Stanley Fish

[from Stanley Fish's How Milton Works, 2001]

In speech act theory (as originated by J. L. Austin) . . . a "declarative" [is] an utterance that brings into being the state it names, and does so by virtue of the unique authority of the speaker (when an umpire declares "You're out," you're out, but when a fan or fellow player says it, he succeeds only in expressing his opinion).

How Milton Works

Suzanne Langer

[via Jay Wright via Ange Mlinko in her recent book review in Poetry, October 2007]

Quoting Suzanne Langer in Elaine's Book (collected in Transfigurations), Wright lays claim to her insight: “and the triumph of empiricism is jeopardized by the surprising truth that our sense data are primarily symbols.”

Matthew Zapruder

[from Matthew Zapruder's The Pajamaist, 2006]

Andale Mono

Today I walked past my door in the rain
and put an old key
in a lock from which gold light shone.
Gold light through the keyhole like didactic
material below a painting glows to explain
the nineteenth century and other things we must know.
In the poem we want to try to set off a light each time
the door of the closet is closed. And to be
for the reader a mechanism attached to a string
the poem pulls. And piecing together
as desperately as we can. By fragments we mean
pieces of things we thought we have heard,
and when we say them mean though we cannot
see you we love you. By light we mean light.
Fear is a mechanism thinking too much
and not enough about the closet
holding something. The light in the closet
is on, the garments are thinking,
the door to the closet opens
into a long empty corridor we fear
for verily it like a torch
in the british sense through a dusty room
pervades us. When we are walking
with our torch meaning flashlight before us
reaching for the long poem inside us
one door explains how to read for both meaning
and pleasure. Another shuts.
The poem Andale Mono begins.
When I was a child I used to give speeches
into the mouth of the dishwasher open and gleaming.
When in a private language I said
ritual laughter mother and father
without knowing commit transmits
a kind of anger it understood,
though they were not.
Today I walked right past the face of a woman
I was sure was in Andale Mono.
Today I walked right past the poem
I knew and looked
into a lake which is now my wife.
My wife has entered the room. She is
a finger lake. In one hand she is holding
a sweater, pink, in the other a cream colored
spatula. Which one do you like best?
The poem is now my wife. For the first time
today in Andale Mono I drew my shoulders
back and looked straight forward and slightly
up. All day for the first time things were
true size. Droplets hung from my lashes
strobing at times the warehouse
next to the elevated, at others the brand-new
cathedral from which small people were streaming,
lugging large black musical instrument cases.
Large black chambers hold the delicate
wooden chambers for making chamber music.
In Andale Mono things are both breakable
and strong. In Andale Mono just out of reach
of my dangling hand the lock was a tiny door.

The Pajamaist

Carl Sandburg

[from Carl Sandburg: Poetry for Young People, Frances Schoonmaker Bolin, editor; thanks to David Wayne Hampton for pointing me at this poem]

Boxes and Bags
by Carl Sandburg

The bigger the box the more it holds.
Empty boxes hold the same as empty heads.
Enough small empty boxes thrown into a big empty box fill it full.
A half-empty box says, “Put more in.”
A big enough box could hold the world.
Elephants need big boxes to hold a dozen elephant handkerchiefs.
Fleas fold little handkerchiefs and fix them nice and neat in flea
    handkerchief boxes.
Bags lean against each other and boxes stand independent.
Boxes are square with corners unless round with circles.
Box can be piled on box till the whole works comes tumbling.
Pile box on box and the bottom box says, “If you will kindly take notice
    you will see it all rests on me.”
Pile box on box and the top one says, “Who falls farthest if or when we
    fall? I ask you.”
Box people go looking for boxes and bag people go looking for bags.

Poetry for Young People: Carl Sandburg (Poetry For Young People)

Susan Ludvigson

[from "Letters Back: God Responds to Emily Dickinson," the middle section of Susan Ludvigson's Trinity, 1994]

Consider how the moment enters itself
when you're not looking, scarcely
paying attention, imagination
trusting what comes
on the surrounding air, sweet
or cool, whatever wafts
through. Your whole body
participates, yet, as in dream,
hardly moves, nearly
paralyzed with pleasure.
How you are taken into and out of
yourself at once, language
a braid, unbraiding, so that
what the fairy tales call tresses
loosen in your hands, brushing
your eyes back to time,
that slow surprise.

. . .

To a new friend you write,
"To multiply the harbors
does not reduce the sea."
Why do you not find
the only harbor there is?
No, you're perverse, inclined
to let your words
scatter like bread
over the waters,
and then to think
they'll transform themselves
to inlets and coves
the heart of anyone
might row to.
No, I am not jealous.
I want, simply, for you
to be original and mine,
not turn to me late
as to any port.

Trinity: Poems

reading in New York

[from an editor of RealPoetik]

Next week, on October 4, Sharon Dolin - Tao Lin - Niels Hav - Elisa Gabbert - Sampson Starkweather - Carol Peters read for RealPoetik!!!

inspiration

[my friend Sally Rosenthal sent me this email]

If you haven't seen this farewell lecture by Randy Pausch, 46-year-old professor at Carnegie Mellon, i think you'll agree it's well worth the time to watch it. Randy is dying of pancreatic cancer - hard to fathom when you see how healthy he is. The talk is upbeat, with lots of humor, remarkable.

John Milton

[from John Milton's "Of Education"]

I deem it to be an old errour of universities not yet well recover'd from the Scholastick grosness of barbarous ages, that in stead of beginning with Arts most easie, and those be such as are most obvious to the sence, they present their young unmatriculated novices at first comming with the most intellective abstractions of Logick & metaphysicks: So that they having but newly left those Grammatick flats & shallows where they stuck unreasonably to learn a few words with lamentable construction, and now on the sudden transported under another climat to be tost and turmoild with their unballasted wits in fadomles and unquiet deeps of controversie, do for the most part grow into hatred and contempt of learning, mockt and deluded all this while with ragged notions and babblements, while they expected worthy and delightfull knowledge . . .

B. T. Shaw

If you're into ducks (I am)
then you know about their mating
about which here is a great poem.

17th century musick

[from King's College London]

Jeremiah Clarke (1673?-1707) was himself a noted composer, best remembered today for his popular Trumpet Voluntary. He received his musical education at the Chapel Royal under John Blow and later became its organist, as well as Vicar Choral of St. Paul's. Found dead in his lodgings with a bullet in his brain, he was believed to have committed suicide as a result of a failed love affair. His death caused the poet Edward Ward, author of The London spy, to observe:

Let us not therefore wonder at his fall,
Since 'twas not so unnatural
For him who liv'd by Canon to expire by Ball.

Linda Annas Ferguson & Rick Mulkey

Please come to the Poetry Society of South Carolina meeting tonight, 7 PM, at the Second Presbyterian Church in Charleston to hear Linda Annas Ferguson and Rick Mulkey read from their new books.

Peter Sacks

[from Peter Sacks's "Milton: 'Lycidas'" in The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats, 1985]

What is the real significance and function of Saint Peter's opening words? I do not think that the purpose of his "How well could I have spard thee . . . Enough of such" has been adequately noted. He is making an equation, and it is important in the light of what follows to recognize this as the essential equation of the revenger. One Lycidas is worth enough of such, and it is against that number -- that tally -- that the entire speech unrolls like a single act of vengeance. Here is the controlled release of rage that we have seen to be so crucial to the work of mourning. Once again, it involves the locating of a target for a wrath that must be turned outward; the shifting of the burden of pain; the reversal from the passive suffering of hurt to the active causing of it; and above all, the assumption of the power to hurt, a power that we have studied in its relation to the totemic force associated with a metaphoric sexual immortality.

The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats

Theo Jansen

Theo Jansen

Grace Simpson

[from Grace Simpson's Dancing the Bones, 2001]

Trying on His Body

I dragged the cane-bottomed
wheelchair down from the attic
and sat, right arm dead,
hand curled shut.
I crammed my foot
into his built-up shoe
and braced against the footrest,
even screwed my mouth
like his. Not enough.
I had to go
to the high oak bed,
crawl into his hulled-out shape
and become a paralyzed father
begging for the urinal,
while the little girl patted her doll,
pretending not to hear — until
he turned his face away
and wept, and she did
that indecent thing:
grabbed the chipped
white pitcher and shoved it tight
between his naked legs,
not looking, while the shuddering
rush of pee splattered
the sheets and the loose
enamel handle wobbled
in her grip.

It all came back:
the sharp ammonia smell,
my red shame,
his hand on my head,
drawn mouth slurring
Bless you, Daughter.

Father, I still hear
those garbled words.
Now, after fifty years of need,
I accept your absolution.

Dancing the bones: Poems

Basil Bunting

[from Basil Bunting's Complete Poems, 2000]

excerpt from Villon, III

How can I sing with love in my bosom?
Unclean, immature and unseasonable salmon.

Complete Poems

William Meredith

[from William Meredith's Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems, 1997]

A View of the Brooklyn Bridge

The growing need to be moving around it to see it,
To prevent its freezing, as with sculpture and metaphor,
Finds now skeins, now strokes of the sun in a dark
Crucifixion etching, until you end by caring
What the man's name was who made it,
The way old people care about names and are
Forever seeing resemblances to people now dead.

Of stone and two metals drawn out so
That at every time of day
They speak out of strong resemblances, as:
Wings whirring so that you see only where
Their strokes finish, or: spokes of dissynchronous wheels.

Its pictures and poems could accurately be signed
With the engineer's name, whatever he meant.
These might be called: Tines inflecting a river, justly,
Or (thinking how its cables owe each something
To the horizontal and something to the vertical):
A graph of the odds against
Any one man's producing a masterpiece.

Yet far from his, the engineer's, at sunrise
And again at sunset when,
Like the likenesses the old see,
Loveliness besets it as haphazard as genes:
Fortunate accidents take the form of cities
At either end; the cities give their poor edges
To the river, the buildings there
The fair color that things have to be.
Oh the paper reeds by a brook
Or the lakes that lie on bayous like a leopard
Are not at more seeming random, or more certain
In their sheen how to stand, than these towns are.

And of the rivering vessels so and so
Where the shadow of the bridge rakes them once,
The best you can think is that, come there,
A pilot will know what he's done
When his ship is fingered

Like that Greek boy whose name I now forget
Whose youth was one long study to cut stone;
One day his mallet slipped, some goddess willing
Who only meant to take his afternoon,
So that the marble opened on a girl
Seated at music and wonderfully fleshed
And sinewed under linen, riffling a harp;
At which he knew not that delight alone
The impatient muse intended, but, coupled with it, grief —
The harp-strings in particular were so light —
And put his chisel down for marvelling on that stone.

Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems

Thom Gunn

[from Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats, 1992]

Odysseus on Hermes
   his afterthought

I was seduced by innocence
— beard scarcely visible on his chin —
by the god within.
The incompletion of youth
like the new limb of the cactus growing
— soft-green — not fully formed
the spines still soft and living,
potent in potential,
in process and so
still open to the god.
             When complete and settled
             then closed to the god.
So sensing it in him
I was seduced by the god,
becoming in my thick maturity
suddenly unsettled
                           un-solid
still being formed —
in the vulnerability, edges flowing,
myself open to the god.

I took his drug
and all came out right in the story.
Still thinking back
I seek to renew that power
so easily got
seek to find again that knack
of opening my settled features,
creased on themselves,
to the astonishing kiss and gift
of the wily god to the wily man.

The Man with Night Sweats: Poems

Ellen Doré Watson

[from Ellen Doré Watson's We Live in Bodies, 1997]

On the Seventh Anniversary of the Conception of My First Child

I look to the world. I ponder the possibility of number two.
     Out the window fresh nubs of dead wood suggest
putting on some lullabies and sitting on the front stoop
     to blow bubbles. The chickens with the wounds of winter
on their backs have tired of walking tiptoe in the mud.
     They long to do the cross-stitch in the grass; they’re
dreaming of getting into real estate. It’s a Spring thing.
     There’s an attic full of baby clothes that want to get out.
They sigh and whisper with the rafters, sell all your roadmaps —
     hell, forget how to drive. I try to see myself as the eager
young poppy in the corner of the garden, always the first
     to wave her red hanky at each passing cloud. I rise like
dough on that childlike thought. I can shut out the checkbook
     crying me a river, and the bellyaching rooms, too full
to cough. What needles is this craving for another someone,
     for the pain and beauty of something tugging day and night,
something needy that has no words. Most days it’s words I want.
     My eyes do their searching thing, but no skywriting in the high
thin air, no runes in the compost. The weather-beaten chicken shed
     is looking awfully sullen, playing it close to the vest. Soon darts
of green will gather at its ankles. We believe this on the flimsiest
     of evidence. Just as we know the scanty remains of the woodpile
and cluttered gutters will take a back seat to the question of those
     small boulders in the garden: are they saying goodbye, sucked
down under glacial mud, or rising up in the moonlight with a whiff
     of sour milk on their breath?

We Live in Bodies: Poems

mountain scenery

In her book Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite [New York, Norton, 1959], Marjorie Hope Nicholson documents the change in taste that occurred in the eighteenth century with regard to mountain scenery. While seventeenth-century poets and theologians conceived of mountains as "warts, wens, and blisters" that mar the earth, travelers in the eighteenth century sought them out as sources of the sublime.

e.g.

A Country so deform´d, the Traveller
Would swear those parts Nature´s pudenda were:
Like Warts and Wens hills on the one side swell,
To all but natives inaccessible;
Th´other a blue scrofulous scum defiles
Flowing from th´earths impostumated boyles (...)

[Charles Cotton, The Wonders of the Peake (London 1681), 1-2]

[these tidbits found here and here]

John Milton

[from John Milton's L'Allegro, 1645]

There on Beds of Violets blew,
And fresh-blown Roses washt in dew . . .

To hear the Lark begin his flight,
And singing startle the dull night,
From his watch-towre in the skies,
Till the dappled dawn doth rise;
Then to come in spight of sorrow,
And at my window bid good morrow . . .

Mountains on whose barren brest
The labouring clouds do often rest;
Meadows trim with Daisies pide,
Shallow Brooks, and Rivers wide.
Towers, and Battlements it sees
Boosom'd high in tufted Trees,
Wher perhaps some beauty lies . . .

Such sights as youthfull Poets dream
On Summer eeves by haunted stream. . . .

These delights, if thou canst give,
Mirth with thee, I mean to live.

David Wagoner

This Is a Wonderful Poem

John Milton

[from Anonymous Life of Milton]

He rendred his Studies and various Works more easy & pleasant by allotting them thir several portions of the day. Of these the time friendly to the Muses fell to his Poetry; And hee waking early (as is the use of temperate men) had commonly a good Stock of Verses ready against his Amanuensis came; which if it happend to bee later than ordinary, hee would complain, saying hee wanted to bee milkd.

The Riverside Milton

David Ferry

[from David Ferry's Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations, 1999]

Mary in Old Age

. . .

IV

Of Others Who Were There

There was: the old lady in the nursing home
Who kept coming up to me and standing much too close
To me, sniffing at my body or my soul
As if it were something deliciously stinking,

Thrilling to her, or else a flowering bush,
Nourishment for a ravenous questioning;
Staring into my ear the way the child
In the comic routine long ago in the movies

Stared silently into the coils of the ear
Of the man sitting there next to the child,
Trying to watch the movie on the screen,
Driven wild inside by the child's relentless gaze:

As if the ear could speak its secrets back.

Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (Phoenix Poets Series)

Simone Weil

[from Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace, 1947]

Obedience. There are two kinds. We can obey the force of gravity or we can obey the relationship of things. In the first case we do what we are driven to by the imagination which fills up empty spaces. We can affix a variety of labels to it, often with a show of truth, including righteousness and God. If we suspend the filling up activity of the imagination and fix our attention on the relationship of things, a necessity becomes apparent which we cannot help obeying. Until then we have not any notion of necessity and we have no sense of obedience.

After that we cannot be proud of what we do, even though we may accomplish marvels.

Gravity and Grace (Routledge Classics)

George Steiner

[from George Steiner’s After Babel: Aspects of Language & Translation]

We must not trust the translation whose words are entirely ‘un-broken’. As with a sea-shell, the translator can listen strenuously but mistake the rumour of his own pulse for the beat of the alien sea.

Yet ‘mis-taking’, to grasp in place of, to transliterate, as it were, between seizure and surrogation, is indispensable. We have seen that serious understanding depends on a linguistic and cultural experiencing of resistant difference. But the transcendence of difference, the process of internalizing the probabilities of non-communication, of acute doubt as to whether the thing can be done at all, demands Wahlverwandschaft (elective affinity). At close linguistic-cultural quarters the translator often finds himself in a state of recognition. The hermeneutic and praxis of his decipherment and subsequent restatement are those of mirrors and déjà-vu. He has been here before he came. He has chosen his source-text not arbitrarily but because he is kindred to it. The magnetism can be one of genre, tone, biographical fantasy, conceptual framework. Whatever the bonding, his sense of the text is a sense of homecoming or, as the sentimental tag precisely puts it, of a home from home. Poor translation follows on negative ‘mistaking’: erroneous choice or mechanical, fortuitous circumstance have directed the translator to an original in which he is not at home. The alienness is not one of differentiation undergone, circumscribed as a moment in the dialectic of transit, but a muddled, vacant disaccord which can, in fact, be independent of linguistic difference. Thus there are within our own tongue and culture numerous works with which we have no just relation, which leave us cold. Positive ‘mistaking’ on the contrary generates and is generated by the feeling of at-homeness in the other language, in the other community of consciousness. The point is a central one. Translation operates in a dual or dialectical or bipolar energy field (one’s preference between these terms being simply a question of meta-language). Resistant difference — the integral and historical impermeability, apartness of the two languages, civilizations, semantic composites — plays against elective affinity — the translator’s pre- and recognition of the original, his intuition of legitimate entry, of an at-homeness momentarily dislocated, i.e. located across the frontier. At close quarters, say as between two European languages, the charge is maximal at both poles. The shock of difference is as strong as that of familiarity. The translator is held off as powerfully as he is drawn in. Translucency comes of the unresolved antinomy of the two currents, of the vital swerve into and away from the core of the original. Some such picture seems to obtain in the micron spaces between high-energy particles drawn together by gravity but kept apart by repulsion.

But notice how ‘positive mistaking’, the translator’s recognition or Narcissism on which the business depends for half its logic, sets odd psychological traps. Once the translator has entered into the original, the frontier of language passed, once he has certified his sense of belonging, why go on with the translation? He is now, apparently, the man who needs it least. Not only can he hear and read the original for himself, but the more unforced his immersion the sharper will be his realization of a uniquely rooted meaning, of the organic autonomy of the saying and the said. So why a translation, why the circumvention which is the way home (the third movement in the hermeneutic)? Undoubtedly translation contains a paradox of altruism — a word on which there are stresses both of ‘otherness’ and of ‘alteration’. The translator performs for others, at the price of dispersal and relative devaluation, a task no longer necessary or immediate to himself. But there is also a proprietary impulse. It is only when he ‘brings home’ the simulacrum of the original, when he recrosses the divide of language and community, that he feels himself in authentic possession of his source. Safely back he can, as an individual, discard his own translation. The original is now peculiarly his. Appropriation through understanding and metamorphic re-saying shades, psychologically as well as morally, into expropriation. This is the dilemma which I have defined as the cause of the fourth, closing movement in the hermeneutic of translation. After completing his work, the genuine translator is en fausse situation. He is in part a stranger to his own artifact which is now radically superfluous, and in part a stranger to the original which his translation has, in varying degrees, adulterated, diminished, exploited, or betrayed through improvement. I will come back to the consequent need for compensation, for a restoration of parity. This need is obsessive in the distances, at once resistant and magnetic, of Hobbes to Thucydides, of Hölderlin to Sophocles, of MacKenna to Plotinus, of Celan to Shakespeare, of Nabokov to Pushkin.

After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

Hakalau

Pig

 

Richard Hugo

[from Richard Hugo's "Death in the Aquarium}"]

. . . and wouldn't we welcome dying unknown,
unnamed on the floor of the ocean,
our bones ignored by the only clock there,
that slow unrhythmic waver of kelp --
our bones giving off the phosphorus
that collects in pockets and waits,
then one night washes in glowing?
And lovers, lovers would stop making love
and stand there, each suddenly alone
amazed at that gleam riding sand.

New York reading

Bowery Poetry Club
October 4, 2007
8 PM

I'll be reading with other authors from RealPoetik

Frank O'Hara

[from Frank O'Hara's Collected Poems, 1995]

Poem

I don't know as I get what D. H. Lawrence is driving at
when he writes of lust springing from the bowels
or do I
it could be the bowels of the earth
to lie flat on the earth in spring, summer or winter is sexy
you feel it stirring deep down slowly up to you
and sometimes it gives you a little nudge in the crotch
that's very sexy
and when someone looks sort of raggedy and dirty like Paulette Goddard
in Modern Times it's exciting, it isn't usual or attractive
perhaps D.H.L. is thinking of the darkness
certainly the crotch is light
and I suppose
any part of us that can only be seen by others
is a dark part
I feel that about the small of my back, too and the nape of my neck
they are dark
they are erotic zones as in the tropics
whereas Paris is straightforward and bright about it all
a coal miner has kind of a sexy occupation
though I'm sure it's painful down there
but so is lust
of light we can never have enough
but how would we find it
unless the darkness urged us on and into it
and I am dark
except when now and then it all comes clear
and I can see myself
as others luckily sometimes see me
in a good light

The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

My New Gig

Monthly Fiction Writing Group
led by Sean Scapellato and Carol Peters

meets the second Tuesday of each month
starting September 11, 2007, 7-9 PM
Charleston County Main Library, 68 Calhoun Street
free

For all those closet novelists out there: bring your favorite pen and paper, your works-in-progress, your fictive mind. During our recurring fiction workshop series, we’ll be tackling major topics of the craft: dialogue, plot, character, tone, point of view, imagery. We’ll look at process, discipline, revision, submitting, editing. Our two hours will be split with instruction and interactive exercises, questions and answers, and brief sharing of exercises. Use this time to meet other writers and to put pen to paper. We’ll be helping you formulate ideas, improve your works in progress, and learn substantive techniques about the craft and art of fiction. Designed to help fiction writers at all levels, from beginning to professional, this time will allow for introspection and work on individual projects as well as a chance to learn about the many techniques of story. Sponsored by the Charleston County Public Library and The Lowcountry Initiative for the Literary Arts (LILA). For more information please call 843-805-6930.

Buson & Jack Gilbert

[Buson, translated by Lucien Stryk]

A sudden chill —
in our room my dead wife's comb,
underfoot.

[from Jack Gilbert's The Great Fires, 1996]

Married

I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife's hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko's avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

Zen Poems of China and Japan: The Crane's Bill (An Evergreen Book)
The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992

Elizabeth Daryush

[Elizabeth Daryush, from Collected Poems, 1976]

Drought

The shadeless elms, the poplars shimmerless
Have yellowed, dropped their flaccid leaves a full
Two months before their time; the alder-pool
Is a black miry swamp, ploughed by the press
Of tortured, thirsty cattle; or look where
Once would a spreading line of verdure show
The river’s lush umbrageous path, that now
Is a white hard road, hedged with willows bare.

Autumn will flush no harvest in these fields
Failed of slow Nature’s sober, ripening clime,
Nor winter in these woods brighten with rime
Red berry, brown nut, her late-lavished yields

To bird and beast: the blighted copse they rob
Already of its last lean hip and cob.

Collected poems [of] Elizabeth Daryush

more from Mary Kinzie

Philip Hobsbaum's rhyme rankings (the larger the number, the stronger the rhyme):

2.00 interior/superior
1.50 mystery/mastery
1.00 terse/hearse
0.75 world/walled, wheels/wells
0.50 bar/fire, hair/got there
0.25 on/organ

W. K. Wimsatt on rhyme:

Wimsatt makes the further point that it is not sounds that rhyme but meanings (or the single-syllabled meaning-nuggets linguists call "morphemes"), which now clash under the cover of likeness. What comes together in the technique we call rhyme are not so much aural signifiers as semantic ones with subtle syntactical identities, for it is Wimsatt's view that "words have no character as rhymes until they become points in a syntactic succession." . . .

In the couplets of Pope, in particular, Wimsatt believes the disparity between the auditory resemblance and the logical divergence--a divergence in both function (syntax) and meaning (root) -- is exploited with unparalleled cleverness. . . . not only words that rhyme, but small parts of larger, countermatching line-segments (clauses and phrases), which come together with a closure in sound that contradicts the contrast in meaning . . .

A Poet's Guide to Poetry (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)

Liam Rector

RIP

Mary Kinzie

[from Mary Kinzie's A Poet's Guide to Poetry, 1999]

Metrical “correctness,” which leads Surrey to pile one closed pentameter line upon another, does not insure good poetry (and the Surrey versions of many Wyatt works seem padded out — note the frequency of doubled phrases linked by and), just as metrical “incorrectness” does not absolutely diminish a fine poem, although it makes the job riskier . . . Of course, meter that always limps and lurches may irk the reader and distract the writer ar the wrong moment. The middle ground may yield greater success — lines, that is to say, in which neither is the variation so wild as to cancel out the background music of metrical expectation, nor the metrical ground base so rigid as to silence all departures from the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables.

A Poet's Guide to Poetry (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)

Timothy Steele

[from Timothy Steele’s After Sapphics and Other Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986]

Toward Calgary

Out over these parched, gusty plains,
Loose dirt is lifted to a sail;
Beyond wide distances, a train’s
Smoke draws a horizontal trail.

Posts bear a wire, mile after mile,
Across deep views toward which winds roll,
That wire the only obstacle
Between the winds and the North Pole.

Here one could drive what seems an age,
Seeing no more than levelled land
And, on the road, slow-skidding sage
And skating shapes of wind-blown sand.

Here one could try the radio's dial
And, as the inching needle slips
Through far, infrequent static, feel
A stilled world at the fingertips.

And one might sense nothing but thirst
Or soundless hours in this place
Where all horizons are dispersed
Continuously into space.

Yet from caked, crumbly ground and rocks
The spiky purple lupines grow
And cacti shaped like tuning forks.
And some who've crossed such precincts know

The prudent heart is like these plains,
Where quietness has grown immense,
No landmarks rendering its terrains
Measurable to human sense,

And where, remote of any tree,
The sky is an inclusive drift
Of radiance chastening, endlessly,
Needless invention, needless thrift.

Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986

SAWC

I belong to the wonderfully supportive Southern Appalachian Writer's Cooperative

Flossie

Who we're watching

Alice Fulton

[from Alice Fulton’s “Give: Daphne and Apollo” in After Ovid: The New Metamorphoses, ed. Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun]

. . . Remember how

       music was aroused in the old technology?
The stylus vibrated, shaking a crystal in its head,
       and the groove culled this trembling.
The stylus made electrons fly
       from the atom, climb a wire through
the crystal to the gate. There

       the slight current was amplified,
bridling the large —

       and vinyl gave
rise to sonatas, rise to bop.

       This gives the odd god
and hound dog, dolphin and electron,
       the novation and the moment
of change. Since the truly new
looks truly wrong at first,

       it gives the sublime and grotesque,
hoping you’ll receive them kindly,
hoping for the best — newness
       being not so much a truth

as it is emotion.
Can you feel for the dark

       matter, background
lines of lace of brides? Will you
       receive the hybridized and recombined,
the downsized and the amplified?

The greenery and systemic herbicide:
       the laurel wreath. . . .

After Ovid: New Metamorphoses

Thom Gunn

[from Thom Gunn's Collected Poems, 1994]

Moly

Nightmare of beasthood, snorting, how to wake.
I woke. What beasthood skin she made me take?

Leather toad that ruts for days on end,
Or cringing dribbling dog, man's servile friend,

Or cat that prettily pounces on its meat,
Tortures it hours, then does not care to eat:

Parrot, moth, shark, wolf, crocodile, ass, flea.
What germs, what jostling mobs there were in me.

These seem like bristles, and the hide is tough.
No claw or web here: each foot ends in hoof.

Into what bulk has method disappeared?
Like ham, streaked, I am gross — gray, gross, flap-eared.

The pale-lashed eyes my only human feature.
My teeth tear, tear. I am the snouted creature

That bites through anything, root, wire, or can.
If I was not afraid I'd eat a man.

Oh a man's flesh already is mine.
Hand and foot poised for risk. Buried in swine.

I root and root, you think that is greed,
It is, but I seek out a plant I need.

Direct me, gods, whose changes are all holy,
To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly:

Cool flesh of magic in each leaf and shoot,
From milky flower to the black forked root.

From this fat dungeon I could rise to skin
And human title, putting pig within.

I push my big gray wet snout through the green,
Dreaming the flower I have never seen.

Collected Poems

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

[from Walter Jackson Bate's Coleridge, 1968]

As to Nightingales — they are almost as numerous with us and as incessant in song as Frogs with you. Ah! (I groaned forth a few nights ago, when qualmy and twitchy from the effects of an Aperient) Ah! PHIlomel! ill do thy strains accord with those of CALomel!

. . .

I envy dear Southey's power of saying one thing at a time in short and close sentences, whereas my thoughts bustle along like a Surinam Toad, with little toads sprouting out of back, side, and belly, vegetating while it crawls

COLERIDGE

Terri McCord

The marvelous and prolific Finishing Line Press will soon publish a chapbook by my friend and sister poet Terri McCord of Greenville, SC.

Jilly Dybka

I suppose everyone except me knew that Wikipedia refers to my friend and sister poet Jilly Dybka in their Dock Ellis entry.

Anne Haines

I'm delighted to learn that Finishing Line Press is preparing to publish a chapbook by my friend and sister poet Anne Haines.

Ron Silliman

Read Ron's blog posting today, or at least this quoted paragraph:

Thus if poetry is about vocabulary & poems themselves are not referential, we have – no one is more clear about this than Ashbery – a hierarchy of vocabulary. At the pinnacle are the three great orienting pronouns, I, you and we, followed very closely by proper names – Rappahannock or Wimpy or whatever – followed by nouns, as such, then adverbs & verbs and then all other words. It is worth noting that what puts the three pronouns at the pinnacle is their implication of presence, these invariably are the pronouns of immanence, as he, she and they are not.

Ernst Bloch

[from George Steiner's After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation]

We hypothesize and project thought and imagination into the 'if-ness', into the free conditionalities of the unknown. Such projection is no logical muddle, no abuse of induction. It is far more than a probabilistic convention. It is the master nerve of human action. Counter-factuals and conditionals, argues Bloch, make up a grammar of constant renewal. They force us to proceed afresh in the morning, to leave failed history behind. Otherwise our posture would be static and we would choke on disappointed dreams. . . . Bloch has insisted that 'reasonings on a supposition' are not, as Hume in his exercise of systematic doubt ruled, 'chimerical and without foundation'. They are, on the contrary, the means for our survival and the distinctive mechanism of personal and social evolution. Natural selection, as it were, favoured the subjunctive.

Sir Thomas Urquhart's Logopandecteision of 1653

[from George Steiner's After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation]

The object is 'to appropriate the words of the universal language with the things of the universe'. Only a 'Grammatical Arithmetician' . . . will bring about this indispensable accord. Urquhart's interlingua contains eleven genders and ten cases besides the nominative. Yet the entire edifice is built on 'but two hundred and fifty prime radices upon which all the rest are branches'. Its alphabet counts ten vowels, which also serve as digits, and twenty-five consonants; together these articulate all sounds of which the vocal organs of man are capable. This alphabet is a powerful means of arithmetical logic: 'What rational Logarithms do by writing, this language doth by heart; and by adding of letters, shall multiply numbers; which is a most exquisite secret.' The number of syllables in a word, moreover, is proportionate to the number of its significations. Urquhart kept his 'exquisite secret' but the anticipation of his claim on modern symbolic logic and computer languages is striking. As is Urquhart's assurance that the phonetic and syntactic rules of his 'universal character' have inherent mnemonic advantages. A child, he says, will acquire fluency in the new speech with little effort because the structure of the idiom in fact reproduces and reenacts the natural articulations of thought.

After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

Kamau Braithwaite

[from Kamau Braithwaite's Dreamstories, 1998]

from The Black Angel

                                          . . .but like he cdn't hear be->
cause i cdn't speak and in anycase my words. as words. fall>>
chalk & foolish on my tongue

Dreamstories (Longman Caribbean Writers)

George Steiner

[from George Steiner's After Babel: Aspects of Language & Translation, 1998]

It is likely that the current of language passing through the mind, either in voluntary self-address or in the perhaps random but almost certainly uninterrupted soliloquy of mental activity, contributes largely to the definition of 'interior time' . . .

The modulations of inference, of provisionality of conjecture, of hope through which consciousness maps ahead of itself, are facts of grammar. . . .

The tragic vision of Greek literature turns on this deep paradox: the event most expected, most consequent on the internal logic of action, is always the most surprising . . . We know precisely what Oedipus will discover -- in a crucial sense he too has known all along. Yet with each narration or performance of the fable our sense of shock is renewed. . . . Eteocles' knowledge that death waits for him at the seventh gate does not void his action; it gives it the dignity of meaning.

[Thucydides] The past tense of the verb is the sole guarantor of history.

After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

Christopher Isherwood

[from Christopher Isherwood’s novel, Prater Violet, 1945]

The King’s Road was wet-black, and deserted as the moon. . . . The little houses had shut their doors against all strangers and were still, waiting for dawn, bad news and the milk. There was nobody about. Not even a policeman. Not even a cat.

It was that hour of the night at which man’s ego almost sleeps.

Robert Creeley

[from Robert Creeley's The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 2006]

The World

I wanted so ably
to reassure you, I wanted
the man you took to be me,

to comfort you, and got
up, and went to the window,
pushed back, as you asked me to,

the curtain, to see
the outline of the trees
in the night outside.

The light, love,
the light we felt then,
greyly, was it, that

came in, on us, not
merely my hands or yours,
or a wetness so comfortable,

but in the dark then
as you slept, the grey
figure came so close

and leaned over,
between us, as you
slept, restless, and

my own face had to
see it, and be seen by it,
the man it was, your

grey lost tired bewildered
brother, unused, untaken —
hated by love, and dead,

but not dead, for an
instant, saw me, myself
the intruder, as he was not.

I tried to say, it is
all right, she is
happy, you are no longer

needed. I said,
he is dead, and he
went as you shifted

and woke, at first afraid,
then knew by my own knowing
what had happened —

and the light then
of the sun coming
for another morning
in the world.

The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975-2005

David Ferry

[from David Ferry’s Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations, 1999]

Character Analysis of Mary in Earlier Life

Her spinster eccentricity often
Said things for the sake of startling you.

She was like that. It seemed a form of shyness,
Putting you off with her charm flirtatiously.

It was a powerful entrapped wild innocent conventional nature.

The rage in her charm steadily
Burned its way through the materials of her life

So that there was always almost nothing left.
To put it another way:

Where she was was always stranded on a high platform
She got to on high heels getting across

On a tight rope strung out over the abyss.

Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (Phoenix Poets Series)

Thomas Hardy

[Thomas Hardy]

I Look into My Glass

I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, “Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!”

For then, I, undistressed
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.

But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.

John Skelton

[excerpt from John Skelton’s “Philip Sparrow," ~1805]

from Philip Sparrow

Sometime he would gasp
When he saw a wasp;
A fly or a gnat,
He would fly at that;
And prettily he would pant
When he saw an ant.
Lord, how he would pry
After the butterfly!
Lord, how he would hop
After the gressop!
And when I said, “Phip, Phip!”
Then he would leap and skip,
And take me by the lip.
Alas, it will me slo
That Philip is gone me from! . . .

[gressop = grasshopper]

Jaki Shelton Green

[from Jaki Shelton Green's Breath of the Song, 2005]

dust memoirs

I

candles drip air
washed away smiles linger to breathe;
a skeletal interpretation of motherhood
suspends itself above penurized nativity.
go into yourself and free those
midsummer visits free those grasshopper tragedies;
free those public telephones with passionate coffin smells
drip into your burial urn. drip.
this is called neurotic fiction. i am going out of myself into a
woman without skin, into a face without a mouth, into
a woman without a man i am woeman. woeman. this is
neurotic fission. drip, drip into my confusions. i am
vaguely alive, am dying alive native depression and
intellectual inclinations balance this head. keep it adrift.
i have no sweet songs of georgia pine to sing. i have no
succulent verse of carolina wind to whisper. i have only
come to bury my dead. i have only come to bury my dead.
this is my only sonnet. write in the dust with or without
the sandman's help . . . the moon is late. is somewhere raging
suicides and spreading apart skies. such is a product of my
unconsciousness. i do not know who i am and why i
choose . . . life? the writing will actualize the deed the
writing will fire the first plunge and sink the first little dove
into painless death. . . .

Breath of the Song: New And Selected Poems

Laurie Sheck

[from Laurie Sheck's Captivity, 2007]

Or resolve into a calm

For there is so much crumbling and instead. I think of you now writing
       that last
    Note. How the aparts multiply, grow wild with clash and scatter. Or
       resolve into a calm
I can barely understand — a wasp's nest, maybe, the papery regularity of
       its cells,
    All those steady carefuls lining up. Your thin, your brittle wrist, gave
       back

Its weight, its mass, its shadow — but to what? And now, in me, the far of
       your death
    Sternly whitens the notion of to see. You, now, not singular, but
       interspersed
Among the questions,

Elsewheres of water rushing down stone steps.


A ragged fabric

And then the mind begins to starve itself. As if the brain clefts were
       giving back their networks,
    All their tensile webs. Unsafe the worldspeed and the scalded
Warnings. Quiet as errors in genetic script
    Or handcuffs left rusting on a table, the folds and softs
Are vanished from the air. Shock knits a ragged fabric. Each move leads
       into

Ambush and undone.


That I might step

Then I came to a peace so random it felt dangerous.
    Rough battlefield, expectancy, most tenuous and fragile contract,
How can I step with threadbare tenderness
    Across the zero hour of each strike and batter?

Why do we live in time? — its edges crumbling, its contours filling with
       monuments,
    Hard data. But there is a very plain in things that sometimes comes
Just calmly. It holds no trade routes, no borders fortressed, guarded.
    That I may briefly touch it. That I might step into the curious

Despite —

Captivity

Malena Morling

[from Malena Morling's Ocean Avenue, 1999]

Standing on the Earth Among the Cows
       for Elena

When I was driving through Wyoming
past fields of just-overturned earth
black in the noon sun
and past thousands of cows
totally at home in the open,
I stopped the car to stop moving
and got out to stand among them
and I said nothing in English or Swedish.
Now I want to be whoever I was at that moment
when I discovered my own breathing
among the cows' breathing in the field
and studied their satin bellies
and udders slowly filling with milk.
I was not separate from anything living, I was
equally there and there was nothing to wait for.

Ocean Avenue (The New Issues Press Poetry Series)

Maurice Manning

[from Maurice Manning's Bucolics, 2007]

XXXI

did you teach the woodpecker how
to knock its head against the wood
of hollow trees did you say this
is how you do it Boss then knock
your own head so hard into
the tree it made a rattle clap
I'm thinking nine is the number of times
the bird must knock the tree to make
it rattle right does that sound right
to you is nine the number Boss
to make a rattle clap it sounds
all right to me the number sounds
just right inside the rattle Boss
did you teach birds to count did you
teach me to count what counts beyond
the numbers up above them Boss
are you a number or a sound
or something else I can't learn how
to think about you birdbrain Boss
you rattle me you knock me down

Bucolics

Susan Hutton

[from Susan Hutton's On the Vanishing of Large Creatures, 2007]

Is More Than

The beautiful folded fish nets, the bleached floats,
the ropes and anchors arranged along the shore
belie their heartless presence in the sea. Meanwhile,

the fish have made a heaven of the air. They rise from their cold nights
toward the multiplying dawn. The colors are marvelous, splendid.
It's unfair when they're caught. The escapists: confirmed liars.

The rest: it ends badly, but it simplifies things.
The idea of heaven was once all that mattered: whole and perfect,
beyond complaint. And in the seven such days I spent

in Riomaggiore, knives and forks clattered at me
from other windows while I ate. When the church bells ran in the
     morning
we were all yanked from sleep. I lived easily in their habits

while my world was fresh. After a thousand breakfasts together,
the table really is a table, just as the grass is really the grass.
There is the smell, for one thing, and the way the table stands.

On the Vanishing of Large Creatures (Carnegie Mellon Poetry)

Rosanna Warren

[from Rosanna Warren's Stained Glass, 1993]

Child Model
     for Rosalie Carlson
     (Greenland Eskimo mummy, boy, four years old,
     National Geographic, February 1985)

I want to adopt you, doll-like child,
your death, your National
Geographic resurrection. Cold

has clasped you in its cache, all
gaze, all shimmer. Arctic star,
cuddled in sealskin grave-creche, still

you wait there for your mother,
trusting she'll trudge back through the snow,
famine, centuries: lift you from this glamour,

snatch you, full-limbed, laughing home. But now
in these pages, trapped, you touch
for comfort tiny beads of bone. We know

nothing of you save that such
patient beauty, still unputrefied,
was never seen in death. We clutch

you, ancient child: we need
to think you're saved, as if one face unmarred
in Kodachrome rescued all others who have died

ugly, bruised, disqualified.

Stained Glass: Poems

sunset off the dock

Rosanna Warren

[from Rosanna Warren's "Sappho: Translation as Elegy" in The Art of Translation: voices from the field, edited by Rosanna Warren]

My translation of Catullus' "ille mi par . . ." occurs, with another Catullus poem in the Sapphic meter, in a volume of my own poems. But these possessive phrases become obtrusive, as indeed they ought in matters of authorship. The purpose in focusing on a translation of a translation is not to claim that the world needs yet another version of this perennially retranslated poem; nor is it to demonstrate that I have outpaced all my predecessors and found a perfect English equivalent for Catullus. Rather, I should like to offer it, impersonally, as a small instance of lyric lineage, a type or model for poetry's perpetual re-engendering of itself. It is to argue that poetry is, finally, a family matter, involving the strains of birth, love, power, death, and inheritance; and that, given such strains (in every sense), one is never "by onself" however isolated the act of writing may appear. The so-called original poems in my book are, in their own way, translations of several lyric traditions into personal experience and idiom, and are possible only because of strenuous acts of reading, one form of which we know, conventionally, as translation. I am concerned here with the way in which the individual poet inherits poetry, or, in Eliot's formulation, is catalyzed by it; and I take translation as a specific and especially focused instance of the reception and transformation of literary tradition.

The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field

Henri Cole

[from Henri Cole's Blackbird and Wolf, 2007]

American Kestrel

I see you sitting erect on my fire escape,
plucking at your dinner of flayed mouse,
like the red strings of a harp, choking a bit
on the venous blue flesh and hemorrhaging tail.
With your perfect black-and-white thief's mask,
you look like a stuffed bird in a glass case,
somewhere between the animal and human life.
The love word is far away. Can you see me?
I am a man. No one has what I have:
my long clean hands, my bored lips. This is my home:
Woof woof, the dog utters, afraid of emptiness,
as I am, so my soul attaches itself to things,
trying to create something neither confessional
nor abstract, like the moon breaking through the pines.

Blackbird and Wolf: Poems

Richard McCann

[from Richard McCann's "The Universe Concealed," the last chapter of Mother of Sorrows, 2005]

My friend Helen and I are rowing a boat on Eagle Lake. It's almost dusk, but Helen is wearing her swimsuit because she's working on a tan. She has brought along her bottle of Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil and a Panasonic cassette player made of cheap white plastic, like a teenage girl's. As we row, we listen to The Torah Tapes, which Helen has secured from a Hasidic man who runs a shop on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. He also sells special Yahrzeit candles, she says, although she prefers the ordinary kind that come in blue paper wrappers, available in regular grocery stores. She says they remind her of the Dixie cups of ice cream her father bought her when she was a girl in Livington, New Jersey.

"Be neither sad nor regretful," says Rabbi Ezekiel Stollman. Rabbi Stollman's our invisible passenger, the one whose voice we strain to hear when the Panasonic's batteries are running low. On The Torah Tapes, he speaks in a kind of up-and-down chanting. He says that sadness is arrogance and vanity. The things that sadden us are actually blessings, he says, coming to us from a universe that's concealed.

While Rabbi Stollman talks, I feel the rhythm of rowing — the bending forward, and then the long leaning back, pulling the oars through water — as a kind of secret davening. Helen sits across form me, adjusting her swimsuit's straps. "You think I'm getting too much sun?" she asks.

For several days now, since coming to the Eagle Lake Lodge and Cottages, where we plan to spend a week, we've been making a list of the things we would see if the concealed universe were suddenly and astonishingly revealed to us. At the top of the list, we have written "UV rays."

Beneath that we have written "Joshua," the name of Helen's twelve-year-old son, who died a year ago, and then the names of my friends who have died — Jim, Edward Marcellus, Larry, George, Darnell, Allen, Ricardo, Stanley, Paul, Jaime, Billy, Eduardo, and, most recently, Francisco.

Helen says we should make a list of the things we hope will remain concealed forever. At the top of that list, she says, she'll put the cotton prosthesis she was given after her mastectomy, not long before Josh was killed. On a third list, a list of things that are generally concealed but which we believe might be revealed to us with a minimum of effort, if we put our minds to it, we plan to write "penises."

Mother of Sorrows

Rick Mulkey

[from Rick Mulkey's Before the Age of Reason, 1998]

Cain's Apology

I didn't want to work; Dad made us.
You held a pick; I held a shovel.
And every time you gladly buried your pick
into that black sod, I wanted to bury
my shovel into your black hair.
When I clenched your neck, blood leaped:
I don't know if it was anger or fear
but as I pressed you against the ground,
the vein in your left temple swelled
and branched like a flooding stream.

We were only boys, fifteen and ten.
But I used the man talk. A kid
apprenticed to movie tough guys,
I imitated the slurs of punch-drunk boxers,
spit hanging from my lip,
or the bound-for-hell curses of rednecks
at the Milner Matz lounge,
welts and scars on their cheeks.
I spat bruising words tongued in rail yards
where peroxide whores, numb from Mad Dog,
waited for Norfolk & Western brakemen.

I didn't know the power of words.
Or the difficulty in taking them back.
If I could change my life,
change yours, alter that the last time
I held you was by the throat
then I'd choke back words
meant to make you small, words
which made me smaller. I'd unclench
the past. Gladly plant trees
in shale hard soil.

Before the Age of Reason

A. R. Ammons

[from section 6 of A. R. Ammons's Garbage, 1993]

. . . on writing a poem — you sit vacant and
relaxed (if possible), your mind wandering

freely, unengaged and in search of focus: you
may sit this way for several minutes till the

void unsettles you a bit and you become impatient
with the intrusion of an awareness of yourself

sitting with a touch of unwelcome exasperation
over a great blank: but you keep your mind

open and on the move and eventually there is a
trace of feeling like a bit of mist on a backroad

but then it reappears stronger and more central,
still coming and going, so the mind can't

grab it and hold on to it: but the mind begins
to make an effort, to shed from itself all

awareness except that of going with the feeling,
to relax and hold the feeling — the feeling

is a brutal burning, a rich, raw urgency:
the mind knows that it is nothing without the

feeling, so concentrating on the feeling, it
dreams of imminent shapes, emergences, of

clust'ral abundances, of free flow, forms discernible,
material, concrete, shapes on the move, and

then the mind gives way from its triggering, and
the mechanisms of necessity fall into, grasping the

upheaval, the action of making; the presence
of pressure appears, forces open a way, the

intensity heightens, groans of anguish and
satisfaction break from the depths of the

body, and the sweet dream occurs, the work
payloads, the fall-away slips through, the body

contracts and returns, ease lengthens through
the byways, and the mind picks up on the

environment again, turns to the practical
policing of the scene, restores itself to

normalcy and the objective world, the body hitching
itself up on the way: shit fire (and save matches):

we wheeled down the long glide from the mountains
into Wheeling: morning fog smoked away the tops

of hills and a river (or two) confluencing slashed
across by scary iron bridges jammed the the narrowed

valley road, when the big black mouth of a tunnel
suddenly opened out of fog in solid rock, all the

events at once happening in the shakes: but then going
on down Route 7 along the Ohio; mammoth standings

of steam, way out of size, too solid to vanish, oozed
up from the nuclear craters, so much so tall that even

on our side of the river the outsized opal shades
of steam broke across us, shadowing us once and again:

slows like flying by or trying to drive to a mountain,
the far ahead lingering far behind: the freeway of

refineries, chemical steams, the gross companies
toughening the banks down by the banks of the O-hi-o.

Garbage: A Poem

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Eolian Harp
          Composed at Clevedon, Somersetshire, 1795

My pensive Sara! thy soft cheek reclined
Thus on mine arm, most soothing sweet it is
To sit beside our Cot, our Cot o'ergrown
With white-flower'd Jasmin, and the broad-leav'd Myrtle,
(Meet emblems they of Innocence and Love!)
And watch the clouds, that late were rich with light,
Slow saddening round, and mark the star of eve
Serenely brilliant (such should Wisdom be)
Shine opposite! How exquisite the scents
Snatch'd from yon bean-field! and the world so hush'd!
The stilly murmur of the distant Sea
Tells us of silence.
                         And that simplest Lute,
Placed length-ways in the clasping casement, hark!
How by the desultory breeze caress'd,
Like some coy maid half yielding to her lover,
It pours such sweet upbraiding, as must needs
Tempt to repeat the wrong! And now, its strings
Boldlier swept, the long sequacious notes
Over delicious surges sink and rise,
Such a soft floating witchery of sound
As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve
voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land,
Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers,
Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,
Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untam'd wing!
O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where —
Methinks, it should have been impossible
Not to love all things in a world so fill'd;
Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air
Is Music slumbering on her instrument.

    And thus, my Love! as on the midway slope
Of yonder hill I stretch my limbs at noon,
Whilst through my half-clos'd eye-lids I behold
The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main,
And tranquil muse upon tranquillity;
Full many a thought uncall'd and undetain'd,
And many idle flitting phantasies,
Traverse my indolent and passive brain,
As wild and various as the random gales
That swell and flutter on this subject Lute!
    But thy more serious eye a mild reproof
Darts, O belovéd Woman! nor such thoughts
Dim and unhallow'd dost thou not reject,
And biddest me walk humbly with my God.
Meek Daughter in the family of Christ!
Well hast thou said and holily disprais'd
These shapings of the unregenerate mind;
Bubbles that glitter as they rise and break
On vain Philosophy's aye-babbling spring.
For never guiltless may I speak of him,
The Incomprehensible! save when with awe
I praise him, and with Faith that inly feels;
Who with his saving mercies healéd me,
A sinful and most miserable man,
Wilder'd and dark, and gave me to possess
Peace, and this Cot, and thee, heart-honour'd Maid!

Norman Nicholson

[from Norman Nicholson's "For Hokey and Henrietta," 1944]

What more can you learn to ask for in your prayers,
Than years unpredicted as weather, and days
Adventurous as a lobby full of bears.

Norman Nicholson: Collected Poems

A. K. Ramanujan

[from A. K. Ramanujan's essay "On Translating a Tamil Poem" in The Art of Translation: voices from the field, edited by Rosanna Warren, 1985]

The translation must not only re-present, but represent, the original. One walks a tightrope between the To-language and the From-language, in a double loyalty. A translator is an "artist on oath." Sometimes one may succeed only in re-presenting a poem, not in closely representing it. At such times one draws consolation from parables like the following: A Chinese emperor ordered a tunnel to be bored through a great mountain. The engineers decided that the best and quickest way to do it would be to begin work on both sides of the mountain, after precise measurements. If the measurements are precise enough, the two tunnels will meet in the middle, making a single one. "But, what happens if they don't meet?" asked the emperor. The counselors, in their wisdom, answered, "If they don't meet, we will have two tunnels instead of one." So, too, if the representation in another language is not close enough, but still succeeds in "carrying" the other poem in some sense, we will have two poems instead of one.

The Art of Translation: Voices from the Field

May Swenson

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Kwame Dawes

[from Kwame Dawes's Impossible Flying, 2007]

Ward

The dirt track turns to marl in the wind tunnel
between Maternity — the pale yellow gowns of swollen
women, a constant slash of light through the gray
louvres — and the whitewashed ward where you are.
My heart grows as I walk by casually,
trying to pretend I have forgotten your eyes pleading
with me in the brightly lit greeting room,
pointing to the stumble and glossolalia
of the pretty girl who does not care that her breasts
are poking out of the too small hospital issue
green tunic. Around us the sterile slow pace
of medicated bodies. Like her, I imagine
that you don’t belong; I imagine you are too
astute, too collected for this; your pathologies
are civil things. And yet I see the scars
on your knuckles, and you drool, how you drool,
your tongue, not yours, just a clumsy lump
of meat in your mouth. You are telling me you need
to go, lucid as anyone I know, until you laugh,
reminding me of the morning I held you down,
tied your wings, did not have the faith;
and in that same clean logic, your eyes
stared steadily at me as you spoke in soft
conspiracy, I woulda be flying now,
you know that? I woulda be flying if you never
hold me down . . . It has been a week
since I stopped. That last time the orderlies
told me of the straps you strained against,
the electricity, the padded walls, the shit
in your pants, the tears, as if you were
someone else, as if they needed me
to understand the lunatic’s dialect, as if
they saw in me the hubris of class, or the hope
of sanity; as if I did not understand
the commonness of tragedy. That day I did not stop.
I simply bowed my head and walked away
weeping, angry at my tears, at the noble sorrow —
as if it was me caught in this wrestle
with the chemistry of the head — the demon tyranny.
I wept (a good verb) like an actor, testing each mood,
swept, yes, by the passion of the narrative,
but consumed by the tragic consequence
of fear. I wept as I walked the stony path
to Papine, helpless like that. Tonight
is the seventh night I have walked past.
It becomes easier, now. I fear only
that you will see me going by, not stopping.
Maybe you will see my lips moving, praying
for the miracle promised — another vanity —
the scripted prophecy of my peace.

Impossible Flying

May Swenson

[from May Swenson's Nature: Poems Old and New, 1971]

Waterbird

Part otter, part snake, part bird the bird Anhinga,
jalousie wings, draped open, dry. When slack-
hinged, the wind flips them shut. Her cry,
a slatted clatter, inflates her chin-
pouch; it's like a fish's swim-
bladder. Anhinga's body, otter-
furry, floats, under water-
mosses, neck a snake with white-
rimmed blue round roving eyes. Those long feet stilt-
submerged. Otter-
quick over bream that hover in water-
shade, she feeds, finds fillets among the water-
weeds. Her beak, ferrule of a folded black
umbrella, with neat thrust impales her prey.
She flaps up to dry on the crooked, look-
dead-limb of the Gumbo Limbo, her tan-
tipped wing fans spread, tail a shut fan dangled.

Nature: Poems Old and New