fight in his Larkinness. I want him to
sneak through the obstacles one more time.
k ay ryan
473
Something Matters but We Don’t
In man, I can see no substance solidly;
it is as if what we call man were no more
than an oddly angled look at something else.
Or is it my limitation, being man,
not to be able to see whatever is there?
And aren’t these two alternatives the same?
Let me leave off speaking, unknowing as I am,
but not before I speak of the limits of speech,
or tell of man that there is nothing to tell,
or tell of what we discern perhaps there could be
to tell that we know too little except it is there
and, if anything happens, it must be it happens there
and not to us, not by us: good
or evil, it doesn’t matter what we do.
— William Bronk
474O
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I was enjoying the grind of Bronk, admiring it this morning.
We are all trying to focus, but we each have a particular distance
we care about. Some people are after a granular closeness, some want
a middle range. For Bronk, the remoteness is extreme. He’s so hungry to get some faraway focus and he just can’t. All of his poems
are these barren tripod marks, where he set up his glass once again,
where he tried again.
I don’t know why the evidence of failure should provide consolation but it always does.
k ay ryan
4 75
#1099
My Cocoon tightens — Colors teaze — I’m feeling for the Air — A dim capacity for Wings
Demeans the Dress I wear — A power of Butterfly must be — The Aptitude to fly
Meadows of Majesty concedes
And easy Sweeps of Sky — So I must baffle at the Hint
And cipher at the Sign
And make much blunder, if at last
I take the clue divine — — Emily Dickinson
476O
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Higginson was right; she is spasmodic. Dickinson terrain is hard on
the brain suspension. In any poem of more than one stanza, one stanza
is likely to bottom out.
# 1 099 has several things not going for it. First, I always worry
when it looks like she’s going to inhabit an insect. These experiments
can go bad in the fey direction. (Recall the “little Tippler / Leaning
against the — Sun — .”) And here she is in stanza one already sensing
herself in the early stages of becoming a butterfly.
It’s a very odd condition, squeezed into a Cocoon while also still
in her Dress — not fey but off-balance and unsettled. She isn’t the
one thing or the other quite yet; her condition is conjectural. “Colors
teaze,” and she feels “A dim capacity for Wings.” So far the picture’s
funny and ill fitting and, well, let’s just say so, ravishing: it takes massive poetic wings to think of “a dim capacity for Wings.”
Then stanza two just isn’t very strong, essentially some Dickinson
boilerplate to say, Butterflies fly. Of course it is useful for the advancement of her idea, which is that if she is to be a butterfly she
must get beyond the cocoon stage. And it does serve the purpose
of making a bridge to stanza three, the stanza for which I have dogeared this page in Johnson.
Here she works one of her false-reason tricks, starting the stanza
with “So,” as though what follows will be the result of what has gone
before. As though it won’t be a cosmic leap. As though she cared
about those old stanzas anymore. But this is a different plane. By now
she is purely addressing the poet’s interior puzzle: how can I move in
the direction of what I sense — not as a butterfly, but as a poet?
This is just such a strange capsule of a stanza. I am so interested in
her heavy emphasis on clumsiness here, saying it three ways in three
lines: she must baffle and cipher and make much blunder if she’s ever
going to “take the clue divine.” She’s turning it over and over: the
way of the poet is the way of awkwardness and error.
I don’t know if I’m getting across what seems rare to me in this.
It’s the exhilarating unworkability of it: one can only blunder into the
light, or whatever the “clue divine” is. It’s not gradual, or progressive,
or accumulative: you don’t get better or make fewer blunders, approaching the godhead step by step. Blundering doesn’t work, except
it does. It can’t lead you there, except it’s the only way to get there.
I will go so far as to hazard that blundering might be generative, meaning that rooting around in a haystack long and fruitlessly enough
could conceivably breed a needle.
k ay ryan
4 77
The Poet Hin
The foolish poet wonders
Why so much honour
Is given to other poets
But to him
No honour is given.
I am much condenscended to, said the poet Hin,
By my inferiors. And, said the poet Hin,
On my tombstone I will have inscribed:
“He was much condescended to by his inferiors.”
Then, said the poet Hin,
I shall be properly remembered.
Hin — wiping his tears away, I cried — Your words tell me
You know the correct use of shall and will.
That, Hin, is something we may think about,
May, may, may, man.
Well yes, true, said Hin, stopping crying then,
Well yes, but true only in part,
Well, your wiping my tears away
Was a part.
But ah me, ah me,
So much vanity, said he, is in my heart.
Yet not light always is the pain
That roots in levity. Or without fruit wholly
As from this levity’s
Flowering pang of melancholy
May grow what is weighty,
May come beauty.
True too, Hin, true too. Well, as now: You have gone on
Differently from what you begun.
478 O
P O E TRY
Yet both truths have validity,
the one meanly begot, the other nobly,
And as each alone glosses over
What the other says, so only together
Have they a full thought to uncover.
— Stevie Smith
k ay ryan
4 79
Why is this so wonderful?
Because it is utterly headstrong and meant to amuse and gratify her
own self, meant to keep herself good company and also to console
her, and along the way stumbles into some wisdom.
The most beautiful thoughts and feelings can barely settle or they
break us. We can’t endure more than the briefest visitations. That’s
the cruel fact. Almost every writer almost always crushes her own
work under the weight of thoughts and feelings.
Nobody knows how to be light much of the time. Maybe not even
the Dalai Lama. Stevie Smith had some natural advantages, a natural
distance from conventional behavior.
The only reason it’s bearable to know the things she stubs her toe
on is the offhand method of arrival and her chronic throwaway, “hiho” tone. She sends very hot things through the cooling coils of her
poems and plays with them in her bare hands. For of course poems
must include hot things; if all the hot things are removed the result
cannot be poetry since it is the job of poetry to remain open to the
whole catastrophe.
In “The Poet Hin” she manages to say things she utterly means:
1. I am condescended to by my inferiors.
2. Levity contains pain and weight and beauty.
But these heavy matters enjoy the particular weightlessness conferred
on the reader’s mind by the assurance that they are the ravings of an
individual. The reader of Stevie Smith can never for an instant forget
that she is looking through the cock eyes of Stevie Smith. Everything
that transpires does so in Stevie Smith’s universe, which is not
one’s own. Meaning, none of the sufferings hurt and none of the
pronouncements crowd the mind. Instead, they can be entertained;
we can examine them as if they were toys although they are not.
There is nothing so freeing as someone pleasing herself.
Work that pleases itself first just snips so many binding strings in
the minds of others.
48 0O
P O E TRY
michael hofmann
Sharp Biscuit — Some Thoughts on Translating
A handful of lucky or gifted poets fill their lives with poetry. I’m
thinking of the likes of Ashbery, Brodsky, Ted Hughes, Les Murray.
They write, respectively wrote poems, it seems to me, practically
every day, the way prose writers write their novels. The date at the
bottom of Mandelstam poems. Plath poems. It’s a question of the
force of the gift, the pounds-per-square-inch of the Muse. Heaney,
too, comes close. The rest of us strike compromises, do something
else “as well,” mostly teach, in a handful of cases, do other, unrelated
work, have “a job” in the “real world.” The job is the enemy of the
poetry, its successful, favored rival (the job is everything, the poem
nothing; who wants the poem, and who doesn’t want the job?), but
may also be the dirt from which the poetry grows. Such, anyway, is
my hope, translating.
•
Meetings with remarkable translators. To coin a phrase. The first
was Ralph Manheim (translator of Grass and Handke, then as now
the two most prominent living German authors, but also of Brecht
and Céline and Danilo Kiš and any number of others — Mein Kampf,
anyone?), who invited me to drinks at his flat in Paris. A native of
Chicago, if I remember, and one of the great generation of American
translators that was produced by the war. 1980, 1982, something like
that. Six o’clock. Yard-arm time. I turn up, meet him and his charming wife, who has suffered a stroke and whom he is looking after.
I feel a bond with him: the unusual, “thin” spellings of our names,
he has only one n in his, I have only one f in the same place, plus
he is exactly fifty years older than me, born in 1907. We talk about
the vexatious Handke, who is also living in Paris, and with whom he
says, in a gallant adaptation of the German idiom (which exists in
the negative form), “ist gut Kirschen essen,” you can share a bowl of
cherries, i.e., a companionable and generous and uncomplicated sort.
I demur, but he says it, and he may after all be right. (Years later, I
am with friends in Paris. Very late, long after supper, there is a knock
on the door, it is Peter Handke, who only ever walks everywhere,
michael hofmann
4 81
unannounced, with his hat full of mushrooms he has picked. They are
straightaway cooked and eaten, and I am surprised by Handke, who
is tanned and strong and kind, and has a firm handshake, and I think
about the cherries, and the Manheims.) I drink a beer, they both have
whiskey. Ralph has come from his office in another building. The
sense, then, of it being a job, that he keeps regular hours, locks it
up and comes home. Doesn’t allow it to sprawl greedily or disfiguringly over his life. I think, if I think at all, of my father who writes
at home, giving dictation — furthermore — to my mother, in what
passes for our living room. His writing is everywhere, fills the airwaves, fills our family space, governs our lives like national economy.
Then Joseph Brodsky, some time later in the eighties, in the
Tufnell Park flat of a friend of his. Espresso and Vecchio Romano in
a somewhat redundant, spotless kitchen. (He wrote about Auden’s
“real library of a kitchen” in Kirchstetten, but I guess that for him
and in his life, most of the action will have been in, so to speak, the
real kitchen of this or that library. As he said, “freedom is a library”;
it isn’t a kitchen.) “Circumcised” cigarettes. The practiced fingers
pull out the sponge, pull out the fluff, discard the fluff, return the
sponge. Only then is it safe to smoke. He is translating Cavafy, whom
he loves. The classicism, the history, the anonymity. Into Russian.
He has brought with him from New York a Russian portable typewriter he is using. Greek into Cyrillic. In bourgeois north London. A
bizarre, Conradian phenomenon. The translator as bacillus.
Maybe one more. A rare (for me) gathering of translators in
New York City, perhaps some awards ceremony, I don’t remember. We fill the front stalls of a theater somewhere, feeling unusually
effervescent, like a gathering of missionaries, or spies on day release.
Optimistic. Righteous. Both full of ourselves and among ourselves,
unter uns. Ourselves alone — Sinn Féin. The charabanc effect. To
make things better/worse, Paul Auster is brought on to address us.
Then someone announces that Gregory Rabassa is of the company,
somewhere right and front of us. A slight, stooped figure rises, bows.
From the stage, a beam tries to pick him out, to try and somehow
give him some plasticity. I don’t think I would recognize him on the
street. The first translator I was aware of, I read his Marquez when
I was twenty, and doorstepped his London publishers. (Remember
Marquez’s praise for him as “the best Latin American writer in the
English language”?) A little pencil mustache, maybe? An imperial?
I doubt myself, and think probably I’m making it up, extrapolating,
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literarizing. We applaud frantically. Such are the heroes of a secret
business, a guilty business, even.
•
I translate to try to amount to something. When I first held my first
book of poems in my hands (the least extent acceptable to the British
Library, forty-eight pages including prelims), I thought it would fly
away. To repair a deficit of literature in my life. My ill-advised version
of Cartesianism: traduco, ergo sum. Ill-advised because the translator
has no being, should neither be seen nor heard, should be (yawn)
faithful, should be (double yawn) a plate of glass. Well, Kerrang!!!
•
Many, if not most translators, operate with an acquired language, or
languages, and their own, which is the one, according to Christopher
Logue, they have to be really good at. (I never trust people who translate both into and out of a language: isn’t there something unsanitary
about that, like drinking the bathwater?) That brings a certain dispassion to their proceedings, a lab coat, tweezers, a fume cupboard.
But both my languages are “my own”: German, my so-called mother
tongue, and English, which I have no memory of learning at the age
of four, and was the language I first read and wrote in. Both are lived
languages, primal languages: the one of family and first namings, and
now, of companionship and love; the other of decades of, I hope,
undetectable and successful assimilation in England. Which should
I be without?
I was happily bilingual till my mid-twenties, when I began, by economic necessity, to translate. The matching of my two languages is an
inner process, the setting of a broken bone, a graft, the healing of a
wound. Perhaps it can even be claimed that in me German is in some
way an open wound, which is soothed and brought to healing by the
application of English. Translation as a psychostatic necessity. Look,
there is no break in my life, no loss of Eden, no loss of childhood
certainties, no discontinuity, no breach, no rupture, no expulsion.
English, then, as a bandage, a splint, a salve.
•
michael hofmann
4 83
Late on in my translation of my father’s novel of small town
Germany in the thirties and forties, The Film Explainer, about his
grandfather, my great-grandfather, you may read:
Anyone who now saw Grandfather on the street, under his
artist’s hat, with which “he shields his thick skull from others’
ideas” (Grandmother) no longer said: Hello, Herr Hofmann!
He said: Heil Hitler! Or: Another scorcher!
Yes, this one is ontologically and humorously important to me, it’s
a family book, the hero’s name is Hofmann, and I identify with everyone in it, because they’re all a part of me: the vainglorious oldster
(like me, a wearer of hats), the acerbic Grandmother, the anxiousto-please small boy — but even beyond that, the expressing of that
history, its domestication in English, gives me immense satisfaction.
Where is the rift, the breach, if it is a matter of chance whether you
say the Terry-Thomas “Another scorcher!” or the truly villainous
“Heil Hitler!” It could just as well have happened to you, it implies,
and: look, I am making a joke of it, and: how can you think I am different. I am putting together something in myself, and in my history.
Hence — though of course no one likes a bad review — the way
I react unusually badly (it seems to me) to mistakes (I do make them)
and to readers’ or reviewers’ rebukes. It interferes with my healing,
my knitting-together, my convalescence. It tears off a bandage, and
scrapes open my hurt, or my heart. Don’t disturb my circles, I think.
•
Translation is the production of words, hundreds of thousands of
words, by now many millions of words. I prefer short books, I am
lazy, I am a poet, one page is usually plenty for me. But even so,
the long books have snuck up on me, and passed through me. The
Radetzky March perhaps 140,000 words. Two long Falladas, two
hundred thousand apiece. Fallada short stories, another hundred
thousand. Ernst Jünger 130,000, and with a bunch of other war
books — how did I get into that? — comfortably four hundred thousand. Sixty books, millions and millions of words, like millions and
millions of numbers, like π, an unreal number. Once I notice myself
starting to repeat ( . .. 3 141592 . .. ) , I promise myself, then I will stop.
48 4O
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•
This is all distraction on an industrial scale, the “still small voice” of
poetry decibelled over, my puny resources vastly overstretched, the
six-stone weakling unhappily running amok with a chest expander.
In the Nietzsche / Jünger way, it will either kill me, or make me
strong. Again, how did it happen? Out of fealty to my novelist father:
prose. Out of my German nature: Tüchtigkeit, energetic production,
industry, diligence. Out of dissatisfaction with my own slow, woolgathering, window-gazing methods: all-consuming tasks in unbroken
sequence. Out of a desire to make more — and heavier — books:
translation. Given his druthers, what does moony Narcissus take
upon himself ? — Why, the labors of Hercules!
•
If you want someone to look after your sentences for you, who or
what better than a poet? If you want someone to regulate — enterprisingly regulate — your diction, cadence your prose, hook a beginning
to an ending, jam an ending up against a beginning, drive a green
fuse through the gray limbs of clauses — a poet. If you’re looking for
prose with dignity, with surprise, with order, with attention to detail.
That’s why the first item in Tom Paulin’s book of electric free translations, The Road to Inver, is his version of the opening of Camus’s The
Plague. Prose. Well, up to a point.
•
And the resources, the tools? Well, they can be anything at all.
Sometimes, when I’ve liked certain figures in German — most
especially when they weren’t things I knew, and that therefore gave
me the sense that not everyone would know them in German — I let them stand. Uncommon in German, why not new in English? In
Each Man Dies Alone, there’s this: “The actor Max Harteisen had, as
his friend and attorney Toll liked to remind him, plenty of butter on
his head from pre-Nazi times.” There is a footnote to this, but it’s none
of my making: I’d have let it go without. Butter on the head — isn’t
it an adorable expression?! Or this, from a new novel, Seven Years, by
Peter Stamm, a scene in which two architects are exchanging career
advice: “Berlin is an El Dorado, he said, if you’re half-presentable,
michael hofmann
4 85
then you can earn yourself a golden nose.” Nothing easier than to
have said “really fill your boots” or “earn silly money” or “a shedload
of money,” but I didn’t want to: the golden nose — what a perfect
expression of the wealth gap: such a futile, practically syphilitic protuberance! — had wowed me too much.
So, things let stand from German — but also the opposite. Things
fetched from every corner of English. Someone told me something
in my Wassermann is Australian (I spent hours looking, but couldn’t
find the reference, though I do remember trying to use “Esky,” from
“Eskimo,” the Australian term for a coolbox, and not being allowed
to). Another expression — “a kick in the slats” — is from a Dublinborn civil servant I used to know. This is translation not quite as
autobiography, but maybe as “auto-graphy”: turning out my pockets,
Schwitters-style, a bus ticket, a scrap of newspaper, a fag-packet, a
page torn out of a diary. The words are not just words; they are words
that I’ve knocked around with; they reflect my continuing engagement with Lowell, with Brodsky, with Bishop, with Malcolm Lowry;
words that have had some wear and tear, there is fade in them, and
softness, and history, maybe not visibly so for every reader, but palpably, to some.
I use English and American more or less as they come to hand;
it used to be I thought I knew the difference, and even imagined
I could deliberately switch between them, I’m no longer sure. Is it
the hood or the bonnet? The boot or the trunk? Does something
take “the biscuit” or “the cake”? Is it “the shoe” that drops or the
“penny”? Am I “pernickety” or more “persnickety”? Inevitably,
and increasingly — it’s a function of my life and reading, as well as
of having employers in London and New York — things in me will
come out mixed, in a style you could call “universal-provincial.”
A molten, mongrel English (which I happen to believe is the genius
and proclivity of the language anyway). What I find most resistant
(and least simpatico) is the authentic and the limited and the local
(but what translation is going to sit happily with those qualities: they
are each the antithesis of translation). Everything expressive is possible. I fight hard for British expressions in my us translations (“on
the never-never” is one that comes to mind — surely the American
economy would be in a different shape if that jolly warning as to
the dangers of excessive credit had been understood!), and I like
introducing British readers to American expressions as well. Eight
boyhood years in Edinburgh — I thought they had left no trace — find
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a belated upsurge in a welter of Scottish-isms: “postie,” “wee,” “agley,”
“first-footing.” (The main beneficiary/ sufferer was Durs Grünbein;
if I thought anything by it [by no means sure], perhaps that I was
mapping provincialisms, Saxon on to Scottish, eighteenth-century
capital on to eighteenth-century capital, his Dresden childhood on
to mine in the self-styled “Athens of the North.”) Words I’ve used
in poems myself, “bimble” and others, get in on the act. It’s not just
that — as I’ve thought and said previously — translation takes away all
your words, it’s more insidious than that, more neutron-bomb-like:
it takes away all my words. Again, once I find myself repeating myself,
or see a certain predictability and mannerism in the use — without
much sanction from the original — of a slightly dandyish, comical,
rueful register, say 888888 recurring, it’ll be time for me to stop.
•
But that’s the problem: whose words are you going to use, if not your
own? Reprising Buffon, Wallace Stevens said: “A man has no choice
about his style.” Why shouldn’t it be just as true of a translator as
of John Doe, author? Is it imagined that you take a dictionary to an
original, and make fifty or hundred thousand hermetically separate
transactions, translating, in effect, blind, and into a language not yours
and no one else’s? Is that a book? Every word taken out of its association-proof shrink-wrapping? I don’t see how a personal vocabulary
and personal grammar and a personal rhythm — at least where they
exist, in anyone evolved enough to have them — are to be excluded.
Chocolates carry warnings that they may have been manufactured
using equipment that has hosted peanuts; why not translations too?
But then not just “has written the occasional modern poem” but
also “likes punk” or “early familiarity with the works of Dickens”
or even “reads the Guardian” or “follows the Dow” or “fan of P.G.
Wodehouse.” (Yes, dear reader, these are all me.) But we are all contaminated. I have awe but not much respect for people who translate
with a contemporary lexicon to hand, so that a translation of an
old book is “guaranteed” to contain no words that weren’t in existence — albeit in the other language — at the time of writing. It is
ingenious, yes; disciplined, aha; plausible, sure; but it’s entirely too
mechanistic. Even if you use eighteenth-century vocabulary, chances
are you won’t manage a single sentence that would have passed muster
in the eighteenth century. (There’s a difference between a pianist and
michael hofmann
4 87
a piano-tuner.) Meanwhile, your twenty-first century reader reads
you with what — his eighteenth-century parson’s soul? On his Nook?
•
I want a translation to provide an experience, and I want, as a translator, to make a difference. I concede that both aims may be felt to be
somewhat unusual, even inadmissible. I can see that the idea of me as
writer leans into, or even blurs, the idea of me as translator (after all,
I don’t need someone else’s book to break my silence: I am, if you
like, a ventriloquist’s ventriloquist). Translating a book is for me an
alternative to or an extension (a multiplier!) of writing an essay or
poem. A publisher friend of mine did me the kindness of dreaming of
a world where books were thought of not by author, but by translator
(who is after all the one who comes up with the words on the page):
so, a Pevear/Volokhonsky, not a Tolstoy; a Mitchell, not a Rilke; a
Lydia Davis, not a Proust.
But where is the fidelity, you may say, where is the accuracy, the
self-effacement, the service!? For me the service comes from writing
as well and as interestingly as possible: it comes from using the full
range of Englishes, the different registers, the half-forgotten words,
the tricks of voice, the unexpected tightenings and loosenings of
grammar. (I serve my originals, as I see it, but I am also there to serve
English, hence the importations, the “finds,” the dandyisms, and the
collisions.) I am impatient with null or duff passages of writing, cliches, inexactitudes, even, actually, the ordinary inert. (I don’t know
that I would find anything more challenging than a book where the
characters only ever “went” to places, and only ever “said” things:
I’d find it stifling — and have done.) In his sweet-mannered but
extremely interesting Is That a Fish in Your Ear? David Bellos
characterizes translation as liable to produce a sort of moyen language, clipping the extremes of an original, tending toward the
accepted and the established and the center, the unexceptional and
the unexceptionable. I don’t mind much where my extremes come
from — whether they are mine, or my authors’, but I want them to
be there. Extra pixels. The high resolution of a fourth or fifth decimal place, I once put it. It’s the expectation of poetry: brevity, pitch,
drama. The right word, or phrase or sentence — and thereby too,
something you mightn’t have got from someone else. Yes, a translator is a passenger, riding in relative safety (and deserved penury) in a
48 8 O
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vehicle that has already been built, but I would still rather he were
a passenger of the bobsleigh kind — a converted sprinter, someone
who at least puts his own bones and balance and reactions into his
work.
•
And so one ungrateful reader sees fit to complain: “He uses words
not commonly seen in books and occasionally his grammar is clumsy”
(which only seems to get more hilarious the more I look at it: the
wonderfully aggrieved, positively denunciatory tone; the gorgeous — imitatively clumsy — hitch, a kind of comma-less splice; the absurd
implication that more words may be used in speech [i.e. that written English operates a rather French system of vocabulary restraint];
the rather gray little sentence that flaunts its two mealy adverbs). A
reviewer describes me as “the usually reliable” (which in some moods
I would see as a slur), and goes on to grumble about my use of “inelegant non-words” like “chuntering” (to talk in a low, inarticulate
way) and “squinny” (from squint, obviously) — both of them seem
not just perfect but perfectly good to me (and since when is there
a universal edict on elegance, or on frequency of use?) — and intimates he would rather (sight unseen) read eighty-year-old versions
by my predecessors, the wonderfully named Cedar and Eden Paul,
who sound like the grandsire and grandam of the Tea Party: perhaps
I should counter by denying him any of my other, “usually reliable,”
translations? The novelist A.S. Byatt drew up a little list of words
she thought ought not to have appeared in my translation of Joseph
Roth’s last novel The Emperor’s Tomb (first published in 1938):
“a ways,” “gussied up,” “sprog,” “sharp cookie,” “gobsmacked,” and
(rather ruthlessly, I thought), “pinkie.” The action of the book straddles wwi; only the first of Byatt’s terms comes from “before,” the
others are all “after the deluge,” which I think matters. Four times I
shrugged my shoulders. I inclined my head a little at “sharp cookie” — if English had offered “sharp biscuit” I might indeed have used
that — but the only one that had me scrambling was “gobsmacked,”
which is a vulgarism not in my repertoire in speech, never mind books,
or so I thought. When I looked it up in Roth, I saw it was spoken by
a character called von Stettenheim, a con man — von man — who is
described as a “Prussian vulgarian.” Even that, then — reaching for a
word I don’t use — doesn’t seem wrong to me.
michael hofmann
4 89
What all these have in common, I think, is a neurotic impatience
with the idea, even, of there being a translator. In their cars, as they
conceive of them, there is but one steering wheel, and an author is at
it (in fact there are dual controls). Such readers and critics will sometimes, rather in spite of themselves, read a translation, but with an
edge of apprehension, almost already under protest or under notice.
Their palette of expectation is all negative: impossible to imagine
such people amused, struck, impressed, or surprised by a translation. (“Translation?!” I seem to hear, almost like Lady Bracknell’s
“a handbag?!”) Rather, woe if the translation should happen to show
itself, to obtrude. There is only disfavor forthcoming. Their wrath
will be terrible to behold. A translation is only possible — only bearable, one thinks — so long as it remains meek, clothy, predictable,
a little old-fashioned. It should wear its inadequacy on its sleeve.
Whereas, to me, to sit over something professionally disappointing,
necessarily doomed, and perennially half-empty would be a waste of
my life (which who knows, perhaps I have wasted). Yes, it is impossible, but that is where we came in, it was the fall of the Tower of Babel that gave us our ground plan. Just because I am the translator
of a book doesn’t seem to me to rule out finesse, pleasure, initiative,
even provocation. Hans Magnus Enzensberger — who has dedicated
one of his books to translators, to the “noble coolies” of poetry (and
what a bizarre and wonderful collision of words that is, “noble coolies”!) — still thinks we should have fun. Or does it always have to be
like in Pope, “and ten low words oft creep in one dull line”?
•
Something simple on method. It used to be I wrote out a draft by
hand, usually at night; then the next day I would look up words (irritatingly, they were almost always words I knew, but at that stage I felt
I still needed the corroboration: the people who don’t look things
up are usually the ones who don’t know them), and type up what
I had; in the afternoon I would go swimming, and at night I would
rough out — or rough up — the next few pages. When I’d got to the
end of a manuscript, I would make a large (A3) photocopy of it, and
scribble on it, working only — or almost only — with the English.
Word processing has greatly simplified and run together these stages.
What remains the case is that I get some sort of draft out as quickly
as possible, put the German away, and revise, endlessly. Ten times,
49 0O P O E TRY
twenty times — more. If I can get someone to listen, I like to read
a book aloud. I re-read old translations of mine long after they’ve
appeared, long after they’ve disappeared again. I can see that it is possible for an original to get away from me, but think that on the whole
that doesn’t happen: all my instincts — even working at speed — are
accurate and loyal. I know that in this piece I’ve dwelt on difference
and play and irresponsibility, but I am overwhelmingly a careful and
dutiful worker. Further, there is a benefit to working with and from
English, which is that a translation doesn’t get involved in a sort of
linguistic tug-of-war. There’s not a struggle to be born, just a fairly
quick and clean separation, and the English understands that it’s on
its own, as it has to be. (It’s self-evident but needs saying: I translate
for people without German, rather than those who have the doubtful
good fortune of knowing it.) When I’ve translated poetry, which is
in the last ten years or so, the presence or threat of a parallel text has
protracted negotiations with the German; I’m not sure it’s always
been to the benefit of the translation, but clearly it’s bound to happen that way. A poem-translation can feel like the bundled-up corpse
of an insect that’s got caught in a spider’s web, an overzealous parcel,
attached by a thousand threads to the thing that will wait for it to die
and then eat it: not a comfortable feeling, and not recommended.
•
Over time, I’ve become more sure of myself, and more taken with
myself. I’m not sure either of these is a good thing, but again they’re
both likely to happen. Over their careers, a doctor or stockbroker
or airline pilot will have gone the same way. Partly it’s generalized experience, partly a long association with particular authors
and epochs — the twenties and thirties; Stamm, Roth, Fallada, my
father — but it has given rise to a sense of “this is how I do things”
and even “this is how I want things to come out, and you should
be satisfied with that.” There’s nothing so exhausting as sticking up
for yourself, but I can do it when put to it. I back my feel for words
against just about anyone’s, I know I have a degree of impatience — I don’t like fussing — and then there’s something impetuous and
unpredictable in me as well. That’s what you get. I wouldn’t want it
as a sort of generalized characterological dispensation, but I think in
my own case it’s probably ok.
michael hofmann
491
frederick seidel
La Vita Nuova
Left-handed, by Jonathan Galassi.
Alfred A. Knopf. $26.00.
1
In the middle of Galassi’s life’s journey, in the middle of the dark
woods, the road forked. Galassi had no choice — and chose — and
wrote these poems. You have here the music of civilized decency
superintending a heart raving and roaring like a lion.
As
in those nineteenth-century plays where the
roof gets blown off the
conventional house and
the audience is left to
gape at the bare-headed
heroine — him.
— From Middle-aged
2
This is a book of sadness which describes a triumph. Very little artfulness or coquetry or charm to these poems, though many of them
are lovely and some are quite funny. Even so, what you read is often
pretty plain, a plain but lyrical account of remembering what had
to be lost in order to move on. The moving-on cost plenty and is
what made the poems. There is very little in the way of rhetorical
flourishes or decoration, and not much in the way of narrative facts,
either. No filigree, very little poetry, quite plain — but these are
poems, not straight lines. There is a quiet, careful music. There’s
the voice of the speaker, addressing his past, reminiscing plaintively,
speaking to his future, telling the story of love that failed and new
love that, though absolutely hopeless, transformed and inspired, love
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that changed a life. Above all, these are poems about a drastically
changed life. That’s the costly, melancholy triumph. It’s a book about
a shattering triumph.
3
Joy! Like a trout leaping silver-shiver from an ice-cold mountain
stream into the sunlight! Hooked! That’s Galassi’s book. Have
I ever said otherwise! The amount of pleasure these poems take in
the things of the world, and the special people in it, and the plants,
flowers, lawns, lakes, rivers, skies, sunlight, nighttime, cities, bedrooms, people, friends, lovers, lifts off the page. Laughter! Including
laughing at himself! Joy!
4
Dear Mr. Galassi, you write such skinny poems on your BlackBerry!
This world so
golden so unreachable this
August morning
with its hills
its tawny stubble fields its
full-crowned
trees its single scarlet
branches arching overhead
as desperate
music pours
from the
speakers is
reason enough
to live almost.
— From August
frederic k seide l
493
Then there are the slightly fatter ones, because you’re not always on
your BlackBerry.
on my little terrace
shaded by my little tree of life.
Early morning summer haze,
coffee after swimming,
cherries, toast.
Time to plant some,
read some, dream some,
time to regret,
to mourn, desire.
Time to be up and about,
friends. I can sleep later.
— Breakfast
Sometimes, a poem hears a tune and just can’t stop itself from rhyming (it doesn’t happen often).
So much for direction,
for learning and knowing,
for seeking and heeding,
for staying or going.
These were the ways
of the life that we’ve known
and all of this time
I’ve been going alone
and I can’t anymore.
Will it happen this way?
Do you hear what I’m telling
you, softly, today?
Can you listen to me?
Are you right? Am I wrong?
The answer is somewhere
inside of this song.
— From Radical Hope
Or look at this haiku of straight talk. Basho Galassi.
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You talk about my
bad judgment as
if I had any.
— Judgment
5
It’s time for a love poem out of the man’s vita nuova. I think I’ll quote
the whole thing. It’s just lovely.
Start with the view, the late
great Empire State Building
soldiering solo in your northfacing windows with the roughdiamond city spread-eagled below: how New York is that?
And your stolen Sharon road
sign and Empire State Building model (a present from
Philip?) your grandfather’s
insulators on the sill and
photos of eerie faces and unsettled scenery. Here’s your
collection of caps and your
terrace with its tufted prairie grass your little couch
and table and piles of papers
— surely enough reading for a
lifetime. And here’s Benny
mewing looking for you like
me and your aged Italian
leather chair that’s missing
a button and the garden table
with its pair of folding seats
I bet you never eat at and
your tv on its stable stand
of books, so many books (I
love that the computer’s in
the kitchen). And here’s your
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closet with your cache of secrets, your strong box
stuffed with histories and
letters, your scarves and
jeans and scuffed shoes and
“Not A Supplicant” T-shirts,
enough for a team. Here are
the piles of the poetry that
stings you and your music,
your BlackBerry and the
phone you can’t survive without and often lose, your Ferragamo coat and mittens and
wallet and keys and bag.
Here’s Noah’s shirt and the
golden bed — where are you?
— A Little Tour Around Your Room
6
I’m not going to talk about Mr. Galassi’s line breaks.
7
Life is hard. Here’s what’s on the other side of the bed. More bad.
And more good. Such sweet air to breathe with this new music. Look!
We have come through!
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fanny howe
Second Childhood
1
I have a fairy rosary called Silver who answers questions when I dangle her in the sun at the window. So I have asked her if I have a big
ego and she swings from side to side to say no.
We have other children for friends.
We don’t understand why we are here in the world with horrible
grown-ups or what the lessons are that we’re supposed to learn.
It’s not helpful for us to hear ourselves described in religious, geriatric or psychological terms, because we don’t remember what they
mean.
One cruel female said, “Don’t laugh so much. You’re not a child.”
My cheeks burned and my eyes grew hot.
2
I decided to stop becoming an adult. That day I chose to blur facts,
fail at tests, and slouch under a hood. School was my first testing
ground. I misunderstood lessons, assignments, meanings of poems
and stories, and misinterpreted the gestures of characters in novels.
I was awestruck by geology but mixed up the ages of rocks. I stared
and giggled, and refused to take orders and was punished.
Throughout my life I have remained vague and have accepted the humiliation it brought, almost as if stupefaction were a gift. I willfully
repeat my mistakes over and over and never learn from experience.
Every day has been a threat to this attitude so I avoid obligations. For
example, last night I dreamed I was on an airplane that was open to
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the sky and a storm was coming from a hive of stars, and I wanted to
sit beside my daughter to watch the wind as we strapped ourselves
tight to the invisible seats and stayed awake. If we had been grownups, we wouldn’t have been able to see the stars or the storm. We
would have perished.
So my commitment to childhood has once again been affirmed.
Read the signs, not the authorities.
You might think I am just old but I have finally decided to make the
decision to never grow up, and remain under my hood.
We are like tiny egos inside a great mountain of air. Pressed upon by
the weight of ether, we can barely breathe.
3
One ego is like a spider clutched to a web of its own making.
It turns to enamel and hardens on fulfillment.
Many egos fill up the whole body, every part to the tiniest hair.
Some egos are like fingernails that have been stifled by brittle paint.
All egos have something impersonal about them. They live deep inside like viruses and unlike gods who play in outer air.
But this ego covered my face with spider-dust as I lay in my bassinet.
Today I keep seeing gauze, another kind of web of a type that doesn’t
harden but swings and shimmers.
It’s the remarkable web-hood of a spirit.
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4
At birth a baby failure is unconscious of the shadow that covers her
face: it’s from the success leaning over her crèche smudging out the
color in her cheeks.
The failure is born to measure the shadow of success. This is the failure’s mission.
The secret hood around her face indicates her vocation.
The success arrives in triumph, and is instantly obsolescent, while the
failures keep trying, failing, and reproducing until another success
is born. It could be centuries from their lifetime.
It’s not ironical but logical that the failure is the one who recognizes
success and identifies its potential in her enemies.
She it is who keeps their egos alive with her tears.
She is their harshest critic, she who can separate the fraud from the
living, the cold from the lukewarm. She is still a failure, a tiny ego
who can’t quite rise to the occasion of being. She is an id, driven by
longing.
And she has crazy rules: “If your whole body can’t breathe the air,
your prayers are incomplete. No hair dye!”
5
I think the gods and goddesses were the last good grown-ups on earth.
Once I saw them walking to a party along a beach and I could make
out their shadows like a line of pines in an ocean breeze. They were
laughing and calling to each other. Still, they were always aware of
their mortal children’s prayers and answered them, sometimes in the
form of mist, sometimes as needles of sunlight.
The gods existed outside the ego-world though they were certainly
jealous and angry. Now some of them are pots and pans and wax and
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499
marbles, balls and kettles, rope and puddles. They emit a crackling
sound when lightning hits the ground, and give people shingles.
Other gods have chosen to break out to heaven where they blend into
pastel and ride comets once a year. Sometimes it’s hard to walk with
so many gods bouncing around, so I sweep and use a walking stick.
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clive james
Interior Music
An unusually successful example of that most easily mangled of verse
genres, the philosophical disquisition made fully poetic, Robert
Conquest’s intricately argued poem “A Problem” is in The Penguin
Book of Contemporary Verse, an anthology that was always with me
in the last few years before I left Australia in the early sixties. It’s a
long time ago now but I can still remember the thrill of reading, for
the first time, the line that sums up what he was really after in that
poem. On the face of it he takes a painterly approach, meticulously
registering all the nuances of the Ligurian landscape, and how the
light falls on it from the sky: falls and alters. But he also says that the
shifting patterns of light are “Like the complex, simple movement of
great verse.”
We can call this prose if we like, but only if we wish that our own
prose were as neatly suggestive, as rich in implication as it is authoritative in form — in other words, as complex yet simple, simple yet
complex. The mere fact, however, that you have to say the same thing
from two different directions is already proof that there is nothing
dumb about the idea. Combined into a single oxymoronic phrase,
the two words “simple” and “complex” not only collide, they explode. Once they touch and go off, each is riddled with the other’s
particular shrapnel. You can’t have one without the other.
Is this seemingly simple notion — but so complex when you unpack it — really an appropriate measure for great verse? In those first
years of mine as an appreciator of poetry, I found myself asking that
very question when I started reading the later poems of Yeats. In
Sydney I had already absorbed — or thought I had absorbed — Pound,
Eliot, Auden, MacNeice, and Cummings, plus dozens of others
among the avowedly modern — but with them I could always say,
when I ran into a difficulty: well, that’s modern art, complex and
difficult. I could understand Henry Reed’s “Lessons of the War” perfectly, and thought they added up to a great work. I could understand
the poems in Hart Crane’s “The Bridge” only intermittently, and
thought they might add up to an even greater work, for that very reason. I could scarcely have been more receptive to a dash of obscurity.
Tending to underrate intelligibility, I looked upon it as the poet’s
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fallback position; a true simplicity with nothing complex about it: a
life of ease that he might slip back into if he stopped trying. It never
occurred to me then that an achieved clarity might be the apex of the
craft; and might act as a vehicle for everything that the poet could
not fully explain, just so long as he was clear about the fact that he
couldn’t. But in laying out the possibilities of choice like this — as if I had seen the choices but just hadn’t yet done any choosing — I might
appear to be retroactively giving myself credit for more acumen than
I had at the time.
On the ship to England I took my first crack at the later Yeats.
I sailed off for the territory beyond such earlier showstoppers as “An
Irish Airman Foresees His Death” and got myself into the territory
where it seemed that the aging wizard wanted to be plain as much as
he wanted to be poetic. I caught on most quickly to the poems whose
prose statements I knew I wasn’t supposed to understand completely at first reading. Such lines as “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed”
were obviously meant to be clearer than their context. Byzantium
was a destination in the mind, like the Land of Oob-La-Di. None of
it was supposed to check out: only to resonate. What threw me, and
was to go on throwing me for years, was his use of the perfectly plain,
apparently ordinary prose statement. Apart from its biblical rhythm
and repetition, was the following moment poetic in any way at all?
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say?
But the musical momentum of those words made them into an
extraordinary statement anyway. And actually there was a lot more
to say, and the reader, by trying to say it, must eventually arrive at
the conclusion that this seemingly simple statement is complex in
the extreme. First of all, man is quite likely to vanish before the thing
he loves vanishes. If the thing he loves is a person — say, a beautiful woman — she will certainly vanish one day, but if the beautiful
woman is painted by Botticelli, she won’t. One can go on teasing
out an argument endlessly, and this same attribute applies to almost
every apparently plain statement that the fully mature Yeats ever
made. Right up until the end, the simpler he sounds, the more complex he gets. So Conquest’s formula is not invalidated: far from it.
That famous motto about the evanescence of man’s love is an extreme case, but really a lot of Yeats’s later work is like that. Some
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of the mystical rigmarole of the early work continues into the later
work: there is no escaping “the gyres! the gyres!” But his big poems,
such as “Among School Children” and “All Souls’ Night,” can mainly
be read almost as if they were prose: it’s one of their characteristics.
The characteristic is deceptive because it can lead even the most
acute critic into the delusion that Yeats in his advanced years was
writing rhetoric rather than poetry. He didn’t. What he did was to
trim down the number of complicating factors. Sometimes there was
little imagery and often there was none at all: just an argument. But
even the most straightforward argument was made musical by the
way it moved. In his spellbinder of a short poem “The Cold Heaven,”
the “rook-delighting heaven” is first of all a syntactically compressed
way of saying that the sky delights the crows. But it is also a peal
of music. (One night at a feast in King’s College, Cambridge, when
the late Frank Kermode was already older than I am now, he recited
the poem to me in his soft voice, and I was breathless at the beauty
of its switches and turns, its smooth linking of pause and glide.)
To fill the straightforward with implication — to make the simple
complex — brought Yeats to the height of his technique.
Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made.
— From Under Ben Bulben
In the early work there is frequent mention of mystical inspiration,
but in the later work he is more likely to put the explicit emphasis on
craft. We can be sure that he didn’t think of craft as the lesser thing. It
was the larger thing, embracing all the other mental activities going
on in the mind of the artist.
Looking back on a long life of trying to get my feelings about
poetry into order — a doomed task perhaps, but a compulsive one — I am shamed by the number of times that I did not catch on. The
truth about my admiration for the later Yeats was that it took years
to form. I was off the ship and in England for a long time before
I followed up on the way Philip Larkin had provided latter-day mirror images for the big, sweeping stanzas of the last Yeats poems, and
of how Dylan Thomas had said, while calling Hardy his favorite
modern poet, that Yeats was the greatest by miles. When I read, in a
preface by Larkin, that Thomas had said this, I didn’t catch on about
Hardy, but I was further encouraged into going on with Yeats.
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•
I like to think that I finally did catch on about Hardy’s poetry, but
it was a shamefully recent revelation. There I was, shambling into
oblivion, and I still hadn’t learned to love the mass of Hardy’s verse:
that great bulk of finely made things so cherished by such connoisseurs as, well, Larkin. But catching on can have as much to do with
the when as the how. Larkin, in contrast to his friend Kingsley Amis,
thought that D.H. Lawrence was a valuable writer, even if overrated.
Larkin wrote about Lawrence as if Lawrence had opened up the emotional world for him and helped deliver him from adolescence. I got
to Lawrence too late in my life to feel that way: only a few years
too late, but late enough to close off the possibility. When I was at
Cambridge in the mid-sixties, not to be a worshipper of Lawrence’s
novels could make life tricky if there were any fans of F.R Leavis
about, but I had a get-out-of-jail free card: I genuinely admired
Lawrence’s poetry, and indeed his poem “The Ship of Death” is still
frequently in my mind today, especially as the skies ahead of me grow
dark. I loved the way his verse moved; but if we spool forward a few
decades I find that I still can’t love the way most of Hardy’s verse
moves. For too much of the time he is concerned with making pretty
patterns on the page, and it seems that he must fool with the syntax
and the vocabulary in order to stick within the template. And yet
I can quite see that his poem about the Titanic (cleverly, it talks about
the iceberg rather than about the ship) is a startling feat of the historic
imagination: one of the last of the Empire poems, and as ambiguous
about imperial prestige as anything by Kipling. But what I want, and
want perhaps too much, is a line that carries its load without contortion, a line simple in its complexity.
I heard such a line of Hardy’s when I was starting off in Sydney.
I was no more fit to seek Hardy out for myself than I was fit to seek
out the music of Elgar, which always sent me back to Beethoven after
only four bars. But Hardy, so to speak, sought me out. In our student days, we would be very choosy about the discs we played at
parties. To sit beside the radiogram and load the discs was a position of power. It was an era when the female students were spraining
their hips trying to dance to the title track of Dave Brubeck’s hit
album Time Out: a few minutes of gyrating in 5/4 time could have
dire effects on a foundation garment. But there were discs of spoken
poetry too; and the most favored disc featured Dylan Thomas: and
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one of the tracks was “Poem on His Birthday.” People demanded to
hear it again and again. I knew what they meant. “And my shining
men no more alone / As I sail out to die.” I found that heroic, even if
puzzling. (Wouldn’t they be more alone?) But the track that I myself
insisted on hearing again, sometime against strong opposition, was
his recital of Hardy’s “In Death Divided.” Thomas’s speaking voice
was so beautiful that he would have thrilled you if he had recited
your death warrant, but he seemed to have been saving an extra dose
of magic for the words of Hardy. What I liked best was the ending.
After a twist of syntax in the second last line (“No eye will see,”)
the poem ended with an unblemished directness to which Thomas’s
voice lent full power but which he had no need to distort. “Stretching
across the miles that sever you from me.” Really I should have caught
on about Hardy right then, instead of decades later.
Because there it was: the simple statement made complex by its
own interior music. Though it undoubtedly sounded all the better
because Thomas was saying it, it still sounded pretty good even when
I said it. It still does. There must be many more moments like it in
Hardy’s thick book of collected verse, which still daunts me with its
heap of patterns, as if it were a code book for threading up looms in
a cloth mill. But I shan’t make the mistake of hunting about at random in all that. I’ll go to the selections, of which I own several; and
to those anthologies in which he is featured, starting with Larkin’s
Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse. Introducing you to
a poet is one of the two best things an anthology can do. The other
best thing is to introduce you to a single poem, as The Penguin Book
of Contemporary Verse did for me when it gave me a line by Robert
Conquest that I have been thinking of ever since.
•
When Yeats edited the Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936 he
notoriously left Wilfred Owen’s work out, thereby giving the impression that he did not find the most gifted English poet of the Great
War quite poetic enough. (He left out the other war poets too, as if
he thought war was not a fit subject. It is often necessary to remind
oneself that the great man could be a tremendous fool.) At the time
he edited the anthology Yeats had already made his own discoveries
of just how poetic “unpoetic” poetry could be. Indeed, he had only
three more years to live; most of the body of work that we think of
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as constituting his later manner was already written; and Auden was
all set to sing unforgettably over his grave. One of the phrases that
rings most true in Auden’s triumphal threnody for the departed Irish
giant was “You were silly like us.” In pretending that he had not seen
Owen’s unarguable poetic virtues, Yeats had been as silly as a man of
letters can well get. Cruelly cut down when young, Owen had shown
from the start the quality that Yeats arrived at only near the finish:
the prosaically poetic, the simply complex. (“And each slow dusk a
drawing-down of blinds”: how could Yeats, even at his most batty,
not have seen the genius in that line?) A gift for the clear statement
that would be almost ordinary if it were not so alert with meaning is
one of the things that lock Owen and Keith Douglas in their fearful
historic symmetry. Owen, killed by one of the last bullets of wwi,
and Douglas, killed in Normandy in wwii, both had the secret. The
loss was especially piquant in the case of Douglas because dozens of
surrealists survived to help make a fashion of not knowing what they
were talking about. Especially when they were subsumed under the
blanket title of New Apocalyptics, surrealist poets were the plague
of England in the war years. There were surrealist Americans too,
but as the war wound down and the us took over as the dominant
power in the West, no mishmash of meaning ever stood a chance
against the brilliant clarities of Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, and
a dozen lesser figures who had seen service — some of them had even
seen action — without letting the shock scramble their sense of logic.
Not even Robert Lowell, who wanted to say everything at once, ever
abandoned logical structure. But in Britain, the ideal of intelligible
poetry had to be re-established. Robert Conquest’s anthology New
Lines was a key document in the struggle, which was like trying to
lift a locomotive back onto the tracks. The job would have been a lot
easier if Keith Douglas had come back from the fighting.
•
Complex simplicity means a phrase, a line, and sometimes a whole
poem that makes a virtue out of incorporating its intellectual structure into its musical progression, and vice versa: it is always a two-way
thing, a thermocouple of gold and platinum, but without the capacity
of those two precious metals to give a precisely calculable effect.
On the contrary, a successful moment of poetry won’t let you calculate anything. For as long as it lasts, it is a mental force that silences
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all the other mental forces.
For any modern poets, the ability to transmit this quality seems
to be an important factor in whether or not they will last. Perhaps
not the determining factor: Dylan Thomas would probably still be
with us even if all his poems had been as crowded with symbolism as
“Fern Hill.” But it certainly helped that he could also write
The ball I threw while playing in the park
Has not yet reached the ground.
— From Should Lanterns Shine
Eventually we might have to decide whether the poetry of, say,
John Ashbery is on its way to immortality or to the junkyard. But
most of the great moderns have given us a larger proportion of intelligible statement to go on than he has done over the long span of his
work. For what these titles are worth, Eliot and Frost are still fighting it out for the spot at the top of the rankings. Our first thought
about Frost is that too often he was too plain: he could do a clinching
line that courted banality. People employed the term “cracker motto”
and sometimes they were not wrong. But on second thoughts, and
for many layers of thought thereafter, Frost was a master of organizing a prose argument into a poem. That brief but bewitching
masterpiece “The Silken Tent” is written in the most limpid of plain
language throughout. It’s a kind of level-headed dizzy spell. There
was one academic — I forget which one — who thought that the mention of “guys” meant men instead of ropes, but on the whole the
poem’s language is of a simplicity that not even an idiot with tenure
could get wrong. And yet it is as complex as could be. Anyone who
doubts that should try memorizing the poem. It defies memorization
because of the complexity of its syntax.
Eliot wrote a smaller proportion of “unpoetic” poetry but two
examples might be usefully mentioned. Early on, in “The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock,” there is the passage that starts: “No! I am not
Prince Hamlet” and goes on into an astonishing sweep of deliberate
prolixity. The fluent bravura of the structure is obviously meant to
be one of the elements that produce the emotion — the “art emotion”
which Eliot said was separate from other emotions. When you search
for details, you don’t find details of imagery; you find details of syntax, and of how the phrases and sentences balance up. Thus, “Politic,
cautious, and meticulous” has a phonetic relationship, as well as a
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semantic one, to “At times, indeed, almost ridiculous.” So effective
that it can floor the first-time reader like an overcharged cocktail, this
is poetry with very few of the usual poetic attributes. On the other
hand, it is prose whose interior workings are calculated and refined
to such a high standard that they turn incandescent. If it’s simple, it’s
as simple as complexity can get.
Most of Eliot’s poetry isn’t like that. He struck a similar tone only
much later, in Four Quartets, and we must remember that in each
of the four constituent poems the texture is dictated by symbolism:
not so deliberately tangled as in The Waste Land, perhaps, but still
densely woven, and often oblique beyond analysis. An indicative
moment is when the author completes an obscure lyrical flight and
then starts his next verse paragraph with “That was a way of putting
it — not very satisfactory.” So he has admitted his own thirst for an
alternative; but when he takes a different course, into plainness, it
is only to floor us all over again, as he once did with the attendant
lord who was not Hamlet. In “Little Gidding” we get the long and
rigorously unpoetic passage that begins with how the poet and his
interlocutor met each other before they “trod the pavement in a dead
patrol.” According to a mountain of scholarship, the poet’s companion could be the shade of Yeats. Certainly the mysterious companion
has overtones of Brunetto Latini, Dante’s beloved teacher who turns
up in the Divine Comedy to walk beside him. Towards the end of this
sublime passage — there is no other adjective that will serve — even
the most overtly poetic line, the line that sounds as if it could have
been borrowed from Shakespeare, is a straight statement that you
can take away and use in conversation. “Then fools’ approval stings,
and honour stains.” Otherwise, at the end as at the beginning, the
whole marvelous feat of versification is written as if it had no claims
to the poetic beyond the surefootedness with which it is organized.
Somewhere in the background you can hear the pulse of Dante’s
terza rima, but in fact Eliot’s version doesn’t even rhyme. The phonetic impetus is all provided by the arrangement of the syllables
within each line, and the movement of each line against the next. It is
a tour de force. But is it poetic?
Of course it is. And we can say that with rather more certainty
than when we assure ourselves that a painting by Mark Rothko in
his later manner is still a painting even though almost every standard
painterly component has been suppressed at the deliberate wish of
the artist. About a Rothko painting there will always be a question:
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it’s one of the reasons why so many people have come to see it. But
about this supreme moment in Eliot’s verse there can be no question.
We can tell that it is poetry by the way that we react.
•
I knew an English poet of my own age who was quietly mortified at
being left out of Larkin’s Oxford book. Since the poet in question
was famous for his integrity and stoicism, this was a striking example of how anthologies count. The poet thought that being omitted
would hurt his career. In the long run it didn’t, but the long run
was certainly made harder. Resentment at Larkin’s policy of inclusion did not center so much on the lavish space he gave to Hardy
and Betjeman: everyone knew that he would serve his tastes. What
cheesed people off was that he found room for poems written by sociable versifiers no longer in fashion, while thereby restricting his
accommodation of current poets who were counting on making an
appearance, however cursory. As my friend said, it hurt to give your
life to the art of poetry and then find yourself crowded out by the
resurrected corpse of a genteel scribbler such as Vita Sackville-West.
But we have to see the matter from Larkin’s viewpoint. For all that
he might have admired my friend’s seriousness, he didn’t think that
the result was poetry: whereas he thought that Vita, even though a
loquacious mediocrity whose work in verse could be measured by the
square mile, had occasionally hit the mark. The inclusion of so much
Betjeman was an obvious sign that Larkin’s taste had triumphed: he
had always seen Betjeman as an important poet and now he was in
a position to assert it irrefutably. But the inclusion of even a little
of Sackville-West was an even greater triumph of taste, if much less
obvious. He was saying that something matters beyond the name and
the reputation. What matters is the authoritative voice of the successful poem; a voice in which the poet might speak only once, but it is
still a poem if it sounds like this — All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have held
Reality down fluttering to a bench;
Cut wood to their own purposes; compelled
The growth of pattern with the patient shuttle;
Drained acres to a trench.
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After which she goes on to speak wonderfully about the rich subject
she has opened up. Why couldn’t she have written more poetry like
that? The only possible answer is that she just didn’t find it imperative. The idea that people might actually choose not to do more of
their best thing is one that we are bound to find unsettling, but it is
part of freedom. Robert Conquest, incidentally, has spent most of
his literary career, when he has bothered with verse at all, cobbling
squibs in rhyming form. In a long life he has written only a handful of
serious poems. Sometimes to the dismay of his friends and admirers,
the man who defined the simply complex has seldom pursued it. But
his book The Great Terror helped to bring down the Soviet Union, so
we owe him for other things.
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l e t t e r s to t h e e d i to r
Dear Editor,
Thank you, Joshua Mehigan, for your wonderful, and wonderfully
honest, remembrance [“James Dickey,” July/August 2013]. You may
be gratified to know that by 1996 my father was not drunk. He quit
drinking after 1994 when he was hospitalized with alcoholic hepatitis. But he was dying when he called you, from a progressive fibrosis
of the lungs brought on not by smoking — he never smoked — but,
apparently, by years inhaling the alcohol fumes that surged up
from his gut. If you have occasion to read my memoir, Summer of
Deliverance, you will see that James Dickey had always wanted to be a
god, and believed he could be one, through poetry. And why not? In
his way, I suppose, he was welcoming you to Olympus.
christopher dickey
poetryfoundation.org
Dear Editor,
I read the June issue of Poetry [“Landays”] straight through, sat looking out my window for a couple of hours, then got into bed and read
it straight through again. The landays make me feel so close to these
anonymous women — a sense of closeness that’s hard to get when
encountering a culture so foreign. Yet close as I feel to these lives and
issues, the truth is that this is magisterial work by Eliza Griswold — the
work of collecting these tiny poems, translating and re-translating
them into an English that can affect us. The photos, too [by Seamus
Murphy], are a wonderful help. I’m deeply grateful to have this book!
elaine edelman
new york, new york
letters
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Dear Editor,
For the past while I have been leaving my copies of Poetry mostly
unread, and planned on letting my subscription lapse.
Then there was the May 2013 issue.
On the back was a quote by Amiri Baraka. Remembering him from
my African-American lit class, I was intrigued and wanted to read
where it came from [“A Post-Racial Anthology?”].
Although I am a white male Mormon who voted for Romney,
I say that no one should disparage their roots — be it in the flesh, or in
the arts, or anything else — without fear and trembling. Although my
own poetry bears little resemblance to Shakespeare’s and Cicero’s,
I feel that I owe a lot to them for what they did for their time. I also
love to honor the great lit of other peoples (like Osip Mandelstam,
Olav Hauge, and Harriet Wilson) and feel that I owe a great debt to
them as well.
Keep up the fight, Amiri! I won’t always agree with you, but I will
cheer for you!
david r. boyce
harrisville, utah
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and phone number via e-mail
to [email protected]. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. We
regret that we cannot reply to every letter.
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c o n t r i bu to r s
sherman alexie* is the author of, most recently, War Dances
(Grove Press, 2009) and Face (Hanging Loose Press, 2009). “Bestiary” is reprinted by permission of Ugly Duckling Presse.
maram al-massri’s * most recent book is A Red Cherry on a Whitetiled Floor (Bloodaxe Books, 2004; Copper Canyon Press, 2007).
“Knocks on the door” is reprinted by permission of Bloodaxe Books
and Copper Canyon Press.
john ashbery is the author of more than twenty books of poetry,
including Quick Question (Ecco, 2012). “This Room,” from Your
Name Here, is copyright © 2000 by John Ashbery and used by
arrangement with Georges Borchardt, Inc.
richard brautigan (1935–1984) first appeared in Poetry in October 1969.“A Boat,” from The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disasters
by Richard Brautigan, is copyright © 1965 by Richard Brautigan,
reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing
Company.
alexandra büchler* is director of Literature Across Frontiers
and editor of the New Voices from Europe and Beyond series of contemporary poetry anthologies from Arc Publications, uk.
katharine coles’s fifth poetry collection is Ice Blind (Red Hen
Press, 2013). In 2009–10, she served as the inaugural director of the
Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute.
w.s. di piero is the author of numerous volumes of poetry and
prose. His most recent book of poems is Nitro Nights (Copper Canyon, 2011). His new book, TOMBO, will be published in early 2014
by McSweeney’s. He lives in San Francisco.
carrie fountain’s * debut collection, Burn Lake, was a 2009
National Poetry Series winner. Her poem “Burn Lake” is copyright
© 2010 by Carrie Fountain and used by permission of Penguin, a
division of Penguin Group (usa) llc.
contributors
51 3
graham foust* is the author of several collections of poetry, including A Mouth in California (2009) and To Anacreon in Heaven
and Other Poems (2013), both published by Flood Editions. “And the
ghosts” is reprinted by permission of the author.
johannes göransson’s * most recent book is Haute Surveillance
(Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2013). He has translated several books, including Transfer Fat by Aase Berg (Ugly Ducking Presse, 2012).
eliza griswold lives in New York City.
ava leavell haymon is the author of, most recently, Eldest Daughter (Lousiana State University Press, 2013). “The Witch Has Told
You a Story” is reprinted by permission of Lousiana State University
Press.
michael hofmann’s translation of The Emperor’s Tomb (New Directions, 2013) is his eleventh from Joseph Roth. His translations of
Gottfried Benn, Impromptus, are out this fall from Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.
fanny howe lives and teaches in Boston. Her collection of poems,
Second Childhood, is due from Graywolf Press in 2014.
clive james has published two books this year: the essay collection
Cultural Cohesion and a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, both
published by W.W. Norton. The American edition of his poetry collection Nefertiti in the Flak Tower will be published later this year.
george kalogeris is the author of Dialogos: Paired Poems in Translation (Antilever, 2012) and of a book of poems, Camus: Carnets
(Pressed Wafer, 2006).
nate klug recently won the 2012 Theodore Roethke Prize from
Poetry Northwest. His book Rude Woods, passages from Virgil’s
Eclogues, is out this fall from The Song Cave.
dorothea lasky* has published three collections of poetry, most
recently Thunderbird (Wave Books, 2012). She is also the author of
several chapbooks, including Poetry Is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling
Presse, 2010). “Monsters” is reprinted by permission of the author.
khaled mattawa’s most recent book is Tocqueville (New Issues
Poetry & Prose, 2010). He has also translated many books of Arabic
poetry, including Adonis: Selected Poems (Yale University Press, 2010).
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campbell m c grath’s most recent collection is Seven Notebooks
(HarperCollins, 2008). He teaches in the creative writing department at Florida International University. “Dawn” is reprinted by
permission of the author.
maureen n. m c lane is the author of My Poets (2012), a hybrid of
memoir and criticism, and This Blue: poems (2014), both published
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, as well as several other collections.
stuart mills* (1940–2006) was born in North Wales. He was
a poet and publisher of Tarasque and Aggie Weston’s. “In the Low
Countries” is reprinted by permission of Rosemary Mills.
eileen myles* has published more than a dozen volumes of poetry
and fiction, including Inferno: a poet’s novel (OR Books, 2010) and
Snowflake/different streets (Wave Books, 2012). “Uppity” is reprinted
by permission of the author.
lorine niedecker (1903–1970) first appeared in Poetry in September 1933. “A Moster Owl” is reprinted by permission of University
of California Press.
meghan o’rourke is the author of two poetry collections, Once
and Halflife, both published by W.W. Norton, and of The Long
Goodbye (Riverhead Books, 2011), an account of the internal life of
a mourner.
ron padgett is the author of, most recently, How Long (Coffee
House Press, 2011) and Three Blind Poems (OHM editions, 2012),
a collaboration with Yu Jian. “Poem” is reprinted by permission of
Coffee House Press.
henry parland* (1908–1930) was born in Russia to GermanBaltic parents. He joined the Finland-Swedish Modernists as a teenager. Johannes Goransson’s translations of Parland’s poems were
published in Ideals Clearance (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007). “My
hat” is reprinted by permission of Ugly Duckling Presse.
chris raschka* is a picture book artist and writer who has created
over sixty books. He lives in New York City.
atsuro riley’s book is Romey’s Order (University of Chicago Press,
2010). He lives in San Francisco.
contributors
51 5
katerina rudcenkova* is a Czech poet and playwright. Her
work appears in Six Czech Poets (Arc Publications, 2008). “Yes, I live
inside the piano” is reprinted by permission of author and translator.
kay ryan was recently awarded a National Humanities Medal by
President Obama.
carl sandburg (1878–1967) first appeared in Poetry magazine in
March 1914 with nine poems, including “Chicago.” “Doors,” from
Wind Song, is copyright © 1957 by Carl Sandburg, and renewed 1985
by Margaret Sandburg, Janet Sandburg, and Helga Sandburg Crile,
reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing
Company.
zachary schomburg* is the author of The Man Suit (2007),
Scary, No Scary (2009), and Fjords Vol. 1 (2012), all published by
Black Ocean. “The One About the Robbers” is reprinted by permission of Black Ocean.
frederick seidel’s most recent book of poems is Nice Weather,
published last year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
lemony snicket is the author of A Series of Unfortunate Events, a
new series entitled All the Wrong Questions, and, most recently, The
Dark, a picture book illustrated by Jon Klassen.
liz waldner’s most recent books are Play (Lightful Press, 2009)
and Trust (Cleveland State University Press, 2009). “Trust” is
reprinted by permission of Liz Waldner and the Cleveland State
University Poetry Center.
franz wright’s newest book, F, is published this month by Knopf.
“Auto-Lullaby” is reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
* First appearance in Poetry.
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Southwest Review
2013MortonMarr
PoetryPrize
First Place – $1,000
Second Place – $500
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Visit our website and apply today:
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Deadline to apply: November 11, 2013
2014PoetryMagazineAd_PoetryMagazineAd 5/26/13 9:29 AM Page 1
The Yale Series of Younger Poets 2014 Competition
A
warded since 1919, the Yale Younger Poets prize is the oldest
annual literary award in the United States. Past winners include
Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, William Meredith, W.S. Merwin,
John Ashbery, John Hollander, James Tate, and Carolyn Forché. The current
judge for the series is Carl Phillips.
About the Competition
The competition is open to any American citizen under forty years of age
who has not published a book of poetry (contestants must be under the age
of forty at the time they submit the manuscript to the competition).
All poems must be original – translations are not accepted. Writers who
have had chapbooks of poetry printed in editions of no more than 300
copies are eligible. Only one manuscript may be submitted each year.
Manuscripts submitted in previous years may be resubmitted.
For detailed entry instructions, including the complete competition rules
and submission guidelines, please go to:
http://YalePress.yale.edu/yupbooks/YoungerPoets.asp
Yale university press
YaleBooks.com
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Reginald Shepherd Correspondence and More
Shepherd and Alan Contreras
corresponded until a few weeks
before Shepherd’s death, by which
time he “belonged to this world only
by courtesy,” as Lord Moran put it.
-- from the Introduction
Song After All offers a new window
into Shepherd’s thoughts on writing,
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illuminating and glorious, this
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“
I say my children are
like lightning bugs.
I see how they
glow in the dark.
Sometimes, it is
the only light I see.
—Teresa Mei Chuc
This fall Rattle presents an issue dedicated
entirely to Single Parent Poets. These 37
writers have not only taken on the most important job in the world—alone—but have
also found it fertile ground for poetry. Five
essays guide our journey, each shedding light
on their inspiring lives from different
angles—and Alan Fox interviews single
parent poet/novelist Francesca Lia Block.
$5.95 / issue
$20 / year
$250 / life
Rattle, 12411 Ventura Blvd, Studio City, CA 91604
Currently seeking Love Poems
for our Spring 2014 issue.
Deadline: October 15th
opEN the dooR
HOw TO ExcITE YOUNG PEOPlE ABOUT POETRY
Edited by
jesse nathan, dorothea lasky,
and dominic luxford
A collection of inspirational essays and practical advice,
featuring matthea Harvey, Ron Padgett, william Stafford,
Eileen myles, Theodore Roethke, and many others.
Two new books from the
The
poetry foundation and mc sweeney’s
STRANGEST THEATRES
of
POETS wRITING AcROSS BORDERS
Edited by
jared hawkley, susan rich,
and brian turner
A vital collection of essays by poets who have traveled far
from home, featuring work by Kazim Ali, Nick Flynn,
Yusef Komunyakaa, and many others.
“Poets in the World” series editor: ilya KaminsKy, director of the harriet monroe Poetry institute
P O E T RY F O U N DAT I O N . O R G / I N S T I T U T E
STORE.mcSwEENEYS.NET
yale institute of sacred music
welcomes to its faculty in fall 2013
christian
wiman
poet and essayist
Appointed jointly with Yale Divinity School
Yale Institute of Sacred Music • New Haven, CT
www.yale.edu/ism • 203.432.5180
Now in Paperback!
“If you need to be reminded of the incomparable poems that Poetry
magazine published first in its pages, read excellent poetry by an author
you might not have discovered yet, or simply remember why poetry is
worth loving, this is the book to turn to. You won’t be disappointed.”
—Emma Goldhammer, Paris Review
“A high-wire anthology of electric resonance.”—Booklist
PaPer $15.00
The University of Chicago Press • www.press.uchicago.edu