founded in 1912 by harriet monroe
September 2013
FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE 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 426 Sun In Days eliza griswold 434 Water Table Forecast Sample Lisbon Sirens
Poetry Not Written For Children That Children Might Nevertheless Enjoy 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 “A monster owl” campbell mcgrath 460 Dawn graham foust And the Ghosts john ashbery 463 This Room eileen myles 464 Uppity
comment kay ryan 467 Specks 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 christian wiman Senior Editor don share Associate Editor fred sasaki Managing Editor 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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Poetry • September 2013 • Volume 202 • Number 5
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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 POETRY 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 POETRY 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 klug 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 POETRY 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 klug 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.
418O POETRY 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 POETRY 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 bric- a-brac is purely theoretical, until It’s arranged. Or not. Then, a miracle?
katharine coles 421 maureen n. mclane
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 POETRY 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. mclane 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 POETRY 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. mclane 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 POETRY 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
meghan o’rourke 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
428O POETRY 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
meghan o’rourke 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 POETRY 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
meghan o’rourke 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 POETRY 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
meghan o’rourke 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 POETRY 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 griswold 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 POETRY 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 griswold 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.
438O POETRY poetry not written for children that children might nevertheless 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 writ- ten 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 sim- pleton, 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 base- ment of the Poetry Foundation building. It is a handy place to hide from the authorities, a horrible place to forage for snacks, and a won- derful place in which to get some reading done. The basement is crammed with the efforts of poets living and dead, famed and forgot- ten, 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 gath- ered 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 snicket 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 mat- ters is that there are a bunch of people standing around in a room, and you might want to look at them.
442O POETRY
“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 dif- ferent 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 POETRY
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 POETRY “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 snicket 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 some- times does of the sun, and vice versa. One of the things I like about this poem is how polite it is.
448O POETRY 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 snicket 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 POETRY
“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 POETRY 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 snicket 453 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 POETRY 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 shoul- der 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 snicket 455
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 snicket 457 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
458O POETRY “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 snicket 459 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 POETRY
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 snicket 463 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 POETRY comment “Reference Back” from The Complete Poems by Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Bur- nett. 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 disin- terested 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 car- ried 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 him- self 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 ex- pedience: 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 advanc- ing across the desert.
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kay ryan 467 It’s not so much what poems are, in themselves, but the infinitely larger optimism they offer by their intermittent twinkles: that be- neath 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.
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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.
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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.
468O POETRY 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.
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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 los- ing 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 atmo- sphere, 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 under- taken again — from scratch.
kay ryan 469 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 POETRY 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 rela- tionship 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 per- sonal 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 con- tinue 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.
kay ryan 471 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 POETRY His old mother hovers about, listening from the hall beyond the bed- room 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 al- most 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 suffocat- ing chambers, dumping the emotional contents from stanza to stanza, room to room, mother to son, ear to ear, creating a sense of perme- ability and interpenetration while at the same time walling the poem up with contrary rhetoric. The effect is classic Larkin: irresistible flu- idity 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 un- diminished” — 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 suf- ficient 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.
kay 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 POETRY 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 hun- gry 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 consola- tion but it always does.
kay ryan 475 #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 POETRY 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. # 1099 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 mas- sive 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 ad- vancement 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 dog- eared 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, ap- proaching 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, mean- ing that rooting around in a haystack long and fruitlessly enough could conceivably breed a needle.
kay ryan 477 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.
478O POETRY 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
kay ryan 479 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, “hi- ho” 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.
480O POETRY 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.
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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 charm- ing 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 481 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 disfigur- ingly 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 air- waves, 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 type- writer 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 remem- ber. 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,
482O POETRY literarizing. We applaud frantically. Such are the heroes of a secret business, a guilty business, even.
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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!!!
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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 trans- late both into and out of a language: isn’t there something unsanitary about that, like drinking the bathwater?) That brings a certain dis- passion 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 eco- nomic 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.
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michael hofmann 483 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 ev- eryone in it, because they’re all a part of me: the vainglorious oldster (like me, a wearer of hats), the acerbic Grandmother, the anxious- to-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 dif- ferent. 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.
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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 thou- sand. 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 ( ... 3141592 ... ), I promise myself, then I will stop.
484O POETRY •
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, wool- gathering, 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!
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If you want someone to look after your sentences for you, who or what better than a poet? If you want someone to regulate — enterpris- ingly 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 transla- tions, 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 485 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 pro- tuberance! — 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 Dublin- born 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 engage- ment 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 pal- pably, 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 pos- sible. 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
486O POETRY 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 associ- ation-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 con- taminated. 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 exis- tence — 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 487 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 transla- tor, 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, cli- ches, 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 lan- guage, 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 deci- mal 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 transla- tor is a passenger, riding in relative safety (and deserved penury) in a
488O POETRY 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 writ- ten 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 “in- elegant 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 inti- mates 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 strad- dles 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 489 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 some- times, 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 transla- tion. (“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 bear- able, 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 impos- sible, 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 coo- lies”!) — 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 (irri- tatingly, 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,
490O POETRY 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 pos- sible 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 hap- pen 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 general- ized 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-cen- tury 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 art- fulness 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
492O POETRY 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, bed- rooms, 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 un- reachable this August morning with its hills its tawny stub- ble fields its full-crowned trees its sin- gle scarlet branches arch- ing overhead as desperate music pours from the speakers is reason enough to live almost. — From August
frederick seidel 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 rhym- ing (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.
494O POETRY 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 north- facing windows with the rough- diamond city spread-eagled be- low: how New York is that? And your stolen Sharon road sign and Empire State Build- ing model (a present from Philip?) your grandfather’s insulators on the sill and photos of eerie faces and un- settled scenery. Here’s your collection of caps and your terrace with its tufted prai- rie 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
frederick seidel 495 closet with your cache of se- crets, 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 with- out and often lose, your Fer- ragamo 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!
496O POETRY fanny howe
Second Childhood
1
I have a fairy rosary called Silver who answers questions when I dan- gle 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, geri- atric 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 hu- miliation 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
fanny howe 497 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 grown- ups, 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 in- side 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.
498O POETRY 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 fail- ure’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
fanny howe 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.
500O POETRY 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 authori- tative 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 ex- plode. 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 un- pack 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” per- fectly, 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 rea- son. I could scarcely have been more receptive to a dash of obscurity. Tending to underrate intelligibility, I looked upon it as the poet’s
clive james 501 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 complete- ly 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 beauti- ful 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 com- plex he gets. So Conquest’s formula is not invalidated: far from it. That famous motto about the evanescence of man’s love is an ex- treme case, but really a lot of Yeats’s later work is like that. Some
502O POETRY 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 mir- ror 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.
clive james 503 •
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 connois- seurs 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 emo- tional 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 contor- tion, 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 stu- dent days, we would be very choosy about the discs we played at parties. To sit beside the radiogram and load the discs was a posi- tion 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
504O POETRY 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 ran- dom 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 im- pression 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
clive james 505 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 struc- ture 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 cal- culate anything. For as long as it lasts, it is a mental force that silences
506O POETRY 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 intel- ligible 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 fight- ing 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 orga- nizing 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 men- tion 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 syn- tax, and of how the phrases and sentences balance up. Thus, “Politic, cautious, and meticulous” has a phonetic relationship, as well as a
clive james 507 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 compan- ion 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 pho- netic 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:
508O POETRY 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 exam- ple 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 inclu- sion 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 so- ciable 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 success- ful 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.
clive james 509 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 impera- tive. 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.
510O POETRY letters to the editor
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 hepati- tis. 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 look- ing 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 511 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.
512O POETRY contributors
sherman alexie* is the author of, most recently, War Dances (Grove Press, 2009) and Face (Hanging Loose Press, 2009). “Besti- ary” is reprinted by permission of Ugly Duckling Presse. maram al-massri’s * most recent book is A Red Cherry on a White- tiled 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 Octo- ber 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 con- temporary 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 Can- yon, 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 513 graham foust* is the author of several collections of poetry, in- cluding 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, includ- ing 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 Daugh- ter (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 Di- rections, 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 col- lection Nefertiti in the Flak Tower will be published later this year. george kalogeris is the author of Dialogos: Paired Poems in Trans- lation (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).
514O POETRY campbell mcgrath’s most recent collection is Seven Notebooks (HarperCollins, 2008). He teaches in the creative writing depart- ment at Florida International University. “Dawn” is reprinted by permission of the author. maureen n. mclane 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 inPoetry in Septem- ber 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 German- Baltic parents. He joined the Finland-Swedish Modernists as a teen- ager. 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 515 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 permis- sion 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 divi- sion of Random House, Inc.
* First appearance in Poetry.
516O POETRY Southwest Review 2013 Morton Marr Poetry Prize
First Place – $1,000 Second Place – $500 publication in Southwest Review accompanies both prizes
• Open to writers who have not yet published a book of poetry. • Submission of no more than six, previously unpublished, poems in a “traditional” form (e.g., sonnet, sestina, villanelle, rhymed stanzas, blank verse, et al.). • Poems should be printed blank with name and address information only on a cover sheet or letter. • $5.00 per poem entry/handling fee. • Postmarked deadline for entry is September 30, 2013. • Submissions will not be returned. All entrants will receive a copy of the issue in which the winning poems appear. • Mail entry to: The Morton Marr Poetry Prize, Southwest Review, P.O. Box 750374, Dallas, TX 75275-0374 g Visit us at www.smu.edu/southwestreview Read Poetry annual subscription: $35.00 poetry, po box 421141 palm coast, fl 32142-1141 1.800.327.6976
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• workshops • readings • craft talks • one-on-one conferences • panel discussion • annual gala • coffee house … and more! Special Guest NATASHA TRETHEWEY U.S. Poet Laureate, 2012–2014 Visit our website and apply today: www.palmbeachpoetryfestival.org Deadline to apply: November 11, 2013 2014PoetryMagazineAd_PoetryMagazineAd 5/26/13 9:29 AM Page 1
The Yale Series of Younger Poets 2014 Competition
warded since 1919, the Yale Younger Poets prize is the oldest annual literary award in the United States. Past winners include A 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
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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
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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 im- portant 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.
Currently seeking Love Poems $5.95 / issue $20 / year $250 / life for our Spring 2014 issue. Rattle, 12411 Ventura Blvd, Studio City, CA 91604 Deadline: October 15th opEN the dooR HOw TO ExcITE YOUNG PEOPlE ABOUT POETRY
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The STRANGEST of THEATRES 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
POETRYFOUNDATION.ORG/INSTITUTE STORE.mcS w EENEYS. NET yale institute of sacred music welcomes to its faculty in fall 2013
christian wiman poet and essayist
Appointed jointly with Yale Divinity School
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