Reading in Evergreen Friday, February 10

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Adios, Wisława Szymborska

"Poland's 1996 Nobel Prize-winning poet Wisława Szymborska, whose simple words and playful verse plucked threads of irony and empathy out of life, has died. She was 88. [...] The Nobel award committee's citation called her the 'Mozart of poetry,' a woman who mixed the elegance of language with 'the fury of Beethoven' and tackled serious subjects with humor."

More here.

* * *

Hiroshige Utagawa, "Evening Shower
at Atake and the Great Bridge"

PEOPLE ON THE BRIDGE
by Wisława Szymborska
(tr. Joanna Maria Trzeciak)

Strange planet and strange people on it.
They yield to time, but they don't want to recognize time.
They have their ways of expressing resistance.
They make pictures such as this:

Nothing in particular at first glance.
One can see water,
one river bank,
a narrow boat strenuously moving upstream.
One can see a bridge over the water
and people on the bridge.
People are clearly picking up the pace,
as rain starts whipping down from a dark cloud.

The point is, nothing happens further.
The cloud changes neither shape nor color.
The rain neither stops nor picks up.
The boat moves without moving.
The people on the bridge run
precisely where they ran before.

It is hard to get by without a commentary:
This is not an innocent picture.
Time was stopped here,
its laws no longer consulted.
It was denied impact on the developing events,
disregarded and dishonored.

Thanks to a rebel,
one Hiroshige Utagawa
(a being who, by the way,
passed away, as is proper, long ago)
time stumbled and fell.

Perhaps it is only a prank without much meaning,
a whim on the scale of just a few galaxies,
but in any case
let's add what happens next:

Here it is considered in good taste
to hold this painting in high esteem,
to praise it and be greatly moved by it for generations.
For some, even this is not enough.
They hear the patter of rain,
feel the chill of raindrops on necks and shoulders,
they look at the bridge and people
as if they saw themselves there, in that never ending race
along the endless road, to be traveled for eternity
and they have the audacity to believe
that it is real.

New Salamander Poems

Annie Wyndham has posted a fresh batch of poems over at Salamander Cove, selected from her reading both on and off line. Fine work by Bob Arnold, Bill Knott, Joel E. Jacobson, John Levy and more. Enjoy!

What If Poets Thought This Way?

Friday Notebook 01.27.12

Pastiche: After Bill Knott’s
Selected Poems, 1960-2012*


I like how Bill Knott blows his mouth harp
blithely, as Stevens played his oboe. I call
them masters as I hum-blow my kazoo,
spin these verses out of mere asides
signed sotto mano by deaf-mute twins
parted at birth, but years later delivered
into each other’s care. Small wonder
my poems veer from rancor to abject
tenderness, marking over the years
a hidden rhythm like the heart of some
gravedigger scooping vacancies out
in the gathering dusk. Yet I (no Knott,
no Stevens) play whatever my little gift
allows, swaying in these masters’ shadows.

_____________________
* I'd love to link to Knott's selected, but it's gone from Lulu, as his blogs—art, poetry, prose—seem to have vanished from cyberspace. His sudden absence is a bit alarming, though he's "gone dark" before only to surface downriver, his bespectacled, Orphic head held above the current as he sings. I want him to be well and trust that he is.

A Fine Start to the New Year

On New Year's Eve I picked up mail at our little local P.O. and what should I find but some starch for my flagging ego: a hot-off-the-press copy of a new anthology, Collecting Life: Poets on Objects Known and Imagined, edited by Madelyn Garner and Andrea L. Watson. It's the first publication of a new press called simply 3: A Taos Press. The book was even then listed on Amazon, though—as often happens with brand new titles—was tagged as "out of stock." It's in stock there now, and I hope you'll give it a look.

The collection is described as "an intriguing glimpse into the anthropology of collecting," but this doesn't capture the scope of "collecting" as it appears in these poems; that is something better suggested by the range of poets included: from Antler to Denise Duhamel, Carlos Reyes to Pattiann Rogers, David Trinidad to Kimiko Hahn, Rachel Loden to Jane Hirshfield.

I could go on, but doing so might miss the point, which is that I feel honored to be in such good company.

Gholson Chats Up Wentworth

Steer on over to Christien Gholson's excellent interview with the inimitable Don Wentworth, whose Past All Traps was listed among my 2011 favorites. You'll be glad you did!

An Addendum

L'autoritratto di Montale. 1952.

My last Friday Notebook post should have included the following—a translation of Montale's famous sunflower poem, occasioned by a request from Conrad DiDiodato for versions of it to be published on his blog. Conrad himself and Annie Wyndham (see here and here) have weighed in as well. I highly recommend that you visit Conrad's post and contribute your own version, just for fun. I had a wonderful time doing mine, especially since I don't know Italian!

Bring me the sunflower, and I’ll make it
take root in my garden seared by salt wind,
and all day long the sky’s blue will reflect
upon the excitation of its yellow face.

All dark things lean toward clarity,
bodies exhaust themselves into a flow
of colors: into these airs. To fade away,
then, is the most adventurous venture.

Bring me the plant that leads us up
to where blonde transparencies arise
and the essence of life mists away;
bring me the sunflower delirious with light.

And, since I just got my copy of William Arrowsmith's versions, The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale, 1925-1977, let me include Arrowsmith's take on the poem. It didn't occur to me until I saw it in this book that the poem is one of several untitled poems in the sequence "Cuttlefish Bones" (Ossi di seppia), from Montale's collection (his first) of the same name. Like Williams's red wheelbarrow poem (part of the Spring and All sequence), Montale's benefits from being read in context:

Bring me the sunflower, I'll plant it here
in my patch of ground scorched by salt spume,
where all day long it will lift the craving
of its golden face to the mirroring blue.

Dark things are drawn to brighter,
bodis languish in a flowing
of colors, colors in musics. To vanish,
then, is the venture of ventures.

Bring me the flower that leads us out
where blond transparencies rise
and life evaporates as essence.
Bring me the sunflower crazed with light.

See Conrad's post for the Italian original....

Friday Notebook 01.20.12

Driving a dark, wind-buffeted valley road last night, an idea came to me. One of those proliferation moments, like time-lapse of a sunflower unfolding. By the time I got to a place where I could scribble the following notes, though, the moment was gone. The traces of it are here, in these words, which now have the look of sea wrack on a beach. Nevertheless:

The idea that no creature possesses consciousness. There is only an ability to process and display consciousness. We receive consciousness the way radios receive signals: how well we receive it depends on how finely tuned we are organically; the same with how well we display it. There is always static, power waxing and waning, our circuits overheat, wear out, etc. But the “signals” metaphor is misleading: consciousness isn’t organized into bands, into channels of meaning. We create the channels from the ubiquitous and undifferentiated background radiation of consciousness, according to our own organic form. Let’s say that species are essentially forms that receive and display consciousness in characteristically different ways. Not just species, either. Rocks and trees and waters and fires receive and display consciousness as well, within the limits of their forms.

The practical meaning of this is that there is no “real” distinction to be made between body and mind, natural and supernatural, or any of the other dualisms the human species creates from the consciousness it is organically able to receive. Maybe every form of matter is simply an expression of this undifferentiated consciousness. After all, individual forms come and go; we’re born and we die; species arise and go extinct. All matter, “inanimate” or “animate” (another dualism), comes and goes. But consciousness can neither be created nor destroyed. The practical meaning of all this is that we’d better not delude ourselves about knowing ultimate things, because all forms of matter are by nature limited. Surely it’s absurd for us to be killing one another over the partial and defective expressions of consciousness our species is able to produce.

*

No real poems this week; just a few lines in response to this post by Vassilis Zambaras. They are nestled in the comment stream there, but I'm re-pasting them here. Let's call it "Childish":

Sparingly’s
how imagination’s
always used me,

but I don’t bawl
about it, old enough
to take childish

delight in every
glimmering
pittance.

*

Just so you don't feel cheated, here's the title poem from Valzhyna Mort's extraordinary Factory of Tears, which I read this week:

FACTORY OF TEARS

And once again according to the annual report
the highest productivity results were achieved
by the Factory of Tears.

While the Department of Transportation was breaking heels
while the Department of Heart Affairs
was beating hysterically
the Factory of Tears was working night shifts
setting new records
even on holidays.

While the Food refinery Station
was trying to digest another catastrophe
the Factory of Tears adopted a new economically advantageous
technology of recycling the wastes of the past—
memories mostly.

The pictures of the employees of the year
were placed on the Wall of Tears.

I'm a recipient of workers' comp from the heroic Factory of Tears.
I have calluses on my eyes.
I have compound fractures on my cheeks.
I receive my wages with the product I manufacture.
And I'm happy with what I have.

Rather than Go Dark...

"Let Us Turn Our Thoughts Today to Martin Luther King..."

The Joy of Books

Or, as a poem of mine in The Undersides of Leaves puts it:

THE BOOKS

On the dark shelves
the books are breathing.

Moonlight slips between
their covers, running
bright hands over
the yellowed pages.

When we read them, settled
deep in private chairs,
words splash
down through our bodies
toward the earth’s
black center.

And when sleep
buries us, the deepest
stones whisper (with
the moon’s voice)
to our bones.

From that Wonderful Resource, the Poetry Translation Centre

Flute Player

by Farzaneh Khojandi

Where is the real bazaar?
I want to buy an eyeful of kindness.
I want to dress my soul in hyperbole.
There's a merchant who brings me
a whole spectrum of leaping colour
from the city of desires.
But here at the bazaar at Khojand,
faces are sour, talk is hot
and I long for the cool sweets of Tabriz.
Where is the real bazaar?
The flute-player tells me:
come with your ears used to insults,
and listen to the light recite a prayer to the dark.
Open your eyes used to pale shame
and see the beauty of Truth.
Where is the real bazaar?
The flute-player is there
calling my heart towards his hat
full of old change, but not a single pearl,
and since I am the jewel in the teardrop
I must go.

_________________

The literal translation of this poem was made by Narguess Farzad and Jo Shapcott

The final translated version of the poem is by Jo Shapcott