Comments on: Ochi Day

By: Alicia (A.E.)

Alicia (A.E.) — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 18:01:55 +0000

Thanks for all these thoughts and comments. (Thanks, Steve, too, for your poem and kind comments on the translation–which takes some liberties in the effort to get across the rhymed nature of the poem.)
It strikes me that there are two things at work in many (if not all) of these powerful “no”s. For one thing, so often what they deny, refuse, protest against, is mortality itself, is death, nothingness, ceasing-to-be, and as such are actually litotes–double negatives that make postivies–they are on the side of life. Then also, it seems that negatives couched in the positive act of the poem (as Poe’s “Nevermore” in the gorgeous if over-the-top sonics of “The Raven”) can never be entirely nihilistic.
Thanks for helping me think aloud here!

By: Steve Mackin

Steve Mackin — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:54:14 +0000

A national holiday to celebrate “No.” I love that! It doesn’t surprise me that as a poet, a storyteller, that you would be moved by the negative. It seems to me that art begins with the negative, the no, the denial, contention. That’s where the drama, the tension, starts. If Antigone had followed Creon’s decree there would have been no play. I remember hearing Leonard Bernstein say, during a NY Phil young person concert 40 plus years ago, that if you find something in a work of art look for its opposite for it’s alway there. Joyce has Stephen tell us, in Episode 9 of Ulysses, Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been first a sundering. He’s talking about Shakespeare’s life, but he is also talking about the creation of art. It’s obvious to me that the no is fundamental to art. We live for the No.
I love your translation of the Cavafy poem. I have the Barnestone translation at my desk and I’ve been comparing the two. His is great, but I like yours better. Love the mirroring of the yes thrice in stanza one with the no thrice in stanza two. Love the alliteration in the second line of stanza two (love the music there and throughout). The pairing of rife with life is perfect. I’ll bet Cavafy would have loved it.
Saturday Night on 101
Are you a god or a doggone clod?
J. Joyce, Ulysses
It’s not a progression to God, but a succession from dog.
R. Spoo, Joyce & the Language of History
It’s 10PM on a Saturday
and we’re driving down an American road
between bold commercial ziggurats
of blazing neon and static stone upon the Peninsula.
Ray Charles is praying on the radio.
Taillights string before us like burning rubies
and headlights are too many suns banished from the sky.
Cheshire moon is a wedge of orange sinking in a dark sangria.
The finials along the Bridge flicker across the obsidian Bay.
And far, far away I see the glitter of the Cities.
I’m an atheist to the marrow, but at times like these I look for God
in the empty, inky windows behind these lies of lights,
and I never find him: Elijah broadcasting through the radio?
I don’t think so.
SPMackin, September 18th 2007

By: Michael Gushue

Michael Gushue — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:50:38 +0000

Stevens:
nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.
And Donne’s A Nocturnal on St. Lucy’s Day overbrims with the negative.

By: Emily Warn

Emily Warn — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 13:07:50 +0000

Perhaps your thrill in the negative is a resolve to bust through cultural and political hype in order “to look at life as it is.” Joshua Weiner makes this point about Larkin’s poems in his essay, which we published last week, on “Whitsun Weddings.”
“Yet for all his meanness, there is also irreverent wit and a melancholy mitigated by his resolve to look at life as it is. Readers came to trust him; his poems have a sense of psychological scale, candor, and a thorough ease with metrical forms that place Larkin firmly in a British poetic tradition. If his vision is elegiac, one of gradual diminishment, it is also one of rich and nuanced emotional response. Larkin is a great poet of middle age, whose instinct for social satire amplifies his sense of poignancy. Betjeman describes Larkin’s work as “tenderly observant”; that he could also be bracing and acerbic implies his complexity. (Robert Pinsky’s description of the poems as “sour, majestic refusals” captures it well.)”

By: Don Share

Don Share — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 01:39:05 +0000

Miguel Hernandez:
“No perdona a la muerte enamorada,
no perdona a la vida desatenta,
no perdona a la tierra ni a la lada.”
- from his incredible “Elegia”
or
“No se por que, no se por que ni como
me perdono la vida cada dia.”
- from “Me sobra el corazon”
(can’t get those accent marks in, sorry)

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:02:18 +0000

After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
Or, if you prefer: “A little yes and a big No.”